Year 2 - Week 43: My Work Here Is Done (for the most part)

Sunday was a big day in our house. Not for us, of course. Sundays are usually boring, given that everyone in this town except us goes to church. But today, there was a bit of action around here before church started. Sunday was Sozinho's baptism day, which meant he was up and moving especially. Hey, just because he's being baptized today doesn't mean he's off the hook for his household responsibilities.

My responsibilities in the morning were rather limited. The last thing Sozinho asked me for in regards to his baptism (the list has been endless) was to tie his tie for him. One of the funny parts of Mozambican fashion is that guys like their ties really short, like barely past the their chest. With such a short tie, there was no way I could tie it on myself, take it off, and throw it on Sozinho. So I had to do what my dad used to do with me: stand in front of mirror, behind Sozinho, and tie it like that. Awkward? Yes. But it got the job done.

While everyone was at church, I made a run to the market. I've decided that Sunday mornings are a really good time to go to the market because I don't have to deal with anyone. All the drunkards are not drunk (yet) and there are no crowds to plow through. After the market run, the rest of the morning was spent reading "Lullaby", which is a waste of time.

I thought I was in for a quiet afternoon. Following lunch, I had planned to just relax. But shortly after we ate, one of our colleagues came over and invited us over to his house for a celebration lunch. Someone in his family was also baptized and he wanted us to be there to celebrate. This isn't strange at all. I don't say no when someone offers me free food and drink, so I went.

With a sufficient amount of wine, beer, and food in me, I returned home to do a bit of work. I had to print out my final exam, which I'm giving on Wednesday. I had hoped to print tonight and photocopy tomorrow so I don't have to stress when there is no paper or no toner on Tuesday.

We put together a pretty tasty meal for dinner: burritos. These burritos weren't as good as usual. No guacamole and no cheese really makes a huge difference. But throwing filet in the burritos made up for the loss. Our movie for the night was "The Book of Eli", which was pretty entertaining. By the time we finished the movie, I was back to sober and ready for bed.

That didn't mean I wasn't in for some punishment. I woke up at 2 in the morning with my stomach in a not. I knew I was going to be in for a long night. Two hours, four Peptos, and six trips to the bathroom later, I was back to better. I'm blaming the day-old beans we threw into the burritos.

Monday was a holiday in Mozambican -- shocking, I know. It was Peace and Reconciliation Day. At some point over the weekend, I had told someone that I would go to the plaza for the ceremony. But after a night of very little (and very poor) sleep, I wasn't up for it.

I was, however, able to stick to the far easier commitment of changing out someone's fluorescent light bulbs for standard light bulbs. She told me that her lights hadn't been working for four months. And just now, she decided that she'd had enough.

Instead of going to the plaza, I went to the market in search of some things for the house. One of our power outlets broke and a light switch is on the way to being busted. I want to have them fixed before we leave. The only thing impeding this is the fact that nobody in this village sells the right power outlet or switch. This place could really use a decent hardware store.

I knew that today was going to be a nap day, and after lunch, I did just that. It took about half a second for me to go from awake to asleep. The rest of the afternoon was spent getting through "Lullaby". It was the kind of book that was so bad I just wanted to have it finished, kind of like "All the King's Men". The only difference was this book was about a quarter of the length of "All the King's Men".

I wanted a simple dinner tonight and Richie actually proposed spaghetti. This should sit decently in my stomach. I didn't have any problems after 4 AM, but there was no sense in risking it. Tonight we watched Robin Williams's stand-up "Weapons of Self Destruction". It wasn't as funny as I anticipated but still had some good laughs.

Monday night's sleep went much better than Tuesday's. No waking up writhing in pain. And I woke up with the knowledge that today's class would be my last lesson. From here, I give my exam and return them and that's the show.

Before I could lesson plan, I needed to run to the market. Sozinho told me that he needed more detergent and I needed to buy a ream of paper. Apparently, when I said that I needed 400 sheets of paper, that was the school's cue to not go out and get a ream of paper. Fine. Once again, I realized that if you want something done right here, you better do it yourself.

So while I was at the market, I ran over to our colleague's photocopy shop. Sitting in the shop was a stack of paper reams. I told the kid that I wanted to buy a ream and he comes back with this nonsense: "I'm not authorized to sell this paper." This just about made my head explode. I told him "There's not an option here. I'm buying this paper. Elias (the colleague) knows about this." The fact that he didn't know about it -- that he was actually hundreds of kilometers away, in Beira -- made very little difference. I was getting this paper if I had to kill the kid. Luckily, it didn't come down to knives. He just gave me the paper. Success.

Back at home, paper in hand, I got to lesson planning. Today's lesson wasn't at all about English. It was all about the exam. I wanted to outline what the kids could expect on the exam, in terms of number of questions, distribution of questions, and types of questions. Yes, this would take 45 minutes.

Right after lunch, I went into school to give the lesson that I had prepared. It went shockingly well. The types of questions that I explained were kind of complicated -- having to do with word order, punctuation, and paragraph-making. We'll see how much sticks on the exam.

Oh yes, the exam. My master plan for this year was to give parts of National Exams for each of their three finals. For this last final, I wanted to give a complete exam that was given earlier in the year. This was especially masterful because 1) I wouldn't have to think of questions; 2) it would give the students a chance to take a full exam before actually taking it November; and 3) the closest place that a person could get this exam was more than a hundred miles away.

It goes without say that someone got their hands on the exam. So much for being masterful. The kid came over asking for some help with some questions. When I saw that he had the exam, I almost had a seizure. I couldn't let him have this. That would just be unfair. I told him that I needed some time with the exam. I'll hold on to it and help him tomorrow afternoon...after the exam. It was then that he may have realized that I'd be giving this exact exam for his final. Should be interesting.

After I dealt with this kid, Richie made a run to the market to buy a chicken and I ran to the office to make photocopies. The photocopies were the easy part. The computer full of viruses was more of a challenge. It turned on just fine, but the desktop never loaded. This is the second time I've seen this problem here, only this time, the stakes were higher. This computer was full of documents pertaining to National Exams. Okay. I threw thing in safe mode, grabbed my external hard drive, and saved everything, including the school's backside.

I came home just in time to cook dinner. For the first time in a while, we grilled the chicken. Sozinho cooked rice and made salad. It was all quiet delicious. After eating, we watched "State of Play", which will probably be the winning movie for this week. Very good. While we watched, I collated and stapled together all of the exams for tomorrow. And after the movie, I got into a new book, Dante's "Inferno". I am very poorly read when it comes to classics, and this one seems pretty good.

Wednesday was D-Day here. Final exam, emphasis on final. Two more hours of sitting in class, watching kids try to cheat, and it will all be over. In the meantime, my room had to be Fort Knox. There's no way Sozinho can get his hands on those exams. I'd like to say I trust him, but I only trust him about as far as I can throw him.

All said, it was a quiet morning. No lesson to plan, no market run to make. Richie had exams in the morning. He's in for a long day: exams all morning, plus more than half of the afternoon. I only added to his work load by having him help me proctor my exam late this afternoon.

My only job for the morning was getting my hands on the money that the students are supposed to put together for the exam. I have literally given them weeks to find five Meticais. That's it. Five. And yet, when I went to get money from one of the classes, only a third of the kids had given their money. How is that possible? I'm going to have to figure this out this afternoon.

Before I could give my exams, I had to watch over one of Richie's classes. It's really sad that the only people we can trust when it comes to this stuff are each other. But it's simple: we have higher cheating standards than everyone else here. This obviously frustrates the students, and yet, they keep on trying. Richie threw out his entire class because they were all acting like shitheads. My class eventually threw me out and got Richie instead, which was for the better because I wanted to kill most of those students.

In comparison, my kids were a breeze. Richie had one class and I had the other. I told them that if anyone cheats, Richie has full permission to give zeroes, and he is not in good mood. I think they got the point. Only one kid in his class had to be moved. When that final bell rang, the only thing I could think was, My work here is done. Sure, there's still some stuff to do, but for the most part, I'm finished.

With exams done, all I had to do was correct the suckers. There were about 100 exams to be corrected. I knew this wasn't a job for tonight -- it could wait until tomorrow -- but I did want to correct the exams of the students who help teachers here. It wasn't many, six or seven at most. Sozinho did shockingly well. If he does as well on the National Exam, he will easily pass.

Once word got out that I was correcting exams, students started coming in over in groups of three or four asking for their grades. So I graded on command. If the student showed up, they could have their grade. In all, about twenty students came over. It may have prevented me from eating my chicken dinner and watching "The Hangover", but it did make good dent in my corrections for tomorrow. As soon as the movie ended, I crawled into bed, dead exhausted.

I wasn't surprised that I slept well. Straight through the night until 6 in the morning. I figured that as long as I was awake, I could get corrections done. So I corrected all morning, right up until lunch time. Sozinho wasn't the only one to do well. In his class, 83 percent of the group passed. In the other class, a pathetic 55 percent passed. This from the letters/language group. Combine, they passed at a 72 percent rate, way better than the students from last year did on National Exams. Let's hope that everyone who passed this exam passes in November and some of the borderline kids can make the jump also. If that happens, I will feel really good about giving difficult exams.

There were only two things on my schedule for the afternoon lunch and napping, two of my favorite activities. It's amazing how tiring sitting and grading can be. More mind-numbing than strenuous. Regardless, by 2 o'clock, I was down for the count. The rest of the afternoon was spent working my way through some chapters of "Dante's Inferno". The descriptions of the circles of hell have been pretty sweet.

We broke back into our stash of filet for dinner, stir-frying it with some veggies. For our entertainment, we watched a pretty bad film called "Chloe". Won't be going back to that one any time soon. Knowing that we had a long day ahead of us, it was time for bed.

Richie and I were up and moving pretty early on Friday. Between our school schedules and financial needs, I feel like it's the first time in a while that we've traveled anywhere together. There aren't a lot more of these trips, two or three tops.

The travel day started out promising. We got to the river and instead of waiting for another person to get in the canoe with us, we paid an extra 5 Mets each to go now. From there, we thought we were golden. A Land Cruiser was just about to leave and was heading to Beira. That was fine by us: we'll take that to the crossroads. But all that glitters isn't gold. The dude screwed around in Mambone for an hour before we left. There goes our shot at breaking the record for getting to Vil.

In a strange way though, it may have been a blessing. I'd much rather wait in a Land Cruiser than at the crossroads, and the timing couldn't have been better. As soon as we got to the crossroads, we got a car that was heading to Maputo. And we didn't have to pay for it. Then, as soon as we got to the crossroads for Vilanculos, another car was heading to Vil. We happily paid to be in the sedan. We still managed to make it in under five hours. Funny how a five-hour travel day is an easy day now.

Once we arrived in town we had some time to spare. Another Volunteer wanted to meet us for lunch at New York Pizza, but she had to finish up at school. Sucker. We got some shopping done before heading over for delicious pizza lunch. It never fails to make us happy and full.

We had big plans for the evening, but before that, I needed a nap. I only fell asleep for fifteen or twenty minutes, but man did it help. In the hour or so that we had, four of us played "Phase 10", a great rummy-type game. We only got about half way through the game. If we have time, we'll finish tomorrow.

Our big plans for the night were watching rugby at Smugglers hotel. I know, kind of ridiculous. Besides it being an entertaining game, it was actually a good learning opportunity. One of our colleagues in Inhassoro (who was in town) played rugby at UCLA, so he was able to explain all the things that I hadn't picked up. Given America's love of violent, hard-hitting sports, it's kind of a surprise that more Americans don't like rugby.

After watching rugby, we split into two groups. One group, the tired group, heading home for the night. Meanwhile, a group of about six of us went out to a bar called Tropical to continue the party. And party we did. I knew exactly when I hit my breaking point, but another Volunteer (and one of my best friends here) didn't. By the end of the night, I ended up as babysitter, which was fine by me. I've been taken care of plenty of time in these situations. It all evens out. Once she was asleep, I fell asleep very quickly. And without the dreaded Spins.

I only got four hours of sleep Friday night, but at least it was good sleep. I woke up with a bit of a headache, but that should be expected. My friend, on the other hand, woke up unaware of what had happened for a good portion of the evening. We spent about an hour reconstructing her evening before she fell asleep.

On the other hand, I was up and moving. I knew at the other Vil house that there were plans for pancakes and ocean. I could definitely get on board with that. I got a sweet ride from one side of town to the other, saving me about twenty minutes of walking. One of the Volunteers made some pretty killer pancakes from scratch while we waited for the tide to go out.

A brief explanation. In most situations, one would wait for the tide to come in to go swimming. But on this section of beach, there isn't a lot of beach, just a lot of craggy rocks. There's not much point in fighting with the rocks. It's worth the wait to step on nice soft sand. Unfortunately, we waited a bit too long. The tide in Vil goes out forever. We had to walk almost a mile just to get to a decent patch of ocean. Once we got there, it was beautiful. The water isn't bathtub warm yet. And it was just cool enough to feel good under the hot heat of the sun.

Tired, sun burnt, and hungry, five of us went scavenging for food. We came across a take-away chicken place. In theory, take-away is Mozambican fast-food. In practice, not so much. We waited a good 90 minutes for our chicken. It was good chicken, but not worth the wait.

From there, Richie and I split off to head to the other Vil house. I had the keys and phone of the girl who I babysat for and we knew she would want these things back. But when we got to her house, she was nowhere to be found. We sat around for a while before finally getting in touch with her roommate. They didn't plan on coming back before dinner, which was fine because we had plans on meeting them for dinner.

The plan was to go to a place called Complexo Alemanha. We've been to this restaurant before, but just recently, they started serving pizza. We wanted to see how this pizza stacked up to New York Pizza. But by the time 7:00 rolled around, all of us were too tired and unmotivated to go anywhere. Instead, we ordered New York Pizza, which has free delivery. Don't judge me for eating pizza back-to-back days.

The rest of the night was, as expected, quiet. We drank socially, not gluttonously, and just talked while sitting in a tree house. It was a nice relaxing way to end the week.