I had saved a few posts on MS Word that I was hoping to put up last week. Unfortunately, plans get sidetracked. Seriously sidetracked. I spent Tuesday at the beach with four other PCV's. Our hitched ride back to my town sped and eventually flipped over off the road. All but two passengers (out of ten) were thrown from the van. I was fortunate to have a seatbelt on. I would provide a lot more detail, but I'm currently typing with both hands in casts.
I came-to to find myself covered in blood in an empty car off the road with my crooked left wrist throbbing in pain. Some bystanders helped me out and threw me in the back of a pickup to take off to the Macia hospital (basically a little house). I struggled to put the pieces together in a brain scrambled by concussion, pain, and adrenaline, and confusion. They gave me a pain shot and stabilized my wrist. Eventually thr other PCV's showed up. Two passed away. Two living: One with a severe concussion - very confused and scared; and one more (luckily doing well enough to be on the phone with PC. Hours later, ambulances showed up. We sped down to Maputo (about two hours), spent a night there, and then were evac'ed to Pretoria, SA on Wednesday by plane. I went into a long surgery on Thursday. Permanent plates on the left wrist. Bone graft on left elbow. Staples all over left arm (I think my elbow went through the window next to me) including closing up where my entire elbow joint was exposed. Bone set on right wrist. Stitches in head. Christmas in the hospital. Released yesterday to a nice guesthouse in Pretoria. Nice to be out but friend is helping bath me... haha. Hanging in. Lots of big question. Would like to provide detail but typing is very slow. Doing ok. My phone is down. I can be contacted at The Rose Guesthouse in Brooklyn, South Africa. Hope everyone's holidays have been better. All the best wishes.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Transition
A food deprived man happily digs in on Thanksgiving.
Sporting some new gear at the host family party.
Hiking outside Namaacha.
Currently sitting in the Peace Corps Mozambique Headquarters in Maputo. Today is a big admin day before we swear-in tomorrow and transfer to our sites later this week. Peace Corps Office = Fast Internet. Thought I would take the opportunity to put up a few photos.
Not a ton to report at the moment. Been busy packing up my life in Namaacha and prepping to go to site. While we are all a little sad to say our goodbyes and spread out around the country, everyone is ready to cook their own food and have some more personal space; eating deep fried everything for every meal and worrying about what time you have to be home gets tiresome when you are used to more independence (although I was lucky to have a lax family with the latter).
I scored "mid-Advanced" on the final Portuguese language interview. I gave five seperate 45-minute classes on math and physics in the language; am feeling comfortable speaking. Now I just have to learn some Changana (local language - a dialect of Tsonga - spoken around southern Mozambique) so that I can avoid getting ripped off at the market in my town.
This afternoon we are trucking back up to Namaacha to chill with our families for one last night before leaving the breezy mountains on the Swazi border. Tomorrow morning we come back to Maputo, "swear-in" at the U.S. Embassy, and then enjoy an afternoon and night to wander around the city; likely some 'despedida' festivities for our training group. Friday we all ship off to regional supervisors conferences.
The southern regional meeting (I live in the south) will be in the beach town of Bilene right down the road from my site (see photo in my "Site Placement" post). We will be chilling on the beach and having meetings with our school directors. By Monday, I'll be in Macia setting up my house on a completely deserted school grounds. No students (and likely no other teachers) on campus until late-January. Peace Corps restricts our travel for the first three months at site to make sure we are getting to know our towns. The idea makes sense, but when your entire community is basically gone on vacation it seems like the rules could be loosened up a little.
With no school in session and limited travel, I'll likely spend the next 6-8 weeks setting up my house, starting a garden, building a fire pit in my backyard, reading a ton, regaining my physical health (all day classes, a terrible diet, and lots of beer take their toll...), getting really good at walking back and forth on a thin rope, decorating my house (I'm thinking some cheese wheel and geometric drawings on my walls using charcoal as my paintbrush), getting to know the dog that was left for me (Bee-Bop is his name, I am told), finding a bike, wandering around my town, and hopefully chilling on the beach a bit. I will likely meet up with other PCV's for Christmas and New Years at a beach somewhere.
I'll be sure to update everyone when I get to site and start finding my way around.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Giving Chase
Running down Thanksgiving dinner. He'll be soaking in brine for the next two days in prep for our Thanksgiving feast on Friday.
Thanksgiving Prep
War Stories
Call me up when you are badass enough to kill your own turkey for Thanksgiving.
11/22/2011
My host mom, Celeste, and I have a great relationship. We rarely engage in much conversation but, as most moms do, she has quickly picked up on my quirks and habits. She’ll drop a “estas com fome… “ (you’re hungry, huh?) as I squat next to her by the coal stove, then flash a knowing smile as she chuckles to herself and pulls my lunch out of the frying pan. When I come home from playing basketball, I rarely wait ten minutes before I’m commanded to get clean, “vai tomar banho” (go take a bath); a bucket of hot water (with a bucket of cold next to it to get the temperature just right) is already waiting for me in the bathroom. When she realized that me saying “cheguei tarde” (I got home late…) meant I had showed up at 5:30 am and been let in by my 7 year-old cousin, her response: “Tem que brincar” (you gotta play). I would be remiss in not throwing a shout-out to the real Momma Roberts in this post. Not only is the kitchen always stocked to my taste when I make my occasional appearances back in DC, but dinner requests are always honored. And pre-dinner conversation over a glass of wine is unrivaled by any chats in Portuguese with my temp mom here.
Anyway, Celeste is looking out for me. I’m out bragging about her fish samosas (“chamusas de peixe” in Portuguese) to my American friends. We got each other’s backs. This Friday we are having a huge Thanksgiving party. She’s agreed to make one-hundred chamusas for our party for only 150 mets. To put that into perspective, she’s going to buy ingredients, hand make thin samosa wrappers, cook and mash fish-onion-spice filling, individually wrap and fill one-hundred perfect samosa triangles, and then fry them one-by-one for 150 meticais. “150 meticais is how much?” you ask, yeah that’s about five dollars.
Like I said, as well as Celeste and I get along, she rarely seems interested in engaging in too much conversation. That’s why I was surprised to watch her and Samuel, a guy who stays in a room off our house on weekdays, go off on a two hour chat about the civil war (oxymoron?) years here in Mozambique.
For those of you who don’t know the history of obscure corners of Africa, Mozambique became independent from Portugal in 1975. Frelimo, the socialist political party that spearheaded the independence movement, took control of the newly sovereign nation under the guidance of President Samora Machel. Immediately following independence, the government of what was then Rhodesia engineered an internal resistance movement within Mozambique, Renamo, aimed at destabilizing the country and, by extension, aimed at preventing Frelimo from supporting the movement for an independent Zimbabwe. Similarly motivated, the South African government threw their support behind Renamo fearing that an independent black Mozambique would support Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid ANC party (read William Finnegan’s “A Complicated War” if for some reason you decide you want more history on southeastern Africa in the 1980’s), The Frelimo-Renamo conflict snowballed into a 17 year internal war that completely ravaged the country. When the war ended in 1992, Mozambique “was widely considered the world’s poorest country.” Renamo wasn’t really organized around any idea beyond de-stabilization – its actions reflected this. And Celeste and Samuel’s stories reflected these actions.
It would have been weird to watch Momma Celeste super engaged in any two hour conversation. But to hear her and Samuel chuckle like old friends reminiscing about childhood fun as they chatted about personal accounts of a vicious war was, for lack of a better word, weird (I’m curious if some of you Vietnam-era readers can relate to how unsettling it is to listen to people tell horrifying war stories in this same tone). According to my mom, an entire wedding party was shot up at a house down the street from where we live. She remembers hoping, behind locked doors in the house I currently write from, that the Renamo soldiers singing in the street outside wouldn’t knock on the door and force the parents in the house to murder their own children before robbing them (I guess it happened elsewhere in town). Samuel (not originally from Namaacha) remembers hiding out in a pond in his hometown farther north and ducking as Renamo bullets killed a group of young kids hiding out right behind him in the same pond. Pretty sobering dinner conversation…
But as tough as it is to hear some of that stuff, it was interesting to get some primary-source anecdotes about a history I had previously only read about. Hopefully I can happen across a few more similarly interesting conversations within the household before I dip out in a couple weeks.
Anyway, all is still well here. Hopefully no one took that blurb in the last post too seriously – wasn’t meant as a criticism, really just lamenting that people seem to have to be more guarded around each other than they seem to want to be. Time for me to doze off into some Lariam-induced psychotic dreams (Lariam - a malaria prophylaxis that may as well be classified as a psychedelic drug – I’ve experienced the Apocalypse and stabbed people in my dreams, among other fun things) gotta be fresh to give a lesson on “Determinacao de Planos” in Portuguese to a group of Mozambicans at model school tomorrow. Hopefully the geometric patterns in my dreams tonight will inspire a great geometry lesson!
Monday, November 21, 2011
SunBurned Sunday
Swazi-South African-Mozambican Tri-Border Point
Sunday is typically our only day off of the week. After a Saturday night running the pool table at a local bar (and winning beers for a betting friend in the process), I woke up early (as in around 4:30) to the rumble of the backup generator for the bank next door. It’s about fifteen feet outside of my open bedroom windows and normally only turns on during power outages (which happen daily but usually last just minutes). On this particular weekend, whoever runs the bank had forgotten to buy more electricity credits; the power grid was on, but the bank was forced to run continuously on generator power until Monday. Doesn’t make for a great Sunday morning sleep-in. Not to worry though, a breakfast of bread and tea and a few glasses of water later, I was tying up my hiking boots, ready to trek off with a big group of Americans to the “Tres Fronteras,” the mountaintop meeting point of the South African, Swazi, and Mozambican borders.
No sooner had I finished tying my boots when my 22 year-old cousin, Neto, sauntered into my room asking me where I was headed and if I would like to meet his friends. “Sure,” I replied, “when?” “Right now,” he says. He leads me out to his room (a separate concrete block off of the main house) where I find two of his friends pouring shots of “Hankey Bannister” scotch whiskey. Keep in my mind that it’s a few minutes past 8 am at this point. Working through the bottle of whiskey, the three of them engage me in a babbling conversation about being best friends and about how I had to hang out with them, drink multiple bottles of whiskey, and learn how friends be friends in Mozambique. By the time I escape to go on my hike (about 45 minutes later) the bottle is empty and I’m five shots deep. So much for having a restful Sunday…
I set off in the morning sun with 20+ other Peace Corps kids on a gravel road headed due west out of town. A couple hours and a few thorn scratches later, we’re posing for photos on top of a big rock pile that marks the intersection of the borders of South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique. We were rewarded with cool mountain breezes and sweeping views into all three countries. The group splintered on the decent and I ended up with three friends (the Spades crew – see “Afternoon Tea” photo - the four of us get made fun of for playing Spades all the time with the same teams that started at 5 am on the floor of the JFK ticketing area in September…) wandering down a steep and bushy part of the mountain side. Taking an unorthodox path home would have meant additional hours roasting in the midday sun were it not for a pickup truck driving by as we made it back out to the road. We hopped in the back and waved to the others as we blew by them on our way back into Namaacha.
Sunburned, tired, and hung-over (from my morning “friendship shots”), I wolfed down a plate of rice and matapa (greens stewed in a thick sauce of coconut milk and mashed peanuts – yummy!) and fell asleep. I woke up two hours later feeling rested, recovered, and ready to relax the rest of the Sunday away. I set out to type up this blog post in Word when, low and behold, Neto and his buddy Michele whistle to me from the street to join them. Before I know it, we’re sitting at a barraca filling each other’s glasses with another bottle of Hankey Bannister. A heaping tray of xima (flour boiled in water until it becomes a flavorless but filling paste resembling mashed potatoes), slabs of grilled beef, and tomato-onion salad joins our whiskey bottle a little while later. We tear the tray to shreds, ripping at the beef barehanded. Over the next few hours, Neto and I chat about his girlfriend (16 years-old; he found out this week that he got her pregnant; scary times in Neto’s world) and about life in Mozambique in general.
I would like to interject here for a moment:
Having moved around a lot over the last few years, I continue to find it remarkable how eager people seem to be to engage in pretty intimate conversation if you show yourself open to it. From truckers on the Pan-American Highway in the Atacama Desert, to bunk mates on Chinese sleeper-trains, to people wandering the same piece of beach in San Francisco, to old American friends, to a Mozambican host cousin with a recently pregnant girlfriend, and everyone in between, most people (young or old, rich or poor) are asking themselves pretty much the same questions. That shouldn’t be particularly surprising – pickup any great book and list some themes – but I guess I’m kind of struck by how eager people have been to engage me (or is it me with them… regardless, it’s reciprocated) in these conversations yet how, outwardly, people often seem so set on convincing those around them that they carry a great degree of certainty in their decisions. I don’t mean this as a critique of choosing a definite path for yourself so much as I’m trying to point out that if, across the board, everyone is asking the same questions, why do so many people seem to go to such lengths to sell their “certainty” to each other? Wouldn’t asking yourself questions be a lot less scary if everyone around you wasn’t pretending that they had fixed answers? That’s not to say that people should just float around in “a nebulous world of uncertainty” (cheers to Mr. Woll on that one). It’s just to say that if people were less keen on trying to convince others of the certainty of their decisions, maybe everyone around them wouldn’t feel the need to try so hard to come to any fixed conclusions; if we all stopped bullshitting each other, it would be a lot easier to stop bullshitting ourselves (and vice-a-versa). In that sense, I’ve been very lucky to have spent the last several years scampering around the world running into countless great conversations that have allowed me to feel pretty comfortable running around the world running into countless great conversations. “Estamos juntos,” translation: “we are together,” is a common goodbye here in Mozambique - it seems kind of fitting here.
Anyway…
Bottle number two of Hankey Bannister is soon followed by bottle number three. This bottle is followed by an additional group of Mozambican friends and another whopping tray of xima, meat, and salad. By the time we stumble out of the barraca around 9 pm (roughly five hours later), I’m steering Neto down the street by his shoulders. After a short delay climbing into the back of a covered pickup-bed to help a drunk cop break into his own car to drive home, we wander back into town (I live dead-center in the middle of town), swing by some shady friends’ spots, and return to Neto’s room to cap the night off. Two of Neto’s friends and I leave him asleep sitting up on his bed and I head back into the house to eat the grilled chicken my sister has left out for me from dinner (I was still hungry?). The end. Estamos juntos.
No sooner had I finished tying my boots when my 22 year-old cousin, Neto, sauntered into my room asking me where I was headed and if I would like to meet his friends. “Sure,” I replied, “when?” “Right now,” he says. He leads me out to his room (a separate concrete block off of the main house) where I find two of his friends pouring shots of “Hankey Bannister” scotch whiskey. Keep in my mind that it’s a few minutes past 8 am at this point. Working through the bottle of whiskey, the three of them engage me in a babbling conversation about being best friends and about how I had to hang out with them, drink multiple bottles of whiskey, and learn how friends be friends in Mozambique. By the time I escape to go on my hike (about 45 minutes later) the bottle is empty and I’m five shots deep. So much for having a restful Sunday…
I set off in the morning sun with 20+ other Peace Corps kids on a gravel road headed due west out of town. A couple hours and a few thorn scratches later, we’re posing for photos on top of a big rock pile that marks the intersection of the borders of South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique. We were rewarded with cool mountain breezes and sweeping views into all three countries. The group splintered on the decent and I ended up with three friends (the Spades crew – see “Afternoon Tea” photo - the four of us get made fun of for playing Spades all the time with the same teams that started at 5 am on the floor of the JFK ticketing area in September…) wandering down a steep and bushy part of the mountain side. Taking an unorthodox path home would have meant additional hours roasting in the midday sun were it not for a pickup truck driving by as we made it back out to the road. We hopped in the back and waved to the others as we blew by them on our way back into Namaacha.
Sunburned, tired, and hung-over (from my morning “friendship shots”), I wolfed down a plate of rice and matapa (greens stewed in a thick sauce of coconut milk and mashed peanuts – yummy!) and fell asleep. I woke up two hours later feeling rested, recovered, and ready to relax the rest of the Sunday away. I set out to type up this blog post in Word when, low and behold, Neto and his buddy Michele whistle to me from the street to join them. Before I know it, we’re sitting at a barraca filling each other’s glasses with another bottle of Hankey Bannister. A heaping tray of xima (flour boiled in water until it becomes a flavorless but filling paste resembling mashed potatoes), slabs of grilled beef, and tomato-onion salad joins our whiskey bottle a little while later. We tear the tray to shreds, ripping at the beef barehanded. Over the next few hours, Neto and I chat about his girlfriend (16 years-old; he found out this week that he got her pregnant; scary times in Neto’s world) and about life in Mozambique in general.
I would like to interject here for a moment:
Having moved around a lot over the last few years, I continue to find it remarkable how eager people seem to be to engage in pretty intimate conversation if you show yourself open to it. From truckers on the Pan-American Highway in the Atacama Desert, to bunk mates on Chinese sleeper-trains, to people wandering the same piece of beach in San Francisco, to old American friends, to a Mozambican host cousin with a recently pregnant girlfriend, and everyone in between, most people (young or old, rich or poor) are asking themselves pretty much the same questions. That shouldn’t be particularly surprising – pickup any great book and list some themes – but I guess I’m kind of struck by how eager people have been to engage me (or is it me with them… regardless, it’s reciprocated) in these conversations yet how, outwardly, people often seem so set on convincing those around them that they carry a great degree of certainty in their decisions. I don’t mean this as a critique of choosing a definite path for yourself so much as I’m trying to point out that if, across the board, everyone is asking the same questions, why do so many people seem to go to such lengths to sell their “certainty” to each other? Wouldn’t asking yourself questions be a lot less scary if everyone around you wasn’t pretending that they had fixed answers? That’s not to say that people should just float around in “a nebulous world of uncertainty” (cheers to Mr. Woll on that one). It’s just to say that if people were less keen on trying to convince others of the certainty of their decisions, maybe everyone around them wouldn’t feel the need to try so hard to come to any fixed conclusions; if we all stopped bullshitting each other, it would be a lot easier to stop bullshitting ourselves (and vice-a-versa). In that sense, I’ve been very lucky to have spent the last several years scampering around the world running into countless great conversations that have allowed me to feel pretty comfortable running around the world running into countless great conversations. “Estamos juntos,” translation: “we are together,” is a common goodbye here in Mozambique - it seems kind of fitting here.
Anyway…
Bottle number two of Hankey Bannister is soon followed by bottle number three. This bottle is followed by an additional group of Mozambican friends and another whopping tray of xima, meat, and salad. By the time we stumble out of the barraca around 9 pm (roughly five hours later), I’m steering Neto down the street by his shoulders. After a short delay climbing into the back of a covered pickup-bed to help a drunk cop break into his own car to drive home, we wander back into town (I live dead-center in the middle of town), swing by some shady friends’ spots, and return to Neto’s room to cap the night off. Two of Neto’s friends and I leave him asleep sitting up on his bed and I head back into the house to eat the grilled chicken my sister has left out for me from dinner (I was still hungry?). The end. Estamos juntos.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Site Placement - Macia, Gaza Province
If your picture of Peace Corps service includes living in a stick shack without running water or electricity in a dry dusty field in rural Africa, you have a generally accurate image... most of the time. We received our official site placements on Wednesday - I'll be living in Macia, Gaza Province; running water, electricity, and a 30km ride down the road to Praia Beline (the lagoon picture above). I'll be teaching high school math and possibly physics at a relatively new school. I'll have a small but new house which I'll be sharing with a Mozambican teacher from my school. Should make for great Portuguese practice. Apparently his family lives in Xai-Xai (the provincial capital of Gaza Province - about 2 hours away) which means he'll be gone a lot of the time. The PCV moving out of that site says he's a good guy. I'll have a fenced in yard (keeps the goats away from the garden!) and a dog to inherit. More details to come when I move there on December 9th.
Gaza is the first province north from Maputo Province (the southernmost province in Mozambique). I'll be two hours up the EN1 (Mozambique's main highway) from Maputo City. Will likely have a lot of other Peace Corps people stopping through my house on their trips to the capital. Being in Macia also means being well connected to the better highway systems that are concentrated around the southern half of the country. Hopefully I'll get some good traveling in. Apparently the 30km trip to the beach is doable on a bike if you bring a tent to camp out for the night and ride back in the morning. Main downside is being far down in one corner of the country. Keeping in touch with friends scattered around the north and central regions will be tough.
For now, we're all closing out training here in Namaacha. Two weeks of "model school" teaching starting Monday and then a week to wrap things up here and in Maputo before heading to site. I'll get details up on the house, school, neighbors, town when I get there (no word yet on what internet access will be like). Portuguese is tightening up. Learning to play the Ukulele . Getting ready to go to site.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Training - Life in Namaacha
Samora Machel Honorary Ceremony - Mbuzene, South Africa
November 11th, 2011
The average training day for the first five weeks looked something like this:
Wake up to honking ducks in the yard around 5:30. Rooster may or may not have already been crowing for a few hours. Out of bed at 6:00 to heat up water over the fire in the yard (if my mom started it already) or in the electric water boiler in the house. Take a hot bucket bath in the shell of a bathroom that at some point (I assume sometime in the 70’s when our house was probably owned by a Portuguese family) had running water. Throw on the Peace Corps required “business casual” clothes and sit down for a breakfast of bread and jam with tea. By 7:30 I’m starting language class in the garage at another trainee’s house. Our teacher leads me and the three others in my language group through a morning of intensive Portuguese lessons (from day one, the teacher is speaking not a word of English). We go strong until lunch time with occasional brakes to stand outside the garage, compare the snacks our mothers packed us, break into English (ah! I can fully express myself!), and enjoy the sweeping views over the golden rolling hills of southern Mozambique (something like northern California in summer but without as many trees). I stroll home on the red dirt roads of Namaacha in time to find my mom or sister pulling my fried lunch of french-fries, fried sausage, and fried egg out of the frying pan on the coal stove in the yard. I eat lunch alone in the main room of the house (family eats lunch later while I’m back at class). I wolf down the food (I am generally a fast eater, but I think the low-protein diet here makes me especially ravenous come meal time). I spend the hour or so after eating napping in my bed or lazing around in the yard exchanging the occasional word with my grandma, mom, or sister. By 2:00 I’m back at school. This time it’s me and the eight other math/science teachers-to-be at the “Math Hub,” a house that Peace Corps is renting out for a teacher housing and some learning space. Class is usually held outside under a big lychee tree. We run through various exercises to teach us how to teach. Most of the time, I find myself completely lost in some weird meta-analysis of the class where I’m not sure if what the teacher is teaching is actually what I am supposed to be learning or if I am actually supposed to be learning her method of teaching by observing her teaching something that I do not need to be learning… Teaching about teaching is weird… especially when they are integrating the methods of teaching that we are supposed to teach with into their teaching us how to teach. Anyway… that usually goes on until around 5:00 pm. Evenings are generally occupied by basketball matches against Mozambican teenagers or drinking $1.30 beers (the local Laurentina Preta is pretty good!) at one of the local barracas. By 7:00 pm, I’m home helping chop vegetables, kill chickens, and generally get dinner underway. I munch down dinner with whatever scattering of my family is present in a generally unstructured manner. The TV is always tuned into Brasilian soap operas (us Americans discuss “Caras e Bocas” episodes at the bar – everyone’s family is a fan) and people eat at random – no waiting for everyone to sit down or whatever. By 9:00, I’m passing out on my saggy bed under my mosquito net, ready to do it again the next day.
As far as language training goes, you couldn’t ask for anything much better. 4-1 student teacher ratio for 4-5 hours/day, six days/week. Then you come home to a Portuguese speaking household. Peace Corps conducted official language testing interviews last week and I managed to read in at “advanced-low” level on some international standard scale. Yay for speaking Spanish before I left.
The repetition of that schedule has been broken up a bit by some notable events: Going to Mbuzene in South Africa to check out the 25th Anniversary Ceremony honoring the plane crash death of revolutionary leader and first Mozambican president, Samora Machel (try Wikipedia if you want some more details). Some days off to hike in the surrounding hills. Big Halloween party at a PCV’s house here in Namaacha. A lot of other stuff goes on (at least I feel like my time is occupied…) that seems to keep me busy in between. Us Americans pretty much hang around talking about where we might get sent for site placement. The lack of control and uncertainty of where we will be living and working for the next two years pretty much occupies 80% of conversation. The other 20% is saved to discuss fried meals and the correct form for shitting in a hole or decapitating a chicken. It’s fun though. Really.
The aforementioned language interview marked a turning point in training. The day after the test, everyone shipped out to various sites around the country to hang out with current PCV’s (that’s Peace Corps Volunteers, for the uninitiated – constantly referring to each other as volunteers starts to feel really normal once you get over the initial weirdness of that title) and to get a feel for their sites. Language classes will pretty much drop off now in favor of intensive teacher training (run in Portuguese).
I returned to Namaacha today after nearly a week of travel in the notoriously hot Tete province in northwest Mozambique. Pretty much the only thing any non-Tete inhabiting Mozambican will tell you about Tete is the following: “Tete is hot.” In addition to high temperatures (try 45 celsius!), Tete province is home to a provincial capital, Tete City, that houses an odd mix of expats and non-local Mozambicans working at the nearby coal mines. The surrounding countryside is brown (but I hear it turns green in rainy season) and dotted with baobab trees. If you don’t know what a baobab tree is, google image search it. Baobab trees are cool looking. Another PCT (that’s Peace Corps Trainee!) and I spent most of the week with a couple PCV’s in Moatize, basically the coal mining capital of Mozambique. We cooked lots of food. We danced with Brasilians (and some American lawyer from DC working for one of these mining companies?). We wandered about. We hitchhiked out to another site in the “mato,” Portuguese for bush (beautiful morning ride in an open-backed truck, sitting on rice sacks, cruising through the scrubland and mountains of northern Tete). The PCV there requested to have a site mate and to work at a “secure” site. She ended up opening a new site (as in, no previous Peace Corps teachers there) in the mato by herself with no cell service. Isolated but beautiful place. She had come to love it. We spent time cooking, exploring her school, and wandering around in the bush country behind her house. Bean stew over an open fire was on order for dinner under a nearly-full moon.
I returned to Namaacha today after nearly a week of travel in the notoriously hot Tete province in northwest Mozambique. Pretty much the only thing any non-Tete inhabiting Mozambican will tell you about Tete is the following: “Tete is hot.” In addition to high temperatures (try 45 celsius!), Tete province is home to a provincial capital, Tete City, that houses an odd mix of expats and non-local Mozambicans working at the nearby coal mines. The surrounding countryside is brown (but I hear it turns green in rainy season) and dotted with baobab trees. If you don’t know what a baobab tree is, google image search it. Baobab trees are cool looking. Another PCT (that’s Peace Corps Trainee!) and I spent most of the week with a couple PCV’s in Moatize, basically the coal mining capital of Mozambique. We cooked lots of food. We danced with Brasilians (and some American lawyer from DC working for one of these mining companies?). We wandered about. We hitchhiked out to another site in the “mato,” Portuguese for bush (beautiful morning ride in an open-backed truck, sitting on rice sacks, cruising through the scrubland and mountains of northern Tete). The PCV there requested to have a site mate and to work at a “secure” site. She ended up opening a new site (as in, no previous Peace Corps teachers there) in the mato by herself with no cell service. Isolated but beautiful place. She had come to love it. We spent time cooking, exploring her school, and wandering around in the bush country behind her house. Bean stew over an open fire was on order for dinner under a nearly-full moon.
The cool breezes of Namaacha have been a welcome welcoming back to the south end of the country. From here on out, training will mainly consist of “model school” lessons that we will run with students from the local secondary school. At home, I’ll be back to chilling with my twenty-one year-old Mozambican cousin (passenado is the generally accepted pastime – google that), being babied by my host mother, being laughed at by my seventeen year old sister, enjoying desk side Van Morrison inspired dances from my two-year old sister, and feeling an odd sense of power imparted on me (as the oldest male in the house) by my strong-willed grandmother, the clear matriarch of my huge family (any understanding of familial structure eludes me).
So that’s pretty much where I’m at right now. I’ve surely left out a ton of what’s gone on since I’ve been here. I guess that’s to be expected when you start writing this far in… I’ll try to keep up in the future (I’m writing these in Word and will just copy and paste them into this blog when I get rare chances).
Life is good. I’m learning a ton and staying psyched to keep doing so. Should be a hell of a fun ride for the next couple of years.
Introduction
This blog is mine. The opinions expressed here are not those of the Peace Corps nor of the U.S. Government.
I’ve found keeping in touch with the world from distant corners of southeast Africa to be tougher than expected. Internet access is limited. And when I do get connected, I barely have the bandwidth to open an e-mail. Hopefully posting here occasionally will keep me from completely dropping off everyone’s radar screens over the next couple of years (tough to e-mail everyone when Gmail works too slowly to auto-complete e-mail addresses for me…).
Posts will likely be few and far between. I’ll be lucky to upload one picture. But hopefully I can at least keep everyone up to date on my general whereabouts and happenings as a “malungu” in Mozambique.
Over the next couple of years, I will be living in Mozambique while working as a math/physics teacher through the Peace Corps. I am training in Namaacha, Maputo Province (southern Mozambique, on the Swazi and South African borders) from October 1, 2011 until December 9,2011. During this time, I can receive mail at the following address:
Derek Roberts, PCV
Corpo da Paz/US Peace Corps
C.P. 4398
Maputo, Mozambique
After December 9th, I will be sent to site where I should stay for two full years (until December, 2013). I am still waiting on final site placement. I will provide information/address when it becomes available.
I’ve found keeping in touch with the world from distant corners of southeast Africa to be tougher than expected. Internet access is limited. And when I do get connected, I barely have the bandwidth to open an e-mail. Hopefully posting here occasionally will keep me from completely dropping off everyone’s radar screens over the next couple of years (tough to e-mail everyone when Gmail works too slowly to auto-complete e-mail addresses for me…).
Posts will likely be few and far between. I’ll be lucky to upload one picture. But hopefully I can at least keep everyone up to date on my general whereabouts and happenings as a “malungu” in Mozambique.
Over the next couple of years, I will be living in Mozambique while working as a math/physics teacher through the Peace Corps. I am training in Namaacha, Maputo Province (southern Mozambique, on the Swazi and South African borders) from October 1, 2011 until December 9,2011. During this time, I can receive mail at the following address:
Derek Roberts, PCV
Corpo da Paz/US Peace Corps
C.P. 4398
Maputo, Mozambique
After December 9th, I will be sent to site where I should stay for two full years (until December, 2013). I am still waiting on final site placement. I will provide information/address when it becomes available.
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