Year 2 - Week 40: Top Cuts

With English theater taking place this weekend and my boss heading to Mambone early in the week, I knew that I'd be busy. I just didn't know how busy I would be.

The work began Sunday morning with preparations for English theater. One of the scenes of the play takes place in South African diamond mines. It's not really enough to have a sign that says “South Africa Mining Co.”; we needed props. I went on the hunt for some thin tree branches to make pick axes. The picks were secured with wire and covered with black plastic bags and packing tape to make them look metallic. Considering the resources, they turned out well.

That little task kept me busy all the well until lunch. A little after lunch, we got a visit from the new Brazilian volunteer here. She is the person who replaced Alexis. She's here for a year which means – finally – we'll be leaving before someone else here. We told her the same thing as Alexis – our house is open if she ever just needs to get away from the orphanage.

I spent a little bit of the afternoon continuing in “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”. Unlike Richie, I think the book – for the most part – is pretty good. It has some painfully slow parts, but otherwise it's enjoyable. Later in the afternoon, I fired up the carvao and cooked beans.

Wedged in between phone calls from my grandmother and parents, Richie and I had dinner. I don't know what I did right this time, but these beans were probably the best beans I've cooked here. People are quick to knock rice and beans as a meal, but it's probably the healthiest and tastiest thing we eat here. It's not like it's just rice and beans with nothing added. It requires no oil, is high in protein and fiber and uses lots of veggies.

For our entertainment tonight, we watched “The Hurt Locker”. It was good, but not Oscar-worthy. I haven't seen “Avatar” yet, but from what I heard, it sounds amazing. As for other movies that came out last year, I liked “Up in the Air” and “The Blind Side” more than “The Hurt Locker”. In my humble opinion, “The Hurt Locker” winning Best Picture was as much of an anti-war political statement as Obama winning the Nobel having accomplished nothing as president.

I didn't sleep particularly well on Sunday night, but what else is new? This time, it was a combination of the beans getting to my stomach and the Larium getting to my head. Good thing I had a crazy busy day ahead.

I was scheduled to go into English theater practice on Monday morning, but the timing interfered with a higher priority: a quick trip to Mambone. My boss was in town to check out a couple of houses for the soon-to-arrive Moz 15s. He brought some meds up for me. In exchange, I passed off some paperwork and Peace Corps books to him. The trip, maybe four or five kilometers in total, took up the entire morning.

As long as I was in the sun and sweaty, I figured I'd knock out two more tasks. I went to buy bread but there was no bread. I would have bought it in Mambone, but I had almost no money left after paying our energy bill and shopping. The second task was much more successful. I figured that while I was paying my bill, I could bring back bills for the other teachers here. Before rewarding myself with lunch, I handed the bills out too all the teachers.

All of that work should have earned me a nap, but there was more work to be done. While I was in Mambone, Sozinho went out to find me some bamboo to hold up some English theater signs. I spent the next couple hours cutting down and taping up bamboo to paper. They're far from perfect, but they'll do.

I took a brief break from sign-making to go hunting. Yes, hunting. For the last couple of days, there has been a rat in our bathroom. I have yet to see it, so as far as I'm concerned, ignorance is bliss. But everyone else has seen it. We tried to bait it with chicken bones and peanut butter, but the little guy wouldn't come out. We sat waiting for a couple hours, but he never appeared. Good thing we have the time to waste.

Late in the afternoon, I got back to sign-making. I had one last sign to draw and secure with bamboo. It was maybe an hour of work. I though that I was done for the day, but just after dinner, my English theater counterpart came over to write up a permission slip for our actors and actresses. There are plenty of things I can do in Portuguese, but formal letter writing is not among those skills.

Being busy all day was clearly the solution for getting a good night's sleep. For the first time in weeks, I managed to sleep through the night.

I continued riding the wave of business into Tuesday morning. The little shop that sells bread finally got a shipment in from Mambone. After the bread run, I took a couple minutes to write up a summary of our play for the people who will be judging the plays. My productive morning finished up with lesson planning for the day.

Class went alright today. I had two quick classes, back to back. The lesson was on phrasal verbs with “look”. I think it went well because I was able to make fun of some students to get across the point. One girl came in really late. Normally she has hair extensions, but today, she came in with a head shaved perfectly smooth. So I got to write on the board “It looks like Albertina lost her hair”. Everyone in the class laughed, but her. Mind you, she looked beautiful. She didn't laugh because she didn't understand what I wrote because she wasn't in class. Eventually, someone explained it to her. You'd think you wouldn't be able to see people so dark-skinned blush, but this girl's cheeks turned bright pink. In the other class, I had Sozinho to pick on: “Sozinho looks like a monkey.” Once again, everyone appreciated this except for the target.

Upon my return from class, I got stopped by a teacher who needed some help solving some math problems. Good thing he's teaching math, huh? They were actually pretty tough problems. All of them involved logarithms and substitution, from which I am years removed. I got a brief review of how logarithms work, then got cracking on the problems. I got the answers for all three, but was only able to truly solve one. One of them, I knew I couldn't resolve. The third one, however, I knew could be solved but just wasn't sure how. This was going to kill me.

I tried to solve that problem for thirty minutes, but came away empty-handed. Maybe a nap would help. At least I got myself a bit of rest. Once awake, I dove into “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. A wanted to read this before “A.H.W.O.S.G.” but got caught up into the Eggers book. I read until the energy came on, at which time I ran over to the office to print out the permission slips for the kids.

The night was way longer than I wanted it to be. We had a pretty good stir fry for dinner and watched “Up” afterward. “Up” was way better than “The Hurt Locker” from last week. One of these days, an animated film is going to win Best Picture. It probably should have been this one. After the movie, I crawled into bed to do some more reading until about 10 o'clock. When I turned the lights out, I was wide awake. The nap from earlier did me in. I rolled around for two hours before I decided to make myself useful. At midnight, I grabbed the math problem I had been working on and solved it in about five minutes. Maybe that was on my mind because within a couple minutes of solving the problem, I was sound asleep.

Wednesday started with an English theater that lasted all morning. This was our last day of practice before we head to Chimoio on Friday, so my colleague and I wanted to make sure that everything was running as smoothly as possible. We ran through the play maybe seven or eight times, until we were satisfied. We both believe that it's a top-three play. We'll see this weekend.

Theater practice brought me right up to lunch, which was convenient because I was starving. Even though Richie and I both teach late – he begins third period, I begin fifth – we both wanted to be done eating by 12:30 because of the huge possibility that our students want us to teach early. While I waited, prayed that my students would come to get me early, I typed up a document that a student had asked me to type.

Finally, around third period, the student who asked me to type the document came by – both to see if the document had been typed and if I could come into class to teach. Yes and yes. We're marching on with phrasal verbs, at least through next week. Today's phrasal verbs all involved the verb “take”. There are only about a thousand phrasal verbs with “take”. I could already the hear the “Teacher! Enough!” complaints, so I chose eight common, easy ones.

I wanted to get out of the house after class, so I ran to the market looking for nothing in particular. We needed some things, but nothing that couldn't wait. I walked over to the butchery to see if they had any beef and I hit the jackpot. The butcher had been saving filet for someone, but he was running hours late (go figure) and the butcher wanted money now. Really? Filet? I'll take two kilos of that.

I did a bit of reading before getting dinner ready. This was going to be a glorious night of eating. Sozinho told me he wanted to cook the meat. I laughed at him. He would probably live up to his nickname and ruin it. I wasn't going to let him to do that. Not to my glorious filet mignon. I cut, seasoned and barbecued. It was the best meat we've had in this country. I'm really happy I bought two kilos of it. Most of it is still sitting in our friend's freezer.

Richie crashed shortly after dinner. I did a bit of reading before following suit.

It was a pretty quiet morning on Thursday. I read for a little bit before realizing that I still hadn't resolved the issue of how we would be getting to Chimoio. A school car from Mangunde is supposed to take us, but we've heard nothing about it. I talked to the person responsible for arranging these things. It took a bit of teeth-pulling, but by lunchtime, I had an answer. The car would arrive sometime tomorrow morning and we'd be on our way.

I had class immediately after lunch. This was the same lesson as yesterday, but for the other class. They seemed to pick it up as easily as the first group. As anticipated, I got one “Teacher! Enough!” complaint. “How are we going to pass the midterm? There are thirty verbs to remember!” Clearly, he was not around for my diatribe a couple weeks ago, when I told them that they should all be studying maybe fifteen minutes every night.

I ran to the market after class to pick up some supplies for dinner. We're doing beans, but we were missing onions, a vital ingredient, and needed eggs for tomorrow. I only had to wait an hour between returning home and starting the fire to get cooking.

While the beans cooked, I ran over to the school office to print out a document for one of my students. I told him to come by in the morning to pick it up, but I wouldn't be around. I'm sure he'll be happy to get his hands on it from whomever.

The beans, as usual, we're delicious. I would eat rice and beans every night, but too much beans can actually lead to blindness. It's a shame because aside from this, it is a perfect meal. For our entertainment tonight, we watched “Sons of Anarchy”. It's a pretty shitty show – bad plot lines, really bad writing, and worse yet acting – but we're probably going to suffer through the entire season.

I woke up on the early end Friday morning. It's not that I was anticipating the car arriving early – I thought it would be here between 8:30 and 9; I just had some things I needed to do before getting out of here, like showering and packing. I was wrong with my estimation. The car rolled up at 9:07. Can't complain about that. Also can't complain about the fact that all of my students were already at school when the car arrived. It's all about anticipation: I told them to be at school at 8:00. My guess is that most of them arrived around 8:45.

There were ten of us going up to Chimoio, with only four seats in the truck. The other six of us piled into the back of the truck. The first 60 kilometers down the dirt road was pretty miserable. Once we hit pavement, it was smooth sailing. We stopped in Muxungue for some delicious egg sandwiches. It was here that we were told that we'd have to go into Mangunde to swap drivers.

Whatever. It set us back two hours and we had to endure another fifty kilometers of dirt road, but it was fine. If there was any upside, it's that I was able to check my email, thanks to Mangunde's wifi connection and my iTouch.

From Mangunde, things went by quickly. We had maybe another three hours in the car before we arrived in Chimoio. We got the kids settled into their rooms. Naturally, they were all glued to the televisions. There was no rest for me, though. After taking a shower, I got right back to work.

For at least a couple hours, we were busy hounding the staff of the hotel to get dinner going. The didn't realize that people were on the road all day and we wanted to eat at a normal hour. The first of two groups ended up eating at 8:00. The kitchen staff was moving ineffectively. Three people were working on putting together a food of plate: one person serving, one person holding the plate, one person running the plate outside. I decided to take over this operation, putting together an assembly line. This newly-found efficiency prompted a marriage proposal from one of the women working in the kitchen. I told her that she just wanted me for my kitchen skills.

The second shift ran much smoother. While the first group finished up, I helped wash dishes and put the next round of plates together. The second group had no wait time, which is how it should be.

The fight continued after dinner. The hotel was really screwing us on price. We were not really receiving what we were paying for. And they just dropped the price increase on us without warning. We yelled and negotiated for half an hour, eventually getting half of the plates at a reduced price.

The last thing we had to do was put together small sandwiches for the students for breakfast. It was a stressful day to say the least, and I wasn't even the one most stressed. Bryan, our colleague in Mangunde, was in charge of the whole event. You could only imagine the stress he was under. Once everyone was fed and in bed, I took him out for a beer or two as a reward.

The big day finally arrived for our students. Everybody was up and out of the hotel around 7 o'clock. We walked over to the theater, about 20 minutes away. I think all of the students were overwhelmed by how big the place was. By around 8:30, we got the show started. Machanga would be performing second, which was nice for us. We'd get it done right away, the kids wouldn't have to think about what they were doing, and I could be of help to Bryan for the rest of the afternoon.

Our kids did really well. We had two minor mistakes, but otherwise things went very well. I couldn't have asked for it to run much smoother. And yet, as is human nature, the kids were all worried about the mistakes they made.

After our students went, I wasn't able to watch any of the plays. First I was busy organizing – then cleaning – snack. Following snack, I ran into town to find Bryan to help him with lunch. We got lunch to the students around 12:45, then I got all the lunch stuff cleaned up.

The timing worked out pretty well. I got everything squared away right when the plays ended. The judges took their sweet time determining the places. Amazingly, the judges started at last place. We were all blown away by this. As the judges read the school names, Machanga was never mentioned. There's a chance that we could actually win. We got to the top three without being mentioned. “Number three – New Horizons School”. Crap, we could actually win. “Number two – Machanga”.

The students were happy. Really happy. They were probably a little disappointed that they didn't win – and that they were so close to winning – but it's hard to be sad about it. They placed second out of 14 schools. And when you take into account that so many of the schools have so many good (Zimbabwean) English speakers, it's even more amazing. Whatever disappointment our students had was quickly erased when the judges announced that one of our students (deservedly) won best actor.

I had planned on taking care of some shopping, but that plan was quickly erased when someone proposed getting a drink. Of course, the situation quickly devolved. A bottle of Jameson was brought out, more beers rolled out. Eight hours later, we were all pretty toasted. I ate dinner around midnight. I had to wait almost an hour for my chicken, but I can't complain. It was too good of a week to end on a bad note.