I have had many lazy days here. I've had days where I've barely made it out of bed, days spent entirely on the patio being completely useless to the world. But Sunday might have topped all of those days. The rain from yesterday came to a halt, leaving blue sky scattered with cotton-ball clouds. The ocean was a spectacular shade of green. And the internet at the Vil girls' house was up and running.
I did manage to get some work done. Peace Corps has some online reporting that we fill out twice a year and this was my best shot to get it in. While we do have internet in Machanga (at my house and my house only), our internet is slow. Think AOL at the dawn of the internet era. I can't send attachments, which this Peace Corps work requires. So the beginning part of my morning was spent filling out some forms. But after that, it was pure internet gluttony. The truth is, I don't even know what to do when I'm online anymore. I've forgotten how to fill time. I keep reverting to the same sites -- ESPN, New York Times, Facebook -- but even the places I visit are foreign to me. I still managed to kill the vast majority of the morning on these sites and catching up with friends.
This "internet passear" lasted well passed lunch time until one of the girls proposed watching "Where the Wild Things Are". After reading the reviews for this movie in Time and Newsweek, I was really excited to watch the movie. For a children's book, the managed to add a little edge to it. More amazingly, the writers and directors managed to stretch out a 338-word book into a ninety-minute film. It was pretty good -- not worthy of another watch, but I don't feel like it was a waste of time.
By late afternoon, I was ready to make my way over to the backpackers. I didn't bother asking if I could stay the night on Sunday. I know how often that house gets visited and I feel bad staying over for more than one night. Plus, I'm pretty happy to have a night to myself. I plopped myself in a hammock, and as if on cue, my four American friends from earlier in the weekend popped up. They seemed to have pretty good trips -- two went snorkeling, two camped on one of the islands off Vilanculos. Our conversations picked up where the left off, trading stories and experiences, hardships and laughs.
I woke up Monday morning not quite ready to travel but ready to get home. I was out of clean clothes and living out of backpack is really no fun. Our house was empty on Sunday with Richie in Chimoio, Sozinho in Beira, and me in Vil. And neither would be home Monday night. That means I'd have a night to myself.
Along with the two Volunteers from Malawi, I walked down to the bus stop, hoping that the chapa would be running. Monday was a holiday in Vilanculos and I didn't know if it would affect the chapa schedule. It did, just not as I had expected. I arrived at the stand in 9:30, a full hour early, and the driver was ready to go. Luck was on my side further -- I was able to grab the front seat, which is always more comfortable than the other seats in the chapa.
The trip home was uneventful, its typical five hours. There were no problems on the chapa and I only to wait a little while to get a canoe across the river. What I came home to was beautiful. Things were quiet, as we are on school holiday. Most of the students and teachers have found their way home for the week.
More important, I had four packages waiting to be opened. I got into these like a boy on Christmas, excited to see what would come out of each box. I now have enough cake frosting to last me through my time here and I now have magazines that are actually dated 2010. You can only read the same news from seven months ago so many times. In just a few short hours, I managed to read two magazines cover to cover. Apparently, I have a problem with portion control.
This problem isn't just limited to reading. My dinner was probably enough for two people. I felt particularly lazy about dinner and opted to go with some of the food sent in one of the packages. There was a can of beef chili, which intrigued me. As I ate this meal, I realized two things. First, my chili is more delicious than canned chili. And second, my chili is a lot healthier than canned chili. I was horrified when I looked at the label and saw that I'd be gettting almost all of my daily recommended saturated fats.
Is it any wonder why Americans are obese? We have managed to take a perfectly healthy meal like chili and made it into a heart attack in a can. Well, as long as I'm going to have clogged arteries, I might as well go out in a blaze of glory. I cut up an avocado and threw it and some cheese on top. Now that's eating like an American!
There wasn't much point in watching anything. I feel bad about watching new stuff without Richie. Plus, I had a bounty of magazines to get through. This would provide plenty of entertainment for the next couple of nights.
I slept through the night, which was curious considering how hot it was as I went to bed. Before I could open my eyes, I heard the reason and then felt the reason why I slept so well. A storm blew in over night, cooling everything off. I woke up the sound of pounding rain on my roof and the feeling of a light mist blowing over my body. The rain, which usually heads north, moved south today, blowing directly into my bedroom. I was far from done in bed, so I rolled out of bed, closed the shutters, and crawled back into the discomfort of my bed for a couple hours (yea, my bed is uncomfortable, but it's better than my chairs).
Well, this day was shot. My morning was spent cooped in my house reading. The rain did not stop for the entire morning. So much for going to the market. The upside to all of this was I really needed to go to the pump to get water. Putting buckets outside my door and letting them fill naturally is always a better alternative. At some point in the morning, the winds changed, doubling back the storm. There goes sitting on the patio.
For one of my students from last year, however, it takes a lot more to make him give up. He's studying at a different school well north of here, but he had an English assignment for the holidays. I must say that it's these students that probably make me feel best -- I'm not their teacher anymore but they still come for help. This student was a good one. I spoke almost all English to him. He's the kind of student I didn't want to lose because he will probably pass the National Exam on the first shot.
By mid-afternoon, the rain had stopped and Sozinho came rolling into town. My peace of mind went as he arrived. I was pissed off at him anyway. We gave him more than enough money to get to Beira and back and he still asked for more money. As he walked up, I realized where my money went: pineapples. Don't get me wrong, I love pineapple, but I didn't ask for pineapple. There was no need to bring four of them. One of them would have sufficed. He's picking up the tab next time.
Then he dropped a bombshell on me, just the kind of thing to put a damper on a day. I did the courteous thing and asked how his trip was. As usual, he offered an ambiguous answer. "It was good. It was bad". Okay...go on. "I got the papers Richie and I needed." So that must be the good part. What's the bad part? "And I think all of my family is dead." I'll be honest: I'm not good with death (I mean, who is?) and I'm not good at consoling people in Portuguese. I didn't know what to say, so I pretty much stood there like an asshole.
The rest of the night was just awkward. I didn't feel much like talking and he didn't feel much like talking, which suited me just fine. I'm perfectly fine dining in silence. Again, I was entertainment free tonight, although I did see that Richie received "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell". I've read through the book two or three times already, so I expect it will make for good entertainment when Richie comes home.
I woke up to good news on Wednesday. My parents called shortly after I opened my eyes with news of a Sharks victory, tying the series at two. This was good news because there's no way they would win the series going down 3-1. And that, for the most part, was the peak of my day.
This day was incredibly boring and I was effectively useless to society. There are people who will say that we deserve the break. I don't know if that's true. This break is just sort of thrown on us. We can't really help it if everybody in the school, students and teachers alike, leaves for Beira for two weeks. So the day was spent on the patio -- thank goodness for clear weather. I spent most of the morning reading an Esquire magazine. I had never read Esquire before, but after reading one magazine, I can confidently say that I will be subscribing to this magazine when I get home.
Having read the Esquire cover to cover in the morning, I turned my attention to an Economist in the afternoon. When I became bored, I walked to the market to do some shopping. That's right, I walked to the market just so I could kill time. Earlier in the day, Sozinho actually made himself useful and brought shrimp home, so I knew what I had to get at the market for a decent dinner. The market run killed a good hour of my afternoon and within an hour of coming home, the energy was on. Sweet.
I had only one task to accomplish in the evening. Richie failed to print grades over the couple days I was gone, leaving me with this minor responsibility. This job shouldn't have taken more than a couple minutes, but all of the technology gods conspired against me to make this a half hour task. I guess it could have been worse -- it took away half an hour of sitting on my ass, doing nothing but playing Spider Solitaire.
For most of this week, it's been very easy to sleep. It hasn't been cold like it was for the first half of last week, but I'm not sweating anymore. I won't declare it winter yet, but there has been a definite turn in the weather. Wednesday night was no different. I slept through the entire night, no problem. Not a single wake up.
Thursday looked almost exactly the same as Wednesday, but even quieter. Some teachers were doing some work sorting out grades -- the kind of menial work that could be eliminated if the entire school got on board with using Excel. I mean, I'd love to spend my day pounding numbers into a calculator, but dragging the mouse down the page just seems to make a lot more sense.
Richie was on the road home Thursday. For most of the day, I was getting a play by play of his travel. For a while, it looked like he wasn't going to make it all the way home. It wouldn't be the first time that one of us falls short in getting home.
Late in the afternoon, I started getting antsy. Richie still wasn't home and he wasn't sending messages, and I can only sit so still for so long. I made my way to the market, thinking that Richie would be home by the time I got back. But when I walked in the house, his door was still locked. He must have gotten a really bad ride.
When he got home, he told me all about his bad rides, plural. One car badly overcharged him and didn't even make it half way home. Eventually he got into the Machanga chapa. Twelve kilometers from home, they blew a tire, swerved off the road and nearly hit a tree. Clearly, this would be a night that would end with cake. We had delicious beans for dinner -- you know they were good because Sozinho didn't continue cooking them for thirty minutes. Between beans and cake, we watched "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell". We were both left a little disappointed. We had high expectations. It wasn't nearly as raunchy as I expected and they combined way too many stories into an hour and forty five minutes. They could have done a lot more with this movie.
My Friday started with good news. The Sharks blew out the Avalanche 5-0 in Game 5 of their series. This is good news, considering the Sharks don't know how to win a Game 6. Hopefully they'll figure it out in Colorado this weekend.
The sun struggled to make its way out on Friday. Greyness enveloped the sky. Of course, we (or rather Sozinho) chose this day to wash our clothing. No less than an hour after he finished did the deluge begin. Wonderful. The chances of our clothes drying just about went out the window.
The rain stuck with us all morning, pinning us inside. We kept ourselves entertained with magazines while a strong wind pushed the rain out of town. It never got particularly sunny, but the wind stuck around. By the end of the windy afternoon, most of our clothing was dry. The sheets and jeans were still soaked, but some is better than none.
Our night was okay, no more exciting than usual. Richie wanted to watch something funny, so we watched "Pineapple Express". Every time I see a film with Seth Rogen, I think of my buddy Joe. This was especially appropriate as today is his birthday. We were done with the movie with more than an hour and half of energy ahead of us, so we returned to "Criminal Minds" for a little while.
I thought it would be a good idea to put up the line on our patio so our things could dry overnight. I wanted to use the strong wind to dry out my sheets. Sozinho thought it was going to rain, but I ignored his advice. After all, the stars were all out.
My gut proved me right. We didn't get a drop of rain all night and my sheets were perfectly dry. I'm never listening to Sozinho again. The wind remained strong all day, making us feel really cold. Yea, it was probably 60 or 65 degrees outside, but when you're coming down from 95 two weeks ago, it's a huge difference.
It was cold enough that by the time lunchtime rolled around, I was wearing a sweatshirt and Richie was in a hockey jersey. Oh winter, how we have waited for you. We weren't the only ones cold. The eight people who are still around were all balled up in pants, sweatshirts, jackets and beanies. Even though we went through this last year, I'm still shocked at how cold it can be here. I guess you just don't normally associate being cold with being in sub-Saharan Africa.
We were once again completely useless here. Nobody has returned and it looks like school won't begin next week like it should. So we sat around, thumbing through magazines, staying in bed for extending stretches, not being productive, drinking hot chocolate. It was a nice way to spend a cold day.
The wind finally settled down in the evening. We had another delicious night of Mexican food, especially since we had cheese this time around. We also had chicken, so we didn't even bother with the beans. It was delicious. We wrapped up this week by finishing up the first season of "Criminal Minds". The first season ended with the first part of a two-part episode and we don't have Season 2. We'll just have to wait till we get home to see who survives.
In the meantime, I'll just have another night of glorious, shivering in my sheets.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Year 2 - Week 19: Useless in the Cold
I have had many lazy days here. I've had days where I've barely made it out of bed, days spent entirely on the patio being completely useless to the world. But Sunday might have topped all of those days. The rain from yesterday came to a halt, leaving blue sky scattered with cotton-ball clouds. The ocean was a spectacular shade of green. And the internet at the Vil girls' house was up and running.
I did manage to get some work done. Peace Corps has some online reporting that we fill out twice a year and this was my best shot to get it in. While we do have internet in Machanga (at my house and my house only), our internet is slow. Think AOL at the dawn of the internet era. I can't send attachments, which this Peace Corps work requires. So the beginning part of my morning was spent filling out some forms. But after that, it was pure internet gluttony. The truth is, I don't even know what to do when I'm online anymore. I've forgotten how to fill time. I keep reverting to the same sites -- ESPN, New York Times, Facebook -- but even the places I visit are foreign to me. I still managed to kill the vast majority of the morning on these sites and catching up with friends.
This "internet passear" lasted well passed lunch time until one of the girls proposed watching "Where the Wild Things Are". After reading the reviews for this movie in Time and Newsweek, I was really excited to watch the movie. For a children's book, the managed to add a little edge to it. More amazingly, the writers and directors managed to stretch out a 338-word book into a ninety-minute film. It was pretty good -- not worthy of another watch, but I don't feel like it was a waste of time.
By late afternoon, I was ready to make my way over to the backpackers. I didn't bother asking if I could stay the night on Sunday. I know how often that house gets visited and I feel bad staying over for more than one night. Plus, I'm pretty happy to have a night to myself. I plopped myself in a hammock, and as if on cue, my four American friends from earlier in the weekend popped up. They seemed to have pretty good trips -- two went snorkeling, two camped on one of the islands off Vilanculos. Our conversations picked up where the left off, trading stories and experiences, hardships and laughs.
I woke up Monday morning not quite ready to travel but ready to get home. I was out of clean clothes and living out of backpack is really no fun. Our house was empty on Sunday with Richie in Chimoio, Sozinho in Beira, and me in Vil. And neither would be home Monday night. That means I'd have a night to myself.
Along with the two Volunteers from Malawi, I walked down to the bus stop, hoping that the chapa would be running. Monday was a holiday in Vilanculos and I didn't know if it would affect the chapa schedule. It did, just not as I had expected. I arrived at the stand in 9:30, a full hour early, and the driver was ready to go. Luck was on my side further -- I was able to grab the front seat, which is always more comfortable than the other seats in the chapa.
The trip home was uneventful, its typical five hours. There were no problems on the chapa and I only to wait a little while to get a canoe across the river. What I came home to was beautiful. Things were quiet, as we are on school holiday. Most of the students and teachers have found their way home for the week.
More important, I had four packages waiting to be opened. I got into these like a boy on Christmas, excited to see what would come out of each box. I now have enough cake frosting to last me through my time here and I now have magazines that are acutally dated 2010. You can only read the same news from seven months ago so many times. In just a few short hours, I managed to read two magazines cover to cover. Apparently, I have a problem with portion control.
This problem isn't just limited to reading. My dinner was probably enough for two people. I felt particularly lazy about dinner and opted to go with some of the food sent in one of the packages. There was a can of beef chili, which intrigued me. As I ate this meal, I realized two things. First, my chili is more delicious than canned chili. And second, my chili is a lot healthier than canned chili. I was horrified when I looked at the label and saw that I'd be gettting almost all of my daily recommended saturated fats.
Is it any wonder why Americans are obese? We have managed to take a perfectly healthy meal like chili and made it into a heart attack in a can. Well, as long as I'm going to have clogged arteries, I might as well go out in a blaze of glory. I cut up an avocado and threw it and some cheese on top. Now that's eating like an American!
There wasn't much point in watching anything. I feel bad about watching new stuff without Richie. Plus, I had a bounty of magazines to get through. This would provide plenty of entertainment for the next couple of nights.
I slept through the night, which was curious considering how hot it was as I went to bed. Before I could open my eyes, I heard the reason and then felt the reason why I slept so well. A storm blew in over night, cooling everything off. I woke up the sound of pounding rain on my roof and the feeling of a light mist blowing over my body. The rain, which usually heads north, moved south today, blowing directly into my bedroom. I was far from done in bed, so I rolled out of bed, closed the shutters, and crawled back into the discomfort of my bed for a couple hours (yea, my bed is uncomfortable, but it's better than my chairs).
Well, this day was shot. My morning was spent cooped in my house reading. The rain did not stop for the entire morning. So much for going to the market. The upside to all of this was I really needed to go to the pump to get water. Putting buckets outside my door and letting them fill naturally is always a better alternative. At some point in the morning, the winds changed, doubling back the storm. There goes sitting on the patio.
For one of my students from last year, however, it takes a lot more to make him give up. He's studying at a different school well north of here, but he had an English assignment for the holidays. I must say that it's these students that probably make me feel best -- I'm not their teacher anymore but they still come for help. This student was a good one. I spoke almost all English to him. He's the kind of student I didn't want to lose because he will probably pass the National Exam on the first shot.
By mid-afternoon, the rain had stopped and Sozinho came rolling into town. My peace of mind went as he arrived. I was pissed off at him anyway. We gave him more than enough money to get to Beira and back and he still asked for more money. As he walked up, I realized where my money went: pineapples. Don't get me wrong, I love pineapple, but I didn't ask for pineapple. There was no need to bring four of them. One of them would have sufficed. He's picking up the tab next time.
Then he dropped a bombshell on me, just the kind of thing to put a damper on a day. I did the courteous thing and asked how his trip was. As usual, he offered an ambiguous answer. "It was good. It was bad". Okay...go on. "I got the papers Richie and I needed." So that must be the good part. What's the bad part? "And I think all of my family is dead." I'll be honest: I'm not good with death (I mean, who is?) and I'm not good at consoling people in Portuguese. I didn't know what to say, so I pretty much stood there like an asshole.
The rest of the night was just awkward. I didn't feel much like talking and he didn't feel much like talking, which suited me just fine. I'm perfectly fine dining in silence. Again, I was entertainment free tonight, although I did see that Richie received "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell". I've read through the book two or three times already, so I expect it will make for good entertainment when Richie comes home.
I woke up to good news on Wednesday. My parents called shortly after I opened my eyes with news of a Sharks victory, tying the series at two. This was good news because there's no way they would win the series going down 3-1. And that, for the most part, was the peak of my day.
This day was incredibly boring and I was effectively useless to society. There are people who will say that we deserve the break. I don't know if that's true. This break is just sort of thrown on us. We can't really help it if everybody in the school, students and teachers alike, leaves for Beira for two weeks. So the day was spent on the patio -- thank goodness for clear weather. I spent most of the morning reading an Esquire magazine. I had never read Esquire before, but after reading one magazine, I can confidently say that I will be subscribing to this magazine when I get home.
Having read the Esquire cover to cover in the morning, I turned my attention to an Economist in the afternoon. When I became bored, I walked to the market to do some shopping. That's right, I walked to the market just so I could kill time. Earlier in the day, Sozinho actually made himself useful and brought shrimp home, so I knew what I had to get at the market for a decent dinner. The market run killed a good hour of my afternoon and within an hour of coming home, the energy was on. Sweet.
I had only one task to accomplish in the evening. Richie failed to print grades over the couple days I was gone, leaving me with this minor responsibility. This job shouldn't have taken more than a couple minutes, but all of the technology gods conspired against me to make this a half hour task. I guess it could have been worse -- it took away half an hour of sitting on my ass, doing nothing but playing Spider Solitaire.
For most of this week, it's been very easy to sleep. It hasn't been cold like it was for the first half of last week, but I'm not sweating anymore. I won't declare it winter yet, but there has been a definite turn in the weather. Wednesday night was no different. I slept through the entire night, no problem. Not a single wake up.
Thursday looked almost exactly the same as Wednesday, but even quieter. Some teachers were doing some work sorting out grades -- the kind of menial work that could be eliminated if the entire school got on board with using Excel. I mean, I'd love to spend my day pounding numbers into a calculator, but dragging the mouse down the page just seems to make a lot more sense.
Richie was on the road home Thursday. For most of the day, I was getting a play by play of his travel. For a while, it looked like he wasn't going to make it all the way home. It wouldn't be the first time that one of us falls short in getting home.
Late in the afternoon, I started getting antsy. Richie still wasn't home and he wasn't sending messages, and I can only sit so still for so long. I made my way to the market, thinking that Richie would be home by the time I got back. But when I walked in the house, his door was still locked. He must have gotten a really bad ride.
When he got home, he told me all about his bad rides, plural. One car badly overcharged him and didn't even make it half way home. Eventually he got into the Machanga chapa. Twelve kilometers from home, they blew a tire, swerved off the road and nearly hit a tree. Clearly, this would be a night that would end with cake. We had delicious beans for dinner -- you know they were good because Sozinho didn't continue cooking them for thirty minutes. Between beans and cake, we watched "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell". We were both left a little disappointed. We had high expectations. It wasn't nearly as raunchy as I expected and they combined way too many stories into an hour and forty five minutes. They could have done a lot more with this movie.
My Friday started with good news. The Sharks blew out the Avalance 5-0 in Game 5 of their series. This is good news, considering the Sharks don't know how to win a Game 6. Hopefully they'll figure it out in Colorado this weekend.
The sun struggled to make its way out on Friday. Greyness enveloped the sky. Of course, we (or rather Sozinho) chose this day to wash our clothing. No less than an hour after he finished did the deluge begin. Wonderful. The chances of our clothes drying just about went out the window.
The rain stuck with us all morning, pinning us inside. We kept ourselves entertained with magazines while a strong wind pushed the rain out of town. It never got particularly sunny, but the wind stuck around. By the end of the windy afternoon, most of our clothing was dry. The sheets and jeans were still soaked, but some is better than none.
Our night was okay, no more exciting than usual. Richie wanted to watch something funny, so we watched "Pineapple Express". Every time I see a film with Seth Rogen, I think of my buddy Joe. This was especially appropriate as today is his birthday. We were done with the movie with more than an hour and half of energy ahead of us, so we returned to "Criminal Minds" for a little while.
I thought it would be a good idea to put up the line on our patio so our things could dry overnight. I wanted to use the strong wind to dry out my sheets. Sozinho thought it was going to rain, but I ignored his advice. After all, the stars were all out.
My gut proved me right. We didn't get a drop of rain all night and my sheets were perfectly dry. I'm never listening to Sozinho again. The wind remained strong all day, making us feel really cold. Yea, it was probably 60 or 65 degrees outside, but when you're coming down from 95 two weeks ago, it's a huge difference.
It was cold enough that by the time lunchtime rolled around, I was wearing a sweatshirt and Richie was in a hockey jersey. Oh winter, how we have waited for you. We weren't the only ones cold. The eight people who are still around were all balled up in pants, sweatshirts, jackets and beanies. Even though we went through this last year, I'm still shocked at how cold it can be here. I guess you just don't normally associate being cold with being in sub-Saharan Africa.
We were once again completely useless here. Nobody has returned and it looks like school won't begin next week like it should. So we sat around, thumbing through magazines, staying in bed for extending stretches, not being productive, drinking hot chocolate. It was a nice way to spend a cold day.
The wind finally settled down in the evening. We had another delicious night of Mexican food, especially since we had cheese this time around. We also had chicken, so we didn't even bother with the beans. It was delicious. We wrapped up this week by finishing up the first season of "Criminal Minds". The first season ended with the first part of a two-part episode and we don't have Season 2. We'll just have to wait till we get home to see who survives.
In the meantime, I'll just have another night of glorious, shvivering in my sheets.
I did manage to get some work done. Peace Corps has some online reporting that we fill out twice a year and this was my best shot to get it in. While we do have internet in Machanga (at my house and my house only), our internet is slow. Think AOL at the dawn of the internet era. I can't send attachments, which this Peace Corps work requires. So the beginning part of my morning was spent filling out some forms. But after that, it was pure internet gluttony. The truth is, I don't even know what to do when I'm online anymore. I've forgotten how to fill time. I keep reverting to the same sites -- ESPN, New York Times, Facebook -- but even the places I visit are foreign to me. I still managed to kill the vast majority of the morning on these sites and catching up with friends.
This "internet passear" lasted well passed lunch time until one of the girls proposed watching "Where the Wild Things Are". After reading the reviews for this movie in Time and Newsweek, I was really excited to watch the movie. For a children's book, the managed to add a little edge to it. More amazingly, the writers and directors managed to stretch out a 338-word book into a ninety-minute film. It was pretty good -- not worthy of another watch, but I don't feel like it was a waste of time.
By late afternoon, I was ready to make my way over to the backpackers. I didn't bother asking if I could stay the night on Sunday. I know how often that house gets visited and I feel bad staying over for more than one night. Plus, I'm pretty happy to have a night to myself. I plopped myself in a hammock, and as if on cue, my four American friends from earlier in the weekend popped up. They seemed to have pretty good trips -- two went snorkeling, two camped on one of the islands off Vilanculos. Our conversations picked up where the left off, trading stories and experiences, hardships and laughs.
I woke up Monday morning not quite ready to travel but ready to get home. I was out of clean clothes and living out of backpack is really no fun. Our house was empty on Sunday with Richie in Chimoio, Sozinho in Beira, and me in Vil. And neither would be home Monday night. That means I'd have a night to myself.
Along with the two Volunteers from Malawi, I walked down to the bus stop, hoping that the chapa would be running. Monday was a holiday in Vilanculos and I didn't know if it would affect the chapa schedule. It did, just not as I had expected. I arrived at the stand in 9:30, a full hour early, and the driver was ready to go. Luck was on my side further -- I was able to grab the front seat, which is always more comfortable than the other seats in the chapa.
The trip home was uneventful, its typical five hours. There were no problems on the chapa and I only to wait a little while to get a canoe across the river. What I came home to was beautiful. Things were quiet, as we are on school holiday. Most of the students and teachers have found their way home for the week.
More important, I had four packages waiting to be opened. I got into these like a boy on Christmas, excited to see what would come out of each box. I now have enough cake frosting to last me through my time here and I now have magazines that are acutally dated 2010. You can only read the same news from seven months ago so many times. In just a few short hours, I managed to read two magazines cover to cover. Apparently, I have a problem with portion control.
This problem isn't just limited to reading. My dinner was probably enough for two people. I felt particularly lazy about dinner and opted to go with some of the food sent in one of the packages. There was a can of beef chili, which intrigued me. As I ate this meal, I realized two things. First, my chili is more delicious than canned chili. And second, my chili is a lot healthier than canned chili. I was horrified when I looked at the label and saw that I'd be gettting almost all of my daily recommended saturated fats.
Is it any wonder why Americans are obese? We have managed to take a perfectly healthy meal like chili and made it into a heart attack in a can. Well, as long as I'm going to have clogged arteries, I might as well go out in a blaze of glory. I cut up an avocado and threw it and some cheese on top. Now that's eating like an American!
There wasn't much point in watching anything. I feel bad about watching new stuff without Richie. Plus, I had a bounty of magazines to get through. This would provide plenty of entertainment for the next couple of nights.
I slept through the night, which was curious considering how hot it was as I went to bed. Before I could open my eyes, I heard the reason and then felt the reason why I slept so well. A storm blew in over night, cooling everything off. I woke up the sound of pounding rain on my roof and the feeling of a light mist blowing over my body. The rain, which usually heads north, moved south today, blowing directly into my bedroom. I was far from done in bed, so I rolled out of bed, closed the shutters, and crawled back into the discomfort of my bed for a couple hours (yea, my bed is uncomfortable, but it's better than my chairs).
Well, this day was shot. My morning was spent cooped in my house reading. The rain did not stop for the entire morning. So much for going to the market. The upside to all of this was I really needed to go to the pump to get water. Putting buckets outside my door and letting them fill naturally is always a better alternative. At some point in the morning, the winds changed, doubling back the storm. There goes sitting on the patio.
For one of my students from last year, however, it takes a lot more to make him give up. He's studying at a different school well north of here, but he had an English assignment for the holidays. I must say that it's these students that probably make me feel best -- I'm not their teacher anymore but they still come for help. This student was a good one. I spoke almost all English to him. He's the kind of student I didn't want to lose because he will probably pass the National Exam on the first shot.
By mid-afternoon, the rain had stopped and Sozinho came rolling into town. My peace of mind went as he arrived. I was pissed off at him anyway. We gave him more than enough money to get to Beira and back and he still asked for more money. As he walked up, I realized where my money went: pineapples. Don't get me wrong, I love pineapple, but I didn't ask for pineapple. There was no need to bring four of them. One of them would have sufficed. He's picking up the tab next time.
Then he dropped a bombshell on me, just the kind of thing to put a damper on a day. I did the courteous thing and asked how his trip was. As usual, he offered an ambiguous answer. "It was good. It was bad". Okay...go on. "I got the papers Richie and I needed." So that must be the good part. What's the bad part? "And I think all of my family is dead." I'll be honest: I'm not good with death (I mean, who is?) and I'm not good at consoling people in Portuguese. I didn't know what to say, so I pretty much stood there like an asshole.
The rest of the night was just awkward. I didn't feel much like talking and he didn't feel much like talking, which suited me just fine. I'm perfectly fine dining in silence. Again, I was entertainment free tonight, although I did see that Richie received "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell". I've read through the book two or three times already, so I expect it will make for good entertainment when Richie comes home.
I woke up to good news on Wednesday. My parents called shortly after I opened my eyes with news of a Sharks victory, tying the series at two. This was good news because there's no way they would win the series going down 3-1. And that, for the most part, was the peak of my day.
This day was incredibly boring and I was effectively useless to society. There are people who will say that we deserve the break. I don't know if that's true. This break is just sort of thrown on us. We can't really help it if everybody in the school, students and teachers alike, leaves for Beira for two weeks. So the day was spent on the patio -- thank goodness for clear weather. I spent most of the morning reading an Esquire magazine. I had never read Esquire before, but after reading one magazine, I can confidently say that I will be subscribing to this magazine when I get home.
Having read the Esquire cover to cover in the morning, I turned my attention to an Economist in the afternoon. When I became bored, I walked to the market to do some shopping. That's right, I walked to the market just so I could kill time. Earlier in the day, Sozinho actually made himself useful and brought shrimp home, so I knew what I had to get at the market for a decent dinner. The market run killed a good hour of my afternoon and within an hour of coming home, the energy was on. Sweet.
I had only one task to accomplish in the evening. Richie failed to print grades over the couple days I was gone, leaving me with this minor responsibility. This job shouldn't have taken more than a couple minutes, but all of the technology gods conspired against me to make this a half hour task. I guess it could have been worse -- it took away half an hour of sitting on my ass, doing nothing but playing Spider Solitaire.
For most of this week, it's been very easy to sleep. It hasn't been cold like it was for the first half of last week, but I'm not sweating anymore. I won't declare it winter yet, but there has been a definite turn in the weather. Wednesday night was no different. I slept through the entire night, no problem. Not a single wake up.
Thursday looked almost exactly the same as Wednesday, but even quieter. Some teachers were doing some work sorting out grades -- the kind of menial work that could be eliminated if the entire school got on board with using Excel. I mean, I'd love to spend my day pounding numbers into a calculator, but dragging the mouse down the page just seems to make a lot more sense.
Richie was on the road home Thursday. For most of the day, I was getting a play by play of his travel. For a while, it looked like he wasn't going to make it all the way home. It wouldn't be the first time that one of us falls short in getting home.
Late in the afternoon, I started getting antsy. Richie still wasn't home and he wasn't sending messages, and I can only sit so still for so long. I made my way to the market, thinking that Richie would be home by the time I got back. But when I walked in the house, his door was still locked. He must have gotten a really bad ride.
When he got home, he told me all about his bad rides, plural. One car badly overcharged him and didn't even make it half way home. Eventually he got into the Machanga chapa. Twelve kilometers from home, they blew a tire, swerved off the road and nearly hit a tree. Clearly, this would be a night that would end with cake. We had delicious beans for dinner -- you know they were good because Sozinho didn't continue cooking them for thirty minutes. Between beans and cake, we watched "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell". We were both left a little disappointed. We had high expectations. It wasn't nearly as raunchy as I expected and they combined way too many stories into an hour and forty five minutes. They could have done a lot more with this movie.
My Friday started with good news. The Sharks blew out the Avalance 5-0 in Game 5 of their series. This is good news, considering the Sharks don't know how to win a Game 6. Hopefully they'll figure it out in Colorado this weekend.
The sun struggled to make its way out on Friday. Greyness enveloped the sky. Of course, we (or rather Sozinho) chose this day to wash our clothing. No less than an hour after he finished did the deluge begin. Wonderful. The chances of our clothes drying just about went out the window.
The rain stuck with us all morning, pinning us inside. We kept ourselves entertained with magazines while a strong wind pushed the rain out of town. It never got particularly sunny, but the wind stuck around. By the end of the windy afternoon, most of our clothing was dry. The sheets and jeans were still soaked, but some is better than none.
Our night was okay, no more exciting than usual. Richie wanted to watch something funny, so we watched "Pineapple Express". Every time I see a film with Seth Rogen, I think of my buddy Joe. This was especially appropriate as today is his birthday. We were done with the movie with more than an hour and half of energy ahead of us, so we returned to "Criminal Minds" for a little while.
I thought it would be a good idea to put up the line on our patio so our things could dry overnight. I wanted to use the strong wind to dry out my sheets. Sozinho thought it was going to rain, but I ignored his advice. After all, the stars were all out.
My gut proved me right. We didn't get a drop of rain all night and my sheets were perfectly dry. I'm never listening to Sozinho again. The wind remained strong all day, making us feel really cold. Yea, it was probably 60 or 65 degrees outside, but when you're coming down from 95 two weeks ago, it's a huge difference.
It was cold enough that by the time lunchtime rolled around, I was wearing a sweatshirt and Richie was in a hockey jersey. Oh winter, how we have waited for you. We weren't the only ones cold. The eight people who are still around were all balled up in pants, sweatshirts, jackets and beanies. Even though we went through this last year, I'm still shocked at how cold it can be here. I guess you just don't normally associate being cold with being in sub-Saharan Africa.
We were once again completely useless here. Nobody has returned and it looks like school won't begin next week like it should. So we sat around, thumbing through magazines, staying in bed for extending stretches, not being productive, drinking hot chocolate. It was a nice way to spend a cold day.
The wind finally settled down in the evening. We had another delicious night of Mexican food, especially since we had cheese this time around. We also had chicken, so we didn't even bother with the beans. It was delicious. We wrapped up this week by finishing up the first season of "Criminal Minds". The first season ended with the first part of a two-part episode and we don't have Season 2. We'll just have to wait till we get home to see who survives.
In the meantime, I'll just have another night of glorious, shvivering in my sheets.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Year 2 - Week 18: A Taste of Winter
If there is a way to completely disappear from the world have almost no one know about it, then Richie and I nearly managed to pull it off on Sunday. The cloud-cover that rolled in last night stuck around into Sunday. More important than the clouds and the rain was the coldness that came with them. For the first time in months, I managed to sleep through the night. And when I woke up, minutes before a call from my parents, my sheets were not drenched in sweat.
It was one of those days that even if we wanted to do something, we probably would not have been able. The rain for the most part prevented us from going to the villa for whatever reason. Hell, we couldn't even sit on our own patio because the rain blew directly onto our porch. So the day was spent inside, and if we are going to be trapped in our own house, the most comfortable place to be is in bed. It's not because the beds are so incredibly comfortable -- they are actually quite uncomfortable -- but because there is not a single comfortable chair in all of Machanga. Given the choice between uncomfortable in a bed and uncomfortable in a chair, I'll always take uncomfortable in bed.
Not only did we get the rain and the cold, but the wind decided to change directions and blow through our house, making our house quite chilly. This was the perfect day to stay in bed. Over the course of the day, there couldn't have been more than three hours that both of us were up and out of bed, at least until the energy came on.
Sozinho had cooked beans for lunch -- terribly, at that -- but he left some unused. These quickly became my dinner, while Richie and Sozinho split some fish. We made a return to "Criminal Minds" tonight for the first time in a months. We gave this show a shot, expecting it to be like "Dexter", but it wasn't at all like "Dexter", leaving us disappointed. With that out of our minds, we let it into the line-up again, and it's actually pretty good. Richie and I agree that a) people on TV are stupid and should probably consider locking their doors; and b) we both want to put iron bars over our windows. The show has sufficiently freaked us out.
My night ended in a way it hasn't in months: a call from one of my best friends at home. It had been months since I'd spoken to him, and although I wasn't particularly concerned -- I know he's crazy busy with school -- it still sucked not chatting with him.
Although the rain had stopped, the cold stuck around for a second consecutive night. I don't want to jinx it, but such a cold spell has us wondering, is this the start of winter? I remember last year, some teachers said that one day it's summer and the next day it's winter. If that's the case, then April 11th was the day of the change-over. Regardless, I won't complain about being able to sleep through the night.
School has nearly come to a complete halt. For the most part, teachers, including Richie and me, have given their final exams and it's just a matter of grading and returning. Richie, being a sucker, got roped into watching a Portuguese exam. He couldn't help but laugh at the fact that the students started asking him for answers by the end of the exam.
Monday is my regular day off, so not doing much was pretty normal for me. With the rain no longer blowing into our patio, I was able to kick my feet up...until a teacher needed some math help. I was able to figure out one problem after about 25 minutes of failure. He ended up figuring out the other problem. He claims I helped him in resolving it, but what I did wasn't particularly helpful.
Other than that, it was a pretty lazy day. Richie and I headed over to the market in the middle of a beautifully clear-skied but cool afternoon. We are trying to make a better effort to get more protein in our diet, so we bought a frozen chicken for dinner.
Whenever we've bought chicken, we've only cooked in one way -- grilled. It's fairly easy with the charcoal we use anyways and it's generally delicious. But I chose to be ambitious today and tried roasted the bird. I had never done this before -- in America or Mozambique -- so I didn't know what to expect. I certainly didn't expect it to take as long as it did. But wow! did patience pay off. This chicken was juicier than any chicken we'd had in this country.
For some reason, however, this wasn't good enough for Sozinho, and he decided to cook it in a stew. Sometimes I don't get this kid. Actually, most of the time I don't get him. He didn't even try to eat the chicken the way I prepared it. It's kind of disrespectful. Whatever. I know that whatever he did could not have improved what I made. And watching "Criminal Minds" again took my thoughts away from wanting to kill Sozinho and put them on other people getting killed.
Tuesday marked the official end of the first school trimester. For me anyways. Richie has been done for a while and some teachers will be giving exams this week. Judging from last year, I knew that other teachers would give their exams on their whim, using other teachers' teaching slots without telling them. This is why Richie and I (as well as other teachers) tend to give exams the week before final week. All I had to do on Tuesday was hand back the exams.
Returning exams isn't at all a difficult task. Students rarely care why the answers are what they; they just care if they passed or failed. On this final, about 60% of the students passed. Given that all of the questions were from National Exams, this is pretty good. It looks especially good when taking into account that only 18% of my students from last year passed the National Exam last November. There might be hope for some of these kids.
I would have liked to have gone in, handing back the exams, taken questions, and then moved onto the next class, but one of our friends decided to give his biology exam during my teaching time. And not only that, he got me to control during his exam. I'm sure the students thought I was going to be an easy controller, at least easier than some Mozambican teachers. They were wrong. I didn't catch anyone blatently cheating -- cheatsheets, open notebooks -- but I moved four or five kids who couldn't keep their mouths shut or their eyes on their own paper. These students are probably thrilled that I am no longer their English teacher.
I wasn't too angered to control this exam, especially after I got a peek at it. The teacher had typed everything by himself. I had given him a quick lesson on subscripts, superscripts and designing the night before, so I was thrilled to see that he had put all of these things to use on his exam. I have decided that if I get nothing accomplished in these two years besides making some of these teachers more tech-literate, I'll be okay with that.
After controlling his exam, I went over to my second class to turn in their English exams. People were mostly satisfied with their grades, and as usual, there were no questions about their scores. For the first time in a while, I didn't screw up any of the math on the grading. One kid, especially pissed off because of his failing grade, said, "I don't think there are more than six people who passed this exams". I, knowing better, asked for students with passing grades to put their hands up. More than half the class raised their hands. Embarrassed, the kid shut up.
The rest of the afternoon and the evening were calm. At some point, I got called into the director's office to do some computer work, but other than that, we did a lot of sitting around doing nothing. For our evening entertainment, we moved away from "Criminal Minds", wanting to give "Mad Men" a shot. One episode in, we decided to go back to "Criminal Minds". If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
After our episod of "Mad Men", Richie and I realized that we were both still hungry. Richie had dined on the delicacy that is the sardine sandwich (I refuse to participate in that) while I ate spaghetti. I jokingly said that "we could make a cake". He unjokingly replied, "yea". We didn't have the right ingredients but we did have a box mix. All we needed were eggs, oil, and water, and those are three ingredients that we are rarely short on. The other minor obstacle we faces was we didn't have a cake pan big enough. We cut the recipe in thirds and it turned out okay. I mean, it's cake. How bad can it be?
It wasn't super hot, like it has been for most of the year, but the coolness of the last couple nights disappeared. There was no struggle to sleep by any means, but it wasn't nearly as comfortable as our few nights of cold.
A couple of afternoons ago, while at the market, a spoke with an English teacher about doing some computer work with him. I told him how easy it was to keep grades in Excel and he was intrigued. I like this particular teacher. He is young, tech-savvy, willing to go beyond the paper forms that his school gives him, and his English is pretty good. We rarely converse in Portuguese. As I showed him the power of Excel, I explained everything in English. He only wanted a Portuguese explanation at the end, so he could pass the knowledge on to his colleagues at the secondary school.m
Beyond this piece of tech help, there was one more thing I had to do, and I wasn't sure if it was possible. One of the teachers had a document that was saved as docx. I guess this is from the newest version of Microsoft Office, but I'm not sure. Of course, none of the computers here had the capability to open such a document, but I had an idea. I don't use Microsoft Office -- when my computer crashed, Office went with it -- but I use OpenOffice, a shareware quasi-equivalent. My guess was that the newest version of OpenOffice could open docx documents, and I was right. Victory! My work is done for the day.
Just before lunch, I headed over to the market. We were lacking food of all sorts and most importantly, we needed something that would qualify as a dinner food. We were really hoping to buy beef in the market, but our expectations were low. They have been out of beef the last couple days. But I came across something quite possibly better than beef: avocado! Today was the first day in almost a year that the holiness that is the avocado had appeared in our market. I made the decision then and there that we were doing a full-blown Mexican night, complete with sombreros.
Richie and I passed the afternoon in pretty much the same way -- doing nothing in particular. Richie tried giving beginner kakuro a shot while I struggled with the advanced puzzles (it's been a rough few weeks with that game). All I heard from his side were grumblings of "I hate this game" and the sound of the eraser on the paper. This was entertainment enough for me. I also took me a nap of catatonic proportion. I woke up ninety minutes later not knowing where I was -- a blissful thirty seconds.
The Mexican food night extravaganza began late Wednesday afternoon. Only one of our two burners is functional these days, and with a lot of cooking ahead, we knew that lighting the charcoal would be a good idea. Beans tend to cook better on an open fire anyway, so it was a blessing I guess. Everything turned out perfectly. The beans were cooked all the way through and not liquidy at all, the rice was fluffy, the salsa spicy, the guacamole creamy, and even the homemade tortillas were pretty good. Richie and I each got through our two tortillas-worth of food, and we still had a ton of food left over. Richie gave in, but I foolishly marched on. Fifteen minutes later, all the food was gone. I wallowed in the glorious pain of being overstuffed while watching "Criminal Minds" until the lights went out on us.
Thursday was largely uneventful for us. The heat that had left us earlier in the week came back, although not in full force. Sleeping was still okay, but it was evident as soon as we set foot outside that it was hot. With no school responsibility and a filthy room in front of me, I realized that this would be the perfect day to get things cleaned up and organized. It has been months since I cleaned under my bed, and with the recent track of ants I've noticed, there must be a significant-sized insect cemetery down there. My cleaning inspired Richie. He got cleaning as well. By 10:00, we had a pristine house. Now we just had to kill off the rest of the morning.
We lounged around for most of the afternoon, but eventually we found the inspiration to get up, go to the market, and get some sodas. While we were there,we picked up some meat from the butcher. We once agin did not get a particularly good cut of meat. All they had was bone-in meat. We usually avoid this because it's such a hassle, but we really wanted steak.
Half way through preparing it, we realized we had made a terrible mistake. As we sat eating our bony, rubbery meat, we vowed that we were going with boneless beef or nothing at all. A little bit of "Criminal Minds" made things better until the power went out.
Friday was a travel day for me. When heading to Vilanculos, I am usually with Richie and we are usually out of the house well before 7:00. But today was very different. For one, Richie decided to stay in. He has some other traveling to do next week and he didn't want to head south before heading north. Secondly, I also got a later start than usual. I felt particularly lazy and didn't get rolling out of the house until 7:04.
Why 7:04, you ask? Leaving at four minutes after made the math easy on what time I would need to arrive in Vilanculos to break the record of 3:56. As I thought about it, getting to Vil by 11 seemed like a near impossibility. But as I got rolling, things looked promising. There was no wait time for the boat and I had a chapa out of Mambone before I could even hit the villa. Then the biggest hit of all came: I got a private car from Maluvane all the way down to just outside Vilanculos.
We were cruising along at 120 kilometers per hour when my dreams were shattered: we got pulled over for speeding. The driver got hit with a 1000 Metical ticket. It's only 30 some dollars but, it's a huge sum of money here. Although I was saddened that my shot of breaking the record was gone, I was sadder for this poor guy who had to pay a massive fine.
All said, I made it to Vilanculos in four hours and fourteen minutes, the second fastest time for me. I can't say I was angry with that. Making it to Vilanculos before noon is always an accomplishment. Per my normal routine, I went straight to New York Pizza, and I actually had company this time around. Two of the Volunteers stationed in Vil came over to join me. I hadn't seen either of them in a while, so it was nice to catch up.
Following lunch, all of us made our way to the other side of town. I was really hoping to get some work done and to pick up some new media, but it wasn't in the cards. My hard drive isn't mac compatible apparently, so that was kind of a bummer. And I needed Excel to get my work done and a computer wasn't available to me. So like so many things here, I'll have to wait.
In the meantime, I headed over to our regular backpackers place. While I was there, something strange happened: there were a lot of Americans there. Okay, not a lot, but four. But for a country like Mozambique, four Americans who are Volunteers in Mozambique is a huge number. I soon found out the truth: two of them are Volunteers in Malawi and one was a Volunteer in Zambia ten years ago. He returned for the first time with his wife on their honeymoon and they are currently continuing through Mozambique to South Africa. It was especially cool to talk to that guy because I realized how much things had changed. I couldn't imagine doing two years here without a cell phone or internet access. How the world has changed in a decade.
I had probably my best night of sleep at the backpackers place ever. It helped that no one was there, so I was able to stack one mattress on top, making a super-mattress. All of my new friends left in the morning to go on island adventures, so I headed out as well, back to the Volunteer's house here. I went again with the hope of getting work done, but the power was out all morning and well into the afternoon, killing any shot of getting work done.
Just when we thought all hope was lost, the energy came on, and I got to work. Okay, not work. But I had some serious downloading to do. My brother sent me some new music and this would be the fastest internet for me in a while. He expected the downloads to be done in minutes, but what I consider fast internet is still horrifyingly slow. Regardless, I got one album downloaded before going to bed. At least I'll have something to hold me over until the music madness that will be coming in May.
It was one of those days that even if we wanted to do something, we probably would not have been able. The rain for the most part prevented us from going to the villa for whatever reason. Hell, we couldn't even sit on our own patio because the rain blew directly onto our porch. So the day was spent inside, and if we are going to be trapped in our own house, the most comfortable place to be is in bed. It's not because the beds are so incredibly comfortable -- they are actually quite uncomfortable -- but because there is not a single comfortable chair in all of Machanga. Given the choice between uncomfortable in a bed and uncomfortable in a chair, I'll always take uncomfortable in bed.
Not only did we get the rain and the cold, but the wind decided to change directions and blow through our house, making our house quite chilly. This was the perfect day to stay in bed. Over the course of the day, there couldn't have been more than three hours that both of us were up and out of bed, at least until the energy came on.
Sozinho had cooked beans for lunch -- terribly, at that -- but he left some unused. These quickly became my dinner, while Richie and Sozinho split some fish. We made a return to "Criminal Minds" tonight for the first time in a months. We gave this show a shot, expecting it to be like "Dexter", but it wasn't at all like "Dexter", leaving us disappointed. With that out of our minds, we let it into the line-up again, and it's actually pretty good. Richie and I agree that a) people on TV are stupid and should probably consider locking their doors; and b) we both want to put iron bars over our windows. The show has sufficiently freaked us out.
My night ended in a way it hasn't in months: a call from one of my best friends at home. It had been months since I'd spoken to him, and although I wasn't particularly concerned -- I know he's crazy busy with school -- it still sucked not chatting with him.
Although the rain had stopped, the cold stuck around for a second consecutive night. I don't want to jinx it, but such a cold spell has us wondering, is this the start of winter? I remember last year, some teachers said that one day it's summer and the next day it's winter. If that's the case, then April 11th was the day of the change-over. Regardless, I won't complain about being able to sleep through the night.
School has nearly come to a complete halt. For the most part, teachers, including Richie and me, have given their final exams and it's just a matter of grading and returning. Richie, being a sucker, got roped into watching a Portuguese exam. He couldn't help but laugh at the fact that the students started asking him for answers by the end of the exam.
Monday is my regular day off, so not doing much was pretty normal for me. With the rain no longer blowing into our patio, I was able to kick my feet up...until a teacher needed some math help. I was able to figure out one problem after about 25 minutes of failure. He ended up figuring out the other problem. He claims I helped him in resolving it, but what I did wasn't particularly helpful.
Other than that, it was a pretty lazy day. Richie and I headed over to the market in the middle of a beautifully clear-skied but cool afternoon. We are trying to make a better effort to get more protein in our diet, so we bought a frozen chicken for dinner.
Whenever we've bought chicken, we've only cooked in one way -- grilled. It's fairly easy with the charcoal we use anyways and it's generally delicious. But I chose to be ambitious today and tried roasted the bird. I had never done this before -- in America or Mozambique -- so I didn't know what to expect. I certainly didn't expect it to take as long as it did. But wow! did patience pay off. This chicken was juicier than any chicken we'd had in this country.
For some reason, however, this wasn't good enough for Sozinho, and he decided to cook it in a stew. Sometimes I don't get this kid. Actually, most of the time I don't get him. He didn't even try to eat the chicken the way I prepared it. It's kind of disrespectful. Whatever. I know that whatever he did could not have improved what I made. And watching "Criminal Minds" again took my thoughts away from wanting to kill Sozinho and put them on other people getting killed.
Tuesday marked the official end of the first school trimester. For me anyways. Richie has been done for a while and some teachers will be giving exams this week. Judging from last year, I knew that other teachers would give their exams on their whim, using other teachers' teaching slots without telling them. This is why Richie and I (as well as other teachers) tend to give exams the week before final week. All I had to do on Tuesday was hand back the exams.
Returning exams isn't at all a difficult task. Students rarely care why the answers are what they; they just care if they passed or failed. On this final, about 60% of the students passed. Given that all of the questions were from National Exams, this is pretty good. It looks especially good when taking into account that only 18% of my students from last year passed the National Exam last November. There might be hope for some of these kids.
I would have liked to have gone in, handing back the exams, taken questions, and then moved onto the next class, but one of our friends decided to give his biology exam during my teaching time. And not only that, he got me to control during his exam. I'm sure the students thought I was going to be an easy controller, at least easier than some Mozambican teachers. They were wrong. I didn't catch anyone blatently cheating -- cheatsheets, open notebooks -- but I moved four or five kids who couldn't keep their mouths shut or their eyes on their own paper. These students are probably thrilled that I am no longer their English teacher.
I wasn't too angered to control this exam, especially after I got a peek at it. The teacher had typed everything by himself. I had given him a quick lesson on subscripts, superscripts and designing the night before, so I was thrilled to see that he had put all of these things to use on his exam. I have decided that if I get nothing accomplished in these two years besides making some of these teachers more tech-literate, I'll be okay with that.
After controlling his exam, I went over to my second class to turn in their English exams. People were mostly satisfied with their grades, and as usual, there were no questions about their scores. For the first time in a while, I didn't screw up any of the math on the grading. One kid, especially pissed off because of his failing grade, said, "I don't think there are more than six people who passed this exams". I, knowing better, asked for students with passing grades to put their hands up. More than half the class raised their hands. Embarrassed, the kid shut up.
The rest of the afternoon and the evening were calm. At some point, I got called into the director's office to do some computer work, but other than that, we did a lot of sitting around doing nothing. For our evening entertainment, we moved away from "Criminal Minds", wanting to give "Mad Men" a shot. One episode in, we decided to go back to "Criminal Minds". If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
After our episod of "Mad Men", Richie and I realized that we were both still hungry. Richie had dined on the delicacy that is the sardine sandwich (I refuse to participate in that) while I ate spaghetti. I jokingly said that "we could make a cake". He unjokingly replied, "yea". We didn't have the right ingredients but we did have a box mix. All we needed were eggs, oil, and water, and those are three ingredients that we are rarely short on. The other minor obstacle we faces was we didn't have a cake pan big enough. We cut the recipe in thirds and it turned out okay. I mean, it's cake. How bad can it be?
It wasn't super hot, like it has been for most of the year, but the coolness of the last couple nights disappeared. There was no struggle to sleep by any means, but it wasn't nearly as comfortable as our few nights of cold.
A couple of afternoons ago, while at the market, a spoke with an English teacher about doing some computer work with him. I told him how easy it was to keep grades in Excel and he was intrigued. I like this particular teacher. He is young, tech-savvy, willing to go beyond the paper forms that his school gives him, and his English is pretty good. We rarely converse in Portuguese. As I showed him the power of Excel, I explained everything in English. He only wanted a Portuguese explanation at the end, so he could pass the knowledge on to his colleagues at the secondary school.m
Beyond this piece of tech help, there was one more thing I had to do, and I wasn't sure if it was possible. One of the teachers had a document that was saved as docx. I guess this is from the newest version of Microsoft Office, but I'm not sure. Of course, none of the computers here had the capability to open such a document, but I had an idea. I don't use Microsoft Office -- when my computer crashed, Office went with it -- but I use OpenOffice, a shareware quasi-equivalent. My guess was that the newest version of OpenOffice could open docx documents, and I was right. Victory! My work is done for the day.
Just before lunch, I headed over to the market. We were lacking food of all sorts and most importantly, we needed something that would qualify as a dinner food. We were really hoping to buy beef in the market, but our expectations were low. They have been out of beef the last couple days. But I came across something quite possibly better than beef: avocado! Today was the first day in almost a year that the holiness that is the avocado had appeared in our market. I made the decision then and there that we were doing a full-blown Mexican night, complete with sombreros.
Richie and I passed the afternoon in pretty much the same way -- doing nothing in particular. Richie tried giving beginner kakuro a shot while I struggled with the advanced puzzles (it's been a rough few weeks with that game). All I heard from his side were grumblings of "I hate this game" and the sound of the eraser on the paper. This was entertainment enough for me. I also took me a nap of catatonic proportion. I woke up ninety minutes later not knowing where I was -- a blissful thirty seconds.
The Mexican food night extravaganza began late Wednesday afternoon. Only one of our two burners is functional these days, and with a lot of cooking ahead, we knew that lighting the charcoal would be a good idea. Beans tend to cook better on an open fire anyway, so it was a blessing I guess. Everything turned out perfectly. The beans were cooked all the way through and not liquidy at all, the rice was fluffy, the salsa spicy, the guacamole creamy, and even the homemade tortillas were pretty good. Richie and I each got through our two tortillas-worth of food, and we still had a ton of food left over. Richie gave in, but I foolishly marched on. Fifteen minutes later, all the food was gone. I wallowed in the glorious pain of being overstuffed while watching "Criminal Minds" until the lights went out on us.
Thursday was largely uneventful for us. The heat that had left us earlier in the week came back, although not in full force. Sleeping was still okay, but it was evident as soon as we set foot outside that it was hot. With no school responsibility and a filthy room in front of me, I realized that this would be the perfect day to get things cleaned up and organized. It has been months since I cleaned under my bed, and with the recent track of ants I've noticed, there must be a significant-sized insect cemetery down there. My cleaning inspired Richie. He got cleaning as well. By 10:00, we had a pristine house. Now we just had to kill off the rest of the morning.
We lounged around for most of the afternoon, but eventually we found the inspiration to get up, go to the market, and get some sodas. While we were there,we picked up some meat from the butcher. We once agin did not get a particularly good cut of meat. All they had was bone-in meat. We usually avoid this because it's such a hassle, but we really wanted steak.
Half way through preparing it, we realized we had made a terrible mistake. As we sat eating our bony, rubbery meat, we vowed that we were going with boneless beef or nothing at all. A little bit of "Criminal Minds" made things better until the power went out.
Friday was a travel day for me. When heading to Vilanculos, I am usually with Richie and we are usually out of the house well before 7:00. But today was very different. For one, Richie decided to stay in. He has some other traveling to do next week and he didn't want to head south before heading north. Secondly, I also got a later start than usual. I felt particularly lazy and didn't get rolling out of the house until 7:04.
Why 7:04, you ask? Leaving at four minutes after made the math easy on what time I would need to arrive in Vilanculos to break the record of 3:56. As I thought about it, getting to Vil by 11 seemed like a near impossibility. But as I got rolling, things looked promising. There was no wait time for the boat and I had a chapa out of Mambone before I could even hit the villa. Then the biggest hit of all came: I got a private car from Maluvane all the way down to just outside Vilanculos.
We were cruising along at 120 kilometers per hour when my dreams were shattered: we got pulled over for speeding. The driver got hit with a 1000 Metical ticket. It's only 30 some dollars but, it's a huge sum of money here. Although I was saddened that my shot of breaking the record was gone, I was sadder for this poor guy who had to pay a massive fine.
All said, I made it to Vilanculos in four hours and fourteen minutes, the second fastest time for me. I can't say I was angry with that. Making it to Vilanculos before noon is always an accomplishment. Per my normal routine, I went straight to New York Pizza, and I actually had company this time around. Two of the Volunteers stationed in Vil came over to join me. I hadn't seen either of them in a while, so it was nice to catch up.
Following lunch, all of us made our way to the other side of town. I was really hoping to get some work done and to pick up some new media, but it wasn't in the cards. My hard drive isn't mac compatible apparently, so that was kind of a bummer. And I needed Excel to get my work done and a computer wasn't available to me. So like so many things here, I'll have to wait.
In the meantime, I headed over to our regular backpackers place. While I was there, something strange happened: there were a lot of Americans there. Okay, not a lot, but four. But for a country like Mozambique, four Americans who are Volunteers in Mozambique is a huge number. I soon found out the truth: two of them are Volunteers in Malawi and one was a Volunteer in Zambia ten years ago. He returned for the first time with his wife on their honeymoon and they are currently continuing through Mozambique to South Africa. It was especially cool to talk to that guy because I realized how much things had changed. I couldn't imagine doing two years here without a cell phone or internet access. How the world has changed in a decade.
I had probably my best night of sleep at the backpackers place ever. It helped that no one was there, so I was able to stack one mattress on top, making a super-mattress. All of my new friends left in the morning to go on island adventures, so I headed out as well, back to the Volunteer's house here. I went again with the hope of getting work done, but the power was out all morning and well into the afternoon, killing any shot of getting work done.
Just when we thought all hope was lost, the energy came on, and I got to work. Okay, not work. But I had some serious downloading to do. My brother sent me some new music and this would be the fastest internet for me in a while. He expected the downloads to be done in minutes, but what I consider fast internet is still horrifyingly slow. Regardless, I got one album downloaded before going to bed. At least I'll have something to hold me over until the music madness that will be coming in May.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Year 2 - Week 17: Finals Week
Though I am not accustomed to going to bed at 2 in the morning, I still woke up fairly refreshed. Unlike the sleep I usually get in Machanga, this sleep was a deep sleep. I did not wake up a single time. I guess that's proof enough that six hours of good sleep is better than nine hours of really shitty sleep. When all of us were awake, we straightened up the house to a sufficient level of cleanliness and I was on my way.
The two other Volunteers who were with me had very short trips to make, no more than 90 minutes each. And for each of them, there is never a shortage of chapas. I, however, was a little concerned. Being Easter Sunday, I wasn't sure if the chapa would be running. Our driver has a history of not driving on holidays, so I got to the chapa stop early, and anticipated the worst. If he hadn't arrived, it would have been easy enough to take three different chapas home. For some reason, though, Easter isn't a holy enough day to cancel his route -- good news for me.
What I have come to realize is that this particular driver is a really shitty driver. It's not just that he drives slower than he should. He also doesn't know how to say "no". It doesn't matter how long a person needs to stay on. He's happy to collect even a few Meticais. While I certainly appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit, it pisses me off to no end that he's willing to pick up people who could walk the same distance quite easily. All the stopping and starting added a good chunk of time to hour trip.
Another 45 minutes was added waiting at the river. The holiday apparently kept people on their respective sides of the river. Finally, enough people showed up to make the trip worthwhile for the boatman. All said, I didn't make it back to Machanga until well after 3 in the afternoon. What normally take takes four and a half hours took nearly six today.
Of course, I was hungry following such a trip. I had the foresight to buy a couple avocados while in Vilanculos, and this provided the perfect post-trip snack. A bit of good fortune was also on our side today: one of the stores had a truck of frozen chickens arrive. We would eat like kings tonight: chicken, salsa, guacamole and rice, a veritable feast.
A physics teacher had come by earlier in the day requesting help with some exams. Richie had already typed out most of the pages, but he needed some help formatting the last one. It was easy enough.
If I had no obligations on Monday, I probably would have stayed in Vilanculos for the extra day, but Richie roped me into proctoring an exam at the ungodly hour of 7:00 AM. I will not forgive him for this. Not only was the hour insane, but as I have made abundantly clear in the past, proctoring exams is one of the worst activities we do here. His little (and I really do mean little) eighth graders were taking their final exam today. I wasn't nearly as vigilant as I would be with my students, but I still nailed a kid cheating. He wasn't even creative: he had his notebook laid open on his lap. Sigh...they learn so young.
In one fell swoop, Richie ruined my day. Asshole. There was only one solution for this: a story of death and vengeance. Richie has praised the book "The Count of Monte Cristo" to no end, and with some time on my hands this week, I figured it would be worth the read. From 8:15 in the morning until the well into the afternoon, I struggled to put to the book down. This is the kind of book that every sixteen year old boy should read. It might keep them interested in reading.
While I sat in the house reading, a very strange thing happened: it rained. And it didn't rain just a little bit. It rained hard for hours on end. I would have thought this would be a good thing, but apparently, the hard rain did a good amount of damage to the gardens behind our house. It seems like we can't live with the rain and we can't live without it. Greedily, I was happy because it cooled this place off a little bit.
My day wasn't the only one that was ruined. Richie had even more exams to give, so his day was ruined even further. I can be forgiven for seeking some pleasure in his pain, can't I? In months past, there is a singular solution to such suffering: baked goods. We haven't made cookies in months, but all of that changed tonight. We were mildly concerned about our oats being expired, but as we have come to learn, don't trust expiration dates and don't trust "must be refrigerated" warnings. They are bullshit. The oats were fine and the cookies were delicious.
The only downside for the night is that we finished our last episodes of "How I Met Your Mother". I'm going to be honest: I'm kind of ready to know who she is. I'm four seasons committed and there isn't even a hint of who she is. I guess that's how they keep you coming back. In place of said series, we moved onto "The Big Bang Theory". I had heard good things but Richie was skeptical. Ten minutes into the first episode, we had approved of it.
The night here was ridiculously hot, just as it had been the night before. All of our little fans have broken. They lasted about a year, which was a pretty good run. I'd ask for more, but by the time they get here, we will be well into the cold season, and then we'll only have to suffer a little in September and October. For now, though, I continue to wake up to sweat-drenched sheets.
I dove right back into "The Count of Monte Cristo". At this rate, this 530-page book is not going to last me very long. I finally got to the part of the book when the Count starts to carry out his revenge. There are so many pieces to this little puzzle, it's quite beautiful to see it all come together.
I had two work-related interruptions in the afternoon. The first was my own work. My last two classes of the trimester were this afternoon. Even though the weeks have been almost painfully slow, this trimester has gone by fast enough. All I had was a brief review of what would be on the exam. It's pretty easy for a final exam: study what we did this trimester.
The second interruption was another request for an exam. One of our best friends, the French teacher, came over in need of a typed exam. He wanted to dictate the exam to me, which would have been a royal pain in the ass, seeing as the extent of my French is limited to pastries. I objected to this, but told him to stick around in case I made mistakes. He still sat by my side and watched me type, impressed at how quickly I was able to type in French. In the end, it's all the same. Letters are letters, regardless of order or language.
I came achingly close to finishing my book before the energy came on. There was beef in the market in the market today, and for some reason, we got a great cut of meat tonight. It's hard to call the guy who kills meat here a "butcher" because he doesn't know how to cut meat. He just takes an ax and a saw and goes to work. But tonight, we had a nice lean cut of meat.
With plenty of energy left, we decided to watch a movie, "Yes Man". It was funny through the first hour until Richie's computer froze. We tried to start it again, but it froze again minutes later. That's grounds for giving up. I curled into bed with my book until the lights went out.
I refused to get out of bed until I finished my book on Wednesday. There wasn't a whole lot to go, maybe 30 pages. In most cases, I would say that bed always beats no bed. These days, though, I'm starting to question that line of thinking. It has been so hot these days that our sheets are literally wet when we wake up (and no, neither of us has a peeing in bed problem). Plus, absolutely no breeze passes through our house. I believe that we have the right to complain. Why do I say this? Because our Mozambican colleagues tell us that it's fuckin hot and even they are having trouble sleeping. I figure if they, who were born and bred here, are complaining about the weather, we can too.
My book finished -- the last couple chapters were kind of a letdown -- I had absolutely nothing to do on Wednesday. Wednesday was a holiday in Mozambique: Mozambican Woman's Day. Women definitely carry the workload in this country. The men may have the glorified positions in government and civil service and teaching, but you rarely see a man with a baby tied to his back throwing a ho in a corn field. So yea, women in this country earn this day off.
Of course, the whole town pretty much shut down for this holiday. School, in spite of being in the middle of finals week, was closed for the day. The truth is that the school probably could have functioned just fine, even without the female teachers. Less than 10% of the teachers here are female, so the impact would be minimal. But that can't be done -- it's a holiday, and if it's a holiday, there's drinking to do.
Usually, this is a day that would be right in our wheelhouse. Booze, food, not working -- it's a perfect combination. But Richie and I weren't really up for it today. Both of us were pretty lethargic. The heat from last night and into this morning sucked the life out of us. We attended one party briefly. The goat they cooked up was pretty good, but the beer was horrifyingly warm. Like, there wasn't even an effort at refrigeration. The spelled the end for me. There was another party in the villa, but that required walking to the villa, and sitting on our patio seemed like a far better option.
Richie was in the mood to see death and destruction. I can never blame him for this. I think it's one of the side effects of living in Machanga. We turned to a movie with guaranteed gore: "300". I've never been a fan of these illustrated novel type movies, but "V for Vendetta" was awesome, so I figured this would be okay. And okay is what I would call it. It wasn't great, it wasn't bad. Some of the effects were cool, but for the most part, it was just there. Not nearly as good as "V for Vendetta".
I had a truly terrible night of sleep Wednesday night. It was hot beyond imagination and I couldn't fall asleep until nearly midnight. Then I was up at 4:00 for some ungodly reason. And then to top it off, I was awakened by my phone buzzing. At this hour, it's usually a hockey score, but this was no text message. This was a phone call from Richie. "Hey man, can you come to the school and control an exam?" You son of a bitch. It's 7 in the morning, I'm still in bed, haven't brushed my teeth, haven't even thought about putting pants on. And you want me to work? Fine. I scrambled my way out of bed, into clothes, and over to the school.
Oh controlling exams, how I hate you. I will not forgive Richie for this. I caught one kid ogling his neighbor's paper like it was covered with Swedish supermodels...three minutes into the exam. He was moved immediately. Other than that, these kids weren't so bad. Some girl rolled in twenty-five minutes late and got right to work. I though, "Wow, she's going to bang out this exam in 20 minutes." Nope. She wrote all of the parts to the exam except the answers. Her paper looked like this: "The five kingdoms of living beings are: 1)_____2)_____ 3)_____4)_____5)_____ " Beautiful. I don't know a damn thing about biology, but even I could grade her exam.
Well, proctoring an exam while still half-asleep put me in just a wonderful mood. It was a good thing I had nothing to do today. I'm playing the waiting game until Friday to give my exam. It's the only day when I have all of my students for two hours each. The only downside was that a nap was out of the question. Despite being exhausted, I knew that if I napped during the day, I wouldn't sleep at night. What a sick trade-off that is.
At some point, a a group of seven year olds came over to my house. "Teacher, we want to learn some English words". Like anyone else, I asked them what words they wanted to know. They ended up learning seven or eight words, including "door", "bucket", "chair" and "shoes". Tragically, I'm pretty sure that these kids no more English than some of my twelfth graders.
To kill some time in the afternoon, Richie and I wandered over to the market. The price of stuff here has skyrocketed in the last couple weeks. The price of a bottle of Coke has jumped from ten Mets in December to twelve Mets in February to fifteen Mets today. Kinda sucks, but what can you do? It's still delicious.
I cooked beans for the first time this week. I really half-assed it, and it showed. The beans were undercooked, and I forgot garlic. That's a huge fail. Whatever. Richie, as usual, wasn't eating dinner, so it was only one of us who had to suffer. Following exam day, we knew we had to watch something funny, so we returned to "The Big Bang Theory" before going to bed.
Friday was the day for my students, but they would have to suffer until the afternoon to take my exam. While they waited to meet their fate, I did some work for the French teacher. He had another exam he wanted typed up, and of course I said okay. Why should he take five hours to type the exam when I can do it in 20 minutes? Not surprisingly, not a single students came over for help or clarification before the exam -- not today, not any other day. I don't know if they are too proud to ask for help or would be too ashamed or are just not used to teachers willing to help, but I offer to help them every time, and every time, no one comes over.
This test, I will say, is probably the most difficult test I've given in my year-plus here. Every question was taken from national exams from years before, there was a ton of vocabulary (most of them cognates) that would be new to them. But seriously, if you can't figure out that negligent is negligente, you might have bigger problems. Plus, on top of the all the new vocabulary, I told them I wouldn't be helping them define certain words. They were on their own, just like they would be on their national exam in November.
So there I stood, for more than three hours, watching my students take exams. Some of them tried to ask for help, but when they asked, I just shrugged my shoulders like I was the one learning English. For the first time in ages, I had no cheaters and I didn't even have to move anyone. They finally realize that I mean business on exam day. The only thing that is slightly concerning is there is a group of students in one of my classes who have not taken a single one of my exams this year. I saw them just sitting under a tree during my exam and they walked in after the exam was done. The truth is, these aren't particularly good students, and they would probably fail the exam anyway. They are just making it easier for me to grade. I have no problem giving out zeroes.
I wanted to get grading right away. 100 exams times 40 questions per exam is a lot. My saving grace was this exam was multiple choice. Ten exams into grading, I pretty much had the sequence memorized and could get through an exam in about a minute or two. I managed to knock out one of two classes before the energy came on and set aside the other class for tomorrow.
For the first time in a while, I was called in on serious tech duty. One of the computers wasn't starting up at all, which was just a little curious for me and a little disconcerting for some teachers because they needed to get documents from this computer. Sure, most of these computers have viruses, but even the most severely infected ones turn on before they shut down. I looked through all the basic stuff -- cables, wires, etc -- and everything seemed in place. I opened her up, and couldn't notice any disconnections. So I went to a last result: I popped out the hard drive, put it another computer, and voila! we had a running computer. The teachers were very grateful for my assistance. While I was out, Richie had cooked up some shrimp and rice. We watched some "Big Bang Theory" while eating, and when the energy when out, we were out too.
I immediately went back to work on Saturday morning. I wanted to get these papers graded as quickly as possible. Usually, the science-track students do better than the language-track students, but that was not the case on this exam. I think the reading comprehension section really messed with them. The difference wasn't too noticeable -- a slightly lower passing rate and a slightly lower average score. Nothing too noticeable, but noticeable to me because they are normally significantly better. Either way, I was done grading by noon, which means I'm done with work until about May!
There was some sort of festa going on in town today, some sort of cultural day. Richie, being the muzungu representative, went to the even while I stayed home and graded papers. Following this event was a soccer game featuring a team from Mambone and a team from Machanga. This is not something I'd usually attend, but Gary came over from across the river. They told him that the game would be in the morning. I laughed when he said this, knowing that most of these games don't start until 4 in the afternoon. And I was right. In the meantime, Gary came over for the better part of the afternoon. We introduced him to the glory that is potato pancakes and egg sandwiches.
Around 4:30, we wandered over to the field to watch the soccer game. It was a terrible game -- a zero-zero tie. While we were there, I think there were two shots on goal. Gotta love soccer. We needed something to make us feel better after that train wreck of a game, so we said goodbye to Gary and walked over to the vila for a soda. One of the stores actually head Pepsi, a rare deviation from the normal Coca-Cola. And everyone knows that Pepsi is better than Coke. I was very happy. My happiness increased when we found out there was beef in the market. We're eating well tonight.
Richie didn't want to do anything fancy. He just wanted meat. I see nothing wrong with that. I tried to make mashed potatoes, but I undercooked the potatoes and we didn't have better. It's tough to fuck up mashed potatoes, but I figured out a way to do it. The steak was still pretty good -- not as good as what we had earlier in the week, but not bad.
I got called back to teach duty tonight with a much simpler task. A teacher wanted me to transfer documents from a computer to his laptop. My work was done in five minutes, and thank god it didn't take longer. Within minutes of me getting home, the deluge began. It rained for the better part of the night. At least it should make for easier sleeping.
The two other Volunteers who were with me had very short trips to make, no more than 90 minutes each. And for each of them, there is never a shortage of chapas. I, however, was a little concerned. Being Easter Sunday, I wasn't sure if the chapa would be running. Our driver has a history of not driving on holidays, so I got to the chapa stop early, and anticipated the worst. If he hadn't arrived, it would have been easy enough to take three different chapas home. For some reason, though, Easter isn't a holy enough day to cancel his route -- good news for me.
What I have come to realize is that this particular driver is a really shitty driver. It's not just that he drives slower than he should. He also doesn't know how to say "no". It doesn't matter how long a person needs to stay on. He's happy to collect even a few Meticais. While I certainly appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit, it pisses me off to no end that he's willing to pick up people who could walk the same distance quite easily. All the stopping and starting added a good chunk of time to hour trip.
Another 45 minutes was added waiting at the river. The holiday apparently kept people on their respective sides of the river. Finally, enough people showed up to make the trip worthwhile for the boatman. All said, I didn't make it back to Machanga until well after 3 in the afternoon. What normally take takes four and a half hours took nearly six today.
Of course, I was hungry following such a trip. I had the foresight to buy a couple avocados while in Vilanculos, and this provided the perfect post-trip snack. A bit of good fortune was also on our side today: one of the stores had a truck of frozen chickens arrive. We would eat like kings tonight: chicken, salsa, guacamole and rice, a veritable feast.
A physics teacher had come by earlier in the day requesting help with some exams. Richie had already typed out most of the pages, but he needed some help formatting the last one. It was easy enough.
If I had no obligations on Monday, I probably would have stayed in Vilanculos for the extra day, but Richie roped me into proctoring an exam at the ungodly hour of 7:00 AM. I will not forgive him for this. Not only was the hour insane, but as I have made abundantly clear in the past, proctoring exams is one of the worst activities we do here. His little (and I really do mean little) eighth graders were taking their final exam today. I wasn't nearly as vigilant as I would be with my students, but I still nailed a kid cheating. He wasn't even creative: he had his notebook laid open on his lap. Sigh...they learn so young.
In one fell swoop, Richie ruined my day. Asshole. There was only one solution for this: a story of death and vengeance. Richie has praised the book "The Count of Monte Cristo" to no end, and with some time on my hands this week, I figured it would be worth the read. From 8:15 in the morning until the well into the afternoon, I struggled to put to the book down. This is the kind of book that every sixteen year old boy should read. It might keep them interested in reading.
While I sat in the house reading, a very strange thing happened: it rained. And it didn't rain just a little bit. It rained hard for hours on end. I would have thought this would be a good thing, but apparently, the hard rain did a good amount of damage to the gardens behind our house. It seems like we can't live with the rain and we can't live without it. Greedily, I was happy because it cooled this place off a little bit.
My day wasn't the only one that was ruined. Richie had even more exams to give, so his day was ruined even further. I can be forgiven for seeking some pleasure in his pain, can't I? In months past, there is a singular solution to such suffering: baked goods. We haven't made cookies in months, but all of that changed tonight. We were mildly concerned about our oats being expired, but as we have come to learn, don't trust expiration dates and don't trust "must be refrigerated" warnings. They are bullshit. The oats were fine and the cookies were delicious.
The only downside for the night is that we finished our last episodes of "How I Met Your Mother". I'm going to be honest: I'm kind of ready to know who she is. I'm four seasons committed and there isn't even a hint of who she is. I guess that's how they keep you coming back. In place of said series, we moved onto "The Big Bang Theory". I had heard good things but Richie was skeptical. Ten minutes into the first episode, we had approved of it.
The night here was ridiculously hot, just as it had been the night before. All of our little fans have broken. They lasted about a year, which was a pretty good run. I'd ask for more, but by the time they get here, we will be well into the cold season, and then we'll only have to suffer a little in September and October. For now, though, I continue to wake up to sweat-drenched sheets.
I dove right back into "The Count of Monte Cristo". At this rate, this 530-page book is not going to last me very long. I finally got to the part of the book when the Count starts to carry out his revenge. There are so many pieces to this little puzzle, it's quite beautiful to see it all come together.
I had two work-related interruptions in the afternoon. The first was my own work. My last two classes of the trimester were this afternoon. Even though the weeks have been almost painfully slow, this trimester has gone by fast enough. All I had was a brief review of what would be on the exam. It's pretty easy for a final exam: study what we did this trimester.
The second interruption was another request for an exam. One of our best friends, the French teacher, came over in need of a typed exam. He wanted to dictate the exam to me, which would have been a royal pain in the ass, seeing as the extent of my French is limited to pastries. I objected to this, but told him to stick around in case I made mistakes. He still sat by my side and watched me type, impressed at how quickly I was able to type in French. In the end, it's all the same. Letters are letters, regardless of order or language.
I came achingly close to finishing my book before the energy came on. There was beef in the market in the market today, and for some reason, we got a great cut of meat tonight. It's hard to call the guy who kills meat here a "butcher" because he doesn't know how to cut meat. He just takes an ax and a saw and goes to work. But tonight, we had a nice lean cut of meat.
With plenty of energy left, we decided to watch a movie, "Yes Man". It was funny through the first hour until Richie's computer froze. We tried to start it again, but it froze again minutes later. That's grounds for giving up. I curled into bed with my book until the lights went out.
I refused to get out of bed until I finished my book on Wednesday. There wasn't a whole lot to go, maybe 30 pages. In most cases, I would say that bed always beats no bed. These days, though, I'm starting to question that line of thinking. It has been so hot these days that our sheets are literally wet when we wake up (and no, neither of us has a peeing in bed problem). Plus, absolutely no breeze passes through our house. I believe that we have the right to complain. Why do I say this? Because our Mozambican colleagues tell us that it's fuckin hot and even they are having trouble sleeping. I figure if they, who were born and bred here, are complaining about the weather, we can too.
My book finished -- the last couple chapters were kind of a letdown -- I had absolutely nothing to do on Wednesday. Wednesday was a holiday in Mozambique: Mozambican Woman's Day. Women definitely carry the workload in this country. The men may have the glorified positions in government and civil service and teaching, but you rarely see a man with a baby tied to his back throwing a ho in a corn field. So yea, women in this country earn this day off.
Of course, the whole town pretty much shut down for this holiday. School, in spite of being in the middle of finals week, was closed for the day. The truth is that the school probably could have functioned just fine, even without the female teachers. Less than 10% of the teachers here are female, so the impact would be minimal. But that can't be done -- it's a holiday, and if it's a holiday, there's drinking to do.
Usually, this is a day that would be right in our wheelhouse. Booze, food, not working -- it's a perfect combination. But Richie and I weren't really up for it today. Both of us were pretty lethargic. The heat from last night and into this morning sucked the life out of us. We attended one party briefly. The goat they cooked up was pretty good, but the beer was horrifyingly warm. Like, there wasn't even an effort at refrigeration. The spelled the end for me. There was another party in the villa, but that required walking to the villa, and sitting on our patio seemed like a far better option.
Richie was in the mood to see death and destruction. I can never blame him for this. I think it's one of the side effects of living in Machanga. We turned to a movie with guaranteed gore: "300". I've never been a fan of these illustrated novel type movies, but "V for Vendetta" was awesome, so I figured this would be okay. And okay is what I would call it. It wasn't great, it wasn't bad. Some of the effects were cool, but for the most part, it was just there. Not nearly as good as "V for Vendetta".
I had a truly terrible night of sleep Wednesday night. It was hot beyond imagination and I couldn't fall asleep until nearly midnight. Then I was up at 4:00 for some ungodly reason. And then to top it off, I was awakened by my phone buzzing. At this hour, it's usually a hockey score, but this was no text message. This was a phone call from Richie. "Hey man, can you come to the school and control an exam?" You son of a bitch. It's 7 in the morning, I'm still in bed, haven't brushed my teeth, haven't even thought about putting pants on. And you want me to work? Fine. I scrambled my way out of bed, into clothes, and over to the school.
Oh controlling exams, how I hate you. I will not forgive Richie for this. I caught one kid ogling his neighbor's paper like it was covered with Swedish supermodels...three minutes into the exam. He was moved immediately. Other than that, these kids weren't so bad. Some girl rolled in twenty-five minutes late and got right to work. I though, "Wow, she's going to bang out this exam in 20 minutes." Nope. She wrote all of the parts to the exam except the answers. Her paper looked like this: "The five kingdoms of living beings are: 1)_____2)_____ 3)_____4)_____5)_____ " Beautiful. I don't know a damn thing about biology, but even I could grade her exam.
Well, proctoring an exam while still half-asleep put me in just a wonderful mood. It was a good thing I had nothing to do today. I'm playing the waiting game until Friday to give my exam. It's the only day when I have all of my students for two hours each. The only downside was that a nap was out of the question. Despite being exhausted, I knew that if I napped during the day, I wouldn't sleep at night. What a sick trade-off that is.
At some point, a a group of seven year olds came over to my house. "Teacher, we want to learn some English words". Like anyone else, I asked them what words they wanted to know. They ended up learning seven or eight words, including "door", "bucket", "chair" and "shoes". Tragically, I'm pretty sure that these kids no more English than some of my twelfth graders.
To kill some time in the afternoon, Richie and I wandered over to the market. The price of stuff here has skyrocketed in the last couple weeks. The price of a bottle of Coke has jumped from ten Mets in December to twelve Mets in February to fifteen Mets today. Kinda sucks, but what can you do? It's still delicious.
I cooked beans for the first time this week. I really half-assed it, and it showed. The beans were undercooked, and I forgot garlic. That's a huge fail. Whatever. Richie, as usual, wasn't eating dinner, so it was only one of us who had to suffer. Following exam day, we knew we had to watch something funny, so we returned to "The Big Bang Theory" before going to bed.
Friday was the day for my students, but they would have to suffer until the afternoon to take my exam. While they waited to meet their fate, I did some work for the French teacher. He had another exam he wanted typed up, and of course I said okay. Why should he take five hours to type the exam when I can do it in 20 minutes? Not surprisingly, not a single students came over for help or clarification before the exam -- not today, not any other day. I don't know if they are too proud to ask for help or would be too ashamed or are just not used to teachers willing to help, but I offer to help them every time, and every time, no one comes over.
This test, I will say, is probably the most difficult test I've given in my year-plus here. Every question was taken from national exams from years before, there was a ton of vocabulary (most of them cognates) that would be new to them. But seriously, if you can't figure out that negligent is negligente, you might have bigger problems. Plus, on top of the all the new vocabulary, I told them I wouldn't be helping them define certain words. They were on their own, just like they would be on their national exam in November.
So there I stood, for more than three hours, watching my students take exams. Some of them tried to ask for help, but when they asked, I just shrugged my shoulders like I was the one learning English. For the first time in ages, I had no cheaters and I didn't even have to move anyone. They finally realize that I mean business on exam day. The only thing that is slightly concerning is there is a group of students in one of my classes who have not taken a single one of my exams this year. I saw them just sitting under a tree during my exam and they walked in after the exam was done. The truth is, these aren't particularly good students, and they would probably fail the exam anyway. They are just making it easier for me to grade. I have no problem giving out zeroes.
I wanted to get grading right away. 100 exams times 40 questions per exam is a lot. My saving grace was this exam was multiple choice. Ten exams into grading, I pretty much had the sequence memorized and could get through an exam in about a minute or two. I managed to knock out one of two classes before the energy came on and set aside the other class for tomorrow.
For the first time in a while, I was called in on serious tech duty. One of the computers wasn't starting up at all, which was just a little curious for me and a little disconcerting for some teachers because they needed to get documents from this computer. Sure, most of these computers have viruses, but even the most severely infected ones turn on before they shut down. I looked through all the basic stuff -- cables, wires, etc -- and everything seemed in place. I opened her up, and couldn't notice any disconnections. So I went to a last result: I popped out the hard drive, put it another computer, and voila! we had a running computer. The teachers were very grateful for my assistance. While I was out, Richie had cooked up some shrimp and rice. We watched some "Big Bang Theory" while eating, and when the energy when out, we were out too.
I immediately went back to work on Saturday morning. I wanted to get these papers graded as quickly as possible. Usually, the science-track students do better than the language-track students, but that was not the case on this exam. I think the reading comprehension section really messed with them. The difference wasn't too noticeable -- a slightly lower passing rate and a slightly lower average score. Nothing too noticeable, but noticeable to me because they are normally significantly better. Either way, I was done grading by noon, which means I'm done with work until about May!
There was some sort of festa going on in town today, some sort of cultural day. Richie, being the muzungu representative, went to the even while I stayed home and graded papers. Following this event was a soccer game featuring a team from Mambone and a team from Machanga. This is not something I'd usually attend, but Gary came over from across the river. They told him that the game would be in the morning. I laughed when he said this, knowing that most of these games don't start until 4 in the afternoon. And I was right. In the meantime, Gary came over for the better part of the afternoon. We introduced him to the glory that is potato pancakes and egg sandwiches.
Around 4:30, we wandered over to the field to watch the soccer game. It was a terrible game -- a zero-zero tie. While we were there, I think there were two shots on goal. Gotta love soccer. We needed something to make us feel better after that train wreck of a game, so we said goodbye to Gary and walked over to the vila for a soda. One of the stores actually head Pepsi, a rare deviation from the normal Coca-Cola. And everyone knows that Pepsi is better than Coke. I was very happy. My happiness increased when we found out there was beef in the market. We're eating well tonight.
Richie didn't want to do anything fancy. He just wanted meat. I see nothing wrong with that. I tried to make mashed potatoes, but I undercooked the potatoes and we didn't have better. It's tough to fuck up mashed potatoes, but I figured out a way to do it. The steak was still pretty good -- not as good as what we had earlier in the week, but not bad.
I got called back to teach duty tonight with a much simpler task. A teacher wanted me to transfer documents from a computer to his laptop. My work was done in five minutes, and thank god it didn't take longer. Within minutes of me getting home, the deluge began. It rained for the better part of the night. At least it should make for easier sleeping.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Year 2 - Week 16: The Source of My Headaches? Quite Possibly...
If it is possible to be noisy and quiet at the same time, this past Sunday was just that. The church was very busy today. Even Sozinho went to church. He came back with a palm leaf, so I came to reason that it was Palm Sunday. While there was plenty of noise in the church, the house that the godless hedons live in -- our house -- was nice and quiet.
With this new week, it seems that my headaches have mostly gone away. There is still some residual pain, so I considered it best to continue taking aspirin. One of the reasons I don't particularly enjoy taking pills is that most problems will go away naturally, but this headache was persistent and quite painful. The other reason I don't like taking pills is that I believe that you lose some tolerance as you take them more often. Clearly, I'm no doctor, but there have been enough people who become way addicted to pain killers that it pretty much scares me to take pain meds.
I spent most of the morning reading "Dexter in the Dark", one of the books about our favorite television character. I must say that the thing we like most about "Dexter" is the killing part. And over 302 pages, there was way too much plot and not nearly enough death. I was about half way through the book when...
After an otherwise pain-free morning, a whole new different kind of pain came over me. One of Richie's students from last year came over to get some help with English class. This is always an interesting event. Depending on the student, it could be really quick and helpful or really painful for just about everyone. And this was going to be painful. It was just a matter of how painful it would be.
This particular student is not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed and he came with the task of writing a composition. Sentences are difficult enough, even for my students. A full composition -- a near impossible mission. But this was bad. He had to write a composition about two Mozambican he admires, which required the verb "to be". So we said, "Okay, let's conjugate the verb 'to be'". And I couldn't not make this up if I wanted to. Richie and I started him off. "I am. You..." and he believed that the second conjugation was "eat". I am. You eat. Of course.
This was a whole new type of pain. It was the kind of event that every Mozambican English teacher should see. This student was in 10th grade, which means that he had English for 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and part of 10th grade. That's four full years of English. We then said that the verb "to be" was from Day 1 of English. We meant it figuratively. He thought we meant it literally. So he turned to page one of his notebook and there it was: the conjugation of the verb "to be". We couldn't help but laugh. And cry.
We really couldn't deal with this. We had to get out of there, so Richie claimed that he needed to "go somewhere" and I eagerly followed along...for about 30 feet, until the student left our house. And then I returned right back into the peace and quiet of death at the hands of Dexter.
I have come to realize that the real source of my headaches was probably not dehydration or an inability to conjugate the most basic verb in the English language. It is probably just your run-of-the-mill malnutrition. It's become evident that we are not eating nearly as well we were last year. We haven't seen packages since December, which means we haven't had chicken or turkey in a long time. The only real protein we get is from our daily three eggs split between the two of us and the occasional bean night. And there's not a whole lot of fruit here and almost no vegetables. It's not healthy.
Thankfully for us, tonight was a night for beans, and if it was possible to top the beans that I cooked a couple nights ago, I did so tonight. They were even more Mozambican than the last ones. Topped off with some "How I Met Your Mother", we turned a painful afternoon into an okay night.
If there is any upside to not getting a lot of calories, it's that I've been sleeping extraordinarily well. I've been so exhausted on the whole that I've been sleeping until almost 8 every morning.
Richie had class Monday morning and we had almost food in the house, which meant that I had to go to the market. This was bad news for two reasons: one, I had almost no money so I had to spend conservatively; and two, it was fuckin hot outside. There was not a cloud in the sky and I was going to be hot and dehydrated very quickly.
I was very happy to have no obligations on Monday afternoon. Tragically, walking the two miles to and from the market pretty much did me in. I spent almost the entire afternoon laid out on the floor -- on a mat, of course. There is no exaggeration when I say that. The only times I got up were to get my "Dexter" book (which turned out okay, at best), to get a newspaper, and to get my kakuro book when I was done reading.
Just as I was getting comfortable -- which takes a while on a concrete floor -- two students came up looking for English help. As usual, I obliged, and thank goodness this kid at least knew how to conjugate the verb "to be", in both present tense and past tense. This kid had clearly paid attention at some point in the first ten years of his education. He seems to actually want to learn. So often, kids come over here once and say they want to learn English, but the entire time they are here, they speak Portuguese (and occasionally Ndau). This kid actually tries to speak English with us, so I consider him a winner.
There were no beans tonight, so it was another night of lovely carbohydrates for me. I never really thought I'd get sick of spaghetti, but I'm getting ever closer to that point. I ate my spaghetti, Richie ate tuna, and we finished season three of "How I Met Your Mother". We are moving through these DVDs way too quickly.
I was asked once again to type up a couple of exams by my mathematics counterpart. He came over with a couple of problems, one of which I just could not solve. It was some third degree polynomial equation. The only way I ever learned to do these was by grouping common terms, if it's possible. But then, my colleague blew my mind with some knowledge and I went about solving the problem. He later came over with another that he couldn't solve but I could. When he realized is misstep, he just laughed at himself. I'm always happy to help, regardless of the discipline
I felt miserable for the better part of the day. It wasn't just the headaches. In fact, for the most part, the headaches were gone and I was off Advil. My stomach was not feeling pleasant. Along with realizing that my headaches were probably from not eating, I have recognized that I am struggling to eat potatoes and eggs. I just really can't do it anymore. Maybe it is all the oil. Maybe it's the fact that we have eaten potatoes and eggs for no fewer than 300 days out of the last year. But I just can't do it.
The class I had to teach today was incredibly simple. It should have required about four seconds of explanation and then I should have received glowing examples. I taught past continuous today, as in "I was playing football". This should be simple because they already know how to do present continuous. All it requires to change present tense to past tense is changing the verb "to be" from present tense to past tense. We know this could be problematic, so I went over it with them, for the thousandth time, before getting into the actual grammar.
My hopes for dietary bliss were exponentially elevated when a truck from Beira arrived. We had heard that a car would be coming this week, and while in Beira, Richie had insisted that they go to the post office to get my packages. Putting all the math together, this would mean that I have packages. But apparently, the rules of mathematics don't apply in Mozambique. There were packages in Mozambique, but the morons in the office failed to go to the post office to pick them up. I ask so little of those people in Beira. We just want them to pick up and bring us our packages, and every now and then, we ask to stay in the guest house. How they manage to epically fail at such a simple task is shocking.
We were really banking on packages to arrive because those packages usually contain canned chicken and turkey. For a while, we were feeling cocky and thought that we could probably do without these provisions. We were wrong. We are dying without them. Aside from the variety, we need the protein. It goes without say that while we are in Vilanculos this weekend, I will be gorging myself on at least a half chicken, possibly an entire chicken. I am just hoping that I can make like a brown bear and store this food over the winter. So it was another carbalicious night of spaghetti and "How I Met Your Mother" for me.
Wednesday, as has become normal was slow. I didn't have classes until the insane hour of 4 in the afternoon. What am supposed to do until 4 o'clock" Well, I had to actually figure out what I'd be teaching. There was one more piece of past tense that I had to cover: the perfect tenses. These are tenses that are used regularly in English but are not so common in spoken Portuguese. These are compound tenses that require the verb "have" along with a participle, as in "I have learned English since 7th grade" or "He had gone to Vilanculos before going to Beira". In theory, this should be easy to teach because it is structurally the same as Portuguese. But there's always something that gets in the way.
The rules for forming participles are not exactly clean cut. The first is easy: any regular verb in past tense uses the same word for its participle. For example, the verb "cook" in past tense is "cooked" and its participle would be I have "cooked". But things get messy with irregular verbs. For example, the participle for "teach" is "taught" and the participle is also "taught". But another irregular verb like "fly" has the participle "flown". If you are confused, you can imagine how my students feel. I tried to simplify things by just giving them a list of different participles that they need to know for my class.
Along with this glorious lesson on two forms of past tense, I squeezed in a lesson on passive voice. With limited time remaining in this trimester, I'm trying to squeeze in as much as possible. I found out that my remaining week would be severely shortened by two holidays -- Good Friday and Woman's Day. That's fine. Things are just going to have to move a little faster than I would have liked. I wanted to do the lesson on passive voice because it uses the same list of participles, like "The class is taught by Mr. Lee". They seemed to understand this more than the first part of the lesson.
We were told that there would be beef in the market by late afternoon, so we sent Sozinho with a mission: find the meat or bring back something with protein. The meat was sold out, but Sozinho had the good sense to bring back some fish for Richie and a can of cooked beans for me. I can't actually say he had the good sense. I told him to do exactly that. At least he carried out this simple task well. I ate my rice and beans, Richie ate his fish, and we closed the night with more "How I Met Your Mother".
I slept until the insane hour of 8:45. I don't know how I managed to do such a thing. I think it may have to do with the fact that I had about six calories yesterday. At least it served its purpose of getting through the better part of the morning.
There wasn't much lesson planning to do today because my lesson was already planned. I went into class and banged out my lesson. Strangely, this group understood the perfect tenses but did not at all get the passive voice stuff.
After class, I got roped into helping out with some math class for my colleague. He was teaching a class on probability and wanted to demonstrate using cards. And he wanted to use me, which was fine. He wanted me to do some magic tricks and I obliged. I'm sure the kids thought that what I was doing was some April Fools Day prank, pulling up their card every single time. The cards were actually a pretty good tool. I think it's the first time I've seen a teacher here use a resource that goes beyond teaching material, so credit to him.
Oh yes, this April Fools Day thing. I was not going to let this opportunity go by unused. Before the math class began, I told the students that when he walked in that they should all stand up and turn away from him. In a country where the teacher is greeted with "Good Afternoon, teacher. How are you", this would be a big deal. My students acted excellently. We walked into the classroom, and a huge group of them stood up, turned around, and faced the other wall. The reaction I got was one of anger: "I think that I am already here. This is a lack of respect". Yes, and it's hilarious.
I wasn't able to eat until after all these classes, around 3:00. And to be honest, I wasn't even that hungry. I tried to eat, got four bites into my potatoes and eggs, and gave up. I just couldn't do it anymore. I thought eating was one of the things I did best, but now I'm second-guessing myself. Instead I went to something that I know I'm good at: lying down. And that's how I spent the better part of my late afternoon.
For a good portion of last year and even into this year, Richie went into this phase where he couldn't eat dinner. He'd get through lunch no problem, but I'd end up eating at least 60% of his dinner. I think the same is starting to happen to me, but with the opposite meals. I can't eat lunch anymore, but dinner was no problem. I ate way more than my fair share of rice and beans, to the point where I almost felt sick - the good kind of sick. We decided that watching people die would be nice, so we watched "Smokin' Aces 2". It's the kind of movie that you don't really have to pay attention because everyone is going to die in the end.
Richie and I were on the move early Friday morning with one thought on our minds: pizza. We knew that a mere five and a half hours from the time we set foot out the door, we would be enjoying delicious New York Pizza. Getting to Mambone was no problem, but then the travel gods decided to fuck with us. We sat in Mambone for nearly an hour before the car left. I don't think that it's the waiting that makes us angry. I think it's the fact that we have absolutely no control of our travel fate.
After finally leaving Mambone, we got to the EN1. Richie and I both really needed to go to the bathroom, but a car was barreling down, and I figured I should at least see where it's going. Maputo, you say? Let's go, Richie, we can hold it. This guy bombed it down the EN1 and we didn't have to pay for the ride, which made it even better.
We made it to Vil in about five hours -- not record time, but faster than usual. We actually arrived just before things shut down for lunch break, so we tried to squeeze in some shopping before eating, but the cheaper supermarket was closed. Frustrating, a little, but nothing could ruin this day. There was pizza, just right there. There was no question about what happened to be done: a large for me and a large for Richie. I'm pretty sure that this meal will be more calories than we'd had during the rest of the week. I powered through my piri-piri chicken pizza with ease and watched Richie struggle toward the end. He fell a little short and I got his last piece. I then proceeded to make fun of him about it for the rest of the day.
We checked into our regular backpackers place and found our way to the hammocks. This is exactly what I needed -- a full belly, sunshine, ocean, and a hammock. I sat in the hammock for a good couple of hours, trying to figure out why I had to torture myself with that last slice of pizza. We swam off some of the calories in a rapidly cooling ocean. For most of the year, the ocean has been a bathtub, but this was beautiful today. And because we didn't have enough to eat for lunch, we each had a chicken sandwich for dinner. We clearly got in touch with the fat kids within each of us.
Richie wanted to headed out Saturday morning, but I wasn't quite ready to go back. I was in no rush to go home. I didn't have work until Tuesday, but Richie wanted me to help him proctor and exam on Monday, so I figured Sunday would be a good day to go back. Plus, staying in Vil for another day would allow me to get a little fatter before going home. Before he headed to the chapa, we knocked out some shopping and I got my final exam photocopied. The lady initially told me that there were not photocopies today, but when I told here that I had 200 copies to make, she changed her tune. Apparently, 200 was the magic number. The funny part is some kid walked in wanting to make one copy, and she said the machine wasn't working. She managed to do this with a straight face, even though my copies were being made right then and there.
With my copies made and my shopping done, I headed over to the Vil girls' house. They graciously opened there house to me despite their absence. When I walked into the compound, I noticed a familiar white face. One of the Volunteers from close by was in town, just to unwind. Sweet. Company. I had bought a kilo of chicken breasts from one of the stores. I had planned on decimating said chicken over the course of the day, but now I had a partner in crime. And another Volunteer would be coming in a bit later, so we decided to put of lunch for a while.
Lunch was fried chicken and pasta. One of the Volunteers in town was a southerner, so I pretty much knew I couldn't compete. This wasn't going to be home-style country-fried chicken, but he was satisfied with the end result and that was good enough for me. We were all quite satisfied actually.
We mostly hung around for the day, talking about the pleasures of teaching in Mozambique. We also talked about "community integration", two of Peace Corps' favorite words. By coincidence, the three of us all had something in common: all of us work at mission schools, not standard state schools. I think there may be something about this that gets in the way of full-blown community integration. The mission, more than anything, is our community. Most people on the campus know who we are, and there are fair amount of people outside who know us also, but for the most part, our school is our community.
At some point in the afternoon, I got a call from my parents. I don't know, but it felt like it had been a while since I talked to them. It was nice to hear from them, even though there wasn't a whole lot of news to share. It's a little strange how our conversations have changed over the course of the 18 months. At first, there was so much to talk about because everything was so new. Then, most of our conversation geared toward their upcoming trip. And now, a mere seven months from going home, there has been increasing discussion about me coming home. It's kind of amazing.
Despite the big lunch, that didn't deter us from wanting to eat a huge dinner. We headed down to the market to buy some goods: grouper, which would be beer-battered and fried, some vegetables, and most importantly avocado. Oh yes, it's avocado season again, which means it's time to go crazy with guacamole. I think this is one of those things that we really don't appreciate in America. Due to the glorious weather in California and other parts of the country, we can get just about any fruit or vegetable whenever we want. That is not true here. Things have a season, and 'tis the season for avocado. It should be a beautiful couple weeks.
Dinner was delicious and the rest of the evening looked a lot like the afternoon: just catching up. By the time we looked at a clock, it was already two in the morning. Wow. Where did the time go?
I'm happy report that the headaches I'd been having are gone, for now. I still can't say if it was from a lack of ability to conjugate or a lack of food. Either way, I'm glad they're gone.
With this new week, it seems that my headaches have mostly gone away. There is still some residual pain, so I considered it best to continue taking aspirin. One of the reasons I don't particularly enjoy taking pills is that most problems will go away naturally, but this headache was persistent and quite painful. The other reason I don't like taking pills is that I believe that you lose some tolerance as you take them more often. Clearly, I'm no doctor, but there have been enough people who become way addicted to pain killers that it pretty much scares me to take pain meds.
I spent most of the morning reading "Dexter in the Dark", one of the books about our favorite television character. I must say that the thing we like most about "Dexter" is the killing part. And over 302 pages, there was way too much plot and not nearly enough death. I was about half way through the book when...
After an otherwise pain-free morning, a whole new different kind of pain came over me. One of Richie's students from last year came over to get some help with English class. This is always an interesting event. Depending on the student, it could be really quick and helpful or really painful for just about everyone. And this was going to be painful. It was just a matter of how painful it would be.
This particular student is not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed and he came with the task of writing a composition. Sentences are difficult enough, even for my students. A full composition -- a near impossible mission. But this was bad. He had to write a composition about two Mozambican he admires, which required the verb "to be". So we said, "Okay, let's conjugate the verb 'to be'". And I couldn't not make this up if I wanted to. Richie and I started him off. "I am. You..." and he believed that the second conjugation was "eat". I am. You eat. Of course.
This was a whole new type of pain. It was the kind of event that every Mozambican English teacher should see. This student was in 10th grade, which means that he had English for 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and part of 10th grade. That's four full years of English. We then said that the verb "to be" was from Day 1 of English. We meant it figuratively. He thought we meant it literally. So he turned to page one of his notebook and there it was: the conjugation of the verb "to be". We couldn't help but laugh. And cry.
We really couldn't deal with this. We had to get out of there, so Richie claimed that he needed to "go somewhere" and I eagerly followed along...for about 30 feet, until the student left our house. And then I returned right back into the peace and quiet of death at the hands of Dexter.
I have come to realize that the real source of my headaches was probably not dehydration or an inability to conjugate the most basic verb in the English language. It is probably just your run-of-the-mill malnutrition. It's become evident that we are not eating nearly as well we were last year. We haven't seen packages since December, which means we haven't had chicken or turkey in a long time. The only real protein we get is from our daily three eggs split between the two of us and the occasional bean night. And there's not a whole lot of fruit here and almost no vegetables. It's not healthy.
Thankfully for us, tonight was a night for beans, and if it was possible to top the beans that I cooked a couple nights ago, I did so tonight. They were even more Mozambican than the last ones. Topped off with some "How I Met Your Mother", we turned a painful afternoon into an okay night.
If there is any upside to not getting a lot of calories, it's that I've been sleeping extraordinarily well. I've been so exhausted on the whole that I've been sleeping until almost 8 every morning.
Richie had class Monday morning and we had almost food in the house, which meant that I had to go to the market. This was bad news for two reasons: one, I had almost no money so I had to spend conservatively; and two, it was fuckin hot outside. There was not a cloud in the sky and I was going to be hot and dehydrated very quickly.
I was very happy to have no obligations on Monday afternoon. Tragically, walking the two miles to and from the market pretty much did me in. I spent almost the entire afternoon laid out on the floor -- on a mat, of course. There is no exaggeration when I say that. The only times I got up were to get my "Dexter" book (which turned out okay, at best), to get a newspaper, and to get my kakuro book when I was done reading.
Just as I was getting comfortable -- which takes a while on a concrete floor -- two students came up looking for English help. As usual, I obliged, and thank goodness this kid at least knew how to conjugate the verb "to be", in both present tense and past tense. This kid had clearly paid attention at some point in the first ten years of his education. He seems to actually want to learn. So often, kids come over here once and say they want to learn English, but the entire time they are here, they speak Portuguese (and occasionally Ndau). This kid actually tries to speak English with us, so I consider him a winner.
There were no beans tonight, so it was another night of lovely carbohydrates for me. I never really thought I'd get sick of spaghetti, but I'm getting ever closer to that point. I ate my spaghetti, Richie ate tuna, and we finished season three of "How I Met Your Mother". We are moving through these DVDs way too quickly.
I was asked once again to type up a couple of exams by my mathematics counterpart. He came over with a couple of problems, one of which I just could not solve. It was some third degree polynomial equation. The only way I ever learned to do these was by grouping common terms, if it's possible. But then, my colleague blew my mind with some knowledge and I went about solving the problem. He later came over with another that he couldn't solve but I could. When he realized is misstep, he just laughed at himself. I'm always happy to help, regardless of the discipline
I felt miserable for the better part of the day. It wasn't just the headaches. In fact, for the most part, the headaches were gone and I was off Advil. My stomach was not feeling pleasant. Along with realizing that my headaches were probably from not eating, I have recognized that I am struggling to eat potatoes and eggs. I just really can't do it anymore. Maybe it is all the oil. Maybe it's the fact that we have eaten potatoes and eggs for no fewer than 300 days out of the last year. But I just can't do it.
The class I had to teach today was incredibly simple. It should have required about four seconds of explanation and then I should have received glowing examples. I taught past continuous today, as in "I was playing football". This should be simple because they already know how to do present continuous. All it requires to change present tense to past tense is changing the verb "to be" from present tense to past tense. We know this could be problematic, so I went over it with them, for the thousandth time, before getting into the actual grammar.
My hopes for dietary bliss were exponentially elevated when a truck from Beira arrived. We had heard that a car would be coming this week, and while in Beira, Richie had insisted that they go to the post office to get my packages. Putting all the math together, this would mean that I have packages. But apparently, the rules of mathematics don't apply in Mozambique. There were packages in Mozambique, but the morons in the office failed to go to the post office to pick them up. I ask so little of those people in Beira. We just want them to pick up and bring us our packages, and every now and then, we ask to stay in the guest house. How they manage to epically fail at such a simple task is shocking.
We were really banking on packages to arrive because those packages usually contain canned chicken and turkey. For a while, we were feeling cocky and thought that we could probably do without these provisions. We were wrong. We are dying without them. Aside from the variety, we need the protein. It goes without say that while we are in Vilanculos this weekend, I will be gorging myself on at least a half chicken, possibly an entire chicken. I am just hoping that I can make like a brown bear and store this food over the winter. So it was another carbalicious night of spaghetti and "How I Met Your Mother" for me.
Wednesday, as has become normal was slow. I didn't have classes until the insane hour of 4 in the afternoon. What am supposed to do until 4 o'clock" Well, I had to actually figure out what I'd be teaching. There was one more piece of past tense that I had to cover: the perfect tenses. These are tenses that are used regularly in English but are not so common in spoken Portuguese. These are compound tenses that require the verb "have" along with a participle, as in "I have learned English since 7th grade" or "He had gone to Vilanculos before going to Beira". In theory, this should be easy to teach because it is structurally the same as Portuguese. But there's always something that gets in the way.
The rules for forming participles are not exactly clean cut. The first is easy: any regular verb in past tense uses the same word for its participle. For example, the verb "cook" in past tense is "cooked" and its participle would be I have "cooked". But things get messy with irregular verbs. For example, the participle for "teach" is "taught" and the participle is also "taught". But another irregular verb like "fly" has the participle "flown". If you are confused, you can imagine how my students feel. I tried to simplify things by just giving them a list of different participles that they need to know for my class.
Along with this glorious lesson on two forms of past tense, I squeezed in a lesson on passive voice. With limited time remaining in this trimester, I'm trying to squeeze in as much as possible. I found out that my remaining week would be severely shortened by two holidays -- Good Friday and Woman's Day. That's fine. Things are just going to have to move a little faster than I would have liked. I wanted to do the lesson on passive voice because it uses the same list of participles, like "The class is taught by Mr. Lee". They seemed to understand this more than the first part of the lesson.
We were told that there would be beef in the market by late afternoon, so we sent Sozinho with a mission: find the meat or bring back something with protein. The meat was sold out, but Sozinho had the good sense to bring back some fish for Richie and a can of cooked beans for me. I can't actually say he had the good sense. I told him to do exactly that. At least he carried out this simple task well. I ate my rice and beans, Richie ate his fish, and we closed the night with more "How I Met Your Mother".
I slept until the insane hour of 8:45. I don't know how I managed to do such a thing. I think it may have to do with the fact that I had about six calories yesterday. At least it served its purpose of getting through the better part of the morning.
There wasn't much lesson planning to do today because my lesson was already planned. I went into class and banged out my lesson. Strangely, this group understood the perfect tenses but did not at all get the passive voice stuff.
After class, I got roped into helping out with some math class for my colleague. He was teaching a class on probability and wanted to demonstrate using cards. And he wanted to use me, which was fine. He wanted me to do some magic tricks and I obliged. I'm sure the kids thought that what I was doing was some April Fools Day prank, pulling up their card every single time. The cards were actually a pretty good tool. I think it's the first time I've seen a teacher here use a resource that goes beyond teaching material, so credit to him.
Oh yes, this April Fools Day thing. I was not going to let this opportunity go by unused. Before the math class began, I told the students that when he walked in that they should all stand up and turn away from him. In a country where the teacher is greeted with "Good Afternoon, teacher. How are you", this would be a big deal. My students acted excellently. We walked into the classroom, and a huge group of them stood up, turned around, and faced the other wall. The reaction I got was one of anger: "I think that I am already here. This is a lack of respect". Yes, and it's hilarious.
I wasn't able to eat until after all these classes, around 3:00. And to be honest, I wasn't even that hungry. I tried to eat, got four bites into my potatoes and eggs, and gave up. I just couldn't do it anymore. I thought eating was one of the things I did best, but now I'm second-guessing myself. Instead I went to something that I know I'm good at: lying down. And that's how I spent the better part of my late afternoon.
For a good portion of last year and even into this year, Richie went into this phase where he couldn't eat dinner. He'd get through lunch no problem, but I'd end up eating at least 60% of his dinner. I think the same is starting to happen to me, but with the opposite meals. I can't eat lunch anymore, but dinner was no problem. I ate way more than my fair share of rice and beans, to the point where I almost felt sick - the good kind of sick. We decided that watching people die would be nice, so we watched "Smokin' Aces 2". It's the kind of movie that you don't really have to pay attention because everyone is going to die in the end.
Richie and I were on the move early Friday morning with one thought on our minds: pizza. We knew that a mere five and a half hours from the time we set foot out the door, we would be enjoying delicious New York Pizza. Getting to Mambone was no problem, but then the travel gods decided to fuck with us. We sat in Mambone for nearly an hour before the car left. I don't think that it's the waiting that makes us angry. I think it's the fact that we have absolutely no control of our travel fate.
After finally leaving Mambone, we got to the EN1. Richie and I both really needed to go to the bathroom, but a car was barreling down, and I figured I should at least see where it's going. Maputo, you say? Let's go, Richie, we can hold it. This guy bombed it down the EN1 and we didn't have to pay for the ride, which made it even better.
We made it to Vil in about five hours -- not record time, but faster than usual. We actually arrived just before things shut down for lunch break, so we tried to squeeze in some shopping before eating, but the cheaper supermarket was closed. Frustrating, a little, but nothing could ruin this day. There was pizza, just right there. There was no question about what happened to be done: a large for me and a large for Richie. I'm pretty sure that this meal will be more calories than we'd had during the rest of the week. I powered through my piri-piri chicken pizza with ease and watched Richie struggle toward the end. He fell a little short and I got his last piece. I then proceeded to make fun of him about it for the rest of the day.
We checked into our regular backpackers place and found our way to the hammocks. This is exactly what I needed -- a full belly, sunshine, ocean, and a hammock. I sat in the hammock for a good couple of hours, trying to figure out why I had to torture myself with that last slice of pizza. We swam off some of the calories in a rapidly cooling ocean. For most of the year, the ocean has been a bathtub, but this was beautiful today. And because we didn't have enough to eat for lunch, we each had a chicken sandwich for dinner. We clearly got in touch with the fat kids within each of us.
Richie wanted to headed out Saturday morning, but I wasn't quite ready to go back. I was in no rush to go home. I didn't have work until Tuesday, but Richie wanted me to help him proctor and exam on Monday, so I figured Sunday would be a good day to go back. Plus, staying in Vil for another day would allow me to get a little fatter before going home. Before he headed to the chapa, we knocked out some shopping and I got my final exam photocopied. The lady initially told me that there were not photocopies today, but when I told here that I had 200 copies to make, she changed her tune. Apparently, 200 was the magic number. The funny part is some kid walked in wanting to make one copy, and she said the machine wasn't working. She managed to do this with a straight face, even though my copies were being made right then and there.
With my copies made and my shopping done, I headed over to the Vil girls' house. They graciously opened there house to me despite their absence. When I walked into the compound, I noticed a familiar white face. One of the Volunteers from close by was in town, just to unwind. Sweet. Company. I had bought a kilo of chicken breasts from one of the stores. I had planned on decimating said chicken over the course of the day, but now I had a partner in crime. And another Volunteer would be coming in a bit later, so we decided to put of lunch for a while.
Lunch was fried chicken and pasta. One of the Volunteers in town was a southerner, so I pretty much knew I couldn't compete. This wasn't going to be home-style country-fried chicken, but he was satisfied with the end result and that was good enough for me. We were all quite satisfied actually.
We mostly hung around for the day, talking about the pleasures of teaching in Mozambique. We also talked about "community integration", two of Peace Corps' favorite words. By coincidence, the three of us all had something in common: all of us work at mission schools, not standard state schools. I think there may be something about this that gets in the way of full-blown community integration. The mission, more than anything, is our community. Most people on the campus know who we are, and there are fair amount of people outside who know us also, but for the most part, our school is our community.
At some point in the afternoon, I got a call from my parents. I don't know, but it felt like it had been a while since I talked to them. It was nice to hear from them, even though there wasn't a whole lot of news to share. It's a little strange how our conversations have changed over the course of the 18 months. At first, there was so much to talk about because everything was so new. Then, most of our conversation geared toward their upcoming trip. And now, a mere seven months from going home, there has been increasing discussion about me coming home. It's kind of amazing.
Despite the big lunch, that didn't deter us from wanting to eat a huge dinner. We headed down to the market to buy some goods: grouper, which would be beer-battered and fried, some vegetables, and most importantly avocado. Oh yes, it's avocado season again, which means it's time to go crazy with guacamole. I think this is one of those things that we really don't appreciate in America. Due to the glorious weather in California and other parts of the country, we can get just about any fruit or vegetable whenever we want. That is not true here. Things have a season, and 'tis the season for avocado. It should be a beautiful couple weeks.
Dinner was delicious and the rest of the evening looked a lot like the afternoon: just catching up. By the time we looked at a clock, it was already two in the morning. Wow. Where did the time go?
I'm happy report that the headaches I'd been having are gone, for now. I still can't say if it was from a lack of ability to conjugate or a lack of food. Either way, I'm glad they're gone.
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