Getting down to Business

I have officially entered the real land of Peace Corps...meaning, I've completed training and am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer now.
We had our swear in ceremony and had to repeat an official oath at the US embassy last week. Since then we've been pushed in to the deep end and scattered about throughout Mozambique.
It was a little sad leaving Namaacha and saying goodbye to my host family. They walked with me to the mercado where the chapa's were picking us up. My host mom and Sonia were so sad and when I got on the chapa and looked out the window I could see my mom crying. It's so strange to think I could never have imagined when I first arrived that I would become so close to them and really feel like they are family and actually be sad to leave them. I also think about what it must be like for them since they seem so upset and sad that I'm going. Sonia kept telling me she was going to cry and wasn't eating because she said she had no appetite. I don't blame them, their lives just go back to normal, cleaning everyday, every meal taking hours to prepare, and a huge source of income they were getting from the Peace Corps is now gone. I'm really going to be excited to visit them in a year at mid-service!
I had a supervisor conference in Nampula on Thursday. Me and the rest of the PCVs living in the North flew in to Nampula on Wednesday and were pleasently surprised by our hotel accomidations. Running HOT water, air conditioning (although the unit in my room didn't work), good food, and comfortable beds! I met my bosses and counterparts and we all went to meetings to inform our organizations on what we did during training and go over possible problems we may run into while working together. I really like the people I'll be working with, they all seem really nice and excited to work on the projects I'm interested in. My counterpart lives in the same district as me and seems to be eager to listen to my ideas and help me integrate in to my community as much as possible. He speaks really good english so he said if I ever don't understand anything to be sure and tell him so he can clarify but that he would try to talk mostly in Portuguese in order to help me learn. The day after the conference, the five new PCVs that will be working for FGH and our bosses drove up to Quelimane to stay in another hotel-more of a bed and breakfast-where we have the weekend to rest and make purchases for our houses, then on Monday we are having work meetings to introduce ourselves to everyone and the organization. They are driving us to our sites on Wednesday. I'm really excited to get there and see my house! Most other volunteers have arrived at their houses already and it's cool to hear what their houses are like. I am greatful that my house is mostly set up and ready to go since I'm replacing a volunteer because a handful of Volunteers are kind of in limbo because their homes aren't ready-they are either still needing repairs or trying to sort out payment issues.
Quelimane is the capital of my province, Zambezia, and there is definitly a lot of poverty here. It's sad to see so many people walking around with no shoes and begging for money for food.
It's nice being in such a big city where they have a wide selection of goods and such, but I'm really happy that I'll be going to a smaller community where I'll be able to get to know everyone.
Us new PCVs can only leave our sites for either Christmas or New Years so we are planning a little get together over New Years at one of the Moz 13ers house. It will be fun to get together and talk about how our first week or two at site went. Not sure yet what I'll do for Christmas then. I'm thinking I'll either do a day trip to Quelimane to have lunch with friends or maybe once I get to my site I'll get an invite to spend the holiday with a neighbor. Either way, I downloaded plenty of Christmas music on to my ipod and have a mini Christmas tree coming my way-so I'll be celebrating one way or another :)
I'm already thinking ahead trying to plan for visitors and just want people to keep in mind the World Cup in South Africa is June and July 2010 so everything is going to be WAAAAY more expensive around that time-and probably at least a month or two before and after also. Just something to keep in mind! I will free, glorious wifi internet access for the next couple days, so I'll try to post another update soon!

Happy Thanksgiving and Site Placements!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I´m a bit sad I won´t be there to celebrate, but I have plenty to be thankful for!

Yesterday we had a Thanksgiving celebration a bit early. Everyone cooked something to bring and Peace Corps made turkeys. There was SO much food, we ate like Kings! It was soooo good after 8 weeks of rice and xima! It was really nice to be all together and be able to have our own little celebration, it almost felt like home :) We also got to find out our site placements yesterday! I was so nervous, we all were!....so, my new home for the next 2 years is.... Macuse, it´s a small fishing village in Zambezia district. I am beyond happy about this! I will be working with an International Non-Governmental Organization called Friends in Global Health, it is connected to Vanderbilt University. I am replacing a PC Volunteer that has finished her two years so I was lucky enough to talk with her on the phone yesterday and she also wrote me a long letter about the house, job, and town. One of the trainees here actually visited this site for her site visit so I also got to see photos of the area. I will be the only Peace Corps Volunteer in the village, but there are a large number of PCV that will be in the province and we´ll be able to get together often. It sounds like the perfect location because it´s a small enough town where I´ll get to know everyone but also located close to a bigger city which I can travel to a few times a month as needed. I´ve also been told that the ocean is only steps away from my house :) I´m looking forward to that!

To give everyone a better idea of the description I´ve received, I´m going to sum up the details I was given from the previous volunteer.
While Macuse is a rural fishing village, it is in good proximity to Namacurra and Quelimane which makes it feel a bit less remote. There are two ways of arriving and leaving the village. The first is by land from Namacurra, the second way is by boat and chapa (like a mini-van/bus), from Mause you go to the boat landing at the school and they row you across to Supinho where you then get in the chapa to Quelimane. Going by boat is generally faster and less painful, but I wouldn´t go by boat November-January because the water is a lot rougher and the road to Quelimane that way becomes almost impassable because of the sand.
Dress code in the village is extremely relaxed. You will spend a lot of time sweating on your bike, so keep it conservative, clean and comfortable.
One of the organizations I worked with, TCE, will only be here until next July, so I don´t know how involved you want to be with them. I suggest accompanying a few field officers, they do community HIV awareness in the village. This will mean a lot of sweating on your bicycle, but it is a great way to get to know your way around the thousands of sand paths that make up this community and get you a good glimpse into daily life here. A few of the fields are far, taking nearly 3-6 hours to reach by bike, so be sure to bring lots of water and rehydration salts. Another organization doing work here with various women´s groups on micro credit projects is International Relief and Development, also at the ADPP school there is also a famer´s club that does agricultural work in the community if you are interested in doing permaculture garden projects.
The ADPP future professor´s school is the center of Macuse. They have a volunteer house near the school and usually have volunteers there who serve 6 month contracts as teachers in the school. They come from all over the world and there have been Japanese, Brazilian, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Mexican and all sorts of other volunteers. In the past I´ve had some success collaborating on projects with them.
The obvious way to pass weekends here is to head to the beach. It´s about an 8km bike ride through the shortcuts, though sometimes I pay a canoe to just paddle me up to Macumbine to save me the work. You can buy huge fresh fish there and sometimes the ADPP organizes volleyball games there as well. On Saturday nights the ADP almost always has dance/cultural programs up at the school which can be pretty fun. On weekends and some weeknights there are often soccer games going on somewhere in the community if you want to watch or even play. There is a soccer field near the house and salt fields that I usually go jogging at in the evenings.
As far as your house is concerned, while you are located in front of a bar and near the market, I have never had any safety concerns the whole time I´ve been here. The loja (store) behind the house has a guard and he also keeps an eye out for the house and the neighbors in general are very good about watching the house. It is a predominantly Muslim neighborhood and the mosque is close by. There is a Madrassa (religious school for boys) located on the other side of the loja which is run by the Mulana from India. The Mulana´s wife is kind of shy but also very sweet and a great cook if you ever want lessons on cooking amazing Indian food. Your Mozambican neighbor directly across from you was my empregada (maid) and I recomend her to you. She gets the work done and I figure since she is your neighbor, she is least likely to steal from you and easy to find if you need something done at the house. She is a single woman with 6 girls, 3 of who still live at home. She brought my water every day, washed clothes once a week, swept the yard and whatever else I might want done like going to the market or watching my dog/house while I´m away.
At the market you can usually get tomatoes, onions, rice, coconut, and beans. Depending on the time of year, you can also find bananas, oranges, couve, potatoes, and garlic. Other vegetables like pumpkin, lettuce, cucumber, and stuff, there are a lot of local groups in the area including the Farmers Club who grow vegetables to sell but don´t necessarily end up in the market so you have to seek thm out and let them know what you want to buy and when/if they have it, they will bring it to you. Someone usually stops by the house once every week or two to sell eggs. If you go down to the boats near the mosque and salt storage place by your house at around 3 or 4pm you can usually find the fisherman bringing in their catch for the day and can buy giant fish and crabs for cheap. You can also find fish on the beach or down byt the ADPP boats sometimes too. Chickens of course you can always find to buy.
As far as water, I won´t lie, your water supply in the well in front of your house can sometimes get kind of gross, especially during dry season. Occasionally it goes completely dry and then the empregada has to bring it from quite far. Macuse got hit by cholera really hard last year and you share your water supply with lots of people and it is not a protected well, so always boil, filter and bleach your water. Sometimes when the water gets really bad, you may also want to filter your bath water through a capulana (cloth material) but that only usually happens at the very end of dry season. About once a year you will probably get an itchy rash because of the crazy bean patch behind your house bit it only lasts a week or so, just don´t be surprised. Unfortunately you also have a rat problem in the house. I highly recommend getting a cat because the only time I did not have rats was when I had a cat. If you wear sandals a lot, you will most likely at some point get a matakenia in your foot. It´s a small worm that lays eggs in your feet. You will first notice it as a small, somewhat painful hard bump on the bottom of your foot or around your toes that sometimes itches. They aren´t particularly dangerous, just very gross. The best thing to do is ask one of the neighbors to dig it out for you since they will know how to make sure the entire worm and its eggs are indeed out. Then you will want to put bleach on the spot you pull the worm from to make sure you kill it all.
In the last few weeks I have hounded the landlord to get the house in better shape for you. We have painted the entire inside of the house and put up curtains. There are also now doors on your room, kitchen and bathroom and I had new light bulbs put in. They sealed up the major openings in 2 sides of the house near the ceiling line and new locks were put on the front and back doors. I also put up a shower curtain for you in the bathroom. I never got a refrigerator because I didn´t initially have electricity but since you have it now you might want to think about getting one it fyou want.

That´s is the summary I received from the previous volunteer! I hope you found it as interesting and exciting as I did! Here is a brief description of my job working with Friends in Global Health:
They provide support to the Ministry of Health and the national health services in the incorporation and reinforcement of clinical HIV/AIDS services, including the rehabilitation of health infrastructure, assuring human resources to provide services in the focus areas covered by the I-NGO, and continual monitoring and training of personnel in health facilities. The organization implements a community intervention strategy which has a social component in order to ensure that clinical services have the greatest possibility of being used by the population at the lowest levels of the system. Components of teh community intervention strategy include a communication strategy, support to groups of PLWHA (people living with HIV/AIDS) and other community-based support groups, adherence promotion program, development of nutritional support strategies for patients on Anti-retrovirals, foster better coordination at the district and provincial levels.
There will be 5 Volunteers placed with this care and treatment organization to assist specifically with strengthening their community outreach activities. Trainees with a background in communication and media (radio, video, editing, etc) and experience with theatre will be especially competitive for these positions.
In collaboration with the persons working in the organization´s newly-created staff roles of Community Intervention Assistans, Volunteers will:
Support the local coordination of community activities
Support the development of small support frojects for PLWHA
Support the development of gardens fr the nutritional support of patients living with HIV/AIDS

The only hard part will be sitting through 2 more weeks of training! I can´t wait to get to my new community and get started!

Today I did my practicum! It´s basically a practice run, doing a little lesson or activity with a group of your choice in the community. I did a lesson on hand washing with a group of older women in the community, many of whom are HIV positive. I did a little demonstation using cool-aid and dyed all their hands red to represent germs and how ineffective using water only is, then had them re-wash using soap. I was quite nervous when I began. It´s a bit intimidating teaching people that are much older than me, but it went realy well. The majority of community members there only spoke Changana (a local language) so I had to speak in Portugues and then have a translator translate into Changana. The message was conveyed and the group seemed to be generally interested and got a lot out of the lesson. I´m happy to have it done with and relax through the rest of training and just wait to get to site!! It felt really good to put everything we´ve been learning to use and finally feel like I am doing some good in the community here. I was also surprised at my ability to speak in Portugues, while it wasn´t perfect by any means, I was still able to talk relatively easily during my 20 minute presentation. I thought about my last semester of college and after 6 years of Spanish I was still nervous to do a 10 minute speech in Spanish and needed note cards, so I am impressed at how quickly I´ve progressed. All in all, it´s been a great week so far! And I am looking forward to talking with my family tonight!

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I´ll be thinking of you all :) Love and miss you!!!

Site Visit to Vilankulos!

Site visit was amazing! It was really great to get out of Namaacha and see more of the country! We took a 12 hour bus ride up to Vilankulos, so I was able to see quite a bit. We also spent one night in Tofo-which has a really beautiful beach and a little hostel along the beach that we stayed at. I´ll back up and fill you in on the last few weeks though first before I get on a rant about how beautiful these sea side towns are!

The Halloween party was pretty successful-it was a lot of fun to hang out with all the Trainees outside of PC sessions. There were some very creative costumes with such little resources here. There were vampires, a fairy, mummys, a giant flower, Fred and Willma Flinstone, the world cup-my siblings were a soldier, a nurse, and a soccer player and I was a cave woman! The kids ate a bunch of candy and danced, there was a pretty big turn out. In the later part of the night we went to Palucia´s, a local restaurant/bar and got to hang out with all the Trainees.

The next week we were all really excited for hub day to find out where we would be going for our site visits! Peace Corps sends all the Trainees out to stay with current Volunteers throughout the country to get a feel for what life as a Volunteer is really like and to go to work with them and see the school or organization where they work. I was really hoping to visit a Volunteer living near the ocean, but had totally prepared myself to be placed somewhere in-land, either way, it was the perfect time for a break from training. Everyone really needed to get away and have some independence back-even if it was only for a little bit, and to get a break from each other. It´s tough being in such a new culture and learning so much every day and being around each other 24/7 with such big, out-going personalities...it was just perfect timing to have some time away!

I was SOOO excited to find out I would be visiting Vilankulos. It is a very touristy town in Inhambane province along the Indian Ocean. I had seen some pictures on facebook of the volunteers that lived there and was hoping I would have a chance to visit at some point, so this was perfect! Sarah and Courtney are the Volunteers living there, they´ve been here a year. I had 2 other trainees staying at their house with me, and 3 other education trainees also went to Vilankulos and stayed with an education Volunteer close by. We left Saturday morning at 4am and it was around 12 hours to drive all the way there. It was not exactly desirable circumstances, but I knew it was going to be worth the trip! The commom transportation here is called chapa´s, they are basically big vans that fit about 16 people, but generally you can expect to squish 20+ people in!

Once we arrived in Vilankulos and got to the Volunteers house it was all worth it! Their backyard is the Ocean! I felt completely stress free as soon as we arrived! We were also really excited about dinner and getting a chance to cook some American meals. Sarah and Courtney had made us tacos and even brownies for dessert, it was amazing! There house is really nice, they have running water and an indoor shower, a stove and oven, electricity...it´s very nice. We went out Saturday night for a bit and met some of the other Volunteers that live in the province, it was fun to meet people that have been at site for a while now and understand what we´re going through with training. Sunday was very relaxing, we layed out by the Ocean and swam a bit. It was really hot and I had to reapply my sunscreen about every 15 minutes because the sun is so powerful here. We watched a couple movies and even ordered pizza which was very exciting! ....oh the simple pleasures! On Monday we went to work with Sarah and Courtney to see what the organization they work for is like. They work for CARE, which is an NGO educationg people on HIV/AIDS and they plan different events in the community. The organization is pretty large and their work is very structured which isn´t usually the case for health volunteers. This years Volunteers won´t be assigned to positions like this because PC is trying to give health Volunteers more time for secondary projects and have less structure in their jobs so they can have more of an opportunity to define their own job and tasks. We attended a meeting with the girls and met some co-workers, then hit the beach :) It was good to see their office and find out what they do, but there wasn´t much more we could do, so we went into town and bought some things to make dinner and then swam and laid out for a while. The next morning we left early to travel to Tofo, which is another touristy-beach town about 3 hours south. A lot of other trainees that had site visits in surrounding areas also came down to spend the last night in Tofo, so there were about 250-25 of us Peace Corps people there. I really loved the town, the only down-fall was that we were all looked at as tourists and people didn´t realize taht we actually are living in the country, so it´s a little irritating to be treated this way. The same can be said for Vilankulos. People living in these towns just assume you are a tourist and try to sell you merchandise and talked to us in english which I did´t really like. We all stayed up pretty late the last night and hung out at Fatima´s, which is a little hostel on the beach with a bar and music. It was a lot of fun!

The trip back the next day was a bit grueling with the lack of sleep and having to say goodbye to my ocean gettaway! I feel completely refreshed though now and have been in a great mood since returning. It´s all downhill from here with only 3 1/2 weeks of training left! We´ll find out where our actual site placements are on Thanksgiving, so I have that to look forward to! After staying with Volunteers I´m sooo ready to be out on my own and start making a life for myself here! I feel re-energized and ready to really focus on my Portuguese these last few weeks and get the most out of training, along with really making an effort to spend more time with my host family and to try to not be so irritable with them :/

I´ve had some really great conversations with them the last couple nights. Yesterday I was able to talk with my mom about her Labolo (bride price) and found what my dad paid her family in order to marry her-money, clothing, and animals is the norm. I also asked if she was going to have Labolos for her daughters and was incredably happy to find out she´s not! She said she wants her daughters to go to school, get jobs, buy a house and car, and THEN get married and just have a wedding. I was so happy and proud to hear her say that! I´ve been teaching my host family a lot about my family and life back in America and feel like it´s much easier to deal with the homesickness when I can talk about home to my family here. The other night I had them draw pictures for me to send with my letter home to my parents and then they decided they wanted to have me write letters from them in english, so they told me in Portuguese what they wanted to say and I wrote it in english to my parents. It was the sweetest thing about how they want to come visit me and my parents in America and that they are going to be so sad when I leave in December and want to visit at my site. The family is really starting to grow on me and I feel much more comfortable in the home now that I´m able to communicate a bit more with them.

I´m off to have lunch and then meet with my APCD (assistant Peace Corps director) about where I would like my site placement to be and with what type of organization I want to work for! Tchau!

Home Sweet Home...Mozambique

I´ve been a PCT (Peace Corps Trainee) for over three weeks now and there´s definitly been countless highs and lows so far in the journey. they come and go VERY quickly! Each day presents new challenges, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Not only is Portuguese constantly being pounded into my brain at a rate and level that I can´t seem to find time to digest and make sense of, but I´m also busy learning about the many traditions, history, and the structure of many organizations here. For example: the health care system, Lobolo´s (bride price), school systems, HIV/AIDS, safety and security issues as a Volunteer, polygamy, landmines, gender roles, ways of assessing my community and their needs once at site, etc.

Everything is just so new and there´s so much to learn. It´s hard to find any free time to just kind of take everything in! A typical day for me here looks like this:

5-5:30am Wake up, roosters go off! Start the fire and heat my bath water
6-6:30 Bucket bath out in the little hut make of stones and mud with a ripped up sheet for a door-that blows in the wind! Pretty sure the whole neighborhood can see me in there...
6:30-7:30 Get ready and have breakfast-which can be anything from salad to cookies! Usually plain bread and coffee and tea
7:30-930 Portuguese lessons with my language group-there´s 6 volunteers in my group and we take turn meeting at each others houses with our teacher who only speaks Portuguese!
10-12 Technical sessions-which is where we learn about the practical information I listed above, mostly health issues we´ll be dealing with once at site.
12-1:30 Break to go home for lunch-which is often times when I have a mild breakdown! I just want a nice, quiet lunch, maybe a moment to be a lone and so some homework...instead somehow, I often times become the circus side-show act with all the neighbor kids crowding and poking and prawding me, asking question in Portuguese, which I usually don´t understand, so they all laugh at me and want to touch and see all my papers and notes! This combined with a lot of heat and homesickness makes for an unpleasant afternoon!
2pm-5 In the late afternoon we sometimes have another technical session and then always more Portuguese lessons.

Wednesdays are hub days, we get together with all the Volunteers (there´s about 70 of us with the education volunteers) and go over issues all PCVs need to know about. Weekends are open for the most part-just Portuguese lessons for a couple hours Saturday morning and then most people are busy with domestic tasks that used to be taken for granted at home, ahhh the simplicity of a washer and dryer, dishwasher, microwave, stove, fridge....

The main issue for me during these first few weeks has been the sanitation, or lack there of! I´m surprised I´m not on my death bed at this point. There is no concept of hand washing which includes soap! Washing dishes is also not one of my favorite activities, not because I don´t want to help wash, but because seeing the process grosses me out and makes me nervous to use the dishes! The water inevitably turns dirty pretty quickly, at times there can be flies floating in it, the rags used are usually pretty gross. The floors are washed every morning, the rag used to clean out the latrine and bathing rooms is the same one used to clean the kitchen and living room floor-and the bucket of completely filthy water is often times the same bucket my heated water goes in for me to use in my bucket bath. There is no seperation of buckets used for say-dirty floor water, vegatables, raw chicken, and bathing...it´s disturbing! But, I´m still here and alive! I can only hope that this sanitization issue will help strengthen my immune system for the future! My sister got sick about a week ago too and I was just waiting to see how long until I got sick as well, because she is the oldest girl living in the house and therefore does most of the cooking and cleaning. There were many instances that I watched her cough and sneeze directly into whatever we were cooking, as well as using her hands to touch food right after coughing in to them. This is mainly why I´m excited to get to site and be able to cook and clean things the way I want-preferably with soap!

My host family took a while to figure out. Family here is really an inclusive word here in Mozambique. My mom, Floriana, works for a family-watching their son, Obama, and does some cooking and cleaning, my dad, Viergas, is only home on the weekends because he works far away-which is very common here, he´s pretty quiet usually around me but seems like a nice guy that likes kids, they have 2 older children that live in the capital, Maputo, where I think they go to school, which is great! That´s pretty uncommon for parents here to send the eldest daughter to school and not have her married off to another family. In the house there´s 3 kids, the oldest is Sonia, she´s 15 and has been very kind in showing me the ropes and being patient with me, Ana Katoosh is 12 and just the cutest little girl, and then there´s EnSelmo, who is 9-he´s always dancing to Michael Jackson! There very nice and excited for me to learn Portuguese and want to teach me so much! At times however, it is a bit overwhelming. There´s just a lot of humility to this whole process and it´s very humbling to be living somewhere where you are completely helpless. Even after being shown and taught how to do something I´m usually told I´m still not doing it "correctly." The issue here is that although I may not be doing things their way, it´s still going to get done and be fine! It´s pretty easy to feel inadequate here, especially after living on my own the past 5 years and suddenly being told everything I´m doing is wrong...and not being capable of doing it the "right" way.

I don´t want this post to seem all bad though, I really am enjoying learning about this new culture and can´t believe almost a month has already passed. This week I had a pretty memorable event...I killed my first (and last) chicken! There is no such thing as a sharp knife here in Mozambique so I wasn´t so much worried about feeling bad about killing it, if I didn´t do it someone else would, but I just didn´t want to cause it pain! I had to pin the wing down with one foot and hold the neck with my hand..at this point I was screaming and asking my mom to help me! She got me right in there and got the cutting started and then backed off...I was happy it was already 6:30 and dark out so I could hardly see what I was doing! It was over quickly and I felt like I really gained some respect in my family for going through with it...they also kind of forced me by telling me their last Volunteer did it! I had so much to live up to!

The presidential elections are next week, so we are all on alert in case any violence occurs and we would have to be evacuated to Swaziland. Hopefully things go over smoothly and then we´ll get a little more freedom to stay out later and go visit Maputo. We were able to talk our coordinators in to letting us have a Halloween party though next Saturday, so we are all looking forward to that!

Now that I´ve begun this blog I´ll be better about updating it more often! I miss everyone soooo much and am always thinking of you all!