Written November 15, 2012
I have been having trouble starting
a blog here. I came into the Peace Corps with the intention of sharing my
experience with my friends and family back home through this blog and it is now
week 8 of training and this is my first post.
Let me start by gushing about what
a great experience this is. I had heard that training is tough and frustrating
but that has not been my experience. For me, training is incredible at the best
of times and boring at the worst of times. The days are long (7:30 to 5:30) but
the weeks fly by. It helps that my training group is fantastic. I have made
some great friends already and I have been enjoying trying to know everyone in
the group a little better by the end of training. The town of Namaacha is
gorgeous, with green rolling hills in each direction and mango trees at every
house. It can get very hot here which has us hoping for rain. Then it rains and
we remember that we hate that because then there is matope (mud) EVERYWHERE! I
go out to the bath house to take a shower and by the time I’m back in the house
my feet are muddy again. That’s how much matope there is. My host family has
welcomed me from day one as Mana Anneke (older sister Anneke) and I was lucky
to have enough Portuguese and Spanish to be able to communicate with them right
away. I dance with one host sister, do math homework with the other, and bake
cakes with my host mom. Each day I am learning more and more Portuguese.
Being so content with my current
situation made it hard to write. I didn’t know where to start when all I
thought of was, “I like this and I like this and I love that!” Where’s the
drama? Where’s the suspense??
But what made this post the hardest
to write was the realization that I have only begun to think about what it
means to live in Mozambique. So far, I spend a majority of my waking hours with
Americans. We have 10 hours of class together a day. Add in a few hours of
bonding time (ie. Jogging, walking, beers, Frisbee) and it takes up a good
portion of the week. I do spend a lot of time with my host family but even
then, I cannot begin to realize the importance of the cultural differences I am
seeing. So that is why I am hesitant to write anything about what Mozambique is
like. The truth is I have been seeing everything from a Namaacha bubble. We are
close to South Africa and Swaziland, and Maputo in a place that gets colder
than almost anywhere else in the country. It is nowhere close to representative
of the country. I don’t expect to know
everything about Mozambique by the time my 27 months is over either, but I am
open to learn as much as I can and I share it along the way.
So this is my version of a cultural
disclaimer. I don’t know everything and I will try my hardest not to pretend I
do. But I do want to share a bit about my experience and this beautiful country
where I am living.
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