Journey to Site

We have been getting ready to move to our site for over a week now. We packed up all our stuff into boxes, including all the many manuals and books the Peace Corps has provided us with. Every time we brought out another box, our host mom would tell us how sad she was that we were leaving. It was a bittersweet farewell after ten happy weeks with our host family. Our mom had been hoping we would have a site near enough to visit her on weekends, but unfortunately we're almost as far as possible! Mozambique is a very large country and it takes a long time to get anywhere. Basically, if our training town were San Diego, our site in Tete would be up in Oregon somewhere, but there's no Highway 5 in Mozambique - or highway of any kind. So we flew to Chimoio, the captial of Manica province, on a very small plane. In fact, the plane was so small that half of our central region colleagues were left in Maputo, along with most of our stuff! But we are Peace Corps Volunteers, so we are flexible, and we all made it eventually to our supervisor's conference where we met the directors of the secondary schools where we will be teaching. We also got to stay in a very luxurious hotel, which has wi-fi - hence all the photos and blogging! (Click on the link in the right column under our picture to see our photos). We still haven't arrived at our site yet- we still have another 500 km to travel tomorrow. But due to the difficult travel conditions, we will be driven there in a Peace Corps vehicle, with all of our stuff. We didn't come to Africa with that much stuff, but Peace Corps has bestowed upon many resources, including water filters, mosquito net, bedding, a library of materials, a huge medical kit, etc. So basically we are traveling with 4 boxes and 4 suitcases of junk! So tomorrow we will arrive in our new little house, unpack, meet the neighbors, and begin the process of getting to know our new community.