Team Days and First Week

So the free Internet in our apartment died and now we are a little more limited in terms of access.

We spent the last weekend on our team days. We stayed at home and talked about our goals and plans for the next few months. On Friday morning, our session included walking around downtown and seeing some of the tourist sites of Maputo. We saw the City Hall and a nice white church. The a house made entirely out of iron and designed by the guy who did the Eiffel Tower. Turns out it wasn’t such a good idea though, as nobody has ever been able to live there because of the heat. Now it is a ministry for the government. We went to a park where you are not allowed to walk on the grass (what a waste!) but it has trees from all over the country and some of them are really gorgeous. Then we went to see the war memorial and train station (apparently the 6th most beautiful train station in the world) Then we wandered over to the Municipal Market, where they sell vegetables, fruits, meats, fish, seafood and cheese all fresh made. It’s quite the place! And apparently very cheap, though we didn’t buy anything.

On Saturday we went to a large store near the coast, so I had my first glimpse of the Indian Ocean. We bought a few things for the house and then continued with our sessions back at home. At the end of the Team Days Daudo gave us some videos and letters from our friends back home with words of encouragement. It was so sweet! Thank you guys!

Now we are on our first real week of work. Lilian and I are working at ISCTEM, which is a private university specializing in science and technology. The boys are at UEM, the largest public university. These first weeks are all focused on recruitment, which is my department, so I have been doing a lot of planning. Lilian is making the posters and flyers, Daudo and Marco are coordinating the other campus. Next week we are going to visit the classes and tell them about AIESEC. Things will be crazy for a couple of weeks and at the end we hope to have selected the new executives for two new local committees here in Maputo!!

We have also been busy filling out house. We have bought garbage cans, pots, plates, bowls, spices, sugar and a million other things. It’s seems like every time we leave the house we return with something new. We finally got a stove!! So now we can cook out own food instead of always eating out. We also got a TV because Daudo likes to watch the news. We just have the antenna stations, and it is all in Portuguese so I haven’t really watched much. I haven’t done any baking yet because we don’t have any baking pans, but I’m hoping to get some soon and fill the house with muffins and cookies J We had a little trouble with some small uninvited guests in our house, but we have been slowly dealing with them.

Hmm, what else. One random thing: It is strange to have a person named Marco in my house. Every time someone calls “Marco!” I think that he should reply “Polo!”.

I mentioned last time about the crazy parking on the streets. Well I found out why that is. Apparently until very recently only the very wealthy had cars. Then Japan came up with the brilliant idea of selling their used cars in East Africa. All of a sudden anyone with $500 could buy a car. The wave of cars was so fast that nobody had time to develop any kind of system for it.

The main streets are kind of interesting as well. They have two lanes going each direction in the middle, then a barrier on each side with breaks every once and a while, with one more lane on the outside. I saw the same things on the Marginals of Sao Paulo. The idea is that if you are going a ways, you stay in the middle so the traffic flows. If you need to turn off, you go on the outside lane, which moves slower.

Even though it is quite hot here (though today was unusually cool) nobody seems to wear shorts. Like Egypt I guess. The office we have been working (temporarily, until our office is ready) has super duper air-conditioning and is SOOO cold! We have been walking to the office, Lilian and I, each day. It’s about 30-40 min depending how fast we walk. Today on the way home we of course stopped of in this big store full of cheap imported stuff from China and bought some more things for the house.

The cell phone system here is just nuts. There are two companies. One old (Mcel) and one new (Vodacom). Every few days, one of them just stops working for no apparent reason. Because of this, almost every Mozambican carries two cell phones, one of each company. Cell minutes are a lot more expensive here than they were in Kenya! There it was 1 shilling per minute, which would be the same as 50 cents per minute here. Yet it’s more like 6.5 Meticais per minute! But on the other hand, you can buy a big bag of fresh vegetable for about $2.

Last thing and I promise I will stop. Portuguese is the official language, but people in different regions of the country speak different local dialects which are mixed with African languages. When bargaining on the street, the sellers know they can charge you more if you can’t speak the dialect. Even Daudo can’t speak it because he is from the north. Luckily for us Vera speaks it, so she does most of our “street shopping” and gets good prices.

And I’ll stop before you all explode. Till next time!

Oh P.S. The other day I wanted to order peach juice, and I was thinking the word "peach" so I said "sumo de peixe por favor" but peixe is not peach, it's fish! Mmm, fish juice!