Monday, November 30, 2009

30/11/09

Had a session on stigma and HIV/AIDS today, all in portuguese. It's amazing to realize how much my portuguese has improved. I can understand it all and I don't even get a headache after. Unfortunately listening and understanding is drastically different from actually forming the sentences yourself. And of course there is often a disconnect between what you have in your mind and what actually comes out of your mouth. With my family if I don't know a word I often guess using my ground in spanish and latin. Sometimes that works really well and sometimes they just stare at me. It's amazing how experience can completely change one's attitude. In the short time I have been here I have come to realize that for me, electricity is simply a luxury, while water is a necessity. Electricity allows me to write emails and blogs, listen to my ipod, and use my cell phone. I enjoy doing all of these but could live without them. On the other hand, water is necessary all the time and for everything! You need it to bathe, to wash your dishes, to cook with, to wash your food, to wash your clothes, to wash your hands, and to drink. I don't yet know the electricity or water status of my future site, but I am just crossing my fingers that water is fairly accessible!

29/11/09

After doing my laundry for 2.5 hours this morning Rebecca, Erica, and I packed a "piquenique" (portuguese for picnic) and walked the 11ish mile loop. It seemed much shorter than last weekend when I walked it alone and life doesn't get any better than eating a bajia sandwich sitting on top of a ridge where you can see farther than 50 miles. It makes me sad that people I could see myself becoming good friends with are going way la (the portuguese word for anything that's not too close) and I probably won't see them again until midservice training. I do plan to travel the country and visit people, but I doubt I will get to do much of that during my first year. Whenever my grandma asked if I was afraid of the thunderstorms I always though she was patronizing me, but them tonight I watched her duck/flinch away from the window and cringe in fear during a particularly loud thunderclap. I would understand better if Mozambique didn't have an extended and incredibly intense rainy season. My cousin and I just opened a can of peas with a butter knife. I didn't know that was possible. We do have a can opener but nobody can find it right now.

28/11/O9

Just about everyone in our group went to Maputo today. Some people went to run errands, other people just wanted the excuse to get out of the house for the day. A bunch of us got pictures of us with our families printed to give them as gifts because pictures are post of a novelty here. Mozambicans don't smile in pictures. So in my picture with my family everyone else looks either miserable or pissed off, and I look even more out of place than I would have otherwise with my huge smile. We ate at a Thai restaurant for lunch! It was delicious and just nice to have different kinds of tastes. I also got had cream today which is one of the biggest perks of going to Maputo. The lack of personal space here still catches me off guard. I just have to keep reminding myself that when my mom elbows me at dinner, or people bump me as they walk by, or every single person in my family bumps my chair as they're walking past it, that they don't see any of that as rude.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

28/11/O9

Today we ended classes early so a bunch of us made picnic lunch of the wonderful bread we have here and bagias (these delicious fried bean patties that are sold outside the bakeries here) and hiked up the mountain outside of town to the point where Swaziland, South Africa, and Mozambique all meet. Unfortunately it was pretty overcast so while the view was amazing for most of the hike up and down, once we got to the top of the mountain everything was completely shrouded in fog and we couldn't see more than 5O feet. Our sandwiches at the top of the mountain were just delicious and when we could we the view was gorgeous. When we are walking around town it is very common for the kids to yell "hey foreigner" in portuguese at us. Today when I walked by a group of kids, a boy "spoke chinese" (ching chong kwa) at me. This is very common for the Asian volunteers here, but I was just pretty impressed via any even knew I was Asian, especially without my hair which is about my only Asian feature.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

26/11/O9

We had our big american football game today to celebrate Thanksgiving in true american fashion. It was supposed to be health versus education (which education would have obviously easily won) but it just ended up being a mix of everyone. It was really fun. We played on the main camp in town and I'm sure all the Mozambicans who passed by thought we were crazy playing such a funny game. When I got home I taught my 13 year old cousin to throw a football. It doesn't feel like Thanksgiving at all. Not in a depressing way. It's just hard to remember that at home all the things associated with Thanksgiving, the leaves changing, the first frost/snow, hockey, the annoying Christmas songs and decorations, are happening when here everything feels and just is completely different. While we were playing in the yard my 13 year old cousin was eating a mango. When she was done she tossed the sit aside on the ground. A few minutes later I pc my 7 year old cousin eating a mango pit. Once I confirmed that it was the same one and he had picked it up off the ground and it was covered in dirt I got pretty mad at him. Are kids everywhere like that and I am just more sensitive to health and hygiene issues here? It's just hard to not be hypersensitive in a country where kids are still dying from things like diarrhea which is completely preventable but comes down to simple hygiene.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

25/11/O9

We got our site placements today! It was torturous, they waited until after all of the sessions because they knew we wouldn't be able to concentration once we had found out. Them they passed out a white envelope to each person, on the outside our name and a letter reminding up that we were Peace Corps volunteers, not club med members, and that they tried to place everyone in the sites that were the best fit for their skills, etc. Then once everyone had their envelope they gave us the okay and we all ripped our envelopes open! They had a huge map of Mozambique and had given everyone a sticky with their name on it so everyone labeled their site so we could see where everyone will be. In previous years apparently people have cried when they received their sites, but nobody in our group cried. I am in Inhambane province which is along the coast (though I am not sure how close to the ocean I will actually be). I am only five hours from Maputo which is great because traveling and visitors will be so much easier and I can easily get to the Peace Corps office. I am also only am hour from Inhambane city where I will have access to things I can't buy in a small town. I have two site mates: Emma a Moz 13 who is also a teacher, though not at the same school, and Ann from my year who is a health volunteer. It is a brand new site so I won't have to live up to the expectations set by the previous volunteer, but it is also a little daunting because I am creating my role in the school completely from scratch. The school is a mission school run by nuns, I think. My school director is a nun which I am a little relieved by because one problem women volunteers can have here sometimes is butting heads with an "old fashioned" make school director who doesn't appreciate women who speak or think out of turn. There are quite a few other volunteers in the area and in Inhambane province in general which will be nice, especially during the upcoming holidays. After all this excitement we celebrated Thanksgiving by eating more food than we should in a month.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

24/11/O9

Today I caught my three year old brother chewing on a battery. Scary. My lesson today was to review for their practice test. To say my activity crashed and burned might be a little dramatic, but it certainly didn't in as planned. There was too much information in the diagram and some of the students spent almost the entire period just copying it down. But I suppose that's what model school is about: learning what to do and especially what not to do. We have a practice exam in the second class. It was interesting to see how the kids fared and which concepts they really struggled with. A few of the kids got every single question right. One girl not only didn't write a single attempt at an answer, but didn't even copy all the questions down. We find out our site placements tomorrow!

Monday, November 23, 2009

23/11/O9

Last night I heard something running around the floor of my bedroom. I just hope they are the lizards they have here, rather than mice. And I hope they stay on the floor. The Portuguese word for chalk is "giz," pronounced the same as the english slang "jizz." So the childish jokes are endless when we are constantly getting chalk all over our faces, shirts, and pants. We have one more teaching day of model school and them we are giving exams on Thursday. We are giving a practice exam tomorrow which is as much for us to learn as for them. A volunteer told us, "if you can't take the exam in three minutes, it's too long" (class periods are 45 minutes here). I now have three little brothers/cousins. One who just showed up is three years old and apparently always lives here, if just happened to be with an aunt for the first seven weeks I was here. Mozambican kids like to in through the trash and play with it. This is something all volunteers from all years have experienced. Girls have to be especially careful to properly dispose of all items, otherwise they will become a child's plaything. Today I came home from classes and found my seven year old brother chewing on my old birth control packet.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

22/11/O9

Today was the first sunny day in over a week, so I walked the approximately 12 mile route on the road the runs out of town, loops around, and then back into town again. I'm not sure how long it really was but it took me just over three hours. I walked briskly but it was also very hilly. On top of some of the ridges the view was literally breathtaking, all I could do was stand there and stare. I felt like I could see forever. The town, perched on the side of a small mountain, stayed in sight for almost the entire wall. It was exhilarating to be up that high and to look back at town, but to be so physically removed from it: from language classes, from model school, from homestay, from dirty laundry. Two any followed me for a about half a mile until it became clear that, despite being white, I wasn't going to do anything interesting. Coming back into town I walked along the barbed wise fence of the South Africa border for a few miles. That was the most free and relaxed I have felt in a really long time.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

21/11/O9

Today we went to the "curandeiro," the witchdoctor. I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but I think the reality was a bit different. It was a round stone and mud hut with a thatched roof, about 12' in diameter. We took off our shoes to enter and sat on mats on the floor. Inside there were some of the things you might imagine a witchdoctor to have: some animal skins, a snake skin, some different stones and shells, some sticks, something with what looked like human hair attached to it, and of course all the traditional medicines. But all of the traditional medicines weren't kept in the gourds or animal skins I had imagined a witchdoctor would have. They were kept in old glass mayonnaise jars, ketchup bottles, liquor bottles, and soda bottles. And on the wall behind the curandeiro's head hung a certificate from the national ministry of health. To demonstrate the kind of head covering if was describing, if showed us a poster that had a picture of himself. It has been raining for six days straight now, I think. Our village has become one large red mud puddle. But I have no frame of reference: has it just been rainy or has the rainy season begun? I guess I will know for sure if it's still raining in three months.

Friday, November 20, 2009

2O/11/O9

I am a little frustrated because I feel like the kind of chemistry we are teaching the students is really on a need-to-know basis. Like, I'm going to teach you this rule, knowing that it doesn't apply here or to these elements, but we are just going to ignore the things that don't adhere to the rule because you won't need to know about them for a few more years. It frustrates me because I don't like that style of teaching but it is what makes the most sense right now and for the intellectual level our students are at. Or maybe this is how chemistry is always been taught and I just never knew any better. I found out yesterday that my 13 year old girl cousin failed her grade. It's frustrating to hear because secondary school is so hard to get into here (not in terms of academic standards, but because there simply isn't enough space for all the kids who want to go), and since she doesn't live with her own family and is in more of a maid's position, I didn't think her chances of going on to secondary school were very high to begin with. One of the factors taken into consideration for secondary school admission is age (they are more likely to admit the younger kids, i.e. The kids who have failed a grade fewer times). Failing a grade is actually pretty common here (a colleague Meagan's host brother was amazed to learn that she had never failed a grade in her life), but for someone like my cousin who is in a fairly precarious position, it could be the determining factor.

19/12/O9

For the students in Mozambique, what the teacher says and writes on the board during class is the only information they will ever get on that subject. They have no textbooks. And all of the other resources I have always taken for granted simply don't exist for most of the students here (internet searches, encyclopedias, asking your parents, going to the library). So that puts a ton of pressure on the class periods. One thing I have learned this week in model school is that the kids write SO slowly. But you really have to wait for them to finish writing because they need to have that information in their notes. In my cohort there are ten chemistry teacher. Fun fact we just discovered the other day: of the ten of us, we have only one chemistry major and two chemical engineering majors. The rest of us are three physics majors, three biology majors, and one neuroscience major. So aside from learning about teaching in model school, most of feel like we have been learning as much about chemistry as the students! Sometimes when it rains really hard the roof above my bed leaks a little and I occasionally get hit in the forehead by drops of water while I'm sleeping.

19/12/O9

For the students in Mozambique, what the teacher says and writes on the board during class is the only information they will ever get on that subject. They have no textbooks. And all of the other resources I have always taken for granted simply don't exist for most of the students here (internet searches, encyclopedias, asking your parents, going to the library). So that puts a ton of pressure on the class periods. One thing I have learned this week in model school is that the kids write SO slowly. But you really have to wait for them to finish writing because they need to have that information in their notes. In my cohort there are ten chemistry teacher. Fun fact we just discovered the other day: of the ten of us, we have only one chemistry major and two chemical engineering majors. The rest of us are three physics majors, three biology majors, and one neuroscience major. So aside from learning about teaching in model school, most of feel like we have been learning as much about chemistry as the students! Sometimes when it rains really hard the roof above my bed leaks a little and I occasionally get hit in the forehead by drops of water while I'm sleeping.

18/11/O9

Model school began yesterday. We recruit 7-11ish grade kids from the community to come to school in the mornings so we can have practice teaching in a school setting. Of course the classes are only about 2O students rather than the 7O most of us will have at site, and these kids are very well behaved, so it's not entirely representative of what we will be facing. We give one lesson and observe three others per day. Giving lessons to real Mozambican students, rather than our american chemistry colleagues, is very helpful though. I think observing other peoples' lessons is most beneficial for me. There is just so much you see from the back of the classroom that you don't see when you're up front and your adrenaline is pumping. Today I was to give a lesson on the periodis table, which would have been straightforward if it weren't that the ONLY copy of a periodic table was the small one in my book. So yesterday afternoon my colleagues and i made a 4x6' periodic table with all 111 known elements, their chemical symbols, their atomic numbers, and atomic masses. Our supplies: one marker and no straightedges. There were a ton of elements I wrote yesterday that I swear I had never seen before!

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

16/11/O9

I got viciously sick today. My mom was trying to figure out what might have made me sick and decided it was because I had eaten a banana first thing this morning. She said "here in Mozambique we don't eat bananas in the mornings." On a separate occasion I have been told that in Mozambique people don't eat oranges at night. We have had huge storms the past few nights. Lightning and thunder right on top of each other and pain so hard the sound is just deafening against the metal roofs. In the bathroom, which is not as well constructed as the rest of the house, you can see the outline of the cinderblocks where the water has seeped through the cement. Tonight my mom was telling of she has a bump or something below her arm that she has to go to the doctor's tomorrow. The word she was using wasn't in my dictionary, so instead she was describing it. She said it was "dura," like the dura part in your breasts. I freaked out a little and told her that breasts shouldn't have dura parts. I think we then decided that she was using dura to mean something closer to firm, rather than hard/solid how I was thinking. I hope.

15/11/O9

A few weeks ago during training we had a little competition and my group won, so our prize was that today we had lunch at the house of Rubin, the Peace Corps Mozambique director. He and his wife are very nice and the food was great (and not oil-soaked). They have an american phone number so we were all able call home, the only drawback was that it was between 2am-5am, depending on where we were calling. Yesterday at the chinese walmart I got a pack of chopsticks that I gave to my family tonight. They were a huge hit! Everyone tried to eat dinner with them, with varying degrees of success. My brothers were determined to use them, often picking up food with one hand and placing it on the chopsticks. When my mom tried my 3 year old brother said "wait mom, let me show you how!" Tonight there was another cousin here who is 3 and apparently used to live here until about a week before I came. I asked my mom how now grandchildren my grandma has. She wasn't sure but thinks 2O.

14/11/O9

Today Erica and i went to Maputo after classes. We went to A Casa de Elephante, a famous capulana shop. It is almost information overload when you walk in, there are just hundreds and hundreds of beautiful patterns everywhere. We then went to the wood market where I got a frame to put in a picture of me with my family to give them. Erica bought a drum! I had two incredibly rich and delicious milkshakes at lunch. A number of restaurants I have been to advertise milkshakes on their menus but then never actually have them. It's a terrible tease. After we went to a store in the front of the chinese hotel, I don't what the real name is, the volunteer just call it the chinese walmart. The Mambas, the Mozambican soccer team, had a game today that some of our colleagues went to. Admission was 1OO meticais, about $4. When I returned home everyone had gone to Maputo to see the new baby cousin so my 13 year old cousin and I were on our own for dinner. Erica and Diana came over and we made banana pancakes with chocolate syrup and onion and tomato scrambled eggs. It was fun in cook and so nice to do it without anyone hovering and commenting on how strangely (or wrong) we were doing things. It was funny, my 16 year old cousin took advantage of everyone being away by throwing a rowdy party with his friends, when all we wanted to do was cook our own food, our own way.

13/11/O9

One really interesting thing about here is that because we are so near to the equator the sun passes almost directly overhead which causes the sunrises and sunsets to be incredibly fast. It can be kind of dangerous because you may think you have time to get home before dark, but the sun sets (like from daylight to complete darkness) in about 2O minutes. I hate walking home in the dark here, not because I am afraid for my safety in terms or robbers or assailants, but because the roads are in such bad shape I am afraid of twisting am ankle!

Thursday, November 12, 2009

12/11/09

One of my colleague’s sisters is in high school and recently took the national English exam. One multiple choice question was “which are all modes of transport?” In the correct option, one of the listed modes was a tractor. It is very common to see people driving down the main road in town on tractors, and not necessarily going to or from the farm. Today our APCD’s (I don’t remember what that stands for, but they are in charge) talked about the sites that are opening up for this year. Since there are only ten chemistry teachers we definitely have more of an idea of possible sites than people in larger groups like English or health. We will find out our site placements two weeks from today! My mom is taking her final exams this week. Yesterday we had an exam on the Bantu languages of Mozambique, today was a Portuguese exam. Tomorrow she has math, so I was helping her study tonight. I was able to explain area and circumference of a circle which apparently her teacher didn’t understand, so just wrote the information on the board and walked out.

11/11/09

24 of us (we almost filled a whole minibus) left Tofo for our homestays at 3:30am this morning. I took Imodium this time. American conceptions of privacy and personal space simply don’t exist here. Once, my mom brought up the fact that I was on my period in dinner conversation. When walking around town, it is quite common to bump you as they walk by, because it’s simply not rude to make physical contact. On chapas, you can just forget any personal space. People are crammed four across into the seat, so there is barely room for everyone, and on the chapa ride today both women on either side of me fall asleep and one ended up with her head on my shoulder and the other was basically sleeping in my lap. One thing that bothers me is that saying “excuse me” basically gives people license to physically move you out of the way. But at least they are polite about it, I suppose. I didn’t realize until I wrote the date that it is Veterans Day. That means that in Culver, Indiana some 900 kids and adults are standing outside freezing their asses off.

10/11/09

It seems that I have forgotten how to take a shower—I choked twice in the shower this morning. Apparently you can’t inhale when you’re under the water (there is always plenty of time to inhale in between cupfuls with my bucket baths). Today we took a boat from Maxixe to Inhambane city, which took about 30 minutes and I was pretty certain the motor was going to die a few times. We water is deceivingly shallow, even after the boat had been moving for ten minutes there were men standing out in the water fishing with the water at about their waists. It was kind of surreal. We then caught a chapa from Inhambane to Tofo beach, the famously beautiful tourist trap, to meet up with about 40 other Peace Corps people, current volunteers and their visiting trainees. One thing that sucked about Tofo was that there were white people everywhere, so we got mistaken for tourists too, meaning that vendors would try to speak English to us and would try to charge us about 4x as much as they should.

09/11/09

Right now is national exam time, so Becky and Stephanie both had to proctor two tenth grade national exams this morning. Meagan and I tagged along to see their school and facilities and to see a little of how things are run. However, apparently when people saw us this morning, a few of them decided that that meant that they could have the day off, so we found ourselves actually controlling two national exams today. Luckily all national exams are co-proctored, but there are 60 biology and drawing national exams with my signature on them now! Cheating is a huge problem in Mozambican schools, but luckily it’s harder to cheat (in terms of bringing in cheat sheets) on the national exams. Still, there is a ton of helpful sharing of information. It’s hard for me to even understand in many ways, because I wouldn’t want someone else benefitting from my hard work, but here the mentality is much more communal and many people simply don’t see the problem with sharing. This evening we met up with some more volunteers in the area and I met a guy who isn’t a Peace Corps volunteer, but is living in Inhambane city working for a health organization and is from Yarmouth, Maine!

08/11/09

I ate seven mangos today. We got up at about 6am in typical Mozambique fashion, made mango and banana crepes, and just hung out in their yard for most of the morning. They have shade cover over part of their yard (essential because it gets hot!), and have a few kids who basically live in their yard. For lunch we went to town and met up with a bunch of other volunteers who live in the area and their visiting trainees. After we went to the beach near their house. It is perfectly acceptable to have alcohol in public here, so we all bought beers and walked down the beach with them. The large beers are actually cheaper here than the regular (16oz) beers because the large bottles are returnable, so being the environmentally conscious Peace Corps volunteers we are, we all got the big ones. At the end of the beach is a small mountain and we climbed to the top where the view was gorgeous: the Indian Ocean on one side and palm trees as far as you can see on the other. We couldn’t find a chapa back to their house, so we walked for a while until we were able to hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck. Giving rides and hitchhiking are pretty common here, to the point that it’s rude to drive by people without picking them up.

07/11/09

As a Peace Corps volunteer every day brings new challenges and some days you are trying to save the world, and other days you’re just trying to get by. Today my big accomplishment was that I didn’t poop my pants. We left for our site visits at 4am this morning. We took chapas (the mode of transportation in Mozambique. They are vans into which 18 passengers (no fewer, chapas won’t leave unless they are full), the driver, and the conductor are crammed) to Maputo where we were swarmed by drivers eager to transport all the white people. As we were loading our bus a ~18 month boy was wandering the aisles crying. At one point a man held him up and asked whose he was, but nobody claimed him. His mom eventually found him. Then about 5 hours into the 6 hour ride I got very sick and I would have to say that not knowing whether or not I was going to poop my pants on a bus full of people is one of the worst feelings I have ever felt in my life (and no, of course the buses here don’t have bathrooms—the houses don’t even have bathrooms). Meagan, another trainee who will be a biology teacher, and I visited Stephanie and Becky, who are chemistry and biology teachers, respectively, and live together in Inhambane province. Their site is pretty amazing. They are a ten minute walk from the ocean, a 15 minute walk from the market, a 20 minute walk from school, and near large cities which is good for buying essentials that can’t be found in small towns. Also, they have running water! They have a shower, flushing toilet, and sink with running water in their outdoor bathroom. They also have a faucet in their yard. I can live without the shower or flushing toilet, but the convenience of having a faucet in their yard, of never having to go get water in many large buckets, is just amazing.

06/11/09

We leave tomorrow morning at 4am for our site visits. Of course, my mom is insisting on packing me a lunch and walking me to the bus stop in the morning. I tried to tell her that I didn’t need to pack a lunch and I had already bought snacks for the drive, but no use. She asked what time I was getting up to take a bath and have tea before I left, I said no way. The idea of leaving the house without first having tea is borderline sacrilegious, so she tried to convince me to take the thermos into my room to have my tea in my room (though I’m not really sure how that would make any difference). When I said no she tried to convince me to take the thermos on the trip with me.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

O5/11/O9

Change is almost impossible to come by here. No matter what you are buying and how small the currency you use, the vendor will still give you a slightly pained expression when they realize you expect change. Whe exchange rate is 26-29 meticais per dollar. Last week i bought something for 19 mets with a 2O met coin. This has station with a computer register and electronic scanner didn't have change and when I made it clear that I didn't also want the imitation starburst for 1 met, the woman had to go outside and ask one of the pump attendants for the 1 met I was owed. Today, at a bar/store, I wanted to buy a yogurt for 25 mets but only had a 1OO met bill (the equivalent of less than $4). The man didn't have change. Erica also bought a 25 met water so it would be easier to come up with change. If still wasn't able to find 5O mets, so if said to wait and he sent a kid to the bank to get change. When the any returned from the bank he had exchanged the 1OO met bill for one hundred 1 met coins. Thus, I was given fifty 1 met coins as change. The man was nice, he gave me a plastic bag to carry them in. Last night we had a tremendous rainstorm, with the metal roofs on our house it is one of the loudest noises I have ever heard, but oddly very peaceful to sleep to. A colleague today told how at 2am last night his host mom called his bell phone from the next room to ask if if was afraid of the storm. Tonight at dinner my grandma, very concerned, asked me the same.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

O4/11/O9

Not many people can boast of having gone from black to blonde to black to bald in one year. But I can, because I shaved my head today. We found out where we are going on our site visits today. I am really excited to see other parts of Mozambique! Our director gave us our hosts' information and said "call your hosts, but wait until tomorrow. Don't call them today, we haven't talked to all of them yet." Such is life in the Peace Corps. I made the mistake of looking at the water my cousin was using to wash the dishes. It was the same red color of the dirt here. Yum. I have gotten quite adept at putting on my wants without letting them ever touch the floor. Even though I sweep every other day, one brush against the floor and the are instantly red/brown.

O3/11/O9

We went to orphanages today to practice implementing nonformal education and to basically play with the kids. The place I went to was more on the order of a boarding school though. It's actually the school my cousins go to and where we go to church. Some of the girls recognized me from church and this definitely answered my question as to why there are always so many kids in church! Many times my mom will year a capulana skirt and wrap her head with one as well and will look exactly like the stereotypical African woman. Then other times she will put on her skinny jeans, fashionable sandals, denim jacket, framed glasses, and matching headband and earrings and she could be any young woman in urban America.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

O2/11/O9

Today I was interviewing a cousin for a homework project and I asked him his age. He gave me a weird look, he didn't know. He knew his birth date though so he wrote that down and I told him he is 24 years old. He is in the ninth grade but my mom said that it is not uncommon where we live for people that old to be only in secondary school. For the same project I asked my mom how old her son's father (her boyfriend) is. She didn't know, maybe 28 or 29. There are two bakeries in town. The one by the market has just wonderful homemade bread, think sourdough quality. The other bakery is just not that good, think supermarket quality, drier and flakier. My family gets bread everyday, but seemed to switch between the two bakeries without any pattern which I didn't understand because they taste so different but cost the same. I finally asked my mom why some days we get bread from one bakery and some days the other. She said she likes the one by the market more (the good stuff) but grandma had said that I would like the other bread better. This morning my mom asked me if I liked something. I didn't know the word so she showed me a tin of something like canned tuna. I said sure, I eat anything, and she said "okay good because I put it in your salad." Oh, the homestay experience.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

01/11/09

Today is November 1st, first day of hockey season. I don't mind that I don't get to skate today, but I do miss that today I don't get to be a Bowdoin Women's Ice Hockey player. Last night we had our Halloween party. It was the first time since we began training that we have all gotten together and done something really fun, so it was just such a nice release. Everyone’s costumes were really great, and all of the Mozambicans thought we were crazy. For the second weekend in a row I want to do laundry, but we are out of water. I explained to my mom though that I really need to do it today since I wasn’t able to last weekend, so they are buying some water. I still haven’t learned to carry things on my head but I really want to! You will see people here carrying huge containers of water or crates filled with two liter glass soda bottles on their head, it’s incredible. A few of my colleagues are starting their machamba (garden) today, so I will go over and see how their swales and berms look. I learned today that my little brother has another name everyone calls him by, and suddenly things make a lot more sense. A cousin died and in Mozambican culture family goes to stay with the family of the deceased, so I haven´t seen my grandma in days.

31/10/09

Halloween. In Mozambique, simply the 31st of October, which for all of the kids (like my extremely excited little brother) is the first day of summer vacation. Something I have noticed more as my Portuguese is improving, there are many instances where I understand all of the words that are said to me, but I still have the feeling that (and I’m sure look as though) I don’t understand, because I don’t know why I am being told this information. One of the current volunteers here said that it is pretty common for Mozambicans to sort of bury their questions, such that it sounds like they have simply stated something, but they are expecting a response. The other night when my aunt was here she told me something and then asked if I understood. I said that I wasn’t sure I had understood everything, so she repeated what she had said in English. Turns out that I had understood everything she said the first time when she said it in Portuguese, but I still have no idea why she told me.