Just Another Mos in MOZ

First, about the title:  as some of you know, I transferred from Cabo Verde to Mozambique.  I lived and worked in the capital city of Praia, on the island of Santiago.  Though I taught English college reading and writing, as well as communication at a university there for an academic year, most days I spoke Kriolu de Kabu Verdi. In Kriolu, the word mos means “guy,” “dude,” or, I suppose, “chap,” or “bloke,” since Cabo Verde receives more British tourists than Americans.  But mos actually comes from Brazilian Portuguese, which many Cape Verdeans prefer over the European.  And so I am a mos, one of the “dirty dozen”--thanks for this appellation, Kim--that transferred from Kabu Verdi to The Wonderful Land of Moz (aka, Moçambique). 

I’ll post my response to Peace Corps’ closing in Kabu Verdi later.  It’s been months now since I’ve been processing our displacement.  For now I just want to introduce this blog, my first, and to sketch out some of my goals in it.  In Cape Verde I was not able to keep up with my writing, perhaps because the atmosphere, the bomping island culture, especially in the capital, was a little too much for me.  But really I’ve never been able to keep up a log anywhere on a regular basis, despite good beginnings and intentions.  The big move from the U.S. to Cape Verde, and then to Mozambique brings on, after all the fireworks of excitement, a sense of loss and longing.  Writing, I hope, will help as a guide and keep me connected, if not with others, then at least with myself. 

I was originally turned off by blogging—I used to (and still do) just email friends in the states. Writing emails to friends is a lot like writing letters—they are personal and private correspondences with clear readers, qualities which seem to me absent in blogging.  Blogs seem too self-centered, a self-indulgent artifact of (youthful) cyber-culture, of which I don’t (or didn’t) want to be a part.  But perhaps now, more than ever, I need to be a bit more self-centered.  Writing, recording, chronicling, can help reduce a sense of dislocation for someone who has, over the years, been an outsider from one country to the next, from Cape Verde to Mozambique (even from the Philippines to the U.S.). So here I am. Here in The Wonderful Land of Moz.  Writing to you all.    

So who are you?  Friends, I hope.  Readers who’ll understand.