This is the fifth week in a row that we’ve stayed in Machanga. Even a year after being here, our breaking point is usually four weeks. Needless to say, we’re going a little insane. And we can’t wait to get out of here this weekend.
Our day, like most of last week, was pretty quiet. At least we had some things to keep us entertained. We both buried ourselves in magazines. Over the course of the day, I powered through a pair of Newsweeks and a Time. On of my old hockey buddies is now writing for Newsweek, which I find awesome. But, really, I should learn to spread out my reading a bit more.
The only eventful thing in the afternoon was Richie and I – along with a couple of kids and another teacher – trying to repair our bike for good. I don’t know if it will ever be perfect. I think the roads and the kids do a fair amount of damage to it. Whatever we did to it today, it’s running a bit better now
All that really matter on Sunday was we had for dinner. With the arrival of Velveeta, we were really hoping to do pizzas last night, but the bread shortage put a dent in that plan. However, there was no shortage of bread today, and therefore, no shortage of pizza tonight. We thought it would be a good idea to have pasta beforehand and make it a full-blown Italian night. It seemed like a good idea, but we were full half way through the pizza.
We fought through the food – a tough fight, but we both came out victorious – and watched a bit of “How I Met Your Mother”. In the meantime, my mother tried to give me a ring, but there was no luck. My parents will just have to wait till the morning.
Other than the 2:20 AM run (make that sprint…), I slept through the night well. I was awakened by a sports report – another Yankees win, three in a row. And once I was truly awake, my parents were able to get through. It’s been a couple weeks, so it was lovely to catch up.
Monday looked a lot like Sunday. Instead of going to the “light reading” of Newsweek, I jumped into an Economist. That took up a fair portion of my morning. The rest of my morning was spent doing mind games.
After our regular lunch (albeit with freshly imported cheese and bacon bits!), we had a very brief, boring meeting about national exams. Testing begins tomorrow and we need to be ready to proctor exams. I’m really hoping the director will spare us.
I killed the last hour or so of the afternoon turning peanuts into peanut powder. Seriously. The ambitiousness snuck back up on me and I thought I could do a sorta Thai peanut sauce. Ambitiousness failed me. It was awful We bombed it out with teriyaki sauce and it turned out okay. We capped our night with some “House” and “How I Met Your Mother”.
Richie and I have been dreading Tuesday for the last couple days. National exams started Tuesday which meant that we had to get off our patio and go to school with the chance that we might have to work. No, really. Our school director told all the teachers that we had to be at the school at 7:15 because we may – may! – have to proctor exams during the day.
Richie got off lucky – no controlling for him. I, on the other hand, was not so lucky. I was pegged by one of the assistant directors to proctor exams in the afternoon. This sucked for two reasons: not only would I have to stand bored for two-plus hours, but I would have to wait all day to be bored in the classroom.
As such, the morning was boring. It’s not even worth describing. Basically, it’s what I’ve done for the last couple weeks – sit on the patio, feet up. Today, however this earned me a compliment from my neighbor: “Your feet are so clean. I could put bread on your feet and eat it.” That might just be the greatest compliment a Mozambican can offer a muzungu, whose white feet show dirt so beautiful.
If the morning was boring, then the afternoon was terrible. I walked over to the school mid-afternoon and walked to my assigned room. Students filed in, sat down, and filled out their scantron forms. And then I stood there. For two amazingly boring hours. There is no knife sharp enough nor no gun big enough that could take the away the pain from today.
The only upside of proctoring exams late in the afternoon was that it brought us that much closer to energy. In fact, the energy was already on when I got back home. Most excellent.
Richie was on top of things tonight. He started dinner late, but nothing harmful to our regular nightly schedule. While the beans cooked, we watched an episode of “House” and after dinner, we watched “How I Met Your Mother”. Oh, TV, thank you for salvaging this day.
Once again, I dreaded waking up on Wednesday for fear of having to proctor exams. Richie and I stood in the room and listened as other teachers were called to serve. Phew! Spared today.
But what do we do now? We figured that we could be bored and do nothing or be bored and do something. We chose to be bored and do something; we volunteered our service to correct, or do whatever the director wanted us to do.
In this case, that meant we had to “tramcar” exams. “Trancar” means “to lock”. What could possibly be locked on exams? We found out: taking a red pen and putting lines through every unused space in exam books. Very exciting, huh? Either way, it took an hour out of our day.
I had some actual work to do in the afternoon. The students took their English exam today. I was left to read through the exam and make sure it was clean. Now, even with the exams that I write, I catch mistakes. This, however, was a bloodbath. Some words were missing, some answers misspelled, some questions didn’t have particularly good answers. After consulting with some other teachers, we found that of the sixty questions, five had problems and one was scientifically inaccurate.
So after my strenuous, forty-five minutes of work, I was back to the patio, “Economist in hand”. Usually – and this is going to sound sick – I love the obituaries in the “Economist”. But today I was disappointed. It’s hard for me to feel sympathetic toward a free-climber – as in no ropes – who dies by (wait for it…) falling.
Our night was pretty typical – sandwiches, “House” and “How I Met Your Mother”. And of course, another fascinating text conversation with my brother, this time on the topic of winter fruit.
One other note: today is one of my best friend’s, Ryan’s, birthday. He has the strange distinction of not only being the oldest of my closest friends, but he is also the only of my closest friends whose birthday I will miss three times while in country. So buddy, even though I can’t be there with you, I still raise my cup of scotch to you.
I thought that Thursday was going to be a light work day again. I could not have been more wrong. I got tapped to “tramcar” exams once again, followed by back to back exams period, with just a brief break for lunch. Making things worse, Richie – who had yet to work a single minute this week (other than the time we volunteered for) – only got hit with controlling one exam. This was supposed to be my day off.
Thursday was the breaking point. Five weeks of staying in Machanga will do that, but standing there for five hours to control exams definitely redefined “boring”.
By 3:00, following the second exam, I thought I was off the hook for the day. Once again, I thought wrong. “No, no, you have to go correct English exams”. Are you fuckin’ kidding me? I just worked eight straight hours and now I had to work another two, reading pathetic “essays”.
5:00 could not come soon enough and I’m pretty sure that if he wasn’t actually laughing, Richie was laughing on the inside. There was some silver lining, though, to this dark cloud of day: we wouldn’t have to do it tomorrow because we were going to Vilanculos. With this in mind, we happily ate dinner and watched some “House” before bed.
I feel like getting out of Machanga on Friday was a beautiful disappearing act. We left school at exactly 6:30, long after most teachers were awake but just before they were due to congregate for their proctoring assignments. We didn’t need to be so covert – I told our director that we would be gone – but it still felt sneaky.
Whatever bad luck I had yesterday was clearly not contagious. We waited exactly zero minutes to get a canoe across the river. And once across, we didn’t even make it to the villa to catch a car out to Maluvane; the car met us just before the town. The only downside of that leg of the trip was that the kid collecting money tried to overcharge us (by a measly five Mets), but Richie got it out of him.
Our luck continued all the way down. Within five minutes of getting to Maluvane, we had a car going down to Pambarra. But not just any car. First off, the car waited for us to walk over to him. Lourenço, the very nice driver, said in English, “I saw two white guys, I knew you were going south”. Secondly, this car was awesome: the guy had air conditioning, nice leather seats and a GPS. I enjoyed these benefits while Richie was stuck in the back of the car. But even that wasn’t too bad – he had a mattress in back laid out for his kids. This was a perfect ride.
Lourenço dropped us off at Pambarra for the cost of a coke. He didn’t even ask for it. I offered – I figured it was the least I could do if we weren’t going to pay for the ride. We barely made it out of the car before we had another free ride heading into Vilanculos. Today was just our day. All said, we set a new record for the Machanga-Vilanculos trip: Three hours and fifty-seven minutes. This accomplishment should be up there with being the first to climb Everest and breaking the four minute mile.
We almost didn’t know what to do with ourselves once we got to Vil. We got to town so early that the chapa that goes leaves from Vilanculos to Mambone was still in town. We could have gone back to Mambone and probably returned to Vilanculos. Instead, we decided that our better option was to drop off our stuff and do some shopping.
While we were in the villa, we made a pit stop at the little hamburger shack that has brought us so much joy. We were happy with our burgers, even though they didn’t have cheese. But for one man from South Africa, it was a less than pleasurable experience. He walked in to this little hole in the wall place, and just stood there, waiting to be waited on. But that’s not how things work: you place your order, then wait. And he only spoke English, which did not help his cause. In the end, he just stammered off in a furor.
Tourists, usually from neighboring South Africa, sometimes make life for us Volunteers a little difficult. For one, they generally don’t know the prices of things. So when muzungus try to buy anything in the market, the little market kids will mark up everything by 100 percent or more. Not knowing better, the tourists will pay it, which leaves us fighting tooth and claw for every Metical. They also put a dent into our reputation. We have a cultivated sense of patience that a lot of tourists lack. We know we’re going to wait and we deal with it. But impatient tourists often make us look bad.
The rest of our day was very relaxing. The ocean was a little cold but it felt wonderful under the scorching Mozambican sun. And each of us spent a fair amount of time in hammocks. Another rough day in Vilanculos.
We knew that this was going to be an expensive weekend, so instead of buying dinner tonight, we cooked our own dinner. A lot of money will be spent on beer so only spending sixty Mets between the two of us is a steal.
Needless to say, we were very happy to be in Vilanculos. And we were even happier on Saturday. The Trainees from Moz 14 are on site visit and there is a veritable crew heading up to the Vilanculos area. Another Volunteer arrived late morning and we met her in the villa to do some beer purchasing.
So what do we do with five cases of beer and at least four hours until the Trainees arrive? All of us thought the same thing: start. And so we did. A lot of beers later, everyone else arrived and the party really started.
I think the Trainees were really happy to escape Namaacha for a couple days. I remember last year that I was ready to get out for a while. It was such a good pick-me-up for me and I’m sure it will work wonders for them.
This was really exciting for us because we got to meet a lot of the new group. They are a really good group. Everyone seems to be getting through training okay. I think that they were really happy to express whatever concerns they had and were even happier to know that we went through the same shit last year.
And whatever concerns we couldn’t alleviate, we left to Afro Bar. When in doubt, go to Afro Bar and dance your worries away.
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