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.