Christmas in the Moz/NEW ADDRESS!!

First off, IMPORTANT! Here is my new address where I can receive mail for the next two years or so:

Courtney Alev, PCV
Corpo da Paz
Vilankulo, Mozambique

Please continue to write “air mail/par avion” on letters, and also if you have sent anything to the Maputo address please let me know so I can try to get it sent up, and if you send anything to this address please let me know so I can expect it—just to make sure things get to me. Thanks!! Please write.

So the holidays are here and this Christmas was a little different than what I have been used to. I have traded Granite Bay and luminaries and carols and cold weather and Bayside´s midnight Christmas spectacular for my new life in Moçambique, replaced the Christmas trees with the palm trees in my yard and the snows of Tahoe for the Indian Ocean. It has been an interesting week, but a good one.

Monday will be the two-week mark since I arrived here in Vilankulo. It has been overwhelming and exciting and so many other things all wrapped up into one. Vilankulo is a town right on the coast of Inhambane province about 10 hours north of Maputo and 9 hours south of Beira. From what I’ve been able to experience so far, it is a great little town and we can get almost everything we need here which is awesome, especially since we are so far from any major cities. But the supermarkets sell pretty much whatever we want for cooking and there are also restaurants and bars and such as it does get a tourist influx from South Africa. Our house is right on the beach in a compound where I live with my roommate Sarah in our house and our neighbors are all colleagues of ours. It is an absolutely beautiful place, with palm trees and sand and grass and of course the ocean. There’s a picnic table in the compound where we can eat breakfast and stare at the ocean and the nearby islands of the Archipelago de Bazaruto, which are right off the coast of Vilankulo. It is simply beautiful. Our house is made of canhiço (kinda like bundles of bamboo wrapped together with sticks and leaves and all that) and has a thatched roof. And we are blessed with the amazingness of electricity and running water—there is even a shower, it´s cold but wonderful. We´ve been able to get the house set up a little, painting and decorating and settling in.

For Christmas, several other PCV´s came to Vilankulo to spend the holidays here, and it was really fun to have visitors. We just kind of relaxed, hung out in the ocean (which is beautiful but it is really funny to go swimming because first of all, the water is like spa water hot, and it´s such a gradual decline with all the sandbars that you can walk out 50 feet and still be in only up to your thighs, so we just kind of sit in the water), cooked tacos and cookies and pancakes (amaaaaaazing), went to a pizza restaurant in town (that serves milkshakes, this is a luxury), and so on. We had a good time but it didn’t really feel like Christmas, but that was okay. It was just different. We did hang up some decorations and I was going to try to make a Christmas tree with palm fronds but it just wasn’t really the same. Definitely an experience though, you don’t realize what traditions mean to you until you are taken out of them. I also hope to travel back to the States for Christmas and New Years if it is possible, to eat my fill of sushi and Starbucks and go to Target for every day for no reason, and maybe spend time with friends and family too. JK. It was great to see everyone who came, and now our house is back down to just myself, Sarah, and our dog Simba. We don’t start work at Care full time until January 5th (the office is closed two weeks for the holidays), so next week will be about finishing up the house, working on Peace Corps community-entry activities, studying a lingua portuguesa, and preparing for the start of work. And the New Year’s holiday will be passing some point in there too, hopefully involving some festejar-ing.

There has been so much going on but it’s hard to think of some of the funnier stories or more poignant moments when I go so long without using the internet. Hopefully things will get more regular with updates and emails soon as I settle into my new routines in Vilankulo. Until then I want to wish you all a very happy and healthy holiday season, wish well be well.

Court