eu vou comer arroz com boi

once again, i had a great post, and i cant seem to get it to work. ya the condoms and plastic bags...used for soccer balls...pretty smart huh? a realy soccer ball costs about $40, and when the average pay is $2 per day, isnt really reasonable. i guess nothing is super exciting. i started tutoring some 7-10 year olds who dont know the numbers 1-10, it is going pretty well. umm ya i guess i dont have a whole lot to say. i will post the other thing when i get it to work. love and miss you all! thanks a ton for hte packages!! it is like christmas in march!!! :) :) :)

This will probably be kind of random because I am writing weird things as they happen, so it might just be a random blob of stories. Every Friday we have what are called reunios de turma, which are just meetings of the classes. Some of the students didn't think that we were going to school, so they came to our house to make sure that we would be going to school, and then they carried our bags for us...interesting. I am the director de turma, basically I am just a homeroom teacher.Yesterday we didnt have anything to do and they wanted me to sing (dont asky why-they obviously dont know horribly I sound), so I taught them some lovely songs in English. You know the good ol classics twinkle twinkle little star, itsy bitsy spider, abcs, head shoulders knees and toes. If anyone can think of any other fun easy ones tell me because they love them. The other day my roommate said she was woken up at 4am, because she could hear students in the gym. 2 of the students came to visit us and we asked what time they had gotten up and they said 4. apparently the school made all of the students who live in the dorms get up at 4 and go running in the gym. A lot of the students have been sick and the administrators think that it is because they are doing any sort of exercise...once again interesting. I also met a German girl a few weeks ago who lives in my village and the other night we went to have dinner and drinks together and were talking about the AIDS project that she is working with, and she was explaining how they do a baseline study to figure out the level of information that community members have. And one of the things that a lot of people reported on the survey is that they think that white people created HIV/AIDS so that they could have even more control over black people in Africa....sad huh? And more random stories...And more random stories...a few weeks ago when we were coming home from the city the chapa stopped and everyone had to get out and go through this hand washing station, we all had our hands washed with bleach water in the hopes that cholera will not be spread. They also implemented the same thing at our school, everyone has to wash their hands when then walk through the front gate. Weird, but whatever. I finally remembered my camera one day when we walked to the villa, and on the way home I asked one of the mothers if it would be ok to take some pictures.. when the kids saw my camera they went crazy. They love to have their picture taken. After each picture they would jump up and down clapping and screaming because they were so happy. I love the simplicity of life here.The only bad thing is that everytime I walk to town at least 3 children say “Dona Cecilia tirar foto.” “Ms. Cecilia, take a photo.” I am also working on learning dialect- lets just say the progress is going to be really slow. I am only working on good morning, good afternoon, good evening, hello, and what is your name- but it is going to be a long process. One of the ladies in the market is teaching me, so everyone else gets a nice laugh when they hear me try to repeat what she says. But the dialect is so hard.My favorite world is malala- good morning. Muzungu is someone who is sick but MuZUngu is a white person, then plural white people is AZUngu...looks like it is going to be a long road. Thanks to my cousin Paige for the hemp, we have been making lots and lots of stuff, and we started our girls group, and at the first meeting we all made matching hemp bracelets, and they loved it Norths and Grams-first- THANK YOU so much for the packages! you might find this kind of interesting- All of the movies that you sent in the last package had stickers on the boxes, so one day I was being anal and peeling off the stickers while Tembo and Simba were here. I had fully intended to throw them away, but the boys had better use for them. They used them to decorate their phones and notebooks, and the continued to go on and on about how beautiful their note books were. And these stickers were not beautiful by any means. They were stickers with blockbuster bar codes- ohh the simple things that satisfy. As I am typing this there are 4 children standing outside our fence begging to come in, and then speaking Mbarue(the dialect) thinking that we understand. Yesterday one of carries students was wearing a Sioux Falls shirt- how crazy is that! Sorry about the bad link to my pictures, my mother informed me that it doesn't work trying to get it fixed, but I think if you go to webshots and search for Lsongstad it should still work. Once again apologies for this being so random, it has been written over the course of the last 4 weeks, which have for the most part been pretty awesome, so there is a lot to tell about. You will have to go look at my pictures, because I finally got to go to the top of the mountain and it is BEAUTIFUL! I am not even going to try and explain it because it was honestly breathtaking. We drove to the very end of this 'road' which was more like a footpath, it was like the end of the world. It is actually the path that the people coming over from Zimbabwe use. If you don't know, conditions in Zimbabwe are really bad, really bad to the point that people will walk for 2-3 days just to come to Mozambique to buy a bag of rice, and then make the 3 day journey back home. If they are lucky and can get a lift they can save about a day, but most of it has to be done on foot, horribly sad, but the people are still are so friendly. We were also privileged enough to meet this guy who is writing / doing a photo documentary of the Mbarue culture. And he has taken us to see some pretty amazing dancing, singing, and instrument playing. The last few days have been the days where I am getting ready to go to bed saying that I could live in Mozambique forever .I hope that all is well at home. DONT FREEZE! Love and miss you all.

ps- mom I have a new obsession with patsy cline. And to both mom and dad- HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!

Colleagues

I have some pretty amazing colleagues, ( have I ever used that word in America- No, but here it seems to have become common place) in the English department. One of my favorites is a guy from Zimbabwe called Goodluck. Nope not a nickname, his name is really Goodluck. My favorite thing about Goodluck is that one day he wrote a note to another colleague called Albino asking for a favor. In this note he asked Albino if he could get some stuff from me, but in the note he said “ Could you please get the 9^th grade book from the woman (white). Awesome reference huh, but I guess when you are one of 4 white people in the entire town it is kind of fitting isn't it?

And trivia for the next post.... if you had a condom and a lot of plastic bags what would you do? Or what do you think a mozambican would do. Nothing perverted please.

just so you can all be jealous...i went tubing on a croc infested river yesterday...good thing i didnt fall off!

I love it!

Hello Everyone! So I am officially a teacher! What a scary thought! I am teaching 5 turmas of 9^th grade english! I everyday at 7 or 7.50 and I am done by 12.05, so I am going to have a lot of free timeA turma is basically just a class. Each turma has between 35-55 students. And I teach each turma 3 classes a week- so my work load here is going to be pretty light. Only 15 classes a week. It kind of makes me feel bad because there are teachers at the school who are teaching. Classes in the morning, afternoon and evening. Our school is so big and overcrowded that they have classes broken up into morning afternoon and evening. I think that there are close to 45 turmas each with about 45 students. So there are somewhere around 2000 students. Last week we were helping with some tasks at the school and having meetings, and you would not believe some of the things that were brought up at the meeting. We spent 45 min discussing what is and what is not an appropriate teacher/student relations. They also talked about not beating your wife, children, girlfriend, boyfriend, ect, in the street because you are a teacher and a role model. I am not so sure what I really think about the teaching thing. Monday was the first official day of school, but we didn't teach. There was an assembly where they went over the rules(One of which was “when you have a question raise your right hand), and expectations for students and teachers. It was almost 3 hours long and really boring. One thing that I am not sure if I have mentioned or not is the way in which question/answer sessions are held here. When they open the floor for questions, people ask questions, the questions are written down, and then all of the questions are answered at one time. It just seems odd to me. The first day of actual class was pretty interesting. My first class was first period, so I went a little early. Classes start at 7, but students have to be at school at 6.30. Before school they line up by turma and at 6.45 they sing the national anthem. The students stay in the same classroom all day and the teachers move from class to class. When the teacher enters the room one student says “ Attention class” and then everyone stands up and says “ Good morning teacher, how are you?” I am well how are you? “ we are fine thank you.” and if you forget to tell them that they can be seated they will continue to stand until you remember. Also whenever students want to talk they have to stand, it all seems so odd Most of the 9^th grade curriculum involves Mozambican culture and teaching kids to be able to speak about Mozambique in english. Today we were talking about traditions. And one tradition here is called the Lobolo- it is basically just a bride price. So in class I was asking my students to explain this to me, one boy asked if he could explain it to me using an example. So he stands up and says “ I want to marry professora Cecilia and I go to her father and give him money.” I told him that was a bad example, but the class had a great laugh. But things are going well and I think that for the most part I am still enjoying myself. Before I forget I wanted to mention that my favorite part of Africa is sitting in my bed with a flash light for 10 minutes before I can go to sleep to be sure that all of the bus INSIDE my mosquito net are dead. Another story about the little criancas...when I was home from the market yesterday my hands were full and this little boy came up and grabbed my arm and started walking with me, a few feet down the road another boy did the same thing, and it was adorable because they were just grinning from ear to hear, and they were speaking all kinds of dialect to me that I couldn't understand, but really when a kid is grinning from ear to ear just because he can hold your hand does it really matter?

Estou a pedir (I am asking for)

This lovely saying is quite possibly one of my least favorite parts of Mozambique People will estou a pedir for just about anything. One day a child pedir(ed) for ONE flip=flop... really child what good is one flip flop going to do you? We also have people pedir for work at least once a week. One of my all time favorite pedirs was estou a pedir a bebe – I am asking for the baby. There is also a mother on the road to the market that will say A bebe esta a pedir um mil. The baby is asking for 1 metacal? And the thing about estou a pedir is that there is no shame in asking for anything here. People will ask for you for just about everything. I have read stories of other people comparing estou a pedir to the lottery. You play and play but never win... you just continue with the hopes that it might work. At least with estou a pedir they have nothing to lose.

Estou a pedir some beef stock...yes I know it sounds weird. And some glow starts to hand out to students who do well on tests, and crushed red pepper, Parmesan cheese, anything girly (ie facial stuff, pedicure stuff, manicure stuff, and magazines...new or old.

Love and miss you all (South Dakotans...please don't freeze- Africa is warm...come visit!)

linds :)

Ela Danca Bem

Back again, but this time only because I am a total and complete idiot. I have been told I am a dumb blond before, but I think that this story tops them all. At some point over my Christmas holidays I lost my bank card, I wasn't too worried about it though because you need the pin to do anything so I was just kind of putting off getting a new one as long as I could. I finally went to the bank on a Friday and got a new card, considering all of the paperwork was in Portuguese it was much easier than I had imagined. It took forever but oh well. To make a long story short, my card didn't work for 4 days, and when it finally worked I was so excited to finally have money ( I had been living off 3.5 Mtn- about $0.10 ) that I left my bank card in the ATM, now I get to go through the entire process again, hopefully this time it wont take 4 days to get a working card. But anyway... I am falling in love with Catandica. As I have said before we like a few Kms from the market, so we have to walk into town most days to buy one thing or another, and the kids that live along the road never cease to make me smile. They now know that I am not professora kelly and that my name is cecilia (Lindsay is way to hard for native Portuguese speakers to say). When then see us coming down the road they start yelling “professora cecilia, professora carolina.” it is crazy to be able to make a kid smile just by saying good afternoon. What is even more cute is the fact that the really young ones don't even speak Portuguese, so they don't even understand good afternoon, they just love the fact that we say something. They have also picked up the habit of grabbing my hands if they are free. It is the cutest thing to see huge smiles just because they can walk down the road holding my hand. The past few days we have been doing some work at the school, helping to type lists of kids who passed and those who failed so that they can make up new lists for classes this year, and the directors are amazed at how fast we can type. I have a feeling that we will be asked to do a lot of typing over the next two years. We also have two kids living with us. Simba and Tembo( the boys who lived with the former volunteer) are living with us for the time being. They stayed at our house over the holidays, and when we got back they asked if they could stay with us until they could move into the dorms. So for 2 weeks we have 4 people living in our house, a little cramped for my standards, but I can deal for a couple weeks. And they do lots of cleaning for us, so it is a fair trade.
From this point forward I am going to try and include random facts/stories about Mozambique in general:
The Capulana- Possibly the best invention ever.
The capulana is basically just a wrap, but it can be used for just about anything. Most women wear them as a wrap, usually over another skirt or pants ( I don't know how they do it with the heat). Capulanas are also used to carry babies. The women put the babies on their back and then use the capulana as a carrier- simply genius. Any one who has a baby and doesn't want to spend $70 on a baby bjorn let me know and I will send you a capulana. Capulanas are also used as bags, blanks, sheets, pillows, wall decor, diapers, curtains,. They are also wonderfully used to make shirts, skirts, dresses and pants. When I come home with 86 capulanas in 2 years you will know why- they are amazing! I have yet to see this done, but we were informed early on not to use a capulana to carry an animal( ie. Puppy or kitty) because the women will see it as offensive.
Also if anyone has any suggestions as to how to improve this- or any questions that you want answered- let me know
love and miss you all!
Linds :)
I am going to try and start my webshots thing again so if I get it to work I will put a link under my address!

hello africa tell me how you're doin!

i have an address now!
write it just like this
____________________________________________________________________
Lindsay Songstad
your address goes here

Alexa Banks

C.P. No.173

Chimoio, Mozambique

_____________________________________________________________________

that my friends is supposed to be an envelope. so address everything to alexa and just put my name on the return address with your address

also a watch would be a wonderful thing to have sent- i would prefer one with a velcro band

love you-

linds :)

feliz ano novo!

Hello everyone! so much has happened since i last wrote. For christmas about 15 of us went to stay with some friends in gorongosa. it is an amazing place close to gorongosa national park, unfortunatly we were not able to go to the park because they close it for the rainy season, but we had a ton of fun. we spent most days at the river and most evenings cooking amazing meals. who ever would have thought that on christmas day i would be taking a bath and washing my clothes in the river. we spent alot of time having a "spa". we sat between rocks on the river and let the water beat down like a massage, then did little peticures using river rocks. it was amazing. on christmas night we even had cheese foudu! there are now 10 of us in a place called chimoio. chimoio is the capital of manica provice and i think there are about 20,000 people that live here. it is a cool city with a lot of little shops and stuff. my friend alexa lives in a really cute apartment here, so we have been having fun. for new years we had an 80s prom party.we went to the used clothing market and bought some of the worst dresses that have ever been made and ended up having a great party. new years day was a day that seems so far from being in the peace corps, you probably wont believe what i did, here is a brief recap just so you can see how unpeace corps the day was:
first of all we texted a friend using a cell phone(cell phones in the peace corps?)
at 10.30 he picked us all up in his brand new honda truck, on the way to his house i listened to music being played from his ipod, and i was actually using a seatbelt(a first for mozambique) we got to his house and put our stuff by the pool. he then asked if we like gin and brought us out gin, tonic and limes. around 1 he left the house and told us to cook whatever we wanted. we then had a lovely lunch of shrimp and pasta while sitting in a massaging chair watching mtv. when we got home we had chicken stir-fry and chocolate fondu for dessert.it was just such a crazy day. i never would have thought that i would do anything like that in all my time in the peace corps. this guy works for the world food program and knows most of the peace corps volunteers in mozambique, he said that we can use his house whenever we want to have pool parties- he has also offered to give us rides to and from catandica and chimoio when he has trips to make. dont worry we have checked with other volunteers and this guy is cool, no one has had any problems. he is just a cool guy with an awesome house. hopefully today we are going to set up a post office box, and if everything works out i will put up my new address tomorrow. if anyone wants to send a garlic press feel free. also any movies would be great because life in catandica can get to be a bit blah(but i still love it!)any random spices(because i am going to be an amazing cook by the time i get home!) old navy flip flops size 7- i know it is winter so they probably arent avaliable now.i think that is all for now. love and miss you all. i hope the snow is not to horrible! ohh ya if anyone has a number with an area code that starts with 31 let me know because there is a loop hole in the mcel network and i can call for free!
linds :)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year( Hope you have lots of time to read!)

18.12.07 Tuesday
Below (6.12.07) is the post that i was so upset that i lost last time. But if you don't want to read it don't bother because it may not be too exciting. But anyway... i am now a Peace Corps Volunteer! Finally! After 10 weeks of my darling homestay family and living like a 12 year old again, i am very happy to be living on my own. Well kind of on my own... i have an awesome roommate named carrie who is from Charleston, south Carolina and she rocks. She is a huge fan of phase 10, honestly how could we not get along. Our house is great. It is actually nicer than the lovely little place i called home in vermillion.(I just took a little break from writing to fix the lock on the back door, this might be one of my proudest moments in Mozambique to date- I just fixed a lock!) Sorry if this is a lot of stuff that I have told you about before. But our house is in a teacher sort of compound. We are about a 2 min walk from the school and there are 12 teacher houses set up in a town house sort of fashion. Our yard and driveway are fenced in and we have 2 gates that lock, well one locks and the other is broken, but no big deal. Good thing we have a drive way that way when I get all sorts of visitors who rent cars they have a place to park the car at night :) but I have a living/dining room with a table and 6 chairs, a couch , 2 chairs, a book shelf and coffee table. In the kitchen we have a stove fridge, pantry, and sink. The bathroom has a BIG mirror(the largest I have seen since leaving America), shower, toilet and sink. My room has a huge closet, bunk beds and a small dresser. I just said today that I think that this place would be the perfect place for me in America My school is amazing. All of the rooms have desks, chalkboards,and ceiling fans.there is also a computer lab,and chem/bio/physics labs. The directors are all very nice, and I am really looking forward 2 the next two years. I have made 2 new friends. Simba and Tembo, they are students at the school and lived with the volunteer who was here before us. They are 18 and 19 and amazing. They help us with yard work and for the first few days went to the market with us to be sure that we were not getting muzungo( the word for white in the local language) prices. The most important thing to mention is that I saw a monkey in the wild. It was probably about 100 yards away, but it was amazing. I have also become more domesticated than I had ever imagined possible. I can now make a wonderful mango salsa that rivals my mothers homemade salsa (sorry mom, I guess you will just have to come visit to see for yourself ;) to go with the lovely salsa I can also make homemade tortillas and tortilla chips. Other amazing food that we have made includes spaghetti, curry and nan, and yogurt. One night we also make chicken strips (from a frozen chicken that we had to cut apart ourselves, a big accomplishment for both of us), but we ate them with real ketchup! I am so excited to get gas for the oven because as soon as we can bake the possibilities will be endless! The one down side to this house(sorry I have ADD and cant put this in any sort of order) that there is a HUGE bug problem. Lots and lots and lots of bugs, so I am glad that I got over that fear during homestay. I have also decided that the whole idea of those princess net things is crap, the only reason that you should sleep under a net is for protection from icky nasty bugs. The other night I woke up because there was a bug crawling on my leg( and yes I was under my mosquito net). But the beauty of this place makes up for the bugs. Hopefully there will be pictures accompanying this, but being that I am pre-typing this I am not sure if it will work or not. We are surrounded by mountains and they are amazing. It rains almost everyday, but that is the reason for the amazing lush greeness of the area so I will not complain. I love it here, so hopefully it will keep up for the next 2 years. I can not believe that it is almost christmas. I try and tell people here how cold it is at home and they think that I am struggling with portuguese because there is no way that it can really be that cold. That will be it for now. I hope that I am not boring you all to death. I love and miss you all. Once again thanks for all the thoughts and mail! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you. I am still working on figuring out something for mail.
6.12.07 Thursday
So I hope everyone has a lot of time to read...I woke up at 4.30 this morning and i have nothing to do, and now that i have my computer i can write my blog entries at home... it is going to be long. Tomorrow is swearing in-when i actually become a real volunteer and not a trainee. I am really excited. Then on Saturday I leave for Catandica, the place that i will call home for the next 2 years. I don't even really know what has happened since the last post. We had one more week of model school and thankfully that is over. I loved teaching but no so much being observed by my colleagues all the time. This past Monday and Tuesday we had a supervisors conference where we got to meet the director of our school. He seems like a really cool guy, but i am kind of worried because when we had question and answer sessions he was the one who was always asking why volunteers cant work more hours and why cant volunteers teach night classes, so that makes me a bit nervous. This conference was the most boring thing ever,and it was done in all Portuguese so it was pretty exhausting to be translating things for myself all. They served us lunch each day, and let me tell you buffet style eating is not a talent here. The concept of a line is out of the question, at first i got really angry about it, but then as we started talking about it it made sense. These people were raised with the mentality that if you don't eat now and get your fair share it might not be there 5 min from now. After i realized that i was a little less angry. The last session of the conference we were given the opportunity to write down questions that we didn't feel comfortable asking, and you would not believe how many of the questions were about volunteers marrying Mozambicans or volunteers being in relationships with directors or volunteers having children here. It was crazy. We are scheduled to get to our site on Sunday, and when we told the director he asked us if we wanted to start work on Monday. (We don't have to start until January when school starts) Peace Corps said that if we don't want to do it that this is the perfect time to start practicing the wonderful word NO! Apparently the school will ask you to do just about anything and at first a lot of people struggle to say no, but we said no, so hopefully they wont ask again for a while. Oh ya last Saturday we had a homestay celebration. It was basically just a party to say thank you to the families that took us in for the past 10 weeks. There was so much food and so many people it was pretty fun. We also got capula (the wrap sort of thing that the women always wear) from our families, and it was really cute. I guess i really don't know what else is going on except that i am so very excited to go to site!
i think that i should have a new mailing address in the next couple weeks, so as soon as we get our post office box set up i will let you know! I love and miss you all!
and for my darling family in cali:i got 2 of the packages yesterday...THANK YOU! I can not wait to eat ketchup(real stuff that doesn't taste like sweet and sour sauce)



26.11.07 Monday
Wow I am so excited! I am sitting at my homestay house on my computer and I can actually type correctly and not struggle. What an amazing day!On Friday night I went to the preschool graduation with my sister and it was so cute. All of these 4 and 5 year old kids singing and dancing. Saturday all of the peace corps volunteers had this huge thanksgiving feast and it was amazing. I have not eaten so much good food in one sitting since I was in America. It was really fun, and it almost didn’t feel like I was half way across the world. On Sunday I had my hair braided. Now I am not so sure that I want to shave my head because I kind of look like a man with my hair braided….but I guess I will just wait and see what the future has to hold. Model school is annoying because it is supposed to help prepare us for what school is really going to be like, but that is kind of a joke because like there is anyway that we will ever have a class with only 10 students, every teachers dream right? When I got home on Friday night I discovered that my 2 year bag had been dropped off(hence why I now have my computer) and I was ecstatic! But I realized that so much of what I brought was a total waste of weight. I can get toothpaste and soap here. Some stuff like school supplies I am really glad that I brought, but I feel like a lot of it was a waste. But I wont complain that I have it. Getting some more clothes was like Christmas a month early. I can not even imagine how sick of my clothes I am going to be by the end of two years, thank goodness for used clothing markets. Who ever would have guessed that goodwill(or worse yet…clothes that even goodwill couldn’t sell) would be the highlight of my week? So I love and miss everyone and I hope that everything is going well on the home front. Like I said I think that internet at my site is going to be kind of rare so this may be my last post for a while. So if I don’t get to the internet again before Christmas…Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. If anyone can figure out how to do the 315 area code thing through google I can call you for free so jump on it! Hugs and kisses
Linds J