i chase chickens out of bathrooms

The other day there was a snake in the bathroom. It was 5 am and I was just getting up. I opened the door to see a snake coiled up after I shut the door. Ugh, disgusting. I was just like "sai, sai!" and it went through the wall. After it went away, I realized that the snake probably didn´t understand that I was telling it to go because last I checked, snakes don´t have excellent ears. My bathroom is crazy. In fact, I would probably say that it´s an 8 year old American boy´s dream come true. I have chased a chicken out of the bathroom, yelled at a snake, seen plenty of lizards and many centipedes. I am just waiting for an unpleasant experience in the bathroom/outhouse revolving around an animal living in the latrine.

So we´re nearing the end of November here in Namaacha and I now know where I am going to in Mozambique for my two year stint. I will be living in Monapo in Nampula Province, which is in the northern part of the country. I am going to be moving there with another Moz 12er, Nia, and we´re going to share a house that is actually located at a school. It sounds like it´s a pretty secure site, especially since our house is right next to a police station and the primary school. I am excited though because according to PCVs I´ve spoken with, our site is going to be at a good location, about two hours or less from Nampula City and about an hour away from Ilha de Mocambique, which is supposed to be gorgeous. I´m happy with my site placement but I´m dreading saying goodbye to my host family since we´ve become close. I hope to visit though, depending on the price of plane tickets.

I apologize, since I haven´t been able to download pictures as of yet. I am technologically impaired enough as it is but put me on a slow slow computer and you might as well take away the computer and hand me a calculator. Anyhoo, I hope everyone is having a wonderful fall season. It´s Turkey Day soon and we Americans here in Namaacha are going to have a little festa. I wish everyone well!

happy november

So it´s November. Holy crap. Time has flown. Anyway, everything is going well here. I have just found out that I will be traveling to Tete next week for a site visit. And Tete is pretty much the hottest place in Mozambique. So what did Peace Corps do? Send the sweatiest volunteer to Tete. How wonderful for me. Christmas has indeed come early. I am excited tho, nonetheless. The volunteer I am going to stay with sounds nice and I even bought shoes for it today - at the shoprite in Namaacha, which is basically a big flea market of clothing from China and given from the US. I even saw a Dare shirt. I felt like I was in fifth grade again. Hmm. What else? I am still eating rice and I had ice cream today. It was strawberry chocolate ice cream. I pretty much died and went to heaven and I bought one for my brother too. I am not even worried about gaining a little weight because I sweat so much here and everything is always uphill. It´s like jazzercise every morning on the way to language class, minus the pumping jams and an addition of small children and adults staring at you. I went to church last sunday for 7 hours and it was 7 hours full of dancing and singing church songs. Pretty impressive actually. Definitely beats St. Mary´s at home in the entertainment department. Me and Jamie, another volunteer, don´t know what´s going on most of the time but we go for the music and for a fellow American´s company. My brother is a translator from Changana into Portuguese, which is pretty interesting to watch.

That´s all for now I suppose. When I return to Namaacha next week I am going to try to download my pictures onto the computer, onto my Flickr site to give you all a little slice of my world.