week 3. or Pre-hell week

On Saturday I learned that week three (this week) is "The week everyone gets sick"  and that week 4 is "hell week, let's not even talk about it".  And here I was feeling all sorts of proud that I hadn't been sick yet (respiratory, gastrointestinal or otherwise) for two whole weeks in Africa.  Well, guess what?  Africa doesn't care.  I woke up this morning definitely feeling sick just in time for "the week everyone gets sick".  My throat hurts.  But not bad.  I think I'll survive this.

In other news, I learned some interesting things from my Mae over cha this afternoon.  For instance:  it's very common for Mozambique-ans to have several names.  One for casa and one for escola, for example.  This has been causing much distress with some of my fellow trainees.  Before we were dropped off at our homestays we were given the names and ages of everyone in our new families.  Because the names in the information and the names spoken at home often didn't match at all we have been having conversations like this:  "I have no idea who I live with.  There are twins and one is named Grandson and the other is Junior.  I think".

I have a sister named Clotilde, but she's called Jodite at home.  Likewise, Helder is Mandito and Luis is Leo, but his name was Joao on the family-info sheet.

One of our final projects for training is to create a family tree.  Now I see why that project can take weeks to produce.