October 24,
2012
It's been
about a week and a half since I last wrote a blog, so obviously there's been
some major things happening here. Let
me try to recap...
Last week the
PCT's and their mae's had a cultural cooking exchange. My language group and I cooked an American
meal for our mae's, and our mae's cooked a traditional Mozambican dish for us
(not that we haven't been eating traditional Mozambican food for weeks, but
still). My language group decided to
make burritos, because it seemed like the easiest/most practical thing we could make. What I didn't realize when I got here was
how difficult it would be to cook here.
There are no boxes in a grocery store that you just add water to and
have an immediate meal. If you want to
eat well, you have to put time into
it. We started cooking at 7:30
am to have lunch ready by 12. Freaking nuts.
Anyway, our mae's went to the market and bought us everything on our
list of ingredients that they could find.
We had homemade tortillas (we used the wrong type of flour, so they kind
of fell apart), chicken, beans, onions, rice, tomatoes, piri piri (hot sauce
here...clearly I didn't partake), and probably a few other things I can't
remember. I don't know if you guys have
thought of this, but chicken doesn't come in a bag here like we're used to in
the states. If you want to have
chicken, you go to the market and buy a live chicken. Then it's up to you to bring it home, kill it, defeather it, and
cook it.
My first
experience with this was the day that we cooked with our mae's. At about 9 am, they brought out two live
chickens. The chickens didn't run, they
just sat in the yard waiting for their imminent death. Everyone asked me if I wanted to be the one
to kill the chicken, and I just responded with, "NO! I'm going to
cry!" So everyone laughed at me, but I was serious. Tears didn't come, but they were close. My friend Ryan did actually decide to kill
one, though. So you have to put a foot
on top of the chicken's body/wings and literally saw at its neck until you cut
it off or just leave it dangling from
the body. And then the chicken will
like bounce around for a little bit until it actually dies. Pretty sick nasty. Anyway, then you take the feathers off by dipping the body into
boiling water and scraping them off.
They actually come off pretty easily.
Then of course you have to cut open the chicken and take out the
insides. I didn't get a close up visual
of that part when I cooked with the mae's, but two days later I could say that
I'd witnessed that up close and personal as well. Then the chicken is cut up and put in this little grate-type
thingy that you put on top of a charcoal stove. You keep flipping the grate until all of the chicken is
well-done.
By the time
we were eating lunch, I had kind of forgotten about the whole killing process
because it was such a long morning. I
didn't even feel bad when I was eating it, so I guess I don't have to be a
vegetarian or anything crazy. Two days
later my family killed two more
chickens to have for the next couple of weeks for meals. They also asked me if i wanted to kill one
of them, but I declined. I will
probably end up doing it by the end of PST, just for the experience of it. The Anna that got here 4 weeks ago would be
disgusted with me, but when in Mozambique I have to do as the Mozambicans do.
In other
news, my Portuguese is improving every day.
I can finally have conversations with members of my family that don't
involve long, awkward pauses and other equally embarrassing situations. Using the correct tenses is a problem, but I
have a basis of verbs and vocabulary that I can definitely work with. I still confuse Spanish and Portuguese at
times, but I'm doing the best I can and my improvement in the past month has
been pretty incredible. Today I gave my
first mini-lesson in Portuguese about the slope of linear functions, and I
actually thought it went decently well.
I didn't stumble too much with my speech, so I actually think this whole
teaching in Portuguese thing is possible.
It might be far-off still, but I know that eventually it will come.
At the end of
next week, all of us PCT's get to go on site visits and stay with currently
serving volunteers for 5-6 days. I am
so excited to see where I'll be going
and see a real site; to see what my life might look like in a month and
a half. We find out our actual site
placement in week 7, and right now it's week 4, so I have about 3 weeks until I
find out. So that's super exciting.
Hmm...what
else? Having whatsapp has been great to
communicate with my family and friends back at home. Also, I now have email access, so feel free to email me if you
have questions/comments/anything to say (brandt.169@gmail.com). I haven't been able to get any pictures on
here yet because the computer that I have to use to post blogs is like from the
1990's. It has a slot for a floppy
disk, no joke. So that doesn't work
very well, but my mom posted some pictures on my facebook wall so you can look at those to see my
house and other things I think have been picture-worthy here in Moz. If you want any specific pictures, let me
know and I can try to take some.
That's all
for now! :)
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