Site Placement, etc.

I´m going North! Really North. My new housemate Mary and I will be the farthest up of any PCVs in Moz (for now). Moz is roughly the height of the Eastern seaboard (huge country!), and if I`m in southern Floriday now I`ll be north of Boston when I get to my site!

Our site is in the northern part of Nampula province, approaching Cabo Delgado. Our house will be cement (presumably with a tin roof, easy-bake oven effect here I come!) with electricy, thank God, so I can have a fan to combat the ridiculous Nampula heat. We may or may not have running water--we don´t know yet because they haven´t actually finished building our house....

Custodio, our fabulous and dedicated programming director assures us that they have a nice place lined up for us until our house is completed. Although I´d really like to start getting our house together--decorating, building things, etc., while we have time before school starts in February, but I suppose it will be nice to be able to supervise (and maybe make suggestions) as they finish building. It´s kind of strange to think that someone is building me a house....

I don´t know Mary very well--her training group is in a different town--but from the little I´ve seen she seems laid-back and nice, and I hear she has a good sense of humor so I think we´ll get along well. I am really glad that I have a site-mate, especially since we will be rather isolated from the others--I think the nearest Volunteers will be 3-5 hours away by chapa. However, we are already making tentative Christmas plans! and maybe getting everyone in teh Province together at Ilha de Mozambique, which is supposed to be really nice.

Neat upcoming things; Peace Corps wants to open another office in Nampula to better support Volunteers in the North (they have been gradually expanding the program from the south to the central provinces and now into the north). PC wants to open up Cabo Delgado, and since we´ll be the closest Volunteers we might get to help with site development. I can´t wait to get up there and find out more about my new home! Nampula is supposed to be really interesting and extremely diverse because of the ports--70% of all Moz trade goes through Nacala.

Not quite so neat things coming up; I´ll probably be ~3 hours by chapa from my bank/post office/internet in Nacala, so it will probably cut back a bit on the frequency of letters/emails/blogging. However we do apparently have cell service in my town, and I can send you eleven text messages for the price of one stamp, so send me your numbers if you want me to text you! Because of the way phone credit works here (no cell phone plans) it doesn´t work well for me to call out (~$1 per minute for a LOCAL call!), but any of you are more than welcome to call me--apparently the 6 cent/min phone cards work pretty well and are relatively easy to come by online. Hint hint.

Thanksgiving was fabulous and I ate a RIDICULOUS amount (the director of training lauged when she saw how high my plate was piled). The day before I was sick, and terrified that I wouldn´t be able to eat Thanksgiving dinner. But by a great stroke of fortune it was only a 24 hour bug. I wish the Mamas here who think I´m too skinny could have seen how much I ate--I tell them I eat a lot, but they never believe me. They pinch my stomach and then shake their heads in disapproval.

I guess that´s enough info for one entry--we´re all recovering from an over-excited day of combined Thanksgiving and site placement--the two biggest events of training before Swearing In on December 8th!

Wish me luck with my 4th language--we start local language survival classes Friday, and I´ll be learning Makua!

Special thanks to Dad for his letter, and Liz for her letter and FALL LEAVES--I ran around our thanksgiving celebration showing everyone :) It was a beautiful cool (!) day for our Thanksgiving, almost reminiscent of Fall, and I got the leaves/letters that afternoon--it made me really happy.
Special thanks also to the lovely people who emailed me: Auntie Judy, Marie, Trev, Uncle Jon, Prof. Fraser, and Mummy! What a good week for emails :)

Will try to update again before we fly off to Nampula! Wish me luck!

Facebook

One more quick note--I´m also uploading my pictures to facebook (www.facebook.com), which puts up lower quality images, which load much faster, so feel free to check out the album there, I think it will get a fair number o the pics up by the time my internet runs out again.....

Week of suspense..

Only three more weeks of training! It´s amazing how things drag along at first, and then FLY by. Something someone said the first week is incredibly true here--the days are very long, but the weeks are very short. It´s Monday forever, and Tuesday forever, but then all of a sudden it´s Friday and you don´t quite know how you got there.

This week will be the third and final week of teaching. I will have 9th grade students this time, which means plants plants and more plants. Note to self and other foreign language science teachers--do NOT change your lesson plan drastically while you are giving it unless you are A. very confident in your language skills, or B. it is absolutely necessary, or C. you like feeling like an idiot. No major teaching problems, just moments of "oh dear god, i have no idea how to explain this in Porguese, wish I´d thought about it more when I didn´t have a class full of kids staring blankly at me."

Next Saturday is a BIG DAY. We have Thanksgiving lunch (ALL of the trainees together) and Site Placement. A week from today I will know where I´ll be living for the next two years, and who I´ll be living with! We have interviews with our Programming director this week, and then he will make final decisions about where we´re all going. We can indicate preferences for things that are important to us. I want a site-mate and access to varied food--I´ve decided I like the idea of having someone nearby, (plus it´s pretty common in Peace Corps Moz), and I´d rather not have months of the year where the vegetables in my market consist of onions and the occasional tomato. At some point after placement I´ll try using the internet in my town to give you an update, as I probably won´t get back to Maputo until the end of training (thanksgiving festivities next Saturday, and homestay celebration the following) right before SITE DELIVERY. In past years Peace Corps has dropped everyone off at their sites individually, but our training group is enormous, so we may be sent off with our school supervisors.......there´s potential for 10 hours of awkward silence in a chapa*....

*Note on chapas: Imagine a mini-van, take out the regular seats and replace them with four rows o tiny seats, the the left of which folds to one side. Put four people in each of the "regular" seats in each row, plus two-three up front with the driver (try not to get your arms-legs-belongings in the way of the stick shift), then add maybe 5-8 more people crammed in by the door, sprawled/leaning over the people in the first two rows, oh and toss in a few live chickens just for kicks. The cobrador (guy who collects the money) worms his way in the door, the chapa starts moving as soon as he has one foot off the ground, and he uses an impressive flicking motion to close the door behind him (this often takes a few tries when there are people in the way). You are now crammed into a teeny tiny space, and hopefully have one of the back (less crammed) spots by a window, so you can actually get some air. The my usual chapa ride to maputo is only 45 minutes, and the longest chapa ride that I´ve had so far (complete with chicken flapping against my legs) was only four or five hours, so I´ve been spared the "real" experience so far, but we will see in the two years to come....

In the last 45 minutes another 13 pictures have gone up, many of these from site visits--first few beach ones at Xai-Xai, the provincial capital, and the later ones at the small town I visited, also in Gaza province. We´ll see i ever manage to get captions up on some of the pics...

Special people of the week: mummy, Uncle Jon and Connie-girl for sending me letters!
Victoria, Uncle Jon, daddy and Professor Fraser for sending me emails!
and my oh-so-fabulous mummy for my very first PACKAGE, complete with wrapped christmas present, so now I have at least one present to open on christmas day :)

Note about the package: the padded envelope was great (lower taxes, which means i don´t have to pay to receive it), but make sure to really really UNDER-value the contents on the customs slip, as this helps avoid theft.

Love to you all, and keep me posted!

Laura

Teaching? What?

Dear Family and Friends,

Thanks to the lovely Sveta for pointing out that I´m an idiot and don´t know my own login to the ophoto site! Here is the correct info:
www.ophoto.com
login: lbelazis@gmail.com
pass: pictures
The pictures are uploading as I type, 11 have gone up so far I have another 30 minutes of internet, so hopefully you´ll get a reasonable assortment of pictures, and you will definitely actually get to see Moçambique this time!

Thanks also to Mummy and to Sarah Pettit, the wonderful people who sent me letters this week! --this is a not so subtle guilt trip for the rest of you ;)

So, on to my life in Moz:
I have now (with some degree of success) taught three classes on the digestive system in Portuguese to actual Moçambican students. Crazy, i know. This week we had Micro school (each person gives a 20 min lesson per day), and I taught 8th grade bio, which is the human body. It´s a rather odd feeling to think that I planned lessons in Portuguese, gave lessons in Portuguese, and the kids (actual mozambican students) actually answered the questions that I asked them in Portuguese! My langue skills are still rather pathetic and limited, but we have all come along way (especially us bio teachers because we have more opportunities to use it/be forced to use it than the english teachers who aren´t supposed to use any Portuguese in their classrooms).

Next week we have Model School, which means full-length 45 minute lessons each day, and administering a cumulative exam on what we´ve taught on Friday. We´ll then have another week of Model School, which may be a different grade (9th is plants, 10th is genetics-evolution). My drawing skills are going to have to improve rather dramatically in the next two years, because the only visual aids that the kids are going to see are ones I make--few to none of the students have text books, and other resources are tricky to come by.

It´s amazing how time flies by when you´re typing away frantically in an internet cafe--juggling multiple windows of blogging-email-photos! It´s hard to decide what to write about in the little time that I have, so let me know what you want to hear about!
The wild life? Neat little birds with bright blue stomachs, roosters (which contrary to everything I remember learning do in fact crow all. night. long.), sea turtles, whales, monkeys, dogs--of which Mozambicans are petrified--by the way the word for dog is cao, pronounded cow, which I think is funny, lots of lizards--gala galas and geckos, but not too many big things. Most of the large animals were killed in the civil war--one side hunted them for food, and the other side hunted them so the other side couldn´t eat them. Alas, no elephants for me.

Well, my time is up, so lots of love to all of you at home!

Laura

Pictures

I don´t have much time left, so I´m hoping they will finish uploading, but I´m putting up pictures as we speak! Go to www.ophoto.com and log in as me, my email is lbelazis@virginia.edu and the password is pictures.

The first two pictures are of loading the buses in Philly, the third is of our hotel in S Africa, and then.....two pics of Maputo from the air. Then there are five of our ridiculous hotel during Pre Service Training, followed by three of the village where I live now during training. The last series (including all the fabulous beaches) are in Gaza province, where I went these past few days for site visits.

Oh wow, the upload is going REALLY slowly and I have another 3 minutes of internet.....so I´ll try to finish uploading next time I make it to an internet cafe. Trust me, the pictures are beautiful and you´ll see them eventually.....

Site visit was amazing, it was so nice to get a way for a few days. It was quite the little vacation seeing Jill´s town and hiking to the beach.

Love to all, and special thanks to Marie, Laura and Daddy whose letters I got last week!