Training Recap

Bom Dia! I have successfully completed Peace Corps training and have officially become one of the 200,000 PCVs sworn in over the last 51 years. Clearly, I completely neglected my blog throughout training; there was one computer in our town, and 68 trainees, so I was a bit out of touch for 10 weeks. To recap training:


We arrived in Mozambique on September 27th, and stayed two days in the capital, Maputo. The city is enormous (close to two million people), beautiful, and very scary. The group then traveled down to the city of Namaacha, about an hour southwest. Namaacha sits on the three borders of Mozambique, South Africa, and Swaziland. It was originally a Portuguese vacation town, built in the mountains, so it was generally very cold, rainy, and non-Africa-y.

Each volunteer was adopted by a host family, and mine was amazing! My host mom, Mae Elisa, has two adult daughters (Melita, 30, and Lotinha, 22), and each of them have a son (Lay, 9, and Donavan, 4). There was another little girl (Elsa, 6) who lived with us, but I never figured out who her parents were. It's a very common practice in Mozambique to take in the children of your relatives in exchange for an extra pair of hands around the house. Elsa was loved and cared for, but she always ate in the kitchen, slept on the floor, and never had as nice of clothes as her cousins.

Elsa, 6

Donavan, 4

My host mom and sisters were unique in that they are all single, educated, independent mothers in a country where women are still second class. They were patient (usually) in teaching me the "Mozambican" way of doing things, and often treated me like a little kid: they drew my bath for me, served my rice, and told me when to go to bed. Silly American.

Elsa, Lay, Donavan

Mae Elisa was always disappointed that I didn't want to engordar (gain weight), as that is culturally considered both a sign of health and social status in southern Africa. The first Portuguese expression I learned (and used at every meal) was chega!, meaning enough! The diet here is very carb-heavy: on average we had bread and tea for breakfast, cookies for a snack, a french fry sandwich for lunch, and rice with potatoes, and a side of pasta, for dinner. Yum.


Training consisted mainly of language class, cross-cultural education, and technical training (or, How To Be A Science Teacher). Portuguese is tough! Once I realized the differences between it and Spanish, it became a lot easier, and I passed my official Language Proficiency test at an Advanced Mid level. Translation: My garble is intelligible enough. My host family laughed at my Spanish for the first few weeks, but were very surprised by how much my Portuguese progressed toward the end of my 10-week stay.

Golden Orb Spider, Nametil, Nampula.

During Week 7, the trainees split off into pairs to go visit current volunteers throughout the country. I flew to Nametil, Nampula, a small rural site in the north of the country. It was my first taste of what Life After Training would be like. We saw the school where the two volunteers taught, met members of the community, and spent a couple days in Angoche, a coastal city with the most beautiful beach I've ever seen.

Angoche, Nampula

 Two weeks later, we were given our site placements. I was really excited to go back to the north of the country, in the province of Cabo Delgado! Northern Mozambique is very rural and much poorer than the south where we had been living. Portuguese is much rarer, women are significantly less educated, and traditional practices such as polygamy are incredibly common. One of the volunteers I visited in the north told me that his school director would often change the grades of boy students so that a girl wouldn't have the highest grade.
As a female teacher, and specifically as a female science teacher, I will be somewhat of an anomaly in my community. Challenge: accepted.

The last two weeks of training flew by, as I prepared to say goodbye to all the amazing people I had spent ten weeks holed up with. We returned to Maputo to swear in at the ambassador's residence, then were on a north-bound plane the next morning.

Peace Corps' office in the North is located in Nampula City, and we had a two-day conference there to meet our school directors (P.S., new address and instructions here). It was also a great chance to get to know my new housemate, Jamie, better. She's going to be a biology teacher, loves to read and cook, and is just generally the bee's knees.

Hoping to post again soon with more information about my site, where we've been living for about a week.

Peace, Love, and Beijinhos,

Elizabeth