21/6/12

Doing some mid-week blogging here since I have a little free time (no TPC tonight, woot woot!)

I know a lot of people are still emailing me wanting to know more of the day-to-day stuff so I’ll talk a little about what I did today – it’s not all that interesting but at least it can give a glimpse of my daily activities J

This morning we had language class at my house from 7:30AM – 9ish. Today’s lesson included every piece of vocabulary under the sun for anything and everything related to clothes (from shoes, belts, different types of hats, bed linens, sewing machines, etc. you name it, I can tell you the Portuguese counterpart.)

One of the native pieces of clothing here is the capulana which is basically just a large rectangular piece of cloth with pretty (or occasionally not-so-pretty) designs printed on it. Women here use it for everything. Like, seriously, EVERYTHING. One of the current volunteers here said she was going to write a book called the 101 uses of the capulana, which another current volunteer corrected saying it should be titled the 1,000,001 uses. They can wear it as a skirt, a dress, a shawl, a head scarf to hold up your hair, they use it as a towel when they bathe, as an apron when they cook, they can wrap it around their head when they carry large heavy materials balanced on their heads, or they tie their small children around their backs with it…. They can use it as a blanket, as a wall if they need privacy to do their business, they can wrap it around children as diapers, or themselves as underwear, etc. etc. etc… **let me clarify however that the capulana is cleaned in between these uses** ha, in case there’s any confusion.

Back to class: we also learned colors, their Mozambican symbols, the national holidays (all jam packed in our 1.5 hr lesson!) Love me some early morning vocab!

Afterwards we went to the Peace Corps “Hub” for technical training – today we learned a lot about GI issues (even got a take-home sheet: the Bristol Stool Chart. I’m very much hoping I don’t ever need to use that!)

Our country director also visited from Maputo today to perform a Myers Briggs training for those of us that wanted to find out our personality type. I didn’t take the test since I’d already taken one recently at my last job, and also a FyroB test last year for my grad program. Plus one of the other volunteers had forgotten her test at home so I let her use mine – good Samaritan deed. Also, I have to say, every time I take the MBTI I always end up with a different result. I don’t really see the point of it as a whole since it’s all relative to your surroundings and what is expected of you at that point in your life. I can be super extraverted, sensing, thinking and judging at work, but then totally introverted, intuitive, feeling and perceptive with my friends. It doesn’t mean either side of me is a truer representation of who I really am just because I’m capable of adapting to whatever the occasion deems appropriate. And I think that’s true for most people; nobody’s ever just one personality - the beauty is in our complexity.

Okay, enough with the tangents and back to training: after going home for a quick lunch I went back to the hub to play some soccer (and by soccer I mean we just juggled the ball in the air for a half hour) and then afternoon training. Today we went into perma-gardening techniques which included how to build a compost, which horticulture is most common here, how to build our beds and berns so that they won’t be washed away in the rainy season or cyclones, etc. I actually really loved that session, it was probably my favorite so far. Tomorrow and Saturday we’re going to build perma-gardens with the trainers in order to apply what we learned which I’m really excited about. Added bonus: they asked my host mother if we could do it in our house so I’ll have half the volunteer group over tomorrow bright and early at 7:30 to dig up my back yard and plant my host family a new garden – woot woot!

After our technical training ended at 4:30 today we had a mini chefe meeting (my language class voted me as our group’s chefe [chefe = chief] so I meet with all the other chefes and the PST director [PST = pre-service training] to go over logistical updates and issues that may have occurred that week.) Afterwards two of the visiting volunteers from this week (every week we have current PC volunteers come visit to help with training) hosted a little get together for us all to hang out with them and ask them questions outside the work-training environment. The visiting volunteers this week have been absolutely great, to say the least. Both of them have been fantastically successful with their work at their sights and they’ve shared some awesome stories and tips to our training group. It was funny because one of them looked very familiar when he introduced himself in Monday’s session, and after training we realized that not only had we both gone to BU at the same time, both lived in the Hyatt our first years (he was a year after me though), we both spent a lot of time working at the BU Community Service Center, did the same study-abroad trip to Ecuador as language students (different semesters though), AND we interned together at the International Institute of Boston - same boss and everything. Small world eh?!  Funny how certain types of people tend to pop up into your lives over and over again, and how common it is if you look for it.

Ok, dinner’s probably going to start soon so I should wrap this up. Oh, before I finish though I promised I’d let you know how the cake turned out! So let me set the scene: no oven, no recipe, no measuring cups or measurements at all for that matter, no milk, 1 bowl, 1 spoon, 3 eggs, a very old block of margarine, some flour, salt, sugar, dry powdered creamer, dry powdered custard mix, water, a few packets of expired baking soda, some lime rind, and an electric contraption that you plug into the wall and it heats up these 2 coils, between which a bundt pan is placed, and then we put a plate on top and a towel. Mix it all together with mama Cecilia’s never failing Mozambican cooking magic and VOILA: an amazing cake! I was utterly speechless, per usual. I’d love to be able to contribute something one day besides chopping up veggies – only thing I’ve made for them so far is guacamole, which they were NOT a fan of (the avocados here are HUGE and very sweet so they usually mash them up with lime and sugar for dessert. Obviously having their dessert food mixed with onions, salt and tomatoes wasn’t a big hit.) If anyone has a good banana bread recipe that doesn’t call for any crazy ingredients please email it to me! (I can find fresh milk here if it calls for it.) Thanks in advance J!!

Xoxox

Ems