04/06/11

I apologize for such a long hiatus! But I have my computer again and I am back at home in Inharrime now, thank goodness. I went down to Swaziland last weekend for the Bushfire Music Festival with other PCV friends. We froze our butts off each night when the sun went down, but we had a great time—the music was generally good, or at least entertaining, we met lots of interesting people, and we ate tons of delicious food.
In Maputo after I got to meet our new country director for Peace Corps, and then we had a REDES meeting, the first pre-conference planning meeting for the 2011 southern regional conference. On Thursday I was able to convince people to eat Thai with me at lunch and then again at dinner—great day!
Yesterday my brother and my dad arrived! This morning we headed to the “junta,” the hellhole where all the chapas and buses leave from Maputo. Immediately upon seeing three white people, every chapa driver in the vicinity saw dollar signs and came running over, trying to forcibly get us into their chapa. But we were able to get into one that left fairly quickly and didn’t make too many stops, so that was lucky. My dad and brother each had a backpack, two duffel bags, and an instrument, I had a backpack, my purse, and two rolled-up, full-size tennis nets. As we got off the chapa in front of my school, relieved to finally be home, we looked down and realized…we were one bag short! Buck tried running after the chapa but to no avail. So I ran into the mission and found the driver and, after clearing it with the sisters, we took off down the road after the chapa. Since we had delayed so much in leaving, we weren’t able to catch up with the chapa for about 40k, but we did eventually, we got our missing back, and everything turned out okay. Thank goodness!