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.
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Dude, here in Cameroon we lose so many school days for random holidays, unannounced visits of local government delegations, and unpublicized-until-the-day-of staff meetings. Yet, at the end of each sequence, they blame us, the teachers, for not covering the entire syllabus on time.
ReplyDeleteFrustrating, to say the least...