Abertura do Ano

Buster’s Barbeque. That is what I think of when people start talking about school sponsored events to celebrate the start of the academic year. The only thing is that I have absolutely no memory of Buster’s Barbeque. Frankly I don’t think I even went once during my time at Lincoln High School, but I remember the sign-up form and the posters… it was probably some kind of PTA fundraiser linked to a football game, but those details are vague. My parents are absolutely phenomenal parents, they just aren’t the all-American, homecoming football game, Buster Barbeque type. At the U of Oregon start of the year events, there was usually a guest speaker, maybe food, again the memory is hazy and I only went once… I have stronger memories of the non-institutionally-associated celebrations, and I doubt few college graduates have good memories of those sloppy, but fun, gatherings.
Fast forward: me. Here. now. I have had the privilege of going to two, extremely different, start of the academic year celebrations, one at the secondary school and the other one at the university.
At the secondary school we had a tree planting ceremony (I know this sounds like some hippie thing from Oregon, but I’m not confusing things). Mostly everyone showed up on time, and waited around for a couple of hours for things to get set up: the chairs for the attending students and parents had to be moved to place, the plastic flower decoration, which was usually some kind of pencil holder from a director’s desk, had to be artfully positioned the speakers’ table, the district representative had to arrive (he was on Mozambiquian time… two hour difference with real time). By the time things were ready it was blazing hot and everyone was huddled in the shady spots under buildings or shrubbery around the school grounds. A student was selected to ceremoniously dig/plant a small sappling, and the school officials helped water it to show the strong bond within the community. We sang the national anthem (look it up online, the lyrics are good but the longest anthem ever, I think the main verse is repeated some eight times). When all was ready for the speakers’ time, the sun was high and the chairs were no longer in the shade… so things were adjusted and parents’ seating was moved perpendicular to the ornamented speaker’s table and students stood inside the building across the way, watching from the windows.
Okay so the set up was awkward, but what was more awkward were the main topics of the keynote speaker: (1) corruption. All involved parties: parents, students, and professors, were specifically asked to stop playing their respective role in the rampant corruption at the school. Parents were asked to not come by the school with live goats and chickens (… and I was later told by Dio pigs) to give to teachers, students are not to do manual labor and/or sexual favors (apparently a popular option) for teachers, and teachers are not to solicit sexual favors or livestock from students. Yep, I was going to have to hold back from my 8th graders…this kind of corruption is disgusting and sickening. (2) Dress code. Students can no longer show up to class with tagline shirts purchased from the mercado (these are clothes that Goodwill ships to Africa, meaning the shirts that you give to Goodwill, that can’t get sold at the regular Goodwill or, after, the BINs). The problem is that none of the students know what the shirts say because their english ain’t so good. The speaker’s examples of taglines include “My name is John” “I love you” “New York” …. But I could think of some (spicier) examples. Though I always notice the bizzarro shirts that make it out of the states to Mozambique, I had never heard a Mozambiquan talk about it. Granted I know people don’t know what they are wearing, I still get surprised when I see “guess what’s making me happy down here [with an arrow]” “Someone I know went to Hawaii and got me this shirt” around town, or in the classroom with the words are showing through the pressed white button up school uniform shirt.
I often imagine various scenarios with events from Mozambique transposed onto life back home. Like what if a suburban forest heights mom pulled a live goat out of her mini-van to take to her child’s trig teacher at Lincoln High, and what that teacher would say upon receiving the goat. Or a parent teacher conference with the student wearing an ironed t-shirt with “i have problems” on it. Or, over hamburgers at Buster’s Barbeque, teachers being told they could not do naughty things with their 14 year old students while parents stood around rolling their eyes thinking “hmm… that will be the day….”.
The university Abertura do Ano was… tame and much better and not too much of an interesting story (what will I blog about… man). This was one of the few times I’ve been to a mass, the bishop came, bible passages were read, people got on their knees and prayers were said. All of the professors were in their black graduation robes and hats, except for me… it was a like a game of “Where’s the Unqualified Volunteer Who’s on Faculty?”. Over the center table there was a photo of an African Mary holding a black Baby Jesus with a caption reading “our mother”. A phenomenal speaker came and talked about human rights issues and how to protect the oppressed. She talked about the US, and it was the first time I’ve hear a non-American give a reasonable account of US issues, usually things are unreasonably (and falsely) positive, or excessively (and unfairly) negative. We had chamussas, rissois, cake and champagne.
And at the university level here, just like the university level back home, the non-formal event was more memorable (and sloppy… if not sloppier than at home). The only difference here is the event was sanctioned by the school. After teaching my class one evening a co-worker asked if I was going to the “baptism” that coming Saturday morning. Sure, which church, whose baby, what time? He just laughed, no not a baby baptism, come to the main campus and you’ll see how the new students are welcomed by the old students.
Second/third year students had spent the last month fermenting raw eggs, milk, corn husk, and I’m-don’t-want-to-know what else in an old oil barrel… this is the “holy water” for a university baptism. Tests are arranged so all of the first year students have their last mid-term the same time on a Saturday morning at the main campus, and as they exit out they are initiated into the student body. The first year students had to walk on their knees in the mud to a pick-up truck with the spoilt food filled barrel; a rather animated, chanting mob of older students taunted…. Because of my language issues in understanding what the heck was going on in mob settings either the older students were chanting “I am bishop” or they were telling the first year students to say “I am little-insect”…..bishop and little-insect sound similar in Portuguese hence the uncertainty. Anyways…. once they reached the barrel they were smashed with raw eggs and doused with the chunky, foul smelling “holy water”. When I came to the campus, the gates were locked tight to prevent potential escapees; cars were pulled up around the perimeter as extra blockade. As the barrel emptied, the solution was augmented with muddy puddle water. Students who tried to flee had it much worse than those who embraced the ceremony. The parking lot was full of spilt “holy water”… it was absolutely disgusting. And disturbingly amusing to watch.
We do a lot of weird initiation hazing events in the states (for sports, for greek life, for secret societies, etc. etc.) I wonder how it would be different if it was all done out in the open, not behind closed doors.

I have arrived…take two

Long story short, Peace Corps decided to pull me from my Zambezia site because of that little security incident and because of absolutely zero support from the school. In retrospect I can now see what a headache everything was getting to be. Just a little sampling of what was going on between me and the school: they never called after hearing about the break-in to see if I was okay (and this is not a cultural difference problem… ), they did call once … to see when our personal belongings were going to be out of the house so the new director could move in. They never tried to help find a house and were unable to tell PC where we were living (we could have been living in a cardboard box under a mango tree and they would have never known or cared). A week before PC pulled us, I showed up to teach classes only to be told by students (?!) that I was no longer their teacher, half of my classes had been reassigned to a physics professor (when he and I talked about it, he asked for my all class prep materials because he didn’t know anything about biology), school administration apparently thought they didn’t need to communicate directly with me about this and later denied the whole situation when the PC chefe showed up. School administration was surprised and stressed about our departure “… but we love our peace corps volunteers, they do so many important projects and are such hard workers…. How can you leave us …. ” Suddenly, when they were faced with the monetary cost of finding replacement teachers, they were the most devoted administration in PC Moz history.

Peace Corps came to site, made a decision, and we had less than 24 hours to pack our belongings, say our goodbyes, and move to Manica Province. We drove through one of the biggest rainstorms; rain filled some of the boxes on top of the car and leaked down through the plastic tarp into the car. The roads between the village and Quelimane (where we overnighted) are some of the worst in the country, 100% deep rivets and pot holes, and as they turned into muddy rivers all I could think was: I love you SUV. The roads shouldn’t be that bad there, some government somewhere has funded a complete infrastructure rehabilitation project but the money has been sucked into someone’s play fund and the road remains… horrible. To make it worse (and you see this around Moz), people (with an average age of 12 years old) living along the side of the road have taken to digging up soil next to the road to patch the holes in the middle of the road--- it’s a niche to make money, they patch the road and the drivers owe them for the labor. As you drive by they lean on their hoes, clap their hands their hands together and and hold them out. The only hitch is that by carving out earth next to the road they are only creating more erosion, so besides the holes and rivets in the middle of the road the sides of the road are also cracked down and melting away into cassava and pineapple fields.

After a couple days driving, Peace Corps dropped me off at my brand new site, and guess what: I’m teaching biology at a university! Yep, Doutora Alexandra, that’s me because I also got a couple extra academic degrees in this transfer. Now I wish I could say this promotion was due to my incredibly inspirational teaching skills, but this is sadly not the case. The university schedule is a bit different, classes hadn’t started yet and I didn’t have to jump mid-term into anything, which would have been the case if I had gone to a secondary school.

I’ll be honest: teaching biology at the university was (still is) scary. I feel more accountable for what I teach, big difference from that secondary school up north where I could have showed up to class and taught basket weaving and nobody would have known the difference.

Getting assigned to teach at the university is some Karmatic fate after four years of being a complete bitch to all of those foreign GTFs I had at the University of Oregon. When I was a student I had zero patience when I showed up to class and the GTF lectured in sounds that are not even close to the English language and wrote things on the board that looked more like drunk Pictionary. … so I’m *that* GTF now, except I’m called Doctor and feel a little bit like a fraud. When I lecture I sometimes wonder what it sounds like to the students, in Portuguese I primarily can only speak present tense, my vocabulary is probably about 150 words, and I have directly transported my Spanish grammar/sentence structure into Portuguese (they are not the same). But they did really well on their first test, so either things are better than what it seems or there was a heck of a lot of cheating… Either way the students are enthusiastic and positive to work with. Despite being adults, I still get giggles when I talk about sperm and fertilization.

The university is in a city and my lifestyle has completely changed. This really brings to home the fact that every Peace Corps experience is uniquely different, even in the same country. Actually I am almost not in Peace Corps anymore: My house has tiled floors, a shower, running water, and electricity, I am no longer only eating okra, tomatoes, and wild chicken eggs because the markets here are fully of stunningly beautiful produce, the nearest place to buy food is a supermarket (just like one in the states: frozen processed food, ice cream, skim milk, diet soda, and everything… not that I eat most of it but the point is that I could if I wanted to), a driver comes to pick me up to take me to and from work, I have a real sized oven and refrigerator…. Etc. etc. Things can still be hard but in a different way than before at my first site.

Overall, I’m glad I stuck through the hard things and am excited to see how this whole teaching at a university thing goes. I get to be a part of a really interesting department (Nutritional Engineer) that could really help communities eat locally and am lucky to work with such wonderful, intelligent people. And on those rough days, when everything is going wrong and cultural differences seem impossible to overcome, when the guard is drunk and passed out in his underwear in the front yard, when the house floods and the faucets fall apart because they are super-low grade Chinese-ware, when my neighbor’s guest absent mindedly takes my house keys to Beira unbeknownst to me, when living alone is as lonely as it sounds, when the Portuguese just isn’t coming out right and I wonder how the heck I’m going to pull this lecture off, I just take a big breath . . . life is good, overall.

Nighttime Machete Break-Ins: This is why you should wear PJs always!

First: I am totally 100% okay and so freaking LUCKY!! This could have turned out really bad, but it didn’t.


I wasn’t sure which would be the best media to tell everyone at home about this. On one hand blogging seems very public, very open—it almost seems inappropriate to use this space for an event that will greatly affect my personal outlook. On the other hand the blog is an ideal way to let friends, family, etc. know without having to individually contact and recount for everyone (I already a bit burnt out on retelling). Also, I would rather people hear about this from me because I don’t want imaginations to get out of control in the gossip train, thus furthering negative or misguided stereotypes about Africa. No need for paranoia but these things happen EVERYWHERE and ANYWHERE—had this happened to me in America it probably would have been guns rather than machetes. Regardless of where, I think it’s important to persevere through the negative and choose to live life by caring for the community around us.
Okay … disclaimer being stated, where to start…


Two weeks ago, at 3 am, I woke up with a flashlight being shone on my face. My first thought was that it was Dio—maybe he was confused or sleep walking or something—but he had gone to sleep in his little house behind our house. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness behind the light, there was a man with a machete. “Get money, money, money.” I’m not really sure what I was thinking at this point—I knew I had to keep things calm, I didn’t want to provoke him, but I also needed to get the attention of someone outside the house. I told him to turn on the lights because I can’t see anything in the dark (maybe Dio would notice…). I kept my eyes down as I wrapped myself up in my sheet (because I wasn’t wearing PJ bottoms, it’s Africa and really flipping hot, and I will probably never just sleep in a t-shirt and underwear again) and fought my way through the mosquito net. I didn’t want to be able to recognize him; I didn’t want him to get edgy. He was intense but I could tell he was nervous—if he was the violent type he would have set the mood of the break-in aggressively—he would have hurt me to begin with. I shuffled around my room in my bed sheets, giving him money from the top of the bookshelf, from my wallet, a cell phone. I tried to respond to him loudly, in slow and long phrases… anything to get Dio’s attention but the man told me he would beat/cut me with the machete if I didn’t quiet down… so yeah that shut me up really quickly. He asked for my laptop but specifically didn’t want the cord (side note: idiot, because you can’t get mac laptop cords/mac anything in moz… meaning he has my computer and won’t be able to sell it or use it…. Clearly not a professional, which is fine by me). He left the room for a second and then came right back with a second man with a machete. “More money, more money, more money.” The first man had initially left my room with only about $15.00, his friend was clearly pissed that he didn’t steal enough money. The second guy made me nervous—his demeanor was much more aggressive. Again they threatened a lot to cut/beat me with the machetes. “Open this. Open that.” I think they really believed I was going to have bags of money lying around, and I’d be dumb enough to store it so obviously. I gave them money from my passport pouch (they declined the passport, again lucky me they weren’t professionals). They had me open the med kit, I told them I had no more money (apparently in really stressful situations I’m a pretty good liar) but they could sell the meds (yeah sorry PCMO, collateral damage)—nope they didn’t want to. Finally they left the room; I shut the bedroom door, tried really really hard not to cry or freak out, and waited 15 minutes until they left the house. I yelled for Dio from my room and he came up, pointy-wooden-carved-weapon-thingy in hand.


We assessed the house together. The men, probably more than the 2 that were in my room, had pried the security bars off the kitchen window—probably with a car jack—climbed up into the house. Took apart the lock on the front door from the inside. I’m still unsure how they opened my room because it doesn’t have a handle and you need a key to open the door. They also took a DVD player, which actually belongs to the teen community program Peace Corps runs and ironically was at our house for safe keeping, a Peace Corps bag (because that is something you can totally use anonymously around town), some money from my roomie’s room, a machete—looks like I was held up with my own machete, and other odds and ends.

I’m pretty sure the men came from the mato/bush outside of town because of the way they spoke Portuguese … it’s most people’s second language here and they did not speak it well, their old goodwill clothes, and the fact that they didn’t cover their faces. Also they were quite a bit shorter than me (I’m very tall for Mozambique)… but honestly when someone has a big ol’ machete it doesn’t matter if they are a head shorter than you are. The house had been cased, and the break in was planned, I don’t think it was just chance that this happened the night before Claire was coming back home.


Dio and I frantically tried to call people, a little hard when of the two cell phones we had one didn’t have rede/reception and the other was out of phone credit. He sent out as many beeps (this free text message that tells the recipient to call the person who sends the beep… very popular here, basically “I want to talk to you but you should pay for it”) as is in his daily allotment. We even tried calling the MCell customer service line to see if they would call PC for us. Long story short, got a hold of PC and they sent someone down from Nampula immediately to temporarily evacuate me.

While I waited for the ride, the sun came up and people started congregating around my house, looking at the grate dangling from the house. Most of the talk was about how I should ABSOLUTELY go to a witch doctor, who could have these men killed, make them go crazy, and other charming options. The rest of the time people debated if it was someone from Ile who did it, how the neighborhood was changing. It was touching how the rest of the community responded. People kept stopping by to make sure I was okay. The girls who play in front of the house everyday sat outside all wispy eyed. Actually everyone came by or called except for the school officials… interesting…


So that’s the bulk of it. Congratulations if you made it through this lengthy post. PC has been amazing through the process. We are in Ile for the moment and homeless… waiting to see where we go and live… (maybe I get to use my marine biology experience after all… haha)


A million thanks for all of the love and support everyone!! I’m just getting to the point where I can more or less laugh about it… and being in this positive emotional space would not be possible without the amazing community back home that I am a part of.


I don’t think I’ll ever get over how unbelievably lucky I am.

The Cat… Issue

What is that smell? is usually not the first thing that I want to think about when I wake up, but the Wednesday after New Years I woke up to the undeniable oder of dead animal. A neighbor (?) had left the previous volunteer’s cat dead…and here is the creepier part…. With it’s feet cut off at my front door. It was 5 in the morning when I found it and I did what any other tough Peace Corps Volunteer would have done… went back into the house and locked the door. Maybe the body would wash away to someone else’s house, there was a sprinkle … or maybe someone would be so offended by the smell that they would take care of the body (okay embarrassingly selfish but I wouldn’t have complained)… or maybe the ants were feeling extra ambitious today and would consume the body entero by the end of the morning. In a state of denial, I putzed around, made breakfast, tried to read… but that smell (!)…. it’s something you just can’t ignore when you only have screens for windows. I needed to be an adult and buck-up and deal with the situation. But what do I do with it? I had some rocks, a broken hammer, ripped plastic, and some big sticks….hmm… pyre? The body could be dragged to some bushes and then the smell wouldn’t be so bad, and it would surely get eaten or disintegrate in no time, this is Africa afterall and the circle of life is strong here. I had a plan, a fail proof plan… now… where to drag the body? At first I though the backside of the house, nowhere near other neighbors and lots of bushes, but my bedroom window is right there so that was out (I am not risking any contamination in my room). There were those bushes to the side of the house, tall grass: good; upwind from the house: bad. Didn’t really look like any other spot would work.
The neighborhood came out to watch me move the cat onto plastic, chopstick style with big sticks. I studied biology and I’ve seen some pretty gross dead things… but this one really reached a new level of grossness. The cat had been poisoned and it’s body was horribly contorted. All four feet had been hacked off and the intestines were falling out of an incision on the torso. My stomach hurt, I gagged but really didn’t want to vomit in front of the silent watching crowd at the other side of the street. So awkward.
Sometime after I had pulled the cat to the bushes, a guy from down the street came by with a hoe and we dug a small hole for the body. Thankfully! Later he would ask if I wanted to enamorar with him… nothing puts me in the mood like dead cat, blech.
Since I was alone in the house and all (3 of ) my new friends were still away on New Years trips, I was especially freaked out. I stayed inside, I called Peace Corps and the school director: . Ultimately it was explained to me that if someone killed my cow or my goat (this is a hypothetical… I don’t have any livestock at the moment) and left it at my doorstep it would be considered a threat. Apparently a cat doesn’t count because it’s not edible. Of course.

My Mosquito Net is My Safe Space. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out.

Creepy crawlies galore! And I’m a wimp! I was really excited about getting out to the mato (aka boonies) and seening cool birds, etc. Heck I’m a biologist and a nerd …. I live for this stuff. So… things have not been panning out how I expected. I’ve seen: (1) humungo cockroaches. It has really been an all out war zone. Me versus the cockroaches. I sleep with the cockroach spray next to my bed so that when they wake me up with their little prickly legs scratching up against plastic bags, my suitcase, the cardboard box… I attack. I’ll do anything to get rid of them. Sometimes I even leave the little chemically crippled bodies out for a little while, just so their little roach friends can see that this is no safe zone. (2) Mini dragon – thing. Big black and caught by the dogs. Iguana? I don’t know but if you get a chance to check out the photos please don’t tell me it’s some endangered critter… I’ll feel bad. (3) Big furry spider. A friend who was visiting went on to the porch. I hear some banging and went outside to check what he had killed. It was so big and so furry that I thought the pulverized mass was a mouse. But it’s okay because apparently they only come out after rain. Too bad it rains fairly often. (4) I’ve seen a couple of little scorpions on the window frames. I wasn’t really worried about them because they are like ¼ of an inch and clear. Kinda cute, as far a scorpions go. Then my mom talked about the little ones being the dangerous ones in San Cristobal, and the missionaries said that a friend of theirs was stung by one here and it hurt for a week. (5) termites and ants. I wonder if my house will morph into the last few pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude (ants take over the family and their house). The ants have already burrowed through parts of my house. You can’t really see it unless you look carefully. At junctures in the room you can see their little red tunnels moving up walls. Or sometimes mini mud towers erupt through cracks in the floor. A few nights this week there have been termite hatchings and the outside wall around the front door gets covered covered covered with them. In the morning they die or loose their wings, I’m not sure, and when the mounds of their bodies get swept out the ants take over and after a few hours there isn’t anything left.

At least the rodent problem isn’t like Namaacha (teeming would be an understatement, but they are cute compared to the woodrats, etc. of the PNW), I’ve only seen one in the latrina…. I hope he was a loner and sterile.

I like all the geckos, even though they poop everywhere, they eat lots of bugs. And I like the lizards. They are a bit fat. Again, I probably like them because they eat bugs.

It really could be a lot worse (horror stories of rats nesting in people’s mattresses), and as far as Peace Corps goes this is a cakewalk and I probably shouldn’t be whining.

Site Delivery

It has been a week since site delivery. I am officially at site. My town has two names: you may find it called one on some maps or in the name of the secondary school, but on other maps, or on the entry signs it is called something else (very different). I’ve yet to get a good explanation about why there is confusion, it has been vaguely explained as some linguistic disconnect between the Portuguese and the original inhabitants (by Dio) and the fact that it is a district capital. But the names come from two mountains (more like huge huge rocks…. don’t think mount hood) next to the town.

The house is in much better condition than I thought it would be. Two plus bedroom, bright paint colors. Nothing fancy, but comfortable. Hole in the ground latrine… guess I’ll be working on those thigh muscles.

When I got to site I was greeted by Dio (soon to be 17 yr old, who gets room and board for helping out around the house, he is a wonderful person and extremely honest/thoughtful… he called me his “new American mom” on day one. So guess that’s the first time I’ve been called “mom”…. I don’t know if I’m mature enough) and some girls from the neighborhood. They sang a greeting song and had hung little welcome notes around the house. Made my day… especially after a rather long day of travel to get to site (our chapa was unauthorized to leave our city of departure, so we had to wait for it to go get proper paperwork before we could actually get anywhere).

***

Today I had to pay the electric bill. Easy enough. Right? Imagine: 20+ people crammed into a small area, three of them are with suckling babes (there is no personal space difference when it comes to nursing… anytime, anywhere, even if you are pressed up against other people), no deodorant, 150 degrees F and really high humidity. Even though there was quite a lot of space to spread out—even form a line (astounding!)--everyone pushed up against each other at the window to pay, there was a women’s and a men’s line (more like mobs) and the office would alternate between the sexes, slowly printing out receipts. I guess lines are a cultural thing, I kind of miss them. While I was trying to assert myself and trying not to step on any kids, one women (nursing while working her way through, pressed up on everyone else) did the standard hiss/hand flick motion – Mozambiquan beckoning-- granted it still takes me a little while to register the gesture I couldn’t figure out how she wanted me to get any closer to her… I was right up in there with her baby, nipple, and everything. Well it turned out she wanted my money and bill, so she passed it up with hers when she got to the window. Again part of the way it is done. People kept coming up passing bills/money to their friends waiting in line. I am glad she helped me out, I would have probably drowned in the crowd. Receipt printed and I was outta there.

***

Tonight, we were getting low on water, but it rained. Luckily. We filled up buckets and watched the neighborhood fill with smoke. A cane house down the street caught on fire, maybe electrical maybe a cooking fire—though the owners said (through the grapevine) they had put everything out. It’s still smoking now but I think (hope) the rain will keep it from getting too far.

There is something precarious about filling up basins in a lightening storm. I know they say don’t stand in puddles go swimming—I just don’t know if it counts if you are holding a contained mini body of water. Either way, with the smoke in the air, fire on the mind, I kept getting paranoid and would stop filling up buckets when the lightening got especially bright or the thunder particularly loud.

(Written 12/21/09)

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::