Brunch at Eddie's House

Jess, Jenn, Patti & me

Namaacha....from on top of the mountain

PST week 4

The Good. The Bad. And The Ugly….

Today’s blog post is going to be in the form of the good, the bad and the ugly…Let’s start off on a happy note, shall we??

My favorite “good” of this week was definitely the PC Halloween party we had last night at Casa Grande…. Which is this ridiculously large house/compound that Peace Corp owns for the Training Manager.  There is a giant pavilion out back by a pool, which is where we had our party.  Costume highlights include a 6-person cow and butcher, the cat in the hat (with thing 1 and thing 2), dueling chapas, and the recycle fairy.  I was a world cup USA fan.  All costumes were impressive given the lack of resources – excluding the fake Namaachan shop-rite. Plus, it was some much needed Laurentina-Preta (a local beer) after a particularly tense diversity session we had that afternoon.

Runner Up:  A tie…… the wonderful American breakfest we made yesterday for our families. Complete with French toast, scrambled eggs, and fruit salad. Seriously, amazing. AND the Glee-inspired rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody that some other PCTs performed at this weeks ngoma time.

The Bad…. Well. No one really likes this one, so I’ll keep it short.  This week’s bad is the mail (or lack of) in Mozambique.  Despite the Peace Corps driver checking the our PO box twice a week, there is no mail to be found.  Our training manager said that usually by week 2 (which was ohhhh 3 weeks ago) she is like Santa Clause with bags and bags of letters and boxes.  So something is wrong and no one knows what it is! Don’t they know that I want my sweatpants and hot tamales?!

Runner Up: The Mozambican government for increasing the cost of our visas by ten-fold.  Basically, this results in us crossing the border into Swaziland once a month to renew our tourist visa.  Apparently PCmoz doesn’t have the $240,000 USD just laying around in the budget for that…..

The Ugly: I’m going to have to say the weather this week in Namaacha.  Tuesday is was particularly hot…close to 107 degrees.  So hot that you literally sweat through any clothes you’re wearing…So hot that you have to take a cold bath at lunch… So hot that you need to lay on the tile floor of you’re house.  Then, as we’re sitting in a Classroom Management session at the local secondary school, it starts to get cool. Then cold. Then it starts raining. Then, hail. Yes. It hailed. People FREAKED OUT.  The weather here is more unpredictable than Louisville  (I didn’t know that was possible).  It ping pongs between extreme heat, extreme cold, and crazy crazy rain.

Ok I can’t think of a good “runner up” …. My feet? Hahahaha! Butttt reallyyy

Peace out. Love yall! 

Weekend Update - Mountain edition

Friday:

Hmm let me think…On Friday our professor let us out of language a few minutes early.  Some of the PC kids met up at Casa dos Dois for a cerveja…. Mozambique actually has some pretty decent beer! My fave is a dark beer, Launtina Preta. The weather was awesome, so we posted up at the plastic tables outside.  Now, when it gets dark here, you’re pretty much S.O.L. if you’re trying to walk home one the rocky paths. Plus, I needed dinner and don’t know enough Portuguese to explain to Mama Joana why I was out past 8 pm. So I called it a night pretty early.

Saturday:

There is a huge market at the end of town on Saturdays and Wednesdays – which is where Mama Joana works.  It’s pretty much just wood tents with thatched roofs, one after the other.  There are huge sections of fresh produce, which would be awesome if I was cooking for myself (but …. I’m not). They sell all of this crazy clothes/shoes too. It’s all consignment stuff. So there are all of these old t-shirts and used soccer cleats etc.  Half of the time, the T-shirts are from colleges or sports teams in America…..so people don’t really know what they’re wearing since most of them can’t read English. This explains why you see grown men wearing shirts that say things like “Greek goddess.” And they are totally fine with it!  I bought myself two new capulanas… one of which I’m taking to a seamstress this week to have a dress made. It’s green. (shocked? Ha!)

That afternoon we (me and 5 friends) perfected “passear-ing.”  What is passear-ing you ask…well. Passear-ing is a big social thing here. It basically means you are walking with no destination. Just wandering. Stopping. Talking to people on the road. We walked wayyyy down into Bairro B, the neighborhood next to mine.  There, we picked up some kids. They pretty much just followed us to see what we were up to.  Found an entire heard of under-3 year old boys who were mesmerized by a ukulele one of my friends was carrying.  So we had a little impromptu  jam session with toddlers playing air guitars.  SO CUTE!

Sunday:

I was up at 6 am on the dot.  Mama Joana told me that I needed to wash my clothes and sheets AND sweep and scrub my floor before I left for our mountain trek.  So by 6:15 I was on our porch scrubbing my knuckles raw in soapy buckets of water.  At 9:30 I met a group of other volunteers (close to 30 of us total) for a hike. Not just any hike. A hike up a mountain. And not just any mountain.  A mountain where the borders of Mozambique, South Africa, and Swaziland meet.  So after a solid few hours hiking – part of which was super steep – we finally made it to the top.  We brown-bagged lunch, took lots of pictures, and enjoyed the view of all 3 countries. Ps- standing in three countries at once totally beats the Four Corners in the States.  Just saying….. On the way back, we stopped in this incredible grove of trees for a shade break.  I have no idea what kind of trees these were, but the were huge and wind-y and PERFECT for climbing.  By the time I made it home around 3pm that afternoon – I was in dire need of a cold bath.  Mostly because (even though I had pants on) I had dirt caked to my skin. Oh and it was freaking HOT. Like, crazy hot.  So post-cold bath,  I napped on the floor of my room because I have a tile floor…..and I now understand why our dog used to like to lay on the time floor in the basement during the summer !  ha!

Namaacha Huh!?!

During PST (pre-service training), I’m living in Namaacha. Now, I realize that yall don’t know what Namaacha (or Mozambique, in general) is really like…so I’ll try and describe it… The key word there is “try”! ha!

Namaacha is a village about an hour and a half North of Maputo City.  There is one paved road that cuts straight through the center of the village and it will lead you right into Swaziland.  Along this lovely paved road are 4 “neighborhoods”…clusters of huts/houses. Most of the houses are very small and have tin roofs, although there are a fair number of round, rock huts that have thatched roofs sprinkled in the mix.  Since there is only the one actual road, everything else is dirt paths.  And by “path,” I mean wide enough for one person, rocky paths that are easily mistaken for goat paths or walkways to people’s backyards (someplace I’ve ended up on more that one occasion).  There are no signs and the paths are not named. So when someone asks me how to get to my house, I usually respy something like this, “Take a right at the mercado.  Keep walking down the hill until you see the tomato stand on your left.  Then, walk under the Coca Cola sign.  Keep going until you pass two round huts. Take a right at the house with brown swirls painted on it….” Blah blah blah.  At which point whoever I’m talking to usually asks if I will just come meet them somewhere.  This whole “landmark” business was a struggle for the first week or so.  Especially considering I have absolutely zero sense of direction.

Other random things….

There are chickens and roosters everywhere. Seriously. Everywhere. They’re taking over. And the roosters start crowing at 3:30 am. How do I know that? Because I wake up every time they start!! Also, there are tons of goats. And occasionally our neighbor’s pigs wander around my yard.

 People here have yet to experience the “earth day” phenomenon and throw trash everywhere. I can count the number of trash cans I’ve seen here on one hand. Trash everywhere.

The last “everywhere” thing in Namaacha….kids. This place is swarming with children.  And they usually run in packs.  It’s totally normal to see a couple 2 or 3 years olds wandering around unattended.  Can you imagine if you saw a 3 year old in the states just wondering down a road?! Um. No.  Someone would call CPS so fast your head would spin. Here, that’s completely normal….

Women and girls here carry everything on their heads.  I’ll be honest…. It’s pretty bad ass. Giant containers of water from the well? Check. Milk cartons full of glass Fanta bottles? Check.  Huge bags of beets, rice or any other food from the market? Check.

Every bar – and even some random houses- has those overly large speakers [Rhodes kids. Think kappa sig house. Yeah…. Thoseeee] Anyways, they love musica here and they blare it on these giant speakers TWENTY FOUR HOURS A DAY. Totally serious.  My house is located in prime air-space apparently, so I usually get dueling music.  And what type of music do they play? Ah. Well, they love random American music…. Lots and lots of old Akon, Snoop, Cher, Michael Jackson. Oh and Justin Bieber is a god.

We have a gas station (“Total: a boutique”…great name) which sells laughing cow cheese, Cadbury chocolate bars and the occasional ice cream sandwich.  A high school.  The Mercado central. A post office. Two restaurants. A bank. And lots of little hole-in-the-wall bars.  Note: any town in which you can buy chocolate and/or any kind of cheese in Mozambique is considered a big deal…

a normal day in namaacha..

On training days (which, essentially is everyday but Sunday) life in Namaacha is exhausting at best.  I’m loving it, but it’s definitely not easy.  I wake up between 5:45 and 6 am every morning , lay under my mosquito net (which is completely tucked into my mattress because I’m paranoid) and listen to the odd combination of rooster and Snoop/Rihanna/Justin Beiber.  There is CONSTANTLY music blaring- all hours of the night. Lucky for me, people in Namaacha like the Shakira world cup song as much as I do – so no complaints there!  Then, I wait for Mama Joana to knock on my door and yell “tome um bahno” which means “take a bath!” Being obedient and ready to get out of my net, I retrieve a basin from our indoor bathroom (jackpot) and take it to the kitchen where she’s heated my bath water.  I take the basin back to the bathroom and stand in the bathtub for a quick bucket bath. It’s usually more than enough water – especially since hair washing here not a regular occurance.  Now, I’ve lucked out with the indoor bathroom because it gets pretty chilly in the mountains of Namaacha. So when my friends are toting their basins of bathwater to their outhouses, I’m sitting pretty with my indoor tub! There’s no running water in our house, so the sink and tub don’t have water handles….just drains. I finish my bath, wrap up in my capulana (a large piece of brightly colored material that women in Mozambique use for just about everything – to have dresses made out of, to wrap and wear as a skirt/dress, to tie a baby to their back, to use as an ironing board or tablecloth. Capulanas give new meaning to the words “all purpose”), and return to my room to get dressed. Mama Joana will have set out my breakfast for me – a fried egg, fresh baked bread and peanut butter (she found out I loved peanut butter and now I have it with every meal), hot tea, and finally either salad or French fries. Quite the meal. And before I walk out the door, she stuffs a roll of cookies and a juice box in my backpack as my morning snack. Although one time, I got the remnants of my breakfast in sandwich form as my snack….bread, egg yolk (I always leave those), French fries, bread. Yummmm.

Morning class starts at 7:30, and usually we have language class until about 10 am.  Our training class is broken into lots of little groups, each with an individual teacher.  My group only has 5 people in it, so there is TONS of one on one attention (read: you are paying attention whether you want to or not).  He teaches our lessons entirely in portuguese… in fact, he doesn’t speak English at all.  But so far, so good.

After language, we go to the local escola secondaria (high school) where we have tech sessions. For me, this usually means background info on the Mozambican school system, classroom management, lesson planning, appropriate discipline methods etc.  It’s a little intimidating! Schools here are very different from the ones in the states…combine that with the fact that 1. I’ve never actually taught before and 2. I will be teaching in Portugues …so its occasionally nerve racking!

Around noon, we break for lunch.  I come home and eat whatever Mama Joana has prepared…usually rice and covie (greens, cocunuts and peanuts).  After that, there is usually some other sort of tech session.  It will be with the whole group, just the education kids, or broken down even farther to just the biology teachers (there are 12 of us).  Oh and almost all of these are in Portuguese as well. Active listening ALL THE TIME. Ah!!  After that, we regroup with our language classes for more tutoring in Portuguese.

Our last session usually ends at 5:30.  I walk home and help Mama Joana with whatever it is she’s doing. Washing dishs  or clothes on the porch, cooking dinner, etc.  Then I take my evening bath and in the dining room.  During this time I get a big dose of Mozambican tv which is …. Interesting? My favorites are “music box,” a show on ATP that is kind of like an MTV video countdown (but I don’t think they’re actually counting anything down lol) and “escrava isaura,” a Brazilian novella that is supposed to be set in antebellum America.  Its absolutely ridiculous and fabulous.   Because, after all, why wouldn’t Brazilians be the experts on the states at that time? Ha!

A senhora a minha mae? (oct 2 2010)

Today we left Maputo and headed towards the village of Namaacha – where our pre-service training will take place.  The village is very different than the rest of Mozambique as it is green and mountainous – more like the boarding country of Swaziland than actually Moz.  We were meeting our new families in the outdoor gymnasium of the local secondary school.  Despite feeling like a puppy in a pet store (where your new family would pick you up, take you home, and hope you don’t destroy their house) it was exhilarating.  Then, there was this incredible singing- like- traditional tribal African music. And in came 75 women, singing, dancing and waving post-it notes – each with a name on it.  Now, maybe it’s the malaria medicine (which I started last night and have yet to have the “lucid nightmares” or  paranoia as side-effects) or maybe the fact that everyone’s emotions are so high, but people started crying at the singing. Myself included. It was such an amazing moment.  Finally, I found a woman waving a wallet with my name on it! We hugged and kissed on the cheek (standard Mozambincan greeting), and she grabbed my backpack off my back and took my hand. We walked down the road a little ways, and then hopped in the back of a pickup truck and hitched a ride deep into Namaacha.  Coming down the long dirt road, with little huts everywhere (and sprinkled with various animals – chickens, goats, etc) – I was mentally preparing myself for a one-room place with a thatched roof and an outdoor latrine. Just then, we turned off the path to face a little pink house. I don’t know if I was more excited about the house part or the pink part! Ha!

Mama Joana (that’s my Mozambican mom) showed me around her little house-which she is extremely proud of.  It has a toilet inside AND electricity. Jackpot with Mama Joana.  Now, Mama Joana does not speak English. And I do not (yet) speak Portuguese.  So really this was a lot of hand motions and confused looks.  We managed to have a cup of tea and attempt to assemble a water filter before she shooed me into the bathroom for a bucket bath. Honestly, bucket baths? Not so bad! Now, I haven’t tried to wash my hair yet, so that may be a a different story!   When I finished, we had some lunch: a fried egg, and some freshly baked bread with peanut butter. PEANUT BUTTER!!  We showed each other pictures of our families and had some a few broken conversations- but the Portuguese is a struggle.  Really, I wanted to know if anyone would be joining us – or if the two of us were flying solo for the next few months.  She is widowed and has 3 children.  A daughter in Maputo, a daughter that is still in Namaacha (but grown and living away) and a 5 year old daughter.   She could tell I was just barely hanging on and told me to go take a nap.  Something I was totally fine with.

I woke up in to the sound of something grinding , and I wandered out of my room to see where she was.  She saw me first and told me to come sit outside with her while she cooked.  She peeled a fresh coconut, hopped off the porch to crack it on a rock and handed me a piece of the flesh.  The rest she grated on this special little stool-grater contraption and made a broth with the milk….and later added some form of greens. My instinct was collard greens, but maybe that’s just because I’m used to Rat greens. Hah! She cooks everything on this little charcoal stove outside on her porch where you can look out over all of Namaacha and some Mozambican country side. It’s pretty awesome.  She has her own mango and papaya trees in the front yard – so papaya is for breakfast! Wahoo! Maura (or Meninah), her daughter wandered home and played in the yard (errr rocks and dirt, is that still a yard? Or does yard mean grass? Who knows…) while she cooked and we sat barefoot and talked. She has asked me a total of three times about my boyfriend (non-existant) and still can’t figure out why I’m not married. Mysteries of the world Mama Joana, mysteries of the world....

Mailing Address

If you get the urge to mail me a letter....or a care package :)

Audrey Zoeller
Corpo da Paz
Av. do Zimbabwe
No. 345
Maputo, Mozambique
C.P. 4398


During the first 5 weeks of training, mail letters to this address.  By week 7 (Thanksgiving) I will have a new address which is where I'll live after Dec. 5.  Some other PCVs told us that it should take between 2 weeks and a month. 

Orientation

Welp. We finally made it! After a quick Staging event in Philadelphia, a 2 am wake up call, a 4 hour bus ride to JFK, a 4 hour wait, a 15 hour flight,  a 4 hour layover in Jo’berg, and a quick 50 minute flight to Maputo. We finally made it!

It was so great to be outside for a few minutes leaving the airport, and the weather in Maputo (the capital city of Mozambique) is surprisingly nice right now ….  Somewhere in the 70s.  Our  group of 35 (half of Moz15) checked into the Hoya Hoya hotel where we had to drag our 100+ pounds of luggage up 4 flights of stairs. So that was pretty sweet. Not.  We can’t see the ocean from our hotel, but we are right in the middle of the city.  It seems to be pretty a pretty busy place and is apparently not a good representation of the rest of Mozambique

We had our first day of orientation today – basically prepping us for Training (I’m noticing that we’re getting a lot of “prepping”….staging prepped for orientation, orientation preps for training, training preps for service blah blah blah).  We met with the US ambassador (who is ranking right up there with the lady who spoke at Rhodes baccalaureate as one of my new idols), learned how to assemble water filters, got a rabies shot, and had an interview in Portuguese…just your average Thursday! Hah!

On Saturday morning we are being bussed to Namaacha, a small mountain village on the border of Swaziland and South Africa for our homestay training.   I have no idea what the internet situation is there (I’m guessing very limited compared to Maputo) but I’ll try to get some posts in it keep yall updated.  OH and I should have a phone by next Saturday and texting is super cheap!

Ok so for some random information….

•           the other PCTs  (Peace Corps Trainees) are amazinggg ! They’re from everywhere and they are so impressive!
•         Meal time is getting more interesting everyday. Dinners have been pretty legit … lots of curries, stews, rice.  Breakfast is a little bizarre. Today, for example, we had huge HUGE bowls of bread (some sliced, some rolls, some loaves).  Then each person got a banana and a kraft single….maybe they figure the Americans really like American cheese? I don’t know!
•          I have a bathroom in my hotel room. However. The toilet doesn’t work, and shower either has hot water or cold water – never at the same time. And water pours all over the floor whenever we turn it on.
•         On the bus ride to our hotel, we passed tons of women and girls carrying huge buckets and crates on their heads! So impressive. We tried with our Medical kits today at orientation, and apparently you need to be a native with a lot of practice to be able to pull it off!

Hope everyone is doing well!! Miss and love yall!

Tchou!