Paul and Eli Blog in Moz

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!

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.

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.

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








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









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

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


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

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.