It's my personal goal to blog at least once a month. Since it's already Jan 31 today and my laptop still have some charge left, here's a quick update since the last post before my laptop runs out of battery!
Holiday break:
I was on holiday break from 12/20/14 to 1/20/15!! I came back to site after 2 weeks only to find out I have another 2 weeks off the weekend before I thought I'm supposed to be back at work hahah. For the holidays, I traveled to Zambezia province to spend Christmas in Namarroi and then back to Pemba for New Year. I got to visit PCVs and see their sites in Mocuba, Namarroi, Alto Molocue, and Macomia. Zambezia is beautiful with lots of mountains and really cheap fruits!! 33 cents for pineapple?! I'm so jealous! I also went hiking in the tea field in Gurue, which was also beautiful. Here's a map to show how much ground I've covered during my break! Purple dot is my site, red dots are where I traveled to.
Power outage:
My longest power outage record since I've been here was 3 days.. I have a new record now and it's 20 days AND COUNTING! ahh! So the power went out on the evening of 1/12/15 and I didn't think anything of it since power outage is a normal thing here. 3 days later, I finally heard about the heavy rainfall that caused a lot of damage and deaths in Zambezia. Read here for more info on the floods and storms: http://allafrica.com/stories/201501210330.html
I have to give props to PCVs who are living without electricity at their sites! Life is hard here already but it is even harder without electricity! All of my electronics were dead so I was unreachable for days. Phone service was also out for awhile. I slept at 7pm because there's nothing else to do in the dark and end up waking between 10-midnight and try to go back to sleep until the morning. Cooking everyday with charcoal really sucks... good thing I have amazing neighbors who give me food often :) I've also been eating a lot of snacks like mandaze (fried donut-like ), bread with peanut butter, and baija (fried bread-like bean). It's also tempo de fome (starving time) here so the market literally have nothing but onions. My friend gave me a solar panel that charges to a lamp which can also be used to charge some stuff. It's been a life saver! The cost of candles was getting expensive! It was rainy and gloomy most of the first 2 weeks of the power outage so I was only able to charge about 10% on my phone each day.. 20% on a slightly sunnier day. This past week, it was really sunny and hot. I was hoping it would rain again soon and it finally did yesterday! I desperately needed water since I was almost out of the rain water I saved from the last time it rained. No electricity = no water since it has to be pumped from the ground. By the way, I've been taking cold bucket bath.. rain water is REALLY really cold :( After 2 weeks of finding ways (solar panel, car, other org have a generator, etc) to charge my phone whenever I can, I finally have a constant place to charge all my electronics! My org got our generator from Chiure back so I can charge during the weekdays. As long as I have a place to charge my electronics, life without electricity isn't so bad now! I think I'm finally getting used to this lifestyle hahah Okay I have 20% left on my laptop so my power outage ranting will stop here. Here's some pictures:
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| candlelit bucket bath |
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| cooking with charcoal |
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| collecting rain water |
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| Generator at work |
Hora das Criancas:
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| 1/8/15 coloring pages |
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| 1/27/15 coloring pages |
-The termites has been destroying the roof in my closet! Because of the power outage, it's always dark in my closet so they were having a feast eating away the cardboard roof. My landlord helped me fix the piece that was falling off but then they started attacking another piece and it's starting to fall off too. I decided to just replace the whole roof with tin since this problem keeps on happening.
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| new roof! |
-It took a little over 2 months but I finally got my care package from Bryan!! <3 I've been anxiously waiting for hot cheetos!! hahah
-I booked my flight to Cape Town for April!!! I'm so excited for April! Bryan's coming here to visit for 2 weeks and then we're spending a week in Cape Town :)
