“What continent are you on?” ~Anonymous

(quotation borrowed from an email that I received a few weeks ago after going to the internet cafe for the first time in a few decades)

I believe I owe a bit of an explanation. Here I am, having been here for several weeks, already an expert bucket-bath taker, and there you are, left cliff-hung at the end of the previous chapter when I boarded the plane knowing only enough Portuguese to get around Hogwarts and to ask where the latrine is.

So, I have joined the Corps of Peace, the 17^th group to be in Mozambique (it’s in Africa), to teach biology. That really is about all I knew when I left, because plans around here have a habit of changing at the last minute, not existing in the first place, or existing but kept locked in a top secret high security vault and not made known to anyone until they are being carried out. So I am perfecting my ability to ‘go with the flow,’ whether the flow is a short walk with my host brother to watch a soccer game which actually turns into a 4-hour long hike, or whether it’s a flow of rain and mud down the path that I use as a shortcut and takes me sliding down with it.

But the basic structure is becoming clear to me now that I’m in the midst of it. We are education volunteers, currently being educated on how to educate. Training takes place in Namaacha, a town composed of rust-red dirt that sticks to everything and trees with purple flowers, near the border of Swaziland and South Africa. There are 51 of us (we are very conspicuous) each living with a host family for 10 weeks, while we attempt to cram an entire language into our heads and new foods into our bodies without our digestive systems launching a rebellion. At the end of training (if you make it through…dun dun dun) we will be sworn in as real live Volunteers, and sent to our individual sites around the country – which we find out next week! Once settled in there, where we will be alone or with 1 other volunteer, we start teaching around January. And thus begins what I am sensing will be the craziest 2 years of my life.

the road to Mike, Adam, and my houses, lovingly dubbed "Purple Tree Way" in honor of the landmark we use to locate the turn

where in the world is Mozambique?