Living in the moments of Mozambique: REDES handover

Home sweet home…. It feels great to be back from my adventure in the north, Lua is healthy and well, and the neighbors all had such a warm reception to me coming home. I forget sometimes how much I’m loved here.

So… the GREAT NORTHERN ADVENTURE! I think I’m going to break it up into parts, like I did the trip with my dad. The breakdown of our trip (I say “our” because I traveled first with Wendy and Olivia, and then Olivia and I continued on) – We were in Nampula City, Nampula Province for the REDES handover from Sat night until Tues morning. From there Wendy, Olivia and I hitchhiked to Ilha de Moçambique, Nampula Province, where Olivia and I stayed until Saturday morning. Saturday morning, we hitchhiked to Pemba, Cabo Delgado Province, and were there until Tuesday morning. Flew home Tuesday evening, and stayed the day in Maputo on Wednesday. I successfully arrived home yesterday mid-afternoon! Lots of moving around, lots of sights seen, and great time spent with wonderful people.

REDES Handover 2013-

Saturday morning I traveled down to Maputo, to meet Olivia, and catch our plane to Nampula. Now, the airport is on the outskirts of Maputo, so for me to come into the city, to then turn around and come out, just didn't seem smart. So I found myself a little café at the airport, had a beer and read my book until the plane departed. Smooth flight, no problems, and one of the Peace Corps doctors was actually on the flight returning home, so he gave us a lift to the backpackers where we were staying. We had dinner out that night at a Chinese place in Nampula. . . I miss Chinese food so very much, and this did not do it justice. Sadly it was just a bunch of grease and noodles on a plate. Very disappointing.

At the actual handover (sun/mon) we had one full day with our Mozambiquean counterparts, and one full day with the new volunteer leadership. We discussed many things; the responsibilities and roles of the counterpart and volunteer, the monitoring and evaluation of programs we run (the training of trainers, the workshops etc) our budget for this coming year, we talked about the curriculum for REDES, had a long discussion about our income generation project and the future of REDES. All in all, it was a great few days.

We have lots of ideas for the future of REDES – the biggest idea is, turning the secondary project for volunteers into an actual legal organization run and operated by Mozambique. Volunteers can still have groups, and help run them, and we can possibly even create a third year position focused primarily on this organization. A great dream to be sure, we just have lots of work coming up these next few months to help determine if it will be possible/what we will have to do to make it work.

So, two long days spent in the Peace Corps Nampula office, left little time to really get to know the town. We did a little exploring, and I bought some new beaded sandals, but I have discerned that Nampula is not a great city to go “walking around” in. It is very unsafe, especially at night.

(the whole gang)

The second evening, the night before departure, I made a big dinner for everyone at the hostel – we had eggplant parm, pasta, homemade tomato sauce, and some sautéed veggies on the side. Turned out great, and was very cheap for everyone because we just split the cost of the ingredients. There was wine, and lots of dancing on the front porch of the backpackers that night, so much fun.

Great people, great food, great work and motivation. . . what is not to love?