The Long Awaited (and I suppose needed) Update

Well it’s been about two months since I updated my blog and in that time I’ve been living the dream. Getting up at 5:30am, eating beans and rice everyday, bucket bathing, shitting in a hole in the ground, talking about condoms and or the United States, and doing all that in before my bedtime @ 8:oop.
I was living in a small village about 30 km outside of the district capital near a major fishing river (but the river has been the cause lately of more than a few accidents with crocodiles). The village I lived in did not have energy and had a very fickle cell phone network, for example I have two cell phones one for each of the two major cell phone networks in Mozambique, Mcel and Vodacom. Mcel would only function if I stood still on sat on the ledge of my front porch, whereas I got Vodacom in most places in or around my house but if I decided to go for a walk chances are I would have quickly strayed into a area without network coverage. The cellphones are pay as you go, you buy a certain amount of credit and when it runs out you need to find somebody to sell you more credit.
So this past week when I really needed to talk to my supervisors with Peace Corp and with IRD about the logistics of moving to a different area I couldn’t because I used up all of my credit on Valentine’s Day calling Kate (I had to talk to her so I wasn’t just sitting there looking at pictures of us and reading old letters) and my Dad (his birthday is February 14th) and only had 1 or 2 Metacais left on each phone after those calls. I had never bought credit before in the past at site, I had always bought credit when I was in the Provincial Capital Quelimane before I left for site, assuming that if needed I could buy credit at site easily (I’d seen the overly abundant Mcel signs in different shops around my site). I guess I shouldn’t have assumed just because shops had signs for Vodacom or Mcel credit that they would actually sell it. Because that morning when I needed to make a call, I set out to buy some credit. The market close to my house had none; all the shop owners said they were out credit at the moment. So I asked my empregado if he knew of other shops I could go to, to buy some credit, he said that he did so we left to go buy some credit. Not so easy. The first shop we went to had some children sitting on the front stoop, I asked if they had credit and they said yes, then when I asked if I could buy some they said no. They couldn’t sell me credit because their parents where in their fields, but if I came back later I could buy some when the parents were around. But since I needed to talk as soon as possible I walked the few kilometers back to my house and got my bike to ride to the next bairro over to see if those shops had credit. Nope. Apparently the one time I needed credit was the time my area was out, or maybe it was out for a while and it was not a big deal to everyone because most of the bairros are not in network coverage and also do not have electricity to charge phones (thank god for my Solio! Solar phone/iPod charger, I highly recommend, for future PCV’s to buy this wonderful item, because it’s absolutely necessary if you live in a area without energy and you still want to keep in touch with people in ways other than letter writing.) Anyway after a few hours I gave up and just sent my supervisor’s mBeep’s (you can type in a code and somebodies number with Mcel and it will send somebody a free text message that basically says “call me!”) so they called me back later.
I guess I better backtrack a bit after that sidetrack story about searching for cell phone credit.
I am in the process of moving sites, or moving from the community I was in to a different one. I’m not moving because I had any problems with the community or anything like that, in fact mostly all of the people I met were extremely generous and friendly people willing to help out as I spoke terrible, terrible Sena (local language, but that probably can apply to my Portugues at times as well). But my program I was going to work on in this community was going to be new in this community. So I waited until about February (I wasn’t kept in the dark at all I knew that I might be waiting until February to start work) until I was told by supervisors that the program might not be starting in this community until later because of money issues stemming from global food prices.
Anyway long story short my supervisors asked if I would be okay moving to a different community where our program is already up and running so I’m not waiting around doing nothing at all. I said that whatever they thought was best I was okay with, if they think I should wait- that maybe the issues might clear up and I can start work, that’s fine. But if they would rather have me moved to another community to work there that’s fine too. As I am a “volunteer” for this organization and here to work where they need me most. After this the ball started rolling and my org started looking for a new house for me in a town not to far at all from other volunteers which I was excited about and also with a market with a choice of food! (The village I was in had a market that was mainly-FISH (dried), and depending on the season one of these fruits (mangos, then pineapples, then oranges).
So although I left the choice up to my supervisors and would have stayed in the village I was in before, I am also happy the way things turned out i.e. being close to other PCV’s, bigger market (other PCV’s keep teasing me that they’re worried by how skinny I’ve gotten, but I suppose that’s what walking everywhere, not drinking at site, and no fast food will do to you), and being closer to my organizations office with free wireless internet. So I hope to be able to discover what is happening the outside world now more often than every couple of months. (Barrack Obama’s president now? Cool) *I hope sarcasm was detected there, I don’t believe there’s anyplace on earth now you can go and find somebody who doesn’t know or have heard of Barrack.*
For the two months I was at site I’ve played a lot of guitar (would love any new music tab books for my “concerts” I give to the neighborhood children who already think everything I do is amazing and new), read 9 books (Neuromancer, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, The Count of Monte Cristo, Otherland (books 1-4), and studied a lot of Portugues. All the studying must have worked a little bit too as I can understand people I formerly couldn’t before because they talk to fast and also my supervisors have said my Portgues is vastly improved. Therefore if you really want to learn a language just go somewhere that you can only speak the language you want to learn and not your native language so you’ll end up so starved for human interaction you will enjoy speaking that language (though I feel sometimes it’s taken a toll on my mastery of English).
I’ve also developed a different kind of relationship with creatures that enter my house than the one I had in the United States, in the USA I was very live and let live, I’d let spiders be (unless Kate was around because then I’d have to be on spider alert and murder any that were spotted in the same room as her) and just try to stun bats that enter the house so I could throw them outside. Not in Mozambique. I’ve killed many massive spiders in my house. The spiders are huge, with fangs that just freak me out because of the thought of one of them biting me. I think one actually did bite me as I had big bug bite on my left but cheek, and pics to prove it, that was so painful I couldn’t sit down for a few days (don’t anybody worry or give any concerned calls it cleared up just fine). But also my house had an infestation of bats. Each night I would be kept up to high pitched shrieking up bats in the cracks where the wall meets the zinc roof. So sometimes during the day when the roof would get hot the bats would crawl down the wall a little bit to get away from it, and then my empregado would use a fishing spear to kill these bats. He ended up killing 8 bats I think in the time I lived there. I killed just one bat. Because one time when my empregado was killing some of the bats one flew straight at me hit the wall next to me, so I immediately grabbed the closet thing to me, which happened to be a big saw and dispatched (of course before this I shouted “it’s coming straight for us!” if you don’t get this don’t worry, South Park joke).
Also one time there was a snake in my bed. True story. One morning I was sweeping around my bed when I saw something curled up around the bedpost by my pillow (my windows were being replaced the day before so rain didn’t get in and so for the better part of the day I had huge holes in my walls during which time the snake could have entered). I looked a little closer and saw it was a snake and so I shouted cobra and my empregado and the pedrero came running into the house and killed the snake. I was a little unsettled that it was right next to my pillow and had probably been in my room all night with my while I was sleeping, I think I would have been more freaked out if it was inside my mosquito net, but since it was not it couldn’t have crawled on me or bit me or anything (one of the reasons I love my mosquito net, it keeps other things out of my bed, things like snakes!).
Well I think that’s most of the major news as to what I ‘m up to and have been up too and the most interesting stories I can think of right now. I will start working (with groups of women teaching health) as soon as my new house is ready, until then I will stay with other volunteers and do some work around my organizations provincial office. Things like English lessons. Oh wait I forgot, I tried this type of termite (I think that’s what it is) that people eat in the area I was in. Tchau!