Completion of Service (COS) Week

All volunteers go through a very formal week-long Completion of Service ordeal at the Peace Corps Office in the capital city, Maputo. It involves a long checklist of administrative tasks, like a final Portuguese language evaluation (we both got advanced), getting all our Meticais out of the bank and closing our account, pages and pages of forms to sign or get signed by various Peace Corps staff, the comprehensive medical check-up (including the three stool samples that form the base of so many Peace Corps jokes), and the final interview with our Country Director. The big city is helping us along in the cultural readjustment process. Staying in our fancy little Peace Corps hotel, with air conditioning, hot water showers, and cable TV, in a city full of so much traffic, so many restaurants, so many friends to hang out with, it’s all a little overwhelming for a couple of volunteers fresh from two years out in the bush (especially for Luc, Janet actually seems to enjoy the change of pace). We had a little piece of reverse culture shock with an all you can eat pizza lunch with the new volunteers just finishing training; we left the Peace Corps Office looking like a college party gone wrong.



The Peace Corps Director also invited all the volunteers completing their two year stints to his shwanky pad overlooking the Indian Ocean, for a gourmet home cooked meal.




We got a very brief chance to say goodbye to our host mother in Namaacha, our training town, by volunteering to lead the session on Information and Communication Technology for the new group. The good-bye was interrupted by the Peace Corps car just as our mom pulled some samosas off the fire. The new volunteers swore in on December 8, reminding us of our own swearing in exactly 2 years before, and then on December 9 we officially finished our service and gave our last good-byes to Peace Corps.



We were thrilled to have a chance to sit down with Dan and Lisa, the lucky new married couple who will be moving into our little house in Zóbuè next week. They are wonderful and have lots of exciting project ideas. Zóbuè will be lucky to have them!



We are now RPCVs, the R standing for Returned although Peace Corps Volunteers like to joke that it stands for Recovering. We’re heading out on the night bus for a short COS trip in South Africa. We’ll be back in America December 20!

Good Bye Zóbuè

After two years in site, all of a sudden we find ourselves in our last week in Zóbuè. Good-byes are always emotional, but this one feels extra intense since, due to great distance and poor communications infrastructure, our Mozambique life will be completely divorced from our life back in America. Departures are ceremonious and very important in African culture. People in town still talk about how one volunteer left suddenly without saying a proper goodbye. We scheduled a whole week with no other obligations except preparing our little house for the next volunteers and organizing our farewell events. We really wanted to make sure to do everything right and include everyone, which given our special status here literally means everyone in our entire town. We made visits to all our special friends’ homes or market stalls, giving out small gifts and saying many very formal good-bye speeches. We had students come by our home and say good-byes while we boxed things up and tried to organizer two years’ worth of lesson plans and sort the gems from the junk in our piles. Junk ended up in a giant pile in the front yard, which Romao enjoyed burning for us.


We couldn’t get to everyone personally, so we made use of some community events to help broadcast our farewell message. We had a final faculty meeting in which the school director gave us the floor to summarize our achievements at school and say adieu. Even better, the teachers organized an end of the year party which doubled as a farewell party for us since it coincided with our last day. Everyone said nice things about us, and we formally presented some materials to our school, some English-Portuguese dictionaries, a soccer ball, and photos of all our secondary projects, before digging into the barbecued meats. We also presented African style shirts to our two vice-principals as a thank you to all the support they gave us over the past 24 months and gave each of our colleagues one of the pictures of us and family that had been decorating the walls in our little house as a remembrance. It all ended with a ceremonious cake cutting of the extra fancy cake Janet baked and decorated with colored icing (no Mozambican party would be complete without a wedding style cake ceremony).


Our very last morning was a Sunday and the Padres called us to the front of the congregation to say some words. Luc gave his entire farewell in Chichewa to great applause. Then we caught our last African mini-bus and headed down towards the city, catching our last glimpses of Mount Zóbuè through the rear windshield. Our student Zach, who now lives down in the city, accompanied us to the airport and waved farewell and we walked out across the tarmac to catch our jet plane to Maputo.

So Much to be Thankful for!

Living in Africa with our share of hardships and inconveniences, its often easy to think of all the things we had in America and have been doing without for the past two years, but the truth is we have lots to be thankful for here as well. We've been healthy, without any major problems besides that gross bout with intestinal parasites, we've been very safe with no attacks or break-ins, our community loves us, and we have a huge network of fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, who, after two years serving together, feel like our family here. These were our thoughts as we gathered with a group of 20+ volunteers in the Gorongosa National Park to celebrate Thanksgiving. Obviously food is a big part of this holiday, so we did our best to recreate all those dishes everyone was craving with plenty of improvising due to all the African x-factors. We did have the park's industrial kitchen at our disposal, but half the appliances wouldn't work, and the electricity kept cutting out. Luc headed up team pie, and assembled two apple and two pumpkin pies from ground zero, discovering just how much extra work it is to make that orange goo that just comes out of a can back home. We even had a turkey, and although she was a scrawny bird, she provided that all-important Thanksgiving touch to our plates. Janet made everyone get up and say something they were thankful for before digging in, we both mentioned how grateful we have been to have the opportunity to serve for the past two years in this country that has grown so special to us and how much we have appreciate all the support and love from back home for our efforts. We held our festivities in the eco-friendly environmental education center, which blends in with the natural setting of forest and open countryside. Even though we didn't see any wild animals or go on any game drives, we did stay in the fancy safari tents, right out in nature, and drive out to an overlook above the park to watch the sunset with all our friends. It was an especially emotional time for those of us finishing our two years of service since the holiday meant our last chance to say good-bye to many of those gathered.

Beach Getaway

In Peace Corps volunteers abandon all aspects of their lives to fate. We were placed in a little mud brick cottage up in the mountains near the border with Malawi, while we have friends serving in modern air-conditioned teacher's college professor housing next door to beach resorts with views of the ocean. Sometimes it's easy to get jealous, but every site has its pros and cons. Mozambique is famous for its coastline, and Peace Corps Mozambique has a strong beach ethos component to its culture that we feel totally removed from. Now that we're on vacation and done with all our school responsibilities we decided to spend a few days relaxing on the sand down in Inhambane province to decompress from our big end-of-the-year sprint. We met up with a bunch of our teacher friends also on holiday and crashed at our buddy's pad down on the beach. After two years in country, it was our first big beach trip and we thoroughly enjoyed eating fresh seafood, riding horses through the surf, doing crossword puzzles under the coconut trees, and just enjoying catching up with everybody's hilarious PC stories. The beach is also a little edgy. The coast gets a lot of tourists, and coming from our small town where everyone recognizes us as the local school teachers, it was hard being treated just like a cash opportunity for annoying drunks and street hustlers. We've gotten pretty good at dealing with these inconveniences and just focused on enjoying an awesome beach weekend, with plenty of sunshine and good times. It's awesome having a tropical paradise within two days of hitch hiking from site.

Giving Stuff Away Without Creating a Feeding Frenzy

There is only so much we can or want to take back with us to America. Most of our stretched, faded, or torn clothes have had a rough two years here in Africa, with the tropical sun and hand washing. These rags would be embarrassing back in America, but here in Africa there are many who would cherish them. It is Africa after all, and some stereotypes about the poverty here are true. Unfortunately giving stuff away isn’t as easy as it would seem. One volunteer who recently left simply informed her neighbors to come to her house on her last day in site and take things that could be useful to them. Starting at 5am, her neighbors swept through her home cleaning out everything in less than an hour, someone even took her half full coffee mug and the open can of cat food she had bought as a going away present to her pet. We’re trying to avoid this kind of free-for-all, not only for our own sanity, but we don’t want to reinforce the perception that all white people are primarily a source of freebies for locals. Having been on the receiving end of countless begging encounters here in Mozambique, we know how this type of irresponsible behavior can permanently impair community relations for future generations of volunteers. The begging relationship seems likes a continuation of the dependency on the rich Patrão the relatively wealthy Portuguese deliberately fostered over centuries of colonization in these parts. After plenty of opportunities to see charity gone wrong, like the kids at popular tourist destinations who temporarily suspend their laughter and street games to approach white visitors and request in their most obsequious voice possible, “Pencil boss,” “Give me 10 meticais,” or just simply “hungry.” As our departure date draws neigh, people have no shame in coming up to us and suggesting we leave them lembranças, souvenirs to remember us by. A souvenir could be our flash drive. “Do you really want my flash drive as a lembrança? Or do you just want a flash drive?” So, we’re not handing out anything to people who randomly show up to ask for things. Instead we are earmarking things for favorite students, helpful neighbors, and special people, and trying to give them away as discreetly as possible. We also made a trip out to Zach’s village with ten items of clothing for the large family, plus a couple dictionaries and books for Zach’s ever curious mind and Janet’s old sandals for his new wife. Luckily, we will be replaced by new volunteers, so we’ll just pass on most of our stuff to them.

National Exams

Since our secondary school only has the first cycle (grades 8-10), the 10th grade National Exams are the culmination of our students’ academic careers. National Exams are high stakes, anyone failing to pass has to repeat 10th grade and try again the next year. As the name implies, National Exams are a Mozambican-wide phenomenon, each 10th grade student taking the exact same test at the exact same time from Maputo all the way to Tete. That’s why on Thursday when Maputo city suspended exams for its municipal holiday, everyone else in the country had to stand still, and wait until Friday so that everyone could take the Math exam together. Exam sheets arrive in top-secret envelopes, held in high security fashion until the bell announces test time. Then the envelopes are all simultaneously opened ceremoniously by a student picked at random. Most of the time the student is too nervous and can’t tear the opaque black plastic, so the proctoring teacher has to mock him and take over. All teachers are required to wear their white coats and no one is absent. Cell phones are strictly prohibited to prevent students from texting for help, and to prevent teachers from texting answers. The cheating so endemic to Mozambican testing is strangely absent, our school hasn’t caught a single cheater in National Exams, and at least the two of us are actually looking. It would be difficult for even the most ambitious students to cram 3 years worth of material into a single crib sheet, and the stakes are so high, academic fraud during National Exams carries an automatic 2 year suspension from school. Also, there is no need to cheat during exams. Since the test is graded locally by the same teachers who have been teaching you over the past three years, it’s easier to convince one of them to grade your test favorably. All the tests are coded, so a student’s name never appears on their response sheet, but since they are coded in alphabetical order it doesn’t take a Rosetta Stone to figure out who is who. In fact every teacher carries a small sheet of paper with all his or her cousins’, nephews’, sister-in-laws’, or whoever’s secret codes on them and hovers around his colleague’s table to make sure they get a passing grade. So much wrangling goes on that the biology teachers, including Janet, who were still actually trying to grade had to leave the chop-shop and find somewhere quiet to work. People know we, as Americans, don’t condone this perversion of the academic system, so they get a kick out of being extra blatant in front of us. They mean it more of a joke but they don’t understand the degree of disdain we have for the corruption so damaging to the society. The final day we had to make public everyone’s results, which involved a complicated set of calculations. We have to average each student’s national test score with their high school grades, and then average all of those. No student can pass if their total average is less than 10 (everything here is out of 20), neither if any of their national exam scores is lower than 7 and no student can pass if they fail either Portuguese or Math. All the results had to be meticulously documented in a gigantic grid, in duplicate. Basically we set up a grading sweat shop with teachers clustered around the giant grids, with one teacher reading each name and test score, another calculating averages on a hand held calculator, and another two writing down the results; something excel could do with one click. It felt like a Victorian accounting firm from a Charles Dickens novel. It took 18 teachers six hours to do a job Janet and I could have done in an hour on the computer. It took all day and we had to work through lunch to finish the task, but it was our last official duty at the school, so it felt good to be done.

Posting Grades in Public, No Secrets Here

So it’s the end of the school year. Back home in America kids’ might be nervously monitoring the mailbox to intercept their grades to inspect the good/bad news before their parents get home. Here in Mozambique there is no mail and there is no mediating the day of reckoning. Our school director simply calls all the parents down to the school and has each term director post their students’ grades on a giant poster-sized report card for everyone to see who is passing on to the next grade, and who will be repeating the same level again next year. The palpable excitement translates to cheers of joy and smiles for those on the positive end of the year’s account of tests and grading, and disappointment for those on the negative side. Most kids have a good idea of were they should be by this stage, but there is always room for surprises, like the case of our kid Romão. By all objective measures he’s had a terrible academic year. We have quizzed him several times on various class subjects and his responses never fail to disappoint. “Romão, what does the digestive system do?” Response: “Is that the lungs?” “Romão, this one is easy, what is 5 divided by five?” Response: “Oh yeah, I got it, it’s zero.” “No.” “Oh yeah, its two.” Sometimes it just seemed hopeless and too painful to try to help. He brought home negatives from end of the year exams in every subject except for a couple of passing 10s in Physical Education and English. A basket full of mangos for the teacher got his Portuguese grade into positive territory, and hauling several loads of bricks to the math teacher’s new house helped that discipline. Various rounds of begging and chores got most things straightened out, but still, he had a 2 in Physics, so far from the minimum of 10 needed to pass. Well, something happened, because when we checked his name on the report card he was passing physics. Maybe the physics teacher did it because he knows Romão works for us, or maybe his Class Director, our theater group counterpart Artur advocated for him, or maybe nobody wanted him to repeat 8th grade for a third time. Whatever the reason, Romão is moving on to 9th grade, but can still barely read or do any math beyond simple addition or subtraction, so it’s unclear weather we should be happy for him or sad for the whole system, or both. Romão will definitely be pleased with the news; he’s out in the fields for the week planting corn. Looking at the long lists of names on the grade sheets made us realize how connected we have become with our student community, as most bring to mind faces and warm memories from class or clubs during our two years here.

The next Generation

Its that time in our Peace Corps cycle where the young new trainees come out to visit the older and more experienced volunteers out in their sites. We both had great site visits when we were in training and wanted to give our trainee visitors the same. Peace Corps had already warned senior volunteers not to be too cynical or bitter with the impressionable trainees, and while we’ve not been immune to negativity during our service, we’re riding high and full of sunshine for the next generation, coming off the end of the school year and a very successful English Theater. When making plans to meet them at the Tete airport on the phone, the trainees wanted to know how they would recognize us, not knowing that our one terminal airport never really has more than a few dozen people at a time. “We’ll be the sweaty looking Peace Corps Volunteers, jumping up and down yelling your names.” Sure enough, there was no confusion, but plenty of heat and sweat down in the ever scorching Tete city airport where all the black tarmac just amplifies all the heat creating a microwave oven and leaving us feeling like little popcorn kernels on the verge of exploding. Peace Corps sent six visitors for the Tete area, which made a nice excuse for a little welcome party and get together for the rest of us volunteers in the area. Training can be a trying time with culture shock happening in so many was, and your entire life scheduled and controlled by the training staff, so we wanted all the newbies to know how much better life would be once they graduated into actual Peace Corps service. Unfortunately, intensely hot Moatize threatened to turn all of our plans into a big pool of sweat the first night, especially when power went out leaving us to cope with the sweltering temperatures without the relief of any kind of air blowing devices. Luckily a summer shower broke the oppressive heat, and the next day we escaped to our cool mountain site with our two trainees, Bitsy and Jill. We basically talked non-stop for the five day visit, trying to sum up our entire experience in words as best as possible, often failing to capture all the emotions, but they’ll experience them for themselves soon enough. Peace Corps headquarters hasn’t made site assignments yet, so we don’t know if Jill or Bitsy will take over for us or end up in some other random corner of the country, but everyone they met in our town said they would be praying for them to get assigned here. One of our main goals was to make as many delicious recipes as possible during our visitors’ stay, and despite several sabotage attempts by the electricity, we did pretty well with our tried and true repertoire of crowd pleasers: lasagna, bean burgers, quiche, cinnamon rolls, and fresh veggie salads. The site visit came during final exams, so our school was off-limits to outsiders, but they got to peek through the windows at the rooms full of kids quietly trying to apply all the knowledge they were supposed to have learned during the past three years to each of the 90-minute tests. We were busy most mornings playing our proctor roll in this, the most solemn of secondary school rituals, but that left plenty of time in the afternoons for hiking and exploring our little town. The girls also bought capulana clothes and had outfits tailored during their stay! A massive Nyau funeral at the house just opposite the window of our guest bedroom added some spice to the last evening. We tried to warn Bitsy of the all night stamina of the mourners and offer her some earplugs, but she refused and probably lost some sleep with the nonstop drumming and yelping from the costumed dancers until the wee hours of the morn. The proliferation of the intimidating growling unearthly men-creatures also made walking to and from school a dangerous endeavor as unruly Nyau clogged the arteries on which we normally circulate in our crowded neighborhood, and sent us darting in and out of random hiding places. We got them to the mini-bus safely and set about sweeping and tidying up our little house for our last few weeks and washing a mountain of laundry.

English Theater

Mozambicans really love theater and Mozambicans really love English, so English Theater is the perfect Peace Corps project. Despite the overflowing interest, it takes a lot of work to make an event actually happen, and we’ve been building up to this one for months. Saturday, October 29 was the big day, but we left a day early to get details sorted out down at the mission in Moatize where the event was taking place. We made another massive withdrawal from the bank and rubber banded all the various stacks of cash for each expense. Most of the kids from our nine participating schools in Tete province could travel to and from the event the day of, but a couple of the schools four hours away needed to spend the night, so we greeted them and got them set up at their air conditioned hotel. We were staying at the non-AC mission, but at least we had a fan, essential during the hottest week so far in the hottest town in Mozambique (it hit 115 degrees). We didn’t get much sleep anyway, since we were up until 10PM moving pews over from the chapel, setting up the jury tables, and decorating with posters we borrowed from the Chimoio event which was held the week earlier. October 29th started at 5:30AM and Luc was immediately sweating in the epic heatwave temperatures. Janet started by signing all 200 some certificates for all the participants, judges, and special prize winners. Luc corralled some of the mission youths to help move our cookies, T-shirts, and dictionaries into the theater room. Students started arriving even before we got our breakfast, which was a good sign here in Africa when people can show up hours late even after texting to say their mini-bus is about to arrive. Luc commandeered a few students to buy extra cookies, pens, and other random last minute items and Janet started running around managing all the little details that constantly pop-up when you’re in charge of everything. As do all events in Mozambique, we opened with the national anthem, and treated the crowd to a special rendition of the US national anthem, which most of the Mozambicans had never heard before, and some students even recorded with their cell phones. Then we drew numbers from a hat to determine the order of performance. One by one the schools presented their plays that they had been rehearsing for weeks back in site, some more nervously than others. Our school had probably practiced more than anyone else, and it showed. Everyone of our students had their material down, and their costumes were much more involved than anyone else. Every volunteer in Tete brought a team, and we even had two schools with no Peace Corps affiliation prepare teams, one of which had our graduates from last year who were now studying 11th grade down near the city at the new high school with boarding facilities built by the coal mining companies to replace the one on top of the coal deposits they destroyed. Lunch arrived an hour and a half late, but that was beyond our control. Luckily everyone here is accustomed to waiting. After chowing down on some delicious beef and chicken, and leaving nothing but the bones, everyone reconvened for the exciting awards ceremony. We were thrilled when the jury gave our team second place overall! We came in last place the year before, so we really enjoyed coming out on top this time. Our narrator took the Best English Speaker, something he’ll cherish forever considering how proud he is of his language abilities. First place went to the team composed of our graduates, so we were proud of them too, especially since the team was entirely student initiated. After the emotions calmed down, everyone wanted their pictures taken in their new English Theater t-shirts. And with the close of English Theater comes the close of our Peace Corps responsibilities! School’s out, grades are in, and our big final project was a success. Now all that’s left in our last month at site is proctoring and correcting national exams, then packing and farewells!

Health in our part of Africa

This Halloween the world’s population reached 7,000,000,000. Our town has definitely contributed its fair share of babies, all you need to do is look towards the women’s section at church to get a visual on population growth here, every female of reproductive age has a baby strapped to her back or breastfeeding, and several more running around the kids section. Things may be changing though, as many of our students claim to want families of only 2 or 3 kids. We’ve taken our youth groups to the health center several times to learn about family planning and all the free contraceptives available that no one seems to be using. This extreme fertility made sense in a world where half your children died before the age of five, but is unsustainable in a town with even limited access to modern life saving vaccines and health care, like ours. So what is health like here for all these new people entering such a poor part of the world? We still have plenty of people dying from totally preventable causes, like dehydration for infants with diarrhea, meningitis due to the lack of diagnosis in the case of two of our students, childbirth for many women with complicated deliveries, and any sort of accident or emergency since we have no rapid response team and our ambulance is chronically out of fuel. Do we have starving skeleton people dying on the streets? No, but we do have plenty of toddlers with distended bellies, brittle orange hair, and bowed legs, signs of different nutritional deficiencies. We see goiters, something iodized salt totally eliminated from the devolved world. Everyone has parasites, including us, but we won’t talk about it since our stories tend to gross people out. It is very rare to see an obese person. Only the richest people here have access to excess calories, so getting called fat is a big compliment that people use generously, even with the not so fat, much to the dismay of many an American volunteer trying to watch his or her waistline. This includes Janet, whose extra few pounds get regularly “complimented.” HIV and AIDS continue to plague our community, with infection rates above 20%. Everyone knows people who have died as part of this epidemic; even we have lost several people close to us during our two years here. Recently a New York Times article highlighted some success our town has had in distributing the life saving anti-retroviral therapies with the help of Doctors Without Borders (Click Here to read the complete article). We were quite surprised that our random African town was featured in one of the world’s most famous newspapers, but people here, most of whom have never seen a newspaper, didn’t seem to appreciate the significance. Of course other diseases, such as malaria, cholera, and tuberculosis also kill lots of people, even though they are all very avoidable with the use of mosquito nets, proper hand cleaning and hygiene, or basic medical treatments. Life expectancy is low, and anyone over 50 is considered really old here, as some of our family visitors have been told! Despite all the scary health issues linked to our tropical environment and general poverty, we’ve remained very healthy. Once we get back to the America we’ll have obesity, cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and all the other developed world diseases to worry about.

Making a Difference

Every teacher has at least a few students who make them feel like they really made a difference. Zach is one of those students for us. We don’t get to see him often since he is working as an office assistant down in the city, but this last weekend we met up while we were down there preparing for English Theater. His life doesn’t seem that fabulous at a casual inspection. Despite leaving his rural village for the city, he still lives in a one room mud house with a dirt floor and no electricity, and walks to and from work, at least 4 miles each way with no respite from the hot sun. He works 6 days a week for less than $80 a month. Still, this is an achievement here. Zach looked skinnier so we took him out to lunch and fed him beef. He casually let us know that he took his girlfriend from the village to live with him in the city and that they are married now. He’s still so eager to learn, and reminded us several times that we should leave him our Chewa-English dictionary when we leave since it will be of little use in America. We made good on a promise to teach him how to use the internet this weekend. We took him to the mission and sat him on the computer for two hours going over e-mail. We opened his own yahoo account and showed him how to write all the different volunteers which have passed through his life. What he really liked was facebook. He told us he had forgotten what the volunteers looked like. He also wanted to see Google Earth and locate his home. He let us know how marvelous the internet is. He also used the bath room at the mission which was his first encounter with a western style toilet. He couldn’t figure out how to make it flush, and then once we showed him how, he was worried about how to make it stop flushing. We let him know it would stop on its own.

Hot and Dry

We’ve had several people follow up on our water situation after we wrote about the drought affecting our region especially with all the international news about Somalia and the Eastern Horn. It’s dry here where we are, but no one is starving. We did get one big storm on Teachers Day, so that replenished our wells temporarily, but now a couple weeks later water is just as difficult as before. We’ve made it by this week on just six 20 liter buckets. Luckily we manage our personal water situation conservatively, so we’ve never run out of drinking water, unlike Romão, who routinely uses his last liters for bathing or washing his shoes, and then complains at dinner time that he has no water to cook rice. We’re still in the dry season, so even though it’s extra dry, it’s not unexpected, but if rainy season doesn’t start on time, people will really start to worry. Locals have already tilled their little plots of land and are ready to plant corn as soon as the first showers arrive. This week brought a major heat wave. Just today our thermometer recorded 98° indoors and 109° outside in direct sun, and we’re lucky to live in a relatively cool high plateau site for Mozambique, our friends down in the Zambezi valley regularly get readings at least 10 degrees warmer than us. Luckily we have the keys to the computer lab, the only air conditioning in the entire town. We’ve been coming up with things to do on the computer just to escape the oppressive heat. Luc gets especially overheated regularly sweating through his shirts. One of our Peace Corps buddies Audrey texted us from her hot hot site down near Tete city wondering if she could get water poisoning. We also drink lots of water, and even though we’re not worried about water poisoning, we decided to count how many liters of water we drink. Janet weighed in at 4.5 liters and Luc at a mighty 7+ liters in one day. We’re definitely getting our 8 cups a day.

Lasts

At this time in our service we start running into a lot of lasts. Earlier this month we taught our last classes, then we proctored our last finals, now we are calculating grades and filling in all those tiny boxes on the grade sheets for the last time. Eventhough the school year is almost over it doesn’t feel like it for us yet since we still have our big English Theater competition coming up the day after school officially ends. We’ve held practices every day this week to get ready, and spent last weekend down in the city running around trying to take care of all the details, buying soda, ordering lunches, making reservations at the hotel, picking up all the T-shirts we ordered, coordinating transportation. All these things are so much harder here when cell network drops for hours at a time, shops close at random hours, the person in charge never shows up, and in general people keep claiming it’s too early to plan things until the week before our event. Luckily the Padres are hosting English Theater at the mission and they have a proactive mindset more in line with ours. They are giving us lots of support, like driving us around in their truck and letting us stay in our little VIP room at the mission. If you’re wondering why we’ve posted so many pictures lately, its probably because they have wireless internet. It’s recharging spiritually to hear about all the projects the Padres have been able to accomplish and joking around about life in Africa as we eat meals together at their long dining table. You can think of us on Saturday when we finish this, our last secondary project, and finally start to feel like we’re done with Peace Corps.

Going Backwards in Africa

The 7 kilometers between our border post and the neighboring immigration office in Malawi has the worst cars of any no-man’s land we know, and we’ve crossed a lot of borders. These moribund taxis shuttle travelers between immigration posts at an inflated rate of almost two dollars per person, and they always wait until they have six passengers to cram into their sedan before departing. Since they escape regulation by either government it’s a free for all of exploitation, the victims are the hapless travelers who have no other choice than walking, which we have done plenty of times, but you have to be willing to work up a sweat. Our town is higher elevation, so going to Malawi, cars don’t even turn the engines on, they just coast all the way down in neutral. On the way back is the real workout. On our last foray through this unfortunate little strip of neglected territory, we grudgingly played along with this travesties of public transportation, squeezing into the back seat with two other passengers, while two large Zambian ladies shared the front chair next to the driver. Like always, the driver had to recruit some muscle from the group of men perpetually loitering near the border to give the dilapidated vehicle a literal jump-start. Chug chug chug we went up the hill. I think I can, I think I can. As we approached each successive climb, the driver shifted from third to second gear, then to first. Once we started to stall out in first, we knew we were in trouble. The driver turned around and we thought we were going to coast back to Malawi. Just as we were thinking how glad we were we hadn’t paid him yet, the crafty driver switched the car into reverse and powered up the last hill going backwards. The giggling Zambian mamas in the front seat switched from Chewa to English to half-jokingly tell us that things are backwards in Africa. Although we, as development workers, hope that Africa is actually moving forwards in most aspects of life, in this case they were right. There we were, barreling down the national highway backwards, to get where we needed to go.

Visiting our Old Site Mate in Mulanje

Just last month we had two Peace Corps Malawi site mates within walking distance of our town, Jordan and Os. Since then, Jordan has closed his service and Os transferred sites. Jordan arrived in country only a day before us, but due to some shifts in the Malawian academic year he finished his primary assignment three months early. He is currently backpacking across India. With Jordan gone, Peace Corps Malawi thought Os, the only remaining volunteer in the south western region, was too isolated, so they transferred him to a small cluster of volunteers on the other side of the skinny country. So now we are without site mates, but it turned out to be a boon since Os now lives in the middle of an old English tea estate under the highest mountain in the region. Mount Mulanje, the ‘island in the sky,’ is a massive granite outcropping soaring above the surrounding plains. It’s been nominated as a World Heritage Site, so it’s waiting to get on UNESCO prestigious list. Basically green carpets of tea extend in every direction with granite cliffs and waterfalls completing the scene. The region’s contrasting brown and yellow dry season color scheme typical of this time of year made the emerald carpet that much more exquisite. We hiked to Leith’s site, Os’ environment volunteer site mate, on the side of the mountain. We worked up a sweat under the sunny blue sky, but washed it away in some crystal pools on top of one of the tropical waterfalls we had been admiring from the distance. That evening we transformed raw materials from Leith’s Peace Corps garden into a lofty meal of eggplant ravioli with red sauce and fresh herbs; it was probably actually gourmet quality, not just PC gourmet, although we can’t totally trust our palate at this point. It’s always replenishing to escape the hecticness and routines of site for a weekend, and enjoy good-times with friends.

Unexpected Holiday

October 19th is not a national holiday. We even asked specifically if we would have classes on Wednesday and our acting director assured us we would. Then Radio Mozambique announced on the 18th that the following day would be a national holiday, so that’s how things work here. Luckily the last two weeks of school after finals are a joke, so we didn’t have to cancel anything too serious planned. October 19th commemorates the day in 1986 when Samora Machel, the first president of Mozambique, died in a suspicious plane crash during the tumultuous civil conflict period. We already celebrated the revolutionary figure’s death on February 3rd, Mozambican Heroes Day, but since this is the 25th anniversary of the tragic death, the entire year has been dedicated to him and the ruling party decided to make the actual day of the anniversary a holiday, albeit at the very last minute. This break makes it four weeks in a row with a school day cancelled due to a national holiday. We have serious holiday fatigue. The day off did give us a chance to settle our ongoing soccer feud with our rivals the border guards. Our last game ended in a tie two all, so they challenged us, the teachers, to one last game. The town mayor made it out for the kick off and promised a new soccer ball to the winning team. The border guards struck first, scoring off a fierce strike and they all danced in front of our students. But they celebrated too soon as we went on to score the next three goals and put the game away. Our acting principal was especially happy since he had mocked the students who had cheered for our opponents at morning assembly after our tie on Teacher’s Day.

Teacher's Day 2011

Teacher’s Day this year was jam-packed with activities. Both of us missed the 4am cleaning of the graves of past teachers. Apparently it involved some sort of an alcoholic offering and ceremony. The actual day started late, no surprise to us at this point of our service, but only by about an hour, so that’s actually almost on time for here. Once we got a critical mass of enough teachers to make a respectable showing, we paraded through the twisting pathways that make up our town, all wearing our teachers uniforms through a slight drizzle, calling teachers and students to join as we passed their homes. We caught one of our colleagues in the latrine, so we laughed and teased him until he joined our ranks. Teachers here have lots of songs, so we sang all the way to the praça, students out in front holding the posters they made with pro-teacher slogans, all of us teachers following in a sea of white lab-coat-like outfits.

After all the formalities in the town square we migrated to the football pitch for male and female soccer matches, which we both participated in much to the amusement of our students.

Then we all headed home to get fancied up for the party. Teachers Day is a big deal in Mozambique, especially for us teachers. Several faculty meetings had gone to planning our big party and we even had an organizing committee dedicated to working out the details. One of the main discussion points had been whether to hold the party on actual teachers day, October 12, which was a Wednesday, or postpone it until Saturday. The main fear was teachers would get so drunk they wouldn’t show up the next day to proctor final exams. Apparently many Mozambican schools just cancel classes the day after Teacher’s Day, or even take the rest of the week off, but since we’re a serious school, we all pledged to fulfill our duties, but just in case we set the starting time at 3pm so things wouldn’t get too out of control. Another point of contention was the sound system. Apparently there is no party if there is no sound system, so teachers were upset and threatening to boycott when they heard loud music would be absent. After all the fighting, we did end up with music. Each teacher contributed 500 meticais (about $20 US), which entitled him or her to two plates of food, one soda, and six half-liter beers. Luc decided to invite Janet as his guest, and since he doesn’t drink, Janet was stuck with the hefty task of disposing of all the liquid. She only made it half way through, but we convinced the other teacher’s to let us take the other three home. It was a great party, we got to meet everyone’s family, danced so much, and ate chicken.


It was especially fun to see the kids playing on playground equipment, just recently installed at the venue, our only restaurant in town. Their shining faces made it clear that none of them had ever seen slides or seesaws before. In fact, we’re pretty sure some of the teachers had never seen this before either, as they were playing and grinning too!

We made it home by 10:30pm just in time to beat the first storm of the summer. It really poured, so we felt bad for the teachers that had lingered after us, and the organizing committee that was still cleaning up. The next morning, to our surprise, everyone was on hand for invigilating exams, no one skipped out after the big discussion we’d had.

Day of Peace and Reconciliation

Lucas playing soccer with the teacher team

Student pyramid at the holiday celebration

Ceremonial wreath with border guards

October 4th is a national holiday here in Mozambique celebrating the signing in 1992 of the Rome Peace Accords, which ended over a decade of civil unrest and war between FRELIMO, the ruling party, and RENAMO, the armed opposition, which followed soon after the resolution of the armed conflict with the colonial Portuguese forces in 1975. Considering how peaceful our town has been during the past two years, it’s hard to imagine that the people now coexisting here were killing each other just twenty years ago. You can still find bombed out buildings, blown up bridges, and plenty of bullet holes throughout the country, but you never see firearms other than the Kalshnikovs the police and border guards carry. Even bandidos have a hard time getting guns and mainly use knives or machetes to commit their crimes. Most of the landmines in our region have been cleared out by Project Halo, a de-mining group sponsored mainly by USA, Japan, and Britain, but there are still swathes of countryside too dangerous to visit because of all the explosives laid down by both sides during the conflict. People rarely speak of the troubled time of conflict other than mentioning how hard life was. Many Mozambicans in our area fled to Malawi, living in refuge camps during the most violent parts of the war. Students and even most teachers are too young to really remember the war, and even those who were alive don’t like to remember the horrors. One neighbor has confided with us how his first family was killed when bandits, the term used by the government for the RENAMO fighters, bazooka-ed his home. Our host family during training also told us about hiding above the ceiling on the rafters while bandits pillaged through the house. In general, people seem to leave the violence in the past, and if it hadn’t been for all the books we’ve read, we wouldn’t know much about this troubled period in Mozambique’s recent past. So, like every other holiday, we celebrated laying a wreath of flowers at the star monument in our town square. Our kids performed a hilarious theater about cholera and our teacher team, including Luc, played a soccer match against the border guards. We tied 2-2. Most of the youngsters and many of our students didn’t even know what holiday we were celebrating, or exactly which conflict the Rome Peace Accords ended, they just enjoyed a the day off and the various festivities.

Steady Trickle of Visitors

As we quickly approach the end of service, volunteers eagerly attempt to notch up travel to those last few dream destinations like Victoria Falls or Lake Malawi they’ve postponed during the past two years. Since Tete province serves as a gateway to both Malawi and Zambia, we’ve benefited from some spill over visits. Others really feel a need to visit all 11 Mozambican provinces, and often times Tete is the last one for people to scratch off the list, so that’s drawn some visits. We also have the Cahora Bassa dam, which justifies the trek for some volunteers, and one volunteer, our friend Bao, came all the way to Tete just to see us, no other side agendas. As our once seemingly endless two year tour winds down to the last couple months, people are dashing around to say their good-byes, and check off the last few items on their “must see” lists, so even living on the very edge of Peace Corps Mozambican, we’ve received a steady trickle of visitors. The latest two were our buddies Matt and Lisa heading through our site for some fresh water diving at Lake Malawi.
Living in such a peripheral site we’re always trying to catch up on Peace Corps news, so we really appreciate any tid-bits of gossip our visitors bring along. At this stage of service the juiciest stories are about how people are dealing with amorous relationships which have flourished during service, but which face a difficult transition. Lots of volunteers are just calling it quits, especially for those with Mozambican significant others, but plenty of volunteers dating other volunteers are going to see if they can keep the relationship working back in the States and several volunteers have gotten engaged. Even for those of us without relationship drama, there are plenty of other anxieties concerning reentering life back in America to talk about, or on a more pleasant note, its always fun to hear about what kinds of exciting close of service trips people are planning. Although most of us are racing to make it home in time for Christmas holidays, most volunteers are still trying to tie in a few of those exciting African destinations in countries we would already be flying through or over like South Africa, Ethiopia, or Egypt. So everyone is trying to swap Lonely Planet travel guides and get last minute tips and recommendations. Our own close of service trip will involve a few days in Cape Town and then, since the cheapest tickets we could find were on Turkish Air, a brief visit to Istanbul to break up what would otherwise be 30+ hours of airplane and airport time.

New Monies

Living in a rural area in Mozambique we’re on the periphery of the metical zone. In fact we often see Malawian Kwacha competing with our national currency in the market place and products are often priced in both currency, although the recent economic crisis across the border dampened local enthusiasm for the foreign denomination. With no local banks here, its difficult for our money to circulate with any vigor with the larger Mozambican financial system. Sometimes I think we pass the same grubby bank note back and forth with the market ladies, each time slightly dirtier and smellier. The 20s are the worst, most of them are torn or have holes with the metallic security strip hanging out or missing. Few can pass as purple, there intended color, most just look a grubby shade of brown. The large big bills like the 1000 or 500 don’t change hands too often, so they’re rarely seen in these rural parts. That’s often what comes out of the ATM in the city, so even though they’re not as gross, it’s always a challenge to find someone with enough to accept one of these monster bills worth the equivalent of about $35 or $17.50 respectively, more money than most locals make in a month. The government has an idea for upgrading their embarrassingly dirty notes, new plastic money. We’ve only seen a couple so far, one down in the city, and one in the town square where one of our teacher colleagues was trying to confiscate it from some students during a holiday celebration. Considering we are still using the old Mozambican currency from before when they chopped of three zeros over five years ago, we’re not expecting to see too many of these new plastic monies before the end of service. Still, Malawi is were they really needed to update the money. Currently their highest valued note is 500 Kwacha, about $3 US, and that value is steadily eroding in their precarious national situation. It doesn’t take much wealth at all for a Malawian to boast a healthy looking wad of cash. They are really due for some larger bills.

Two Years in Country

On our first day in Namaacha, our training site, at church with our host mom and aunt

On October 1st we celebrated two years in country. Although we were too busy for any elaborate celebrations, it did get us thinking about the bigger picture. Our little house has a few more cracks, we have a few more drips during rain storms, our latrine is now almost full, the papaya tree we planted our first year here is now taller than our roof, our mattress has a big dent where we sleep. The kids who were little babies when we arrived in site are now stumbling around, yelling our names every time we pass, and plenty of new babies have been born during our stay. The pigs and chickens that wrecked our garden last year have all been killed and eaten and replaced by news crops of equally destructive animals. There are less mango trees now, and more brick houses dotting our neighborhood. The school has two less functioning computers in the lab, but we still have five survivors. We’ve caught dozens of kids cheating on tests during our stint, sent plenty to clean the latrines or dig trash pits, but we’ve had hundreds of students graduate from 10th grade as well. Sometimes it seems like not much has really changed and it’s hard to tell what kind of impact we’ve had on the community. We write semi-annual reports trying to quantify our service. We just filed our last one this week. It is nice seeing all of our activities written up, but its still hard to interpret what all the charts documenting the hundreds of kids that have received HIV/AIDS training or improved their grades due to our extracurricular activities really mean. Our Peace Corps Project Director was just here this week on one of the rare tours our staff makes to the nether regions of Mozambique. He met with our school administration to evaluate Peace Corp’s relationship with the community. We got to hear our directors say lots of positive things about us, rating our performance as A to A+, and ask us one more time to extend our service for a third year. Our PC Project Director seemed impressed by the quantity of secondary projects we have completed during our stay. All of this positive feedback reinforces what we really do think ourselves, that we’ve made a difference here. The past few public holidays our theater group has really made us proud, showing us how much they have matured, displaying leadership skills and confidence. The new group of Peace Corps teachers has now arrived in country and is just beginning their ten weeks of intensive training, just like we did two years ago. We’re lobbying hard to be replaced. We’ve really enjoyed our two years here in site, and our school is such a wonderful place for volunteers to serve, we think it would be great for another generation of Peace Corps. Most of all what we notice is the love and acceptance we feel here. Two years ago we were strangers from a foreign country, just another two azungus (white people). Now we are truly part of the community, we are Teacher Luka and Madame Janeti.

Reading Lists

We expected to devour books here in Africa with the rural pace of life and general absence of leisure activities, but as it turns out we’re averaging just under one book per month. Some of our Peace Corps buddies put us to shame in the literary department having read over a hundred titles during their stay. Volunteers have pooled all of their pirated e-books, making a nifty file with thousands of volumes, all accessible on Janet’s reader, so lack of material is not our excuse. We’re just too busy to pound the pages during the daytime, and after dinnertime we just want to sleep. Overland travel still provides some quality book time, although not without competition from the African landscapes passing in the windows. The opportunity cost of reading is substantially lower when our vehicle is not moving, which is not an inconsequential portion of time when you consider break downs, flat tires, passengers boarding and disembarking, rearranging the mountains of baggage, and just waiting for vehicles to fill before they depart. Even with full time jobs, we still find some time for reading at home. Even our anemic literary habits here impress the locals. Reading for pleasure is completely foreign. Passers by assume we’re reading religious material or studying. Romão still attempts to read a few words whenever he sees Luc with an open book, but can never put together an entire sentence (especially since Luc is usually reading in English). Everyone marvels at how our collection of printed materials fills an entire bookcase, more titles than the rest of the town combined. Only the schools have more books since they receive free government textbooks, especially at the primary level. We have access to the Peace Corps libraries where books have accumulated from previous generations of volunteers, although it’s unclear who would ever allot precious international baggage space to such trashy romance novels which always seem to abound. Maybe they’re just more visible because no one takes them to site. Janet reads widely: novels, historical fiction, biographies, while Luc has given up on made-up stories. He reads almost exclusively histories, travel guides, Peace Corps memoirs, and inspirational biographies about people who have given their lives to making the world a better place. After two years of enduring such a scarcity of printed material, it will be amazing to see a bookstore or an actual library when we get back to the United States.

Life Goals

Its funny how different people’s goals are here in rural Mozambique. Our fellow teachers have begun commenting on how lucky we are to have seen so much of Mozambique and the neighboring countries. At the same time, none of them have made any effort to explore their own region of the world. None of them have passports and only a few have ventured into Malawi beyond our immediate border town, all but the most ambitious never even having been to Blantyre, only two hours away, and none of them have seen the marvelous Lake Malawi, and definitely not the ocean or any of those beaches that grace Mozambique’s Indian Ocean shore. None of them have ever seen elephants or lions or any of the animals Africa is so famous for. Most of them have never been to the capital city, although that is more understandable since it would be about 40 hours of hard mini-bus travel. People here just aren’t that interested in what lies beyond the provincial borders. Occasionally people will make trips to neighboring provinces, but only to visit family. The other teachers always complain about how expensive it is to travel here in Mozambique, and it must be hard justifying scarce resources on something as seemingly inconsequential as traveling, but they always find a way to buy beer or new cell phones. The truth is, we make the same amount of money as our colleagues, and we have been able to stretch those meticals on some pretty amazing trips, but teachers here would just rather buy a TV or motorcycle or blow it all on a bender. We can’t say one way of spending money is better than the other, but we have really enjoyed getting to travel across this part of the continent, despite the physical discomforts, and really getting to know what it has to offer. Our neighbors seem content to invest their earnings in traditional beer and spending the afternoon gyrating drunkenly as close as possible to the giant speakers announcing the availability of alcohol.

Our Acting School Director

We love Guilherme, our acting principal since our previous school director was promoted to chief administrator in a neighboring post last trimester. He’s a hard worker, showing up every morning, afternoon, and evening. Unlike so many other administrators that look the other way, Guilherme calls people out when they blatantly flaunt the rules or egregiously fail to meet their duties. He loves calling students out during morning assembly. Last week he publicly humiliated a student who had been posing as a tenth grader even though he failed both eighth and ninth grades. Guilherme had discovered the fraud during the laborious review process, which would be so easy if our transcripts were digitized and not in huge stacks of folders in the corner of the teachers lounge. He’s not afraid of teachers either, pointing out how several colleagues had merely signed the term book documenting their teaching after only a brief chit chat with the students instead of the full 45 minutes of instruction. Last faculty meeting he told us how teachers were not using the latrine correctly and that there would be consequences if he found any more pools of urine on the cement floor. Guilherme really made things happen for Janet’s construction project. The entire community respects him, especially students (we still have corporal punishment here). He’s also the heart of our teacher’s soccer team. So even though he has his character flaws and is an alcoholic, we love working with him.

Sorcerer's Airplane?

The other day Romão woke us up with some strange news: Have you seen the airplane? Yes, a plane crashed last night in the neighborhood. Soon another neighbor confirmed the story: everyone is over there. We do not live under any commercial air paths; we have seen small charter planes flying over maybe once or twice during our two years here. We definitely hadn’t heard any unusual noises or explosions that night, so we investigated. A short walk exposed the mystery. Lying in our neighbor’s yard was some sort of pumpkin shell with handlebars and a broomstick type sitting area. It was clear enough to everybody else: a sorcerer’s airplane. Apparently the denizens of the home had noticed sorcerers flying above their hut so they engaged a witch doctor to protect their airspace with some defensive charms, and low and behold, the next day the sorcerer’s flying contraption falls out of the sky. People were disappointed that the sorcerer had escaped, but his/her vehicle certainly was generating plenty of gawking.

No More Shade for Hot Season

Luc stresses out every time we leave our little house imagining all the possible misfortunes that could befall our abode in our absence. Burglary persists as a worry, especially since our neighbor’s experience with the spaghetti thief, or with so much shoddy wiring and poor general construction it’s not unrealistic picturing coming back to find the house a mere pile of rubble. Our latest return from a Peace Corps gathering provided us with an unpleasant surprise; our majestic mango tree lay amputated in pieces all across our yard. All the aborted fruits that had already piqued our taste buds with anticipation for delicious mango season littered the walkway. Our landlady had decided to convert the tree into firewood in our absence to feed a brick project she was undertaking at her mother’s house. Of course all we could think about is where will we hide from the unforgiving sun during hot season in the absence of our mango’s deep foliage that provided cool refuge from many a scorcher last summer.

The Spaghetti Thief

While we and most of the community where at a funeral for one of our teacher colleague’s brother, a thief broke down our neighbor’s door and stole some of her stuff. The neighborhood was abuzz with gossip when we returned from the cemetery. Apparently the thief took about the equivalent of $20 in cash, an iron, two pairs of pants, and... ten packs of spaghetti! It was a little unnerving to have a break-in literally ten feet away from our bedroom window. Our house is slightly more secure, with burglar bars on the windows and doors, but the old mortar holding them in is so crumbly now, Luc is convinced one good tug from a would-be burglar could easily remove the obstacle. We don’t have much to steal in our little house and people think we are poor since we don’t have a TV, which seems to be the very first sign of affluence here, but we are foreigners, and with no bank in the town, there have been times when we have had stacks of cash in our house. We put an extra pad lock on our main grate. In the end the spaghetti was his undoing. Some of the neighborhood kids starting investigating and spying into windows. The suspect was boiling a pack of spaghetti. That was enough to bring the police into it and he was apprehended and forced to give back three packs of spaghetti and the iron. He was just a rebellious teenager with nothing to do, not a serial criminal, so we’re feeling much safer now that he was punished and outed to the whole town as a robber. We can’t imagine a crook in America, going in to someone’s house and stealing… spaghetti. But this isn’t America…

A Quiet Weekend at Home

For the past three months our lives have been whirlwinds of activity. With visits from Janet’s family and best friend, a safari trip to Zambia, a visit from Luc’s brother, a week down in Maputo for our close of service conference, our trip to Tanzania to get Luc’s dad, our farewell event for our Peace Corps Malawi neighbors, and several visits from our Peace Corps Mozambique buddies it has been three months since we have had a weekend in site, just the two of us. But that’s exactly what we got this weekend. No scrambling into overcrowded vehicles, no endless waiting for buses to fill, no border crossings, no battling with cell networks to coordinate via text messages, no travel drama. Janet got to sleep in, Luc got to go to church, and we did some hiking. We attended the Sunday afternoon soccer game, sitting on the grass and chatting with colleagues while our local team beat a team from the city sponsored by a large auto repair garage. We made some of our favorite meals, pizza one night and hamburgers with potato salad the other. We also had some excitement to celebrate. With some of Noah’s help (Luc’s older brother in California), we bought our plane tickets to America. African airfare can be unpredictable and all flights require multiple layovers and connections. What is totally predictable are the high prices, but Peace Corps had already calculated $2,600 for the one-way flight, so that alleviated the financial pressure. We had already scouted out all the major airlines while at the Peace Corps office during our trip to drop Luc’s dad at the airport in Malawi, so we already knew our best options, which this year happen to be Turkish Air. We just needed Peace Corps’ final confirmation of our Close of Service Date, which we just got this week. On-line purchases are way beyond the rudimentary capabilities of our little cell phone web browser and we didn’t know when we’d be able to connect at our nearest café down in the city, plus last time some spyware on that computer stole Luc’s credit card number and made some sketchy purchases in Nigeria. Luckily our little phone can handle e-mail, so after 7 rounds of back and forth with Luc’s patient brother we had our e-tickets. It feels different now, even though we knew from the beginning that we would be finishing in December 2011. Now that we actually have an exact date inked in on the calendar it really looks like a count down. We’re trying to avoid crossing off the days and really trying to enjoy all of our last experiences.

Another Round of Good-Byes

Every time we see Peace Corps friends now we have to say good-byes and this weekend we had a good share of farewells. We made the trek down to Gorongosa for a big end of service get together, and with buddies starting to head back to America next month, it was our last time seeing a bunch of the guys we’ve had such a strong shared experience with over the past two years. Tete province traveled in a pack, and like all our African travel, we had our share of adventure. Our 4am bus out of the city broke down half way to Chimoio in the middle of nowhere. Our conductor managed to muster two small mini-buses to rescue us, but we had to pack 5 to a row to all fit in. Our next transport had a blow out, but luckily managed to retain control and not flip over. In the end we made it safe and sound. Close to 50 volunteers congregated on the centrally located Gorongosa, so we brought a tent and camped out under the stars, until it started raining. Our rain-fly is already in the USA, so we had to scrounge some floor space and sleep slumber party style. One of our colleagues works in the nearby Gorongosa National Park, so she organized a safari for us in one of their mini-buses. Gorongosa was one of the continent’s premiere safari parks during the Portuguese era, but the two decades of conflict that followed left the park devastated and devoid of the kind of flashy wildlife we’ve grown accustomed to on some of our other vacations to Mozambique’s neighbors, but we still enjoyed the drive and spotted some beautiful antelopes, including our favorite, the majestic Sable. It was kind of crazy with all the tents, hungry mouths to feed, puppies, emotional farewells, and unexpected precipitation, and at times it felt like a refugee camp, but our hosts, Brian and Jordan, did a great job taking care of us all, so we’re glad we made it, despite the 30+ hours of travel it took for the roundtrip. Plus we got a chance to hear about how everyone is negotiating closing their service here, and what people see in their future for when they get back to America (most people, including ourselves, have been avoiding thinking about this, so we got a lot of hums and uhs in peoples’ answers). We ended with a late evening bonfire, with volunteers playing the guitar and singing songs, no marshmallows or ‘smores, but a few tears and lots of smiles.