Year 1 - Week 34: Oh Yea, That's What It's Like to Be a Volunteer

I didn´t want to spend my last day off traveling, but I didn´t have much of a choice. This travel day worried me more than usual. Normally, traveling is not a problem, but with four laptops, it´s a little daunting. Typically, I would leave my stuff on the chapa to reserve a spot, but carrying four computers will change that. Instead, I walked over with a sweatshirt and arrived at the chapa stop just as the chapa was pulling up. I told the driver that I needed a specific space for my bag - one where the computers would not be crushed - and he was more than accomodating.

With a couple hours to kill before leaving, I went back to the Volunteers´ house to hang out for a little bit. I hadn´t seen one of them for a month, so it was good to catch up with her. I headed out around 9:30 to go to the bank, pick up a newspaper, and buy some vegetables before the chapa left.

Getting the computers on to the chapa was concerning enough. Watching them bounce around during the ride raised my blood pressure just a little bit. With every pothole that we hit, my heart jumped up to my throat and down to my stomach. For those computers to travel thousands of miles without problem, only to be ruined on the last, shortest leg of the trip, would kill me.

And the chapa ride wasn´t even the most dangerous part of the journey; I still had to cross the river with these things. Of course, on this day, we came the closest to tipping over. The paddler decided that it would be a good idea to pull up the anchor before he had everything he needed and we almosted drifted away.

Across safely, Richie came down to the river and spared me the pain of having to carry all four computers back to the school. Once we were in the school, I opened up my backpack to see if the computers survived. No cracks, no damage, just a problem with one of the chargers. The stress flew off my shoulders.

I was back in Machanga with a little time to relax. I sat on the patio and read a little bit before prepping for dinner. One of my students came over and, after reading a national exam from last year, thanked me for the format of last trimester's final. "It was good practice", he said. I certainly didn't see that coming but I appreciate the compliment.

Machanga received a very unique sunset tonight. With growning season mostly over, people are starting to burn their fields. All of the smoke turned the sun blood red. It was cool. I don't think I've ever seen the sun turn completely red before.

We cracked open a can of turkey and threw it in a delicious stir fry. As we watched Arrested Development, I loaded XP and Office on to my computer, and just like that, I had a fully functioning computer again! My night ended with phone call from my parents before the energy went out.

For the first time in a long time, I had a case of the Mondays. It´s been four weeks since I´ve had to work, so I really don´t have a lot of room to complain. In a lot of ways, I´m ready to get back into the classroom. I know that I can sit still doing nothing for only so long. Teaching will certainly help quell the boredom that I´ve experienced for the last few weeks. There´s nothing else to do in Machanga, so I might as well teach.

I spent a bit of the morning lesson planning. This trimester is going to spent almost exclusively on the past tense. We have already covered present and future, along with some other tenses like conditional; now it´s time to look backward. It´s going to be slow and go. This first week, we will only be using four verbs in past tense - to go, to be, to do, and to have. Once they have these down, it´s all just memorization.

Hearing that bell ring at 12:15 made me cringe. Work? Work?! I don't wanna do this. Once I was in the classroom, though, everything was good. The students were happy to see me, I think. Well, as happy as a student can be after four weeks of vacation. Everybody seemed to do pretty well with this first lesson on past tense. Of course, this is all stuff that we did in the first week of school, so they should get it quickly.

All that work -- 5 hours of teaching in all -- made me exhausted. But my work wasn't even done yet. I continued working with the laptops, installing XP in Portuguese on all of the laptops. It's difficult enough to learn how to use a computer. The least I can do is alleviate some of the pain by installing programs in their language. The burden will fall on me to learn the vocabulary. In the end, everyone wins in this situation: they learn more quickly, and a augment my vocabulary.

Just as it was starting to get cold, the weather has turned up again. It's not blazing hot like it was in February, but still warm enough to necessitate a fan. Without the fan, I would not have been able to sleep through the night as I did.

Richie made a run to the market Tuesday morning while I washed the dishes and swept up the house. I didn't have to do much lesson planning -- maybe ten minutes -- before I knew what I was doing for class.

Day Two of past tense was pretty simple. With the verb "to be" nailed down pretty decently, I moved to "be", "go", and "do". This should be pretty straight forward, and for the majority of the kids, it was. But there's always one or two who, even after showing how the Portuguese is exactly the same, still don't get it. I don't want to say that they are lost causes, but if they haven't figured it out this far down the line, they probably never will.

Once again, I was exhausted after work. Richie, however, was not. He wanted to work out before we ate dinner, so I obliged. It is pitiful seeing how out of shape I am. I shouldn't be exhausted after 15 minutes. I have never been so happy, though, to take a cold bucket bath. In five minutes, I went from sweating to shivering.

We were particularly lazy tonight when it came to dinner. We used one of the sauce packets that my mom sent me. Richie did the cooking while I helped out a teacher in the computer lab. He needed a lesson-planning form made, and I busted it out in about 10 minutes. I came back just as dinner was ready. After eating, we watched "Dan in Real Life", which was pretty funny, and did some reading before bed.

Wednesdays have always been good days here in Machanga. I never have to lesson plan and I almost always finish classes early, courtesy of one class that is very quick to learn and one class that refuses to ask questions. And on this Wednesday, I was particularly productive. I washed my sheets, which were in dire need of cleaning. It's one of those things that I could have easily passed off to our regular clothes-washer, but I just didn't have anything else to do in the morning.

The afternoon went as expected. My smart class picked up the material very quickly. I was able to get three lessons worth of material into two teaching periods. My other not so smart class was slow to pick up the material, but claimed it to be easy after struggling through it. I try to poke and prod them into asking questions, but whatever I do, it doesn't work. In the end, it's their grade, not mine, so if they don't want to ask questions, I can't force them.

I spent the rest of my afternoon reorganizing a bit. My sheets dried, I made my bed and cleaned up my room a bit. I tried to start the non-functioning computer, but failed. And late in the afternoon, one of my students came by just to practice English. After dinner, Richie and I finished off the first season of "Arrested Development", which definitely improved over the course of the season.

I had to get back to lesson planning on Thursday, but before I could do that, I had to make my usual Thursday morning run to the market. We were fresh out of everything in the house and I was in dire need of buying phone credit as it was.

My first round of students had seen all the material and the second round of students are just beggining to get the second round of lessons. The kids from earlier in the week had a big lesson in front of them: 20 irregular verbs and learning how to do questions and answers in the past tense. It would also be difficult for me because I had to figure out a good list of irregular verbs. For this, I turned to my ever reliable iPod to give me some good ideas. By the end of the morning, I had come across some 38 verbs that could be of immediate use for my students.

The afternoon classes went as well I could have asked. A lot of the students started to make the connection between present tense and past tense and how easy it easy to change a sentence from present tense to past tense. It's one of those things where I could hear the lightbulbs over their heads go on, like "Oh, it's exactly like Portuguese" -- which it is, structurally -- "but just using different words". It's those moments when this job is most rewarding.

Richie and I made dinner ridiculously early. We left ourselves with way too much time to watch TV. If we decided to watch TV, we would have time for something like eight episodes of a show, and it's just not worth it to knock out a third of a season of a show in one night. Instead, we turned to a movie, "Run, Fat Boy, Run", which had it's funny moments. I'd recommend it if you have a couple hours to kill and want a good laugh.

For the last week, I have slept awesomely, and last night was no exception. I woke up feeling great, especially since I had no work to do Friday morning. My Friday students get the same lessons as my kids on Thursday, so I was off the hook for the morning. Most of the morning was spent trying toget online to activate Microsoft Office on the teachers' laptops. And for the first time in almost ten days, I was successful in getting online. Having activated Office in all the computers, all I have to do now is get all the Windows updates from a students, and the computers will be ready for distribution.

Classes went alright today. I'm glad to have my slower group first because it means I can power through with the second group. Nobody wants to stay until the last period on Friday, and it's especially true these days because by the end of the day, it is impossible to see. There are few classrooms with functioning lights, and with the sun still going down early, there is little natural light at 4:30 to help. My second groupl, of course, picked up the lesson quickly, and I was done with plenty of time to enjoy the sunset.

We broke out a new meal -- an especially Mozambican meal -- for the first time tonight. Along with a little tomato sauce and rice, we cooked couve (koh-vee), a leafy green. We had hoped that it would fill us up, but once we were finished, we were both itching to eat something more. We split our last loaf of bread and that seemed to do the trick. Once again, with plenty of time, we turned to a movie. This time, we went back to my five-in-one war movie DVD. Going in chronological order, it was time for "Black Hawk Down" -- an awesome film about the tragedy (both for the sodiers and the people) in Somalia.

I slept so well into Saturday that I almost overslept a 7:00 meeting that we were supposed to go to. When I say that, I mean that I woke up at 7:40 and the meeting didn't start until 8:00, so it was actually quite perfect. The meeting was quite useless -- just a bunch of stuff for teachers that didn't at all apply to us. We bailed out of it early to meet with our English Theater kids. We have a new secondary project going. This is one of the projects that is well established amongst Peace Corps Volunteers here. The Volunteers who were in Machanga last year helped the students with the same project, so we will continue the tradition. Richie stuck around for a while, then headed to the market while I finished up with the students.

The meeting bled into our regular prep time, which was probably for the better. We ate lunch later than usual and then each of us spent some time napping in the afternoon. Late in the afternoon, we went over to the main soccer field to watch a game. We decided that at half time or at the first goal, whichever happened first, we would go grab a beer in the market. Halftime arrived at 0-0 and we were off to enjoy a cold one.

The rest of the afternoon was pretty calm. As the energy came on, one of my best students came over to practice typing. He came over yesterday to begin lessons and I continued with him today. The learning curve for this is quick because he is literally starting at nothing. He is a fast learning and anxious to learn quickly, but sometimes it doesn't help his cause. He tried to rush through the typing exercise, but ended up doing poorly.

While I helped my students, Richie took care of cooking dinner. For the first time in a while, we had spaghetti and tomato sauce. It took me longer than it took Richie, but I think I finally burnt out on spaghetti. Thankfully, we are down to about once a week. Our week -- one that moved very quickly due to our return to school -- ended with a few episodes of "Arrested Development" and a failed phone attempt by my aunt. Thanks mCel.

In spite of the actual having to work thing, it's not so bad to be bad to work. If the rest of this trimester moves as quickly as this past week did, the school year will be over before I know what happened.