Site Placements!

After a long wait, site placements finally came! I still remember the first week of training when this seemed so far away, now it has already come and passed. The week leading up to site placement day was like torture! We had just returned from our site visits where we got to go out and see what life as a volunteer is all about. 

 

Relaxing on the Beach near Xai-Xai

I visited Heather in Chicumbane, Gaza with a fellow trainee Alice. We learned how to hitch hike, spent some time on the beach, toured the health center she works at, and played with kids at her organization CASHES which uses art, music, and dance to spread awareness about HIV and AIDS. It was amazing to see all the young men who lead the organization have such a passion for what they are doing. You can tell they just love spending time with the kids and the kids all really look up to them. It would be touching to see this at home too, but the culture and its concrete gender roles makes it seem so extraordinary to me. Props to those young men.

 

After that small touch of freedom, we came back to Namaacha and had our final interview for site placement. I thought sitting through tech sessions was rough before, but with placement announcement day in the near future it was harder than ever. Those five days leading up to Thursday seemed to last 2 weeks. But they day finally came! They drew out a giant map of Mozambique on the ground outside, we all lined up along the edge of it, sang both the Mozambique and American national anthem (props to us for memorizing the entire anthem in Portuguese!), then they handed us all an envelope with our site and organization info inside. We all read the congratulations letter on the outside first and then opened the envelopes all at the same time. I don’t think I even had much of a preference as to where in the country I ended up because I feel like I still know too little to be able to choose. But I was still extremely nervous, anxious, excited, my heart was pounding as I opened my envelope, my palms were even a little sweaty. The next two years of my life seemed like they were going to be decided by what was inside that envelope. I have not felt that kind of excitement since I was a little kid on Christmas morning!

 

 

 

 

And so, I will be spending my next two years in Chiure, Cabo Delgado in the very northern part of Mozambique!! I am very happy with both my site location and organization placement. I will be working with Ariel, an NGO focused on HIV/AIDS transmission prevention, treatment adherence, mother to child transmission, and the list goes on. It is a very dynamic organization with a lot going on to keep me busy. I will also be working with an organization that focuses on health care in rural and underserved areas. Before deciding to join Peace Corps, I was thinking of going to Med school to become a doctor in underserved areas back home so hopefully this experience will bring light to that and help me decide if it is still something I want to go for when I get home. I am so stoked to get to site!! 

 

Oh and an added bonus, I have a fellow Moz20 volunteer only about an hour away so I am sure I will get to see a lot of her :) Her site is right on the way to Pemba, a really awesome beach city where there is also another Moz20 volunteer placed probably about 2.5 hours total from my site. It will make for some pretty awesome weekend beach get-aways!

 

I cannot wait to get to my house, finally have my own space, and make it feel like home. I have learned so much in these 8 weeks of training, and there is still so much more out there to explore! My adventure has been nothing short of amazing so far, and the heart of it has yet to even begin. Only one more week of training, our big going away party this coming Saturday, swearing in on Tuesday the 6th at the ambassadors house, then finally boarding the plane on Wednesday and heading to the north! We have supervisors conference in Nampula for three days then we will be dropped off at site. It is going to be an exciting next few weeks. Let the adventures begin!

 

Side note, in a session we had this week about identity and stereotypes and such, we read a story written by a currently volunteer about how when she came here she felt like she had a pretty ordinary life. She went off to college after high school, did a little traveling, all pretty typical in the eyes of a middle class American. Then she got here and started sharing her story with the people of Mozambique. To them she had this completely amazing life that just blows them out of the water every time, this 25 year old woman living completely on her own (something unheard of in this country), with an extremely strong educational back ground, venturing half way around the world to live and work. A girl here her same age probably was forced to drop out of school before finishing high school to help at home or on the garden, was forced into marriage and starting a family at an extremely young age, and now leads in the same footsteps as her mother and her mothers mother with little to no sense of control over what happens next, as if in a puppet show. She probably has never had the chance to leave her province, let alone the country. I guess I had never thought about my life like this before and I cant even put into words how grateful and appreciative it makes me feel about my life, the opportunities I have had, and most of all my friends and family back home. I feel so overwhelmed just trying to wrap my mind around life here in Mozambique. I guess I have the next two years to contemplate all of this. Hearing what that volunteer said just hit home for me and put back into prospective why I am here, taking baths out of a bucket outside, peeing in a hole full of cockroaches, eating rice for every meal, and missing out on everything happening back home. I can't wait to get out there and start making a difference!