Year 1 - Week 9: Baby Formula Pancakes

Three nights in a row, I have slept well. The weather gods have graced us with wind once again, making my hours in bed actually enjoyable. I woke up refreshed, but with little to do and few people with whom to talk. This place is awfully lonely without my roommate. But he should be back by the end of the day, depending on how lucky he is getting a chapa.

I spent the morning tidying up the house. I organized the kitchen, swept, and mopped the place down for the first time. The place was clean. And then thirty seconds after I finished mopping, it was dirty again. Tis is life in Machanga.

One advantage of being alone is I have complete control over the food. This also can be a massive disadvantage, as it proved to be last night, which resulted in unspeakable things coming out of my back end. But today, it proved to be advantageous. I didn’t want scrambled eggs and potato pancakes again, so I changed it up: I made an omelet and French fries. Don’t mock me, this is considered a change. And it was good.

The rest of the afternoon was spent reading, waiting for Richie to come home. There are times when I’m reading here that I think I’m living in a universe two months behind the rest of the world. In November, after Barack Obama had won the election, we were reading magazines talking about October surprises. Now in February, we are reading about the type of team President-elect Obama will put together. Come April, we will finally get to read about President Obama.

Richie came home just before 4:30. We were supposed to go to a meeting. I had vowed that I wouldn’t go to another staff meeting, and for this week, I stayed true to my word. But I can’t take credit for it; one of the assistant directors told me it wasn’t important and we wouldn’t need to attend. Glorious. Richie would not have gone anyway, as he was exhausted from his travel.

With Richie asleep, I took care of dinner. Because Richie came through Mambone, he was able to pick up among other wonderful items tomatoes. I made my delicious tomato sauce. We dined, watched “House,” and passed out, ready for another week of school.

Monday morning was slow. Richie had a class in the morning – poor soul: one class – so I went to the market. Our new regular bakery had no bread, so we had to go back to the old one. At least the bread was fresh today.

The afternoon was polar opposite to the morning: busy, fast-paced, and encouraging. I had six class periods – three double sessions – consecutively. But I was encouraged by what I saw. I taught my 12th graders “should” and “ought,” and following the curriculum given to me, we actually had some discussion about children’s rights. My 11th graders quickly picked up on how to use “like,” “don’t like,” and “favorite.”

Of course, in any ESL class, there will be errors, some funnier than others. One student wrote on the board “My favorite beer is water.” This made me sad, but not for the grammatical incorrectness. Another student asked me, with a straight face, “What is the difference between ‘put yo hands up’ and ‘raise your hand?’” I actually needed to take a minute to think how to explain this one. But on the whole, the students did very well. They seem to be adapting to my style.

The good part of teaching so late into the day is the energy comes on quickly. With our fresh bread, we made French toast, watched “House” and turned in.

I woke up from awesome dreams. This is the upside of Larium: every once in a while, instead of completely fucking with your head, it gives you a sense of pleasure. In the first dream, I was eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. But it wasn’t just any chicken. This chicken was hand-delivered to me by the Colonel himself. I couldn’t make that up if I tried. The second dream was just as, if not more pleasurable. It involved two girls in bikinis, both of whom I knew, neither of whom know the other. We were in the pool at my house, which is strange since neither of them had ever been there before. Larium is a great drug sometimes.

That was the beginning to what would prove to be an exhausting day. I had eight classes to teach – three in the morning, five in the afternoon. Tuesdays and Thursdays are awfully long days, but this is the price I pay to have Fridays off. The morning classes went well. I have a couple of very small boys in the class. They certainly don’t look like tenth graders. They were so eager to participate, but every time they wrote something on the board, they made a small mistake. This isn’t the big deal. What is the big deal is that every time, we corrected it, they made note of it, and they were back participating during the next activity. They both left with smiles on their faces, satisfied with their work. That, I think, is the biggest deal of all.

I rushed home for lunch, which Richie had dutifully prepared. It must be very hard to fill them time, seeing as he has zero classes on Tuesdays. Right after lunch, I was back to work. My first set of twelfth graders did a nice job learning “may” and “might.” And then the collapse began. My next two lessons – on how to use “I think” and “I believe” – tanked. Hard. I knew it was going to be a brutal lesson. After all, I was essentially teaching subjunctive, and that’s just not fair considering what we had done before that. Thankfully, I was spared by my second set of twelfth graders, who needed to learn “should” and “ought to,” which was followed by a discussion on children’s rights, albeit not as compelling or well thought out as the other class yesterday.

Exhausted, I returned home to finish a book, “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” I recalled my brother reading this book years ago, and when I found it, I snatched it up. It’s a nice read, and I related to the main character on a superficial level – his love of prime numbers and order, his tendency to ramble, and the simplicity of his sentences. I am glad, however, that I don’t have the medical issues that he had. And I don’t mind the colors brown or yellow, which I guess is also good.

The night was pretty normal, with few exceptions. Somebody came to our house to put light bulbs in our bedrooms. So for the first time in nine weeks here, there are light bulbs in all three rooms in the house. It’s almost cause for a celebration. Now if we could only get the other power outlets working, because one out of three just isn’t cutting it right now.

We ate our regular spaghetti dinner, although we had a new bread from a bakery we had not yet been to. One of my students, out of the clear blue, asked me this morning where I bought my bread. He told me that there was another place closer than the market. The bread wasn’t terrible, probably ranking second out of the four we have had. It is definitely more convenient to buy this bread than the other bread, so it may become our favorite quickly.

Wednesday was low-key. I only teach in the mornings on Wednesdays, and the students were mostly on their game. I was teaching this group of tenth graders how to use “like” and “don’t like.” Most of the sentences were good. Some needed some correction. And some were grammatically good, but still needed correction. In one case, a girl wrote “She didn’t like to eat her family.” I just sort of stared at the board as the students soaked it in, and all of us started laughing. The girl changed the sentence to “She didn’t like to eat fish.” That’s better.

Having classes only in the morning allowed me to help out Richie with lunch. I feel a little guilty not being able to help out as much around the house. At the same time, I’m sure he does not feel guilty about teaching a third of the hours that I teach, so I really shouldn’t feel bad.

The afternoon was relaxing. Having finished one book, I started up on another: Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat.” Everybody and their mother love to cite this book, so I figure I should at least know what I’m reading. Lost in all of that relaxing, the book, and a photo-worthy sunset, both Richie and I failed to realize that we were just about out of food. Oops. We had to dig into the American-sent reserves. The food wasn’t bad – the simple fact is that it gets us to the next meal.

Between dinner, and watching the last couple episodes of “House,” my brother called for the first time in a while. It was good to catch up with him, hear about what’s going on his world and the world at large.

I was in for another long day on Thursday, and with it being the end of my work week, I just wanted to get through it. I was scheduled for three classes in the morning, but after I finished my second class, one of the students approached me. He said that his class had already received the three lessons for the week. Really? He explained that two of the classes had switched classrooms and that we were caught up. Either he was a magnificent liar or he was paying closer attention than I was. I let them go, and as relieved as the students were for not having class, I was relieved for having a little more of a break for lunch.

Even though I have the same number of classes on Thursdays as I do on Tuesdays, Thursdays are easier days. I have a two-hour break for lunch instead of 25 minutes. I can actually relax, help with lunch, whatever. In this case, I contributed to the throwing out of rotten eggs. We expect a bad egg now and then, but when eight of the 12 are bad, that’s just not acceptable.

The afternoon schedule was planned for five classes, but due to students’ good work, I was able to cut it to four. My last two classes of the day are with the same group of kids, so I told them that if we move quickly – meaning, if the students volunteer quickly – we can probably get done in less than the two class periods. It is the end of my day, and it is the end of their day too, so we were equally motivated to finish. With this group, I was teaching “would like.” When one of the students wrote on the board “The students would like to leave class early today,” I knew they understood. Class dismissed, thirty minutes early.

Soon after I got home, I got a call from my parents. For the second night in a row, the connection was good. Something must be going on. Richie and I are figuring it will all come crashing down soon. Between their call and my brother’s call last night, I feel like I am almost well informed.

As the afternoon turned to night, Richie and I knew we were in for a treat. On his quest to the market earlier in the morning, Richie bought baby formula mix instead of powdered milk. This should be interesting. We figured if it’s good for babies, it probably won’t kill us. And that is how we ended up with baby formula pancakes for dinner. Amazingly, they were probably the best pancakes we had made to date. Richie credits the baby formula; I remain skeptical, but willing to withhold judgment for now. Fairly content with dinner, with watched a couple episodes of “Seinfeld,” and as the power went out, we crashed.

Friday was domestic day. I hadn’t done laundry in weeks. I pumped two buckets of water from the well and got cleaning. I hate doing laundry, but it’s a necessary evil. It’s a lot of work, and the clothes are never really clean. But we have been in country for almost five months now and we have learned to accept dirtiness.

Just as I finished washing, Richie and I started prepping lunch. With no eggs, we decided to try something totally different – rice and beans. It was filling, but all in all, quite terrible. As Richie went to the bakery, he said “make that lunch disappear”; I knew he wasn’t asking me to eat all of it. Now, I am no fan of wasting food, given where we are and how little we eat, but this just needed to go. We won’t be trying rice and beans again until we have sufficient tomatoes for salsa and good avocados for guacamole.

Our afternoon was calm. With a nice breeze blowing, we sat on the patio, drank some coffee and read books. I figure that I should have “The World is Flat” polished off by the weekend. Richie and I braced ourselves for dinner. With few ingredients to work with – or at least few that we are willing to work with – it was a solid dinner of potato pancakes and bread. It will get us to tomorrow.

I had trouble sleeping for two reasons. For one, my head was racing. I kept thinking about what I would be teaching for the next couple of weeks, even though I had it all written down. But more interesting, I had trouble sleeping because of a sensation I hadn’t felt in a while: coldness. Coldness to the point of shivering. Coldness to the point of requiring more than a pillowcase and a bottom sheet. By 4 AM, I had enough. I wrote down my thoughts, threw on a shirt, grabbed another sheet, and slept for a couple hours.

We had planned on going to Mambone to get some vegetables, but the weather nixed that plan. It seems like every time we want to travel, the weather has to say something about it. It was a cold, slow and steady rain. I had to dig into the winter clothes to pull out sweatpants and a long-sleeve shirt. Once the rain slowed, I ran to the market. While shopping, I saw three of my students, all of whom spoke English to me, one of whom called me “Mr. Lee” instead of the standard “teacher.”

Upon my return, we made lunch. There is not a lot to do here on the weekends, so most of our day was spent reading. I had a student come by to pick up a magazine, which was good. I’m glad that students are willing to take some of their own time to learn.

Then the bombshell was dropped on me. One of the assistant directors told me that the split up the 11th grade classes, from two into four. This is not good. It’s not that it’s any more students. It’s more hours of teaching, hours that can’t fit into my Monday to Thursday schedule. I haven’t seen the new schedule, but I suspect they are going to be dropping Friday classes on me. If that is the case, I’m going to have a word with the assistant directors.

We had our regular spaghetti dinner, followed by a couple episodes of “Scrubs.” As seems to be the case, it got hotter when the sun went down. Luckily, it wasn’t too hot, and since I hadn’t slept the night before, I should be out like a light tonight.