May 13, 2011
I can't believe it's already mid-May. This time last year I was graduating from Smith (CONGRATS to all the ladies graduating this weekend!) and other than a 3-month summer internship in DC, my future was more or less a mystery. I don't think I would have ever guessed I would be in sub-Saharan Africa a year after graduating, to be honest. If I were going into Peace Corps, which was my first choice, I thought I would be going to Central or South America (as that was the region from my Peace Corps nomination). However, I could not be happier with how everything turned out
I absolutely love it here in Mozambique, especially in my town of Angoche. Of course things aren't easy, but that makes each little success even sweeter. Between classes at school and the youth center, our girl's empowerment group, our youth art group, and the computer club I started, I am keeping pretty busy. This is definitely my preferred method of operating (if any of you knew my schedule during college, you have an idea). If I have free time now, I usually spend it playing with and training my new puppy, reading a book, or cooking something new.
My roommate and I got a puppy a couple of weeks ago and are currently trying to house break him which is proving rather difficult in our apartment. We named him Pequininho (tiny one in Portuguese) or Nino for short. He was so small when we got him we had to bottle feed him for the first week or so, but he is doing wonderfully now and growing fast.
I'm in the middle of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I am enjoying a lot, but I don't have nearly as much time to read it as I'd like. I took a break from Zen and sped through a quick read called Do Fish Drink Water? which was really interesting. It's a book of random questions and answers, and I recommend it as a highly entertaining collection of fun facts. For example, if you took all the pennies the U.S. Mint has ever produced and lined them up edge-to-edge they would circle the globe 137 times. Or the reason we say 'god bless you' (or the German version, gesundheit) when someone sneezes is that during the Middle Ages when people were suffering from the last stages of the plague, they would have sneezing fits. So if if you heard someone near you sneeze, you knew they were about to die so you asked god to bless their soul. The children's song 'Ring around the Rosey' is about the plague also.
I've had some baking successes recently too, including some great banana bread and delicious peanut butter cookies. The next challenge will be baking a pizza in my dutch oven (aka a large covered pot with rocks and dirt in the bottom to insulate and then the baking dish inside. It's all done over charcoal). My site-mate is heading down South for a couple weeks and on the way back she's going to pick up some mozzarella cheese in the provincial capitol as that is really the one pizza ingredient we can't get here.
Well as I explained I'm really busy lately and I am about to head off to school, but hopefully the internet will come back on long enough for me to send this sometime this weekend. It keeps going on and off and we don't really know what the problem is. It hasn't worked well in over a month. Oh well. So it goes in Mozambique
Love, Alissa
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