My Home in Namaacha

It has been a crazy first week in Africa and I will do my best to summarize the past week’s events…

My Home in Namaacha

Where do I begin…I guess I should start by describing my living situation.

I am living with a family here in the city of Namaacha (pronounced NaMAsha), about an hour and a half bus ride from Maputo, the capital of Mozambique.  All the volunteers are dispersed around the town living with different homestay families.  The city has beautiful views of the mountains around the area.  , It is about a 45 minute walk from one end of the city to the other.  The town itself is bigger than I was picturing, houses are not right on top of each other and are more spaced out so that they have their own yard most times.  Roads are dirt, except for one paved road, which makes for a lot of mud in the raining season which is about to begin. 

In my house lives my mae (mom) Palmira, avo (grandma), irma (sister) Senina (19 years old), and irmao (brother) Whyte (16 years old).  I have also met several cousins who sometimes stop by for lunch or dinner.  Peace Corps does an intensive training with the families prior to our arrival, covering the importance of proper food and water preparation and overall methods for making sure we stay healthy and safe during these 10 weeks of homestay life.  The families have basically been told that we don’t know how to do anything, let alone speak Portuguese, so they are extremely patient with me as I try to communicate in my broken knowledge of the language and go throughout the house asking how to say things or practicing formulating an intelligible sentence in Portuguese.  Our homestay families are a great resource for learning everything from how to clean the house, to cooking, to killing that chicken (haven’t done it yet, but I told them I would watch them do it one time.  Though I did discover that my mae is afraid of killing the chicken and has my sister or brother do it, or one can buy chicken in the market.)

In the house, there are two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room.  Following Peace Corps policy, I have my own room with a lock on the door and bars on the window.  I was provided with a plastic box where I have all my clothes stored, a wire to hang clothes on and hangers, a table, bed, and a chair.  Quaint yet comfortable.  I wouldn’t recommend the bed to anyone with a back problem, but it works.  My only complaint, the pillow….probably the hardest pillow I have ever seen.  The house, like most houses in the area, has electricity, but there are sometimes random power outages that can last for a few minutes to a few hours.

So, on to the kitchen.  My house has an electric stove and an oven (I came home to cookies and cake the other day).  They also have a freezer/refrigerator which basically resembles one of those rectangular ice cream freezers.  Meals in my house typically consist of a meat, starch, and vegetable.  They definitely use a lot of oil in their cooking and have a heavily starch dominated diet, but my family definitely seems to cook somewhat more healthy than other families.  For breakfast I usually have bread with peanut butter, or a fried egg, and polonhy (which I think is a kind of bologna type thing).  Then they have an AM snack of either fruit or saltine-like crackers.  Lunch and dinner are pretty much interchangeable meals regarding what we eat, but  I’ve had fish, chicken, beans, and sausage, pasta (spaghetti noodles),  and we always have either rice or potatoes.   The meal finishes with fruit, such as orange, papaya, bananas, pears, apple, etc.  I have quickly learned ways to say I am full, as they always offer seconds and seem confused when I decline until I explained, “Tenho uma estomaginha.” (I have a little stomach), to which I received chuckles but I see it was on our cheat-sheet intro to Portuguese paper for a reason!  They definitely eat huge platefuls of food!  Mom, make room in my bridesmaid dress in case you have to take it out a little! I can only say no politely so many times to seconds, and I have heard girls typically gain weight during training! Quite the starch filled diet!  Though, compared to other families, my family seems to cook fairly healthy.  I am hoping to engage in a nice cultural exchange soon and offer to cook dinner for them. 

On to the fun stuff: the bathroom.  My bathroom is located outside the house a short walk, about 10-20 steps or so.  (Some houses have the bathroom inside.)  SO there are two types of toilets: latrines and “flushing”, I have the later.  A latrine is just a key shaped hole in the ground, I haven’t actually seen one yet, but I can imagine, and you just squat over it and do your thing.  For flushing toilets, you do your business and then pour in a bucket of water and it goes down.  (They do have toilet paper.)  So woo, having a toilet seat to sit on! 

So showers…. They aren’t as bad as it sounds, I promise.  I take water from this huge trashcan like holder where it is stored in the house and mix it with some boiled water to create nice warm bath water in a large basin which I proceed to carry out to the bathroom.  Then you take a cup and use that to pour the water over yourself.  It sounds terrible, but it’s really not all that bad, surprisingly.  I can imagine it feeling really good when it gets super hot outside soon, but it has been pretty cold lately in the morning which wakes you up pretty quickly.

Weather: the weather here is pretty random.  One day it was freezing and rained a little then the next the sun was out and it was a nice 80ish degrees.  The rainy season is coming though and I anticipate it to be very muddy, and loud on these tin roofs which certainly make the smallest sprinkle sound like a torrential downpour. 

SO those are the typical day to day things in probably way too much detail.  It is amazing how different each volunteer’s house and family are.  Some have bigger houses, some smaller, outside latrines, and inside toilets, houses with several younger kids and little privacy, or houses with demanding maes who make them bathe three times a day, etc.  Overall, I have had no problems with my family.  They are extremely respectful of my house, give me privacy but are eager to help me learn when I ask.  At first, I wished I had a family with more younger kids in it because they somewhat cling on to you and love teaching you vocab, etc., but I have definitely come to enjoy having my own space and having a family where I am not afraid to join in but don’t feel pressured to always do so.  And then I can just visit other friends’ houses and play with their kids when I want.

I will try to upload photos soon!