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!