Officially a PCV!

After 10 weeks of training that at times seemed like they were never going to end, Moz20-ers finally went from PCTs to PCVs on Aug 6th! Amazing group of people, that's for sure

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After site announcements we still had a few weeks left of training to get through before heading off to site. I thought this time would pass really slowly because we were all so anxious to get to site, but for me it didn't for some reason. I was just trying to soak up those last few days with my Moz20 crew and my host family and Namaacha before we were all scattered to site. It still amazes me how close a group of 26 strangers can get in 10 short weeks. I would trust my life to anyone in our group and do anything for them. I already miss them all and can’t wait for reconnect in 3 months!! It is going to feel so good to be re-united :)

 

We had a big farewell party with all of our host families before leaving site as well. There was tons of great food, drinks, dancing, and fun. I feel like all of training we have been looking ahead waiting for it to be over, but it wasn't until the last day came that I realized how much I was going to miss it...funny how things always work that way. Here are a few pictures from the party of me and my host family, they were amazing!

 

 

 

 

The swearing in ceremony was short and sweet. We sat outside of the ambassadors house, listened to a few speeches, sang the Mozambique and American National Anthems, took some pictures, mingled a bit with RPCVs that had come for the event, had some finger foods, and just like that it was over. We headed back to the hotel, rested for a bit, then soaked up the last bit of time all 26 of us would have together before heading our own ways to site.

 

The very next day we were separated into two groups for the North and South regions. All of the Northern volunteers boarded the plain for Nampula for our supervisors conference. I was not sure what to expect out of the conference, but it turned out to be really helpful. We got to meet our supervisors, then Peace Corps went through step by step what we are all about, what they should expect from volunteers, basically just got everyone on the same page so we were all comfortable with things and knew a little more what to expect when getting to site. I actually had 2 supervisors at the conference, one from each of my orgs. I left the conference excited to finally get started with my work!

 

Angela and I with our Wiwanana counterparts

That excitement was followed by somewhat of a let down. It would be a lie to say the first week at site was not a huge struggle for me. Almost every night I went to bed thinking how much easier it would be to just to pack up and head home. I was staying in a hotel because my house wasn't ready when I got to site, I was out of clean clothes, the power in the hotel went out, I could not go anywhere without feeling like every person I passed stopped what they were doing to stare at me, every time I went to the market I would get followed around by kids saying they were hungry asking me to buy them food, when I tried to go to a soccer game with my site mates to just hang out and relax and have a little relief I was pretty much the only female in the entire place and I was continually being confronted by drunk men. It was like anything I did I could not get an escape for myself. But something deep down inside of me must have wanted to stay and push forward, because here I am still here!  

 

Just like I kept telling myself, the struggles finally pasted. I was finally able to move into my house and start settling into my new life. Everyone that I work with both at the Hospital and at the Wiwanana office are super friendly and I can tell they are making a big effort to make me feel comfortable even though my Portuguese skills are still quite lacking. I don't notice the staring as much either, I don't know if it is because I have gotten used to it or if they have gotten more used to seeing me or a combination of the two, but it is easier to handle now. There are still a lot of little things I am working on ironing out but I am starting to realize I need to just take things day by day and make a point to celebrate the little accomplishments, like discovering a whole new part of the market I never knew existed before or starting to build a relationship with the kids who live next to me.

 

I still have a long way to go before this place is going to feel like home, but I think I have finally made it over the first hurdle. I just have a few more things to figure out for my house and then I can start putting all of my time and energy towards learning this language, getting to know the people, and figuring out exactly what my role here is going to be.

And this is my house! I had quite an interesting first few days here, but I will save that for another post :)




 

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!     

 

 

 

Traditional Healer

Today we got to take a trip to a traditional healer, something that is still deeply woven into the culture here in Mozambique. This is something I am extremely curious about and I really want to go back and have a conversation with one later on when my Portuguese skills are a little better. Before the visit, we had a mini info session on traditional healers and learned that the health system really tries to incorporate traditional healers into services provided by medical centers. They work with traditional healers and have them inform patients that it is also important for them to seek treatment at the health center after they visit the traditional healer for more serious illnesses. There are still a group of people who will only seek treatment with a traditional healer, but I think this is a really good thing to have them working together because it allows the patient to have more control over their treatment and follow their personal beliefs. Your brain is a magical tool, and just the fact that they believe so strongly that the healer helped them might have an effect on the success of their treatment.

 

On the walk their, it was beautiful! Surrounded by mountains

 

The traditional healer was located in a remote area in a small circular hut with a reed roof. We all took off our shoes before entering hut and sat cross-legged on the floor. Inside, there were various animal skins on the walls and floor, a big chunk of lion fat hanging from the ceiling, and a large number of bottles filled with different things used for treatment:

 

 

 

The healer started off by explaining how one goes about becoming a traditional healer. There is schooling that they go through, but he made it very clear that not anyone has the ability to become one. For him personally, he said the spirits entered his body and made him sick which is how he knew his calling was to become a healer. Some people try to become healers who are not meant to be and these people often advertise their services, which is how you can tell they are fakes because true healers never advertise their services, rather people know of them by word of mouth.

 

He then went on to explain what happens when someone comes for treatment. They come in, sit on the floor in front of him, place there money under a piece of animal fur that sits on the floor between them. He then asks for their name but nothing else. He has a bag of different items such as sea shells, coins, and few other things that I am not quite sure what they were. He then takes a nibble off of a stick and spits it into the bag and this action is what activates the spirits which will allow him to diagnose the patient. He then dumps the bag of items out onto the animal skin and the way that they arrange themselves also tell him something about what is wrong. There were also a set of four or five brown oval shaped shells that he shook in his hands and threw down onto the animal skin like you would do with dice and the way they landed told him another piece of information. He said then he can see the spirits that are inside of you making you sick around the room. Based on the spirits, he chooses what treatment to give you. One example I caught for treatment was he gave you a certain type of Tabaco which you would them smoke and it would make the spirits leave your body. I really want to find out more about the various treatments, we ran out of time before he could get that far into it.  

 

It took me a while to try to take all of this in, and I am sure some of it was lost in translation along the way as well. I am still pondering it a bit to tell you the truth. Coming from the western world, it is hard to imagine believing in this type of healing. Everything in relation to medicine in my life has always been purely scientific and it is easy to take what they say and just laugh at it. However, it is so intriguing at the same time and I want to be able to understand their mindset and where they come from. I don’t think this will be able to happen until I get my language skills up to par to have that conversation, but it is defiantly one of my goals.    

 

 

The group :)

 
 

Cooking class

Cooking class!

 

For our language class yesterday we worked with our instructor and each of our moms and had a little food exchange lunch! This was probably my favorite day so far. Tommy, Pharren, and I decided to make them fried chicken, sweet potatoes, and a salad. Little did we know when we picked our menu that we would have to start from scratch with everything, including the chicken! They came walking up with a live chicken in their hands for us to kill, clean, then cook. They ended up doing most of the work on that one because clearly none of us had a clue on what to do. I have a hard enough time taking a frozen chicken breast out of the freezer and cooking it! It was about all I could handle just watching the chicken be killed, its head slowly cut off with a really dull knife while it squawked away, then watching the moms chop it up. If there is one thing I learned it is that people in Mozambique let nothing go to waste! They had a use for literally every last part of that chicken, my mom even took the intestine and braided it all up, it was kind of cool to watch I will admit. After it was cut up, we did the rest of the work and I must say I was both very impressed and surprised at how well our chicken turned out :)

 

The moms showed us how to make my favorite dish thus far, which I can't think of the name right now, but I now know how much work goes into making it! Cooking here, like anything else, is an big process!

 

Step one...lighting the coal stove

 

 

 

 

After a few failed attempts, they turned to a plastic bag to light the charcoal...healthy! Not

 

 

 

 

                                            

Step two...cutting up all the greens and letting them cook in water

 

                                          

 

 

 

Step three...grinding up the peanuts
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm still trying to figure out how to rotate pictures, sorry lol

 

 

 

 

 

Step four...grinding out the coconut and making coco-water out of it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Step five...putting it all together and letting it simmer. This dish is really hard to explain the taste of because I have never really had anything like it. The coconut and peanuts give it a sweat and creamy taste, but it also tastes really fresh because of the greens used. They usually eat it over rice (no meal goes without a big pile of white rice here).

 

Step six...Enjoy!! What I described making is in the bottom left of the plate, then there are the sweet potatoes we made, the salad, and the breaded chicken.

  

 

 

I just had to include a few of the chicken pictures too!

 

Health care Mozambiquan style

We have now passed the two week mark of being in Namaacha with our families! It feels like it has been so much longer. I feel like I am making good progress on the language and we are actually starting to get into things more so training is a lot more interesting now.

 

We visited a local health center last week for a tour. The hospital was broken up into a bunch of little offices each specified for a different condition, much like how wings of a hospital at home are set up. The thing that shocked me the most was the lack of privacy, which I guess I expected this but seeing it in person is a different story. There was a women who just gave birth to a child laying in a bed right next to other women, some getting ready to give birth, others recovering, all in a room with probably 30 other beds practically right on top of each other. And here we are, a group of 26 Americans who they let just stomp through the entire hospital and gaze at them. Also surprising, in order to be classified as a hospital in Mozambique, a health center here must have a laboratory. I was completely amazed by the simplicity of the lab in this hospital, the deciding factor making this a hospital was a little room with some very low tech equipment and one single microscope, ONE! The room was about a third of the size of an average high school chemistry lab in America. After this visit, I am so excited to finally get in the action and do what I can to help the health system here. 

 

We also learned a lot of little random things like they really have no system for keeping medical records. They only keep them for people with certain conditions and only for the duration of treatment. Mothers are given a card that the doctor fills out for them and their child each visit. Patient records are just left out in the open all over the place it seemed. Women are given a mandatory HIV test when they find out they are pregnant but many of them do not go back to get the results because they are afraid of what they might find. If they do find out they are positive, they do not follow through with treatment because they do not want to tell their husbands they are HIV positive in fear of his response, even though it was likely the husband who got infected by another women and then infected his wife. Keep in mind too that all of their treatment is free of charge, so money is not a factor in their choice. There is a huge shortage in doctors here as well, only one doctor for every 10,000 people.

 

This all still just blows my mind every time I think about it. I can’t wait to learn more about it and actually start putting myself to work!

It is finally here!!

So this is only my 4th day in Namaacha and yet I feel like I have been here for so long! Time moves a lot slower here than I am used to, and daily chores that seem ridiculous in the states (like hand washing clothes and boiling, then cooling, then filtering your water before you can drink it) feel almost relaxing here. I decided to start typing my blog every few nights even though I don’t have internet because almost everything I have done in the last few days is a completely new experience.

 

                                                                       Moz 20 group

 

Day 1...I don’t know how to describe life here in Mozambique short of saying it feels like I am in a movie! Women carrying giant baskets on their heads, people washing clothes in a dirty stream, it feels like I am in one of those commercials about sponsoring a child. I still can't believe I am actually here! It was rough the first day I will admit, really rough. My toilet is just a hole in the ground in the middle of a cement room. I would be completely fine with this and was completely expecting it, except for when night came. I walked out to use the bathroom just before bed. I brought my lantern along because by about 6:30pm it is pitch black here (by the way the stars are nothing short of amazing here!). There is a doorway to the bathroom that is covered with a sheet hanging down acting as a door. So I am walking really slowly, half hunched over and turning my head at any little sound thinking about all the blogs I read with spider stories and such. When I made it to the door (which by the way the bathroom is outside and around the corner from the main part of the house) there was the biggest cockroach I have ever seen chillin right by where I needed to grad the sheet to pull it out. I paused for a second, took a breath and pulled the sheet back. This made me really leery so I stepped up into the room ever so slowly, one foot at a time, shinning my lantern in ever direction before making my way inside completely. I take another breath, tell myself I got this, and made my way over to the hole. Then I see them. An entire clan of cockroaches bigger than the one at the door lining the entire inside of the hole. Literally EVERYWHERE!! I turned around right then and there and headed back into the house.

 

My house...pictures of the bathroom will come soon!

 

About five steps out of the bathroom I decided you know what, I just have to do it there is no way around it and the sooner I get over the fear the better. So I turned back around and headed back into the room. It took me what felt like 10 minutes to strategize how to go about peeing into the hole without cockroaches crawling on me. Keep in mind this is only my second time peeing into the hole and it is a bit of an art positioning yourself in a way that you won’t get pee on yourself. All I kept imagining is pee splashing on the cockroaches and them reacting by all running out of the hole onto my feet. I also had to figure out where to put the lantern so I could see what was going on with the cockroaches as I was peeing. Oh yeah I forgot to explain that this hole I keep talking about is raised up. Imagine a square block of cement that raises to about 8 inches or so off the ground (like a step but just one square in the middle of the room). Then within the raised square is a square hole. So you only have a space about 5 inches wide to place your foot. So it is a bit of an art getting the process down.

 

Being dropped off into a house full of strangers, speaking a language you don’t know at all, in a country you never imagined yourself going to is an indescribable feeling. By the end of my first day I was laying in bed thinking what did I get myself into?!

 

 

Let the packing begin

After hours and hours of reading up on blogs and suggested packing lists from the Peace Corps, I think I have finally finalized my packing list! In an effort to help out those who will be desperately searching for packing lists in the future just like I have been the last two months, I will share my entire list..

To start off though, here is a list of a few of the many many little things I have yet to buy for my adventure for those of you coming to my going away party who wish to help out. Please please please do not feel obligated to bring anything, as long as I get to see all of you before I head out I will be happy :)  So, here it is....

Thing I have yet to buy:

duct tape
sewing kit (w/ cloth and nylon thread)
electric voltage converter (America/Africa 220 volts)
rechargeable batteries & charger (all sizes)
water bottles (nalgene)
flavored water packets 
Quick dry travel towels
ziplock bags (various sizes)
hand sanitizer
luggage locks and tags
quality pens/sharpies
sharp cooking knife
rope
USB flash drives
camera memory chips
sun screen and bug spray
deflated soccer balls (to give out to kids)
games- cards, uno, banana grams, ect
journals
coffee press
personal size blender
stamps/postage
pocket knife
books for leisure reading
smart wool socks (light weight)
battery powered potable speakers
seeds- basil, mint, thyme, oregano, ect


Other things I am bring...

Clothes:
4 skirts
3 dresses
2 pairs of jeans
2 pairs hiking style pants
7 solid color comfortable t-shirts
8-10 tank tops
Sweat pants/yoga pants
2 long sleeve shirts
under armor long sleeve shirt
2 sweaters/sweat shirts
3 button-up dress shirts
2 pairs of leggings

Shoes:
Chacos
keens
tennis shoes
hiking/walking shoes
flip flops
dress flats

Other stuff:
sleeping bag (45+ degrees)
sleeping pad (?)
pillow
leatherman knife
computer
ipod
external hard drive
sports watch
camera
my favorite coffee mug
pictures of family/friends
polarized sunglasses
backpack (school size)
3 months worth of shampoo/conditioner/bathroom supplies

And all of this needs to fit in one hiking backpack and one suitcase and be under 80lbs...wish me luck!!

LET THE PACKING BEGIN :)