Written August 27, 2012

Hopefully posted later today, seeing as we finally have cell service again.

Hello hello, nice to see you all again haha.

These past few days have been extremely busy and at times overwhelming, but never fear, all is well here in beautiful Quissico!

So Thursday, I made a day trip up to Maxixe (about a 2 hour drive) with Angela to run a bunch of errands for the festival this past weekend. Although my town is right on the EN1, it is not very big, therefore it lacks a lot of things that we needed for the festival. For example, we wanted to laminate some photos and signs for the booth, and that can really only be done in a big city, we also had t-shirts made, and needed to buy fruit in a LARGE quantity for the smoothies we made on Saturday.

It was a long day in the city, but we got just about everything accomplished, I bought some mustard (yum, forgot how much I missed that) and we headed home. We decided to rent out a chapa, because we were carting home a lot of stuff, all the fruit, a lot of buckets for trash, rakes/brooms, some esteras, and all sorts of other things. We also picked up two fellow PCV’s and a JICA volunteer. So it was money well spent, and made transport of everything much easier.

That evening, Kyle (a fellow volunteer in my group) and I folded origami hearts and put condoms inside them to be passed out during the festival. It was a cool way that the JICA volunteers promoted safe sex, while sharing some cross-cultural experience. It made me think of the one Christmas when my mom decided that our tree was to be decorated entirely in origami, my brother and I weren’t thrilled because it wasn’t our normal tradition, but in hindsight, it was a really cool experience. So yeah, Thursday night Kyle and I spent the entire evening folding, catching up about our first two weeks at site, and watching a movie (Zombieland). It was really nice to spend time with him, and I’m happy he is only about 2.5 hours away.

Friday was just another big day of preparation for the festival on Saturday, many other volunteers arrived in Quissico, I would guess that we had about 25 volunteers here for the weekend. We finished the origami hearts, ate some lunch, I showed Kyle around our small town, we worked on signs, setting up our booth (we couldn’t put anything but the frame out overnight because things would get stolen) and in the evening, those who stayed in my house cut all of the 200some oranges that we had purchased earlier in the week. Lets talk about that little adventure here for a minute, so we had 6 people Friday night at my house, 3 people were the “peelers” and the other three were the “cutters”, after about 3 hours of peeling, cutting/dicing the oranges we made a sizeable dent, though there was still some oranges left. . needless to say, we were all very sticky, there were a few puddles of orange juice on my floor, and we were all really sick of oranges by the end of it.

Oh- I guess I should explain why we were cutting oranges. . . for our booth we had a few things representing what Peace Corps, and American culture is. So we decided to make smoothies as our “American dish” – 2 cups of diced oranges, 4 small bananas, some ice, a spoonful of sugar, and a spoonful of moringa – this amazing plant that has an insane amount of nutritional value. Easy enough, and it tasted really great. Buying the blenders was an adventure in itself, finding a place that made ice/having to buy that, drying out the morina leaves, to then have to crush them into a fine powder etc. . . it was a LOT of work to make these smoothies happen, but everyone really loved them, it got the information about moringa out to people, and was a general success! So yeah, we had smoothies, earrings/jewelry that was made by REDES groups, jams, cashews, t-shirts, and a cool table where kids could write to American kids about their life in Moz, and what they thought life was like in America.  I’m trying to upload some pictures from the festival to facebook- so you guys will have to check them out.

Saturday started really early to set up the booth at 6am, we had it all going well up until the electricity part for the blenders. We knew that we would need it, and had positioned our booth in an area that it would be easily accessible, but then we had to wait for the guy to set it up for us. And of course he had to finish his beer first, hit on me and some other volunteers, talk to his friends, have another beer, and then find his “work shirt” before he could set up the energy supply. ANNYOING. But it happens I guess. We got the smoothie part of the stand up and running about 9am, and it ran until about 4pm. It was a great success!! A lot of people were a bit quizzical about the color of the smoothie, or how it would taste, but those who were most skeptical turned out to be the ones who loved it the most!

After the festival, we did a massive clean up, and dropped all of the things off at my house/Angela’s house. At this point, everyone was hot, tired, and very dirty (and or sticky) so we all went back to our respective houses to rinse (there was a lack of water, so full bucket baths were kind of out of the question) and just relax a bit. We all met up at the local restaurant/bar for a well-deserved beer. But after one beer, I was absolutely exhausted, so some of us headed back to my house. The next morning, many left at an ungodly early hour, and those who remained here made a quick trip down to the lagoon to unwind, enjoy the beach, and the water. After the lagoon, we got some lunch at a booth that was still set up from the festival, and just called it a day. Everyone else left after lunch, and I finally took a nice long bucket bath (meaning I took my time – its not like a long shower where you have endless water haha) and just went to bed.

This morning I’ve spent time really cleaning my house, mopping my floor to get rid of the sticky juice, washing some underwear, cleaning my dishes etc. just trying to get this small “bungalow” back into some working order. I’ll be here for another 4 weeks or so I think. Today is a day off here in Quissico for everyone, so I am taking the opportunity to clean, write this blog, I’ll go into town to buy some groceries, maybe do some laundry etc. just a general day of rest and recuperation.

The festival was a great success, people worked really hard, and I think our booth was a great example of what Peace Corps is. But with that said, I am really looking forward to things being calm here, and actually getting into the work I’m supposed to be here to do. I didn’t sign up to be a party/event planner, and yes I know there will be exceptions to that (for example next years festival) but it was a bit overwhelming for me. My first two weeks at sight, and things were just wild and crazy? Wow. This experience is hard. At times a lot harder than I thought it would be. I have self-doubt often, but then I have personal successes as well. Its going to be a rollercoaster like I’ve said before.

Keep the email’s coming. I love hearing from everyone at home. This weekend, because of the number of people here in town, the cell phone service – called “rede” was down. Making it all the more difficult to organize everyone, get in touch etc. I didn’t receive any calls/texts all weekend – so to my parents who tried to call on Sunday, I am sorry I didn’t hear from you. I look forward to those weekly phone calls more than I could ever put into words. Missing you all at home – lets talk about people coming to visit! I want to share this experience and my beautiful site with anyone who wants to come!

I’ll have some more blogs soon about how things are going in a normal life setting here soon!

Xoxo always

t