Site Placement! And Rain!

SITE PLACEMENT: Northern Zambezia province!!! Woohoo (though they did reject my marine bio background... apparently not so important). I´ll just say more when I get there in December... I do have roommie, another PCV who has been there for a year. There is rain. And an avocado tree. And a view. We´ll see.. I’ll have a new mailing address soon so hold off on things for now!!

Here is something that I wrote like a week ago but haven’t had a chance to post until now:

After electrocuting myself in the process of plugging in my computer -- I’ve decided to hold off on re-charging pretty much everything I own until site. At the moment the only outlet in my room is an extension cord, which has been threaded from who-knows-where down into my room. That horrendous electricity section in physics senior year may not have been my thing... but I’m pretty sure the set up is a hazard.

It’s rainy season--officially. Our training began with a few showers, but nothing compared to the last 5 days. Namaacha is saturated. The aptly called matope-- or mud-- is inches deep around my house and the rainboots I purchased a few weeks ago have been key!! The mud forms a thick layer on the soles of my shoes...any experience (mostly in middle school) I had with platform shoes is finally paying off.

With rain the ecosystem has started to shift. 2 weeks ago there was a hatching of termites-- thousands, everywhere. Last week there were huge golden dragonflies. The frogs are louder. And the mangos riper.

Today we went to a waterfall outside of town that had transformed, in a matter of weeks, from a small trickle, to a huge foamy blast.

My mom wrote with a grab bag of questions that I can answer here too- more or less:

FOOD (I think like 90% of my mom’s questions were cooking related...so I figure this is what people want to know): varies depending on the family. Lots of rice and sauce. The sauce is coconut based half of the time with greens (bean leaves, kale, chard, etc) and ground peanuts. Also pasta (but they cook it like rice) with carrots and tomatoes. Fabulous bread-- but that is special for Namaacha. You can get fried bean cakes outside of the bakery to put in bread rolls. YUM! Bananas and oranges are standard; apples are considered a luxury but purchased in Swaz for a reasonable price (or so I’m told). Meats: smaller boned fish (lots of bones. lots and lots of bones. really just more bones than fish), chicken (very fresh and running around outside the house). Actually my host brother just bought 20 chickens that he is planning on fattening then re-selling around Christmas. Food at my host family house is cooked over a charcoal stove (iron structure with small coal beds). My formal charcoal cooking lesson involved plastic bags as the start up fuel... luckily I have electricity at site, or I’ll have to figure out an alternative method, because plastic seems...toxic. The host fam also has an electric stovetop for backup. I miss food from home though. sigh.

TRAINING: lots of work, long days but totally manageable. We just finished model school and I can give a 45 minute lesson on genetics in Portuguese (more or less). The most successful lesson was when I "bred" Beyonce and 50 cent (sorry Jay-Z) and students had to pick out which chromosomes they had, etc... a lot more attentive and more participation when they got to act as sperm and egg from superstars in from of the class. Oh geez... we’ll see how this goes. Got to work on those hypothetical phrases.

Current book: Africa: A biography of the Continent by John Reader. So interesting, despite some claims that it was dry (it´s not)...

::Also sorry for the weird english writing here on out, I can´t write in english anymore apparently::