So we are finally getting to visit our permanent site!\u00a0 So much has happened over the last few weeks, that it is shocking to think it has only been 5 weeks.\u00a0 We have met hundreds of new people, started learning a new language, were adopted, renamed, and grown up in to Swazi teenagers and given cell phones all within a few days.\u00a0 We have met many of the volunteers who came last year, and several that started over two years ago.\u00a0 Our permanent site in Lomahasha near the Mozambique border will be our home for the next two years.<\/p>\n
You can Google Lomahasha and see that it is around 15,000 people.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t the largest city, but it is far larger than the several hundred person village we are in now.\u00a0 Since we are close to the border we will be able to negotiate with the Peace Corps staff about a daily visa to get us into Mozambique without counting as a vacation day for us.\u00a0 One of the more interesting notes about Lomahasha is that a large percentage of the population speaks Portuguese, so we will be learning a second language during our stay.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n What we will be doing during our service in Lomahasha, is still to be determined but the volunteers there before us seem to have been involved in a few strong projects, including a new library, a sewing circle, and teaching computer & english classes.\u00a0 Pretty sweet!<\/span><\/p>\n Hopefully we will have more time and opportunity to write letters, journal, and even email.\u00a0 The training schedule has been absolute non-stop with the exception of this last weekend when we went to the \u201cCadillac of backpackers\u201d and hiked around the Mlilwane game reserve for 5 hours.\u00a0 We saw dozens of zebras eating grass, some type of white-furred monkey , several types of antelopes, a mother and baby hippo, and a crocodile.\u00a0 And this is NOT A ZOO.\u00a0 This is similar to the Saghuaro national monuments in Tucson.\u00a0 A huge chunk of land set aside to protect the land and animals in it from us.\u00a0 Lomahasha is only an hour or so by khumbi (minivan\/bus) to the Hlane game reserve which has lions, elephants, rhinos, and giraffes.\u00a0 I will be able to post some pictures soon I hope.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So we are finally getting to visit our permanent site!\u00a0 So much has happened over the last few weeks, that it is shocking to think it has only been 5 weeks.\u00a0 We have met hundreds of new people, started learning a new language, were adopted, renamed, and grown up in to Swazi teenagers and given …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[163,86,162,161,164],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-peace-corps","tag-animals","tag-hiking","tag-home","tag-lomahasha","tag-mlilwane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":575,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions\/575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.briandeyo.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}