22/06/10

Today was a huge day of celebration. It was Irmã Albertina’s (my school director) birthday, and we were also celebrating the birthdays of two other sisters and two girls-in-training who also have or had birthdays recently or in the near future. This afternoon was a huge frenzy of preparations, making and frying the samosas (YUM! Ann and I ate so many we felt sick after), washing and cutting the vegetables, gutting the fish, etc. Some of the fish were over a meter long and the girls were having fun seeing the insides, especially the little fish that were still in the stomachs of some. I tried to explain how gills work but my Portuguese is not surprisingly limited when it comes to topics like that. One fish was so fresh that when the heart was taken out it was still beating. The girls started yelling, insisting that there must be a bug inside jumping. No matter how many times Gina (the woman who works in the kitchen at the mission) and I told them it was just a muscle and there was no little bug or animals inside making it move, Gina had to cut it in half eventually just to prove it. Margarita, the 3 year old, watched it all with a mixture of fascination and disgust. I have to hand it to these girls, I wouldn’t have been able to handle that until a few years ago.
I decided to dress up a little for the celebration dinner by putting on a pair of high heels. When Irmã Albertina saw me she commented on how cute they were and I said “well you should be the one wearing them, it’s your birthday!” Turns out we have EXACTLY the same size feet, so she donned my heels and I her loafers for the night. She was loving it and everyone else got a kick out of her strutting around and posing like a model.
After dinner Sandra, my REDES counterpart and best friend here at the mission told me some devastating news. She is being moved up to Nampula on Thursday (24/06). I was crushed. This will be a huge blow to our REDES group because she was such a great counterpart, able to get the girls motivated in ways that I couldn’t sometimes. I am also crushed because she was my closest friend here at the mission and I am frustrated because it always seems that the sisters or girls-in-training I am closest to are the ones who get moved!