Year 2 - Week 32: Disconnected

Now that school is over for the trimester – for us, anyway – our days here have become slower than usual. We are somewhat pinned by the timing of an upcoming conference. If we leave now, there's no real sense in coming back to Machanga until the next trimester starts, but we'll blow through a ton of money. If we stay, then we sit here like idiots. We went with the latter. No school, no traveling, very little to do and – to top it off – no phone network. Mcel, the biggest phone network in the country was down, and not just for us. Apparently, it went down for a good chunk of the country. Curious.

A complete lack of talking wasn't merely limited to a phone network. We have pissed off Sozinho to the point that he chose not to talk to us for the entire day. A few weeks ago, he made a request of us to buy him white pants and a white shirt for his baptism. We told him that it was the responsibility of his godfather to buy such clothing and that he should talk to his godfather. A couple days ago, he told Richie that the the price of white cloth was 70 Meticais per meter. Richie answered with a cold and non-committing “okay”. I, however, was a little more blunt.

Sozinho approached me and told me the same information: 70 Mets for a meter of cloth. Knowing that he had not spoken to his godfather and that he had already told Richie, I became the bearer of bad news. “We're not buying them. It's your godfather's responsibility to buy your clothes for your baptism. Go talk to him.” He walked off with a smirk. The cracking of that little sarcastic smile was the last we heard from him for the rest of the day.

The quiet in the house provide me the opportunity to finish up a book that was eerily related to the incident above. The book was “African Friends and Money Matters”. This book outlines some of the economic habits of Africans. I'm always somewhat skeptical of books or people that try to throw Africa under one umbrella. In a continent of hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of tribes, ethnic groups and languages, and more than four dozen countries, declaring anything universally African is tough. I firmly believed this – until I read this book.

Most of the author's research, stories, and examples come from Senegal, with a smattering from Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon. For some perspective on how far Mozambique is from Senegal, consider this: excluding the Indian Ocean island nations (Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius, and Seychelles) the capital city furthest from Senegal's capital of Dakar is Maputo. And yet, almost every observation made in this book frustratingly applied here. Some of them – not having loans paid back, watching food purchased in bulk rapidly “disappear”, people taking our bike without asking – I've experienced myself. Most of the lessons, I've learned the hard way.

I nearly got through the book before dinner. Sozinho cooked couvi – a leafy green that he almost knows how to prepare well. I added a couple of spices and made it a little more tolerable. After watching a couple episodes of “Spartacus”, we retired to our rooms. Richie, I'm assuming, fell asleep. I stayed up a little more to finish the book.

Monday was the beginning of our third straight day without a functioning phone network. Everybody is waiting for the flood of backed-up text messages to roll in. Sozinho smoothly moved into day two of his silence spell, only to be broken by asking for money to pay for exams. He made the not talking a lot easier by lazing in bed until 11:00. Right now, this kid is more useless to us than our phone network.

In the meantime, I had a busy morning. One of our colleagues asked if I could hook in some new light bulbs, to which I of course obliged. I asked him he had turned the energy off. He said yes, and I trusted him. That was a bad decision. Zap! Something clearly was not understood. The electrical shock actually punctured the skin of my thumb, leaving a hole about the diameter of a fork tine. Yes, the light was turned off, but the electricity in the house was not. Brilliant. I shut down all the electricity in the house, taking no chances, and went about my work.

Another colleague reminded me that I had promised to put up a closet for him. I promised him months ago, but had completely forgotten. Not a problem. While Richie prepped for lunch, I went over to his house, pounded some nails into his concrete house and the job was done.

Following lunch, I glued myself to a book, “The Unforgiving Minute”. A close friend of mine sent it a couple months ago, and I had failed to this point to pick it up. It's a memoir – so it's up my alley – about an Army Ranger in Afghanistan. For someone in the Peace Corps, I like war a lot. I don't like so much the actual fighting or some of the pathetic justifications, but I love reading about all the technology and weapons systems used in war. To this point, the book has largely been about the author's education at West Point and then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. If nothing else, the book has given great insight into life as a cadet. It's a life I certainly would not want to lead, but you can't help but admire the people who go through it.

Richie and I ran to the market late in the afternoon. He has a lot of documents to print over the next couple of days, so his main purpose for the market run was to buy paper. Richie's downward spiral began when he tried to pay twenty-three Meticais for a thirty sheets of paper, even though each sheet only costs half a Met. From there, things only got worse for him. Since Mcel has gone down, Richie has bought some phone credit for Vodacom, the competing network here. Instead of buying a new SIM card, he's been using Sozinho's card. Earlier in the day, he put forty Mets of credit onto his card. When we came back, it was all gone. We figured this would happen, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating.

There was only one way to make our day better: cheese. Options abound, but we decided to go with fake chicken parmesan and spaghetti. It didn't bring back Richie's phone credit or completely alleviate his frustration, but it did make the evening a little more tolerable. The rest of the evening ran the same as last night. Richie went to bed, and I curled up with a book for a couple hours before sleeping

Tuesday picked up exactly where Monday left off: with one of us pissed off at Sozinho. I woke up – or rather, I was awakened – seven minutes before 5 o'clock. I hate waking up to the echo of Sozinho's voice from talking on the telephone in our bathroom. He thinks it minimizes the sound, but it doesn't help at all. I would rather wake up to the sound of a rooster than Sozinho's voice. I gave him a quick, bleary-eyed reprimanding: “I can hear every word. I already told you not to do this.” That pretty much marked the end of him talking to me for the day.

After a couple more hours of vivid dreams, I got back into the “The Unforgiving Minute”. While Sozinho washed dishes, in complete silence next to me, I read on the patio. I had expected Sozinho to be washing our clothing, seeing as we put it by the door last night. Our expectations of him, however, are rarely matched by reality.

Following lunch, with nothing to do, Richie and I realized that Tuesday afternoon was a perfectly reasonable time to get tanked. We headed over to the villa around 2:30 and commenced. Four hours and sixteen American-sized beers later, we were ready to go home for food. We cooked the easiest and fastest meal we could whip up – stir fry.

The rest of the evening was pretty standard. We had three episodes of “Spartacus” remaining. We really wanted to get through the remainder of the season. But after two episodes, we were both exhausted and I had a splitting headache. Sleep was the solution.

I woke up Wednesday morning without a hangover, which was a welcome surprise. This prompted Richie to propose us downing a bottle of scotch in the afternoon, to which I politely rejected. I think he was just as happy to hear my “no” answer.

Wednesday marked the fifth consecutive day that we have not had phone service. This is the longest stretch we've endured and, quite frankly, we're fuckin sick of it. Madinha had told us that it was nationwide, but she's full of shit. Maputo, Nampula, and Beira all have network. This, as far as know, is a Machanga-Mambone problem, and it's pissing us off.

By the time we got out of bed, Sozinho had already finished the laundry. He stayed up into the early hours of the morning washing instead of doing it at a regular human hour. We're done trying to understand this kid.

Most of the day was pretty slow. I made a run to the market to pick up some standard items – potatoes, garlic, toothpaste – so I can feel good about having done something. The rest of the morning, I continued in “The Unforgiving Minute”, right up until lunch.

I didn't wait long to start on dinner after finishing lunch. With the charcoal we had remaining from lunch, I lit a full stove's worth and started cooking beans. In the three hours they took, I finished my book. It was very good, well-written and fast-moving. I'd have to find something new for the rest of the week.

We ate our beans quickly and turned to the season finale of “Spartacus”. We figured that a whole bunch of people would die; this was only confirmed with an episode title of “Kill Them All”. We didn't expect everyone to die. That was one awesome episode of blood and death. We finished the episode around 8:00 and Richie was already done for the night. I stayed up for another hour or so before going to sleep.

Nobody was working on Thursday morning. I didn't hear a single school bell go off, even though school is supposed to continue through the week. Mcel wasn't working either. Day six without phone network has prompted us to buy our own Vodacom cards. We'll turn back to Mcel when it comes back, but it could be a while. We heard this morning that the there is a problem with the fiber optic cable that runs near Inhambane. There was a similar problem in the north last month, leaving them without Mcel for about a month. That's what we're preparing for now.

Also of note this week is that the temperature is starting to turn. We had a very light drizzle earlier in the week, but that was an anomaly. The days are getting hotter and hotter while the nights remain cool. The heat isn't intolerable yet, so we are soaking in these last few weeks. We know it won't be long until we'll only be sleeping with a sheet.

Considering that we're not actually “working”, I still had a fairly productive morning. I did some minor repairs around the house. Over the course of our time here, we've made some minor alterations to the house, resulting in no shortage of nail holes in our concrete house. I started to fill some of the bigger holes with twigs, a fairly effective method for filling in concrete bricks. At least it's a lot cleaner than filling them with concrete.

Richie and I were invited to a party in the afternoon, which meant it wouldn't be starting until well into the evening. Regardless, we went over to Madinha's to begin the festivities. We downed a couple beers as we watched Madinha and all the women in the family cook up a storm. Chicken after chicken was thrown onto a grill, multiple freshly killed goats were stewing on a couple fires, and the biggest pot I've ever seen was filled with an entire 25 kilo sack of rice. It reminded of a witch's cauldron. I'm pretty sure that I could balled up my body to fit inside it.

Around 7:30, we went over to the house where the party was to be held. We were celebrating the fiftieth birthday of a lady we've never met. Wherever you are, fifty is a number worth celebrating. In a country where the average life expectancy at birth is about forty, fifty deserves a huge party. The party was a surprise party, although I don't know how surprised she was. Nobody really hid. A bright moon did not help our cause. Either way, she was happy to be with her entire family and a lot of friends. We were happy because we got free dinner and beer. We stayed until around midnight before stumbling home

Before going to sleep, I told Sozinho that I wanted him to go over to Madinha's house at 5:30 in the morning. South African Greg, our long lost buddy, needed some stuff from our house and he was planning to cross the river at 6:00. In spite of my drunkenness, I made it clear that I wanted him to do this. So you can understand my frustration when I rolled out of bed to see him still asleep. I sarcastically asked him if he went, to which he said “I will”. Wrong answer. He would be in for a morning of hurt.

After talking my parents – the first time in a while because of this little phone network issue – I started ordering around Sozinho like a general. First he had to buy bread. Then wash our dishes. And finally, he had to go to Mambone to pay our energy bill and drop off the stuff for Greg. If nothing else, it meant we didn't have to see him all morning, which is a victory in itself.

The best part of the whole morning happened when Sozinho left. As he was on his way to Mambone, Greg came over with his son to pick up the package himself. I couldn't help but laugh. It's the first time he'd seen our house. He immediately noted that we lived much better than the former Volunteers in Mambone. True that.

Greg and his wife pushed back their departure time to the afternoon, so Greg stuck around a while. We eventually made our way over to the market to say goodbye. While we were there, Richie paid down a small debt and we bought potatoes. Just another exciting afternoon in Machanga.

The rest of the afternoon was quiet. I read for a little bit, cleaned up some of the electrical wiring around the house, did nothing in particular for a while. At some point, a math teacher from another school here came over for help with some problems. The problems were a little complex, but I walked him through it slow enough so he could understand.

As afternoon turned into evening, I became tired very quickly. After eating dinner, we put on “District 9”, a movie about aliens in Johannesburg. About thirty minutes into the movie, I couldn't keep my eyes open. By 8 o'clock, I was in bed, down for the count.

The exodus began early on Saturday. At least that is our assumption. A huge group of students were even louder than usual, probably excited to not be in Machanga for two or three weeks. They got out early before the sun came up, able to walk a good chuck of the day before the temperature rose.

For us, it just became all the more quiet. Some teachers had also made their way our of town, leaving very few behind. Those who stayed decided to celebrate the end of the trimester by drinking at 9 o'clock. I wasn't up for that. Plus I had a little project of my own. The handle on one of our pans broke off months ago, leaving a nearly unusable pan. I've tried to repair it twice before, but failed both times. Today, I thought a bit outside of the box and managed to whittle a functioning handle. Success!

Having done my job for the day, I could now start drinking. Richie started with the group at around 9. I jumped in around 11. A group of six of us knocked out a case pretty quickly. After a lunch break, the plan was to head out to the villa to the continue – all afternoon and well into the evening. I was tired as it was and knew if I had to be up all night, I would need a nap. I crawled into bed at 3:30 and was out cold by 3:31.

I woke up refreshed at 5 to head to the villa. I tried to play catch-up, but it's tough to make up for an hour and a half of lost time without some serious hard liquor. We stayed for a couple quiet hours, returning home briefly for dinner. Food in our bellies and slightly sobered up, we headed back out. It should have been a huge drinking night, but nobody really showed up. By 10:00, Richie was burnt out and I was over it. Clearly, no one got the message that it was supposed to be a drinking night.

Can we blame the network for that too?