Hey look, I'm an adult

While we were in Nampula for a Peace Corps conference last week, our school received two new English teachers.  They gave my lone English class to one of them.  The good thing about it is that now I have a four-day weekend (if you don't count my youth group meetings on Saturday and Monday).  The bad thing is that I kinda sorta wanted to teach English, and it was going really well.  Also, the students of 8D will never have a chance to properly pronounce the letter "r" in English

Professor Ruben and I are organizing a two-week course to train the student counselors who will work in our youth counseling center.  Last year, Ruben, a born trainer, did all but one of the sessions.  This year, I have the majority of the sessions.  The good thing is that I have all the technical subjects; gender, reproductive health, pregnancy, contraception, people living with HIV, etc.  All reasonable subjects for a non-counselor/biology teacher.  Thank god he didn't leave me with things like "behavior change" and "the cultural and traditional aspects of counseling".  Nevertheless, I'm nervous.  I'm the lead trainer.  Why do I suddenly feel like an adult?

As for my youth group, JOMA, we should be publishing our first newsletter in the next week or two.  Yesterday, a few of the students went to Ile's new cell phone tower to interview some of the workers and take photos.  The tower was built by Vodacom, the only competitor of Mcell, a company which has completely monopolized the cell phone business in Mozambique.  Ile-an citizens now have two options for cell phone companies!  Big news for a small town.  JOMA has weeded itself down in the last month to a solid core group of about 12-15 students.  I like all of the students, and am excited to see what they'll put together; none of them have ever used computers before!  We're going to have an amazing newsletter by the end of the year, and twelve to fifteen very capable young adults.

I found out recently that we aren't receiving a lump sum of money for JOMA, like in the previous years.  Instead, we have to write VAST proposals to fund our projects.  VAST is a subset of PEPFAR (The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), the US-government's initiative to combat HIV/AIDS in a handful of third-world countries.  In short, where 15 billion U.S. tax-dollars disappear off to.  It's unfortunate, because the grant-receiving process can take a lot of time.  Cross my fingers to get my proposals passed quickly!  I suppose I should begin writing the proposals...

Other amazing things: The corn in my backyard is ripe.  To prevent the neighbors from stealing it in the dead of night, we picked it all and are determined to eat three to four ears of corn a day before it all goes bad.  Corn overload!  This morning, I began "Paradise Lost" by John Milton, and am indulging myself in 17th century poetry.  So spake the Peace Corps volunteer.