Introduction

Dear diary and all the readers. First of all I want to say that I've never really written a blog or anything similar except for some pages of travel diaries. Writing has never come naturally for me either. So I really hope I will be able not to bore you to death with my posts.

I was trying to figure out what kind of blog I want to write. Will it be like a diary or more of a collection of reflective essays or something else? I think it'll end up as a mixture of different styles as I write about what I feel like writing at the time. The language of the posts will be mostly English and sometimes probably Finnish if I feel like it. I might try my luck with Portuguese as a writing exercise as well. At the same time I will be writing in Finnish to the official blog of the project I'm working for here. That blog will contain more stuff about my work and in here you'll find more personal things.

For those who don't know what this is about I should tell something. My name is Aleksi. For the next seven and a half months I will be living in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. I will be working in a project of a Finnish NGO, Taksvärkki and a local organization ASSCODECHA (Associação Comunitária para o Desenvolvimento do Chamanculo). ASSCODECHA operates in many different ways in a part of the city called Chamanculo. You can find more about that in the other blog. As the title of the blog bombastically suggests this blog will be about my life and experiences here. I hope I will be able to shed some light on what it is like to live here and it would be great if we can even get some conversation going on.

People ask me why I chose to come here. I'll give the answer I always give. I had heard lots of interesting things from some friends who had done voluntary work or something similar in some part of the world. While hearing their stories quickly the feeling grew that I wanted to do something like that, too. Last summer I was bored out of my mind almost alone in the office and decided to apply. I thought it was a good time to go since I was planning to graduate before this summer. Mozambique I chose simply because I wanted to learn more Portuguese. I was considering to apply to South America as well but an African country seemed more interesting and it was great to be able to combine these two. Only after applying and in the training sessions we had I became really interested in the whole development cooperation scene.