Paul and Eli Blog in Moz

COSing!

2008-06-03T08:35:00.000-07:00

Well, a lot of time has passed since my last post! I'm now in Maputo, about to COS. Eli is still in Ile, she'll come to the US in July for a month of home leave, and then return to Mozambique until December. Friday, June 6th is my last day as a volunteer and on the 9th I fly back. Crazy times!

JOMA '08

2008-04-09T13:49:00.000-07:00

We are now preparing for the third JOMA conference of our Peace Corps careers! This year the conference is in Nampula. I am helping to organize and film the conference, while Eli will be bringing 2 students and a teacher and attending as a participant. Our kids will be trained in theater and gender relations. It should be a really good time! Right now I am in Nampula, helping prepare for the arrival of students.

Incidentally, Eli and Bethany (the PCV from Gurue) are planning a provincial wide theater competition. It should be a really good experience for everyone.

Moving Day

2008-03-19T05:33:00.000-07:00

Well, today is the day, we're moving into the new house! Moving is a lot of work, I am realizing. The new place is nice and has a good location, although the roof is still a little leaky, and there's a definite lack of furniture. I wish we had not abandoned most of our stuff when we moved out of the school! It'll be fun though, to have a more normal peace corps housing situation.

Also, we have a new school director, and he seems pretty interested in our projects. He is going to help get everything squared away for the Rotary Club library project and is fine with us taking kids and teachers to Nampula for our conference in April.

Will send out an update of our living conditions in a few weeks.

and....Action!

2008-03-03T11:14:00.000-08:00

This weekend I have been in Mocuba filming for the first movie of my DVD project. The Mocuba theater group has a lot of talented people and I think it's going to turn out to be a good, and fairly interesting (and dramatic) movie. I was hoping to start filming earlier, but now I have three more groups who are interested and/or close to ready to film, not including my own group in Ile. So that's progress. I've also been working on a promotional video for the Science Fair, which I hope to have completely finished by this next weekend.
In April I will be at the Northern JOMA conference, and there I'll be giving a hand as an organizer, and also filming a promotional video of that. So I'm having a lot of fun with the cameras. Yes, we have to cameras, Eli's step-dad donated one to us for the project, and that's going to make the films a lot better, we have every scene filmed from two angles which makes editing easier.
We are still in our old house. We were planning to move when the missionaries returned, because we needed their help with the car, however on their way back from their trip the car broke- so we may not move for a little while yet!!
Hope everyone is well,

PJ

our new house

2008-02-27T00:12:00.000-08:00

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.

Zambeziapalooza

2008-02-04T11:23:00.000-08:00

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!

call for computers

2008-01-16T06:24:00.000-08:00

I would like to know if anyone who reads this has, or knows of, cheap laptops for sale. There are a large number of people (teachers, directors, administrators) in our town who would really like a computer, and a used laptop would be perfect. If you have any info, please email me. Eli will be coming back to the US in July and could then bring computers back to Moz. We're looking for $100-200 laptops.

Also, just an FYI, we're in Maputo for a week long HIV/AIDS conference, so should have some internet access.

we're back!

2008-01-14T08:23:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone! Eli and I are now back from our trip! It lasted 49 days, and we visited 7 countries! South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania and Malawi. Our highlights (although there were many, many amazing things), where the sand dunes of Namibia, white water rafting the Zambezi river (we have a DVD of it, it's shocking), and our safari in the Serengeti. We spent a few days back in ile, and met Jessica, our new site mate. She will teach biology this year, and will keep Eli company after I go back to the US in June. Right now we are in Maputo for a week long conference. Classes start again in February, and I will start with my video project.

This is the overland truck that we took for the first part of our trip.

Zambia

2007-12-14T05:08:00.001-08:00

We arrived today in Zambia (the town of Livingstone). Our organized tour through drifters is over! It seemed to go by so fast, and now we're on our own. We had a great time in northern Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe though. Tomorrow we're going white water rafting on the Zambezi river, which should be intense- lots of class 5 rapids! After that we head up to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

trip report-- southern africa

2007-12-03T06:41:00.000-08:00

After spending a few days in maputo we took a bus to Jo'burg and flew that same night to Cape Town. We're doing an overland tour with Drifters, which started the next day. We're in a group of 9 people (all European or Canadian), all really nice, and 1 guide, in a huge truck. So far the trip has been great, we've climbed Table Mountain in Cape Town, gone to the Cape of Good Hope, done wine tasting, and traveled up from Cape Town across the coast of Namibia. Yesterday we visited the sand dunes (which are enormous and amazing), before that we spent 2 days at Drifters' private desert camp, where we saw a lot of Oryx and Springbok (a type of gazelle) and did a night drive. We've also been to the Fish River Canyon, the 3rd largest in the world. The food has been good, our guide cooks, we eat a lot of meat (barbeques often), and have to help with dishes every 3rd day. Usualy we camp, and Eli and I have been sleeping under the stars, although today we bought a sleeping bag as it's been getting chilly. Also today Eli is out quad biking in the sand dunes which sounds really fun. (I'm going white water rafting at Vic Falls instead). Tomorow we will go back to the Namibian desert to see some other sites (mountains and cave paintings) then head up to Etosha national park for 2 days of animals, and then onwards to Okavango delta (for more animals)

the Southern Africa circuit

2007-11-17T10:30:00.000-08:00

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!

2007-11-08T22:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Our trip to Moz

2007-10-05T10:23:00.000-07:00

Guest Blog: Monica's and my trip to Moz, August 1-14

Paul was worried. We had packed 50 pounds (27 Kg) of food for our two week (ten day's actual) visit with Paul and Eli. I was going through the 4 pound bag of Dark Chocolate - Peanut M&M's too quickly. I suggested that they hide them, that being the only way to keep me out of the bag, but bless Paul and Eli's heart they didn't. I could see Paul's worried looks whenever I got into them. Good chocolate is at a premium in Moz. That and a lack of whirlpool tubs would probably keep me from ever living there. We would have, and should have, taken more chocolate but before the trip I overestimated my willpower. I had my own food worries later in the trip when Paul pulled a small worm from the cooking water. If I had thought about it in advance I would have suggested that Paul's cook use filtered water when preparing food for us. Despite the worm, the meals were prepared as hygienically as possible given the environment. I tried not to think about the worm when I ate, instead I focused on being careful to chew lightly in case a pebble might have remained in the rice while it was hand sifted. I was lucky, I only got one crunchy bit that might or might not have been a pebble. The two locally prepared meals we had were wonderful, an experience I wold not want to have missed. I even tried to grate a coconut for the Metapa. I enjoyed watching the process of getting lunch on the table unfold. Paul would wake up early, and head to the market with Monica and I following along. We purchased the fresh ingredients for the meal and got them home for his cook to begin preparing. Their cook would light a small wood fire in the tiny outdoor stove, get the water boiling when the coals were ready, chop the vegetables, sift rice, grind corn, and peanuts, grate coconut, and do whatever else was necessary for the meal. From walking to the market to having food on the table was often a five hour long process. Two locally prepared meals were cooked for us. By comparison, most of the meals I prepared took 20 minutes. Paul and Eli were treated to my back country camping specialties-all prepared on their gas stove.

What interested me most in my trip to Moz (besides spending time with Paul, Eli, and Monica) were the people of Mozambique and seeing how they lived. If I were an average Mozambican, I would have died a few years ago. The average life expectancy is 45 years or less depending on your source. Roughly 50% of the population is under the age of 14. These statistics, I believe, suggest difficult times ahead for this beautiful country. Depending on where you live in Moz. the AIDS rate is between roughly 14% and over 25%. While we didn't see obviously homeless children, the number of orphans and homeless children must be staggering. Over 80% of Mozambique's two million people live as subsistence farmers. They eat what they grow and have (hopefully) a little left over to trade or sell. In Ile, you will notice that there is little trash on the streets. Why? Because very few people can buy disposable items. You won't find empty water or pop bottles, candy bar wrappers, or anything similar on the streets other than orange peels and other organic matter.

In Ile and in the country people were on the move gathering firewood, cutting material for thatched roofs, transporting water, and taking care of what needed doing. Homes were built using locally available materials, bricks were made on the spot from the clay soil, thatch from the grasses, and roof supports from nearby trees and shrubs. Beds were simple reed mats which could be folded up and put out of the way during the day. The average home (mud house) appeared to have little to no furniture inside and it appears that homes were mainly for sleeping. Life is an outside affair. The evening entertainment wasn't too hard to guess. There were very few young girls without a baby strapped to her back.

I am really proud of the work Paul and Eli are doing. They clearly serve the people of the United States in their Peace Corps work in Mozambique. The relationships and goodwill that PCV's establish throughout the world makes a difference in how citizens of these impoverished countries view Americans. Paul and Eli have established many friendships and it is easy to see that they are valued and appreciated. I'm sure that the US government didn't set the Peace Corps up just to help. I think the Peace Corps and the work the volunteers do is something we can all be proud of. Knowing that, I would expect more budget cuts .

Mozambique won't be a major tourist destination for American's anytime soon. Despite the relatively low cost and beautiful country public transportation is a problem, arranging air travel within Moz from outside the country can be a challenge, English is not widely spoken especially outside the capitol city, and sanitation is a major issue. However, with the help of someone that speaks the language and knows their way around the country, it can be a great travel experience. I just can't imagine doing this trip as an English only speaker.

While making airport connections, I had noticed that there were a large number of missionaries flying into Mozambique. I talked with one on the flight back home. He had just completed three months of service in Pemba ministering to the people. He told us that his job was to teach the people that "witchcraft bad, Jesus good". I can appreciate his point of view but I wonder if he ever stopped to think about the relationship that witchcraft and the witchdoctor have to the people. We learned from one of the missionaries in Ile that the witchdoctor held the medicinal plant lore within the community. The land is rich in healing plants and the witchdoctor does not share that knowledge. A more sustainable ministry is to first teach the people how to use the plants for healing.

Monica and I decided in our trip planning that seeing where Paul and Eli lived and meeting their friends was more important to us than going on Safari. It would have been nice to do both but I think we chose well given the limited time we had and our interest in minimizing travel time. I especially enjoyed observing the differences between city and country life, and the people that lived with a foot in each domain. The paved connecting roads between cities and villiages was much more than a travel route-foot trafic outnumbered auto trafic by an enourmous factor. The roads were a place for local commerce, socializing, or just sitting and watching people and time go by.

It was a fun trip-wonderful spending time with Paul and Eli and in seeing the country. We played the board game Siedler, read, traveled to Ile de Mozambique, hiked to a waterfall, and enjoyed time on the Indian Ocean at Nacalla Bay Divers. Thank you Paul and Eli!

photo journalism

2007-10-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

(Just an add on to the last post) Here's a picture of our kids distributing copies of the photo journal during a holiday. They gave out about 450 copies, and other copies will be put up at school and distributed by the education department. It talks about gender equality and has 4 pictures that the kids took. I think it turned out pretty well, although we had hoped to make a lot more than just one journal all year long! oh well though, we've been busy. We're also rehabilitating a room at school which will be a counseling center next year, and a place for us to store our material (pamphlets and stuff). Its a lot of work since the room the school gave us was an old bathroom, so we had to tear down stalls and break down some walls! It should be nice by next year though.

color by numbers

2007-10-05T08:03:00.001-07:00

We're not exactly painting by numbers, but it feels like it with our world map project. We are painting a giant 6ft by 12 foot map at school, and painting the countries according to the HIV AIDS rate (we are getting funding from PEPFAR). It's really a fun project, and the kids are enjoying it, although it's a lot of work, after scraping the area and painting it all ocean blue, we've drawn a grid of 7cm by 7cm squares in pencil, and used these as guides to draw the countries. Some of the kids are really good at it, doing an excellent job of drawing in all of asia, australia and the phillipines almost perfectly.

We are almost done with school, we have 1 more week of class and then final exams, and then school is over! And next friday is a holiday- teachers days! To celebrate there is no class (also, TODAY was international teachers day so there was no class, and yesterday was a holiday as well, also no class... you get the idea). But next friday will be a huge party for us teachers, it should be interesting! (Some teachers have already promised that they will not drink a drop of water the whole day... we expect a lot of hangovers).

The next group of volunteers has arrived (moz 12), there are 69 new volunteers! A large number of them will be coming up here to zambezia. One will come to Ile, a bio teacher, so that after I leave Eli will not be living alone. We will find out who lives with us in November.

Today we had a monitoring visit from the branch of the government that fights HIV AIDS. It's a really good way for them to get familiar with our group and projects, and they will most likely fund our group for next year.

The school is currently working on building a new house for us. (Actually, they are making the mud bricks to build the house, but it's all the same thing). The house is on school grounds, in fact, it is incredibly close to the school, but it should be fine. It will lack privacy, although we will have a fence, which should help, and it will give us easy access to kids, school, and visitors, which is our lifeblood in mozambique anyways. It will probobly not be done until late November, and we will be sharing the house with the new volunteer for the first six months (until I leave).

Overall, things are going really well. Eli's parents visited and we had a great time. I only spent 3 full days with them because I was later coming back from our COS (close of service) conference in Maputo, which was nice by the way. Lyn was very interested in the rotary club project which is funding our library rehabilitation. I brought books up with me from Maputo- about $800 worth, although thats not as much as you might think, books are very expensive here. One book, a complete illustrated dictionary of portuguese, was $100. Eli's parents mostly stayed in Ile, although we made a day trip to Gurue to see the waterfalls, the same as my parents (who still have not written on the blog!) After leaving Mozambique they did a safari in Zambia and went to vic falls.

Sorry for the lack of blog entries, when I have more time I will make another newsletter to email. Take care everyone,

As aulas começam amanha

2007-08-29T01:45:00.000-07:00

As aulas começam amanha

Literally translated it means classes start tomorrow, but what it really means is ‘nobody knows when classes will start, but show up every day just in case.’ And that pretty much sums up the current situation- doing final grades for the second trimester still isn’t done (even though class was supposed to have started on Monday) and many students have not even returned from the holidays. It will make an already short last trimester (shortened by almost a month because of the national census) even shorter.

The next month will be pretty busy here. This weekend (or next, depending on if the students return or not!) we will be taking 4 kids from our JOMA group and Adolfo to Mocuba for a two day theater training. The Mocuba JOMA group will be planning and putting on the training and it should be a really experience, both for our kids to improve their theater and to share ideas with the Mocuba kids. Also the 15^th is the regional science fair in Nampula. We will be taking the three winners from our local fair to compete, and Nacala will also bring a group of students (we did a science fair there last year) which is exciting. For now those kids are working on refining and improving their experiments. (One of them is trying to run a light bulb off of a lemon, but is having some trouble, anyone have ideas?).

Following the science fair we have a COS (close of service) conference in Maputo, which we go to even if we extend. That means missing another week of school! (The trimester ends in mid October, and the last few weeks are final exams and grading so there really is not much time for classes!!).

The school received a chessboard (possibly two) and the other day I taught one of the other teachers how to play. I’m hoping to teach a small group of kids to play and then leave those chessboards in the library. We’ll see how it goes, but other PCVs have started chess clubs and been pretty successful.

The only other major news to report is that the school is starting to make mud bricks for a new peace corps house. That way there will be a place for us (and the new volunteer who will come to teach biology in December) will have a place to live when we leave the missionary housing. The fact that they are starting is really good news and I’m really hoping that they get it done before December!

At long last, an update!

2007-08-14T04:56:00.000-07:00

Yes, it has been a long time without a blog entry, and I'm sorry for that, although many of you have received a PDF newsletter which talked about July. The last two months or so have been pretty busy for us. We came back from our first trip to Malawi at the end of June. There was only a few weeks of school and then final exams following that, and the second trimester was officially over. This year Mozambique is doing their third national census, and it's a very big, very serious undertaking... I'm actually very impressed by the organization of the whole project, although we are taking nearly a MONTH LONG BREAK from school in order to get it done! (It is, however, incredibly important for the future of Mozambique, so I understand. Its a very detailed census). So, what are we doing with all this free time? First, we held the first ever science fair in Ile, and went to Gurue to help with their first science fair. (Send me an email if you want a copy of the newsletter that talks about the science fair k01pj01@gmail.com) Both of the science fairs were excellent, and we will be taking 3 students to Nampula in September for a northern regional science fair...also a first time event up here in the north.
In July we made a 2nd trip to Malawi, in fact going back to the very same Liwonde National Park, but this time we went with other PCVs (from Mocuba and Gurue, our two closest neighbors). We arrived in the park exactly 1 month to the day since our last visit. We spent 3 nights and had a great time. At one point a large heard of elephants walked right past us, in a marsh, another time we were in a tree house 'lookout' and saw a herd of 34 elephants go underneath us.
The biggest news though, is that my parents visited! They were in Mozambique for about 10 days (a 2 week trip minus travel days). They spent several days in Ile, went hiking through the tea plantations of gurue up to an amazing waterfall and back, saw the school but unfortunately no classes, went to Nacala and spent two nights at a resort outside the city, saw whales in the bay, and spent a night on the Ilhe de Mozambique. They actually flew out of Maputo today, having arrived yesterday in the city and managed, without speaking portuguese, to get to the hotel, go out for pizza and ice cream, and get to the airport with out problems. It was, I think, a wonderful trip, and I will leave it to them to describe it in more detail. (to be posted here soon, I hope).
Also, a big announcement from Eli and I: we are receiving funding for a project through PEPFAR, the US program that funds HIV/AIDS programs, to create DVDs with short HIV/AIDS films. It's a big project and I'll be staying an extra six months in Mozambique in order to complete it. So, I will be returning around June, 2008. Eli has decided that she would like to continue teaching for a third year, and, pending final Peace Corps approval, will be staying until December of 2008. (Although Peace Corps will give her a plane ticket to come back to the US in June or July for a month). I know you may be sad that we will not be coming home as soon as you had hoped, but on the bright side, there will be 12 more months of exciting blog entries :) Hope everyone is doing well back home, take care,

Paul and Eli

Canoe Safaris in Malawi

2007-06-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

Eli and I are on our way back from a 5 day trip to malawi, which has been great. We got a ride right to Blantyre with our missionary freinds, stayed in Blantyre at a Peace Corps transit house (a nice place to stay, which costs less than $1.50 a night) and got to meet some malawi PCVs which was fun. Malawi is actually a bit more developed than Mozambique- the road changes from dirt to asphalt at the border and there are more stores and things being sold on the street, etc. (Although the majority of people are still in absolute poverty like Mozambicans). Anyways, Eli and I stayed one night in Blantyre and then took a bus up to Liwonde, where we caught bycicle taxis to Liwonde National Park. The bycicle taxis were really fun, they have padded seats in back for passengers and a second set of handle bars. They took us 6 Km to the park gate. There, we met up with another PCV who's site is actually inside the park! (Those lucky environmental volunteers!) We went to a safari lodge called Chinguni Hills, which was very relaxed and an overall nice place. We stayed two nights, using our tent for the first time. The tent is nice but extremely small!! The whole thing about Liwonde is that the shire river- a major river that drains lake malawi- passes through it. Our campsite looked out over the river and some lagoons and marshes. Every day we saw herds of elephants in the marsh. One night we even heard them crashing through the trees as they went by our campsite down to the water! The park doesn't have the big five, but it did have lots of baboons, waterbuck, impala, elephants and lots of birds (410 species), so I was pretty happy. In fact, we went on a drive (an RPCV from micronesia took us in her car) and saw some parrots and some really rare ground hornbills (even Eli was excited, which should tell you something). We also did a canoe safari through the marsh and lagoons, and got really close to hippos and saw a number of birds, and the setting was wonderful.
The food at the lodge was superb, and eating was actually our biggest expense. They served great roast beef (the best beef we have ever had in Africa), a bacon quiche, indian food, fish and chips, etc. and every meal was great. We're already planning a return trip!
I'll include more details and pictures when possible. We are returning to Ile tomorrow (currently in Mocuba, in transit back home after the trip). Take care everyone,

Paul and Eli

hello

2007-06-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

Last weekend we got a visit from an American living in Quelimane- he’s a professional photographer and he came up to Ile just to do a training session with our JOMA group; and it was a lot of fun! He has brought his computer, we borrowed a projector, and inside of a classroom with all of its windows covered in capulanas, we got to see a great slide show. The kids really enjoyed it because he was charismatic, and his pictures were great, so I’m hoping that they gained some ideas or perspective from him. Hopefully some of it will rub off when they start taking their own pictures, which is starting any time now.

Unfortunately there weren’t as many kids at the meeting as there normally are, because there were two holidays that weekend. Friday was ‘Children’s Day’ which was not supposed to be a school holiday (since we teach older kids!) but strangely enough, the kids took it off anyways! Then Sunday was Dia do Ile, or the day of Ile, I guess, which celebrated the founding of Ile 71 years ago. It was a pretty big holiday, and we spent about 6 hours outside at the administration building where all the festivities were held. It was all very official (because holidays always are in Mozambique), but this time things were a little different. They had giant speakers set up, and someone from the public radio was there interviewing people and broadcasting their responses over the loudspeakers. He actually came up and talked to Eli for a bit, which you can imagine, she loved. Our JOMA group was scheduled to do a theater piece, but because of all the delays they had to wait almost 2 hours later then what the time they were scheduled for. Waiting that long in the sun gave us both a sun burn, Eli’s was worse than mine, but our kids’ theater piece went really well. Afterwards we bought juice and cookies and had a snack, since the kids waiting so long to do their theater that they missed lunch! (Most of our kids live and eat at school).

So that holiday was on a Sunday, and technically (according to the district director for education) we still had to work on Monday. However, that day was also taken off. So we had a four day weekend, which was nice. If we had known in advance that it was going to be a four day weekend we may have planned to do something else though!

This weekend we are going to Alto Molocue, a town which isn’t that far away, but because of the transportation here and the way the roads are, it still takes us quite a while to get there. We’re spending a long weekend there (our first time visiting the PCVs there too!) and then going to Mocuba.

As for basketball, we have not started practicing yet (it’s been almost two months!) because the court is still under construction! For whatever reason, they tore up the court before they were even remotely ready to repair it. And when they did have cement, they used it to construct a short wall around the court- I guess so they can play ‘indoor’ soccer in there. Of course, you can’t play anything right now because the floor is dirt and cement chunk. It will never make sense to me.

We’ve also recently hired someone to cook for us, once or twice a week, which is a big time saver for us.

Hope everything is well back home.

novidades

2007-05-31T01:53:00.000-07:00

Sometimes Eli and I sit around and talk about things that we miss from home. Like big screen movies and popcorn. Oh wait, we have those here J Our missionary friends have a projector which they use every Saturday as a home theater system. I guess that after moving to our new house we can’t really complain about roughing it anymore (although our gas tank did run out last weekend and we had to take bucket baths again for a while, it was hard, trust me).

This weekend we have a professional photographer coming up from Quelimane to do a session with our JOMA group. It should be pretty exciting, hopefully he will have a really strong impact on the quality of the kids’ pictures. His main focus will be putting meaning into pictures- sometimes I feel that the students interpret all of their photos too literally.
Next Sunday is ‘Ile Day’, celebrating the founding of Ile, so it should be an interesting holiday. We already have our Ile Day t-shirts (for sale in the street). Whether or not people will be recovered enough to work or teach on Monday is anyone’s guess. Also Friday is ‘Children’s Day’, although our students aren’t technically considered children anymore (cheers to Saioa though) they all want the day off- there should be classes but you never know.

Take care everyone.

snapshots

2007-05-25T05:33:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures of classes in Ile- the first two are of kids working on a group project where they were making informational f liers about either AIDS, malaria or nutrition. The pictures were actually taken by a student from our youth group who was practicing photography for the photojournalism project (using Julie's old digital camera). The picture below is of the tea plantations in Gurue.

Hard at Work

2007-05-16T23:46:00.000-07:00

Believe me when I say we’re working hard: Eli and I are teaching photography lessons with our digital camera, teaching gender and HIV/AIDS classes on the weekends, organizing a science fair- which also has weekend meetings, writing grants for our photography project, a world map (painting) project, and a video project. As soon as the basketball court is fixed I’ll start coaching basketball again, and Eli is considering both coaching girls’ basketball and doing a small English club. On top of it all we’re teaching- and I just received an 8th class! It’s certainly enough to keep us busy- it seems like we’re always running from one meeting to the next.

Right now we are training our JOMA group in photography. We’ve bought 2 film cameras from Malawi but are training with Julie’s old digital camera since it doesn’t cost money when the kids take bad pictures (and so far they have almost all managed to cut the head off the subject in their first pictures!). I then hook up the camera to a TV and we can look at the pix the same day. The plan is that once the kids are trained they’ll start taking pictures showing either gender inequality or HIV/AIDS – they’ll pick a new theme each month. At the end of the month we’ll put together a short photo essay which we’ll photocopy and distribute in the town and neighboring schools. It’s a fun project because all the kids are excited to use a camera. We were already interviewed, along with some of the kids, by the community radio station, who saw us taking pictures in town!

We’ve started preparing for a science fair- both a local Ile one and later on a regional one (although I’m not planning the regional one, but we’ll participate). I had 30 kids come to my first meeting, although we’ll see how many of them manage to make projects. This year I will put a lot more time into organizing than last year- getting a good place, inviting all the important people of the town, etc. We’re hoping it’ll be a big success!

If you were to go to the school in Ile today, you would probably find a bunch of cut of shirt sleeves on the ground, scattered around in the dirt. Why? Apparently long sleeve shirts are not part of the school uniform, so the other day one of the teachers called every student who had long sleeves, and cut their shirt sleeves off them, in front of the whole school! Then he kicked two of them in the butt for good measure. We felt pretty bad for the kids, who had raggedy shirt cuffs- especially two of them who had had fairly nice white shirts. We were pretty surprised at the whole thing.

We’re hoping to take a trip to Malawi at the end of June, along with some other PCVs from Zambezia province. It’d just be a few days, when we have a long weekend, but we’re really excited to go- we hear a lot of good things about Malawi and it’s really not that far away (well, by chapa things seem a lot farther than they really are).

No idea when our cell phone tower will start working… there are rumors for early June, but you never know. Other sad news, one of the 6 other PCVs in our province had to go home for health problems, so we have one less immediate neighbor! It’s sad, we were already few up here. Next year they’ll be putting a lot more people up here, but of course, we won’t be here!

p.s. blogger is weird on these gurue computers- I can't tell how the pictures are going to come out- but there are pictures of Eli teaching the last class of the day, a picture of students learning photography (yes, they are taking pictures of a bathroom), and a picture that one student took in the market. Enjoy.

After the conferences

2007-04-25T02:41:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

After a very stressful trip back from the Girls’ Conference, Paul and I are back home in Ile, ready to start the second trimester. I think Paul will write later about the Boys’ Training, but here’s what happened with the girls. There were about 50 girls, 15 PC volunteers and 15 Mozambican female teachers from 8 different provinces. The week was divided into themes, so for example, Monday was “sex and gender”, Tuesday “sexual health, HIV/AIDS”, Wednesday “self-esteem and relationships”, Thursday “future goals” and Friday was a general wrap-up day. My province was in charge of organizing the sessions for Thursday, which was really fun and kinda scary (you know me and public speaking). But I think it went really well, basically we had the girls think about the future (which is something they don’t do very often). One of the best activities was the “footsteps activity” in which we had cut up footsteps and asked the girls to think of an objective (step 1), think about the benefits of that objective (step 2), what obstacles you may encounter (step 3), how you can overcome them (step 4), who will be there to help you (step 5), and once you accomplish that objective, what is the next objective (step 6). So we had the girls think step by step and write in their thoughts in the footsteps. It’s kinda hard to explain, but I think it went really well, and it got them thinking about the future. We also had guest speakers (including two female, Mozambican med students that were amazing!) come and talk to the girls. Overall it went really well and it’s something that I’m very proud of, but man, I was exhausted at the end of the week! (I was even more exhausted after a horrible trip back home – involving a broken chapa, barely catching the last ferry across the river, not being able to find another chapa to Nampula, another broken down chapa to Ile, and a driver with malaria!!!! Seriously, that trip was a lesson on patience).

So, we’re back in Ile and classes technically started on Monday, but there are no students, and the teachers have to go into Gurue tomorrow to do some registration/paperwork. So, it looks like next Monday classes will start for real (which is fine with me, cuz I’m still recuperating from the conference!).

And the Boys’ conference in Chimoio went well too- it was six days (a day longer than the girls’) but I ended up meeting up with Eli on the way back because of all her chapa problems! I had a great time and was really busy- I got about 4 hours of sleep three nights in a row! Part of that time I was up working on a photojournalism manual to give to the kids, other people were up until 3am with me working on a newspaper using articles from the journalism group and pictures from my photojournalism group. There were a lot of fun activities for the kids, and my counterpart really enjoyed himself. On the last day we took the photo kids to an orphan farm (they don’t farm orphans, the orphans do their own farming- learning and growing their own food). It was really pretty spectacular- they are housed at the farm, fed, and it looks like they learn quite a lot. We got a tour and little orphans explained the uses and care of various plants. The whole place looked well run. This is a picture of the orphans shucking corn below.

Here's a picture of me putting my shoes on after the ferry ride across the zambezi river.

More pix, part 2

2007-04-18T01:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of two of our students (both are going to our conferences), making egg sandwiches for a end of the trimester party that our school group had.

Here's Eli's girls making cakes for their snack on April 7th (see other pics on previous post).

And here's the living room of our new house!

Some pix

2007-04-18T01:27:00.000-07:00

Here are some pix from the last few weeks:

Here are girls from our school group helping Eli put on her capulana. All the girls bought matching capulanas, and they wore them on April 7th, Mozambican womens' day

Here's the students from our school group marching through town on the 7th, girls in front with matching capulanas and white shirts, boys in back in red shirts. They sang all the way through the middle of town (they even made up songs about us!)

Later in the day the girls had a snack, they invited the important women of the town including the hospital director and the distrect director of education. Here they are carrying a crate of pop and other stuff to the 'lanche' (snack).

Traveling in Mozambique

2007-04-18T01:09:00.000-07:00

It’s been a busy few weeks; the first trimester of school just finished this week! No rest for the weary though, we are right now participating in the girls’ and boys’ conferences- in Beira and Chimoio respectively. It’s a two day trip from the north, so we each had a long trip down with our students. I'm with my boys (two guys, Filipe and Dionisio who are part of our school activista group) and my teacher counterpart, Adolfo. Eli is traveled down with her girls (Ivólas and Monica). They were supposed to travel further on the first day and stay in another city, since they have further to go, but they were delayed on the first leg of the journey and had to stay in the same place as me! They left at 3am to make up for lost time (we left at 5:30 and passed them on the road!) Each of our conferences will last for about a week, then we’ll be returning to Ile (and the second trimester will start!! No vacation!). To get to the lower provinces we have to pass the Zambezi river- which is a major river with no bridge! The only way across is by ferry boat, that takes a 2-3 cars and a truck each time it crosses. Of course when my chapa went the ferry was a extra full, and had to back out into the river a little to be in deep enough water so that it wasn't touching the bottom- so there was a stretch of water between the bank and the ferry boat. I was talking to Eli (and not paying attention) so I was the last person to board and I didn't realize that there was now this gap of water. And the ferry boat started to raise its door. I had to quickly tear of my shoes and run through the water, scramble up the closing ferry door; all in my jeans which got soaked. Fun.

Now that I'm at the boys conference we're doing a lot of work on our micro-project- photodocumentary. It's been fun so far, each group of kids is using a digital camera (my kids are using mine! Kinda scary). It's amazing to see how their pictures have improved after two days of practice and lessons. They went from nearly all bad pictures to mostly all good or decent ones. So far the conference has been a big success. I haven't spoken much with Eli, but from what I've heard she's having a good time too. Our only problem here is that my counter part got Malaria! I just came back from the clinic with him; he has medicine and should be better soon.

In other good news- we finally moved to our new house! We moved on April first, and the last two weeks have been great! The place is beautiful, there are hot showers, and the best part is the kitchen- now we’re cooking on a real gas stove and using good pots; having counters and sink helps a lot too! Living in the same compound with our missionary friends is really nice as well, as we get to spend more time with them.

The last two weeks of school has been a little rough though, in terms of it being the final exams. We are both sick of grading tests; it’s the worst part of teaching! I have about 550 students, and Eli has about 440. I made the mistake of giving an exam the week before the finals (the school wants us to give two minor tests a trimester; I also did it to help get grades up, but it had the opposite effect!), so I ended up grading nearly 1100 exams in a two weeks! It was awful! So in the future we’re only giving easy to grade multiple choice exams.

My basketball team is doing well. We’re taking a break because of final exams and the conferences. We still don’t have a hoop set up(!) but the school just started re-cementing the court, which is good because it had several large cracks (huge holes actually, a couple feet in diameter). Unfortunately they filled in all the holes with cement yesterday. Today, after all that work was done, someone decided that they’d better redo everything, so they tore up the whole court!! Right now it’s all rubble, hopefully by the time we get back they’ll have made it nice again!

Speaking of things being done by the time we get back- hopefully we’ll have cell phone soon!! We actually do have cell phone coverage in Ile now, but only in a few spots! And it’s very spotty, it tends to come and go. The cell tower that we’re using is about 38Km away and they have a range of 40. We don’t get it at home, only in the center of town! But our own cities tower is ready to go, as soon as someone shows up to turn it on. So, like I said, hopefully by the time we get back!

Take care, hope everyone back home is doing well.

more pictures

2007-03-27T04:54:00.000-07:00

Here are two more pictures to go with the post below.

One is of me working with Suzete (the teacher who's coming with me to the girls' conference) and the other is movie night, when we showed our first film.

It’s raining frogs

2007-03-27T04:31:00.000-07:00

Or something equally as strange, because we’ve found six frogs in our house over the last five days (and none before that in the last three months- very strange). Maybe it’s the same frog coming back each time?

We are on our last week of classes before final exams for the first trimester. We don’t actually teach classes next week at all, just proctor exams all day. After that it’s smooth sailing until April 14th, when both Eli and I will be taking kids to conferences (the REDES conference in Beira and the JOMA conference in Chimoio respectively). It should be fun, but also a lot of hard work and it means no break at all!

We’ve been doing a lot of interesting projects with our HIV/AIDS activist group. Lately we’ve been making short films with them about gender equality, discrimination, using condoms, etc. Then we show a film to the whole group and have a discussion. This last Saturday the group then presented the film to the kids who live in the school dorm, and had a little debate about it. It went well, but there were over 100 kids in the room, watching a small TV, and they were making a lot of noise (see picture). Next time I think they’ll show it a couple of times to smaller groups.

I’ve also started coaching basketball 4 times a week. I’m enjoying it a lot so far, although we still don’t have hoops(!) and we only have 4 balls- 3 of which I bought.
But there are a number of students who are really interested, and we’ve been doing a lot of dribbling and passing drills. At least one backboard and hoop has been made locally, and supposedly will be mounted soon. It’s actually been completed for over a month, but things here can take so long to happen, it’s unbelievable!

Speaking of things taking a long time- early this month a contract was signed for us to move into the missionaries’ compound. The only problem is the school doesn’t have the money for the first payment (apparently they only have $41 right now!). So we’re waiting for a while longer, in the meantime all our clothes smell smoky.

We have tried biking around a bit, but my bike pedal has fallen off 3 times. Eli tried to fix it but it fell off again after we went 20 yards or so. Even the professional bike fixer here only got it to stay on for 15 minutes or so of easy riding. I’m not sure I have a lot of confidence in the bike anymore.

I did a final count and we have about 420 eight grade students total. The classroom without chairs and desks somehow lost the few chairs and desks that it did have, and now is completely empty. At the same time the school transferred more kids there, raising the number to 93. Yesterday, giving an exam, only 13 kids were sitting on chairs, and none of them had a table to write on. They all spread out sheets (capulanas) to sit on the floor of the room. Before giving the test I made all the kids leave the room, then I picked up their capulanas and removed all the biology books which they had stashed.

Everything else is normal- we’re really busy but having a good time. Hope everyone at home is doing well.

The goings on in rural sub-saharan Mozambique

2007-03-13T02:05:00.000-07:00

A lot of things are happening at the same time here, most all of them good (we think). Last weekend we were at the Peace Corps regional meeting in Nampula, which was a lot of fun for us- it’s a real vacation being somewhere with hot showers and, if not good, at least regular meals. It’s also nice to see all the other PCVs and see how things are going in their sites. The recent groups of volunteers is a great group of people who seem to be doing very well in spite of some tough conditions up here in the north. We also had the ¨pleasure¨ of making two 10 hour bus trips from hell with the other zambezia volunteers. Coming back from Nampula we had to get on a bus at 4:30 am- and getting on the bus itself was a challenge since there was a small crowd of people all pushing to get onto the bus (less seats than there are people), and it was starting to rain. We managed to get our seats, but a lot of people didn’t have a space- no problems there, they just kept getting into the bus, filling the aisle until there wasn’t room to scratch your back with out touching someone. For the next ten hours the bus went over some of the worst roads in the country (technically the national highway), dirt roads which I’m sure would constitute a motor bike race track in most other countries. It started to get hot, and the windows on the bus were very small; before long we PCVs were all dripping sweat. The body heat of everyone pressed in around us added a lot to the temperature- we noticed a substantial drop once when everyone got off the bus for a break (due to a blown tire). When we got off the bus, finally, we all stank; probably, I have never smelled as bad in my life. I feel bad for everyone that had to smell us.

Speaking of more pleasant things, the school has met with our missionary friends, written up, and signed a contract with them to pay for our housing for the rest of the year. We are planning on moving sometime this week. Hopefully everything works out- we’re not there yet and things have a way of not working out just as planned in Mozambique. But things do look good.

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I think I may coach basketball. There are a lot of kids interested, the school is supposedly working on making the basketball backboards (I have seen one, although it hasn’t been paid for) and I actually received a nice leather ball from the phys ed teacher. Those of you who watched me play basketball in high school may be laughing now.

Eli and I have been working a lot with our HIV/AIDS activist group, and things are going really well. We have meetings at least once a week and are working on a lot of activities. Every Saturday we try to make a presentation from the Peace Corps Life Skills handbook. The idea is to work on behavior change, since most people know already know all the important facts about AIDS, they just don’t follow through on making safe decisions. On top of that, they’re working on making short skits about HIV/AIDS that we’ll film with Eli’s digital camera, then edit into short videos (we have a DVD of short AIDS films which they’ve watched for inspiration). I’m training a group of kids to do photography; in April I’m taking 2 kids and another teacher to Chimoio for a JOMA boys’ conference (I went last year, remember?) where the micro project this year is photo-journalism. It should be really interesting! Eli is also preparing to take 2 girls to the girls’ conference in April. There are a lot of other little side projects, and the kids seem genuinely interested. We have between 20-25 kids most days.

Eli is pretty bummed out because the school just got a new history teacher, who took all the history classes she had. She’s only teaching English now, but having had a taste of history she prefers that a lot more than English! (Despite that, she hasn’t shown much interest in my history books… I’m reading one about the naval build-up to World War one that’s pretty good).

Our cell phone tower is finished- however we’ve heard from a reliable source that it will take 4-6 more weeks for them to actually activate the tower. So expect late April.

I’m including some pictures from one of the classrooms that has almost no desks for over 80 students. This was after all their classes for the day were over, so many of them had gone home before I got there with my camera. Last time I gave an exam at least 33 students were sitting on the floor and 13 more were sitting on top of desks but didn’t actually have a chair (you can see a lot of the desks are broken). It almost makes me feel bad for stealing a desk to use as a kitchen counter in my house. The first picture (above) is the school bell.

Pix part 3

2007-03-02T02:03:00.000-08:00

Another view of one of our classrooms.

The school secretary, where they only have 1 type writer! (no computers or anything else!)

Pix part 2

2007-03-02T01:52:00.000-08:00

Here are some more Pix:

Adolfo and me at the pool, which is now empty, although sometimes it really is full of water. (You wouldn't swim with all the people washing clothes and little kids peeing in there though!)

We biked to the pool; the two yellow bikes are ours! They've only broken a few times on us, though there are lots of people who fix bikes in Ile.

That piece of metal hanging from the tree there is the school bell! The people on the right are all teachers, sitting around and talking

A couple of Pictures

2007-03-02T00:50:00.000-08:00

Eli and Adolfo (another bio teacher who is a co-leader of our HIV/AIDS group at school and one of our best friends in Ile) at the town pool. It was very nice, say 40 years ago. Today it's mostly in ruins and you would never want to swim in it.

One of my 8th grade classes (Eli and I both teach these kids), it has 80 students. It's one of the nicer rooms because they have almost enough desks and the chalk board isn't rough like some of the other rooms.

Here's a view of the school- you can see it in the distance (middle of the picture).

Here's Eli, talking on the phone to her mom!

I Love the Smell of Dried Fish in the Morning!

2007-02-15T00:02:00.000-08:00

It’s not exactly Folgers in your Cup, but it does wake you up [actually, it wakes me up, but Paul can sleep through anything!]. We can usually tell what they are cooking at school without having to leave the house. Of course, since they usually cook the same thing every day, it’s not very hard to guess. Everything in Ile is going well, but our housing situation is getting on our nerves. We have actually gotten used to the noise of 250 kids eating in front of our house 3 times a day (it helps that we watch TV on the computer at night while they eat dinner), although the lack of privacy is also getting on our nerves. We also just learned that the director will probably not be leaving to study in another city, but will stay in town and do a learn from a distance program.

Anyways. My classes are going well, and so are Eli’s, for the most part our kids are well behaved. We only have one class that seems difficult, and I blame it on the fact that they don’t have desks and the chalk board is rough like sand paper (large grain) so it’s hard to read anything we write on the board. Eli is just starting to teach her history classes, so it’s too early to tell if she’s overloading herself (although my guess is that with 800 students the answer is yes). On her busiest day she has to teach nine 45 minute classes.

With one of our Mozambican teachers we have created an HIV/AIDS group at school, which so far seems like a good group of kids. We’ve only had one official meeting, but from that they have worked on a theater piece to do at school on Valentine’s Day, as well as making a lot of pictures and poems (with our markers and crayons) advocating abstinence, etc. to put up around school for the 14th. It’s a good start and we hope to do a lot of things with the group. Hopefully we’ll each be able to send students to the boys’ and girls’ conferences like we did last year. I still have a plan to paint a giant world map mural at the school and color code the countries by HIV/AIDS rates (this was one of my plans for Nacala, I’m transferring it to Ile now).

Other interesting news: this Saturday Ile is supposedly getting an American doctor, which will be really interesting for us. On Sunday the missionaries are having a lunch party for her (that’s the plan at least) so we’ll get to know her then. Some of the missionaries have already met her, and one of them thinks she said she was from Michigan, but I suspect that she saw my MSU hat and got Michigan from that. Anyways, it’ll be nice to have another American in town and perhaps she’ll let me do some work with AIDS patients. I am assuming that she’s here to do AIDS work, and I’ll be surprised if she’s not.

Everything is going well and we’re enjoying ourselves. Hope everyone back home is doing well.

Paul and Eli

And I just have this kids picture to show that we're not the only people in Ile from Michigan! (Anyways, the kid has a 1986 fiesta bowl [whatever that is] t-shirt).

some pix for the last post

2007-02-08T03:10:00.000-08:00

Here are some pix I've taken recently- the one on the left is a house for goats- the school will be keeping 10-12 of them in here and then the students will eat them occasionaly with their chima (see below). On the right is a rainbow over ile, I guess it's fairly self explanatory. The little brick buildings in the foreground with two openings each are bathrooms.

living on an island

2007-02-08T02:58:00.000-08:00

Only two weeks have passed since we returned to Ile from the conference in Maputo, but it seems like months. It´s strange; the complete lack of communication makes living in Ile feel like living on an island. We can´t even communicate with nearby Peace Corps Volunteers, which can sometimes be tricky. When we got back to Zambezia Province we invited all the other PCVs in the area to come visit us the next Friday and Saturday, but once we got to Ile we had no way to know if they were going to show up or not. Someone did show up on Sat. night, then we found out that other people had tried to come, gotten stranded at a cross roads for 4 hours, then turned back, and the third group of PCVs had a teachers meeting and didn´t make it.

It´s a reminder of how hard transportation can be here. It´s funny, when we first came to Mozambique and lived in Boane we thought the transportation was really bad- crowded, slow, public transportation, somewhat irregular… compared to what we have up here in the north of Moz though, that was a dream! Getting anywhere is a major challenge, despite the fact that the major national highway runs right through Ile! (The road forks just below Ile, going to the the major northern cities- still pretty small places). You can wait for hours before getting a ride here, and that´s if you don´t mind being in the back of an open pick up truck or a semi-covered (metal roll bars, seats, and covered by a plastic tarp) truck. So far we´ve gotten lucky with getting front seat spots in open-back trucks, since we´re not allowed by Peace Corps to go in the back of an open car… Also, we´ve been able to get rides with people in town who have cars, or the hospital ambulance (since I fix some of their computer problems!) or the Germany missionaries.

Speaking of, today I am in Mocuba- the next major town to the south- about a 3 ½ hour trip, although it´s only about 50 miles, because the road is so bad. Eli had to stay and teach, but this is my day off and I´m going to take advantage of the Germans´ generous ride to get a refrigerator, some bikes, and a load of other things here in Mocuba. So no more cooking every single meal, or eating everything we make because we can´t keep left overs and hello cold drinks. Speaking of food, we´ve been eating a LOT of pasta these days, that and tuna sandwiches. We have a way of making tuna and avocado sandwiches that comes out pretty good. Right now we´re in the middle of avocado season and there are avocados everywhere. A giant avocado costs about 4 cents. We are eating about 3 large avocados a day here, and that´s because we´re exerting a lot of self control. Our german friends have 3 avocado trees at their house and every time we visit them they give us a sack full! (Eli is eating an avocado as I write this). We usually mash them up and sprinkle sugar on them and have ´em for dessert, but we do occasionally make guacamole and eat it on crackers.
(Does anyone know any other ways to eat an avocado?) Anyways, my dad would be very jealous J

School officially started on January 29th – that was the day of the opening ceremony which started an hour and a half late and lasted 3 hours, during which many important things were discussed such as the exact number of books for every discipline which we have in the library (both this year and last year), which actually didn´t take too long because there are very, very few books of any value there. Also, school uniforms were discussed (sometimes in local language, which we are only now learning a few new words) at length. It turns out they are the same as last year, no changes, but that was discussed at length. Also, the rights and responsibilities of students and teachers was read, while we sat in the heat.

Classes were supposed to start the next day, but it took a week before things really got started. By really got started I mean before students or teachers started showing up to classes at all. This is no real surprise to us, after last year. So we only really started teaching this week (and even then things aren’t running very smoothly). Today the person in charge of ringing the bell forgot to do so about half the time and nobody’s classes were on time (the school bell is a rusty tire frame hanging from a mango tree), so it’ll probably take another week or two before things start running smoothly.

*This picture is of the kitchen, the far right wall in the picture is our bedroom wall! They are right next door to us. Here they are cooking chima, (boiling water and flour) which the kids probobly ate with dried fish or canned fish or peas... you get the idea. Eat up!

Eli and I both teach 8th grade, which is what we wanted. Because the school has so few classrooms we only teach 5 “turmas”, or classes which we see three times a week for 45 minutes. Each turma has about 80 kids. In Nacala every kid got to sit at a desk (usually 2 or 3 to a desk), but here a lot of kids sit on the floor or squeeze in 4 to a desk (eight graders are small!). I think we’re both excited about teaching this year, the eight grade material is very interesting. In biology it deals more with human bio, health, etc. which I can use to teach HIV/AIDS and life skills. Eli is teaching a lot of introductory English. Eli also recently offered to teach history- the history teacher recently died- so she now has 5 turmas of 10th grade history (they meet only twice a week each so it’s not a complete overload of work, but it’s still a lot). She’ll be teaching about the World Wars and some African history (!?!) But she is pretty excited about it because she’ll be able to use Portuguese in the classroom and history is fun. (Speaking of history, I recommend Truman by David McCullogh).

So far we are still living at school, connected to the lunch room where 250 kids fight for food three times a day!!! We also are still here next to the kitchen, so there’s usually some smoke around the house, but it is handy when I have to start my coal fire, I just go over there and ask for some hot coals. We just put up an esteira, which is like a rug made of reeds, to block the students view of our front door, so we don´t have to worry about people peeking inside every time we go in or out (remember that we have to go outside to get into our bathroom!)

Our day to day is going well- we owe a lot of thanks to Julie and Justin for all the movies- thanks again!

Next time we do internet will probably be the first week of march, when we go to Nampula for a Peace Corps regional meeting- only for the weekend though. Hope all is well back home, miss you all.

Paul and Eli

To Inhaca... almost

2007-01-21T04:14:00.000-08:00

Our fancy conference at the Hotel Cardoso has ended (sadly-no more 4 star treatment) so all the Peace Corps volunteers have moved en masse to the Hotel Africa II- minus the 4 or 5 people who went home. Eli stayed because she is part of the planning committee for REDES (the girls conference), and I stayed because, well, I'm sort of a drifter. I actually asked Peace Corps to change my plane ticket so I could stay a few more days and now I'm sharing a room with someone from the REDES committee- which is free. So I thought I would use all this free time to take a trip to the island of Inhaca. A 3 hour ferry ride from Maputo, it's one of the more popular vacation destinations in the country; famous for its snorkeling, beaches, dolphins and flamingos. Half of the island is taken up by a biological research station and nature reserve, so I brought my binoculars all the way from Zambezia.
I took a taxi at 7am today with two other PCVs (one who actually lives on the island, lucky guy), only to find out that, for some reason which was never made clear to us, the ferry isn't running today. So no trip. So here I am trying to pass the time away in Maputo on a Sunday, with Eli in meetings all day. The only thing that's keeping me afloat is the new gelatto place that opened :-)

Here's a picture of the bird that lives next to my house in ile. No, I didn't take the picture, I got it from google, but it looks the same.

I forgot all the good details!

2007-01-17T13:35:00.000-08:00

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!

Link to Pictures

2007-01-16T08:50:00.000-08:00

I´ve started posting some of my pictures on Flickr.com, definetely go there and check them out! I´m posting under the name Paulthelatino, or you can follow this link: http://flickr.com/photos/82111593@N00/ Hope it works for you :-)

A week in Maputo

2007-01-14T11:29:00.000-08:00

Eli and I just arrived at the Hotel Cardoso- one of the nicest hotels in Maputo (in fact, in the whole country), and we´ll be here for about a week for an HIV/AIDS conference and our mid-service conference (wow, half way done!). All of this is thanks to PEPFAR; the Presidents Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief; or, how to spend 10 billion dollars quickly. I paid for access to the wireless internet, so we should be able to update from our room here :-) I´ll try to post over the next few days and fill you all in on whats been happening over in our corner of Africa :-) But just as a teaser, here are a few pix:

This is the view from our balcony at the Cardoso- very, very sweet.

Below is a picture of ile from the top of a nearby mountain- we have 2 big ones just beside the town. Most of the houses are mud brick with thatched roofs. The second picture below is from the other side of the same mountain, just showing off the landscape.

2006-12-26T00:53:00.000-08:00

Ile is the exact opposite of Nacala- in fact, as I write this it is pouring outside (we got 200 liters of water filled in under 10 minutes), where as in Nacala it never rained. Ile is small; actually ile is tiny. Looking out from behind our house you see only a handful of houses- the rest is open land and sky. The climate is much cooler, although the humidity makes it feel hotter. Also the market in Nacala was much much bigger than the one in ile, in fact, the entire food selection in ile is much simpler, although it does have the advantage of having cheap pineapple, which were rare in Nacala. So far, it´s great.

Getting to ile was a little bit of a challenge- all of our stuff was still in our house in Nacala, and had to be moved before we could go anywhere else. There was a little bit of a mad scramble at the last minute, logistics wise (logistics are very complicate here) but things worked out well. In fact, we got a 1st class flight up to Nampula, which was nice, and once there we were met by a Peace Corps driver/ all around handy-man who was up in the North fixing up houses. He took us in a Land Cruiser pick up truck, loaded all of our belongings, and then took us to ile the next day. I´m not sure that anything else would have fit in (or on) the truck.

We´ve been really happy with our reception in ile. People so far have been very friendly and welcoming. Our director took us to meet some of the important people in town (police chief, city administrator, local brazilian nun, Canadian shopkeeper- he´s from Toronto- etc.) We have been introduced to some of the teachers, who were working on the final grades of the year, and they all seemed excited to see us. One of the teachers came to our house, showed us around town, and took us to his house, where we watched pirated south African music videos on his TV. Then, since we had just moved in, the school took us out for dinner- and lunch the next day.

On one of our first days shopping in the market we met some German missionaries (although not actually missionaries- there are 2 nurses and a civil engineer, but very similar to missionaries), who have been very kind and had us over for lunch- very tasty sauerkraut.

As for our housing situation… For now, things are OK. We are litteraly a part of the school here, though, our house being attached to the building where the kids eat. We even share a wall with the kitchen! Right now there are only half a dozen kids staying here, waiting for their final grades, but once school starts there will be hundreds. The house is supposed to belong to the Director of Student Dorms, but he moved out because of the noise! The school tells us that we will have a new house soon, but I know that can mean in 6-8 months unless we push…. The house is pretty bare right now, there are 3 rooms with no kitchen, counters, closets, etc. Just 3 plain rooms, and since this should be temp housing, we aren´t doing much to build on it. (Although we´re adding some furniture and it is getting more comfortable- who knows, we could be here a while).

We have to thank everyone who gave us flashlights- they´ve come in handy lately! We haven´t had power for about 5 days, and it may be a few more weeks before we do!! Last week we were in our house when we saw orange and red light under our door, and heard a burning noise- I thought someone was welding outside our door! Turns out that a wire burned up, which is not surprising because students had connected a power strip to it, and other connetions to the wire were made with plastic bags and candy wrappers. So we didn´t have power. We thought it might only take a little while to fix that cable. And in fact, it would, the power people could have it fixed pretty quickly, excpet that the director of the student dorms (or LAR) decided not to pay the power bill, so on top of the burned cable, they cut our power! We won´t have a chance of getting it back until next month (and that means we have to wait to finish watching Lost! Aaaarg).

The only serious problem is a dispute Eli and I have over a word in Scrabble- I think she was angry because I was winning by 150 points, but maybe someone can check this word for us. I used Adz which is a noun (some kind of tool) and then I made it plural, so Adzs. If that´s not right someone let me know.

The other disadvantage of ile is that there is no cell phone coverage, but rumor has it that they are building a new cell tower that will be operational within a month. It hasn´t been confirmed, but if I start sending text messages, you´ll know. I hope everyone is doing well back home, things are very good here.

PJ and EO

Even more pix

2006-12-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

OK, a few more pix to go with that last post... sorry for everyone on a slow internet connection, let me know if its slow to load the pictures.

This elephant stumbled around after drinking the mystery water from a manmade reservoir

Woodland Kingfisher

The leopard that Eli spotted!

Pix

2006-12-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

These pix go with what I just posted

Herd of Elephants... there were LOTS.

Blyde River Canyon!

White rhino with an oxpecker on its back

Me, feeding a vulture!

Going back to Moz

2006-12-08T11:36:00.000-08:00

**sorry, long post**

Today 55 trainees swore in and became Peace Corps volunteers, bringing the total in Mozambique up to 113, and most of which will be leaving tomorrow for their new sites. But there´s a lot that´s happened between us leaving New York and attending the swearing-in ceremony today.

Eli and I took an 18 hour flight from New York to Johannesburg where we were picked up by the guy who does marketing for our safari company (he runs a B&B out of his apartment). On the way to his place he took a detour to show us part of downtown Jo´burg. Johannesburg is, by the way, the most dangerous city in the world- as in, it has the highest murder rate. We only went by the edge of the downtown, because he said he doesn´t drive through the actual downtown, but he pointed out hotels and buildings which used to be nice and now were really run down. In the 70´s, he told us, this was the place to live in South Africa. What a change. He didn´t even want to stop at traffic lights because that´s where a lot of car jackings happen.

The next day we got picked up by our safari company. Most safari companies have a set day when they start, but Viva Safaris goes every day, and we were curious as to how that worked. It turns out that there are always groups of people coming and going, and we met quite a few international people. In the van with us were an Australian and a Brazilian, and we also met people from England, Germany, Scotland and the US.

Viva Safaris advertises tree houses but, of the 11 or so cabins they have, only 2 or 3 are actually tree houses, the others are on stilts! But, they do overlook the river, and they are very nice inside (big double bed, chairs, bathroom with hot water). On our first night we did a game drive in a private reserve, which they advertised as a night drive, but which actually ended at sunset. There was a huge difference between the private reserve we went to with Eli´s mom and this place- it wasn´t nearly as nice here! (The place was a sister company to viva safari´s, about half hour away from our camp).

However, we had 2 full days in Kruger Park on open 4X4 game viewing vehicles, which was amazing. Being in the game viewers, as they called them, was great because you were pretty high up, to see through the brush better, and there were no windows between you and the animals. We saw 4 of the Big Five- only lions were missing, and they saw them the day before we came! However, we did see the most difficult to see of the big five, which is the leopard. Eli is the one who spotted it too, while it was napping in a tree.

We saw huge amounts of elephants and zebras, lots of interesting birds including ostriches, ibises, vultures, and a lot of other bright ones. (Eli was really glad that I had brought 2 pairs of binoculars J) . We saw warthogs wallowing in mud, others with its babies, baby zebra and giraffe and baby elephants. We saw groups of baboons fighting and tons of impala. One of the best things we saw were the white rhinos, which we spotted 5 times. Once it crossed the road right by our car, and we got a great view of it. We had a wonderful time on the game drives. Our only complaint was that we didn´t get into the park until about 9:30am (our camp was outside the park on private land that still had a lot of animals), and breakfast was a 7:30- we should have been in the park by 7:30!! Early morning is the very best time to be out a and we missed a lot of it. However, we still did see a lot and have a good time.

Another day we went to a Cheetah rehabilitation project, which was interesting and we saw Cheetah, who were being bred, in cages, and some other animals on their property, such as the sable antelope with is very nice and rare. They have a vulture feeding pit where the bones of dead gazelles´ and elephants are cleaned. Then the bones are sold to be crushed into powder to be used as an ingredient for cheese cake, ice cream, and chocolate etc! After that we did another ¨night drive¨ in the private reserve where we went the first night, which was disappointing. That day we were not extremely happy because although the Cheetah project was interesting, it was a short tour and we had a lot of downtime.

Another day we went to the Moholoholo animal rehabilitation center, which was even better than the Cheetah project. They had a lot of animals which had been injured (birds of prey which had cut their wings off by hitting power lines while in a dive). They had lots of vultures, because vultures get poisoned easily (farmers put out poisoned meat to kill things like coyotes or leopards which eat their animals, and it kills hundreds of vultures at a time). In one cage they had a group of cape vultures, which are fairly rare. We went into the cage with the tour guide to get a close look, and then they offered to let us feed them! Of course I wanted to do it, so they gave me a leather glove that went up to my elbow, and a piece of raw meat to grip. Once I had the meat a giant cape vulture landed on my arm and started trying to pull the meat out of my grasp. It was amazing! A lot of people asked me if it was heavy, because it´s so big, but it wasn´t. We also saw lions, which were only separated from us by a chain link (and electric) fence, so we got very close, and the guide fed them raw meat through the fence. Then we saw a baby rhino who was being cared for. Because he didn´t have a mother, but still needed a mother figure, someone was always with him. We saw the baby rhino sleeping on the grass snuggled up to a lady! He came over to us when he heard us and we got to pet him- he had really hard, thick skin. Next we saw a honey badger, which we were also able to touch. There were giant marabou storks around the place, which the guides threw meat to and we were able to get pretty close to (I hear they are fairly rare from an experienced birder, although we saw one with Eli´s mom).

That afternoon we did a walking safari in Kruger, with 2 Kruger Park guides. There were only 3 of us, Eli me and the Australian girl who came on the same day we did. It was fun, although we saw no large animals (except for a few sleeping antelopes who ran away when we got near) but we did see a decent number of birds. We enjoyed the walk, and the guides were great.

On the last day we were scheduled for a morning walk then a visit to some scenic spots near Kruger. Before we left the camp guide had to rescue some people who were trapped in their cabins by a herd of buffalo! (One of the big 5 animals). The walk was at that original private reserve that we did not like very much. It was funny because at our Transfrontiers safari, the guides were very professional. This time, the guide was wearing a polo shirt, board shorts, and he didn´t even have shoe laces in his shoes! (He was the guide for our driven safaris in kruger too, and he was pretty knowledgeable and very nice). It was a good walk though, we ended up getting really close to a giraffe that was at a water hole. It was short- only an hour, but fun, then we left to get dropped off in Nelspruit. On the way we saw the Blyde River Canyon, which is the 3^rd largest canyon in the world and amazing, as well as a few other scenic stops in the mountains.

In Nelspruit we stayed at the same place we stayed at with Eli´s mom, Old Vic´s, which is a great place. The only problem is that when we arrived we were told by the owner that he had heard Americans had to buy visas to Mozambique at the consulate the day before crossing the border, and that it costs $100. That was bad because peace corps told us they were $25 and that you could get them at the border! We went to the consulate and they confirmed the bad news. (Our 1 year visa had expired while we were in the US, so we had to get a new temp. one to come into Moz, and now peace corps is working on getting us a new year long visa). The other problem was that it takes a day to get a new visa, and our bus left the next day at noon. They usually only accept visa applications in the morning, but we left $200 and our passports at the consulate so they could start early the next morning and hopefully have it done for us before noon the next day.

Of course, this being Africa, we arrived at about 11:30 the next day to get the visas and that is when they started working on them! We got them just after noon and then rushed over to the bus station- although the bus actually leaves at 12:30 and arrived late anyways, so it was alright. Everything was going well until the bus stopped for a snack and gas break about half an hour from the border. It never left the bus stop. Somehow, it broke down while we were stopped. So everyone on the bus, which was nearly full, was trying to get on the other buses which were stopped nearby, and this led to a fairly competitive struggle because there weren´t enough seats on the other buses for everyone on ours! We got lucky and got onto a bus with only 7 seats, even though there were about 20 people trying to get on! It was crowded and not as nice as our bus, but they took us for free. I sat next to a South African lady who introduced herself by saying ¨I´m going to Maputo to visit my daughter, who is a dancer. Actually, she´s a stripper.¨ And that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the conversation.

We made it to Maputo with no incidents and joined the trainees for the directors conference the next day in Boane. This is the time when you meet your new school director and go over peace corps rules, etc. It was pretty darn boring, but also necessary. Our director seems nice, and we are for sure going to be in ile, in the Zambezia province, which is where we had wanted to go. Very rural, and no cell phone coverage! Our director also told us that our house is inside the school grounds! We asked for some more details and he told us that the school boards about 400 kids, and our house is attached the building where they eat!! Wow, we´ll have to see how it turns out, but it could be good- a lot of involvement with the kids, and that should make it pretty safe, since there will always be people around. We´re really excited to go there! We have 6 neighbors nearby, and a lot of new people in Nampula, which should be fun.

Tomorrow morning we leave for Nacala, so we can get our stuff and move it to ile. The plan is to arrive in ile with all of our stuff on Sunday night. There will be a peace corps person up there with a car to help us with the move- hopefully everything fits in the car! Ile, by the way, is pretty small, and if you look for it on a map you may not find it. It is between Gurue and Mocuba in Zambezia...sort of close to Malawi.

p.s. They just filmed the amazing race in Maputo!! I don´t know any details but I have been to the fort where the pit stop was. Cool.

Turkey Day in NYC

2006-11-24T08:06:00.000-08:00

Eli and I are approaching the end of our stay in the US! For almost 2 weeks Eli had been in Brooklyn with her sister, and I joined them the 20th. We just had a fun Thanksgiving dinner with Rory and Aitors friends. Even little Eli Saioa had a friend for dinner. We´ve spent the last few days doing tourism in New York- which is an amazing city! So far we´ve gone to the MET, the Meusem of Natural History, and to the top of the Rockafeller Center. Today we´re going to try walking the Brooklyn Bridge and then walking around the financial district (Wall Street).
Here´s our schedule for the next few weeks:

Nov. 27th- An 18 hour flight back to Johannesburg, SA!
Nov. 28th- We arrive in South Africa, and instead of taking our flight to Maputo, we stay in a bed and breakfast in Jo´burg
Nov. 29th- We start our six day safari in Kruger park!
December 4th- Hotel in Nelspruit
December 5th- Attempt to cross the border into Moz. with expired Visas, stay the night in Maputo
December 6th- We meet our new school director and attend the Peace Corps directors conference
December 9-10- Trainees become volunteers, have a party, then we all go to our new sites!
Eli and I will probobly have a lot less internet time at our new site, sorry everyone.

Here is
Eli and me on top of the Rockafeller Center

Hope everyone is doing well, and sorry to those of you that we weren´t able to see! I guess you´ll have to come visit us in Mozambique then....

Paul and Eli

Home Sweet Home

2006-10-29T08:37:00.000-08:00

After a 48 hour journey Eli and I arrived home late last night! For the last two weeks we' ve been helping out at the training for the new PCVs (a group of 55, mixed health and education volunteers, who have only been in the country for a month). I was pretty excited to go to the training, although in the end it was fairly boring for us; lots of downtime and we were there for TWO weeks! However, it was a lot of fun to meet the new volunteers, talk to them about Mozambique, and visit Boane.
Friday morning we left Maputo and flew to Lansing- of course it took 4 planes and many (many) delays to get there... Today is our first full day back home and it's wonderful! We'll spend 2 weeks (in Eli's case) and 3 weeks (in my case) in Michigan, and the rest of the time in NYC with Eli's sister. We fly back to Maputo on the 27th of November, and then we'll do this safari .
We'll get back into Mozambique in time to join the trainees for the directors conference- the time when they meet and talk with their new school directors. Since we'll be going to a new site we'll also meet our new director; it should be much better this time since I'll actually be able to speak to him in complete sentances :-)

Oh yeah,the 1st meal back: spiral cut honey baked ham and cheesy potatoes :-)

Dry Spell

2006-10-13T06:40:00.000-07:00

Today we cut off our water. It`s not as simple as it sounds, really. It had to be done since we`re leaving the apartment (and our stuff in it) until December and didn`t want to be charged for all the time when we weren`t living there. In the US that would be pretty easy, but here it was pretty complicated. The bills always arrive several months late (we had just paid for our water in July, for example) so we had to pay August and September as well. I don`t think they`re used to people trying to pay the extra months that remain before leaving (hence we received a 3 month bill when we moved in). Also the whole process of getting the water turned off required a special letter, carbon copies, and signatures. The red tape to be able to pay all of the months that we owe was impressive; we had to talk to someone official in another place to get approval. I don`t think they want to make it easy for people to pay.
Our schedule has changed a bit and we`re flying down to Maputo on Monday. Hope everyone is enjoying the last of the warm weather back home!

And just to keep interest in the blog up, here are some new photos. The first is a girafe pic that Lynn took in Kruger park, and the second is an oldy (almost a year old!) of Eli climbing during training in Boane.

What an Empty House!

2006-10-11T04:25:00.000-07:00

Well, we finally did it. We got rid of the kibby. Temporarily, that is; yesterday I took him to Monapo, his original home. Eli´s sad because she didn´t really get to say goodbye, but we got a visit from the Peace Corps doctor, and I caught a ride with her back to Monapo so I could avoid taking the cat on a public chapa. I rather ingeniously got the cat into a plastic clothes hamper, then tied the lid on him so he couldn´t escape. Unfortunately, I disingeniously didn´t tie it tight enough so half way to Monapo he made enough space for himself to get out, and then he was free in the back of a land cruiser with 5 passangers- two of whom (both mozambican) were NOT very happy at all to have a loose cat in the car; i.e. `stop the car, I´m getting out`.
I ended up sitting in front with the kitty on my lap, and he was good until we got to Monapo. Getting him out of the car was a little harder, and I have all the scratches on my arm to prove it.
We plan (or at least Eli does) on getting him again mid-December when we return.

As for school, we´ve both graded and turned in all of the final exams. Now we´re just tying up loose ends before we go. We´re leaving the final grades with our mozambican counterparts, and they´ll have to do the rest of the work (sorry guys). A lot of kids have been asking us to give them higher grades, and it´s sad when you like the kids but you have to give them a failing grade. Most of my kids that failed are only failing because they tried to cheat several times, and I gave them a zero for it. Next time I won´t be so harsh- I thought the severe penalty would make kids cheat less but it didn´t.

Sunday morning we leave Nacala!

A wonderful blend of...

2006-10-03T07:31:00.000-07:00

...fish and bananas, yum! Tired of the same old food, we asked Rosa to cook us a new mozambican dish. The result, a concoction of fish, bananas, onions and peppers was... let´s say interesting. And we asked her to take the left overs home. All of the left overs. But certainly, it was worth a try. How often are you going to get that wonderful flavour combination again?

Eli and I are spending our last 2 weeks in Nacala proctering and grading final exams, which is one of the most boring activities we´ve had to do yet. Kids taking final exams here are like kids taking final exams anywhere else- except that when it gets windy the tests here blow out of the classroom; although we both think the `teacher, my test just blew out the window, can I go get it?´ speel is just a ploy to go and look at a cheat sheet.

Hope all´s well back home!

Paul and Eli

we get audited

2006-09-28T05:20:00.000-07:00

Well, not really audited, but the Boys Conference (the one I went to in April) sent up a volunteer, Daniel, to see how the boys´ project was going. He stayed at our house for a while and we had a good time. The murals are going well and the students enjoyed the chance to show off their work.
During the weekend I took Daniel to Bay Diving and we saw a big school of dolphins swimming close to shore; It was my first time seeing dolphins here, too bad Eli didn´t come with us that day.

Also we´re now finishing our last ´normal´ exams at school, and the official final exams start next week (they´ll be cumulative finals). After that we´re basically done. We´re planning on comming to Maputo on Oct. 13th, but there´s a lot of things for us to get situated before we leave.

The really exciting news (and Eli is making fun of me for considering it so exciting) is that a new group of 55 volunteers arrived in country today.

Another egg, please

2006-09-21T05:03:00.000-07:00

We have a small crisis. Our empregada, Rosa, traveled to another town and hasn`t been here in a while. So Eli and I have been living on a diet of hard boiled eggs and bread. It`s not that we couldn`t cook anything else- it`s that all of our dishes are dirty and Rosa isn`t here to clean them. If she doesn`t come back soon, we may be in for a rough ride.

Actually, it`s not that bad (really, her absence has made us try frozen hotdogs, which you can eat together with bread and eggs.)

Another impeding crisis: (well, not really, but an impending event) we will be changing sites. Peace Corps is going to close our site and we will move to another town this December. Nacala is a pretty city and we like the school, but due to the size there`s too much crime for it to be a good site. Eli and I have been robbed twice so far (within the last 6-7 weeks), so both Peace Corps and ourselves think a move is the best idea. The school and (at least some of) our students are sad that we`re leaving, and we`re sad too, but we`re also looking forward to moving into a smaller place where we can be more integrated with the community. (Nacala, pop. 200,000+).

We are not sure where we`ll move to; we will probably stay somewhere in the northern provinces. In mid-October we will go down to Maputo to help out with the training of the new volunteers, then back to the US briefly until December. In the middle of that we`re thinking of treating ourselves to a safari :-)

Eli´s Annerversario (i.e. b-day!)

2006-09-18T05:43:00.000-07:00

Eli turned 23 yesterday (I can no longer say, ´I`m older, Eli, I know better´) and I think the last three days were some of our best yet in Mozambique. For starters, on Friday morning (the 15th) we were picked up at our house by our missionary friends, who took us out to a private house on the beach; which they were house-sitting for South African missionaries. The weather has been great, as it`s just starting to get warm (by which I mean HOT), but comfortably so. Our friends have their own boat; which they built, and which we had the pleasure of going out on. We cruised around the bay a bit, to check out the sites, then went to ¨Paradise¨, a coral reef on the other side of the bay- to do some snorkeling.
It was amazing. The water is not that deep; we had great views of all the tropical fish and corals- big groups of black and white and yellow and blue fish everywhere. We saw a few larger fish too, like kingfish. On our return trip across the bay we spotted two Humpback whales (a mother and a calf) swimming not too far from our boat. Talk about huge! We only saw their backs as they swam and blew water out their blow-holes, but they were gigantic. We got closer to them- about 50 yards- and followed for a ways. We got a really good view of them! Later, we spoke to someone who saw us from the shore who thought we were too close- but they didn´t seem to notice us when we were out there.
That night we had a fish barbeque, with kingfish fillets that had been caught that morning.

On Saturday I gave Eli her birthday present; we were picked up at 9am by Bay Diving, the tourist resort in Nacala. We spent all of Saturday and most of Sunday there. We stayed in a nice A-frame chalet that, when you open the windows or doors, looks directly out over the bay. They also have their own beach, and the two days we were there the beach was probably the nicest I´ve ever seen it. It seriously looked like something you usually only see in advertisements- crystal clear water and a dozen shades of blue. We spent most of our time just sitting on the beach and reading.
The food at Bay Diving is also very good (especially the dessert!) and for Eli`s birthday they made us Macaroni and Cheese with ham. They surprised us by serving dinner in a little cabana away from the main restaurant with candles and flowers- it was pretty fancy.

We are kind of disappointed to come back and have to teach J The only bad thing is that when we came back, we found the cat had been locked all weekend in our bedroom! (I think maybe the wind slammed the door while he was sleeping- otherwise Rosa got so sick of his meowing that she locked him in and forgot to let him out!) Anyways, only a few weeks of classes left, punctuated by a couple of holidays. We´re thinking of coming home from mid November to mid December, and having Christmas and New Years here in Mozambique.

Home Sweet Home

2006-09-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

Here are some pix of nacala: The bairros (or: where most everyone lives) and the beach!

The other day we went to the beach with our missionary friends. They were house sitting in a place by the beach- it has an amazing view of the Bay! We went snorkeling and saw a little coral garden with some interesting fish. I didn´t get a great view because it was so deep that I could barely make it down before I had to come straight back up (bad timing with the tide, added a couple of meters of depth). There were lots of jellyfish, but the kind that don´t sting. We´ve gotten a little more used to them, so now its fun to poke them with your finer and push them around the water. It´s strange what you can get used to.

From the shore we saw a pod of humpback whales (the Bay is really DEEP!) We saw one slapping the water with his tail, others were blowing water out their blow holes, or just swimming. It was pretty cool.

By the way, we are planning on comming back to the USA for the holidays! We don´t have exact dates, but I think we´ll come back in mid November, and maybe leave right after New Years.

Send your mail here

2006-09-07T03:39:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,
For now any mail you want to send us should go here:

Paul and Eli
Corpo da Paz/Peace Corps
345 Avenida de Zimbabwe
Maputo, Mozambique

Thanks!

Where in the world is Nacala?

2006-09-06T06:07:00.000-07:00

1) The city of Nacala (we live in the downtown area near the port, the area all around is neighborhoods- its a big city! 2)The Bay of Nacala from above (Nacala is onthe lower right side of the bay). The pix come from google earth, which give good quality shots of downtown Nacala, but don't even give a good one of my house in Michigan!

Funny story, our Macua teacher (who happens to be an 11th grade student at night school- he's 22 though and has a kid) was taking a french exam a few days ago. A big part of the test was reading comprehension. The story he had to read was written by his teacher, and it was about Eli and me! He told everyone sitting near him that he knew the people from the story on the test, but he said nobody believed it. The french teacher is from the congo and lives in the apartment right below ours.

Right after my birthday we received something like 3 packages in the mail, I got 3 birthday cards and 4 postcards (all at the same time! I think the post office saves things up to make delivery easier). Anyways, Eli took a brownie that my parents had sent us, filled it up with candles, and gave me a real birthday party. Well, close enough- I got 1 refrain of Happy Birthday, but even the cat ran out of the room, so she cut it short. I got a bottle of green food coloring (I'm getting a green MSU cake sometime in the near future) and a birding magazine. Now though, I have to think of something to do for Eli's birthday which is less than 2 weeks away!

If you have ideas please help me out- right now I'm just planning on sharing my green cake.

-paul

Happy Birthday (almost!) to me

2006-08-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Hi! Im on my way back from the regional meeting in Chimoio and staying the night tonight in Beira (sorry about the lack of apostrophes, this is a chinese keyboard, dont ask why). Eli just found out that her dentist appointment has been delayed until Thursday! She is going to be stuck in Maputo for a few days with nothing to do (except go out to nice restaurants and see movies I guess...) and she wont be with me on my birthday tomorrow!

Anyways, the regional meeting went really well for me, Im not sure how it was for Eli because I have her cell phone with me and it doesnt work to talk, only for sending messages. But I did hear it was cold and rainy down there! Its sad because they were at a nice place on the beach. It was also cold and rainy for me here in Chimoio, which is pretty bad too because its getting hot in Nacala and I didnt bring ANY cold weather clothes.

No other big news except that I turn 23 tomorrow and nobody will be able to call me since Eli has the phone! For my birthday I will be giving the kibby some cat toys and a new flea coller, but there wont be a party or anything. Hope alls well,

Paul

some pix 2 go with the last post

2006-08-21T04:26:00.000-07:00

A view of the Nacala Bay and some houses, near our school.

The so called Kibby sleeping on MY clothes.

Cat Calls

2006-08-21T04:03:00.000-07:00

Mozambicans aren`t really into pets, but I think our house worker is starting to grow fond of our kitty (or kibby, as she- and us now too- calls him). At least, she is starting to respect the cat as an intelligent animal. She was highly impressed that he knew how to use the litter box we had set up for him. She was even more impressed though when, one morning last week, he tried to answer our phone! We were both out of the house, but here`s the story she animatedly told us when we got back: When our cell phone, laying on the kitchen table, started ringing and vibrating, the cat came running, jumped on the table, and tried to answer it. Not being able to answer the phone with his paws, he knocked it off the table and onto a chair. Still trying to answer the phone, the cat jumps down onto the chair as well, put since he has paws he just knocks it around some more. She then tells us about how she once saw a movie where a dog took a ringing phone in its mouth to give to its owner. She hadn`t believed it when she saw it, but now she knew that it was true- cats and dogs can answer the phone!
What was really funny for us was her sincerity in believing the cat was trying to answer the phone, and how excited she got when she told us the story.

This Thursday Eli and I will be going to the Peace Corps regional meetings, which will take a week including travels. I`m going to stay in the north (in Chimoio) and Eli is going to Maputo because she`s also going to a dentist appointment. But she`s pretty lucky because her regional meeting is going to be at a beach resort! Anyways, it`ll be a nice break for us and a chance to see a lot of people that we don`t get to see very often.

This weekend we had a taco and movie party at our house, and the other 3 volunteers in the province came over, as well as one volunteer from Madagascar, named Lindsey. She finished her time in Madagascar (plus a stint in Morocco) and was traveling all over Africa. It was interesting to hear about some of the other Peace Corps programs, since her environmental tourism projects were quite different than our education programs.

Welcome home to my sister Julie, who just got back to the US after a year abroad in Germany and a job at a soccer camp in Hungary! Also welcome to my parent`s host daughter, Nina, who`s going to be at their house for about a year and comes from eastern Europe (the details escape me).

Super Mario, Zelda, and Lost- all in Mozambique!

2006-08-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Eli and I spent the day watching DVDs and playing Mario 64 (actually Eli prefers tetris), and it just didn`t feel like peace corps! How strange, now that we have Eli`s computer, we can watch DVDs or download emulators online that let us play console games on the computer, it feels a little more like home. Speaking of DVDs, our missionary friends just let us borrow the first season of Lost, and all I can say is WOW! We had never watched or even heard much about Lost back home, but we got really addicted to the first season.
Also we`re about a week into computer classes now (Eli is going to start giving them 2 days a week starting this coming week). I`ve realized that it`s going to be a lot harder than I originally thought. Last week I had my first trial group of 8 students go. The course was supposed to last 2 days, but on the third day and after over 7 hours of classes many of the kids were still struggling to open folders (DOUBLE click!!). They`re supposed to take a `test` to show what they`ve learned at the end, and part of the test is exactly like one of the practice exercises they do on the first day, but somehow only 1 or 2 out of 8 kids remembers what to do. It`s a little frustrating, so Eli and I are going to try and find new methods for teaching, and maybe make the courses a little longer. I have over 100 kids on my wait list to learn on only 4 computers… it`s going to be a busy trimester!

More Pix

2006-08-09T01:14:00.000-07:00

Here are some more pix of the murals my kids did at school- some of the finished products! (Sorry for the delay Renée!) The very first picture is the first mural they did, and I consider it a sort of ´warm up mural´. They are planning on painting some more in the next few weeks, and also maybe painting a big world map somewhere!

2006-08-09T01:01:00.000-07:00

I recently did something that you only get to see in movies: I kicked down a door. My own front door at that, and THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I`ve done it. We seem to have really weird luck with locks. Luckily peace corps is going to let us have a carpenter put in new wood around the door frame and 2 brand new locks, so we shouldn`t have this problem again, but Eli and I seem to get locked out of our own house a lot (locked out because the keys don`t work!)

Last weekend Eli and I went for a walk around the bay, just following the beach. We made about a 3.5 hour round trip walk- coming back a little early because of the heat. Around Nacala city the beach is nothing to rave about, it`s a little polluted and there`s a lot of warehouses and people associated with the port. But as you go out a little ways you get back into nature pretty quickly. There were still people and paths where we were, but not as many, and we were entering some areas with very few if any other people, which was kind of nice. The edge of the beach started turning into a mangrove wetland, the baobob trees start to appear, and you can hear tons of birds (although seeing them was trickier, despite my best efforts). The next time we go out we´re going to try and push a little farther and get more into the wilderness.

This last week I`ve started teaching my computer classes more seriously- having 3 day courses (supposed to be 2 originally but it takes a LONG time to teach some of this stuff!). It`s really hard with people who have never really seen a computer before, and where everything is new- plus for me to explain in Portuguese is a little harder because I`m not sure of all the computer vocab, plus it`s all new vocabulary to them, so they can`t help. Also we have 4 computers and 100 kids on the wait list for classes so…. As you can imagine it’s a lot of work! Eli is thinking of giving classes in the mornings too, although since that would mean GETTING UP early, I have my doubts!

Hope all`s well back home.

Top Left: A view of Nacala city from farther down the Bay, Top Right: Me looking for birds. This part of the Bay is getting a lot more ´wildernessy´. Bottom Left: Eli under a Baobob tree! Baobob and Acacia are the two famous types of African trees that we have around here.

GIRLS'S CONFERENCE!!

2006-08-04T00:59:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

Last week two of my students, two students from Monapo and I went to the Girl’s Conference near Chimoio (in the Centre of Moz). Overall it went really well. We left on Sunday and flew down (none of the girls had ever been on a plane, so they all got sick!). We stayed in Casa Msika, which is a beautiful “resort”, on a river (that looks like a lake) and mountains in the background (for us Nampula folks it was a big change in scenery, considering, we don’t have mountains or big rivers!). There were about 55 girls from 8 provinces in Mozambique, 2 female Mozambican med students (they were great!),10 Peace Corps volunteers (all women, except for one guy), and about 10 female Mozambican teachers. Throughout the week we had a bunch of speakers come in: people from the Ministry of Education, NGO workers, a young woman living with HIV, people from different women’s group and the founder of the Human Rights League (a really cool woman). They talked about different things, ranging from HIV/AIDS to how to use a tampon (that was a funny session). Besides the speakers, we had activities dealing with sex/gender, future goals, relationships, women’s rights… When there wasn’t a speaker, volunteers led the sessions. Since each province had a specific day, Nampula and Tete did a session on “future goals.” We had the girls draw what they wanted their future to be like (so for example, some wanted to be doctors, so they drew a hospital, others wanted to have a big house or play football, etc). I think it went pretty well.
I think one of the highlights was the Human Rights speaker. She was really well-spoken, and spoke to the girls like adults (which really impressed them). She told them how she had to quit school because there was no money, so she first worked really hard until she could afford to finish school (she was in the 30s when she finished secondary school). Eventually she got a scholarship to go to University; from there she got an opportunity to go to Europe where she learned about the Human Rights League, so when she came back to Mozambique she worked to start an office here. This was in the early 90s, and since then she’s been fighting for Human Rights in Mozambique. She’s a really cool lady!
Anyhow, I’m not gonna bore you all with details, but overall the conference went really well, and I’m sure all the girls will remember it. But before I say good-bye, I have some exciting news: I’m gonna be a big part in organizing next year’s conference! There are three main people organizing the conference, two deal with logistics (location, speakers, food, transport, etc) and one deals with money (the conference and projects have a 25,000 dollar budget – which in Mozambique is a HUGE amount of money). Anyhow, I’m gonna be the money person! I’m pretty happy, and somewhat nervous, but Alex (this year’s money guru) promised to tell me all her secrets.
Aight, gotta go. I hope everyone is doing well (I hope the camino is treating Ivy and Rob well). Miss you all!
Eli

Why we need a vacation after the school break

2006-08-01T05:20:00.000-07:00

Today is only the second day of the third (and last) trimester of school this year. The last two weeks have been ferias, or school break. Of course, as teachers we don´t get a whole 2 weeks off- the first week is spent doing grades, and during this break, proctoring national exams as well. To keep a long and boring story short I will summarize the duty of proctoring exams as follows: It takes a very long time, and it is very boring. If you´re imagining 8 kids taking a test in a room being proctored by two teachers, both of which must sign the students test and check the students ID multiple times during the test, then you are accurately imagining what we did for a whole week.

But that was just the prelude to a really great school break. Eli had been planning for a long time to go to the 2nd annual girls conference in Manica province (somewhere to the south and near Zimbabwe). The 1st girls conference was a huge success and the inspiration for the boys conference. Like the boys conference it was totally organized by PCVs and talked about HIV/AIDS and gender things (you practically have to, to get funding). Eli took 4 girls to the conference, 2 from Nacala and 2 from Monapo.

I also went down to Manica- I had a ride in a private car lined up to take me down (about a 3 day trip!) so I bought a one way plane ticket to come back up. Unfortunately at the last minute my ride fell through, so I had to buy a round trip ticket, but that meant that I got to fly both ways with Eli and her girls. It was a good flight, but none of those four students Eli took had ever flown before. At first it was kind of funny when they couldn´t figure out the seat belts, but things got a lot less funny when they all got air sick and had to run to the bathroom to be sick (somehow the airplane had no barf bags so I was pretty nervous when they were sick). We had made sure to give them window seats, but I think having a view didn´t help them any.

We all flew to Beira and got a Girls Conference rented van to Chimoio- I just tagged along J I got left in Chimoio to find my way to another PCVs house and Eli took her girls to the conference in nearby casa msika.

I spent that week with a bunch of other PCVs who were nice enough to let me stay in their houses, feed me and show me around. Most of my time was spent in the cities of Chimoio, Catandica, and Manica. Manica is really close to the girls conference, so one day the country director picked us up and took us there to spend some time and have lunch.

The volunteers in Manica are working on building a hot tub in their front yard, and I have no doubt it will be a first class hot tub- they have already built day beds, installed ´running´ water and made a zen rock garden. After coming back from their house I was inspired to build a shelf in my kitchen, after which Eli took away my hammer and said in a very loud voice ¨You are NOT a handy man. You have no idea what you are doing. STOP NOW before you break something!¨ So I haven´t built anything else, but my 1 shelf is really nice.

Manica is famous for some really old cave paintings- the whole area is part of the rift valley which is supposedly the origin of humanity, so here´s some pix of both the paintings and my friends school as seen from the mountain in his back yard, and a picture of casa msika on the bottom. Sorry, the pix are comming out a little wierd. Also, I took two sets of batteries and they both died during my first day there, so there aren´t many pix!

After Manica I traveled north to Catandica. Its supposed to be about 2.5 hours north of chimoio although we made the trip in 6. Our chapa broke down repeatedly- at first it was every hour, then every 20 minutes, then every 5 minutes, until we got to the point were immediately after fixing it, it would break down. So we did what any good peace corps volunteers would do, considering that night was falling, it was freezing cold, and we still had a ways to travel. We started a bonfire on the side of the road and waited for a new chapa to pick us up, which, thanks to the bonfire, didn´t take too long.

Catandica is one of those little towns that mainly serves as a truck stop. Somehow, despite this, it has been selected by the world bank to receive a brand new, model school. They just finished building a beautiful, new, modern school in Catandica, complete with new teachers housing, which is where the PCV in catandica lives. Every classroom there has ceiling fans, they have a computer lab, sports facilities, you name it. It’s a really nice school! The teachers housing came with a fridge and stove, hot showers, and everything.

Catandica is also a town in the mountains, and there´s a relic from the Portuguese nearby called the Pool. I went to check it out one day, and it´s a natural waterfall, rock slide, and little water pool up in the base of the mountains. The interesting thing is that once upon a time it had been a major hang out for the Portuguese, there were the ruins of little snack shops, a fancy stone bridge, and old tables which had sunk into the ground. There were changing rooms (now empty, with no roof, and falling apart), and little benches that were crumbling. It was still a pretty area, but now little kids were using the pool and natural rock slides to wash their clothes and nobody was swimming. A lot of Mozambique is like this.

Back in Casa Msika Eli was having a great time. She filmed a lot of it and is going to make a little video. She wants to blog about it herself, so I´ll save it for her.

Anyways, the whole conference was more work than play for Eli because she had to be a chaperone and help with the sessions, and I´m just tired because I traveled all over the place. Now that schools started again we both feel that we need a vacation. Fortunately, our students seem to agree about needing more vacation since they haven´t really come to the first day of class, which makes our jobs easier.
In other news, we recently had some work done in our kitchen (no not by me, Eli doesn´t trust me not to break things). We had our kitchen sink hooked up to the buildings plumbing so it doesn´t have to drain into a bucket anymore. I watched the work being done and had to wonder what my grandpa, who was a plumber, would think if he saw what was going on. The guys doing the work didn´t have any of the right pieces of tubing, they just cut apart a PCV tube to make the right lengths, then put it over a coal fire to get it soft when they needed to bend it. When two pieces had to be stuck together, they went back to the fire and heated them up again. After they got all the pipes assembled and found that it leaked, they tore apart plastics bags to wrap the joints with. Then they cemented around that. I´m not sure how long the situation will last, but the sink does drain. I guess I shouldn´t complain since we ended up paying about 8 dollars for all of the work that they did on the sink.

Renée's thoughts

2006-07-16T02:40:00.000-07:00

Hello All,

This turned out longer than I thought it would, so if you don’t want to read it all, don’t worry – I will never know!

Well, I know I promised to write something about our trip a few days ago, but what with one thing and another – mostly another, called WORK! – I didn’t get around to it until today. Luckily for me, Paul and Eli (actually I think it was Paul J) managed to write something on their blog (http://peacecorpsmoz.blogspot.com/) before I wrote my bit, so I have just copied it below and now all I have to do is write my comments on the trip. That was fortuitous, was it not? J

So where to begin? When we used to travel as a family with the kids, we started a sort of tradition of saying at the end of each trip, what the best and worst of the trip was. So maybe I will just continue that tradition here.

Certainly, the best part of the trip for me was seeing Elisabeth and Paul and seeing that they were happy and well in their life together in Mozambique. They both seemed to enjoy what they were doing (perhaps Elisabeth more than Paul as far as the teaching was concerned, but then Paul seemed to compensate for his frustration in the teaching area with his projects of the mural and the science fair). As a teacher, I was very impressed with their ability to teach anything at all given the circumstances in which they were trying to do so (huge classes, no materials, teaching in a foreign language, etc). They had also had very little teacher training before being set down in front of 90 students and told to teach them something, and they are doing very well! They talked a lot about how their students cheat like crazy and how they are really only interested in passing the course rather than actually learning anything. I understand that this can be extremely frustrating, as I have had the same experience when teaching in Spanish schools. In fact, it’s one of the reasons I stopped teaching kids and decided to stick to adults, who have their own learning issues but who at least want to learn what you are trying to teach them. Paul seemed to think this was a US-Mozambique cultural difference, but I am not sure. It would be interesting to hear what the situation is in US high schools with a non-upper middle class student body.

Besides teaching well, they seem to have adapted well to the Nacala life style, with all the cultural differences that I am sure have caused them some degree of frustration. They seem to take bucket baths in their stride (Is this my daughter, who used to use her 15-minute morning hot shower the way I use coffee to wake up every morning?!) and can bargain with the best of the door-to-door fruit and shrimp vendors to get a good price. Every time we went out, people would call out “salaama” (sp?) to them (actually more to Paul – remember this is a male-dominated society, at least in public). The whole city seemed to know them – and by extension, us – and I got the impression that they were liked and respected. It was great to meet their friends in the market and we were made to feel very welcome.

In general, the people we met were very friendly to us. Their students were shy but very interested in speaking to us, and they asked us all sorts of questions about ourselves and our life in Europe. They all wanted to go to Europe or the US, where I suppose they think the streets are paved with gold. One of the questions they always asked us was how old we were, and when we said “58”, they always cheered and clapped. At first, I didn’t see what that was all about, but when you think that the life expectancy in Mozambique is 42, I guess reaching 58 is quite an achievement! (Or maybe they were just clapping because we answered the question – who knows?)

A few times, we visited the homes of students or friends, and they always treated us as if we were honored guests. For example, most of the people do not sit on chairs; they sit on mats (made of straw or rattan or something similar – I am not sure what the material is). But when we went to visit, they always brought out chairs for us to sit on. And once we went to visit a friend of theirs (Raimundo – he is in the photos), and he sent his daughter to the store to buy Cokes and Fantas for us (though I am sure he could ill afford it) and he put out French fries and pieces of bread (we figured that was all he had) for us to snack on. So you can see that although they may not have much, they shared what they had. We actually felt kind of bad about eating and drinking this when we knew that it was difficult for him to provide it, but there was clearly no way we could refuse.

Another interesting part about these visits was that it was always the man of the family who “entertained” us. At some point, he called over his wife and children to introduce them, but they never said anything – they just sat on the side without participating in the conversation unless they were invited to do so by the man.

Most of the people we met were native Mozambicans, but we also met a family (Abdul in the photos) who is from Mozambique but of Indian origin/ancestry, and it was interesting to see the difference in attitudes and life styles. This family is VERY nice and has helped Elisabeth and Paul in many ways, but they really do not like Mozambique. They are talking about moving to South Africa, or at least to the south of Mozambique, which is much more developed than the north. This family lives in an apartment with a huge American-style kitchen, a living room with a big TV, running hot and cold water in the bathroom, etc. Although they were from a different social class, they were equally friendly, welcoming and generous to us.

The scenery in Mozambique is stunning! The country has such a potential as a tourist destination – all they need is some organization and some infrastructure and they could make a fortune! Theoretically, they are trying to develop an environmentally sustainable tourism, and I hope they succeed. At the moment, though, the tourist industry is sort of non-existent. When Paul talked about Ilha (the original Portuguese capital of Mozambique) being “more touristy”, you have to remember that everything is relative. It is more touristy than Nacala, for example, but it is not what anyone from Europe or the US would consider a “tourist spot”. There weren’t even any fridge magnets!!! It is a beautiful place, and really very hard to describe – the buildings are sort of remnants of past colonial glory that have been left neglected and are now pretty well falling apart but they still give you an idea of the glory and splendor that was. As Paul said, the Mozambicans are slowly but surely fixing up the town, and I hope that they can do that without destroying the special ambience that pervades it now. Another thing I noticed about Ilha was that the light was very special; I don’t know if that was because it was raining off and on or for some other reason, but it was a very beautiful light.

If you have managed to stay with me this far, you may be wondering if there were no negative points. Don’t worry, there were. This is still a poor, third-world country trying hard – against many odds – to develop its economy and social structure. If you have never traveled in one of these countries before, it can be quite a shock to your system. Fortunately, I had had experience (albeit many years ago – somewhere around the time of the dinosaurs, as my kids would say) and I can say that I was not shocked by any of it and thoroughly enjoyed the entire trip! (In fact, I think I bored Paul and Elisabeth out of their brains at times with remembrances of my travels that were sparked by similar situations we experienced in Moz.) But for someone who has only traveled in Europe and other more developed tourist destinations, if you are planning to go to Moz, try to prepare yourself mentally first to keep an open mind (and resilient body J) to face some circumstances that will be difficult. “Time doesn’t matter”, as we were told on our first day there, for example, so don’t get uptight if people aren’t where they say they will be when they say they will be there. “Chapas” are crowded, unsafe (usually), uncomfortable (always), and driven at breakneck speeds on very dodgy roads; and there are not many alternatives (taxis are in short supply, expensive, and often the driver just doesn’t want to take you where you want to go). The water is not safe to drink. The water supply, even when we were there in the season without a water shortage, is unreliable, to say the least. Hygiene is pretty well a non-concept, and material goods are in short supply. (One of my friends asked if Paul and Eli did their shopping “in a supermarket” – a perfectly reasonable question unless you realize that there is no such thing as a supermarket where they live.)

Having said all this, I have to say that the whole experience is more than worth the inconveniences I have just mentioned. The people are wonderful, the scenery is fantastic, and I hope to go back next year.

Paul has pretty much said all there is to say about the safaris and South Africa, but I will just add that we saw wildebeests at night, not buffalo, though we did see a lot of buffalo during the day and once at a watering hole at sunset. What I liked most about the walking safari was that you really were in the bush, and the guide was extremely knowledgeable not only about animals, but also about plants and constellations and really everything to do with the bush. So it was more of a total experience, as opposed to the Kruger Park bit, where we saw a lot of animals (obviously the best part of that experience), but you had to stay in your car and it was more like being in a really big zoo than in the bush. I think the two experiences complemented each other, and I would recommend that combination to anyone who was thinking of going there. (And I would stay longer in Kruger. Since this was a last-minute change in plans on our part, we had a limited time in Kruger before we had to catch our plane home, and sometimes we felt a bit rushed.)

The other thing I noticed about South Africa was that there seemed to be a lot more racial hostility than in Mozambique, and certainly there was more danger. All the houses had barbed wire and big fences around them (and I mean barbed wire like at army camps and federal prisons!) and people said they never went out at night except by car. I could never live like that!

I hope you enjoyed this LONG commentary. I could probably write a lot more – this was really a wonderful trip, and I am so happy that Paul and Elisabeth were able to put up with us for so long.

Love,

Renée

nossa visita

2006-07-15T03:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay in blogging, but we´ve been really busy with the end of the second trimester here! Eli´s mom and Lyn came to visit us for over 2 weeks. They flew into Nampula on June 20th where we picked them up in a rented chapa (like a mini-van but usually with 18 passengers squeezed in). We spent the next week or so in Nacala, so they could see what our day to day life was like, meet our friends, see our school, etc. Renee and Lyn got to sit in on both a class of mine and a class of Eli´s, they got to speak with lots of students and teachers, and also they saw the painting of the first murals at our school.
Another day we took them to the market where we spent the afternoon introducing them to all of our market vendor friends. We also had lunch at the market, where the food is a little more traditional than what our empregada cooks for us. We made trips to the Fernao Veloso beach that´s near our house and to the Bay Diving tourist camp where we tried to snorkel and dive, and even though we paid for all the snorkel equipment we really did neither because it was too windy that day. But we had a good lunch, they met our missionary friends, and also we got some great views of the bay.
To get a more Mozambican experience we also went on a walk through the bairos, or neighborhoods, which are mostly mud houses built on a rock hill. They are much more reflective of how most Mozambicans live- they are relatively few areas like where we live in the country. Most apartment buildings like ours were built by the Portuguese and are fairly rare.
After about a week we rented a chapa again and went to Chocas beach, which is a very famous and pretty beach, about 75 Km away. It was our first time there as well, because it´s hard to get to with out a private car. Unfortunately it rained when we got there! And it hadn´t rained in our area in almost 2 months! Very strange. We didn´t spend much time there because of the rain and continued on to Ilha de Mozambique, which is a world heritage site and more touristy.
Although it was still raining off and on, we had a good time walking around, visiting the old Portuguese fortress and eating at some nice restaurants. The city is slowly being rehabilitated, and looks better every time we go (they are redoing some of the old Portuguese architecture, redoing railings and mosaics on the ground). The island has a lot of history and was the original capital of the country. Also, the island is tiny so we managed to spend just 1 night there and still managed to see a lot of it.

The visit to Nacala was pretty brief, but after our trip to Ilha we all flew down to Maputo, then caught a bus to South Africa, to go on a safari in Kruger park! We were picked up in Nelspruit for the safari and driven to a private game reserve that is adjacent to Kruger park and has no boundaries or fences between it and the park, so all the kruger animals are free to come in. On the safari we stayed in a bush camp in the middle of a 60 thousand hectare reserve. There were only 11 tourists in that area, and the four of us got our own guide, so during the animal viewing part of the safari it was just us. In the camp we stayed in large tents that had real beds and a fairly weak light if we needed it, it also had hot showers and flushing toilets which were solar powered. There was a kitchen and pavilion to eat in, and it was very comfortable. We were right in there with the animals and the guides warned us not to wander out of camp. During the night baboons would poop on our tent, and we could wake up to find hyena and hippo tracks not far from our camp at all!
On a usual day of the safari we would wake up before dawn, and have a quick breakfast of hot chocolate and cereal, then go on a walk or drive just as the sun came up. Sometimes we would drive out a short ways in the open land rover, then walk. Our guide tried to track the animals and would point out their prints to us. He also carried a gun in case something ran into us! The morning walk was about 4 hours, then we would go back to camp and have a full breakfast. Then we relaxed for a bit, had a big lunch at 3pm, and went on another walk drive. This lasted for about 3.5 hours, and when the sun went down we would have drinks then take a night drive. A night drive consists of riding around in the cold, while the guide tries to spot animals by blinding them with a spotlight. For the most part we didn’t see much on the night drives, although once we did see a hyena crossing the road or a herd of buffalo another time.
When we got back we had a big dinner, sat around the campfire, then went to bed.
The one important thing is that it was FREEZING THERE! We had to wear 3 layers at morning and night, although you could usually get to shorts and shirt during mid day. Eli and I had to sleep with hot water bottles at night! We´ve never had a day of cold weather in Nacala and weren’t prepared for it at all in South Africa!

In terms of animals, we saw a lot, but because it´s a walking safari and thus we´re not covering as much ground, we didn´t see all of the big 5, and sometimes we went whole walks with out seeing any major mammals. I say mammals because we did see lots of birds, but nobody seemed to really care about that but me. I had my bird book and a good pair of binoculars so I was happy. In fact, after the safari the guide gave me one of his bird guide books. We did see an elephant up close, which was great. We had spotted him and tried tracking him on foot, and got pretty close, but we had to turn back because the elephant was in deep bush which I guess can be a little dangerous. So we took our land rover and intercepted him in the road. He passed right in front of our car and took his time, so we got a good view.

We tried tracking a rhino but we never found him. We also didn´t see any lions or leopards on the walking safari. We did see a lot of giraffe and zebra, hords of impala, a lot of buffalo and a hippo as well as some warthogs.

After the walking safari we rented a car and went into the actual Kruger park, which has paved roads, and you´re not actually allowed to get out of your car. But in the actual park there are lots of animals, and many of them aren´t afraid of your car, so we did see a LOT of animals. We saw 2 different prides of lions, although mostly they were laying in the grass so you had to wait for them to get up and move to get a good view, but once we saw the male lion with his big shaggy mane get up and walk around, which was cool. One of the times there was a really big group of cars near the lions, all pushing to get as close as possible, and even some people hanging out of their car windows trying to get pictures. It was ridiculous! One of the best parts of the walking tour was the complete absence of other tourists.

We saw more elephants and giraffe in Kruger park as well. Some of the best viewing came when we pulled up to a small water hole which was full of hippos, some of which were playing in the water near our car, and others which were standing on the far shore. The banks were lined with crocodiles, and there were a bunch of big birds in the water.
There are little rest stops in Kruger park where you can get out of your car and buy some food, and look out over the river for animals. We stopped once to stretch and get a bite, we bought some waffles and Renee bought herself a cookie. Before she even got a chance to eat the cookie she was charged by a giant baboon! Thinking that it wanted to cookie she threw it at him, but he wasn´t interested in the cookie and kept running at her. Apparently the baboon had been a problem and someone was ready to smack it with a big stick. People were talking about how the rangers would have to come out and shoot it because it had become too aggressive. Just before we left we watched it run up to someone else and grab a whole loaf of bread and then run away. Baboons are fairly large and have pretty big teeth, so usually you just let it take what it wants!

The only problem with our trip to Kruger park is that we hadn´t booked a camp site inside the park, hoping to just get one when we showed up. Unfortunately they were completely full, so we had to stay in a hotel outside of the park. It actually worked out kind of well for us because the first hotel we went to was the Protea Kruger Gate hotel, which is an incredibly fancy 4 star hotel. It´s by far the nicest hotel I´ve ever been to. It´s also very expensive but the receptionist took pity on us and counted Eli and I as children, and gave us a discount for a group that we weren’t members of, and so we all got to stay in one room at about half the normal price. We also ate a really wonderful dinner for free, partly because Renee and Lyn´s meal was free with the room, and then they forgot to charge Eli and me.

After our 2 days driving around Kruger Eli´s parents went to Jo burg to fly back to Spain and we stayed in Nelspruit then caught a bus back to Maputo. We had been planning on traveling around the south of Mozambique a bit so we had bought our plane tickets for 4 days after we got back to Maputo. But we were feeling tired, and also feeling bad about missing school, so we tried to change our plane tickets to leave right away. Unfortunately all the flights for the week were full, and we didn´t feel like traveling, so we just stayed in Maputo in a nice hotel and hung out with the other peace corps volunteers who are always in Maputo for one reason or another. (We always stay at the same hotel too, where we get a nice discount). The first time we ever saw Maputo we were shocked by how poor it looked, but this time we really felt that we were in New York, it had soo much compared to what we´re used to!

Anyways, we flew back to Nacala just in time for the last week of school, which gave us time to get our grades sorted out, and then we had Conselho de Nota, which is where we actually write out all of the grades. It is a HORRIBLE process where I probably copy out about 5000 grades into various places. Not only do you copy grades for every student in every discipline into 4 locations, but you do it first in pencil and then again in pen, and when you have 90 students with 6 disciplines… it takes about 3 days. Tomorrow is the last day of that. Then next week we have to proctor national exams.

I have my camera now and I´m trying to send out some pictures. I had emailed some out, but if anyone has a good suggestion on how or where to post my digital pix, I´d appreciate it. I would prefer something where I don´t have to send people an email link in order for them to be able to see the pix.
Hope everything is good back home!
Love,
Paul and Eli

pictures of our trip

2006-07-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

Paul has given me his ID and password so I can post some pictures and comments about our trip to Moz and South Africa. For the moment, all I have is pictures, but I promise to write something about the trip soon and post that. It was a great trip, and I want to go back next year if they can put up with me. I suppose if I bring a suitcase full of sudoku books, they might let me stay :))
Anyway, here are the links for the photos:

My pictures

http://es.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/robrate/album?.dir=79e1re2&.src=ph&store=&prodid=&.done=http%3a//es.photos.yahoo.com/ph//my_photos

Lyn's pictures

http://es.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/robrate/album?.dir=/84a9re2&.view=t

Hope you enjoy them.
Renée

Back from the Bush!

2006-07-10T09:38:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Nacala today alter an almost 3 week hiatus! Eli´s mom and Lyn visited us, and we spent about a week in Nacala, visiting the ilha of Mozambique and some other places, but the real highlight of our trip was a safari in Kruger park, South Africa. We just got back from a 4 day walking safari in a private game reserve, and then rented a car to actually go into the public part of Kruger park.

Unfortunately Eli and I have a lot of school work to make up- it´s almost the end of the 2^nd trimester and we´ve got to finish grading- so today I won´t do the full report of the last 3 weeks. But I do have some good pictures to give you a taste of what we´ve been up to! Enjoy, and I´ll be putting up a lot more pix in the near future! (As soon as time permits!)

Eli, Renée and Lyn in the Jeep (actually land rover or some such) taking some pix of the animals. We usually traveled a little ways in the jeep before starting on our walks. It´s also a great way to see the animals because you can get a good view with the lack of windows or doors to get in the way!

This is the bay of Nacala! As seen from Bay Diving the touristy resort that´s near our house. Of course we don´t get out here that often, but we are right on the bay (just farther down).

Eli and her mom on Ilha de Mozambique. You can tell it´s cold because Eli has wrapped herself up in a capulana! We spent the night on the ilha and had a really good time! Unfortunately it also rained on that trip, after almost 2 months with out ANY rain!! Weird!

Safari Pictures! We saw a lot of animals, and especially on the walking safari we got to be fairly close to some of them. Lyn had the best camera and took the most pix, hopefully I´ll get a CD of them sometime soon and then we´ll see some nice animal close ups! (He had a 400mm zoom lense!)

Sunday

2006-06-18T05:51:00.000-07:00

Hello-
Today was a kinda sad day, Paul and I went to the funeral of the daughter of a friend of ours. When we got to his house, the women and the men were sitting on opposite sides. Not knowing what to do, I went with the women, and Paul with the men (obviously). But then, our friend's son came to us and brought us inside the house where there was the priest and other people, including the parents and grandma. They were all sitting around the little girl, getting her ready for the coffin. Then they brought out the coffin and we went one by one putting flowers in the caskett (sp?), we did this, women first, and then the men. There was a group of women singing during most of the ceremony.
There were two cars ready to take us to the cemetery, so we all loaded up onto those. The front car had the casket and a wooden cross with the name of his daughter written by pen. When we got there, men and women got divided again. While they put the coffin down, the priest said a few words, but mostly the women sang. It's hard to describe the singing, to us it sounds very African (and i dont mean to stereotype). Usually there is a woman leader in the chorus who sings a phrase, and then the group repeats it. Sorry, I know that doesnt say much, but its hard to explain (and considered how musically challenged I am...). The parents and grandma went to say their good-byes, and then the men began covering the grave. After a few minutes, the women went to help, but mostly in a symbolic way (just a few handfuls of dirt). Then our friend came to us and told us to go back to the car.
Once back at their home, there was water ready to wash the shovels and everyone's hands. Once again, we didnt really know what to do, but people were really nice and told us. I think we got the special treatment tho, cuz Paul was the only person sitting on a chair (someone specifically brought him a chair), everyone else was either standing or sitting on the ground. The priest said a few more words, the women sang a few more songs and they set out a plate for offerings. After that, they offered chima and peixe (which we tried to avoid, but got anyway!).
Well, that was about it. I hope all is well for everyone.
Love
Eli and Paul

general post

2006-06-16T07:33:00.000-07:00

Hello all!
Everything is going well here, just excited for the visita :-) After about two weeks of 'winter' (chilly in the mornings) it's back to hot - 85 degrees F by 9am. But for those two weeks, Paul actually wore a sweatshirt in the morning three different days (only one of the days, did he actually have to take it off, cuz he was sweating!).
I'm going to Monapo tomorrow to meet two girls that are going to the conference with me and the two girls from my school. I'm still not sure who to pick, I have a lot of people that are interested, and that I think would do good there, but I have about four days to decide!!! While I'm in Monapo, Paul has the wonderful opportunity to endure a 3hour school meeting (about nothing important).
Paul's science fair has been postponed to next week, so will let you know how it goes. There's been a lot of kids who are joining the last minute and need more times for their experiments.
We don't seem to be able to open our emails so:
- Happy Birthday, Dad (David)!
- Thanks for the post, Ivy and Rob - we really miss you guys, and hope you are doing well. Good luck with the camino!!
- I wanted to reply to your email, Sarah M., but will have to do it old style and write you a letter. Hope all is well!

Hope everyone is well!
Love,
Eli and Paulo

They don't do bank cards on Saturday

2006-06-10T01:34:00.000-07:00

so I will go another month without an ATM card, and while my account is full of money Eli's account is empty, because thats the one we always use. And since my monthly trip to Nampula, 150 miles from Nacala, happens to be on a Saturday, I can't get a new ATM card to access my money. Luckily I have just enough on me to get back to Nacala. And buy a 1KG bag of peanuts. And buy a book on the street. But I can't buy anymore today, really.

Besides the frusterating bank situation- they're less than helpfull most of the time- things are going well. Next friday is our science fair, which I'm hoping goes well, but right now it's anybodies guess as to whats going to happen. We have a huge number of students who said they were doing projects (like 40) but we'll see who shows up!

Also, we just got a grant from the boys conference to buy materials to paint murals at school. So I came into Nampula today with one of the students to buy paint and things. Hopefully in a week or two they can start doing some murals! We'll see how it all goes, we only managed to buy red, yellow, green blue and brown paints today (to mix with the white base paint), so we don't have black and our range of colors isn't huge. Still, it's a start.

Eli and I will be celebrating our 1 year anniversary on the 12th!

2006-06-04T08:29:00.000-07:00

Here´s a picture of my student Abdulcadre, painting his mural (there was a picture of him last time as well).

Here´s me in front of my mural, which includes both the planet earth and sun, the giant condom, and the peace corps symbol that says JOMA underneath it. This picture is funny because my hair was getting long and I had it cut again as soon as I got back to Nacala!

Mmm Chamosas

2006-06-02T06:08:00.000-07:00

Today we learned (or our empragada did) how to make chamosas, a fried triangle of dough filled with meat and potatoes. It almost reminds me of a michigan pasty, only smaller and with a different shape. Since we´ve finished our box of Snickers (which is very distressing) this may be just what we need to fill the snack gap.

The science fair that I´m organizing along with my ped director is two weeks from today! We posted a list of all the people who have turned in their proposals for experiments, and the list numbers 38 people!! And I know that some of my biology students aren´t on the list. However, I think that many of the people who said they were interested probobly will not come through. But still, it´s exciting! I´ve also been talking to some of the local business people and 2 different restaurants have donated certificates to us for prizes, so thats nice! Hopefully it goes well.

Today I am using the internet in another place in Nacala (a school in the cidade alta, about 15 min. away from our house), but unfortunately it can´t seem to open our email and often can´t load web pages, although it´s half the price of our usual internet connection. We´ll see how it works out.

The only other news is that I´m trying to give computer lessons at school, but the word has gotten out and I´ve got a 2 page waiting list of students who want to learn! It´s a little out of control because I really am not good at teaching people how to use the computer in Portuguese (nobody has ANY idea about anything! Using the mouse, keyboard, you name it is new!) is a challenge. I´ll be working on it though.

teaching, climbing and shrimp

2006-05-28T03:16:00.000-07:00

Hello!
Sorry, it's been forever since i've written anything on the blog (Paul has more patience with the slow internet than I do). Everything is going pretty well here, I think both Paul and I are getting extremely frustrated with teaching - we both still like teaching, but it kinda gets to you when you've taught the present continuous for two weeks (this is second trimester of ninth grade, so they've already had a year of English) and students still write stuff like "I is drive a bicycle"! But there are nice things, for example when I got sick and Paul taught the class for me, a bunch of my students came by our apartment to see how I was feeling, so that was nice.
A couple of fun things happening around here: we found some rocks to do rock climbing about a 45 minute hike out of town. It's quite amazing, you're pretty high up so you can get a beautiful view of the bay. We're planning on taking the camera next time. Since we dont have our harnesses or ropes, we just boulder around, which is still really fun.
Paul has gone in a shrimp buying frenzy, so we have about 12 pounds of shrimp in our freezer now! (that's in addition to our box of snickers bars :-)
My girls club is up and running, it's still a little unorganized, but going well. I'm really excited for the Girl's Conference in July (kinda what Paul did in March for the boys). I'll be taking two students from my school and two from Monapo (where two other PC volunteers are at). It's difficult to choose the girls tho, so for now they're writing an essay, and then I'll probably sit down with a couple and "interview" them. We'll see.
Paul is about to finish War and Peace, which was our emergency back-up book! We're hoping to get some new books from the Monapo girls and when my mom and Lyn come :-)
Anyway, I think that's it for today. I hope everyone is doing well. Love,
Eli

5 minutes of fame

2006-05-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

Ok, I already had my 5 minutes of fame, when I grated a coconut on national TV during PST, but I had another 5 minutes of fame when I played basketball this weekend. It actually wasn´t really fame, since I didn´t do anything good, I was just the only white person playing and everybody was talking. Our game against Pemba was at night, under the lights (yes, they got light bulbs for the game, and put up nets- we also had referees and jerseys, and about 100 spectators). Somehow we had a coach whom I have never seen before in my life, and I think he only let me play because I´m white (we had 3 guys who are better than me who didn´t get to play at all). We did end up losing to pemba, not necessarily because they´re better than us, but our guys started out pretty darn nervous. Anyways, it was a good time, but I think the games are going to be pretty few and far between- there are only a few towns with teams within a couple hundred miles.

This weekend we got an unexpected call from Bern, the volunteer who had organized the boys conference that I went to. He called us and said he was in Ilha, and the next day he showed up at our door. It was fun to have a visita, since we have so few here in Nacala. On Saturday we went to the beach, where we witnessed a) people brushing their teeth with twigs, then pooping on the beach (they did this in big groups) and b) muslims praying on the beach only a dozen feet from the poopers. This was an interesting contrast.
After lunch at the beach we asked a group of chinese guys for a ride home. It turns out they live really close to us and are working in the lumber trade. We got to talking with them and ended up going out to the local disco together, where it was really funny to see the chinese guys dancing, and we got treated well by the managment. We didn´t come back until after 3am, and since on a normal night we go to bed at 9pm, this morning was a little rough.

Here´s a reminder of our mailing address and contact info for people who want to email
Email: paulthelatino@gmail.com or eliobrate@yahoo.com phone: 82-101229 and you have to look up the country code.

Mailing:
Paul and Elisabeth
Escola Secundária de Nacala-Porto
CP 187
Nacala, Nampula
Mozambique

Hope all´s well and you´re enjoying the warmer weather. Our weather is getting cooler, which is to say, we only sweat a little bit when we´re inside.

What a weekend

2006-05-15T09:25:00.000-07:00

This weekend we were invited to church by our empregada, who goes to the baptist church which our missionary friends work at. We were pretty excited to go and get more involved with the community. I am very glad that we did go, because we had a great time. The church is small, one room with cement pews and a thatched roof. It did not remind me of a US church because 80% of the time here was spent singing (in portuguese and makua, and it sounded good). They also had a drum to spice it up! As part of the church ceremony they announce any guests that are there that day, so our empregada, Rosa, took us up to the front and announced us. This church is a little far from our house, but when Eli mentioned that we were teachers at the secondary school, someone in the front leaned over and whispered to her neighbor, `oh, he´s a biology teacher!´ It´s interesting how widely known, if not us at least our presence, is here! After being announced they started singing a song (the words were basically ´it´s a pleasure to meet you´and everyone in the church came up and shook our hands- it was fun). The majority of the service was then singing and announcements, followed by a sermon in portuguese that was also translated into Makua. We may try to go once a month or so because it´s very fun to see the people and hear the singing in Makua.

Last Friday I had decided that I hated teaching, because my new schedule is so bad and my students had just failed a test, tried their best to cheat during it, and then I had to sit through a long meeting which did not accomplish much, if anything. But then I went to school today and had a very good class, followed by 5 students who were telling me about their ideas for the science fair. I was really happy about that, and I only hope that they actually do the experiments. (Most of them seem to involve killing rats, and I´m trying to steer them away from that, as in, how about working on worms?) We have just 1 month to go, so the students will have to work pretty hard to get everything done by then. Hopefully it´s a success! And I´m not serious about hating teaching, that was just one day after a series of bad exams. Normally I really enjoy teaching, and so does Eli (she actually enjoys it a lot more than I do!)

On the 20th my basketball team has a game against Pemba!

Hope everything is going well. Nacala is actually starting to get kind of cool, at least in the mornings, when I now have to shut the windows the keep the cold breeze out.

-paul

----» extra news:: we have just found a store that sells Snickers bars for about 4o cents. This is very amazing.

Boys Conference Pictures!

2006-05-10T09:19:00.000-07:00

I just got these off of the Peace Corps Mozambique website (PCMoz.org).

Here are my students painting a mural! Thats abdulcadre (number 11) and Ismael in the forefront there. They´re the ones who are going to be leading the mural group at school. They´re working on a painting about gender roles.

A group picture of everyone at the conference. I´m in the middle, in a yellow shirt! We´re in front of the secondary school at Inhambane, which is very nice.

And here I am in the middle of a session on gender roles. That was hard, because its all about what a rough time the mozambican women have, and how the mozambican men have all the advantages, but you´re discussin it with a room full of mozambican men. Not easy. But it was good.

Hopefully someone will email me some pictures of me with the murals I painted! Take care,

pj

Trading Spaces

2006-05-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

Today Eli and I traded spaces, or rather, I went and taught her classes and she stayed at home watching tv and eating spanish tortilla (which I cooked) and drinking tea. Its funny how hard words like departure and schedule can be to pronounce.

The school just changed our class schedules. I´m not sure why. But lets do a comparison between the old and new schedules. Old Schedule: Fridays off. New Schedule: 1 class Friday morning at 6:45am. Old Schedule: all of my classes in a row. New Schedule: first two tempos, then the last 2 tempos, with 2 empty periods in the middle. Eli also got her schedule shuffled around, and I think she´s not super thrilled with it either. Hopefully we can switch again next trimester.

Our science fair is slowly getting organized- I think the school as a whole is having trouble grasping the idea, but today I had a student come up and ask me for help with his project(!). Unfortunately, as I was going to teach Eli´s classes, I will have to talk to him about it tomorrow. Also, we´re starting a mural club, to paint he walls of the school. This is the ´microproject´that my students learned about during the boys conference. My counterpart and I are doing a lot of work to make sure it gets started, but from there the kids should be running it. I´m sending in our proposal today, hopefully we´ll recieve about 8 million. (about $320). I´m excited to start painting some murals!

I was surpised to show up at basketball the other day and see that we had a bunch of baskeballs (normally we have just one). Then I was surprised when we started stretching as a group. But I was really surprised when we started drills. So while we´re not an ´official´team, we´re trying as hard as we can be to be one! We even have a game against Pemba this saturday! Someone told me that, and I was like, ´ah, you´re playing pemba on saturday,´ He responded, ´No, we´re playing pemba on saturday,´which was nice. Except that during our first practice I slipped on the court and hurt my wrist :-( So I probobly will just be in the cheering section for the first game.

Walking home from Eli´s classes today I had a number of students tell me what a good teacher she is, and how much they are learning with her. A bunch of other students told me they hoped she feels better soon, or said they would stop by to wish her well. It was pretty nice to hear all their coments about her.

In computer news: not much is new, but the librarian is now addicted to hearts. It´s a start.

Something is seriously wrong

2006-05-05T09:37:00.000-07:00

with our cat. He just stole a half eaten squash from the kitchen table and growled when I took it away from him. (It was cooked in the oven with butter and sugar... later I gave him the remains and he sat there happily eating it). What is wrong with this animal?

Eli and I have had a pretty tiring week. We just set up 2 more computers at school- and just the sheer volume of teacher questions are keeping us busy. Apparently we will have wireless internet access in all of Nacala in a very short time- however at $80 a month! The school is thinking of getting internet for at least one computer, which would be very nice- and might increase the number of times we can update the blog!

Today we went to Nacala-a-Velha, which is a little village on the other side of the bay. It was the original town and tiny port here, before the portuguese decided to build a whole new city where present day Nacala is (apparently the whole city was built in just a few short years, then the Portuguese were forced to flee). The trip was fun because we took a sailboat, or dhow, over. This is a sailboat where you can still tell what peice of the tree the timbers came from. The trip itself is maybe the best part- just because the bay is really spectacular.
The city of Nacala-a-Velha is small, nearly empty, hot and dry. We wandered around for a little while, but there really wasn´t much to see. We tried finding the secondary school but turned back because of the sun.
Just before leaving we met the cheif of police (which worried us, because we had both forgotten our papers at home, and you´re always supposed to carry ID). He turned out to be really friendly, and offered us a guide to show us around the city. Since we were just leaving, he gave us his cell phone number and said if we ever want to come back and needed anything we could ask him. So that was nice, and since there are some good beaches in the area (and birds, but Eli laughs at that) we might return.

However, we both got a lot of sun, so I think we might take a break from traveling by boat for a while. On the up side, we both look a lot tanner right now (granted it´s a farmers tan).

Hope all´s well. My inbox has been empty for a very long time so I assume everyone must be extremely busy back home. Take care,

Paul

a weekend in Nampula

2006-05-01T05:26:00.000-07:00

This weekend Eli and I took a bus down to Nampula to spend the night at the home of our Makua teacher´s mother´s house. It was a good time- his mother lives in a neighborhood outside of the city, in a little cement house without electricity. The experience was very cultural- as in we saw more of the traditional moçambican culture. Since we live in a city we see a lot of western things, but as soon as you step a little bit outside of the cities borders, you see bigger differences.
One interesting thing we learned is that our makua teacher has a son! We had no idea, until he introduced us to the kid (our teacher is a 12 grade student, 21 years old). It turns out that he had been married before, but he was a student with out a job, so one day his wife left him- taking everything in their house with her, including the kid. Now that he lives in nacala and has a job, she has been asking to move back in with him (he has refused). Interesting.
While at his house we had some interesting food, like octopus and rice for dinner, and my favorite type of tea- a hot water and sweetend condensed milk combination (they call it tea, but really there is no tea). I thought it was good as is, but many mozambicans like to add sugar to this mix.
On sunday morning we went to the craft market. Our teachers friend was supposed to pick us up in her car, so we waited 2 hours for her before we decided she wasn´t coming and made the 15 minute trip by foot :-) The market was pretty large and interesting. Unfortunately, we didn´t have a ton of time, and we felt bad about buying lots of things with our mozambican friends with us. So we kept it down to 3 peices of makonde art. We got 3 tree house scenes, 1 large and 2 small which are pretty neat. The only problem with the market is that being white, makonde art vendors are practically fighting to put their goods in front of your face, and if you really don´t want something, you have to say so about fifty times before they stop trying to sell it to you. If you take something to look at it, sometimes they don´t want to take it back, so you ahve to just set it down.
Anyways, we had a good time in Nampula. We were sent home with a large sack of peanuts, beans, cucumber and melon.

Today someone came to our front door selling live crabs. They were $1 per kilo, so we got 4.5 pounds for $2. We were putting them in a plastic bag when they ripped the bag open and escaped into our living room. We had to round them up and throw them into the freezer to kill them- we´ll let our empregada cook them tomorrow.

In other good news, on Friday we set up two computers in the school library. We´re really excited about getting some computer classes started (2 more computers should be set up soon). I´m still trying to get some rules-norms for computer use set up, but it´s looking promising.

-paul and eli

I´m out of shape

2006-04-27T09:52:00.000-07:00

Thats true. I´m really out of shape, and it´s really obvious because I´ve started playing basketball every evening at the ferroviario- the local basketball court. There´s pick-up games that usually have 10-15 guys playing for 1.5 hours. It´s fun because they always let me into the games right away, and even when we´re rotating teams and my team is out they often let me substitute and play in. The only thing is I´m really bad compared to them- they all play every night and I´m ready for a break after 4 laps around the court.
Still its been fun, and a really good way to meet people. A lot of the guys are my age or a little older, and really friendly. They all want to learn english, and try to say things to me during the game, which can sometimes be funny, although sometimes they´re not so funny... like when they tell me, at an apropriate moment- ´white men can´t jump.´ Yes, its true.

Everything else is going well. Monday is a holiday (May 1st) and maybe tuesday is well, although apparently we don´t know for sure yet, or why. We just had our bathroom retiled, which was nice, and got a peep hole thing put into our door. $1 for the peep hole, $1 to get it intalled. And I demorrared (delayed) because I was worried about the price. It comes in handy when we have people knocking on our door in the middle of the night, trying to sell us makonde art (the carved black wood stuff that I´m addicted too buying- ask Eli for details, she would love to talk about it :-). They also sell lots of things made of Ivory and tortoise shell here, which I´d love to buy, but can´t imagine supporting something where they kill animals, especially since I´m a ´biologist´. I´m having a chess set made and I really wanted peices made out of black wood and ivory, but couldn´t bring myself to do it.

We´re going to Nampula this weekend to meet the parents of our Macua teacher. We may stay the night at his house (?) we don´t know yet. But it could be a very interesting experience. Then I´ll be in Nampula on sunday to go to the craft market, where they sell lots of makonde art cheap :-)

Mpaka logo
paul

More boys conference

2006-04-21T07:03:00.000-07:00

I´ve been having fun at the boys conference, the other day we started working on our microprojects, which is a whole new direction from the HIV/AIDS and gender classes. The idea is that the students learn about a type of project here, and when they go back to Nacala they can start a project of their own. They´re even shown how to apply for money for their projects, filling out paperwork and everything, which is then fast-tracked to get them about $300. My kids choose murals (well, they chose theater and I made them switch to murals- not because I´m pushy but at the last minute I found out the school already had a theater group). Its been fun, we got to paint a mural on the inside of a local PCV´s house. Its the kind of project I´d be excited to participate in, and I´m hoping my kids take it seriously and get a mural group up and running.

Last night we had a talent show, which was 1 mini theater presentation and 13 lip sync song/dance things. It was fun for me because I got to judge, and we gave pretty nice prizes to the top 3 winners (1st place got more than I earn in a day!) The school we´re at has a really nice auditorium with speakers and microphones, and the kids were really into it. At the end I got up on stage to announce the winners; they wanted to shake my hand and get a hug, then make long speaches thanking people. It was a good time. The only downer was that afterwords, someone´s phone got stolen, and there was a search of every kids bag in the place. The phone was never found, and the kids kept us up half the night with all the noise.

Today I had some free time so I decided to walk down to the market. My students saw me and asked if they could go, so I ended up going with 4 students. We spent a while walking around the market at inhambane, which is pretty touristy and had a lot of crafts (although things which I can buy for $4 in Nampula were $40 here!). While we were walking back one of the kids asked if I wanted to see a statue of Vasco de Gama, a portuguese explorer. He took us to a field behind the police station, which was full of broken buses and piles of cinder blocks. There, completely hidden from view, was a really big old stone statue. My students said it had been sent over from Portugal. I have no idea why it was hidden like that, it was the kind of thing that you usually find in the middle of the town square. Anyways, these things happen....

Tomorrow I travel back to Nacala, but it may be a 2-3 day trip, depending on connections. Then we will start with the 2nd trimester. Take care,

Paul

Inhambane, Conselhos and Craziness

2006-04-19T10:39:00.000-07:00

It´s been a while without a post, and thats entirely because Eli and I have been so busy lately! (Also, the computer is just a pain to use sometimes). We just finished conselho de nota last week, which is where you record the students grades. I always thought that teachers just submited their grades to the school secretary, who put them into a computer, printed off some report cards and mailed them out. (I´m probobly not close at all, which shows how much attention I payed as a student). Let me remind you that in Nacala, our secretaries have type writers, not computers. The teachers tabulate all the grades for their students by hand. It is a very complicated system. Unlike in the US the students are divided up into turmas, or classes that remain fixed through out the year (for example, within 10th grade there is 10A-10J and they never have classes with kids from other turmas, even though they may be in the same year). Each turmas has a director- or director de turma. I happen to be director of 11C, which has 91 kids.

During conselhos there is a lot of work to do for each turma, so they break it down into jobs. I was the president for my turma, I had 2 secretaries and a vocal. The vocal reads out the grades from all disciplines, the secretaries are each copying the grades onto two pautas (a gaint grade sheet) and I copy the grades into the grade book, or livro de turma, for the class. We have to go through and do the grades for all 91 students in every subject. In pencil. Then we double check, and if its good, go over it in pen. Then I have to copy all of the grades that the student recieved for the year into their personal file. After that I calculate the percentage of pass-fail for men and women, then get all the teachers to initial the stats for their discipline. I also need signatures for every person that worked on the pauta. Finally, I have to write a cover sheet detailing when were and who worked on the pautas. Yup. It was a fun time. I also was secretary for someone elses turma. Eli, who is not a director of turma, just had to give grades to other teachers, but that was complicated because a lot of times teachers didn´t show up when they were supposed to. We were also really worried that they would change our grades, because some teachers were talking about having a minimum grade of 7. I gave several 4´s and 5´s (out of 20) because I just don´t believe in changing grades. I figure if other kids in the turma can get a 17, its a fair class.

Quick story: Eli and I were at home the other day when a fisherman showed up at our door. He was selling lulas (squid), and he had them strung up on a line. We bought 10 big squid for $2! Easily enough for 3 meals with leftovers. It is very cheap (and tasty).

Ok, so now I am in Inhambane for the boys conference. It´s very interesting. Some weird stuff has gone on, such as the students demanding that we give them a subsidy. I´m not having a bad time, but the atmosphere is a little odd. We did go to the beach today, and everyone had a great time, although it rained on us a little. The surf here is really strong and it´s a good time to play in the water. More later on this, since I´m still here.

As for Eli, she´s going to the IST (in service training) this week. She has certainly had an intersting adventure and I will let her tell it when she has a chance. Hope everyone is doing well.

Paul

More Dia da Mulher

2006-04-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

Hello!
I always think of a ton of things to write on the blog, but as soon as I sit in front of the computer I forget everything. Anyhow, I wanted to quickly tell you about the Dia da Mulher Moçambicana (April 7th). Last week I talked to some of my students about starting a girls club, and organizing something for April 7th. So, about 10 of them were interested, and decided to march to the main city square. As Paul said, everything was delayed (very normal for Mozambique), but we had a good time. After that the school director took us all for lunch, which was a big surprise for everyone (for Paul and I it was a great time to get to know the director and the ped directors - we all laughed a lot about the fact that Paul and I had never cooked with coals!). I had to give two public speeches for this girls club, and you all know me with public speaking, but on top of that, they were suprise speeches: the director just called me up and told me to say something!
I'm very excited about this girls club, I think it will be good for the girls and for the school in general. As of now, we only have vague ideas of what to do (dances, football games, debates, etc), but there's a lot of potential. I will keep you posted as things progress.
Also, Paul and his ped director are organizing a science fair at the school (we are hoping that eventually it will get to the provincial level). We're gonna set up the computers at the school, which have been in boxes for THREE YEARS!!!! Hopeuflly by the end of this week, they will be up and running in the school "library". So, a lot of new cool stuff is going on here (the school is also getting windows put in in one classroom).
ANyway, I hope all is good. Rory, I saw Eli's picture finally, she looks sooo cute!! SEnd me more pix!!
Love,
Eli

Dia de Mulher Moçambicana

2006-04-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

Today is the Dia de Mulher Moçambicana, which is a womans holiday (day of the mozambican woman). Eli just created a girls club and we were planning on meeting up at the school at 7am to march to the praça (the town plaza) to join the festivities. Eli even got matching capulanas and pants made for all the members of her girls club- (there are almost as many boys as girls hence the pants!). Its a good thing that she made the girls club, because they were just about the only people to show up for the march! But we went, marched a little then caught a chapa to the praça. The ceremony took a little while to start, and once it did, it fell even farther behind schedule because of all the speaches. Eventaully we left for a restaurant, where the school director bought lunch for everyone who had come, and then Eli, I, the school director and two pedagogical directors sat and drank and ate for a few hours just chatting. Overall it was pretty fun, and worthwhile.
Eli probobly has a lot that she wants to say since this is about her girls club so I´ll keep it brief.
The only other news is that we´ve finished with the first trimester, and on monday we start with conselho de notas, or recording students grades, which is supposed to be a heck of a lot more complicated than anything in the US, since it´s all done by hand. Plus there are some options for changing students grades after the fact. I´m ´president´ of a class which means I´m in charge of running the record keeping for that class (I don´t know anymore than you do at this point, I´ll have to update the blog when I learn what I´m supposed to do!!).
We have 2 weeks of holidays before the next trimester which will be nice! As for now, we´re working on puzzles, getting more furniture for our house, and eating a lot of biscoti (the mozambican pastries that are like mini flour pretzels). Thanks for the recipies that have been sent so far, we appreciate them! Adeus,

Paul

Eli the Builder

2006-04-02T05:31:00.000-07:00

Eli and I just finished with a major construction project. We built a counter with shelves on our balcony today (it´s a covered balcony where we do all of our cooking). Since we had NO counterspace in the whole house it seemed like a pretty important thing to do. We went out and bought 16 cinder blocks, a bag of cement, a trowel and I had a carpenter make 2 boards for a counter and a shelf, then we mixed our cement, placed our blocks and did a pretty haphazard but hopefully decent job of stacking them and laying the board on top. We still need to add a little cement and paint, but so far so good. Next weekend we might build a roof over the stairwell.

Eli wants me to point out that since nobody has sent us any recipes, despite our pleas- we´re forced to eat things like egg sandwiches (just an egg on a peice of bread) for lunch, and tuna sandwiches for dinner. Although on Friday we had chicken, which was kind of a fun change. Especially since I got to go to market and pick it out, carry it home, and then give it to my empregada, so she could throw some sand on the floor then cut its throat in the kitchen. We let her do all the dirty work, but she killed cleaned and cut up a chicken on our floor. It actually tasted pretty good, but the head feet and some of the internal organs got tossed into the cook pot too. So, if you have chicken recipes, please send those too.

We have one more week of school, then break- although already the majority of students and teachers are taking vacation. I´m not even sure if I have 1 or 2 days left with each class (I´m getting conflicting information from some of my students, whom I´m not quite sure I can trust).
Anyways. After that we have IST, which is in service training, and should be a lot of fun.

For those of you with free/cheap fed-ex possibilites, we´ll be getting mail at the IST (in 2 weeks) so it´s a good time to mail stuff ;-)

Yesterday we got a handmade couch ($6), made from wood and rope. It´s actually pretty nice, and it´ll be even nicer once we´ve got some pillows on it. Our house is slowly becoming normal.

**We saw that Barcelona´s jerseys became yellow, when did that happen? **

And Paul learns something...

2006-03-28T03:38:00.000-08:00

...about the shape of his head. I got my haircut today, Mozambican style, which is too say, practically shaved off. Looking at myself in the mirror as I got my haircut I felt like I was joining the military and getting a crew cut. I think its a fine haircut (we´ll see what Eli has to say), but it is funny how ´a little bit off the sides´ can really mean ´leave only about 4mm everywhere´.
In case you were wondering I actually have a nicely shaped head.

Cats dogs and lanche

2006-03-26T05:31:00.000-08:00

We just finished with the ACP week, which was interesting... I barely had to work although Eli had to control a lot more exams than I did. We each caught kids cheating with cabulas, little hidden cheat sheets (up until now they´ve been using their notebooks). Eli actually has to go back on Monday to proctor another test on account of school being canceled last thursday due to an enormous rain storm here in Nacala.

It was raining cats and dogs, or maybe bigger animals, because by the end of the day a big section of the road by our house had been washed away! Now there are piles of dirt and rocks at the bottom of the hill here and in front of our new apartment. At some places the water was 5 inches deep and running fast. It all came down a hill with dirt roads, and brought most of the dirt from those roads with it. And Eli had to walk to school in that rain only to learn that school was canceled!! We´re not complaining though, rain is the one thing that this city desperatly needs. Unfortunately, the rain should have started months before it did.

Friday was our moving day! So we´ve had 2 nights in the new house. We spent ALL DAY friday moving, it was especially hard because we hadn´t really packed beforehand. The moral from this story is that you shouldn´t bring a lot of junk to Peace Corps, but what can you do. The new places is really nice in a lot of ways- and needs fixing up in others. Also there´s a small problem with cockaroaches, but we´re getting that under control (not to worry anyone who is visiting, esp. renee and lynn!) Eli´s going to train our cat to eat them, and we have 2 cans of bug spray so we´re good. The place is a lot smaller, but its comfortable, and will be a lot more so once we get some furniture :-) The school bought us a big fridge (!!) a table, a 200L water tank, and a baby bath (I think its to store water...but its still not clear), a bed with a nice mattress, a TV and some dishes. We just had an electrician come over and get all our lights working again (including outdoor lights on our 2 porches) so that´s nice. We´re hoping for some wicker furniture and homemade seats later. The bathroom could use a lot of work but I guess we have 2 years to fix it up. It´s a lot more ´peace corps´, but its still an apartment with TV!
The harder things are that our sink does not have plumbing- we just have a bucket under the sink drain to catch the water, and we have to flush it every day. We have running water, but it only comes out of the bathtub faucet! And of course, there is no roof on the stairwell.

Last night was our neighbors daughers birthday. They were playing loud music and little kids were running around, having a good time. Our neighbor came to tell Eli she was sorry about the noise but it was her daughters birthday. When Eli asked if she was having a party, she said, oh no, just a lanche (snack). Well, that Lanche was still going strong at midnight, and they had definetly broken out the booze, and they may have had a DJ. I don´t think the lanche was just for the kids anymore. Anyways, our building seems to have a lot of character and friendly people so we´re excited about that. It should be interesting to meet everyone. I went out into the stairwell today because I heard a thump thumping sound, and was surprised to see someone with the big wooden pilao on the stairwell, grinding away at some peanuts! Its funny to see some of the traditional moçambican things going on in the stairwell.

On Friday our new empregada started as well. Her name is Rosa, she´s much older than our old empregada, and I think we both imediately liked her a lot more. She seems much more capable and I trust her a lot more- especially since she was recommended by our missionary friends.

Everything else is still going well. We went to the market yesterday for a few things for lunch and spent an hour talking to people. By now everyone there knows that we´re the white people trying to learn macua, so everyone tries to talk to us. Unfortunately, we can really only say basic things so we have almost the same conversation multiple times, but its a lot of fun. We´re buying from the same people over and over, and now they´re starting to give us bonuses :-) like free guavas or extra tomatoes. This last time we also bought a ´watermelon´ (although it was white and pink inside with red seeds, but still tasted good) and made a fruit salad. We wanted to know if it was red inside, to know if it was an american watermelon, so they cut a slice out of the side to show us! It was only a little pink, but they had cut it and then they dropped it, and we felt bad so we bought it (at a cheaper price since it had fallen). We also have oranges here, although they´re completely green- but still good to eat.

Speaking of food, we´re also making our own yogurt! Its experiments in microbiology. We had to sterilize all of our equipment, mix the new culture with the old starter culture, and incubate our yogurts in the oven. I think it turned out really well, although I dumped out a whole jar on accident because I had to get up at midnight to put the cultures in the fridge (hence I knew that the lanche was still going strong) and I was so tired I dropped a jar. Now we can use the yogurt as a sour cream substitute, or get fancy and put some fruit in it. We´ll see what happens. If it wasn´t against Peace Corps rules, I think we´d go into business selling it.

Keep the posts comming. Grandma, call my dad and ask how to post, then you can send me some of your recipes! Jim, thanks for your posts and updates of barcelona, keep them comming!
We´re looking forward to hearing from the rest of you. We´re off to correct our ACPs (Eli has over 350!)

paul and eli

Return from our vacation

2006-03-21T04:18:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! Eli and I just got back from our trip to Inchope, which was a really good time! I have to say, Peace Corps treats you really well (and I´m not just saying that because Peace Corps also likes to read our blogs, hi dave!), we were staying in a nice hotel in Beira, got rides in the Peace Corps land cruiser, had snacks and good meals, and had AC at night.
We spent most of the time planning for fun stuff like the boys conference, which I´ll be doing in late april- more on that later, and a science fair that I want to start here. Also, Eli is working on a girls conference and she joined the volunteer advisory commitee.
While we were at the meeting, which was at a kind of tourist complex, one of the volunteers got bit by a baboon! It was a little bite, and luckily the peace corps doctors were also there (giving us the flu vaccine as it turns out, and warning us about bird flu). The complex keeps monkeys in cages, and one got loose. These same monkeys were splashing dirty water on people from inside the cage, so they were all around unpleasant.

Eli and I just got the keys to our new apartment, although we won´t be moving in for a week. They´re still cleaning it a little, and making some minor repairs. They´ve made a lot of progress, but I think Eli and I are going to have to take some matters into our own hands to get the place up to snuff.

More when more exciting things happen. I just want to say that we got several packages during the conference and it felt like christmas (in fact, some were from christmas!) Thanks for the books, food, calendars, contacts, and everything. We greatly appreciate it all. Até logo.

Beira Mar

2006-03-17T20:29:00.000-08:00

Hi! I'm writing from the lobby of Hotel Mocambique in Beira! We flew in to Beira yesterday, with the four other PC Nampula people. Unfortunately everyone else is already at the meeting (which is in another city), and we're leaving today at 6:30am to join them. We should hopefully get mail, I'll let everyone know, but it feels like christmas eve.
Last night we went and saw an American movie, in English, at the movie theater in Beira, which was a lot of fun. The place was empty but the screen was big, and it felt like being back home. The movie might have been Just Like Heaven, but they renamed it in Portuguese and I forget exactly what it was. Anyways, we all liked it, and I don't know if thats because it was good or if we would have liked any American movie. We were the only people laughing in the theater, and I don't know if thats a cultural thing, or if we're the only ones who got the jokes.
Eli and I want to buy some books on Amazon.com but since we have no idea what's come out lately, we'd appreciate some suggestions- so post or email please :-)

After our trip this weekend we should be moving to the new apartment. They' ve been doing a lot of work on it, putting up new counters in the kitchen, new flooring, and painting (white and blue, eli says it looks mediteranean, and it does remind me of greece). We' re both pretty excited, and our missionary friends are recommending an empregada to us, so we should have someone to help us soon. It's been really tough these last two weeks doing all of our own housework and teaching! Work here takes a lot longer, since there's no machines to help you... wash by hand, cooking on the fire makes makes a lot of dirty dishes, then washing with out running water, you have to sweep twice a day, and cooking can take hours... we're already sick of doing housework and can't wait to have someone to help us!

In other news, our cat got into another fight- we let him outside since he really likes to roam- and it hasn't been a problem until this incident, when a cat came up to our house and I guess you could say, started the fight. The cats fought on top of our neighbors roof, and it looked like our cat might be losing until, in the middle of rolling around, the other cat fell of the roof! It was like a 12 foot drop. We were really relieved because surely that meant the fight was over, but then our cat jumped down after him to continue the fight...
in the end we had to rescue our cat from the neighbors yard. In the middle of the fight some people and a bunch of police showed up at the door, and I thought they were going to shoot our cat (or something) but they only wanted to say they were working on our power. Why the police were there I still do not know.

Take Care, send us letters,

paul and eli

The new apartment and avacado ice cream

2006-03-12T07:51:00.000-08:00

We have Novidades! There´s been a lot of interesting things going on lately- for starters, we´re pretty sure that we will be able to move into our new apartment on time- probobly this thursday. They´ve started working on it this saturday; we went over to see what was going on, and there were 6 people working construction and my pedagogical director (a good guy who´s the 12th grade bio teacher too) was there to control the situation. They´re doing a lot of work to this place, like putting mosquitoe nets over the balconies, windows, putting new doors on, painting, re-tiling the kitchen, putting cement on the floor, adding a new toilet, getting furniture, etc. So we´re really excited to see what it´ll look like when its done. During the day we could appreciate the view more too- it looks out towards the bay, although because it´s low it´s not a perfect view, but still a lot cooler than our current apartment´s! Eli says the balcony is the best part.
While we were there we noticed that the stairwell was a little wet, but also, curiously, pretty well lit, especially considering that Moçambican stairwells don´t have lights... so we went up another floor and looked up into the bright blue afternoon sky. So, the stairwell is open to the air, and I´m still not sure if that´s a feature or a defect. Apparently the roof blew off during a cyclone in ´93, and it´s never been repaired. They added a little cement ´patio´ in front of our door (it extends really far out into the hall, and I feel bad, like someone is going to trip over it) in order to keep water from getting into our house when it rains! I can just imagine water pouring down the stairwells like a water fall.
Eli says that it won´t be a problem because it hardly ever rains here in Nacala- and right now is technically the rainny season! As for the water situation- we actually have had running water for the last few days, although I don´t know how much longer that will last. The new house will also have running water (well, theoretically...) and indoor plumbing, and the school will get us some water tanks to keep in the house.
As for how trash removal works here... we just keep our trash in a bucket, which we empty every day or two in the local trash pit, which is the street, and it´s cleaned 3-4 times a week. Nacala is actually a really clean city, compared to other places we´ve been.

This weekend we had a school meeting where we learned that in 1 week (starting on the 20th), we have to give final exams (the ACP)! We´ve only had about 4 weeks of school so far, and we just recently gave tests to our classes. After the ACP, which is a whole week of testing and no classes, we will have 2 more weeks of class, and then a break. Although most likely students aren´t going to be comming to all these classes since the final exam will already be done...

Eli and I are really looking forward to cooking tonight... we just bought 4 lobsters (1 enormous, 1 normal, and 2 smalls, all for $10) and we´re going to be grilling the big daddy over an open flame tonight. Our neighbors helped us to prepare and marinade it, so it should be good! This big one is about 16 inches from head to tail, not counting appendages.

Since we´re moving so soon we´re trying to use up our extra energy (power here is pre-paid) so the other night I slept with a fan directly beside me and the AC on :-) Very nice. Surprised that we have AC? We´ve only just started using it, but this apartment is like an old luxery apartment, it has a lot of nice features. Also, the AC doesn´t work too well because one of our windows is broke (no glass, only a mosquitoe net), so its kind of wastefull. To use it now we cover it with a curtain.

Lastly, but certainly not least, the other day I made what will be the first of many batches of Avacado Ice Cream :-) Basically it´s just sweatened condensed milk and avacado, frozen, but its really good- if you can get over the funky green texture.

P.S. To answer some of Janet´s questions about family structure, etc. we´ll need to use a whole new blog entry, since it´s fairly complex here- matrilineal society- but we will get to it!

Hope everyone´s doing well, please keep sending us messages. Also recipies for cookies, shrimp and fish dishes are welcome. Thanks!

A day in the life...

2006-03-07T05:31:00.000-08:00

... here´s a ´normal´ day (for me at least), and as normal as things get here :-)

Wake up at 5 am for classes, at which point the sun is already comming up and it is hot hot hot! (Only the breeze keeps us cool here, and that doesn´t pick up until later!) At this point I have to feed the cat his xima and fish, or he drives me crazy with his meowing. As a side note, I saw the neighbors empregados eating almost the same meal of xima and fish that we feed our cat, for their lunch today. We have one lucky kitty.
I boil water for my bucket bath, then water for Milo (lwhich is ike hot chocolate with vitamins) that Eli and I will then drink with powdered milk. Eli swears the powdered milk is better than real milk, so you can see what kind of effect Peace Corps is having on us already.
I head out for school by 6:15 if I have early classes, and since I´m wearing long pants, shoes and my shirt is tucked in, I´m sweating buckets by the time I reach school- which is an uphill hike. Once there I throw on my lab coat (bata) and start teaching- usually 2-5 classes. (Eli does 4-5 every day).
Classes are only 45min. but they usually come in a duplo- 2 classes back to back. We only have 3 classes a week with each group of kids, so it´s really not that much time! Anyways after teaching, I head back home, then rest in front of the fan and drink a lot of water to recover.
We fired our empregada yesterday, for various reasons, but usually she or Eli would start to make something small for lunch, like a salad, or rice and fish in a coconut curry sauce... And right after lunch Eli goes to school.
In the afternoons I get some Portuguese tutoring from one of the teachers (actually he´s an english teacher, although I usually can´t understand his english, and he has to write things down). Thats not helping as much as I wish... but he´s too nice for me to get rid of him now.
Eli and I usually make a trip to the market to get some food for dinner, which is always interesting, because we try to speak some Macua while we´re there. Also, we´re getting to know some of the market vendors and they´re really friendly. Then it´s usually my job to start the coal stoves (the coal here is preburned chunks of wood, it´s kind of an interesting way to cook) while Eli cuts up and prepares whatever food. We do a lot of grilled fish and chicken, pasta dishes and some seafood and rice things. I had tried to get into the peanut sauce things by buying that giant wooden pilao (that I mentioned in an earlier blog) but the inside part grew a thick green mat of fungus so I´ve taken a break from that recently. Eli and I are actually getting to be really good cooks!
We also have to spend a lot of time in the afternoons lesson planning and napping, thats part of the job. As you can see most of what we do is eat and work. Also playing with the cat takes a lot of the afternoon, as does listening to the MP3 player (books on tape are wonderful!). Its usually so hot outside- although today was only 90 degrees, the sun is intense here- so we don´t just go out and wander.
A lot of times we get visits from people selling wood carvings or vegetables door to door which is usually interesting.

Also, good news- we´ve got a new house! We´ll be moving in like 10 days or so. It´s almost as close to our current house as possible, just across the street, and much much smaller, but it should be nice. It´s only 30% of the cost of the current house, so the school is happy and they said they will be spending some money to get it fixed up and maybe get us a fridge (we hope!). It has a little balcony facing the bay, although as its only on the 2nd floor I don´t think we´ll get a view of anything. Still, we´re both really excited!

Also, we´ll be traveling on the 17th to a Peace Corps meeting, which will be fun and we should get mail! In April, I will be going to Inhambane for a week for a boys conference, and will be bringing 2 boys and a fellow teacher with me to learn about HIV/AIDS , leaderships skills and awareness, so that should be interesting. Keep us posted on how things are back home!

-paul

2006-03-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

Well! Having realized that nothing showed up from the last blog but the title, I guess it´s been a long time without any news. We´re doing well and just finished our first month of teaching!! This last week was an exam week- or ACS as they call it here (ACP is the end of the trimester exam, much bigger).

Eli made the mistake of trying to grade her students entire notebook as part of the ACS grade, instead of just a single test, so she´s spent the last 4 days grading 2 tons of notebooks, or 200 students books. The kids also had to write a biography for the test, but most of the ones that I read made absolutely no sense to me.

I also gave ACS´s, and it was a huge headache! We´d been warned by all the other PCV´s we talked to during training that students here will cheat like crazy- and é verdade! With one of my tenth grade classes things were out of control- I think every single kid in the room was cheating, and I even kicked one kid out! (Not only did I catch the kid with his notebook open in his lap, but I change the order of the questions for every class, and he had his answers in the same order as the last class´s test!). I would write something on the board, and when I turned around the whole class would be looking at their cheat sheets under the desks.

We´ve been talking a lot about moving, and the plans seems to change every day, but we might be going to either a) an apartment kind of far away from the school but pretty well integrated or b) a more ritzy place really close to our current apartment, but that would only be a 3 month leaes while we look for even cheaper places near the school.

Today Eli and I went to the house of one of our friends from the market (the bean merchant to be exact), and had a great cultural experience! He lives in one of the bairros outside of the main city, which is a lot more lively and interesting! We walked around, visited a local school and had a drink, and then went to his house for dinner. We felt bad because he asked us if we wanted rice or xima, and we said xima because we don´t usually eat that (it´s like a flour paste). So his wife made that for us, although we learned later that she had already made the rice.
It was really interesting because it was very ´mozambican´, we had a big pile of xima each and shared a grilled chicken. To show me that the food was good our host reached over and ate some of my xima (we all ate with our hands). We also had a fish sauce to dip the xima in.

Overall it was a lot of fun, and a really good experience. It was fun to get a more rural experience. He also said he was looking forward to meeting Renee and Lyn and has already invted you to his house for xima and fish!

Hope everyone is well, hope you all is gut in deutchland mom and dad!

Hows things

2006-02-24T05:36:00.000-08:00

Pictures!

2006-02-14T06:29:00.000-08:00

Eli in the doorway to our bedroom: this place has 1.5 baths and 3 rooms that we don´t even use! Its a mansion, but we´re trying to get the school to move us to a cheaper place (that hopefully has a view of the water!)

This is from way back when at our host families house near Maputo. I was grinding up peanuts (or maybe corn) for dinner. Thats my host mother beside me, and our host father sitting down behind me. The room behind all of us was actually Eli and my bedroom (seperate from the main house). We don´t own one of these giant grinders yet- we have to borrow our neighbors- but you can make really good peanut sauces with them, so I want to get one. Eli´s been holding out because they´re expensive (about $4).

Eli and I at the top of Nacala

Here´s the inside of one of the classrooms- they´re all exactly identicle. There´s no glass in the windows here, and sometimes the students are sitting 3 to a desk (at least they are in my 11th grade class). But the rooms aren´t really bad, and the lack of glass gives a nice breeze.

Eli outside of the school- there are 3 rows of class rooms like this one, and one row of admin. buildings.

Well, those are the pictures! We´ve also been doing a lot of teaching, which has been good. I´ve had some rough classes (prepared for the wrong one!) and today I had some really good classes, so it was fun. Eli´s been doing really well, her classes are good and the other teachers are really impressed with her lesson plans.

We´ve also met our neighbors, who are really very nice, and interested in learning english. We´ve been giving english lessons to our neighbors kids in exchange for Indian food (WOW) and water.

The only bad news is that our cat got out (ok, we let him out) because he starts making horrible noises at night when other cats are near our house. The sound will drive you crazy and woke up our neighbors, so we figured we had to do something to shut him up. Once he got out he got into a cat fight, which he lost, so he spent the last few days licking his wounds in the house. He´s making a good recovery, and we´re now keeping him away from windows at night, although he still likes to attack the mirror.

Happy Valentines Day everyone!

Our real first day of class

2006-02-07T04:19:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone,
I just want to leave a quick note about my first day of classes. Overrall it went really well, I was really happy with myself, because I wasnt nervous at all once i went in the classroom. My first class had about 30 students (about half the normal size i think -- i dont have a class list yet), and they were good students, aging between 12 and 21!! (nobody older than me, good thing). The next class was a little rowdy, but managed to control them (i think i may have problems with them later on), i had about 45 students in that one. The last two classes were actually the best tho. Something funny that happened - I actually taught the wrong class at one point!!!! haha, let me explain. I teach 9H and then 9G, but i taught 9G and then 9H, but by that point all the other teachers had left, so nobody came to claim the class!!!! Anyway, about 20 students waited for those last two classes, and i think that's why it went so well, only the good students waited, all the other went home. Haha, oh well, I had a really good time, and looking forward for tomorrow (i'll try to keep the classrooms straight this time).
Aight, here's Paul. I hope all of you are doing well,
Love
Eli

Hi! I taught my first classes this morning- only two, as I teach 4 days a week so they´re spread out- and it went pretty well. I´m not sure that all of my students understood my Portuguese- I´m not actually sure that I could understand my Portuguese at some points, but they didn´t really say anything, so we´ll have to wait and see how much they got. I start teaching at 6:45am most days! so at least it´s still a little cool out, which is nice.
One of the wierd things about teaching is that the bell system isn´t really worked out yet. Class kind of starts when you walk into the room and ends when you leave. I remember looking at my watch and then asking the students when class ended. They said ´technically 5 minutes ago,´but I was looking at the classroom across from mine and they were still teaching, and no bell had rung, so I hadn´t been sure. But when I left my classroom, sure enough all the others were out of session (and were out of session every time I went out to look, so I guess you can´t tell anything by that).
My big shock for the day is that I´m the head of the biology department! I´m not really sure what extra work is expected of me, or why they picked me, but we´ll see what happens. Also, I´m the director of the 11th graders that are following the science path. Hopefully its not too complicated, I think I would do better my second year when I speak better portuguese!
We´ll talk more about teaching when we´ve gotten more into the meat and bones of it- these two days were just introductions. Hope everyone is well,

Paul

School has Started!

2006-02-02T05:31:00.000-08:00

Except not really. We had the opening ceremony for the school on Tuesday, where people made speaches and we got introduced by first name only :-) Following that was the real ´first day´of school, when classes were supposed (according to the director) start. I´m scheduled to teach at 6:45am on Wed. so I was up and ready and had all my teaching materials. Eli gave me a big hug and said good luck, call me after your first class. Sounds good, but when I arrived at school the teachers were all in the teachers lounge trying to get the schedule straightened out and the students were all looking for their names on the class lists to find out what classroom and class group they were in. So I sat for a while, eventually recieved some school matieral (chalk, 2 pens and a notebook) and then went home for the day. Eli went at noon, because thats her teaching time. We figured that classes might have gotten started by noon, so she was ready to teach.

There weren´t actually any classes in session, and Eli just got her chalk and paper and we were ready to leave. The other nice thing we got from that trip was a note from the school to take to the alfaiateria (tailor), so we went and got measured, and are going to have Batas (think lab coat) made for us. I kind of like the idea of having a bata to teach in, its really formal. We also go our pictures taken and we´ll get neat name tags- I think they´re actually pretty cool looking.

I also went to school today (Thurs) in case I had morning classes. But nobody was teaching, and everyone told me things wouldn´t start until Monday (actually a lot of students I´ve spoken too have said they thought school started next Monday period, so... most people never planned on starting this wed. or thurs!) Friday is a holiday so no school then. We´ll write again after Monday to tell you how our first classes go!

As for what we´re teaching- I have 3 turmas (classes) of 10th grade biology, which is Genetics, Evolution and Ecology, as well as 1 turma of 11th grade bio, which is all taxonomy. It means about 13hours in the classroom a week, but I´ll have about 80 kids a class for 10th and 50 for 11th. Eli has 4 turmas of 9th, and only works 2 days a week, with a total of 12 hours a week. Our nearest PCV neighbor said she was teaching 9 turmas! I think we´re lucky, but we haven´t started teaching yet, so we might get a surprise.

A few weeks ago on our trip to Pemba we met some American missionaries who live in Nacala. We´ve gotten together with them twice since, which has been a lot of fun. Once they had us to their place for pizza (the best I´ve had in the country) and some card games, and the other time we went to Bay Diving, a tourist place that we´d never been to before. They have good food though, I had some Mahi mahi fish (about $5 for the plate) and Eli had some South African sausages and a chocolate cake with ice cream. We eat a lot of rice and beans, so it was a good change of pace!

We have decided to name our cat Ptolemy. Eli really pushes for the ancient names, so my idea (Kermit or Dilbert) will have to wait for another pet. Not that it matters since he doesn´t respond to anything we say. Overall, he´s a great cat though, really fun to have in the house, and a good house cat in general. The only bad thing is that sometimes another cat comes onto our porch at night, and if our cat sees him he goes nuts! He starts making a horrible meow that sounds like a baby crying and he trys to attack our mirror. Its definetly weird, so now we take precautions against him seeing anything on the porch.

Hopefully we´ll get some more pictures posted up soon, maybe a better one of the apartment. Oh, we also officially recieved mail at our Nacala address, so if you want to send letters (large things will still probobly be safer going to the Maputo address) you can send them to us at:

Escola Secundaria de Nacala-Porto
C.P. 187
Nacala, Nampula
Moçambique

Thanks everyone!

More Nacala Pictures!

2006-02-02T05:08:00.000-08:00

This is the street that we live on, our apartment is on the right hand side just out of the picture. Straight ahead is the beginning of the central market, although you can´t really see that from here.

This is supposed to be a picture of our apartment, but like Eli just said, ´thats weird, you can´t even see our apartment!´ If you look closely though- our apartment is in the center of the picture, just above the tops of the trees (if you look just below the trees, for those white triangles, those are also directly below our place. All you can really see is our balcony, but we live on a street with a lot of wealthy people, so I kind of feel bad, like we´re not getting the full

Moçambican experience, but on the other hand, we have a really nice house (despite what some of you may think from the picture of Eli in the kitchen- we could be living in a mud hut you know!)

Photo's

2006-01-26T17:25:00.000-08:00

(top) The beach 10-15 minutes from the apartment- fernao velhoso,
this isn't actually the best swimming area, but it's the beach out in front
of the Hotel Napala, which the US ambassador- and I think she's probobly
right here- says you can get some of the best fish dishes in the whole
country.

(bottom) This catholic church is right across the street from our house- in fact this view
is from our balcony. It's very pretty, but they just cut down a tree that was in front
of it, for no reason that I can see, and I'm really pissed about it.

(middle)Here's Eli, probobly not too happy about having her picture taken,
in our kitchen. It was probobly a really nice kitchen 20 years ago...
now I think it could use a re-tiling.

Gato- português for cat

2006-01-22T05:47:00.000-08:00

Ok, so we just traded our cute (but obnoxious, loud, not potty trained and flea ridden) dog in for a sweet, cuddly little kitten. The dog, who´s name I won´t even mention, went to our landlord, who I´m sure will be sick to death of him before the week is over but who, also, is wisely keeping the dog outside. He also, sadly for the dog, will probobly not hesitate to chuck a stone at the dog when he´s being annoying.
We got our cat from our neighbor PCVs in Monapo- they didn´t really want the cat, who was left over from the previous PCVs. They brought us the cat (by chapa, and the cat was uncerimoniously kept in a rice sack!) along with 2 flea collars, flea shampoo, and some food. We made the cat a litter box out of a cardboard box and some shredded paper. The cat, like our dog, was never potty trained because he had always been able to go outside to use the toilet. This kitty though, learned to use our homemade litter box on his second try, so we´re quite proud of him (and a little relieved). We still haven´t decided on a name for the cat, we´ve been throwing around Kermit, Dilbert, Cujo, some Greek names that Eli seems to be rooting for (hermes?) and also just plain kitty. Let us know if you think of something good.

I´d also like to report that our water crisis is temporarily solved (although not the cities). We had completely run out a few days ago, and were really suffering- so we went to the street and stopped someone who had a truck loaded down with water barrels. He agreed to fill our water tanks up (we have about 250 liters of water storage in our house) for 300k (about $12). That actually took him several hours to go and get the water and bring it back. The next day our landlord brought us 4 big 20 liter containers, so now we have water, and we have containers so we can send our empregada out on a bus to bring back more water. Should be a sure thing, but Eli is still out there collecting rain water during our (brief) storms.

A lot of people have been wondering when we would start to work- some of you probobly thought that Peace Corps was one long vacation by the Indian Ocean (you went to Pemba and Ilha again??) Well, we´ve been wondering as well. The official word is- we start tomorrow at 8am with our teachers meetings and planning, and classes start on Febuary 2nd. We also just learned, from our landlord, that our school has a new director, and that the old director will be moving on (although still teaching a few classes). So we´re not really sure what to expect from this new director, and I´m curious to see if anything changes. However, I am really looking forward to going out and getting some work done, meeting my colleagues, and finally getting my class schedule. I think I may be teaching in the morning and Eli in the afternoon, if we get the classes we asked for. Also, it would be nice, and we might request this- to have either Fridays or Mondays off.

There´s not a whole lot more to add- our empregada turns out to be a really good cook, and we spent last night on the beach with a friend of ours. The AC in here is a lot colder than anything we´re used to, so we have to get back into the 100 degree weather and warm up. Hope everything is well for folks at home,

Paul and Eli

"Malapua"- dog in Makua

2006-01-16T04:42:00.000-08:00

Hello,
Sorry this is gonna be a short entry. Just wanted to let everyone know that Paul and I got a dog! He's all black, except for his white paws. As of now we call him Bacchus, but we're still deciding. He's sorta well-behaved, but still needs training. It's funny, he's not avery big dog but everyone is scared of him (when we walk him in the street, people avoid us and cross to other side!!). ANyhow, we'll let you know how it works out.
Another quick little story. Two days ago we went with our landlord to get water (just to keep him company, and check out the place). So we drive off with the pickup truck full of huge empty plastic containers, and a couple of guys to carry the water. We go farther and farther into the mato, and reach a tap in the middle of nowhere. There were about 100 people trying to get water, almostfighting to reach the tap. Meanwhile, water is spilling everywhere (beause people are pushing their way in), so people are slipping on the mud (with 20liters of water on their head!). Man, you forgot that you were in a drought with so much water around. In any case, Sausau (our landlord) drives thru the mud (gets caught, but the guys push him out), and starts filling up his water containers. After about 30 min, we're ready to leave, except that with sooooo much weight in the truck, there is no way to get out of the mud. Sooo, he calls 15 more guys to help him out of the mud. No use, the car is so heavy, it doesnt really move. Sooo, they empty one of the containers (300 liters wasted). Still no use. They take out the other containers (but keep thewater this time), but still no use. Eventually, the truck is completey empty, and after an hour of "chovar" (pushing) the truck is free. Then, they have to carry the water containers back into the car, and wash off the mud. A fight almost broke out when Sausau gave them 4dollars for their help, and ended up giving them 4 more (i think he got a little scared). EVentually, after another hour, we head on back out. Then, he took us out for beers, i think he felt bad that we had towait all that time, but it was actually very interesting.
Aight, one more thing. I'm a little worried because Paul got a bill for his school loans and I havent. I can remember what address i gave them, but i thought it was Laingsburg, but it couldve been Madison. Has anyone gotten a bill???? Please let me know, ireally dont wanna go back in two years, and havea warrant for my arrest waiting for me! THanks!
IHope you are all well andhealthy,
Love,
Eli

A week at Pemba

2006-01-14T04:42:00.000-08:00

We just returned from a four day trip to Pemba, 450km north and supposedly one of the best beaches and scuba places in the country. The whole trip was kind of spur of the moment- it started when our friends Rhett and Konstantine showed up (they were on a very extended trip across the country!) and wanted us to go to Pemba with them. They had hitched the whole way up the country, so we all decided to hitch up to Pemba.

Konstantine has a theory that trips can either start out really good, use up all your luck and end badly, or start badly and have no where to go but up. Ours was the latter. I woke up at 4:30 (ideal hitching time) ready to puke- possibly from my anti-malaria drugs, which can cause nausea- but decided to go anyways. Before leaving I tried to withdraw cash from my american bank- this being a vacation afterall, so we felt we deserved a little something extra- but the bank ATM stole my card! So I had to wait 2 1/2 hours until the bank opened to get my card back... which gave me a chance to get over the nausea at least.
Hitching rides can be a really long process, depending on traffic- and a lot of places here see surprisingly little traffic- and it took us 7 different cars to get to Pemba (Eli Rhett and I traveled seperatly from Konstantine and the Monapo girls), but we did meet an American couple that lives in Nacala as missionaries, and hopefully we´ll get to know them well.

Now Wimbi beach (the beach at Pemba) is pretty, but its not that much better than our own fernao velhoso to warrant a 450km treck. What it does have is some great coral reefs, and Eli and I spent a whole morning snorkeling around looking at fishes (I was also keeping an eye out for sharks...) We went out twice, the second time in a boat- which was basically a hollowed out canoe with two logs spaced a few feet on either side as stabilizers. It was fun to ride in. When we got to our reef I jumped out of the boat and turned to ask Eli to hand me my fins and mask, with just enough time to see the boat roll completely over, dumping out Eli and our boat guide. Oops :-) I guess I didn´t jump out as gracefully as I thought.

We managed to recover everything that fell out, except the sunscreen (the result- we both have nice sunburns, mine are itchy too) and still have a good time. The other big thing about Pemba is the seafood- our first night we each got 2 lobsters, one normal and one giant- for about $14, which I assume is a good price... anyways it was tasty. Secondly, Pemba is famous for its Makonde wood carvings, so we had to buy some souvenirs to decorate our apartment. We got 3 little monkey statues, covering their eyes, ears and mouth for see no, hear no and speak no evil respectively. We also- don´t ask me why because I´m still not 100% sure- bought a large drum. A really large drum, its like 2 ft. tall. Its pretty neat looking, carved and painted with a fur on the top and 3 wooden legs. It was $18 which seemed cheap to me but someone later told me it was expensive... it was a touristy shop afterall. Lastly Eli and I bought carved wooden rings, since we don´t have gold wedding bands here.

So after the start we had a really good trip- only the way back was less than perfect too. We decided to take a direct bus at 5:30am to Nacala- easier than hitching and we found out not to expensive. (the majority of moçambican transport is cramped and slow, but buses can be OK) The bus would have us home by 1pm or so- except we broke down in the middle of nowhere and had to wait 5 hours for another bus to come get us!!! Its amazing though, Eli and I have gotten really patient after 4 months here, so we just spread a sheet, sat down and read and played rummy for 5 hours.

Today we´re going to try to get a dog- we saw him last week before Pemba and he looks good, no open cuts. He´s not a puppy though, so we´ll have to see what kind of personality he has.
So, thats the situation. I dont know if I already mentioned, but eli and I have some good computer speakers (2 satelites and a small subwoofer) hooked up to our MP3 player, so the house is enjoying some good jams :-) Hope you are all enjoying your cold weather, we´re hitting 40 degrees C pretty regularly here. Also, my inbox is empty and we have yet to recieve much more than a post card from people! (some exceptions noted) Take care everyone!