Paul and Eli Blog in Moz

Our house is the cement one in back- the mud house in the front here is a small, 2 room place that we had made for a student, Renee, who will be living there and working for us. In exchange for the house and his meals he is going to do our cooking, dishes, and general cleaning. We are also going to take care of whatever basic needs he has. He used to live 12Km outside of town, so it was a long way for him to commute to school.








This is inside our house- this is Renee and Eli. They are standing in the hallway looking into Jessica's (our roommate) new room. The door in the picture has already been put in.









This is us, with one of the construction workers, and with Jessica, the new PCV, in front of our new house. We arranged to have the little 'cabana' on the left built, to have a shady place to sit with visitors, and also a small brick latrine, which you can see in the back on the left side. The house is fairly large, and should be a fun place to live. It's very close to the school and is right in the middle of the community, which are bonuses.

This weekend, to celebrate the start of the school year and the arrival of new PCVs we had a pig roast in Ile. We had 25 people over and roasted two pigs. we even had a pig pinata filled with candy and condoms, and a chocolate cake with a pig on a spit made in frosting.
School is probably starting this week, Tuesday, and Eli had class in the morning and afternoon, although the same number of classes as last year. This year she is teaching 9th grade, so she gets to follow her students from last year.
One of the projects we started last year was the creation of a room at school to serve as an HIV/AIDS counseling/resource center, and also as a base of operations for our youth group. We had only started to clear out a room (that the school donated) and were going to finish the project this year. So we decided to ask for funds from CNCS, the Mozambican AIDS fund. As part of the process we had to submit the proposal to our district administration to get their approval and for them to certify that we are an actual group. However, admin came back and said that they liked the proposal so much they wanted to skip CNCS and fund it themselves. They also said they wanted to give us more money than we had originally asked for (which was over $1200). It's pretty exciting, and should be a really great project.


So, pictures. On top we have Brian and Bethany with one of the pigs, on our homemade brick oven. On bottom people took turns taking a broom to the pig pinata!