My MCC coworker Jenny is amazing and put together a cookbook of recipes that are easy enough to cook here in Moz (given that a lot of foods we would have eaten back home do not exist here or are really expensive). My other MCC coworker Brooke, who is also amazing, included this lovely recipe for “cake balls”:

So you take cake mix (for those of you who don't have access to this just prepare your normal cake as usual) follow the instructions on the box for the cake mix. Once the cake is done take it out of the pan and crumble it up. Yup, just take it in your hands and smash it/crumble it up (which ever one you find more satisfaction doing). Take your icing tub (or your homemade icing if you can't buy it where you’re at) and put the whole tub of icing in your bowl of smashed cake. Mix it up until its well mixed. Stick this in the freezer for at least 30 min.

Take the bowl of crumbs and frosting and shape them into balls. Then grab some almond/chocolate bark or chocolate chips and melt them in a pan (you may need to add a little bit of milk if you find that its sticking.) What I have done to keep it from burning is I boil water in the pan and put a bowl over the pan and stick the chocolate in the bowl and let the heat rising melt the chocolate. Dip the balls in the chocolate mix and there you have a new way to eat cake. It looks pretty and it tastes delicious.

Christmas is great to bust out with your cake balls. I've yet to meet someone who can only eat one after tasting it. Play with the frosting and cake mix flavor. Also you can add nuts etc... -my favorite is lemon cake with cream cheese frosting dipped in white chocolate!

Well, as I soon found out, my friend Brooke is a bit mafiosa, because she had actually never made cake balls. So I insisted that we should give them a try before she heads home, slash everyone who knows my habits at Valpo will know that I’ve been missing the weekly cake parties. So yesterday was the big day of cake ball joy. We baked a lovely strawberry flavored cake and mixed it with homemade frosting. We intended to use white chocolate chips but they had a mishap and we ended up just melting some regular chocolate bars instead. Here is the finished product:

Our assessment: delightful, although you can’t eat too many at once because they’re very sweet. But don’t take my word for it . . . try it yourself!

The post office is the joy and the bane of my existence . . .

One of my regular activities here in Moz has been going to the post office to pick up mail (there’s no delivery . . . just PO Boxes) and send letters. Now, to begin with, the mail is kind of a strange concept here. It doesn’t seem like very many people use the mail system to send letters in country. Actually if you want to send something to someone, most people use chapa-mail, in which they pay the driver of a minibus to carry their package to the destination (but the recipient had better be there to pick it up, because the driver won’t stop for long!).

Anyway, I love to send and receive real mail, so I’ve been determined to figure it out, but it seems that every time I go there is a problem. Sometimes they run out of stamps. One of the postal workers finally advised me that I should come on a Monday when they are delivered and buy a large quantity – good idea – I didn’t know it was possible to do that because the stamps have to be glued on with real glue. [This was after sending a 33 Mt. letter on a crazy conglomeration of 6 and (huge) 2 Mt. stamps – the lucky recipient will surely laugh]. So yesterday I showed up at 4:30 to buy stamps and finally send those cards I finished the middle of last week, but the guard kindly informed me that you can only buy stamps until 3:30. Ok . . . that’s a new piece of information that is going to cramp my style a bit, seeing as I work until 3:30.

Now in case you think, “wow, she’s really stupid to have not figured that out after 6 months”, let me explain further. I normally do show up after 3:30 and I have managed to send many letters thus far. In fact, one day I rushed to get to the post office before it closes (which I thought was at 5) but one letter wasn’t quite done. One of the other post office workers was very kind and told me to relax – I could sit down and finish the letter and then we’d get all the postage figured out. Another time during the Christmas package fiasco (see below), I was told that the package part of the post office closes at 3:30 but you could still send letters until 5. So now I’m pretty much thoroughly confused. I guess I will have to ask to leave work early from now on if I want to send mail.

Sometimes the letters come quickly – recently I received a letter from my Grandma that had been sent less than 2 weeks before. And sometimes they come slowly – like 6 weeks later. And sometimes they don’t come at all  Same for my letters. Much to my amazement they’ve made it to places like Germany and Honduras, but some have also gotten lost along the way.

One time I got a package from my parents. That was exciting! But here’s how I finally got it:
Sunday – received the package slip from the lady at my church who has the key to the PO Box
Monday – went to the post office. They told me I needed to go to customs to get the package cleared, but by that point it was too late in the day to do it.
Tuesday – my host mother and I asked to leave work early so we could go to customs, which is way out on the edge of town on the other side of the river. This involved a long walk to the bus station, a bus ride out, one stamp on the package slip, bus ride back in, and then the long walk home, by which point we were hot and tired so I decided to wait til the next day to pick up the package.
Wednesday – went to the post office once again, only to discover that the package department closes at 3:30 (I got there at 3:45). I’m not gonna lie, I cried a few tears of frustration at this point.
Thursday – left work early once again and finally managed to pick up my bundle of Christmas joy. Which I had to pay $2 to receive.

I think my experiences with the post office are a little bit of a microcosm of life here. For one, it illustrates how much miscommunication is possible. I don’t know the right questions to ask, and no one will think to tell me things outright. There are just pieces of “basic” information that I’m missing – like the fact that all government related things close at 3:30 – which are obvious to someone native but I had no way to know until I found out the hard way. But also this pattern of having to try and try and try and try again to do something as simple as send a letter is very typical of day to day life. A lot of things are just really unpredictable.

Which is why so many people prefer not to try. Why set yourself up for disappointment? People have had to develop incredible patience as a survival mechanism. Hope has been battered and abused here in Moz, which often makes development work difficult.