more from Namaacha

ok, so i'm going to try to answer some questions people have asked. things are still going great in week two.

i love my family more every day. my mom is a math teacher at the catholic school here, and all the girls go to school, in about the grades you would expect for their ages. she explained to me last night that she's essentially separated from Mariazinha and Isabelle's dad - he took up with another woman (very common here, not taboo, and totally legal in traditional marriages), and she didn't like that, so that's why she's alone. Jussara and Dani have different mothers, I just found out, but Dani's mother died, and their father is brother to my mother's husband, so that's the family connection. and if that confused you, you ain't seen nothing yet. every time i find out more about family connections it gets more and more confusing, and that's pretty typical.

They all speak portuguese fluently (all our families do, although some speak more than others). The local language is Shangana (which i don't know how to spell, sorry), and they all speak that as well. I have learned a few phrases but not too much yet. I want to learn a basic structure, like people and basic verbs to form sentences, but i haven't worked on that much yet. But since my portuguese works with no problem that is my next goal. so my portuguese works fine, the accent isn't too hard to understand, there are some pronunciation differences from brasilian portuguese, and i've had a pretty easy time dropping the "weird" brasilian pronunciations but a harder time picking up the new weird mozambican ones, but i'm trying. everyone understands me though, even if i speak "brasilian," because they watch so many brasilian novelas here!

so Namaacha is considered a city. i haven't been able to get any official population stats but some people estimated in the 20,000 range which i would believe. but it could also easily be described as a village. there is one main paved road, and all other roads are dirt - idyllic rural/pastoral trails of red clay (red dusty dirt that gets all over everything but is washable), and most are barely wide enough for one car, which is fine cuz most people don't have cars anyway. so it feels very rural and underdeveloped in the sense of infrastructure, and everyone knows each other and is related to each other like in a small town. it's an interesting mix.

my house is pretty nice, i think because it's old - it belonged to the parents of my mom's husband. i have electricity, which obviously surging currents because the lights brighten and fade all the time, and i am lucky enough to have an indoor bathroom. that means there's a toilet, tub and sink, but no running water, and all pipes lead to a storage tank underground. so i have to flush my toilet by pouring water in it, and i bathe by bringing heated water into the bathroom and mixing it with colder water and pouring it over myself. we also have an outdoor bathroom, which is more common, which is actually two rooms, one for bathing, which is just a stall with a hole in the ground, and the other for going to the bathrom, which has a toilet to sit on instead of squatting over a hole (also common). we have a gas stove which we use a lot, but the oven doesn't work so no baking :(. there's also an outdoor charcoal stove which we use for things that take longer, which is also really common. i have to prove i can light the charcoal on my own before i can leave here. i wash my clothes outside in a basin with a washboard (i have the scars on my knuckles to prove it). washing by hand is a LOT of work, especially with the red dust, but they are so good at it, my white capoeira pants and sneaker socks are the whitest they've every been! so that's a little of my setup. while picturing this, keep in mind peace corps puts us with relatively well off families, so my description of my house is definitely not true for all people in namaacha. many people live in tiny houses made of stones, mud, or sticks.

ok, i have to share one funny store then get off. today i was eating lunch with my mom when a chicken hopped into the window. this wasn't anything major, there are animals wandering around all over the place. but it then proceeded to squeeze between the burgler bars and climbed into the living room! i thought this was pretty crazy in and of itself, but my mom wasn't phased, she just said, "yeah, that chicken likes to come in and lay her eggs on that chair over there." the chicken hopped from chair to chair all though the rest of my lunch, squawking and turning around and sitting down to check out how comfy different places were. she was still there when we had to leave, and my mom said not to worry, that she'd climb back out again when she was done! it was the funniest thing, and yes i have pictures, and no i'm not going to try to load them now because this internet isn't terribly slow, but it isn't all that fast either. hope everyone reading this is doing well. keep sending questions/emails/LETTERS, and i'll respond when i can!

Namaacha

Hello all! I have now completed almost a week of my homestay and training, and so far am having a wonderful time. My family is all women (this seems to be my lot in homestays, and Iºm totally cool with that!). My mãe is 39 and is super happy and smiling all the time. She has two daughters (Antionetta/Mariazinha, 15, and Isabelle/Doadona, 11-ish) and also two nieces who live in the house (Jusara/Sara, 13 and Daniella/Dani 8-ish). They are all super cute, very friendly and inquisitive, and I am having a great time hanging out with them every night. I am slowly learning how to do things like washing and cooking their way, and will hopefully learn a lot more this weekend. I do have to take a bucket bath twice a day, which is nowhere near as weird as it sounds, itºs actually pretty simple, and the thought of not wasting gallons of water every time i bathe is pretty satisfying. Every meal my family has cooked has been really yummy. Favorites so far include xima ("sheema"), which is somewhere between grits and polenta, made from corn meal, that you eat with your hands and dip in yummy sauce, and matapa, a green goopy sauce made of yucca leaves, peanuts, and coconut mushed up and poured over rice. Delicious!



My days here are pretty busy. I have Portuguese class in the morning in the house of one of my classmates (we're going to switch every week), then most days have health tech class and/or cross cultural class, then a break for lunch, then in the afternoon sometimes more tech or language practice time, like going to the market and talking to the vendors. It's a lot of walking around, up and down tiny red-dirt paths, but it's a really good way to get to see more of the city. Another favorite funny thing so far: there's the everyday mercado, then there's the twice a week feira where women from swaziland come (we're really close to the border) to sell clothes and stuff. The first is in a fixed building, the second is just a collection of ramshackle wooden stalls. The first they call the mercado; the second is "ShopRite" cuz that's the fancy supermarket they have in Maputo. This probably doesn't translate at all, but I thought it was hilarious.



Ok, I'm almost out of money, so i have to get off! If there are specific things people want to know about please let me know, cuz thereºs so many things to talk about itºs hard to know what to focus on.

from maputo

hello all, writing really quickly during my last few minutes at the hotel in maputo. sorry i haven't written sooner. things have been great. lots of training, lectures, questions, getting to know people. we split down for the first time into our project groups and it was really great to see just the 18 health people together, a much more manageable group, and to start to talk about what we'll be doing. and we had our first portuguese classes, which i know many of you were curious about. there are actually 5 other people in my group who have portuguese background, and all but one of us are doing health so we're in the same portuguese class and it's nice to be around other people who can comiserate w/ me over the funny accents and the fact that they don't use the fun brasilian phrases i love. oh well. it sounds like i should be able to improve a lot of my portuguese, and then after week 5 i can hopefully start learning the local language! so i'm off in like 10 minutes to my homestay! we''re all in the same city 2 hours outside of maputo, but split up in different neighborhoods, with all the health people together. we have classes planned for like 8 hours a day, it's gonna be really intense and tiring, but i'm really excited to start learning everything! i'll update when i can, but i guess internet is pretty sparse there. i do, however, have a cell phone! the number is: 011-258-82-8198136, so feel free to call/text, keeping in mind that i'm 6 hours ahead of east coast time, and i can't answer/respond when i'm in class. k, i gtg for now. hope everyone is well. send emails!!