We tried. Kind of.
The idea was to leave Vilanculos on Sunday, relax on Monday, and get back to work on Tuesday. I headed out to the market around 7:30 to see if the chapa had arrived, but nothing was there. Maybe it was just late. I returned around 8 and still it had not arrived. This was getting suspicious.
Having gone twice already, Richie relieved me of my duty. He staked out at the chapa stop around 8:30, but the chapa still had not arrived. And it wasn’t going to at all today. Richie called the chapa driver and because of the holiday, he was taking the day off. Reasonable, I guess, but it would have been nice to know earlier.
Prepped to leave…wasn’t meant to be
As other people started to leave, we figured that we could also get home. After all, getting north to Maluvane is easy, and we could probably get a ride from Maluvane to Mambone. But was it worth the risk? A hundred and fifty yards out of the house, Richie said, “I’m not opposed to staying another night”. This sentiment was echoed by Alexis, and then by me. Just like that, we were staying in Vilanculos for another night.
Getting home clearly was not meant to be. Us staying in Vilanculos for the day clearly was. Everything that could go right did. With our newly acquired bicycle, I rode down to the other end of town to order some pizzas for the three of us. Within minutes of the pizzas coming out of the oven, Richie and Alexis walked in. All we wanted this weekend was to eat pizza, and the extra day here gave us the opportunity.
And when in beautiful Vilanculos, you might as well go to the beach. And so we did. The ocean was absolutely fantastic, and to make the day better, a couple of artists came by to sell their work. Usually I’m standoffish with these people, but as we get closer to Christmas, I know that the prices are going to get out of control. I bought a nice painting and Alexis went crazy and got three.
Exhausted from the ocean, we decided to pretty much call it a day. We ran to the market to buy some dinner ingredients. Richie took care of dinner for the night. As it rained outside, we ate dinner and watched some “House”. By 8:30, wiped, we were all in bed.
My forehead was turned into a Braille book by Monday morning. Three nights of sleeping without a bed net did me in. We packed up our things, said our goodbyes (which was a lot less awkward today, since we were actually leaving), and headed out to the vila to catch our ride.
The chapa ride was tolerable, at least for Alexis and me. Richie was squeezed in between us, with one buttcheek on one seat and one on another seat. He also claimed that there was an umbrella poking his ass, but I didn’t see any umbrella.
On our walk back from the river to the our house, we saw a very small monkey run no more than twenty yards in front of us. Super cool.
We were once again happy to be back in Machanga. What a strange feeling. We cooked up some sandwiches, watched the end of season three of “Dexter” and called it a night.
I’ve decided that I like the taste of freedom, but with the sweet taste of freedom comes the bitter taste of boredom. A portion of my morning on Tuesday was trying to resolve a major issue with the GRE. There are only four days in between the GRE and the presidential election. And while we hope that nothing will go wrong, there are security risks. Our director worked vigilantly with the embassy and the GRE people to see what we can do about the situation. In the end, I took the safe way out: moving the test back until February. It probably won’t hurt my situation. While four months is a long time to wait – and as much as I just want to get the test done – it will probably prove beneficial in the long run.
I was back to work on Tuesday. This was it – the grand finale. Two more days of work and I’m done for the year. All I have to do is hand back exams. Once again, luck was one my side. It looks like Year Two is shaping up okay. I was able to get back all six groups of exams back to my students. Goodbye students. I’ll see you next year.
While I waited to hand back exams to one of my classes, I noticed that there was a strange, white-ish blob sitting on one of the windowsills. I wondered if this was the long-lost sticky-tack that I have been trying to find for weeks. I pushed it with my finger, hoping for something solid and sticky. Instead, it was soft and slippery. No, my sticky-tack didn’t melt: it was just a very large, white frog.
I almost didn’t know what to do with myself for the rest of the afternoon. So I sat on the patio and did nothing. Oh Machanga, how you beat me down sometimes.
At some point in the afternoon, I made a run to the market. Now that we have a bicycle, going to the market is nearly a joy. We can leave the house, buy everything we need, and get back home in two minutes. The only downside is now we have to figure out what to do with that extra 50 minutes.
We had hoped that we could watch “I Love You, Man” tonight. This was among our selections from a DVD buying binge in Vilanculos. Unfortunately, Ussene, one of our colleagues, asked us to type up some exams for him. We thought we could bang them out in an hour, but it ended up taking twice as long. So much for a movie tonight. Instead, we cooked up a late dinner and went to bed without watching anything.
Richie and I decided to passear to the vila once the stores opened. We had no expectations. All we really needed were potatoes. Then all of a sudden, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s showed up on a table outside on of our favorite stores. Jack? In Mozambique? We can’t pass up American booze! We washed it down with 2M’s and Manica’s – local brews – and walked back in the dark to cook dinner.
We were going to cook chili tonight, but that was going to require a serious amount of work. Instead, we went with low-maintenance pasta and sauce. After we ate, we finally got around to “I Love You, Man”, which was funny albeit a little predictable. And outside of the midnight wake-up and conversation, I slept a glorious sleep.
I made my regularly scheduled market run on Thursday morning to fend of the now regularly scheduled morning boredom. Our needs were few. With the bicycle, we are not able to go to the market every day with no problem. But there was one notable success. We have been looking for some five-liter oil containers to use as weights and I finally found them. Great success! I also passed off one of my Bruce Springsteen t-shirts to one of the store owners. In our drunken haze, we had this epic conversation about American music that he liked. Springsteen was among the names he mentioned, so I figured he would enjoy this little gift.
After relaxing for a bit, I headed back out to deal with some passport stuff. I recently handed over my passport to the office to have my visa renewed for another year. I have a certified copy of my passport, but we have been told that the copies expire after six months. However, the local notary informed me that as long as the visa was good, the stamp was good. Okay.
We enjoyed a late lunch. With a wide schedule in the afternoon, we are no longer tied to eating lunch before noon. Instead, we can wait until a reasonable hour to enjoy our food. After lunch, Richie headed to a class to cover some lectures for a teacher while I sat on the patio listening to music. Once he got back from class, we filled our new containers with water and sand. We are now the proud owners of two sets of authentically Mozambican weights.
Later in the afternoon, Richie wanted to take the bike out for a ride. But there was a small problem: the back tire went flat. A couple of kids came over to fix it, but by the time it was done, Richie was in no mood to go anywhere. After all, the energy was just about to come on. While he relaxed, I got in an actual workout. It felt good. Very good.
We once again had a late dinner, but this time, the choice was ours. We threw in “The Hangover” while the beans took their time cooking. The movie was funny – outrageous, actually. It made me miss Vegas. By the time we finished dinner around 8:15, we were both toast. The lights weren’t out, but it was close enough to give up for the night.
For having nothing to do on Friday, I had a thoroughly productive. Okay, “productive day” may be a bit exaggerated, but productive afternoon would be a valid statement. The morning was for the most part boring. After waking up to a flurry of text messages concerning my brother’s presence at my beloved San Jose Sharks’ home opener, I rallied myself out of bed...for a couple hours, anyway.
In between waking up and my late morning nap, I continued reading “The Masked Rider” by Neal Peart, the drummer of Rush. It’s not the greatest read. I mean, when you’ve been called “muzungu” for the last year, it’s really hard to sympathize for someone who has been called “white man” for a mere month.
After eating lunch, I thought I would do something reasonable. With our newly made set of weights, I did a solid lower-body workout followed by a brief bike ride to cool down. Other than being ridiculously sore afterward, I felt good. Hell, being sore even felt good.
And, really, is there a better post-workout drink than three beers? I just don’t think so. Richie and I headed to the vila to chill with Medinha, one of our favorite storeowners. She always buys us beers, and on this day, she busted out meat and cheese. Meat and cheese!
Richie and I returned to a lit up house. Nice timing, for sure. After the spectacular meat and cheese platter, we weren’t all that hungry. We didn’t even bother cooking dinner. Instead, we put on “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”, not a bad movie, and called it a night.
Boring. Mundane. This was worsened by the fact that almost nobody was around. A lot of teachers are in Beira dealing with university stuff. The people who remained disappeared somewhere, presumably for a political rally. Rarely have I seen this place so dead.
After a workout and a satisfying lunch, I ran over to the market briefly to pick up some items. Nothing special, mainly candles so I can read at night. In truth, though, the market run just broke the monotony of sitting on the porch doing Sudoku. Yea, it was that kind of afternoon.
Our night was pretty regular. We had nothing new-ish to watch, so we watched a couple episodes of “30 Rock” and that was that. Another week down. School year done.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Year 1 - Week 42: One
We were supposed to be back on the road before 8 o’clock on Sunday, like everyone else. The only problem was our car wasn’t anywhere close to Chimoio. Like not even in the same province. It was only a taste of what the rest of the day would be like.
There was an upside to the delay. One of our goals for the weekend was to get to Shop-Rite, where we could get all sorts of luxury items like chocolate. The morning would be perfect. Except it wasn’t. I thought I had a ride out to the market, but that wasn’t meant to be. The car got half way there, picked up some other kids, then turned back to our hostel. Well, I guess that means I have to give up.
There was, however, some consolation. Gigabottle, a little burger and beer place just up the road from the hostel, was already open. Even though it was only 9:30, I was ready for a burger and, apparently, so were three other Volunteers. The only problem was that they were out of hamburgers. Fine, we’ll take hotdogs and three egg sandwiches for the vegetarian in the group. The dogs came out fine, but the place ran out of gas for the burner a quarter of the way through cooking the eggs. I thought I could get a discount on the eggs, but the chefe said no. At least the person working the place got a good laugh out of the attempt.
Okay, we were pretty happy with our hotdogs and cheese sandwiches, a reasonable substitute for egg sandwiches. Things seemed to be coming together. By the time we finished eating, the car had just about arrived to Chimoio.
We were in the same tiny truck that we arrived in. Four seats and thirteen passengers meant nine of us had to be in the back of the truck. And seeing that Richie is white as glue and I’m well beyond bronze, we all knew who would be sitting in the back of the truck for six hours in the midday sun. The ride turned out to be not so bad and a few kilometers down the road toward Machanga, we saw monkeys again, which put smiles on everyone’s faces.
Our arrival nearly coincided with the energy coming on. With the bell pepper that we picked up, we had the perfect missing ingredient for stir fry. After eating dinner and watching a couple episodes of “Dexter”, I caught up with my parents and grandparents.
I was in for a boring morning on Monday. In fact, by the end of this week, I will be in for a lot of boring mornings. Richie was pretty bored too, other than for the 45 minutes he was proctoring an exam. During those 45 minutes, he was especially bored.
I know how bored he was because I had the pleasure of controlling exams for the entire afternoon. I should have had six consecutive periods of test giving, but thanks to the gloriousness that is cancelled class, I was able to combine a couple of classes and be done in four hours. Valeo!
The only problem with giving exams, again, is that I have to correct them. The good news about these exams is that, unlike my midterms, these things are multiple choice. That means that I can correct one forty-question exam in about ninety seconds. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to correct exams today. This is a job that can wait for tomorrow. Going to the villa with Richie for a celebratory soda is a much better option.
Our night was not too bad. We cooked up some chicken sandwiches, watched some “30 Rock” and called it a night.
I woke up Tuesday morning to a strangely empty house. Richie had talked about going across the river to Mambone in search of a phone charger, but I didn’t think he was actually motivated enough to go. It took me a second to realize where he went.
With the house to myself, I was able to be wildly productive. But not with grading papers. I swept and mopped the house, pumped three buckets-worth of water, attempted to clean the stovetop, and washed the dishes from last night.
Having procrastinated enough, and with absolutely nothing left to be cleaned, I decided it was time to grade some papers. Everybody seems to be doing really well – very few failures overall. Once I average their final exam score with their last midterm – which everyone tanked – everyone’s grades should be okay.
Not including thirty minutes for lunch, the grading was incessant. Nearly four hours after I started correcting exams, I was almost done with all the exams from yesterday. I would have finished if my students hadn’t come by and asked me to give their exam early.
After proctoring my last twelfth grade exam, I got right back to correcting exams. I had three-quarters of the exams correcting by the time the energy came on. We ate our dinner and I punched in some grades while we watched some “Dexter”.
I was excited on Wednesday, for Wednesday was my unofficial last day of work. I think the students were even more excited as it was the last day that they would have to deal with me speaking a foreign language to them. But before I could give my last two sets of exams, I had some work to do.
I put off correcting Tuesday’s exams because I wanted something to do this morning. I figured that correcting exams would be a good way to fill the morning, but this class did better than all the others. Less marking meant less time correcting and I was left bored for a good portion of the morning. At least I was all caught up on correcting exams…for an hour, anyway.
After lunch, it was back into the classroom for me. Two more exams. Just two more exams and I’m done for the year. It seemed like these three hours dragged on forever. It may have been because a lot of students used the entire ninety minutes, but I think my anxiety to be done was the main cause. Shockingly, there were no cheaters: not in these classes, not in any classes. I guess after six months of handing out zeros, the students realized they shouldn’t fuck around when I give an exam
I had no intention to work the rest of the afternoon. This would be an afternoon of relaxation. I broke out the Sudoku book for a bit before starting dinner. After dinner, we watched our regular “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.
Now I’m left with quite the challenge. I have a total of sixty exams to correct and then I’m home free, done correcting exams until March. The problem with having nothing to do, though, is that there is nothing to do. It’s not like having nothing to do in America, where you could easily kill a day watching YouTube videos and repeats of SportsCenter. Having nothing to do means staring blankly off our patio, maybe studying, and occasionally stabbing our eyes with pencils to make sure we are awake. For what it is worth, I did absolutely nothing of value today.
The truth is, I should have corrected those last two sets of exams, but what’s the point? I have an entire week to correct them. Going to the market, getting a coke, and throwing around the Frisbee for a bit seemed like much better options for the morning.
Those activities were almost productive. The afternoon was even less so. For hours on end, I sat on my patio and filled out Sudoku grids. It was the kind of afternoon that almost made me just give up for the day.
Once the energy came on, things turned around. I was able to be a little productive with the help of a computer. I spent a bit of time punching in grades to the spreadsheet and applying a curve to my second midterm. With the curve, the students are passing at a reasonable rate. My work done, we cooked up dinner, watched some “Dexter” and closed up shop.
We hit the road early-ish on Friday. We told our Canadian friend Alexis to meet us at the police station at 7:00. We arrived at 6:58 and she was sitting there waiting. Gotta love Western appreciation for being on time. We walked through the bush to the river and crossed over to Mambone. It took a bit of time, but we eventually got a ride out to Maluvane.
This is where things got interesting. Usually, we have pretty good luck catching rides down from Maluvane toward Maputo. But today, nothing was passing through in either direction. We decided that we would take anything heading south. On this day, for us that meant sitting in the cab of a big rig. At least it was comfortable: the cab was tricked out with a bed. And the best part of the ride was that we didn’t have to pay for it.
Considering the pace at which the truck drove, we made really good time. As soon as we got to the crossroads for Vilanculos, we got a ride into town. We arrived by 12:30, a solid five and a half hour trip. Instead of grabbing the key to the house from our local Volunteers, we decided to wait it out in the villa until they arrived. We killed a couple hours passear-ing through town, showing Alexis the ins and outs of Vilanculos. Chillar.
Once the girls got home, we settled into the house, threw on our bathing suits and headed to the ocean. It was a perfect beach day. Not a single cloud sat in the sky, and at low tide, the ocean was striated by sand bars.
We made another run into town to get some ingredients for dinner. One of the downsides of traveling is that it is almost more expensive than eating at home. Cooking just one or two meals in the house though can save hundreds of Meticais. For tonight, we decided on rigatoni with our regular tomato sauce. After eating, the five of us watched “Tropic Thunder”, a not-so-good Ben Stiller outfit.
Alexis got the full Vilanculos treatment on Saturday. She went out to the beach early in the morning. Ten minutes later, he sandals were gone, stolen by some kids. Little bastards. Our only mission today was to get her some new shoes. We walked down to the market to see what we could find but they were charging ridiculous South-African-tourist prices. I refuse to pay 500 Mets for a pair of sandals. That’s just outrageous.
We walked all the way to the other side of town, where we were able to do all of our regular Vilanculos shopping. Alexis found a decent pair of sandals for seventy-five Mets, a much more reasonable price. And on the way we stopped over at another Volunteer’s house. Having seen the houses in Vilanculos, she now understands why we love the place so much.
On our way back to the other side of town, we grew hungry. Lunch time arrived, and we decided to stop at our new favorite place. Just outside of the market, there is a little take-away place that sells the most delicious grease-ball cheeseburgers. For fifty Meticais, we were very, very happy. Passear down thru the market, burgers!!!!
Our food mostly digested, we decided to head out to the beach again, this time to toward a more beachy part of the ocean. Of course, it was beautiful. We walked through a little backpacker’s stop on the way back to the house. While Richie talked to one of our friends who works there, I had a conversation with a man about some artwork that he was selling. It was on of those conversations that made me think “Holy crap, I’m speaking pretty solid Portuguese”.
After being in Mozambique for one full year – the anniversary is today – it made me realize how far we have come. Never could I have imagined having that sort of conversation a year ago. Once other people started to arrive, the reminiscing continued. We laughed a lot about how little we knew then, how much we have know, and how the newly arrived Trainees are going to experience what we had just a year ago.
We made a run back to the villa to pick up some party goods. A little kid tried to sell me a small bottle of rum for three times the regular price. I laughed in his face, asked to see his boss, then yelled at him – in Portuguese – in front of his boss. His boss was with me: he called the kid a thief, rightfully.
On the walk back, I talked to one of the Trainees now living with my minha mãe. Minha mãe has a married couple living with her. If she treats them half as well as she treated me, they should have a great experience.
Our one year party was shockingly timid. At the party, I had another one of those conversations that gave me some confidence. A Japanese Volunteer who has been here for two years, she told me that my Portuguese was really good for having only been here a year. Even a year into this, I still have those days when my Portuguese is terrible. But it’s still nice to have those reaffirmations that I’m doing okay. There must have been just the right amount of rum in me to keep me going well.
I think everyone fell into a food coma from the salsa, cheese dip, and hummus. We didn’t even bother to eat dinner: the snacks were more than sufficient. Around 10:00, we put on our dancing shoes and headed out for a night at AfroBar, where only good things could happen.
Happy One Year, Moz 13! Welcome aboard Moz 14! We can’t wait to meet you all.
There was an upside to the delay. One of our goals for the weekend was to get to Shop-Rite, where we could get all sorts of luxury items like chocolate. The morning would be perfect. Except it wasn’t. I thought I had a ride out to the market, but that wasn’t meant to be. The car got half way there, picked up some other kids, then turned back to our hostel. Well, I guess that means I have to give up.
There was, however, some consolation. Gigabottle, a little burger and beer place just up the road from the hostel, was already open. Even though it was only 9:30, I was ready for a burger and, apparently, so were three other Volunteers. The only problem was that they were out of hamburgers. Fine, we’ll take hotdogs and three egg sandwiches for the vegetarian in the group. The dogs came out fine, but the place ran out of gas for the burner a quarter of the way through cooking the eggs. I thought I could get a discount on the eggs, but the chefe said no. At least the person working the place got a good laugh out of the attempt.
Okay, we were pretty happy with our hotdogs and cheese sandwiches, a reasonable substitute for egg sandwiches. Things seemed to be coming together. By the time we finished eating, the car had just about arrived to Chimoio.
We were in the same tiny truck that we arrived in. Four seats and thirteen passengers meant nine of us had to be in the back of the truck. And seeing that Richie is white as glue and I’m well beyond bronze, we all knew who would be sitting in the back of the truck for six hours in the midday sun. The ride turned out to be not so bad and a few kilometers down the road toward Machanga, we saw monkeys again, which put smiles on everyone’s faces.
Our arrival nearly coincided with the energy coming on. With the bell pepper that we picked up, we had the perfect missing ingredient for stir fry. After eating dinner and watching a couple episodes of “Dexter”, I caught up with my parents and grandparents.
I was in for a boring morning on Monday. In fact, by the end of this week, I will be in for a lot of boring mornings. Richie was pretty bored too, other than for the 45 minutes he was proctoring an exam. During those 45 minutes, he was especially bored.
I know how bored he was because I had the pleasure of controlling exams for the entire afternoon. I should have had six consecutive periods of test giving, but thanks to the gloriousness that is cancelled class, I was able to combine a couple of classes and be done in four hours. Valeo!
The only problem with giving exams, again, is that I have to correct them. The good news about these exams is that, unlike my midterms, these things are multiple choice. That means that I can correct one forty-question exam in about ninety seconds. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to correct exams today. This is a job that can wait for tomorrow. Going to the villa with Richie for a celebratory soda is a much better option.
Our night was not too bad. We cooked up some chicken sandwiches, watched some “30 Rock” and called it a night.
I woke up Tuesday morning to a strangely empty house. Richie had talked about going across the river to Mambone in search of a phone charger, but I didn’t think he was actually motivated enough to go. It took me a second to realize where he went.
With the house to myself, I was able to be wildly productive. But not with grading papers. I swept and mopped the house, pumped three buckets-worth of water, attempted to clean the stovetop, and washed the dishes from last night.
Having procrastinated enough, and with absolutely nothing left to be cleaned, I decided it was time to grade some papers. Everybody seems to be doing really well – very few failures overall. Once I average their final exam score with their last midterm – which everyone tanked – everyone’s grades should be okay.
Not including thirty minutes for lunch, the grading was incessant. Nearly four hours after I started correcting exams, I was almost done with all the exams from yesterday. I would have finished if my students hadn’t come by and asked me to give their exam early.
After proctoring my last twelfth grade exam, I got right back to correcting exams. I had three-quarters of the exams correcting by the time the energy came on. We ate our dinner and I punched in some grades while we watched some “Dexter”.
I was excited on Wednesday, for Wednesday was my unofficial last day of work. I think the students were even more excited as it was the last day that they would have to deal with me speaking a foreign language to them. But before I could give my last two sets of exams, I had some work to do.
I put off correcting Tuesday’s exams because I wanted something to do this morning. I figured that correcting exams would be a good way to fill the morning, but this class did better than all the others. Less marking meant less time correcting and I was left bored for a good portion of the morning. At least I was all caught up on correcting exams…for an hour, anyway.
After lunch, it was back into the classroom for me. Two more exams. Just two more exams and I’m done for the year. It seemed like these three hours dragged on forever. It may have been because a lot of students used the entire ninety minutes, but I think my anxiety to be done was the main cause. Shockingly, there were no cheaters: not in these classes, not in any classes. I guess after six months of handing out zeros, the students realized they shouldn’t fuck around when I give an exam
I had no intention to work the rest of the afternoon. This would be an afternoon of relaxation. I broke out the Sudoku book for a bit before starting dinner. After dinner, we watched our regular “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.
Now I’m left with quite the challenge. I have a total of sixty exams to correct and then I’m home free, done correcting exams until March. The problem with having nothing to do, though, is that there is nothing to do. It’s not like having nothing to do in America, where you could easily kill a day watching YouTube videos and repeats of SportsCenter. Having nothing to do means staring blankly off our patio, maybe studying, and occasionally stabbing our eyes with pencils to make sure we are awake. For what it is worth, I did absolutely nothing of value today.
The truth is, I should have corrected those last two sets of exams, but what’s the point? I have an entire week to correct them. Going to the market, getting a coke, and throwing around the Frisbee for a bit seemed like much better options for the morning.
Those activities were almost productive. The afternoon was even less so. For hours on end, I sat on my patio and filled out Sudoku grids. It was the kind of afternoon that almost made me just give up for the day.
Once the energy came on, things turned around. I was able to be a little productive with the help of a computer. I spent a bit of time punching in grades to the spreadsheet and applying a curve to my second midterm. With the curve, the students are passing at a reasonable rate. My work done, we cooked up dinner, watched some “Dexter” and closed up shop.
We hit the road early-ish on Friday. We told our Canadian friend Alexis to meet us at the police station at 7:00. We arrived at 6:58 and she was sitting there waiting. Gotta love Western appreciation for being on time. We walked through the bush to the river and crossed over to Mambone. It took a bit of time, but we eventually got a ride out to Maluvane.
This is where things got interesting. Usually, we have pretty good luck catching rides down from Maluvane toward Maputo. But today, nothing was passing through in either direction. We decided that we would take anything heading south. On this day, for us that meant sitting in the cab of a big rig. At least it was comfortable: the cab was tricked out with a bed. And the best part of the ride was that we didn’t have to pay for it.
Considering the pace at which the truck drove, we made really good time. As soon as we got to the crossroads for Vilanculos, we got a ride into town. We arrived by 12:30, a solid five and a half hour trip. Instead of grabbing the key to the house from our local Volunteers, we decided to wait it out in the villa until they arrived. We killed a couple hours passear-ing through town, showing Alexis the ins and outs of Vilanculos. Chillar.
Once the girls got home, we settled into the house, threw on our bathing suits and headed to the ocean. It was a perfect beach day. Not a single cloud sat in the sky, and at low tide, the ocean was striated by sand bars.
We made another run into town to get some ingredients for dinner. One of the downsides of traveling is that it is almost more expensive than eating at home. Cooking just one or two meals in the house though can save hundreds of Meticais. For tonight, we decided on rigatoni with our regular tomato sauce. After eating, the five of us watched “Tropic Thunder”, a not-so-good Ben Stiller outfit.
Alexis got the full Vilanculos treatment on Saturday. She went out to the beach early in the morning. Ten minutes later, he sandals were gone, stolen by some kids. Little bastards. Our only mission today was to get her some new shoes. We walked down to the market to see what we could find but they were charging ridiculous South-African-tourist prices. I refuse to pay 500 Mets for a pair of sandals. That’s just outrageous.
We walked all the way to the other side of town, where we were able to do all of our regular Vilanculos shopping. Alexis found a decent pair of sandals for seventy-five Mets, a much more reasonable price. And on the way we stopped over at another Volunteer’s house. Having seen the houses in Vilanculos, she now understands why we love the place so much.
On our way back to the other side of town, we grew hungry. Lunch time arrived, and we decided to stop at our new favorite place. Just outside of the market, there is a little take-away place that sells the most delicious grease-ball cheeseburgers. For fifty Meticais, we were very, very happy. Passear down thru the market, burgers!!!!
Our food mostly digested, we decided to head out to the beach again, this time to toward a more beachy part of the ocean. Of course, it was beautiful. We walked through a little backpacker’s stop on the way back to the house. While Richie talked to one of our friends who works there, I had a conversation with a man about some artwork that he was selling. It was on of those conversations that made me think “Holy crap, I’m speaking pretty solid Portuguese”.
After being in Mozambique for one full year – the anniversary is today – it made me realize how far we have come. Never could I have imagined having that sort of conversation a year ago. Once other people started to arrive, the reminiscing continued. We laughed a lot about how little we knew then, how much we have know, and how the newly arrived Trainees are going to experience what we had just a year ago.
We made a run back to the villa to pick up some party goods. A little kid tried to sell me a small bottle of rum for three times the regular price. I laughed in his face, asked to see his boss, then yelled at him – in Portuguese – in front of his boss. His boss was with me: he called the kid a thief, rightfully.
On the walk back, I talked to one of the Trainees now living with my minha mãe. Minha mãe has a married couple living with her. If she treats them half as well as she treated me, they should have a great experience.
Our one year party was shockingly timid. At the party, I had another one of those conversations that gave me some confidence. A Japanese Volunteer who has been here for two years, she told me that my Portuguese was really good for having only been here a year. Even a year into this, I still have those days when my Portuguese is terrible. But it’s still nice to have those reaffirmations that I’m doing okay. There must have been just the right amount of rum in me to keep me going well.
I think everyone fell into a food coma from the salsa, cheese dip, and hummus. We didn’t even bother to eat dinner: the snacks were more than sufficient. Around 10:00, we put on our dancing shoes and headed out for a night at AfroBar, where only good things could happen.
Happy One Year, Moz 13! Welcome aboard Moz 14! We can’t wait to meet you all.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Year 1 - Week 41: To the Theatre
I woke up Sunday with terrible stomach pain. I don’t know if the copious amount of meat and cheese from dinner is last night did this, but I refuse to blame such a delicious combination. Whatever it was just did not agree with my system.
Adding to the physical pain, I still had a hundred exams to correct. There was no urgency to correct the exams last week, but now I could procrastinate no longer. These exams have to go back this week. Along with innumerable trips to the bathroom, correcting papers took up almost all of my morning and good portion of the afternoon.
Even though grading papers is a pain in the ass, at least it gave me something to do for the better part of the day. Once I finished grading papers, I had nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon.
All I had to look forward to was a phone call from my parents. After talking with my brother and grandfather toward the end of last week, talking to my parents was the end of a full weekend of catching up with family.
By the end of the night – and four Pepto-Bismols later – my stomach was feeling better for the most part. After dinner, we watched some “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” before going to bed.
I was fully recovered by Monday morning and whatever I had passed on to Richie. All is well that ends well, right? Unfortunately, the probelm that is correcting exams was still in front of me. There was only one more class to deal with, and this was by far my best class. Still, I will give my students the chance to improve their grade on their final.
There was little preparing to do for classes today. This is my last full day of lecture, which is obviously exciting. My twelfth graders got a full two hours of lecture and my eleventh graders reviewed for their final exam. By the end of next week – and 200 more exams later – I will be done with formal teaching for the year.
My night was shockingly productive. I wrote more than half of my students’ final exam. As if that wasn’t enough, getting in two episodes of “Dexter” made our night complete. And once the lights went out, my aunt (a “Dexter” fan, herself) and I talked for a bit.
Our English theatre students were back to work Tuesday morning. After a couple days off, it was time to practice in front of people. For the first time, they performed the play in front of a crowd, and they more or less got everything right. There were a few lines that were flubbed, but the timing was near perfect. We recapped after they finished and I spent the rest of the morning before lunch relaxing.
Classes were alright today. My twelfth graders got their final exam review and the eleventh graders had the opportunity to ask me whatever they wanted about the exam. Shockingly, I got a fair amount of questions. This might be the first time students have asked me questions about the exam, so I was happy to address their doubts. During the break between classes, the students performed the play again in front of a different group of students. The timing was better than the first time, but some lines were seriously screwed up. There’s some time yet to get it down perfectly.
The rest of the night was pretty relaxed. Sadly, it was not a “Dexter” night, so we watched “30 Rock” and “Curb” after dinner.
With the practice runs behind them, the students went back to practicing in front of just us. We set up shop in the gym and they ran through the play a couple times. They have started to realize when they are making mistakes, so we no longer have to point out their errors.
My weekly market run was pushed up a day to this morning. We are heading out of town on Friday, so it doesn’t make a whole lot sense to make a full market run on Thursday.
Luck continued to be with me in terms of being able to put my classes together. The other teacher who should be teaching each of the groups I see on Wednesday has already given his final exam, which means I am good to combine from here on out (even though “here on out” is just one more week). The class went okay. This was their review day and as is typical with these groups, there were no questions. It’s strange though: in one group they don’t have questions because they get it, but the other group doesn’t ask questions because I think they don’t know where to start asking.
Having classes end by 2:00 meant my afternoon was free. I would love to nap but I’ve come to the tragic realization that if I nap during the afternoon, there is no way I will be able to sleep at night. This is the downfall of having a 9 PM lights out. I read some “Economist” and studied some GRE vocab before the power came on. From here, the night was all good: turkey sandwiches and “Dexter”
Thursday was an all around boring day. With school wrapping up and a holiday on Friday, I am down to one more hour of teaching before final exams. So what the hell am I supposed to do? For almost the entire morning, and a good portion of the afternoon, Richie and I sat on our porch in silence, trying to find ways to speed up the clock.
The one class that I had today went well. This is by far my best class and sadly, this is the last time that I will see this group of kids. I will miss working with them. A lot.
And once I was done with them, it was back to the regularly scheduled boredom. Napping was again out of the question. I have a bad feeling that this is going to be a preview of my next four months. This could be bad.
We actually had something to do in the evening. Besides dinner, we had to get our house cleaned up. Richie was busy with something for the most of the night, so I ended up prepping, cooking, and cleaning. And on top of all of that, we had to get the rest of the house cleaned up before heading out. With our cleaning finished, we had a bit of time left for “30 Rock”.
Originally, we thought that we would be heading out to Chimoio at 6 AM on Friday. That, however, would have made no sense. We are not supposed to arrive to Chimoio before 1 o’clock, so the pushed back 8:00 departure was a blessing. The late leave time also allowed me to get a bit of work done. A teacher needed a document printed, so I asked the director to flip on the energy, and it was done. Even though I had to wait to use the computer, we were still gone on time.
The ride up to Chimoio was different than the rides we have taken in earlier months. As we get into the hot months before the rainy season, all of the greenery has turned into one big sepia picture. The only real signs of life on the EN1 were the troop of monkeys that walked right in front of our truck.
As it was with our departure, our arrival was perfectly timed. We got into Chimoio around half past 1. Had we left at 6, we would have been there insanely early. A lot of our students haven’t been to Chimoio before, so they are really exciting. After getting everyone checked in to the hotel, we walked the town for a bit. The stage that the students are going to be performing on is fuckin’ huge – way bigger than anything we were anticipating. It won’t change our play though.
Walking through the city exhausted all of us. As we made our way back to the hostel, we bought our students sodas. This weekend is really all about them, and if it costs us an entire four dollars for twelve sodas, it’s worth it many times over.
We got back to the hostel before dinner, and with time to spare for the kids to wash up. And I got to wash up too, with a spectacularly hot running-water shower. Today was the first time in two months that I’ve seen running hot water. Needless to say, I soaked in every glorious moment of it.
After dinner, our kids had the opportunity to practice the play on a small stage. With 12 hours to go, we expected it to be tight, but they butchered it. Missed lines, missed cues, scenes out of order. And the second time they did it was worse. As our Mozambican counterpart said, “I just don’t know.” We’ll see how it goes down tomorrow.
Everyone was up early on Saturday, but for different reasons. Of course the kids were up before sun break, but I actually made it to the 5:45 alarm. Apparently, miracles do happen. The kids needed to be out by 6:30, and I was in charge of this. Getting anything done on time is tough here, but I was on a mission. Mission failed…but not by much. By 6:40, everyone was out of the hostel.
As it turned out, they got to the theatre early. Beautiful. Another Volunteer and I rode to the theatre with the judges and the props and the show was off and running. School names were drawn and Machanga pulled tenth out of eleven schools. I don’t know how it will play out. All I do know is that it’s going to be hours until my kids get to perform, hours for them – and me – to get nervous.
I felt like a parent the entire day. I went to the bathroom no less than eight times over the course of the day. Hard to believe, but I think I was more nervous than they were. Every time I talked to my students, they said they were good to go.
They went on stage second after lunch, which turned out to be not a bad time. The play will be fresh in the jury’s mind come judging time. I gave them a little pep talk a small dance to make them laugh and calm them down – those who have seen me dance know that it will make you laugh.
I stood at the side of the stage helping the students with their props and their cues. And they fuckin nailed it. They missed one line and three words over the entire eighteen minutes. It was good enough, in my totally biased opinion, to win. But when the judgment came down, we didn’t win. Or place. Or show.
The disappointment in my kids was palpable. It probably was in me too. But when the results were called, it was time to be a parent again. The performance they put on was the best run-through they had ever done. And unlike last year, this was truly their play. Their writing, their ideas, their practices. They have a lot to be proud of, and I made sure to tell them that.
I don’t know how much it meant coming from me, but when it comes from someone outside, I’m sure it meant more. Another Volunteer told them that they had come a long way from last year. I know that means a lot to them. And it means a lot to me too, because it means I must be doing something right in the classroom with them.
As we walked back, we passed a little bar and, as we did yesterday, we offered to buy sodas for our kids. Once they had Coca-Colas in their hands, all was forgotten. They were happy to be drinking cold sodas.
The dance party that followed dinner also helped ease the pain. I mean, how can you think about not winning when there is a dance party?! It was also good for us Volunteers too. While the kids danced, a good group of us had our own little celebration, not only because of the successful weekend but because we know our time with our Moz 12 buddies is slowly slipping away.
Adding to the physical pain, I still had a hundred exams to correct. There was no urgency to correct the exams last week, but now I could procrastinate no longer. These exams have to go back this week. Along with innumerable trips to the bathroom, correcting papers took up almost all of my morning and good portion of the afternoon.
Even though grading papers is a pain in the ass, at least it gave me something to do for the better part of the day. Once I finished grading papers, I had nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon.
All I had to look forward to was a phone call from my parents. After talking with my brother and grandfather toward the end of last week, talking to my parents was the end of a full weekend of catching up with family.
By the end of the night – and four Pepto-Bismols later – my stomach was feeling better for the most part. After dinner, we watched some “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” before going to bed.
I was fully recovered by Monday morning and whatever I had passed on to Richie. All is well that ends well, right? Unfortunately, the probelm that is correcting exams was still in front of me. There was only one more class to deal with, and this was by far my best class. Still, I will give my students the chance to improve their grade on their final.
There was little preparing to do for classes today. This is my last full day of lecture, which is obviously exciting. My twelfth graders got a full two hours of lecture and my eleventh graders reviewed for their final exam. By the end of next week – and 200 more exams later – I will be done with formal teaching for the year.
My night was shockingly productive. I wrote more than half of my students’ final exam. As if that wasn’t enough, getting in two episodes of “Dexter” made our night complete. And once the lights went out, my aunt (a “Dexter” fan, herself) and I talked for a bit.
Our English theatre students were back to work Tuesday morning. After a couple days off, it was time to practice in front of people. For the first time, they performed the play in front of a crowd, and they more or less got everything right. There were a few lines that were flubbed, but the timing was near perfect. We recapped after they finished and I spent the rest of the morning before lunch relaxing.
Classes were alright today. My twelfth graders got their final exam review and the eleventh graders had the opportunity to ask me whatever they wanted about the exam. Shockingly, I got a fair amount of questions. This might be the first time students have asked me questions about the exam, so I was happy to address their doubts. During the break between classes, the students performed the play again in front of a different group of students. The timing was better than the first time, but some lines were seriously screwed up. There’s some time yet to get it down perfectly.
The rest of the night was pretty relaxed. Sadly, it was not a “Dexter” night, so we watched “30 Rock” and “Curb” after dinner.
With the practice runs behind them, the students went back to practicing in front of just us. We set up shop in the gym and they ran through the play a couple times. They have started to realize when they are making mistakes, so we no longer have to point out their errors.
My weekly market run was pushed up a day to this morning. We are heading out of town on Friday, so it doesn’t make a whole lot sense to make a full market run on Thursday.
Luck continued to be with me in terms of being able to put my classes together. The other teacher who should be teaching each of the groups I see on Wednesday has already given his final exam, which means I am good to combine from here on out (even though “here on out” is just one more week). The class went okay. This was their review day and as is typical with these groups, there were no questions. It’s strange though: in one group they don’t have questions because they get it, but the other group doesn’t ask questions because I think they don’t know where to start asking.
Having classes end by 2:00 meant my afternoon was free. I would love to nap but I’ve come to the tragic realization that if I nap during the afternoon, there is no way I will be able to sleep at night. This is the downfall of having a 9 PM lights out. I read some “Economist” and studied some GRE vocab before the power came on. From here, the night was all good: turkey sandwiches and “Dexter”
Thursday was an all around boring day. With school wrapping up and a holiday on Friday, I am down to one more hour of teaching before final exams. So what the hell am I supposed to do? For almost the entire morning, and a good portion of the afternoon, Richie and I sat on our porch in silence, trying to find ways to speed up the clock.
The one class that I had today went well. This is by far my best class and sadly, this is the last time that I will see this group of kids. I will miss working with them. A lot.
And once I was done with them, it was back to the regularly scheduled boredom. Napping was again out of the question. I have a bad feeling that this is going to be a preview of my next four months. This could be bad.
We actually had something to do in the evening. Besides dinner, we had to get our house cleaned up. Richie was busy with something for the most of the night, so I ended up prepping, cooking, and cleaning. And on top of all of that, we had to get the rest of the house cleaned up before heading out. With our cleaning finished, we had a bit of time left for “30 Rock”.
Originally, we thought that we would be heading out to Chimoio at 6 AM on Friday. That, however, would have made no sense. We are not supposed to arrive to Chimoio before 1 o’clock, so the pushed back 8:00 departure was a blessing. The late leave time also allowed me to get a bit of work done. A teacher needed a document printed, so I asked the director to flip on the energy, and it was done. Even though I had to wait to use the computer, we were still gone on time.
The ride up to Chimoio was different than the rides we have taken in earlier months. As we get into the hot months before the rainy season, all of the greenery has turned into one big sepia picture. The only real signs of life on the EN1 were the troop of monkeys that walked right in front of our truck.
As it was with our departure, our arrival was perfectly timed. We got into Chimoio around half past 1. Had we left at 6, we would have been there insanely early. A lot of our students haven’t been to Chimoio before, so they are really exciting. After getting everyone checked in to the hotel, we walked the town for a bit. The stage that the students are going to be performing on is fuckin’ huge – way bigger than anything we were anticipating. It won’t change our play though.
Walking through the city exhausted all of us. As we made our way back to the hostel, we bought our students sodas. This weekend is really all about them, and if it costs us an entire four dollars for twelve sodas, it’s worth it many times over.
We got back to the hostel before dinner, and with time to spare for the kids to wash up. And I got to wash up too, with a spectacularly hot running-water shower. Today was the first time in two months that I’ve seen running hot water. Needless to say, I soaked in every glorious moment of it.
After dinner, our kids had the opportunity to practice the play on a small stage. With 12 hours to go, we expected it to be tight, but they butchered it. Missed lines, missed cues, scenes out of order. And the second time they did it was worse. As our Mozambican counterpart said, “I just don’t know.” We’ll see how it goes down tomorrow.
Everyone was up early on Saturday, but for different reasons. Of course the kids were up before sun break, but I actually made it to the 5:45 alarm. Apparently, miracles do happen. The kids needed to be out by 6:30, and I was in charge of this. Getting anything done on time is tough here, but I was on a mission. Mission failed…but not by much. By 6:40, everyone was out of the hostel.
As it turned out, they got to the theatre early. Beautiful. Another Volunteer and I rode to the theatre with the judges and the props and the show was off and running. School names were drawn and Machanga pulled tenth out of eleven schools. I don’t know how it will play out. All I do know is that it’s going to be hours until my kids get to perform, hours for them – and me – to get nervous.
I felt like a parent the entire day. I went to the bathroom no less than eight times over the course of the day. Hard to believe, but I think I was more nervous than they were. Every time I talked to my students, they said they were good to go.
They went on stage second after lunch, which turned out to be not a bad time. The play will be fresh in the jury’s mind come judging time. I gave them a little pep talk a small dance to make them laugh and calm them down – those who have seen me dance know that it will make you laugh.
I stood at the side of the stage helping the students with their props and their cues. And they fuckin nailed it. They missed one line and three words over the entire eighteen minutes. It was good enough, in my totally biased opinion, to win. But when the judgment came down, we didn’t win. Or place. Or show.
The disappointment in my kids was palpable. It probably was in me too. But when the results were called, it was time to be a parent again. The performance they put on was the best run-through they had ever done. And unlike last year, this was truly their play. Their writing, their ideas, their practices. They have a lot to be proud of, and I made sure to tell them that.
I don’t know how much it meant coming from me, but when it comes from someone outside, I’m sure it meant more. Another Volunteer told them that they had come a long way from last year. I know that means a lot to them. And it means a lot to me too, because it means I must be doing something right in the classroom with them.
As we walked back, we passed a little bar and, as we did yesterday, we offered to buy sodas for our kids. Once they had Coca-Colas in their hands, all was forgotten. They were happy to be drinking cold sodas.
The dance party that followed dinner also helped ease the pain. I mean, how can you think about not winning when there is a dance party?! It was also good for us Volunteers too. While the kids danced, a good group of us had our own little celebration, not only because of the successful weekend but because we know our time with our Moz 12 buddies is slowly slipping away.
Year 1 - Week 41: To the Theatre
I woke up Sunday with terrible stomach pain. I don’t know if the copious amount of meat and cheese from dinner is last night did this, but I refuse to blame such a delicious combination. Whatever it was just did not agree with my system.
Adding to the physical pain, I still had a hundred exams to correct. There was no urgency to correct the exams last week, but now I could procrastinate no longer. These exams have to go back this week. Along with innumerable trips to the bathroom, correcting papers took up almost all of my morning and good portion of the afternoon.
Even though grading papers is a pain in the ass, at least it gave me something to do for the better part of the day. Once I finished grading papers, I had nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon.
All I had to look forward to was a phone call from my parents. After talking with my brother and grandfather toward the end of last week, talking to my parents was the end of a full weekend of catching up with family.
By the end of the night – and four Pepto-Bismols later – my stomach was feeling better for the most part. After dinner, we watched some “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” before going to bed.
I was fully recovered by Monday morning and whatever I had passed on to Richie. All is well that ends well, right? Unfortunately, the probelm that is correcting exams was still in front of me. There was only one more class to deal with, and this was by far my best class. Still, I will give my students the chance to improve their grade on their final.
There was little preparing to do for classes today. This is my last full day of lecture, which is obviously exciting. My twelfth graders got a full two hours of lecture and my eleventh graders reviewed for their final exam. By the end of next week – and 200 more exams later – I will be done with formal teaching for the year.
My night was shockingly productive. I wrote more than half of my students’ final exam. As if that wasn’t enough, getting in two episodes of “Dexter” made our night complete. And once the lights went out, my aunt (a “Dexter” fan, herself) and I talked for a bit.
Our English theatre students were back to work Tuesday morning. After a couple days off, it was time to practice in front of people. For the first time, they performed the play in front of a crowd, and they more or less got everything right. There were a few lines that were flubbed, but the timing was near perfect. We recapped after they finished and I spent the rest of the morning before lunch relaxing.
Classes were alright today. My twelfth graders got their final exam review and the eleventh graders had the opportunity to ask me whatever they wanted about the exam. Shockingly, I got a fair amount of questions. This might be the first time students have asked me questions about the exam, so I was happy to address their doubts. During the break between classes, the students performed the play again in front of a different group of students. The timing was better than the first time, but some lines were seriously screwed up. There’s some time yet to get it down perfectly.
The rest of the night was pretty relaxed. Sadly, it was not a “Dexter” night, so we watched “30 Rock” and “Curb” after dinner.
With the practice runs behind them, the students went back to practicing in front of just us. We set up shop in the gym and they ran through the play a couple times. They have started to realize when they are making mistakes, so we no longer have to point out their errors.
My weekly market run was pushed up a day to this morning. We are heading out of town on Friday, so it doesn’t make a whole lot sense to make a full market run on Thursday.
Luck continued to be with me in terms of being able to put my classes together. The other teacher who should be teaching each of the groups I see on Wednesday has already given his final exam, which means I am good to combine from here on out (even though “here on out” is just one more week). The class went okay. This was their review day and as is typical with these groups, there were no questions. It’s strange though: in one group they don’t have questions because they get it, but the other group doesn’t ask questions because I think they don’t know where to start asking.
Having classes end by 2:00 meant my afternoon was free. I would love to nap but I’ve come to the tragic realization that if I nap during the afternoon, there is no way I will be able to sleep at night. This is the downfall of having a 9 PM lights out. I read some “Economist” and studied some GRE vocab before the power came on. From here, the night was all good: turkey sandwiches and “Dexter”
Thursday was an all around boring day. With school wrapping up and a holiday on Friday, I am down to one more hour of teaching before final exams. So what the hell am I supposed to do? For almost the entire morning, and a good portion of the afternoon, Richie and I sat on our porch in silence, trying to find ways to speed up the clock.
The one class that I had today went well. This is by far my best class and sadly, this is the last time that I will see this group of kids. I will miss working with them. A lot.
And once I was done with them, it was back to the regularly scheduled boredom. Napping was again out of the question. I have a bad feeling that this is going to be a preview of my next four months. This could be bad.
We actually had something to do in the evening. Besides dinner, we had to get our house cleaned up. Richie was busy with something for the most of the night, so I ended up prepping, cooking, and cleaning. And on top of all of that, we had to get the rest of the house cleaned up before heading out. With our cleaning finished, we had a bit of time left for “30 Rock”.
Originally, we thought that we would be heading out to Chimoio at 6 AM on Friday. That, however, would have made no sense. We are not supposed to arrive to Chimoio before 1 o’clock, so the pushed back 8:00 departure was a blessing. The late leave time also allowed me to get a bit of work done. A teacher needed a document printed, so I asked the director to flip on the energy, and it was done. Even though I had to wait to use the computer, we were still gone on time.
The ride up to Chimoio was different than the rides we have taken in earlier months. As we get into the hot months before the rainy season, all of the greenery has turned into one big sepia picture. The only real signs of life on the EN1 were the troop of monkeys that walked right in front of our truck.
As it was with our departure, our arrival was perfectly timed. We got into Chimoio around half past 1. Had we left at 6, we would have been there insanely early. A lot of our students haven’t been to Chimoio before, so they are really exciting. After getting everyone checked in to the hotel, we walked the town for a bit. The stage that the students are going to be performing on is fuckin’ huge – way bigger than anything we were anticipating. It won’t change our play though.
Walking through the city exhausted all of us. As we made our way back to the hostel, we bought our students sodas. This weekend is really all about them, and if it costs us an entire four dollars for twelve sodas, it’s worth it many times over.
We got back to the hostel before dinner, and with time to spare for the kids to wash up. And I got to wash up too, with a spectacularly hot running-water shower. Today was the first time in two months that I’ve seen running hot water. Needless to say, I soaked in every glorious moment of it.
After dinner, our kids had the opportunity to practice the play on a small stage. With 12 hours to go, we expected it to be tight, but they butchered it. Missed lines, missed cues, scenes out of order. And the second time they did it was worse. As our Mozambican counterpart said, “I just don’t know.” We’ll see how it goes down tomorrow.
Everyone was up early on Saturday, but for different reasons. Of course the kids were up before sun break, but I actually made it to the 5:45 alarm. Apparently, miracles do happen. The kids needed to be out by 6:30, and I was in charge of this. Getting anything done on time is tough here, but I was on a mission. Mission failed…but not by much. By 6:40, everyone was out of the hostel.
As it turned out, they got to the theatre early. Beautiful. Another Volunteer and I rode to the theatre with the judges and the props and the show was off and running. School names were drawn and Machanga pulled tenth out of eleven schools. I don’t know how it will play out. All I do know is that it’s going to be hours until my kids get to perform, hours for them – and me – to get nervous.
I felt like a parent the entire day. I went to the bathroom no less than eight times over the course of the day. Hard to believe, but I think I was more nervous than they were. Every time I talked to my students, they said they were good to go.
They went on stage second after lunch, which turned out to be not a bad time. The play will be fresh in the jury’s mind come judging time. I gave them a little pep talk a small dance to make them laugh and calm them down – those who have seen me dance know that it will make you laugh.
I stood at the side of the stage helping the students with their props and their cues. And they fuckin nailed it. They missed one line and three words over the entire eighteen minutes. It was good enough, in my totally biased opinion, to win. But when the judgment came down, we didn’t win. Or place. Or show.
The disappointment in my kids was palpable. It probably was in me too. But when the results were called, it was time to be a parent again. The performance they put on was the best run-through they had ever done. And unlike last year, this was truly their play. Their writing, their ideas, their practices. They have a lot to be proud of, and I made sure to tell them that.
I don’t know how much it meant coming from me, but when it comes from someone outside, I’m sure it meant more. Another Volunteer told them that they had come a long way from last year. I know that means a lot to them. And it means a lot to me too, because it means I must be doing something right in the classroom with them.
As we walked back, we passed a little bar and, as we did yesterday, we offered to buy sodas for our kids. Once they had Coca-Colas in their hands, all was forgotten. They were happy to be drinking cold sodas.
The dance party that followed dinner also helped ease the pain. I mean, how can you think about not winning when there is a dance party?! It was also good for us Volunteers too. While the kids danced, a good group of us had our own little celebration, not only because of the successful weekend but because we know our time with our Moz 12 buddies is slowly slipping away.
Adding to the physical pain, I still had a hundred exams to correct. There was no urgency to correct the exams last week, but now I could procrastinate no longer. These exams have to go back this week. Along with innumerable trips to the bathroom, correcting papers took up almost all of my morning and good portion of the afternoon.
Even though grading papers is a pain in the ass, at least it gave me something to do for the better part of the day. Once I finished grading papers, I had nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon.
All I had to look forward to was a phone call from my parents. After talking with my brother and grandfather toward the end of last week, talking to my parents was the end of a full weekend of catching up with family.
By the end of the night – and four Pepto-Bismols later – my stomach was feeling better for the most part. After dinner, we watched some “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” before going to bed.
I was fully recovered by Monday morning and whatever I had passed on to Richie. All is well that ends well, right? Unfortunately, the probelm that is correcting exams was still in front of me. There was only one more class to deal with, and this was by far my best class. Still, I will give my students the chance to improve their grade on their final.
There was little preparing to do for classes today. This is my last full day of lecture, which is obviously exciting. My twelfth graders got a full two hours of lecture and my eleventh graders reviewed for their final exam. By the end of next week – and 200 more exams later – I will be done with formal teaching for the year.
My night was shockingly productive. I wrote more than half of my students’ final exam. As if that wasn’t enough, getting in two episodes of “Dexter” made our night complete. And once the lights went out, my aunt (a “Dexter” fan, herself) and I talked for a bit.
Our English theatre students were back to work Tuesday morning. After a couple days off, it was time to practice in front of people. For the first time, they performed the play in front of a crowd, and they more or less got everything right. There were a few lines that were flubbed, but the timing was near perfect. We recapped after they finished and I spent the rest of the morning before lunch relaxing.
Classes were alright today. My twelfth graders got their final exam review and the eleventh graders had the opportunity to ask me whatever they wanted about the exam. Shockingly, I got a fair amount of questions. This might be the first time students have asked me questions about the exam, so I was happy to address their doubts. During the break between classes, the students performed the play again in front of a different group of students. The timing was better than the first time, but some lines were seriously screwed up. There’s some time yet to get it down perfectly.
The rest of the night was pretty relaxed. Sadly, it was not a “Dexter” night, so we watched “30 Rock” and “Curb” after dinner.
With the practice runs behind them, the students went back to practicing in front of just us. We set up shop in the gym and they ran through the play a couple times. They have started to realize when they are making mistakes, so we no longer have to point out their errors.
My weekly market run was pushed up a day to this morning. We are heading out of town on Friday, so it doesn’t make a whole lot sense to make a full market run on Thursday.
Luck continued to be with me in terms of being able to put my classes together. The other teacher who should be teaching each of the groups I see on Wednesday has already given his final exam, which means I am good to combine from here on out (even though “here on out” is just one more week). The class went okay. This was their review day and as is typical with these groups, there were no questions. It’s strange though: in one group they don’t have questions because they get it, but the other group doesn’t ask questions because I think they don’t know where to start asking.
Having classes end by 2:00 meant my afternoon was free. I would love to nap but I’ve come to the tragic realization that if I nap during the afternoon, there is no way I will be able to sleep at night. This is the downfall of having a 9 PM lights out. I read some “Economist” and studied some GRE vocab before the power came on. From here, the night was all good: turkey sandwiches and “Dexter”
Thursday was an all around boring day. With school wrapping up and a holiday on Friday, I am down to one more hour of teaching before final exams. So what the hell am I supposed to do? For almost the entire morning, and a good portion of the afternoon, Richie and I sat on our porch in silence, trying to find ways to speed up the clock.
The one class that I had today went well. This is by far my best class and sadly, this is the last time that I will see this group of kids. I will miss working with them. A lot.
And once I was done with them, it was back to the regularly scheduled boredom. Napping was again out of the question. I have a bad feeling that this is going to be a preview of my next four months. This could be bad.
We actually had something to do in the evening. Besides dinner, we had to get our house cleaned up. Richie was busy with something for the most of the night, so I ended up prepping, cooking, and cleaning. And on top of all of that, we had to get the rest of the house cleaned up before heading out. With our cleaning finished, we had a bit of time left for “30 Rock”.
Originally, we thought that we would be heading out to Chimoio at 6 AM on Friday. That, however, would have made no sense. We are not supposed to arrive to Chimoio before 1 o’clock, so the pushed back 8:00 departure was a blessing. The late leave time also allowed me to get a bit of work done. A teacher needed a document printed, so I asked the director to flip on the energy, and it was done. Even though I had to wait to use the computer, we were still gone on time.
The ride up to Chimoio was different than the rides we have taken in earlier months. As we get into the hot months before the rainy season, all of the greenery has turned into one big sepia picture. The only real signs of life on the EN1 were the troop of monkeys that walked right in front of our truck.
As it was with our departure, our arrival was perfectly timed. We got into Chimoio around half past 1. Had we left at 6, we would have been there insanely early. A lot of our students haven’t been to Chimoio before, so they are really exciting. After getting everyone checked in to the hotel, we walked the town for a bit. The stage that the students are going to be performing on is fuckin’ huge – way bigger than anything we were anticipating. It won’t change our play though.
Walking through the city exhausted all of us. As we made our way back to the hostel, we bought our students sodas. This weekend is really all about them, and if it costs us an entire four dollars for twelve sodas, it’s worth it many times over.
We got back to the hostel before dinner, and with time to spare for the kids to wash up. And I got to wash up too, with a spectacularly hot running-water shower. Today was the first time in two months that I’ve seen running hot water. Needless to say, I soaked in every glorious moment of it.
After dinner, our kids had the opportunity to practice the play on a small stage. With 12 hours to go, we expected it to be tight, but they butchered it. Missed lines, missed cues, scenes out of order. And the second time they did it was worse. As our Mozambican counterpart said, “I just don’t know.” We’ll see how it goes down tomorrow.
Everyone was up early on Saturday, but for different reasons. Of course the kids were up before sun break, but I actually made it to the 5:45 alarm. Apparently, miracles do happen. The kids needed to be out by 6:30, and I was in charge of this. Getting anything done on time is tough here, but I was on a mission. Mission failed…but not by much. By 6:40, everyone was out of the hostel.
As it turned out, they got to the theatre early. Beautiful. Another Volunteer and I rode to the theatre with the judges and the props and the show was off and running. School names were drawn and Machanga pulled tenth out of eleven schools. I don’t know how it will play out. All I do know is that it’s going to be hours until my kids get to perform, hours for them – and me – to get nervous.
I felt like a parent the entire day. I went to the bathroom no less than eight times over the course of the day. Hard to believe, but I think I was more nervous than they were. Every time I talked to my students, they said they were good to go.
They went on stage second after lunch, which turned out to be not a bad time. The play will be fresh in the jury’s mind come judging time. I gave them a little pep talk a small dance to make them laugh and calm them down – those who have seen me dance know that it will make you laugh.
I stood at the side of the stage helping the students with their props and their cues. And they fuckin nailed it. They missed one line and three words over the entire eighteen minutes. It was good enough, in my totally biased opinion, to win. But when the judgment came down, we didn’t win. Or place. Or show.
The disappointment in my kids was palpable. It probably was in me too. But when the results were called, it was time to be a parent again. The performance they put on was the best run-through they had ever done. And unlike last year, this was truly their play. Their writing, their ideas, their practices. They have a lot to be proud of, and I made sure to tell them that.
I don’t know how much it meant coming from me, but when it comes from someone outside, I’m sure it meant more. Another Volunteer told them that they had come a long way from last year. I know that means a lot to them. And it means a lot to me too, because it means I must be doing something right in the classroom with them.
As we walked back, we passed a little bar and, as we did yesterday, we offered to buy sodas for our kids. Once they had Coca-Colas in their hands, all was forgotten. They were happy to be drinking cold sodas.
The dance party that followed dinner also helped ease the pain. I mean, how can you think about not winning when there is a dance party?! It was also good for us Volunteers too. While the kids danced, a good group of us had our own little celebration, not only because of the successful weekend but because we know our time with our Moz 12 buddies is slowly slipping away.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Year 1 - Week 40: The Price of Democacy
The Mozambican presidential campaign officially started on Sunday. Now, this campaign is not like our timid American campaigns, where people slap a sticker on the bumper, read the headlines on CNN, vote, and then call themselves “politically active”. No, no. The party started no later than 5 AM, when I was awakened by horns blowing and people yelling “Frelimo! Hoi-Yay!” over and over again. Lovely.
Just because they woke me up didn’t mean I had to get myself out of bed. I stayed in bed until 8, when I realized that it was a reasonable hour to get out of bed. When I stepped outside, the picture was, well, unique. Almost everyone had cleared out of the school to go to a rally. Everyone returned around 9:15, drunk, covered in tomato red and highlighter yellow Frelimo t-shirts, and – for the most part – drunk.
Of course, we couldn’t take part in any of this. Nor did we have reason to. I love me some politics, but only when I have vested interest in it. I can’t vote in this election, a change in status quo won’t affect Mozambican-American relations, and to be honest, this election can only affect me negatively. I, of course, hope that Mozambique chooses to follow in Ghana’s footsteps with peaceful elections instead of following in Kenya’s bloodied path. But if, for some reason, things go awry, it may mean our service is finished.
Other than the raucousness outside, the afternoon was quiet. By mid-afternoon, I think most everyone was burnt out and ready for a nap. I know I was. After my nap, I did a little bit of reading until the energy came on.
One of my best friends tried to get in touch with me today, but the nine hour time difference our conflicting schedules made it impossible. It left plenty of time for me to catch up with them, make cookies, and watch “Shawshank Redemption” with Richie.
I woke up at 6:45 Monday morning – on my own accord. I usually like I sleep later, but in this case, the timing could not have been more perfect. One of my best friends called me around 7:00. We caught up for a good while – enough time for me to wake up and roll out of bed.
I had a good bit of preparation to take care of on Monday. There was a double lesson to be taught to my eleventh grade students: one lesson on ordinal numbers, one lesson on how to augment one’s vocabulary. There are so many words that are almost exactly the same between Portuguese and English – organization and organização, minimize and minimizar – that improving one’s vocabulary is easy.
Before I could give my classes, I had an exam to give to one of my twelfth grade classes. It’s amazing: between Thursday and today, I heard significantly less griping about the exam from class to class. As for the classes, they went pretty well. For a change, forming ordinal numbers in English is actually easier than forming them in Portuguese. So that puts the score at English: 1 – Portuguese: 1,000.
My classes got out early, just early enough to make a run to the market with Richie. I was on the hunt for two things: ever elusive phone credit and a decent capulana. I got a couple of blocks from the construction site next to our house. Paired with a couple slats of wood, it makes for a perfect clothes dresser. The capulana – which is covered in fish – will at least make it look okay.
While chili cooked, I arranged the dresser and my clothes. My room is in much better order now. Our night was pretty standard. Food was, well, good. And “Dexter” is always good.
Boredom may have reached new heights on Tuesday morning. I had little work to do and there was no market run to be made. I figured I could at least make myself productive and clean up around the house a bit. The truth is that I had work to do. There was no shortage of papers to correct, but no pressing urgency to correct them. So they sat.
I spent a little time before class preparing. We are really winding down the year – about two weeks to go. I’ve given them just about all of the structures they can handle. Now I just want to help out their vocabulary. Along with the lesson on language parallels yesterday, adverbs are an easy way to add to vocabulary. They are as easy to form in English as they are in Portuguese. And they require no new vocabulary, just the adjectives they already know.
All in all, the class went okay, although the best part of class was being able to teach two groups of students together. With so many teachers working on the presidential campaign, a lot of classes have been cancelled. It is kind of the tragedy of this campaign. For sure, it is great that so many people – teachers and students alike – are committed to this campaign, but it comes at the cost of the students’ education.
As we move into the latter months of the year, I have expected the energy to come on closer to 6:00. Yet night in and night out, the energy has come on at 5:30. But today was an exception: the energy was on my by 5:00. The night was relatively calm. We went with a lazy pasta dinner with packet cheese sauce and watched some “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” before going to sleep.
My mind was racing all night. Everything that could go through my mind went through: song lyrics, sports teams, memories of my students in San Diego. There was nothing I could do to stop it. And to top it off, the Larium kicked in. For most of the night, I had no idea if I was awake or asleep.
I must have slept at some point during the night because I woke up relatively refreshed. We were fresh out of bread and it was my day to make a bread run. While I was out, Richie took in the English theatre presentation. I got to see a good chunk of it as well. The play has really come along. The students know their lines, they started putting costumes, and it comes in at about 17 minutes – could not be more perfect.
There was no need to prepare a lecture today. Wednesday is repeat day, and just my luck, the teacher teaching after me had cancelled class. For the second time in a week, I got to combine classes. For the second time in a week, those students lose out on day of French class.
It really is a beautiful thing to be done with work by 2:00. It would be better if there was actually something to do in Machanga. Instead, the rest of the afternoon was quiet, spent with cryptogams and Kakuro. With school finishing up in a couple weeks, it could be a sign of what’s ahead for the next, um, few months.
Our night was normal. You know, chicken sandwiches, a bit of “Dexter” and some “30 Rock”.
As usual, I had a busy Thursday morning. I made a run to the market to stock up on food before heading over to the school to watch English theatre practice. They have their lines down. Now they have a week to clean up pronunciation and timing. After practice ended, I corrected some abysmal papers and prepared for lunch.
Nobody is in school anymore. Teachers have almost completely stopped showing up, and as a result the students don’t have a reason to be here. The only people winning in this situation are Richie and me. We love being able to put our classes together, as I was able to do today.
Putting classes together meant I had plenty of time to myself in the afternoon. I screwed up a couple of Kakuros before starting to prep for dinner. Beans take a good two hours make, so we can’t for the energy to come on to cook; we have to use the carvão to eat at a reasonable hour.
Richie wanted to make the beans Mozambican-style. I really don’t care one way or the other. This was the first time we made beans Mozambican-style alone, and as is the norm when we cook something for the first time, we failed epically. The only good thing about these beans was we that we finished them. We salvaged the night with a couple episodes of “30 Rock”.
Friday morning looked a whole lot like Thursday morning – grading and theatre for most of the morning. But there were two difference, one small and one big: I didn’t have to make a market run and the energy was on. The Brazilian church brothers arrived and had some work to do. We know that we don’t need it, so we never really know what to do when the energy is on during the day. With temperatures rising quickly – after all, it’s almost summer here – I charged up some batteries for fans.
Whenever we do have energy during the day, we always have a game we play: can we cook lunch without having to light charcoal. On a couple of occasions, we have started cooking on the stove, only to have the energy go off half-way through cooking. Today, though, we had some good luck. Five minutes after we finished cooking, the energy went out. It’s days like today when having the electric stove is so worth it.
I was in the classroom for a grand total of 20 minutes this afternoon. All I had to do was return a set of exams and I was able to knock out two classes at once. Having the entire afternoon open gave me the opportunity to take a full practice GRE. I did pretty much as expected – killed the math, did okay on the verbal, and satisfactory with the writing section. I’d love to blame the environment – watching little kids fall over, Richie asking me to drink whisky – on my verbal score, but the truth is all the blame is on me.
Our night was okay. After eating dinner, we watched some “Dexter”. We planned on going out tonight, and we did make it to the villa, but there is just no action there. After two beers, we left. We did get some good news at the bar: the guy who runs the place is going to Mambone tomorrow to buy meat, which means we will be buying meat tomorrow also!
The Brazilian brothers arrived a week earlier than expected. It might be the only thing that has ever arrived early in Mozambique. They should have arrived next weekend, but the 25th of September is a holiday here. This is the last time they’ll be coming to Machanga for the year, which means it’s the last opportunity we’ll have to get a ride out with them. Unfortunately, we have nowhere to go – an opportunity gone to waste.
Halfway through their presentation, I took my neighbor’s bike and headed to the market on a meat run. The guy told me to come at 9:00, which I took to mean 10:00. Even showing up an hour late, the guy had not arrived. I left my number at the bar, and told them to call me when he arrived. Around lunchtime, the call came. I took the bike once again – the bike makes the market run almost pleasurable – and became the proud owner of a kilo of delicious cow.
This is the second time we have purchased meat here, and it makes us incredibly happy. We know that we have delicious meals for at least the next day. In our immediate future, we have stir fry. Even with a lack of vegetables, it was still fuckin fantastic.
I was back to the GRE grind after lunch. All my focus today went into sentence completions. Thirty minutes later, I was satisfied with my results – 28 out of 30 correct. One section mastered, three sections to go.
The rest of the afternoon was all about anticipation. Cheese steaks were in our future and that’s all that mattered. Of course, they were delicious. How could cheese and meat on Mambone bread not be delicious? And to make the night even better, we finished off the second season of “Dexter”. It was a slow season – not as good as the first – but the conclusion was fantastic.
Now if only the GRE will have such a good ending.
Just because they woke me up didn’t mean I had to get myself out of bed. I stayed in bed until 8, when I realized that it was a reasonable hour to get out of bed. When I stepped outside, the picture was, well, unique. Almost everyone had cleared out of the school to go to a rally. Everyone returned around 9:15, drunk, covered in tomato red and highlighter yellow Frelimo t-shirts, and – for the most part – drunk.
Of course, we couldn’t take part in any of this. Nor did we have reason to. I love me some politics, but only when I have vested interest in it. I can’t vote in this election, a change in status quo won’t affect Mozambican-American relations, and to be honest, this election can only affect me negatively. I, of course, hope that Mozambique chooses to follow in Ghana’s footsteps with peaceful elections instead of following in Kenya’s bloodied path. But if, for some reason, things go awry, it may mean our service is finished.
Other than the raucousness outside, the afternoon was quiet. By mid-afternoon, I think most everyone was burnt out and ready for a nap. I know I was. After my nap, I did a little bit of reading until the energy came on.
One of my best friends tried to get in touch with me today, but the nine hour time difference our conflicting schedules made it impossible. It left plenty of time for me to catch up with them, make cookies, and watch “Shawshank Redemption” with Richie.
I woke up at 6:45 Monday morning – on my own accord. I usually like I sleep later, but in this case, the timing could not have been more perfect. One of my best friends called me around 7:00. We caught up for a good while – enough time for me to wake up and roll out of bed.
I had a good bit of preparation to take care of on Monday. There was a double lesson to be taught to my eleventh grade students: one lesson on ordinal numbers, one lesson on how to augment one’s vocabulary. There are so many words that are almost exactly the same between Portuguese and English – organization and organização, minimize and minimizar – that improving one’s vocabulary is easy.
Before I could give my classes, I had an exam to give to one of my twelfth grade classes. It’s amazing: between Thursday and today, I heard significantly less griping about the exam from class to class. As for the classes, they went pretty well. For a change, forming ordinal numbers in English is actually easier than forming them in Portuguese. So that puts the score at English: 1 – Portuguese: 1,000.
My classes got out early, just early enough to make a run to the market with Richie. I was on the hunt for two things: ever elusive phone credit and a decent capulana. I got a couple of blocks from the construction site next to our house. Paired with a couple slats of wood, it makes for a perfect clothes dresser. The capulana – which is covered in fish – will at least make it look okay.
While chili cooked, I arranged the dresser and my clothes. My room is in much better order now. Our night was pretty standard. Food was, well, good. And “Dexter” is always good.
Boredom may have reached new heights on Tuesday morning. I had little work to do and there was no market run to be made. I figured I could at least make myself productive and clean up around the house a bit. The truth is that I had work to do. There was no shortage of papers to correct, but no pressing urgency to correct them. So they sat.
I spent a little time before class preparing. We are really winding down the year – about two weeks to go. I’ve given them just about all of the structures they can handle. Now I just want to help out their vocabulary. Along with the lesson on language parallels yesterday, adverbs are an easy way to add to vocabulary. They are as easy to form in English as they are in Portuguese. And they require no new vocabulary, just the adjectives they already know.
All in all, the class went okay, although the best part of class was being able to teach two groups of students together. With so many teachers working on the presidential campaign, a lot of classes have been cancelled. It is kind of the tragedy of this campaign. For sure, it is great that so many people – teachers and students alike – are committed to this campaign, but it comes at the cost of the students’ education.
As we move into the latter months of the year, I have expected the energy to come on closer to 6:00. Yet night in and night out, the energy has come on at 5:30. But today was an exception: the energy was on my by 5:00. The night was relatively calm. We went with a lazy pasta dinner with packet cheese sauce and watched some “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” before going to sleep.
My mind was racing all night. Everything that could go through my mind went through: song lyrics, sports teams, memories of my students in San Diego. There was nothing I could do to stop it. And to top it off, the Larium kicked in. For most of the night, I had no idea if I was awake or asleep.
I must have slept at some point during the night because I woke up relatively refreshed. We were fresh out of bread and it was my day to make a bread run. While I was out, Richie took in the English theatre presentation. I got to see a good chunk of it as well. The play has really come along. The students know their lines, they started putting costumes, and it comes in at about 17 minutes – could not be more perfect.
There was no need to prepare a lecture today. Wednesday is repeat day, and just my luck, the teacher teaching after me had cancelled class. For the second time in a week, I got to combine classes. For the second time in a week, those students lose out on day of French class.
It really is a beautiful thing to be done with work by 2:00. It would be better if there was actually something to do in Machanga. Instead, the rest of the afternoon was quiet, spent with cryptogams and Kakuro. With school finishing up in a couple weeks, it could be a sign of what’s ahead for the next, um, few months.
Our night was normal. You know, chicken sandwiches, a bit of “Dexter” and some “30 Rock”.
As usual, I had a busy Thursday morning. I made a run to the market to stock up on food before heading over to the school to watch English theatre practice. They have their lines down. Now they have a week to clean up pronunciation and timing. After practice ended, I corrected some abysmal papers and prepared for lunch.
Nobody is in school anymore. Teachers have almost completely stopped showing up, and as a result the students don’t have a reason to be here. The only people winning in this situation are Richie and me. We love being able to put our classes together, as I was able to do today.
Putting classes together meant I had plenty of time to myself in the afternoon. I screwed up a couple of Kakuros before starting to prep for dinner. Beans take a good two hours make, so we can’t for the energy to come on to cook; we have to use the carvão to eat at a reasonable hour.
Richie wanted to make the beans Mozambican-style. I really don’t care one way or the other. This was the first time we made beans Mozambican-style alone, and as is the norm when we cook something for the first time, we failed epically. The only good thing about these beans was we that we finished them. We salvaged the night with a couple episodes of “30 Rock”.
Friday morning looked a whole lot like Thursday morning – grading and theatre for most of the morning. But there were two difference, one small and one big: I didn’t have to make a market run and the energy was on. The Brazilian church brothers arrived and had some work to do. We know that we don’t need it, so we never really know what to do when the energy is on during the day. With temperatures rising quickly – after all, it’s almost summer here – I charged up some batteries for fans.
Whenever we do have energy during the day, we always have a game we play: can we cook lunch without having to light charcoal. On a couple of occasions, we have started cooking on the stove, only to have the energy go off half-way through cooking. Today, though, we had some good luck. Five minutes after we finished cooking, the energy went out. It’s days like today when having the electric stove is so worth it.
I was in the classroom for a grand total of 20 minutes this afternoon. All I had to do was return a set of exams and I was able to knock out two classes at once. Having the entire afternoon open gave me the opportunity to take a full practice GRE. I did pretty much as expected – killed the math, did okay on the verbal, and satisfactory with the writing section. I’d love to blame the environment – watching little kids fall over, Richie asking me to drink whisky – on my verbal score, but the truth is all the blame is on me.
Our night was okay. After eating dinner, we watched some “Dexter”. We planned on going out tonight, and we did make it to the villa, but there is just no action there. After two beers, we left. We did get some good news at the bar: the guy who runs the place is going to Mambone tomorrow to buy meat, which means we will be buying meat tomorrow also!
The Brazilian brothers arrived a week earlier than expected. It might be the only thing that has ever arrived early in Mozambique. They should have arrived next weekend, but the 25th of September is a holiday here. This is the last time they’ll be coming to Machanga for the year, which means it’s the last opportunity we’ll have to get a ride out with them. Unfortunately, we have nowhere to go – an opportunity gone to waste.
Halfway through their presentation, I took my neighbor’s bike and headed to the market on a meat run. The guy told me to come at 9:00, which I took to mean 10:00. Even showing up an hour late, the guy had not arrived. I left my number at the bar, and told them to call me when he arrived. Around lunchtime, the call came. I took the bike once again – the bike makes the market run almost pleasurable – and became the proud owner of a kilo of delicious cow.
This is the second time we have purchased meat here, and it makes us incredibly happy. We know that we have delicious meals for at least the next day. In our immediate future, we have stir fry. Even with a lack of vegetables, it was still fuckin fantastic.
I was back to the GRE grind after lunch. All my focus today went into sentence completions. Thirty minutes later, I was satisfied with my results – 28 out of 30 correct. One section mastered, three sections to go.
The rest of the afternoon was all about anticipation. Cheese steaks were in our future and that’s all that mattered. Of course, they were delicious. How could cheese and meat on Mambone bread not be delicious? And to make the night even better, we finished off the second season of “Dexter”. It was a slow season – not as good as the first – but the conclusion was fantastic.
Now if only the GRE will have such a good ending.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Year 1 - Week 39: Breaking Point
Coming back yesterday was tiring as all hell. The two day trip to Vilanculos is always exhausting, but having both Sunday and Monday to recover makes the temporary exhaustion bearable. The only downside to coming home so quickly is that there is really nothing to do. I could be doing nothing in beautiful Vilanculos or I could do nothing in, um, Machanga.
Sunday proved to be rather productive. The house got a good tag-team cleaning and we rewarded ourselves with a short Frisbee session and lunch. But after that, I knew I had to get to work. Real work.
I have not looked forward to this day. I knew that I would have no problem and the only ceiling on my vocab score is my own vocabulary. But the writing section…this is going to take some practice. Along with the fact that I haven’t written an argumentative piece of writing in two years, the GRE requires two different specific types of writing. The first set of essays I wrote were a struggle to say the least. With a little bit of time, though, I should be okay.
Burnt out on writing, I gave my mind some time to unwind with an “Economist”. As my vocabulary has increased, courtesy of studying, those magazines have become easier to read. There is no shortage of GRE vocabulary in the economist and seeing the words in context really helps me retain the definitions.
We had our regular Sunday chili dinner, topped off with a bit of gin that I brought back Mambone. The plan was to go out with some colleagues and kill the bottle off, so we thought we’d get started early. Immediately after dinner, my grandmother called. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked with her, as she has had trouble getting through to my phone, so it was nice to talk with her again.
Before going out – and before the energy went out – we knocked out a couple episodes of “Dexter”. We are inching our way closer to the season finale. We have one more episode left before we move on to season two.
We left when the lights went out, but it wasn’t with our usual crowd, which was kind of disappointing. No more than a few beers in did we decide that it was time to leave. The scene wasn’t right and the crowd was even worse. We came home around 11 unfulfilled.
But alas, there was a fulfillment. It waited on Richie’s computer, which had just enough power left to survive the finale of “Dexter”. Beautiful. We watched the last episode amongst too many mosquitoes to count.
Monday was a holiday in the states and by strange coincidence, it was also a holiday here. Of course, there was some sort of celebration in the town plaza which, as always, I chose not to attend. Too much sun, too much waiting, too many other ways to waste a couple of hours. While Richie was out, I cleaned up the house and spent some quality time in my vocab book. I am achingly close to having this book finished.
By mid-afternoon, I was ready to give up. Napping was in the cards and it felt fantastic, good enough to make me thoroughly groggy when I woke up. Still slightly in the haze, I got to work on practice sets. I started out easy and built up to the most difficult level. I did just fine on the math, projecting to a 750 out of 800. The 620 on verbal was a little disappointing, but there is still plenty of time for practice.
As I finished up the last set, Richie gave me a call. He was in the villa with some colleagues. Done with my work, I went over there for a bit before the energy came on. Just before eating dinner, my aunt and grandfather called. Just as with my grandmother, I haven’t talked with each of them in a long time. After the calls, we ended our night with a couple episodes of “30 Rock”.
I was back to work with computers on Tuesday morning. It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve done this, so it was good to get back in the game. I’ve wanted to teach Excel for these couple of weeks, but malaria and computer updates have interfered with my plans. But now we are back in the rhythm. I introduced my students to the magical world of Excel formulas. This is certainly a little more complicated than Word, but with time and experience, they will be fine. Richie dropped in toward the end of the class. Having him there was nice. He could keep his eyes on teacher while I worked with the other.
We returned back home around 11 to get lunch going. After lunch, the day was pretty boring. I had three classes instead of my regular five. Yesterday’s holiday screwed up my schedule pretty good. With the free time, I studied a little bit and threw the Frisbee with Richie.
By the late afternoon, we were trying to figure out what to do for dinner. It’s too soon for chili, and we usually wait until Wednesday to crack open a can of turkey or chicken. I proposed a radical idea: soft tacos. We didn’t want to cook beans, so Richie ran to the market to buy canned beans. In comparison to having to soak the beans all day, then taking 90 minutes to cook them, reheating canned beans was a dream (albeit a relatively expensive one).
The tacos were better than we could have imagined. My homemade tortillas were pretty damn good. Most importantly, they didn’t fall apart when we ate. All that was missing was some guacamole and Corona. We capped the night with the first two episodes of season 2 of “Dexter”..
For the first time in a while, we had an English theatre meeting. It’s not that the students haven’t been meeting; they have actually been meeting on their own for a while. It’s good. And they’ve actually done a really nice job of getting the play together. They know their lines for the most part and they’ve added some nice little twists. Most importantly, though, the play is long enough to qualify for the competition in a couple weeks. Once it is cleaned up, it could win.
I had hoped that I could continue teaching Excel today, but theatre practice ran late and many of my teacher-students were busy. It was for the better. Having a bit of time in the morning allowed me to get back into my GRE vocab book. Out of about 400 words, I hit all but one definition. Now, it is just about mastering the techniques and I should be good to go on two of the three sections.
Classes went decently today. I was teaching the same class that I struggled with last Thursday. For some reason or another, the class went much better today. Included in the lesson was a review for my students’ last midterm with me. I’m sure they are thrilled that they are almost done with me.
I was left with a little time to myself to play Sudoku. After failing epically at Kakuro for the last couple weeks, it was a relief to play Sudoku, a game at which I have a far higher success rate. Sudoku preceded a delicious chicken sandwich dinner, followed by a couple of episodes of “30 Rock”.
Thursday
I had a remarkably busy morning Thursday. Aside from my regular market run, I had to write an exam for this afternoon. I prepared the questions last night, so all I had to do was write it on monster paper. This would be a five minute job for any normal person, but with someone like me with terrible writing, it’s a task.
As if my students don’t hate me enough already, this test was the final nail in the coffin. They were responsible for knowing three forms of past tense. And the truth of the matter is this should have been an easy test: memorize three tenses that are all used in Portuguese plus a grand total of sixteen new words. Apparently, it wasn’t so easy. A lot of students actually took the entire 90 minutes to finish. It could be a bloodbath.
I started correcting exams as soon as I got home. Results were mixed. It was feast or famine for these students. Those who studied for ten minutes did as well as they normally would. The ones who failed to study failed miserably. With a forty percent fail rate, though, I have little choice but to curve it.
A couple of students came over to practice typing. Afonso brought along one of his buddies who wanted to learn. Strangely, he brought over a keyboard that he had. We were really in no mood to teach typing tonight, so told Afonso to teach the other kid.
Richie was feeling ambitious tonight. He wanted to try to cook beans Mozambican-style. The problem is that neither of us knows how to do this. Our neighbor came over and gave us some help, and by all accounts, they turned out pretty good. We ended our night “Dexter”.
Having corrected one set of exams yesterday, I was left with only thirty exams to correct Friday morning. This set of exams was a little better. The average was about the same, but the scores were more disparate. As with the other class, the exam was feast or famine. With so many mistakes, it took a lot of time to correct all the exams. Almost the entire morning was committed to correcting that set of exams.
Today’s classes took just as long to finish the exams. The second group of students just about shit themselves when they saw it. “Todos vão chumbar” – “We’re all going to fail” – said one of my best students. She did. A lot of students though did just fine. As with yesterday’s classes, those exams will need a good curve. Now that I’ve pushed my students to their breaking point, I’m quite sure that they all hate me.
Richie thought it would be a good idea to buy shrimp this afternoon. I don’t know why. I have learned to tolerate shrimp here, but given the choice, I’d rather not eat it. And it’s nearly impossible for us to finish the twenty Mets of shrimp. With me eating my regular 5% of the group, Richie was in for a long night of shrimp eating. After dinner, we ended our night with a couple episodes of “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.
We had a meeting on Saturday morning. Of course we had no obligation to go to this meeting, but we decided to go. We wanted to see what all of the hullabaloo was about. The 8:00 meeting started at 8:45 as usual. Most of the meeting was spent arguing over the color of t-shirts and how much money to contribute for a party. Big-time negotiations.
The only good part of the morning was that it took time. The rest of the morning was spent sitting around doing nothing of substance until lunch.
I thought I’d at least be a little productive and run to the market. I thought I had timed it perfectly. I got to the market at 2 o’clock, just when the shops should be re-opening for the afternoon. But nothing was open. Nothing. Even with that bad luck, there was still a silver lining: the market had bell peppers today, an always welcome addition to our meals.
The latter part of the afternoon was pretty quiet, just spent playing Kakuro. My book is just about filled out. I’ll have to resort to Sudoku or cryptograms before long.
Our night was pretty normal for the most part. We ate our dinner and watched a couple episodes of “30 Rock” before heading out to the villa for a beer or two. We were surprised by how calm it was. Tomorrow is the official start of election season. Should be interesting.
Sunday proved to be rather productive. The house got a good tag-team cleaning and we rewarded ourselves with a short Frisbee session and lunch. But after that, I knew I had to get to work. Real work.
I have not looked forward to this day. I knew that I would have no problem and the only ceiling on my vocab score is my own vocabulary. But the writing section…this is going to take some practice. Along with the fact that I haven’t written an argumentative piece of writing in two years, the GRE requires two different specific types of writing. The first set of essays I wrote were a struggle to say the least. With a little bit of time, though, I should be okay.
Burnt out on writing, I gave my mind some time to unwind with an “Economist”. As my vocabulary has increased, courtesy of studying, those magazines have become easier to read. There is no shortage of GRE vocabulary in the economist and seeing the words in context really helps me retain the definitions.
We had our regular Sunday chili dinner, topped off with a bit of gin that I brought back Mambone. The plan was to go out with some colleagues and kill the bottle off, so we thought we’d get started early. Immediately after dinner, my grandmother called. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked with her, as she has had trouble getting through to my phone, so it was nice to talk with her again.
Before going out – and before the energy went out – we knocked out a couple episodes of “Dexter”. We are inching our way closer to the season finale. We have one more episode left before we move on to season two.
We left when the lights went out, but it wasn’t with our usual crowd, which was kind of disappointing. No more than a few beers in did we decide that it was time to leave. The scene wasn’t right and the crowd was even worse. We came home around 11 unfulfilled.
But alas, there was a fulfillment. It waited on Richie’s computer, which had just enough power left to survive the finale of “Dexter”. Beautiful. We watched the last episode amongst too many mosquitoes to count.
Monday was a holiday in the states and by strange coincidence, it was also a holiday here. Of course, there was some sort of celebration in the town plaza which, as always, I chose not to attend. Too much sun, too much waiting, too many other ways to waste a couple of hours. While Richie was out, I cleaned up the house and spent some quality time in my vocab book. I am achingly close to having this book finished.
By mid-afternoon, I was ready to give up. Napping was in the cards and it felt fantastic, good enough to make me thoroughly groggy when I woke up. Still slightly in the haze, I got to work on practice sets. I started out easy and built up to the most difficult level. I did just fine on the math, projecting to a 750 out of 800. The 620 on verbal was a little disappointing, but there is still plenty of time for practice.
As I finished up the last set, Richie gave me a call. He was in the villa with some colleagues. Done with my work, I went over there for a bit before the energy came on. Just before eating dinner, my aunt and grandfather called. Just as with my grandmother, I haven’t talked with each of them in a long time. After the calls, we ended our night with a couple episodes of “30 Rock”.
I was back to work with computers on Tuesday morning. It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve done this, so it was good to get back in the game. I’ve wanted to teach Excel for these couple of weeks, but malaria and computer updates have interfered with my plans. But now we are back in the rhythm. I introduced my students to the magical world of Excel formulas. This is certainly a little more complicated than Word, but with time and experience, they will be fine. Richie dropped in toward the end of the class. Having him there was nice. He could keep his eyes on teacher while I worked with the other.
We returned back home around 11 to get lunch going. After lunch, the day was pretty boring. I had three classes instead of my regular five. Yesterday’s holiday screwed up my schedule pretty good. With the free time, I studied a little bit and threw the Frisbee with Richie.
By the late afternoon, we were trying to figure out what to do for dinner. It’s too soon for chili, and we usually wait until Wednesday to crack open a can of turkey or chicken. I proposed a radical idea: soft tacos. We didn’t want to cook beans, so Richie ran to the market to buy canned beans. In comparison to having to soak the beans all day, then taking 90 minutes to cook them, reheating canned beans was a dream (albeit a relatively expensive one).
The tacos were better than we could have imagined. My homemade tortillas were pretty damn good. Most importantly, they didn’t fall apart when we ate. All that was missing was some guacamole and Corona. We capped the night with the first two episodes of season 2 of “Dexter”..
For the first time in a while, we had an English theatre meeting. It’s not that the students haven’t been meeting; they have actually been meeting on their own for a while. It’s good. And they’ve actually done a really nice job of getting the play together. They know their lines for the most part and they’ve added some nice little twists. Most importantly, though, the play is long enough to qualify for the competition in a couple weeks. Once it is cleaned up, it could win.
I had hoped that I could continue teaching Excel today, but theatre practice ran late and many of my teacher-students were busy. It was for the better. Having a bit of time in the morning allowed me to get back into my GRE vocab book. Out of about 400 words, I hit all but one definition. Now, it is just about mastering the techniques and I should be good to go on two of the three sections.
Classes went decently today. I was teaching the same class that I struggled with last Thursday. For some reason or another, the class went much better today. Included in the lesson was a review for my students’ last midterm with me. I’m sure they are thrilled that they are almost done with me.
I was left with a little time to myself to play Sudoku. After failing epically at Kakuro for the last couple weeks, it was a relief to play Sudoku, a game at which I have a far higher success rate. Sudoku preceded a delicious chicken sandwich dinner, followed by a couple of episodes of “30 Rock”.
Thursday
I had a remarkably busy morning Thursday. Aside from my regular market run, I had to write an exam for this afternoon. I prepared the questions last night, so all I had to do was write it on monster paper. This would be a five minute job for any normal person, but with someone like me with terrible writing, it’s a task.
As if my students don’t hate me enough already, this test was the final nail in the coffin. They were responsible for knowing three forms of past tense. And the truth of the matter is this should have been an easy test: memorize three tenses that are all used in Portuguese plus a grand total of sixteen new words. Apparently, it wasn’t so easy. A lot of students actually took the entire 90 minutes to finish. It could be a bloodbath.
I started correcting exams as soon as I got home. Results were mixed. It was feast or famine for these students. Those who studied for ten minutes did as well as they normally would. The ones who failed to study failed miserably. With a forty percent fail rate, though, I have little choice but to curve it.
A couple of students came over to practice typing. Afonso brought along one of his buddies who wanted to learn. Strangely, he brought over a keyboard that he had. We were really in no mood to teach typing tonight, so told Afonso to teach the other kid.
Richie was feeling ambitious tonight. He wanted to try to cook beans Mozambican-style. The problem is that neither of us knows how to do this. Our neighbor came over and gave us some help, and by all accounts, they turned out pretty good. We ended our night “Dexter”.
Having corrected one set of exams yesterday, I was left with only thirty exams to correct Friday morning. This set of exams was a little better. The average was about the same, but the scores were more disparate. As with the other class, the exam was feast or famine. With so many mistakes, it took a lot of time to correct all the exams. Almost the entire morning was committed to correcting that set of exams.
Today’s classes took just as long to finish the exams. The second group of students just about shit themselves when they saw it. “Todos vão chumbar” – “We’re all going to fail” – said one of my best students. She did. A lot of students though did just fine. As with yesterday’s classes, those exams will need a good curve. Now that I’ve pushed my students to their breaking point, I’m quite sure that they all hate me.
Richie thought it would be a good idea to buy shrimp this afternoon. I don’t know why. I have learned to tolerate shrimp here, but given the choice, I’d rather not eat it. And it’s nearly impossible for us to finish the twenty Mets of shrimp. With me eating my regular 5% of the group, Richie was in for a long night of shrimp eating. After dinner, we ended our night with a couple episodes of “30 Rock” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.
We had a meeting on Saturday morning. Of course we had no obligation to go to this meeting, but we decided to go. We wanted to see what all of the hullabaloo was about. The 8:00 meeting started at 8:45 as usual. Most of the meeting was spent arguing over the color of t-shirts and how much money to contribute for a party. Big-time negotiations.
The only good part of the morning was that it took time. The rest of the morning was spent sitting around doing nothing of substance until lunch.
I thought I’d at least be a little productive and run to the market. I thought I had timed it perfectly. I got to the market at 2 o’clock, just when the shops should be re-opening for the afternoon. But nothing was open. Nothing. Even with that bad luck, there was still a silver lining: the market had bell peppers today, an always welcome addition to our meals.
The latter part of the afternoon was pretty quiet, just spent playing Kakuro. My book is just about filled out. I’ll have to resort to Sudoku or cryptograms before long.
Our night was pretty normal for the most part. We ate our dinner and watched a couple episodes of “30 Rock” before heading out to the villa for a beer or two. We were surprised by how calm it was. Tomorrow is the official start of election season. Should be interesting.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Year 1 - Week 38: Happiness is a Cheese Steak
For some reason, while we were out last night, Richie committed us to going to Mambone for the day. I was not happy about this. I didn’t just want to stay in Machanga: work all but forced me to stay here.
After reading for a little bit, Richie made his way out while I politely declined the invite. One of the beautiful things about being here is you can commit to do something, then bail on it, and it’s perfectly okay. “Sure, I’ll teach your math class next week.” “Of course I’ll go to Mambone tomorrow.” Haha, yea right.
Instead of making the journey, I spent a solid four hours – well into the afternoon – correcting the last set exams. I committed myself to finishing those damn exams before I ate, but I didn’t expect to take until 2:30. Had it been any other group of kids, it would have taken longer, but this particular group did a nice job.
With the rest of the afternoon to myself, I decided I should be productive. I gave the house a thorough cleaning and even put up a small addition to the house. Richie, who recently spent some time in Maputo and Beira, came back with some essential spices. Lacking the room to place said spices, I found a small shelf-like piece of wood, put a couple of nails into the concrete wall, and just like that, we had a third spice shelf.
Richie returned from Mambone absolutely tanked. The party they expected to go to never really happened (you see, you can even say you’ll have a party, and then not do it!). Nothing that a little food can’t help. We made our usual Sunday chili dinner, and with the addition of recently arrived cheese, it was more delicious than usual. Out of boredom, I made on of the boxes of cake that my parents sent and spent the rest of the night freaked out by “Dexter”. That is on creepy dude, but I like it.
Monday morning, like a lot of Sunday, was committed to work. Our journey through the past tense was to continue today. For this week, I had plans to delve into the world of past participles. As is the case with most things grammatical, this is a lot easier in Portuguese than it is in English. The trade-off, though, is that participles are rarely used in spoken Portuguese, so I will be doubly challenged teaching both new vocabulary and rarely used structure at the same time.
Richie made a morning market run while I prepared for classes. As he shopped, he sent the most beautiful two-word text message I’ve ever seen: “buying beef”. Glorious. In conjunction with Velveeta, we are in business for some beautiful meals. For lunch, we started simply, just fried up with veggies and potatoes. The game changes later tonight.
Classes went alright today. Sometimes I feel like my eleventh graders pick up the things more easily than my twelfth graders, but it may just be certain individuals. Classes today, though, were only standing in the way between me and a cheesesteak.
There are few things that can go wrong with cheesesteaks. Cheese, beef, vegetables and good bread are a pretty deadly combination. And especially when you haven’t had one of those suckers in a loooong time, it can be terrible and still be great. For tonight, there were no words spoken between us during dinner, only the occasional groan of utter satisfaction. With an Oreo or two and an episode of “Dexter”, this night will not soon be topped.
I woke up Tuesday hung over, but not hung over from beer. If it’s possible to have a food coma last over night, this must be what it feels like. I didn’t want to get out of bed for fear that this wonderful feeling would flee. By 9, though, I had to get up. Sadly, that hung over feeling left quickly and no magazine could replace that feeling. My classes already planned, I read for the better part of the morning.
The beef that Richie bought survived overnight without a fridge, but we wouldn’t dare try to stretch it out until the evening. Whatever we had left, it had to be finished by lunch. We cut up some veggies, cooked up some rice, and made a lovely beef stir fry.
Classes went swimmingly today, nothing special. What was special would be dinner. No, we didn’t have any beef, but surely we could find an apt substitute. We still had cheese and damn it, we were going to put it to use. And if we were going to make pizza, we would need some beer. I ran to the little stand behind out house, bought a couple of warm beers and we had another silent dinner. Satisfied by our dinner, we satiated our hunger for entertainment with a couple episodes of “Dexter” before bed.
Wednesday was largely normal. I made a bread run after a bit of reading. There was no need to plan lessons today: Wednesday is the day of repeats.
After two days of meat and cheese, it was difficult to go back to the regular rotation. The bread was fresh and we had just a little bit of cheese left to throw into the eggs. It will help ease the transition into normal food.
Normally, the lesson I give on Wednesday is given twice, once to one class and once to another. But fortune was on my side today. One of the teachers has not been around this week and his classes have been left open. A student said that there was no teacher and wanted to do classes together. Would I love to! Half the chalk, half the time, everyone wins.
I was free from classes by 2:00. Freedom! I could have napped. I should have napped. But I chose not to. Instead I just sat on the porch inundated by magazines. It was a beautiful thing, a rare day when Richie actually worked more hours than I did.
The night was alright. We ate dinner quickly so we could get in two episodes of “Dexter”. Tonight should be the night that the Larium kicks in. This asshole is probably going to give me some serious nightmares.
Well, I was right, plus some. I didn’t fall asleep until 1:00. Instead of bad dreams, I got the paranoia. Then when I finally got to sleep, I the bad dreams came. Fun fun.
There was no need to make the normal Thursday market run. Richie and I had plans to go to Chimoio for a bank run, shopping, and an epic Central party. Already with a general idea for a lesson plan, I was left with little to do. So I sat and read.
Classes were both better and worse than anticipated. They were better in that because so many teachers cancelled class, I was able to do classes together; they were worse in that the content was much more difficult that I anticipated. The first half went okay, but the second part will take another day of explanation. Eh, they can’t all be great.
Being done with classes by 2:00 was beautiful. Having the energy on when I came back was just glorious. We have some Peace Corps paperwork to take care of and this was a good time to take care of it. My neighbors, on the other hand, had other ideas. They had someone that they wanted me to meet: the new muzungu here. She’s a nice girl from Manitoba who is here on a year contract. It’s nice to have another muzungu here, but it’s kind of sad to know that she arrived here months after we did and she will be gone before we leave.
We spent a good part of the afternoon talking, jumping between Portuguese and English. She just arrived two weeks ago and we thought we’d show her around town for a bit. And we had the pleasure of introducing her to the glory that is Mambone bread.
Dinner was ordinary and “Dexter” was good as always. But we called it an early night. Going to Chimoio will mean we have to get up at 4:15 tomorrow for an intolerable chapa ride.
Hearing the phone alarm go off is depressing, but being awake for when it happened was just terrible. We packed our bags, closed up the house, and walked under a bright moon to the villa.
Unfortunately for us, we weren’t going to Beira, just the crossroads, so we would have the last priority for getting on. And as luck would have it, we got pinched out. Our day might as well have been over, but it was only 6:15. There was a car that was going to head out at 8, and we considered it. The problem, though, isn’t leaving Machanga, it’s getting back into Machanga.
Richie decided to give up. For some reason, I was ambitious. I decided that it would be a good time to go to Vilanculos. After all, it’s been a while since I’ve left town and I’m starting to run low on money. Plans changed. I crossed the river and actually had a stroke of good luck: a trucked was heading directly from Mambone to Vilanculos. Beautiful. Other than two lengthy stops in Maluvane and Inhassoro, it was smooth sailing.
My main concern once I got into town was to pick up a laptop. But first, there was food to be eaten. And when in Vil, it must be pizza. It doesn’t matter than I’ve had more cheese this week than I have had in the last year. If I’m in Vilanculos, I’m eating pizza. The timing was perfect. I got my pizza, did my shopping, and had the computer in my hands by later afternoon.
The girls in Vilanculos were gracious enough to let me stay with them on extraordinarily short notice. They had work to do and I was drop-dead exhausted so it proved to be a quiet night, a night I was welcome to have.
The Vilanculos girls made their way out early Saturday morning, but I stuck around for the Vil-Mambone 10:30 chapa. While I waited, I knocked out some last-minute shopping and secured my shotgun seat. The ride was largely uneventful, which is good. But by the time I got back to Mambone, I was drop-dead exhausted.
I returned to an empty house. Richie was out drinking in the villa with some teachers. Apparently, he started around 9:30 in the morning. Fortunately, he had the good sense to drop our keys off with the neighbor.
As soon as I sat down to eat a little something, Richie called. I needed to go to the villa immediately, to get in on the drinking. Hungry, dehydrated, and tired, I wanted no part of the villa. But when I got a call from a colleague called to say he wanted to celebrate his birthday with friends, I had no choice.
At a reasonable hour, and reasonably liquored up, we returned home to cook up dinner. Dinner, though, was just the preface to a glorious night of “Dexter”. In between episodes, I talked to my parents, the first time I’ve talked with them in a while.
Pizza, cheese steaks, Dexter…going to be tough to beat this week.
After reading for a little bit, Richie made his way out while I politely declined the invite. One of the beautiful things about being here is you can commit to do something, then bail on it, and it’s perfectly okay. “Sure, I’ll teach your math class next week.” “Of course I’ll go to Mambone tomorrow.” Haha, yea right.
Instead of making the journey, I spent a solid four hours – well into the afternoon – correcting the last set exams. I committed myself to finishing those damn exams before I ate, but I didn’t expect to take until 2:30. Had it been any other group of kids, it would have taken longer, but this particular group did a nice job.
With the rest of the afternoon to myself, I decided I should be productive. I gave the house a thorough cleaning and even put up a small addition to the house. Richie, who recently spent some time in Maputo and Beira, came back with some essential spices. Lacking the room to place said spices, I found a small shelf-like piece of wood, put a couple of nails into the concrete wall, and just like that, we had a third spice shelf.
Richie returned from Mambone absolutely tanked. The party they expected to go to never really happened (you see, you can even say you’ll have a party, and then not do it!). Nothing that a little food can’t help. We made our usual Sunday chili dinner, and with the addition of recently arrived cheese, it was more delicious than usual. Out of boredom, I made on of the boxes of cake that my parents sent and spent the rest of the night freaked out by “Dexter”. That is on creepy dude, but I like it.
Monday morning, like a lot of Sunday, was committed to work. Our journey through the past tense was to continue today. For this week, I had plans to delve into the world of past participles. As is the case with most things grammatical, this is a lot easier in Portuguese than it is in English. The trade-off, though, is that participles are rarely used in spoken Portuguese, so I will be doubly challenged teaching both new vocabulary and rarely used structure at the same time.
Richie made a morning market run while I prepared for classes. As he shopped, he sent the most beautiful two-word text message I’ve ever seen: “buying beef”. Glorious. In conjunction with Velveeta, we are in business for some beautiful meals. For lunch, we started simply, just fried up with veggies and potatoes. The game changes later tonight.
Classes went alright today. Sometimes I feel like my eleventh graders pick up the things more easily than my twelfth graders, but it may just be certain individuals. Classes today, though, were only standing in the way between me and a cheesesteak.
There are few things that can go wrong with cheesesteaks. Cheese, beef, vegetables and good bread are a pretty deadly combination. And especially when you haven’t had one of those suckers in a loooong time, it can be terrible and still be great. For tonight, there were no words spoken between us during dinner, only the occasional groan of utter satisfaction. With an Oreo or two and an episode of “Dexter”, this night will not soon be topped.
I woke up Tuesday hung over, but not hung over from beer. If it’s possible to have a food coma last over night, this must be what it feels like. I didn’t want to get out of bed for fear that this wonderful feeling would flee. By 9, though, I had to get up. Sadly, that hung over feeling left quickly and no magazine could replace that feeling. My classes already planned, I read for the better part of the morning.
The beef that Richie bought survived overnight without a fridge, but we wouldn’t dare try to stretch it out until the evening. Whatever we had left, it had to be finished by lunch. We cut up some veggies, cooked up some rice, and made a lovely beef stir fry.
Classes went swimmingly today, nothing special. What was special would be dinner. No, we didn’t have any beef, but surely we could find an apt substitute. We still had cheese and damn it, we were going to put it to use. And if we were going to make pizza, we would need some beer. I ran to the little stand behind out house, bought a couple of warm beers and we had another silent dinner. Satisfied by our dinner, we satiated our hunger for entertainment with a couple episodes of “Dexter” before bed.
Wednesday was largely normal. I made a bread run after a bit of reading. There was no need to plan lessons today: Wednesday is the day of repeats.
After two days of meat and cheese, it was difficult to go back to the regular rotation. The bread was fresh and we had just a little bit of cheese left to throw into the eggs. It will help ease the transition into normal food.
Normally, the lesson I give on Wednesday is given twice, once to one class and once to another. But fortune was on my side today. One of the teachers has not been around this week and his classes have been left open. A student said that there was no teacher and wanted to do classes together. Would I love to! Half the chalk, half the time, everyone wins.
I was free from classes by 2:00. Freedom! I could have napped. I should have napped. But I chose not to. Instead I just sat on the porch inundated by magazines. It was a beautiful thing, a rare day when Richie actually worked more hours than I did.
The night was alright. We ate dinner quickly so we could get in two episodes of “Dexter”. Tonight should be the night that the Larium kicks in. This asshole is probably going to give me some serious nightmares.
Well, I was right, plus some. I didn’t fall asleep until 1:00. Instead of bad dreams, I got the paranoia. Then when I finally got to sleep, I the bad dreams came. Fun fun.
There was no need to make the normal Thursday market run. Richie and I had plans to go to Chimoio for a bank run, shopping, and an epic Central party. Already with a general idea for a lesson plan, I was left with little to do. So I sat and read.
Classes were both better and worse than anticipated. They were better in that because so many teachers cancelled class, I was able to do classes together; they were worse in that the content was much more difficult that I anticipated. The first half went okay, but the second part will take another day of explanation. Eh, they can’t all be great.
Being done with classes by 2:00 was beautiful. Having the energy on when I came back was just glorious. We have some Peace Corps paperwork to take care of and this was a good time to take care of it. My neighbors, on the other hand, had other ideas. They had someone that they wanted me to meet: the new muzungu here. She’s a nice girl from Manitoba who is here on a year contract. It’s nice to have another muzungu here, but it’s kind of sad to know that she arrived here months after we did and she will be gone before we leave.
We spent a good part of the afternoon talking, jumping between Portuguese and English. She just arrived two weeks ago and we thought we’d show her around town for a bit. And we had the pleasure of introducing her to the glory that is Mambone bread.
Dinner was ordinary and “Dexter” was good as always. But we called it an early night. Going to Chimoio will mean we have to get up at 4:15 tomorrow for an intolerable chapa ride.
Hearing the phone alarm go off is depressing, but being awake for when it happened was just terrible. We packed our bags, closed up the house, and walked under a bright moon to the villa.
Unfortunately for us, we weren’t going to Beira, just the crossroads, so we would have the last priority for getting on. And as luck would have it, we got pinched out. Our day might as well have been over, but it was only 6:15. There was a car that was going to head out at 8, and we considered it. The problem, though, isn’t leaving Machanga, it’s getting back into Machanga.
Richie decided to give up. For some reason, I was ambitious. I decided that it would be a good time to go to Vilanculos. After all, it’s been a while since I’ve left town and I’m starting to run low on money. Plans changed. I crossed the river and actually had a stroke of good luck: a trucked was heading directly from Mambone to Vilanculos. Beautiful. Other than two lengthy stops in Maluvane and Inhassoro, it was smooth sailing.
My main concern once I got into town was to pick up a laptop. But first, there was food to be eaten. And when in Vil, it must be pizza. It doesn’t matter than I’ve had more cheese this week than I have had in the last year. If I’m in Vilanculos, I’m eating pizza. The timing was perfect. I got my pizza, did my shopping, and had the computer in my hands by later afternoon.
The girls in Vilanculos were gracious enough to let me stay with them on extraordinarily short notice. They had work to do and I was drop-dead exhausted so it proved to be a quiet night, a night I was welcome to have.
The Vilanculos girls made their way out early Saturday morning, but I stuck around for the Vil-Mambone 10:30 chapa. While I waited, I knocked out some last-minute shopping and secured my shotgun seat. The ride was largely uneventful, which is good. But by the time I got back to Mambone, I was drop-dead exhausted.
I returned to an empty house. Richie was out drinking in the villa with some teachers. Apparently, he started around 9:30 in the morning. Fortunately, he had the good sense to drop our keys off with the neighbor.
As soon as I sat down to eat a little something, Richie called. I needed to go to the villa immediately, to get in on the drinking. Hungry, dehydrated, and tired, I wanted no part of the villa. But when I got a call from a colleague called to say he wanted to celebrate his birthday with friends, I had no choice.
At a reasonable hour, and reasonably liquored up, we returned home to cook up dinner. Dinner, though, was just the preface to a glorious night of “Dexter”. In between episodes, I talked to my parents, the first time I’ve talked with them in a while.
Pizza, cheese steaks, Dexter…going to be tough to beat this week.
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