Back in Site

After four days of early morning travel and about 500 kms a day, we are back at home from the capital! Our sunflowers are all blooming and we found everything in our little house as we left it when we entrusted it to Romão three weeks ago to housesit when we set out on vacation with Janet's parents. We spent our school two week spring break traveling through exciting destinations in the Southern Africa region, including a few days in Malawi, a week in Madagascar, a three day safari in Kruger National Park, South Africa, a two day tour of Swaziland (luckily its a small country), and finally lunch with our host family at our original training site in Namaacha. There we parted ways with Tim and Melinda after five weeks together as they returned to Jo'berg for their flight back to America, and we headed to Maputo, were Luc had a three day training session with Peace Corps. Usually we would fly when on official business, but since this only applied to one of
us, we decided to travel back home together overland. Despite the discomforts and challenges associated with ground travel in such a large country, it was a nice opportunity to visit people and places we normally fly over. We returned very briefly to Janet's original site-visit location from training, the palm tree lagoon side town of Quissico, then after a painfully slow ride on an 18 wheeler big-rig, a too short stay at the beach town resort of Vilanculos, where we slept in the swanky teacher housing provided for two of our colleagues at a fancy new World Bank school (with not only running water, but running hot water!), a night in Chimoio where we had our favorite pizza in the country, and finally a 4am bus to Tete and a very uncomfortable two hour chapa up into the cool mountains on the border of Malawi where we live. We had permission to miss the first week of school, and the other teachers said with cold weather and rain not too many students
showed up, so we did well to extend our trip. So now back to class and village life. It is nice to be home!