The invitation has arrived! Mozambique!!!!!!

It’s here!!!!  My invitation arrived in the mail on Tuesday, and I’m going to Mozambique!!!  It was a beautiful moment because it was late, after 7pm, and I’d given up on it arriving.  Both of my grandparents and my aunt and uncle and their kids and my parents were outside at the house to look at my car, so I had this big pile of family around me when the UPS truck showed up with my invitation.  When I opened it, I yelled and jumped up and down over and over and over again!

It’s taken me this long to update because I have been so busy scrambling to get everything done as fast as possible.  I am so close to the staging date that I don’t want to risk having something go wrong with my paperwork and the invitation packet is so full of information and forms and various steps that even I (the paperwork queen) am having difficulty keeping it all straight.

So how do I feel?  I feel like I’ve won the lottery in terms of my assignment.  Literally.  I had images in my brain of Lesotho (the other potential country I could have been placed in) and from the various blogs I’d read, it is a chilly mountain country just going into winter and volunteers were talking about being freezing cold all of the time.  Plus, when I had imagined where I would like to serve if I could choose, climate-wise it would be somewhere warm and tropical (at least most of the time), but I also hoped for a place faced with challenges where I could feel like I could use my knowledge and skills to make a difference.  I was very (very) drawn to Africa.  So Mozambique is a perfect fit and I am absolutely ecstatic!

What will I be doing?  My placement is as a Community Health Promoter, which is slightly different from what I imagined, but I am still thrilled!  It sounds like there is a lot of work in NGO Advising (my specialty) within the program, working around issues of HIV/AIDS, orphaned children, outreach and education and other health issues.  I’m slightly intimidated, because health isn’t my area of expertise, but I am so ready for this challenge!

What language will I be learning? An added bonus is that one of my concerns about serving in Africa was learning a language that would be extremely geographically specific.  In Mozambique, there are local African languages, but the primary language is Portuguese, which transfers very well to learning Spanish and spoken in a number of places.  When this girl gets home, she will be tan and fluent in Portuguese.  Can you believe it?!

So what now? Well, I’ve sent off my Peace Corps passport application, visa application, PR materials, updated resume and aspiration statement to the country staff and have a packing list.  I am assuming that I will be flying to Philadelphia for staging on May 30.  Thanks to my lovely employer, I have work through the week before I leave (which is a massive blessing financially).  In addition, I have a huge running list (growing faster than I can check things off of it).  Including:

·         Sell my car;

·         Sort and pack my things for storage;

·         Buy the supplies I’ll need;

·         Pay off my credit cards;

·         Save as much money as I can;

·         Start daily Portuguese language training at LiveMocha;

·         Sell some other miscellaneous stuff;

·         Read up on Mozambique;

·         Finish recovering a chair and an art project that I’ve started;

·         Pack, pack, pack and pack!

The long and short of it is that I am beyond thrilled.  I am so excited and relieved and happy and nervous and I’ve been walking around with a huge smile on my face randomly screaming “MOZAMBIQUE!!!!!” at the top of my lungs.  So life is good.