Peace Corps Reconnect

After serving in site for close to 4 months, Peace Corps brought all
of us new volunteers together again for a four-day conference in
Nampula. If you don't have a Mozambique map handy, Nampula is
approximately a 1500 km journey from our site in Tete. So that
translates into an additional 6 days to travel there and back, even
including the fact that we flew one leg of it (given the airlines
sitation here in moz, we went 500 km just to get to the flight). The
upside of all this was that we got to see a lot of the country,
including Mozambique's second city, Beira, which had a delightfully
derelict maritime colonial feel. We also saw Ilha de Moçambique, but
that's another post. Everyone at the conference was more excited about
seeing friends and staying in a fancy hotel with catered meals than
anything else our conference had to offer. We were especially excited
because we hadn't seen anyone from our group since Christmas since our
site is so isolated. We loved hearing stories, getting gossip (like
who already has a Mozambican boyfriend), and strategizing about common
problems such as systemic cheating, low learning outcomes, and heavy
teaching schedules. We also loved our king-sized bed with a real
mattress, satellite tv, air conditioning, eating meat, cheese,
pastries, ice cream, pastries, yogurt, cereal, apples, butter, honey,
and pizza (needless to say, Luc gained 5 pounds). Our formal sessions
were also useful. Luc had to lead one on monitoring and evaluation
that was got good reviews (surprisingly, as you might imagine, given
the subject). We also had daily trivia games on Mozambican history and
geography, and together we won every one, meaning we got lots of
chocolate bars and cookies as prizes!