I heart Tete

Hello!! First of all, disclaimer—my province is pronounced like “Tet”, not “teat” as most of my friends and family like to snicker at back home 

Our little crew up here is the best. Not only do we have the seven of us in my group, but we also have a married couple that has been here for a year already. This past weekend we went down to visit Luke and Janet in their village about 2 hours from mine. First, in pure logical Mozambican form, the only chapas aka public transportation out of Angonia (where I live) is to the border about 20 km away or to Tete City. So our options to go visit their village was to pay a chapa and get out half way (big waste of money) or to hitch-hike. Option #2 it was. Hitching is actually very common here among the volunteers and is often a safer and cheaper way to travel. Many times the cars you hitch in are in much better condition and sometimes free (which when you’re living on less than $200 a month is a huge plus). We jumped up into a semi on the way down, grabbed another truck to the border and were there.

They live way into a neighborhood through all these twisting paths. They have a cute little house, not on a school campus like my duplex. As a consequence/bonus of this they constantly have Mozambican children in their yard hanging out, and their helper around the house is an 8th grade student Ramão that is there constantly. It was super fun to be there for the weekend, and Janet is an amazing cook. When we got there we had a lunch of homemade hummus and gazpacho with salad; dinner of bean burgers and fries; breakfast of coffee and cinnamon rolls; lunch of fajitas that really made me crave sour cream. Plus care packages from their holiday in the states. Mine had Jr Mints, a granola bar and Jelly Bellies!! Throw in a poster of Puck from the “All about Glee” special edition US magazine and I was in heaven. I sweated off the 5 pounds I gained from eating so much scaling a mountain to take some photos at the border marker between Moz and Malawi (my 4th African country!!). And by scaling, I mean I was looking for footholds on some of those rock faces—the closest I ever want to get to rock climbing. It’s Wednesday and my quads are just starting to feel not sore.

It was a great weekend of bonding with my Tete crew, swapping stories of the first week of teaching, comparing what lessons we were planning, lying on a grass mat in the shade reading, enjoying a beer, and sharing squatty potty maneuvers for aiming (my first experience with the squatty potty and aiming is hard when you’ve never had to do it before, trust me). I’m really enjoying my replacement family this side of the ocean 