End of orientation
Today I am off to my home-stay. I will be living in a town called Nammacha with a family. It is about two hours outside the city, and part of my group will be living in the same town with me. I will have my own room, and they will make my meals for me and show me how to cook and do my laundry, and they will help me learn portugese. I started my language lessons the other day. Portugese is both easy and hard because of spanish... Easy because I understand a lot of the vocab, but difficult because I get a lot of the vocab confused. I am looking forward to spending time with my new family because I will have to use the language to communicate so I should learn it a lot faster.
I have not seen much in terms of Maputo so far. I have only seen a little bit of what I would call "real" Africa, and that was on the trip from the airport to our hotel here in Maputo. On the way I saw poverty like I have never seen before. People were running around with no shoes on through trash and muck, and the houses all seemed to be made out of scraps and were very small and close together. I saw one little boy taking up water from a really dirty gutter running through the middle of the houses... it definitely was startling to see even though I kind of knew that was going to happen. Luckily, I am not going to be living in extreme situations such as this. I will say, though, that all the kids seemed to be running around very happy, and they had made there own soccer balls and were playing every where, which I found to be really cool.
The Americans and the staff here are great. I think there are some amazing people in the group. We went on a retreat yesterday to the American School and we had a lot of fun activities. I got to play soccer with all the guys, which I loved. We also had a scavenger hunt, and some relay races. It was a nice way to end our time together.
This coming week I will start the real training. Lots of language and some cultural training. I will be out of touch for a bit, but I will let you all know how it is going with my family when I have a chance.
I have not seen much in terms of Maputo so far. I have only seen a little bit of what I would call "real" Africa, and that was on the trip from the airport to our hotel here in Maputo. On the way I saw poverty like I have never seen before. People were running around with no shoes on through trash and muck, and the houses all seemed to be made out of scraps and were very small and close together. I saw one little boy taking up water from a really dirty gutter running through the middle of the houses... it definitely was startling to see even though I kind of knew that was going to happen. Luckily, I am not going to be living in extreme situations such as this. I will say, though, that all the kids seemed to be running around very happy, and they had made there own soccer balls and were playing every where, which I found to be really cool.
The Americans and the staff here are great. I think there are some amazing people in the group. We went on a retreat yesterday to the American School and we had a lot of fun activities. I got to play soccer with all the guys, which I loved. We also had a scavenger hunt, and some relay races. It was a nice way to end our time together.
This coming week I will start the real training. Lots of language and some cultural training. I will be out of touch for a bit, but I will let you all know how it is going with my family when I have a chance.
posted by Kendall | 2:51 AM
2 Comments:
Kendall, we love you and know that this will be an amazing journey for you. We are proud that you are willing to share your light with others! Love, Mom
Kenny, glad to hear all seems well.. after a little research on Nammacha it seems that there is a really awesome waterfall within 3km of the town! You should check it out! Also glad to see you have been playing some soccer and representing the Back Bay Bombers! Keep the updates coming.. some people are reading them ;) be safe! -rob
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