Year 1 - Week 44: See My CIty Dead

Things are slow. Really slow. But slow can sometimes be good. Slow gives me time to be productive. And on this slow Sunday, I was productive. We have been really slack on cleaning up the house these days. Sure, we’ve cleaned our dishes and pots and pans, but sweeping and mopping have really been pushed to the back. This quiet, slow morning gave me the opportunity to do all those things plus some.

The saddest part of all of this cleaning up was having to put away all of my “cold” weather clothing. For the last couple weeks, it has been hot. It’s not yet intolerable eat, but it’s definitely hot enough that the time has come for fans and not for blankets. Along with my blanket, my sweatshirt, sweat pants and long-sleeve shirt all got packed away, gone until the colder nights return.

Cleaning took almost the entire morning. After lunch, the boredom began. I cracked open a sudoku book to see something very interesting: some strange variations on regular sudoku. I figured, what the hell, I can probably figure this out. I spent the afternoon obsessed with the book. Before I knew it, the afternoon was gone. Dinner had arrived. We ate our chow, watched some “30 Rock” and went to bed, fans blowing cool air on our faces.

Monday was the most important day for many Mozambicans, and it was important for us too. “Dia do Professor” – Teacher’s Day – meant more than just a day off work, a day that we had no reason to teach anyway. Following a small procession from the town square toward the vila, the activities began. Like Sunday, things started slowly – just a beer. But then more people showed up. Our table of six quickly polished off on bottle of terrible scotch. And by ten o’clock, we were on to the second. One would think that bad scotch would get better as you had more of it. Nope. The second bottle was worse than the first.

By 11:30, we were tired, drunk, hungry, and not wanting to drink any more scotch. We returned home for a quick, undercooked lunch. Instead of heading back to the vila, we decided that an hour siesta would be a good idea.

After our naps, we actually wanted to head to the vila, but we were stopped half way there. A group of teachers were drinking and the secondary school, so we joined them for a good while. From there, we went back to the vila to continue to the festa. And once we were done drinking at the vila (again), we went back to the secondary school (again). There was supposed to be a monster party, but after waiting for two hours, we gave up. We don’t know if the party happened, we didn’t really care. We were just happy to be done drinking.

I felt absolutely terrible Tuesday morning. But I wasn’t hung over at all. Not on bit. Aside from the test that I had to proctor for one of our friends, my problems on Tuesday morning were purely mental. I was a wreck and I had to do something about it. So I took my bike and just went. And went. And went. I went until the “Clap Your Hands Say Yeah” album was finished. Eleven kilometers later, I turned around, into the wind, and went home.

Nothing like a twenty-two kilometer bike ride in the African heat to clear your mind. All of the pain that was in my head transferred to my legs. Stretching would have been a good idea. Besides clearing my head and sweating out whatever alcohol was left in my system, the bike ride managed to kill nearly the entire morning.

After lunch, I actually had some work to do. Calling it “some” would even overdo it. I had three classes to teach to my twelfth graders. All of the material was test preparation. In theory, they should already know the vocabulary and structures, so I just wanted to give some lessons on how to take an exam. They seemed to soak up the lesson pretty well.

By the end of the day, my head was completely clear and my leg was absolutely killing me. I limped my way around as Richie and I cooked dinner. After dining, we watched “The Bank Job”, a pretty good film. What started out as a terrible day ended up okay.

I had another productive day Wednesday morning, with a couple of factors at play today. For one, Richie went off to the vila, and never really came back. Apparently, after buying some potatoes, the school director hooked him into having a beer…or four…at 8:30 in the morning. While he was out, I started cleaning up the house. Then a call from our boss came in. He was across the river and wanted to come over. Of course, we were happy to have him over, and it just gave me more reason to clean up more.

Our boss made it to our house before Richie got back. Very impressive, on both counts. He joined us on our patio for a while before they headed out to buy some supplies.

The clean-up didn’t stop once he left. But this clean-up was personal. I finally got sick of my three month old goatee. And while I was at, I shaved my head clean for the first time in nearly a year. Using a clipper is fine and all, but I forgot how glorious a shave with a blade is. Now everything in the house, including me, was squeaky clean.

After relaxing for a bit, Richie and I made a joint market run. During his morning-long booze fest, Richie was informed that meat would be sold in the market today. Sweet! We downed a soda and headed over to the butcher. When we arrived, all we saw was a cow hide spread over a tarp with buckets at its side. Nothing like fresh-killed meat. It should make for a couple good days of eating.

We used about half of our kilo of meat for always delicious cheesesteaks. Once our stomachs were bloated, we watched “Slumdog Millionaire”, a really well-done film.

When the lights went out, I picked up with my regular dark-time activities. For the last week, I’ve been reading my dad’s newest book “Confronting Reality: Ten Issues Threatening to Implode American Society (And How We Can Fix It)”. (Go get it on Amazon!) It’s very exciting for me to read because I read almost every word of the drafts last year. To have a bound form in my hands is pretty cool

The other habit I’ve picked up on this week is taking a couple of minutes to appreciate the stars. As we get ever closer to having full-time energy, I’ve come to realize that I won’t have this Planetarium-like view again. I have to soak it all in while I can, before technology robs me of it.

Richie and I were both up at insanely early hours. Richie is usually up by 5, but I normally refuse to roll out of bed until at least 7:00. But today I was up and at it. Considering that we were both awake, Richie proposed something new: breakfast. It took ten months, but for the first time in Machanga, we had a real breakfast at an appropriate hour.

Even after eating though, there was still so much of the morning left. I ran over to the well to pump some water and put myself to use. Our dish towels were in dire need of a cleaning, and with the pounding sun, it only took ninety minutes to hand-wash and sun-dry them. That killed off most of the morning, but I was still left a little time to relax.

We had a stir fry lunch today, which is always good, but it was especially good to use beef. One of our colleagues keeps an iced over freezer in his house. We passed our beef to him yesterday, assuring ourselves of having good meat today. No need to gamble it like we did last time.

I had a mere one class to teach today to one of my groups of twelfth graders – just more test prep today. After I finished with them, Richie went to their class to watch some presentations. And then the fun began.

We ran over to the vila for a soda. A cold soda. A cold soda courtesy of twenty-four hour energy in the vila! It arrived a couple months left, but as we thought, it arrived just in time for the election. I don’t know how many ballot votes it will win, but it certainly won our vote of approval.

The nights was pretty calm. I put together a packing list for my family’s trip here. I know it’s close now (something like seventy days away)! We cooked up a chili dinner with our remaining beef and watched a couple of episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. And as I have done all week, I had my minutes with the stars and hour with my dad’s book.

So many days here, Mozambique defeats us. One more occasions than I can count, we have days or even mornings where we just want to give up and try again the next today. But today: today was different. Today, we won.

Around 9:30, after eating some bread and cleaning the house, Richie and I headed over to Mambone. We had a couple things to do. Primarily, we wanted to eat some chicken at Zimaima, a restaurant in Mambone. But we also wanted to get a part for our bike and say goodbye to a colleague who is heading home.

We hit the Mambone vila at 10:30. The part we were looking for – a small rack to throw over our back tire – was difficult to come by. But in a rare moment of resilience, we chose not to give up and found it on our third try.

Our reward for our morning’s work was some delicious chicken from Zimaima. It’s so lovely to have someone cook a meal for us. The only downside to Zimaima is that they take forever. But even that couldn’t deter us. The timing was nearly perfect. With just a twenty minute lag-time, we caught our friend who heads back to the states this weekend. He is the first of what will be many friends lost to completed service.

By mid-afternoon, we had purchased our bike part, eaten our chicken, said goodbye to a friend, and even bought bell pepper. A full day of victories, all packed in one five-hour period.

We arrived at the river just as a boat was about to leave. The successes continue. We figured that something would have to go wrong sometime this afternoon, but it just never happened. Once we got back to Machanga, we spent some time attaching the part to our bike. Again, we failed a few times, but after twenty or so minutes, we had it figured out, attached perfectly.

This was way too much success for one day. Something had to go wrong. And it finally did. My grandfather tried to call, but neither of my lines worked. But clearly, resilience runs in the family. He tried Richie’s line and got through with no problem. Another victory.

After all this success today, we rewarded ourselves with a delicious sandwich dinner. Our regular sandwiches were made better by the addition of honey mustard. Honey: good. Mustard: good. Honey mustard: delicious. Following dinner and a shower, we watched some “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, a perfect end to a near perfect day.

Richie was sure that since everything went so right yesterday, things were bound to go wrong today. For him, this may have been true. But things weren’t so bad today. It wasn’t like yesterday. Things just sort of went.

Yesterday was the last official day of school, so things are now especially quiet. Some kids have already found their way off of school grounds. Others are sticking around to take national exams. But the whole, there is not a lot going on. This place is dead.

Quiet doesn’t begin to describe the morning, but it wasn’t too bad. I knocked out another chapter of my dad’s book and played and knocked out a good round KenKen puzzles. Lunch could not come fast enough.

One of the upsides of a lot of quiet is that it makes napping more than possible. For two solid hours after lunch, I was out like a light. Nothing like a nap to kill off a good portion of the afternoon.

After naptime, we made our now-normal run to the market for a soda. These daily soda runs are going to put a major dent into our bottom line. For ten Mets a day, though, a cold soda is so worth it.

With the energy on, we got cracking on dinner. After powering through our stir fry, we decided we wanted to watch something with explosions. We thought that “Stop Loss”, a movie about the Iraq War, would provide such fireworks. Other than a couple scenes here and there, there was nothing. So this is where the day goes wrong. The movie sucked. I mean, really sucked. We wanted our two hours back.

The night and my week ended with another chapter of my dad’s book. It certainly saved my night. And it put a nice end to another week.