June 7

It has been a while since I posted anything, but I can explain why. I think that the things that I do here in Mozambique have stopped becoming eventful to me. I have grown used to my life here and nothing that I do seems so out of the ordinary that it can warrant a blog entry. For example, I think I wrote in one of my first entries about defecating in a hole – at this point I that is something that I would not think twice about.

All that being said I suppose I will continue to write things in order to satisfy my friends, my family and most importantly, my mother.

I have been chugging away at school trying in vain (for the most part) to get my students to understand something about chemistry. I decided to start telling them exactly what I am going to put on my tests, but most students still struggle mightily. There are some students that make an effort and actually learn something, and those are the ones that I focus on. I have no qualms about playing favorites – if I did I think I would loose my mind.

Some of my recent travel has included a trip to Manica City (which is in the mountains on the Zimbabwe boarder) to play a basketball game. Manica City is the currently the home of a large population of rich Zimbabweans who have gotten fed up with their own country. As a result it is a very nice little city. You can sit down at a nice restaurant and watch the fancy cars drive by, or walk through neighborhoods full of enormous houses. The income gap here in Africa is enormous – and I have not seen a more clear demonstration of that gap in Mozambique than in Manica City.

I returned on Sunday from a trip to Beira, which is the second biggest city in Mozambique and generally considered to be (by travelers and PCVs, but not by Mozambicans) a very unpleasant place to be. It is dirty, hot, and full of Malaria transmitting mosquitoes. However, I did have the pleasure of seeing a traffic light (we don’t have any in my province), and I got to go to the beach. My fellow PCVs and I took a trip north of Beira that included a 40 km along a terribly maintained dirt road and a short boat ride to a place called Rio Savane. It is a small campsite situated on a peninsula at the confluence of the Rio Savane (Savane River) and the Indian Ocean. There were miles and miles of beautiful beach and not another person to be seen – quite frankly it was one of the coolest places I have ever been. We played games on the beach during the day, and had bonfires on the beach at night- it was a fun weekend for all that were involved.