Paul and Eli Blog in Moz

I know it´s been a while since the last big update. We have either had lots of free time but no energy or internet access, or no free time with unlimited (wireless!) internet access. Anyways, back to the beginning:

How did we spend Christmas? Originally we wanted to travel and be with other PCVs, but since our house didn´t have bars on the windows we didn´t feel very comfortable leaving, especially with all the expensive things, like the computer, in the house. On Christmas morning we went to another teacher´s house and spent the morning talking and eating pineapple, then had lunch at his place. Right after lunch we went to our school directors house, who was having a baptism party for his child. For the party he had a large reed hut (similar to a party tent) filled with tables and food and people; we got to spend a few hours eating and drinking (and they kept bringing us beers!) with Mozambicans. It felt like a good bonding time- getting to know some of the people of ile.

We didn´t do anything special at all for New Years, but I´m sure we had fun.

Shortly after New Years the school managed to have bars installed on our windows (although I´m not sure I have much confidence in the guy they hired to install them- he was just the only person in town who happened to have any metal bars at the time). We also went for 3 weeks with out power; the school (actually the student dorms, which is separate from the school) neglected to pay the electric bill, and it took them 3 weeks to pay and get us reconnected! So 3 weeks of using candles and with no movies! (Thanks to Julie and Justin for sending us back to Moz with over 65 movies!!) One of the hardest things was the lack of light and being forced to use coal to cook everything, plus taking cold showers every day!

To pass the time we also painted our house, and now it looks much better than it did originally. If all goes according to plan we will be moving to another house shortly, but you never know in Mozambique, so we decided to make this house as comfortable as possible…

Right now we are in Maputo for a week long conference on HIV/AIDS, as well as some other administrative peace corps things (health check-ups, etc). It´s great for us because we stay in a 4 star hotel, eat good food, and get to see everyone that we haven´t seen in the last year or so! Everyone in PC except the very newest volunteers are here, so there are about 60 of us. After the conference Eli is staying for 2 days to plan the next Girls´ Conference, during which time I will be bumming around the city.

I know I promised a long blog, but it´s been so long that a number of things have slipped my mind. I can only remember to add that on the first night that our power went out we found an enormous centipede in our house, crawling among some boxes of books; it was one of the grossest things I´ve ever seen. One of the things about ile is that you see a new weird bug just about every day, and many of the bugs get superlatives like ¨ugliest¨, ¨biggest¨ ¨fastest¨ etc.

Also, chech the previous post for a link to my pictures on flickr.com

That´s all for now!