Swear in Ceremony!

Officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!!!!!

This is it!!! After a year and half waiting for my departure, I am officially a Peace Corps volunteer.  2 years countdown starts from now! Two years of adventure, learning, struggles and accomplishment.
I am very excited and ready to face what is coming for me. I want to say an enormous thank you to my family and friends who helped and supported me from the application process until after training and now. I will try my best to post as much posts as I can.

Thank you!!!

Host Families Festa

Last week of training

Here I am completing my last week of training. I cannot believe 10 weeks has gone by. Next week I will be heading back to Maputo for our swear-in ceremony and I will officially become Peace Corps Volunteer. And the 2 years countdown will start on this day. I am extremely excited to finish training and finally get to my site.

This training was intense challenging, long very helpful, confusing. It was a very structured and dense schedule that I had very little time for myself. The huge benefits tha I received is to be able to communicate in Portuguese. As of now I am able to have a basic conversation and yet talk about more complicated topics. I also learned a lot about health and nutrition. I have been well treated by my host family and learned local cuisines. After that, I am finally ready to step in. Next week I will move to Chokwe, move into my house and I’ll have to buy all the appliances since I am opening the site. I am looking forward for this opportunity that is coming up for me and I am staying positive all the way. J

Amazing day to hopeless day

Part of the training is to work with an organization based in Namaacha. I was assigned to this organization called Associacao Tiane. We work with them to understand how an organization works and to give us a preview on what we will encounter in our site.

Asociacao Tiane is an organization that supports people living with HIV/AIDS. Although the medication (TARV) that treats patient with HIV/AIDS is free, people stop taking this treatment after a month.

The hospital provides to the patient with medicine worth of 30 days and they have to come back to get more medicine. Unfortunately, patient don’t come back to get their medicine and stop the treatment. This is when Associacao Tiane comes in and reaches out to the community doing home visits in person and looking for the patients directly to their house to find out why they stopped the treatment and ask them to go back and get treated.

I had the chance to participate in a home visit with an activista. We had to look for patient A in the Barrio Z of Namaacha. This barrio is very much different from where I live. It is very poor and the house lives next to each other and they are in bad conditions. There is no system of numbers for each house and they are no street names as well….it is like a very tiny village where people know where people lives by names. So we went asking to neighborhoods and kids where Patient A lives. When we finally found the house, we passed as we were patient A’s friends paying him a visit to say hello.

It is important that neighbors and family don’t know about the real reason why we come in person for confidentiality. Unfortunedlty patient A was not at his home.

Associaciao Tiane pays a visit 3 times. After 3 unsuccessful visits, the patient is classified as ‘abandon’. And they won’t follow up on the patient because that person was not reachable, or did not want to be reached or simply decided to stop taking the medicine.

The activista took me around the Barrio and we talked to the neighbors. On that day I had my second lesson of Changana, the local language in Namaacha, so I was able to practice my language with them and talk to the community. It was amazing. People were so welcoming and were so happy I was talking to them in their own local language. It was truly a great experience to be in community. On my way going back home, I had this long conversation with the activista who is actually living with HIV/AIDS as well. Being a foreigner and not speaking Portuguese totally fluently has its advantage and I took the opportunity to ask personal questions. Questions I think I would never ask to someone with the same situation and who would speak English. After our long conversation, what I can vividly remember is the activista saying….all you have to do is forgive and move forward. At this point I was inspired and amazed by her persona t the point that I teared…

It is truly amazing to see people like this activista fully grasping the beauty of life despite living with the disease. I admire her way of thinking and her input in working for Asociacao Tiane in helping the community. She has the will to give back to the community and she wants to encourage people who have the same disease as her to continue living their life fully and inspire them that….simply….life is not finished. Also, tell others that by taking the medication people can live a normal, healthy, happy life.

We parted and I walked home tearing….I was probably a bit too much emotional on that day but I was amazed by her sense of determination  that she had left me inspired and moved….

All these tearing completely stop as soon as I saw an older woman, albino, beating up this little girl like no shame. I was standing there….powerless…what should I do? Intervene? Scream to stop the beatings? Or walk away?

I was shocked….I walked slowly and then stopped as I was standing in between this woman the child who had ran passed me and stood behind me. The woman stopped, grabbed her children walked away…and I continue to walk my way home. I kept thinking…I can’t believe this woman would dare putting her hand on this child but also I felt so powerless in this moment.  In the states, people in the street would intervene right away. Although, I have to always remind myself that I am not home. That I cannot completely act the way I would do back home and that I have to be careful and discreet in the things I do. I was by myself surrounded by little kids and this woman…there was no police….there was absolutely nothing at all around me. This is just sad….to feel powerful in this situation. That was one crazy first experience of violence that I have experience and really pray it will be the last one.