Tudo bem

The first week in Namaacha has been great. I was placed with a really cool host family. My host “mom” is really only 29 and considers me her sister. Her name is Ana Paula. She also has a sister, Cecilia, who lives with us who is 24 and a brother who is in high school (although I’m not sure of his age). Their mother also lives with us as well as Cecilia’s baby, Roland, who is almost three. Roland has some sort of mental disability…at first they said it was Downs syndrome, but it’s not, and then they told me that it was epilepsy, so I am not quite sure what the story is, but he is a happy kid and has shown a liking for me. He is also fun to play with when my mind is fried from speaking Portuguese because he isn’t talking yet, so I can just play with him.

When we first arrived in Namaacha our host mothers picked us up from the school and we walked with them back to our house. After walking for just a minute or two, a pick-up truck passed us with a volunteer and his mom sitting in the back. They stopped and my host mother pulled me towards it and we got in along with a couple of other pairs. The truck stopped a couple of more times until we had 13 people sitting/standing in the back of this small pick-up truck. Luckily, everyone made it to their destination safely. The first weekend with our families was long, but luckily two other girls live close to me and my host mother is good friends with their families so I got to visit with them some.

They baptized a bunch of people at one of the churches last Sunday so we got to go to a baptism party, which was pretty cool. We stopped at a few places on the way to pick up a cake, sodas, and “biscoitos” that I helped make (they are like balls of dough that are lightly fried and rolled in coconut shavings). The women do all the work here, which was obvious when my host mother carried a 24 pack of full glass soda bottles on her head and the father of her child who was with us carried her purse.

My room is a decent size and I am in a full sized bed which is nice. Other than a bed there is not much else in my room other than dated pop star posters, my water filter, and my suitcase of clothes. We have electricity, but no running water so my baths are out of a bucket as expected. They keep very clean here and expect you to bathe 2-3 times a day so I have been bathing in the morning before school and then again at night before dinner.

They are feeding me well—too well—and I have to refuse food at every meal because they are trying to fatten me up. The food staple here is definitely rice, but we always have some sort of veggie like dish or sauce with it. We eat a lot of cabbage and they make all sorts of other leaf dishes with coconut shavings or coconut milk to flavor.

Yesterday we walked down to a “nearby waterfall”, which ended up being a little trickle of water because it has been dry, and also was about 3 or 4 miles away, which meant that we had to then trek back uphill for 3 or 4 miles. It was a good workout though. I have been running in the mornings with a couple of the volunteers here in the mornings which is refreshing and my host brother ran with us one day also. Apparently he runs for the team at his school and has won all sorts of medals so it was really nice that he wanted to come along with us to run. Other than running in the mornings I don’t have that much free time.

Namaacha is cooler and it has been in the low 60’s most of this week, but it should get warmer as the summer progresses. It is also muddy, muddy, muddy and when it rains and everything gets dirty with the reddish mud. The people here are very nice and always greet us on the street and the little kids love us. Yesterday a couple of friends and I were bombarded by some elementary school kids on our way home from lunch. They were fighting each other to hold our hands and ask us questions as we walked home.

In the afternoons we have technical classes at the secondary school with Peace Corps workers and we have been learning about making learning objectives and lesson plans. Next week each subject is required to do a 10 minute mock lesson to the class and I was elected to present the main part of the one for the chemistry group—oh and it’s in Portuguese, so I have a lot of prep to do for that this weekend and words to look up that pertain to chemistry.

I am enjoying myself very much here so far!
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