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!!!