Year 1 - Week 35: When Nothing is Better than Something

Year 1 – Week 35: When Nothing is Better Than Something

There were eight murders in Machanga last night between 3 AM and 4 AM. The weapon was my hand. The victims were mosquitoes that were stupid enough to venture in, on, or around my bed net. It’s clear that they wanted to die anyway. Mosquitoes are one of the less joyful things about Machanga, right up there with being 100 kilometers away from a bank and a severe lack of cold beer, and it actually brings me joy to kill them.

Starting with the obvious, the little fuckers bite. And because I have a tendency to pick scabs, they leave scars that look like little bullet wounds. Further, they are amazingly loud at night. Once our energy goes off, all we can hear are mosquitoes outside and it sounds like Armageddon is around the corner. But the grievance that earns them death is their entrance into a bed net. It’s not just that they bite and we hear the buzzing – that would be enough; but mosquitoes, for some reason I do not know, like to fly right into your ear at the very moment that you are about to fall asleep. Invariably, this leads to us boxing our ears hoping to kill the bloodsucker. For this, they must die. At this rate, by the time we leave Machanga, Richie and I will have personally killed every mosquito and eradicated malaria in the area.

Other than the hour-long killing spree, the night passed peacefully. Unlike yesterday morning, I had no obligations, no meetings, no nothing. This would be a good day for giving up. But before I could crawl back into bed, there was a little house work and some studying to do. The house received a full cleaning – dishes, sweeping and mopping – and it almost ended up clean. No matter how many times or how well we sweep, there is always more dirt to be found, and that just gets frustrating. At least the mopping makes the floor clean enough that we don’t feel the dirt when we walk in the house. Once the cleaning was done, it was nearly time to eat.

After a filling meal and falling into a bit of a food coma, I tried to wake up my mind to study. I broke out the Kakuro book and, for the first time in about a week, actually finished a puzzle. I don’t know if the puzzles are getting harder or I’m getting stupider, but good lord, I needed that boost in confidence. My mind sharpened, I got down to studying GRE vocab. It’s a slow process, especially since my motivation level is pretty low right now. But I’m pretty close to having added 300 new words. There aren’t that many more to go, so I’m not so concerned.

By the time I was finally ready to give up for a nap, it was already too late. I can’t nap at 4:30 and decide to go to sleep at midnight. Hah! That’s not one of the options. In fact there are no options when it comes to bed time. So I trudged through the rest of the afternoon with a magazine.

One of my students came over when the energy came on. He wanted to continue to learn how to use a computer and we were happy to oblige until dinner time. Richie started him out while I helped out our school director with some computer stuff. It’s going to be nice once I can give these teachers consistent computer lessons. At some point, they will be able to do most things for themselves and won’t have to turn to me or Richie for tiny things.

While my student tinkered around on the computer, I helped him a bit and Richie took care of cooking chili. Chili takes a long time to cook, so we didn’t get to eat until almost 8:00. This was quite beneficial in reality: we had enough time for two episodes of “Arrested Development” before the energy went out. Reading by candlelight, I managed to stay up until 10 o’clock before going to bed.

I had an unusually full work day on Monday. The English theatre students wanted to meet at 8 in the morning. So we showed up around 9 AM and most of the students still weren’t there. By 9:20, everyone arrived and we were ready to go. The students broke up into groups and started writing their play.

Once they got rolling, Richie stuck with the kids while I went on the hunt for bread. There are two places where we can buy delicious Mambone bread: in the market, which is a bit away, and a little store that is really close to the school. I walked over to the close market, but “Não pão”. So I made the long walk to the market under the hot sun. Once again, não pão. All they had was terrible Machanga bread. I figured that crappy Machanga bread was better than no bread at all.

I was wrong. It’s been so long since we’ve had Machanga bread that we forgot how awful it really was. I really should not have bought enough bread for two days. But we couldn’t waste it, so we painfully made our way through almost all of the bread. We got through most of it, but by the end, we were so sick of it, we gave up.

The meeting and the bread hunt took up almost all of the morning. We at our regular lunch with irregular Machanga bread before heading off to another week of work. Classes went alright. This was the third lesson of past tense for my twelfth graders and the fourth for eleventh graders, so they are starting to pick it up decently. It shouldn’t be this difficult because they are not learning any new structures, only new vocabulary. Sometimes, though, I take for granted the fact that even if I didn’t learn how to actually speak during high school Spanish, I got a good understanding of structure. Even though these kids do get Portuguese lessons, I don’t think that they learn structure.

I came back from class to a curious sight: Richie sitting under the tree with a bunch of teachers. Usually, I can find him on the patio. There could only be one thing going on – drinking. So at 5:30, we start drinking wine out of coffee cups. Very classy. We drank until 8:00, only interrupted by a call from my parents. Delicious French fries and “Arrested Development” made our night complete.

Outside of the dry-mouth, spinning wake-up at midnight, I slept a lovely, mosquito-free sleep. The students for English theatre planned to meet on Wednesday, so I was off the hook for morning. Richie ran to the market and I thoroughly cleaned up the house. I was bored to the point that I even gave the chairs a good washing.

Richie returned with glorious Mambone bread and we were back in business. We made a vow that given the choice between Machanga bread and no bread, we will always go with no bread.

Class today went quickly, even though I had five consecutive teaching periods. For some reason, teaching three single classes followed by a double feels faster than it actually is. We threw around the Frisbee, with some kids joining us, before the energy came on. After prepping for dinner, I helped out a teacher transfer some documents from one computer to another so they could be printed off of the one computer that has the software for the printer.

I returned to see my chair filled and my computer being used by my student. This makes I think five nights in a row that he has been over to practice. It’s a little annoying having kids come over after work, but you got to love the commitment. He typed up some sentences in English and we explored around the computer a bit. He is happy with the progress he is making and by the end of the year, he should have a skill set that could easily land him a job here. Once he left, we ate dinner and had enough time a couple episodes of “Arrested Development” before bed.

As scheduled (kind of), we had another English theatre meeting on Wednesday morning. Slated for 8:00, we didn’t start until close to 9. One of the groups came prepared with a decent translation of their scenes. They were very happy with their translation although, as expected, it needed a bit of tweaking and rewording. Some things just don’t translate well from Portuguese to English, but for the most part, it’s their work.

The meeting took up the whole meeting. Richie returned to the house a little early while I took some questions from the students. They ask me about little but important things and for some reason, these ten minutes lessons are the ones that stick with them. They are also pretty fun because they stretch my mind. I don’t know what questions they are going to fire at me, so I have to be on my game.

Classes went as they typically do on Wednesday – starting out well before becoming torturous. One class – the smarter of the two – finished three classes worth of material in two periods, early. The other class painstakingly stretched out the two slow-paced classes for almost the entire two hours. I will never understand how there could be such a large difference.

Either way, I was done early, and Richie, courtesy of being able to combine a couple classes, was also done early. We spent a good 90 minutes on our porch undisturbed. It was beautiful. My student came over once energy came on and continued typing up the play. It’s moving along, um, slowly. He stayed until 8:00, when we finally told him that we needed some “Arrested Development” time.

I spent way too much money at the market on Thursday morning. I jumped at the opportunity to buy delicious Mambone bread, as well as buying a couple of sodas. All in all, I spent about 500 Meticais, a little less than 10% of our monthly salary. I should have returned to a house empty, with Richie in class; instead, Richie was sitting on the porch. Only five of his students showed up to class. They gave up, so he gave up too. He claims to have tried.

I spent a bit of the morning planning out when my students would take their first round of midterms. The schedule is going to be all fucked up because I’ll be giving the exam to my crappy classes first. I know that they like to get answers from the other groups, so now the tables will be turned. It will be awfully tough for them to get answers from the other classes when the other classes haven’t seen the test yet.

Classes ended exceptionally early for a Thursday. The test schedule is messing up my teaching schedule, but for the better. I now have to stretch out my teaching schedule for the smarter classes, which isn’t a big problem. All it means is that I have to cancel teach one class instead of two today. Hmm, poor me. It just gave me a little unexpected extra time off to relax. The sunset was as crazy a sunset as we have ever seen. The sun once again turned red, but this time, the sky above it turned pink and below it turned grey. It was like watching some strange NASA production.

Once again, my student came over to continue typing up his English theatre bit. I tried to guide him through it, but when I was met with an “I know!” I let it go. He’s a pro now. He finished typing up his piece just as we were having dinner. We spent the rest of the night finishing up the season of “Arrested Development”.

Oh Friday, how sweet it was. No classes to plan, no market run to make. Just magazines to enjoy and vocabulary to study for the entire morning before an awkward afternoon of classes.

If I could change one thing about my schedule (besides eliminating some classes), I would move around my Friday schedule. As it stands now, I teach the first two periods in the afternoon, then have a two hour break, followed by another two classes. I would much rather do them all in a row, in whatever order, instead of having that break in the middle. And it’s especially true on days that I end early. If I only use half the time – as I did today – I have a four hour break in between classes, and that is just not right.

For dinner, we decided to go with something that would fortify our stomachs, a rare night that we actually wanted to eat pasta. We were in for a long night of drinking with a couple of colleagues. Richie, having nothing to do earlier in the day, bought a bottle of whisky that we hoped would be good. We were wrong. But that didn’t stop us from drinking it.

We were doing okay through the first bottle, but then our school director (who we did not expect to see and with whom we have never drank) purchased a second better bottle of whisky. At this point, I knew this night was going to end badly. Even after the second bottle, we weren’t doing terribly, although the fact that I got up to dance at one point is a pretty solid measurement of how drunk I actually was. With the second bottle gone, the director bought a third bottle of whisky, and this is where me – and my liver – gave up.

Richie and I both felt terrible by the time we got home. We knew that lying in our beds would result in a terrible case of the spins. So for some reason, we decided that sleeping on the patio would be a better option. I think each of us slept for a bit until my face started to freeze off, so we moved inside.


Awful does not begin to describe how hung over I was for my entire Saturday. I woke up feeling like I wanted to die. And to make it worse, Greg, our Peace Corps colleague came across the river with some of his students to do an Ultimate Frisbee demonstration. I was going to meet him in the vila, but my laziness paid off and he just came straight to the school.

For being hung over, I was both in shockingly good spirits and surprisingly active. Spending time in the sun was probably to stupidest thing I did the entire morning, and eventually I just gave up, sat and the patio, and tried to restore my fluids to a reasonable point.

I felt almost 100% by the end of the morning and thought a run to the market would be a good idea. Besides getting some regular items, I really wanted to buy a cold bottle of water. I had the good fortune of getting a ride in a truck to and from the market, sparing me some time in the sun. While in the market, though, I ran into the school director who – oh my god – was drinking. Of course, he didn’t drink as much as we did last night, but to be back on the horse by 11:30 was amazing. He asked me if I wanted a glass of beer, to which of course I said “no” and then “okay”. I don’t think it caused me too much additional pain.

The rest of the afternoon was spent between the house and the field. I probably should have spent more time in the house because the sun finally caught up to me. By the time everyone left, I started to feel sick. Not hung over – sick. As I started to prepare dinner, I started shaking, which was just freaky. I gave up on preparing dinner, and popped some re-hydration salts and aspirin.

Once dinner was on the table, I started to feel better. Maybe it was all of the oil in the delicious onions that did the trick, but the pills probably kicked in just in time. After dinner, we watched “Behind Enemy Lines”, the fourth of our five war movies. It was weird to see Owen Wilson in a dramatic role, but he acquitted himself well. Finally feeling like myself by the end of the night, I was ready to sleep.