Site Placement!

Hi all! I got my site placement today! I will be in a small village called Chongoene in Gaza Province. I am replacing a previous volunteer which is nice because I have a house that is already furnished. It is a three room house with two bedrooms and a kitchen/living room I guess?? It sounds like a pretty small town, but I am only 17K from a popular beach town called Xai-Xai which has a lot of resources. My house will have electricity (most of the time), but no running water or internet or anything. I am slated to teach chemistry and computer technology. The volunteer before me taught 11th and 12th grade chem so it's possible that I'll be teaching that too. I also live right at my school so it seems like it might be a bit safer. I am very excited about my site as of now, however I am veryyyy far away from some of my good friends here.

This weekend we have a 3 day weekend and I am going to a beach town called Bilene with a bunch of other volunteers. Our plan is to lay on the beach and relax! We leave at 5:30 tomorrow morning and the trip should take about 4-5 hours. I'll update when I get back. It's always great to hear from everyone!

I'm a Mozambican aunt!

We went to a suburb of the capital city last week called Matola. It has a supermarket, some clothing stores, and a restaurant with wireless! Anyway, all of those things are really exciting for us. We literally just walked around the supermarket for a while checking out all of the things that it had. At lunch we all had chocolate milkshakes and then burgers or pizza and diet cokes. Sounds pretty normal for the US, but those are special treats for us J.

The trip back from Matola last week was quite the adventure. In Mozambique a lot of travel is done by chapa. A chapa is like a little van that has four rows of seating. The chapas have no set schedule, but do have set routes that they travel. They also really pack people into the chapas and they will not leave unless they are packed full of people. Anyway, we had taken a chapa to Matola in the morning directly from Namaacha. We got on the chapa in Namaacha at 8 and then it circled around town for an hour until it found enough people to fill it up and leave. On the trip back we discovered that there are no chapas that return directly from Matola to Namaacha and so we would have to take a bus halfway there to a town called Boane and then we could find a chapa from there. We eventually found the bus that would take us to Boane and even though it seemed full, we knew we would have to pack in. I have never been so squished and so close to people in my life! They literally pack as many people as possible that will fit in this bus. We got off at the last stop so the bus cleared out a little bit and we saw a sign that said that listed the bus capacity at 40 people. We counted and estimated that there were about 150 people on the bus at one time…no exaggeration there… We then figured out the “spot” in Boane where we had to wait for the next chapa. It was literally a corner of this playground in town which was unmarked, but everyone of course just “knew” that it was the right place to get a chapa from Boane to Namaacha. We then waited for about 2 or 2 ½ hours as several open backed trucks carted people off to Namaacha (we were advised not to ride in those). Finally after one failed chapa, we found one that would take us home and we made it back to Namaacha.

I’m a Mozambican aunt! We have had a sister-in-law of my family here living with us for a while because she was pregnant. Yesterday morning she had her baby at the hospital here in town! The grandmother invited me to go with her to the hospital yesterday so yesterday afternoon I went to see her. The hospital has a small building designated to be a maternity ward. It was one long room with about 10 hospital beds. There were four women in the room with their newborn babies. They handed me the newborn baby girl right away and I got to hold her for a while. I’m not sure I’ve ever held a baby that small! The baby's name is Yulli and they named her today because they didn't know if it was going to be a girl or a boy. It was a really cool experience and I think the two of them are coming home this afternoon.

Also I have recently discovered that my camera cord is packed away in my 2 year bag….so it will be another month until I have access to it. So I promise I will post pictures in a month!

This week we have started to prepare for model school. Model school is set up at the local secondary school to be practice for all of the education volunteers. The kids here are on summer vacation, but they get a group of kids to sign up to attend model school and we teach lessons in our disciplines to them each morning for two weeks. I will be teaching 4 different lesson plans and 7 lessons in total, so three of the lessons I will be teaching to more than one class. It’s a little intimidating to have to teach in Portuguese in a real classroom setting, but it will be great practice to have to design our own lesson plans and teach them before we get into our real schools.

This week we also had a technical session where the teachers evaluated us on the domestic skills that we have learned since we got here. Some people had to light charcoal, others had to grind peanuts, make coconut milk, kill chickens, pluck chickens, etc. A friend and I volunteered to crack and shred the coconuts and it was a success...and also really fun.

Life with the host families is still going well, but I am more eager to live on my own and on my own schedule by the day. Also, the immense attention that I get from people, especially kids, on the street is starting to get old, but that’s something that I’ll have to get used to here in Mozambique. The weather has gotten hot and we have had several 100 degree plus days, but it always cools off at night so sleeping is still comfortable. That’s all for now. I’ll update again soon!