Welcome to Africa! ....oh wait, my host family WHAT?!

Hello friends and family!  I'm in Maputo, Mozambique...and I'm ALIVE! Thank goodness. As for being well....only time will tell. 

(WARNING: the text below is overly dramatic and possibly takes a deranged undertone due to sleep deprivation, extremely recent rabies vaccination, and setting foot on a foreign planet)

It's been a long road here, but we finally made it. After two solid days of traveling like wandering nomads, pitching up our tiresome and oppressive luggage in all sorts of crevices in JFK, Johannesburg, and Maputo airport we have arrived in paradise. Sort of. If not for the threat of possible theft of personal items, unsafe drinking water, possible food poisoning, and the ever present danger of getting bitten by a Malaria infested mosquito, it has been absolutely beautiful at the Hotel Cardoso. We showed up in time to watch the sunset with a GRAND view over the Indian Ocean with palm trees swaying in the ocean breeze. We then had an amazing and very luxurious dinner with all kinds of goodies: salads of all varieties, soup, rice, chicken, pork, fish, bread, freshly grilled kabobs, chicken, cakes, choc mouse, fresh fruit, and one of the most amazing bread puddings I have ever tasted. Could we have even asked for more? 

And yet, I DO! We got our host family information today, and we were all just so stoked to see what our families would be like. We were given a booklet with our names assigned to a family, consisting of the number of family members, their names, their professions, their ages, the languages they spoke, and whether or not this was their first time hosting a volunteer. Many people got a cute family anywhere from 4-6 people, with a husband and wife, and lovely children, the average ages you would expect a young family to be. About half the volunteers received families that have hosted before and know what to expect. 

This is my host family's description:

Family Members (name/age/relationship/activity):
Ricardo Canza/63
Leonilde/18/daughter/student
Elidio/15/son/student
Miriama/13/student
Languages Spoken:
Portuguese and Changana (local language)
Observation
First year with volunteer

My first reaction to my host family's description:
WHAT?!!!! YOU MEAN THERE IS NO MOM?! I HAVE NO MOM!????????????? WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITHOUT A MOM????!!!!!!!!!!!!
 (***To my real mom: Please don't freak out after reading this. Me going crazy over this is quite tramatic already. Just tell me it's going to be ok, even if it is a lie. I'll believe you because your my mom, and I love you and trust your judgement***)
 

My second reaction to my host family's description:
And it's their FIRST time with a volunteer??!!! OH NO, OH NO OH NO!! I'm living in a MAN'S house, with NO WOMAN FIGURE of the house to show me the ropes. OH NO! He's going to make me cook, and clean, and wash clothes, and collect the water, and clean and manage the kids, and OH NO, OH NO, OH NO!!!! And what am I supposed to do if I don't know how to use the bathroom, or get the water and set up the bathroom for a bath, or anything womanly?!!! There's NO WAY I'm going to ask him about that kind of personal business. And then my mind wandered to living alone in a house with just A MAN and his kids and as you can imagine my mind ran away to the worst of possibilities (I've also been reading "The Color Purple" which made this so much worse). Unless "Ricardo" is really a woman, I'm in for a tough 3 months folks. Peace Corps, really? You thought it was a smart decision to put a naive American girl into a first time host family without a woman? OH NO!!! And they don't speak a lick of English?! OH NO! 
(***P.S. Every OH NO, was really taking the Lord's name in vain. I'm sorry God. I blame the drugs.***)

In all honesty though, it's not even my first full day here, and already I need to remember the title of my blog "In God, We Trust." I can't imagine the reason for this insanity, but I trust that you know God. That you have a purpose for it that is beyond my comprehension and beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I know this is going to be hard, but I know that I am not alone. God, only give me the strength and perseverance to be able to do it! I hope that whatever Sunday may bring when I meet my host family, I can look at the positive in it, and be thankful for such a learning experience to grow me into a stronger more resilient woman.

....but for the next two days, I'm seriously going to be praying hard that the description of my family is inaccurate and that I really do have a host mom after all. 

More shots to follow tomorrow, and hallucinations from malaria meds.
Time for sleep.

P.S. The best part of my day? The ride from the airport to the hotel. It was everything you've ever seen about Africa, but to see it with mine own eyes was UNREAL! Dirt covered roads, sides littered with rubbish, people everywhere, crazy driving, women with heavy bundles on their heads, brightly colored skirts, slums made with collected trash, roofs made from metal embarkments held on to the roof by discarded bricks, children playing in the streets in abandoned rusty old cars, music jamming, shops of all kinds, bra stands, shoe stands, children on the side of the road selling chips, officers carrying AKs, the smell of cool ocean water, the palm trees, etc. etc. This is really Africa, and I LOVE EVERY BIT OF IT! I want to soak it all in. A jaw dropping WOW for this southern girl.

P.S.S. I move to my host family's house on Sunday where I won't have access to internet often (maybe once a week) and maybe with service so poor that I won't be able to update my blog. I'll try and update it with at least a sentence saying I'm alive and ok. 

Love you all so much!
Saranya