Look At The Birdie

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been living in Mozambique for six months now, and here in Nametil for nearly four months. It’s a strange dichotomy to look at my time here. In some ways, I feel as if I just arrived here. Yet in other ways, I feel that my time here has expanded far beyond anything that could possibly fit in six months.

I vividly remember stepping off the airplane for the first time in Maputo, all of us just a group of nervous individuals, barely acquainted with the only other people speaking English. I remember trying to talk to the customs agent, trying to simply ask how he was, and struggling to do that. Now, I teach chemistry in Portuguese four days a week.

I’ve never really understood how time can go by so fast, and yet have it feel like it’s been ages. Perhaps part of it is the fact that we (my training group) have been through quite a lot of novel experiences here. There aren’t many people in the states that can relate to sitting down for dinner to find a chicken foot in the bowl of soup… and not many people stateside have rode 72 kilometers in the bed of a truck with 24 of your closest friends and a goat. There are so many things that have built solidarity. So I feel like I’ve known my friends here for so much longer than six months. I’ve learned a language, I’ve been flung into an alien school system in a town with one other white person, I’ve been away for my first Christmas, I’ve lost two friends in a car accident, I’ve swam in bioluminescence, and so many other tiny, insignificant events that add up to be some of the craziest months of my life. I couldn’t replace any one of my friends here.

Perhaps that irreplaceability is the reason I can’t imagine it’s happened in only six months. I blinked, and a group of complete strangers has become one of the tightest woven networks of which I’ve ever been a part.