Liz and I had been telling everyone we meet that we want a
kitten. We finally removed the mice from our house but we are still working on
the lizards and geckos. Liz had been eyeing a stray cat outside our house for a
few weeks until the day before Will, Anna, and Mireya visited us. That morning
our pedagogical director came and got us. She said that there was a cat inside
a bag of charcoal. We were so excited! We ran outside and found the kitten
shivering in the bag. He blended in so well we could barely see him. He still
had his umbilical cord attached, which meant he was only a few days old. We
didn’t think he would last the night but did our best by feeding him powdered
milk from a dropper every hour (yes, throughout the night as well!). The next
day, he was still alive! Anna bought us powdered baby formula that we fed him.
We also found out that he was not just a stray house kitten, but a “wild”
kitten. His paws were huge and all the neighbors kept joking that he was going
to eat us one day.
Our kitten had finally opened his eyes and started walking
around after a few weeks but one day, he woke up very sick and couldn’t even
swallow any milk. When I returned from class, Liz told me he had died. I was so
sad! We tried though. And it also made us realize that taking care of a baby is
a lot of work lol Another volunteer in Macomia has a female cat with kittens
though so hopefully, when they’re old enough, we will have a cat in our house.
Wish us luck!
The first day we found our kitten. He liked cuddling with
the rice sock we made him :)
Isn’t he cute?
Feeding the kitten.
What he looked like after he opened his eyes and started
walking.
I have a favorite student in one of my 11th grade
classes. Her name is Angela and she always sits in front of the teacher’s desk
and came by my house a lot to hang out. I taught her how to make paper cranes
and friendship bracelets while she taught us Mozambican card games. Today, she
came by with one of the teacher’s nieces to cook. We showed her how to make
banana bread and she showed us how to make a very popular Mozambican dish
called Matapa with rice. It was a lot of fun!
I just found out, unfortunately, that she is leaving at the
end of this trimester to go back home to Beira. I was really upset I wouldn’t
be able to have her as a part of our community for the two years we’ll be here.
It is so difficult to find girls who have self confidence. Most of the time the
girls in my classes sit in the back of the classrooms and just copy answers
from their male classmates. If I call on one of them to answer a question or
participate in class, they either speak so softly that I can’t hear them or
cover their mouths to show modesty. It’s frustrating. Only ten percent of
students at Mariri Secondary School are female. There are also many female
students who have babies. They leave in the middle of lecture to feed their
babies outside the classroom when they start crying. Typically here in
Mozambique, if a girl becomes pregnant, she must stop going to school with
everyone else and take night classes. Our school, however, does not have
electricity so they just do not go to school if they become pregnant. I want to
find a way to empower girls here in Mozambique. Hopefully I can come up with
something. I have time, right? Sometimes, two years feels like an eternity. At other
times, time seems to be flying by. Wish me luck everyone. I got this ;)
Eating banana bread with Angela!
