Paul and Eli Blog in Moz

Hi! I know Eli started off with something in Macua, but she´s really into that local language thing and I don´t know anything but this one frase! ( Kimpelaa kamparão, which means I´d like some shrimp!) Well, we have one more week of training, and I can´t wait for it to be over so we can go to our site! Next week we are going to be meeting our directors, which should be interesting. I am going to ask if there is any chance that I can teach teh 11th grade, which is taxonomy! (The whole Genus species thing!) I don´t really know a ton about taxonomy but I´ve gotten really interested in it since graduating. Schools that are big enough to teach the 11th grade are really rare, most high schools here end at the 10th grade, but Nacala is a bigger city (the 2nd biggest in Nampula I think, although I´ve heard that the biggest is still only like 4 blocks of big buildings!)
There are only giong to be 4 other peace corps volunteers in the Nampula province, 2 girls who will be about 1.5 hours away from us and 2 boys who will be about 6 hours away from us, although they´re all really nice and we should have a good time with them (we´ll at least get to know them pretty well! After them the nearest people are a 2 day train ride away! And we have to cut through Malawi to get there!). The Zambezi province below us has nobody, and Manica has only a few, so we have to go west to Tete or SW to Manica to find the nearest people, although the vast majority are in the far south of Inhambanne or Gaza. I think we´re between 700-800 miles north of the capital city and the peace corps office! But we actually will have open ended plain tickets back to Maputo in case we ever need to return in a hurry, also every site has cell phone coverage.
I hear there is good scuba diving near Nacala, and there is a place to get your diving certification, so Eli and I may do that depending on the price. Also, a little ways north of us is Pemba beach (it´s actually probobly a long journey, but possible) and it´s supposed to be the 2nd best beach in the whole country. Considering that the place is full of beautiful beaches, that´s saying a LOT! Also, just a little south of us is the Isla de Moçambique, which is a world heritage site and is supposed to be really beautiful. Usually when you see pictures of Nampula they come from that island. The other thing I heard about our site is that it´s incredibly hot! Our latitude is about 15 degrees! That compares to below Puerto Rico ande Haiti in the north, or about honduras I think.
I´m working on uploading some pix to www.ofoto.com. I´m not sure how you can find them yet though.... I´m emailing them to some people who´s email I have on hand, otherwise you might be able to go to the site and search, the email address they are under is mozten@gmail.com. Or email me and I´ll send them to you!