End of the first trimester and Reconnect conference in Maputo

The last few weeks have really flown by!

The week before last was the last week of the trimester. This meant that I had to finish up evaluating my students and calculate and submit all of their grades by Friday. For many people, this is work, but not too time consuming. Compared to other volunteers and many other teachers at my school, I teach A LOT. I have 600 students and to evaluate them, correct exams, and calculate grades for that many kids in a week is a real challenge.
The other 11th grade English teacher volunteered to write the 11th grade final English test if I would write the 10th grade one in an attempt to split up the work and make it easier for each other. I said that was fine, but made it very clear that the test MUST be printed and in my hand on Monday morning so that I could evaluate my 3 sections of 11th grade English.
I sent him a text message on Sunday night to remind him of this, but low an behold, first period on Monday morning he was nowhere to be seen. I called him right away and he told me that he had arranged the periods with other teachers to be able to give exams to all five of the 11th grade classes at the same time. We would be giving the test at 9am and he would arrive at 830. I was a little bit annoyed because I was at school bright and early at 6:45 and would have to hang around doing nothing until 9, but I acceped it.
By 9:10, he still had not arrived and I was starting to get somewhat ticked off. I called him and....he was still at home. He promised to be on his way and still come in and although I waited until noon for him to show up, he never arrived. Needless to say, I will be writing all of my English exams on my own from now on. I slept little during the week and spent most of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning correcting, grading, correcting, grading and finally finished Friday afternoon so that I could head out to Maputo the next morning.
This past week we had a big conference in Maputo. After 3 (or 4) months of being at site all volunteers have in service training in their area of work. My conferece was with 16 other education volunteers from the southern provinces of Mozambique. Peace Corps pays for cute little hotel rooms for us and meals are all provided to us which is a really nice treat for us. Ans we got to take showers!!! This was my first hot shower in 4 1/2 months so you bet I enjoyed it. The first day of the conference was really nice. We each gave 10-15 minute presentations about our experiences about our respective sites and it was so interesting to hear about the similar and different experiences that the other volunteers were having.
For dinner on the first night we had salad and LASAGNA and veggies, chicken, and CHOCOLATE PUDDING. Okay, so that probably sounds pretty normal to you, but that was the most exciting meal that I had eaten in 4 1/2 months. Unfortunately either that meal or the next one had something in it that was out to destroy my body because the next two days of the conference I spent in my bed with a fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pains. The fever subsided after a day, but my two roommates and I there have been suffering from abdominal pains and intestinal problems ever since.
The doctor here said it was just food poisoning which is unfortunate because I have been waiting to eat ice cream and food variety forever and when I finally have it, I can't eat it!
I was planning to visit my host family from training in Namaacha which is only an hour and a half away from here for a couple of days, but I decided to go home tomorrow instead and spend the weekend at home in my bed recovering.
All is well and it was so much fun to visit with the other volunteers in the South. It will be nice to start a new semester fresh with my students on Monday and I bought some speakers in Maputo so I can play my English classes some American songs to learn! Any suggestions???

During my first few, slow weeks at site I used to say that Africa was testing me every time I hit a bump in the road. With time I got used to expect the unexpected and, with lots of patience, handled the challenges that were presented to me. Yesterday made me go back to my original thinking. What a day! Firstly, I use a little two burner gas stove to cook on. The has tank attached to it lasted me from when i moved in in december until now. On Friday night the gas finally ran out. Unfortunately my visa also expired last week and Peace Corps had taken our passports to renew them. We are not supposed to travel without our documents and Peace Corps informed us that they would be returning them to us on Saturday or Sunday which also meant that I had to be near my house in case Peace Corps showed up with my passport. I decided that i could survive until Monday on bread, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. On Monday afternoon I asked one of my close Mozambican friends if he would go with me to get my gas tank filled up and help me carry it. I also had not done this before so it was nice to have someone along with me who knew where to go for this sort of thing. We set out in the afternoon and got a chapa headed for the city. We got off at a has station part way there and lugged the gas tank across the road. As we walked over to the gas station an attendant signalled to us that there was no gas. He then came over and explained that they had gas but the system for pumping it was down. We dejectedly got onto another chapa and headed to the city. The story was the same at every place that we went to. Every place was completely out of gas. Darn! This took us a couple of hours to do and included about 5 chapa trips. By this time my arm also felt like it was going to fall off. We stopped in the market to talk to my friend's brother to see if he knew anything about the gas situation in town. He said that even Maputo, the capital city, was having gas problems and that there was no place that we could go. GREAT! We reluctantly decided to head home as a rainstorm came through and started pouring on us. My friend said that he would lend me am extra electric stove that he had until I could buy gas. I went to his house to pick it up and then trudged home. At this point I was tired, hungry, and soaked from the rain. Then the power went out. Needless to say, my morale was low. The power went back on a little while later, but I realized that the stove that he lent me had a plug that did not fit in either of the two outlets in my house. Luckily when i told him this he invited me over for dinner so that I didnt go hungry. It was just one of those days where when you think more things could not possibly go wrong, they do. Hopefully when I go back to the city on Wednesday to buy gas ill be successful!