Year 1 - Week 50: The Life, Travels, Death and Digestion of Maurice

This is starting to get miserable. The sky was covered in grey again all day Sunday. There wasn’t even a sign of blue sky. This is what we have to look forward to until about April. Fun.

So once again, we were pretty much left useless for most of the day. We just sat around, laid around, lounged around. We just stayed around the house because going to the villa, trudging through the mud was not an option in the morning.

But we were able to escape the house for a little bit in the afternoon. We went over to Madinha’s store to see if we could get a turkey update. She had talked to someone across the river in Mambone, but it still wasn’t confirmed. We sat around at her bar for a while to see what she should come up with, but nothing turned up while we were there.

However, within minutes of getting home, Richie got a call from Madinha: the bird is ours for a cool 850 Mets. So what if we’re spending 6% of our monthly salary on one night’s dinner. It’s Thanksgiving, and damn it, I (along with many other happy Volunteers) am going to have turkey. We are, as another Volunteer told us, “conquering heroes” of the party.

Just before the energy came on, I went over to the director’s house to talk about the upcoming computer situation. Project eCycle has put together another five (!) laptops for the teachers here. We put together a plan to maximize their usage of them which satisfied everyone here. And I told him that I wanted to do tech classes with each of the forty-five teachers here, to which he agreed.

The night was nothing really to speak of, as usual. We ate our dinner, watched some “Office” and finished a season of “How I Met Your Mother”.

I was slightly concerned that I had not taken my Larium yesterday. I had left it on my plate yesterday but never recalled taking it. I think I just swallowed it with the food. My theory was confirmed Sunday night when I had some ridiculous lucid dreams.

My parents called early Monday morning, but the connection was a little rough. It was still clear enough for me to hear that Cal beat Stanford and that my dad, once again, spent the vast majority of the day sitting in front of the new fifty-two inch flat screen at home. The things I’m missing…

We had blue skies on Monday, which was most lovely. The sun helped dry out Machanga a little bit, making the walk easier than it had been last week. We handed over our 850 Meticais to Madinha, who had someone get our turkey from across the river. She told us to come back in the afternoon to check him out.

In the meantime, we had some waiting to do. Even with the sun out, most of the day was spent on the patio. It’s were damned if we do or damned if we don’t. If it rains, we want to stay dry, and if it’s sunny, we want to stay out of the sun. It kind of sucks. While in the shade, I spent some time reading some short stories by David Sedaris. Years ago, I tried to read a Sedaris book, and I made it fifty pages before I gave up on it. I’ve tried to like his writing, but I find most of it terrible.

After lunch and a short nap, Richie and I headed back to the villa to check out Mo. Yes, we named the turkey Maurice, but we think that Mo is much more appropriate. Mo is large, brown and looks absolutely delicious. It should be an interesting ride down to Vilanculos with a live turkey.

We have quickly come to the end of our new media, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. We have a couple more episodes of “House” and “The Office”. We knocked out a couple tonight after dinner, but we vowed to save some for when we get back from our trip.

Richie and I no longer have to set an alarm to get an early start to our travel day. Richie is up by 5 and recently I’ve been up around 6. It’s great. On Tuesday, we were both up and moving around 5:45. We cleaned up our house, closed up shop, then headed to the villa. Maurice stayed the night at Madinha’s house with a bunch of other birds. By 6:30, he was in our hands and we were off and running.

Maurice was a pretty good traveler. He kept his head up the entire way in spite of being carried upside-down by the feet. In his final days, Maurice will see the best and worst that North Inhambane has to offer: the best being Vilanculos, the worst being Machanga.

After crossing the river – is there anything funnier than a live turkey in a canoe? – we jumped in a chapa to get to Maluvane. The driver said that we would be going directly to Maluvane. He should look up “directly” in a dictionary; the longest stretch we drove without stopping was maybe five kilometers.

The next leg of the trip went a little more smoothly. We didn’t have to wait too long to get a ride down toward Inhassoro. Instead of going all the way to Vilanculos, we thought that staying the night in Inhassoro would be a good move. After all, the Volunteer in Vilanculos has dogs and we don’t want them to kill Maurice. We want to kill Maurice!

Once we arrived in Inhassoro, we untied Maurice and let him stretch out his legs. Being in a chapa is torture enough: being tied up in a chapa is just inhumane. While Maurice walked around, we spent some quality time on the beach.

With everyone in Inhassoro together, we decided to do Mexican night. One of the Volunteers bought a grouper from a kid off the beach, which was cooked perfectly for fish tacos. Paired with mango daiquiris and cervejas, it was a very successful food night.

All of us reconvened for breakfast Wednesday morning. Richie and I cooked up some pretty delicious scrambled eggs for everyone. When you’ve cooked them every day for the last year, you become pretty good.b

After an otherwise relaxing morning, we retied Maurice and loaded him into a truck heading south. Things got interesting when we got to the crossroads. We got a ride in the back of a truck. The driver for the life of him could not keep the car rolling straight. A bought a third of the way down the road, the driver managed to drive on the complete opposite side of the road.

Now, Richie and I have been in some not so great rides, but we have never really been scared in a car…until today. We told the kid collecting money that we wanted out of the car. He said now. We demanded it. He said no. And then we threatened not to pay, and that did the trick. The argument that followed with the now-clearly drunk driver was ridiculous. He thought we were “ninjas”, but we made the right decision.

Three Mozambicans decided to get out of the car with us. Apparently, they thought we made the right decision also. The only problem was we were now in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully, within fifteen minutes, two tank-like trucks came by and stopped for us. As a bonus, we didn’t have to pay. It may have taken a little longer than if we had stayed in the first truck, but our safety is more important than speed.

We arrived in Vil in the middle of the afternoon. We dropped off our things at the house and headed into town for a beer. By the time we got back, it started getting dark. We had to get to killing immediately.

From everything we’ve heard, we were supposed to get Maurice drunk before killing him. I know that if I’m about to have my throat slit, I would like a drink or two before. But we didn’t know the first thing about how to make Maurice drink. So after multiple failed efforts, we said “fuck it” and just decided to kill him.

Even without the booze, Maurice did not put up much of a fight. He made one big last-ditch flap, but he otherwise died calmly. From there, we drenched the deceased one in scalding-hot water and I started pulling out feathers. The plucking of this bird was nothing short of tedious, but by the time Maurice was plucked, he looked like something from a supermarket.

But our work was still not done. Once externally cleaned, we had to clean out the inside. We slit open the chest bone and started removing all sorts of cool stuff – intestines, kidneys, a heart and more. I think we did a pretty good job, especially since none of us had done this before.

Since we couldn’t get Maurice to throw down any beer, we thought that we would have a drink for him. After all, this is the last time that we are going to be enjoying each other’s company, so we might as well make the most of it.

Maurice made it through the night okay. Now that the bird is dead, we have no more turkey-related responsibilities other than eating it. One of the out-going Volunteers prepped the turkey while a couple of us ran some errands. Of course, among the errands was getting delicious cheeseburgers.

When afternoon hit, we got back to getting our drink on. The turkey, as it cooked, smelled absolutely delicious. The house smelled like America. And over the course of the day, more Thanksgiving food came out: mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, dessert after dessert. All that was missing was football, and even that was possible.

But after three full plates of turkey, potatoes and desserts, I was pretty much done, and everyone else was mostly catatonic. Instead of going out, some people went to bed and a group of eight of us played some cards. Considering the circumstances, this was a pretty remarkable Thanksgiving.

Sleeping was an absolutely struggle Thursday night. Besides the heat and mosquitoes, I was so full from eating that it actually hurt to lie down. This was a good pain.

Nobody slept particularly well Thursday night and nobody decided to stay in town on Friday. We had planned on staying in town but with no one else staying, we decided to go home as well. For the first time, there were two chapas running from Vil to Mambone, one at 9:30 and one an hour later. We took the early chapa home, a ride that was not so bad.

When we got home, we were done. I ate something quickly, but Richie and I were both intent on going to bed. I was absolutely out for about ninety minutes and woke up groggy. After a couple minutes though, I was ready to deal with other people. I went out on the patio and set up shop. Some teachers came by to talk about our trip and I was happy to talk with them.

Even with the naps, we were both seriously exhausted. After dinner, we watched a pair of season finales, one of “House”, one of “The Office”. By the time the lights went, we were more than ready to go to bed.

Other than one strange wake-up at 11:30 at night, I slept like a baby until 7:15 in the morning. I haven’t had a night of sleep that good in a long time. It was one of those nights of sleeps from which you wake up drowsy.

For a little while in the morning, it looked like it was going to rain. There were no shortage of clouds, but soon enough, grey clouds turned to white clouds and white clouds turned to no clouds at all.

As soon as I was awake enough, I realized that we may have made a terrible mistake coming home a day early. Machanga was fucking hot and there’s not a beach anywhere close. Being alone in Vilanculos would not be the worst thing in the world. At least we weren’t the only people doing nothing – by 9:30, a good group of teachers were hanging around under the trees, drinking beer and wine. We decided not to join in.

Sure, drinking would have spruced up our day. It would have made the hour pass. It would have made us social. But the truth is that we wanted no part of drinking or being social. Finally, the morning passed by, and we were ready for lunch.

The afternoon went by in the same way that the morning did: me on the patio, Richie in the house, colleagues drinking underneath the trees. Around 4:00, we were ready to get out of the house. We wandered over to the villa to get a soda. We didn’t even get a chance to order; Madinha just brought us out a beer. Then another. With the second beer, she brought us some food. And when we tried to pay for everything, maybe 100 Mets in all, she wouldn’t let us pay. Nice.

We didn’t have to wait too long for the energy to come on. As we get ever closer to summer, the energy has been coming on later. (And yes, that means we still don’t have 24-hour energy.) We cooked up some sandwiches and mashed potatoes, and after eating we watched “The Big Lebowski”, a very strange but funny film, an odd end to a great Thanksgiving week.