settling in - and new address!

oh my goodness, where to begin. i know it's been a thousand years since i've updated, but i swear i've tried! every time i've gone to the internet in the past few weeks it's been closed, not working, or with a wicked long line and people cutting.

my province trip was good. for people who like looking at maps, i got to see the cities of mocuba, milange, and gurue. most of the trip was on "highways" of hardpacked dirt, so it was quite an adventure. zambezia is beautfiul, i got to see green fields, huge craggy mountains, boulderish hills, and tea plantations, and i can't wait to travel around it more and do some hiking!

my holidays went well. i hope all yours did as well! i spent christmas eve at alison(the other icap volunteer in quelimane)'s house with some other volunteers. we ate yummy food and drank gin and watched movies and decorated a small christmas tree with pipecleaner ornaments. on christmas day we watched a ridiculous bollywood movie in a hot sweaty theater full of screaming children. interesting thing about christmas was that businesses were closed and the streets of quelimane were empty - except for hordes of children running around unsupervised! i felt like i was in a sci-fi movie where all the adults have disappeared. for new years i traveled to mocuba and spent time with 6 other moz13 friends. we had a grand old time hanging out, sweating together (mocuba's hot!), cooking, eating, drinking, reflecting, etc.

so i'm now back in my city and my house and the holidays are over and i'm finally starting to settle in. i'm an easy 30-ish minute walk from town, so most days i walk into town to run errands or just poke around and find out where i can get stuff. when i need to get somewhere fast or i'm too hot or tired to walk (or trying to beat the rain!), i take a bike taxi, an exhilarating/bumpy ride on the back of a bike. on the home front, i've comissioned a table and bookshelves to be made so i can stop storing all my stuff on the floor. i've bought a two-burner gas stove but can't use it til i get the wooden table to put it on (i have the feeling it would melt right through my plastic table!) so i've been cooking on my one-burner coal stove outside every night, pretty successfully.....with one burner and only one pot at the moment i've been eating a lot of pasta, but i love pasta, so it's all good! my landlord, oscar, has been really helpful in showing me around my neighborhood and helping me get stuff, like the furniture, and he's nice and worries about me if i come home late. i made friends with a woman who works at a market in town and hung out with her yesterday. and i've made preliminary friendships with some other neighbors. so all in all things are good. and i start work tomorrow, in some capacity or another, so i'll have more to update on the work front soon.

but i wanted to get some updates up, and also get out my new address!

Sarah Farnsworth, VCP
ICAP Columbia C.P. 395
Quelimane, MOZAMBIQUE

so anyone who sent me mail to the old address it will get to me eventually when someone from pc comes up here from maputo, but this address should be good from now on!

i also wanted to let the world know that due to flash drive issues i have managed to lose maybe 8 emails from various people, sent in the beginning-middle of december, so if i don't reply to any emails from that time frame it's not because i don't love you anymore, it's just that i'm techonolgically impaired. and if i don't reply to emails from other time periods, it's just cuz i'm lazy.

that's all for now. as always, if people have specific questions feel free to post them. when everything's new and there's so much going on around me it's hard to know what to focus on on here! and i do respond to emails (eventually), and i've actually been shockingly good at responding to snail mail (except to my immediate family, sorry!), so feel free to send questions/messages/hugs in any format you like. até a próxima (until next time)!