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.