Year 1 - Week 45: Seriously, it's a Scantron

Now that school is officially over, this place has gone way too quiet for anyone’s liking. Combined with our lack of new media, we are left with little to do, little to read, and little to watch. Thankfully, I still had a couple chapter’s left of my dad’s book. And luckily, I can only read one chapter at a time because, well, it’s a text book.

Once I finished the chapter, though, there was nothing to really do. I scoured the house for something interesting and found Richie’s game book. Over the year here, I’ve learned a lot of things about Richie. He can’t roll his r’s. He’s a Jets fan. He likes bologna. And these types of games are not his forte. They kept me occupied in the hours before lunch.

After a lovely post-lunch nap, Richie and I headed to the vila for a cold soda. It’s not so much that we wanted soda; we just needed a way to kill an hour of the afternoon. Our effort to get through the afternoon was further aided by a soccer game. Usually, I won’t go to such games – they are usually just opportunities to be on the receiving end of stares – but today, it was worthwhile.

Along with our daily activities rut, we have hit a serious rut in our food choices. Pasta has nearly been taken off the table. We can only eat so much rice and potatoes. But tonight, I felt ambitious. I decided to take another crack at making ravioli. Usually, the first time we cook something, it sucks, and the second time, it’s better. The pattern remained true with ravioli. Better, yes, but it was far from perfect. Richie thought it was okay, but I thought it was mediocre. Our mediocre meal was followed by a mediocre film, “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay”. It had its laughs, but it was not nearly as funny as the original.

I was sleeping a lovely sleep when, at 6:10, somebody decided that it was okay to knock on the door. There are some things I will never get used to here: the constant “estou a pedir milis” from children, the ridiculous music, the fact that people tend to speak in either a whisper or a yell, but not between. But the crazy hour at which people start their days tops the list. I don’t care where I am – 6:10 is not an acceptable hour to be the recipient of a knock on the door.

After dealing with the knock at the door, I crawled back into bed to do some reading. Once the reasonable hour of 7:30 had arrived, I woke up to the rest of the world. The moring on the pario was fairly productive. I got in a lovely workout, topped off by pumping a couple buckets worth of water.

I actually had a class to teach in the afternoon following lunch. I continued preparing my twelfth grade students for their national exams. Apparently, they are going to be putting out a schedule of when these prep sessions will take place, but I really don’t care. They can use all the practice they can get.

The class lasted about an hour. Most of they them did pretty well with the material. It was nice to see them applying the test-taking techniques that I taught them last week.

I had a couple hours of break before we were due to gave a 4:00 meeting. As meetings usually start about 45 minutes late, I brought my iPod, prepared for the worst. Shockingly, the meeting started 4:05. The topic of the meeting was of great importance: the energy situation. It seems that there is actual progress. A date of November 5th was set to buy materials for the hook-up. Quite fantastic. I’ll believe it when I see it.

A couple of us talked after the meeting. There is some concern amongst the teachers that they won’t be able to pay for the materials, pay the bill, etc. I suspect people will find a way. They have waited too many months – hell, too many years – for energy to arrive. Sacrifices, I’m sure, will be made.

For now, though, the energy situation remains out of our control. Once the powers that be flipped the switch, we cooked up our dinner and watched some “Curb Your Enthusiasm” before bed.

I was once again the victim of an early wake-up Tuesday morning. This time the perpetrator was our friend and fellow teacher Ussene, via text message. At least he had the good sense to not knock at the door at an unreasonable hour. The message said that I needed to turn in my twelfth grades okay. I saved my grades onto a flash drive, ran over to the director’s office, and handed in my grades. No work necessary.

The energy was on for most of the morning. It has been on for most of the mornings this week. Strange, to say the least. What’s more strange is that I really haven’t been sure what to do with myself. Internet is too expensive to just mess around on it. All I can really do is charge batteries. Funny what a year will do to you: from not knowing what to do without energy to not knowing what to do with it.

I tried to teach Tuesday afternoon. I really did. I walked over to the class, but no one was there. And when I say no one, I mean no one. I even went back to the classroom ten minutes later, but no one was there, still. Defeated, I gave up.

I finished my dad’s book upon my return It was definitely better the second time around. I guess after all the edits and all the eyes, it should be better. Finishing the book was the beginning of my master plan for the afternoon. I could work out and shower before dinner and have a lovely evening. But no. All of that was ruined by another meeting.

This meeting was ridiculous. Actually, it was beyond ridiculous. There were four points to be covered in the meeting and we barely got through the first one: rules for teachers during testing and how to fill out a scantron form. During the meeting, by Richie’s request, I drew a samurai killing himself, a man jumping off a bridge into a sea of sharks, and a person getting electrocuted. All of these alternatives seemed better than sitting in this meeting.

There is only one way to deal with such torture: sweets. We know that cookies make everything better, but tonight we took a different route – brownies. They weren’t exactly pretty, but damn they were delicious. A cup of butter, a cup of sugar, a cup of flower and cup of cocoa go a long way.

I was up early again on Wednesday, but I was actually up on my own volition. Alexis came over to go for a passear with Richie to the salt fields. Apparently there is a place not so far from here where the tide rolls in and out and leaves plenty of salt. I chose not to embark on this mission. If I want salt, I’ll go to my kitchen.

While Richie and Alexis were out an about, I had myself a lovely morning. I went out for a quick wake-up bike ride around town, followed by a workout. I pumped some water – a nice finish to the workout – showered, and did some laundry. In a place where it’s so easy to do nothing, it felt good to do something.

Richie returned from the salt field looking like a man defeated. He didn’t just look exhausted from what turned out to be a much longer walk than he anticipated. Courtesy of a bad choice in footwear, the skin of his pinky toes was gone. I looked on horrified – and glad that I chose not to go on this little journey.

I took care of lunch. It was the least I could do. Plus Richie was asleep. Could you blame him? I would get my nap in later in the afternoon. Being the day after I took my malaria meds, I knew I was in for a trippy sleep.

One of the biggest downsides of this malaria drug is that when you have really vivid dreams, you can’t really tell if you are awake or asleep. The dream that I had felt so real. I know I was out like a light for at least an ninety minutes, but it wasn’t a restful sleep: it felt like I was constantly on the move. I felt more tired after my nap than I did before it.

I eventually woke out of my post-nap haze. Late in the afternoon, Richie and I met Alexis over in the vila for a soda. If two muzungus isn’t enough to grab your attention, you can only imagine what having three of us together does.

When we got home, I had two missions. The first one was a piece of cake. I wanted to fix our front door. For months, we have struggled to lock and unlock our door from the outside. Today though was the breaking point. After trying for five minutes to lock the door, we gave up. The brilliant minds that installed our door failed to properly align the lock with the catch. That was an easy fix.

The bike however was a different story. There was one small screw that was keeping our newly purchased baggage holder from fitting nicely. I figured, what’s one little screw? Apparently, that one little screw held the entire gearbox in place. Oops. I tried to fix it, but darkness fell before I could get it to fit. Bike: 1 – Lee 0.

Before getting to dinner, our neighbor came over with some minor computer inquiry. He had typed up the list of students taking national exams – an accomplishment in itself. All he needed now was to have it printed. I grabbed a flash drive, headed to the director’s office, and printed off the materials. After eating, Richie and I enjoyed a couple “Seinfeld” episodes before bed.

If nothing else, butchering the bike last night gave me something to do Thursday morning. I’m pretty good at breaking things, but I am also fortunate to have received a fraction of the mechanical skills that my grandfather has. As with the door situation, if something is broken, I can usually fix it.

Such was the case with the bike. After an initial struggle, followed by some help from a teacher whose interest only went so far as wanting to use it, I pretty much figured out how to get the gearbox back in place. I don’t know if it’s perfect – in fact, it probably isn’t – but for what we need, it’s more than functional. It’s not like either of us is going to be hitting the Pyrenees or the Alps any time soon.

As I worked on the bike, Richie made his way over to a funeral. It was never really made clear who had died and it was no one who I had personally dealt with, so I didn’t see much reason to go. It turns out that it was the school librarian, with whom I had spoken exactly zero. As told by Richie, no one really said what he had died from, but apparently he had been sick for a long time.

When you hear something like that – non-descriptive, enduring – there is really only one answer: AIDS. It’s the pink elephant in the room that everybody sees, even acknowledges, but nobody is willing to say “Look, a pink elephant!” In a country where one in six are living with HIV/AIDS, most people want to fight it with exigency, but refuse to declare it as the cause of death. Diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis, or the flu might be the proverbial final nail in the coffin, but they become sick with these diseases only because their systems have been so weakened that they are susceptible to even the weakest of strains.

Upon Richie’s return, we cooked up lunch. Richie noted that he had pretty much bottomed out for the day. I guess a funeral will do that to you. I was supposed to cook lunch, as Richie was responsible for the preparation, but that came to an end when our neighbor came over with a computer question.

It’s a beautiful thing to see, these teachers using computers. But there’s still a long way to go. Our neighbor had a list of names that he wanted to alphabetize. This is an easy task, but it was made a little more complicated by the combination of manually typed numbers and auto-numbering. The intent here was good, but it just shows a lack of experience. All the more reason to continue with more intensive computer classes when we have full time energy.

The afternoon was full of boredom. I tried to read, but I was severely lacking in motivation. Games provided me a brief respite, but I think I spent more time than not just staring into space. This place may kill us.

Our night was, as normal, quiet. Other than a money request from a student – the worst kind of a request, the type we almost always deny – we were uninterrupted both during dinner and “V for Vendetta”, one of the better movies we have watched here.

For not doing anything of substance for the better part of the week, Richie and I both were shocked at the relative speed with which this week has passed. It’s hard to believe that it’s already Friday, considering that the days have been so slow that I can feel my beard growing.

Richie finally had the good sense to not roll out of bed until a later morning hour. Mornings can be awfully long when you wake up at 5:00. Making yourself available to the world at a reasonable hour like 8:00 takes three hours off your morning without even trying.

There was really not much to speak of Friday morning. I know that I did a lot of sitting on the patio, reading ancient magazines and writing tiny letters and numbers into small boxes. But other than that, there wasn’t a lot going on.

Somehow, we got to 11:30 without knowing. Usually, we are beyond prepared for lunch by then, but in some way, it got passed us. Time flies when you are doing nothing.

It goes by even faster when you do something. I got in good lower-body workout (all done on the patio, of course). My neighbors looked on briefly, and I think they tried to talk to me, but I was plugged into my iPod and I really didn’t want to talk to anyone.

We made plans with some of our neighbors to go out tonight, which just gave me good reason to lay down for a little while. I didn’t sleep, but it still felt better than sitting or standing.

By 4:00, we were just waiting for the energy to come on. At 5:00, Richie stated that “we’ll have energy in the next hour”. No less than three minutes later, the energy was on. It almost made me a believer. Almost.

We cooked dinner on the early side and after a couple of episodes of “Seinfeld”, we put on our drinking pants and headed to the villa. It was kind of an awkward group of people to drink with, definitely not our usually crew. They rolled in, very drunk, about an hour after we arrived. But by the time they arrived, we were over it. We finished our beers and left.

I woke up, after a good night’s sleep, feeling pretty terrible. Besides the minor alcohol-induced headache, my entire lower body was really sore. I guess its better to have a small headache and be very sore than have a monster headache and only be a little sore.

In spite of not doing much of anything, the morning passed by pretty quickly. At some point, Richie went out for a bike ride and returned very burnt. It’s not riding right, which pisses me off. At least I have plenty of time to figure out what’s wrong.

The post-lunch boredom was kept to a minimum because of a nap. It was one of those larium-induced “sleeps” where I really wasn’t sure if I was awake or asleep for most of it. I figured since I woke up feeling refreshed, I must have slept at least a little.

Richie roped me in to going to the villa late in the afternoon. After drinking a fair amount last night, I wasn’t really in the mood to drink beers, but what can I do? Someone else is buying. Our trip was made worthwhile when after three beers, our friend busted out a plate of cheese. Success!

The energy came on shortly after we returned home. Because we were cooking beans tonight, we chose to light up charcoal instead of using the stove. The beans (and rice, for that matter) seem to cook better on the charcoal. Of course, once we get twenty-four hour energy, I’ll be damned if I have to light charcoal.

Considering our desperate lack of media, Richie proposed that we watch a movie called “Devon’s Ghost”. It sounded pretty shitty to start with and the fact that it was all overdubbed in Portuguese made it worse. Amazing, it did not reach our low expectations. I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, but this one might sit at the top of the list. A fitting end to the week, for sure.