Holy MOZes!

        I took my first African vacation a couple weeks ago with my volunteer buddies, Melanie and Kim. We went to a small island in Mozambique called Inhaka. Oh. My. Gosh. It was... amazing. We spent one night in Maputo (sorry, Dad, I know Maputo was the only place in the entire Subsaharan I wasn’t supposed to go... but it was only one night! And the whole city was really dirty and smelly, so I have no desire to go back... if that makes you feel any better) before we caught a ferry over to the island. We stayed at this really neat little back-packers called Cool Runnings. The whole thing was outdoors except the beds - very neat. We became great friends with the people running the place, and this good-lookin’ fella’, Jeffrey, ended up cooking us dinner every night - whatever catch-of-the-day we picked out (for free - they literally fed us for free the entire week - wouldn’t take money for it... they lost a LOT of money on us I am afraid). I had a great chat with this guy, Rob, on the ferry to the island, and he and his son, Natalio, wound up staying at Cool Runnings with our gang instead of the only actual resort on the island where they’d had reservations. We all had too much fun. WAY too much. During the days we all relaxed on the white beaches, hiked around the island, snorkeled, swam in the Indian Ocean, hiked up to this really cool light house, hung out with local kids, and just relaxed. It. Was. Fantastic. At nights we got wild and went down to the beach to star gaze and to the pier to watch the fish swarming around in the street lights on the dock. The Cool Runnings gang brought Melanie, Kim, and me to the pier the morning we left. Lots of hugs and long good-byes. It is CRAZY how fast you can grow so close to people! To say it was hard to leave Inhaka with its fresh coconuts strait off the tree, mangos, monkey-fruit, fresh fish, the water, sand, and ocean breeze would be a vast understatement. The ferry wasn’t running the day we left, so we had to hitch a ride on a small cargo sailboat. It was pretty awesome. The whole hull was full of fish, and 20 people crammed onto the deck, all huddled together, sitting in the sun under a sail of odd scraps of fabric stitched together hung on a tree-trunk-mast (literally the mast was the trunk of a gum tree with the branches cut off). It was a pretty sweet experience.
         Now it’s back to the grind-stone. Melanie came for a couple days to help me make library cards for all of the books in the school library - what a help that was! School starts on the 22nd, and I am in no way ready. But I wouldn’t trade that vacation for all the preparation in the world!
        Thanks for keeping up with me!!