Most of the time we are divided based on what our jobs will be here in Mozambique, Education or Health.  Once a week we have what are called HUB days, where we are all together and go over important stuff like medical and safety as well as other things.  For our first HUB day the officials of Namaacha came and there was a ceremony, of course completely in Portuguese.  The officials came in and sang the Mozambican national anthem to us and we sang the USA national anthem for them.  Some of the PC administration gave a couple introductory speeches then the Namaacha officials gave speeches.  Since I still don’t understand Portuguese and I was extremely tired due to my lack of being able to sleep well at night, I took a small nap during the ceremony.

And so begins the malaria meds induced crazy dreams.  I was suddenly at my room here in Namaacha yet my clothes dresser from back in the US was here with me.  I walked over to my dresser opened the top drawer where all my socks are and grabbed them all at once.   They were squirming slightly in my arms and there was an opening in one of the walls in my room.  I walked over to the opening and it was a giant mouse maze, just like the ones on TV, where there is a mouse in one part of it, cheese in another and the mouse has to find their way through the maze to get the cheese.  I just threw all of my socks into the maze and they started running around the maze like mice and making little mouse sounds.  Then I was awaken by the sound of applause for one of the officials speeches.  While I was probably only asleep for about 15 minutes it’s the strangest dream I’ve had since I’ve been here and it seemed so real.

Mama Celeste decided to check on the cleanliness of my room, like any mother would.  She noticed that I had all my shoes turned upside down and told me that I needed to turn them right side up.  I was trying to explain to her that I kept them that way so mice and insects wouldn’t crawl into my shoes.  Of course I have an extremely limited vocabulary and was trying to use my dictionary to help me out.  Once she figured out why I did it we all had a good laugh.  It finally seemed like the ice breaker that is so desperately needed.  She finally wanted to know what I was working on in Portuguese and wanted to check my homework.  I found out that she teaches a couple days a week for an informal education program here.  With the way life is here, especially since there was a civil war not too long ago, it’s not uncommon for someone to not get an education.  There is an informal education system for individuals who were not able to go through the normal education program and are now older and want to learn how to do the basics like read, write and math.  There are many efforts to improve the level of education here in Mozambique, but the way things are really done are far different from what the intended outcome is.  That is for another blog post all together and I’m not even teaching yet.