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!