Blog about life as a Peace Corp Volunteer, in Mozambique.

What have I been up too

Well first off I just got back to Quelimane after spending a week in Maputo with all of my fellow Moz 13 volunteers. We stayed at the same place that we stayed at when we first arrived in Maputo so it was a little weird being back there. For instance now I don’t get nervous thinking about how I’m going to ask a staff member to bring some Ketchup or that we need more towels, so check Portuguese skills. It’s also weird to see all these people of my group whom I haven’t seen since training, over a year ago, some because I hardly know those people and others like my two best friends from training Anthony and Vic like we never went o different site and have been hanging out the whole time. Lots of volunteers arrived to Mid service after just coming back from holidays in the states. So I lived vicariously thru their tales of Taco Bell, Starbucks and snow. Also they brought a bounty of movies on their computers and external hard drives so now I have enough TV shows and movies to last me at least through another six months here and I’ve already found portuguese subtitles for a bunch of the movies so my colleagues are pretty excited too.
Another difference this time around is that we are allowed to leave the compound and go into the city, and I think each time I visit Maputo I like it more as I discover more things to do there, such as beer and bumper cars and beer and the tilt a whirl. I felt like I was 12 again and the Mozambican workers thought it was pretty hilarious too.

Then of course in Mid service there was the work component, we me with our new APCD which a lot of us had never met before seeing as Maputo is pretty far from a lot of our sites and reviewed our program goals here in Moz depending on if you are Ed or Health and other not so exciting but very useful things like Monitoring and Evaluation of our projects and how to record the indicators in our projects for reporting to PC and up the ladder from there all the way to Congress. I was also excited to learn that the Peace Corps program in Mozambican is planned to grow. By a lot. Next year they will have two inputs of volunteers into Mozambique. Meaning as of now and so far in Mozambique there is only one input of volunteers a year. New trainees leave home and arrive in Moz more or less in October and go through training until December after which they go to their sites. Next year they will still have the education and health volunteers arriving in October but also want Food Security volunteers to arrive in April for deployment at sites in June. And more immediately effecting my group they would like to start the expansion of the program with increasing the amount of volunteers who extend for a 3rd year to 16 volunteers who extend. I think from the group before in Moz 12 there are….5? who extended to stay for a 3rd year. So thats a pretty large increase in extenders.

Another highlight from Mid service was a visit from the Charge de Affairs (basically the acting US Ambassador to Moz while we wait for one to arrive). I really like all the conversations I’ve had with him as he’s very candid with us on how things are going with the State Department and Moz relations and its cool to hear stories from a guy who works directly with the leaders of Moz as opposed to us who are working only with local leaders. Also whenever he’s traveled up to my area he’s taken time to have a informal meeting with me and other volunteers to hear about our work and how things are on the ground so to speak. Definitely has peaked my interest in the State Department as a really cool and rewarding career. I purposefully did not go into specifics of what he said because I don’t want to accidentally misrepresent his opinions or those of the State Dept.

After the Mid service conference I stayed the weekend after in Maputo for a conference with the coordinators of JOMA so we could plan more in detailed our plans for the upcoming months. I’m not sure if I mentioned in this blog but in July? I think of last year we had a JOMA transfer meeting where the old Moz 12 leaders of the JOMA project handed over responsibilities to the (then) new Moz 13 group. I volunteered to be the Northern JOMA Coordinator, and Quelimane Conference Coordinator. So we talked about what things have to be done by certain dates so we can have Provincial Conferences in April and Tech Trainer Visits to groups throughout the rest of the year. It’s a little overwhelming but luckily I have an awesome site-mate Sarah who helps out with everything and is basically co-coordinator though now after the meeting she may be tied up with finding trainers as she’s in charge of that too. For the conference though we expect to have around 10 groups per conference with 5 kids per group, 1 counterpart and 1 volunteer = 70 people that I need to arrange room and board for, luckily Dinha’s also helping out with this.

During mid-service we also had a PSN meeting (Peer Support Network) meeting, last year at regionals I was selected by the old Moz 12 PSN members to be a part of PSN for the following year. PSN is just as the name sounds a group of volunteers that have their numbers given out to all other volunteers who are available for the other volunteers to call for basically any reason, homesickness, problems at their site, work issues anything, and all the calls are protected under a confidentiality agreement.

Also it looks like I’m going to be the Northern Coordinator for another volunteer led project The Future Business Leaders of Mozambique. Luckily because I have a lot on my plate already my main responsibilities for this will be the distribution of money to northern groups and collection of receipts.

On the primary project work front I also recently made a plan for work where I would be going out into the field Mon – Wed and on Thur and Fri be in Quelimane. While I’m in the field I’d do my usual health talks with the women’s groups and while in Quell can help around the office (IT and also an English class) and also attend to my other Peace Corp project responsibilities like JOMA and FBLM.

So now that I’ve thought it all out it seems like it could be a lot of things at once but I feel happier now having all these things to do. I’m definitely happier here when I have things to do as opposed to not having things to do.