Christmas in May

Mail in Africa is different than in America. There are no postmen and
there are no deliveries - you have to go to the nearest post office
and pick it up yourself. In our case that post office is over 100km
away and that's not even the most inconvenient part. Since we share
our box with the rest of Peace Corps Tete, another volunteer picked up
the package slips, but then she got sent to Maputo, so she gave them
to another volunteer to give them to us in Nampula, but she forgot
them at her site in Manica until just now at the youth conferences. I
(Janet) don't have class on Mondays yet since computers haven't
started, so I volunteered to go into the city and attempt to retrieve
our packages. The process involved taking the slips to get a stamp at
the customs office on the opposite side of the Zambeze River as the
post office. When I got there I was told the person with the stamp was
working at the airport that day. Luckily they offered to drive me
there. We spotted the customs guy at the jet fuel depot entering the
airport. I then switched into the stamp guy's truck and he drove me
across the river on the semi-closed rickety bridge to the post
office. I was thinking this was all working out grandly, when I
learned that two of our four boxes had disappeared. Apparently they
sent them back to America since they had been there so long. Still, we
did receive two boxes of Christmas presents from my family, so we
celebrated Christmas in May while opening 'How the Grinch Stole
Christmas', Elvis carols and fudge ingredients. Our neighbor's
favorite was the snowman ornament, which he thought was some sort of
bling bling to be worn around the neal. Fortunately our mailbox in
Tete expired so now we'll use our Peace Corps neighbor's post office
in Malawi. Hopefully it'll be less dramatic!