My Mozambiquan Family

All in all, it’s been a great first week in Mozambique (yay it rhymes!) There is nothing that makes adapting to a new culture easier than being with family. This is something I witnessed while I was in China, and wished that I had had the whole time. So when I found out that the Peace Corps has you live with a Mozambuiqean family, I was super excitied. Not only would I be able to practice my newly forming portugese skills and learn about another culture through their eyes, I would have a new family to do it with.

Driving to the trainning facility in Namacha, where our host families are, I was filled with questions about who I would be living with for the next few weeks. How big a family will I have? Will I be their first volunteer? Will there be any english speakrs in the house? What will the living conditions be like? Will I be close to the other volunteers? The answers were found among the wonderful Ngovene family that I ended up with. It includes minha prima Lina, mama Laura, e mi Irma Cecilia. Lina is 14 years old and is quiet and incredibly helpful. Cecilia is a talkative and intelligent 17 year old, also a huge MJ fan. Mama is loving and knowledgeable about her culture, but understanding in my foreign ways. We talk, charade, eat, play, and watch TV together; leagues better than coming back to an empty and lonely room. Though our conversation is limited for now, we have still been able to cover such diverse topics as minha Irma’s chemistry  test to how my dreams have getting crazier since I started taking the mefloquine anti-malarials. Hopefully, as my vocabulary gets better, these conversations will move faster than the speed of my dictionary searching.

Towards that effort, I have about 30 hours of Portuguese lessons a week with other Peace Corps volunteers, which has been helping a ton. Just the fact that someone tells me when my spangesse is wrong has been a huge help. Also we’re learning a ton of new vocabulary for Mozambiquan Portuguese, such as Nindja for theif and Txilar for chilling out. Besides the language classes, we’ve also been having classes on history, education, and health, though I hope the teaching classes start soon because have no clue what I’m doing in a classroom. But I imagine I’ll learn what I need to when I need to, as Peace Corps Mozambique is run surprisingly well.