Just a heads-up: new pictures of my family's visit to Africa are posted on the right. There are a lot of really awesome pictures that do a far better job explaining this place than my words can do. Enjoy - LG.
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I had Sunday morning all to myself. Richie went across to the river on a solo expedition. He came back with a bounty of goods including tomatoes and bell pepper. It is a rough season for us. Besides being ungodly hot and occasionally rainy, this is the time of year when we are shy on even the most basic vegetables. Things should get back to normal around March. Unitl then, it's going to be an interesting couple of weeks.
I spent most of the morning reading “Strength in What Remains”, a story about a Burundian trying to make it in America. It's a book stitched together by short, simple sentences, a style of writing I've come to appreciate. It's also a good story, which helps a lot.
Just as Richie got back to our side of the river, our school director came over. This is usually not good news. It's never a death message, but it's almost always a “pedir”: help with computers, the need for a signature, whatever it may be. And today was no different. He had a very important request of us “I bought a case of beer over at Madinha's and I need help drinking it”. Hello, beautiful! We've been called into duty to drink, and damn it, we can't say no to that.
I brought along the bottle of Jameson that I bought in Maputo. It was our intention to share the bottle with Madinha. At the end of the afternoon, we did leave the bottle with her. But to kick off the afternoon, I decided to go a little crazy with Irish Car-bombs. Amarula was a reasonable substitute for Bailey's and Laurentina Preta performed well in place of Guinness. The result was delicious though eye-raising for Madinha. She thought I was nuts, especially after I did a second one right after the first. She quickly understood: after sampling mine, she saw the light.
Toward the end of the afternoon – and the end of our case – the conversation turned to football. The final of Cup of African Nations was to be contested tonight between Egypt and Ghana. Well, my allegiance was set. Ghana is my first African love, the place that made me want to come back to Africa for my Peace Corps service. The game started minutes before we started talking about. The director said we could go back to his house to watch. “And don't worry”, he added, “I have another six beers in the house”. Charming.
We got back to his house just as the second half was beginning. Analysts had said that the team that got the first goal would win the game. This isn't the bravest of predictions, but there was a point: this was going to be a close game. The half-time score of 0-0 made that prediction look good. The stats didn't lie either: Egypt had a slight edge in time of possession, while Ghana had more chances. Ghana added some quality chances in the second half, but nothing found the back of the night.
In the 85th minute, Egypt took advantage of a defensive lapse. Two players put together a beautiful give-and-go and Egypt effectively ended the game right then and there. It's one thing to give up the first goal. It's another thing to give up that goal with five minutes to play. Full of beer and tired, I was now disappointed. I did find some consolation, though, in the cheese steaks that we had for dinner.
I woke up feeling okay for the most part. I wasn't hung over at all. The only pain I had was the pain that was lingering from the infection from two weeks. I would have thought that the antibiotics would have killed it off. But this was a new kind of pain. This was day four or five of this pain, and I was not happy about it. I considered doing the guy thing and just dealing with it, but this was becoming more and more difficult every day. I decided that morning that I would leave for Maputo on Tuesday. I had to be there over the weekend for the GREs anyways, and my doctor's appointment on Friday gave me reason to leave early.
Monday meant I was back to work. I was due to teach for five periods, but with the upcoming week of cancellations, I wanted to keep some sense of balance. I canceled two of the five, so each of my eleventh grade groups got one class. There was a bit of a fight with the pain and all, but I still managed through it.
Our evening was pretty typical, aside from Richie cooking banana bread. He never cooks anything. After dinner, we started watching “Criminal Minds”. We were hoping for a “Dexter”-type drama, but this just didn't live up to our expectations.
For the first time since we arrived at site, I woke up before Richie. I wanted to get on the road and, apparently, Richie was feeling particularly lazy. I was out the door at 6:27 in the morning, armed with a small backpack and a loose travel plan: at worst arrive in Vilanculos, at best get to Xai Xai. Xai Xai was certainly ambitious, but doable.
The travel day started poorly. I had to wait a good while for the chapa to leave Mambone. Sometimes on days like this, I think about how the same activity would be done in America. I think, given the same circumstances, a driver would load a car with the cargo, then get people. After all, in America, time means money, and everyone's time is valuable. Here, time is nothing, there's no rush, and there's little money to be earned, so fuck it. The driver collects a couple people, then spent the next hour loading up the car with rice-sacks full of fish. Frustrating, to say the least.
The only upside to the first ride was that I had the front seat to myself – much better than sitting with stinky fish. I had a bit of wait time before I got a car down to Inhassoro, a seat in the back of the truck. I was making decent time. From Inhassoro, I caught a chapa toward Vilanculos, again in the front seat to myself. It was barely noon and I had already arrived at my low-end goal. Time to be greedy. I sat around the crossroads for an hour or so. Suddenly, two cars came screaming around the corner. Bingo! For the third time, I had the front seat of a car, this time, a ballin' four-by-four truck. At one point we hit ninety miles an hour, a speed unheard of here. I got to Maxixe, a city between Vilanculos and Xai Xai, around 4:00. This would make for a good stopping point.
Within ten minutes of arriving in Maxixe, one of the Volunteers living there pulled up in a chapa. Excellent timing, indeed. He was giving an introductory English class between 4 and 5. Having nothing to do and nowhere to go, I stuck around to watch.
We had only seen each other a couple times over the past year. Even though I had just seen this Volunteer but two weeks ago, it was still nice to see him. We cooked up some pretty damn good Venezuelan food and watched “I Love You, Man”, a movie that has gotten funnier every time I've seen it. Exhausted from a long travel day, and the pain I was still dealing with, I went to bed.
For the last couple days, sleep has been one of the few times where I've felt almost no pain. Being on my back was far better than the absolutely worthless ibuprofen that I was taking. But Tuesday night was agonizing. It was the most pain I've been in during this entire stretch.
Needless to say, I didn't sleep well, but I was still committed to getting on the road relatively early. I put in a call to a Volunteer in Xai Xai, just in case I couldn't make it all the way to Maputo. It's not that the distance is impossible to cover – under normal circumstances, it's an easy one-day trip – but between wanting to get a free ride and dealing with the pain, I wasn't sure I can make it.
The ride was the easy part. After 40 minutes of waiting, I had a seat in a car that was going all the way to Maputo. But as we made our way down the bumpy road, I knew I wasn't going to be able to make it all the way down. By the time we reached Xai Xai, I was done.
As it turned out, stopping in Xai Xai was a blessing. For one, the Volunteer in Xai Xai was spending the day at the beach. I can't say if the ocean and beer helped my condition, but they didn't hurt. Each certainly did contribute to my absolute exhaustion. The fact that I didn't have to pay for hotel in Maputo was a second factor in my decision. And closely related, the fact that I wouldn't be paying an exorbitant amount for dinner sealed the deal. This didn't just make sense for my health – it made financial sense as well.
The night in Xai Xai was excellent. The Volunteer's empregada made rice and beans earlier in the day. Her rice and beans are delicious. This was a treat. After dinner, we watched a movie called “The Maiden Heist”. It's a movie I had never heard of, but it was pretty funny. Somehow, I managed to make it to 10:00 before falling asleep.
I had really good luck leaving Xai Xai the last time I headed down to Maputo. If I had even half of that luck on this trip, I would make it down to Maputo with ease. It wasn't promising initially. A few cars, clearly heading to Maputo and with empty space, passed me up. But the fifth or sixth car passed me, then backed up and picked me up. Once again, I was in luck. The trip was a piece of cake. The only difference between this trip ad the one a couple weeks ago is that I had to pay for this one. Still, given the choice of paying for a chapa or paying for a ride in a private car, I'll always take the private car.
I would be mooching off of another Volunteer's hotel room for the night. She had made the reservation a couple days ago and I knew she had extra space in the room. Arriving from Vilanculos, she wouldn't arrive until late in the evening. I checked into her room and for hours, enjoyed the glory that is the hotel room: CNN, refrigeration, air conditioning, internet, and a comfortable bed. This wouldn't be a healthy way to live on a daily basis, just sitting like this, but every once in a while, it can't be that bad for you.
I did make one trip out before the end of the day. I walked down the street to a book store in search of the new twelfth grad English book. I was unsuccessful in my attempt, but two things came out of it. The first was that I bought a new English-Portuguese dictionary for Sozinho. His birthday is coming up and with me speaking only in English to him, a dictionary would be good for him.
Failing to find the English book the first time, I went to a second bookstore. There was a couple in the first bookstore and we both ended up at the second. The man turned to me and said, in perfect English, “Are you following us or are we following you?” It turned out the man, a Mozambican, has lived in LA for twenty-five years and now runs a hedge fund. We swapped information and I look forward to meeting with him on my side of the world.
My roommate for the night didn't arrive until 9:00. I had been waiting for her to have dinner, but at some point I gave in and went by myself. She ended up getting a taxi, the traffic broke, and she made it to the restaurant before my food was out. Wisely, she asked me to order food for her.
Through a lot of dinner and over the hours after dinner, a lot of our conversation centered around the GRE. The exam is this weekend. After originally being signed up for the October date, we are both anxious to get this test behind us.
I had two missions on Friday. One of them would come late in the afternoon: getting to the other side of town to make my appointment with the urologist. Before that, though, I had the entire day to kill. My other mission for this time in Maputo was to continue looking for the new twelfth grade English book. Late in the morning, I went on a march through town in search of said book. I got my answer concerning the book in the second store I went into: “The book won't be ready until September”. So just to make this clear, there is a curriculum, but no book. There are many things I will never understand about this country. I will never understand why the first person off the chapa is always the person who sits in the back row. But this – this tops the list. Why the government release a curriculum without a book is beyond me.
I needed something to fix this. Down the street from the hotel sits an Indian restaurant. In all the times I've been to Maputo, I have never been to this restaurant. What a mistake that was. The curry was delicious, the chicken was perfectly cook. It was the perfect cure to my book-search frustrations.
The early part of the afternoon was spent bunked up in the room, soaking in the air conditioning and CNN. Around 3:30, my roommate for the weekend and I walked down to Baixa for different reasons: she wanted to do some shopping and I had my 5:00 doctor appointment. Of course, I got to my appointment ten minutes early; you can't take the punctuality out of us Americans. And then I sat in the waiting room. As Jerry Seinfeld would say, “there's no chance of not waiting, it's called the waiting room”. I just didn't expect to wait for three hours.
The whole experience was quite frustrating. Navigating the Mozambican medical “system” in Portuguese presented some challenges. The waiting was excessive even by Mozambican standards. But the appointment itself was the worst part. Now, don't get me wrong: I love taking off my pants, but I like having control of where and when I do so. I'll spare you the details of the appointment, but I was diagnosed with prostatitis, an inflamed prostate. The doctor told me that sex would help cure this little infection. Well, god damn, if I have to....
After a trying day, I was pissed off, tired, and hungry. A good chunk of my dignity was taken away and all I wanted to do was eat. If there was any good news to come from this, it was that my medical issue kept my mind off of tomorrow's GREs. At this point, all I wanted to do was eat and get a good night's sleep.
Eating was easy. Getting a good night's sleep was more challenging. I was up every couple of hours like clockwork. Regardless, I still felt decent going to the exam. I wasn't at all concerned about math. I figured the writing would come naturally. And I had added a significant number of words to my vocabulary. I thought I could do well, even after knocking out the essays. Then the vocab/English section came, and I felt like I got slaughtered. Hell, all of us felt like we got slaughtered. I would have loved to have gotten hammered afterward, but being on antibiotics put that idea to bed. Instead, we just wallowed in our collective despair for a while.
As if getting killed on the exam wasn't enough, I had to go back to the clinic to do some tests. Today's trip was much smoother than yesterday's. I went straight to the front of the line and was clear about what I needed to get done. The doctor wanted all sorts of fluids taken from me for whatever reason. It didn't really matter to me since I was in and out in fifteen minutes.
We continued our trip of international cuisine with Thai food tonight. I love most Asian food. Chinese and Japanese are over-rated. Thai and Vietnamese, though, are superior products. I have been itching for some for a while. And, man, the wait was worthwhile. The food was perfectly cooked, perfectly spiced. The only problem was that it was gone too fast. Following dinner, we went out for a couple of drinks, nothing too serious, just enough to be social.
I'm just glad this week is over.
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