Paul and Eli Blog in Moz

Well, it's that time of year, school is wrapping up, kids are going home (those that didn't fail the national exam anyways), and we are going on vacation! This is our BIG trip- since Eli and I are leaving peace corps at different times, this is our chance to do some serious travel. The itinerary is like this: Nov 24th we start an overland tour from Cape Town, which goes through Namibia, going through the sand dunes, Etosha National Park, and then through Botswana and the Okavango delta, and to Victoria Falls, where, after 21 days, our overland tour ends. We then take a bus up to Tanzania, via Malawi, where we meet Eli's sister and brother in law for a few weeks of tourism in Tanzania, going to the serengeti and bumming around before returning to Mozambique in early january. We'll do our best to keep everyone updated during the trip. Take care!

School has just about wrapped up- in fact, classes are over, and all that’s left is grading and the national exam for 10^th graders. The grading is actually pretty complicated, because before the National Exams we have to determine if the students are eligible, and that means comparing their grades from 8^th, 9^th and 10^th grade for every discipline, and checking to see if they have a positive average in the sciences and letters- we worked all week and up to Saturday on it! We won’t do 8^th and 9^th graders grades until after the national exam.

Most students have already left school, only the 10^th graders are waiting around for the exam. That means that our JOMA group has left too. Our last big project was a 6ft by 12 ft world map that we painted at school, color coding each country by its HIV/AIDS rate. It took about 10 days to do, but the result is a pretty darn nice map- although not always 100% accurate. Here’s a picture of the map about midway.

We are planning a big trip from November to January. Starting late November we hope to go overland (on a bus/truck) from Cape Town, through Namibia and Botswana, to Victoria Falls, then up to Tanzania to meet Eli’s sister, do some travel there, up to Uganda, and back to Mozambique. We’re still working on the details, but it should be a good trip however it ends up.

p.s. since originialy writing this blog we've actually proctored the national exams and are now correcting them, which is a pretty long and tedious job, but it's almost the last thing of the year that we have to do. We also had two peace corps trainees (from the newest group) come and stay with us for a few days, which has been a lot of fun.