Changing Seasons

As of last week, a new occurrence has begun during the evenings. We find ourselves reaching for the extra blanket in the middle of the night, snuggling underneath. Finally, after what has pretty much been a year of summer for us, winter is coming to the southern hemisphere. And, yes, believe it or not, it does get cold enough in Africa for blankets, sweatshirts and hot chocolate. We’re only at the beginning of the cold months which apparently last through September and for once in my life, I am looking forward to it. Anyone who knows me has probably heard me say “I could live without ever seeing snow” and though this is still true, the sometimes brutal heat of Africa has given me a new appreciation for the season I used to dread. I also find it comforting to know that while most of the time my friends and family are experiencing the total opposite weather pattern above the equator, we are now going through a transition time together. While you’re all heating up, we’re cooling down but I’m sure we have some days where our Fahrenheit and Celsius match up.

It felt strange to go through holidays like Halloween, Hanukkah and Christmas when it was so hot and sticky outside, but I finally succeeded in recreating a holiday here where it actually felt like home. The food, the customs and even the chill in the air on Friday night seemed right when I hosted my first Passover Seder. A fellow PCV who lives in our region suggested that we do a Seder at our home. He has a little bit of Jew in him, but not enough to know how to put on the full production. Of course I wanted to do this, but I was a bit nervous about how I would pull this off considering I would be working with no electricity or running water and had not even hosted a Seder in the States with all the amenities. But, Passover has always been one of my favs, particularly because it is such a cozy holiday with its rich traditions, foods and family time.  So I decided I had to find a way to pull this off. I wondered how I would make haroset (a must-have Passover staple) without the key ingredient, walnuts. And, what the heck could I find in Mozambique that could take the place of matza. Oh man, If only we had a kosher section in the Mapinhane market. :) And, most of all, I worried if I had the right stuff to be the fearless Seder leader as I would be the only 100% Jew in the room and they’d all be looking to be for guidance. Luckily, all my fears subsided. I received my care package with boxes of matzo and matzo ball soup mix just in time, I miraculously found walnuts in our closest large city (and another Passover classic, horseradish!) and I looked through the Haggadah I brought from home to brush up on my Seder 101. We made soup and chicken and potatoes and fixed up a full seder plate. I was ready. Two of our PCV friends and our Mozambican teacher buddy joined us and as we sipped our grape juice and took turns reading from the Haggadah, I could feel the cool air outside, and for a moment, had the pure feeling of home. NEXT YEAR IN ISRAEL!!! Err, umm, Mozambique again.

And while the season is changing, other things are too. Our first trimester comes to an end next week as we wrap up test corrections and grade averaging exercises. We were caught by surprise a few weeks ago when the Provincial government decided that, with only a day or two notice, all students needed to take a week’s worth of standardized tests in each subject. With only three weeks left in the trimester, it threw off the rest of our lesson plans and gave us a hasty crash course in attempting to control wandering eyes in a classroom of 60 while the students churned out test after test. It was a bit of an exhausting week, even more so for me then when I have my regularly scheduled classes. Although it gave me a break from planning and teaching my normal 20 hours, I found it more exhausting to sit and survey a room of students (sometimes rabidly cheating ones) for an hour and a half at a time. Not to mention that our schedule for proctoring and grading changed daily, something that still drives me a little crazy. Although I am learning to roll with the unstructured nature of things here more, I will always be a sucker for set schedules. But when all is said and done, we survived our first trimester and already have an idea of how we can be more comfortable and improve for our next one. During the break we will be attending our reconnect conference, where we will join PCVS from our training group to digest our first 3 months at site and continue to learn how we can best benefit our community. Both Chris and I are looking forward to hearing more about secondary projects since we now feel comfortable enough with teaching, we’re ready to delve into new things. He’s already got a lot of things bubbling like helping with a cultural group, guitar club and science fair. I’d like to start a REDES group (a club to foster growth and empowerment of girls) and maybe get an English club going. Hopefully, we’ll have a blog post in the next few months to talk about these new developments! And all of these new prospects are good for us especially because we realize something else has changed; We are past the “everything is shiny and new” phase of our Peace Corps experience. We’ll never be 100% integrated (even after 2 years because we are foreigners after all) but we are more settled in then when we first came and we recognize that’s made us a bit restless; Still feeling fulfilled and loving the experience, but restless. This is apparently pretty common for PCVs around their 6^th-7^th month. Oh wait, did I mention that as of the end of March, we have officially been in Mozambique for 6 months!!!! Who-hoo! Anyway, I think a new side project might be just the thing to move us into the “it’s ok that everything is no longer shiny and new” phase.  In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy the cooler weather as we move into winter and will imagine we are sipping tea at the same time as you move into spring.