Good Morning!

Rico and I have now been sleeping on the floor for 4 nights. We made a little nest out of all the blankets and towels that were in our drawer, plus my yoga mat underneath the whole thing. I am still adjusting to sleeping on the floor, the hardest part being that my hands seem to fall asleep multiple times each night, but overall I must say that my back feels much better. We are on a mission this week to get a new mattress.

Likely, this will involve a trip to Beira in the big white Land Cruiser that we occasionally borrow from our friend Canas. We also need to buy desks and chairs so that we can finally start working from the big colonial house that Agrolink has been renting as an office since July. We share the office with our housemate Patricia, who is Chimoio's best and busiest accountant, so the space isn't totally unoccupied. I must confess I am really looking forward to being able to work from an office that is separate from my home life. Between that an a new mattress, my quality of life seems set to drastically improve in the next week or so.

Yesterday, my housemates and I decided to get out of the house and go for a drive to Chicamba Dam, a beautiful river/lake about 30 mintues from Chimoio. It was well worth the effort. I hadn't been out of the house in 5 days (think about that for a minute. Five days without setting foot in the grocery store, the post office...nothing!) and was starting to become really irritated and depressed from the monotony of life in a small town where your only real responsibilities never take you outside the house.

So Chicamba was really beautiful. Bright blue water, some canyon-like cliffs and hills all covered in semi-tropical forests, with occasional boulders and sheer walls of granite poking out through all the green. We ate lunch at a lakeside kiosk. We all had fish from the lake (tilapia, I think), and I finally tried xima, the ubiquitous corn mush that is a staple in most southern African countries. It is also known as sadsa in Malawi, or pap in South Africa. It is basically a big, thick mound of a cream of wheat-type porridge that is cooked with no salt. I had mine with a tomato sauce and peri-peri, the local blend of peppers and oil that Mozambicans so love, smothered all over the top. It was actually quite good.

Unfortuately, today is back to business as usual. For me that means being at home all day and working on the final details of the timber proposal. Right now, I'm going to make a cup of tea. That's about all I can handle at this point...I'm still very, very sleepy!