FIRST WEEK AS A PCV

Today is my 7^th full day as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

These last few weeks have been crazy and activity packed but now I am finally in my own house, in my own little space enjoying the independence that I didn’t realized I had missed until now. I’m sitting in the corner of my living room on a little wooden bench that undoubtedly used to be part of a classroom desk/chair combo, and using a paint covered chair as table as to write this blog post.  I miss the comfy padded furniture of my host family’s house, and delicious carb-filled meals, but here I can sit around wearing nothing but a tank top and shorts (showing  skin above the knees is frowned upon for women here), and eating Nik Naks (a brand South African cheetos) for lunch.  Not exactly picturesque adulthood life, but it's my first week on my own... my diet will hopefully improve.

Fellow PCTs and I in front of our newly dug garden.

Phase 3, or my final few weeks of training, passed in a whirlwind. It has been well over a month since my last blog update, but the last few weeks of training were jam packed with new training sessions, Peace Corps activities, and time spent with my fellow PCT friends.  We attended a technical session where we learned how to permagarden, in other words how to make land fertile and which crops to plant where and when.  We had a chores competition where we competed against each other to see who had best mastered Mozambican house chores like smashing peanuts into dust. We had ‘model school’ where we had the opportunity to practice our teaching skills at local high schools as guest lecturers.  And finally we had were local language classes where learned the local Bantu language of our future community.  I learned xangana/changana – the most widely spoken language of Maputo province. Unlike Portuguese, this language is unlike any language I had ever spoken before, so it was incredibly difficult.  After 2 weeks I can say I confidently learned "Lixile"– good morning and "kanimambu" – Thank you.

A few members of my host family and I,
all dressed up for the wedding.

I also had the opportunity to attend my first Mozambican wedding during my last few weeks of training. Mozambican wedding are HUGE affairs – the wedding had hundreds of people!  My Mae and several other Maes from the community cooked all night to prepare food for the wedding reception – they did not sleep!   The wedding consisted of a church ceremony (which I missed due to the Peace Corps chores competition), followed by a car parade of the newlyweds and select family and friends all around town, and finally then the reception – dinner (with a buffet line of about 30 different dishes), presentation of gifts (song and dance usually accompany the gift), and a D.J. and dancing (including Mozambican versions of line dances). Waiters walked around throughout the night with crates full of beers and wines – a new bottle of beer appeared before me every time I finished the previous one.  It was quite a night of celebration!

Thanksgiving Dinner

Throughout the last weeks of training, fellow PCTs and I grew closer and our sense of family bond strengthened.  We spent our time after technical sessions together passear-ing (strolling) around the village, spent evenings cooking American foods for our host families to try, and weekends at the local baraccas (bars) sharing stories and making memories.  We got together on the morning of November 9th to crowd around a 20-inch TV and to watch as the results of the United States Presidential Election come in live on CNN. I arrived in the morning, some other volunteers started watching around midnight when polls closed on the east coast. After we got over our initial shock, we spent time spent time figuring out how to discuss these results to our Mozambican host families who had tuned into American election updates every night during their evening news. My Mae told me me I did not need to get up early the day after the election to check the results because it was obvious that "A Senhora Clinton vai ganhar" - Mrs. Clinton is going to win. Well, my Mae was wrong. In the days following the election, I had conversations in which I had to explain how the American election process works, how votes are counted, and what my feelings are about the new President-elect.

Picture perfect before Peace Corps Prom.

On a different and happier note, my PCT family and I had the opportunity to celebrate and American holiday together! Thanksgiving holiday fell during our last week of training, and our extremely generous country director hosted Thanksgiving dinner for all of us at his house in Maputo city.  His family, Peace Corps staff, and members of the U.S. Embassy community prepared delicious turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie, and all of the American Thanksgiving dinner must-haves. We ate until we could not eat anymore, just as we would have if we were home in the U.S

The following day, we celebrated together with another American tradition - PROM.  For our Moz 27 Peace Corps Prom, food and music was organized, prom dates were found, and many people bought/rented clothes from the local outdoor market (my rented dress looked eerily similar to my real high school senior prom dress), or wore clothes made from local capulana fabric.  The day after prom, we had official end of training despidida, or going away party/feast with all of our host families.  My Mae was incredibly cute and stood up in front of the crowd to talk about her experience with her Peace Corps daughter. She was so proud of me (and my newfound Portuguese language skills!).  I was so lucky to have had her and her family with me during my entire training process.

My host family - wearing the matching capulana fabric
along with everyone of our neighborhood (Kala Kala)

The celebrations were wonderful and bittersweet, as it really felt like we were children graduating from high school.  We were all filled with excitement to go off on our own, anxious to be away from the only friends we have known during our entire education (training) process, and sad leave our loving host families who had taught us so many important things about life in Mozmabique.  

With our Peace Corps Country Director, in front of the
Mozambican Ministry of Education building

On November 30, my fellow trainees and I traveled to Maputo city together for our official Swear-In Ceremony (Graduation), held inside the Ministry of Education building.  The 64 of us wore clothes made from matching capulana fabric, raised our right hands and took the oath that made us official Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs)! We did it! 

Following the ceremony, we all took a crazy amount of pictures togehter, said our thank-yous and good-byes to the wonderful Peace Corps staff and trainers who had been with us from Day 1, and spent our last day drinking and ordering pizzas poolside at a fancy hotel. The entire experience was amazing and a little surreal. Reality did not hit until the next day, when a range of emotions that I didn’t know I had began to set in. I wished my newfound best friends good luck and said tearful good-byes to those traveling to the Central and Northern regions of the country. We likely will not see each other until our Peace Corps Mid-Service Conference over a year from now.

Performing a step routine during our Swear-In Ceremony.
If you could like the whole video, check out
Peace CorpsMozambique's Facebook page.

My site mate and I had the shortest distance to travel, so we were  the first ones of our group to arrive at site the morning of December 1.  We arrived at on school grounds and checked out our new houses.  Our identical houses each
contain a large living room with a sink/kitchen area, a bedroom, and an indoor bathroom complete with a toilet, urinal, shower, and sink.  The school had placed  one table and 2 chairs into each of our houses. Unfortunately, that was the only furniture provided.  And unfortunately, my house needed (and still needs) a bit of work… the electricity did not work (the circuits of my house tem problemas), the sink drains were clogged (to the point where a plumber will be need), windows lacked glass/screens/security bars (this has since been resolved), and stains and small insects covered every possible surface. 

But, it's home. Compared to many of my fellow volunteers out in the mato whose entire villages do not have electricity, who Mae houses do not have sinks that could possibly be clogged, whose huts of straw do not have windows cut out….my house is a chiquy Peace Corps Volunteer house.  There is no running water, but there is a spigot in the backyard has running water every morning for me to collect water to use to flush my toilet and take my baths.  The front door (facing the school) and the backdoor (facing small personal gardens) have secure locks. It's no 5-star resort, but pouco a pouco - all of the flaws will be fixed and it will feel like home. 

I've given you all a relatively positive outlook of everything, because I am a glass half full kind of person. But if you’re curious about how this week really went for me, keep reading. 

I have been here for 7 days. These have been a long 7 days.

Feel free to laugh, cry, scream, or just chuckle. 

That’s how I felt about this week.

Day 1:

• Arrive at site and talk the pedalogogical director at the school into driving us in his truck to the villa (or downtown) area of Boane
• Buy a bright red mattress covered in happy elephants
• Buy a gas stove and gas tank (unfortunately, the parts to connect said stove to tank were out of stock, we are told to return in a few days)
• Buy basic household supplies (pots, pans, candles, matches, etc) at a store with ‘good prices’. Turns out the store is owned by local Chinese people (it’s a small world filled with billions of Chinese people), and I used my best combination of Mandarin/Portuguese to explain to the confused cashier what an English-speaking Chinese-looking girl is doing shopping in Boane.
• Stop by my Phase 2 host family’s house to say hello and they generously feed me delicious dinner when I tell them my stove cannot yet function.
• Learn that a ceramic mug is the best candleholder to use to avoid burning fingers on hot candlewax

Day 2:

• Painter comes to paint my walls bright, white, and shiny. I sleep inhaling fresh paint fumes
• Neighbors lend me large water jugs and show me where/how I can fill them up with water
• Peace Corps staff drops off my 2 suitcases, large cardboard box, and Peace Corps issued plastic trunk.
• Dig out all of my sheets/capulanas to hang as curtains so I can have some privacy
• Buy food in the villa and cook it at my neighbor’s house because neither my sitemate nor I have procured stove parts yet. 

Day 3:

• Welders arrive to put steel bars are put onto my back door and window.  They do not have the tools to remove the few existing screens on the window so they burn large gaping holes into them.  Mosquitoes enter and decide my blood is delicious, they invite all of their friends – flies and cockroaches, to come hang out with me in my house.
• I scrub all of the mystery stains off the kitchen tiled walls
• I unpack all of the snacks sent to me by my friends and try my best to exercise control and not eat them all at once.

Day 4:

• I go for my first run, carpenter arrives while I am gone and cannot get into my house to measure windows to fit them for screens and glass.
• The school brings me a bench and an extra table welded together by the welder the day before.
•  Energia, or electricity, is out all day in the district for no apparent reason. The neighbor’s blaring stereos are silent and I cannot charge my phone anywhere.
• Our gracious neighbor invites my site mate and I to cook/eat dinner with her.  We cook a feast of pasta, rice, chicken liver, sardines, and salad.  We eat via lantern and candlelight.

Day 5:

• Carpenter takes apart windows to put in screens to keep out the bugs, but realizes the glass he bought for the windows is the wrong size (even though he took measurements the day before). Glass for my windows does not get installed
• Carpenter installs a handle to my bedroom door
• The gas station obtains parts for one stove.  We install the stove at my site mate’s house since he has electricity and overhead lighting to use while cooking

Day 6:

•  I go for a 5AM run (before the heat sets in), and a friendly young man on a bicycle comes up to chat. He asks if we can be friends, or exercising buddies, or maybe more than friends. I tell him I like to run alone in the mornings. He follows me for 2 more miles until he gets bored.
• I return home and discover district’s water supply had run low and the water spigot stopped spouting water so I cannot fill up my jugs.  I skip my daily bath (after running, so gross) and save my remaining water from the day before for toilet flushing.
• I go to the villa to visit the Shoprite grocery store to buy 3 large 5 liter bottles to drink and cook with. 
•  The gas station in the villa finally has parts for me to connect my gas stove to my gas tank.
• I stop at a nice restaurant with AC to enjoy a meal of strong coffee and a grilled egg/cheese sandwich because I am too lazy to return home and put together my stove to cook.
• Carpenter returns to my house with tools needed to cut the glass to fit into the window frames, and installs locks on all of my windows
• I put together my gas stove and cook my first meal in my house – FRIED RICE with eggs, carrots, and onions  – because rice makes home feel more like home.  

Day 7:

•  I discover that the school has a latrine (hole in the ground bathroom) for students.  I bring my toilet paper use the latrine to avoid having to flush my toilet with my non-existent water.
• I finally unpack my 2 year bag (packed in August and stored at the Peace Corps office in Maputo until last week) and discover the 20 deodorants and 10 lbs worth of Pantene shampoo and conditioner carefully wrapped in clothes that I had forgotten that I packed.  It’s like Christmas came early. So many new things!
• The school’s wonderful pedagogical director drives our large water jugs to a nearby river (about 5km away) to fill them up with water for us to use until the spigot water gets turned on after the next rain storm (which my weather app tells me will happen later this week).
• I finish this blog post at my site mate's house because my house still does not have power to charge any electronics. 

Hope you have all enjoyed Reading about my day to day life. The school year here just ended (it's summertime, seasons here are opposite from the seasons in America ), and the next school year does not start until late January.  I have nothing but time on my hands now and I would love you hear from all of you! Letters or packages would be a treat.

Peggy Zhang, PCV

Corpo da Paz/U.S. Peace Corps

Avenida Zimbabwe 345, 

C.P. 4398

Maputo - MOZAMBIQUE

FYI mailing costs to Mozambique are a bit pricey so if you love me but your bank account does not shoot me a message here, via e-mail: pxzhang1015@gmail.com, or Whatsapp message / call me at my Mozambican number: +258 870887159.

Until next time.