Staff Visit

When you’re a Peace Corps volunteer you periodically get staff visitors from the country office. This usually entails cleaning your home to make it presentable and getting invited out to dinner. In our case our house is usually decent and our site has no real restaurants, so we did neither. Instead we prepared a home-cooked meal. It had been four days without a power cut, so we weren’t surprised when it failed right as we were toasting our garlic breads and bringing a pot of water to boil for our spaghetti – we just quickly transferred everything to our barbeque and finished cooking outside. We ate a lovely dinner by candlelight, which our guests complimented as very healthy, since it featured a tomato-based sauce and salad instead of the usual variety of fried items and oily sauces typical in this country’s cuisine. We originally expected both our project director, Custodio Langa, in charge of education volunteers, and the County Director, Ruben Hernandez, in charge of all Peace Corps Mozambique, and their driver Miambo, but the big boss cancelled after the national airlines rescheduled his flight at the last minute (something that happens frequently here). We got good news though… Custodio told us he plans to expand the Peace Corps’ presence in Tete next year, meaning more neighbors, and he brought us chocolate and cheese, which was also very exciting. The rest of our visit consisted of a delicious cinnamon roll breakfast, a treat our guests had never had before but loved and devoured, and a tour of our school, where we had our youth group perform our premature marriage play to our visitors, the entire student body, and our school teachers and administrators during an extended 25-minute passing period, so as not to interfere too much with classes.