These are a few pictures from Namaacha... the top is a view of the mountains, the second is me with my language group, and the last is of the two twin babies that my second mother has... very dirty but very cute little girls!

Vilanculos!

Hi everyone! So the big news is in, I have my site placement. I am going to be living in Vilanculos, Mozambique for the next two years. I am so happy about this placement! From what I have heard from current volunteers, I will basically be living in paradise. My site is right on the coast, in Inhambane Province. It apparently has pristine beaches, and my living situation sounds like it is going to have a lot of perks. I am supposedly going to have my own apartment that is comparable to one I would have in the US. It will have running water, a shower, furniture, an oven, and in December they are putting in electricity as well. So, as far as the living situation goes, I think I have been hooked up. I don’t want to get too excited about all the things that I have heard because I am just going by what other people are telling me, but it sounds as if I will be living well. I am not sure if this really falls in line with what I was expecting when I signed up for Peace Corps, but you won’t hear any complaints from me.
Another great thing is that I have a ton of volunteers around me. I was worried about being placed in the middle of nowhere by myself, and it is certainly not going to be the case. I will have my own apartment at this site, but there will already be another English teacher there (a guy who is extending for a third year, whom I met and really liked), and then there are two new health volunteers also being placed in the town who will be living close by. There are a bunch of other new volunteers living in other towns that are close as well. A few of my friends from training will be living in these towns, so that is a plus. So overall, I would have to say I am very pleased. It will be interesting to actually get to my site and see it for myself, but I have already had a preview with pictures that people took at site visit and it is looking good. Everyone start saving to come and visit me because it should be well worth the 18 hour plane ride!
Today was kind of intense because everyone was so worked up about site placement. We had our Thanksgiving feast adjacent to finding out where we will be living. We all cooked up food for a pot luck type of party. We showed up in Boane at the training center at 10, and we found out our site placements around noon. The two hours before finding out were pretty nerve racking. I hadn’t been really nervous about site placement, and hadn’t been thinking about it too much. I have really been trying not to care where I was going to be placed, since it was completely out of my control. Even so, the gears in my brain were certainly turning in the time leading up to placement. I couldn’t believe I was placed in Vilanculos, but I am completely psyched about it. Now I just have to get through two more weeks of training and then I actually get to get out and do what I came here for.
I feel a little weird about my placement because it sounds like I am going to have all these great things that I wasn’t expecting. Running water is definitely a luxury here. I think that I will have a lot of other challenges to face though, so I will not feel too bad about having running water and a shower even though some of my counterparts will not. Learning Portuguese has definitely been one of the biggest challenges so far, and I am sure it will continue to be so. I am not too bad at speaking at this point, but I am definitely far from fluent. I will also have to adjust to teaching in a Mozambican classroom. We just finished up model school this past week, and it gave us an idea of what it will be like to teach in a classroom, but I have a lot to learn. I have some experience with my student teaching, and it has certainly made classroom management easier, but teaching English is still very new. The way that kids are used to learning here is also very different then in the states, so they have a hard time with working in pairs, or when they are asked to do anything besides copy down exactly what is being said and written on the board. I am really excited to teach here though because I will get to be really creative in the way I teach, and I will finally have a classroom all to myself! The school year should start around the first week of February (they have not made the school calendar yet!) so I still have some time before I start teaching. I am going to go to site, settle in a bit, then I am going to try to travel. It sounds like a lot of people are going to come in to Inhambane, near me, for Christmas and New Years. After that hopefully we are allowed to venture out into some of the other provinces. I am not going to have any breaks like this for another year, so I want to take advantage of the travel time while I can.
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! The food today was amazing and we brought home leftovers to enjoy for the next couple of days. So all in all, it has been a great day and I can’t wait to finish up with training and get out into my site! I will update again when I get to Vilanculos so I can let you all know if it is really as good as what as I have heard, or if it is even better! Take care.

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.