So, as usual when I finally get around to sitting down and
writing out a blog post, I’ve realized that quite a lot of time has passed
since I wrote my last post. Two months
in fact. Epah!
In all fairness, it has been a busy couple months, what
with traveling, conferences, visitors, saying farewell to old volunteers and
welcoming new volunteers.
At the beginning of July, I was lucky enough to have the
opportunity to go to Mbuna Bay, a resort on the Mozambican side of Lake Malawi
(or Lake Niassa, if you are in Mozambique), with a handful of other volunteers
and one of our Australian missionary friends.
Mbuna Bay is a luxury resort, with all the modern comforts of running
water (hot and cold!), big fluffy beds, beautiful views, beachside gazebos, and
wonderful, beautiful, delicious vegetarian food for every meal. While we were
there I was able to go swimming, kayaking, spend amble amount of time reading
in a hammock, celebrate the 4th of July with a few fellow Americans
(and the lone Australian), drink a few beers while having a bonfire on the
empty beach, and throw my sitemate Laura part one of her despedida. What’s really cool about Mbuna Bay, however,
is that it’s also very involved in the community – the owner is the wife of the
former Swiss ambassador to Mozambique.
While living here, she fell in love with the people and decided to build
a resort here. Almost all of the staff
are from the village (there are usually one or two volunteers from Switzerland handling
the business side of things), the cottages are constructed of local materials
in the same way Mozambicans construct their houses (but with many more
amenities!), they work with community members to teach them skills (sewing,
construction, etc) and sometimes English, and have invested in the little
village – they’ve built a school, a community center, and a bridge so the
village isn’t completely divided by a river during the rainy season anymore.
The oh-so-beautiful Mbuna Bay!
After we got back from the lake (after much too short of a
visit – it’s definitely a place I want to visit again and would recommend to
anyone coming to Niassa!), we (aka, Laura, our health volunteer) received two
trainee visitors from the new batch of health volunteers. This is one of my favorite parts of training –
about two-thirds through training, everyone gets sent off to different sites in
Mozambique to visit with current volunteers to get a sense of what their work
might be like, what sites can be like, and what they may or may not want out of
their future sites. And now that I’m a
volunteer I like it because it means I might be able to see new people a couple
times a year! We also get to show off
our site, which is exciting, since Lichinga is amazing. We brought the visitors to our favorite
restaurants (one is actually a restaurant, with pizza and burgers and sometimes
ice cream, the others are a take-away stand with appas…which deserve their own
post… and a food stall at one of the markets with excellent Mozambican food),
showed them the sites in town (the reservoir, the crashed airplanes, our
‘fancy’ grocery stores that stock more than one brand of each thing), and fed
them all sorts of things that you don’t get in training (eggplant parmesan, banana
chocolate chip cookies, yogurt), before sending them back south to training and
paved roads.
Our visiting trainees were only two of many visitors who
passed through Lichinga between the end of June and the end of July – in total,
in our house, we had nine during the month, with two more who stayed at Laura’s
house (not including the trainees). This
is unheard of in northern Niassa – we are not on the way to anything and are
extremely hard to get to. By the end of
the month I had hosted so many people that I was completely exhausted and a bit
bewildered by all the people. Of course,
I had the lovely distraction (not quite a respite) of conferences to distract
me by the time late July rolled around.
One of the more unfortunate parts of being an education
volunteer is that it’s hard to travel outside of school breaks, but Peace Corps and secondary projects love
to fill up school breaks with Conferences and Workshops. This time around, I had two weeks of
break…with two conferences to take up about half of my time off. First I had the Niassa REDES Workshop – an
annual event where all the REDES groups (or, part of all the REDES groups,
thankfully) meet up in one city for a three-day conference about life choices, health
(with a focus on HIV/SIDA and puberty), self-esteem, and, this year, how to run
a business. With a lot of singing thrown
in. A LOT. This year the conference was in Mandimba (a
centrally located town on the Malawi border) and we had 33 girls from 9
different groups through out the province, along with volunteers and Mozambican
counterparts. The conference was a lot of fun and a big success – the girls
learned a lot and had a great time – but it was also an astounding amount of
work. Since there were only a handful of
volunteers and many things to get done, we spent most of the time running
around buying food, fetching things for sessions, and trying to figure out
where various people had wandered off.
As much fun as the conference was, I was glad when it was over and I
could come back home for a few days of rest before our next conference the following week.
Some pictures from REDES:
The second conference of my
break was PDM – Project Design and Management – an official Peace Corps conference,
which means it was held out of province,
in a fancy hotel, with a pool, and a buffet, and internet! So off I went with five of my site and
almost-site mates and our counterparts – because PDM is for both volunteers and
people we hope to be doing projects with in the future. My counterpart was a
representative from União Associada
dos Campesinos de Lichinga, a farming union that also does a lot of work
with food sustainability, resource management, and a bit with
conservation. Other people brought
students, doctors, fellow teachers, or people from the community. The best things about PDM, for me at least, were
that I was not involved in the organization at all, it was only two days long,
and that Peace Corps paid for me to get out of my province – via airplane! I was also able to see some volunteers from
my training group who were placed in the central and southern regions of
Mozambique who I hadn’t seen since swearing-in – an opportunity for
catching-up, exchanging stories, and getting a nice dose of perspective on life
in our little corners of Mozambique.
After PDM, I had several days before I had to be back in
Lichinga to teach, so I took off traveling.
My friend Casey and I headed up to Pemba – provincial capital of Cabo
Delgado and a lovely beach town – where we met up with our friends Nick and
Jamie from training, as well as Nick’s parents who were visiting. There were many lovely things about our
three-day trip to Pemba – the beautiful beaches, seeing Nick for the first time
since swearing in and Jamie for the first time since April, wonderful food, a
few free meals courtesy of Nick’s parents (thanks again!), drinking wine and
eating M&Ms with a few of my favorite people, our adventure of buying,
transporting, presenting, and eating a full-sized Mozambican cake for Nick’s
parents’ anniversary (yup, we bought a cake, and then took in on a chapa!) –
but I think my favorite part were the dogs who lived at the hostel we stayed at. There were three of them and they were unlike
any dog I’ve seen since getting to Mozambique:
they were all fat and happy and extremely friendly. I hadn’t thought a
dog could be fat in Mozambique! By the
morning after I arrived, we were all buddies and a couple of them even came
along when Nick, Jamie, Casey, and I walked out to the beach one morning to
watch the sunrise. After leaving Pemba,
we went back down to Nampula, where I was able to spend some time at a friend’s
site, which I always find fascinating – they’re all so different – before I
flew back to Lichinga to starting teaching for the third, and final, trimester
of this year.
Some pics from Pemba - including the adorable puppies who quickly became my best friends!
A week and a half later, I’m back in the swing of things –
teaching, having REDES meetings, playing with my animals (both are doing
wonderfully – the cat as weird as every, the dog getting big and starting to
acquire boyfriends, eek!), and walking around Lichinga and being told I’ve been
disappearing a lot lately. Normal.
This trimester for school I’m focusing on trying to fit a
lot of material in a short amount of time – we have nine teaching weeks,
including the first week when no one shows up and a handful of holidays that
mean no school. But luckily I teach 11th grade and don’t have to worry
about national exams!
One of my classrooms the first week of school:
I’m also hoping to
start really working with UCA (the farmer’s union) on some of their projects,
or at least just hanging around to see what they’re up to. REDES will be taking up quite a bit of my
time for the next year, also, as I’ve been elected to the national board as
Curriculum Coordinator – which means I’ll be working with the curriculums,
editing and writing manuals, and incorporating feedback from the many different
groups. Because of this I’ll be heading
back to Nampula in September for the Handover (where all the previous leaders
help us figure out what it is we’ll be doing), where there is now a Shoprite! For
those of you who haven’t spent much time in southern Africa, Shoprite is a
chain of grocery stores – American-style grocery stores, with pretty much
everything you could think of – including cheese and yogurt and cereal and dog
food! I’ll have to remember that
everything I buy I have to carry on my lap for the 300 km chapa ride between
Cuamba and Lichinga. Also in September
I’ll be brining my REDES group to the provincial English Theater competition –
another Peace Corps secondary project where groups of up to 10 students write
and perform and short play in English – so we’re spending the next month and a
half working on that. I’ve decided that
means the time is ripe to teach them all a bunch of camp songs! You know, so
they can practice their English! Not at
all just because I like singing camp songs…
Also during the past month, my sitemate Laura finished her
service and headed back to America. As
she’s about to start graduate school at Harvard, it definitely was one of those
‘sad to see you go, but so excited for you!’ things. Before she left, I was lucky enough to be
able to be there for part of her despedida (goodbye party) with all of her
Mozambican friends. It was amazing to
see the impact that she had had in just two years – there were so many people
there who she had connected with or help or just hung out with during her
service that were so sad to see her leave.
It made me realize that, in spite of the fact that we’re usually so
focused on our projects – how many we have, what they are, what group of people
they are helping – the most important part of our service is just being here,
talking to people, making friends and sharing experiences. Any organization can bring teachers, do
studies, or form youth groups, the thing that is special about Peace Corps is
that we live in the communities where we work, we only receive enough money to
live reasonably – similarly to our neighbors, and we focus so much on
integration.
Last week our new health volunteer arrived – John. It’s been fun to watch his reactions to
everything and see his unhindered excitement about everything. Instead of being fed-up by yet another random
person stopping you on the street to have an unending conversation or someone
stopping by your house to ask seemingly unimportant questions, he’s excited by
it – it’s new, it’s interesting, it’s what he came here for. It’s refreshing to see that enthusiasm – and it’s
a bit contagious!
Áte proxima!
And no posting on the internet would be complete without a few animal pics:
