November 24, 2012

Model School, Thanksgiving, and Maputo

There is a lot to update about this week.  This past week was our first try at teaching in a Mozambican classroom setting in the form of model school.  The schedule for it was a big mess and changed about five thousand times, but when it was finalized, I was told that I would be teaching a class on Wednesday, one on Friday, and two this coming Monday.  However, when we got to model school on Monday there was an empty slot in one of the 8th grade classes, so I was asked to fill it.  I couldn't exactly say no since I was just observing someone else, so on the spot I went into the room and started giving the lesson that I had planned for Wednesday.  Surprisingly enough, I gave a lesson on slope of linear functions in Portuguese relatively successfully.  Yeah, I was shocked too.  I felt like my class Wednesday went a little worse, because I had time to psych myself out, and I could say the same thing about Friday's lesson.  But after my lesson on Friday, my students knew how to graph a function of the form y = 4 and x = 4, so I felt pretty accomplished.  I have two more lessons to give on Monday, and those are my last big assignments before I am done with training. CRAZY!

All of the PCT's celebrated Thanksgiving on Friday with our language professors, and lots of the Peace Corps country staff.  We had around 100 people total.  10 turkeys, lots of mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, salad, pumpkin pie, brownies (that I helped make), chocolate chip cookies, pecan pie, apple crisp. Yeahhhhh, it was a feast. And it was sooooooooo good. :)  Seriously, such a good day.  We had so much food left over that I brought home two huge tupperware containers of food so that my host family could have Thanksgiving dinner too!  They loved the food, and apparently now I have to teach them how to make the mashed potatoes and stuffing.

Today I went to Maputo with some other volunteers (by ourselves!), and it was a very long but successful day.  First, I bought the modem that I'm using to post this blog.  I can now use my own computer to post blogs and send emails, which is super exciting.  I ate pizza for lunch and bought a donut which was probably the best thing I've ever eaten.  I also bought capulanas for my host family for going away gifts, a surge protector, and I tried to find an external hard drive/external memory for my computer, but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't exist in Mozambique (or it's way more than I would ever pay).  My external hard drive is doing crazy things and won't let me take anything off of it, or put anything on it, or do anything with it....so that's fun.  But it's not the end of the world.  I'm going to put some media on the actual hard drive of my computer and call it a day.

So, it was a successful day.  Time is going so  fast now, especially since I'm quickly approaching the time where I will have to say goodbye to my new friends who will be in the northern provinces of Mozambique (days of travel away from me).  But I'm also super excited to be going to site soon, seeing where I'll be living, and getting accustomed to my new life for the next two years.  :)

Important things coming up:
December 4th: Leaving Namaacha and officially swearing in to the Peace Corps
December 8-9th: Messica! :)

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