During our most happy time, our triumphal return home aftertwo years serving in the Peace Corps, we received sad news. On our very firstday back we got an e-mail informing us of the death of two of the teachers inthe new Peace Corps group in Mozambique.We had just meet them briefly during the training session we gave and at theirswearing-in ceremony at the ambassador’s residence the week before in Maputo,so we did not know them well personally, but as brothers and sisters in thePeace Corps family we naturally felt a strong bond; the news of their deathsjust a couple days before Christmas affected us deeply. We only got a few details about thecircumstances of the tragedy, we know a group of five volunteers were involvedin a bad car accident while hitch hiking near the beach in Gaza, SouthernMozambique, and that two died as a result of injuries and the other three weretaken to the hospital, at least one with injuries severe enough to end hisPeace Corps service. Usually heroes is a word we associate with soldiers,firefighters, or police, men and women willing to put their lives on the lineto serve their communities and countries. Peace Corps volunteers may not be inarmed combat or have to rush into burning buildings, but they are also asked tomake sacrifices. We give up the comforts associated with our lives in the USA,running water, delicious foods, often times electricity, toilets, reliabletelecommunications, access to entertainment, but also we give up many of thesafety features built into our American lives: seat belts, airbags, welldesigned and maintained roads andvehicles, general education campaigns against drunk driving, emergencyresponders, nearby hospitals, in essence putting our lives at risk to serve thepoorer communities of this planet we all live on. Its not often that a Peace Corps Volunteerdies in the course of their service, these were the first deaths in the historyof Peace Corps Mozambique, but this was the case for the two young teachersfrom Wisconsin and Washington state, aged 22 and 23, recent graduates fromcollege, having just started their service in Mozambique. We thought of themand their families, as well as our friends recovering in the hospital, allthroughout Christmas, as we read articles and internet tributes. We were so happy to have finished our serviceand with our joyful reunion with our family and friends, and the thought ofthese two who would never be coming home and the families who sent away theirdaughters with so many hopes and expectations, only to hear this news; it madeus extra grateful for our own circumstances and reminded us of the ephemeralnature and inherent mortality in life. We only have a finite time here onEarth, we are glad we spent two of those years together serving the people of Mozambique.

The newest PC Mozambique group at their Swearing-In Ceremony in Maputo

Mozambiqueis basically the farthest place from Californiaon the planet. Actually we’ve consulted our world map several times on thisissue and there are two countries further from our home in Pasadena, Mauritius Islandsand Madagascar,but still Mozambiqueis really far! If our rocky, unpaved airstrip in Zóbuè could accommodatepassenger jets, and there was a direct flight to LAX (Los AngelesInternational) it would take at least 24 hours of flying and require a mid-airrefueling session. If we somehow bookedthat hypothetical flight, we would earn over 12,000 frequent flier miles. Needlessto say, that flight does not exist, and our sojourn back involved severaldifferent planes, layovers, and in flight movies. After two years of travel in Africa,we had no major complaints, other than Luc’s irrational air-travel anxiety,possibly exaggerated by his malaria prophylaxis’ psycho-side-effects. Our moms were waiting to greet us at the LAXInternational Terminal and we went immediately to El Arco, our favorite Mexicanfood restaurant where the rest of our welcoming committee greeted us as wechowed down on corn chips, enchiladas, burritos with tomatillo sauce, mole, andall those comfort foods we just couldn’t quite replicate in Africa.Our journey took us through progressively more developed cities: Maputo(a huge step over our rural village), Cape Town(way more advanced than Maputo),and Istanbul (a full blown Europeanmetropolis), so we had a gradual readjustment to the speed of modern life whichhelped mitigate our reverse culture shock. Jet lag was another story. Mozambique,Capetown, and Istanbul are all inthe same time zone, so we left all of the time shifting for the last 14 hourleg of our journey on the non-stop from Turkeyto Los Angeles. 11 time zones leftus with an extra ten hours of being awake; we originally planned on sleepingin-flight, but were just way too excited. The trade off was several days ofserious jet lag, crashing out at dinner time and waking up at 2am, possiblyexacerbated by our non-stop trying to see everyone and do everything schedule.

Lucas at 8pm on Christmas Day

So now that we’re back in the landof plenty, we’ll see if we can stay at our recommended BMI (Body Mass Index).With a virtually infinite array of tempting foods at our fingertips stayingthin will be much more of a challenge than it was in perma-skinny Mozambique,but Janet rejoined her favorite gym and Luc has plenty of hiking and joggingtrails nearby. We’ve traveled back and forth between the modern fancy rich partof the world and the poor less-developed traditional part of the world severaltimes, so reverse culture shock wasn’t too bad, but we’ve still had a fewmoments of culture related anxiety attacks: trying to get the remote control towork, realizing we had nothing fashionable to wear to Janet’s ten year HSreunion, walking into the AT&T store and looking at all the differentmodels of iPhone, opening up piles and piles of X-mas presents, all the whilethinking of how simple our lives were back in Zóbuè.

Janet's Dad's house post gift opening

We’ve tried not to convertprices from dollars back into meticais, or think about how many months we couldlive in Africa on the amount of money spent on anevening out here in Los Angeles. Butwe are glad to be home, especially with so many people around for Christmas andNew Year’s celebrations. Even though we don’t have jobs, or cars, or phones, ora place of our own to live, or any of those items we once considered luxuries butpeople here seem to think are necessities, we are confident things will workout for us. We’ve heard the question“So, what are you going to do now?” at least 200 times, basically everyone hasasked us. Luc is going back to UCLA to finish his dissertation on Education forSustainable Development based on the research he did while living in India justbefore Peace Corps. The project has basically been on hold for two years, sohopefully it reignites without too many hitches. Janet’s future is less constrained,and involves finding some sort of meaningful employment, hopefully in theInternational Health Education field. We don’t know where that job will begeographically, but we would like to stay near our families, which live mainlyin California. In the meantime wehave lots of friends and family to catch up with and are expecting a new niecethis month. We have thousands of pictures to sort through; we have somewardrobe shopping to do and various of our favorite museums to visit, so many newbooks to peruse at the library, endless food sensations waiting for us at LosAngeles’ endless assortment of eateries, and recipes to try out with thegrocery store’s limitless array of exciting ingredients. We would like to takea couple of road trips and reacquaint ourselves with USAand maybe visit some of our new Peace Corps friends now scattered across thecountry. Africafeels distant now. We try to keep up, reading the news on the internet andfollowing the blogs of the current volunteers living in Zobue (Lisa and Dan),but it’s all quickly fading into the past.

When flying Turkish Air, you have to stop in Istanbul, so we decided to take advantage of the layover and make it into a mini-vacation. The modern network of subway, buses, and metro rail facilitated circulating through the massive city, and being wintertime low-season, we had this staple of package tourism almost to ourselves, sharing mainly with local Turkish tourists. After two years in Africa, Istanbul had a very metropolitan feel and with ancient monuments in site everywhere, it felt much more historic than anything in our part of Africa. Situated on several hilltops and surrounded by various narrow bodies of water, every direction tempted the photographer’s eye with panoramic vistas, so even though we are only amateurs with a little point-and-shoot digital machine, we still took nearly 400 pictures during our short stay.

The city’s countless mosques with their myriad minarets, each trying to outdo its neighbor in projecting the call to prayer from its megaphones left no doubt when the faithful should face Mecca and comply with their religious duties. For us the five times daily cacophony of Arabic was a convenient way to mark our daily activities: waking up, breakfast, lunch, mid afternoon snack, and time to head home.

Food in Istanbul is omnipresent and amazing. Markets burst in cornucopias of fresh fruits and produce priced very reasonably. We treated ourselves to pomegranate, dried apricots, and apples. There is no peanut butter, but we discovered hazelnut chocolate spread just as good for making snack sandwiches. Street vendors make sure you are never more than a two minute walk from the nearest sesame seed bagels, called simits, pastries, or fire roasted chestnuts.

Tea vendors find you even in the most obscure places, like on top of the cities ancient walls. Luc’s favorite vegetable eggplant is everywhere, and in every form.

Potatoes are also taken to creative extremes, often times unrecognizably camouflaged by toppings,

and bright windows full of sweet desserts, baklava, and Turkish delights entice even the most regimented of dieters as they wander the avenues.

For the bargain hunter there is the Grand Bazaar, an entire covered section of the old city spanning several city blocks where you can find anything from antique carpets, to tourist curios, to plastic junk manufactured in China. We took advantage to do some last minute Christmas shopping.

Istanbul is most definitely a European city when it comes to walking. Even a drizzly afternoon created no visible reduction of volume in the river of Turkish pedestrians clad almost exclusively in dark colorless winter attire.

Istanbul, having served as capital of various empires, had more historic sites than even Luc could try to visit on a three day layover, so we tried to get a representative mix of the highlights: imperial mosques,

ancient Christian churches with golden mosaics,

the more than opulent Topkapi Palace where the Ottaman sultans reigned,

the roman aqueduct and city walls, the Genoese fortifications,

and even an underground Byzantine cistern.We took a ferry cruise across the Bosphorus to the Asian side of the city, which seemed no less European to our casual visit. We enjoyed the views from the boat, but locals seemed busy feeding the seagulls ensuring flocks of birds around each vessel. Janet found time at one of the centuries old Turkish baths to get the full clean experience where a young masseuse scrubbed off two years of accumulated African grime. Still, despite the amazing opportunity for a mini Istanbul vacation courtesy of Turkish Air, we were longing to be home, and secretly enjoyed the fact that we only had three days there and soon enough found ourselves on a USA bound jet plane.

Cape Town is not only the oldest city in Southern Africa, founded by Dutch settlers in 1652, it’s also the most picturesque, built between a seafront and the dramatic Table Mountain, and enjoys a temperate California climate year round. Given its tourism credentials, and its extremely inconvenient distance from the USA, we thought it best to visit before we permanently departed the Motherland.

We found Cape Town much more inviting and walkable than sketchy Johannesburg, South Africa’s apocalyptic version of Los Angeles, and Southern Africa’s largest and most dangerous metropolis. But even postcard perfect Cape Town has its dark side. Given the recent history of apartheid, race relations in the city are still viscerally tense, and violent crime is a constant threat. Having navigated cross-cultural challenges continuously during the past two years, we had plenty of skills to cope with these obstacles, but in South Africa everything is exaggerated, probably explaining why the country’s Peace Corps completion rate is the lowest in the entire Peace Corps. We explored some of this history on a tour at the Robben Island maximum security prison; the site of Nelson Mandela’s captivity during some of South Africa’s darkest times.

Segregation far exceeds levels we are accustomed to in the United States with many posh all-white neighborhoods surrounded by more distant ghetto-style black townships. We also had an unsavory taste for the ever-present danger of violence when an aggressive street hustler threatened to cross the line in downtown Cape Town, but the police quickly intervened, weapons in hand. It’s something that happens in all big cities, but with one of the largest wealth disparities between rich and poor, and white and black, its all the more common in South Africa.

Despite the disagreeable underlying realities which make Cape Town a place neither of us would like to live in, it is an amazing place to visit. The city is full of historical sites, parks, and museums, everything having received a facelift for the 2010 World Cup. We stayed on a pedestrian avenue were we could walk to an array of funky restaurants, souvenir shops, or curio stands.

We rented a little car and saw all the big sites, including a driving tour of wine country, and a road-trip all the way to the Southwestern-most point of the continent, the Cape of Good Hope, where baboons tried to hitch a ride on our windshield and Luc led our group on a walking safari where we encountered a herd of large Bontebok antelope with babies and a group of ostriches running on the beach.

We also visited the largest colony of breeding African penguins in a protected cove.

Another highlight involved hiking the city’s dramatic topography to countless amazing views, including the very top of Table Mountain, recently declared one of the 7 new Natural Wonders of the World.

We enjoyed the steep hike up, but decided to take the scenic cable car down.

Culinary highlights included Mexican-like food, eating extremely big sandwiches at a sports bar, Ethiopian food, and several picnics full of chips, cheese, crackers, olives, and other assorted snacks not available in Mozambique, purchased at the outrageously American supermarkets. We even got a candle light Christmas concert in spectacularly beautiful, Kristenbosch, one of the premiere botanical gardens in the world specializing in the unique Cape Floral Kingdom.

South Africa is the most American of places in Africa, and indeed a few times it actually felt like we were back in the USA, in a fully stocked grocery store, or at the mall all decked out in Christmas decorations, or hiking on a well maintained and signposted trail, or dining in a sports bar, which was admittedly showing rugby instead of football, but the club sandwiches were just as obscenely stuffed with chicken and bacon as you would expect back in the USA.

After Completion of Service there is the trip home; some volunteers take the first flight back to America, but more commonly volunteers have a tradition of rewarding themselves with at least a few stops along the way to visit some of those places they failed to squeeze in during their busy two years of service. Some volunteers take the COS trip to the extreme, extending the voyage to as many countries as their limited budget permits. We had several volunteers from other African countries stay at our house on extravagant Capetown to Cairo trips and our PC Malawi neighbor took over three months touring India and Southeast Asia before finding his way back to America after completing his stint. We originally envisioned a grand celebratory road trip of our own hitting up all the highlights in Southern Africa; fantasizing about a leisurely COS trip got us through several low points during our two years. However, as our close of service approached and we ticked off most of the regional destinations on our must-see-list, we felt more eager to get home for all our family Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. We drastically abbreviated our trip, focusing on Janet’s favorite city on the continent, Cape Town, South Africa. In addition, Turkish Air was the cheapest flight home from Cape Town to Los Angeles, so we extended our layover in Istanbul as a bonus. Since the Turkish metropolis occupies two continents, extending across the Bosphorus Strait that divides Europe and Asia, our nearly 12,000 miles took us to four of the Earth’s seven landmasses, Africa, Europe, Asia, and finally North America.

All volunteers go through a very formal week-long Completion of Service ordeal at the Peace Corps Office in the capital city, Maputo. It involves a long checklist of administrative tasks, like a final Portuguese language evaluation (we both got advanced), getting all our Meticais out of the bank and closing our account, pages and pages of forms to sign or get signed by various Peace Corps staff, the comprehensive medical check-up (including the three stool samples that form the base of so many Peace Corps jokes), and the final interview with our Country Director. The big city is helping us along in the cultural readjustment process. Staying in our fancy little Peace Corps hotel, with air conditioning, hot water showers, and cable TV, in a city full of so much traffic, so many restaurants, so many friends to hang out with, it’s all a little overwhelming for a couple of volunteers fresh from two years out in the bush (especially for Luc, Janet actually seems to enjoy the change of pace). We had a little piece of reverse culture shock with an all you can eat pizza lunch with the new volunteers just finishing training; we left the Peace Corps Office looking like a college party gone wrong.

The Peace Corps Director also invited all the volunteers completing their two year stints to his shwanky pad overlooking the Indian Ocean, for a gourmet home cooked meal.

We got a very brief chance to say goodbye to our host mother in Namaacha, our training town, by volunteering to lead the session on Information and Communication Technology for the new group. The good-bye was interrupted by the Peace Corps car just as our mom pulled some samosas off the fire. The new volunteers swore in on December 8, reminding us of our own swearing in exactly 2 years before, and then on December 9 we officially finished our service and gave our last good-byes to Peace Corps.

We were thrilled to have a chance to sit down with Dan and Lisa, the lucky new married couple who will be moving into our little house in Zóbuè next week. They are wonderful and have lots of exciting project ideas. Zóbuè will be lucky to have them!

We are now RPCVs, the R standing for Returned although Peace Corps Volunteers like to joke that it stands for Recovering. We’re heading out on the night bus for a short COS trip in South Africa. We’ll be back in America December 20!

After two years in site, all of a sudden we find ourselves in our last week in Zóbuè. Good-byes are always emotional, but this one feels extra intense since, due to great distance and poor communications infrastructure, our Mozambique life will be completely divorced from our life back in America. Departures are ceremonious and very important in African culture. People in town still talk about how one volunteer left suddenly without saying a proper goodbye. We scheduled a whole week with no other obligations except preparing our little house for the next volunteers and organizing our farewell events. We really wanted to make sure to do everything right and include everyone, which given our special status here literally means everyone in our entire town. We made visits to all our special friends’ homes or market stalls, giving out small gifts and saying many very formal good-bye speeches. We had students come by our home and say good-byes while we boxed things up and tried to organizer two years’ worth of lesson plans and sort the gems from the junk in our piles. Junk ended up in a giant pile in the front yard, which Romao enjoyed burning for us.

We couldn’t get to everyone personally, so we made use of some community events to help broadcast our farewell message. We had a final faculty meeting in which the school director gave us the floor to summarize our achievements at school and say adieu. Even better, the teachers organized an end of the year party which doubled as a farewell party for us since it coincided with our last day. Everyone said nice things about us, and we formally presented some materials to our school, some English-Portuguese dictionaries, a soccer ball, and photos of all our secondary projects, before digging into the barbecued meats. We also presented African style shirts to our two vice-principals as a thank you to all the support they gave us over the past 24 months and gave each of our colleagues one of the pictures of us and family that had been decorating the walls in our little house as a remembrance. It all ended with a ceremonious cake cutting of the extra fancy cake Janet baked and decorated with colored icing (no Mozambican party would be complete without a wedding style cake ceremony).

Our very last morning was a Sunday and the Padres called us to the front of the congregation to say some words. Luc gave his entire farewell in Chichewa to great applause. Then we caught our last African mini-bus and headed down towards the city, catching our last glimpses of Mount Zóbuè through the rear windshield. Our student Zach, who now lives down in the city, accompanied us to the airport and waved farewell and we walked out across the tarmac to catch our jet plane to Maputo.

Living in Africa with our share of hardships and inconveniences, its often easy to think of all the things we had in America and have been doing without for the past two years, but the truth is we have lots to be thankful for here as well. We've been healthy, without any major problems besides that gross bout with intestinal parasites, we've been very safe with no attacks or break-ins, our community loves us, and we have a huge network of fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, who, after two years serving together, feel like our family here. These were our thoughts as we gathered with a group of 20+ volunteers in the Gorongosa National Park to celebrate Thanksgiving. Obviously food is a big part of this holiday, so we did our best to recreate all those dishes everyone was craving with plenty of improvising due to all the African x-factors. We did have the park's industrial kitchen at our disposal, but half the appliances wouldn't work, and the electricity kept cutting out. Luc headed up team pie, and assembled two apple and two pumpkin pies from ground zero, discovering just how much extra work it is to make that orange goo that just comes out of a can back home. We even had a turkey, and although she was a scrawny bird, she provided that all-important Thanksgiving touch to our plates. Janet made everyone get up and say something they were thankful for before digging in, we both mentioned how grateful we have been to have the opportunity to serve for the past two years in this country that has grown so special to us and how much we have appreciate all the support and love from back home for our efforts. We held our festivities in the eco-friendly environmental education center, which blends in with the natural setting of forest and open countryside. Even though we didn't see any wild animals or go on any game drives, we did stay in the fancy safari tents, right out in nature, and drive out to an overlook above the park to watch the sunset with all our friends. It was an especially emotional time for those of us finishing our two years of service since the holiday meant our last chance to say good-bye to many of those gathered.

In Peace Corps volunteers abandon all aspects of their lives to fate. We were placed in a little mud brick cottage up in the mountains near the border with Malawi, while we have friends serving in modern air-conditioned teacher's college professor housing next door to beach resorts with views of the ocean. Sometimes it's easy to get jealous, but every site has its pros and cons. Mozambique is famous for its coastline, and Peace Corps Mozambique has a strong beach ethos component to its culture that we feel totally removed from. Now that we're on vacation and done with all our school responsibilities we decided to spend a few days relaxing on the sand down in Inhambane province to decompress from our big end-of-the-year sprint. We met up with a bunch of our teacher friends also on holiday and crashed at our buddy's pad down on the beach. After two years in country, it was our first big beach trip and we thoroughly enjoyed eating fresh seafood, riding horses through the surf, doing crossword puzzles under the coconut trees, and just enjoying catching up with everybody's hilarious PC stories. The beach is also a little edgy. The coast gets a lot of tourists, and coming from our small town where everyone recognizes us as the local school teachers, it was hard being treated just like a cash opportunity for annoying drunks and street hustlers. We've gotten pretty good at dealing with these inconveniences and just focused on enjoying an awesome beach weekend, with plenty of sunshine and good times. It's awesome having a tropical paradise within two days of hitch hiking from site.

There is only so much we can or want to take back with us to America. Most of our stretched, faded, or torn clothes have had a rough two years here in Africa, with the tropical sun and hand washing. These rags would be embarrassing back in America, but here in Africa there are many who would cherish them. It is Africa after all, and some stereotypes about the poverty here are true. Unfortunately giving stuff away isn’t as easy as it would seem. One volunteer who recently left simply informed her neighbors to come to her house on her last day in site and take things that could be useful to them. Starting at 5am, her neighbors swept through her home cleaning out everything in less than an hour, someone even took her half full coffee mug and the open can of cat food she had bought as a going away present to her pet. We’re trying to avoid this kind of free-for-all, not only for our own sanity, but we don’t want to reinforce the perception that all white people are primarily a source of freebies for locals. Having been on the receiving end of countless begging encounters here in Mozambique, we know how this type of irresponsible behavior can permanently impair community relations for future generations of volunteers. The begging relationship seems likes a continuation of the dependency on the rich Patrão the relatively wealthy Portuguese deliberately fostered over centuries of colonization in these parts. After plenty of opportunities to see charity gone wrong, like the kids at popular tourist destinations who temporarily suspend their laughter and street games to approach white visitors and request in their most obsequious voice possible, “Pencil boss,” “Give me 10 meticais,” or just simply “hungry.” As our departure date draws neigh, people have no shame in coming up to us and suggesting we leave them lembranças, souvenirs to remember us by. A souvenir could be our flash drive. “Do you really want my flash drive as a lembrança? Or do you just want a flash drive?” So, we’re not handing out anything to people who randomly show up to ask for things. Instead we are earmarking things for favorite students, helpful neighbors, and special people, and trying to give them away as discreetly as possible. We also made a trip out to Zach’s village with ten items of clothing for the large family, plus a couple dictionaries and books for Zach’s ever curious mind and Janet’s old sandals for his new wife. Luckily, we will be replaced by new volunteers, so we’ll just pass on most of our stuff to them.

Since our secondary school only has the first cycle (grades 8-10), the 10th grade National Exams are the culmination of our students’ academic careers. National Exams are high stakes, anyone failing to pass has to repeat 10th grade and try again the next year. As the name implies, National Exams are a Mozambican-wide phenomenon, each 10th grade student taking the exact same test at the exact same time from Maputo all the way to Tete. That’s why on Thursday when Maputo city suspended exams for its municipal holiday, everyone else in the country had to stand still, and wait until Friday so that everyone could take the Math exam together. Exam sheets arrive in top-secret envelopes, held in high security fashion until the bell announces test time. Then the envelopes are all simultaneously opened ceremoniously by a student picked at random. Most of the time the student is too nervous and can’t tear the opaque black plastic, so the proctoring teacher has to mock him and take over. All teachers are required to wear their white coats and no one is absent. Cell phones are strictly prohibited to prevent students from texting for help, and to prevent teachers from texting answers. The cheating so endemic to Mozambican testing is strangely absent, our school hasn’t caught a single cheater in National Exams, and at least the two of us are actually looking. It would be difficult for even the most ambitious students to cram 3 years worth of material into a single crib sheet, and the stakes are so high, academic fraud during National Exams carries an automatic 2 year suspension from school. Also, there is no need to cheat during exams. Since the test is graded locally by the same teachers who have been teaching you over the past three years, it’s easier to convince one of them to grade your test favorably. All the tests are coded, so a student’s name never appears on their response sheet, but since they are coded in alphabetical order it doesn’t take a Rosetta Stone to figure out who is who. In fact every teacher carries a small sheet of paper with all his or her cousins’, nephews’, sister-in-laws’, or whoever’s secret codes on them and hovers around his colleague’s table to make sure they get a passing grade. So much wrangling goes on that the biology teachers, including Janet, who were still actually trying to grade had to leave the chop-shop and find somewhere quiet to work. People know we, as Americans, don’t condone this perversion of the academic system, so they get a kick out of being extra blatant in front of us. They mean it more of a joke but they don’t understand the degree of disdain we have for the corruption so damaging to the society. The final day we had to make public everyone’s results, which involved a complicated set of calculations. We have to average each student’s national test score with their high school grades, and then average all of those. No student can pass if their total average is less than 10 (everything here is out of 20), neither if any of their national exam scores is lower than 7 and no student can pass if they fail either Portuguese or Math. All the results had to be meticulously documented in a gigantic grid, in duplicate. Basically we set up a grading sweat shop with teachers clustered around the giant grids, with one teacher reading each name and test score, another calculating averages on a hand held calculator, and another two writing down the results; something excel could do with one click. It felt like a Victorian accounting firm from a Charles Dickens novel. It took 18 teachers six hours to do a job Janet and I could have done in an hour on the computer. It took all day and we had to work through lunch to finish the task, but it was our last official duty at the school, so it felt good to be done.

So it’s the end of the school year. Back home in America kids’ might be nervously monitoring the mailbox to intercept their grades to inspect the good/bad news before their parents get home. Here in Mozambique there is no mail and there is no mediating the day of reckoning. Our school director simply calls all the parents down to the school and has each term director post their students’ grades on a giant poster-sized report card for everyone to see who is passing on to the next grade, and who will be repeating the same level again next year. The palpable excitement translates to cheers of joy and smiles for those on the positive end of the year’s account of tests and grading, and disappointment for those on the negative side. Most kids have a good idea of were they should be by this stage, but there is always room for surprises, like the case of our kid Romão. By all objective measures he’s had a terrible academic year. We have quizzed him several times on various class subjects and his responses never fail to disappoint. “Romão, what does the digestive system do?” Response: “Is that the lungs?” “Romão, this one is easy, what is 5 divided by five?” Response: “Oh yeah, I got it, it’s zero.” “No.” “Oh yeah, its two.” Sometimes it just seemed hopeless and too painful to try to help. He brought home negatives from end of the year exams in every subject except for a couple of passing 10s in Physical Education and English. A basket full of mangos for the teacher got his Portuguese grade into positive territory, and hauling several loads of bricks to the math teacher’s new house helped that discipline. Various rounds of begging and chores got most things straightened out, but still, he had a 2 in Physics, so far from the minimum of 10 needed to pass. Well, something happened, because when we checked his name on the report card he was passing physics. Maybe the physics teacher did it because he knows Romão works for us, or maybe his Class Director, our theater group counterpart Artur advocated for him, or maybe nobody wanted him to repeat 8th grade for a third time. Whatever the reason, Romão is moving on to 9th grade, but can still barely read or do any math beyond simple addition or subtraction, so it’s unclear weather we should be happy for him or sad for the whole system, or both. Romão will definitely be pleased with the news; he’s out in the fields for the week planting corn. Looking at the long lists of names on the grade sheets made us realize how connected we have become with our student community, as most bring to mind faces and warm memories from class or clubs during our two years here.

Its that time in our Peace Corps cycle where the young new trainees come out to visit the older and more experienced volunteers out in their sites. We both had great site visits when we were in training and wanted to give our trainee visitors the same. Peace Corps had already warned senior volunteers not to be too cynical or bitter with the impressionable trainees, and while we’ve not been immune to negativity during our service, we’re riding high and full of sunshine for the next generation, coming off the end of the school year and a very successful English Theater. When making plans to meet them at the Tete airport on the phone, the trainees wanted to know how they would recognize us, not knowing that our one terminal airport never really has more than a few dozen people at a time. “We’ll be the sweaty looking Peace Corps Volunteers, jumping up and down yelling your names.” Sure enough, there was no confusion, but plenty of heat and sweat down in the ever scorching Tete city airport where all the black tarmac just amplifies all the heat creating a microwave oven and leaving us feeling like little popcorn kernels on the verge of exploding. Peace Corps sent six visitors for the Tete area, which made a nice excuse for a little welcome party and get together for the rest of us volunteers in the area. Training can be a trying time with culture shock happening in so many was, and your entire life scheduled and controlled by the training staff, so we wanted all the newbies to know how much better life would be once they graduated into actual Peace Corps service. Unfortunately, intensely hot Moatize threatened to turn all of our plans into a big pool of sweat the first night, especially when power went out leaving us to cope with the sweltering temperatures without the relief of any kind of air blowing devices. Luckily a summer shower broke the oppressive heat, and the next day we escaped to our cool mountain site with our two trainees, Bitsy and Jill. We basically talked non-stop for the five day visit, trying to sum up our entire experience in words as best as possible, often failing to capture all the emotions, but they’ll experience them for themselves soon enough. Peace Corps headquarters hasn’t made site assignments yet, so we don’t know if Jill or Bitsy will take over for us or end up in some other random corner of the country, but everyone they met in our town said they would be praying for them to get assigned here. One of our main goals was to make as many delicious recipes as possible during our visitors’ stay, and despite several sabotage attempts by the electricity, we did pretty well with our tried and true repertoire of crowd pleasers: lasagna, bean burgers, quiche, cinnamon rolls, and fresh veggie salads. The site visit came during final exams, so our school was off-limits to outsiders, but they got to peek through the windows at the rooms full of kids quietly trying to apply all the knowledge they were supposed to have learned during the past three years to each of the 90-minute tests. We were busy most mornings playing our proctor roll in this, the most solemn of secondary school rituals, but that left plenty of time in the afternoons for hiking and exploring our little town. The girls also bought capulana clothes and had outfits tailored during their stay! A massive Nyau funeral at the house just opposite the window of our guest bedroom added some spice to the last evening. We tried to warn Bitsy of the all night stamina of the mourners and offer her some earplugs, but she refused and probably lost some sleep with the nonstop drumming and yelping from the costumed dancers until the wee hours of the morn. The proliferation of the intimidating growling unearthly men-creatures also made walking to and from school a dangerous endeavor as unruly Nyau clogged the arteries on which we normally circulate in our crowded neighborhood, and sent us darting in and out of random hiding places. We got them to the mini-bus safely and set about sweeping and tidying up our little house for our last few weeks and washing a mountain of laundry.

Mozambicans really love theater and Mozambicans really love English, so English Theater is the perfect Peace Corps project. Despite the overflowing interest, it takes a lot of work to make an event actually happen, and we’ve been building up to this one for months. Saturday, October 29 was the big day, but we left a day early to get details sorted out down at the mission in Moatize where the event was taking place. We made another massive withdrawal from the bank and rubber banded all the various stacks of cash for each expense. Most of the kids from our nine participating schools in Tete province could travel to and from the event the day of, but a couple of the schools four hours away needed to spend the night, so we greeted them and got them set up at their air conditioned hotel. We were staying at the non-AC mission, but at least we had a fan, essential during the hottest week so far in the hottest town in Mozambique (it hit 115 degrees). We didn’t get much sleep anyway, since we were up until 10PM moving pews over from the chapel, setting up the jury tables, and decorating with posters we borrowed from the Chimoio event which was held the week earlier. October 29th started at 5:30AM and Luc was immediately sweating in the epic heatwave temperatures. Janet started by signing all 200 some certificates for all the participants, judges, and special prize winners. Luc corralled some of the mission youths to help move our cookies, T-shirts, and dictionaries into the theater room. Students started arriving even before we got our breakfast, which was a good sign here in Africa when people can show up hours late even after texting to say their mini-bus is about to arrive. Luc commandeered a few students to buy extra cookies, pens, and other random last minute items and Janet started running around managing all the little details that constantly pop-up when you’re in charge of everything. As do all events in Mozambique, we opened with the national anthem, and treated the crowd to a special rendition of the US national anthem, which most of the Mozambicans had never heard before, and some students even recorded with their cell phones. Then we drew numbers from a hat to determine the order of performance. One by one the schools presented their plays that they had been rehearsing for weeks back in site, some more nervously than others. Our school had probably practiced more than anyone else, and it showed. Everyone of our students had their material down, and their costumes were much more involved than anyone else. Every volunteer in Tete brought a team, and we even had two schools with no Peace Corps affiliation prepare teams, one of which had our graduates from last year who were now studying 11th grade down near the city at the new high school with boarding facilities built by the coal mining companies to replace the one on top of the coal deposits they destroyed. Lunch arrived an hour and a half late, but that was beyond our control. Luckily everyone here is accustomed to waiting. After chowing down on some delicious beef and chicken, and leaving nothing but the bones, everyone reconvened for the exciting awards ceremony. We were thrilled when the jury gave our team second place overall! We came in last place the year before, so we really enjoyed coming out on top this time. Our narrator took the Best English Speaker, something he’ll cherish forever considering how proud he is of his language abilities. First place went to the team composed of our graduates, so we were proud of them too, especially since the team was entirely student initiated. After the emotions calmed down, everyone wanted their pictures taken in their new English Theater t-shirts. And with the close of English Theater comes the close of our Peace Corps responsibilities! School’s out, grades are in, and our big final project was a success. Now all that’s left in our last month at site is proctoring and correcting national exams, then packing and farewells!

This Halloween the world’s population reached 7,000,000,000. Our town has definitely contributed its fair share of babies, all you need to do is look towards the women’s section at church to get a visual on population growth here, every female of reproductive age has a baby strapped to her back or breastfeeding, and several more running around the kids section. Things may be changing though, as many of our students claim to want families of only 2 or 3 kids. We’ve taken our youth groups to the health center several times to learn about family planning and all the free contraceptives available that no one seems to be using. This extreme fertility made sense in a world where half your children died before the age of five, but is unsustainable in a town with even limited access to modern life saving vaccines and health care, like ours. So what is health like here for all these new people entering such a poor part of the world? We still have plenty of people dying from totally preventable causes, like dehydration for infants with diarrhea, meningitis due to the lack of diagnosis in the case of two of our students, childbirth for many women with complicated deliveries, and any sort of accident or emergency since we have no rapid response team and our ambulance is chronically out of fuel. Do we have starving skeleton people dying on the streets? No, but we do have plenty of toddlers with distended bellies, brittle orange hair, and bowed legs, signs of different nutritional deficiencies. We see goiters, something iodized salt totally eliminated from the devolved world. Everyone has parasites, including us, but we won’t talk about it since our stories tend to gross people out. It is very rare to see an obese person. Only the richest people here have access to excess calories, so getting called fat is a big compliment that people use generously, even with the not so fat, much to the dismay of many an American volunteer trying to watch his or her waistline. This includes Janet, whose extra few pounds get regularly “complimented.” HIV and AIDS continue to plague our community, with infection rates above 20%. Everyone knows people who have died as part of this epidemic; even we have lost several people close to us during our two years here. Recently a New York Times article highlighted some success our town has had in distributing the life saving anti-retroviral therapies with the help of Doctors Without Borders (Click Here to read the complete article). We were quite surprised that our random African town was featured in one of the world’s most famous newspapers, but people here, most of whom have never seen a newspaper, didn’t seem to appreciate the significance. Of course other diseases, such as malaria, cholera, and tuberculosis also kill lots of people, even though they are all very avoidable with the use of mosquito nets, proper hand cleaning and hygiene, or basic medical treatments. Life expectancy is low, and anyone over 50 is considered really old here, as some of our family visitors have been told! Despite all the scary health issues linked to our tropical environment and general poverty, we’ve remained very healthy. Once we get back to the America we’ll have obesity, cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and all the other developed world diseases to worry about.

Every teacher has at least a few students who make them feel like they really made a difference. Zach is one of those students for us. We don’t get to see him often since he is working as an office assistant down in the city, but this last weekend we met up while we were down there preparing for English Theater. His life doesn’t seem that fabulous at a casual inspection. Despite leaving his rural village for the city, he still lives in a one room mud house with a dirt floor and no electricity, and walks to and from work, at least 4 miles each way with no respite from the hot sun. He works 6 days a week for less than $80 a month. Still, this is an achievement here. Zach looked skinnier so we took him out to lunch and fed him beef. He casually let us know that he took his girlfriend from the village to live with him in the city and that they are married now. He’s still so eager to learn, and reminded us several times that we should leave him our Chewa-English dictionary when we leave since it will be of little use in America. We made good on a promise to teach him how to use the internet this weekend. We took him to the mission and sat him on the computer for two hours going over e-mail. We opened his own yahoo account and showed him how to write all the different volunteers which have passed through his life. What he really liked was facebook. He told us he had forgotten what the volunteers looked like. He also wanted to see Google Earth and locate his home. He let us know how marvelous the internet is. He also used the bath room at the mission which was his first encounter with a western style toilet. He couldn’t figure out how to make it flush, and then once we showed him how, he was worried about how to make it stop flushing. We let him know it would stop on its own.

We’ve had several people follow up on our water situation after we wrote about the drought affecting our region especially with all the international news about Somalia and the Eastern Horn. It’s dry here where we are, but no one is starving. We did get one big storm on Teachers Day, so that replenished our wells temporarily, but now a couple weeks later water is just as difficult as before. We’ve made it by this week on just six 20 liter buckets. Luckily we manage our personal water situation conservatively, so we’ve never run out of drinking water, unlike Romão, who routinely uses his last liters for bathing or washing his shoes, and then complains at dinner time that he has no water to cook rice. We’re still in the dry season, so even though it’s extra dry, it’s not unexpected, but if rainy season doesn’t start on time, people will really start to worry. Locals have already tilled their little plots of land and are ready to plant corn as soon as the first showers arrive. This week brought a major heat wave. Just today our thermometer recorded 98° indoors and 109° outside in direct sun, and we’re lucky to live in a relatively cool high plateau site for Mozambique, our friends down in the Zambezi valley regularly get readings at least 10 degrees warmer than us. Luckily we have the keys to the computer lab, the only air conditioning in the entire town. We’ve been coming up with things to do on the computer just to escape the oppressive heat. Luc gets especially overheated regularly sweating through his shirts. One of our Peace Corps buddies Audrey texted us from her hot hot site down near Tete city wondering if she could get water poisoning. We also drink lots of water, and even though we’re not worried about water poisoning, we decided to count how many liters of water we drink. Janet weighed in at 4.5 liters and Luc at a mighty 7+ liters in one day. We’re definitely getting our 8 cups a day.

At this time in our service we start running into a lot of lasts. Earlier this month we taught our last classes, then we proctored our last finals, now we are calculating grades and filling in all those tiny boxes on the grade sheets for the last time. Eventhough the school year is almost over it doesn’t feel like it for us yet since we still have our big English Theater competition coming up the day after school officially ends. We’ve held practices every day this week to get ready, and spent last weekend down in the city running around trying to take care of all the details, buying soda, ordering lunches, making reservations at the hotel, picking up all the T-shirts we ordered, coordinating transportation. All these things are so much harder here when cell network drops for hours at a time, shops close at random hours, the person in charge never shows up, and in general people keep claiming it’s too early to plan things until the week before our event. Luckily the Padres are hosting English Theater at the mission and they have a proactive mindset more in line with ours. They are giving us lots of support, like driving us around in their truck and letting us stay in our little VIP room at the mission. If you’re wondering why we’ve posted so many pictures lately, its probably because they have wireless internet. It’s recharging spiritually to hear about all the projects the Padres have been able to accomplish and joking around about life in Africa as we eat meals together at their long dining table. You can think of us on Saturday when we finish this, our last secondary project, and finally start to feel like we’re done with Peace Corps.

The 7 kilometers between our border post and the neighboring immigration office in Malawi has the worst cars of any no-man’s land we know, and we’ve crossed a lot of borders. These moribund taxis shuttle travelers between immigration posts at an inflated rate of almost two dollars per person, and they always wait until they have six passengers to cram into their sedan before departing. Since they escape regulation by either government it’s a free for all of exploitation, the victims are the hapless travelers who have no other choice than walking, which we have done plenty of times, but you have to be willing to work up a sweat. Our town is higher elevation, so going to Malawi, cars don’t even turn the engines on, they just coast all the way down in neutral. On the way back is the real workout. On our last foray through this unfortunate little strip of neglected territory, we grudgingly played along with this travesties of public transportation, squeezing into the back seat with two other passengers, while two large Zambian ladies shared the front chair next to the driver. Like always, the driver had to recruit some muscle from the group of men perpetually loitering near the border to give the dilapidated vehicle a literal jump-start. Chug chug chug we went up the hill. I think I can, I think I can. As we approached each successive climb, the driver shifted from third to second gear, then to first. Once we started to stall out in first, we knew we were in trouble. The driver turned around and we thought we were going to coast back to Malawi. Just as we were thinking how glad we were we hadn’t paid him yet, the crafty driver switched the car into reverse and powered up the last hill going backwards. The giggling Zambian mamas in the front seat switched from Chewa to English to half-jokingly tell us that things are backwards in Africa. Although we, as development workers, hope that Africa is actually moving forwards in most aspects of life, in this case they were right. There we were, barreling down the national highway backwards, to get where we needed to go.

Just last month we had two Peace Corps Malawi site mates within walking distance of our town, Jordan and Os. Since then, Jordan has closed his service and Os transferred sites. Jordan arrived in country only a day before us, but due to some shifts in the Malawian academic year he finished his primary assignment three months early. He is currently backpacking across India. With Jordan gone, Peace Corps Malawi thought Os, the only remaining volunteer in the south western region, was too isolated, so they transferred him to a small cluster of volunteers on the other side of the skinny country. So now we are without site mates, but it turned out to be a boon since Os now lives in the middle of an old English tea estate under the highest mountain in the region. Mount Mulanje, the ‘island in the sky,’ is a massive granite outcropping soaring above the surrounding plains. It’s been nominated as a World Heritage Site, so it’s waiting to get on UNESCO prestigious list. Basically green carpets of tea extend in every direction with granite cliffs and waterfalls completing the scene. The region’s contrasting brown and yellow dry season color scheme typical of this time of year made the emerald carpet that much more exquisite. We hiked to Leith’s site, Os’ environment volunteer site mate, on the side of the mountain. We worked up a sweat under the sunny blue sky, but washed it away in some crystal pools on top of one of the tropical waterfalls we had been admiring from the distance. That evening we transformed raw materials from Leith’s Peace Corps garden into a lofty meal of eggplant ravioli with red sauce and fresh herbs; it was probably actually gourmet quality, not just PC gourmet, although we can’t totally trust our palate at this point. It’s always replenishing to escape the hecticness and routines of site for a weekend, and enjoy good-times with friends.

October 19th is not a national holiday. We even asked specifically if we would have classes on Wednesday and our acting director assured us we would. Then Radio Mozambique announced on the 18th that the following day would be a national holiday, so that’s how things work here. Luckily the last two weeks of school after finals are a joke, so we didn’t have to cancel anything too serious planned. October 19th commemorates the day in 1986 when Samora Machel, the first president of Mozambique, died in a suspicious plane crash during the tumultuous civil conflict period. We already celebrated the revolutionary figure’s death on February 3rd, Mozambican Heroes Day, but since this is the 25th anniversary of the tragic death, the entire year has been dedicated to him and the ruling party decided to make the actual day of the anniversary a holiday, albeit at the very last minute. This break makes it four weeks in a row with a school day cancelled due to a national holiday. We have serious holiday fatigue. The day off did give us a chance to settle our ongoing soccer feud with our rivals the border guards. Our last game ended in a tie two all, so they challenged us, the teachers, to one last game. The town mayor made it out for the kick off and promised a new soccer ball to the winning team. The border guards struck first, scoring off a fierce strike and they all danced in front of our students. But they celebrated too soon as we went on to score the next three goals and put the game away. Our acting principal was especially happy since he had mocked the students who had cheered for our opponents at morning assembly after our tie on Teacher’s Day.

Teacher’s Day this year was jam-packed with activities. Both of us missed the 4am cleaning of the graves of past teachers. Apparently it involved some sort of an alcoholic offering and ceremony. The actual day started late, no surprise to us at this point of our service, but only by about an hour, so that’s actually almost on time for here. Once we got a critical mass of enough teachers to make a respectable showing, we paraded through the twisting pathways that make up our town, all wearing our teachers uniforms through a slight drizzle, calling teachers and students to join as we passed their homes. We caught one of our colleagues in the latrine, so we laughed and teased him until he joined our ranks. Teachers here have lots of songs, so we sang all the way to the praça, students out in front holding the posters they made with pro-teacher slogans, all of us teachers following in a sea of white lab-coat-like outfits.

After all the formalities in the town square we migrated to the football pitch for male and female soccer matches, which we both participated in much to the amusement of our students.

Then we all headed home to get fancied up for the party. Teachers Day is a big deal in Mozambique, especially for us teachers. Several faculty meetings had gone to planning our big party and we even had an organizing committee dedicated to working out the details. One of the main discussion points had been whether to hold the party on actual teachers day, October 12, which was a Wednesday, or postpone it until Saturday. The main fear was teachers would get so drunk they wouldn’t show up the next day to proctor final exams. Apparently many Mozambican schools just cancel classes the day after Teacher’s Day, or even take the rest of the week off, but since we’re a serious school, we all pledged to fulfill our duties, but just in case we set the starting time at 3pm so things wouldn’t get too out of control. Another point of contention was the sound system. Apparently there is no party if there is no sound system, so teachers were upset and threatening to boycott when they heard loud music would be absent. After all the fighting, we did end up with music. Each teacher contributed 500 meticais (about $20 US), which entitled him or her to two plates of food, one soda, and six half-liter beers. Luc decided to invite Janet as his guest, and since he doesn’t drink, Janet was stuck with the hefty task of disposing of all the liquid. She only made it half way through, but we convinced the other teacher’s to let us take the other three home. It was a great party, we got to meet everyone’s family, danced so much, and ate chicken.

It was especially fun to see the kids playing on playground equipment, just recently installed at the venue, our only restaurant in town. Their shining faces made it clear that none of them had ever seen slides or seesaws before. In fact, we’re pretty sure some of the teachers had never seen this before either, as they were playing and grinning too!

We made it home by 10:30pm just in time to beat the first storm of the summer. It really poured, so we felt bad for the teachers that had lingered after us, and the organizing committee that was still cleaning up. The next morning, to our surprise, everyone was on hand for invigilating exams, no one skipped out after the big discussion we’d had.

Lucas playing soccer with the teacher team

Student pyramid at the holiday celebration

Ceremonial wreath with border guards

October 4th is a national holiday here in Mozambique celebrating the signing in 1992 of the Rome Peace Accords, which ended over a decade of civil unrest and war between FRELIMO, the ruling party, and RENAMO, the armed opposition, which followed soon after the resolution of the armed conflict with the colonial Portuguese forces in 1975. Considering how peaceful our town has been during the past two years, it’s hard to imagine that the people now coexisting here were killing each other just twenty years ago. You can still find bombed out buildings, blown up bridges, and plenty of bullet holes throughout the country, but you never see firearms other than the Kalshnikovs the police and border guards carry. Even bandidos have a hard time getting guns and mainly use knives or machetes to commit their crimes. Most of the landmines in our region have been cleared out by Project Halo, a de-mining group sponsored mainly by USA, Japan, and Britain, but there are still swathes of countryside too dangerous to visit because of all the explosives laid down by both sides during the conflict. People rarely speak of the troubled time of conflict other than mentioning how hard life was. Many Mozambicans in our area fled to Malawi, living in refuge camps during the most violent parts of the war. Students and even most teachers are too young to really remember the war, and even those who were alive don’t like to remember the horrors. One neighbor has confided with us how his first family was killed when bandits, the term used by the government for the RENAMO fighters, bazooka-ed his home. Our host family during training also told us about hiding above the ceiling on the rafters while bandits pillaged through the house. In general, people seem to leave the violence in the past, and if it hadn’t been for all the books we’ve read, we wouldn’t know much about this troubled period in Mozambique’s recent past. So, like every other holiday, we celebrated laying a wreath of flowers at the star monument in our town square. Our kids performed a hilarious theater about cholera and our teacher team, including Luc, played a soccer match against the border guards. We tied 2-2. Most of the youngsters and many of our students didn’t even know what holiday we were celebrating, or exactly which conflict the Rome Peace Accords ended, they just enjoyed a the day off and the various festivities.

As we quickly approach the end of service, volunteers eagerly attempt to notch up travel to those last few dream destinations like Victoria Falls or Lake Malawi they’ve postponed during the past two years. Since Tete province serves as a gateway to both Malawi and Zambia, we’ve benefited from some spill over visits. Others really feel a need to visit all 11 Mozambican provinces, and often times Tete is the last one for people to scratch off the list, so that’s drawn some visits. We also have the Cahora Bassa dam, which justifies the trek for some volunteers, and one volunteer, our friend Bao, came all the way to Tete just to see us, no other side agendas. As our once seemingly endless two year tour winds down to the last couple months, people are dashing around to say their good-byes, and check off the last few items on their “must see” lists, so even living on the very edge of Peace Corps Mozambican, we’ve received a steady trickle of visitors. The latest two were our buddies Matt and Lisa heading through our site for some fresh water diving at Lake Malawi.

Living in such a peripheral site we’re always trying to catch up on Peace Corps news, so we really appreciate any tid-bits of gossip our visitors bring along. At this stage of service the juiciest stories are about how people are dealing with amorous relationships which have flourished during service, but which face a difficult transition. Lots of volunteers are just calling it quits, especially for those with Mozambican significant others, but plenty of volunteers dating other volunteers are going to see if they can keep the relationship working back in the States and several volunteers have gotten engaged. Even for those of us without relationship drama, there are plenty of other anxieties concerning reentering life back in America to talk about, or on a more pleasant note, its always fun to hear about what kinds of exciting close of service trips people are planning. Although most of us are racing to make it home in time for Christmas holidays, most volunteers are still trying to tie in a few of those exciting African destinations in countries we would already be flying through or over like South Africa, Ethiopia, or Egypt. So everyone is trying to swap Lonely Planet travel guides and get last minute tips and recommendations. Our own close of service trip will involve a few days in Cape Town and then, since the cheapest tickets we could find were on Turkish Air, a brief visit to Istanbul to break up what would otherwise be 30+ hours of airplane and airport time.

Living in a rural area in Mozambique we’re on the periphery of the metical zone. In fact we often see Malawian Kwacha competing with our national currency in the market place and products are often priced in both currency, although the recent economic crisis across the border dampened local enthusiasm for the foreign denomination. With no local banks here, its difficult for our money to circulate with any vigor with the larger Mozambican financial system. Sometimes I think we pass the same grubby bank note back and forth with the market ladies, each time slightly dirtier and smellier. The 20s are the worst, most of them are torn or have holes with the metallic security strip hanging out or missing. Few can pass as purple, there intended color, most just look a grubby shade of brown. The large big bills like the 1000 or 500 don’t change hands too often, so they’re rarely seen in these rural parts. That’s often what comes out of the ATM in the city, so even though they’re not as gross, it’s always a challenge to find someone with enough to accept one of these monster bills worth the equivalent of about $35 or $17.50 respectively, more money than most locals make in a month. The government has an idea for upgrading their embarrassingly dirty notes, new plastic money. We’ve only seen a couple so far, one down in the city, and one in the town square where one of our teacher colleagues was trying to confiscate it from some students during a holiday celebration. Considering we are still using the old Mozambican currency from before when they chopped of three zeros over five years ago, we’re not expecting to see too many of these new plastic monies before the end of service. Still, Malawi is were they really needed to update the money. Currently their highest valued note is 500 Kwacha, about $3 US, and that value is steadily eroding in their precarious national situation. It doesn’t take much wealth at all for a Malawian to boast a healthy looking wad of cash. They are really due for some larger bills.

On our first day in Namaacha, our training site, at church with our host mom and aunt

On October 1st we celebrated two years in country. Although we were too busy for any elaborate celebrations, it did get us thinking about the bigger picture. Our little house has a few more cracks, we have a few more drips during rain storms, our latrine is now almost full, the papaya tree we planted our first year here is now taller than our roof, our mattress has a big dent where we sleep. The kids who were little babies when we arrived in site are now stumbling around, yelling our names every time we pass, and plenty of new babies have been born during our stay. The pigs and chickens that wrecked our garden last year have all been killed and eaten and replaced by news crops of equally destructive animals. There are less mango trees now, and more brick houses dotting our neighborhood. The school has two less functioning computers in the lab, but we still have five survivors. We’ve caught dozens of kids cheating on tests during our stint, sent plenty to clean the latrines or dig trash pits, but we’ve had hundreds of students graduate from 10th grade as well. Sometimes it seems like not much has really changed and it’s hard to tell what kind of impact we’ve had on the community. We write semi-annual reports trying to quantify our service. We just filed our last one this week. It is nice seeing all of our activities written up, but its still hard to interpret what all the charts documenting the hundreds of kids that have received HIV/AIDS training or improved their grades due to our extracurricular activities really mean. Our Peace Corps Project Director was just here this week on one of the rare tours our staff makes to the nether regions of Mozambique. He met with our school administration to evaluate Peace Corp’s relationship with the community. We got to hear our directors say lots of positive things about us, rating our performance as A to A+, and ask us one more time to extend our service for a third year. Our PC Project Director seemed impressed by the quantity of secondary projects we have completed during our stay. All of this positive feedback reinforces what we really do think ourselves, that we’ve made a difference here. The past few public holidays our theater group has really made us proud, showing us how much they have matured, displaying leadership skills and confidence. The new group of Peace Corps teachers has now arrived in country and is just beginning their ten weeks of intensive training, just like we did two years ago. We’re lobbying hard to be replaced. We’ve really enjoyed our two years here in site, and our school is such a wonderful place for volunteers to serve, we think it would be great for another generation of Peace Corps. Most of all what we notice is the love and acceptance we feel here. Two years ago we were strangers from a foreign country, just another two azungus (white people). Now we are truly part of the community, we are Teacher Luka and Madame Janeti.

We expected to devour books here in Africa with the rural pace of life and general absence of leisure activities, but as it turns out we’re averaging just under one book per month. Some of our Peace Corps buddies put us to shame in the literary department having read over a hundred titles during their stay. Volunteers have pooled all of their pirated e-books, making a nifty file with thousands of volumes, all accessible on Janet’s reader, so lack of material is not our excuse. We’re just too busy to pound the pages during the daytime, and after dinnertime we just want to sleep. Overland travel still provides some quality book time, although not without competition from the African landscapes passing in the windows. The opportunity cost of reading is substantially lower when our vehicle is not moving, which is not an inconsequential portion of time when you consider break downs, flat tires, passengers boarding and disembarking, rearranging the mountains of baggage, and just waiting for vehicles to fill before they depart. Even with full time jobs, we still find some time for reading at home. Even our anemic literary habits here impress the locals. Reading for pleasure is completely foreign. Passers by assume we’re reading religious material or studying. Romão still attempts to read a few words whenever he sees Luc with an open book, but can never put together an entire sentence (especially since Luc is usually reading in English). Everyone marvels at how our collection of printed materials fills an entire bookcase, more titles than the rest of the town combined. Only the schools have more books since they receive free government textbooks, especially at the primary level. We have access to the Peace Corps libraries where books have accumulated from previous generations of volunteers, although it’s unclear who would ever allot precious international baggage space to such trashy romance novels which always seem to abound. Maybe they’re just more visible because no one takes them to site. Janet reads widely: novels, historical fiction, biographies, while Luc has given up on made-up stories. He reads almost exclusively histories, travel guides, Peace Corps memoirs, and inspirational biographies about people who have given their lives to making the world a better place. After two years of enduring such a scarcity of printed material, it will be amazing to see a bookstore or an actual library when we get back to the United States.

Its funny how different people’s goals are here in rural Mozambique. Our fellow teachers have begun commenting on how lucky we are to have seen so much of Mozambique and the neighboring countries. At the same time, none of them have made any effort to explore their own region of the world. None of them have passports and only a few have ventured into Malawi beyond our immediate border town, all but the most ambitious never even having been to Blantyre, only two hours away, and none of them have seen the marvelous Lake Malawi, and definitely not the ocean or any of those beaches that grace Mozambique’s Indian Ocean shore. None of them have ever seen elephants or lions or any of the animals Africa is so famous for. Most of them have never been to the capital city, although that is more understandable since it would be about 40 hours of hard mini-bus travel. People here just aren’t that interested in what lies beyond the provincial borders. Occasionally people will make trips to neighboring provinces, but only to visit family. The other teachers always complain about how expensive it is to travel here in Mozambique, and it must be hard justifying scarce resources on something as seemingly inconsequential as traveling, but they always find a way to buy beer or new cell phones. The truth is, we make the same amount of money as our colleagues, and we have been able to stretch those meticals on some pretty amazing trips, but teachers here would just rather buy a TV or motorcycle or blow it all on a bender. We can’t say one way of spending money is better than the other, but we have really enjoyed getting to travel across this part of the continent, despite the physical discomforts, and really getting to know what it has to offer. Our neighbors seem content to invest their earnings in traditional beer and spending the afternoon gyrating drunkenly as close as possible to the giant speakers announcing the availability of alcohol.

We love Guilherme, our acting principal since our previous school director was promoted to chief administrator in a neighboring post last trimester. He’s a hard worker, showing up every morning, afternoon, and evening. Unlike so many other administrators that look the other way, Guilherme calls people out when they blatantly flaunt the rules or egregiously fail to meet their duties. He loves calling students out during morning assembly. Last week he publicly humiliated a student who had been posing as a tenth grader even though he failed both eighth and ninth grades. Guilherme had discovered the fraud during the laborious review process, which would be so easy if our transcripts were digitized and not in huge stacks of folders in the corner of the teachers lounge. He’s not afraid of teachers either, pointing out how several colleagues had merely signed the term book documenting their teaching after only a brief chit chat with the students instead of the full 45 minutes of instruction. Last faculty meeting he told us how teachers were not using the latrine correctly and that there would be consequences if he found any more pools of urine on the cement floor. Guilherme really made things happen for Janet’s construction project. The entire community respects him, especially students (we still have corporal punishment here). He’s also the heart of our teacher’s soccer team. So even though he has his character flaws and is an alcoholic, we love working with him.

Luc stresses out every time we leave our little house imagining all the possible misfortunes that could befall our abode in our absence. Burglary persists as a worry, especially since our neighbor’s experience with the spaghetti thief, or with so much shoddy wiring and poor general construction it’s not unrealistic picturing coming back to find the house a mere pile of rubble. Our latest return from a Peace Corps gathering provided us with an unpleasant surprise; our majestic mango tree lay amputated in pieces all across our yard. All the aborted fruits that had already piqued our taste buds with anticipation for delicious mango season littered the walkway. Our landlady had decided to convert the tree into firewood in our absence to feed a brick project she was undertaking at her mother’s house. Of course all we could think about is where will we hide from the unforgiving sun during hot season in the absence of our mango’s deep foliage that provided cool refuge from many a scorcher last summer.

The other day Romão woke us up with some strange news: Have you seen the airplane? Yes, a plane crashed last night in the neighborhood. Soon another neighbor confirmed the story: everyone is over there. We do not live under any commercial air paths; we have seen small charter planes flying over maybe once or twice during our two years here. We definitely hadn’t heard any unusual noises or explosions that night, so we investigated. A short walk exposed the mystery. Lying in our neighbor’s yard was some sort of pumpkin shell with handlebars and a broomstick type sitting area. It was clear enough to everybody else: a sorcerer’s airplane. Apparently the denizens of the home had noticed sorcerers flying above their hut so they engaged a witch doctor to protect their airspace with some defensive charms, and low and behold, the next day the sorcerer’s flying contraption falls out of the sky. People were disappointed that the sorcerer had escaped, but his/her vehicle certainly was generating plenty of gawking.

While we and most of the community where at a funeral for one of our teacher colleague’s brother, a thief broke down our neighbor’s door and stole some of her stuff. The neighborhood was abuzz with gossip when we returned from the cemetery. Apparently the thief took about the equivalent of $20 in cash, an iron, two pairs of pants, and... ten packs of spaghetti! It was a little unnerving to have a break-in literally ten feet away from our bedroom window. Our house is slightly more secure, with burglar bars on the windows and doors, but the old mortar holding them in is so crumbly now, Luc is convinced one good tug from a would-be burglar could easily remove the obstacle. We don’t have much to steal in our little house and people think we are poor since we don’t have a TV, which seems to be the very first sign of affluence here, but we are foreigners, and with no bank in the town, there have been times when we have had stacks of cash in our house. We put an extra pad lock on our main grate. In the end the spaghetti was his undoing. Some of the neighborhood kids starting investigating and spying into windows. The suspect was boiling a pack of spaghetti. That was enough to bring the police into it and he was apprehended and forced to give back three packs of spaghetti and the iron. He was just a rebellious teenager with nothing to do, not a serial criminal, so we’re feeling much safer now that he was punished and outed to the whole town as a robber. We can’t imagine a crook in America, going in to someone’s house and stealing… spaghetti. But this isn’t America…

For the past three months our lives have been whirlwinds of activity. With visits from Janet’s family and best friend, a safari trip to Zambia, a visit from Luc’s brother, a week down in Maputo for our close of service conference, our trip to Tanzania to get Luc’s dad, our farewell event for our Peace Corps Malawi neighbors, and several visits from our Peace Corps Mozambique buddies it has been three months since we have had a weekend in site, just the two of us. But that’s exactly what we got this weekend. No scrambling into overcrowded vehicles, no endless waiting for buses to fill, no border crossings, no battling with cell networks to coordinate via text messages, no travel drama. Janet got to sleep in, Luc got to go to church, and we did some hiking. We attended the Sunday afternoon soccer game, sitting on the grass and chatting with colleagues while our local team beat a team from the city sponsored by a large auto repair garage. We made some of our favorite meals, pizza one night and hamburgers with potato salad the other. We also had some excitement to celebrate. With some of Noah’s help (Luc’s older brother in California), we bought our plane tickets to America. African airfare can be unpredictable and all flights require multiple layovers and connections. What is totally predictable are the high prices, but Peace Corps had already calculated $2,600 for the one-way flight, so that alleviated the financial pressure. We had already scouted out all the major airlines while at the Peace Corps office during our trip to drop Luc’s dad at the airport in Malawi, so we already knew our best options, which this year happen to be Turkish Air. We just needed Peace Corps’ final confirmation of our Close of Service Date, which we just got this week. On-line purchases are way beyond the rudimentary capabilities of our little cell phone web browser and we didn’t know when we’d be able to connect at our nearest café down in the city, plus last time some spyware on that computer stole Luc’s credit card number and made some sketchy purchases in Nigeria. Luckily our little phone can handle e-mail, so after 7 rounds of back and forth with Luc’s patient brother we had our e-tickets. It feels different now, even though we knew from the beginning that we would be finishing in December 2011. Now that we actually have an exact date inked in on the calendar it really looks like a count down. We’re trying to avoid crossing off the days and really trying to enjoy all of our last experiences.

Every time we see Peace Corps friends now we have to say good-byes and this weekend we had a good share of farewells. We made the trek down to Gorongosa for a big end of service get together, and with buddies starting to head back to America next month, it was our last time seeing a bunch of the guys we’ve had such a strong shared experience with over the past two years. Tete province traveled in a pack, and like all our African travel, we had our share of adventure. Our 4am bus out of the city broke down half way to Chimoio in the middle of nowhere. Our conductor managed to muster two small mini-buses to rescue us, but we had to pack 5 to a row to all fit in. Our next transport had a blow out, but luckily managed to retain control and not flip over. In the end we made it safe and sound. Close to 50 volunteers congregated on the centrally located Gorongosa, so we brought a tent and camped out under the stars, until it started raining. Our rain-fly is already in the USA, so we had to scrounge some floor space and sleep slumber party style. One of our colleagues works in the nearby Gorongosa National Park, so she organized a safari for us in one of their mini-buses. Gorongosa was one of the continent’s premiere safari parks during the Portuguese era, but the two decades of conflict that followed left the park devastated and devoid of the kind of flashy wildlife we’ve grown accustomed to on some of our other vacations to Mozambique’s neighbors, but we still enjoyed the drive and spotted some beautiful antelopes, including our favorite, the majestic Sable. It was kind of crazy with all the tents, hungry mouths to feed, puppies, emotional farewells, and unexpected precipitation, and at times it felt like a refugee camp, but our hosts, Brian and Jordan, did a great job taking care of us all, so we’re glad we made it, despite the 30+ hours of travel it took for the roundtrip. Plus we got a chance to hear about how everyone is negotiating closing their service here, and what people see in their future for when they get back to America (most people, including ourselves, have been avoiding thinking about this, so we got a lot of hums and uhs in peoples’ answers). We ended with a late evening bonfire, with volunteers playing the guitar and singing songs, no marshmallows or ‘smores, but a few tears and lots of smiles.

So after 5 weeks together here in Africa, its Luc’s Dad’s last day with us here in Africa. It’s been great having his fresh perspective here to remind us about all the wonderful things that just seem normal to us now. As a retired teacher of 40 years, Pepe made some interesting reflections on our school life, like how interested everyone is in our lives and wellbeing and how much effort our students put into attending school well bathed and in clean clothes, even if they have to wear the same uniform everyday and have to walk down to the dam to take a bath. Even though he doesn’t speak Portuguese he’s been able to communicate well using his Spanish. Also our Padre from Chile and one of our teachers who studied in Cuba can both speak Spanish and a few of our colleagues and friends from the generation that lived in refugee camps in Malawi can communicate in English. We’ll miss Pepe a lot: Janet will no longer have a drinking partner to share her sundowner beer and we will definitely be thinking of him when we snack on the queso Manchego and jamón Serrano he left us. Africa still had a couple of surprises for Dad, like our last bus breaking down in the gas station on our way to the airport leaving us to scramble out the emergency exit in a frenetic free-for-all to get seats on the next bus. But sometimes Mama Africa throws in good surprises too, like a half flat of strawberries for $2.50 available on the street corner when we hadn’t even realized it was strawberry season.

We’ve basically had family visitors since July 4th, so after Pepe leaves it will be our first time with our little house to ourselves in over two months. Hopefully we won't feel lonely!

Janet had received a donation last year from Polytechnic School Lower and Middle school students, the school she went to when she was a girl and where her mom and Luc’s aunt currently teach. The kids there sold popsicles to raise money for our school here in Mozambique. Kids here frequently sell home-made freezies, but they didn’t understand how Janet’s school was able to raise over $300. It’s probably because they only charge 3 cents a popsicle here. Janet originally wanted to build a sports court for our school with the money and everyone was very excited, but after various months of failed efforts we realized that is not a realistic project. People just don’t really understand how to build basketball hoops here and we don’t have any skilled cement workers available to refurbish the crumbling surface left behind by the old Portuguese gas station. Instead we’re going to use the money to finish the administrative block at our school which has been standing half complete since we started working here in 2009. It’s not as exciting of a project as a sports court, but it will house offices for our principal and vice principal, who currently just conduct there business in the teacher’s lounge, create a space for our school library, and provide somewhere for the distance learners to meet when they come in to do their tutoring and testing. The money has totally revitalized the project and all kinds of work is now going on at the school. One of Janet’s 10th graders is doing the masonry, one of our teacher colleagues is installing the wiring, and we just saw three of our students walking to campus with doors on their heads, so those are probably being installed as we write this. Our Vice-Principal has really come through to make this happen, negotiating good prices on all the materials and work, something we really hate to do since we have no idea how much something like a door frame is worth here in site. Plus he’s kept a record of every single purchase, down to the last nail, a practice which is so important in a system where money often disappears. Our kids can always find somewhere to play soccer, so even though they don’t get the sports court there will be no lack of physical exercise here, but finishing this school building will really help the academic life of our campus, something which is so important for a community with so few academic facilities available.

We’re already half way through our last trimester; it’s just five more weeks until final exams. Our school principal, Mr. Sandwich, got promoted to be in charge of a neighboring administrative post, something akin to a small county, so the top position on campus is now vacant. We really liked our principal, so we’ll miss him, but we always suspected this would happen given how competent he has been and how cozy he is with all the provincial big shots in the ruling party. Luckily we have great assistant principals, so our school should survive. The last trimester here is basically equivalent to the push from after spring break to the end of the school year in June in the traditional American calendars, so any student or teacher back home knows how that is. Basically everyone is running out of gas and starting the countdown for summer break, which starts on October 29th. We’ve had trouble keeping our afterschool clubs going since everyone is tired or busy preparing for national exams if they’re in 10th grade. We had to rally to get something together for the September 7th national holiday here commemorating the Lusaka Peace Accords, which ended the colonial conflict with the Portuguese in 1974. Luckily Liston, one of our most dedicated activists, got a theater piece together at the last minute. He had to run to a couple of students’ houses to drag them to the performance, but he made it happen. He’s become such an outstanding leader; he even got a group of kids together to play games before the ceremony to draw the local townspeople into the plaza so we could get started.

Next up is getting our English Theater team together for the provincial competition down in Tete next month, which as the only second year volunteers in this part of the country, we are in charge of organizing. Luckily one of our friends has a theater he is willing to lend us free of charge (we love Padre Ricardo)! If that’s not enough to keep us busy, we still have four more holiday performances for our Youth Activists. Next they want to do a piece where all the girls and boys play opposite gender roles. So we’re not expecting too much free time in the next couple of months, but as we head down the home stretch of our Peace Corps experience, we’ll try to remember to savor our last moments because before we know it, we’ll be flying home. Speaking of which, we need to buy our tickets!

We've been so busy with family visits, traveling, and teaching, it's been a while since we've been able to spend some time in our regional capital Tete, except driving through with Janet's family to see the science fair. With Luc's dad still here, we decided to take a little break from village life and show him a little more of Mozambique by spending a weekend down in the city with Padre Ricardo at our parish headquarters in Moatize. Padre Ricardo is a Chilean priest in the Salesian´s of Don Bosco order serving as the director of the Missão São João Bautista here in Mozambique.

He always has activities going on in the community, building churches and schools, running a carpentry shop, computer lab, community radio, and agricultural project, and organizing groups of international volunteers to carry out projects, as well as all his normal priestly duties, like celebrating mass and attending to the spiritual needs of his flock. He is an inspiration for us and it was great to spend a weekend with him at the mission relaxing and having pleasant meals and conversations. Padre Ricardo took us on a tour to see some of the schools in various states of completion he's working on, and some of the churches he's trying to resurrect.

Moatize is the site of one of the world´s largest coal reserves, and we saw the part of town the Brazilian mining company Vale simply cleared out to make way for one of the mega projects, including the demolished church Padre Ricardo is now trying to get rebuilt in the new town built for the displaced community members thirty kms from the original. We also saw the old Portuguese mining town and the very unique open air church they built dedicated to Santa Barbara, the patroness of coal miners. We had a chance to take Luc's dad into Tete, the hottest city in the country. Luckily its cold season, but that doesn't mean we didn't sweat plenty walking to do our favorite shopping, eat pizza, and tour the different old Portuguese fortresses to get the best views of the majestic Zambezi and the suspension bridge, which is looking quite dapper after its two year renovation.

We also got money from the bank. We were critically low, and there are no withdrawal options anywhere within 100 kms from our house. Adrienne, one of our Peace Corps friends, threw a Mexican party at the home of one of our Brazilian friends. They live in the Mozambican Leaf Tabacco housing, which is a verdant oasis of green on the outskirts of town surrounded by arid baobab desert. Needless to say their housing situation is not Peace Corps style, so we enjoyed catching up with them and our PC buddies, cooking fajitas, and experiencing a timeout from everything African in this posh gated community.

On Sunday we attended the Padre Ricardo´s early morning mass, which we could actually understand since it was in Portuguese unlike our service entirely in Chichewa. Janet tried to make a quiche for our host, but the electricity kept failing at crucial moments in the cooking process, and you can't bake quiche on the charcoal barbeque. That afternoon we drove out along the Zambezi to the historic, but sadly dilapidated Boroma mission.

The church is the oldest in Tete, built in 1885 and stands high on a hill looking out over the Rio Zambezi. This weekend has been relaxing and fun, a nice break from our fast-paced, very intense lifestyle at site. Plus we have great internet access here so we've put up a bunch of pictures and done some much-overdue facebook-ing.

Zach's dad, Jordan and Zach

We have written some in our blog about Zachariah and his job search in Tete city. It has been an on-going saga since he graduated from twelfth grade in an English medium high school in neighboring Malawi. It’s hard to get jobs in this country without connections. But, his persistence paid off. Zach is now an office man for a construction company down in booming Moatize. He claims it is a lowly job, but any type of paid employment is an achievement here in Southern Africa, where official unemployment rates aren’t even measured. He does a lot of typing on the computer, which vindicates our seemingly endless hours maintaining the lab and running community computer courses, Zach being one of our graduates from earlier this year. His salary is just under $100 a month, about half as much as we make as teachers. There are a lot of demands on that income since he has a large extended family back in his home village relying on him. Zach has not forgotten the contribution Peace Corps has made to his social promotion, having learned English from three generations of volunteers in Mozambique, and then receiving sponsorship for his school fees in Malawi from Angelina, the volunteer we replaced, and living his final school year with Jordan, our PC buddy in Malawi. In gratitude he invited Jordan and us to his village to meet all of his family. We had been already several times, but it meant so much to Zach to finally have Jordan there. He made a special meal with ocean fish he bought frozen in the market. We took lots of pictures and toured the village. We even got to meet his girlfriend, Elita, a young woman from a nearby village who has also finished high school. He says they will marry next year when he has saved some cash and built a house and he also says they will spend lots of time reading together since she is educated like him. Zach’s father was so gracious and instead of emphasizing how much help Zach needed, like on each of our previous visits, he just recognized how much Zach had accomplished with help from all his many “white teachers.” It was a special afternoon for everyone, one of those moments when a lot of things come together and being a Peace Corps Volunteer feels so satisfying and worthwhile. Our next goal is to teach Zach how to use email so we can stay in touch with him next year.

So we lost our two closest Peace Corps neighbors this week. Ironically, they were both Malawi volunteers, but it makes sense since we live right on the border, and our own volunteers are so spread out across the vastness of Mozambique. Jordan arrived in country the same week as us, but due to some surprise shifts in the Malawi academic calendar he is already done with his second year of teaching, so he’ll be touring India and Southeast Asia for the next three months while we still have a whole trimester left to complete during that time. Yeah, we are a little jealous. Jordan says he will miss us, but he won’t miss performing to 50+ student classrooms everyday. Oliver, our other PC neighbor, still has over a year left, but headquarters feels his village site is too isolated now without Jordan in his hub town, so he’s being moved farther south. We had a farewell weekend with them to celebrate. We cooked them chocolate chip cookies, lasagna, cinnamon rolls, and had a Glee marathon, watching the last three episodes of the season (we had managed to get them from our download network while down in Maputo). We gave them both matching Mwanza Boyz t-shirts Janet made with her rainbow Sharpies and a couple of Luc’s cleanest undershirts. We also took some farewell pictures. Peace Corps is an intense experience that makes you grow close to your fellow volunteers so it was tough to say goodbye. Last week we had two Peace Corps buddies within walking distance of our home and next week we’ll have none.

Here in Africa cell phones are big business. Our town doesn’t have a single land-line, and people love to communicate, but everyone seems to have a cell phone, or at least access to one. Mozambique has two main service providers, MCel and Vodacom. We, like most Mozambicans, use both since we never know when one will suddenly check out for an extended period of time. It just involves switching the different SIM cards in and out, the same thing we have to do when we visit neighboring countries. No one here has contracts, you just pay as you go, buying little phone vouchers from the omnipresent street vendors. Each company vies desperately for each little 60 cent phone credit purchase we make, so their advertising is one of the few commercial presences in our lives. Our town doesn’t have any adds for Coca Cola, or Nike, or McDonalds; the two large billboards here are both for cell service. An even more popular advertising gimmick is sponsoring local paint jobs. About half of our little stores are painted gold and green for Mcel, and the other half navy blue for Vodacom, or at least they were until last month when Voda decided to switch from blue to red. The move means repainting thousands of little shops around the country, including 3 in our town, but obviously they love the attention. It’s rare to go a day without seeing at least a couple of our students sporting Mcel or Voda promotional t-shirts or caps. At least the competition seems to keep prices accessible, especially for text messages and cell phone based internet, which is the service we use the most, and how many of the blogs on this site have been sent.

Southern California exists in a semi-permanent state of draught, but despite all the talk of water scarcity, we can’t remember water running out, or ever encountering a tap which failed to produce the precious liquid back home. Here in Africa you know it’s a drought when you toss your bucket down the well and instead of hearing that reassuring splash you just get a muddy thud. This year is particularly parched and our wells are already going dry; we still have at least a month or two before we expect the rainy season to relieve us. With questionable water availability we have to rethink all of our daily activities. Drinking water is top priority. Washing clothes? Good luck. Taking a bath? Hopefully, but maybe recycling water used earlier to rinse our salad vegetables. Maybe we have to wear our semi-clean/semi-dirty clothes a couple extra times between washes (Luc doesn’t seem to mind), and then save the sudsy laundry water for our dishes. Maybe we get lucky and we’re first in line at the well and we get water that’s actually translucent and not chocolate milk. It’s extra stressful when we have guests. People are trekking down to the small reservoir dammed up at the edge of town to do washing, but we don’t trust that parasite infested body of water, and our local stream reeks of cesspool, so we don’t have too many alternatives available. We’ve even had to buy water to get out of a couple of pinches. We’ve reducing our usage to about five gallons of water per day person. Maybe the rains will come early and relieve us, but either way we know that from now on, we’ll appreciate turning on the tap so much.

After two years of moving around Africa we have developed a respectable repertoire of public transport skills. But even a couple of old hands like us have our bad days. One of our least favorite places on the continent is the Lilongwe bus depot. It brings out the worst in people who just see you as another body they need to get to fill another seat on their vehicle. Touts are aggressive and use all kinds of tricks to coerce our decision. We just want to get on the next bus out, but it’s so hard to figure out which one that is with the anemic information available. Buses rev their engines and pretend to pull out, but this means nothing, they can maintain the charade for hours before actually leaving. There are bus companies with ‘schedules’ but this also means little, especially now with the fuel crises and everyone vying to fill their already uncomfortable buses to the max. The words ‘express’ or ‘luxury’ also mean nothing. Mini-buses compete against the big buses, and they are even worse, oftentimes physically grabbing our bags or pushing us towards their dilapidated vehicles. It’s so bad we just steer clear of that part of the yard completely. In the end none of the options are that good and we always seem to wait at least two hours before leaving, so Africa Always Wins. This time around we got on what we thought was a reputable bus, with a decent price, but it still took three hours to fill. We share a last-resort technique with some other Peace Corps friends, which we call “Going to your dark place.” It involves completely giving up, closing your eyes, and retreating into a gloomy mental state of barely hanging on. It’s a last resort coping strategy, if you can call it a strategy, but when we’re in the Lilongwe bus depot, or an open pickup in the rain, or squashed into the aisle of a bus at three times its capacity, we’re glad the dark place is there for us.

So after our safaris and tropical island rest and relaxation it was time to head home, crossing all of Tanzania and Malawi. After so many crazy African buses, we decided to give the train on this continent a chance. Getting tickets was a nightmare, and Luc had a mini breakdown after trying unsuccessfully for three hours at the station. Luckily Janet made a couple phone calls and solved the problem. The old Tazara line built by the Chinese in the 1970's has received no non-essential maintanence since. Half the electricity dind't work, we found several holes in the floor we could watch the tracks zooming by through, our bathroom was only functional for #1, for #2 we had to go to the next car, and of course the engine broke down, delaying our trip for 7 hours while they sent a new locomotive to relieve us. Us being foreigners everyone assumed we were engineers ready to fix the problem so they brought us into the engine room, unfortunately our white person magic did nothing. The train was spacious though, at least in 1st class were we had our own cabin, dining car and lounge. We remarked several times how glad we were not to be in third class pressed up with all the humanity, we've done plenty of that already. We passed the time watching Tanzania roll by, eating food and drinking beverages in the lounge, and chatting with all the world citizens and PC tanzania volunteers we meet, passing on and recieving travel tips. Pepe particulary enjoyed the various Spanish speakers we coincided with. The train traversed the Selous National Park and even though a locomotive isn't the best safari vehicle, we spotted animals and enjoyed an amazing sunset. So, on aggregate, we would take the train over a bus, especially for any distance over 20 hours. Northern Malawi was scenic, with plenty of views of the lake, but with the ongoing fuel crisis and so many bus routes cancled, all the transport is uncomfortably sardine can jammed packed. Luckily one of the police at one of the numerous roadblocks confiscated the 10 drums of fuel one of the passangers was trying to smuggle from Tanzania because the fumes had been making us nauseus. We've tried to shield Luc's dad from some of the less pleasant aspects of life here, but transport is always hard. He's been a trooper though and enjoyed getting to experience the real Africa. Hopefully readjusting to teaching and life in site won't be to challenging after so much action and adventure, but we're really going to try to make the most of it now that the end of service is within sight.

Exotic spice islands, white sandy beaches, medeival forts and mosques, narrow meandering streets, Sinbad the sailor, Zanzibar lived up to everything we imagined. It was the perfect way to relax, sleeping in an old but nicely restored Swahili mansion overlooking the ocean, after all our hundreds of miles of African travel. There are a lot of tourists here, and some aspects of Stonetown have been cleaned up and Disneyfied since Janet's last stay here, but we've been living in Africa since 2009, so we've already had plenty of authentic experiences. It was still Ramadam, so daytime food was still scarce, but the night time food market made up for it, with Zanzibari pizzas, shishkabobs galore, and Pepe's favorite chicken shwarma. Curio vendors and touts get a little aggressive with all the business opportunities us foreigners present, but we had Janet's swahili to neutralize their sometimes outrageous demands and prices. We did plenty of shopping, so maybe some of you will get a Zanzabari souvenir for Christmas. Luc did a couple of early morning runs to some outlying ruins and Janet enjoyed sleeping in every day. Sunsets were gaurenteed awesome every night, overlooking the ocean with traditional Swahili boats. We experienced some traditional Taarab music while dining on fancy Swahili cuisine in an old palace sitting on pillows. There were also plenty of places to just sit and relax and plenty of amazing views to absorb. We also got out of town for a day and actually got to have some normal interactions with locals, including some impromptou lessons with a group of Zanzibari students eager to practice their English. The modern ferry back and forth from the mainland was a smooth two hours and we even saw humpback whales. It was a great farewell to vacation, now we just need to get back to site for third trimester.

The next phase of our trip was safari in northern Tanzania, but to make it possible we had to spend a hungry day organizing travel details in hectic Dar, where finding daytime food wasn't happening in the predominantly Muslim city center. Luckily nightfall magically transformed the streets into barbecue feasts. We also found time for site seeing the German buildings, drinking extremely strong coffee with locals, and touring the smelly fish market and sea shell stalls. Then it was an all-day bus to Arusha through sisal plantations and Rift Valley landscapes, including an up-close view of Mt. Kilimanjaro and its disappearing glaciers. We went with a "luxury" bus company so even though it was 10 hours at least we had our own seats. We had already done our homework sorting through potential scams and booking a safari tour since it is nearly impossible to visit the northern parks without your own 4x4. We chose a camping safari so our Land Rover was packed with tents, sleeping bags, pads and all our food, along with affable Cosmas, our guide/driver and Luc's new best friend and Sokoine the cook and another Italian couple. To describe in brief, the luck on this safari was the kind that happens once in ten years. It was like driving in a National Geographic documentary, seeing highlight reels that take naturalist thousands of filming hours to compile. Janet had specifically requested cheetahs, and presto! Our first day in the Serengeti we see a cheetah chasing a Thompson's gazelle, which escaped leaving the winded sprinter panting in plain view 10 feet from Janet's window. Serengeti means 'endless plain' in the Maasai language and the scene was indeed that, a sea of golden grass so easy on the eyes, punctuated by the iconic flat-topped acacias. We also saw Pride Rock, islands of granite called 'kopjes' dotting the otherwise flat landscape. Speaking of Simba, we saw more lions than we can count, sleeping, eating, playing with their cubs, posing next to the road and on our last day, in Ngorongoro Crater, providing some serious fireworks for the grand finale. A pride of 15 lions took down an adult buffalo, the specific event our guide had coincidentally told us the first day was the most exciting thing he'd seen in his 7-year career. He even let us climb on the roof of the safari vehicle to get better views of this once in a lifetime spectacle. Janet teared up as the lions struggled with all their force and cunning to take down the mighty beast. Eventually the roars, grunting, and splashing ended as the buffalo surrendered and the lions chowed down. Time to make our exit from this amazing bowl of wild animals... but wait! What's this? There a lioness in the road. She had been stalking a herd of wildebeest for the past three hours and we happened to arrive for the exciting climax. We had the prime spot and quietly watched her creep closer and closer to her prey, carefully peaking over the berm of the road until she had just the right spot, her skill and patience apparent to all except for the unfortunately oblivious wildebeest. So with Janet silently cheering her on, she made her leap and in a cloud of dust, came up with a wildebeest by the throat and slowly suffocated it to death over the next 5 minutes. Exhausted she laid in the grass to recovered, exposing her bloody fur. Janet was also exhausted and tearing up again. The thrill of this final encounter was the intimacy, taking place all within 10 feet of Luc's front seat window. The extraordinary of watching what is ordinary for the lion and the completion of the circle of life is a memory we won't forget, especially since we have so many amazing pictures we hope to post as soon as we get a good connection. Although totally overshadowed by all the lion drama we also had lots of other amazing safari moments: Janet spotting a hidden serval cat while our guide tracked the illusive black rhino, flamingos flocking in the alkaline Lake Manyara, ostriches, huge herds of zebra, wildebeest and buffalo, a leopard in a tree over the road causing a traffic jam while munched on yesterday impala catch, gazelles prancing and swishing their tails, and all our other favorites, like giraffes, elephants, hippos, warthogs and the rest of the Lion King menagerie. Cosmas told us that when he has good clients, good things happen; we just felt lucky to witness so many aspects of Africa's natural riches on our five day safari.

With our PC service winding down, we took advantage of our inter-trimester break to take our last big trip and burn our remaining days of vacation. Our goal this time was Mozambique's neighbor to the north, Tanzania, and meeting up with Luc's dad in the capital, Dar es Salaam. The obstacles were the great distances and lack of roads or reliable travel information in Mozambique's untamed northern province, Cabo Delgado. Our volunteer buddies up there tried unsuccessfully to dissuade us, focusing on the discomforts of the overland journey. Nonetheless, we flew to Pemba, Moz's northernmost city, spending a dreamy afternoon swimming at Wimbe Beach, eating seafood and watching a postcard-perfect sunset. The next morning was a very early and very crowded bus, followed by an equally crowded afternoon Land Rover, which covered the extremely bumpy final roadless-stretch to the border. Our sore backs and butts confirmed the discomfort we'd been warned about. The actual border is the river Rovuma, which we hired an over-priced wooden skiff to help us cross just at sunset. The rest of the travelers, all Muslim, started scooping water and eating dates, which they shared with us, to break their Ramadan fast. Unfortunately, the late crossing meant we arrived in Tanzania to find the immigration post closed. The locals assured us that a small bribe would convince the border officer to return, but we were unable to stomach this way of doing business so we spent the night right there in no-man's land with no electricity in a surprisingly comfortable bed in a small rest house next door. It's a good thing Janet was able to salvage enough Swahili vocabulary from the back of her brain because no one spoke English and we had already had enough adventure for that day. The next morning the inefficient border post took over two hours to issue our visas, even though we were the only travelers there. Luckily, an old woman's breakfast stand had spiced milk tea, rice cakes and chapati to nurse our frustration. From there it was one more crowded open-back pick-up ride over a rough sand road through palm groves and ocean views to get back to electricity, paved roads and civilization in Mtwara. We broke up the 14 hour bus trip from there to Dar es Salaam with a 2-night stop in Kilwa. The ancient Swahili coastal town where sultans controlled the lucrative gold, ivory, spice and slave trade routes from Mozambique to Oman during the Middle Ages. You still have to take a traditional sail boat to get to and from the island where the now-ruined palaces and mosques attest to the former greatness of this place, now a sleepy fishing village, with meager guest houses and tourist amenities that even we considered dirty and run-down. The town had a great post-sunset Ramadan fast-breaking atmosphere and we gorged ourselves on fried 'sambusas', potato omelets and exotic-tasting hot drinks with the locals. Our next bus broke down but eventually made it to Dar, leaving in a crazy bus station surrounded by blocks of even more frenetic market stalls and aggressive taxi drivers vying to grab vulnerable tourists. We just secured our valuables and pushed our way through until we found some fresh air. We calmly boarded the 30 cent local bus which took us straight to city center hostel where Luc's dad was waiting and we were joyously reunited.

What's the perfect stress release after a weekend full of emotional goodbyes? Yes, its bumper cars! The Maputo Fair Grounds, conviently located across the street from our hotel, has it all, a ferris wheel, carnival type games, restaurants, bars, and as you can guess from the title of this post, bumper cars. Janet thought it would be a good way to get her ready for driving real cars when we get back to America. It seemed like the Mozambicans crowding the amusement park for a Sunday evening family outing enjoyed watching a bunch of American adults acting like kids. Hopefully Peace Corps' ban on driving motorized vehicles won't apply to this situation. Unfortunately we didn't take any pictures since a flashy digital camera makes an attractive target for petty street theft. The big city is such a blast, it'll be hard to return to our provincial town after so much fun!

Now this is not the end, but it is perhaps the beginning of the end. It was 22 months ago that 69 of us flew from USA to Africa to serve as teachers and health workers here in Mozambique and now with just over 4 months left of service, Peace Corps brought the remaining 59 of us down to the capital to start the close of service chapter of our sojourn. Its an emotional time for volunteers. Arriving in the lobby of our fancy hotel we bumped into colleagues, some we had not seen since our swearing in ceremony in December 2009. The hotel is shwanky, especially when something as simple as running water is such a luxury to us now, so a bathtub with hot water in our room is almost overwhelming and oh so enjoyable. Unfortunately the pool is being rennovated, but the meal service has kept everyone happy and full including Luc, who has a weak spot when it comes to buffets, especially ones with four kinds of dessert. We also have our own TV with ESPN and got to watch the Giants edge the Philies in the first baseball transmission we've seen on this continent. We saw the bill when we swigned for the room, each day here is the cash equivalent of an entire month in site! But we're not dwelling on that desparity, this is a celebration of making it through this at times very trying, but always amazing Peace Corps ordeal together. As far as the content of the conference is concerned there is plenty of bland paperwork and formalities to occupy our three days, like specifying how we would like to receive our readjustment allowance, learning what our medical care will look like post service, and filling surveys quantifying our experiences. There's also a psycological and emotional component. Peace Corps staff wants to prepare us as best possible for the stresses of saying good-bye to our communities that have been our homes for the past two years. Plus there will be the reverse culture shock when we reenter America. Apparently some of us will suffer from "Supermarket Syndrome," which basically means having an anxiety attack when we come face to face with US consumer culture after our spartan existence in rural Africa. Janet is anticipating Luc will be suseptable to this condition. We'll also have a two year gap in technology and pop-culture to deal with open arrival. Most of us don't know exactly what we'll do once our Peace Corps lives are behind us and the state of the world economy is disheartening, but those of us who have made it this far are a resiliant bunch, so I think we'll be ohkay. So after the emotional reunion came the even more emiotional good-byes as we return to our scattered locations across this vast country to complete our service. Because of our flight schedule we had an extra day in the city, so we spent it soaking in everything this cosmopolitan African capital has to offer, snacking on gelatto and pastries at sidewalk cafes, strolling the wide Acacia lined avenues, and visiting the lively taxidermies in the Natural History Museum, which has the worlds most comprehensive collection of elephant fetuses representing the full 22 month gestation of the gargantuan animal. But we're not done yet. We are just on inter-trimester break, and still have all of third trimester and organizing our provincial English Theater competition left to do, so there is no rest for the weary here in Peace Corps service! We can catch up on sleep in December when we get back to America.

Now this is not the end, but it is perhaps the beginning of the end. It was 22 months ago that 69 of us flew from USA to Africa to serve as teachers and health workers here in Mozambique and now with just over 4 months left of service, Peace Corps brought the remaining 59 of us down to the capital to start the close of service chapter of our sojourn. Its an emotional time for volunteers. Arriving in the lobby of our fancy hotel we bumped into colleagues, some we had not seen since our swearing in ceremony in December 2009. The hotel is shwanky, especially when something as simple as running water is such a luxury to us now, so a bathtub with hot water in our room is almost overwhelming and oh so enjoyable. Unfortunately the pool is being rennovated, but the meal service has kept everyone happy and full including Luc, who has a weak spot when it comes to buffets, especially ones with four kinds of dessert. We also have our own TV with ESPN and got to watch the Giants edge the Philies in the first baseball transmission we've seen on this continent. We saw the bill when we swigned for the room, each day here is the cash equivalent of an entire month in site! But we're not dwelling on that desparity, this is a celebration of making it through this at times very trying, but always amazing Peace Corps ordeal together. As far as the content of the conference is concerned there is plenty of bland paperwork and formalities to occupy our three days, like specifying how we would like to receive our readjustment allowance, learning what our medical care will look like post service, and filling surveys quantifying our experiences. There's also a psycological and emotional component. Peace Corps staff wants to prepare us as best possible for the stresses of saying good-bye to our communities that have been our homes for the past two years and how not to freak out if our friends start asking us for our bed or our shoes or anything else that might be hoping we'll leave behind. Plus there will be the reverse culture shock when we reenter America. Apparently some of us will suffer from "Supermarket Syndrome," which basically means having an anxiety attack when we come face to face with US consumer culture after our spartan existence in rural Africa. Janet is anticipating Luc will be susceptible to this condition. We'll also have a two year gap in technology and pop-culture to deal with open arrival. Most of us don't know exactly what we'll do once our Peace Corps lives are behind us and the state of the world economy is disheartening, but those of us who have made it this far are a resiliant bunch, so I think we'll be ohkay. So after the emotional reunion came the even more emiotional good-byes as we return to our scattered locations across this vast country to complete our service. Because of our flight schedule we had an extra day in the city, so we spent it soaking in everything this cosmopolitan African capital has to offer, snacking on gelatto and pastries at sidewalk cafes, strolling the wide Acacia lined avenues, and visiting the lively taxidermies in the Natural History Museum, which has the worlds most comprehensive collection of elephant fetuses representing the full 22 month gestation of the gargantuan animal. But we're not done yet. We are just on inter-trimester break, and still have all of third trimester and organizing our provincial English Theater competition left to do, so there is no rest for the weary here in Peace Corps service! We can catch up on sleep in December when we get back to America.