After a 15 hour flight to Jo’burg, a 5 hour lay over, then 1 hour flight to Maputo, I finally arrived.  It was a frantic grabbing luggage, skipping security, declaring arrival in Mozambique and then finally stepping outside.  I don’t think there are words to describe an experience like this.  The air smells somewhat of a cross between a forest and an island, yet distinctly Africa.  The sounds of people speaking Portuguese and other local dialects, big noisy buses driving by and people offering to take your bags or give you a ride to get a buck.  Clearly the large group of white people looking out of place didn’t make them think we couldn’t speak Portuguese.  Luckily there were plenty of people from PC there to help us get everything done and on our way to the hotel.  On our ride to the hotel they inform us that the half of the group that caught the earlier flight to Maputo is staying in one hotel and we are staying in another.

As we head out of the airport to our hotel it hits very quickly that I am in a third world country.  Driving on the left side of the road, the streets are dirty, lined with random trash.  There are buildings that are nothing more than cement blocks with rusty tin roofs on top, looking no more than a couple hundred square feet.  In front are the families sitting in plastic lawn furniture, just watching as everything goes by.  There are little kids running down the sidewalks, barefoot and wearing shirts and pants, some shirts have Mickey Mouse or Power Rangers, others have old sports team logos.  Clearly their clothes have been donated by Americans (so keep donating your old clothes, there are people that need them and will use them.)  There are street vendors everywhere set up on anything from tables to cardboard boxes and plastic crates; selling shoes, clothing, sunglasses, fresh fruit and vegetables.  The shops have windows and doors that are covered in bars.  Our driver weaves in and out of traffic, speeding up and slamming on the breaks.  If there are diving laws here people clearly don’t follow them.  The driver goes to make a turn and looks like he is going to just turn even with on coming traffic, but stops at the last sec.  He edges his way forward little by little until there is enough of an opening to where the drivers coming the other way have to slow down to avoid hitting us.  Now I understand why there are as many vehicle related deaths here as there are for HIV and malaria.  We make our way deeper into downtown Maputo, the buildings begin to get a little nicer, more like a run down American town.  Some buildings only 4 or 5 stories high with others coming in with over 20.  Shops for food and clothing mainly, but there are a couple signs I recognize.  I see one shop that has HP, Sharp, Canon, Sony and others all hanging out front, clearly an electronics store which is comforting to see.  Then out of no where, Playboy, that right Playboy!  Never did I think I would be going to Africa and see a Playboy store.

It’s hard to believe that I’m riding down the very roads that no longer than a month ago were the center of the Maputo riots.  I remember seeing videos online, tires burning, trash burning, large trash bins pushed out in the street, anything the people could do to make it difficult for people to drive around.  The riots were in response to the government raising the prices of many items in the country, and bread was the straw that broke the camels back.  The government did not do a good job at telling the people why the prices were increasing and that is the main reason the people were mad.  In the southern part of Mozambique, the food is brought in from South Africa, where the Rand is much stronger than the Metical.  As South Africa continues to get stronger and Mozambique continues to struggle the prices will continue to go up.  The northern part of Mozambique is very rich in resources and grows a lot of food.  The problem is the infrastructure here, there is no good system to get the food from the north down south.  American and many other countries realize that this could easily be solved by  building a nice highway system that runs from the north to the south.  The project has the funding to get started and should begin soon.  Hopefully in the next decade or so there will be an efficient way to keep from relying on South Africa for food and help strengthen Mozambique.

Back to my story, we arrive at our hotel, Hoy Hoy, it means welcome in the local language.  Everyone unloads from the bus and there are about 5 more PC staff and Volunteers waiting for us.  As the men hired to deliver our bags unload the truck full of our luggage, we beginning our checking in process.  They welcome us and immediately start handing us paperwork.  We have to fill out more paperwork about our passports, I swear it never ends, and just basic info we need to know about our three day orientation that we were getting ready to start.  There is a large packing of lots of different information and a seven page packet about health and information we have to submit.  And they told us one last thing, no leaving the hotel for any reason.  Apparently last year the PCT went looking around the city and a crazy man with a large knife was running around and scared everyone.

All the guys are given roommates while most of the girls are by themselves.  My roommate is Eddie, a guy from D.C. and went to school in Atlanta, he is going to be a fellow biology teacher.  Our room is in the 300s, so we are on the third floor, well scratch that, 4th floor.  The first floor lobby doesn’t count as a floor apparently.  Oh and there aren’t any elevators in the hotel so we have to carry all our bags up there ourselves.  I strap up my carry on backpack grab my two checked bags and am ready to run up to the room.  Too bad there’s a traffic jam.  After a couple minutes I make my way to the lobby and see what the problem is, the girls can only carry one of their bags at a time.  The lobby looks like a baggage lost and found at the airport.  As you can imagine the girls are having a hard time even with their single bags, most weighing from 40-50 lbs.  My total checked luggage came in around 60 lbs.  I anxiously wait to get up the stairs to what I’m expecting to be a very small room with no electricity and no running water.  I was surprised, while the room is quite small, nothing more than three or four feet between the two single beds, a closet about eight square feet and a tiny desk.  At the same time there was an overhead light, a lamp and even a TV and window A/C unit.  Hidden behind the front door was our bathroom, crammed with a shower, toilet, sink and even toilet paper!  We have a nice little balcony out back.  I knew instantly that we were living the high life by Mozambican standards and I wasn’t going to complain one bit.

I hadn’t slept more than 20 hours in the past 6 nights but I had more energy than this moment.  This is the first time that I had ever traveled outside the US, not even to Canada, and was the only PCT in that position.  As you could imagine there are a lot of people that had done a lot of traveling.  One kid has now set foot on 6 out of 7 continents, others have résumés that look like they are international travel agents.  Makes me start to think how I got in with no international travel, or better yet, how I’ve never been outside the US!  I like to just think that when I do things I like the “go big or go home” philosophy.  I mean my first travels outside America is me moving over 8100 miles away from home for 27 months and I don’t even speak the language.  We had about 1.5 hours until we had to be downstairs at the little restaurant for dinner.  Eddie decided he couldn’t stay awake until dinner so he fell asleep.  I started to check my luggage and make sure everything made it okay.  I noticed that when I carried my travel bag for my large backpack, it felt like my boots were loose in their but just told myself that I was just feeling things weird due to lack of sleep.  When I unzipped the travel bag, sure enough my boots and other things were just floating around.  TSA decided to check my bag, taking everything out and not able to put it back in.  They tested all my sealed shaving cream, shampoo, sunblock, toothpaste, anything that seemed like it wouldn’t be normal for traveling.  Luckily, I planned ahead and had all my liquids in a dry sack, so now only my dry sack has a bunch of different products all over it.  Aside from that, everything traveled well, including me.

Time for my first introduction into Mozambican cuisine.  I woke up Eddie but he decided his sleep was more important.  I walk down to the restaurant and outside they have all our places set up.  As all of us PCTs start filing in and sitting down it seems like we are all old friends that haven’t seen each other in ages, yet we still struggle to remember each others names.  We are all talking loud, laughing even louder and it’s nothing but a sea of smiling faces.  We sat around for about 45 minutes before they came out with some soup, common before the meal here.  It was a yellowish-green color, with what looked like a type of spinach in it.  I guess it’s common to put anything green possible into some dishes, this could even be weeds from the yard.  The soups are heavy on MSG and you can taste it, not exactly a flavor I enjoy.  The main course came out, as you can imagine rice is included with almost everything out here, which is fine by me I love rice.  The first thing was green; apparently it is common here and they once again take any green leaf and smash it all up to make a sauce out of it.  They cooked it with crab, which I am a little picky about my seafood but I will try anything.  The next was a brownish-red sauce with chicken in it.  There was also an Asian style noodle dish with cooked carrots, green beans and onions, this was my favorite for the night.  After the meal they brought us ice cream, quite a treat.  After dinner people slowly began to trickle back to their rooms and start to catch up on their sleep.  Some of us remained behind to talk, mainly to the two PCV that are currently serving in Mozambique.  Both PCVs at my hotel are girls, one is getting ready to finish up her 3rd year and will be finished with service while the other just extended for a 3rd year.  Apparently it is very common for people to extended their service in Mozambique.  Mozambique is said to have one of the lowest dropout ratings in PC.  We just kept asking question after question for the PCVs and listen to all the great stories they had.  Not all the stories are happy but that is the cruel reality to life here.  There will be some major adjustments I will have to make.  No matter what the story was about and how ugly it may have seemed they kept telling us that Mozambican people are some of the friendliest and nicest people we will ever meet.

I got back up to my room and Eddie was finally awake.  I told him about dinner and we started to try and get things ready for the next day.  Around midnight I finally decided to crash.

Next morning I woke up around 5:45am, the sun was already up!  I took my first shower in a few days.  The major problem, no hot water in the shower, but there was hot water in the sink.  It was nothing more than a dripping shower head with just hot on.  I knew it was going to be a cold and fast shower, but I didn’t think it was going to be as cold as it was.  Didn’t take me long to decide it was a turn on the water to get wet, turn off the water, lather up and shampoo, turn on the water to rinse off.  After talking to other PCT at breakfast, the hot water was scalding hot the night before but none this morning.  Breakfast consisted of juice or coffee, bread, a banana, jelly, butter and a slice of American cheese.  Apparently cheese is a luxury in certain parts of the country. It was the most interesting breakfast I’ve ever had but I’m sure there will be more to come.  We were then bussed over to the hotel the other group was staying at for our orientation.  The trip there wasn’t as bad as getting to our hotel from the airport, it was a much shorter ride.   There were some very nice houses along the way and a couple company buildings.  All of them had cement walls around the yard with electric fences on top of that.  There were security guards with what looked like AK-47s at most of the entrances.  We ride along the road that runs along the beach, that’s right the other hotel over looks the beach.  We are told we never want to go swimming in the water because the water is so dirty with trash and chemicals.  The other hotel is much nicer than ours, apparently everyone was supposed to stay there but the hotel screwed something up.  There were 5 pools that I saw and bird cages.  We immediately went to the air condition conference room where our long day of orientation would be.  All the administrative people introduced themselves, except the Country Director, CD, since he is out of town at the moment.  The US Ambassador to Mozambique, Ambassador Leslie Rowe, came and spoke to us.  She often makes visits to PCV sites when she travels around the country so all of us will most likely see her again.  We then had our morning snack break, this included coffee, juice, muffins and assorted small fresh baked snacks.  They were really good.  Then we had a security briefing and had to do some administrative work, this resulted in me get my first meticals, 1300 for spending money.  It’s not that much money US dollars but any money is good enough for me.  We will soon exchange USD for Meticals so we can go purchase things like cell phones and things we didn’t bring.  After all of that we went to have lunch.  It was very good, more rice of course, steamed vegetables, cucumber salad, a fish dish I skipped because there really wasn’t much left but the head, a lamb with vegetables, kind of like a stew, baked potatoes, similar to potato wedges cut up and a salad with lots of different vegetables and some tuna, which was very good.  We enjoyed sitting outside in the beautiful Mozambican weather, sunny and about 32 C or  90 F.  It was all medical after lunch.  The head doctor talked to us about who she is and how to contact the doctors under different circumstances.  Then we got medical kits and talked about what all the medicine is used for.  We had to go over how to assemble our water filtration systems.  After that fun session we had afternoon snack and started vaccinations.  I had to get only two today and I don’t know how many tomorrow.  I also did my language interview today in which the only things I know how to say are hello and thank you, pretty sure I’m going to be starting out in the beginner’s course.  Tomorrow I will have to do my medical interview and finally get my maria prophylaxis.

One of the PCV that is staying with us at our hotel was giving me a hard time about trying to get to the bus to leave.  I was going to go back the way we came but she was telling me that I didn’t know where I was going.  Taking her word for it, and a lot of crap as she likes to harass me, I followed her.  As we turned one corner I asked her if the white bus was ours because it looked like the type we take, she told me no our bus was some where else.  We pretty much walked around the entire complex only to end up at the bus I pointed out and the way I wanted to take would have taken about 30 seconds to get to the bus.  Needless to say I had to give her a hard time.  We took a ride back to Hoy Hoy, and had about an hour down time until dinner.  Everyone went back to their rooms to relax.  I sat down on my bed and next thing I know Eddie is waking me up telling me it’s time for dinner.  I guess I was a little more tired than I thought I was.  Dinner was okay tonight, more rice, some Mozambican type of curries that lack hot spices, so I was really disappointed, but they were still good, then a fish dish, which was okay just not really my thing, a shredded carrot and cabbage with onion salad, and some sort of spinal column dish, not sure if it was lamb, goat, or beef, but it was good just not a lot of meat, but a lot of cartilage.

Now I’m just sitting in my room, Eddie went to sleep right away so I haven’t had a chance to sort out all my things for what I am taking to Namaacha for training.  I can only take one checked bag and my carry on with me to my host family, everything else gets locked up at the PC office.  I will have to do it early tomorrow morning, it is 1:45am here now, we have to be at breakfast with our bag for the PC office at 7 am.  I’m just so excited to be here I can’t sleep, I’m not really tired.  I don’t think I’ve been so excited in my life!  Mozambique just seems so amazing, all my fellow PCT are great people that I’m really looking forward to sharing training with and getting to know even more, and there are just so many things to do.

I apologize to all my friends and family that are patiently waiting for a personal email.  I am extremely busy and am getting ready to go to a remote location on Saturday to live with my host family.  They do not speak English and I don’t speak Portuguese so we are going to have a great time together.  Training is very intense and I will not really have free time when I’m out there.  Mail drop offs are not timed, PC will just drop off things when they have enough mail to fill up their truck and drive out to our location (if you had written down my address before, please check my contacts now, they changed the address on us).  I plan on getting as many pictures as possible and will load them whenever I can.  I know I will have more pictures then I will time to load them all up.  Hopefully in about 5 months or so I will be in a position to where I will be able to communicate better.  Thanks everyone for being patient during crazy time, I know everyone wants to hear from me and I wish I could call all of you and tell you about everything.  At least through my blog I can let all of you know at once.  Remember that no news is good news and news from me is great news!