First Day of Homestay

I’m here!

My homestay house in Namaacha

Although it’s been nice to be unplugged for a few weeks, on the bright side now I get to look up the next day’s weather forecast- and of course update this blog! Although Peace Corps gave us all phone SIM cards on the first day, I wasn’t able to unlock the smartphone I brought with me without wifi, and since wifi is scarce and/or extremely expensive here, I wasn’t able to log on until I had the chance to buy a personal internet modem instead. Peace Corps even made arrangements to have modems pre-registered and brought to us at training to make it a little easier. So here I am! It’s worked out with just a few kinks here and there- everything takes a little longer in Mozambique. Even though I’ve got a lot to catch up on, I’m going to go back and start writing where I left off, and probably work my way back up to the present within a few posts.

We arrived at our homestay houses on Sunday afternoon, September 28^th, in Namaacha, the town where we’ll be staying with our host families for the next ten weeks during our Portuguese language and technical training. As we left on mini-busses from our fancy hotel in Maputo (which we’d gotten to stay at because apparently it’s the only place big enough to accommodate our large group), it felt like we were finally traveling to the Mozambique we’d been expecting from the start.

I was trying not to think about the fact that I didn’t really know much actual, practical Portuguese. I used the Duolingo app over the summer, which is a good program except I realized too late that for some reason it doesn’t teach many words or phrases you might actually need. Duolingo taught me how to say things like “The boy eats an apple” and “The municipality is on the border”. Meanwhile, I had no idea how to say “My name is _____,” “How are you?” or “Where is the bathroom?”, among a million other, you know, typically necessary things. Luckily, it seemed I wasn’t alone, since half of everyone on the bus spent the two-hour ride nervously studying their dictionaries and the survival-phrases cheat sheet Peace Corps had given us the day before. We were all a combination of thrilled and terrified to be meeting our host families soon.

On the bus

Some of the landscape on the road to the Namaacha- the pictures don't really do it justice

When we finally left the wide-open terrain and pulled into the center of Namaacha, we immediately saw the huge crowd of people gathered at the basketball court. I sat there, a little shell-shocked. For some reason I’d assumed we’d stop at the Peace Corps office or someplace first, get oriented in town, then go to the host family ceremony.

NOPE!

There were at least a couple hundred people milling around. I didn’t know if they were there for our arrival, or if there was something else that had been going on. Although I guess over 50 foreigners in a small town is always a spectacle. As our bus pulled around into the parking lot, the tension inside the bus ramped up- or maybe it just felt that way because Matt, a current volunteer who was riding with us to help with training, chose that moment to put on a jokingly high voice and yell “OH MY GOD, THEY’RE HERE, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO, WHAT AM I GOING TO SAY!!!”, which caused all us newbies to start freaking out in the same way ;)

We got out and walked down the bleachers to the court floor, where our host mães stood in a semi-circle, singing. I tried not to freak out more. Soon the singing was done, and we each walked around the circle to find our mãe holding a sign with our name on it. I found my mãe, Olympia, a big and friendly lady, about three-quarters of the way around the circle.

She took my hand and we followed the stream of volunteers and mães up and out of the gym area. All of the Portuguese words I knew that hadn’t managed to fly out of my head the moment we’d arrived in Namaacha, I used up in our the first fifteen seconds of interaction. As we walked up the bleachers, she took my guitar to help carry my things, and asked (in Portuguese) “Do you play the guitar?”. As she took it from me, I responded with “Oh, thanks! Yes, I uh… yes. I like… the guitar. It’s… very good!” The only reason I even remembered the word for guitar was because my mãe had just said it. She nodded.

As we started walking down the road, I started seizing on pretty much whichever Portuguese (or Spanish) words popped into my head based on the surroundings. We passed a huge purple flowering tree (which you will not be hearing the last of- I’m kind of obsessed with them now), and said, “Oh, very pretty! I like…” I didn’t know the word for ‘plants’. “Uh… I like… those. These summer I works… uh, I work, for flowers to buy… uh, I mean…uh…“

Mãe: “You sold plants?”

Me: “Yes! That. I sells plants. In past, I mean. In summer.”

We walked on another ten minutes or so, me speaking the occasional sentence of nonsensical Portuguese, and my mãe patiently responding. Finally, we arrived at a rust-red painted metal gate, walked a narrow path around the concrete house, and stepped up through the entrance in back. Inside, there was a door immediately on my right. “Your room,” my mãe said, and pushed open the door. There was a double bed with a blue sheet, a small closet space, a trunk full of stuff from Peace Corps (a water filter, bedsheets, towels), and my large backpack was already on the bed, having already been delivered by Peace Corps staff a few hours earlier.

I got a short tour of the kitchen, dining/living room, and backyard with the bathhouse out back. It’s funny, because after looking back even after just a couple of days, my perspective has changed so much. On this first day, I’ll admit I didn't feel totally comfortable there. The house felt small, the kitchen felt dark and damp, the yard barren and scattered haphazardly with rocks, and the whole place felt sort of quiet and isolated, despite being in the middle of a large neighborhood.

Now that I’ve gotten settled and more used to the Mozambican way of things, I can see that my house is actually very chic (or chique, as one might say here), and carefully cleaned and organized, with quite a lot of luxuries. The living room has a neat rug and comfy couches, and there is a solid wooden dining table with six sturdy, matching chairs and a clean tablecloth and runner always on the table. There is a (sometimes, depending on the level of the water tank) flush toilet both inside and outside the house, a TV and DVD player sitting on a set of large and nice wooden shelves, with framed glass pictures and decorations. The kitchen has a working refrigerator, an electric kettle, and an electric stovetop and toaster oven. The backyard is large, relatively private, and someone has gone to the work of planting and maintaining several flower bushes and sections of grass, all around the house. Also, nearly all the windows are glass, and open and close easily.

As I set up my water filter, I met my host-cousin, 15-year-old Chaide, and my 8-year-old niece, Teresa. Since they live in the house though, in Mozambican terms they’re pretty much my brother and sister. Though I tried to help, Chaide pretty much set up the filter for me, and Teresa stared silently while trying to touch all the crinkly plastic packaging. Afterwards, it was time to head to the Peace Corps science hub for language interviews, which would help place us in language groups for our upcoming weeks of training. Chaide led me and another volunteer there, since we didn’t know our own way around Namaacha yet. Chaide was pretty cool and patient while talking to us during the walk, during which I felt a little more relaxed than I had during that first walk with my mãe. There is hope for my Portuguese after all! :D

On top of that, my interview went well- TOO well, it felt like, because somehow even though with my host family I wasn’t so hot at communicating, when the instructor giving the interview spoke, I was able to understand just enough to be able to answer the questions (which were things like “What is your host mother’s name?”, “What are your hobbies?”, “What is your Peace Corps assignment?”), and avoid answers that included words I didn’t know.  So I worried a bit that I might be put in a language level too high for me, but figured it’d work out fine either way.

Once back home, I was finally getting around to organizing my room and putting things away, when I heard the door open… and turned around to find Teresa standing right behind me. I’d been hoping to be left alone for a while, but since Teresa hadn’t talked much to me yet, I didn’t want to scare here away (*note that in hindsight two weeks later I am LAUGHING UPROARIOUSLY at the idea that I ever thought this was possible). So I rushed through putting away the rest of my things- partly because I could barely stop Teresa from keeping her hands off EVERYTHING I took out of my bag. When we went back to sit in the living room, it turned out that my possessions weren’t the only thing she liked- the moment I was sitting down, she immediately started stroking my hair and making as many braids as she could (it’s a good thing my hair isn’t as long anymore!), chattering the whole time now that she seemed to have gotten over her initial shyness.

Before going to bed, I also had the chance to totally MASTER my first bucket bath- no running water, no problem! Piece of cake. I’m probably going to be using less water in the next two years than I ever used in two days in the U.S. Or something like that. Anyway, maybe that’ll make up for the fact that I’ll be burning all my trash. Who knows ;)