Sleeping didn't come easy but waking up was alright. Still no sleeping pill! There were omelets for breakfast but I had a piece of toast and jam, and three cups of some AMAZING coffee. Sitting outside to have a cup of coffee was amazing, it's humid but cool.
One thing that's bothered me is that there is another vegetarian on this trip, and I was hoping it would be like an alliance type thing but all I've seen him doing is complaining about not having food or a bunch of hot water for everyone to shower. I didn't even take a shower since we've been in Mozambique, plus....get over it! You can see peoples houses from our lodge, and they clearly don't even have power. Plus the ladies and gentlemen who are cooking for us are so sweet, just appreciate what you do have and don't be a jerk. That's like a rule of life.
We took a Choppa through the city, we had a pitstop at a shoprite to get some things for lunches/snacks.
They have a lot of things that are similar to American but some that are not even close. Also, they keep things very differently than we do, eggs are kept in stacks without refrigeration and there are things like intestines and whole giant fish on display.
When we got to the Women's Center. We were greeting by singing and it was a really heart warming experience.
There was a welcoming ceremony and we were paired up with women to do interviews. It was awesome to sit in the school house with the women and hear the translations of what the Hamblin's were saying.
Our initial interviews consisted of asking the woman's age, marital status, age of their children and various health questions. They were surprisingly receptive to the questions and it was interesting trying to communicate with the language barrier.
After the welcoming center we were able to walk and see the building that's being constructed to be the women's center. Something got mixed up with the building plans and the building is three times bigger than it should be. This is causing problems because the walls are too thin to hold up the roof, they are currently working to put in metal supports to help relieve the tension in the roof.
There is a major garbage problem everywhere in Mozambique. They also do not have a garbage man or a dump, they simply create a large pile of garbage and burn it. One part of our job was to collect the garbage and put it in piles. Without tools we used out feet and hands to level out the floor and smash large dirt clods. There was also a frog, sapo, in one of the rooms and I rescued him from certain death as someone suggested killing him.
We finished out our first day at the women's center about an hour and a half before we had scheduled to be there, which was nice because we were all exhausted. Getting on the choppa we began the travel back to the lodge. It's hard to take pictures out the window of the moving vehicle but I got this good one of one version of public transportation that they have in the city. Many people travel this way or stuffed into vans.
For dinner we had an awesome authentic Mozambican dinner. Matapa which is made out of cassava leaves and coconut milk, rice and xima, which is cornflour and water. You take a piece of the xima and roll it into a ball and dip it into the Matapa/rice mix. It's AMAZING. Beatrice, the lady of the house told us she would be doing more experiments with authentic food. I'm very excited.
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