Thanksgiving in Mozambique

We hope you all had a wonderful day of gratitude back home! We celebrated a day early here, on Wednesday, with a huge potluck feast, including turkey (which is called Peru in Portuguese!) and all the trimmings. Everyone began the day with some serious nerves though because we would find out our sites at some point that day. The schedule was all mixed up, so we didn´t know exactly when the news would come, but eventually we all got our site envelopes and opened them simultaneously. Most people seemed pretty happy, although there were some surprises, including our placement. We will be going to Tete province, in the mountains near Malawi. We will both be teaching in a small school grades 8-10, living in a nice house in the town with lots of neighbors. There will only be 2 other PC Mozambique volunteers in our province, but luckily we have each other, and possible some volunteers from PC Malawi on the other side of the border. Hopefully since our town is in the mountains it won´t get too hot, although we are expecting lots of rain from the monsoon, which begins now in December. We will finish up with our last week of training and then celebrate our Swearing-In as volunteers next Tuesday the 8th. Then we fly north! We are very grateful for this opportunity to serve together here in Mozambique and for our family and friends around the world. We will be thinking about you all during the holiday season! Also, our house has a spare bedroom, so we will be able to host any visitors ready for adventure! (Photo is of our Thanksgiving touch football game!)

Model School

We teach in a large school built by the Portuguese in the time before the revolution. In it day it must have been a magnificent building, with large windows, high ceilings, and hand painted tiles. Today a general sense of neglect and disrepair conveys the feelings that no maintenance has occurred since the colonial powers left in 1975. Broken panes of glass, cracked porcelain sinks in the bathroom, faded paint covered in murals, drawing and grafitti, and low lighting conditions all contribute to a post-apocalyptic atmosphere that would be perfect for a haunted house zombie movie. But it is not Knott´s Scary Farm, it is a functioning secondary school. Currently, we the 40 Peace Corps Education volunteers in training, just finished running a two-week academic session for local students. We face many difficulties in our effort to teach our classes: our only resources are the chalk and blackboard, our students´only resources are their pencils and paper and anything our creativity can scrounge up (in the case of my lessons "colors and clothing" I brought in different pieces of Janet´s and my wardrobes). When it rains outside of the classroom (which has been frequent lately!), it rains inside of the classroom as well. When the wind blows outside, it blows through the class as well. When it is nice outside the classrooms are pleasant. Most of classes have about 20 students, but the rooms still have about 50 empty spaces which will be full during the academic year, when some of us will have classes of up to 125 young Mozambicans. In general our students have been eager to learn, but have difficulty retaining the information we impart. They love to repeat in chorus, but are more intimidated by any assignments that go beyond that. Now as we walk around town we receive many more greetings and smiles from the youth, and a lot more people know our names, although it is very difficult to remember all of our students´names. We are very excited to get out to our little school in the north and start teaching when the new academic years begins in January.

Traveling and placement nerves

It has been a bit longer than usual since we updated because we´ve been traveling! Last week we split up and went to visit some current volunteers in two very different parts of Mozambique. I headed up the ´volunteer super-highway´to southern Inhambane province. There are many volunteers placed all along the coast, so many trainees went to this area. Luc went to the mountains and lakes of Manica provice, but I´ll let him tell his stories. I stayed with a wonderful volunteer biology teacher who lives in an amazing coastal town with views of the coast to die for. The town has lagoons vbetween it and the beach: crystal clear semi-salty water, safe for swimming and lined with coconut palms. It was breathtaking. I had lots of chances to swim, practice Portuguese with teachers from her school and try my hand at cooking Ámerican recipes over a coal stove. Overall, the 5 days were inspiring and fun to see a volunteer thriving in a really spectacular setting.

When all the trainees returned with new perspective about a better idea of what life may be like, the suspense about where we will all be placed has gone sky-high. We are sscoping out the list of possible sights, prioritizing our preferences and waiting impatiently for the big reveal day. Emotions are all over the place in our training group, but we are crossing our fingers for a great placement! Wish us luck!

Festivities

While most of you were celebrataing Halloween in the USA, we were also celebrating Halloween in Mozambique, where no one knows what Halloween is, which would explain the extra stares as Janet and I walked to our party dressed as a flower and a tree in our costumes made mostly out of materials gathered from local vegatation. Our fellow trainees exhibited great creativity in assembling costumes from market products and recycled items. Some host siblings also participated in the festivities; they particularly enjoyed the concept of trick-or-treat. Later on we danced the night away at the local ourdoor disco to mostly American music was a few Mozambiquan dances thrown in, which Luc was very bad at executing. It was the first time we stayed up past 10pm, as we usually go to bed soon after dinner at around 9pm! We finished off the weekend fun with a birthday party for one of our colleagues. Her host family threw quite a bash, including a huge buffet, dancing in their yard and a cake, which they cooked somehow without an oven. We´re learning how to ´skake-it´Mozambique-style, with dances such as the ever-popular marrabenta and passada. Admittedly, most of the kids we´ve seen are way better dancers than we could ever dream of. All in all, a wonderful weekend. We love it here in Mozambique!

Hitting the half-way mark

Here´s an update on our Peace Corps training in Mozambique! Elections took place last week in a mostly peaceful process. No major surprises occurred, the FRELIMO party, which has ruled since independence in 1975, won another landslide victory (75% of the vote) so they are in charge for another 5 years. We´ll miss FRELIMO´s catchy jingles, which until now have dominated the airwaves. As a result of the smooth elections the US embassy has lifted the nationwide standfast travel alert for Americans, which is especially meaningful for us because this next week we are scheduled for site visits. All of us trainees will spread out across Mozambique to visit current volunteers at their sites to see what Peace Corps is really all about. Janet will visit a rural beach site in southern Inhambane province - supposedly one of the most beautiful PC sites in the country (or world!). It will involve most of the day in various types of ground transport on Saturday, but she´ll be with other volunteers. Luc will spend the visit in the mountainous interior province of Manica, near Chimoio. He will travel by air because of the great distance, which he does not like very much!. Everyone is very excited for a chance to see more of the country and get a little break from our routines. We have spent most of our training hours focusing on honing our Portuguese (and Changana, the local language) and preparing our technical skills for teaching large classes with very limited physical resources (lots of practice at the blackboard!). We also have weekly cultural exchange sessions called Ngome(drum) time, which usually involve lots of dancing and skits. This week Janet´s group led us in the playground fortune-telling game of MASH and Luc attempted to portray American culture by painting himself blue and beating our rhythms on trash a la Blue Man Group. Last week we had a two day training session dedicated to permaculture - how to use simple agriculture techniques to increase food production in small sustainable family gardens. It was very fun getting out and digging in the earth, even though it was raining and we later had to spend extra time while cleaning our clothes to scrub out all the red clay dirt. Next up after site visit is our Model School, a two week school simulation organized by Peace Corps in which all of us Peace Corps education trainees teach classes to local secondary school students currently on vacation, which we anticipate will more accurately reflect our future jobs than our current mock teaching assignments which involve presenting English/Biology lessons to our peers, who already speak English/majored in Biology! Training is flying by quickly, we are just about halfway done!