The Only Constant is Change

I know, I know. It's been an inexcusably long time since I last made contact. It is with great sheepishness that I sit down to write this final entry, averting my eyes and changing the subject like a guest at a dinner party who has just returned to their chair after 45 long minutes locked inside the host's bathroom. Was it really that long? I guess so. Sheesh.

*looks at the floor*

In any case, it will have been for the best. You'll see. This way I'll still have some fresh stories to regale you with when I get back. Won't it be nice when we go out for beers and it's not all re-runs? :)

I've closed my bank account, met with my directors, and turned in the obligatory stool samples: my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer has officially come to an end. In a few weeks I'll be back in the States; looking the wrong way when I cross the road, picking my nose in public, and fighting off the urge to brush my teeth in the yard. Try to understand that I've just crawled back up out of the rabbit hole, and that it may take a few months before my levels of "embarrassingly crazy" drop down to their previous levels of medium high.

My flight gets in on the 19th of December, and I am so spinning-with-my-arms-out excited to see absolutely EVERYONE for the holidays! Instead of buying me presents, people should just fluff the pillows on their couches and wait for me to come crash on them. Deal? Deal.

Lots of love and upcoming bear-like hugs from the egret-like girl,
Manna Jacki

Here in southern Mozambique we are finally entering headfirst into the weather that everyone emphatically refers to as "FRIO." Cold. Which is the word that we use to refer to the shortest of our two official seasons. Technically it's winter, but winter isn't really a word that has any logic alongside a mere three months of hoodies in the evening and sandals in the afternoon. Basically it's cold now the way it is in Oregon during the early summer: you might be interested in laying around in your bikini during the afternoon, but socks and sweaters become necessary items as soon as the sun goes down.

It's made teaching at night a somewhat unpleasant affair, except that I now have an excellent excuse to wear hats while I stand in front of the chalkboard making crazy gestures and speaking as if to the hearing impaired.

I still love my night classes, though, even if the challenges can be decidedly different than teaching during the day. For example, one of my turmas has had to miss class three times because of a serial crapper that continually leaves smelly deposits in the back corner. I showed up to find half of them standing outside in a huddle, the lights off.

"Let's go!" I say, "Get in the classroom!"

"No teacher! We can't. Someone made the big necessary inside."

And what do you say to that,really? No one is sure if the little kids are doing it after their classes get out in the afternoon or if someone from ninth grade has discovered a creative way to cut classes without any consequence, but it's happening with a disturbing regularity.

Then, the other night I was just leaving school when the power suddenly went out. Even a blind person would have known what happened, as every student immediately broke out into howls, either of joy or disgust. If you've ever seen "Dazed and Confused," it was decidedly similar to the last day of school scene, with people leaping wildly, hooting, throwing things, banging the walls. Students came pouring out of the classrooms like water through a broken dam, and I stood watching the cell-phone illuminated chaos in awe. Within a few minutes the power came back on and I headed off for home, but for some reason it kept having problems and after a few minutes the whole town went dark again. It was then that I started receiving messages from my buddy, who was still at school.

"Oh well," he wrote, in English, "no light!"

Then, a few minutes later, in Portuguese, "These little bastards are freaking out! There is war at school! We are in a war of throwing rocks!" Followed immediately by, "We're all in a panic to get out!"

It turned out that some of the directionless punks who attend night classes in impersonation of real students had reverted immediately back into their natural state in the absence of anything but starlight. A few of them started throwing rocks onto the roof of the office, where all the teachers and bosses were, and the effect of cement chunks hitting the aluminum roof was so loud that it literally sounded like a war. I laughed at the ridiculous of it all when I saw my friend later, but he looked back at me with serious eyes.

"You weren't there. It wasn't cool at all! Everyone was scared for their lives. Teacher Susanna was even crying!"

And I could see his point. What a world we're living in here. Sometimes it feels like our school is doing nothing but keeping up appearances. It looks like an institute of learning (a mozambican institute, anyway) and sounds like one. You see teachers walking around holding chalk and wearing white lab coats. The kids sit in front of the chalkboard and copy dutifully into their exercise books. But in reality the students are passed whether or not they learn, teachers show up drunk, sex is traded for grades in exchanges of only moderate secrecy, and civilized behavior is apparently only separating all out free-for-all wildness by the tiniest technological thread. People crapping in the classrooms and trying to scare teachers by throwing rocks. Good lord.

Anyway, life is good. My kitten keeps getting bigger. My cousins Kelly and Lisa passed through with their friend Jody a few weeks ago, and I made it their responsiblity to name him. They came up with "Halfrican," as in half African, which is exactly the kind of ridiculousness that his weasel-like nature merits. And actually, lately it seems like his name isn't Halfrican at all, but rather Halfrican No!, which is how I always call him. He climbs onto the table: Halfrican, no! He gets into my basket and starts gnawing on a bread roll through the plastic bag: Halfrican, no! He pounces on a big stack of tests and they go scattering every which way in the breeze: HALFRICAN, NO!!

Must get going, as there is a long, impatient-looking line of mulungos waiting to use this computer, and I have a grilled cheese sandwich to eat and a bus to catch! I've been terrible about writing lately, so if your mailbox has been lonely it's not for lack of love, just lack of motivation to give voice to this love by uniting pen and paper.

I miss you, whoever you might be! Already making out a "must-hug" list for when I get back in December. :)

Namaste,
Jackalyn Isenaugle

Okay!

So!

In spite of all appearances (or lack of appearances), I am still very much alive and kicking here in the good land of Mozambique. The last few months have been spent mostly gasping for air: sprinting from class to class, grading hundreds of horrifically disastrous tests, and trying to keep up on housework during the three weeks my empregada spent sick and living in the bush with a witch-doctor.

Busy. Ridiculously busy.

Anyway, life is more or less back to normal now. We finally got another English teacher, who relieved me of all but two of my night classes. I asked to keep my two classes of ninth graders, because they help keep me sane. Just like my eighth-grade kiddies, they know bewilderingly little English, but with the added bonus of being old enough to better understand my hopelessly sarcastic sense of humor and not constantly shriek like monkeys. And they may not know much, but some of them are impressive when it comes to using what they know. One test question asked the students to list two instruments that are used in traditional farming, and only afterwards when I encountered answers like "big knife" and "bush-cutter" did I realize that I'd forgotten to teach them the word "machete."

So work is better.

Also, I recently got a new kitten from another volunteer, since Jonas turned out to be somewhat defective as far as satisfying my cat needs are concerned. I mean, he's my cat and all, and I love him... but he's kind of skinny. And cranky. And mentally deficient. Prone to sit slightly forward on his haunches, squinting one eye like a drunk old man who has just returned from an unpleasant encounter with his proctologist. Not exactly the kind of cat who enriches the quality of your life. The new one though, much to Jonas's obvious dismay, is a total show-stopper: all white except for a tabby patch on his head and tail, chubby, fuzzy and affectionate. He doesn't have a name yet, although my aunt Terri went around calling him "baby kitty" for almost a week and he seems to now be responding to that.

My aunts Millie and Terri are actually on their way out of the country on Monday, after spending a good five days bumming around my house and town. They were easy guests to host, quite content to just sit around all morning reading and drinking tea, not phased at all by the idea of wandering around town unaccompanied despite their inability to understand the constant streams of Portuguese that my overly friendly townsfolk immediately inundated them with. They came back from walks and said things like, "Hey, we met one of your 'big' friends! We don't know what he was saying but he seemed really nice!"

They also cleaned my house, which I should have seen coming. I mean, if the guest you're hosting is a sea lion, you don't offer to put it up in a bed of dry sand and offer it salads to eat. You splash buckets of water on it and make constant offerings of fish. Likewise if you guest happens to be an Aunt Millie, you should NEVER lodge her in a small, dirty, confined space that looks for all intents and purposes like the aftermath of a terrible care package explosion. She will appear to be fine, but, unable to ignore the squalor, she will inevitably suffer in a constant state of mild alarm. And that's no way to spend a vacation! She lasted two days before delicately asking permission to sweep, wipe, and reorganize my shack into something more aesthetically pleasing and less likely to spread infectious disease.

It's been great having them around (and an excellent reminder that my cheerful battiness is not a fluke, but rather a genetically inherited condition), but I'm looking forward to heading back home tomorrow to sweet, sweet day-to-day life. Even if day-to-day life doesn't normally entail coming home from work to find that somebody has made you fried potatoes and an amazing omelete...

And that's my story! I hope all is well in the land up above. Big, gratuitously wet kisses for all!! :)

love and a zen-like state of quiet contentment,
aquela americana gigante

Greetings, all!
Long time no excessively wordy post. Life has kept me pretty busy over the past weeks, to the point where I find myself wondering exactly what I could share that wouldn’t necessitate an unreadable novel-length update.

But I guess work is a good place to start.

Teaching this year is four hundred percent better than last year. I can still remember the first “lessons” I ever gave in Quissico. They were a disaster. I walked uncertainly into the classroom like a husband sent on his first mission into the “feminine hygiene” aisle at the supermarket, awkward, certain that everyone was staring and judging.

Except that in this case, everyone really WAS staring and judging. Seventy pairs of watchful eyes, theoretically at my command.

“So….” I said. “Right. I guess I’m your teacher then. English. Do you like English?”

The seventy pairs of eyes blinked. Silence.

“Great. And do you know any English? Like colors? Animals? Clothing?”

And so we made lists on the board. I was trying to assess the levels of linguistic awareness in their heads, and ended up leaving the classroom pleased, having not yet made the discovery that the four or five students who are inclined to yet out things like, “CHICKEN!” and “TROUSERS!” are the exception rather than the rule. That the vast majority of my kids have big empty spaces in their heads where two years of English in primary school should have at least left basic words like “he,” “she,” “night,” “day,” “hot,” and “cold” had not yet become clear. I assumed that they could do simple things like conjugate the verb “to be.” On the first test, I marked off points for misspelled words. I took off points for lack of punctuation. I was expecting the impossible. I was opening a can of tuna and expecting fireworks to come shooting out.
This year I started off with the (correct) assumption that the vast majority of them know next to nothing not just about English, but about grammar in general. We had a whole lesson on punctuation and capitalization. We started every class conjugating verbs in the present simple. Lots and lots of call and repeat.

“Okay class, so this is a….?” I cupped my hand to my ear expectantly.

Silence.

“This is a MAN,” I said. “This is a….?”

“MAN!” said the class.

“Good! And this is a….?”

“WOMAN!”

“Right! Now, this man. Is he tall? Is he a tall man?”

“No!”

“No, he is not tall. He is….?”

“SHORT!”

“Good. He is a short man. He….?”

“IS A SHORT MAN!”

Phew. But in the end parrot-like repetition is not only something that students here excel l at, but with classes sizes of seventy or more students, it’s almost the only way to make sure that everyone gets a chance to practice speaking. Also I’ve been grading my tests with a far looser hand. I still dispense lots of red ink making corrections, but this year students got full points for writing that a house is “biger then” a chicken. Or that the mother of your mother is your “grahmather.” If it can be sounded out to produce something that one might possibly understand as English, I change the spelling with red pen and give them full credit.

Another big difference so far is my work load. At first I had the same relaxed schedule of five turmas (classes) of tiny eighth graders, which was comfortable, if a little underkill. But a recent faculty shuffling resulted in one of our four English teachers being transferred to Inhambane, and I was asked to take on nine more turmas of night classes to fill the gap. Now I have six classes every night, plus three days a week where I get to school at 1:00pm and don’t leave until almost 11:00pm. It’s exhausting, but not unfamiliar, seeing as the five years of my life pre-Mozambique also fell under the heading of “crazy busy.” I know how to work my ass off, and after a year’s experience, I finally know how to teach. So for now it’s okay. I fall into bed and sleep like the dead at the end of the day, but I still have my sanity clutched tightly in both hands. It should only be temporary, since we’re expecting a new teacher to arrive any day now… but madness of the temporary variety remains madness nonetheless. :)

Other changes include extreme material comfort derived from things that were purchased by me, donated by friends, or brought to me by my wonderful family over the holidays:

1) A refridgerator. Tiny. Blessed. It sits on my floor all day long humming and making things cold, and I wake up most days surprised to find such a modern-looking device squatting on the floor of my two-room shack. I no longer have to wait for winter to buy butter or finish off a can of jam in a matter of days!!

2) A hammock. Nylon. Lightweight. Suspended in the somewhat precarious shade between my guava and acacia trees, facilitating afternoon naps that don’t involve trying to prop myself up in a fold-up camping chair or lying on a reed mat being marched on by ants.

3) An MP3 player with all the music that Andrea found on my laptop. After an entire year rotating basically between five CDs (two of which are the Indigo Girls), I have easy access to all the songs I neglected to bring in the midst of the chaos that preceded my departure to Mozambique. Puttering in the lawn and cooking dinner now have the optional soundtracks of Kayne West, Regina Spektor or REM. I don’t have to wait until ten o’clock on the weekends for danceable music to come pouring out of the nearby disco if I want to dance in my yard. I can put on the Blackeyed Peas and dance at five am if I want to.

These three items have literally revolutionized my existence. So much for anti-materialism. :)
In all ways, life here feels deeper than last year. My Portuguese is infinitely better. My house is more comfortable. My Mozambican buddies can make me laugh until I’m gasping for air. My students are no longer a mysterious, uncontrollable source of frustration. I figured out how to make fried noodles with ginger and soy sauce that tastes like second rate Chinese food. My house is surrounded by things that I’ve planted. I can go for a hike seven kilometers outside of town and have toothless women raise their hands and shout, “Ola amiga! Where have you been lately?” I’m comfortable in a skirt. I can dance passada.

But for all the ease of my second year, there is also a bittersweet undertone that comes from the knowledge that it’s probably also my last. I look around soaking up beauty and feeling an irrational sadness, nostalgia for things that aren’t even in the past yet.

I wish I could somehow bridge these two worlds. Go home to the mountains and rugged pines of the Pacific Northwest, and yet stay here forever surrounded by goats and chickens and palm trees.

Anyway. I hope all is well way far away. I miss you all like I miss freshly baked chocolate chip cookies: with intense longing and just a little bit of drool. :)

Namaste,

Ja aqui

Phew. It's hot again. I've been more or less sequestered in the illustrious Hotel Cardosa for the last six nights, where air-conditioned rooms are complimented by hot showers and everything is squeaky clean to the point of fragrance. Pure, unnecessary luxury.

Leaving the shiny confines of the hotel can be a little traumatic, though, with the low point being my trip down into Baixa to develop film. I went into an internet cafe to wait for my pictures and emerged an hour later to find that dark clouds had rolled in. It was still a muggy ninety degrees, but instead of cooling us down, the crazy gusts of wind picked up clouds of dust, dirt, and garbage which you could actually see blowing down the sidewalk in sheets. Air-borne filth stuck to my dirty skin like iron filings to a magnet and stray wisps of my hair stuck up in odd tufts. By the time I made it back to the Cardosa, where an attendant stood poised to open the double glass doors for me, I'm pretty sure I was repulsive to all five senses and generally bad for the hotel's business. :)

Actually, I think everything about the reunion of long-lost Peace Core buddies in a classy hotel is bad for business. It involves a lot of grubby people in flip-flops squirreling away packets of butter and jam at the breakfast table and creating a gleeful ruckus in the pool at 2am. We're definitely the only clients who can be seen making nonstop evening trips across the street to the gas station, where the drinks are cheaper, and returning faithfully each time with plastic bags full of beer and potato chips. Mmmm. I haven't had so much fun all year as I've had in the last month, without a doubt.

But anyway, all things vacation are now coming to a close and tomorrow morning I'll be heading to the circus-like busyard and finally, finally, finally settling back down into a routine in Quissico. I still maintain that teaching English to Mozambican secondary school kids is about as much fun as cleaning muck out of gutters (and not half as satisfying), but this year could only be better than the last.

Back to the real world! It's been so long that bet it doesn't even remember me anymore. :)

Namaste,
Jack

Mmm... Here I sit in Pemba, travel-weary, covered in a thin layer of grime (you can scrape it off with your fingernails and roll it into little grey balls - excellent entertainment for 7 hour bus rides), and absolutely amazed at how big this country is. I always knew that Mozambique is a little less than the size of two Californias, but since Mom and Andrea got here I've used almost every available mode of transport to travel steadily from bottom to top.

Mom flew out on New Years Eve day, glad to have seen Mozambique and just as glad to be bidding it adeiu. She enjoyed her time here, but after This left Andrea and I to finish the rest of our trip alone, which would have started out easier if we had utilized ANY portion of our over-sized homosapien brains and deduced that New Years Day would not be an optimal one for travel by bus. Not because of the hangover or the tragedy of spending the first day of the new year crammed into a tiny, sweaty, malodorous space, but rather because there were no tiny, sweaty, malodorous spaces to be crammed into: New Years Day is a holiday, and there weren't ANY buses running.

"Are you serious?" I asked the bus driver, who was reclined in his dark, empty bus drinking a beer and watching the festive hoardes bustling down the street.

"Of course," he said. "There are thirty-three seats on this bus. It's 8:00 at night, and you are only the third person to come by wanting to buy a ticket. Three people. Thirty-three seats. You can do the math. There is no way I'm going to Beira tomorrow."

"But we already bought plane tickets for a flight that LEAVES Beira at 9:00 am on the 2nd! We HAVE to get to Beira tomorrow!"

He shrugged. "There will probably be buses coming out of Maputo. You could always go out to the highway and wait for something there."

"But what if all the buses coming from Maputo are already full?"

He shrugged again. From behind me I heard the sound of a bottle breaking and someone screamed, "WOOOOOO 2008!!" I sighed.

And so it was that Andrea and I were sitting on the side of the highway at 8:30 on January 1st, trying to flag down ANY kind of transport that was going north. There wasn't really a whole lot to see. Men staggered around the barracas with bloodshot eyes, still drunk from the night before. Three cars passed us in half an hour, but nothing stopped except for a Mozambican guy named Jimmy who likes country music and practicing his English with captive audiences. He pulled up right in front of us and turned his motor off. I frowned.

"The New Year!" he cried. "Forget all your worries! Forget all your suffering! Today there are no problems!"

"Except that you're not going to Beira and we're stuck on the side of this deserted road," I pointed out.

"You have nice eyes," he continued, ignoring my lack of holiday spirit. "If I could write your song, I would name it Blue. Because of your eyes. Blue!"

I shot Andrea an irritated glance and she smiled. "I wonder if you should tell him they're actually green?" she pondered.

Some time after Jimmy left us, we saw the approach of something large and white in the distance. Our antennae lifted visibly.

"Bus?" Andrea asked.

"Maybe..." I said. "Dude!! Yeah it is!! Quick, get the sign!"

We'd made a special "Beira" sign that morning to better get the message across to passing cars, and when we held it up to the approaching bus, it did indeed begin slowing down and finally stop about a hundred feet up the road. I trotted up to the first guy that came out, who greeted me in a very official manner.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"Beira!"

"No problem. We'll go up to Inchope, and then get another ride from there."

Inchope is conveniently located at one of the biggest intersections in all of Mozambique, so this didn't sound like too bad of a plan. Even though the road was pretty deserted where we were, there would definitely be something passing through Inchope going to Beira. If we didn't stop much, we could maybe even make it into Beira before dark and thus avoid getting lost and mugged wandering unknown city streets!

So we got on the bus. It was a big, dirty, extend-o-bus that was coming up from Johannesburg with Mozambicans who work in South Africa. Everyone was drinking and generally merry, especially the man who had recruited us for the voyage. He had small, somewhat squinty eyes and wanted to explain endlessly the locations of the different provinces in Mozambique, or the animals that prowl the bush in the central, or the merits of marrying an African man... I nodded politely, but mainly focused my energy into staring out the window and willing the bus to arrive speedily in Inchope.

We putted slowly, but steadily along until we go to the Save River, at which point it stopped inexplicably for an entire hour while it began to pour down rain. Everyone closed their windows to keep from getting wet, but this proved to be counterproductive in an 85 degree unmoving bus. It became so humid that you could almost detect the presence of jungle-like steam. The windows fogged up and sweat ran down our backs. Water was running off the roof of the bus in rivers and thirsty people were using the streams to fill empty soda bottles with foamy, yellowish water.

"It's HOT!" yelled someone from the back.

"And it STINKS!" agreed someone else.

I looked over at Andrea. She was pale, damp, and hunched slightly forward in her seat. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, too uncomfortable to move. I fanned her with my hat.

"Theoretically we'll have to start moving again someday," I suggested helpfully.

After an overly moist and malodorous eternity, the engine finally ground to a start and we lurched slowly forward. I looked at my watch. If we kept on at this rate, we might get to Inchope by four or five o'clock, and then onwards to Beira before seven. The map showed it as about 300 kilometers away, and so I was alarmed when we made a sudden left turn off the main road in a tiny little notch on the side of the road called Mexungue. The man who had recruited us onto the bus and taken our money announced, "This is where we get off!"

"Here?"

"Yep!"

So I prodded my soggy sister into action and we followed our guide off the bus. He told us that the bus was going on west into the interior. He would arrange us a ride from there.

"I thought this bus was going to Inchope," I said.

"Nope," he said. "But don't worry. This is my home. From here it will be easy to arrange a ride. You, her, me, and five other guys. We will rent an entire car for ourselves and get there in no time. I'm going right now to arrange a ride."

As we sat down in a cloud of flies outside a barraca, it became increasingly apparent that the man who was leading us was not only annoying the people he talked to, but he had little to no contact with reality. I watched him walk back and forth, talking to different people in local language, them shaking their heads and walking away. His eyes looked squintier than ever. I thought I saw him twitch.

"So where's the car?" I asked, swatting flies and looking nervously at the long, slanting shadows on the ground.

"No car," he replied.

"What do you mean 'no car?'"

"You have bad luck, you know. It's New Years Day! Looks like there really aren't any cars."

I stared at him in disbelief.

"I mean, any normal day, cars as far as the eye can see. No problems! But today is a holiday, so...."

I continued to stare at him, with my stink eye reflex now fully activated. Was he serious? This 30-something year old Mozambican man had had no previously existing idea that traveling on New Years Day in his country was the efficiency equivalent of spitting into the wind? I could have killed him. After almost an hour of sitting and waiting for him to "arrange" the ride that would never come it was four o'clock. The sun was getting low and we were still HUNDREDS of kilometers from Beira. Not a single bus had passed through in this hour. No chapas. Maybe two private cars. Far from Inchope, even further from Beira...

At the exact moment that I realized that we were basically sitting by the side of the road on our own again, I saw a shiny white truck approaching from the South. I hurried up to the side of the road and tried to flag it down, but it sped past giving me hardly a second glance.

"Hey," said the squinty-eyed maniac, "That car isn't even going the right way! It's going to Maputo!"

"Oh. My. God." I said, in English. "He's completely insane." I looked at Andrea, my disgust now mingling with amazement. Our guide didn't even know WHERE Beira was!

"Maputo is that way, right?" asked the lunatic, pointing North.

The two women sitting at the bar shook their heads.

"Oh," he said.

I counted slowly backwards from ten. The flies orbited us in dizzy circles. They landed on our faces and on our many bags as we watched the southern horizon for signs of wheeled salvation.

"Look at that dog," said Andrea. "It's going to pee exactly on that square of cardboard! Or -- oh wait, not pee..."

In silence, we both watched the dog crapping on the side of the road.

We had to get out of Mexungue.

Shortly after I had given up even LOOKING at the bamboozling, squinty-eyed nut-case, a blue double cab truck with a canopy on the back stopped in town to buy some pineapples. I ran up to the window with big, desperate eyes. They were going to Beira. There was definitely room in the very back for Andrea and I. I begged. He looked uncertainly behind him.

"I don't know, it's kind of full..."

"We will pay you," I said, looking him straight in the eye, both hands resting on his open window.

He shrugged and got out of the cab. I motioned Andrea to grab her bags and then we stood staring into the depths of our new ride. It was indeed full: suitcases, duffel bags, four large pineapples, a huge sack of rice, and a battered styraphome cooler. I eyed the latter with suspicion.

"What do you think is in there?" Andrea asked.

"Hmm... given our luck, probably raw fish."

As the driver moved the cooler to the side it left a trail of blood. The lid popped off halfway to reveal a set of glistening, red, freshly skinned haunches.

Andrea and I looked at eachother in resigned despair. We probably would have ridden a crippled walrus into town if it could have guaranteed us that it would drop us off right outside our hotel.

And so it was that we finally made it into Beira around 8:00pm, after four hours sitting hunched over in a rattling, cramped compartment with the pungent remains of what looked like a tiny gazelle as our only company. The next morning we woke up in our hotel room, waited only five minutes for a cab that drove us straight to the airport where our flight was on time. Good-looking stewards served us moist, delicious finger sandwiches with real cheese, and we traveled more than 1,000 kilometers in an pain and odor-free hour. If it were possible to die of sudden convenience shock, I would definitely be writing this from beyond the grave right now.

Nampula, Ilha de Mocambique, and Pemba have all been amazing, and I have made definite secret plans to come back up and travel the North before my last year is up. Preferably in a private jet. :)

Andrea and I are headed back down to Maputo today, where I'll be staying in a fancy hotel at Peace Corps' expense for the next week. More then, when the internet is free!

Beijinhos e cervejas bem geladas,
Jax

Hello world! Merry Christmas! Somewhat belated, I know, but then again after a year in Mozambique I've come to the conclusion that doing anything "on time" can only result in much foot-tapping and forehead-wrinkling as you wait endlessly for everyone else to catch up. In my universe the creeping shadows of sundials make more sense than the mechanical precision of clocks, and it's always better to putter around the house inspecting your plants and drinking one more cup of tea.

Which I've been doing lately in the fantastic company of my travel-weary mom and sister! They've been here a little over a week so far, surveying the landscape of my new life with amazement (the ramshackle transport, the cheap produce, the towering palm trees, the women who could probably carry even a boxcar on their heads, if only they could find some way to get it up there) and occasional dismay (almost every bathroom they've encountered outside of Maputo).

The first thing my mom did when she made it out of the airport was give most of her candy stash away to one of the vulture-like opportunists who help recently arrived tourists with their luggage without first mentioning that they are later going to hold their hand out and ask for money. He rolled the baggage cart to the curb and Mom said "Thank you," in English.

The man nodded and smiled. He didn't go anywhere.

"Sim, muita obrigada," I added in Portuguese, trying to will him away with my stare.

More nodding, more smiling. His hand still on the cart.

"Oh, for the love of god. He wants money," I said. I began rummaging futilely through my pockets for spare change.

"I don't have any Mozambican money yet," Mom said worriedly. She opened her shoulder bag and began to poke around. She produced a Snickers bar and handed it over to him. "Here!" she said. "Do you like Snickers?"

He accepted the Snickers, but kept his hand out, still looking for money. Mom went back into her bag and pulled out a bag of M&M's. "Here, take these too."

"Senhora," he implored, "Estou a pedir dinheiro. Pelos menos veinte contos..."

Mom, frazzled, jet-lagged, and not understanding a word of Portuguese, tried to go back into her bag to see what else she had.

"Mom! That's enough!" I cried, horrified, and shooed the lucky porter away, happily inspecting his goods.

"Well," said Mom. "There goes all Jacki's candy!" She shrugged and smiled.

And so it began. :) I don't think I had realized before they got here how much work the first few days would be, seeing as neither of them speak any Portuguese or have had the benefit of Peace Corps coddling them through the first weeks. Coddling, incidentally, is not one of my finer points. When we finally got out of the city and into a house with no running water, I gave them the briefest run-down on the type of bathing that utilizes only a basin of water and a cup for scooping it with.

"Okay, but what about hand-washing?" asked Andrea.

"Hand-washing?"

And so it also came to my attention that people recently arrived from the States are not only used to hygiene being convenient, they are also used to it being frequent. I can't even count the number of times a day I've seen Mom and Andrea washing and purell-ing their hands or applying sunscreen and insect repellent as I observe them curiously from beneath raised brows.

Although I can say with certainty that my eyebrows are not the only ones that have been raising daily in skepticism. When we got to my house in Quissico and the "where do we wash our hands?" question directed them to the large, open tank of murky rainwater (collected by a system of gutters that drain off the roof), my mom fairly radiated dismay. She put up with my sub-par wash water quality until the last morning, when she ventured out at 6am and was startled by the sounds of frantic splashing. My cat, Jonas, had fallen into the tank. In his panic, he flailed all the way around the perimeter and stirred up all kinds of sediment before managing to climb out and dash away at full speed.

Mom drew the line there. She used the rest of the water from the jug to wash her face that morning, and that was that.

Anyway, things have been going really well, all things considered. I've been having a great time being reunited with the fam (only missing Dad!), and they've mostly been great sports about all the crowded, sweaty, disorganized chaos that is life and travel in Mozambique. I think they're adapting quite nicely, considering that they've only been here a week and three days. I imagine that by the time they get back they'll both be brushing their teeth in the yard and forgetting how to form orderly lines in public places. :)

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas! Or at least got the day off from work in order to eat their body weight in honey-glazed ham. (Or similar honey-glazed vegetarian substitute.)

Miss you all! Will definitely be sending hugs bag with Mom next week so she can give them out to all my loved ones in the Northwest.

Boas festas,
Jacki

Mmm... I would say that I'm refreshed after 9 hours of sleep in a giant bed, but post-buffet attack finds me busily digesting my body weight in eggs, sausage, cereal, toast, and fruit salad. Possibly just as sedated as last night. Even back home any kind of buffet is an invitation to throw moderation out the window. Here, where the "all you can eat" is in reference to things only glimpsed once a month during trips to the city, it's an invitation to throw moderation into a meat grinder and bury the remains in the backyard. And then open the door to your good friend gluttony. :)

Actually, eggs aren't by any means a rarity in even the most remotest of places in Mozambique. No one refridgerates them (even people with giant refridgerators) and you can buy them literally anywhere. If you go to the city, you'll find it crawling with small boys selling hard-boiled eggs for about twenty cents apiece. The eggs sit in direct sunlight and the majority of them are from yesterday, or even three days ago, but still I buy them all the time when I'm traveling and have never gotten sick. One year in Mozambique has convinced me that Americans are inordinately obsessed with keeping things cool.

I usually cook eggs at least every other day, scrambled with onions, tomatoes, and fresh basil. Once randomly for a pair of extremely mismatched travelers who happened to find themselves dinner guests at my house.

When I encountered them, it was a Sunday night and I was coming back from a walk in the hills with Mena, squinting into the setting sun and thinking about the peaceful evening I would have. Maybe I'd make chocolate milk out of powdered milk and cocoa and finish the book I was reading. Or wash my hair. It had gotten to the point where I could brush it straight back and it would stay obediently in this position as if frozen by gel. Hmm... yeah. Hairwashing. Probably a good idea.

As I approached the Mirador, the small collection of tables and chairs overlooking the beautiful swoop of blue lagoon, green hills and ocean, I saw a shiny new car parked outside the barraca, apparently related to the two white guys and a Mozambican standing there watching my approach.

"Jacki! Perfect! We were just talking about you," shouted the Mozambican, in perfect English. I realized it was Custodio, the man who is in charge of the development of tourism in Quissico. The first five times I'd met him he had been clingy, drunk at ten o'clock in the morning, and unwilling to speak to me in Portuguese. Exactly the kind of person you'd like to squirt in the eyes with a water pistol. But regardless, every foreigner who wants anything to do with land use down around the lagoon must go through Custodio, which makes him an excellent person to know.

"Hello Custodio," I said with a smile, accepting his extended hand. "How are you? Who are your friends?"

"This is Gert," he said, indicating a tall, older man with crazy tufts of grey hair. "He owns property down below. And this here," he said, indicating the younger man, "is Olivier. He's Canadian."

"Oh, fantastic!" I exclaimed, genuinely excited. "Nice to have someone around with a normal accent for once."

Custodio coughed. "Actually he's French Canadian."

Olivier smiled sheepishly and said hello.

We all decided to sit down and order a round of beers, and I put my mind to understanding exactly how it was that this unlikely group of people had become united in Quissico.

"So what are you doing in Mozambique?" I asked Olivier, who seemed somehow relieved by my presence.

"I'm traveling with bicycle," he said carefully, pointing to the bike stuffed in the back of Gert's SUV. "I start in South Africa, go up through Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda. Is beginning of trip. I start just three weeks ago."

Gert slapped him hard on the shoulder, "That's right! And if he's going to survive he's going to have to relax a little. We just took him on a little trip down to see the property and he sat there with his ass all clenched up and eyes the size of saucers! The bastard thought we were gonna KILL him or something."

Olivier stared at Gert.

"Isn't that right?" Gert asked.

"What?" asked Olivier, squinting as he said it and leaning forward, confounded by the rapid out-pouring of South African English.

"YOU, my friend! You were so scared! Eyes the size of SAUCERS!" Gert put down his cigarette and held his hands up to his eyes with thumb and forefinger together to demonstrate. Custodio shrugged and nodded affirmatively.

"I was worried about my bicycle," said Olivier, clearly annoyed.

"Your bike was FINE. Nothing was going to happen to it." Gert chuckled and shook his head. "Eyes like saucers, I tell you."

It turned out that Gert and Custodio had encountered Olivier around one o'clock in the afternoon as he was pushing his bike along the highway, admiring the view. They had pulled up alongside him and asked if he wanted to take a ride down to see the lagoon. Olivier, clearly understanding neither that Gert was drunk nor that "see the lagoon" meant driving 15 kilometers into the middle of nowhere on a sandy, one-lane road, had accepted. The short trip dragged on to three and a half hours, Gert downing beers all the while, probably cursing and getting stuck in the sand, and it became clear that Olivier would have to sleep in Quissico. Custodio had reassured him that there was an American girl living in town, and that he could stay at her house.

Which explains why all their faces lit up when I magically appeared.

Since Olivier had a tent, it was no problem to host him at my house. All he really required was space and water to take a bath. Gert, however, had also decided that returning to his property after dark was not an option and that he would also stay in town. He looked at me hopefully.

"Hmm, right," I said. "Well, I don't have an extra bed or even a sleeping bag."

"Oh," he said, crestfallen.

"But if you want, you can come to my house and I'll cook you something to eat. And I think there are beds you can rent in town. Nothing fancy. Basically just a place to sleep, but maybe better than the backseat of your car."

"Great!" he said, raising the last inch of his beer in a toast.

So it was that I had a grizzled old South African and a traumatized young French Canadian over to my house for dinner, to eat the only thing I had on hand: four eggs and toasted bread.

After we finished eating, Gert suggested we go out for more beers, whereby he attained a state of drunkenness that saw him leaning blearily across the table to shake his head at Olivier and say things like, "You know kid, you're either really SMART... or really STUPID. And I can't bloody tell which it is." And later, "You know," (hiccup), "you remind me EXACTLY of myself when I was a boy." He paused and had a private chuckle with himself. "And you have no idea what's about to hit you. No idea whatsoever."

All of this punctuated by Olivier getting annoyed, understanding the words only partially, but clearly understanding that he was being belittled, and asking, "What?"

It was definitely one of the best shows I've seen in years.

At any rate, it's not clear what became of Gert. Olivier and I went home and I convinced him to stick around for another night so I could take him on the beautiful hike to the ocean the next day, something I'd been wanting to do anyway. The more I think about it, I'm pretty sure my house should actually be listed under "low-budget" in the Lonely Planet guide for places to stay in Quissico.

Anyway, I should probably rise up and start being productive. I'm down in Maputo again to help out with the last week of training, which after the health sessions should be a firestorm of Inhambane newbies pumping me for information about their prospective sites. Good thing I ate a big breakfast.

I hope all is well in the other dimension! I'd send some sunlight to my loved ones on the dark side of the moon if I could. We've suddenly got way too much down here. :)

Ate a proximo,
Jacki

Hello all! Long time no cheerfully disgruntled rant. :)

It's been a gloriously action-packed last month, so I'm not even sure what most warrants writing about. It's like going to choose an ice cream flavor and all you can do is stare with lustful indecision into the glass case. Clearly forcing a human being to make the decision between chocolate peanut butter and peppermint is something only satan would ever demand, so maybe I'll do my best to supply a double scoop.

First, it's worth mentioning that we spent almost an entire month preparing, giving, and grading national exams for the tenth grade students to see if they were worthy to move on to bigger and better high schools in "the big city." A lot of them apparently were, but only because of our standard policy of shrugging dismissively at mediocrity.

Every day there were two tests that lasted two hours each, controlled and collected by two teachers wearing special plastic badges clipped to the pockets of their white lab jackets. Mine identified me as Jacklina Isenaug.

The tests came in sealed plastic envelopes direct from the Ministry of Education, labeled with strict instructions not to open them until the appointed day and the appointed time. When that time came, I learned that custom dictates that a student must be chosen to tear open the envelope.

"Hmmm..." said Teacher Banze, sauntering with slow sadistic ease through the classroom. "We need a strong student. Do we have any strong students here?"

There was silence as people examined their suddenly fascinating desktops and fingernails.

"No one? Not a single strong student amoung you? Fine. You. Get up here and get this show started."

Teacher Banze had directed his words at a short, skinny, sweaty young man who had had the misfortune of being assigned a seat in the front row. He rose, reluctant, banging his knees on the desk and accepting the envelope with visible dread. He pulled futilely at one corner of the envelope, managing to stretch it out, but not tear it. Thus foiled, he switched to the other side to give it another try. The same thing happened. The two sides of the envelope now stood up in twin peaks like bat ears and the whole class groaned in unison. A thirty-something man wearing shiny leather shoes and a gold wristwatch had to come to his aid, and as he dropped the piece of torn envelope to the floor, there was a round of somber applause. The test had begun.

I was excited for the phenomenon of one student in every desk plus an extra teacher to help me sniff out cheaters, but it soon became clear that these seemingly strict precautions were mostly a formality. As soon as the students had all bent their heads over their papers and began scribbling decisively, Teacher Banze created a great ruckus by dragging his chair across the room until he was practically sitting in my lap.

"Hey," he whispered. "Where'd you get that bracelet? Is it from America?"

And so it went.

The English test included multiple choice questions such as:

12. You _____ plant your own garden to avoid disturbing others.

A. haven't B. did C. should D. mustn't

13. _____ can not they sit at the clean table?

A. How B. Because C. We D. Why

And so it was that I gave up worrying about any of my students learning perfect grammar from their syntactically anal American teacher. Clearly understanding basic rules about the workings of the English language might serve only to confuse them when it comes down to the moment of truth.

So that's work: as circus-like as always.

I wasn't lying when I promised a second scoop, and it'll have to be regarding play, but up four flights of tiled stairs there awaits a fantastic double bed in an air-conditioned room with a hot shower. I'll be back tomorrow after making a gluttonous scene at the breakfast buffet. :)

Love,
Jacklina Isenaug

I'm in Maputo again! It definitely seems like I'm here a lot buying Pringles and olive oil and taking hot showers considering that in the beginning I envisioned myself living out on a wild savaanah somewhere in a grass hut. Which is definitely no cause for complaint. I went to see the new Hollywood remake of "Hairspray" at the movie theater last night and ate Thai food for lunch; all things considered, I could not be further from content.

The official cause for the trip was to help out with the training of all the Peace Corps Mozambique education newbies out in Namaacha, which was a really good time. The new kids are great. They run the spectrum from mega-nerd to Bachelor of Fine Arts hipster, and it was fun to be able to widen their eyes and crack them up with stories I've collected from the gong show that is my life in Mozambique.

Meanwhile, I've collected a small series of extremely minor health problems that I finally got to talk to one of our medical people about. The other day I asked another volunteer to borrow her chapstick and she raised an eyebrow teasingly.

"Sure, you can borrow it. As long as you don't give me any of your weird fungi."

"Right," I said. "No worries. All my fungal colonies are located far away from my face."

"I know," she replied, with one eyebrow raised. "That one on your neck doesn't look so good, by the way."

"Haha. Shut up or I'll rub it on you," I teased, taking a threatening step forward before finally digesting the meaning of her sentence. "Wait a minute... on my WHAT?"

And so it was that I found out that I not only have weird white spots on my left shoulder blade and a few dark colored blotches on my chest, but also a strange flaky patch on my neck that had potentially been there for weeks. I showed the visible ones to Abdul, one of our health guys, and he gave me some anti-fungal cream with the usual written instructions in brutish-looking Afrikaans. I also got to show him my mystery toenail and attempt to explain the origins of it's aesthetic unpleasantness.

A few months ago I started noticing that it was turning somewhat darker, and looked to be thickening up somehow. The whole nail was starting to curve skyward, and I fretted about it out loud to another American.

"Look how gross! What if it falls off?"

"Then it falls off. It's not like that particular toenail is doing anything important."

"I know," I sighed. "But it's kind of nice to have a full set."

A month later it was looking even darker and even grosser, and I had resigned myself to a lifetime of weird fungal deformity when I finally got around to showing it to a Mozambican. I presented my foot to my friend Josie one afternoon after classes. She was in the salon next to her barraca at the time, carefully winding rollers into a woman's hair.

"Ahhhh, it's a pulga!" she said, without hesitation.

The woman getting her hair done looked down at my foot and nodded in agreement. "Pulga," she confirmed.

"Pulga!" shouted Josie's four year old son, pointing at me.

"Pulga?" I asked.

Turns out that a "pulga" in Mozambican Portuguese means "nasty parasitic worm that burrows into your flesh when you walk around with no shoes on during mango season." Or even in flip-flops, as it were, since nowadays I'm not even barefoot when I'm taking a bath. It was explained to me in no uncertain terms that the pulga would have to come out, and that its means of exit would be a needle and a lot of elbow grease. Furthermore, it was recommended by everyone that after the intruder had been removed, it was best to put a little gasoline or Doom into the wound to ensure that its progeny were exterminated. I didn't quite go that far. But I did sit down after dinner and use a needle, disinfectant, and every available shred of courage to open up my toe/parasitic lair and squirt out a horrifying quantity of brownish liquid and white eggs. I guess the worm itself must have come out too. I was too busy trying not to vomit to really pay much attention.

But then, a month later, the toenail STILL looked kind of thick and nasty. So I showed it to Abdul yesterday, along with my fungal growths.

"Hmmm..." he said, inspecting it with great seriousness. "Does this hurt?" he asked, pressing his fingernail into the weird layered region under the toenail.

"No."

"Hmmmm..." he said again. There was a meditative pause, and then: "I don't want to alarm you, but I think you may be growing a second toenail underneath the first one." I stared at him, unblinking, for a good ten seconds. Then I burst out laughing until even people across the street were looking at me.

Oh the irony. Here I was worried about spending the rest of my days walking around with only nine toenails, when it turns out that the problem is really that I might forever have eleven.

Anyway, all is well in the land of Jackalina. I'm heading home today with my city loot and backpack full of dirty clothes.

Mmmm. Going home.

Namaste,
Jacki

As the 8th grade academic year has officially come to a close in Quissico, I thought I might salute my students with a quick sample of their best (not to say brightest) responses to test questions.

***QUESTION****
What will you do during the summer holiday?

Answer:
I will visit my mother
Im going to visit my mother
She is is my grandmother

Answer:
I will the mom moz is cap.
and women is capulany the best of visiting
family it is maputo or xai-xai

Answer:
I has have my right
I has climbed a trees
I has jumped and my brother
in traditional marriages a woman must obey her husband
you are climb
you are jump
the people have same right


****QUESTION****
Do you like dogs?

Answer:
No because dogs meat legs


****QUESTION****
Do you think women's rights are valued in Mozambique?

Answer:
cooking da food

Answer:
Yes, because I am afraid of Mozambicans.
Sometimes Mozambicans bite and also they bark.

Answer:
Drink milk every day in freedom and safety
can have black slaves


****QUESTION****
List six crops that we grow in Zavala.

Answer: pew pew
Answer: peanus
Answer: anus
Answer: people
Answer: I have dogs

After a year sorting through their scribbles, I was able to decipher that "pew pew" means "paw paw" (crazy British English for "papaya"), "peanus" means "peanuts", and "anus" is a creative spelling of "onions". The last two are just further proof that teaching English in Mozambique can be exactly like the Saturday Night Live sketches that make fun of Celebrity Jeopardy. :)

I'm in Maxixe today to rememdy my seemingly abrupt "empty wallet" situation. Yesterday I returned home from the market with my frumpy reed basket brimming with goodies. I produced an enormous head of lettuce, a stick of margarine, a baggie of dried shrimp, a small clay pot which will serve as a planter, and a used saffron yellow T-shirt that proclaims "GIRLS POWER: HOUSE OF LOVE 1998" in glittery scarlet letters. I held it up to to show it to Maria.

"Check this out! Isn't it cool?"

She looked up from the pot of chiguinha she was stirring and raised an eyebrow. "It has a big stain on the sleeve," she said. "How much did you pay for that?"

I stuffed the shirt back in my basket. "You sound like my mom. But hey... that smells good," I replied, leaning in to sniff that pot and carefully avoid her question. Mena and Jonas had joined us in the kitchen and were also eyeing the pot in a particularly covetous way.

Mena thumped her tail on the ground and stared at me pointedly.

"MrrrrrOOOOOOOooow," said my less subtle kitten, standing with his ears back and his tail pointed stiffly to the sky.

"I think the kids might be hungry," I said, picking up Jonas and trying to caress him into a less prickly and rigid state. He fussed and rolled the way I imagine an aligator might if similarly entreated to cuddle, and finally dropped to the ground to let out another high-pitched wail and glared up at me accusingly. "Right then. Let me go look for fish money."

I ducked under the low roof of my porch and began to search out all my secret hiding places to gather funds for pet food. I went through pants pockets and junk boxes and every small purse-like creation that I own. I pooled the collected change and one wadded up bill on the kitchen table and stared at it grimly. In total, I had 49.5 metacais to my name, which is somewhere in the ballpark of two US dollars. Since the bank in Quissico doesn't have an ATM, it would cost almost that much just to take money out of my account.

I poked my head back outside. "Hey Maria! Guess who's going to Maxixe tomorrow?"

And so I arranged for another teacher to cover my one Tuesday class and left the house early this morning with my backpack, khaki colored Fidel Castro-style baseball cap, and twenty metacais stuffed in my front pocket. It wasn't even enough money to get to the next town up the street, but I managed to get here free of charge due to the audacity of a fellow teacher.

He passed me on the side of the road with my backpack and determined eyes, and wondered where I was going.

"Maxixe! I'm broke, but it should be quite simple: all I have to do is get someone to stop their car long enough for me to jump inside."

"Ahhh," he nodded. "You're looking for a bouleia. Why don't you just tell that policeman to find a ride for you? He's already ordering almost every car to pull over to the side of the road."

And before I could decline, Teacher Zepherino rolled into action.

He waved at the cop. The cop waved back. He took his hat off and approached the cop. They talked for a few minutes in Txopi while I smiled sheepishly and tried to look deserving of a free ride. A few minutes later a chapa rolled up and the cop approached the driver's side window and conversed with the motorista in confidential tones. There was some pointing, more Txopi, and finally, the cop and motorista nodded smilingly at eachother and motioned for me to get inside.

Really?!! I was struck almost dumb by the genius simplicity and rapid success of Teacher Zeph's plan. He had to whack me on the back with his shoulder bag and shout, "Get on the chapa, mulungo! They're waiting for you!"

And so it is in Quissico when you're the only American teacher for miles around. Somehow, even if dirty and not particularly charming, I'm kind of a big deal. It's going to be disorienting to arrive back in the states where I can walk around without people gawking and doing double-takes like they'd just spotted a yeti.

Namaste,
Jacki

P.S. It has recently come to my attention that I might have gigantism. Another volunteer who stubbornly refuses to accept that he is anything but six foot two is EXACTLY the same height as me. This means that I might not be six foot one anymore, which was already an inch taller than I ever aspired to be. All signs point to a hideous glandular disorder of ceaseless growth. I will no doubt soon be a gawky, hideous nightmare, like a beardless Abraham Lincoln.

Maybe I should actually prepare myself for a lifetime of "dear-god-I-just-saw-a-yeti" looks. :)

Our unexpectedly long break in classes is almost over. Thank God! I've had a great time bumbling lazily around with my head in the clouds for the past month in a half, but in the end complete lack of enforced activity always somehow turns me into a lethargic, blob-like nap-a-holic. I'm not sure why, but my house is always messier the more time I have to clean it (the clutter providing a protective camouflage for my many ambitious "to-do" lists), and it's not unheard of for me to sit in the kitchen staring at a pot of water, waiting patiently for it to boil. I think the sole beneficiaries of my many "dias feriados" have been my plants, which I've had plenty of time to water in between resting and snack-making.

When I'm actually at home, that is.

Yet again I'm abandoning plants, pets, and townspeople to spend a short series of days in the city. As of five days ago I am a member of our Peer Support Network group, which is having some kind of training back in our old stomping grounds in Boane. This means an inadvertent one night stand in the restaurant and hot shower-filled haven of Maputo! After the usual trauma of standing under harsh fluorescent lighting in front of a full-length mirror, I was whisked off in my dirty sweatshirt to eat Thai food in a restaurant filled with well-coiffed foreigners, where my girlfriends and I promptly lowered the class rating by several stars simply by shouting things like "And THEN, the anal fissure turned into SKIN TAG!!" in our obnoxious American accents.

Anyway, this workshop we're having will presumably turn us all into amateur psychologists who can effectively console downtrodden volunteers, talk snipers off gun towers and other such miracles. We're having the training now because the next wave of Peace Corps Mozambique is flying in at the end of September -- less than two months away! Good lord. I can't believe it's almost been a year since it was me stepping off that plane, wide-eyed and struggling with two wheeled suitcases, still under the impression that there was some point to wearing deodorant and thinking, "Man, it's hot in Africa!"

Actually, all these months later the "hot in Africa" thought still surfaces on a regular basis, and will continue to do so as long as I am the pinkest, sweatiest, most naked mole rat-looking thing around in a sea of otherwise poised and dignified ebony.

But aside from the heat still kicking my ass on a regular basis, almost everything around here has finally reached a state of comforting normalcy. What at first was a strange new chorus has now become such a familiar tune that I can practically whistle it in my sleep. It's dancing with lots of hips and shoulders, sacrificing efficiency to small-talk as a general rule, and trying never to take anything too seriously. I've been robbed in Vilanculos, attacked by jellyfish at Tofo, and forcibly bathed by my host mother back in training: there is, apparently, lots of useful advice that I could share with the newbies.

In the meantime, my cat, Jonas, is getting bigger and devotes his days to prowling about the yard set on "auto-destroy." He eats moths, cockroaches, and once the entire lower half of a lizard while its still-living head looked on in horror. I need to go see about getting my tiny little death machine vaccinated, but he still seems kind of young. Especially for the Mozambican method of giving shots to animals, which appears to consist mainly of sneaking up from behind with a syringe and spastically jabbing them at random. For now I think I'll just cross my fingers against rabies and hope for the best.

You'd all still love me if I were foamy and rabid, right?

...Right? :)

Okay, that's enough of me. My friend David posted some pictures of my site on his blog, so if you're curious to see how I've been living for the last 8 months check out the comments section on my last entry, where he left the link. I didn't know they were intended to go to press, so you get the benefit of seeing all the realistic clutter and chaos of my humble domicile.

Hope all is well way far away!

Namaste,
Jackson "T-Rex" Icelong

Well, I'm back in Xai-Xai. Again. On official business for perhaps the first time ever, although goofing off in the company of friends and beer is definitely on the agenda. Peace Corps is getting everyone in the south together for a meeting, which will probably entail a lot of sitting in a conference room, forcibly converting our complaints and struggles into insights and productivity. And if all else fails, we're on the beach. If not a single insight appears on the horizon, we can always sit on the sand and watch whales lazily bobbing to the surface, slapping their enormous tails in the water just because they can.

The ultimate reminder that life is never to be taken too seriously.

I can't say that there is really anything new to report from Quissico. I've been in Mozambique now for almost a year, and although every day continues to feel more like a comic strip than reality, I find myself sitting down at the computer completely unable to decide what to write about. Things are colorfully dysfunctional so often here that life is always a good story, but nowadays my perspective has shifted so substantially that it's never actually entirely clear WHAT would be interesting to the folks back home. Eight straight months of turkeys wandering uninvited into classrooms, dancing barefoot in the streets on the weekends to music blasting from the speakers of parked cars, unwelcome encounters with every imaginable variety of suitor (I have even had 4 month-olds propose to me via their actively breast-feeding mothers), going for a hike and encountering someone whose straw knapsack contains a dead monkey with a bullet hole in its side, which they will sell in the vila for 100 contos... And it's all finally starting to seem, if not normal, at least to be expected.

And I love it here. I am truly foaming-at-the-mouth crazy in love with this place. It has occurred to me that back in high school my biggest ambition was more or less to "live in a van down by the river," eating a steady diet of government cheese a la Chris Farley in that famous SNL sketch, with only a dog for company and lots of time to contemplate the way the morning light filters, dancing, through the leaves of overhanging trees.

So where am I?

In a house that is actually LESS complicated than (and about the same size as) the purple Chevy camper van of my fantasies, in a sleepy little Mozambican town overlooking an oil painting of electric blue lagoons, palm trees and ocean. Living with a dog, cat, two tortoises, and a lot of lizards. Trying to personally attain some resemblance to a respectable English teacher, but always having ample time left over to go for long, meandering strolls without destination, or just sitting outside my friend Josie's barraca watching the world go by at snail's pace, talking about the weather. And trying to explain the concept of "dinosaurs" to people who wouldn't even be able to locate Italy on a map. In Portuguese. That's always interesting. No cheese in sight, but there are always tomatoes, bananas and fresh bread, which, as a Peace Corps volunteer, the government is definitely paying for.

Somehow it's all come full circle.

But it won't last forever.

So if anyone has any ideas as to what I should do with the rest of my life, please send word immediately. In the meantime, I'll be in the street, dancing barefoot with small children.

Namaste,
Jacki

Oi!

So here I am in Maputo again, trying to resolve the dilemma of my passport's recent disappearance. Fortunately this administrative hassle happened to correspond with a gi-normous break in classes, so when I got the call to come down to the Peace Corps office, I didn't have anything more important to do than finish washing my underwear and bid my furry children goodbye.

Our school's break actually started prematurely due to some half-baked logistical planning. For some reason the directors scheduled the final tests of the trimester to predate the end of classes by three whole weeks. The breakdown of attendance in the week following this test was like this:

Monday: Students - 80%, Staff - 40%
Tuesday: Students - 70%, Staff - 30%
Wednesday: Students - 50%, Staff - 10%

and then cut to Friday: Students - 20%, Staff - Me. And the woman who carts water and empties the trash.

Needless to say, the next week was even more useless, and I commenced staying at home during the mornings to putter around the house inspecting my plants and drinking green tea.

But it's been nice to float around free of responsibilities so far. I've been reading a lot and cooking more. I have been tagging along with my friend Mustafa when he makes his tri-weekly chapa trips into the bush, and am thinking about someday soon sweeping under the reed mat in my bedroom. (Reed mats, for those who are unacquainted with them, magically suck up all dirt and grime to be stored safely beneath it and out of sight. If you lift up one corner of the mat in my bedroom you will find it to be concealing a perfectly solid and rectangular patch of sand. Since moving in I've only moved it to sweep twice, and it usually generates a volume of dirt that would easily fill up a Nalgene bottle.)

Then, three days ago I set off at 9:00am to "take a walk" and didn't come back until 5:30pm, dirty, hungry and exhausted, carrying a large piece of driftwood over my shoulder and missing one sandal.

Mmm... Life is good.

Except that winter is already starting to slink away with its tail between its legs. After a few months of absolutely perfect weather, I think we're all teetering on the brink of reentry into the realm of forearm sweat and looking forward to that drop in temperature around 2am when it's finally cool enough to cover yourself with a sheet. Oh well. I've seen monkeys, dolphins, and whales in the last 8 months, and if that isn't justification enough for living here, I don't know what is. :)

Namaste,
Jacki

Just an update on the dentist situation, in case anyone is sitting on the edge of their seats in suspense.

Our dentist, who bore a delightfully striking resemblance to Dr. Hibbert from the Simpsons, explained to me in jolly tones that what was causing the pain seemed to be enamel loss and a series of tiny abraisions along my gum line.

"Do you happen to eat a lot of citrus fruit?" he enquired from behind his gauzy face-mask.

Hmm. And indeed I do, for it happens to be tangerine season in Mozambique, a glorious time in which mounds and mounds of this fabulous fruit appear daily in the market for the US equivalent of 8 for fifty cents. I have been averaging six daily: with breakfast, after lunch, before dinner, after dinner... And it didn't seem that any harm could come of it. Clearly more citrus fruit could only equal a happier colon and immune system, right?

But no. As Dr. Hibbert (as he shall from this point be known) explained, "In Mexico or California, for example, the farmers irrigate their trees. They water them almost daily and it makes the fruit far more juicy and sweet. But here in Mozambique, if you explain this concept to someone who lives out in the bush, they are going to look at you like you've completely lost your mind. If you have to walk three kilometers to the nearest well and carry water back on your head just to wash the dishes or take a bath, watering trees is going to be the last thing on your mine. So the citrus fruit here is very acidic, much more so than usual. Eventually, if you eat it often enough, it can cause enamel loss such as we are beginning to see here."

With that he folded his gloved hands over his stomach and had a little chuckle to himself.

I, meanwhile, was flabbergasted (which I assure you is a very unflattering way to look when you have wads of cotton shoved in between cheek and gum on both sides of your mouth, top and bottom). Tangerines? I came all the way down to Maputo with tooth pain because of my tangerine habit?

Hmm. So the verdict is that my habit is still not forbidden, I simply must remember to rinse my mouth out with water after every citrus-eating frenzy.

Who knew?

Namaste,
Jacki

Here I sit in Maputo, in the Peace Corps office, still picking pieces of a recently devoured Snickers bar out of my teeth and somewhat anxiously awaiting my 3:30 dentist appointment. About a month ago one of my molars started to give me some trouble, and I suspect that my lifelong submission to all things sugar has once again resulted in moderate tooth rot.

So here I am: ta-dah!

It’s been awhile. I’ve been a volunteer for six months now and I feel like I’m so far out of the loop back home that I can’t even SEE it anymore. I’m only vaguely aware that somewhere, on the other side of the globe, this loop still exists, and that within it, people I love are busily running around getting married, graduating, making babies, getting fat, going bald, and above all, enjoying regular access to cheeseburgers. Mmm…

Nothing much in the way of news here in Mozambique. Everything is gradually starting to normalize to the point where my two-room shack in Quissico genuinely feels like home. The only thing that is actively changing is the weather, which has begun to take nightly plunges into the realm of true chilliness. Turns out the Mozambicans weren’t lying when they assured me that it would, eventually, get cold. During the day it still regularly gets up into the eighties, but we’ve had a couple nights now that were in the fifties. One night my thermometer read 49 F, and I swear I was on the brink of death. I sat wearing every long-sleeved shirt I owned (which admittedly only amounts to two), a ski cap, and my sweatshirt with the hood up and cinched down, and still I was cold. Jonas, my kitten, sat curled up on my lap, apparently unfazed by the glacial air, and I poked him resentfully with a sweatshirt-covered finger. “You, cat, are far too small," I said accusingly. "Clearly you would be more useful if you were a roaring fire or a giant bearskin rug.” He purred contentedly in response, and I sighed. Finally I gave up and went to bed even though it was only 6:45, and read by headlamp until it was time to fall asleep.

The act of teaching continues to bob along on seas of fickle ease that go in and out with the tides of my mental stability. Some days I show up, put on my long, white bata, and prance into the sala de aulas looking like a gleeful mad scientist and energetically conduct the class as though it were a linguistic orchestra. Other days I drag into the classroom and find the act of subduing the endless chatter and trying to inject something English-related into their blank stares to be utterly, oppressively exhausting. Teaching English is hard work when your target audience would rather be hooting, hollering and making the occasional mask out of notebook paper and peering at you quizzically through the eyeholes. Once I sat in the teachers' lounge surveying a fresh mound of tests, utterly disappointed by the results, when the head of the English department walked in brandishing a sheet of paper that contained my passing rates for the first trimester.

“Jacqueline,” he began, in a subtly patronizing tone, “I saw a copy of your last test.”

“Oh yes?” I replied dismally, hoping that the conversation would end there.

“Yes,” he said. “And I have to say, I think it is much too hard.”

“Hmm,” I said. The test he was talking about had seemed ridiculously easy to me when I wrote it, but indeed here in front of me sat the smoking ruins of the students failed attempts.

“You have to understand the reality of the situation. These kids, they don’t know anything.”

“Hmm,” I said again.

“You need to get your numbers up, more of these students need to be passing.”

I finally looked up. “But seriously, what more can I do? I show up every day and teach them something small. I explain what the words mean. I translate into Portuguese if they are too confused. I give tests that are mirror images of the exercises we do in class. All they have to do is study and they just don’t DO that!” I was fuming. The tides of my mental stability were WAY out. Fish flopped around helplessly on the sandy beach gasping for air and danger of a tearful outburst loomed on the horizon. I began to look around for a possible escape, but I was hemmed in by the desk and the head of the department.

“Yes…” He said, as though speaking to a small child. “But you have to understand. These numbers need to improve.” He gestured to the sheet containing his own passing rates, which are 30% higher than my 53% average. He who writes things like “Entertainment are things that make us to enjoy” on the blackboard to begin the day’s lesson. And numbers! Percentages! AGHHH!! I was SO SICK of hearing about numbers and percentages! Who cares about numbers and percentages when they don’t actually reflect ANYTHING related to the reality of what is going on inside the students’ heads? Why bother giving grades at ALL if they just indicate whose parents have enough money to bribe the teachers or which teachers want to make it seem as though they are having more success with their students? Why? Why?! WHYYYYYYY??!

I sat silently, but my eyes began to fill with tears.

The head of the English department noticed and began, as people usually do in these circumstances, to panic.

“Oh, don’t cry…. Look,” he said quickly, “my numbers shouldn’t really be this high, but here in Mozambique, if a student is very close to passing, we give him an extra point. If he has a nine, see, we will give him a ten so that he will pass. It’s just politics.”

I let out a miserable wail of despair and put my head down the stack of disastrous tests, snuffling loudly.

“It is not necessary to cry,” he said, patting my shoulder awkwardly in attempted consolation. “Hey, don’t cry.”

To my further mortification, more teachers began to gather around to see what was wrong with the Weeping American, and I wiped my eyes and tried to pull myself together. As soon as the crowd dispersed to a reasonable degree, I excused myself and hiked out past the school on a trail that leads to an amazing panoramic view of the lagoon. Sparkling electric blue water, and the ocean stretching endlessly beyond the row of green hills that border it. Palm trees and warm sun in the clear sky. I sat down in the sand and sighed. Mena, who follows me to school every day without fail, plopped down next to me and looked up quizzically. I patted her on the head. She rolled over onto her back and looked at me upside-down with her tongue hanging out into the dirt, grinning like a loon and totally unaware that anything had gone wrong. In spite of myself, I had to smile back.

Man, I love dogs. Life is so simple for them.

But then again, I am definitely the only one at my school who actually gets frustrated enough to cry about the state of affairs. I guess if Mozambicans cried every time something was corrupt, disappointing, or unfair in life they wouldn’t really have much time left over to do anything else. Clearly my usual state of idealistic stubbornness is going to be troublesome here, but neither can I imagine submitting to the shadiness of wheeling and dealing in grades as though they were some kind of commodity.

Time to start polishing the art of bending without actually breaking, which now that I think of it, was really why I decided to come herein the first place. :)

Going with the flow
(Although occasionally getting sucked under and coming up with an indelicate series of coughs and gags),
Namaste,

Jacki

P.S. My mom and sister are coming out to visit me next December! Hallelujah! Any other takers? I promise you won’t have to teach ANY English if you don’t feel like it…

So it is: I have spent literally most of the daylight hours just trying to get 140 kilometers up the road to use the internet. I actually made it about five kilometers on foot, walking along the EN1 and waiting for a chapa or ramshackle bus or South African on a holiday to pick me up and take me to Inhambane City. Nothing much appeared. Birds flew overhead going about their bird-business and children walked by heading towards town to go to school.

"Give me money!" they said, adorable in their tiny school uniforms.

"I don't have money," I said, sweaty in my capris and baseball cap. "Give me a chicken."

They regarded each other with large bewildered eyes and scurried on ahead, whispering to each other in Chopi. I kept walking. More than an hour later, a shiny new four-door pickup truck finally pulled over and rolled down the window. It was a friend of mine, Francisco, who has a comfortable government job and is forever commuting back and forth between Quissico and Maxixe. When he found out that I was headed to Inhambane, he offered to drive me there on his way back.

"I'm just going to Quissico to oversee a little job," he promised. "We'll head back right away."

Free, air-conditioned ride to Inhambane? I grinned and climbed into his truck, despite the fact that I was undoing an entire morning's worth of strolling along.

So we arrived in town. His house in Quissico is right next to the barraca of the friends who introduced us, so I sat down and watched a group of men sipping on glasses of morning beer. I saw that they were selling chocolate bars with hazelnut chunks for twenty meticais. Mmm, I thought. Chocolate. Cheap chocolate. I immediately bought one and tore into it with great enthusiasm.

"Heeeey," I whined, several seconds later. "This chocolate doesn't have nuts in it at all!"

Josefina, the owner of the barraca, nodded and shrugged.

"I know," she said. "It lied," she said, pointing at the wrapper, which depicted a bounty of golden hazelnuts drowning in a velvety sea of chocolate.

I sighed and continued eating my deceitful goods.

An hour later I was still waiting for Francisco to finish his "little job," which now seemed to consist of drinking a beer with friends outside the barraca. When I asked if we would be leaving soon, he assured me that everything was packed and ready to go. We were just waiting on the chicken.

"We're waiting for... a chicken?" I asked.

He laughed. "For lunch. There is chicken, salad, and fried potatoes on the way. My empregada should be finished with them any time now."

So we waited on the chicken. And when it arrived, it was fantastic. By the time we finished eating, it was almost noon and I was thinking about just calling it quits for the day and heading home to lesson plan and read James Joyce and maybe go for a walk. But I was assured that we were now going to get in the car and speed, rocket-like, to Inhambane City.

And I guess we were sort of rocket-like about it... If you take into account that rockets might occasionally stop at five different roadside stands to buy firewood and take detours into towns along the wayside to drop off documents and talk about the weather with random acquaintances. By the time I got into Inhambane it was after two o'clock, leaving me only about an hour and a half to get in, use the internet, and start looking for a ride back to Zavala. Yeesh.

This is my life in Mozambique in a nutshell. I do a lot of shrugging and going with the flow, because to do otherwise would be to invite premature death via sress-induced aneurysm.

School continues to be a source of constant frustration, but speckled with random moments of unexpected joy. Yesterday I sat in on an oral exam that another English teacher was adminsitering to his hapless pupils. The questions were pretty easy, all things considered, but he delivered them in rapid, ill-pronounced, and unnecessarily complicated language that left the students shifting in uncomfortable silence and looking like they wanted to die.

"So what I am asking you is where you spent your holiday? Did you go anyplace interesting? What kinds of jobs did you do? I mean to say, did you do anything in specific?"

The student blinked. He cracked his knuckles and scratched his neck. He began picking his nose and his mouth opened several times as though he were teetering on the brink of saying something really important.

My colleage and I leaned forward, watching his mouth open and close.

"Well?" my colleage asked, impatiently.

The student, backed into a corner, finally began to produce sounds.

"I... I...." he said.

"Yes? You what?"

"I am a fish man," he finally managed.

Rude as it might have been, I burst out into a fit of uncontrollable laughter and the whole class looked up in alarm. The poor student, traumatized back into fearful silence, resumed looking like he wanted to die and my colleague shook his head and told him to sit back down.

I think sometimes, when your job is teaching English at a Mozambican secondary school, all you can really do is laugh. Laughter helps you to feel far less homicidal when a student sees this: "WILL (she/eat beans)" and gives you in reponse a sentence that is incorrect beyond all probable logic: "she is beans eat will". Laughing gives you the strength to plow diligently forward when it seems that for all intents and purposes you are trying to succeed in the teaching equivalent of trying to pick up an apple with a whiffle-ball bat.

Humph.

Things can be so unnecessarily complicated here.

I might never go home. :)

Namaste,
Jacki

So I guess it’s been awhile since I poked my head in and said hello. You all are probably wondering if I just wandered off into the bush never to be seen again (always a danger with Jacki even back home), or maybe you’ve just started to forget about me altogether (Jacki who?). Whichever side of the spectrum you fall under, I figure it’s probably a good idea to make an appearance and re-insert my proverbial two cents.

I have come to the conclusion over the last few weeks that my house is slowly beginning to make its way back to the earth from whence it came. I asked a Mozambican friend how long reed houses are supposed to last, and he paused to consider.

“I don’t know. Five, maybe six years? How old is your house?”

I thought about it. Well, Mike was here for three years. Before Mike was Jeff, and before Jeff was Jabiz. Three, two, two…. That’s seven years. And that’s not taking into account the termites that have established the east side of my house as a kind of reed and wood buffet. Then, when the rains stopped last week I opened up my bedroom window and watched in horror as wood frame on the bottom lazily dropped away, leaving the pane of glass to dangle precariously from a few cracked patches of epoxy.

I winced and made a noise like air going out of a tire.

A few days later, I noticed that the giant papaya tree that usually rises proudly from the cement floor of my bathing area had begun to slump against the reed wall. My house is built on a sandy hill, and it looked as though maybe gravity was finally winning the battle. I spent a few more days pondering the situation, until one afternoon the outcome was suddenly decided for me. I was sitting on the latrine, attending to business, when I began to hear a series of worrisome creaks and moans coming from the cock-eyed papaya tree.

“Oh, no you don’t!” I said. “Now is not a good time for me!”

“Rrrrrroooooww…. EEEEEEE,” it said in reponse, and the wall behind me began to bow under the weight of the descending tree.

I wondered if the tree was tall enough that it would take down not just the bathroom wall, but also a small section of backyard fence. I thought about the fact that if both canico walls went, I would suddenly be sitting with my pants down NOT inside my bathroom, but rather in the middle of my yard. Looking at neighbors. I think even Olympic gymnasts would be hard-pressed to rival the speed and agility with which I dismounted the latrine.

With a final series of agonized groans, the tree fell to the ground with a heavy thud, efficiently peeling back the delicate wall of my casa de banho. And that was that. Until I get it fixed, I am enjoying an excellent view of the sunset and silouhette of palm-lined hills while I take my evening bath.

Aside from the excitement of things falling apart, I was exposed to the drudgery of pulling things together at the school as the first trimester came to an end last week. We spent two straight days writing hundreds of disappointing grades in pencil, reviewing every single grade with other teachers, and finally copying everything over again in pen. The best thing about “conselhos de notas” is that it is the only occasion in which teachers are offered food as a reward for their services, perhaps as a means of assuring that everyone actually shows up. I enjoyed a heaping plate of rice and fish with a bottle of pineapple fanta while my dog stared pleadingly at me from increasingly smaller distances.

“Eesh,” I said, patting her on the head. “I think Mena’s hungry. I should probably go home to feed her.”

“Why don’t you just go ask for a plate of food for her?” another teacher said, talking around a large mouthful of rice and roast goat. “That’s what Mike did last year.”

I looked at Mena.

She looked at me with eyes the size of saucers.

I felt weird about asking for the school to feed my dog, so instead I took my empty plate and wandered around collecting extra food bits from the other teachers. Finally, I had a respectable-looking mound, and I set the plate down in the shade. She descended upon it like a plague of locusts on a really green field and I sat back contentedly.

“What are you doing?” asked the same teacher, noticing the happily scarfing dog.

“Feeding Mena,” I said. “Like you told me to.”

“Yeah, but, she’s eating right off the plate. The people who brought the food are going to be pissed.”

“Well, where else am I supposed to feed her?” I wondered out loud. At that exact instant one of the serving ladies rounded the corner in her red-checkered apron, still holding a wooden spoon. She was advancing towards me with a severe frown, which is a relatively rare state of the Mozambican face.

“The dog can’t eat off that plate,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked. “I’m done with it.”

At this point, everyone started delivering that look that I receive at least a few times a week. Like they’ve just noticed that something alive is peeking its head out of one of my nostrils. It had to be explaining to me (in tones usually reserved for small children) that Mena could not eat off a plate, even a dirty one, because she is a dog. They really couldn’t make it any simpler than that. We went in circles for a little bit: “But the plate will be washed!” “But it’s a dog!” “But you’re going to wash the plate!” “But the dog will still have eaten off of it!” until I finally gave up and just scraped the food off into the sand. To be fair, Mena didn’t seem to notice a difference. The next day I compromised and brought a plate from home from her.

So life goes on here. Things fall down and fall apart, but every day I put a few more things together and figure out exactly what separates the Mozambican and American mentalities. Sometimes it isn’t much, and other times we find ourselves regarding one another like two strange dogs. No pun intended.

Namaste,
Jacki

I looked at my American Lung Association calender the other day, and it informed me that spring has officially sprung way back up north and around the corner! Mmm... spring. It seems like winter is starting to lazily make it's way over the horizon in our strictly bi-seasonal zone, meaning that once or twice it has been "chilly" at night (read: 20 degrees celcius), and I've started to wake up to find everything drenched in dew. Still it is capable of merciless heat during the day (read: 34 degrees celcius at 11:00am), but I also took an outdoor bucket bath at 7:00 this morning with cold water and barely broke a goosebump.

The other day I was standing around in the villa talking to a friend, when a woman comes up who is always trying to sell me things that I don't want.

"Boa tarde, amiga!" she says. "Compra-la banana!" And she holds out a blue basin full of small, green bananas.

I shake my head and wiggle my index finger to decline.

Unfazed, she produces a medium-sized cardboard box and tries again. "Estou tambem com tartaruga. Compra-la tartaruga!"

Tartaruga? She peels back the flap and from within the shadows an unamused reptilian face glares up at me.

"Ahh!" I exlaim, delighted. "A tortoise!" I pick him up by the sides of his shell and hold him up in the air for inspection. He is about seven inches long, and looks pretty much like any small tortoise you can buy at Petsmart for ninety dollars. He paws at the air fruitlessly with his scaly, clawed feet. Still staring at me hatefully, he suddenly excretes a copious amount of runny white fecal matter.

"Ewww," I say, holding him at arms length. "I'll take him!"

So now I have a disgruntled tortoise living in a caged off area of sand just outside my kitchen. A few days later, I picked up a kitten from a fellow profesor, completing the desired effect of house/miniature zoo. The kitten sleeps indoors, curled up in a spiral next to my neck or under my arm, and during the day it runs around mewling like the only survivor of a horrible massacre and looking for things to knock off shelves. I am completely and utterly in love. :)

Now I have one pet that can go running with me in the afternoon and one that can cuddle with me at night. Then there's that other one that just seems to sit outside under a rock trying to kill me with its thoughts... but I have hopes that someday we might find a common interest.

Classes are going alright. Test scores have raised from dreadful to mediocre, and I am going to start meeting with the school's girls group next week.

Nothing of any real significance to report, which is always a good sign.

Love you and miss you all. :)

Your favorite pseudo-African psychopath,
Jacqueline