Oh, the excitement that awaits me!

This evening I will start my long journey back home to Mozambique. I leave at 8pm on the red-eye from Oakland to Atlanta, then cool my heels for 5 hours until my flight for Johannesburgb leaves at 10:30am. The only thing worse than a 17.5-hour flight at night? The same butt-busting trip during daylight hours. I will literally fly all day, arrive in Jo-burg at 10:30am on Friday, then wait for another several hours to get the LAM flight back to Maputo. (By the way, LAM was one of the airlines recently black-listed by France and Belgium...Not sure why, honestly. It seems like a pretty well-run airline to me.)

I will spend the weekend in Maputo working with the credit union that I'm putting together this rural microfiance proposal for, and hopefully accomplishing enough so that I can leave the capital with a finished document in hand. I fly back to Chimoio on Sunday (there are no flights on Friday or Saturday), then rest for one evening at home before leaving for Zimbabwe the next morning with Ricardo.

We will be near Chipinge in south-eastern Zimbabwe to prep our tea processing client (from my last proposal) for a conference call with the Dutch government, the potential source of funding for the project. Basically, if this conference call goes well and we are able to convince the funders of the company's financial stability, we will likely get the money to start a joint venture and build a tea factory in Mozambique!

I'm excited about going back to Chimoio, as odd as that seems given the isolated, boring nature of life there most of the time. I actually miss my housemates and their crazy ways. I miss the familiar mess of our living room, the bare dirt lot that we affectionately call a backyard, our dopey dogs...I even miss cooking for 5 on a regular basis.

Actually, there are some exciting changes awaiting back in Chimoio. Ricardo and Gemelli, in a surge of creative energy, decided to do a complete overhaul on our living room. They bought a new table and 6 chairs, all made of wood, so we can finally expell the plastic lawn furniture we've been using to work and eat on. They also picked up some large wicker chairs and some end tables that local artisans sell on the side of the highway from Chimoio to Tete, so now everyone has a place to sit and we can feasibly entertain company. The boys then varnished everything, repaired the holes in the wall where darts from an old dart board missed their mark, and rearranged all the furniture. Then came the final touches...Ricardo and Gemelli bought several capulanas, the colorful fabric sheets the local women use as sarongs, and turned them into curtains. Yes, curtains. Complete with measuring and sewing and color-coordination.

Finally, just to leave the decorating marathon on a masculine note, the boys decided to fix our poor tv that exploded in an electrical surge a couple of months ago. They took it completely apart, fiddled with the wiring, and somehow managed to rescussitate the whole thing. So now, not only do we have a working tv again, a household decision was made in my absence to get cable! This is so unbelievably exciting! A makeover for the living room and lots of mindless channels to fill our hours of boredom. I can't wait to go home!