Year 1 - Week 51: Three and Four

If this year’s departure dates are a proper guide for next year, last Thursday was the last Thanksgiving that we will celebrate in Mozambique – weird. Weirder than that is the fact that half the people with whom we celebrated are all but departed. We are hoping to catch some of our Moz12 friends one more time before they leave, but a lot of them are already gone.

This is a time that is both depressing and exciting. It’s depressing because our friends are leaving. Making things more difficult is the fact that there is so little to do these days. Quite frankly, we feel useless right now. At the same time, we are so excited that Moz14 is literally days away from being sent to their sites. And with Moz12 moving out, and Moz14 moving in, it means that we’re the next group out.

Not that we’re necessarily in a rush to leave. We still have a lot of work to do, a lot of little projects we want to get done. But all of that will have to wait until the school year starts up in January. For now, though, we are stuck doing nothing, which is just about what we did on Sunday.

For the last couple days, I’ve read “The Best American Non-Required Reading” of 2008. It’s a collection put together annually by 826 Valencia, which is in my general neighborhood. It’s an interesting collection of fiction and non-fiction writing from 2008. As I think I’ve made clear over the course of the year, literature is not my thing – I’m more of a history/biography kind of person – but this stuff was good. Really good. Can’t put down good. I spent the better part of Sunday, save for a nap, with my face in the book.

Late in the afternoon, we ran over to the villa to get a soda. The soda run on Sunday is always kind of a fishing expedition. For most of the year, the villa has simply shut down on Sunday, but with electricity, there may or my not be something open. Today, we were lucky: we got our cold sodas.

We had but an hour to wait until the energy on. We made chili tonight, which always takes forever to cook, so while the beans cooked, we watched “The Darjeeling Limited”. I saw this in theatres with my best friends and all I could remember from it was that Sweet Lime was drop-dead gorgeous, India is full of bright colors, and it’s pretty funny. I forgot how good of a film it is.

It’s fuckin’ hot here again, making sleep a challenge. One would think that it would cool down after the sun goes down, but by some strange, cruel meteorological twist, the breeze stops at night. Before going to bed, I did a little more reading, but I was distracted by what was outside my window. The sky, at 9:30 at night, was nearly white. A clear sky, nearly no pollution, and a remarkable bright moon will do that. And it’s not even a full moon.

After 1:30 and 5:15 wake-ups, I rolled out of bed around 7:30 for another day lacking commitments. Today begins the second round of national exams, which we thankfully have not been asked to proctor. This left me plenty of time to finish out “Non-Essential”, which I was happy about. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get my hands on the 2009 edition when it comes out.

Richie and I made a run to the market around 10 o’clock. Yesterday, while in the villa, I talked to a tailor about getting a pair of shorts made. He wouldn’t give me a price yesterday, so I decided I should come by with the cloth today. I had a baseline for the price – our colleague spends 200 Mets a pair – so I figured the price would be a little higher here, as there are not as many tailors here. I was shocked to here the price: 600 Mets!

If I was shocked, Madinha, or market friend, was irate. She grabbed my cloth, and the shorts I want the new pair modeled after, and said she would take care of it. “This shouldn’t cost more than 80 Mets!” Then, someone else spoke up. “Are you sure they said 600 and not 60?” Fuck. I was sure I heard 600, but I’ve been wrong before, and there’s no reason I couldn’t be wrong again. I went back to the tailor and asked the price again. “Sixty. Six-zero”. It’s lovely to know that after more than year of speaking this language, I still make the most basic errors. Just lovely.

At least my idiocy provided a good laugh for Richie. And it may have been a good sign. “He doesn’t sew that well anyway”, said Madinha. “I’ll take them to Mambone”. It’s out of my hands now.

I got back to reading Sedaris’s book after lunch. I’m committed at this point, and there’s so little left that I felt like I had to finish it. The second half, in my opinion, was much better than the first. It should come as no surprise that the second half is the non-fiction side. With that knocked out, I started reading “Bulfinch’s Mythology”. This should be interesting. I don’t know what will win out: the fact that it’s a history, making this enjoyable, or the fact that it’s basically a history about fiction.

Our preparations for dinner were minimal. For the first time, I made mango salsa, which was quite good. It’s a shame that mangoes have such a weird texture, because they are so delicious, they could be dessert. After dinner, we watched “Choke”, another strange buy funny movie.

I was enjoying an otherwise cool Tuesday morning when I got the call: “be at school at 8:30.” Damnit. Every time I think I’m done with work for the year, they keep dragging me in. Today was pretty simple – I just had to read through the second English exam and make sure there were no errors. Other than a couple minor things, there was nothing really substantial, much better than the first exam.

It would have been nice to get correcting, but the students were still taking the exam when I was reading through it. This exam, along with having less mistakes, was substantially easier than the first exam. I’ll have to wait till tomorrow to see how they did.

As late morning rolled in, so did the clouds. A pallid sheet of grey took over the entire sky. And then it started to rain…for the next ten hours. It was a weak but constant rain, hard enough to fill a bucket but light enough to not turn the entire town to mud. We followed what everyone else did and just sat on the patio trying to stay dry.

The cloud cover did a pretty good job of turning the place dark. It was so dark that they had to turn the energy on hours early so the students could read their exams. This benefited us, as we were able to watch a movie before dinner. After dinner, we watched the “House” bonus features, which weren’t so bad. It did its job and filled out our night.

Wednesday was the real work day. Even though grading is a completely monotonous task, it was still something to occupy my time. I plugged in the iPod and graded away until lunch time.

There was a very interesting split between the two groups that took the exam. In one group, nearly everybody passed convincingly. In the other class, less than ten percent passed. In theory, the classes should pass at a relatively similar rate. The only difference that I could see between the two classes was that one of the groups was presided over by an English teacher and one wasn’t. I’m not saying that anything fishy happened, but it is quite the coincidence.

I had to go back to school around 2:00 to finish up grading. Along with the actually correcting, we have to record the grades. It’s a boring task made worse by the fact that we have to everything first in pencil, then overwrite in pen. A twenty minute task is immediately doubled.

The clouds finally cleared out in the afternoon. The puddles thrown around town were enough to draw a ton of frogs and bugs out into the open. It was an invasion. For some reason, I thought buying a new light for a porch would be a good idea. Wrong. Once the lights came on, and the sun went down, the bugs swarmed to the light. Terrible idea all the way around.

Richie had a revolutionary idea for dinner: pizza. While he cooked up out delicious food, I went over to our neighbor’s house to buy beers. We can’t have pizza without beer. After eating, we watched “Napoleon Dynamite”. Yes, even though this movie has been out for years, I had not seen it. Gosh!

Since we managed to get all of our correcting done on Wednesday, I was in for another boring morning on Thursday. I was enjoying a nice relaxing day on the patio when the tenth grade math teacher came over and threw me the twelfth grade math exam. The twelfth grade teacher is in the hospital, likely with malaria, so I became the go-to person for math. He gave me four problems that he couldn’t figure out: “a little practice for you”, as he said.

Two of the problems were a piece of cake, one gave me a little strain, and one – because it had logarithms – I had no idea to do. As I was working on the problems, a student came over to ask me about the logarithm problem. He gave me an example of how logarithms worked and a few minutes later, I had the problem figured out. When the teacher returned, he just laughed. “These problems gave me a headache trying to figure them out”, he said. I’m just happy to help out.

Richie and I had a little time after lunch to relax before heading over to Mambone. Two Volunteers are making their way through the country and they wanted to see Machanga. For the third time this year, we’re going to have visitors! Before we headed over, we went to the villa to talk to Madinha. We figured that she could cook us up a pretty good lunch tomorrow, and she was okay with the idea.

We got to Mambone around 4:30, by far the latest we’ve arrived there. Usually, we’re there by 9 in the morning. Our timing was absolutely perfect: just as they were pulling into the villa, we were also arriving. Having traveled all day, we figured that we should give them a small break, so we got a beer before heading back across the river.

Besides the fact that our house is tiny, we are ill-equipped to take on visitors. We pretty much only have two of everything because people so rarely come here. This is especially evident on the sleeping front – we only have our two beds. So we asked Sozinho to grab a couple mattresses from our neighbors’ houses and we were set up.

We went with a very simple pasta dinner. Cooking for four is a bit of a task in our tiny kitchen, but it was also made easier because we had some extra hands to prepare. After eating, we watched “Bruno”, and when the lights went out, we all settled into the sweatbox.

All of us were up pretty early Friday morning. Even though the day was young, it was still ridiculously hot. For a little while, we avoided the sun in the shade of our patio, but late in the morning, we found the energy to get up and passear through town. The four of us made a big loop through the villa, past the government building and back into the school.

By the time we got back, we were hungry. We told Madinha that we would be over for lunch around 2:00 and without having eaten breakfast, we needed something to hold us over. It would be a rare three-meal day for us.

The food was just enough to keep us hungry for lunch and it’s a good thing we brought our appetites. Madinha brought out all the stops: chicken, fish, matapa, rice and a little salad. For all her trouble, we barely paid her anything – 155 Mets each, and that included a couple drinks each. It was probably the best bang for our buck we’ve had anywhere.


We returned home around 4:00 and started debating the merits of dinner. We had just eaten twice. Would it really make sense to eat again? Sure, why not. After hanging around for a bit, our visitors cooked up some delicious spicy rice. While they cooked, I was made useful once again. There were four different tech problems that I attended to: one laptop wasn’t printing; a “lost” (read: unsaved) document needed to be “found” (read: retyped); the director’s computer needed a media player; and the printer jammed. All four problems were resolved with little effort.

I returned from the tech run just as food was coming out. Richie, who is not a fan of spiciness, ate three bites and gave up. I killed my plate and nearly finished his. The best decision we made, though, was the choice to eat dinner on the patio. As it has become hot again, the house has become ridiculously hot at night. Eating on the patio made dinner enjoyable.

Initially, I had no trouble sleeping. But I woke up at midnight, and was for a long time. I think I finally fell asleep sometime around 3 in the morning, but it wasn’t a good sleep by any means. Our visitors headed out early in the morning, making the wise decision, on our advice, to head south to Mambone before heading north. We would have walked them over but we had plans to head across the river later in the morning. While we waited for some hours to peel away, we cleaned up the house.

We were also hoping that the rain that arrived in the morning – and that caught our visitors on the way out – would leave. But as 10:00 rolled around, the rain was still falling, albeit lightly. Hooded and under an umbrella, we headed out to the river. As we walked the rain picked up and the dirt quickly became mud. It continued to rain hard as we crossed the river. And when we finally settled at Zimaima, the restaurant where we like to eat, it was a full-on downpour.

Our reason for going to Mambone was very specific. We didn’t need to have the delicious chicken, although it was a nice perk. The real cause was to pick up our passports. Our renewed visas had made it all the way to Vilanculos, but we didn’t want to go there to get them, so we told one of the Volunteers there to give them to the chapa driver. She bid us good luck, but we had confidence in him. After all, Greg, our recently departed friend, had entrusted him with his bank card and cash. Of course, we got our passports with no problem.

The rain steadily increased for the better part of the afternoon. We caught a break as it seemed to come to a complete halt as we crossed back to Machanga. We then made our way through the mud, both of us nearly falling many times, until we were back at home. As fate would have it, as soon as we were back in the house, it stopped raining completely.

Between the poor night’s sleep and all the walking, we were both exhausted; we both took late afternoon naps. Fully awake, we cleaned up the patio a bit. The rain always turns our blessed patio to mud. And with a night of beans and little media left to watch, we called it a day.