End of Training

A lot happened in the last few weeks of training, we had more language, more tech, model school, the provincial elections, thanksgiving, our host family celebrations and then swearing in!  Lingua (language) and tech were pretty much the same as every other week so I’ll just tell you about escola modela (model school) and all the celebrations we had.
Model school was week 7/8 of training.  We were each assigned a grade and class to teach and then we planned lessons, each English teacher taught 4 or 5 lessons and there were 2 or 3 teachers per class, and then we had to write, administer, and grade a test at the end of all of it.  I was assigned to teach otava (8th grade) and so the other 8th grade teachers and I planned a unit about School subjects and daily routines.
Our students volunteered to come to school for a week during their summer vacation and all they got was a week of English, Math, Physics, and Biology lessons, a notebook, a pen, cookies every day, juice after the test, and a certificate saying that they participated. I’m not sure how many students in the US would give up some of their summer vacation for this… I probably wouldn’t have when I was 12.  Since our students were volunteers, we had a range of ages…  I’m pretty sure we had a legitimate 5 year old and her 6 year old sister in my class, along with about 20 other students ranging from 9-15 probably.  At the end of our class the majority of our students passed and did pretty well on our test.  Overall it was a good week of practice and it felt good to get back into teaching and it was good to see what worked with these students and what didn’t.  Although, I will be teaching a different age and hopefully my students will have a little more English than my students in model school, but at least I’m prepared now if they don’t.
During the week of model school, Mozambique had its provincial elections.  There has been lots of talk about these and about possible violence during them.  Luckily nothing happened near me and there really was not a whole lot throughout Mozambique during the day of the elections or after they announced the winners, but don’t worry my dear readers, Peace Corps took every precaution and had us basically on lockdown and we weren’t supposed to leave our houses and had a bag packed, just in case we had to leave quickly.  Luckily, none of that was really necessary.
After model school, it was time for Thanksgiving.  All of Moz 21 helped cook different dishes and then we had one big feast at the PC Office in Namaacha.  I was in the group that made green bean casserole, and let me just say, cooking in Mozambique takes a long long time.  As a standard, many of the different dishes including the 5 turkeys were about a half hour late.  But it was all delicious.  We had some of the best turkey I have ever had, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, cheesy mashed potatoes, stuffing, sweet potatoes, corn bread, pecan and pumpkin pie, ice cream, and probably more, but that’s all I can remember now.  Let me just say that after eating Mozambican food for the last 8 weeks, it was good to have some American food and it made it feel a lot more like Thanksgiving.  We all stuffed ourselves in true American-Thanksgiving fashion (probably more so) and many people got a little sick after all the food.
Two days later we had our host family celebrations.  They Maes (host moms) really pulled out all the stops for this meal.  They started cooking super early in the morning and made a lot of great food!  I participated in some traditional dancing that I had been learning throughout training and we performed with some Mozambican women at the beginning of the ceremony.  Then all the families were recognized and received a certificate, and then we all ate lots of food.
Finally we packed up all of our stuff and sent it off to Maputo, and we followed it a day later to swear in as official Peace Corps Volunteers.  Every year the group gets capulanas (basically big things of fabric, used for everything here: carrying a baby, blankets, cleaning, a towel, decorations, and clothes) and has them made into clothes for the swear-in ceremony.  I had a dress made out of it, and we also got ties made for the ambassador as well as our country director.  The swear-in ceremony was held at the U.S. Ambassadors house and we had to take an oath, similar to the one that soldiers take, with a few exceptions.  After Swearing-in we were official Peace Corps Volunteers and would be heading out to different parts of the country the next day.  We were put up in a nice hotel in Maputo and had most of the day to eat good food!  Then the next morning those of us going up to the Northern provinces and the central ones were picked up to go to the airport and get our respective flights either to Nampula or Manica where we would be having a few days of conferences and then heading out to our sites for the next two years!

So that is what you missed in the last few weeks of my PST experience!  Now for the exciting stuff... VOLUNTEER LIFE!