Year 2 - Week 15: Headaches (And I'm Not Just Talking About Sozinho)

I think that one of the most amazing things about Machanga is that you could travel for fourteen hours and still have another five to six hour day ahead of you, just to get here. Just looking at the geography of Mozambique, if you look for the biggest cities around Machanga, they are Chimoio (eight hours away), Beira (nine to thirteen hours away, depending on how many flats the chapa gets) and Maputo (two days travel). Vilanculos, which is far from a city is only five and a half hours out and that's all I had to cover today. Compared to yesterday's fourteen hours, this would be a piece of cake.

Even though I went to bed at an absurdly early hour last night, I still managed to sleep until 7:30. I felt refreshed, alive, ready for another day travel. I packed up the few things I had taken out last night and headed toward the chapa stop. The lack of a Mambone chapa was disconcerting, but I was quickly reassured by someone that the chapa was in Vilanculos and it would be returning soon. Sure enough, thirty minutes later, the car arrived. This was a different car than the ones we usually take, but it seemed okay.

I kept myself entertained with a local newspaper which, to my surprise, had a brief interview with Bono. Apparently, he was in Maputo for some ONE Campaign event. Dude, you come all the way to Mozambique and you don't tell me?! Come on, Bono!

Aside from the regular annoying stops along the EN1, the ride was pretty smooth. For a change, we barely made any stops over the last 45 kilometers, which probably shaved an hour off our time. My good fortune continued when I got to the river. Somebody was already there waiting to cross and the boatman was ready to cross with only two people -- nice!

The rest of my afternoon in Machanga was relaxing. I did all the terribly boring things that have to be done after traveling -- unpacking, sorting laundry, blah blah. I also managed to catch up on my writing. Being away for five or six days makes this journal tough to keep.

The evening was equally relaxing. I didn't want to work too hard at dinner, so I made myself some spaghetti and used one of the sauce packets we have. You can go ahead and call me lazy.

As usual, I had no classes on Monday, which gave me the opportunity to take care of stuff concerning the rest of this trimester. We only have three weeks left in this trimester and there's still I lot that I want to cover. Thus far, I have covered present tense and future tense, which are each easier that past tense. It will take me the entire three weeks just to review the grammar of past tense. I also figured out what was going to be on my final exam. These students are going to kill me. Every single question on this exam is taken from National Exams from past years. They are all loosely related to what they have learned this trimester but not as clearly as I have presented it. It should be interesting to see how they do. Just from this exam, I will have a good idea of who will pass the National Exam come November.

My afternoon was committed to numbers, both for entertainment and for work. After lunch, I did some Sudoku and kakuro to keep my mind occupied. Later, one of the math teachers doing university work came over for some help with complex numbers. I came so close to figuring out this one problem, but screwed up somewhere along the line. I must have done it four or five times, but every time, I had a plus sign where I should have had a minus sign. Aggravating , to say the least.

With Richie still gone, I was on my own again for entertainment. His computer tends to work much better when it comes to watching DVDs but I was not going to let that deter me. Following dinner, I watched a couple episodes of "Seinfeld".

Monday was the last day, at least for a little while, that I'd be alone here. Richie was on the road on Tuesday heading for Machanga. I was happy to finally have some company not named Sozinho. That kid is going to drive us to insanity. Eight more months. I was happy to not have anything to do on Tuesday morning because Monday night was probably the worst night of sleep I've had all year. I didn't fall asleep until after midnight, and after that I was up almost hourly. Frustrating would be putting it lightly.

Just before lunch, I took a look at what I was teaching in the afternoon: a quick lesson on possessive adjectives -- my, your, his, etc. I kind of knew that this was going to be a tough lesson for these kids to get because while the Portuguese has just one word for possessives, we use two in English. For example, "minha" can be "my" or "mine" depending on when it is used in the sentence. I'm sure it will cause fits on the exam.

Richie returned within an hour of my classes being done. There wasn't much to do for the afternoon. I think he was pretty tired and I didn't have to worry about work until late tomorrow afternoon. With the exception of a haircut for me, we pretty much did nothing until the energy was on. After a long travel day, Richie wanted to watch something funny, so we jumped back into "How I Met Your Mother" for a little while until the energy was shut down.

I slept in late on Wednesday. For some reason, I had a headache as I went to bed and I woke up with the same headache in the same place. That can't be good. I was prepared to drug myself up, but decided to go the natural route first and pound a bunch of water. By mid-morning, the headache had subsided. I was on my own for a lot of the morning as Richie had classes for the better part of the morning, so I buried myself in kakuro.

There was a ton of shrimp going around Machanga and we decided to get in on the buying spree. We gave all the shrimp to Sozinho to deshell and cook, but the asshole decided that he was only going to deshell enough for him to eat. I really don't mind eating shrimp, but peeling it is a huge pain in the ass. It used to be that I didn't like seafood because it smells horrible. Now, I don't mind the taste and even the smell is okay, but if there's one thing about my food, it is this: I don't want to have to fight with my food to be able to eat it. And eating shelled shrimp is exactly that It's a fight. I swear, if Sozinho manages to survive this year alive, it's because whatever god he believes in decided to restrain Richie and me from killing him.

After my non-shrimp lunch,.I got to work on my lesson for the day. I was meeting with only one of my classes today and today was our first of many discussions on past tense. Past tense in English is easier than Portuguese in some ways and harder in some ways. With the exception of the verb "to be" there is only one conjugation in English, clearly easier than the six that Portuguese offers. The downside is that English has far more irregular verbs than Portuguese. After a year and a half of being here, I still can't conjugate some Portuguese irregular verbs in past tense, so I'm going to say the English is easier.

What I didn't count on was the fact that some of the vocabulary associated with past tense would be so difficult for these kids to comprehend. For the life of them, they could not understand when we use "last" -- when there is only one unit of time, like last year (one year in the past) or last month (one month in the past) and when we use "ago" -- when it is more than one unit, like "three weeks ago". I needed to explain it three times before kids understood what was happening. And even then, I'm pretty sure some didn't understand. These are the ones that might fall under the category of "lost cause".

Richie and I made a late afternoon run to the market. We decided that we were sick of buying rice one kilo at a time, so we stocked up for the year and bought a 25-kilo bag of rice. It will require us to eat a little less than a kilo of rice a week, and considering Sozinho eats more than the both of us combined, this should not be a problem. He has his doubts, but I'm pretty sure that Richie and I could get through the 25 kilos, even without that garbage disposal of an empregado.

There was a party on Wednesday night for one of our colleagues. She has been trying to transfer out of Machanga for at least a year -- can you blame her? -- and she finally got her wish. This lucky soul is out of her on Saturday and I can't see why she would return here. Instead, she will probably be living a life in Beira, a real city with an actual infra-structure. A couple of people spent all day cooking and we were banking on some of this food. But 7:00, then 8:00 then 9:00 rolled around and the food still wasn't ready. I gave up, made some spaghetti, and ate it just before the energy went out.

Sometime around 10:00, two colleagues came over and pounded on our door. Apparently, food was ready. I was horizontal and my head was hurting anyways. The last thing I needed was booze and loud music. I chose sleep over free food and beer, but even in America, I think I would make that choice.

The headache I had last night survived all the way until the morning. This was slightly disconcerting because I usually don't get headaches and to have one last twelve hours is highly irregular. I figured it would go away on its own, like most headaches do.

Even though we missed the party, there were leftovers of everything, and I was hungry. I wandered over to our colleague's house and feasted on rice and beans. Success! Then the beers came. At 8:00 in the morning. Many a Mozambican would consider 8:00 a late start. I can't tell you how many times I've been on a chapa and seen someone drinking at 6:00 or 6:30. I was going to have just my one breakfast beer, and then escape. But one became two and two became five and I had to teach at 12:30. I'm in for a lovely afternoon.

I only had a pair of classes and they had plenty of stuff to copy for this class. If there were ever a good time to not have it all together for a class, this was the one. Considering my condition, the class went pretty well. I also had the benefit of having taught the same class yesterday to a different group, so I knew where the difficulties would be. Richie, who was done with classes by mid-morning, took care of making lunch and I ate a late lunch after my classes.

I had the rest of the afternoon to relax. My head was still hurting, but I don't know if it was from the beer or the headache. I'm blaming the beer. I didn't do much of anything all afternoon. Having sobered up, and with my head still hurting (guess i wasn't the beer), I took the focus away from my head and put it into doing some kakuro.

As Richie took care of lunch, it was only fair that I cooked dinner. The last couple times that I have cooked beans, they have been disastrous. With some failures, like gnocchi, I'm reluctant to try again for a long time, but I know how to cook beans. I just need to put some energy into it. Since beans take forever to cook, we decided to entertain ourselves with "Public Enemies", the Johnny Depp film about the bank heists during the Depression. Between the bumping music outside and Richie's poor speakers on his computers, we barely heard anything, but seeing everyone die was pretty cool. The beans, by the way, were phenomenal, probably the best beans I've cooked. The flavor was right on and the texture was the Mozambican, slightly liquidy texture that has eluded us to this point.

Just as I stepped up my game with beans tonight, the headaches stepped up their game in making my head feel like the inside of a volcano. I don't know why I can't just be healthy. I had absolutely no problems last year, and this year has been nothing but. I get rid of one problem and the next one comes on. Well, two can play this game. I popped an ibuprofen and slept for at least a couple hours.

I woke up around midnight and it felt like a pick ax had been driven into my skull above my right eyebrow. I'm starting to think that this could be a little more serious than just a little headache. I asked someone at home to do some research as to what this could be. The result: a cluster headache. Just sounds painful. There's much that I can do about it. Rest, water, and aspirin. Oh yea, I can also inhale pure oxygen for 20 minutes, which may help, or I can pop some caffeine. I really don't want caffeine. And more than that, I really don't want to go all the way to Maputo to see a doctor about this. I'm fighting this one, and if it becomes truly unbearable, I'll deal with it then.

I started to think about what I could be doing or not be doing that could be giving me this headache. I thought that maybe it was from dehydration, but that's ridiculous since I'm drinking an insane amount of water. I thought it could be hunger. We definitely don't get as many calories as we should be getting. I thought it could be some form of malnutrition. Ditto on the not getting enough vitamins and minerals. So I decided to attack on all fronts. I ate breakfast for the first time in months, I took a multi-vitamin and I drank even more water than I've been drinking.

But this headache is holding on, no matter what I do, and it seems to be holding to a pattern. Not terrible in the morning, almost gone in the afternoon, medication-worthy at night. At least I know when the pain is coming on.

Richie went to Mambone late in the morning to pick up some things and see our colleague over there. While he was gone, I had some time to think about the rules of adding "ed" to form regular past tense verbs, and I came to the following conclusion: there is very little rhyme or reason to how and why we conjugate regular verbs in past tense. Some rules are very sturdy. With verbs that end in "e", all we need is to add a "d" -- "like" becomes "liked". With verbs that end in a consonant and a "y", we use "ied" -- "hurry" becomes "hurried". But aside from that, it's pretty random. Sometimes we repeat the last letter, sometimes we don't and every time I tried to think of a sturdy rule for these verbs, I just found more exceptions.

I had a couple hours to relax after classes before heading to this new English practice group. I had no expectations for what this group was going to be. The new English teacher decided that he wanted to do some extra work with the students, and I told him that I'd help him where I could. I told my students about the group and hoped that some would turn up; lord knows that some of them could use the help.

What I witnessed was shocking on a lot of levels. First of all, the room was packed with students of all ages. My first thought was, "Wow, some people really want to learn English". My second thought was more sobering -- there were going to be so many levels here that this group would need to be broken into at least three. I knew it was going to be problematic when they started with ABC's. Just to illustrate the difference in the levels of students , there were some students who it seemed like they were learning this for the first time and there were some who could probably do it backwards.

I mostly played the role of observer during this event. The shocks continued as the night moved on. At one point, one of the teachers asked a student to come write a word on the board. The teacher spelled out the word letter by letter "T-E-A-C-H-E-R". What came on the board wasn't quite "teacher": "T-I-A-S-I-A". Oh, this is not going to help my headache.

I won't lie. I was really hoping that this would be a more advanced group. I was hoping that this would be for students who had a good base of English and needed the opportunity to practice more, to refine their speaking. I was wrong. This is going to be madness, and until they can figure out how to divide this group into reasonable levels, it's going to be difficult.

Following that hour, I needed a laugh or two. We ate dinner and watched "How I Met Your Mother". I threw down a couple advil and a bottle of water and went to bed in not too much pain.

The English group was scheduled to meet again at 10:00 on Saturday and the other teachers wanted to meet at 8:00 to figure out what to do. I dutifully woke up at 7:50, put on some clothing, and sat outside, waiting for the other teachers to say they were ready to meet. But no one ever came over. With reason -- today was some sort of culture day, which meant that there would be dancing and singing and stuff at the second school. I did my regular thing and didn't go. Richie decided to endure. I was happy when I received the text message "all of these dances are the same". And it was hot. I was happy to sit on my porch doing kakuro.

My morning was marked by one event. My GRE scores were posted online, and I was only slightly scared to see what they were. I remembered the feeling of being completely defeated seven weeks ago, and now my fate would be written in a couple numbers. What turned up wasn't so horrifying. 630 on the verbal, 710 on the math, 4.5 out of 6 on the writing. I hoped for better, expected worse, and pretty much did exactly how I should have. One every aptitude test of this sort -- SAT 2's, SAT's, and now GRE's -- I have never had higher than 660 on verbal or a 720 on math. So there's room for improvement, sure, but the difference is so thin that it won't be worth taking it again.

The afternoon was far more eventful. There was a soccer game between two groups of teachers and we thought it would be good to watch. After all, we had been invited to the post game beerfest which would have no less than four cases of beer. We owed it to the teacher who invited us to watch the game. Our group of teachers ended up winning. We stayed for most of the game, but left with 15 minutes to go. It's soccer. It's boring.

The drinking commenced shortly after. It's been a good while since I've drank with other teachers and it ended up being a good time. We managed to get through almost six cases instead of the anticipated four. And I was happily interrupted by a phone call from my brother. It's been a while since I've caught up with him, so it was nice to talk to him. Certainly a nice way to end a week filled with headaches.