Past the midway

Hi all! Things are going great here in Mozambique. We are officially more then half way through with training. I have been busy the last few weeks. I went to a site in Inhambane Province near the beach for about a week and I had a wonderful time. It was really great to get away from the homestay for a few days and just relax. I also got to see some different landscapes on my 9 hour bus ride... What I have seen of Mozambique has been amazing. It is a really beautiful place. When I can get my pictures uploaded I will share them all. Lets see... some of the highlights of my trip... I went got to see the houses of a bunch of volunteers... that was nice because now I have an idea of what I have to look forward to. The girl I stayed with lived in a reed house, but most volunteers live in cement ones. The reed houses are really cute and pretty, but the cement ones ward off the burglars a lot better. I got to go into Inhambane City. It is a city that has a lot of Portuguese buildings everywhere. It is on a bay that leads out to the Indian Ocean. It was really pretty and I got to eat pizza which was nice. I also got to go do a random trip just outside the city where they were training rats to search for mines. It was very cool to see... I guess the rats cost a lot less money then dogs so they are trying to develop programs to have these trained rats be brought out into land that has mines left behind from previous wars. Mozambique has a lot of these mines so it is a great area to do the testing in. I also got to go to a hospital where I sat in on a counseling session for women with HIV. We were not expecting to do that, and I felt very intrusive. The women had just found out that day that they had HIV and it was their initial counseling session. The counselors wanted us to see what it was really like to work with people with HIV, and we got more then we bargained for. It was something that I will never forget, but it was very heavy and difficult. One of the women couldn´t have been more then 17 years old . It definitely put things into perspective for me here. 16 percent of the adult population has HIV and for most people you would never be able to tell by looking at them. This is going to be a huge focus for me as a teacher, to try to integrate preventative education in my lessons. It is so important, and going to this hospital really helped me see that. So anyway, it was interesting to get out of Namaacha and to get ideas of the kind of work that I will be doing in the future. It definitely helped me remember what I am doing in Mozambique in the first place... It is easy to forget as I am busy adjusting to living in this country.
I hope everyone at home is well. Send me emails... I love getting them! I will write again when I have more news.