Year 2 - Week 17: Finals Week

Though I am not accustomed to going to bed at 2 in the morning, I still woke up fairly refreshed. Unlike the sleep I usually get in Machanga, this sleep was a deep sleep. I did not wake up a single time. I guess that's proof enough that six hours of good sleep is better than nine hours of really shitty sleep. When all of us were awake, we straightened up the house to a sufficient level of cleanliness and I was on my way.

The two other Volunteers who were with me had very short trips to make, no more than 90 minutes each. And for each of them, there is never a shortage of chapas. I, however, was a little concerned. Being Easter Sunday, I wasn't sure if the chapa would be running. Our driver has a history of not driving on holidays, so I got to the chapa stop early, and anticipated the worst. If he hadn't arrived, it would have been easy enough to take three different chapas home. For some reason, though, Easter isn't a holy enough day to cancel his route -- good news for me.

What I have come to realize is that this particular driver is a really shitty driver. It's not just that he drives slower than he should. He also doesn't know how to say "no". It doesn't matter how long a person needs to stay on. He's happy to collect even a few Meticais. While I certainly appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit, it pisses me off to no end that he's willing to pick up people who could walk the same distance quite easily. All the stopping and starting added a good chunk of time to hour trip.

Another 45 minutes was added waiting at the river. The holiday apparently kept people on their respective sides of the river. Finally, enough people showed up to make the trip worthwhile for the boatman. All said, I didn't make it back to Machanga until well after 3 in the afternoon. What normally take takes four and a half hours took nearly six today.

Of course, I was hungry following such a trip. I had the foresight to buy a couple avocados while in Vilanculos, and this provided the perfect post-trip snack. A bit of good fortune was also on our side today: one of the stores had a truck of frozen chickens arrive. We would eat like kings tonight: chicken, salsa, guacamole and rice, a veritable feast.

A physics teacher had come by earlier in the day requesting help with some exams. Richie had already typed out most of the pages, but he needed some help formatting the last one. It was easy enough.

If I had no obligations on Monday, I probably would have stayed in Vilanculos for the extra day, but Richie roped me into proctoring an exam at the ungodly hour of 7:00 AM. I will not forgive him for this. Not only was the hour insane, but as I have made abundantly clear in the past, proctoring exams is one of the worst activities we do here. His little (and I really do mean little) eighth graders were taking their final exam today. I wasn't nearly as vigilant as I would be with my students, but I still nailed a kid cheating. He wasn't even creative: he had his notebook laid open on his lap. Sigh...they learn so young.

In one fell swoop, Richie ruined my day. Asshole. There was only one solution for this: a story of death and vengeance. Richie has praised the book "The Count of Monte Cristo" to no end, and with some time on my hands this week, I figured it would be worth the read. From 8:15 in the morning until the well into the afternoon, I struggled to put to the book down. This is the kind of book that every sixteen year old boy should read. It might keep them interested in reading.

While I sat in the house reading, a very strange thing happened: it rained. And it didn't rain just a little bit. It rained hard for hours on end. I would have thought this would be a good thing, but apparently, the hard rain did a good amount of damage to the gardens behind our house. It seems like we can't live with the rain and we can't live without it. Greedily, I was happy because it cooled this place off a little bit.

My day wasn't the only one that was ruined. Richie had even more exams to give, so his day was ruined even further. I can be forgiven for seeking some pleasure in his pain, can't I? In months past, there is a singular solution to such suffering: baked goods. We haven't made cookies in months, but all of that changed tonight. We were mildly concerned about our oats being expired, but as we have come to learn, don't trust expiration dates and don't trust "must be refrigerated" warnings. They are bullshit. The oats were fine and the cookies were delicious.

The only downside for the night is that we finished our last episodes of "How I Met Your Mother". I'm going to be honest: I'm kind of ready to know who she is. I'm four seasons committed and there isn't even a hint of who she is. I guess that's how they keep you coming back. In place of said series, we moved onto "The Big Bang Theory". I had heard good things but Richie was skeptical. Ten minutes into the first episode, we had approved of it.

The night here was ridiculously hot, just as it had been the night before. All of our little fans have broken. They lasted about a year, which was a pretty good run. I'd ask for more, but by the time they get here, we will be well into the cold season, and then we'll only have to suffer a little in September and October. For now, though, I continue to wake up to sweat-drenched sheets.

I dove right back into "The Count of Monte Cristo". At this rate, this 530-page book is not going to last me very long. I finally got to the part of the book when the Count starts to carry out his revenge. There are so many pieces to this little puzzle, it's quite beautiful to see it all come together.

I had two work-related interruptions in the afternoon. The first was my own work. My last two classes of the trimester were this afternoon. Even though the weeks have been almost painfully slow, this trimester has gone by fast enough. All I had was a brief review of what would be on the exam. It's pretty easy for a final exam: study what we did this trimester.

The second interruption was another request for an exam. One of our best friends, the French teacher, came over in need of a typed exam. He wanted to dictate the exam to me, which would have been a royal pain in the ass, seeing as the extent of my French is limited to pastries. I objected to this, but told him to stick around in case I made mistakes. He still sat by my side and watched me type, impressed at how quickly I was able to type in French. In the end, it's all the same. Letters are letters, regardless of order or language.

I came achingly close to finishing my book before the energy came on. There was beef in the market in the market today, and for some reason, we got a great cut of meat tonight. It's hard to call the guy who kills meat here a "butcher" because he doesn't know how to cut meat. He just takes an ax and a saw and goes to work. But tonight, we had a nice lean cut of meat.

With plenty of energy left, we decided to watch a movie, "Yes Man". It was funny through the first hour until Richie's computer froze. We tried to start it again, but it froze again minutes later. That's grounds for giving up. I curled into bed with my book until the lights went out.

I refused to get out of bed until I finished my book on Wednesday. There wasn't a whole lot to go, maybe 30 pages. In most cases, I would say that bed always beats no bed. These days, though, I'm starting to question that line of thinking. It has been so hot these days that our sheets are literally wet when we wake up (and no, neither of us has a peeing in bed problem). Plus, absolutely no breeze passes through our house. I believe that we have the right to complain. Why do I say this? Because our Mozambican colleagues tell us that it's fuckin hot and even they are having trouble sleeping. I figure if they, who were born and bred here, are complaining about the weather, we can too.

My book finished -- the last couple chapters were kind of a letdown -- I had absolutely nothing to do on Wednesday. Wednesday was a holiday in Mozambique: Mozambican Woman's Day. Women definitely carry the workload in this country. The men may have the glorified positions in government and civil service and teaching, but you rarely see a man with a baby tied to his back throwing a ho in a corn field. So yea, women in this country earn this day off.

Of course, the whole town pretty much shut down for this holiday. School, in spite of being in the middle of finals week, was closed for the day. The truth is that the school probably could have functioned just fine, even without the female teachers. Less than 10% of the teachers here are female, so the impact would be minimal. But that can't be done -- it's a holiday, and if it's a holiday, there's drinking to do.

Usually, this is a day that would be right in our wheelhouse. Booze, food, not working -- it's a perfect combination. But Richie and I weren't really up for it today. Both of us were pretty lethargic. The heat from last night and into this morning sucked the life out of us. We attended one party briefly. The goat they cooked up was pretty good, but the beer was horrifyingly warm. Like, there wasn't even an effort at refrigeration. The spelled the end for me. There was another party in the villa, but that required walking to the villa, and sitting on our patio seemed like a far better option.

Richie was in the mood to see death and destruction. I can never blame him for this. I think it's one of the side effects of living in Machanga. We turned to a movie with guaranteed gore: "300". I've never been a fan of these illustrated novel type movies, but "V for Vendetta" was awesome, so I figured this would be okay. And okay is what I would call it. It wasn't great, it wasn't bad. Some of the effects were cool, but for the most part, it was just there. Not nearly as good as "V for Vendetta".

I had a truly terrible night of sleep Wednesday night. It was hot beyond imagination and I couldn't fall asleep until nearly midnight. Then I was up at 4:00 for some ungodly reason. And then to top it off, I was awakened by my phone buzzing. At this hour, it's usually a hockey score, but this was no text message. This was a phone call from Richie. "Hey man, can you come to the school and control an exam?" You son of a bitch. It's 7 in the morning, I'm still in bed, haven't brushed my teeth, haven't even thought about putting pants on. And you want me to work? Fine. I scrambled my way out of bed, into clothes, and over to the school.

Oh controlling exams, how I hate you. I will not forgive Richie for this. I caught one kid ogling his neighbor's paper like it was covered with Swedish supermodels...three minutes into the exam. He was moved immediately. Other than that, these kids weren't so bad. Some girl rolled in twenty-five minutes late and got right to work. I though, "Wow, she's going to bang out this exam in 20 minutes." Nope. She wrote all of the parts to the exam except the answers. Her paper looked like this: "The five kingdoms of living beings are: 1)_____2)_____ 3)_____4)_____5)_____ " Beautiful. I don't know a damn thing about biology, but even I could grade her exam.

Well, proctoring an exam while still half-asleep put me in just a wonderful mood. It was a good thing I had nothing to do today. I'm playing the waiting game until Friday to give my exam. It's the only day when I have all of my students for two hours each. The only downside was that a nap was out of the question. Despite being exhausted, I knew that if I napped during the day, I wouldn't sleep at night. What a sick trade-off that is.

At some point, a a group of seven year olds came over to my house. "Teacher, we want to learn some English words". Like anyone else, I asked them what words they wanted to know. They ended up learning seven or eight words, including "door", "bucket", "chair" and "shoes". Tragically, I'm pretty sure that these kids no more English than some of my twelfth graders.

To kill some time in the afternoon, Richie and I wandered over to the market. The price of stuff here has skyrocketed in the last couple weeks. The price of a bottle of Coke has jumped from ten Mets in December to twelve Mets in February to fifteen Mets today. Kinda sucks, but what can you do? It's still delicious.

I cooked beans for the first time this week. I really half-assed it, and it showed. The beans were undercooked, and I forgot garlic. That's a huge fail. Whatever. Richie, as usual, wasn't eating dinner, so it was only one of us who had to suffer. Following exam day, we knew we had to watch something funny, so we returned to "The Big Bang Theory" before going to bed.

Friday was the day for my students, but they would have to suffer until the afternoon to take my exam. While they waited to meet their fate, I did some work for the French teacher. He had another exam he wanted typed up, and of course I said okay. Why should he take five hours to type the exam when I can do it in 20 minutes? Not surprisingly, not a single students came over for help or clarification before the exam -- not today, not any other day. I don't know if they are too proud to ask for help or would be too ashamed or are just not used to teachers willing to help, but I offer to help them every time, and every time, no one comes over.

This test, I will say, is probably the most difficult test I've given in my year-plus here. Every question was taken from national exams from years before, there was a ton of vocabulary (most of them cognates) that would be new to them. But seriously, if you can't figure out that negligent is negligente, you might have bigger problems. Plus, on top of the all the new vocabulary, I told them I wouldn't be helping them define certain words. They were on their own, just like they would be on their national exam in November.

So there I stood, for more than three hours, watching my students take exams. Some of them tried to ask for help, but when they asked, I just shrugged my shoulders like I was the one learning English. For the first time in ages, I had no cheaters and I didn't even have to move anyone. They finally realize that I mean business on exam day. The only thing that is slightly concerning is there is a group of students in one of my classes who have not taken a single one of my exams this year. I saw them just sitting under a tree during my exam and they walked in after the exam was done. The truth is, these aren't particularly good students, and they would probably fail the exam anyway. They are just making it easier for me to grade. I have no problem giving out zeroes.

I wanted to get grading right away. 100 exams times 40 questions per exam is a lot. My saving grace was this exam was multiple choice. Ten exams into grading, I pretty much had the sequence memorized and could get through an exam in about a minute or two. I managed to knock out one of two classes before the energy came on and set aside the other class for tomorrow.

For the first time in a while, I was called in on serious tech duty. One of the computers wasn't starting up at all, which was just a little curious for me and a little disconcerting for some teachers because they needed to get documents from this computer. Sure, most of these computers have viruses, but even the most severely infected ones turn on before they shut down. I looked through all the basic stuff -- cables, wires, etc -- and everything seemed in place. I opened her up, and couldn't notice any disconnections. So I went to a last result: I popped out the hard drive, put it another computer, and voila! we had a running computer. The teachers were very grateful for my assistance. While I was out, Richie had cooked up some shrimp and rice. We watched some "Big Bang Theory" while eating, and when the energy when out, we were out too.

I immediately went back to work on Saturday morning. I wanted to get these papers graded as quickly as possible. Usually, the science-track students do better than the language-track students, but that was not the case on this exam. I think the reading comprehension section really messed with them. The difference wasn't too noticeable -- a slightly lower passing rate and a slightly lower average score. Nothing too noticeable, but noticeable to me because they are normally significantly better. Either way, I was done grading by noon, which means I'm done with work until about May!

There was some sort of festa going on in town today, some sort of cultural day. Richie, being the muzungu representative, went to the even while I stayed home and graded papers. Following this event was a soccer game featuring a team from Mambone and a team from Machanga. This is not something I'd usually attend, but Gary came over from across the river. They told him that the game would be in the morning. I laughed when he said this, knowing that most of these games don't start until 4 in the afternoon. And I was right. In the meantime, Gary came over for the better part of the afternoon. We introduced him to the glory that is potato pancakes and egg sandwiches.

Around 4:30, we wandered over to the field to watch the soccer game. It was a terrible game -- a zero-zero tie. While we were there, I think there were two shots on goal. Gotta love soccer. We needed something to make us feel better after that train wreck of a game, so we said goodbye to Gary and walked over to the vila for a soda. One of the stores actually head Pepsi, a rare deviation from the normal Coca-Cola. And everyone knows that Pepsi is better than Coke. I was very happy. My happiness increased when we found out there was beef in the market. We're eating well tonight.

Richie didn't want to do anything fancy. He just wanted meat. I see nothing wrong with that. I tried to make mashed potatoes, but I undercooked the potatoes and we didn't have better. It's tough to fuck up mashed potatoes, but I figured out a way to do it. The steak was still pretty good -- not as good as what we had earlier in the week, but not bad.

I got called back to teach duty tonight with a much simpler task. A teacher wanted me to transfer documents from a computer to his laptop. My work was done in five minutes, and thank god it didn't take longer. Within minutes of me getting home, the deluge began. It rained for the better part of the night. At least it should make for easier sleeping.

Year 2 - Week 16: The Source of My Headaches? Quite Possibly...

If it is possible to be noisy and quiet at the same time, this past Sunday was just that. The church was very busy today. Even Sozinho went to church. He came back with a palm leaf, so I came to reason that it was Palm Sunday. While there was plenty of noise in the church, the house that the godless hedons live in -- our house -- was nice and quiet.

With this new week, it seems that my headaches have mostly gone away. There is still some residual pain, so I considered it best to continue taking aspirin. One of the reasons I don't particularly enjoy taking pills is that most problems will go away naturally, but this headache was persistent and quite painful. The other reason I don't like taking pills is that I believe that you lose some tolerance as you take them more often. Clearly, I'm no doctor, but there have been enough people who become way addicted to pain killers that it pretty much scares me to take pain meds.

I spent most of the morning reading "Dexter in the Dark", one of the books about our favorite television character. I must say that the thing we like most about "Dexter" is the killing part. And over 302 pages, there was way too much plot and not nearly enough death. I was about half way through the book when...

After an otherwise pain-free morning, a whole new different kind of pain came over me. One of Richie's students from last year came over to get some help with English class. This is always an interesting event. Depending on the student, it could be really quick and helpful or really painful for just about everyone. And this was going to be painful. It was just a matter of how painful it would be.

This particular student is not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed and he came with the task of writing a composition. Sentences are difficult enough, even for my students. A full composition -- a near impossible mission. But this was bad. He had to write a composition about two Mozambican he admires, which required the verb "to be". So we said, "Okay, let's conjugate the verb 'to be'". And I couldn't not make this up if I wanted to. Richie and I started him off. "I am. You..." and he believed that the second conjugation was "eat". I am. You eat. Of course.

This was a whole new type of pain. It was the kind of event that every Mozambican English teacher should see. This student was in 10th grade, which means that he had English for 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and part of 10th grade. That's four full years of English. We then said that the verb "to be" was from Day 1 of English. We meant it figuratively. He thought we meant it literally. So he turned to page one of his notebook and there it was: the conjugation of the verb "to be". We couldn't help but laugh. And cry.

We really couldn't deal with this. We had to get out of there, so Richie claimed that he needed to "go somewhere" and I eagerly followed along...for about 30 feet, until the student left our house. And then I returned right back into the peace and quiet of death at the hands of Dexter.

I have come to realize that the real source of my headaches was probably not dehydration or an inability to conjugate the most basic verb in the English language. It is probably just your run-of-the-mill malnutrition. It's become evident that we are not eating nearly as well we were last year. We haven't seen packages since December, which means we haven't had chicken or turkey in a long time. The only real protein we get is from our daily three eggs split between the two of us and the occasional bean night. And there's not a whole lot of fruit here and almost no vegetables. It's not healthy.

Thankfully for us, tonight was a night for beans, and if it was possible to top the beans that I cooked a couple nights ago, I did so tonight. They were even more Mozambican than the last ones. Topped off with some "How I Met Your Mother", we turned a painful afternoon into an okay night.

If there is any upside to not getting a lot of calories, it's that I've been sleeping extraordinarily well. I've been so exhausted on the whole that I've been sleeping until almost 8 every morning.

Richie had class Monday morning and we had almost food in the house, which meant that I had to go to the market. This was bad news for two reasons: one, I had almost no money so I had to spend conservatively; and two, it was fuckin hot outside. There was not a cloud in the sky and I was going to be hot and dehydrated very quickly.

I was very happy to have no obligations on Monday afternoon. Tragically, walking the two miles to and from the market pretty much did me in. I spent almost the entire afternoon laid out on the floor -- on a mat, of course. There is no exaggeration when I say that. The only times I got up were to get my "Dexter" book (which turned out okay, at best), to get a newspaper, and to get my kakuro book when I was done reading.

Just as I was getting comfortable -- which takes a while on a concrete floor -- two students came up looking for English help. As usual, I obliged, and thank goodness this kid at least knew how to conjugate the verb "to be", in both present tense and past tense. This kid had clearly paid attention at some point in the first ten years of his education. He seems to actually want to learn. So often, kids come over here once and say they want to learn English, but the entire time they are here, they speak Portuguese (and occasionally Ndau). This kid actually tries to speak English with us, so I consider him a winner.

There were no beans tonight, so it was another night of lovely carbohydrates for me. I never really thought I'd get sick of spaghetti, but I'm getting ever closer to that point. I ate my spaghetti, Richie ate tuna, and we finished season three of "How I Met Your Mother". We are moving through these DVDs way too quickly.

I was asked once again to type up a couple of exams by my mathematics counterpart. He came over with a couple of problems, one of which I just could not solve. It was some third degree polynomial equation. The only way I ever learned to do these was by grouping common terms, if it's possible. But then, my colleague blew my mind with some knowledge and I went about solving the problem. He later came over with another that he couldn't solve but I could. When he realized is misstep, he just laughed at himself. I'm always happy to help, regardless of the discipline

I felt miserable for the better part of the day. It wasn't just the headaches. In fact, for the most part, the headaches were gone and I was off Advil. My stomach was not feeling pleasant. Along with realizing that my headaches were probably from not eating, I have recognized that I am struggling to eat potatoes and eggs. I just really can't do it anymore. Maybe it is all the oil. Maybe it's the fact that we have eaten potatoes and eggs for no fewer than 300 days out of the last year. But I just can't do it.

The class I had to teach today was incredibly simple. It should have required about four seconds of explanation and then I should have received glowing examples. I taught past continuous today, as in "I was playing football". This should be simple because they already know how to do present continuous. All it requires to change present tense to past tense is changing the verb "to be" from present tense to past tense. We know this could be problematic, so I went over it with them, for the thousandth time, before getting into the actual grammar.

My hopes for dietary bliss were exponentially elevated when a truck from Beira arrived. We had heard that a car would be coming this week, and while in Beira, Richie had insisted that they go to the post office to get my packages. Putting all the math together, this would mean that I have packages. But apparently, the rules of mathematics don't apply in Mozambique. There were packages in Mozambique, but the morons in the office failed to go to the post office to pick them up. I ask so little of those people in Beira. We just want them to pick up and bring us our packages, and every now and then, we ask to stay in the guest house. How they manage to epically fail at such a simple task is shocking.

We were really banking on packages to arrive because those packages usually contain canned chicken and turkey. For a while, we were feeling cocky and thought that we could probably do without these provisions. We were wrong. We are dying without them. Aside from the variety, we need the protein. It goes without say that while we are in Vilanculos this weekend, I will be gorging myself on at least a half chicken, possibly an entire chicken. I am just hoping that I can make like a brown bear and store this food over the winter. So it was another carbalicious night of spaghetti and "How I Met Your Mother" for me.

Wednesday, as has become normal was slow. I didn't have classes until the insane hour of 4 in the afternoon. What am supposed to do until 4 o'clock" Well, I had to actually figure out what I'd be teaching. There was one more piece of past tense that I had to cover: the perfect tenses. These are tenses that are used regularly in English but are not so common in spoken Portuguese. These are compound tenses that require the verb "have" along with a participle, as in "I have learned English since 7th grade" or "He had gone to Vilanculos before going to Beira". In theory, this should be easy to teach because it is structurally the same as Portuguese. But there's always something that gets in the way.

The rules for forming participles are not exactly clean cut. The first is easy: any regular verb in past tense uses the same word for its participle. For example, the verb "cook" in past tense is "cooked" and its participle would be I have "cooked". But things get messy with irregular verbs. For example, the participle for "teach" is "taught" and the participle is also "taught". But another irregular verb like "fly" has the participle "flown". If you are confused, you can imagine how my students feel. I tried to simplify things by just giving them a list of different participles that they need to know for my class.

Along with this glorious lesson on two forms of past tense, I squeezed in a lesson on passive voice. With limited time remaining in this trimester, I'm trying to squeeze in as much as possible. I found out that my remaining week would be severely shortened by two holidays -- Good Friday and Woman's Day. That's fine. Things are just going to have to move a little faster than I would have liked. I wanted to do the lesson on passive voice because it uses the same list of participles, like "The class is taught by Mr. Lee". They seemed to understand this more than the first part of the lesson.

We were told that there would be beef in the market by late afternoon, so we sent Sozinho with a mission: find the meat or bring back something with protein. The meat was sold out, but Sozinho had the good sense to bring back some fish for Richie and a can of cooked beans for me. I can't actually say he had the good sense. I told him to do exactly that. At least he carried out this simple task well. I ate my rice and beans, Richie ate his fish, and we closed the night with more "How I Met Your Mother".

I slept until the insane hour of 8:45. I don't know how I managed to do such a thing. I think it may have to do with the fact that I had about six calories yesterday. At least it served its purpose of getting through the better part of the morning.

There wasn't much lesson planning to do today because my lesson was already planned. I went into class and banged out my lesson. Strangely, this group understood the perfect tenses but did not at all get the passive voice stuff.

After class, I got roped into helping out with some math class for my colleague. He was teaching a class on probability and wanted to demonstrate using cards. And he wanted to use me, which was fine. He wanted me to do some magic tricks and I obliged. I'm sure the kids thought that what I was doing was some April Fools Day prank, pulling up their card every single time. The cards were actually a pretty good tool. I think it's the first time I've seen a teacher here use a resource that goes beyond teaching material, so credit to him.

Oh yes, this April Fools Day thing. I was not going to let this opportunity go by unused. Before the math class began, I told the students that when he walked in that they should all stand up and turn away from him. In a country where the teacher is greeted with "Good Afternoon, teacher. How are you", this would be a big deal. My students acted excellently. We walked into the classroom, and a huge group of them stood up, turned around, and faced the other wall. The reaction I got was one of anger: "I think that I am already here. This is a lack of respect". Yes, and it's hilarious.

I wasn't able to eat until after all these classes, around 3:00. And to be honest, I wasn't even that hungry. I tried to eat, got four bites into my potatoes and eggs, and gave up. I just couldn't do it anymore. I thought eating was one of the things I did best, but now I'm second-guessing myself. Instead I went to something that I know I'm good at: lying down. And that's how I spent the better part of my late afternoon.

For a good portion of last year and even into this year, Richie went into this phase where he couldn't eat dinner. He'd get through lunch no problem, but I'd end up eating at least 60% of his dinner. I think the same is starting to happen to me, but with the opposite meals. I can't eat lunch anymore, but dinner was no problem. I ate way more than my fair share of rice and beans, to the point where I almost felt sick - the good kind of sick. We decided that watching people die would be nice, so we watched "Smokin' Aces 2". It's the kind of movie that you don't really have to pay attention because everyone is going to die in the end.

Richie and I were on the move early Friday morning with one thought on our minds: pizza. We knew that a mere five and a half hours from the time we set foot out the door, we would be enjoying delicious New York Pizza. Getting to Mambone was no problem, but then the travel gods decided to fuck with us. We sat in Mambone for nearly an hour before the car left. I don't think that it's the waiting that makes us angry. I think it's the fact that we have absolutely no control of our travel fate.

After finally leaving Mambone, we got to the EN1. Richie and I both really needed to go to the bathroom, but a car was barreling down, and I figured I should at least see where it's going. Maputo, you say? Let's go, Richie, we can hold it. This guy bombed it down the EN1 and we didn't have to pay for the ride, which made it even better.

We made it to Vil in about five hours -- not record time, but faster than usual. We actually arrived just before things shut down for lunch break, so we tried to squeeze in some shopping before eating, but the cheaper supermarket was closed. Frustrating, a little, but nothing could ruin this day. There was pizza, just right there. There was no question about what happened to be done: a large for me and a large for Richie. I'm pretty sure that this meal will be more calories than we'd had during the rest of the week. I powered through my piri-piri chicken pizza with ease and watched Richie struggle toward the end. He fell a little short and I got his last piece. I then proceeded to make fun of him about it for the rest of the day.

We checked into our regular backpackers place and found our way to the hammocks. This is exactly what I needed -- a full belly, sunshine, ocean, and a hammock. I sat in the hammock for a good couple of hours, trying to figure out why I had to torture myself with that last slice of pizza. We swam off some of the calories in a rapidly cooling ocean. For most of the year, the ocean has been a bathtub, but this was beautiful today. And because we didn't have enough to eat for lunch, we each had a chicken sandwich for dinner. We clearly got in touch with the fat kids within each of us.

Richie wanted to headed out Saturday morning, but I wasn't quite ready to go back. I was in no rush to go home. I didn't have work until Tuesday, but Richie wanted me to help him proctor and exam on Monday, so I figured Sunday would be a good day to go back. Plus, staying in Vil for another day would allow me to get a little fatter before going home. Before he headed to the chapa, we knocked out some shopping and I got my final exam photocopied. The lady initially told me that there were not photocopies today, but when I told here that I had 200 copies to make, she changed her tune. Apparently, 200 was the magic number. The funny part is some kid walked in wanting to make one copy, and she said the machine wasn't working. She managed to do this with a straight face, even though my copies were being made right then and there.

With my copies made and my shopping done, I headed over to the Vil girls' house. They graciously opened there house to me despite their absence. When I walked into the compound, I noticed a familiar white face. One of the Volunteers from close by was in town, just to unwind. Sweet. Company. I had bought a kilo of chicken breasts from one of the stores. I had planned on decimating said chicken over the course of the day, but now I had a partner in crime. And another Volunteer would be coming in a bit later, so we decided to put of lunch for a while.

Lunch was fried chicken and pasta. One of the Volunteers in town was a southerner, so I pretty much knew I couldn't compete. This wasn't going to be home-style country-fried chicken, but he was satisfied with the end result and that was good enough for me. We were all quite satisfied actually.

We mostly hung around for the day, talking about the pleasures of teaching in Mozambique. We also talked about "community integration", two of Peace Corps' favorite words. By coincidence, the three of us all had something in common: all of us work at mission schools, not standard state schools. I think there may be something about this that gets in the way of full-blown community integration. The mission, more than anything, is our community. Most people on the campus know who we are, and there are fair amount of people outside who know us also, but for the most part, our school is our community.

At some point in the afternoon, I got a call from my parents. I don't know, but it felt like it had been a while since I talked to them. It was nice to hear from them, even though there wasn't a whole lot of news to share. It's a little strange how our conversations have changed over the course of the 18 months. At first, there was so much to talk about because everything was so new. Then, most of our conversation geared toward their upcoming trip. And now, a mere seven months from going home, there has been increasing discussion about me coming home. It's kind of amazing.

Despite the big lunch, that didn't deter us from wanting to eat a huge dinner. We headed down to the market to buy some goods: grouper, which would be beer-battered and fried, some vegetables, and most importantly avocado. Oh yes, it's avocado season again, which means it's time to go crazy with guacamole. I think this is one of those things that we really don't appreciate in America. Due to the glorious weather in California and other parts of the country, we can get just about any fruit or vegetable whenever we want. That is not true here. Things have a season, and 'tis the season for avocado. It should be a beautiful couple weeks.

Dinner was delicious and the rest of the evening looked a lot like the afternoon: just catching up. By the time we looked at a clock, it was already two in the morning. Wow. Where did the time go?

I'm happy report that the headaches I'd been having are gone, for now. I still can't say if it was from a lack of ability to conjugate or a lack of food. Either way, I'm glad they're gone.

Year 2 - Week 15: Headaches (And I'm Not Just Talking About Sozinho)

I think that one of the most amazing things about Machanga is that you could travel for fourteen hours and still have another five to six hour day ahead of you, just to get here. Just looking at the geography of Mozambique, if you look for the biggest cities around Machanga, they are Chimoio (eight hours away), Beira (nine to thirteen hours away, depending on how many flats the chapa gets) and Maputo (two days travel). Vilanculos, which is far from a city is only five and a half hours out and that's all I had to cover today. Compared to yesterday's fourteen hours, this would be a piece of cake.

Even though I went to bed at an absurdly early hour last night, I still managed to sleep until 7:30. I felt refreshed, alive, ready for another day travel. I packed up the few things I had taken out last night and headed toward the chapa stop. The lack of a Mambone chapa was disconcerting, but I was quickly reassured by someone that the chapa was in Vilanculos and it would be returning soon. Sure enough, thirty minutes later, the car arrived. This was a different car than the ones we usually take, but it seemed okay.

I kept myself entertained with a local newspaper which, to my surprise, had a brief interview with Bono. Apparently, he was in Maputo for some ONE Campaign event. Dude, you come all the way to Mozambique and you don't tell me?! Come on, Bono!

Aside from the regular annoying stops along the EN1, the ride was pretty smooth. For a change, we barely made any stops over the last 45 kilometers, which probably shaved an hour off our time. My good fortune continued when I got to the river. Somebody was already there waiting to cross and the boatman was ready to cross with only two people -- nice!

The rest of my afternoon in Machanga was relaxing. I did all the terribly boring things that have to be done after traveling -- unpacking, sorting laundry, blah blah. I also managed to catch up on my writing. Being away for five or six days makes this journal tough to keep.

The evening was equally relaxing. I didn't want to work too hard at dinner, so I made myself some spaghetti and used one of the sauce packets we have. You can go ahead and call me lazy.

As usual, I had no classes on Monday, which gave me the opportunity to take care of stuff concerning the rest of this trimester. We only have three weeks left in this trimester and there's still I lot that I want to cover. Thus far, I have covered present tense and future tense, which are each easier that past tense. It will take me the entire three weeks just to review the grammar of past tense. I also figured out what was going to be on my final exam. These students are going to kill me. Every single question on this exam is taken from National Exams from past years. They are all loosely related to what they have learned this trimester but not as clearly as I have presented it. It should be interesting to see how they do. Just from this exam, I will have a good idea of who will pass the National Exam come November.

My afternoon was committed to numbers, both for entertainment and for work. After lunch, I did some Sudoku and kakuro to keep my mind occupied. Later, one of the math teachers doing university work came over for some help with complex numbers. I came so close to figuring out this one problem, but screwed up somewhere along the line. I must have done it four or five times, but every time, I had a plus sign where I should have had a minus sign. Aggravating , to say the least.

With Richie still gone, I was on my own again for entertainment. His computer tends to work much better when it comes to watching DVDs but I was not going to let that deter me. Following dinner, I watched a couple episodes of "Seinfeld".

Monday was the last day, at least for a little while, that I'd be alone here. Richie was on the road on Tuesday heading for Machanga. I was happy to finally have some company not named Sozinho. That kid is going to drive us to insanity. Eight more months. I was happy to not have anything to do on Tuesday morning because Monday night was probably the worst night of sleep I've had all year. I didn't fall asleep until after midnight, and after that I was up almost hourly. Frustrating would be putting it lightly.

Just before lunch, I took a look at what I was teaching in the afternoon: a quick lesson on possessive adjectives -- my, your, his, etc. I kind of knew that this was going to be a tough lesson for these kids to get because while the Portuguese has just one word for possessives, we use two in English. For example, "minha" can be "my" or "mine" depending on when it is used in the sentence. I'm sure it will cause fits on the exam.

Richie returned within an hour of my classes being done. There wasn't much to do for the afternoon. I think he was pretty tired and I didn't have to worry about work until late tomorrow afternoon. With the exception of a haircut for me, we pretty much did nothing until the energy was on. After a long travel day, Richie wanted to watch something funny, so we jumped back into "How I Met Your Mother" for a little while until the energy was shut down.

I slept in late on Wednesday. For some reason, I had a headache as I went to bed and I woke up with the same headache in the same place. That can't be good. I was prepared to drug myself up, but decided to go the natural route first and pound a bunch of water. By mid-morning, the headache had subsided. I was on my own for a lot of the morning as Richie had classes for the better part of the morning, so I buried myself in kakuro.

There was a ton of shrimp going around Machanga and we decided to get in on the buying spree. We gave all the shrimp to Sozinho to deshell and cook, but the asshole decided that he was only going to deshell enough for him to eat. I really don't mind eating shrimp, but peeling it is a huge pain in the ass. It used to be that I didn't like seafood because it smells horrible. Now, I don't mind the taste and even the smell is okay, but if there's one thing about my food, it is this: I don't want to have to fight with my food to be able to eat it. And eating shelled shrimp is exactly that It's a fight. I swear, if Sozinho manages to survive this year alive, it's because whatever god he believes in decided to restrain Richie and me from killing him.

After my non-shrimp lunch,.I got to work on my lesson for the day. I was meeting with only one of my classes today and today was our first of many discussions on past tense. Past tense in English is easier than Portuguese in some ways and harder in some ways. With the exception of the verb "to be" there is only one conjugation in English, clearly easier than the six that Portuguese offers. The downside is that English has far more irregular verbs than Portuguese. After a year and a half of being here, I still can't conjugate some Portuguese irregular verbs in past tense, so I'm going to say the English is easier.

What I didn't count on was the fact that some of the vocabulary associated with past tense would be so difficult for these kids to comprehend. For the life of them, they could not understand when we use "last" -- when there is only one unit of time, like last year (one year in the past) or last month (one month in the past) and when we use "ago" -- when it is more than one unit, like "three weeks ago". I needed to explain it three times before kids understood what was happening. And even then, I'm pretty sure some didn't understand. These are the ones that might fall under the category of "lost cause".

Richie and I made a late afternoon run to the market. We decided that we were sick of buying rice one kilo at a time, so we stocked up for the year and bought a 25-kilo bag of rice. It will require us to eat a little less than a kilo of rice a week, and considering Sozinho eats more than the both of us combined, this should not be a problem. He has his doubts, but I'm pretty sure that Richie and I could get through the 25 kilos, even without that garbage disposal of an empregado.

There was a party on Wednesday night for one of our colleagues. She has been trying to transfer out of Machanga for at least a year -- can you blame her? -- and she finally got her wish. This lucky soul is out of her on Saturday and I can't see why she would return here. Instead, she will probably be living a life in Beira, a real city with an actual infra-structure. A couple of people spent all day cooking and we were banking on some of this food. But 7:00, then 8:00 then 9:00 rolled around and the food still wasn't ready. I gave up, made some spaghetti, and ate it just before the energy went out.

Sometime around 10:00, two colleagues came over and pounded on our door. Apparently, food was ready. I was horizontal and my head was hurting anyways. The last thing I needed was booze and loud music. I chose sleep over free food and beer, but even in America, I think I would make that choice.

The headache I had last night survived all the way until the morning. This was slightly disconcerting because I usually don't get headaches and to have one last twelve hours is highly irregular. I figured it would go away on its own, like most headaches do.

Even though we missed the party, there were leftovers of everything, and I was hungry. I wandered over to our colleague's house and feasted on rice and beans. Success! Then the beers came. At 8:00 in the morning. Many a Mozambican would consider 8:00 a late start. I can't tell you how many times I've been on a chapa and seen someone drinking at 6:00 or 6:30. I was going to have just my one breakfast beer, and then escape. But one became two and two became five and I had to teach at 12:30. I'm in for a lovely afternoon.

I only had a pair of classes and they had plenty of stuff to copy for this class. If there were ever a good time to not have it all together for a class, this was the one. Considering my condition, the class went pretty well. I also had the benefit of having taught the same class yesterday to a different group, so I knew where the difficulties would be. Richie, who was done with classes by mid-morning, took care of making lunch and I ate a late lunch after my classes.

I had the rest of the afternoon to relax. My head was still hurting, but I don't know if it was from the beer or the headache. I'm blaming the beer. I didn't do much of anything all afternoon. Having sobered up, and with my head still hurting (guess i wasn't the beer), I took the focus away from my head and put it into doing some kakuro.

As Richie took care of lunch, it was only fair that I cooked dinner. The last couple times that I have cooked beans, they have been disastrous. With some failures, like gnocchi, I'm reluctant to try again for a long time, but I know how to cook beans. I just need to put some energy into it. Since beans take forever to cook, we decided to entertain ourselves with "Public Enemies", the Johnny Depp film about the bank heists during the Depression. Between the bumping music outside and Richie's poor speakers on his computers, we barely heard anything, but seeing everyone die was pretty cool. The beans, by the way, were phenomenal, probably the best beans I've cooked. The flavor was right on and the texture was the Mozambican, slightly liquidy texture that has eluded us to this point.

Just as I stepped up my game with beans tonight, the headaches stepped up their game in making my head feel like the inside of a volcano. I don't know why I can't just be healthy. I had absolutely no problems last year, and this year has been nothing but. I get rid of one problem and the next one comes on. Well, two can play this game. I popped an ibuprofen and slept for at least a couple hours.

I woke up around midnight and it felt like a pick ax had been driven into my skull above my right eyebrow. I'm starting to think that this could be a little more serious than just a little headache. I asked someone at home to do some research as to what this could be. The result: a cluster headache. Just sounds painful. There's much that I can do about it. Rest, water, and aspirin. Oh yea, I can also inhale pure oxygen for 20 minutes, which may help, or I can pop some caffeine. I really don't want caffeine. And more than that, I really don't want to go all the way to Maputo to see a doctor about this. I'm fighting this one, and if it becomes truly unbearable, I'll deal with it then.

I started to think about what I could be doing or not be doing that could be giving me this headache. I thought that maybe it was from dehydration, but that's ridiculous since I'm drinking an insane amount of water. I thought it could be hunger. We definitely don't get as many calories as we should be getting. I thought it could be some form of malnutrition. Ditto on the not getting enough vitamins and minerals. So I decided to attack on all fronts. I ate breakfast for the first time in months, I took a multi-vitamin and I drank even more water than I've been drinking.

But this headache is holding on, no matter what I do, and it seems to be holding to a pattern. Not terrible in the morning, almost gone in the afternoon, medication-worthy at night. At least I know when the pain is coming on.

Richie went to Mambone late in the morning to pick up some things and see our colleague over there. While he was gone, I had some time to think about the rules of adding "ed" to form regular past tense verbs, and I came to the following conclusion: there is very little rhyme or reason to how and why we conjugate regular verbs in past tense. Some rules are very sturdy. With verbs that end in "e", all we need is to add a "d" -- "like" becomes "liked". With verbs that end in a consonant and a "y", we use "ied" -- "hurry" becomes "hurried". But aside from that, it's pretty random. Sometimes we repeat the last letter, sometimes we don't and every time I tried to think of a sturdy rule for these verbs, I just found more exceptions.

I had a couple hours to relax after classes before heading to this new English practice group. I had no expectations for what this group was going to be. The new English teacher decided that he wanted to do some extra work with the students, and I told him that I'd help him where I could. I told my students about the group and hoped that some would turn up; lord knows that some of them could use the help.

What I witnessed was shocking on a lot of levels. First of all, the room was packed with students of all ages. My first thought was, "Wow, some people really want to learn English". My second thought was more sobering -- there were going to be so many levels here that this group would need to be broken into at least three. I knew it was going to be problematic when they started with ABC's. Just to illustrate the difference in the levels of students , there were some students who it seemed like they were learning this for the first time and there were some who could probably do it backwards.

I mostly played the role of observer during this event. The shocks continued as the night moved on. At one point, one of the teachers asked a student to come write a word on the board. The teacher spelled out the word letter by letter "T-E-A-C-H-E-R". What came on the board wasn't quite "teacher": "T-I-A-S-I-A". Oh, this is not going to help my headache.

I won't lie. I was really hoping that this would be a more advanced group. I was hoping that this would be for students who had a good base of English and needed the opportunity to practice more, to refine their speaking. I was wrong. This is going to be madness, and until they can figure out how to divide this group into reasonable levels, it's going to be difficult.

Following that hour, I needed a laugh or two. We ate dinner and watched "How I Met Your Mother". I threw down a couple advil and a bottle of water and went to bed in not too much pain.

The English group was scheduled to meet again at 10:00 on Saturday and the other teachers wanted to meet at 8:00 to figure out what to do. I dutifully woke up at 7:50, put on some clothing, and sat outside, waiting for the other teachers to say they were ready to meet. But no one ever came over. With reason -- today was some sort of culture day, which meant that there would be dancing and singing and stuff at the second school. I did my regular thing and didn't go. Richie decided to endure. I was happy when I received the text message "all of these dances are the same". And it was hot. I was happy to sit on my porch doing kakuro.

My morning was marked by one event. My GRE scores were posted online, and I was only slightly scared to see what they were. I remembered the feeling of being completely defeated seven weeks ago, and now my fate would be written in a couple numbers. What turned up wasn't so horrifying. 630 on the verbal, 710 on the math, 4.5 out of 6 on the writing. I hoped for better, expected worse, and pretty much did exactly how I should have. One every aptitude test of this sort -- SAT 2's, SAT's, and now GRE's -- I have never had higher than 660 on verbal or a 720 on math. So there's room for improvement, sure, but the difference is so thin that it won't be worth taking it again.

The afternoon was far more eventful. There was a soccer game between two groups of teachers and we thought it would be good to watch. After all, we had been invited to the post game beerfest which would have no less than four cases of beer. We owed it to the teacher who invited us to watch the game. Our group of teachers ended up winning. We stayed for most of the game, but left with 15 minutes to go. It's soccer. It's boring.

The drinking commenced shortly after. It's been a good while since I've drank with other teachers and it ended up being a good time. We managed to get through almost six cases instead of the anticipated four. And I was happily interrupted by a phone call from my brother. It's been a while since I've caught up with him, so it was nice to talk to him. Certainly a nice way to end a week filled with headaches.

Year 2 - Week 14: The Game

The party lasted well into the morning. The discotheque doesn't really get going until 1 in the morning. We ended up staying out until around 3 o'clock. Under normal partying circumstances, this would be okay, because normally I have absolutely nothing to do or nowhere to go the day after.

Today, however, was different. The truth is, I could have stayed in Chimoio on Sunday and gone back on Monday. But I had 100 papers to grade, and doing that after a long travel day would not be pleasant. So instead of sleeping all day, I lay on the hardwood floors for 90 minutes -- until 4:30 -- and then made my way out. This should be lovely.

The day did not start out promising. When I got to the chapa stand, everything heading south to Maxixe, Vilanculos, or Maputo was gone. This day was going to require some luck. Then, while at the chapa stop, I got stopped by two police officers who asked for my passport. I busted out the Peace Corps ID as well and explained what I was doing here. They then asked me for some money so they can have some beers (really, at 5 in the morning?). I then straight lied to them. I told them that I made as much as a first year Mozambican teacher, which is almost true. We make about fifty percent more, but fifty percent of a small amount is still a small amount. They understood, and I walked away paying nothing. The most shocking part of this scene for me though was that even though it was 5:00 in the morning, and I had been up for 24 consecutive hours, my Portuguese was still on point.

This was only the beginning of a long week of travel for me. With a trip to Maputo coming up on Wednesday, this would be week-long contest between me and Mozambique's transportation "system".

Just as I finished talking to the officers, a chapa pulled up heading for the EN1. Perfect. I got in, and for most of the rides, looked at the backs of my eyelids. I was never really asleep, but I might as well have been. As we got to the crossroads, the sun was just making its way up. I figured it was better to get there early and wait then get there late and miss something good.

My planning paid off. After thirty minutes of waiting, a sweet truck pulled up. I thought he was going to blow by me, but he stopped just ahead. He was going way south -- beyond the crossroads for Machanga, and even beyond the crossroads for Mambone. It was in that moment that I made a major decision: fuck Machanga, I'm going via Mambone.

The car didn't go as fast as I hoped, but it was steady, and it was a whole hell of a lot faster and more comfortable than a chapa. And even though the man had music pumping at an absurd level for the ride, I still slept the entire way. This day was actually shaping up. Muzungu: 1 - Mozambique: 0

I arrived at Maluvane in good time and only had to wait about fifteen minutes for a truck to head into town. This ride was slow, and we had to make a small detour off the main road, but I was still at the river by 11:30.

And then the wait began. Sundays are always a slow day at the river, and midday is a never a good day. There were three of us waiting at the river, and the boatman needed five people to cross. We sat for a while, waiting for two more people to show up. We asked if we could just go, but he insisted on getting his fifty Meticais for his work. Fifteen minutes later, I made another decision: I offered to cover the additional twenty Mets. I stayed patient long enough, and if a measly twenty Mets is all I need to pay to get us going, this is money well spent. Once across, I walked back to Machanga. I was home by 1:30. Not bad, seeing as the chapa from Beira won't get in until at least 4:15.

Being home early afforded me the luxury of eating a quick lunch and then passing out for most of the day. This was a good sleep, and I knew that even after the nap, I would still sleep well during the night.

Without Richie here, things are uneventful at night. I made a quick dinner, checked some email, and then crawled into bed early with a book.

Sunday was literally the first night this year that I slept through the entire night. It didn't matter that my fan went off sometime in the middle of the night. There was a slight breeze as it was, and I was gone.

Hour for hour, Monday was probably the most I've worked this school year. I was grading papers by 8:30. I committed myself to finishing one of my classes before lunchtime. It was painful, especially since this was the, uh, slower of my two classes. Even so, they still did well. Most of them did well, although there were some epic failures.

I made myself a quick lunch, and right after eating, I was back to work with my better class. As I expected, this class did much better. 95% of this class passed -- as opposed to 76% in the other class. Despite the actual grading being easier, it still took my three hours to get through the exams.

I had a couple hours to relax before the energy came on, but once the energy was turned on, I was back to work. The math teacher here came over with a request for me to type up some exams. Seeing as there was nothing else to entertain me tonight, I used this to fill my night. I got done all of one exam and half of another before the lights went out. All in all, an extraordinarily productive day.

There was more work to be done Tuesday morning and fortune was on my side. When I woke up, there was something very different going on. The energy was on. And it stayed on. This is awesome. So this is what civilization is like. I spent the entire morning banging out the second exam from last night, and then another two exams. In between exams, I also made myself a delicious stir fry brunch. A day without using charcoal: what a beautiful thing.

I didn't have much of a class to give today. I saw both of my classes today and all I had to do was return and go over exams. But that didn't mean my work was done. The math teacher caught me peeking in his class, and he asked me to come in. I was happy to do so.

This day got interesting though. They were doing work on permutations on combinations, which I haven't done since, oh, high school. So I learned the stuff with these kids. But then, the teacher put up a problem that just didn't seem right to me. We ended up getting into a rather humorous argument about the whole thing. He was convinced he was right, and I wasn't sure. This was years behind me, after all. I still stuck by my guns.

Once I was out of the class, I went online in search of some information about this particular problem. And what did I find: nothing! Absolutely fuckin nothing. I was riding high, but then, another math teacher burst my bubble and said he was right. I asked for the proof in the book, but neither of them could find it. I'm inclined to believe them, but I'd be more convinced if I saw the actual rule in a book.

On this third night without entertainment, I was feeling it a little bit. This place does get lonely when it's only one of us here. I managed to keep myself busy with cooking and cleaning. And before I knew it, it was time to go to sleep.

Day two of the game between Mozambique and me began early. I was on the move for Maputo at 6:30. I knew this was going to be a long day. It was just a matter of how long it would be. Right off the bat, I had luck on my side. Three people were waiting at the river and I was the fourth to fill out their boat. I didn't have to wait long for a truck to head to the EN1. Then things got good.

I got a ride in a Land Cruiser down to Inhassoro. The guy did 120 kilometers per hour the entire way, and I didn't have to pay for the ride. It was by far the fastest I have ever arrived in Inhassoro. After a quick chapa ride to Vilanculos, something truly amazing happened: I got a ride from a guy in a Mitsubishi Pajero heading all the way down to Maputo. 2-0 Muzungu. And I only had to pay half price. 3-0 Muzungu.

My original plan was to take my time on this trip, stopping in Maxixe on Wednesday, Xai Xai on Thursday and arriving in Maputo on Friday around noon. But we were in Maxixe so early that I might be able to arrive in Xai Xai. It was a gamble, and well, I like to gamble. "March on" I said, and so we went.

This is where things got interesting. As the sun started to set, we started to slow down. Significantly. I was not happy about this. Even on the shitty road north of Xai Xai, he should have moving at a decent clip. And then I realized why we were going 40 kilometers per hour: the car's headlights were barely on. Great. After not being passed by a single car on the first half of a trip, we got passed by every car possible after 4:30. It was like the Eleventh Commandment: "Thou shall pass Lee's formerly awesome boleia". Point for Mozambique. 3-1.

And then the rains came. This was an incredibly angry, one of the storms that you could hear before you could see. The sky rumbled like there was an earthquake in the clouds, and lightning provided far more illumination than the car's shitty headlights could provide. Finally, just as we arrived into Xai Xai, the rains came and they did not stop, like the Cahora Bassa dam was just emptied. My ride told me that he could not take me where I needed to go in Xai Xai because it required passing a police check point and they would have dinged him hard for his headlights. He was also going to stay in Xai Xai for the night and would pick me up tomorrow morning to Maputo.

So he leaves me in an absolute torrential down pour. Thanks. A lot. By good luck, a taxi pulled up behind me and I was able to get a ride to where I needed to go. 450 Meticais later, I was nearly broke. Just to put that in perspective. I spent a total of 355 Mets to cover the hundreds of kilometers from my house to Xai Xai, and then paid 450 more to cover the last 15 kilometers. Add another point for Mozambique, 3-2 Muzungu.

My night in Xai Xai was brief and uneventful. I ate dinner with my Volunteer host and we discussed the March Madness bracket. I have seen exactly zero minutes of college basketball this year so I had no idea what was happening. I was in bed by 10:00, knowing that I had to be up at 4:30 to get my ride to Maputo.

One of the things about traveling here is that you as the traveler have absolutely no control. You don't control when your car arrives. You don't control how fast it goes. The only semblance of control the traveler has is how much you pay. On chapas, the price is fixed and generally known and consistent. Boleias tend to run equally as pricy or cheaper. With such little control, you really have to put a lot of trust in other people. And I, even after the ride last night, put a lot of trust in this guy.

Ilidio told me to be on the main road at 5:00 on Thursday morning. Of course, 5:00 came and went without seeing him pass. But then, at 5:15, here it came: a Mitsubishi Pajero. And then it just kept going, right on by me. You asshole. This was bad news. I hoped for the best. There has to be more than one Mitsubishi Pajero in this country. I called Ilidio and asked where he was. He said he as ten minutes away. Phew, okay. Ten minutes later, the correct Pajero rolled in and it stopped for me. We were on the road to Maputo, cruising. 4-2 Muzungu.

I was in Maputo by 11 in the morning, a whole day ahead of when I was expecting to arrive. With all this extra time, and my doctors appointment a whole day away, I decided to go to the Peace Corps office to hang out. I didn't do anything for much of the day. The Peace Corps office has internet so I spent a fair amount of the day doing absolutely nothing productive.

Before heading out to dinner, I went to drop off my stuff at my hotel. The hotel where Peace Corps usually puts us was being renovated, so I was staying at some random place not particularly close to anything. But there was hope: the sign at the entry boasted about television, WiFi and a pool. True to their word, there was a pool with a swim-up bar, a router, a television -- and air conditioning and bathroom with a toilet and hot-water shower -- you know, luxury items.

A whole group of us that were in Maputo went out for Indian food. The Indian restaurant in Maputo is pretty good. Every time I've been there, I've ordered something spicier, so I asked what their spiciest item was. I thought I could handle it. I was wrong. I managed to get through all the meet on my plate, but I could not finish the rice. It was just too spicy. There is a fine balance that needs to be hit between spiciness and flavor. As long as a food is flavorful as well as hot, I'm okay with it, but this was hot for the sake of being hot. Still pretty good though.

My optimism about the hotel quickly faded. The router was down and the television only had three working channels. At least there was still a hot shower and air conditioning. I went to sleep clean and cold, just like in America.

The appointment I had with the doctor wasn't scheduled until 5:00, so I made my way back to the office Friday morning to hang out. Besides the benefits of internet and comfortable couches, the Peace Corps office was a particular item of interest to us Volunteers: satellite television. With ESPN. Which was airing a replay of the Kentucky-East Tennessee State opening round game. I was glued. Hell, I was entranced. I could sit here all day and just watch this. But after ten minutes of game time, people wanted to head out. I begrudgingly left, but at least I had some deliciousness in my future.

A group of three of us headed downtown to Maputo Shopping Center, one of the best parts about Maputo (for me, anyways). One of the Volunteers claimed that there was soft-serve ice cream on the top floor. You don't have to tell me twice -- I was there. This vanilla soft serve was delicious, and only ten Mets. It was so good and so cheap that all of us indulged and got a second. I also purchased a new cell phone. The phone that I've had for most of my time here is all but destroyed. There is no longer a keyboard -- just a big white pad where keys used to be.

I had a couple hours yet before my appointment, so I headed toward the doctor's office and went on the hunt for an internet cafe. It was just late enough in the morning that people in California might be awake enough to talk. I'm fortunate to have some early-risers amongst family and friends.

This was a truly stupid doctor's appointment. It was just a check-up to make sure I was feeling okay. I didn't really need to doctor to tell me I was feeling okay. I knew I was feeling okay, and the only way he was going to know was by asking "How are you feeling?" But Peace Corps wanted me to have this appointment, so I came down for it. Of course, the appointment lasted all of five minutes. At least I didn't have to wait three hours, like last time. The appointment went as I thought. He asked how I was, I said I was fine, and that was about it. Wonderful -- so glad I drove two days for a five minute appointment.

I went to the Peace Corps office straight from the doctor's office to drop off my results. I could have dropped them off in the morning, but doing so would have meant not being able to return on Saturday, and I really wanted to get out of Maputo. It's funny: Maputo has all of the amenities, but I'm always so anxious to get out. The thing about Maputo is that everything is so damn expensive. We eat in Machanga for less than fifty Meticais a day. A meal in Maputo can easily cost 300 or 400. I like internet and air conditioning, but I also like not being broke. As such, I decided not to go out for dinner, but found some place that delivered and was relatively cheap. I ate quickly, showered slowly, and went to bed early, knowing that another long travel day was ahead tomorrow.

My alarm was set for 5:00. Having packed last night, I was on the move by 5:15. For the first time, I caught a chapa to the bus stop instead of taking an expensive taxi. I know exactly where the buses for Vilanculos are and I was heading in that direction when some guy asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to Vilanculos and he said that's where his chapa was going. I was skeptical, but I decided to take my chances. This chapa looked far more comfortable than a regular bus and I decided it was worth the risk.

I was very much wrong. Even though I got on the chapa at 6:30, we didn't leave until 8:00. People were pissed off. I was pissed off too, but I stayed stoic. Other people were a lot more, um, expressive. Around Xai Xai, the driver decided to put up a sign for Maxixe. I asked the cobrador (money-collector) if this would arrive in Vilanculos and he said no. I thought I was pissed, and then I saw the lady behind me. She was outraged. I would be okay as long as I got some of my money back, which is always a task. Once those guys have their money, they do not like to give any back, but I managed to get my 100 Meticais back.

The woman behind me was not so lucky. She was heading in the right direction but wanted to arrive in different town, which would require a boat or a separate chapa. She, like me, was lied to by the chapa guys. While I took my misfortune in stride, she decided to get angry. When she, along with another lady, got out of the car, she went nuts. I've seen people get angry, and I've seen people get angry on chapas, but this was the first time I've ever seen anyone hit the driver and cobrador. On an otherwise slow travel day, this brought a smile to my face. I'm calling this ride a draw. 5-3 Muzungu.

The truth is, I should have stayed in Maxixe on this night, but the gambler in me wanted to make it to Vilanculos. If I made it to Vilanculos by the night, I could take the chapa to Mambone on Sunday. I headed out to the street and tried to catch a ride. Everything that passed me was staying local. There was one more car heading my way and then I would try to get a chapa. The gods, once again, were on my side. This car was heading all the way to Beira and he wanted to move. 6-3 Muzungu.

While the road was good, he did 160 kilometers per hour, the fastest car I've been in during my time here. But then we hit the infamous Massinga road, where the recommended speed is 60. He took this to mean 100. I would have been okay with this, but then we hit this huge pothole and the car bounced so high that I hit my head on the roof of his car. At this point, I felt that a seat belt would be a wise choice, because if we got into an accident, I would be the only one walking away from it. Once we got through the misery of the Massinga road, he was back to doing 160. I got to Pambarra around 6:30 and after catching a truck to Vil, I was in town by 7:30. Just another ho-hum fourteen-hour travel.

I got to the backpackers where I like to stay and ordered food immediately. This was a fast night. Cheeseburger and french fries -- the only food I had the entire day -- a quick shower, a glass of water, and in bed by 8:30. There was more travel to be done tomorrow, but this would be quick and easy -- one chapa and a boat road.

No matter how badly it goes tomorrow, Mozambique can't overcome my 6-3 lead from this week.

Year 2 - Week 13: When Trying To Be Inconspicuous, Yellow Is A Bad Choice

You ever have that feeling when you're lying in bed that there are bugs crawling all over you? It's a terrible feeling, isn't it? Except here's the thing: the bugs that are imaginary for you are real for me. It doesn't really that I have a bug net. Those sneaky bastards always find a way to get in. The proof is all over my ankles. And on my sheets that are speckled in perfectly straight lines of dried blood, crystal clear evidence of bed bugs. I'd like to think that I've adjusted to it, but I still find myself boxing myself when some six-legged freak has found it's way in my ears.

Last night was especially bad. The fan helped, but good god, I think I was up every hour from something buzzing in my ear. Needless to say, I didn't sleep particularly well. Good thing I had absolutely nothing to do on Sunday. I killed some time making a run to the market. Market runs on Sundays are tough because so few of the stores are open. And we were out of beans. It took me three shots, but I finally found beans.

It was an otherwise slow day. I found myself buried in "The Tortilla Curtain", a book my grandmother sent me a couple months ago. It's a pretty good read about two couples in LA -- one Mexican, one American -- and how their lives run together. I'm usually not one for novels, but this one is alright.

Alexis came over in the afternoon. One of her colleagues from Tete (a long ways away) was visiting. I don't know what brought him down here, but this isn't exactly a tourist destination. So while he was here, Alexis dragged him over to our place. He's doing some food security/irrigation project in Tete and Manica, which seems pretty cool. They chilled here for an hour and left before the sun started making its descent.

I was in charge of beans tonight, as this is my job. The beans turned out delicious, as usual. While the beans cooked, we watched a couple episodes of "30 Rock". Then it was back to my bug-filled world.

I got a couple phone calls from family members, first from my parents then from my brother. It's been a good while since I talked to my brother so it was nice to catch up with him.

Normally, my Mondays are slow and uneventful. Today was anything but. Alexis and her colleague, John, went to the market for coffee and they invited me to join them. This was a shockingly good way to kill the morning. I was in the market all the way up until lunch time.

Richie had already started lunch by the time I got home. He had prepped, so it was only fair that I took over the cooking duty. With no classes in the afternoon, I thought I was going to be in for a relaxing afternoon with my book. I was wrong. The physics teacher came over asking me for some help typing an exam. Or I should say, two exams. This wasn't really a problem. If I'm not going to be teaching, I might as well be helpful some other way.

I was able to bang out one and a half exams before my battery gave out. Having nothing else to do, and wanting to get away from words, I folded myself into a Kakuro book. I then spent the remaining part of the afternoon failing miserably at putting numbers into boxes. After a nice run of success, I am back to sucking at it.

When the energy came on, I went right back to work on the exams. I really wanted to get these things knocked out. Usually, typing up physics or chemistry exams sucks because there are so many words with accents, subscripts, and superscripts, but these exams were shockingly devoid of these frustrations. After a pasta dinner (in which I ate my dinner, along with 75% of Richie's -- he just can't eat pasta anymore), we settled in to some "30 Rock".

I committed myself to finishing "The Tortilla Curtain" oon Tuesday. I had no obligations until 12:30 in the afternoon and only 150 pages to knock out. So far, it's been a very fast read. As long as I can avoid distractions, I'll be on easy street. I sat myself on the patio, plugged in my iPod -- making it clear that I didn't want to talk to anyone -- and went to work.

By mid-afternoon, after lunch and following two quick classes on the future tense, I succeeded in my task. What do I do now? I pulled out the kakuro book once again and, with the exception of one puzzle, failed horribly again. It's really frustrating to mess up on these puzzles because it's just basic addition and logic, and yet it has a way of seriously fucking with my head.

Just before the energy came on, the new philosophy teacher came over with a request for a typed test. I was sitting in my house, listen to the angry rhymes of Immortal Technique. When he came to the house, his ears perked up. He said "Is this Immortal Technique?" Yea man, it is. And then he said something I wasn't quite expecting: "Yea, Immortal Technique! I love this motherfucker!" I can't say I'm responsible for teaching him that nice piece of American vocabulary, but man, it was funny.

Having another test to type in front of me, there was no way I could really pay to attention to anything that we were watching. Richie wanted a break from comedy, se he turned to "Blow", the Johnny Depp flick about drug hustling. It's a movie I had seen before a couple times, so I could go in and out of it with little trouble.

With all of the failure I'd had with kakuro in the first part of the week, I didn't have expectations of myself for Wednesday morning. But shockingly, my mind was working decently and I was able to knock out three puzzles in an hour. Great success! As I sat on the patio, one of Richie's students from last year came over for some English help. He needed some help writing a composition. I knew this was going to be trouble. He had already written the passage in Portuguese and just wanted help translating. This is a bit frustrating for me, because I believe that you should at least try to write the thing in English. I passed him a dictionary and told him to look up the words, try to write the paragraph, then we'll mold it into something readable.

The hits kept coming throughout the morning and into the afternoon. One of the English teachers from the secondary school came over for the 12th grade curriculum, a math teacher came over for some help in his university studies -- complex numbers, which I could help with, and some advanced calculus, which I couldn't really help with. It's been too many years since I've studied calc. Then a physics teacher came over requesting help with differential equations. I almost laughed at this request. If I can't do basic calc, I'm fucked on differential equations. And then another student came over for help on writing a composition. Like the other student, this student came without having attempted to write in English. I gave him the dictionary, and told him he could come back when he had at least tried to write something. And on top of that, I had a class to give. Wow.

When the energy came on, I had one important job, and it wasn't cooking (Richie wanted to take a crack at cooking beans tonight). I had a whole line-up of documents to print out: two physics tests, a philosophy test, a letter for science fair, and a letter from our school director to Peace Corps. While I was in the director's office printing these documents, another teacher came in wanting to print his exam. This thing was an absolute formatting disaster spread over two pages. I spent 20 minutes cleaning it up, making it beautiful. He laughed, and told me that what took me 20 minutes would have taken him days to figure out. It's nice to be helpful.

This was by far the busiest, and not coincidentally, the fastest day I've had here in a while. I can't say that I'm mad that I have a light teaching load this year. 25 hours all in the afternoon is not easy. But a busy afternoon makes for a fast afternoon.

Richie's beans were okay, but he wasn't particularly satisfied with how they came out. He told me that the job is officially mine. We turned to one of our old favorites for entertainment: "How I Met Your Mother". We watched three episodes when we realized that we could easily blow through the entire disc in one sitting. Showing remarkable restraint, we transitioned into "30 Rock" before heading to bed.

Thursday was back to the regular slow pace of life in Machanga. Richie had a couple classes in the morning, so I was on duty for the market run. Generously, Richie paid for groceries today. I needed the help. I'm running low cash. We can't get to Chimoio fast enough.

Following a helpful, busy, fast Wednesday, Thursday dragged on and on. Nobody came over for help. Nobody came with a request to have a test typed. The most we had was a request or two for the bike.

Adding to the slowness of the day, I only had one class to give, and I didn't even have to lesson-plan for it. This was the same lesson that I gave to my other students yesterday -- on first conditional. I got through the lesson, and told the students what they needed to know for their exam. After a 20 minute review, they claimed to be ready. We'll see. After the first round of exams, I have my doubts, but I'll be happy if they prove me wrong.

After a boring afternoon of sitting on the patio, failing again at kakuro and starting another book, "Somebody Knows My Name", we ate dinner. Richie and Sozinho ate fish and xima, two foods I choose to avoid on a regular basis, so I made myself some spaghetti. We went away from comedy again and watched "Good Will Hunting". This was another movie that I had seen previously, so I didn't really pay attention. I tried to play catch-up with some people with whom I've fallen out of touch. The movie ended just after the energy went out.

I was back to being busy on Friday. I wanted to give an exam before heading out for the weekend and Friday is the day that I have both classes for two periods. Most of the morning was spent writing the exam. This is a two step process: first I need the questions, then I need to write them on oversize paper so I dont have to write them on the board twice. Usually this is taken care of on the patio, where the morning light is good and the breeze keeps me a little cool. However, as we have Sozinho around the house, I had to write the exam in the dark, sweaty confines of my room. Writing an exam should not qualify as an activity that requires a shower after it.

Alexis swang over just as I was preparing myself for a full cleaning -- head shave plus shower. She got to witness the full transformation. While she was here, we also cooked lunch. We offered her our monotony of potatoes and eggs in place of her monotony of rice and tiny shrimp, but she denied it. Strange, but it just means more food for Richie and me.

We all know how much I love exam days here. In all honesty, though, today's weren't so bad. I had to move a couple people around because of wandering eyes or blabbering mouths, but other than that, there were no "indisciplinados". There was only one student who particular pissed me off today. I know I'm not supposed to hold grudges, but this girl has earned it. Twice I have taken phone credit from her because I've caught her using her phone in class, which drives me up a fucking wall. She has a record of not putting in any effort whatsoever. She has missed multiple exams (she missed the first one from this year, as well as bunch last year) and the ones she has taken, she usually fails.

What she did today, however, topped everything. She walked into the classroom just as I was putting up the big sheets of paper, grabbed her things, and left. If she thought she went unnoticed, she was wrong: the bright yellow shirt she was wearing did not help her cause. And here's where the story gets good. Half way through the exam, she has the audacity to enter my classroom, sit down in the front row, and then...do work for another class. All I could think was "Are you out of your fucking mind?!" I already know what is going to happen. When I see her on Tuesday, she is going to say "Mr Lee, I didn't take the test on Friday". And I'll say "Why not?" but in my head, I'll be thinking, "no shit you didn't take it, and now you'll be getting zeroes for both exams". Then she will give some bullshit excuse, I'll call her out, tell her she's getting zeroes, and she probably won't even fight it. She knows she's screwed.

After that event, I had no motivation to correct exams, but I did find the little energy I needed to put the exams in alphabetical order, making my job of correcting and grade-inputting significantly easier. Aside from that, I relaxed for the rest of the afternoon, recounting the story of the yellow-shirted girl to Richie.

Sozinho and Richie wanted to do fish tonight, so I was on my own for food tonight, which means spaghetti. Richie always gives me shit for not eating fish here. Quite frankly, I'm not interested in starting at an entire fish -- and having the fish stare back on me. Tonight, my pickiness was vindicated. The fish that they bought was terrible. Richie got two bites into it before he threw it out. Meanwhile, I sat there happily enjoying my spaghetti and "30 Rock".

We knew what we were in for come Saturday morning. Richie, Alexis and I were all heading out of town. Alexis was taking care of some business outside of Machanga (AKA getting out of Machanga because it's starting to make her crazy). Richie and I were headed to Chimoio just to go to a party. Richie actually was going to stick around because he had a meeting that required him to go to Beira later in the week, and there's no sense of traveling north twice. I, however, would be coming immediately back to Machanga.

We got to chapa stand around 5:00, anticipating a 6:00 leave. By 7:00, the chapa was still not moving and we were done with it. We collected our stuff and headed for Mambone. Once again, Mambone proved itself to be far superior to Machanga. We didn't even make it to the villa before we had a car to the crossroads. And once we got to the crossroads, we only had to wait about fifteen minutes for a ride half-way to Chimoio that ended up being free. From there, we only had to wait about thirty seconds to get a car continuing north. All said, we got to Chimoio around 3:30, eight and a half hours after starting to move. Not too bad.

Needless to say, we were exhausted. And hungry. After doing a bit of shopping for the evening's festivities, four of us went for pizza. Chimoio probably has the best pizza place in all of the south and central of Mozambique. Real crust, real sauce, real mozzerella. This is happiness.

Then the evening really began. Having missed the first Central party of the year, I had a lot of people to meet. While our departed Moz 12 friends are truly irreplaceable, this group of Central Moz 14s proved to be pretty good. Everybody seemed to be having a good time, and we were just getting started.

Following dinner, we were conned into participated a ridiculous scavenger hunt. Among other things on this scavenger hunt, we had to chug a beer with a Mozambican while not wearing shirts. At some point, I licked someone's face. But the highlight of the evening was walking a chicken on a leash that happened to be my belt. Seriously, this scavenger hunt was fucked up, but really fun. The drinking continued until late into the evening, and by the wee hours of Sunday morning, we were at the disco. This should make for an interesting ride home tomorrow.

Year 2 - Week 12: Blue Skies Shining on Me

Richie was wrong. It rained. And rained. And rained. And then it rained some more. I fear for what the town looks like. We didn't have a choice but to find out. There was no food in the house. This should be fun.

Major negotiations went down before we went to the market. We have one pair of boots and one rain slicker. Richie claimed the boots and I was okay with that. I didn't want to get wet and I'm okay walking in the mud. As we made our way out the school, we walked passed another teacher's house and he offered up his boots to me. Who's the sucker now?

The boots were pretty much useless. We came to find out that boots are really helpful with mud, but not helpful with rain, because the rain fell straight into the boots. And they are not really helpful when the lake that is now sitting in the road is knee high. By the time we got to the river, we both had to take out boots off just to empty the water out.

This turned out to be quite the market run. We didn't have any food in the house and we really didn't want to go back to the market any time soon. So we stocked up on everything -- potatoes, onions, eggs, spaghetti, phone credit, anything we could get our hands on. Walking back with all the groceries was worse than walking to the market. We had to endure the same rain, the same lake in the middle of the road, except now we had ten pounds of food with us.

If there was ever a day to just give up, this was it. We couldn't go anywhere without getting wet and covered in mud. Hell, even our beloved patio was taking a beating, thanks to the wind that blows the rain in just the right way. This was grounds for spending the day in bed.

Sozinho decided to take the lead on this. He said he wasn't feeling well. He didn't need to give us a reason to lie down. I felt perfectly fine and I stayed horizontal for most of the day. I spent almost the entire day doing Kakuro -- and actually getting them right -- before the energy came on.

Following dinner, we wanted to watch something that involved things blowing up. For this, we turned to a movie called "12 Rounds". Any movie that stars a WWE wrestler has to either involve death, fighting, stuff blowing up, or all of the above. We were not disappointed. The movie itself kinda sucked. It was probably one of those straight to DVD films. But it sated our appetite for destruction

Sozinho, meanwhile, remained on his back. He seemed to be struggling. I've stayed in bed for long periods of time, but eight hours in the afternoon is a lot even by my standards. After all that rest, he should feel bette

At least, I thought. Come Monday morning, he was still catatonic. He claimed it was malaria, and who am I to tell him it's not? With Richie having to work on Monday, it looked like I was in charge of the house. This was actually a bit of a blessing. I had no obligations and I really needed something to do.

I can't begin to express how happy I am to be done with February. That was one horrifying month. February has not treated us well in this country: not this year, not last year. Thankfully, the next time we see February we will be in America. It sort have felt like there was a conspiracy amongst the health, school, and weather gods to make February suck.

But now that we are in March, things seem to be looking up. School seems to be picking up bit by bit. We're back into the flow of things. Aside from a small cold courtesy of the weather change, I'm back to healthy. And what is that? A patch of blue sky!

I can't really say I did a whole lot on Monday, but at least what I did was productive. I did dishes, twice. and since it didn't rain much, a had the chance to give the patio and the bathroom a good cleaning. This is the stuff we brought Sozinho to do, but hey, he can't do it if he has malaria. I understand that.

When I wasn't cleaning, I had the Kakuro book in front of me, and I was dominating. It's funny how that game treats me. Sometimes, I can't figure out a damn thing, and other times, they're very easy. Before this week, I hadn't got one right in a long time. Now I was at six in a row. I'll blame my failures on the fact that it was February.

We decided on beans tonight. Foolishly, we thought that putting them on charcoal would be smart. Beans always take forever to cook, so any extra time on the stove helps. Of course, today was the day that they decided to turn the energy on early. The pot was on the charcoal for no more than ten minutes before the energy came on. As long as the charcoal was going, we used it. No use in wasting it. Plus the beans tend to cook better on charcoal. For our entertainment tonight, we decided to watch "Sex Drive", a comedy that only sends like a porno.

The weather gods decided to be extra kind to me for my birthday. I woke up to blue skies from horizon to horizon. If this holds up, Richie and I will be able to go to the vila for food tonight.

The morning was abnormally busy. I wasn't doing anything except talking and replying to text messages. In lieu of receiving physical gifts, hearing people's voices is pretty good. Between all of the phone calls and text messages, my morning was all but gone.

I believe that there should be a rule that you don't have to work on your birthday. I say this especially because my birthday always seems to fall on a Monday or a Tuesday. I can't properly party mid-week. The truth of the matter is I could have cancelled classes today. Who is going to tell me I can't? But my conscience kicked in. I only had to teach two hours today. That wouldn't be a problem.

I gave myself a well deserved nap after classes, waking up at 4:00 for a meeting. This was a big meeting. The education administrator for the district was here. This meeting went on. And on. For two awful hours. I spent the last thirty minutes looking for something I could use to slit my wrists. I just wanted to go out and get drunk.

Finally, at 6:00, we were liberated. Richie and I headed straight to Madinha's place for food and drink. She cooked up some chicken and rice for us. Madinha is very much hit and miss with food. Some of the stuff she gives us, like the stewed beef she makes, is amazing. This wasn't so great, but it's chicken. It's tough to fuck it up too much. With a couple beers in our bellies, we bought a bottle of whiskey and brought it back to our house to drink with colleagues.

At this point, I made what I thought was a wise decision. I told our school director that we had a bottle of whiskey and we needed help drinking it. He invited us to drink his case of beer last month and I felt like I owed him. And he's usually good for providing more booze when the bottle disappears.

As I thought he would, when our bottle was gone, he brought out more alcohol. But instead of bringing whiskey, he chose to bring terrible boxed wine. Why? Why do you torture us so? Well, we weren't going to say no. The box of wine went, and we felt miserable. At least we had enough liquid courage to ask our director to leave in November instead of December. He said it was not a problem. Now we just need Peace Corps to help us out.

I woke up Wednesday feeling like death. Like a truck ran over me, put it in reverse to see what was hit, then run over again after they realized that it was nothing important. At least I wasn't alone. Richie felt just as terrible. And our colleague who also made the beer to whiskey to felt equally bad. At least misery had company today.

Misery also had good luck today. I didn't have to teach until 4:00 in the afternoon, leaving me all afternoon to get my head and my stomach back together. I can't really say I did much. Sozinho was back to feeling better, so he took care of the dishes and cleaning. I took his place and spent plenty of the day in bed reading an "Economist".

I went into class at 4, minutes after the rain had started to fall lightly. When I got to my class, some students told me that I should go quickly because they had to go back to Mambone and they wanted to get back before it really started raining. I have no problem moving quickly. It was a pretty basic lesson today, as it was -- just a review of present continuous. It didn't need the entire two hours, so I cut it down to about half of the time.

We were indecisive about dinner tonight. More than anything, we just didn't have much in the house. Why does it seem like we're always out of food? RIchie, it turns out, wasn't so hungry. He just had a peanut butter sandwich. Being on my own for dinner, I made pasta. Richie is once again done with pasta, so I will take any opportunity I can to eat it. For our viewing pleasure, we watched a couple episodes of "30 Rock". NBC may not have that one hit show, but between "30 Rock" and "The Office" they've nailed certain niches.

The hard rain didn't come until the middle of the night. It didn't last that long, not even long enough to wake us up. It lasted just long enough to make itself recognized by the puddles in the morning.

Sozinho is back ot fully functional and with that I am back to my regular laziness when it comes to going to the market. Sure, I could have gone, but why should I go when we have him to do it for us? Instead of going, I sat around doing Kakuro and cleaning my room. I was up to nine in a row when I got greedy and went for ten and fucked up. Eh, it was a good run.

Class was quick and easy today. I managed to nearly fill the two hours today. that took only an hour yesterday. I'm moving fast with these kids, so they were probably happy to move bit by bit today.

As I got toward the end of class, the twelfth grade math teacher -- the one who thought it wise to bet me five beers -- asked me if I could help out with this class. I told him that it was no problem. I thought this would entail sitting in the back of the room, watching him teach and telling him if something was not correct.

I was wrong. "I'll teach the first half, you teach the second half", said he. Mmm, okay. What am I teaching? Absolute values in inequalities. Alright, fine. There was still a lot of vocabulary I didn't know, so I sat in the back in the first half and listened, trying to pick up the terminology.

My part of class went shockingly well, seeing as I had about 30 minutes to prepare. One of the kids told me he learned more in that math class than he had learned in the previous English class. I don't know if I should take that as a compliment to my ability to teach math in Portuguese or an insult to my ability to teach English in English. Either way, I think that they'll be slightly more prepared when they have to take their exam.

I was in charge of doing dinner tonight. Beans again. Richie and I believe that we can eat beans just about every night. It's cheap, it's easy to make, and it's delicious. And as long as Sozinho is not cooking them, they generally don't take three hours to make. While the beans cooked, I helped another student with some math problems and watched some episodes of "30 Rock".

As if typing up the test and teaching half of a math class wasn't enough, I got roped into proctoring the exam on Friday afternoon. . The last way I want to spend my Friday afternoon is watching kids cheat on a math test. Unpleasant. At least I had the morning to myself. My kakuro dominance went away. I hit a bad streak and apparently, I can no longer solve these damn puzzles. It comes and goes.

My classes went by decently in the afternoon. I finished a little early in both my classes and offered my math services to my students. Both classes jumped at the opportunity. Even though it's a struggle to teach math, especially sicne I have to remember how to do stuff, it's still more fun than teaching English. I don't know how much my teaching helped, but there was no shortage of talking and wandering eyes. If this were an English exam, I'd be taking papers and dropping zeroes like it was nothing. But this was not my class, so I did not care.

At least the teacher who asked for help rewarded us with bottles of wine. So we sat around and drank. And when we got hungry, I did the cooking. The couple hours of drinking, paired with the five straight hours in the classroom, did me in. Richie, however, wanted to go out. I told him I would be staying in for the night. It was a good decision.

Richie rolled in around 2 in the morning. I was awake when he walked in because I'm always awake at 2 in the morning. I don't think I would have made it until 2. And even with a good night's sleep, I woke up feeling tired. I wanted to really just spend the day in bed, so I indulged and stayed in the sheets until 8:30. When i found the motivation to get out of bed, I made a run to the market. I would have gone later in the morning but Richie wanted the bike.

The governor of the province of Sofala was in town to talk to the good people of Machanga. I, as usual, had no interest in going to this type of event. I know the deal: we get there when it's supposed to start, we wait three hours in the sun for the guy to show up, he makes a mediocre speech in Portuguese that requires translation into dialect, and then we leave, asking "Why the fuck did we go watch that?" So I made the decision to not go through all of those steps. Sitting on the patio couldn't be worse than that.

Throughout the event, Richie was texting me. The guy didn't show up until noon. My decision was validated immediately when I heard that news.

Richie came back mid-afternoon and upon his return, we ate lunch. After that, it was just a relaxing afternoon. Each of us napped for some period of time and I read a newspaper from December.

Sozinho cooked dinner tonight. Actually, he started coking last night. This meal took a full two nights to cook. There are a lot of parts of Mozambique that I like, but there food is not high on my list. One of the things I really liked about living without live-in help is that we had complete control of the food. Sozinho wanted Mozambican food so we obliged. Richie enjoyed it. He thought it was sweet. I find at best bland and at worst bitter.

The nightly entertainment was "Funny People". I think it would have been better if we could hear the movie, but it's tough to hear with the beats of Akon rocking in the background. But it seemed like a good film.

I must say, this birthday week was much better than last year's. And I know that next year's, when I'm back with family and friends, will be even better.