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.
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