Year 2 - Week 28: Going Against Home

It took nearly half a week, but by Sunday morning, Richie and I were fully recovered from our trip to South Africa. It is truly amazing how doing nothing but sitting in a bus can completely beat a person down. Of course, we were sleep-deprived and slightly malnourished, but who's counting. Even those few days in Machanga, when we did so little, were exhausting.

We were both grateful to have Sunday to relax and to be able to really appreciate the relaxation. Things were quiet Sunday morning. Church tends to keep people at the school pretty occupied. For us, our holy books are called Time, Newsweek, ESPN, and The Economist. We tear through these magazines. Richie is selective with his articles; I tend to read cover to cover, even though I really don't care about genetics or why the crime rate has fallen. Between sleeping in and reading magazines, we got through the morning rather quickly.

Once again, just as we were preparing lunch, Alexis came by our house. She has the incredible ability to get to our house right as we are putting food on the stove. It's like can smell the smoke from our stove and knows that food is on the way. Today, though, she turned down food. If I were her, I would have played by Richie's rule: if someone offers you something, take it. Especially considering that she is fed crap everyday by her host institution, our food might as well be gourmet. She says she doesn't want to take food away from us, but she knows we don't care. We may be poor, but we like to help a fellow muzungu.

Lunch, though delicious, wasn't particularly filling. Our tomatoes are quickly becoming ripe, and we have many more tomatoes than mouths to feed. If I were my sister, this would be a lot easier. I like tomatoes, but my sister is the only person I know who can sit down and eat tomatoes like they're candy. I need my tomatoes put into something, and our recipe book had something quick and easy: tomato soup. The whole thing, from prep to eating, took only an hour and for a first crack, the soup was pretty good. Plus it used up fifteen tomatoes, so that's a huge victory.

My parents called me shortly after I ate dinner. It felt like it had been a while since I had talked with them, but it was actually one of the shorter gaps I've endured. I think all of the travel made the days feel like weeks, making it feel like it had been months since we'd spoken. Toward the end of the conversation, we talked about how America was robbed of a win against Slovenia, which led to me ranting about the need for instant replay in sports.

My view on this was only justified as I watched the game between Brazil and Ivory Coast. Watching Brazil play is kind of like watching a lizard in pursuit of a insect: the lizard is going to be sneaky, patient, and strike whenever it feels like, ending in sure victory. Brazil was in complete control of the first half but never really threatened...until the decided playtime was over and it was time to put the ball in the net. Just like that, Brazil had the lead. As if Brazil isn't good enough, apparently it's okay for their players to use their hands, because their second goal was the result of not one but two hand-balls. I'm not quite sure what the referees are watching out there, but they are sure missing a whole lot.

The biggest upside to this World Cup for us is that the late game occurs right when we would normally be entertaining ourselves with our precious limited media. These games run until about ten at night, the new normal bedtime for me.

The late bedtime combined with the cold weather means that I've been sleeping very well. In the hot season – a season we're never going to have to endure again – waking up at five occurs out of necessity. The sheets are too soaked in sweat to tolerate. These days, sleeping until seven in the morning is easy. I awoke Monday morning to an empty house. Richie had class, poor kid. He went to collect work he assigned while he was gone. He returned in a rage. All of the kids had copied their work directly from a book. I would be handing out zeroes like Hershey bars on Halloween. Richie is far kinder than I am: I think he's just going to let them off the hook with a look of incredulity, a laugh, an a talk about academic integrity and plagiarism, terms these students have probably never heard before.

While Richie was in the classroom, I managed to keep myself pretty busy. When I realized we had no bread in the house, I made a run for bread. I planned out my lessons for the next couple weeks. It's truly amazing how complex the question “how” is. I knew it was difficult – it's why I haven't taught it up to this point – but this went far beyond what I ad anticipated. Just teaching this one question is going to talk a couple of weeks. I also made a run to the market in search of food. By the time I finished all those things, it was lunch time.

The afternoon was all about food. While I had the charcoal going, I wanted to cook our beans for dinner. I decided to cook these beans as Mozambican as possible. Instead of sauteing the vegetables, I just threw them into the pot. All said, cooked those suckers for nearly four hours. While they cooked, I read some magazines. People came and went. And before Richie came back from his afternoon classes, I had everything cooked and cleaned up. He says that he was out busy bringing home the bacon. That may be so, but I was the one cooking up all that bacon.

Speaking of bacon, my parents brilliant sent me a Costco-sized packet of crumbled bacon in one of their packages. Bacon has been going on or in nearly everything we've cooked up recently. I figured it couldn't be terrible in the beans. It was the one deviation I made from cooking truly Mozambican beans, and I think everyone who consumed the beans would agree it was a good addition.

The featured game of the night was between Spain and Honduras. Spain had underperformed up to this point in the tournament. David Villa hung a couple of gorgeous goals on the Honduran goalkeeper. I was exhausted two-thirds of the way through the game. To that point, Honduras still hadn't registered a shot on goal. I figured the same would hold true for the last thirty minutes of the game. I went to bed figuring Spain would be victorious.

I slept in late again on Tuesday. For the first time in weeks, I would have to actually work today. Taking a two week vacation right in the middle of the trimester sure does make the trimester fly by quickly. The morning, other than a quick run to the market on the bike, was slow. I checked email, read a magazine, and prepped for lunch.

Our charcoal was slow to light today. Finally, around noon, the fire really got going. I only had ten minutes to eat, but I still managed to cram all the food down and brush my teeth in time for class to start.

The grand adventure into the question “how” began today. I counted at least five different ways we use the question “how”, and today's lesson would be on asking for and giving instructions. The example I put on the board was “How do you cook rice?” Of course, I know how to cook rice, but I wanted my students to think about the process. In each class, the students led perfectly into my main talking point: words of sequence, such as first, next, then, and finally. At the end of class, I had the students answer the question “How do you enter credit into a cell phone?” By the end of forty-five minutes, it seemed like they actually understood. This vacation may have been as good for their heads as it was for mine.

Following a quick catnap after class, a teacher came over asking for some computer help. He just wanted to format a document. For some reason he wanted me to put lines at the end of each sentence. It took me until the very end to realize that he wanted to fill in the space on the page. I could have deleted all those lines and hit that beautiful “justified” button in the toolbar, but I was lazy and left it as it was.

Dinner was a grand production. There were so many components to dinner that I had to start early. I was going to make chicken “parmesan”. The parmesan goes in quotes because the cheese we had was gouda. Whatever. We made some garlic bread and some pasta and had ourselves a full Italian dinner. Not bad considering we live in the middle of fuckin' nowhere.

I wasn't particularly interested in the soccer games tonight. The only game of interest occurred in the afternoon. South Africa knocked off France. France should be embarrassed by its pathetic performance in this tournament – a tie to Uruguay and losses to South Africa and Mexico. Mexico, South Africa, and Uruguay all tied in points with four, but South Africa was left out based on goal differential. It would have been nice if the host nation could have advanced, but at least there was some consolation in going out on a win.

It has not been a good tournament for the African teams. Ivory Coast, statistically alive, looks to be finished after their loss to Brazil. Cameroon and South Africa have been eliminated. Nigeria, slaughtered by South Korea, was disposed of tonight. Algeria needs a win against the US and for England to lose against Slovenia, and unlikely combination. The last great hope for Africa is Ghana. They have a win and a tie so far. They should advance out of the group if they play a decent final game.

Wednesday, as usual, passed by slowly. Every Wednesday is a waiting game: I wait to see if another teacher will cancel class, allowing me to teach earlier than usual. For better or worse, this almost always happens. The morning, though, is still challenging.

Unlike other Wednesdays, this day was challenging in another way. In one of the packages from last week, I received a book of logic puzzles. These are way more complicated than Kakuro or Sudoku. These games give you limited pieces of information, and with that information, you must determine all of the other pieces of information. For example, you may have to identify the first name, last name, age, school, and major for five different people, only knowing for certain a couple pieces of information. These puzzles are so complicated that it took me a full three hours to solve one puzzle. My head hurt all morning, but I managed to finished by lunch.

Shortly after lunch, one of the students in my class told me that they didn't have class. Sweet. My class today was part two of “questions with how”. Today's topic was questions dealing with quantity. In English, we use “how many” and “how much” and this is a constant source of confusion for my students. I didn't even know the difference – I had to look it up. It's one of those things that we just take for granted as native speakers. The explanation was quick and easy – “how many” for countable items, “how much” for non-countable items – and as such, so was my class.

I was especially grateful for the early class today because the United States had a little football game against Algeria, with qualification for the knock-out round on the line. The U.S. had no shortage of chances. The could have – hell, should have – scored four or five times. But through ninety minutes, there were just a couple of zeroes. Finally, two minutes into injury time, Landon Donovan scored for the States, pushing them through to the next round as winners of Group C. England, with a win over Slovenia, also advanced.

Which country each will play depended on the games later in the night, just after dinner for us.. Any of the four teams in group D – Australia, Serbia, Ghana, or Germany – could potentially advance. I, of course, was pulling for Ghana against Germany. They played well and had some good chances, but Germany was clearly the better team, earning a one-nothing win. Thanks to Australia's win against Serbia, Ghana moves on. In a rematch from 2006, Ghana will play the United States. I am torn on this game, but I will probably root for Ghana. Whoever manages to win that game, I will root for them for the remainder of the tournament.

Besides keeping our entertainment unwatched, the biggest side effect from these World Cup games has been a later bed time. For the last week or so, I've been going to bed around 11 o'clock, meaning I can sleep in until a reasonable hour. I almost made it to nine on Thursday morning, but I was still slow to roll out of bed. I spent the rest of the morning catching up on news from the internet. Oh, how I can't wait to have cheap internet whenever I want. Five months from now, that will be a reality.

I was scheduled to teach first period Thursday afternoon, but when I went to class, I had exactly five out of sixty students. Where have all the students gone? They started walking home for Mozambican Independence Day, which is tomorrow. How nice that they've managed to stretch this one-day holiday to two (and probably three or four with the weekend). I wasn't going to teach to five students, not when this material would be on their exam next week. I pushed it off to next week.

The rest of the afternoon, with so few people around, was very quiet. I sat on the patio cooking beans and playing – I should actually say “failing at” – logic games. Richie eventually started going stir-crazy and went for a walk to the market. Having already gone earlier in the afternoon, I had no interest in going.

In the meantime, I went over to our neighbors house to watch some World Cup action. Denmark was playing Japan. And even though Denmark controlled the play, Japan still managed to earn a two-goal lead, eventually winning 3-1. Their first two goals came off of beautiful, precisely kicked set pieces from outside the penalty area, the third a bit of individual flair.

With my very amateur eye, it seems to me that a lot of World Cup teams this year have taken on the personalities of their nations. Japan tonight was precise, sturdy, with a little but of wow thrown in. Last night, Germany was absolutely mechanical and strong. The United States, in the face of adversity, found a way to finish on top. The British seemed content to follow America. And the Brazilians might as well be dancing out on the field. On the flip side, the French were pathetic, generally in retreat, protesting against their leadership. The Italians couldn't seem to keep a good thing going. And the Greeks were just a complete mess.

Since Friday was a holiday, Richie decided to head out to the the villa and I joined him after the game. I wasn't in much of a mood to drink, but I still went out to be social. I only stayed out for a couple hours. I had to be rested for Friday.

As I usually do on holidays, I stayed at home while just about everyone else headed out to the plaza for the wreath-laying. Afterward, a colleague asked me why I didn't go today, and I told him it's always the same thing. Seeing a show once is nice, two is okay if the show is good. But this performance is fuckin boring and I don't want to walk out to the plaza, burn under the sun, only to see nothing new. My colleague laughed and agreed. Richie, always the good sport, went out. He as usual represented the muzungu house.

The days was pretty quiet. We knew this was the calm before the storm. Everyone was preparing food, resting up, getting ready for a long night ahead. In the meantime, I went on a hunt. We lent a colleague a fair amount of money a couple months ago and he had not even made an effort to return the money. For some reason, today was the day I wanted to collect. It might have to do with the fact that I was running low on cash for this month and we wanted to go out later.

Things started out passively. I sent Sozinho over to his house early in the morning to ask for the money. I knew that he had been paid yesterday, so there was no reason he shouldn't be able to come up with the money. Sozinho returned with the news that our colleague would come by in the afternoon.

But by the middle of the afternoon, he had failed to show up. This is the third month in a row that I sent Sozinho over there to collect and it's the third month in a row he has failed miserably. I was done with this. I decided to go over to his house myself. I came with the assumption that he was paid and I told him I knew he had the money. He responded by telling me that he hadn't collected his money yesterday and we should talk the the school accountant tonight. Okay. Seemed plausible.

So I went to the school accountant to describe the situation. “No, no, no. He picked up his money yesterday”. Not having collected the money, I could understand. Lying to my face, I can't understand and I will not tolerate. It was time to make him suffer. When our colleague came to the school to flip on the energy for the dormitories, Richie and I were waiting for him. “Let's take a walk to the accountant's house”, I told him. He knew that I had caught him in a lie. This undoubtedly was a walk of shame.

When we got to the house, our colleague told us to wait outside. He was clearly busted and now he was scrambling. When he came out of the house, he told us to wait just a little longer. With no shortage of anger in my voice, I asked him “How many more months?”. “No, no, I'll be back to tonight.” I told him he had until 8:00.

Now, it was just a matter of from whom he was going to borrow the 500 Meticais. Shockingly, just after 7 o'clock, he showed up with 500 Meticais for us. I thanked him for the money and dismissed him from our house. Our neighbor later told us that he felt ashamed for not getting us the money in less than half a year.

In the meantime, Richie and I were thrilled – almost amazed, actually – that we managed to get our money back. This, along with the holiday, called for a celebration. Over the next couple of hours, Richie and I proceeded to demolish a bottle of scotch. We know: we have very healthy drinking habits.

By the time I returned home just after midnight, I was at that perfect stage of drunkenness – ready to sleep but not spinning. Something else managed to keep me awake. Richie has had a sore throat for the last couple of days, and since we already share most things, he decided that he would share this with me as well. Asshole. I was in enough pain that it kept me up all night. A medical book we have told us that I should gargle warm water with salt, so I started that up. Our medical people told me to do the same thing.

Richie lit up the carvao early in the morning to heat up some water from tea. He then made an executive decision that we would have beans for lunch. I'm never one to say no to beans, so I went along with it. I made a run to the market to pick up some necessary items. That was the beginning of the end for me.

I was chugging along just fine for the morning, but by the time we hit lunch, I was exhausted. I could barely get through lunch. I knew a nap of epic proportion would fill my afternoon. The truth is, I can't even call is a nap; this was sleep from last night. I was gone from 1 until almost 5. I woke up groggy and with a sore throat again, but at least felt alive.

After a night of Mexican food, it was on to our entertainment: Ghana against the USA. As I looked at the groups before the tournament, I thought it would come to this. So I went with Ghana as my team for the tournament, even though it meant I would have to root against home. I predicted a 2-1 extra time victory for the Ghanaian squad.

Ghana played fast and loose in the first half and it seemed like the U.S. was feeling the pressure of the situation. Five minutes in, Ghana had a 1-0 lead. The United States' transition defense was absolutely horrible. Ghana clearly played a better first half, but in the second half, it looked like they had the weight of a continent on their shoulders. They were just begging to hold on to that lead, but Landon Donovan changed things with a penalty kick goal.

Ninety minutes in, my prediction was still possible. Tied at one, I needed Ghana to come through. I didn't have to wait long. Three minutes in, Gyan struck a beautiful goal. 2-1 Ghana. Another 27 minutes of extra time later, the game mercifully came to an end. I could breathe again. For the second consecutive World Cup, Ghana put an end to the Americans' dreams.

For now, Ghana stays alive, and they are carrying all of Africa with them.