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.