June 25

The last week in June has been an amazing one. It started with Mozambican Independence Day, June 25. One of the girls in my REDES group came over and we went to the praza to watch the activities. Since Independence Day was a Saturday many people left town to celebrate so there were not many people at the praza. They had a dance group perform and in the group was a girl who was about 2 years old. It was really cute to see the little girl doing as much of the dance that she could.

Other than that the weekend was just spent hanging out with my Mozambican friends and studying for the GMAT.

This week was an amazing one because of so many different reasons. First I started taking Portuguese lessons with one of Scooter’s colleagues. He has already helped my Portuguese so much and is teaching me grammatically correct language. Since many people here speak the local language first and don’t really learn Portuguese until they go to school the Portuguese spoken tends to not be grammatically correct. Since I have pretty much just been learning Portuguese from working I was not speaking 100% correctly. I’m happy to have the chance to learn the language and potentially be perfectly fluent by the time I leave.

My REDES girls had a big part in making this week so great. The lesson we did this was about sex vs. gender. It’s a very complicated topic for most people but the girls tried to learn and participate. Last week we discussed our futures and I wanted tie in the fact that just because women here do most of the work doesn’t mean they are the only one’s that CAN.

The girls also got really into a competition to design the T-shirt for the REDES conference that is in August. A lot of the girls came to my house and just hung out while drawing. They are so funny and asked so many questions. It was nice to be able to just hang out with them. Because there are so many (I have about 80) it just makes it too hard to try and have them all over to my house. I hope the girls will continue to come over and we’ll be able to have more of an exchange as I get to know them better.

This weekend Inharrime is hosting a 4th party. So far we have about 25 people coming so it should be a lot of fun! Happy 4th!