Chicken Dinner

Jesse and I are continuing to love our neighbors. On Satuday, we shared dinner with our friend, Veronica, and her family. We spent the afternoon preparing. First, we walked together to the roadside to buy a couple live chickens, which we held by their wings to carry to the house.

Then, with one foot on the chicken´s head and the other foot holding down the wings, Jesse cut the neck. After the chickens stopped wriggling, their feathers were pulled off and the chickens were washed and cut. Almost all of a chicken can be eaten, even the intestines after they´re opened and cleaned well. The dinner was delicious - even for me, a vegetarian, who enjoyed xima and knowing that the chicken on the table wasn´t from a factory farm.

Photo below: Super cute kids at Veronica´s house.

Painting in Xai-Xai

Emily left Xai Xai for a REDES meeting in Maputo this past weekend, leaving me in charge of buying paint and painting the kitchen and living room of our house. Now, I can imagine that some of you, especially those of female persuasion are cringing slightly knowing that Emily left me, an admitted man, in charge of selecting the paint scheme and color that will adorn our house for two years. To that I say, your fears are groundless – I knew what I was doing. I also brought 2 other men along with me to help me choose the paint. Our friend Dan was down for a visit and quickly enlisted into the painting project along with Rustino, one of our friends who lives nearby.
We began the project on Friday and I had high hopes that we would be putting the finishing touches on the last wall by dinner time on Friday. This conservative estimate was thrown out the window almost immediately as we did not get into town to buy the painting supplies until after lunch and did not return with the paint until around 7 Friday night.
Paint supply procurement was interesting but uneventful. It was the purchasing of the paint that turned the whole outing into an adventure. The best way to buy paint here is to buy a couple gallons of white paint and then add little bottles of “tinter” until you have approximately the color your wife told you would match the pretty curtains she bought the second day we were at site. I even had a sample of the curtains with me and was feeling pretty confident.
The goal was to have a sand colored living room and maroon colored kitchen. Luck was with us because there was a bucket of approximately the correct color for the kitchen already mixed sitting out as if waiting for us. The sand color was not as easy. It took a long time to agree on the quality of white base paint that I was willing to pay for (paint is pretty expensive here, especially good paint). I quickly learned that to the people who were selling me the paint, their concept of a nice sand color is an ugly gray that would not in any circumstance look good on a wall. This was unfortunate because my ace in the hole had been that I had made sure I knew how to say sand in Portuguese before arriving at the paint store which was really the back of a trailer.
The next hour or so was spent trying to make a couple of primary colors do what wasn’t really physically possible. At one point we were mixing red yellow black and brown together hoping that the end result would look like Emily’s curtain sample. Out of desperation I jumped all over a color that was a definite improvement over the green brown and black that was the previous attempt. I think I liked it because it was so bright. Dan and Rustino quickly agreed that this was definitely the best color possible. Their opinion probably mostly being turned by the fact that we had already spent an hour or so matching paint. I held the sample next to the curtain and grimaced but said “Yeah, close enough” and the paint mixing began.
Now, it is one thing to mix a bit of paint together on a piece of cardboard. It is a lot harder to match that color in a ten gallon bucket of paint. For the next hour and a half I watched as more and more tinter was added and the paint color departed from the color sample we had agreed on as if it were an inverse correlation. My favorite part about the paint mixing was the guy who was holding the red tinter. Without much consultation with anyone else he would from time to time dump in a bunch of red. This would elicit a reaction from the woman who was stirring that the red was too strong and we needed yellow to balance it out. I alternated from hysterical laughing to extreme panic. When I finally called an end to this study in primary colors and decided to deal with what we had, I would call the color reminiscent of a dirty traffic cone but was not extremely displeased with the outcome.
Some of the advice for application and storage of the paint was lost in translation as the woman who was selling me the paint alternated between two local languages that I have not had the opportunity to pick up in my month here. Rustino speaks both of the languages and was still a bit confused: “She says you have to mix the paint with petrol”. And we would have, but the gas station had just closed. Rustino left Dan and I that night looking forward to helping us the next day.
In the middle of dinner that night Dan and I spontaneously broke out in laughter after it finally dawned on us that we would be painting the walls of the house the color of the paint that was in the bucket in the corner of the room. We kept laughing because there was nothing we could do. The paint was already purchased, we were committed.
The next day the paint was applied generously in 4 coats. It doesn’t look bad. Seriously. The contrast between the maroon in the kitchen and the orange living room inspires description such as “funhouse without the mirrors,” but what is important is that Emily likes it, or is very good at controlling her emotions.
The next improvement Dan and I are interested in now is lime green borders and a lime green stripe running at about eye level around the room.

REDES

This past weekend I was in Maputo to attend an organizational meeting for an established project of Peace Corps Mozambique called REDES. REDES stands for "Raparigas em Desenvolvimento, Educacao e Saude," or "Girls in Development, Education and Health." Volunteers organize groups of girls in secondary schools across the country for this extracurricular activity. Groups of girls come together to have a supportive place to talk freely and learn and just be girls. The group leaders facilitate education and discussion sessions about important life issues - gender roles, women´s health and STDs, self esteem, healthy relationships, women´s rights, future planning, and goal setting. Each group also does activities that interest them - whether it´s forming a girl´s soccer team or making a craft for income generation.
One highlight of the REDES program is a national conference. Sixty young women from all over the country will meet together in April for a week of education and leadership activities that they will be able to share with the women of their communities when they return. This weekend we planned the conference schedule and logistics. It´s exciting to be part of it!
Jesse is hoping to get involved in the brother organization called JOMA (Jovens para Mudanca e Accao - or - Youth for Change and Action). JOMA has a website - http://joma.pcmoz.org/

Happy Holidays

Best wishes to all for a very happy new year! Jesse and I spent the holidays with our new neighbors. Everyone contributed dishes to summer-barbeque-style potluck parties in our communal backyard. We listened to music and danced until late into the night. We enjoyed incorporating some of our holiday traditions into the celebration, like making pierogies and baking Christmas cookies.
Jesse and I are continuing to enjoy cooking delicious dinners and exploring our community. We found a beautiful spot to walk and ride bikes in the Limpopo River Valley, which is very close to our house.
Many of Justin and Mike´s friends have extended their friendship to us. Our friend, Viegas Sergio, invited us to a family party celebrating the graduations of his brother and sister. The night was filled with great food and lots of music, singing, and praying with thanksgiving.
We are continuing Justin and Mike´s project called "English at the Beach." Participants meet us at the beach on Saturdays to practice English in a low stress environment. Often this includes frisbee and soccer in English. Jesse is trying - without success so far - to teach the concept of Ulimate Frisbee. Our house is a convenient stop for traveling Peace Corps volunteers so we´ve seen a lot of people. The bed frame was successfully cut and fit through the door so our guest room is fully functional and well-used now. Below is a picture of our Peace Corps friends Erika, Katie, Lindsay, and Zach helping to make New Year cakes.

When Dan and Russell visited, they worked with Jesse to sharpen their spears and go crab stabbing at the beach. They successfully speared several teeny crabs which went smelly before the next night´s dinner.

We have also visited the sites of a couple nearby volunteers. We got to spend a couple days with our friend, Russell, who lives in Macuacua, a very rural site a few hours away from the city down bumpy dirt roads. The truck that brings bread to the town only comes twice a week, so each time it swarmed with people. Here is a picture of Russell in front of his school, which is kept in great condition by a wealthy man in the province.
We worked conducting admission interviews last week at the testing site in Chokwe, which is where our Peace Corps friends, Sinead and Andrea, live. After we finished proctoring exams for each day, we were able to visit with them and get to know the town.
We corrected admission exams this week and are preparing to begin teaching at the end of January or the beginning of February. We´re getting used to being summoned by phone calls at unexpected times to go help with work at the school.
Our school, called the IFP (Instituto de Formacao de Professores), provides a one-year training program for graduates of 10th grade who plan to be future teachers of 6th and 7th grade English. Jesse will be teaching the Reading and Speaking components of the course, and I will be teaching the Listening and Writing classes.
A couple weeks ago, Jesse and I carried a new kitten home in a rice sack. After a few baths and hours of attention with tweezers, he is flea-free. The kitten´s name is Xingove, which is the word for cat in the local language of Xangana. We´re trying to encourage this tiny kitten to become a killer cat to rats, spiders, roaches, and whatever else tries to invade our house. The kitten is also very affectionate and will help us to welcome you when you come to visit.
We bought a P.O. box in town. Please note our new address and send letters to C.P. 270, Xai-Xai, Mozambique. We´d love to hear from you! Also, we´ll be having more consistent email access now that we´re settled here. Thank you for your messages!

First week in Xai-Xai

We have arrived in Xai-Xai!
We were dropped off on Saturday after a long ride from Namaacha. After a handshake from the PC director responsible for delivering us to site we were on our own. The campus we will be working at is very nice and our house is great. We are living in a 1 story apartment block with other professors. Our apartment is very nice, we have running water and lots of potential. Emily and I are looking forward to decorating it and making it feel like home. We are especially excited because we have a second room that we can turn into a guest bedroom. Right now the net effect of Emily and my efforts on the spare bedroom has been a negative as all we have accomplished so far is to get a bed frame jammed into the door so that it is stuck and will not enter or exit the doorway without us removing the door! Once we get the bedframe into the room and the door put back onto the frame we will be in business though. So pack your bags and purchase your tickets! We have room for guests. As if visiting Emily and Jesse in Mozambique is not a big enough draw, there is a beautiful beach that is a 20 minute drive from where we are living.

Emily and I plan on exploring the beach this coming weekend and many other weekends to come. The volunteers we are replacing happened to be around on Saturday when we were dropped off. Justin and Mike have just finished up their two years of service at the teacher training institute. You can tell that they impacted this community in a great way just by meeting their friends and colleagues that we were introduced to on Saturday evening. We hope to continue the good work that Mike and Justin have done for the past two years. We are very lucky to have had the opportunity to talk to Justin and Mike about what to expect and develop a better idea about our job and what is required of us. Mike and Justin went out of their way to welcome us to our new home and make us feel at ease and comfortable. We are appreciative and must remember to reciprocate the hospitality in two years with the volunteers that replace us. That is a long way off though and right now we have our work cut out for us. Some how we have to furnish our house and improve drastically in Portuguese in less than one month. Our responsibilities at school start shortly after the new year and it appears that we are going to be extremely busy! It is tough to imagine the hard work ahead because our days so far in Xai Xai have been pretty relaxed. We will be ready and excited to start work in January though. So far our days have been spent exploring town and buying major things for the house. Two major purchases have been an electric stove and a standing fan. One thing about PC salary - we can't live as we may have been accustomed in the US, but it is very livable. We are able to purchase everything we need and if we budget well enough we may be able to afford some paint for the walls. The adventure in purchasing household items here in Xai-Xai is getting them home in the crowded mini-buses which are the public transport here. I wish we had a picture of Emily and I smashed into a seat with two standing fans between our legs and surrounded by people. Words canºt really describe it except that it is pretty funny. Emily and I like to cook and we have been cooking at our house every night with another volunteer named Lindsay who is working for a nearby organization and living very close to us. Lindsay also goes on the adventures into town with us. The next big project for Emily and I is getting a queen size mattress home with us. Wish us luck.

Namaacha

Things I have enjoyed so far in Mozambique:
- Playing soccer with other volunteers and Namaacha children. Every Sunday we meet at 10:00 at the local soccer field and play some soccer. It started out as just a couple of Peace Corp volunteers and their host brothers and sisters but now we have enough to play full field games. It is so much fun to do something I enjoy and while doing so make a connection with so many others. I am looking forward to continuing the tradition at our site.

- Cooking with our host moms. Every once in a while our host father will request that we cook dinner. Emily and I give our host father a list of ingredients and the next day we try to prepare something on the charcoal stove. It is possible to make anything on the stove; it just takes a lot longer. Since we are working with only two burners there is high pressure to figure out a way to get everything done at the same time. And one time a baby peed on my foot while I was frying chicken. Anything can happening in this kitchen, including having to chase chickens and other livestock out of the kitchen. So far we have made chicken soup, fried chicken with mashed potatoes, fajitas with beef and re fried beans. We have also baked cookies at the local bakery and contributed deviled eggs and peanut butter cookies to our Peace Corps thanksgiving potluck. Everything has come out well so far. The fajitas were a bit of a stretch without all of the proper spices, but I was very happy with the refried beans. I assume our host family has enjoyed the meals because they keep asking us to cook more. (Photo below of Emily, Host mother Lydia, and Fina in the kitchen, proudly holding the deviled eggs)

- My site visit to Nampula. I was lucky enough to be one of the PC trainees to travel up North for site visits. All of the trainees were assigned a site to visit where current volunteers give us an idea of what life at site will be like. Emily stayed down south, but I took a plane to Nampula region which is way up north. I stayed with two volunteers in a small town called Murrapula. It was a good opportunity for me to see a different part of Mozambique. Heath and Enrique, the volunteers I visited do not have electricity in their house, but their house is very livable. They have put a lot of work into fixing up their house and are proof that whatever you end up with, you can make the most of it. The school I visited that Heath and Enrique work at was brand new and fairly large. It was a good experience for me to see an example of what I will be dealing with in terms of resources, classroom size and administration. Class sizes were forty +. I was there during national exams so I was able to help give exams and grade them. One of the challenges I will have to deal with in the classroom is the amount of cheating that occurs. After 2 days in Murrapula we took a long bus ride to the coast where we spent an amazing two nights on an island called Ilha de Mozambique. Ilha is beautiful (google it! - ilha de mozambique). It is a former capital of Mozambique when it was under Portuguese rule. The colonial buildings and architecture is amazing. The views on the beach are beautiful. It was a very surreal two days because everything was so perfect, including the weather. (Photo of Jesse on Ilha de Mozambique below)-Teaching model school. For two weeks our group had practice teaching in what PC calls "model school". Model school is basically the rounding up of students who are on their spring break and herding them into school. I was impressed with the amount of children that were eager to take part. My lessons went well. My first lesson was a fun one about animal vocab. I had drawn and colored pictures the night before in preparation. While they are very simple and funny looking, I'm still proud of them, at least the students could tell what animals they were! The students were very responsive to my lesson and it made me excited to be teaching. My second lesson I was sure I bombed because the students were not as enthusiastic and I felt my lesson was not going over well and the students were not getting the meaning of what I was teaching. After the class however during our peer review session, my fellow trainees convinced me that my lesson was actually a good one and they thought it had gone well. This made me feel a lot better and more confident. Model school so far has made me excited for teaching. It is fun coming up with ideas for lesson plans, Emily and I brainstorm a lot. It is also fun to think up creative ways to develop resources. For example: in the states I would probably just cut out pictures in magazines or find some other type of media for examples. Here I am drawing everything. My former art teachers should be proud - or embarrassed depending on what level art they had me as a student. Emily makes posters on rice sacks instead of chart paper. Overall, model school has made teaching a little less daunting. It will still probably be one of the most difficult things I have ever done, but now I know that I am up to it.

- Sharing stories with other trainees. Some days after class our group will get together, have a beer or soda and share some stories. It is really neat to listen to all of the different accounts of of things that have happened and different impressions people have. We are sharing an experience but inside this experience there are lots of differences. It is such a great feeling to be able to talk so openly about our time here and have people understand exactly what you mean or are going through. It is a great feeling of support and community. I imagine that when we are all at our sites, gatherings of volunteers (once or twice a year) will be a very much looked forward to event.

- Walking everywhere. Most days to get to language class, model school or other events, Emily and I have to walk up to the main road and then to wherever we are meeting. Usually it is approximately a half hour walk. Obviously we walk everywhere (no driving for 2 years!) so we are getting a lot of walking in everyday. Some days, since we go home for lunch and then have another session at the school in the afternoon we will make 2 round trips - a solid 2 hours of walking. Luckily, Namaacha is very pretty and fun to walk through and plus now we have almost a regular route with folks we greet every day! I am enjoying our walks more and more as the people we pass become familiar.

Random things:
- It is fun to watch kittens scamper around and get into battles with the chickens and ducks in our yard. Also fun to watch is the crazy baby goat who runs around and bumps into things at full speed - who needs TV?

- The baby twins get so dirty during the day while they are outside. It is comical. It is almost as if when they touch you you are instantly hit with a couple pounds of dirt. After their baths they are a lot of fun to hold and play with.

-There is a fellow Ole' PC volunteer in Mozambique! Jill Johnson who graduated the same year as Emily and I has been in Mozambique for 1 year. At Olaf she was a political science major. It was neat coming up with mutual acquaintances with her.
Also on my trip up North I met Carolyn Kouri who graduated from Carleton College which is the college that shares the town of Northfield with Olaf. Lauren Fox, a trainee in the same group as Emily and I is from Oley Valley PA, very close to where I grew up. Lauren knows several of my friends from high school. Her site mate will be Rachel Silverstein, who is also from Berks County and went to Exeter High school. Rachel knows a few of the people I played soccer with in high school. It is a small world.

- The weather. Some days it is hot, some days it is cool in Namaacha. It is really hit or miss planning on what to wear. I usually guess wrong and am either over dressed or cold.

- Every bump or pimple that Emily and I develop we carefully scrutinize because of all of the readings we have done recently about burrowing parasites that we can get. While it may not be healthy to continually speculate about what disease/parasite we may have, it does help to pass the time.

- Emily and I brought the goats home from pasture one day.


- A baby duck pooped on my shoe. I think it was malicious because the duck had to go out of its way to get to my shoes.
(Photo below: Jesse and Emily and a chicken on the straw mat that they made. It took hours to make.)

Swearing in

"Moz"-hawks with the Peace Corps Mozambique country director and the former director of Peace Corps worldwide at our swearing-in ceremony.

Jesse and I are now officially Peace Corps volunteers! We had our "swearing-in" ceremony this morning at the US ambassador´s house. We're excited to move tomorrow to the site where we'll be living for the next two years.
Jesse and I will both be serving as professors of English at the teacher training college in the city of Xai-Xai. Xai-Xai is on the coast a few hours north of Maputo, the capital city. We'll be spending December fixing up our house and getting to know the community. We'll be living on campus along with the other professors and students. Work should begin in January.
Today is bittersweet because along with the excitement of beginning our term of service, we have to say goodbye to Namaacha and our host family. They have taken great care of us. Some memories:
* Our host family set out a snack for us to carry to class each morning, usually cookies and a juice box.
* When we stopped back at noon, lunch was always sitting on the table.

* Great dinners. One favorite is a sauce of mixed greens and coconut and peanut water over xima (pronounced "she-mah"), which is corn flour and water mixed to a consistency like thick mashed potatoes. It's comfort food ... I think it's the Mozambican equivalent of American macaroni and cheese.

* Namaacha is beautiful. We really loved hiking through the "bush." We could always look back and see the town so we could explore without worrying about getting lost.

* It was very fun to have babies and kids always around. They were always ready to play. In the photo above, Fina and Vina are pushing a toy car that Gito made out of wire and soda cans.
* The patience and encouragement of our host family was amazing. They helped so much as Jesse and I are learning Portuguese. It'll be fun to get to talk to them more when Jesse and I master more Portuguese - and hopefully eventually Changana, the local language, as well.
* Music and dancing. Dino and Mito turn up the volume of music in the house really high so that everyone in the yard dances as they work.
We hope to return to visit.
Thank you for your comments, thoughts, and support. We appreciate it! Hope that everything is going well for you too. Come visit us!