Vamos a Namaacha

Hi All, after tonight I will not have much internet (if at all) over the next 2 months so I figure that a blog update as of now would be useful. I haven’t seen the country or city very much because we have been at the hotel the whole time, but the hotel has palm trees and green grass all around though
and it feels very tropical. I did see the indian ocean on my way here in the bus so that was cool! There were some nice houses and we saw the American Embassy which looked nice, but the neighboring houses are often little shacks so there are definitely big disparities economically.

Yesterday we had safety talks, medical talks, medical interviews, and language interviews and shots. I only had one shot yesterday, but I am getting a couple more today. I also met the Ambassador yesterday morning and she was so cool! I wish she could have hung around more so I could talk to her, but she said that she would be back again soon. She has been a foreign officer for 20ish years and has worked in Thailand, Kenya, Mozambique, Turkey, and a lot of other cool places.

Tomorrow we go to our training site in a city called Namaacha for the next two months where we will live with host families so I get to meet my host family tomorrow!

This week we have had 4 current PC volunteers around so I have been able to ask them questions and one of them is a chem teacher so I have been able to ask him a lot about what to expect. He
says that he has 50 students in his class, which is considered small.
He said that some volunteers up north have up to 120 students!

Apparently previous volunteers here have loved it here. We heard today that out of the
group scheduled to leave in December, 13 volunteers decided to extend
their stay here by either 4, 8, or 12 months. I find that to be very
impressive and I think that it says good things about the country.

I think that life is definitely going to be a lot slower here because
everything just takes a lot longer. They taught us how to take bucket
baths today and educated us on boiling and bleaching our water. (We also will not have any running water and will have to fetch it). The Peace Corps provides us with a water filter, mosquito net, linens,
towels, a cook book and some other study materials for us during
training, which is very nice and will be useful for the next 2 months.

Sorry if this post is badly written. I did it in several different spurts so it might be choppy.

Again, letters are appreciated and I will update the blog when I can!

Love you all,

Michelle