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.