20/01/12

Apologies for the lack of blogging. The cell phone service in our house is terrible, so internet on my phone is only possible from 2am-5am. There is a place in town that has internet but the computer is miserably slow so I have only been twice now. Peace Corps has an office here in Namaacha but until we have been granted access you probably won’t be hearing from me often.
Anna arrived on Wednesday! Luckily a Peace Corps car was driving to Namaacha from Maputo to check on the office since apparently it flooded. All of the paved roads have been turned to rivers and the unpaved roads to mudslides, but this Peace Corps SUV was able to get almost all the way to our house, essential since it was pouring and Anna had all of her big bags from America. It’s been nice to be able to share the experience of being confined to the house (when it rains hard our entire yard, including the bathroom, floods) and not having anything to do with another person finally!
Apparently there are a few cyclones in the Mozambique Channel currently. We haven’t gotten the brunt of the storms, but we have felt the effects in the way of winds and rain. And fairly regular power outages that last anywhere from 30 minutes to 15 hours. I keep putting basins and buckets out to catch the rain water and judging by how much I have been able to collect, I would estimate that we have gotten about 35 inches of rain in the past three days. Everything I touch feels either damp or cold, I can’t tell. Probably both. Even when it isn’t raining the air is filled with moisture, it’s so foggy we can’t see past the front gate and you can see the mist drifting in through the windows.