Happy New Year!

After the wonderful semi-craziness that was Mozambican Christmas, the last week has been a lovely, mellow respite. A few volunteers were here in Chimoio for New Year's Eve and we rang in 2013 with a very American dinner: pizza followed by cake and ice cream, but a more Mozambican midnight. We passed on champagne in favor of firecrackers in the street and pots, pans and bacias to bang on. We stood outside my house and watched as fireworks shot up all around us and noise filled every street.



Making noise to ring in the new year!

On New Year's Day, my family back home always has a traditional meal of black-eyed peas, collard greens and cornbread. It turns out that Sarah, a volunteer who grew up in Georgia and now lives forty-five minutes from me in Messica, has the same meal every year. Since I have been itching to get out of the city and Sarah and her roommate Anna have been wanting visitors, we bought what we needed here and jumped on a chapa to Messica to cook up a feast. Messica is a relatively small town and Sarah and Anna are the first Peace Corps Volunteers there. As we walked from where the chapa left us to their house, we were greeted with "Boas Festas!" and "Boas Entradas!" by nearly everyone we passed. Some stopped us to talk, recognizing that these must be the new teachers in town, and we met the man who sells the girls eggs at the market. It was a very different experience from walking down the street in Chimoio, where the city vibe leads to much more privacy, but also less open friendliness. I will definitely be visiting them more often to get a taste of the community experience they are having!

A flag-painted Chapa and the main road passing by Messica.

Two other girls who live nearby met us there and helped us cook and eat. We cooked up catarina beans in place of black-eyed peas, with chispe de porco (pieces of the leg and foot of a pig) instead of a ham bone, and had couve, a close relative of American collards steamed with tomatoes and onions. The cornbread was just like home and I saved a piece for one of my favorite women at the market. We had explained the meal we would be making when we bought the beans from her and she was skeptical of the idea of bolo de milho, the closest translation we could come up with for cornbread. But when I brought the piece back for her the next day, carefully guarded through a VERY tightly-packed and bumpy chapa ride, she understood.

Beans & pig parts; cooks hard at work; the final product, guaranteed to bring luck throughout 2013.

Other than that, I have had a few guests coming through, one who was meeting up with her friend fresh from the States who was kind enough to bring me a jug of maple syrup - Merry Christmas to me! I have been working on some of the many little home-improvement projects waiting now that the holiday dust is begininning to settle. I have also picked up a new hobby: making jam! When I first moved in, the men working on the house in back ate most of the ripe mangoes on our trees. Now that they are gone, there has been an avalanche of mangoes, way more than I can eat, so I decided to try my hand at cooking them up into jam. There is also a passionfruit vine along the fence in my yard, and that super sour fruit proved a perfect balance to the sugary mangoes. My first batch was mango-passionfruit-lime, with quite a bit of lime peel pushing the flavor towards marmalade. The second batch was mango-ginger, with just enough passionfruit to add a little pucker, while leaving the mango flavor in the forefront. I find myself wanting to give all of it away so that I can make more, but I need to find a consistent source of jars!

Raw materials and finished product: mango-ginger jam.

Now it is time for me to return home and start making some curtains. A friend who is a second year Peace Corps volunteer observed that she wasn't yet sure how much she had learned about economic development, but she is sure that her service had taught her a whole lot about being a homemaker. While The university is on vacation, it is keeping me busy and entertained!

So, until next week, happy New Year and take care. Please do send along news. Boas saidas e entradas!