One of the benefits of only having classes only in the afternoon is that I rarely have to set an alarm here. The only times I have to hear my phone go off at some ungodly hour are the times that I'm traveling very long distance. Or when my family forgets what the time difference is between California and Machanga. Sometimes, the hour is truly unforgivable. Feeling my phone vibrate at 3:17 in the morning is never permissible (you know who you are). 6:30 is more reasonable. That was how this last full week of May began: with a phone call from my parents. I feel like it had been longer than usual since I heard from them. It probably wasn't any longer than usual. Regardless, it was nice to talk to them for a little bit.
I was alone for the first half of Sunday. Richie woke up early and started heading back to Machanga. I had some work to do, so I figured it would be best to get it done before he got back. Correcting exams, usually a hassle, flew by. They are awfully easy to correct when it's only ten questions multiple choice. It took me maybe 40 minutes to get through 100 exams. As long as I was in the mood for work, I might as well pop the grades into my computer.
Richie made it home around 1:00 which worked out quite nicely. I managed to hold off lunch until then. It wouldn't have been the biggest of inconveniences for him if he had to cook for himself, but that doesn't make sense on a lot of levels, especially when I can just wait an hour. After the travel day, Richie said he “needed a win”, so we made omelets.
Given that I was up earlier than I expected, and I worked for a good chunk of the morning, I knew I would be in for a nap during the afternoon. I also knew that I would have to be careful to not over-nap. I love to sleep as much as the next person, but if I sleep too much in the afternoon, I won't be able to sleep at all when I'm supposed to sleep. Thirty minutes wouldn't be enough and an hour might be too much, so I split the difference.
The forty-five minute nap was perfect. I woke up a little groggy, but I was sure I wouldn't be rolling around in bed all night. Richie and I both wanted to get moving a bit, so we headed to the market late in the afternoon on the hunt for food. We didn't find anything promising. Another failed market run; another night of spaghetti for me.
A couple weeks ago, Richie picked up “Forrest Gump” from a colleague. He wanted to watch it tonight. Little did he know that he was putting on quite possibly my favorite movie. We were interrupted briefly by a phone call from my brother, but it was a welcome phone call. I hadn't spoken to my brother in what felt like forever. Following the brief intermission, we finished up the movie. I always shed a tear or two when Forrest talks to Jenny's grave underneath the big oak tree. I warned Richie. On cue, a single tear came out. Names were called, as expected. Nice to know I can count on some things in Machanga.
Our energy went out around 9:15. I don't want to jinx anything, but this is possibly the last week that someone will be turning the lights out for us. Let's hope so. When they said we'd have energy in June, we thought it would be June of 2009. We're hoping for the best, but expecting the very worst.
The weather was absolutely perfect as we went to bed, but the temperature dropped precipitously over the course of the night. I woke up once and definitely felt cold, but it wasn't cold enough to drag me out of bed. Around 5, I woke up again having to go to the bathroom, and this time I was cold. Cold enough to put on sweatpants and a t-shirt for a couple more hours of sleep. I didn't believe it would get cold last year, and I'm still a little incredulous, but god it's nice.
The sweatpants stayed for most of the morning, until I realized that we desperately needed a market run. As I am the one with Monday's off, the responsibility fell to me. We can get away with a lot of things here, but there's no way I can get away with wearing sweatpants to the market. I threw on some more appropriate gear and made the rounds. While I was out, Richie started lunch. The timing worked out perfectly. I got back with fresh bread just as the eggs were going into the pan.
My day to that point was fairly successful, and my string of successes continued into the afternoon. I got the dishes done. Even though Sozinho should be the person doing this, I know that if I don't do them, we won't have dry dishes until 6:45 or 7 at night, and neither Richie nor I have any interest in eating dinner at 8:00. So earlier dinner will be good.
My good fortune ended there. I tried to nap but utterly failed. I really had no reason to nap. I wasn't tired and I got plenty of sleep last night; this was just greedy. I failed at a couple kakuros – nothing new there. I spent some time reading about the utter failure of my beloved San Jose Sharks. Way to get swept, idiots.
But my biggest failure of all was yet to come. Our small pan has been in dire need of a new handle and I thought today would be the day. I got a sharp a knife and a decently sized branch and started whittling. I had the thing shaped perfectly, but as I tried to thread the screw through, it broke. Argh! If nothing else, it killed off most of the afternoon, so I guess it wasn't a complete failure.
We needed a win. More specifically, I needed a win – and stir fry usually is a point that we can count on. We had some bell pepper remaining from Richie's trip which goes a long way in our food. And with delicious Kikkoman soy sauce, we were happy.
For our entertainment, we watched “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs”. It's a cartoon, so I was expecting something on the mediocre end, but cartoons/animation are good these days. “Up” got rave reviews (really want to see it...) so this couldn't be that terrible. It started out a little on the slow side, but it was funny in a stupid kind of way. Our lights went out just after nine, a little on the early side these days, but whatever. It makes no difference to us.
I didn't wait until I was cold to go to sweatpants. I went to bed prepared tonight. I was quite satisfied when I woke up in the middle of the night and I was cold, but not shivering. This is how I like to sleep.
Tuesday was a very easy day all the way around. With only exams to hand back in the afternoon, I didn't have to lesson plan for the afternoon. What I needed to do in a huge way was clean my room. In such a small room, things can get out of hand very quickly. If just one or two things is out of place, then everything gets cluttered. My parents would be quick to say that I never had the cleanest room in the world, but damnit I'm trying here. The upside of having a small room is that it's very easy to clean. I was done in less than an hour.
I was done with my school obligations – I can't even call it “class” – in 20 minutes today. I should have had to wait an 40 minutes in between seeing my classes, but I was able to sneak into my second class before the other teacher could show up, saving me a solid hour.
The rest of the afternoon was very quiet. We wanted to do beans tonight, so we got the charcoal going early. Outside of that, we just lounged around the patio, figuring out how many days until we get to go home. How do we get to do that? We got our official Close of Service dates this afternoon. It's exciting to know that after nearly eighteen months in Machanga, there is a final date to this madness.
When the energy came on, my computer “expertise” was needed. Someone needed some documents saved on a flash drive and printed. I'm pretty sure that anyone over the age of seven in America could do this, but it's still a bit of a task here. Whatever. The whole thing took thirty seconds and I was back to cooking rice and beans.
I'm sure that some of you readers may be mocking my love for rice and beans. But the truth is it is fuckin delicious. It's highly nutritious – a great source of fiber and protein – and easy on a budget. And since Richie doesn't eat that much rice, I'm usually very full by the end of the meal. Today, Richie failed to make it half way through his plate, and guess who gets all that food. He said he wasn't feeling well, so he turned in, leaving me to entertain myself with Spider Solitaire
It was a truly beautiful night for sleep, and by beautiful, I mean absolutely freezing. I'm not quite at the point where sweatpants and long sleeves are required, but it's getting close to that time. I can't wait. With such lovely weather, it is so easy to sleep through the night.
For a day that doesn't require me to do anything until 4 in the afternoon, I had a very busy day. While Sozinho was out buying charcoal, I helped clean the house. Upon his return, I ran to the market to buy some items for the house. And following that, I planned my lesson for the afternoon, a conversation about laws and rules.
The best moment of the morning, however, came at the very end of the morning, while we were cooking lunch. Sozinho was ironing in the house. Now, ironing here is almost exactly as it is in America, except with one big difference: instead of plugging the iron into a wall for heat, charcoal is used. It's fascinating to watch and I will not iron my clothes here because I know I will fuck up everything. Anyways, Sozinho was ironing in the house and our neighbor came over and asked if he was finished. Sozinho said, “Yea, I'm done”. I heard him rummaging around the house, so I said to our neighbor “esta a mentir” – “he's lying”. I said it half-jokingly but with near certainty. Richie than looked in the house and, what do you know, Sozinho is still ironing. “You're not making my life easy”, Sozinho told me. I was thinking that I was just returning the favor.
Richie and I ran over to the district education building in the afternoon to print some documents. I would normally print documents here at school, but both of the printers here are busted. I've tried to repair them, but it appears to be a lost cause. Documents printed, we returned home in time for Richie to yell at his students about cheating.
My class today went amazingly well. The students were actually participating. More than that, they were making an effort to participate in English. This was truly shocking. After the first period ended, I wanted to continue into the second period – the last period of the day. A lot of students in the class, however, wanted to leave. And with reason: most of the students in that class live in Mambone and with the sun going down earlier and earlier these days, it is almost impossible to get across the river before sunset. So for the first time in 18 months, I gave homework: one paragraph, in English, about any rule or law. They probably think it's a joke, but I'm not fucking around. I'm sure a lot of them will not be doing it, and I will be taking points off their exam.
While I was in the classroom, Richie bought fish, leaving me to eat spaghetti. Still pissed off about a lot of his students cheating – he caught eight in one class alone – Richie wanted to see people die. That left us with watching “The Last Samurai”. Pretty sweet movie, and it definitely quenched Richie's thirst to see blood.
Under normal circumstances, a midnight text message from America would be unacceptable. But these were not normal circumstances: my brother's first child, my first niece, was born just after midnight Mozambique time. It was a text message I was very happy to receive. It's strange how things can happen sometimes: within ten days of each other, I lost a family member and gained a family member. If you believe in circle-of-life or reincarnation or whatever, this all makes a lot of sense. To me, it;s just very strange.
I was up, once more around 5 o'clock, before finally rolling out of bed around 8 in the morning. It's awfully hard to find the motivation to get out of bed these days. It's so cold outside, I have no responsibilities in the morning, and even in an uncomfortable bed, being wrapped up in a blanket is quite lovely. Eventually, I found the motivation. Rather, I think I had to pee.
Once I was up, though, I was out and about. I made a bread run while Richie finished up his classes for the week. The rest of the morning was spent relaxing, watching electricians work on the houses. By the time I went to class, a couple of the houses here were hooked up to 24-hour energy. For real. No joke this time. Our house, however, wasn't. “They will get there”, our pedagogical director said with a smile. “No they won't”, I joked back. I was hoping I would be wrong.
I wasn't. All afternoon, they worked on a single row of houses, leaving the other half for another day. Whether that day would be tomorrow is anyone's guess, but we have high hopes. If they could get this much done in one day, they should easily be able to finish tomorrow.
I only found out that our house wouldn't be hooked up on my way back from the market. I left for the market around 4:30, hoping that they electricians would have our house hooked up by 5:30. That dream was ruined, however, when Richie and a colleague walked up to me as I was leaving the villa. We weren't getting energy, but we were going to drink. Okay.
Four of us sat around a table and proceeded to knock out a case of beer in a couple hours. With the cold weather here, it's a perfect time for dark beer. Perfect enough to drink twelve of them, apparently. Sufficiently drunk, we came back to the house to cook up some beef stir fry. If we weren't drunk, it would have probably been terrible. Our altered state made us think otherwise.
The energy went out, on our row of houses anyway, around 9:30. If we're lucky, it will be the last time the lights go out on us.
When we woke up Friday morning, there was no sign of an electrician. I don't mean that the electrician wasn't at our house. I mean that the electrician was not anywhere to be found in school. This was just slightly concerning. I figured that if we didn't get energy on Friday, we'd have to wait until Monday or Tuesday or October to get it. I wasn't holding my breath.
Trying to not thinking about the lack of electricity in our house, I kept my mind busy. I had some surprising success with Kakuro, I cleaned up around the house, and lesson-planned for the afternoon classes. By the time I got through all of that, it was time to cook lunch. Just another day of cooking on charcoal.
If nothing else, I was really hoping that we would have energy when I got back from class. The electrician finally made an appearance and there wasn't a ton of work to do. But after three full hours of teaching, with no break, there was no energy in our house. I was officially pissed off.
Then, out of nowhere, two more electricians showed up and started getting work done. There was no messing around. They sure as hell didn't want to work on Saturday. This was a job that needed to be done. And they barely got it done. At 4:37 PM Mozambique time, on May 28, 2010, Machanga finally saw the light. Our house was lit up.
The question then became, “Well, what do we do now?” We turned off the lights and went for a walk. We didn't have a whole lot of food in the house, so a market run was necessary. There was no other way to welcome in 24-hour energy than with a pasta dinner. For our entertainment, we watched “The Game”. The funny thing is, by the time we got through the movie, we were ready to go to bed. It was 9:45. We're pathetic.
How did I celebrate the first weekend of full time energy? By going to Vilanculos, naturally. It had been a while that I'd come to Vil, but I was in need of a lot of things. We need oil for the house, I needed pizza for my belly, and my computer was in dire need of some updating. Oh yea, and I was flat broke. Thank goodness for payday.
I crossed the river just after 7:00. The travel day started ominously. Fog sat on the river reducing visibility to zero, to the point that no one on the other side of the river could see that there were eight people waiting to cross to Mambone. After crossing the river, things improved dramatically. I was about to crawl into a chapa when a truck rolled by. I asked where he was going, and he said he was staying local, “but there's a car at a restaurant about to go to Maxixe”. Bingo. I walked a kilometer down the road to the restaurant and, as promised, there was the car.
As I stood at the restaurant, I remembered words commonly uttered by my grandfather: you don't ask, you don't get. I walked over to the man, who was finishing his breakfast (and his breakfast beer) and asked if he was heading to Maxixe. When he said yes, I asked for a ride, and he said of course. Immediately after I asked, another guy – who apparently had been there for a while – asked if he could also get a ride. “Nope. Only room for one”. The second man who asked looked like a beaten dog, tail between his legs. Should have asked first.
Aside from the thirty minutes spent fucking around Mambone, the ride was awesome. He didn't stop for anything or anyone. The man went 120 kilometers per hour the entire way down. I didn't have to pay. And then, as if the first part of the ride weren't good enough, I got another free ride from the crossroads to Vilanculos. The entire trip, including the ten-Metical boat ride, cost me ten Meticais. The only tally in the loss column was I didn't break the record: despite the lost thirty minutes in Mambone, I still got to town in four hours in six minutes, my second fastest time.
The afternoon in Vilanculos was lovely as usual. Some other Volunteers from around the area were in town, so some of us got pizza. I tried to run to the supermarkets, but nothing was open. Shame. I'll try again on Monday morning before I get out of here.
The evening was when the real show began. The other Volunteers bought a couple of chickens to celebrate a birthday, and we we're going to cook them up well. We made some delicious rubs for roasting. Some vegetables got steamed while others got thrown in with the chickens. Three hours after we started cooking, everything was finished. I say this without exaggeration: this was the best meal I've had in this country, probably the best meal I've had in the last five years. It was absolutely amazing.
The rest of the night was spent in alcohol-induced joy. We sat around for nearly six hours discussing everything from how good the food was to what happens to running backs when they hit thirty to the best movie trilogies.
Don't get me wrong, 24-hour energy is great. But it doesn't beat out good food, good friends, and good conversation.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Year 2 - Week 23: On Loss and Lights
I fell asleep, quite literally for the first time in my life. I was sitting upright, fairly exhausted from being up for 23 consecutive hours, and at some point, I leaned to the left and just crashed. I stayed like this for a solid hour, until the cat annoyed me to the point that I picked it up off the bed and threw it.
I don't know why I thought that would help. Cats are finicky, the attention whores of the animal world. And quite frankly, at 4 in the morning, drunk and exhausted, I simply don't have it in me to give anything attention. By 7:30, having fought off the damn cat for four hours and mostly rested up, I finally let the cat in the bed. Huge mistake. It took a while, but my cat allergy finally kicked in. Out rolled the tears and the snot. I was down and out for an hour, even after popping a Benadryl.
Four months into having a cushy school schedule, I finally realized the benefit of not having classes on Monday. Usually, I'll travel home with Richie, who has classes on Mondays, leaving me to sit around the house doing nothing. But Richie wasn't with me today and I really wasn't in the mood to travel. Before we even got to breakfast, I made the decision not to go home until tomorrow. This made me happy.
There was no need for a nap today, even though I was still tired. A day of sitting around was exactly what I needed. Three of us, sat around, talking music, talking sports, talking food, talking America. When lunch came around, we made spaghetti, after which one of the Volunteers from further south headed home.
Late in the afternoon, I went on a rare passear through town. Passear'ing is a Richie activity. I don't see a lot of reason to walk for an hour with no reason other than to kill an hour. My passear, however, had a purpose. We are scheduled to have a conference in Inhassoro in August, and I wanted to check out the place. The sign said that it was only 2.6 kilometers away, not so long. As I walked though, I realized this number was absolutely wrong. It was 2.6 kilometers to the end of the first road. I'm pretty sure they forgot to add the extra kilometers on the back roads. All said, it took me an hour to get from the Volunteer's house to the hotel.
It's a nice hotel, right on the ocean, with a pool looking out over the water. Everything is very green, well maintained. And the owners were very kind. The only downside is that it's far away from the town. Come conference time, this is probably a good thing. No need to cause trouble in a Volunteer's site.
I really wasn't looking forward to the walk. It was starting to get dark and I knew I'd be wiped by the time I returned. Less than a kilometer into the walk home, a car went screaming by, then suddenly stopped. "Need a lift?" yelled a thick, Afrikaner accent. Why yes, yes I do. Sitting in the car were a blonde-haired, blue-eyed husband, his blonde-haired, blue-eyed wife, and their two blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughters. They could have easily been from Holland or Sweden. With one child in her lap, the wife sat there smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. The husband also smoked and drank, but he didn't have a child in his lap. It was probably not the wisest of rides to take, but whatever. I wasn't going far and the town was sleepy.
Colin, the Volunteer with whom I stayed, and I cooked beans for dinner. He usually doesn't do feijoada (bean stew) so I was happy to show him my tricks. Colin is from California, went to UCLA, athletic, and a generally cool person. The conversation rolls easily with him. In an area dominated by girls (8-4), it's nice to have guy time. If I went to Vilanculos a lot last year, I could see myself going to Inhassoro a lot this year. The high-speed internet cafe across the street seals the deal for me. If only there were pizza and a good supermarket in Inhassoro, it would be a perfect place.
We didn't make it up much past dinner. We were both still exhausted from the night before and we both had busy-ish days ahead of us on Monday. He had to teach and I had to get back to Machanga.
Before heading out of town, I wanted to hit the internet cafe one more time. If the boss is in town, I can get on Wi-fi, which means that I can do some music downloading. My brother sent me the new album by The National, but since it's a torrent, I can only download it off my computer. Fortunately, the chefe arrived and I got downloading. The internet flew, America fast. It was a thing of beauty. What would have taken me four or five hours in Vilanculos took me a total of 10 minutes in Inhassoro. Looks like I'll be coming down this way a lot.
The other major upside to going to Inhassoro is the car situation. Vilanculos only has the one car that leaves at 10:30 in the morning. From Inhassoro, I can leave anytime between 7 and noon and still get back to Machanga with no problem. I headed out to the road around 9:15 and had a ride all the way to the crossroad by 9:45.
It was a great travel day. The most waiting I did was that half hour in Inhassoro. The ride to the crossroads was slow and steady, but I had exactly zero minutes of wait time at the crossroads, jumping from the back of one truck into the back of another. After shopping in Mambone (the price of tomatoes has dropped 20% recently...is the season), I waited no more than ten minutes before jumping in a boat across the river.
I was home by 2 o'clock, a still acceptable hour to eat lunch. I cut up some veggies, fried some potatoes, and cooked up another delicious Velveeta omelet. The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing. Colin gave me a book called "Best American Sports Writing - 2009". This is my new favorite book. Between the ride up and the slow afternoon, I tore throw a good third of the book. These aren't game recaps. These are feature pieces that go on forever, really beautiful writing all the way around. I was especially hit by a story about a refugee soccer team in Georgia. It brought back all sorts of memories from San Diego. The only person to see the tears well up in my eyes was the truck driver.
Richie had a long afternoon of teaching: four classes, one after the other, in the afternoon. Bummer. I spent the afternoon sitting on the patio, reading, looking at the sky. We've had plenty of days that felt like winter, but this was the first day that actually looked like winter. A blanket of greyness covered the sky, a
brisk breeze blew through. This is what we've wanted for months -- sweatshirts, blankets, hot showers.
We were low on food in our house, but we did have a ton of tomatoes, onion, and bell pepper. We felt obligated to cook tomato sauce. It's been a good while since we've made tomato sauce. Richie committed to spaghetti, but backed out before I even put the spaghetti into the pot. Fine by me -- I can eat pasta until I'm blue in the face. While out of town this past weekend, Richie picked up two seasons of "Chappelle's Show". We watched the first three episodes before calling it an early night.
I woke up Tuesday hungry, which is nothing new. I can usually hold out until lunch to eat. That's how it was in America and that's how it's been here. But today, there was no holding out. By 9:00, I was ready to eat. I cut up some vegetables, threw together a salad dressing of oil, curry seasoning and salt (surprisingly good - don't knock it til you try it) and was quickly sated.
The last couple of weeks in class have all been about vocabulary-building. All of last year and the first trimester of this year went into grammar and structure. Now, it's about plugging more vocabulary into these structures. I've spent plenty of time the last couple of weeks on prefixes, so it only makes sense that I put some time into suffixes. I feel like we have less suffixes than we have prefixes, which certainly makes life easier, and most of these suffixes line up quite nicely with Portuguese.
After lunch, I headed off to class to give my lesson. On my way over to class, I ran into the eleventh grade English teacher. As usual, I tried to make small talk, doing the courteous thing. He ended our conversation in a very weird way: "I will come there now". Okay...and what? Some details were definitely missing. I thought maybe he was heading off to class, I don't know. But then, a couple minutes later, he rolls into my class, notebook open, and sits down.
Okay, looks like my class is going to be critiqued. That's fine and good. I actually had a legitimate lesson plan today, one that would fill the entire forty-five minutes. Well, close enough. The class went forty-three minutes, which worked out well. He wanted to discuss my lesson. I was expecting some serious critiquing, but nothing really came, positive or negative. Telling me that "writing the topic on the board is good" is really not helpful to me.
Richie and I went on a late afternoon market run, not really needing anything but wanting chicken or beef. There was absolutely no protein in the market, at least no protein that we trusted. Yes, one of the places had fish, but hthis place regularly loses energy, causing the fish to spoil very quickly. We have little faith. We did have some canned chicken in the house, so we turned to that and made stir fry.
As I cooked dinner, I received a text message, probably from stateside. This is nothing new: dinner time is usually the time that messages start coming in from America. But the message I got was different than anything I expected. My great-grandmother, in her mid-nineties, passed away. I think I was more shocked by the medium of delivery than the news itself. When you're in your nineties, even the smallest thing can turn things downward. I just didn't think I would hear about it via text message.
My great-grandmother was amazing. She may have been tiny in stature and moved at a pace that a sloth would mock, but her mind was sharp as a knife. She knew everyone's names, what everyone was up to, knew generally where I was (amazing, considering that she had lived a full life before Mozambique as a nation existed) and what I was doing. I was fortunate to have been able to see her just before coming here.
That message sobered up an otherwise jovial day. I didn't really know how to react. The last death in my family was long enough ago that I don't remember what happened or how I felt. Add in the fact that I'm 10,000 miles away, completely removed from the situation, and it's just a little awkward. What I did know is that I needed a laugh, and maybe something delicious in my stomach. We watched "Chappelle's Show" and ate chocolate cake, but as I went to bed, my heart was still heavy.
Usually, I am a terrible sleeper when something is on my mind, but I slept surprising well Tuesday night. I woke up to the bad news that the Sharks had lost (again) on home ice in their Western Conference finals series. I figured between the death and the Sharks losing, my day could only get better from there.
And it did. One of my students came up to me early in the morning to tell me that they wouldn't have their first classes in the afternoon, allowing me to move my teaching time up a full four teaching periods. This made me happy. The only thing it forced me to do was plan my lesson in the morning instead of after lunch. Still, I managed to lesson plan and go to the market. We had almost know food in the house, and I don't know about you, but I generally like to eat around noon.
Class went about as I thought -- short and sweet. I came back to see two out of the ordinary things. The first was Alexis sitting on our porch. She hasn't been in Machanga for weeks. The muzungu population in Machanga jumped from three to four, just like that. The other, way more improbable thing was that electricians were at school. We sat in utter amazement as we watched a team of men in orange jumpsuits dig a whole next to our house for a light pole.
I'm still not holding my breath, but it looks like twenty-four hour energy might actually arrive. I don't blame you if you don't believe me either. I said it in June of last year, and this past November, but this looks real. It's not just talk -- it's work. The work was so stunning that the people building the house next to ours actually stopped working to watch other people work. That said, I still will not believe it until I can actually flip a switch on an off mid-day.
The look of winter stuck around all afternoon. The sky remained grey, the clouds a little angrier than they've been the last couple days. They gave way briefly in the afternoon, dropping a rain so light that it barely hit the ground. Still, it was enough to keep me perched on my patio cooking beans over charcoal and reading "Best American Sports Writing - 2009"
The beans were nearly finished by the time energy came on. All that had to be done was turning the beans into something delicious and cooking rice. We went back to Chappelle, watching some stand-up bit from nearly a decade ago. It's still funny. The sad thing is, we didn't even make it through the entire thing. And it was only an hour and change long. We were just too tired to make it all the way through.
finish cooking, eat, chappelle
In comparison to the rest of the week, Thursday was quiet and uneventful. I had little to do in the morning, as I was giving the same lesson from yesterday. My morning was spent on the computer, mostly because I could. The energy was on and off the entire morning, keeping my computer's battery at almost a complete charge. The electricians, for one reason or another, needed the energy on. I wasn't complaining. At some point, they came into our house to mount a kilowatt-hour counter. This energy thing, finally, seems to be a reality.
We returned to cooking omelets today because, well, they're fuckin delicious. Apparently, they are all also a safety hazard. As usual, we cooked our eggs in oil. When I went to flip the omelet -- always a tedious task -- the oil splashed up to my hand, leaving an archipelago of burns on my thumb. The omelets of course were delicious, so it was worthwhile.
I powered through class to return to more electricity. I barely made use of it, only using my computer to listen to music. I have a feeling that if twenty-four hour energy actually arrives, this is how it will be for us. Little will change in this house. Our eating habits may get better, as we will actually have the ability to freeze things in our neighbor's freezer. And yes, we will be able to use our stovetop for lunch and dinner. And there will never be reason to have a dead phone or computer battery. Aside from this, life will march on. If we haven't come to appreciate life without electricity, we have certainly adjusted to it.
The latter part of the afternoon was slow. I sat on the patio, committed to finishing of "Best American Sports Writing". In anthologies like these, I have found that you can usually expect some uninteresting or not so worthy writing, but everything in this book, no matter the sport (even boring ones like swimming and running), was fascinating, beautifully written. I finished the book just by 4:00. This left me enough time to run to the market to photocopy some exams.
Since we received a photocopier (and then a second one in town), many of the teachers in eleventh and twelfth grades have decided to take advantage of it, as they should. A piece of technology that sits there unused is as good as not having it at all. But it is killing students. You see, teachers have to pay to make photocopies to cover the price of the paper, the toner and the service. In a big city like Beira or Maputo, this would cost a single Metical; in Vilanculos, it costs two. In Machanga, it costs four at one store (the place run by the teacher) and five at the school itself. If every exam is one page, and every teacher gives three exams per trimester, at sixty students a class, this comes out to 900 Meticais per class every trimester. Multiply that by two or three or four classes, and things start to get expensive. Of course, no teacher wants to take this hit, so what do they do? They pass the expense down to the students, not looking to profit, just looking to cover the expense. This wouldn't be so bad if everybody who went to school here actually had family here.
But our school is a boarding school. Many of our students are here with little to nothing, as food and board is paid for at the beginning of the year. I am always left wondering how students can cover up to 100 Meticais in copies every trimester. So I've taken a stand. I'm not charging my students for their exams. And it's not because I make more money than other teachers. The truth is Richie and I make less than our university-educated counterparts. A lot less. I just don't think it's particularly fair to charge students to take exams. So I get creative. The students get half-sheets instead of whole sheets. It's a little more difficult to read, but its better than reading and copying off a blackboard, especially with my shitty handwriting. And I photocopy whole-sheet final exams in Vilanculos, keeping my expenses low. On the whole, I get hit maybe 600 Meticais every three months. And let's face it, if I can't afford 200 Mets a month, I'm not being responsible enough with my money.
Thursday night was a fish night for Richie, meaning I was on my own for dinner, meaning I was eating spaghetti again. It doesn't even matter what I eat anymore, as long as I get my calories and some protein now and then. We'll do protein tomorrow night. For our entertainment, we watched "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", a movie that was probably good when it came out, but now was only funny because of the hair-dos, clothing, and vocabulary.
Richie was going to head out of town Friday morning, but I knew -- we both knew, actually -- at 3:00 in the morning that he wouldn't be traveling. 3:00 was just about when the rain started fell. It wasn't a hard rain: just a pestering rain that would not be fun to sit beneath while in the back of a truck. He hoped that it would clear up by the end of the morning. We figured that he could make it to Vilanculos by a reasonable hour if he left before 11. But 11 o'clock came and went, grey skies still overhead, rain still threatening.
Teasingly, the sun came out around 11:30 and stayed out for the better part of the afternoon. All I could do was mock Richie and his bad luck.
I give my first exam of the second trimester today -- what should be an easy ten-question, multiple choice, fill in the blank exam. I have practiced this form of exam with my students for the last two weeks, so there is really no excuse for failure. There's no way this exam should take more than 45 minutes, and just as I expected, the last student finished 43 minutes into the period. Whatever bad luck cursed Richie avoided me. The teacher of my other class canceled his second period, allowing me to use his time. As expected, some of the students from the second class tried to get answers from the first class. I actually caught one trying to write the answers into her cell phone. I took her phone and by sheer generosity, I allowed her to take the exam. They won't be so lucky next exam. I'll have different exams for the second midterm and allow them to talk all they want. It's all fun and games for them until an entire class fails miserably. My students may think I'm old, but I'm not that far removed from school.
Finished by 2:00, I spent most of the afternoon reading Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers". The first half of the book was really interesting, reminding a little of "Freakonomics". It's incredible how something as simple of a birth-month or birth-year can affect, or at least contribute, to one's fortunes. It was a good enough read to keep me engaged until Richie wanted to make a late afternoon market run on the quest for chicken.
Most of the evening was committed to technology. Our math/chemistry teacher-friend wanted me to type up a couple of chemistry exams. I hate typing these exams -- so many subscripts and superscripts. By the time the next Volunteers get here, hopefully the teachers will be well enough trained that they will only come to Casa de Muzungu for little technical things like formatting. When I wasn't typing, I was in the director's office, trying to get our crappy printer to work. Oh, and the computer in that office has a virus that won't allow me to even get Windows to start. I'm not saying it's completely a lost cause, but getting it to Beira is going to suck. After eating our delicious roasted chicken, we watched some "Chappelle's Show", right up until the lights went out.
Saturday did not start well. The Sharks are all but eliminated after going down 3-0 to Chicago. Yes, teams have climbed out of 3-0 holes. It's happened three times in NHL history, with the last coming, well, last week. So is there hope? Yes. But the chances of it happening twice in one playoffs are miniscule. They'll be lucky just to make it back to San Jose for Game 5.
There was enough of a break in the weather today to allow Richie to escape to Vilanculos to get money and to do some shopping. About an hour after he left, the rain started come down here, and it kept raining for the better part of the morning. This was fine by me: I was happy to stay in bed to finish "Outliers".
I should have graded exams today, but I was really in no mood to do such a boring task. Instead, I spent most of my day listening to "High Violet", the new album from The National. Courtesy of my brother and some very fast internet in Inhassoro, I was able to get this music earlier in the week, and since uploading it to my iPod, I've been hooked. My official iTunes count has me at seven listens, but that doesn't count the six or seven (or more) times I've listened to it on my iPod. I have this problem. When I get something I like, I tend to not put it down. It happens with books. It happens with games. And it especially happens with music. I literally spent the entire afternoon listening to the album, trying to nail down the words.
Finally, the energy came on and I wanted beans. Sozinho was in the same boat, which is better for everyone - especially him, since he does the dishes. I didn't even have to use a plate. I could just throw the beans into the pot of rice and eat direct out of the pot. I know, I'm an animal. But seriously, I'm not going to be able to do that when I get home. It will be back to civilized living, plates and forks and whatnot.
With Richie gone, I was on my own for entertainment, and it pretty much looked like my afternoon. I returned to The National, but instead went to their old albums. It may be impossible to say which is best because they're all so damn good, but for now, High Violet takes the crown.
I may feel differently next week.
I don't know why I thought that would help. Cats are finicky, the attention whores of the animal world. And quite frankly, at 4 in the morning, drunk and exhausted, I simply don't have it in me to give anything attention. By 7:30, having fought off the damn cat for four hours and mostly rested up, I finally let the cat in the bed. Huge mistake. It took a while, but my cat allergy finally kicked in. Out rolled the tears and the snot. I was down and out for an hour, even after popping a Benadryl.
Four months into having a cushy school schedule, I finally realized the benefit of not having classes on Monday. Usually, I'll travel home with Richie, who has classes on Mondays, leaving me to sit around the house doing nothing. But Richie wasn't with me today and I really wasn't in the mood to travel. Before we even got to breakfast, I made the decision not to go home until tomorrow. This made me happy.
There was no need for a nap today, even though I was still tired. A day of sitting around was exactly what I needed. Three of us, sat around, talking music, talking sports, talking food, talking America. When lunch came around, we made spaghetti, after which one of the Volunteers from further south headed home.
Late in the afternoon, I went on a rare passear through town. Passear'ing is a Richie activity. I don't see a lot of reason to walk for an hour with no reason other than to kill an hour. My passear, however, had a purpose. We are scheduled to have a conference in Inhassoro in August, and I wanted to check out the place. The sign said that it was only 2.6 kilometers away, not so long. As I walked though, I realized this number was absolutely wrong. It was 2.6 kilometers to the end of the first road. I'm pretty sure they forgot to add the extra kilometers on the back roads. All said, it took me an hour to get from the Volunteer's house to the hotel.
It's a nice hotel, right on the ocean, with a pool looking out over the water. Everything is very green, well maintained. And the owners were very kind. The only downside is that it's far away from the town. Come conference time, this is probably a good thing. No need to cause trouble in a Volunteer's site.
I really wasn't looking forward to the walk. It was starting to get dark and I knew I'd be wiped by the time I returned. Less than a kilometer into the walk home, a car went screaming by, then suddenly stopped. "Need a lift?" yelled a thick, Afrikaner accent. Why yes, yes I do. Sitting in the car were a blonde-haired, blue-eyed husband, his blonde-haired, blue-eyed wife, and their two blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughters. They could have easily been from Holland or Sweden. With one child in her lap, the wife sat there smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. The husband also smoked and drank, but he didn't have a child in his lap. It was probably not the wisest of rides to take, but whatever. I wasn't going far and the town was sleepy.
Colin, the Volunteer with whom I stayed, and I cooked beans for dinner. He usually doesn't do feijoada (bean stew) so I was happy to show him my tricks. Colin is from California, went to UCLA, athletic, and a generally cool person. The conversation rolls easily with him. In an area dominated by girls (8-4), it's nice to have guy time. If I went to Vilanculos a lot last year, I could see myself going to Inhassoro a lot this year. The high-speed internet cafe across the street seals the deal for me. If only there were pizza and a good supermarket in Inhassoro, it would be a perfect place.
We didn't make it up much past dinner. We were both still exhausted from the night before and we both had busy-ish days ahead of us on Monday. He had to teach and I had to get back to Machanga.
Before heading out of town, I wanted to hit the internet cafe one more time. If the boss is in town, I can get on Wi-fi, which means that I can do some music downloading. My brother sent me the new album by The National, but since it's a torrent, I can only download it off my computer. Fortunately, the chefe arrived and I got downloading. The internet flew, America fast. It was a thing of beauty. What would have taken me four or five hours in Vilanculos took me a total of 10 minutes in Inhassoro. Looks like I'll be coming down this way a lot.
The other major upside to going to Inhassoro is the car situation. Vilanculos only has the one car that leaves at 10:30 in the morning. From Inhassoro, I can leave anytime between 7 and noon and still get back to Machanga with no problem. I headed out to the road around 9:15 and had a ride all the way to the crossroad by 9:45.
It was a great travel day. The most waiting I did was that half hour in Inhassoro. The ride to the crossroads was slow and steady, but I had exactly zero minutes of wait time at the crossroads, jumping from the back of one truck into the back of another. After shopping in Mambone (the price of tomatoes has dropped 20% recently...is the season), I waited no more than ten minutes before jumping in a boat across the river.
I was home by 2 o'clock, a still acceptable hour to eat lunch. I cut up some veggies, fried some potatoes, and cooked up another delicious Velveeta omelet. The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing. Colin gave me a book called "Best American Sports Writing - 2009". This is my new favorite book. Between the ride up and the slow afternoon, I tore throw a good third of the book. These aren't game recaps. These are feature pieces that go on forever, really beautiful writing all the way around. I was especially hit by a story about a refugee soccer team in Georgia. It brought back all sorts of memories from San Diego. The only person to see the tears well up in my eyes was the truck driver.
Richie had a long afternoon of teaching: four classes, one after the other, in the afternoon. Bummer. I spent the afternoon sitting on the patio, reading, looking at the sky. We've had plenty of days that felt like winter, but this was the first day that actually looked like winter. A blanket of greyness covered the sky, a
brisk breeze blew through. This is what we've wanted for months -- sweatshirts, blankets, hot showers.
We were low on food in our house, but we did have a ton of tomatoes, onion, and bell pepper. We felt obligated to cook tomato sauce. It's been a good while since we've made tomato sauce. Richie committed to spaghetti, but backed out before I even put the spaghetti into the pot. Fine by me -- I can eat pasta until I'm blue in the face. While out of town this past weekend, Richie picked up two seasons of "Chappelle's Show". We watched the first three episodes before calling it an early night.
I woke up Tuesday hungry, which is nothing new. I can usually hold out until lunch to eat. That's how it was in America and that's how it's been here. But today, there was no holding out. By 9:00, I was ready to eat. I cut up some vegetables, threw together a salad dressing of oil, curry seasoning and salt (surprisingly good - don't knock it til you try it) and was quickly sated.
The last couple of weeks in class have all been about vocabulary-building. All of last year and the first trimester of this year went into grammar and structure. Now, it's about plugging more vocabulary into these structures. I've spent plenty of time the last couple of weeks on prefixes, so it only makes sense that I put some time into suffixes. I feel like we have less suffixes than we have prefixes, which certainly makes life easier, and most of these suffixes line up quite nicely with Portuguese.
After lunch, I headed off to class to give my lesson. On my way over to class, I ran into the eleventh grade English teacher. As usual, I tried to make small talk, doing the courteous thing. He ended our conversation in a very weird way: "I will come there now". Okay...and what? Some details were definitely missing. I thought maybe he was heading off to class, I don't know. But then, a couple minutes later, he rolls into my class, notebook open, and sits down.
Okay, looks like my class is going to be critiqued. That's fine and good. I actually had a legitimate lesson plan today, one that would fill the entire forty-five minutes. Well, close enough. The class went forty-three minutes, which worked out well. He wanted to discuss my lesson. I was expecting some serious critiquing, but nothing really came, positive or negative. Telling me that "writing the topic on the board is good" is really not helpful to me.
Richie and I went on a late afternoon market run, not really needing anything but wanting chicken or beef. There was absolutely no protein in the market, at least no protein that we trusted. Yes, one of the places had fish, but hthis place regularly loses energy, causing the fish to spoil very quickly. We have little faith. We did have some canned chicken in the house, so we turned to that and made stir fry.
As I cooked dinner, I received a text message, probably from stateside. This is nothing new: dinner time is usually the time that messages start coming in from America. But the message I got was different than anything I expected. My great-grandmother, in her mid-nineties, passed away. I think I was more shocked by the medium of delivery than the news itself. When you're in your nineties, even the smallest thing can turn things downward. I just didn't think I would hear about it via text message.
My great-grandmother was amazing. She may have been tiny in stature and moved at a pace that a sloth would mock, but her mind was sharp as a knife. She knew everyone's names, what everyone was up to, knew generally where I was (amazing, considering that she had lived a full life before Mozambique as a nation existed) and what I was doing. I was fortunate to have been able to see her just before coming here.
That message sobered up an otherwise jovial day. I didn't really know how to react. The last death in my family was long enough ago that I don't remember what happened or how I felt. Add in the fact that I'm 10,000 miles away, completely removed from the situation, and it's just a little awkward. What I did know is that I needed a laugh, and maybe something delicious in my stomach. We watched "Chappelle's Show" and ate chocolate cake, but as I went to bed, my heart was still heavy.
Usually, I am a terrible sleeper when something is on my mind, but I slept surprising well Tuesday night. I woke up to the bad news that the Sharks had lost (again) on home ice in their Western Conference finals series. I figured between the death and the Sharks losing, my day could only get better from there.
And it did. One of my students came up to me early in the morning to tell me that they wouldn't have their first classes in the afternoon, allowing me to move my teaching time up a full four teaching periods. This made me happy. The only thing it forced me to do was plan my lesson in the morning instead of after lunch. Still, I managed to lesson plan and go to the market. We had almost know food in the house, and I don't know about you, but I generally like to eat around noon.
Class went about as I thought -- short and sweet. I came back to see two out of the ordinary things. The first was Alexis sitting on our porch. She hasn't been in Machanga for weeks. The muzungu population in Machanga jumped from three to four, just like that. The other, way more improbable thing was that electricians were at school. We sat in utter amazement as we watched a team of men in orange jumpsuits dig a whole next to our house for a light pole.
I'm still not holding my breath, but it looks like twenty-four hour energy might actually arrive. I don't blame you if you don't believe me either. I said it in June of last year, and this past November, but this looks real. It's not just talk -- it's work. The work was so stunning that the people building the house next to ours actually stopped working to watch other people work. That said, I still will not believe it until I can actually flip a switch on an off mid-day.
The look of winter stuck around all afternoon. The sky remained grey, the clouds a little angrier than they've been the last couple days. They gave way briefly in the afternoon, dropping a rain so light that it barely hit the ground. Still, it was enough to keep me perched on my patio cooking beans over charcoal and reading "Best American Sports Writing - 2009"
The beans were nearly finished by the time energy came on. All that had to be done was turning the beans into something delicious and cooking rice. We went back to Chappelle, watching some stand-up bit from nearly a decade ago. It's still funny. The sad thing is, we didn't even make it through the entire thing. And it was only an hour and change long. We were just too tired to make it all the way through.
finish cooking, eat, chappelle
In comparison to the rest of the week, Thursday was quiet and uneventful. I had little to do in the morning, as I was giving the same lesson from yesterday. My morning was spent on the computer, mostly because I could. The energy was on and off the entire morning, keeping my computer's battery at almost a complete charge. The electricians, for one reason or another, needed the energy on. I wasn't complaining. At some point, they came into our house to mount a kilowatt-hour counter. This energy thing, finally, seems to be a reality.
We returned to cooking omelets today because, well, they're fuckin delicious. Apparently, they are all also a safety hazard. As usual, we cooked our eggs in oil. When I went to flip the omelet -- always a tedious task -- the oil splashed up to my hand, leaving an archipelago of burns on my thumb. The omelets of course were delicious, so it was worthwhile.
I powered through class to return to more electricity. I barely made use of it, only using my computer to listen to music. I have a feeling that if twenty-four hour energy actually arrives, this is how it will be for us. Little will change in this house. Our eating habits may get better, as we will actually have the ability to freeze things in our neighbor's freezer. And yes, we will be able to use our stovetop for lunch and dinner. And there will never be reason to have a dead phone or computer battery. Aside from this, life will march on. If we haven't come to appreciate life without electricity, we have certainly adjusted to it.
The latter part of the afternoon was slow. I sat on the patio, committed to finishing of "Best American Sports Writing". In anthologies like these, I have found that you can usually expect some uninteresting or not so worthy writing, but everything in this book, no matter the sport (even boring ones like swimming and running), was fascinating, beautifully written. I finished the book just by 4:00. This left me enough time to run to the market to photocopy some exams.
Since we received a photocopier (and then a second one in town), many of the teachers in eleventh and twelfth grades have decided to take advantage of it, as they should. A piece of technology that sits there unused is as good as not having it at all. But it is killing students. You see, teachers have to pay to make photocopies to cover the price of the paper, the toner and the service. In a big city like Beira or Maputo, this would cost a single Metical; in Vilanculos, it costs two. In Machanga, it costs four at one store (the place run by the teacher) and five at the school itself. If every exam is one page, and every teacher gives three exams per trimester, at sixty students a class, this comes out to 900 Meticais per class every trimester. Multiply that by two or three or four classes, and things start to get expensive. Of course, no teacher wants to take this hit, so what do they do? They pass the expense down to the students, not looking to profit, just looking to cover the expense. This wouldn't be so bad if everybody who went to school here actually had family here.
But our school is a boarding school. Many of our students are here with little to nothing, as food and board is paid for at the beginning of the year. I am always left wondering how students can cover up to 100 Meticais in copies every trimester. So I've taken a stand. I'm not charging my students for their exams. And it's not because I make more money than other teachers. The truth is Richie and I make less than our university-educated counterparts. A lot less. I just don't think it's particularly fair to charge students to take exams. So I get creative. The students get half-sheets instead of whole sheets. It's a little more difficult to read, but its better than reading and copying off a blackboard, especially with my shitty handwriting. And I photocopy whole-sheet final exams in Vilanculos, keeping my expenses low. On the whole, I get hit maybe 600 Meticais every three months. And let's face it, if I can't afford 200 Mets a month, I'm not being responsible enough with my money.
Thursday night was a fish night for Richie, meaning I was on my own for dinner, meaning I was eating spaghetti again. It doesn't even matter what I eat anymore, as long as I get my calories and some protein now and then. We'll do protein tomorrow night. For our entertainment, we watched "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", a movie that was probably good when it came out, but now was only funny because of the hair-dos, clothing, and vocabulary.
Richie was going to head out of town Friday morning, but I knew -- we both knew, actually -- at 3:00 in the morning that he wouldn't be traveling. 3:00 was just about when the rain started fell. It wasn't a hard rain: just a pestering rain that would not be fun to sit beneath while in the back of a truck. He hoped that it would clear up by the end of the morning. We figured that he could make it to Vilanculos by a reasonable hour if he left before 11. But 11 o'clock came and went, grey skies still overhead, rain still threatening.
Teasingly, the sun came out around 11:30 and stayed out for the better part of the afternoon. All I could do was mock Richie and his bad luck.
I give my first exam of the second trimester today -- what should be an easy ten-question, multiple choice, fill in the blank exam. I have practiced this form of exam with my students for the last two weeks, so there is really no excuse for failure. There's no way this exam should take more than 45 minutes, and just as I expected, the last student finished 43 minutes into the period. Whatever bad luck cursed Richie avoided me. The teacher of my other class canceled his second period, allowing me to use his time. As expected, some of the students from the second class tried to get answers from the first class. I actually caught one trying to write the answers into her cell phone. I took her phone and by sheer generosity, I allowed her to take the exam. They won't be so lucky next exam. I'll have different exams for the second midterm and allow them to talk all they want. It's all fun and games for them until an entire class fails miserably. My students may think I'm old, but I'm not that far removed from school.
Finished by 2:00, I spent most of the afternoon reading Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers". The first half of the book was really interesting, reminding a little of "Freakonomics". It's incredible how something as simple of a birth-month or birth-year can affect, or at least contribute, to one's fortunes. It was a good enough read to keep me engaged until Richie wanted to make a late afternoon market run on the quest for chicken.
Most of the evening was committed to technology. Our math/chemistry teacher-friend wanted me to type up a couple of chemistry exams. I hate typing these exams -- so many subscripts and superscripts. By the time the next Volunteers get here, hopefully the teachers will be well enough trained that they will only come to Casa de Muzungu for little technical things like formatting. When I wasn't typing, I was in the director's office, trying to get our crappy printer to work. Oh, and the computer in that office has a virus that won't allow me to even get Windows to start. I'm not saying it's completely a lost cause, but getting it to Beira is going to suck. After eating our delicious roasted chicken, we watched some "Chappelle's Show", right up until the lights went out.
Saturday did not start well. The Sharks are all but eliminated after going down 3-0 to Chicago. Yes, teams have climbed out of 3-0 holes. It's happened three times in NHL history, with the last coming, well, last week. So is there hope? Yes. But the chances of it happening twice in one playoffs are miniscule. They'll be lucky just to make it back to San Jose for Game 5.
There was enough of a break in the weather today to allow Richie to escape to Vilanculos to get money and to do some shopping. About an hour after he left, the rain started come down here, and it kept raining for the better part of the morning. This was fine by me: I was happy to stay in bed to finish "Outliers".
I should have graded exams today, but I was really in no mood to do such a boring task. Instead, I spent most of my day listening to "High Violet", the new album from The National. Courtesy of my brother and some very fast internet in Inhassoro, I was able to get this music earlier in the week, and since uploading it to my iPod, I've been hooked. My official iTunes count has me at seven listens, but that doesn't count the six or seven (or more) times I've listened to it on my iPod. I have this problem. When I get something I like, I tend to not put it down. It happens with books. It happens with games. And it especially happens with music. I literally spent the entire afternoon listening to the album, trying to nail down the words.
Finally, the energy came on and I wanted beans. Sozinho was in the same boat, which is better for everyone - especially him, since he does the dishes. I didn't even have to use a plate. I could just throw the beans into the pot of rice and eat direct out of the pot. I know, I'm an animal. But seriously, I'm not going to be able to do that when I get home. It will be back to civilized living, plates and forks and whatnot.
With Richie gone, I was on my own for entertainment, and it pretty much looked like my afternoon. I returned to The National, but instead went to their old albums. It may be impossible to say which is best because they're all so damn good, but for now, High Violet takes the crown.
I may feel differently next week.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Year 2 - Week 22: Muzungu Exceptionalism
I knew I wouldn't be sleeping well. In the wee hours of Sunday morning, I rolled around in bed running through all the scenarios, hoping for the best but certainly expecting the worst. It's what we've become accustomed to. But then, after squeezing out a few hours of tormented sleep, my anxiety was relieved with a single text message: "WOOHOO!" Everything I needed to know was written in those six letters: The San Jose Sharks, perennial May no-shows, knocked out the two time defending Western Conference champion Detroit Red Wings. I could now get some good hours of sleep before finding out some of the details.
On Sundays in Machanga, we might as well be in the middle of a corn field in Nebraska. The town comes to a complete standstill, the school sits quietly, other than the morning clamoring of church. The girls sit around, braiding and twisting their hair into intricate patterns. They guys sit around and do nothing. It is a lazy man's paradise. And all I could do was fit in.
I spent most of the morning horizontal in bed. Having not slept particularly well, I was happy to get some rest. I didn't sleep, but I was happy not to be moving. At some point, I rolled out of bed to read up on the Sharks victory. While my computer was up and running, the physics teacher who just received a computer came over with a question. He had written out a three-page questionnaire by himself, impressive considering he hadn't owned a computer last week. It's even more impressive because he didn't just ask me to do it -- he did as much as he could before running into the problem of having to put accents on some of the vowels. I gave him a quick lesson and he was good to go.
The afternoon looked a lot like the morning. I sat around with Richie, reading a Sports Illustrated from months ago. I usually enjoy SI, but I have two problems with this particular issue. One: I've read it cover to cover four times, so it's kind of boring. My second issue is much bigger. It has a picture from the College Football Championship game, with "Dynasty" splashed over the cover the Alabama players. No question mark. No exclamation point. Just "Dynasty". In caps. Maybe something has changed in the year and a half that I've been gone, but I thought you had to win multiple championships over a short period of time to be a dynasty. Alabama is at one. Come on, Sports Illustrated. You should know better.
Considering that the rest of my day was lazy, I saw no reason to change course during the evening. Sure I could have cooked up some gourmet dinner, but why should I do that when I have a box of Trader Joe's macaroni and cheese staring me in face. This was an easy call. Richie was having more problems than usual with his attention span. He didn't want to watch one two-hour movie, so instead we watched eight episodes of "30 Rock". They go by much faster without commercials.
It should go without say that I slept much better on Sunday night. I had nothing to worry about. The Sharks weren't playing. I didn't have to teach class. I literally did not have a concern in the world (well, at least my world). Given our severe dearth of food in the house, I went out for a market run. Things went to plan, in fact better than usual. One of the shops had frozen chickens and orange juice. The chickens, we've come to expect, but the orange juice was a huge victory. As I made my way home from the market, I was stopped by someone. They said my bike was being held in the market. I had no idea why. I didn't take my bike this morning, so I was totally in the dark.
Turns out that all bikes need to be registered, at the cost of 170 Meticais per bike. Really? A year and a half into my stay here, and we are being told now that we have to pay for this. I was a little shocked. I wasn't particularly pissed off by the fact that I'd have to pay the 170 Mets -- a cool 6 dollars. It's just that I know this money is not going to be used for developing the area; it would just wind up in someone's pocket. I tried to get out of paying, but he was having none of it. I told him I didn't have the money, and I'd return in 20 minutes to resolve it.
Before I returned to the market, I asked one of the teachers what the situation was with the bike registration. If I was shocked, he was incredulous. "You don't have to pay! You're Peace Corps!" I tried to weasel my way out of paying, but he was going to make sure it happened. So we went over there and calmly, and then a little loudly, explained the situation. We explained that I was on a tight salary (true), that we hadn't been told about the bike registration (true), and that the bike was given to us by Peace Corps (not true, but they reimbursed us for our purchase). The guy called his boss, and he let us off the hook. He had one more question for us, a last-ditch effort to get the cash, probably to line his pocket. "What if the bike is stolen? We'll have no way to know it's gone." I could have gone the abrasive route and said "Well, given your history of catching thieves in the past, it wouldn't matter if our bike were registered". Instead, I went for funny: "If our bike is stolen, we'll go to the witch-doctor, and it will be back the next day". Keep in mind that Machanga is one of the curandeiro capitals of this country. The truth is that if our bike were stolen, we would go to the witch-doctor, and it probably would be returned. Everyone got a good laugh out of it, and we were off the hook for paying.
Buoyed by this victory, I rode the momentum for the entire afternoon. Following lunch, I wanted to be productive. I don't think I could handle another day of sitting around mindlessly. While Richie was in the classroom, I washed the dishes alone for the first time in a while. Richie had wanted to build a drying table for our dishes. This was definitely my sort of thing. I like building, I'm good with that kind of stuff. So I got to work. For an hour, a threw around a hoe, making space for the legs of the table. I cut the tree branches to reasonable size, then laid a piece of aluminum siding over the legs. Just like that, instant drying table.
I rewarded myself by watching a soccer game here. It was Machanga vs. Mambone. Mambone played a really good first half. Machanga came back in the second half and by my count had seven quality chances to score. Finally, with ten minutes to play, Machanga cashed in. They held on for dear life for the last ten minutes, anchored by the goalie who made two excellent saves from close range. It was probably the best soccer game I've seen here.
I had a little bit of time between the end of the game and the arrival of electricity. I prepared our chicken and left it to Richie to cook. Once the energy came on, I had to go over to the director's office to do some computer work. I went over with one request for help, but one quickly turned into four. It always seems to work out that way, and it's fine by me. I'd rather go once and do four things than do one thing for times. By the time I got back, the chicken was finished and the rice was just about done. Our evening's entertainment was "Still Waiting", the sequel to "Waiting". I got a good laugh out of the original, but seeing as I hadn't even heard of the sequel, I didn't have high hopes. I figured it was a straight-to-DVD kind of thing. And I was right. It was a pretty terrible movie.
Right before going to sleep Monday night, our math teacher colleague came over needing some help with an exam. He wanted a single page typed up, which is no problem at all. I know that these tests -- with fractions and superscripts and whatnot -- are a lot more difficult to format than say, a history exam. Either way, one of my priorities for this trimester is to teach a bunch of classes on how to format math and science exams.
My Tuesday began by typing up this test. What would have taken me an hour last year took me about fifteen minutes to do today. Just as it takes some time to get accustomed to speaking a language, I guess it also takes some time to learn to type it. Even though it is still just fingers hitting letters, I think there's a mental aspect to it. In English, you don't expect to follow an "a" with an "o". These days, though, that's completely normal.
Typing up that exam got my day rolling quickly. I had some lesson planning to do for my own classes and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. The students seemed to kind of enjoy the lesson on prefixes from last week, so I figured I'd continue there. We have tons of prefixes in English, so it was a matter of choosing some that have good parallels to Portuguese. I ended up using "co-", "inter-", "de-" and "re-", each of which is exactly the same in Portuguese (except for de-, which is des- in Portugues).
The class itself went okay. It's a boring lesson because I am just spitting information at them and they are writing it down. But the good students -- the ones like to pass the National Exam in November -- got it figured out. As others were copying, they would shyly ask me to come over and look at a word to see if it worked in English, and most of the time, they did. I think that's all I really want out of my students: to have their minds working just a little bit harder than they would have been otherwise.
If the afternoon was slow, the evening was anything but. I got roped into doing some computer work. The physics teacher who wrote up the exam by himself needed his documents printed. It always starts like this: one person makes a request, and three others roll in. It's all good. I know that all this computer stuff is really difficult for them. I guess that's what were here for.
There is some very good news coming out of Machanga which really made our night. I don't know if you're prepared for this. This is such a tiny thing, it's almost pathetic that it qualifies as news. After months of not being sold here, Mambone bread is back in Machanga! Having good bread back in town meant we could reward ourselves with pizzas. And man, they were delicious.
Tonight, we watched "Zombieland". I don't know when or why zombies and other forms of the undead became big again. I guess things happen when you're in Peace Corps. Anyways, these movies are never really my cup of tea, but "Zombieland" was unexpectedly funny. Props to whoever figured that one out.
I was back to not sleeping on Tuesday night. Having taken my Larium the day before, I knew I was in for something. Usually I get the crazy dreams, but tonight, I got the paranoia/racing mind. It has only happened two or three times over my entire stay, but when it happens, it's not fun. I was up passed midnight with my mind running in circles. Pleasant, huh?
Wednesday was Richie's birthday, and following his first class, he was faced with a philosophical/ethical question: should he cancel class for the rest of the day? The answer was clear to me. Of course he should cancel class. Nobody should have to work on a birthday. He wavered at first, but when he realized that a car was leaving for Mangunde -- his destination for the weekend -- his answer was crystal clear. He threw his notes aside, packed a bag, and was gone by 9:30, leaving me all alone for the rest of the week.
I was in for a boring day all alone. I didn't have class until way late in the afternoon. I still had to lesson plan, but that usually doesn't take more than 15 or 20 minutes. This day might kill me.
My students, however, spared me today. One of them came over right at the beginning of first period, telling me that they had no one in the classroom and they wanted to get our lesson overwith. Nice. I had to write some stuff on big paper, so I wouldn't have to write it twice on back to back days, so I arrived in the classroom starting second period. This is much better than having to wait until 4:00. Even though I'm doing the same amount of nothing, the monotony will be broken up a bit.
For my class today, I had my students do some busy work. It was productive busy work, maybe a little mind-numbing for them, but they need the practice. The National Exam has a section of multiple choice fill-in-the-blank. I gave one of these sections to my students for their first trimester final and all of them failed miserably. I'm committing this trimester to having them do well on this section. So the class for me was boring -- a lot of watching my students copy stuff down -- but when a lot of them were getting 7 or 8 or 9 out of 10 correct, I was pretty happy.
The rest of my afternoon was committed to mastering four-suited Spider Solitaire. I've played this game plenty before and two-suited is way to boring. When I played years ago, I was winning around 20% of the games. I'd like to get back to that level, but right now, I'm only at 18%. I need one good winning streak...
With Richie gone, I was left to cook for myself. Beans were on the menu for the night, and as long as I was cooking for one, I wanted to cook plenty of food so I wouldn't have to cook again tomorrow for lunch. I cooked the regular amount of beans I normally cook, but stashed half for tomorrow. And since Richie wasn't here, I held off on entertainment. I continued to get my ass handed to me at Spider Solitaire until the lights went out.
Thursday did not start well. Larium hit me again, this time with a nightmare. At some point in the dream, someone crushed my face with stone. Nice, eh? And shortly after waking up, I received a flurry of text messages from my brother. Apparently, the nine-hour time difference is still fucking with him. He claims that it's a 24-hour world. That may be so, but Machanga isn't part of that world. We work sunrise to sunset, and anything after sunset is fortunate.
The morning was even slower than Wednesday was. It didn't help that I was tired for a poor night's sleep. It was slow enough that I had to run to the market, even though I needed almost nothing, just to keep my sanity. That knocked off a good portion of the morning. I didn't have to lesson plan since I was giving the same lesson to a different class. Soon enough, though, it was time for lunch. With so much beans left over,I was happy that I didn't have to cook another meal. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Class went about as I thought, maybe a little better. The science class is always smarter and harder-working, so I got out of class a little faster than I anticipated. I'd like to say I was productive the rest of the afternoon, but I wasn't. I was exhausted, but I couldn't bring myself to sleep. I know that if I nap, I'm done for the night. So I just lay there in bed, reading, until the energy came on.
I was particularly lazy about dinner tonight. I didn't want to cook anything special, so it was a night of spaghetti for me. Again, I was left without entertainment and frustrated by Spider Solitaire. I've come to realize that I'm very finicky about my games. If things are too easy, then I hate them because they're boring. And if things are too difficult, then I hate them because I can't complete them. But what I like about Spider Solitaire and Kakuro is that they are Goldilocks games for me. They strain me a lot, but I know I can win at least some of them. And whenever I win them, it feels like I accomplished something. If you hadn't figured it out already, my life is pathetic.
I've been much better about my sleeping habits recently. Following bad sleeping nights, I'm usually good for a mid-afternoon nap, which just makes it more difficult to sleep at night. Today, I resisted the nap and the resulting sleep was beautiful. I slept straight through from 10 at night until 8 in the morning. The cool weather helped a lot too.
Our math teacher colleague came over as soon as I was awake with a couple of math of exams he wanted typed. I really didn't want to waste my battery on typing exams that would take 45 minutes, so I instead went online. Then I got lucky. The energy was flipped on in the school, but not in the houses. I ran over to the school and dropped off my computer to be charged. It charged half way through before the lights went out, but it would be enough to type up the exams later.
Having the first class in the afternoon meant I had to lesson plan in the morning. I chose to continue my lessons on health with the topic of drugs and alcohol. This isn't like teaching drugs and alcohol in high school in America. Drugs aren't a huge problem here and most of my students are old enough to drink legally. It was more about giving them English vocabulary.
I had lunch right before class, just the usual eggs and potatoes. So why comment on it? It took me 18 months, but I finally learned that a single slice of Velveeta turns on omelet from above average to epic. It had to be a good afternoon after that. The classes went very well. For the first time in a while, I managed to fill the entire four hours of class. I was very happy with this, especially since the students seem to making some improvement. I gave them another National Exam practice and almost everyone did better on Friday's round.
The work continued after class. I banged out the exams the math teacher wanted. It was fourteen total questions and four of the questions on one test went right over to the other. It was a piece of cake. And then when the energy came on, the work increased. One of our pedagogical directors wanted to swap out laptops. He's had trouble with his since the first day -- a mouse issue, of all things -- and I finally got him a new one. Thankfully, he didn't have that many documents to transfer. And just when I thought he was all set up, there was another problem -- his charger wasn't working. I had forgotten about this charger. It was the reason I had my parents bring a new one. After getting his computer all set up, we realized it didn't have a sound card. Well, fuck. I gave up for the night. We'll deal with the sound card issue later.
lesson planning -- drugs and booze.
Sozinho wanted to have beans tonight, which was fine by me. He had been cooking the beans for most of the afternoon and I think he was expecting to cook the beans how he wanted to. I know better, though. His beans are fuckin awful. As soon as the beans were cooked through, I took over the operation. It was an excellent decision. My beans were delicious. His, almost certainly, would have been awful.
It has been a long time since I've gone into town for drinks. All of our drinking this year has been at the school or out of town. Ussene, or top drinking buddy, was feeling it too. He hasn't gone into town for a while either. We had to put an end to this. We were both on the tired side, so we stayed out for two drinks and returned. I had a travel day to worry about and I was going to be doing plenty of drinking over the weekend.
I slept well all the way until 4:00. I woke up feeling alive, feeling ready to move, but the boats wouldn't be leaving for at least another hour. Therefore, I had to sleep for at least another hour. You don't need to tell me twice to sleep.
I was on the road by 6:15, committed to getting to Inhassoro before 11. Once I crossed the river, my stomach started hurting. A lot. This could be a long ride. A Volunteer from Zambia once told me that maybe half of the Volunteers there crap their pants at some point. I did not want to become a part of this fraternity. When we got to Maluvane, I shuffled my way from the car to the nearest whole in the ground.
Relieved in every sense of the word, the rest of the ride was a piece of cake. On the last leg of the ride, we almost got rear-ended, but the car blowing by us had the good sense to go by us instead of through us.
Aside from the gorgeous ocean and wide beach, one of the beautiful parts of Inhassoro is is has an awesome internet cafe. It is by far the best internet in the area. Yes, the internet in Vilanculos is nice, but that is due to its convenience. The internet in Inhassoro is lightning fast. America fast. Of course, I had to take advantage of it. I sat in that cafe -- air conditioned, by the way -- for two hours. It was more expensive than other internet cafes, but every Metical was worth it.
Around noon, I walked over to the Volunteers' house, nicely located right across the street. I wasn't particularly hungry. The beans from last night and the bread from the morning kept me pretty full. We made a move to go to the beach. As we walked down, five other Volunteers rolled into town. We turned around so they could drop their stuff off and from there, headed to the ocean.
It was a beautiful beach day. It wasn't scalding hot and there was enough cloud cover to keep us from burning. The ocean, however, was too cold for a swim. Still, we all had a good time. And when the tied rolled in, we walked upstairs to the nearest bar.
The drinking began then, continuing all the way through the night. We went out for dinner to a restaurant near by to celebrate a Volunteer's birthday. One of the other Volunteers made a cake, and I provided the frosting for it. We didn't even bother with forks. The cake was slapped onto plates and eaten by hand. It was delicious. From there, we continued drinking at another bar. By the time we got out there, I was wiped. Between waking up at 4, traveling, and only eating one meal, I was done.
Still, we managed to stay out till 3 in the morning.
On Sundays in Machanga, we might as well be in the middle of a corn field in Nebraska. The town comes to a complete standstill, the school sits quietly, other than the morning clamoring of church. The girls sit around, braiding and twisting their hair into intricate patterns. They guys sit around and do nothing. It is a lazy man's paradise. And all I could do was fit in.
I spent most of the morning horizontal in bed. Having not slept particularly well, I was happy to get some rest. I didn't sleep, but I was happy not to be moving. At some point, I rolled out of bed to read up on the Sharks victory. While my computer was up and running, the physics teacher who just received a computer came over with a question. He had written out a three-page questionnaire by himself, impressive considering he hadn't owned a computer last week. It's even more impressive because he didn't just ask me to do it -- he did as much as he could before running into the problem of having to put accents on some of the vowels. I gave him a quick lesson and he was good to go.
The afternoon looked a lot like the morning. I sat around with Richie, reading a Sports Illustrated from months ago. I usually enjoy SI, but I have two problems with this particular issue. One: I've read it cover to cover four times, so it's kind of boring. My second issue is much bigger. It has a picture from the College Football Championship game, with "Dynasty" splashed over the cover the Alabama players. No question mark. No exclamation point. Just "Dynasty". In caps. Maybe something has changed in the year and a half that I've been gone, but I thought you had to win multiple championships over a short period of time to be a dynasty. Alabama is at one. Come on, Sports Illustrated. You should know better.
Considering that the rest of my day was lazy, I saw no reason to change course during the evening. Sure I could have cooked up some gourmet dinner, but why should I do that when I have a box of Trader Joe's macaroni and cheese staring me in face. This was an easy call. Richie was having more problems than usual with his attention span. He didn't want to watch one two-hour movie, so instead we watched eight episodes of "30 Rock". They go by much faster without commercials.
It should go without say that I slept much better on Sunday night. I had nothing to worry about. The Sharks weren't playing. I didn't have to teach class. I literally did not have a concern in the world (well, at least my world). Given our severe dearth of food in the house, I went out for a market run. Things went to plan, in fact better than usual. One of the shops had frozen chickens and orange juice. The chickens, we've come to expect, but the orange juice was a huge victory. As I made my way home from the market, I was stopped by someone. They said my bike was being held in the market. I had no idea why. I didn't take my bike this morning, so I was totally in the dark.
Turns out that all bikes need to be registered, at the cost of 170 Meticais per bike. Really? A year and a half into my stay here, and we are being told now that we have to pay for this. I was a little shocked. I wasn't particularly pissed off by the fact that I'd have to pay the 170 Mets -- a cool 6 dollars. It's just that I know this money is not going to be used for developing the area; it would just wind up in someone's pocket. I tried to get out of paying, but he was having none of it. I told him I didn't have the money, and I'd return in 20 minutes to resolve it.
Before I returned to the market, I asked one of the teachers what the situation was with the bike registration. If I was shocked, he was incredulous. "You don't have to pay! You're Peace Corps!" I tried to weasel my way out of paying, but he was going to make sure it happened. So we went over there and calmly, and then a little loudly, explained the situation. We explained that I was on a tight salary (true), that we hadn't been told about the bike registration (true), and that the bike was given to us by Peace Corps (not true, but they reimbursed us for our purchase). The guy called his boss, and he let us off the hook. He had one more question for us, a last-ditch effort to get the cash, probably to line his pocket. "What if the bike is stolen? We'll have no way to know it's gone." I could have gone the abrasive route and said "Well, given your history of catching thieves in the past, it wouldn't matter if our bike were registered". Instead, I went for funny: "If our bike is stolen, we'll go to the witch-doctor, and it will be back the next day". Keep in mind that Machanga is one of the curandeiro capitals of this country. The truth is that if our bike were stolen, we would go to the witch-doctor, and it probably would be returned. Everyone got a good laugh out of it, and we were off the hook for paying.
Buoyed by this victory, I rode the momentum for the entire afternoon. Following lunch, I wanted to be productive. I don't think I could handle another day of sitting around mindlessly. While Richie was in the classroom, I washed the dishes alone for the first time in a while. Richie had wanted to build a drying table for our dishes. This was definitely my sort of thing. I like building, I'm good with that kind of stuff. So I got to work. For an hour, a threw around a hoe, making space for the legs of the table. I cut the tree branches to reasonable size, then laid a piece of aluminum siding over the legs. Just like that, instant drying table.
I rewarded myself by watching a soccer game here. It was Machanga vs. Mambone. Mambone played a really good first half. Machanga came back in the second half and by my count had seven quality chances to score. Finally, with ten minutes to play, Machanga cashed in. They held on for dear life for the last ten minutes, anchored by the goalie who made two excellent saves from close range. It was probably the best soccer game I've seen here.
I had a little bit of time between the end of the game and the arrival of electricity. I prepared our chicken and left it to Richie to cook. Once the energy came on, I had to go over to the director's office to do some computer work. I went over with one request for help, but one quickly turned into four. It always seems to work out that way, and it's fine by me. I'd rather go once and do four things than do one thing for times. By the time I got back, the chicken was finished and the rice was just about done. Our evening's entertainment was "Still Waiting", the sequel to "Waiting". I got a good laugh out of the original, but seeing as I hadn't even heard of the sequel, I didn't have high hopes. I figured it was a straight-to-DVD kind of thing. And I was right. It was a pretty terrible movie.
Right before going to sleep Monday night, our math teacher colleague came over needing some help with an exam. He wanted a single page typed up, which is no problem at all. I know that these tests -- with fractions and superscripts and whatnot -- are a lot more difficult to format than say, a history exam. Either way, one of my priorities for this trimester is to teach a bunch of classes on how to format math and science exams.
My Tuesday began by typing up this test. What would have taken me an hour last year took me about fifteen minutes to do today. Just as it takes some time to get accustomed to speaking a language, I guess it also takes some time to learn to type it. Even though it is still just fingers hitting letters, I think there's a mental aspect to it. In English, you don't expect to follow an "a" with an "o". These days, though, that's completely normal.
Typing up that exam got my day rolling quickly. I had some lesson planning to do for my own classes and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. The students seemed to kind of enjoy the lesson on prefixes from last week, so I figured I'd continue there. We have tons of prefixes in English, so it was a matter of choosing some that have good parallels to Portuguese. I ended up using "co-", "inter-", "de-" and "re-", each of which is exactly the same in Portuguese (except for de-, which is des- in Portugues).
The class itself went okay. It's a boring lesson because I am just spitting information at them and they are writing it down. But the good students -- the ones like to pass the National Exam in November -- got it figured out. As others were copying, they would shyly ask me to come over and look at a word to see if it worked in English, and most of the time, they did. I think that's all I really want out of my students: to have their minds working just a little bit harder than they would have been otherwise.
If the afternoon was slow, the evening was anything but. I got roped into doing some computer work. The physics teacher who wrote up the exam by himself needed his documents printed. It always starts like this: one person makes a request, and three others roll in. It's all good. I know that all this computer stuff is really difficult for them. I guess that's what were here for.
There is some very good news coming out of Machanga which really made our night. I don't know if you're prepared for this. This is such a tiny thing, it's almost pathetic that it qualifies as news. After months of not being sold here, Mambone bread is back in Machanga! Having good bread back in town meant we could reward ourselves with pizzas. And man, they were delicious.
Tonight, we watched "Zombieland". I don't know when or why zombies and other forms of the undead became big again. I guess things happen when you're in Peace Corps. Anyways, these movies are never really my cup of tea, but "Zombieland" was unexpectedly funny. Props to whoever figured that one out.
I was back to not sleeping on Tuesday night. Having taken my Larium the day before, I knew I was in for something. Usually I get the crazy dreams, but tonight, I got the paranoia/racing mind. It has only happened two or three times over my entire stay, but when it happens, it's not fun. I was up passed midnight with my mind running in circles. Pleasant, huh?
Wednesday was Richie's birthday, and following his first class, he was faced with a philosophical/ethical question: should he cancel class for the rest of the day? The answer was clear to me. Of course he should cancel class. Nobody should have to work on a birthday. He wavered at first, but when he realized that a car was leaving for Mangunde -- his destination for the weekend -- his answer was crystal clear. He threw his notes aside, packed a bag, and was gone by 9:30, leaving me all alone for the rest of the week.
I was in for a boring day all alone. I didn't have class until way late in the afternoon. I still had to lesson plan, but that usually doesn't take more than 15 or 20 minutes. This day might kill me.
My students, however, spared me today. One of them came over right at the beginning of first period, telling me that they had no one in the classroom and they wanted to get our lesson overwith. Nice. I had to write some stuff on big paper, so I wouldn't have to write it twice on back to back days, so I arrived in the classroom starting second period. This is much better than having to wait until 4:00. Even though I'm doing the same amount of nothing, the monotony will be broken up a bit.
For my class today, I had my students do some busy work. It was productive busy work, maybe a little mind-numbing for them, but they need the practice. The National Exam has a section of multiple choice fill-in-the-blank. I gave one of these sections to my students for their first trimester final and all of them failed miserably. I'm committing this trimester to having them do well on this section. So the class for me was boring -- a lot of watching my students copy stuff down -- but when a lot of them were getting 7 or 8 or 9 out of 10 correct, I was pretty happy.
The rest of my afternoon was committed to mastering four-suited Spider Solitaire. I've played this game plenty before and two-suited is way to boring. When I played years ago, I was winning around 20% of the games. I'd like to get back to that level, but right now, I'm only at 18%. I need one good winning streak...
With Richie gone, I was left to cook for myself. Beans were on the menu for the night, and as long as I was cooking for one, I wanted to cook plenty of food so I wouldn't have to cook again tomorrow for lunch. I cooked the regular amount of beans I normally cook, but stashed half for tomorrow. And since Richie wasn't here, I held off on entertainment. I continued to get my ass handed to me at Spider Solitaire until the lights went out.
Thursday did not start well. Larium hit me again, this time with a nightmare. At some point in the dream, someone crushed my face with stone. Nice, eh? And shortly after waking up, I received a flurry of text messages from my brother. Apparently, the nine-hour time difference is still fucking with him. He claims that it's a 24-hour world. That may be so, but Machanga isn't part of that world. We work sunrise to sunset, and anything after sunset is fortunate.
The morning was even slower than Wednesday was. It didn't help that I was tired for a poor night's sleep. It was slow enough that I had to run to the market, even though I needed almost nothing, just to keep my sanity. That knocked off a good portion of the morning. I didn't have to lesson plan since I was giving the same lesson to a different class. Soon enough, though, it was time for lunch. With so much beans left over,I was happy that I didn't have to cook another meal. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Class went about as I thought, maybe a little better. The science class is always smarter and harder-working, so I got out of class a little faster than I anticipated. I'd like to say I was productive the rest of the afternoon, but I wasn't. I was exhausted, but I couldn't bring myself to sleep. I know that if I nap, I'm done for the night. So I just lay there in bed, reading, until the energy came on.
I was particularly lazy about dinner tonight. I didn't want to cook anything special, so it was a night of spaghetti for me. Again, I was left without entertainment and frustrated by Spider Solitaire. I've come to realize that I'm very finicky about my games. If things are too easy, then I hate them because they're boring. And if things are too difficult, then I hate them because I can't complete them. But what I like about Spider Solitaire and Kakuro is that they are Goldilocks games for me. They strain me a lot, but I know I can win at least some of them. And whenever I win them, it feels like I accomplished something. If you hadn't figured it out already, my life is pathetic.
I've been much better about my sleeping habits recently. Following bad sleeping nights, I'm usually good for a mid-afternoon nap, which just makes it more difficult to sleep at night. Today, I resisted the nap and the resulting sleep was beautiful. I slept straight through from 10 at night until 8 in the morning. The cool weather helped a lot too.
Our math teacher colleague came over as soon as I was awake with a couple of math of exams he wanted typed. I really didn't want to waste my battery on typing exams that would take 45 minutes, so I instead went online. Then I got lucky. The energy was flipped on in the school, but not in the houses. I ran over to the school and dropped off my computer to be charged. It charged half way through before the lights went out, but it would be enough to type up the exams later.
Having the first class in the afternoon meant I had to lesson plan in the morning. I chose to continue my lessons on health with the topic of drugs and alcohol. This isn't like teaching drugs and alcohol in high school in America. Drugs aren't a huge problem here and most of my students are old enough to drink legally. It was more about giving them English vocabulary.
I had lunch right before class, just the usual eggs and potatoes. So why comment on it? It took me 18 months, but I finally learned that a single slice of Velveeta turns on omelet from above average to epic. It had to be a good afternoon after that. The classes went very well. For the first time in a while, I managed to fill the entire four hours of class. I was very happy with this, especially since the students seem to making some improvement. I gave them another National Exam practice and almost everyone did better on Friday's round.
The work continued after class. I banged out the exams the math teacher wanted. It was fourteen total questions and four of the questions on one test went right over to the other. It was a piece of cake. And then when the energy came on, the work increased. One of our pedagogical directors wanted to swap out laptops. He's had trouble with his since the first day -- a mouse issue, of all things -- and I finally got him a new one. Thankfully, he didn't have that many documents to transfer. And just when I thought he was all set up, there was another problem -- his charger wasn't working. I had forgotten about this charger. It was the reason I had my parents bring a new one. After getting his computer all set up, we realized it didn't have a sound card. Well, fuck. I gave up for the night. We'll deal with the sound card issue later.
lesson planning -- drugs and booze.
Sozinho wanted to have beans tonight, which was fine by me. He had been cooking the beans for most of the afternoon and I think he was expecting to cook the beans how he wanted to. I know better, though. His beans are fuckin awful. As soon as the beans were cooked through, I took over the operation. It was an excellent decision. My beans were delicious. His, almost certainly, would have been awful.
It has been a long time since I've gone into town for drinks. All of our drinking this year has been at the school or out of town. Ussene, or top drinking buddy, was feeling it too. He hasn't gone into town for a while either. We had to put an end to this. We were both on the tired side, so we stayed out for two drinks and returned. I had a travel day to worry about and I was going to be doing plenty of drinking over the weekend.
I slept well all the way until 4:00. I woke up feeling alive, feeling ready to move, but the boats wouldn't be leaving for at least another hour. Therefore, I had to sleep for at least another hour. You don't need to tell me twice to sleep.
I was on the road by 6:15, committed to getting to Inhassoro before 11. Once I crossed the river, my stomach started hurting. A lot. This could be a long ride. A Volunteer from Zambia once told me that maybe half of the Volunteers there crap their pants at some point. I did not want to become a part of this fraternity. When we got to Maluvane, I shuffled my way from the car to the nearest whole in the ground.
Relieved in every sense of the word, the rest of the ride was a piece of cake. On the last leg of the ride, we almost got rear-ended, but the car blowing by us had the good sense to go by us instead of through us.
Aside from the gorgeous ocean and wide beach, one of the beautiful parts of Inhassoro is is has an awesome internet cafe. It is by far the best internet in the area. Yes, the internet in Vilanculos is nice, but that is due to its convenience. The internet in Inhassoro is lightning fast. America fast. Of course, I had to take advantage of it. I sat in that cafe -- air conditioned, by the way -- for two hours. It was more expensive than other internet cafes, but every Metical was worth it.
Around noon, I walked over to the Volunteers' house, nicely located right across the street. I wasn't particularly hungry. The beans from last night and the bread from the morning kept me pretty full. We made a move to go to the beach. As we walked down, five other Volunteers rolled into town. We turned around so they could drop their stuff off and from there, headed to the ocean.
It was a beautiful beach day. It wasn't scalding hot and there was enough cloud cover to keep us from burning. The ocean, however, was too cold for a swim. Still, we all had a good time. And when the tied rolled in, we walked upstairs to the nearest bar.
The drinking began then, continuing all the way through the night. We went out for dinner to a restaurant near by to celebrate a Volunteer's birthday. One of the other Volunteers made a cake, and I provided the frosting for it. We didn't even bother with forks. The cake was slapped onto plates and eaten by hand. It was delicious. From there, we continued drinking at another bar. By the time we got out there, I was wiped. Between waking up at 4, traveling, and only eating one meal, I was done.
Still, we managed to stay out till 3 in the morning.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Year 2 - Week 21: Rearranged
With holidays, our unofficial off-week, and Beer Olympics behind us, it's back to the reality of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. And what better way to do that with a painful travel day. Around mid-morning, I paid off my tab, which was lengthy, and made my way out of the backpackers for the market. As soon as I arrived at the chapa stop, I knew I was in for a long day. There are two chapas that run between Mambone and Vilanculos -- one with Korean characters on the side, one without. The one with Korean characters on the sides runs fast, not stopping for a lot of people. The other chapa stps way too often. Guess which chapa I was on.
True to form, the chapa took forever. It took us nearly an hour to cover the first fifteen kilometers and by the time we got to the first crossroads, I wanted to slay everyone on the chapa, starting with the driver. Being on a chapa really brings out the worst in me. It's the only time I want to go on a homocidal spree in this country. Instead I went the peaceful route (it is called the Peace Corps, right?) by plugging in my iPod and ignorning the world.
My frustration only grew over the course of the ride. At some point, a truck heading north carrying six Volunteers passed us. Courtesy of the thousand stops that we made in between Vilanculos and the crossroads for Mambone, the truck beat me to the crossroads and five remaining Volunteers were sitting enjoying some sandwiches. It was at this point that I officially declared to myself that I was never taking this particular chapa again.
The rest of the ride in wasn't so bad. Once we got on the road to Mambone, we went pretty fast, disregarding everyone on the road. This including the drunk man on a bicycle who we came within feet of killing. This also included the passangers. We got a little bit of rain on the ride in and at some point we hydroplaned and almost slid off the road. Isn't traveling fun?
Having survived the ride, I walked through the vila to pick up some bread and other groceries. Knowing that there was delicious Mambone bread at the end of the ride was probably the only thing that kept me sane. My luck finally turned around toward the end of the trip. I didn't have to wait at all for a canoe and it wasn't screamingly hot. For the first time in months, I didn't need to drink water on the walk home.
The entire trip took a full ninety minutes longer than it should have taken. Strangely, I was happy to be home. I was happy to know that I was going to be productive this week. I was happy that I didn't need to see a chapa, at least for a little while.
The long day behind me, the last thing I wanted to do was cook up some complicated dinner. That meant I was in for a night of spaghetti. For a change, Richie even got in the deal. We were happily eating and watching "30 Rock" when out of nowhere, the energy went off. We would have been okay with it if it were 9:00 or 9:15. But no, the energy went out at 8:30. The truth is, if there were any good night for the energy to go out early, this was the night. I crawled into bed and I was out cold before 9:00.
I guess a travel day will make you sleep. The cool weather didn't hurt either. All in all, I was out for almost eleven consecutive hours. In America, sleeping for eleven hours would have meant waking up around noon or one in the afternoon; here, I'm up before 8:00. I could have easily stayed in bed all day, not just because I was drowsy and the weather was good. No, I had no obligations for the entire day. Not working on Mondays is a beautiful thing. I probably should have stayed in Vilanculos for the extra day.
There wasn't much to speak about for most of the morning, but the afternoon was actually pretty good. For months, I've had a sheet of wood that would be perfect for another shelf. I finally decided to put it up and relocate my desk. By the end of the afternoon, my desk was in place, but I didn't have enough wire to hang my new shelf. It will half to wait until tomorrow.
Like a storm, the requests for help came during the evening. I carved out a portion of the evening to hand out a laptop to our physics teacher. I showed him the basics: how to turn it on, turn it off, open and save a document. This same teacher needed help printing a huge document for his math class. A student wanted me to type out some cover sheets for his work. And finally, the new English teacher wanted some help translating and typing a document. All said, most of my night was taken up, leaving Richie to do the stir-fry cooking. We finished exactly one episode of "30 Rock" before the energy went out, leaving us to go to bed well before 9:00 once again.
I was up multiple times over the course of Monday evening, courtesy of my cell phone and some other noise. I think I also finally caught up on sleep, so being up at 4:00 wasn't so big of a deal. I still managed to stay in bed for a good chunk of the morning. I actually had to lesson plan today for the first time in about a month. More than that, I had to figure out exactly what I was going to teach. I took a look at the planning another teacher and I did and saw I was supposed to teach adjective prefixes. Well, that's going to take a lot more than one lesson, seeing as there are probably hundreds of these in English. So I decided I would take this one bit by bit and just look at some prefixes that mean no or not, like "un", "dis" and "in".
Once my lesson planning was done, I headed to the market. We had almost no food and no charcoal. There was the potential for going hungry today. The food problem is easy enough to solve. I went to the market and restocked us on everything. I tried to get Sozinho to get us some carvao, but no one was selling. Cooking without fuel is impossible, so I did what we have learned to do well: I went to our neighbors and asked for charcoal. This is one of the many things I like about this place: being a sort of collectivist place, everyone looks out for everyone. And since our credit is good, people are happy to loan stuff to us. We would not starve today.
I was slightly skeptical about my lesson today. I didn't know if the students would really understand, but Portuguese has plenty of similar examples. I will just have to offer plenty of examples myself. Surprisingly, they seemed to catch on. I am not going to ask them to form words themselves. The rules are just too complicated. But by the time National Exams come around, they should be able to at least recognize these prefixes.
Following my class, I sat in on an math class on limits, which was, umm, interesting. This teacher, who is a good friend of ours, is trying to teach this lesson that is taught in the first week of calculus. He called a girl up to do the problem, and she did just fine until the very end, when she had to solve what zero minus one equaled. I felt sorry for the guy. And he was clearly frustrated by it. Every time she answered incorrectly (three times), he hit her in the hand with the wood side of his eraser. That was enough for me. He wanted me to sit in on the next one, but I escaped.
The rest of the afternoon was pretty calm. Since I purchased some new wire in market on my morning market run, I was able to finish up hanging my new shelves. I have a newly organized room and work station. And we killed another hour by going to the market. We needed candles because we didn't know when they would shut off our energy.
Of course, tonight was the night that our energy arrived on time and it stayed all the way through 9:30. We needed all of that time too. I cooked beans tonight, which always take a good while to cook. They weren't the best, but they were still pretty good. And we were able to finish more than one episode of "30 Rock". I call that a successful night.
I figured that Wednesday was going to start poorly. First off, I got a text message at 5:30 in the morning from a colleague, a truly unacceptable action. More importantly though, my San Jose Sharks, having a 2-0 series lead, played Game 3 in Detroit while I slept. I fully expected to see something along the lines of "Red Wings decimate Sharks, crawl back into series". What I saw this morning, however, was truly shocking: "Sharks win in overtime, take commanding 3-0 lead". What? I don't think anyone saw that coming. I knew at 7:30 in the morning that it would be a good day.
After recovering from the shock of seeing the headline, I walked over to my colleague's house, the colleague who texted me at the insane hour. He has recently acquired a photocopier, a good investment when you live in a town that only has one. Wisely, he is giving a better price (on Richie's and my advice) than the other people. The thing is, it's not really helpful to have a copy machine if you don't know how to use it. Apparently, that's where I come in. I went over there to figure out the machine. It would have helped if the manual were in English, but no, it had to be in Portuguese. Eh, nothing I can't handle.
Helping with the copy machine took me up all the way to...9:30 in the morning. I don't teach on Wednesdays until 4:00. That's a whole lot of time to kill. Soon enough, though, I had my lesson for the day planned and it was time to get cooking. Naturally, just as we fired up charcoal, the energy turned on. I'd like to say that they felt like they owed us, but it was only enough time to get my computer a third of the way charged. It doesn't really matter: it's enough to get me through the afternoon.
An hour before I was supposed to teach, one of my students came over to the house. He said that the teacher who was supposed to be there didn't show up and they wanted to have class now. Don't mistaken this as being eager to learn: most of them need to cross the river to get home. Of course, I was thrilled that I wouldn't have to wait until 4 to teach. I went inside, through on a pair of paints and my teaching coat. And as I step out the door, a Peace Corps shows up at my patio. We knew our boss would be coming this week, we just didn't know when. Apparently, the day was today. I told our neighbor to tell my students to wait until our normal class time.
Our boss and I talked for a little while. This is the third time he has visited in the last 16 months. I don't blame him for his lack of visits. Maputo to Machanga is a long ways, and there isn't a whole lot of reason to come up here. Regardless, some good came out of his visit. I got some clarification on our last few months of service and discussed our World Cup travel plans. Seems like everything is going to be okay but not perfect on both fronts.
When the time came around to go teach, all of my students had dispersed. Sometimes, you just can't win. Who am I to complain, though? It just gives me reason to free my other students on Friday and everyone loves an easy Friday. My afternoon rearranged, I spent the latter part of my afternoon preparing for dinner.
Most of the time, I am convinced that there is no god. But then there are times where I am sure that there is something or someone out there. Today was one those days. For the second or third time all year, our market had avocados, which meant that Richie and I could have a proper Mexican feast on Cinco de Mayo. Chicken, salsa, guacamole, cheese and rice, all packed into a delicious, floury hand-rolled tortilla. This beautiful combination tasted, well, godly. We capped our night by finishing off the third season of "30 Rock".
Thursday was a particularly slow day, and it's a good thing because I was feeling particularly lazy. Last night was hotter than it's been for the last few days. It was back to just using a bottom sheet for most of the night. When I woke up at 4 in the morning, it was just cold enough that another sheet didn't hurt. I didn't roll out of bed until almost 9. That is the best way to kill off the better part of the morning.
I only had to give one class this afternoon, and thankfully, it was the first and second periods of the afternoon. This is a much better schedule that having to wait until the end of the day to give my one class. For the first time in more than a year here, I tried doing something completely different: group work. In groups of four, students had to name five diseases, their symptoms, causes, prevention methods, and cures. This would be a challenge for them because even though much of the vocabulary is similar or exactly the same, they don't know what is the same and what is different.
The lesson actually went pretty well. It was a little stressful running around the class trying to define medical terms, but it was okay. I learned a lot of words that I would never otherwise learned (do I really need to know the verb "to cough"? Not really) and it was really nice to see my students' wheels turning a bit. I could see myself doing more of this over the rest of the year.
Following class, I really didn't have much to do. RIchie and I eventually made our way to the market, looking for nothing in particular. We ended up buying something, what I don't remember. Goes to show how important it was. We were on different dinner plans. Richie wanted to eat xima and sardines, two foods that I refuse to touch. I went a different route with spaghetti. I made an attempt at homemade pesto sauce. It was alright, but probably could have used more garlic. Not bad for a fist shot, though.
For our entertainment tonight, we watched "The Last King of Scotland", a movie about Idi Amin, the former president of Uganda. I had seen it before and I liked it years ago. Like "Blood Diamond", this was one of those Africa movies, where the things that are novel to most -- like crammed-in cars and dirt roads and being in the absolute smallest minority -- are completely normal to us. It was the first viewing for Richie and it didn't disappoint.
Friday: late morning market run
Lunch last of the avocado - delicious mexican food
Same Lesson - not as enthusiastic
relaxing afternoon
beans for dinner...American Gangster
Friday was a pretty slow day for us. Richie didn't have any classes and I only had to teach third and fourth periods in the afternoon. These days, where there's not a lot to do and nowhere to go, can wear on us quickly, so we tried to get ahead of the game. By mid-morning, we were getting antsy, so we made a run to the market, even though we didn't really need anything important.
With only one avocado left, we were hoping to refresh our stock, but our market, which has had avocado maybe three times this year, did not have them today. Very sad. Our last avocado would go to good use in a delicious plate of Mexican food for lunch.
The only thing I bought of the market that was of huge importance was razors. It took nineteen months, but I finally ran out of razor blades. I knew this day would come and I have not been looking forward to it. The only razor blades that can be purchased in Machanga are single-blade disposible Bics. I knew this was going to be painful. I have been shaving my head clean for almost five years now and this shave was the single most painful experience I've had. I'm usually good for one nick in the back of my head, but six -- six! -- is just not fair. Looks like I'll just be using the electric razor for the next couple months. The only thing more painful than the shave was the shower after.
Amazingly, my students failed to notice all the cuts in my head. I'd like to say that they were so into their work that they weren't paying attention to the back of my head. I know this is not true. The group of students today was not nearly as enthusiastic as the other group, something I expected.
The short remainder of the afternoon was pretty relaxing. I sat around for a couple hours, failing miserably again at Kakuro, until the energy came on. With the electricity running, one of the teachers needed help moving a document from a computer to a flash drive. I've showed him how a couple times, but he forgot. I also had to print out a document for another teacher. While I did that, Richie threw the beans on the stove.
They took a couple hours to cook, but finally our beans were ready to eat. While they cooked, we watched "American Gangster". I had never seen it before. It was pretty good, although I think I would have appreciated it more if I had an attention span that could endure a three-hour movie.
An unexpected car arrived on Saturday morning. Tim, the new-ish Volunteer at the next site north of ours, showed up with his school's soccer. With his second visit, Tim has taken the lead in all-time visits to Machanga during our tenure. So sad. He chilled with us for a while before heading back to his team.
We had a ton of beans left over from last night. It took us a year and a half, but we realized that if we cook food for more than one day, we wouldn't have to cook two days in a row. We aren't so bright over here. The beans held up just fine -- I guess there was enough oil in them to keep them from going bad.
I tried something new today: corn flour tortillas. This was merely an effort to try to make our Mexican food a little more healthy. We all know how things go the first time I try to make something new, especially with corn flour. As expected, the tortillas were terrible. Per my personal rules, I will have to wait at least a year to try this again. At least the rest of the food was pretty good.
The soccer game started in the middle of the afternoon when it wasn't too miserably hot. The first half of the game, only students were allowed to play. Machanga scored two goals in the first ten minutes, prompting all of the students watching to run on the field like a point guard just hit a game-winning three-pointer. In the second half, teachers were allowed to enter. Tim, who played in university, jumped in the game and played well. Our school director asked if we were going to join in, and I returned with a hearty laugh.
The energy came on almost immediately following the game, which was just lovely. Richie ate fish tonight, which meant I was eating spaghetti again. We watched "The Proposal" tonight, a stupid romantic comedy, but it featured Sandra Bullock, so we were okay with it.
A sad note to end the week on: Gary, our colleague across the river, is no longer our colleague across the river. He has had a really tough couple of months at site and it finally broke him. I don't blame him for resigning. If I were in his position, I would have done the same thing. With his absence, we are unofficially the most isolated site in this country. More than that though, it's kind of depressing to see someone who arrived after us leave before us. The same will happen with Alexis in a couple months. She'll be leaving at the end of July. By that time, though, we'll be down counting months on one hand.
Happy Mother's Day to all the mamas (and soon to be mamas) out there.
True to form, the chapa took forever. It took us nearly an hour to cover the first fifteen kilometers and by the time we got to the first crossroads, I wanted to slay everyone on the chapa, starting with the driver. Being on a chapa really brings out the worst in me. It's the only time I want to go on a homocidal spree in this country. Instead I went the peaceful route (it is called the Peace Corps, right?) by plugging in my iPod and ignorning the world.
My frustration only grew over the course of the ride. At some point, a truck heading north carrying six Volunteers passed us. Courtesy of the thousand stops that we made in between Vilanculos and the crossroads for Mambone, the truck beat me to the crossroads and five remaining Volunteers were sitting enjoying some sandwiches. It was at this point that I officially declared to myself that I was never taking this particular chapa again.
The rest of the ride in wasn't so bad. Once we got on the road to Mambone, we went pretty fast, disregarding everyone on the road. This including the drunk man on a bicycle who we came within feet of killing. This also included the passangers. We got a little bit of rain on the ride in and at some point we hydroplaned and almost slid off the road. Isn't traveling fun?
Having survived the ride, I walked through the vila to pick up some bread and other groceries. Knowing that there was delicious Mambone bread at the end of the ride was probably the only thing that kept me sane. My luck finally turned around toward the end of the trip. I didn't have to wait at all for a canoe and it wasn't screamingly hot. For the first time in months, I didn't need to drink water on the walk home.
The entire trip took a full ninety minutes longer than it should have taken. Strangely, I was happy to be home. I was happy to know that I was going to be productive this week. I was happy that I didn't need to see a chapa, at least for a little while.
The long day behind me, the last thing I wanted to do was cook up some complicated dinner. That meant I was in for a night of spaghetti. For a change, Richie even got in the deal. We were happily eating and watching "30 Rock" when out of nowhere, the energy went off. We would have been okay with it if it were 9:00 or 9:15. But no, the energy went out at 8:30. The truth is, if there were any good night for the energy to go out early, this was the night. I crawled into bed and I was out cold before 9:00.
I guess a travel day will make you sleep. The cool weather didn't hurt either. All in all, I was out for almost eleven consecutive hours. In America, sleeping for eleven hours would have meant waking up around noon or one in the afternoon; here, I'm up before 8:00. I could have easily stayed in bed all day, not just because I was drowsy and the weather was good. No, I had no obligations for the entire day. Not working on Mondays is a beautiful thing. I probably should have stayed in Vilanculos for the extra day.
There wasn't much to speak about for most of the morning, but the afternoon was actually pretty good. For months, I've had a sheet of wood that would be perfect for another shelf. I finally decided to put it up and relocate my desk. By the end of the afternoon, my desk was in place, but I didn't have enough wire to hang my new shelf. It will half to wait until tomorrow.
Like a storm, the requests for help came during the evening. I carved out a portion of the evening to hand out a laptop to our physics teacher. I showed him the basics: how to turn it on, turn it off, open and save a document. This same teacher needed help printing a huge document for his math class. A student wanted me to type out some cover sheets for his work. And finally, the new English teacher wanted some help translating and typing a document. All said, most of my night was taken up, leaving Richie to do the stir-fry cooking. We finished exactly one episode of "30 Rock" before the energy went out, leaving us to go to bed well before 9:00 once again.
I was up multiple times over the course of Monday evening, courtesy of my cell phone and some other noise. I think I also finally caught up on sleep, so being up at 4:00 wasn't so big of a deal. I still managed to stay in bed for a good chunk of the morning. I actually had to lesson plan today for the first time in about a month. More than that, I had to figure out exactly what I was going to teach. I took a look at the planning another teacher and I did and saw I was supposed to teach adjective prefixes. Well, that's going to take a lot more than one lesson, seeing as there are probably hundreds of these in English. So I decided I would take this one bit by bit and just look at some prefixes that mean no or not, like "un", "dis" and "in".
Once my lesson planning was done, I headed to the market. We had almost no food and no charcoal. There was the potential for going hungry today. The food problem is easy enough to solve. I went to the market and restocked us on everything. I tried to get Sozinho to get us some carvao, but no one was selling. Cooking without fuel is impossible, so I did what we have learned to do well: I went to our neighbors and asked for charcoal. This is one of the many things I like about this place: being a sort of collectivist place, everyone looks out for everyone. And since our credit is good, people are happy to loan stuff to us. We would not starve today.
I was slightly skeptical about my lesson today. I didn't know if the students would really understand, but Portuguese has plenty of similar examples. I will just have to offer plenty of examples myself. Surprisingly, they seemed to catch on. I am not going to ask them to form words themselves. The rules are just too complicated. But by the time National Exams come around, they should be able to at least recognize these prefixes.
Following my class, I sat in on an math class on limits, which was, umm, interesting. This teacher, who is a good friend of ours, is trying to teach this lesson that is taught in the first week of calculus. He called a girl up to do the problem, and she did just fine until the very end, when she had to solve what zero minus one equaled. I felt sorry for the guy. And he was clearly frustrated by it. Every time she answered incorrectly (three times), he hit her in the hand with the wood side of his eraser. That was enough for me. He wanted me to sit in on the next one, but I escaped.
The rest of the afternoon was pretty calm. Since I purchased some new wire in market on my morning market run, I was able to finish up hanging my new shelves. I have a newly organized room and work station. And we killed another hour by going to the market. We needed candles because we didn't know when they would shut off our energy.
Of course, tonight was the night that our energy arrived on time and it stayed all the way through 9:30. We needed all of that time too. I cooked beans tonight, which always take a good while to cook. They weren't the best, but they were still pretty good. And we were able to finish more than one episode of "30 Rock". I call that a successful night.
I figured that Wednesday was going to start poorly. First off, I got a text message at 5:30 in the morning from a colleague, a truly unacceptable action. More importantly though, my San Jose Sharks, having a 2-0 series lead, played Game 3 in Detroit while I slept. I fully expected to see something along the lines of "Red Wings decimate Sharks, crawl back into series". What I saw this morning, however, was truly shocking: "Sharks win in overtime, take commanding 3-0 lead". What? I don't think anyone saw that coming. I knew at 7:30 in the morning that it would be a good day.
After recovering from the shock of seeing the headline, I walked over to my colleague's house, the colleague who texted me at the insane hour. He has recently acquired a photocopier, a good investment when you live in a town that only has one. Wisely, he is giving a better price (on Richie's and my advice) than the other people. The thing is, it's not really helpful to have a copy machine if you don't know how to use it. Apparently, that's where I come in. I went over there to figure out the machine. It would have helped if the manual were in English, but no, it had to be in Portuguese. Eh, nothing I can't handle.
Helping with the copy machine took me up all the way to...9:30 in the morning. I don't teach on Wednesdays until 4:00. That's a whole lot of time to kill. Soon enough, though, I had my lesson for the day planned and it was time to get cooking. Naturally, just as we fired up charcoal, the energy turned on. I'd like to say that they felt like they owed us, but it was only enough time to get my computer a third of the way charged. It doesn't really matter: it's enough to get me through the afternoon.
An hour before I was supposed to teach, one of my students came over to the house. He said that the teacher who was supposed to be there didn't show up and they wanted to have class now. Don't mistaken this as being eager to learn: most of them need to cross the river to get home. Of course, I was thrilled that I wouldn't have to wait until 4 to teach. I went inside, through on a pair of paints and my teaching coat. And as I step out the door, a Peace Corps shows up at my patio. We knew our boss would be coming this week, we just didn't know when. Apparently, the day was today. I told our neighbor to tell my students to wait until our normal class time.
Our boss and I talked for a little while. This is the third time he has visited in the last 16 months. I don't blame him for his lack of visits. Maputo to Machanga is a long ways, and there isn't a whole lot of reason to come up here. Regardless, some good came out of his visit. I got some clarification on our last few months of service and discussed our World Cup travel plans. Seems like everything is going to be okay but not perfect on both fronts.
When the time came around to go teach, all of my students had dispersed. Sometimes, you just can't win. Who am I to complain, though? It just gives me reason to free my other students on Friday and everyone loves an easy Friday. My afternoon rearranged, I spent the latter part of my afternoon preparing for dinner.
Most of the time, I am convinced that there is no god. But then there are times where I am sure that there is something or someone out there. Today was one those days. For the second or third time all year, our market had avocados, which meant that Richie and I could have a proper Mexican feast on Cinco de Mayo. Chicken, salsa, guacamole, cheese and rice, all packed into a delicious, floury hand-rolled tortilla. This beautiful combination tasted, well, godly. We capped our night by finishing off the third season of "30 Rock".
Thursday was a particularly slow day, and it's a good thing because I was feeling particularly lazy. Last night was hotter than it's been for the last few days. It was back to just using a bottom sheet for most of the night. When I woke up at 4 in the morning, it was just cold enough that another sheet didn't hurt. I didn't roll out of bed until almost 9. That is the best way to kill off the better part of the morning.
I only had to give one class this afternoon, and thankfully, it was the first and second periods of the afternoon. This is a much better schedule that having to wait until the end of the day to give my one class. For the first time in more than a year here, I tried doing something completely different: group work. In groups of four, students had to name five diseases, their symptoms, causes, prevention methods, and cures. This would be a challenge for them because even though much of the vocabulary is similar or exactly the same, they don't know what is the same and what is different.
The lesson actually went pretty well. It was a little stressful running around the class trying to define medical terms, but it was okay. I learned a lot of words that I would never otherwise learned (do I really need to know the verb "to cough"? Not really) and it was really nice to see my students' wheels turning a bit. I could see myself doing more of this over the rest of the year.
Following class, I really didn't have much to do. RIchie and I eventually made our way to the market, looking for nothing in particular. We ended up buying something, what I don't remember. Goes to show how important it was. We were on different dinner plans. Richie wanted to eat xima and sardines, two foods that I refuse to touch. I went a different route with spaghetti. I made an attempt at homemade pesto sauce. It was alright, but probably could have used more garlic. Not bad for a fist shot, though.
For our entertainment tonight, we watched "The Last King of Scotland", a movie about Idi Amin, the former president of Uganda. I had seen it before and I liked it years ago. Like "Blood Diamond", this was one of those Africa movies, where the things that are novel to most -- like crammed-in cars and dirt roads and being in the absolute smallest minority -- are completely normal to us. It was the first viewing for Richie and it didn't disappoint.
Friday: late morning market run
Lunch last of the avocado - delicious mexican food
Same Lesson - not as enthusiastic
relaxing afternoon
beans for dinner...American Gangster
Friday was a pretty slow day for us. Richie didn't have any classes and I only had to teach third and fourth periods in the afternoon. These days, where there's not a lot to do and nowhere to go, can wear on us quickly, so we tried to get ahead of the game. By mid-morning, we were getting antsy, so we made a run to the market, even though we didn't really need anything important.
With only one avocado left, we were hoping to refresh our stock, but our market, which has had avocado maybe three times this year, did not have them today. Very sad. Our last avocado would go to good use in a delicious plate of Mexican food for lunch.
The only thing I bought of the market that was of huge importance was razors. It took nineteen months, but I finally ran out of razor blades. I knew this day would come and I have not been looking forward to it. The only razor blades that can be purchased in Machanga are single-blade disposible Bics. I knew this was going to be painful. I have been shaving my head clean for almost five years now and this shave was the single most painful experience I've had. I'm usually good for one nick in the back of my head, but six -- six! -- is just not fair. Looks like I'll just be using the electric razor for the next couple months. The only thing more painful than the shave was the shower after.
Amazingly, my students failed to notice all the cuts in my head. I'd like to say that they were so into their work that they weren't paying attention to the back of my head. I know this is not true. The group of students today was not nearly as enthusiastic as the other group, something I expected.
The short remainder of the afternoon was pretty relaxing. I sat around for a couple hours, failing miserably again at Kakuro, until the energy came on. With the electricity running, one of the teachers needed help moving a document from a computer to a flash drive. I've showed him how a couple times, but he forgot. I also had to print out a document for another teacher. While I did that, Richie threw the beans on the stove.
They took a couple hours to cook, but finally our beans were ready to eat. While they cooked, we watched "American Gangster". I had never seen it before. It was pretty good, although I think I would have appreciated it more if I had an attention span that could endure a three-hour movie.
An unexpected car arrived on Saturday morning. Tim, the new-ish Volunteer at the next site north of ours, showed up with his school's soccer. With his second visit, Tim has taken the lead in all-time visits to Machanga during our tenure. So sad. He chilled with us for a while before heading back to his team.
We had a ton of beans left over from last night. It took us a year and a half, but we realized that if we cook food for more than one day, we wouldn't have to cook two days in a row. We aren't so bright over here. The beans held up just fine -- I guess there was enough oil in them to keep them from going bad.
I tried something new today: corn flour tortillas. This was merely an effort to try to make our Mexican food a little more healthy. We all know how things go the first time I try to make something new, especially with corn flour. As expected, the tortillas were terrible. Per my personal rules, I will have to wait at least a year to try this again. At least the rest of the food was pretty good.
The soccer game started in the middle of the afternoon when it wasn't too miserably hot. The first half of the game, only students were allowed to play. Machanga scored two goals in the first ten minutes, prompting all of the students watching to run on the field like a point guard just hit a game-winning three-pointer. In the second half, teachers were allowed to enter. Tim, who played in university, jumped in the game and played well. Our school director asked if we were going to join in, and I returned with a hearty laugh.
The energy came on almost immediately following the game, which was just lovely. Richie ate fish tonight, which meant I was eating spaghetti again. We watched "The Proposal" tonight, a stupid romantic comedy, but it featured Sandra Bullock, so we were okay with it.
A sad note to end the week on: Gary, our colleague across the river, is no longer our colleague across the river. He has had a really tough couple of months at site and it finally broke him. I don't blame him for resigning. If I were in his position, I would have done the same thing. With his absence, we are unofficially the most isolated site in this country. More than that though, it's kind of depressing to see someone who arrived after us leave before us. The same will happen with Alexis in a couple months. She'll be leaving at the end of July. By that time, though, we'll be down counting months on one hand.
Happy Mother's Day to all the mamas (and soon to be mamas) out there.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Year 2 - Week 20: The Lost Week
Well, we were supposed to start school this week, at least according to the state's official calendar. But given that it was the first week of the trimester, everyone here knew what would be happening: nothing. And nothing is exactly what happened. As such, I'm not going to recount a whole bunch of days of nothingness. That would be as boring for you to read as it would be for me to write. Instead, I'll just give you some random thoughts from this lost week.
To give you an idea of how empty this place was this past week, one of the teachers actually tried to give class on Monday. He was teaching a math class on limits. He said he wanted me to watch. I wasn't so interested in the material. Limits are easy. I was more interested in how many kids would be in the class. Of the 61 students supposed to be there, 15 showed up. I knew by Monday afternoon that I wouldn't be teaching.
It is officially blanket weather here. These next couple months are our Goldilocks weather. It is not too hot in the day, it is not freezing at night. Even so, we still broke out the blankets for the first time. It was beautiful. Along with blankets came the hockey jerseys. We purchased hockey jerseys last year for traveling in the winter, but they also make for great hanging-out clothes.
One of the English teachers from the secondary school came over wanting to plan out this trimester. I'm happy to do this, but it's a truly miserable experience. Part of it is because the curriculum is so awful and part of it is because I like being independent when it comes to this stuff. Though we will be teaching the same material for the next couple of trimesters, we will be doing it in very different ways.
We finally got our accommodations set up for World Cup. Given that my mom has better internet access than me, I put her in charge of this project. That was really the last piece we needed to make this trip run well. Now we just have to go and root like all hell for the US to beat England!
Apparently, Richie and I are dog murderers. For the second consecutive trip to Vilanculos, our chapa hit a dog, killing it immediately. The strange thing is we have each traveled alone in between these two trips and had no problems with dog-killing. It's a truly terrible feeling because it all happens in slow motion. You brace yourself and then boom! car hits dog, dog is dead.
Speaking of chapas, I'm done with the chapa system here. I think whenever I travel now, I'll only be taking private cars. What is frustrating for me is that the chapa drivers that run between Mambone and Vilanculos are willing to pick up everyone between the two town, even though a third town sits in between the start and point. Think about it this way. Imagine there are two kinds of car: A car that runs from LA to San Diego, stopping in Orange County to pick up people going to San Diego; and a car that runs from LA to Orange County directly. You would think that people only going to Orange County would take the LA-Orange County bus, and people going further than Orange County would take the other bus. This makes sense to me. But as we well know, if it makes sense, you can't possibly be in Mozambique. If I were president or a minister of transportation or something, chapa reform would be my number one priority.
We were in Vilanculos this weekend for all the normal reasons: shopping, pizza, escaping Machanga. But this weekend was also the third annual Beer Olympics. I feel like this was the event brought Moz 12 and Moz 13 together last, and I think the same was true between Moz 13 and Moz 14. We finally got to meet a ton of Moz 14s from the southern and northern parts of the country. Everybody had a pretty good time. And making it better, the Central/North team defeated the south, bringing the coconut monkey trophy back to where it belongs.
One other thought from Vilanculos: Pizza and beer, no matter what country one is in, is always a winning combination
School should be starting this week. We hope. We're both ready to do something productive. Hopefully my life will be more exciting next week.
To give you an idea of how empty this place was this past week, one of the teachers actually tried to give class on Monday. He was teaching a math class on limits. He said he wanted me to watch. I wasn't so interested in the material. Limits are easy. I was more interested in how many kids would be in the class. Of the 61 students supposed to be there, 15 showed up. I knew by Monday afternoon that I wouldn't be teaching.
It is officially blanket weather here. These next couple months are our Goldilocks weather. It is not too hot in the day, it is not freezing at night. Even so, we still broke out the blankets for the first time. It was beautiful. Along with blankets came the hockey jerseys. We purchased hockey jerseys last year for traveling in the winter, but they also make for great hanging-out clothes.
One of the English teachers from the secondary school came over wanting to plan out this trimester. I'm happy to do this, but it's a truly miserable experience. Part of it is because the curriculum is so awful and part of it is because I like being independent when it comes to this stuff. Though we will be teaching the same material for the next couple of trimesters, we will be doing it in very different ways.
We finally got our accommodations set up for World Cup. Given that my mom has better internet access than me, I put her in charge of this project. That was really the last piece we needed to make this trip run well. Now we just have to go and root like all hell for the US to beat England!
Apparently, Richie and I are dog murderers. For the second consecutive trip to Vilanculos, our chapa hit a dog, killing it immediately. The strange thing is we have each traveled alone in between these two trips and had no problems with dog-killing. It's a truly terrible feeling because it all happens in slow motion. You brace yourself and then boom! car hits dog, dog is dead.
Speaking of chapas, I'm done with the chapa system here. I think whenever I travel now, I'll only be taking private cars. What is frustrating for me is that the chapa drivers that run between Mambone and Vilanculos are willing to pick up everyone between the two town, even though a third town sits in between the start and point. Think about it this way. Imagine there are two kinds of car: A car that runs from LA to San Diego, stopping in Orange County to pick up people going to San Diego; and a car that runs from LA to Orange County directly. You would think that people only going to Orange County would take the LA-Orange County bus, and people going further than Orange County would take the other bus. This makes sense to me. But as we well know, if it makes sense, you can't possibly be in Mozambique. If I were president or a minister of transportation or something, chapa reform would be my number one priority.
We were in Vilanculos this weekend for all the normal reasons: shopping, pizza, escaping Machanga. But this weekend was also the third annual Beer Olympics. I feel like this was the event brought Moz 12 and Moz 13 together last, and I think the same was true between Moz 13 and Moz 14. We finally got to meet a ton of Moz 14s from the southern and northern parts of the country. Everybody had a pretty good time. And making it better, the Central/North team defeated the south, bringing the coconut monkey trophy back to where it belongs.
One other thought from Vilanculos: Pizza and beer, no matter what country one is in, is always a winning combination
School should be starting this week. We hope. We're both ready to do something productive. Hopefully my life will be more exciting next week.
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