Secondary Projects?

Hello! I’m sorry it has been so long since I’ve updated this thing but honestly it’s been difficult finding things to write about. My hours recently got cut at school, so I am now just working 2 afternoons a week and it’s a serious bummer. The district essentially made a new rule that all teachers needed to teach a total of 24 hours, well because I am not a paid employee (I’m just a volunteer) every teacher was assigned 24 hours and I got the leftover, measly 9 hours a week. It stinks, it really does. But after talking to some colleagues I realized that most of them wanted to work even more than 24 (some had been working 30+ hours before) and because everyone gets paid based on the amount of hours they work, if I request more hours it takes away from another person’s salary---clearly not something I am trying to do. So this means that I have just been incredibly bored. And when I say bored I mean I’ve actually started watching TV episodes on my computer and re-reading old magazines I collected when I was in Maputo last January-it's that bad.

Initially I thought all this free time wouldn’t be that terrible because it would give me more time to work on secondary projects (any type of project outside of professional teaching). Well, starting secondary projects is not an easy task-especially when you live in a village that has never had another volunteer. People are justconfused when I try to offer tutoring or any sort of extra volunteering activity. So far my attempts at secondary projects have included:

-Helping organize our school library; re-arranging an old textbooks by subject (and grade) and then cataloging every book in the library so that when students borrow them we can trace where they’ve gone. This was a fun little project but I finished in about 3 days.

-Helping out at a colleague’s orphanage. Now this was a very exciting potential project for me. Another teacher at school mentioned that he helps out at an orphanage and after expressing interest in going he took me one morning. When I expected to walk to an orphanage in town, I was wrong. He led me on a 20-minute walk into the matu (farmland area) until we got to a very large field. He explained to me that the government of Mozambique donated 10 hectares of land to his organization, but gave them no funding to actually build an orphanage-all that has to come out of pocket. Some women met us at this field and he passed out some cove (kale/collard greens) for the women to plant in there homes. The plan is for these women to start their own small farm at home and use the cove when they cook to add more nutrients to their meals and thus help fight malnutrition (a huge problem here because everyone just eats carbs!) So that little piece was cool but overall I was kind of bummed out. I thought there was an established orphanage where he was helping teach/take care of kids but the fact is it hasn’t been built yet. The children are living with foster families. He was hoping I could help him get a grant or some type of funding to start building. That sucked. This teacher is a really genuinely great guy, and luckily he speaks some English so when I explained that I can’t just donate money to him because I have none he was just curious to learn more about what I can do, which is basically volunteer when the orphanage is going, and I also offered to help clean up some of the land but I don’t think he took me seriously at that offer.

-Finally, I found out another colleague at school wants to start a pre-school. Apparently there used to be a pre-school in Vanduzi that was volunteer run by some NGO but it stopped a few years ago and now there is no pre-school. Arguably worse, there is only one primary school in town, so children that aren’t fortunate enough to go to this school go to your stereotypical, African children sitting under a tree, drawing in the dirt trying to learn kind of school. So basically there is no preschool and limited primary school education available, which helps to explain why when students get to the secondary school (where I teach) they’re abilities are all over the place. I told this colleague if she starts a pre-school I will happily teach there in the mornings. I love kids and seriously need to find something to do to fill up all this free time! But things move SO SLOWLY here and I would be shocked if the pre-school starts up by the end of the year…

-I am also really going to start an English club. I’ve been talking to some other volunteers for advice on how to get it started and plan to really jump in with it in the next week or two so hopefully that will fill up some time and branch into other new projects!

That’s really it for now, I will say that even though I am just teaching 9 hours a week I really value my teaching time and think I spend a lot more time lesson planning, giving assignments (and grading them) and essentially just give my students more attention because I have less of them now, so that could be a good thing!

I’ll try to post again in the next week or two if there’s any new news, but hey, in my case I think no news is always good news :)

And here are some pictures:

Last weekend I went to Chimoio and hiked Cabesa de Velho with another volunteer. The “mountain” is maybe 3k outside of town and the hike to the top isn’t too tough. It’s really neat though, from the top you can see the entire town of Chimoio on one side, and then on the other side its just open fields/trees, a pretty cool contrast! Here’s a picture of me from the top of the mountain.



Two weekends ago a bunch of the PCVs that live in the central region of the country traveled to Vanduzi for a get together. It was a ton of fun, even though it rained all day for the one full day that volunteers were there we still had a great time cooking good food, telling stories and festajaring. Some wonderful person in America sent a box with peach rings in it to another volunteer so we ate those, along with some other great care package food! Here’s a funny shot of mostly everyone crammed into my kitchen posing with their peach rings:)



And I still can’t decide who had more fun that weekend, the volunteers or the kids that live in my bairro (neighborhood). They stood outside my porch watching us all weekend, even when it was pouring. They danced and sang outside, occasionally asked for food, but for the most part were just happy to watch us (and talk to whoever came out to say hello to them)


About a month and a half ago the country director came to visit me at site in Vanduzi. He took me, and two other volunteers out for lunch to talk about teaching/site...etc. Here's a picture of us in front of another PCVs house in Messica.



And I will add another quick story. I wait to bolea (hitch hike) out of site from the same spot everytime I leave. There is this house right on the outskirts of town that has a big tree in front that offers great shade to wait in while I try to flag down cars, and the family that lives there is really friendly too, which is always a bonus. Well today when I got to my spot, the teenage girl who lives at the house waved me over and said she wanted me to come into her house to meet someone. I followed her inside her incredibly small one room hut (which had a straw mat on the floor and then stacks of corn filled the rest of the house) anyway she had just had a baby boy, he was just TWO DAYS OLD. She insisted I pick him up and meet him but he was sleeping so I told her next time I visit I will hold him but he was so tiny! She also asked me to give him a name, at this point I told her I don't know any Mozambican names and that she should name him but she said she wanted to give him an America name...so i gotta start thinking. She invited me back for dinner next week and I think she is hoping that I will have a great name by then-any ideas?

The end.

Beer Olympics and the BEACH.

These past two weeks have been so fun, the only thing is I haven't been doing anything remotely related to my Peace Corps assignment unless it includes teaching Mozambicans some new drinking games. But hey, every once in a while PCVs need to take a break from living in the mato
(bush) and speaking Portuguese, and just relax.

Last weekend was the annual BEER OLYMPICS. An annual tradition, going back I have no idea how long but it is a tradition. Beer Olympics is basically like middle school field day, but with drinking mixed in. Volunteers from across the country escaped to Vilankulos beach for a weekend of relaxing and festivities. We were divided into teams based on our geographic regions in country, and well, the rivalries here run deep. Last year, my team, Central, won Beer Olympics, and we were hoping for a repeat victory and guess what WE WON. For the first time ever, there was a repeat victory! I know it seems silly to get so excited about drinking festivities but Beer Olympics really was a great way to channel some friendly competative energy, and just unwind. The day started with the carrying of a burning torch onto Vilankulos beach, then we all sang the [American] National Anthem, and after that the games began. Games included a shotgun relay, a relay race, dizzy bat, flip cup, beer pong and slam ball (delt ball!) And Central won, which means we get to proudly display the crazy little monkey statue (that has been in our office for the past year) for another year.

Here are some pictures from the event:


The wonderful, beautiful Vilankulos beach---mom and dad are you sure you don't want to visit?


Everyone getting ready for the days festivities.


Just some COESAO cheering to get everyone pumped up for the days festivities!!!


Team picture celebrating our victory!!! (Shane's holding the monkey trophy!)

After beer olympics, instead of heading back to Vanduzi I decided to travel a little further south to Tofo beach with some friends...I was already out of Manica province, and well once you're that close to the beach it's pretty tempting to stay.


Sunset over Tofo Beach.

And while in Tofo, I stayed with some other PCVs in Inhambane City, which is a city unlike anywhere else in Moz...there's a clear Portuguese influence, the town is much safer, and prettier and it was definitely like being on vacation.

A mural in Inhambane City.

And that's it for now---hope you enjoyed the pictures. I'm back to school tomorrow to start the second semester, my students haven't spoken English is almost a month it's going to be rough but I am excited to see their smiling faces again.

Until then!

-H.

Remembering Boston

This past week I've been staying in Chimoio for a Peace Corps conference. The conference was really beneficial because I was able to meet with other volunteers from my training group to talk about integration, lesson planning/school, and any other issues we have faced so far at site. The conference started Tuesday morning and finally ended this afternoon. Tomorrow I'll leave early in the morning to travel to the beach with some other volunteers and enjoy a really fun long weekend in Vilankulos.

I want to back track a bit just to write about the tragedy that happened in Boston on Monday. I was sitting in a hotel room, enjoying some libations and good conversations with friends that I haven't seen in months when one of my friends handed me his phone. I looked at it and saw the headline about the bombing in Boston. It was almost as if the world stopped. I swear, I sobered up, I couldn't hear anything anyone was saying, I couldn't even think. Thankfully I am so close to the PC office so I grabbed my computer and ran to the office to try and figure out a little more about the sudden catastrophe at the race. I sat in the office for the next two hours with another volunteer trying to read news headlines, look at pictures and get in touch with people from home. It was really scary. People always say its the sudden tragedies that make you appreciate what you have, but seeing something (on the news) so outrageous, happen in a place that I truly love was really difficult. Being so far from home, from family and friends, was also really difficult. I am so glad that I was here, in Chimoio, with my PC family when these events happened, because I was able to try and understand what actually happened and I had a great support system.

I'm not trying to write a post so that you can feel bad for me, but I think this sudden tragedy really puts things in perspective. I'm really far away from home, and when something scary happens it's very easy to feel helpless, and its difficult to even begin to understand why/how these kind of events occur.

I just wanted to thank anyone who sent an email or a text and kept me up to date with the current events in Boston, and thought to check in on me. I hope that everyone back home is safe, and is able to begin to register and try to make sense of what happened on Monday. I am really sad to know that the Boston Marathon, America's most famous race, is forever going to be changed, and looked at differently.

End of Semester Blues

If there is one thing that has broken my heart while teaching it is having to proctor exams. I was warned students would cheat, I thought I was prepared but the fact is it still just really sucks. The classes are too large, the students basically sit on top of each other so it is impossible to monitor who is looking at whose papers and who has casually switched exam papers with another student. I found too many students either reading their notebooks under their desks (even though I told them IN PORTUGUESE that they had to put all their notes and books in the front of the room) and countless other students were using their scrap paper (for math and science problems) to pass notes. So incredibly frustrating. It wasn’t even that they were so disrespectful to cheat that upset me it was the fact that I saw just how engrained into their culture it is to cheat. I would guess that just a handful of students actually study for exams, the rest rely on copying from those selected few. That’s the other thing; in most cases the students are copying the completely wrong answers from each other. Gah, it is just so frustrating. I guess seeing how the students “prepare” for these exams was just a reminder of how different my perspective towards academia is from theirs. For the majority of exams I was proctoring classes that I do not teach, so the students felt more comfortable pushing me to see how much they could get away with, thankfully, when I proctored my own classes there was much less cheating. My students were still trying to copy off their neighbor’s papers but at least I didn’t find any notebooks or cheat sheets and the whispering was pretty minimal…so that was nice. It makes me think that maybe, just maybe, my students respect me a little bit.

Proctoring exams also meant lots of grading had to be done, so I spent every night last week working through a pile of over 400 tests. The majority of the tests are multiple choice so that’s easy to correct but the tests that included a composition were a nightmare. The kids simply cannot write. I think out of 200ish tests that had compositions I had one perfect and just a handful of students who wrote decent compositions. Most students skipped the composition section completely or decided to respond in Portuguese instead of English. Let’s just say that grading exams has kind of been a slap in a face as to how much work I have to do here…Don’t get me wrong, I knew exams would be miserable, but I’m not completely pessimistic about school here. If anything I’m just excited to start off the next semester fresh, with plenty of new teaching ideas to use in my lessons. Now that I have my classes set for the rest of the year I can set up a better system to incorporate group work, check homework, give more quizzes to help their grades and ideally work more on writing and speaking…so much to do!

This week has been so incredibly boring though. I finished grading all my tests last Friday so that I could have my weekend free to visit friends. The teachers were all supposed to have their tests graded by Monday but of course no one finished (besides me!). So now it is just a waiting game...waiting for teacher’s to give me back my classes exams so I can calculate semester grades...and waiting for all the students who skipped exams to show up for the make-up test. There isn’t even real school this week, the students come everyday to hangout and play volleyball and see their friends, but no one is actually teaching…and I can’t really do anything until I get the tests back so I’ve just been so bored. I’ve spent my days so far reading, doing yoga, going for nice long runs and actually lesson planning for the next semester. Needless to say I am excited for the weekend—On Friday, the country director of Peace Corps is coming to visit me at site, then I have a friend coming to visit, and on Sunday I’ll go to Chimoio for a weeklong conference with other volunteers. At the end of the conference we’re all traveling to Vilankulos, a beautiful beach in Northern Inhambane, for a huge volunteer get together, so that will be really fun.

On a sadder note, there was some small political violence last week that resulted in 4 civilians being shot and killed from inside a tourist bus. Scary stuff. Peace Corps actually put up a travel ban to restrict volunteers from traveling anywhere remotely close to where the violence occurred but it’s still some pretty scary stuff. Hopefully it won’t turn into a larger conflict…

That’s it for now.

Palm Sunday and some YAMS!!!

FIRST---here is the website that my sitemate set up about the flooding in Guija. She is organizing a couple of different relief projects because she is still working in the area, please take a look at it (even if it is just to read a little) to find out more about what happened in January...

http://www.theguijafund.org/

Last Sunday I went to church and I'm going to tell you all about it...

Another teacher at school preaches at a Christian church in Vanduzi and for the past couple of weeks he has been pleading for me to come to a service. On Saturday we had a meeting at school and he told me he was very worried because I have not come to church yet (I've been away from site the past 3 weekends) and he also reminded me that I promised to come, so not wanting to break a promise I decided to go on Sunday.

The service was so different from any church I've attending in the states. For starts, the majority of it was just singing. THERE WAS SO MUCH SINGING. and that was cool because the singing was beautiful and fun. Everyone sang. The young people (students) sang, the women sang, the men sang...even the little kids stood in front of the congregation and sang for everyone. There was also lots of hand clapping and dancing. People were just really happy. After about 2 hours of singing the actual service began. The paster made me come to the front of the church while he introduced me to everyone and told them that I was from America but now lived in Vanduzi. He told them I was his friend, and was visiting the church, and he wanted everyone else to treat me as a friend, it was really nice.

The most interesting part of the service though was the sermon. It lasted maybe an hour and was more like watching a dramatic play. The paster walked around preaching and another younger boy (actually one of my old 11th graders!) walked around behind him repeating everything that he said in Shona (the local language) and translating it into Portuguese. The two of them were walking in circles around the congregation and they were acting out whatever verses they were reading from the bible, and using different voices and really just getting very into whatever they were saying. It was pretty cool to watch. Someone else from the church sat next to me and translated the entire sermon, so that was also very nice because I think otherwise I would have gotten bored. (My portuguese is getting better but its still hard to focus after an hour of translating...). The main message of the sermon was that even if someone isn't accepted in their community today, or if their life is hard, to remember that they are already a member of god's community, and to remember how special that is.

I don't want to get all preachy but it was just an interesting message to hear in a poor, rural village in the middle of Mozambique.

Overall, the service was 4+ hours long, and there was a meeting after the service but I left before that started. I had lots of work to do on Sunday and by the time church ended it was almost 2 o'clock!

---

Story number two.

I went to church with another teacher at school, Sophia, who has become a good friend of mine. I walked to her house at 9 AM and waited outside talking to her neighbor, Beatrice (also another friend and collegue). Beatrice's empragadas were busy preparing breakfast and when I asked what they were cooking, she told me 'yams'. Well I got very excited about this because I love yams and the sweet potatoes that we have in Vanduzi are nothing like American sweet potatoes, so when I realized that I had been missing out on the real thing I was just so excited. Beatrice must have noticed my excitement because when I was walking home from church one of her empregadas came running up to me saying "Tia Haleigh, Tia Haleigh..." and then waving me to towards Beatrice's house. I walked over and Beatrice handed me a container with cooked yams, she said she wanted to share some of her food with me because she knew how much I like yams. How nice?

And guess what the yams were delicious.

This is the last week of the trimester. Next week, I'll have to give my students a huge exam (its actually the provincial exams, similar to standardized, state testing back in America) so this is very exciting but also kind of nerve-wrecking. Apparently lot of students try to cheat on these tests and even more students will fail...gah, wish me luck!

Here are some pictures!

The road into Vanduzi...



Well, this is the busiest area of town (markets and small stores line both sides of the street, and people are always out and about, this is also where I can catch a chappa to Chimoio!)


Here is the magical fruit truck (that's actually not a truck but I like to call it that) which is on the outskirts of town and sells produce from south africa. Yesterday I bought peaches and grapes...something you usually can only find in the capital way down south!



Here is a picture of my kitchen/common room! Take note of the nice little fridge that I bought last month...it cost almost my entire monthly allowance but the fact that I can now eat leftovers (after slaving away cooking on charcoal for hours) made it all worth it! Also Grace look your card is hanging up! As is your postcard but you can't see it from this picture...



And here are two pictures of my bedroom...I had to take two shots because my room is tiny and if I take just one my bed just takes up the whole shot...



Taking the expression "living out of a suite case" quite literally...



Okay I promise my next post will have pictures of people and new friends I just have been reluctant to get my camera out...but it will happen! Have a great day everyone!

Back to Site/COESAO

Well, I am back at site and things are pretty much back to normal. I went back to school on Monday and it was torture trying to get my students to speak English, but I can’t blame them, I remember after doing site visits last fall (and not speaking Portuguese for 5 days) it was impossible to speak the language…so I guess after 10 days my students complains that ‘it (English) is too difficult’ were true. So Monday was a struggle but by Tuesday class went a lot smoother. Next week I will be testing both of my classes and I am pretty nervous. I wrote up the tests already and they are pretty easy, in fact I took examples almost directly from my notes and their homework but the problem is my students don’t actually do their homework. Some of them do the homework and participate but a lot of them just sit there quietly and with a class of 50+ individuals it is easy to overlook those that just do not want to try. I offered ‘office hours’ (which I sneakily called English Club or Tutoring) but no one came for help, so that was kind of a bummer but I think they will come next week, or in two weeks, or maybe once the national exams start. One of the other teachers said my students are just kind of afraid of me because I am fluent in English, so they are afraid to ask for help or feel embarrassed. At first I was offended by this, I try to be polite and supportive when I teach and have been told that I smile the entire time I lecture but I guess it is also intimidating to ask me for help, since I am so different. We shall see what happens next week when I test them!!

In other stories, since returning to Vanduzi a million people have asked me how I am doing and if I am better. Most people think I got bit by a dog, and had to get rabies shots, while other people think I had Malaria, and a few colleagues just smiled and told me I got sick because I am new but now that I have been sick I will be used to Vanduzi and can live here. Almost like getting sick was my initiation to this town…cute huh? I tried to explain to people that I had a parasite but then they started advising me on drinking better water (I filter and bleach my water) or avoiding vegetables because they grow in the ground….it is nice though that in general, people were concerned about me and are happy to have me back. I think the most excited people though are the little kids here. They are just so cute. I know its cliché to say but they are adorable. Whenever I walk anywhere (or run) they come running out to the road to jump up and down and wave and yell “Ola, Ola, Ola Menina;” and they are always smiling and laughing and so excited. I probably should be a little concerned about the fact that I’m so amusing to them but they’re just too gosh darn cute for me to care. When they say ‘Ola’ I usually great them back in Portuguese or English…it would be pretty cool if all the little kids in Vanduzi started saying English greetings.

Two Random Stories:

There is one man who works at the school and wants to learn English. A lot of people ask me to teach them English but this man is very persistent. He is really nice and he means well but I honestly have no idea how to teach him…he knows zero English. He has come to my house twice now to ask about lessons and I just have no idea where to start. Yesterday he came to my house while I was sitting outside reading the Economist (one of the perks of being in Maputo is buying English-printed news!). Anyway he sits down on my little stove, picks up my bowls from lunch and starts eating my food that I was clearly done with…it was the strangest thing. He didn’t even ask to eat it, and frankly I don’t know what I would have done if he did. I guess I wasn’t going to eat it so at least it didn’t go to waste but it was weird. After eating my food he then asked me about English lessons and I told him I needed to get caught up with work first and think about how to teach him because I don’t know how.

Story number 2…My first week here in Vanduzi I went to a funeral with two other teachers from my school. I’m not even sure who exactly died because it was my third day in town but the teachers said I should go with them out of respect, so I did. It was so different! As we walked up to the house I could hear woman singing and drums beating---a strange mourning sound? At the house all of the women were outside on one side, some of whom were sitting quietly morning, but most of them were standing in a big circle singing and dancing. My friends told me the women will dance until the body is brought to be buried, which meant they were going to dance through the night until the early hours of the morning. All of the men were sitting on the other side of the house in a quiet circle under a tree. None of the women and men were interacting…and actually none of the men were talking. I asked why they were separated but didn’t really get an answer. Also I should mention, I was wearing a long skirt and t-shirt but when we got to the house an older woman said something to me in Shona, and one of my colleagues gave me a capulana* to wrap around my legs because even though my skirt covered my knees it was too short, or maybe just not conservative enough. A lot of the woman were wearing capulanas, which is the traditional thing to wear to a funeral, but we had walked over from school so I was in my work clothes. We sat for a good twenty minutes and then left, and that was that.

So those are my two interesting cultural stories from Vanduzi so far.

Last weekend, after coming back from Maputo, I went straight to Messica for a Peace Corps get together, known as COESAO(a blend of the work central and the portuguese word meaning together...because we all living together in central and are like one big family) with all the volunteers from the central region (Tete, Sofala and Manica provinces). It was really fun. We camped at this lodge called Casa Masika, which was right outside of town but the family that ran the lodge owned hundreds of acres of land. There was a crocodile farm, and apparently other wildlife (like giraffes and gazelles and monkeys and pythons!!!!) but I didn’t see any of those animals. We spent the weekend telling stories from site, learning about the older volunteers secondary projects and we even went for a “little” hike. The hike turned into scaling the side of a small mountain and it was kind of crazy but lots of fun. Overall, it was a great weekend, and it was really nice to meet the rest of the volunteers that live in this region.

Here’s a picture from our hike to the top of this small mountain:



To end, I am completely recovered from my parasite and back to normal. I finally went for a run on Monday night, my first run in two weeks and it felt great! So things right now in Vanduzi are just fine. Oh and I also got a front door on my house so now it is actually safe.

Bolea-ing (halfway) Across the Country + An African Health Problem

Last week, my friend Wendy told me that she was planning to travel South to go to a friend's birthday party in Southern Inhambane. I got very excited about this and told her I wanted to come too. I miss my friends that live down south, and also had TWO packages waiting for me...making the trip there is kind of exhausting but traveling with a friend is much more fun, so I agreed to tag along. Our friend Shane decided to come too.

Wednesday night I went to Chimoio to stay at Wendy's because we wanted to leave really early the next day (5 AM). We left by 5:30, caught a chapa to Inchope (took about 2 hours) and from there we set up camp on the side of the road to try and bolea (hitch hike) south. After almost 2 hours of waving down cars with no success a car stopped for us. Sadly it was just a cop car, he wanted to take our nice spot in the shade to set up a check point (to monitor speeding, check cars...etc) so we moved. A random drunk guy that Shane had befriended decided to move along with us--he was having way too much fun talking to us white people so he wasn't going to leave. We moved to a new spot farther along the road, our drunk friend got tired and left, and shortly after we got picked up by two Mozambicans who worked for Coco Cola. They offered to take us about 2 hours south to a town called Muxungue. We of course accepted their offer and climbed in to their nice, cozy, air conditioned car--where we could use seatbelts and relax a bit. That drive went by pretty quickly, we took turns napping and after about 2 hours got to our destination. We got dropped off on the site of the road, were wished safe travels and our new friends drove off to work close by.

The three of us wandered to find some snacks (we hadn't eaten since 5 AM and were kind of hungry), we bought some bread and bananas and found a new spot to camp out at to eat and try to hitchhike. We were sitting down for maybe 5 minutes (I hadn't even finished my banana yet) when we saw a Land Rover down the road, driving in our direction. Wendy and I jumped up, I remember saying 'there's no way we'll get picked up this quickly but we have to try' and we both started trying to wave the car down. When the driver actually stopped right in front of us were in shock. I remember seeing a small American Flag on the inside of the window and was just thinking, oh my gosh, a bolea that speaks English this is too good to be true. The driver got out of his car, asked us if we were Peace Corps volunteers, then asked where we were going and told us to get in. His friend who was in the passenger seat also got out and they both started moving stuff around so we could fit in the back seat.

Turns out our driver was a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from the Gambia and was now working in Mozambique, doing medical research and his friend was also a doctor in the states; he was just visiting for a few weeks. We talked a bit, and then basically got to enjoy taking an awesome bolea all the way south to inhambane city where we could stay with friends for the night and then continue our journey the next morning. At one point along our drive we stopped at a small baraca on the side of the road to get refrescos. Wendy asked the Americans if they could look at her burn wound on her leg, they happily agreed and checked it out and then offered some advice on how to keep it clean and care for it.

We'll back track a little here, so about a week ago, I noticed a small red bump on my stomach. It looked a lot like a mosquito bite but it didn't itch at all, it actually kind of tingled. After a few days though it started getting really sore, and slowly got more swollen and more sensative each day. I called the PCMO (my doctor) and sent her a picture of this bump, and was advised to keep it clean, and start taking antibiotics. We thought it was just an infected bug bite and that with the antibiotics it would go away. So this "bug bite" hadn't really gotten better but I was taking plenty of ibeuprofin and that definitely helped the pain, and after being told it was a problem that would take care of itself I decided to travel with my medical condition. I decided to ask the doctors to look at my bite too and well when I showed it to them they kind of were really surprised and told me they would take care of it as best they could when we got to a better spot for them to work but that I needed to go to a hospital.

After a lot of hours of driving we get to Inhambane City and meet up with our friends. One of the doctors cleans his hands, puts on gloves, then goes to touch my now incredibly swollen bug bite, and by touch I mean he actually just grabs it and squeezes and lots of really colorful liquid comes out. I almost passed out from shock and pain and started crying and had to sit down. The doctor continued to drain my very infected bump and then gave me some antibiotics. He explained to my friends everything I needed to do since they were in a much better state than I was was, and when I finally calmed down, we thanked them and went on our way.

This bug bite thing was no longer sore the rest of my trip but I was carefull to keep a close watch on it and to keep it clean and bandaged. After a night in Inhambane City, we left the next morning to travel to Quissico, which is thankfully just a 2-3 hour chapa ride away. Of course we wanted to bolea and figured that after bolea-ing almost 1000k another hundred should be easy right? wrong. after three boleas (one of which was a huge truck that we sat in under a tarp while it poured and then had to vacate when the driver decided to pick up a million coconuts) and a short chappa ride we made it to Quissoco and got to see all of our friends!

Catching up with friends at the lagoon. So much fun.

I enjoyed my weekend in Quissoco and had a great time catching up with my friends. On Sunday morning, Wendy and I both got up early to catch a bolea to Maputo. Some really nice South African picked us up and we spent the next 5 hours camped out in the back of their pick up truck. We joked because when they picked us up it was really hot and we figured we'd probably get sunburned in the bed of this truck but after about 20 minutes it started raining, so we used Wendy's sleeping bag to make a tent to try and stay dry. The entire drive was pretty crazy, it kept switching between being really hot, and raining, but atleast we got a nice ride with some very friendly people. We were even given some bottled water and sandwiches!

When we got to Maputo, we went right the PC office and then from there we went to see the doctor. I showed the doctor my bug bites and guess what they actually turned out to be...I'm warning you its incredibly disgusting...it was insect larvae, under my skin!!! The doctor explained that when I hang my clean laundry up to dry, there is a kind of fly that lays eggs in clothing, so in this case it laid eggs in my underware. When I wore my what I THOUGHT was clean underware, I was actually just infecting myself and made it possible for these microscopic eggs to go through my pores in be laid under my skin just below my belly button. DISGUSTING. I asked the doctor how I could prevent this from happening again and he told me I should go back to America. He laughed and then said ironing my clothes should get rid of them. So the doctor cleaned me up and now I am still here in Maputo, totally fine and feeling much better, just waiting for these wounds to heal up so that I can go back home to Vanduzi.

Wendy and I basically traveled half the country this weekend but hopefully we will just get to fly back or take a nice, safe bus all the way up to Chimoio. No more bolea's or chappas and hopefully we'll both be healthy.

The end.