Giving myself two days to recover, I was back on the road on Sunday, this time to Vilanculos. I woke up refreshed at 6:30, cleaned up and closed up the house, and was on the road by 7:00. And then the waiting began. I sat at the river, along with six other people for thirty minutes, before the canoe guy decided that he was ready. Then once I got into the villa, I sat in the chapa for 90 minutes before it filled out. At this rate, I would never get to Vilanculos.
But once I got to Maluvane – the crossroads between the EN1 and Mambone – my luck changed. A few cars passed me, but the ride I got was sweet: front seat of private car. On a freshly repaved road, we bombed it down to Inhassoro. And I didn’t pay a metical for the ride. Sweet. Within minutes of getting out of the first car, a second car flew around the corner and I snagged it. Two Italians took me in the rest of the way to Vilanculos. In all, the first 50 kilometers of the trip took four and a half hours. The last 100 kilometers took 90 minutes. And cost me nothing!
I made my way over to one of the Volunteer’s houses in Vilanculos where I was greeted by a bunch of Volunteers, but not the one I expected. She had left for a conference in Maputo, but was gracious enough to open her house up to other Volunteers. Some long-lost souls from the northern part of the country had made their way down. Of the three that came down, two of them I hadn’t seen since December, so it was really nice to see some old faces.
I had one reason and only one reason to come to Vilanculos so soon after being away, and it was to pick up the four laptops that had found their way into the country. The last of the four arrived on Sunday, so the timing couldn’t have been more perfect, but some bad luck got in the way. I couldn’t get in touch with the Volunteer who had all of the computers. She had dropped her phone into a swimming pool, making reaching her impossible. It’s okay. I had nothing but time. I could pick them up tomorrow. I repeated to myself what has become my life motto – “We’ll make it work” – and put it on the shelf for the day.
The afternoon with a bunch of Volunteers was pleasant. We mostly just watched movies and talked about work. I was especially interested in talking to a Volunteer who was teaching computer classes, as that will be my task once I do get my hands on those computers. Over the course of the afternoon, I was happily interrupted by phone calls, one from my parents and one from one of my best friends at home.
The afternoon bled into the evening, when one of the Volunteers made some delicious eggplant and rice. I’ve never been one to eat eggplant – the look of it just weirds me out – but I figure if I can eat pig brain, I can eat eggplant. The night ended with a group viewing of a hilarious pirate porno, which was not only the worst porn I’ve ever seen, but the worst pirate movie I’ve ever seen.
I slept comfortably through the night in spite of an uncomfortable bed. It’s only a little frustrating that I can sleep well everywhere but Machanga. A couple of the Volunteers headed out early in the morning, and I left with them. I had one mission for Monday: get my hands on those computers. Without being able to reach the Volunteer by phone, I had to go old-school. I went over to the hotel where she was staying with her family, but they had just left for town. I left a message for her at the front desk, hoping that she would get it.
In the meantime, I stuck around near the hotel. I did some shopping for household essentials then headed down to the beach to study some GRE vocab. After finishing off two lists of words, it was nearly lunch time, and how convienent was it that the pizza place was just 100 yards away. I enjoyed what was, by far, the best pizza I’ve had there. Just as I finished eating, I got a call from the Volunteer with my computers. They were walking out the door, heading out of town at that moment. Sigh. Tis life in Mozambique: never quite going to plan. It’s not all bad – I got my pizza and I was pretty happy. The computers will have to wait until another time.
As soon as I returned back to the house, the rest of the Volunteers made their way out. I was in for a lonely afternoon. I finished another list of GRE vocab, making this the most productive learning day I’ve had in a while. And as a reward, I played a bit of solitaire (some reward, huh). I finished off the rice from last night, checked email, and went to bed, once again ready to get back to Machanga.
I didn’t sleep nearly as well as I did last night. I was up at 3:30, feeling pretty good. Waking up that early did, however, give me the opportunity to be the first person to wish my mom a happy birthday. So what if it was still July 20 in America – it was the 21st in Mozambique, and that was good enough for me. Right after receiving a text back from my mom, I went back to bed for a bit. By 7:30, I was up for good. I cleaned up the house, fed the animals, and made my way into the villa.
I hit a prime seat in the chapa for Mambone: first row on the far window. I wouldn’t have to get up for anyone as people piled in and out of the car. My seat claimed, I headed into town to buy an eclectic collection of items – vegetables, a newspaper, and a five-in-one war movie DVD. The ride in was no problem, with very few stops until the very end. Once in Mambone, I did some last minute shopping for bread and vegetables.
When I arrived at the river, there was only one, soft-spoken old man, with hands that had history written in the wrinkles. On the river, two boats sat about 10 yards out. The man yelled something in Ndau to one of the people in the boats, and then did something that has never happened to me before: he translated what he said from Ndau to Portuguese. Even though I generally knew what he was saying – “Come on, buddy, we’re waiting to go across” – it was still extraordinarily kind for him to explain what he was saying.
Once we arrived at the Machanga side of the river, I expected to part ways. I tried to get my bag from him, but he wouldn’t let it go. I figured that I was going to walk like an American – quickly, with purpose – and he, with his walking stick, was going to putt along at Mozambican pace. He put me in my place in one fell swoop: “I may be old,” he said, “but I can still walk fast. Nobody should have to walk alone.” And we did. I tried again to pry my bag from his hands, but he wouldn’t have any of it. He, unnecessarily, walked me to within 100 yards of my house, something I certainly didn’t expect.
Even an easy travel day takes its toll. I arrived home tired and hungry, but I had something to look forward to: a real salad. It’s been a long time since I had a salad with more than two vegetables in it, but with the bounty of veggies being sold in Vilanculos, I was able to make something almost appropriate for a restaurant. It was a good preface to the rest of my dining experience, which was a stir fry that, like my salad, had more vegetables than usual with the addition of bell pepper, bean sprouts, mushrooms, and carrots. And oh yes, for the first time in a while, that stir fry had chicken in it!
The rest of the evening, I was shockingly occupied. Most of my night was spent in the computer lab trying to repair a computer. A virus haunted one computer – the one with the printer attached – but unlike my computer, I was able to repair this one. I cleaned the hard drive and it was good to go. The Brazilians who are bringing me the materials to repair my own computer will also provide materials for this one also. Satisfied with my work, I relaxed with a magazine – and after the power went out, a couple of candles – before going to sleep.
I woke up on Wednesday relieved to not have to travel. I have logged way too many miles over the last ten days and I am looking forward to not doing much traveling in the foreseeable future. Even the short trips from Vilanculos take it out of me.
Most of my day was spent sitting on the patio, which I was happy to do. I continued to catch up on reading, shifting my focus to a more vocabulary-intensive “Economist”. With every GRE vocab list that I finish, these magazines are easier to read. By the time I am ready for the exam, I should be flying through them.
After lunch – a failed attempt at an omelet which turned into scrambled eggs – I switched between Kakuro and reading, switching every time I messed up a Kakuro. All in all, it was a thoroughly unproductive afternoon until I hit the sack for a nap.
I was back on computer duty tonight, although I managed to eat a delicious chicken sandwich before heading over to the computer lab. The task was much easier tonight, to the point that I didn’t have to do anything because, well, I couldn’t. One of the teachers wanted to open Microsoft Word on his computer. He didn’t have Office. I can’t do anything about that, but I did show him how to open WordPad, which is essentially the same thing.
As I walked back from the computer lab, I noticed something new: the usual darkness of Machanga was broken by a string of now-functioning streetlights. They haven’t quite reached the school yet, but they are inching their way closer. As one of the teachers noted, it will be beautiful once they get here.
During the day, though, those light posts are pretty ugly. The wide openness of Machanga is no longer so wide open. There’s a beauty that is certainly lost by having this convenience, a convenience that a majority of people here probably won’t use (or afford for that matter). And now that they have wrapped around the school behind my house, my gorgeous sunset view now has a wire running right across the middle. I guess that’s the price of modernity. With that said, I’m sure I won’t be as sentimental when I can flip on a light at 9:30 in the morning.
I actually had something to do Thursday morning, which made me exceedingly happy. Low on food, I made a late morning run to the market. Hopefully, this is the last time I’ll have to shop for one. With any luck, we should be paid tomorrow, which means Richie will make his way back to town over the weekend. Returning from the market around 11, I had little time to sit around before prepping for lunch. For the first time in I can’t remember how long, I didn’t have eggs and potatoes. I just couldn’t do it. So having not eaten spaghetti for a couple of nights, I made that my lunch.
Once again, the afternoon was rather quiet, spent mostly with an “Economist”. Every once in a while, a teacher would come around and state the obvious “fica sozinho” – you stay alone. Yea, I don’t have much choice in this one. Later in the afternoon, I hit the GRE vocab book. I nailed down another list of words. I will be ready for this exam vocab-wise well ahead of the test.
I had no major plans for the night, but I promised a teacher that I would help him with some computer stuff. What I didn’t bank on was typing up all of the revisions for a 40-page school paper. Whatever. I can’t really complain about having to work a whole two hours. It gave me something to do for most of the night and it gave me reason to make quick and easy mac and cheese. After eating, I settled in bed with a magazine and slept shortly after the energy went out.
Another Friday, another tough work week over. Ha. In theory, we should be starting work again next week, but with an anticipated presidential visit – for real – next week, no one is expecting work to really begin until the first week of August. Most of the teachers will be busy preparing for the executive visit. All that really means for me is I’ll have another week to sit around, read magazines, and study.
Friday was nothing special. The only big difference between Friday and the rest of the week was that a little rain came along with the strong winds we’ve had all week. It’s a little strange to have rain in this time of year – dead in the middle of the dry season – but I guess it’s a welcome change.
I returned to eggs and potatoes for lunch today. Spaghetti’s one day reign came to an end quickly. After eating, the rest of the afternoon was pretty regular: more reading, a little vocab review and a bit of necessary cleaning. The rain, in the sense, helped me since it gave the patio a good rinsing.
I put off eating dinner for a bit in order to help another teacher with some computer stuff. This was a lot less work than I had last night. All I had to do was load a printer driver onto his laptop. As I walked out, I came across two unexpected surprises. The first was an Austrian volunteer working in the ESMABAMA office. We met while I was in Beira and she was as happy to see me as I was to see her for the same reason: we just really wanted to speak English. Since Richie has been gone, it’s been all Portuguese all the time. It’s been really good for me, as these past few weeks were some of the best weeks I’ve had with this language, but every once in a while, a break is necessary.
With her presence, I had high hopes. If a car came from Beira, that means I should have packages. She said she didn’t see any boxes, but as we talked, the school manager came over and said “I have something for you”. Not just something: five somethings! ESMABAMA came through on their promise and delivered the rest of my packages with the first car. I spent the rest of the night opening up packages and organizing the bounty of goodies that arrived. With their arrival, an ordinary Friday became extraordinary.
My run of loneliness finally came to an end on Saturday. Richie texted me in the morning, told me that we got paid, and that he was coming home. He just needed to get lucky to catch the chapa either in Inchope in Muxungue. While he was on the road, I spent the morning cleaning up the house. No one should have to arrive to a dirty house. Sweeping, washing dishes, and mopping took up the better part of my morning.
Having finished all my cleaning duties around 11, I was feeling ambitious. I didn’t really want to eat eggs and spaghetti was not going to happen. So I turned to a meal I haven’t tried in about seven months: gnocchi. The last time we tried to make gnocchi was sometime in January, I think, and it was an utter disaster. Note: using corn flour for gnocchi does not work. Armed with good old wheat flour this time, I gave it a run. Making gnocchi is a labor-intensive process with a delicious end result. The truth is, though, for all the time and effort it takes to make, it’s not just worth it. It’s a good rainy day activity. And it’s nice to know that I can turn to that when I really have nothing to do. Right after eating, I was right back to cooking, this time beans for chili tonight.
Satisfied with my meal, I sat on the patio anxiously awaiting Richie’s arrival. Even though I’ve been alone, I haven’t been lonely, which is a good sign. But having someone else here is always better than the alternative. Finally, around 4:00 he arrived. He looked exhausted, but as I have felt the last few times, he was happy to back in Machanga and stunned by how different it looked.
The night was pretty regular for us. We cooked up a delicious turkey chili, by far the best chili we’ve made so far. And now that we have a functioning computer again, we were able to once again be entertained, this time by the new “Batman” movie. Modernity, once again, is back on our side.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Year 1 - Week 31: Bad News Beira
Sundays were always the worst days in training, mostly because I had nothing to occupy my mind. Even at site, Sundays are usually pretty lame. It’s not like we can go bowling in Machanga, so most of our weekends are just sitting around being lazy. But this Sunday was one that I actually looked forward to because it represented the end five days of loneliness. It’s funny how things have changed in just a few months. A couple of months ago, staying just one night alone was torturous. But these five days, although boring as all hell, were tolerable.
This was also by far the most productive day I’ve had alone. In anticipation of my trip to Beira on Monday, and with Simbanhe (our new clothes-washer) out of town, I was left to do laundry by myself for the first time since, umm, training. It turned out to be not so bad. The weather was perfect for sitting outside and it ate up a good chunk of my morning, leaving me just a little time to mess up a whole bunch of Kakuros.
After lunch, one of my colleagues – the person who ran science fair with Richie – asked me to “passear” with him. I hate passear-ing (one thing that we really enjoy is taking Portuguese verbs and adding gerunds to them or making them past tense). Usually, it just means walking around for absolutely no purpose but to kill time. For a change, though, this had a purpose: we had to talk to the chapa driver to arrange seats for tomorrow. We left at 3:00 in the afternoon, but I figured the chapa would get in later than that, so I grabbed my GRE vocab book just in case. Of course, the chapa didn’t arrive until 4:15. It proved to be a productive hour or so of studying.
The chapa driver had no problem saving the six seats for us. What he didn’t know was when he would leave: “any time between an hour from now and 6 AM”. Thanks. We returned home and I packed immediately, although I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be turning the chapa around that quickly. Once the energy flipped on, I cooked and ate quickly, thinking a departure would be more likely. Just as I finished eating, we were given a departure time: 8:30 PM. Ugh.
8:30, of course, turned into 9:30. While we waited, I showed the science fair kids the magic tricks that I had showed other kids earlier in the week. They ate it up with a spoon. We loaded into the chapa at 9:30 and I knew from the onset that I wouldn’t be sleeping. The driver, needing to stay awake after driving down from Beira earlier in the day, blasted Eminem, 50 Cent, Nas, and any other rap he could get his hands on. By the time we reached Inchope (the crossroads for Beira), the driver switched out rap for a three dedication to Michael Jackson.
We arrived in Beira, weary and filth-covered, at 6:15. A chapa picked us up and took us in the general direction of our hotel, although we had to cover the last half-kilometer or so by foot. As we got close, we ran into Richie, who took us in the rest of the way. While the students slept in the hotel, I mostly hung around being lazy, too tired to sleep. After eating, I was a little more alive and actually productive. Along with a couple other Volunteers, I put together some prize packets to be distributed to the science fair participants.
Late in the afternoon, I made my way over the school’s office, on the other side of Beira. I situated myself on a couch, broadband internet connection in hand, and enjoyed the internet for hours on end. I didn’t even bring myself to eat: I was too enamored with talking to family, downloading grad school information, doing all the things I can’t do on my crappy internet connection in Machanga. Around midnight, I was finally spent. I left myself with two jobs for Tuesday: update anti-virus and go to the post office.
Neither of them, agonizingly, would be done. I woke up to a computer that would not stay on for more than two minutes. Just as with humans, viruses spread rampantly in computers here, and a bad one got to mine. I spent the entire day (save for twenty minutes for lunch) trying to figure out how to eliminate this beast of a virus, but it wasn’t meant to be. Adding insult to injury, no one in the ESMABAMA office could take me, as promised, to the post office. From a peak of elation last night, I dropped into an abyss of frustration; it was the kind of day that should be forgotten, although it won’t be forgotten easily. I went to bed, again without dinner, but this time out of frustration and not of business.
I arose early Wednesday morning with hopes of resolving my computer issues again. Virus-scan ran successfully although it failed to eliminate the virus haunting my computer. Out of my control, I tried to let it go. I melted off some of the stress with a hot shower, but the true stress relief didn’t come until I arrived at the post office. Seven packages, from April to June, sat at the post office waiting for me. It took three attempts – papers needing to be stamp, bureaucracy taking up time – but I finally got my hands on my packages, as well as three for Richie. After a day at the top and a day at the bottom, I felt like I was on top again. Even with my computer mostly shot, I was still overjoyed.
The successes continued throughout the day. I managed my documents and pictures to a flash drive, so all was not totally lost. My music still resides on my iPod so I don’t need to worry about that. And following a delicious Italian-made dinner – pasta with real Italian sauce and monster prawns – I returned to my computer, giving it one more shot at salvation. It was not meant to be. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t be knocked off this hill, and crystal-clear phone calls from my brother and dad kept me soaring. All said, I went to bed around 12:30…
Which probably wasn’t the best idea, considering I had to be up at 3:30 to catch the chapa from Beira back to Machanga. One of the people working in the office gave me a ride to the chapa stop, where I was the first one to arrive. I killed some time finishing off the intro to “Rhetoric”. In the process, I was humored by the presence of the word “jejunity,” a word I learned just a few weeks ago. It was a word I had never seen until I started studying for GREs, and by strange coincidence, it appeared in the first book I’ve read since studying.
Typically the chapa would arrive between 4:30 and 5:00, but on this day, it didn’t arrive until 6:00. By that time, nearly 60 people had showed up looking to get back to Machanga. With a maximum capacity of maybe 20 or 25, there were going to be a lot of unhappy people.
Conincidence struck again on a travel day. Around 5:15, Sozinho, our old clothes-washer/best friend showed up at the chapa stop. He greeted me with a traditional handshake, followed by an untraditional hug. And even in my exhausted state, I managed to understand him.
Considering that I was the first one there, one would think that I would have a spot. Ha! People rushed the doors, and I was given little chance. But that little chance was a huge help: the school director was already on the chapa. He grabbed one of my backs, threw it on the seat, and it was “ocupado”. Sweet. My eyes were closed most of the way, but a little girl with a penchant for stepping on my feet kept me awake for the entirety of the trip.
With a box in one hand, a bag in the other, and a backpack over my shoulders, I labored back to school from the villa. I was happy to be back in Machanga, with no obligations, far, far away from Beira. I settled in on the porch, opened up my packages and organized all of the goodies my family sent me. Having nothing to do, I sat down and started catching up on “Newsweek” magazines from March. Old news is good news when it’s in English. Once the energy came on, I cooked up one of the boxes of macaroni and cheese my mom sent me. I’d be damned if I had to eat tomato sauce tonight.
After eating, I headed over to the computer lab to help out a teacher with computer stuff – basic stuff like copying, cutting, and pasting. I told him that he should be included on the tech lessons. What got me, though, was the ease with which I was able to have a reasonable conversation about computers in Portuguese, especially since I could barely string a sentence together earlier in the afternoon. The variability of competence with Portuguese, 10 months into this job, remains the single most frustrating part of life here.
By 8:30, I crawled into bed, saddled up with “Newsweek” and fell asleep within minutes of the energy going off.
I slept through a night in Machanga – with no wake-ups – for the first time in months. And when I mean slept through, I mean it: I woke up at almost 9:00. I guess physical and mental exhaustion will do that to a person. And the best part of waking up at 9:00 is that half the morning is gone. I remember when I was younger that my brother, an early riser, would mock me for sleeping until 9 or 10 or 11 o’clock (“Half of your day is already gone!”), but here, I will be overjoyed if I can make it to those hours.
Also, for the first time in a long time, I failed to clean the house in the morning. I treaded lightly last night, so there was little to be done in the morning. I ran to the market and picked up items that would last me through the weekend. After all, I would be on the road again on Sunday, this time to Vilanculos to pick up computers for some teachers. I returned around 11:15, and by then, it’s time to start thinking about lunch.
After eating, I had little to do in the afternoon, yet it still passed quickly. I knocked off a couple of magazines, running to a shop to by bread in between a “Time” and a “Newsweek”. And the house, once again occupied, earned a good cleaning. Soon enough, 5:30 arrived, and the cooking began. The night was committed to more reading. It’s hard to catch up on news, especially when it’s three months old (and especially when so much of the news is about an economy from which I am so far removed). With some time to spare in the evening, I made myself some cookies, which always go a long way.
My streak of sleeping through the night ended at one. I woke up at 3:30, refreshed and dry-mouthed. Options at 3:30 are limited. I peaked outside to see a crescent moon rising over the trees, but quickly turned back to the sanctuary of my bed. I rolled around for maybe an hour or two before sleeping again until 8:30.
More reading – in fact, only reading – was on the agenda for Saturday. No market run was to be made: just as quickly as I returned to Machanga, I will be heading out again on Sunday. Few dishes were to be washed, a task a took care of early, just to get it out of the way. The rest of my time, before preparing and cooking lunch, was dedicated to “Newsweek”.
What followed after lunch was much more of the same: a couple more magazines knocked out, interspersed with a bit of Kakuro. By the end of the afternoon, my head was pounding – although the number of chocolate chip cookies I ate my account for some of that. I gave my head a chance to relax by cleaning up the house, a job always done before heading out of town. When the pain was gone, I was right back into the magazines.
I cooked another dinner for just me, a task that I hate yet one that I have become accustomed to. There are two nice parts about cooking for one. Firstly, no plate is required. Most of what I cook is spaghetti or rice, and I am just fine eating it right out of the pot. Sounds like college, right? The other nice thing is that I pretty much can do what I want while I eat. The truth is, most nights, Richie and I eat in silence, enjoying – or at least, trying to enjoy – the food that sits in front of us. Being along, I have the ability to read, play music. Or as comedian Jim Gaffigan would probably note, I don’t even have to put on pants.
The week of ups and downs ended on an up-note, I am happy to say. Three of the four computers coming out here with friends and family of Volunteers have arrived in country. The last will arrive on Sunday. I am thrilled at the prospect of teaching teachers how to use these computers. Hopefully, they will learn from my mistakes and update anti-virus in a timely manner.
This was also by far the most productive day I’ve had alone. In anticipation of my trip to Beira on Monday, and with Simbanhe (our new clothes-washer) out of town, I was left to do laundry by myself for the first time since, umm, training. It turned out to be not so bad. The weather was perfect for sitting outside and it ate up a good chunk of my morning, leaving me just a little time to mess up a whole bunch of Kakuros.
After lunch, one of my colleagues – the person who ran science fair with Richie – asked me to “passear” with him. I hate passear-ing (one thing that we really enjoy is taking Portuguese verbs and adding gerunds to them or making them past tense). Usually, it just means walking around for absolutely no purpose but to kill time. For a change, though, this had a purpose: we had to talk to the chapa driver to arrange seats for tomorrow. We left at 3:00 in the afternoon, but I figured the chapa would get in later than that, so I grabbed my GRE vocab book just in case. Of course, the chapa didn’t arrive until 4:15. It proved to be a productive hour or so of studying.
The chapa driver had no problem saving the six seats for us. What he didn’t know was when he would leave: “any time between an hour from now and 6 AM”. Thanks. We returned home and I packed immediately, although I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be turning the chapa around that quickly. Once the energy flipped on, I cooked and ate quickly, thinking a departure would be more likely. Just as I finished eating, we were given a departure time: 8:30 PM. Ugh.
8:30, of course, turned into 9:30. While we waited, I showed the science fair kids the magic tricks that I had showed other kids earlier in the week. They ate it up with a spoon. We loaded into the chapa at 9:30 and I knew from the onset that I wouldn’t be sleeping. The driver, needing to stay awake after driving down from Beira earlier in the day, blasted Eminem, 50 Cent, Nas, and any other rap he could get his hands on. By the time we reached Inchope (the crossroads for Beira), the driver switched out rap for a three dedication to Michael Jackson.
We arrived in Beira, weary and filth-covered, at 6:15. A chapa picked us up and took us in the general direction of our hotel, although we had to cover the last half-kilometer or so by foot. As we got close, we ran into Richie, who took us in the rest of the way. While the students slept in the hotel, I mostly hung around being lazy, too tired to sleep. After eating, I was a little more alive and actually productive. Along with a couple other Volunteers, I put together some prize packets to be distributed to the science fair participants.
Late in the afternoon, I made my way over the school’s office, on the other side of Beira. I situated myself on a couch, broadband internet connection in hand, and enjoyed the internet for hours on end. I didn’t even bring myself to eat: I was too enamored with talking to family, downloading grad school information, doing all the things I can’t do on my crappy internet connection in Machanga. Around midnight, I was finally spent. I left myself with two jobs for Tuesday: update anti-virus and go to the post office.
Neither of them, agonizingly, would be done. I woke up to a computer that would not stay on for more than two minutes. Just as with humans, viruses spread rampantly in computers here, and a bad one got to mine. I spent the entire day (save for twenty minutes for lunch) trying to figure out how to eliminate this beast of a virus, but it wasn’t meant to be. Adding insult to injury, no one in the ESMABAMA office could take me, as promised, to the post office. From a peak of elation last night, I dropped into an abyss of frustration; it was the kind of day that should be forgotten, although it won’t be forgotten easily. I went to bed, again without dinner, but this time out of frustration and not of business.
I arose early Wednesday morning with hopes of resolving my computer issues again. Virus-scan ran successfully although it failed to eliminate the virus haunting my computer. Out of my control, I tried to let it go. I melted off some of the stress with a hot shower, but the true stress relief didn’t come until I arrived at the post office. Seven packages, from April to June, sat at the post office waiting for me. It took three attempts – papers needing to be stamp, bureaucracy taking up time – but I finally got my hands on my packages, as well as three for Richie. After a day at the top and a day at the bottom, I felt like I was on top again. Even with my computer mostly shot, I was still overjoyed.
The successes continued throughout the day. I managed my documents and pictures to a flash drive, so all was not totally lost. My music still resides on my iPod so I don’t need to worry about that. And following a delicious Italian-made dinner – pasta with real Italian sauce and monster prawns – I returned to my computer, giving it one more shot at salvation. It was not meant to be. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t be knocked off this hill, and crystal-clear phone calls from my brother and dad kept me soaring. All said, I went to bed around 12:30…
Which probably wasn’t the best idea, considering I had to be up at 3:30 to catch the chapa from Beira back to Machanga. One of the people working in the office gave me a ride to the chapa stop, where I was the first one to arrive. I killed some time finishing off the intro to “Rhetoric”. In the process, I was humored by the presence of the word “jejunity,” a word I learned just a few weeks ago. It was a word I had never seen until I started studying for GREs, and by strange coincidence, it appeared in the first book I’ve read since studying.
Typically the chapa would arrive between 4:30 and 5:00, but on this day, it didn’t arrive until 6:00. By that time, nearly 60 people had showed up looking to get back to Machanga. With a maximum capacity of maybe 20 or 25, there were going to be a lot of unhappy people.
Conincidence struck again on a travel day. Around 5:15, Sozinho, our old clothes-washer/best friend showed up at the chapa stop. He greeted me with a traditional handshake, followed by an untraditional hug. And even in my exhausted state, I managed to understand him.
Considering that I was the first one there, one would think that I would have a spot. Ha! People rushed the doors, and I was given little chance. But that little chance was a huge help: the school director was already on the chapa. He grabbed one of my backs, threw it on the seat, and it was “ocupado”. Sweet. My eyes were closed most of the way, but a little girl with a penchant for stepping on my feet kept me awake for the entirety of the trip.
With a box in one hand, a bag in the other, and a backpack over my shoulders, I labored back to school from the villa. I was happy to be back in Machanga, with no obligations, far, far away from Beira. I settled in on the porch, opened up my packages and organized all of the goodies my family sent me. Having nothing to do, I sat down and started catching up on “Newsweek” magazines from March. Old news is good news when it’s in English. Once the energy came on, I cooked up one of the boxes of macaroni and cheese my mom sent me. I’d be damned if I had to eat tomato sauce tonight.
After eating, I headed over to the computer lab to help out a teacher with computer stuff – basic stuff like copying, cutting, and pasting. I told him that he should be included on the tech lessons. What got me, though, was the ease with which I was able to have a reasonable conversation about computers in Portuguese, especially since I could barely string a sentence together earlier in the afternoon. The variability of competence with Portuguese, 10 months into this job, remains the single most frustrating part of life here.
By 8:30, I crawled into bed, saddled up with “Newsweek” and fell asleep within minutes of the energy going off.
I slept through a night in Machanga – with no wake-ups – for the first time in months. And when I mean slept through, I mean it: I woke up at almost 9:00. I guess physical and mental exhaustion will do that to a person. And the best part of waking up at 9:00 is that half the morning is gone. I remember when I was younger that my brother, an early riser, would mock me for sleeping until 9 or 10 or 11 o’clock (“Half of your day is already gone!”), but here, I will be overjoyed if I can make it to those hours.
Also, for the first time in a long time, I failed to clean the house in the morning. I treaded lightly last night, so there was little to be done in the morning. I ran to the market and picked up items that would last me through the weekend. After all, I would be on the road again on Sunday, this time to Vilanculos to pick up computers for some teachers. I returned around 11:15, and by then, it’s time to start thinking about lunch.
After eating, I had little to do in the afternoon, yet it still passed quickly. I knocked off a couple of magazines, running to a shop to by bread in between a “Time” and a “Newsweek”. And the house, once again occupied, earned a good cleaning. Soon enough, 5:30 arrived, and the cooking began. The night was committed to more reading. It’s hard to catch up on news, especially when it’s three months old (and especially when so much of the news is about an economy from which I am so far removed). With some time to spare in the evening, I made myself some cookies, which always go a long way.
My streak of sleeping through the night ended at one. I woke up at 3:30, refreshed and dry-mouthed. Options at 3:30 are limited. I peaked outside to see a crescent moon rising over the trees, but quickly turned back to the sanctuary of my bed. I rolled around for maybe an hour or two before sleeping again until 8:30.
More reading – in fact, only reading – was on the agenda for Saturday. No market run was to be made: just as quickly as I returned to Machanga, I will be heading out again on Sunday. Few dishes were to be washed, a task a took care of early, just to get it out of the way. The rest of my time, before preparing and cooking lunch, was dedicated to “Newsweek”.
What followed after lunch was much more of the same: a couple more magazines knocked out, interspersed with a bit of Kakuro. By the end of the afternoon, my head was pounding – although the number of chocolate chip cookies I ate my account for some of that. I gave my head a chance to relax by cleaning up the house, a job always done before heading out of town. When the pain was gone, I was right back into the magazines.
I cooked another dinner for just me, a task that I hate yet one that I have become accustomed to. There are two nice parts about cooking for one. Firstly, no plate is required. Most of what I cook is spaghetti or rice, and I am just fine eating it right out of the pot. Sounds like college, right? The other nice thing is that I pretty much can do what I want while I eat. The truth is, most nights, Richie and I eat in silence, enjoying – or at least, trying to enjoy – the food that sits in front of us. Being along, I have the ability to read, play music. Or as comedian Jim Gaffigan would probably note, I don’t even have to put on pants.
The week of ups and downs ended on an up-note, I am happy to say. Three of the four computers coming out here with friends and family of Volunteers have arrived in country. The last will arrive on Sunday. I am thrilled at the prospect of teaching teachers how to use these computers. Hopefully, they will learn from my mistakes and update anti-virus in a timely manner.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Year 1 - Week 30: Full, Empty, Dark, Bright
Full, Empty, Dark, Bright
There is an episode of “Seinfeld” in which Elaine is editing a book. As she stands in the elevator with the author, they are talking about coincidences. The author argues that there are just coincidences while Elaine states that “there are big coincidences and there are small coincidences.” After what happened on Sunday, I am a firm believer in Elaine. There are small coincidences and there are big coincidences, and what I experienced on Sunday might fall under a third category of “most improbable coincidences”.
The master chefs that are the Brazilian Brothers were kind enough to give a ride to a group of us, not just to the crossroads, but all the way to Muxungue, the truck stop that sits in between Beira and Vilanculos. I made a stop in the gas station shop, praying that I would find chocolate for cookies, when I noticed another muzungu sitting in the front seat of a chapa. This couldn’t be a South African – I don’t think they would be caught dead in a chapa – and I was pretty sure it wasn’t another Peace Corps Volunteer. Whatever – it wouldn’t bother me.
I joined Richie a little further down the road in hopes of catching a ride down to the crossroads for Machanga. The bus in which the other muzungu sat stopped had stopped just in front of us when I heard “Hey, San Diego!” I walked over to the bus and after one question, we were on the same page. Seth, a PhD student at Duke, had emailed me a couple of months ago about coming to Mozambique. I didn’t hear from again, until we met at the side of the road. He had planned to go to Vilanculos and we were really hoping to hit a private car to take us back, but all of us changed our plans: we got in the chapa and Seth came back to Machanga with us.
We sat at our crossroads for what felt like forever. It proved to be both a nice chance to get to know each other and for everyone to have some Portuguese practice. Seth already speaks a pretty good albeit Brazilian brand of Portuguese; with a background in Spanish and a Brazilian girlfriend in his ear, he is pretty much on par with us. Around 2:00, the chapa from Beira arrived at the crossroads. We boarded and made our way into Machanga.
While Richie went home, Seth and I knocked out some shopping for the couple days that he would be staying. I thought it would be a cold day in hell before we got visitors, but after seven months of being at site, Richie and I wouldn’t be the only people sleeping in our house. By the time we returned home, it was late enough in the day to begin preparing dinner. We treated to him to our regular spaghetti and tomato sauce. For him, it was the first tomatoes he’d eaten since arriving in country a couple weeks ago. After dinner, I got pinned helping some people in the computer lab, but for the most part, they worked independently. We spent the rest of our night swapping stories before the lights went out.
Having guests is one of the best things that has happened to us here. It’s been awesome to having another person around. As much as I enjoy living with Richie and as easy as it has been to live with him, it’s still a treat to hear another voice and see another face. Aside from the conversations, it was also nice to have someone to do to the dishes. For the first time in seven months, neither Richie nor I did the dishes, as Seth was eager to throw in a helping hand.
The three of us made a morning market run to stock up on some things, mostly for me. Seth is due to leave tomorrow and Richie has to head up to Beira to start preparing for science fair. When we got back to the house, we talked about where we had traveled and what we had done with our lives, which revealed more coincidences. Seth and I have both been to Cuba, which is rare for a couple of Americans let alone total strangers. We also discovered that both of us played tennis through high school until switching over to racquetball in college (we both like racquetball more) and that we both have 21 year old sisters. It’s kind of eerie.
There was no special treatment for lunch. Seth got the same crap that we eat every day. After lunch, Richie and I both had just a bit of work to do. Richie had to yell at his students about cheating while I had to tell mine that I couldn’t return their exams until every student had taken the exam. One student followed me back to the house to do his exam. He scored well – 17.5 out of 20 – but told me that his head was right. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me something I didn’t expect but wasn’t surprised by: it’s said that a child in Africa dies every thirty seconds from malaria, and in this case, that child was that of my student’s. It kind of shook me. And Richie. And Seth.
We got away from it from going on a walk, hoping to get to the ocean. We ran into some very drunk men who gave us conflicting information. One told us the ocean was just two kilometers away while the other just said it was “muito longe”. Fair enough. Eventually, we shook them. Along the way, Seth took a ton of pictures. Another benefit of having a guest is that while it is awkward for us to take pictures of here (as this is just life for us), it’s totally okay for him to take pictures at will.
When our energy came on, we exchanged media. I stole Seth’s pictures and in exchange burnt him a CD of whatever he wanted from my music library. Along the way, we showed each other our pictures of Cuba, his pictures of northern Mozambique and mine of Southern Mozambique. All this time, Richie was workmanlike, putting together a delicious chili. This time, with a guest here, we didn’t hold back and added the cheese sauce, which was delicious. I made cookies while we introduced Seth to “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which had us laughing until we went to bed.
Richie, to my surprise, wake up at 4:00 – again – to take the chapa up to Beira. I wasn’t traveling but it was still a travel day for me. I woke up just before 7:00, and with Seth already packed, we headed for the river. If Mambone were on the EN1, I’d be comfortable just putting him on a boat and having him catch a car. But with Seth being unfamiliar with the area, I figured it would be best if I got him set up. I crossed over with him, found a truck that was heading out to crossroads, and we said our goodbyes. I suspect that I’ll catch him on more time before he heads back stateside.
In five hour span, I went from being in a house that was perfectly loud and too small for three to a house that was hauntingly quiet and too big for just one person. Richie and I have each done at a night alone in the house, but this will be a new record: I’ll be flying solo until I leave for Beira with some students on Monday.
At least I had a lot to do in the morning. Dishes needed to be done and I wanted to rearrange my room. In college, I changed my rooms around every couple months just because I didn’t like having the same room all the time, and that habit will probably remain here. I turned around my bed, put up another shelf/desk and cleaned up decently. I like the new look. It is definitely more open than what I had. Enough space was created that I may invest in a comfortable chair for reading.
I didn’t have much lunch to speak of, for two reasons. First off, cooking for one just sucks. But more pressingly, we ran out of charcoal last night cooking the beans for chili. I enjoyed a couple loaves of bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, sufficient for getting me through the afternoon. My afternoon was surprisingly busy. I was going to hand back exams to four of my six classes, but with teachers not being around, I was able to hand out exams for everyone. All that means is I’ll have no work for the rest of this lonely week.
The busy afternoon made the day pass quickly. Before I knew it, the energy was on and I had to think about preparing dinner – spaghetti for one. Sad. After checking email, a colleague invited me over to watch something on TV: “Memorial de Michael Jackson”. I don’t know why, but Mozambicans have a serious obsession with Michael Jackson. Ten of us huddled around a television to watch performances and speeches. When Al Sharpton came on, I gave up. That was enough for me. I turned for home, light some candles just before the energy went out and read before going to bed.
I woke up to a shockingly quiet house. Normally, Richie is up before me, and although he is rarely causes me to wake up, I can usually hear him making some noise in the morning. Not on this morning though – just silence. Committed to eating a real lunch, I walked over to the market to buy a bag of charcoal. I forgot both how heavy the bag of charcoal is and how far the walk is from the market with charcoal in hand. A few people offered me help, but in reality, it’s a lot easier to carry over my shoulders than side by side with another person.
The rest of the morning past by pretty quickly. I got lost in the numbers of Kakuro and before I knew it, it was nearly noon. I fired up my freshly purchased charcoal and prepared the standard eggs and potato pancakes, albeit for one.
The afternoon picked up where the morning left off. I knocked out a couple of Kakuros – and screwed some up along the way – before diving into yet another page of GRE vocab. With no one here, this is probably the best opportunity I’ll have to work undistracted. By the end of all this studying, I hope that I can nail down somewhere between 400 and 500 new words. It should be enough to give me a decent verbal score.
With nothing better to do, I squeezed in a nap just before the energy came on. After dealing with the loneliness last night, I felt a little more prepared to deal with it tonight. What I wasn’t at all prepared for was the energy going out at 5:45. Well, fuck. I hoped for a quick return, but the energy gods would have none of it. Now I was especially happy with my decision to pick up charcoal in the morning. I once again lit carvão and cooked up stir fry. I held out for a little while, with the help of a candle and a magazine, but by 8:45, I gave up.
Going to bed so early meant an early wakeup for me on Thursday. By 4:30, I was pretty wide awake. I watched the sky change from black to blue before going back to bed until about 8:00. Once I lifted myself out of bed, I gave the house a good cleaning, including a Mozambican-style ass-up hands-down mopping of the entire house. The house was by far the cleanest it’s been since we’ve arrived, which doesn’t speak to how dirty we are (we are actually quite tidy), but to how clean the house was. I could walk around the house barefoot and not feel like I was walking on soil.
All of that cleaning got me to about, oh, 9:15. Just three hours until lunch. Three lonely hours. The morning, up until preparing for lunch, followed yesterday’s track. I spent a lot of time in the Kakuro book before quizzing myself on the GRE vocab from yesterday. On the whole, I did pretty well – forgot one out of 22, which now I will never forget.
Just like yesterday, and this morning, the afternoon was boring. Not only is the absence of Richie glaring, but there are fewer and fewer teachers, fewer and fewer students here. As the trimester break nears, this place has become more and more of a ghost town. The silence just gives me more incentive to study and read. I started reading Aristotle’s “The Art of Rhetoric”, which has a 60-page introduction by a British translator. The intro itself is dense, filled with great GRE vocab – there were three solid GRE words in one sentence. It may be judgment based very narrowly, but between reading the “Economist” and this intro, it seems that the British have such a better command of vocabulary than we Americans do.
I prepped for dinner insanely early. I did not like preparing in the dark on bit last night. I hoped that the energy would make a return, but I expect – and received – the worst: another night in the darkness. Add to it that my phone battery was on its last legs and it made for a very quiet night. I cooked dinner in near pitch darkness, aided only by a candle and the light coming off of the charcoal. The blackest of clear black skies revealed an explosion of stars, only to be wiped out by a rising full pearl-white moon. Having blown out my candle, I ate dinner in admiration of the soft yellow halo around the moon. Being bitten up by mosquitoes forced me inside, where I read some more of the intro to “Rhetoric” before going to bed on the early end.
Another early bed time, another early wakeup. Picking up where I left off last night, I dove back into “Rhetoric” for about 45 minutes before welcoming the day. On what was the hottest day in probably the last three weeks, I walked over to the market to buy groceries, hopefully for the last time until I head to Beira. I managed to buy everything in one shop before hitting the outdoor market, which had bell pepper for only the second time. The things that get me excited these days.
Day three of loneliness meant day three of spending my morning in a book. After cleaning up, my face was planted either in the Kakuro book, the vocab book, or the intro to “Rhetoric”. By late morning, I started going crazy. I needed to hear a voice other than my own, even if it wasn’t in English. But I was blessed by good fortune: I found the BBC on Richie’s short wave radio, where I heard briefly about Obama’s first trip as president to Africa – to Ghana, my first African love.
After lunch, I got a break from my now regular nothingness. The students heading up to Beira needed some help with one of the projects. I am about as helpful in the sciences as a three year-old, and in Portuguese, forget it. Nonetheless, I stuck it out for about an hour before being relieved of duty and getting back into my books.
I prepared for dinner early again. There was no sign of energy coming on anytime soon. It seems like the gods of Machanga are trying to test me. Full-time energy should be arriving any day, but before I get it, I need to endure no energy. It’s a really sick joke, but it’s a joke I’ve accepted. Just as it started to get dark, I lit up carvão, and cooked up some egg fried rice. As I took my last bites, a fanatical scream came from the dormitories: the energy was back! I fired up the computer, bumped some music and caught up on emails under my glorious 60-watt light bulb, before the energy went out at 9:30.
I had what was probably the best night of sleep I’ve had in a long time. I woke up feeling good, like I could actually do something productive today. But what was there to do? There was no market run to be made, no papers to correct, and, on this first official day of break, very little regular company to enjoy. Shockingly, though, this morning passed by faster than any other morning this week. I showed one kid a card trick and it drew a crowd of six or seven other kids. Most of the morning was spent entertaining these kids, although the most entertaining part of it for me was watching them trying – and failing – to replicate the tricks.
Lunch was standard fare, although a bit more delicious than usual with the addition of bell pepper. The afternoon that followed was pretty slow. I filled out a couple Kakuro grids, and when I thought it was about time to start thinking about dinner, I went inside to prepare. The only problem was it was 4:00. With time to spare, I went on a massive cleaning binge, sweeping and mopping the entirety of the house after doing dishes.
The night was the busiest I’ve been all week, although that is not really saying much. I prepared my grades for turning in, wrote a letter for another teacher, burned a CD for a friend and went on a successful hunt to find the transcript of Obama’s speech in Ghana. All that “work” made me pretty hungry for what I hope was my last spaghetti dinner for a while. I read both the Obama speech – amazing – and a bit more of “Rhetoric” before kissing the week goodbye.
There is an episode of “Seinfeld” in which Elaine is editing a book. As she stands in the elevator with the author, they are talking about coincidences. The author argues that there are just coincidences while Elaine states that “there are big coincidences and there are small coincidences.” After what happened on Sunday, I am a firm believer in Elaine. There are small coincidences and there are big coincidences, and what I experienced on Sunday might fall under a third category of “most improbable coincidences”.
The master chefs that are the Brazilian Brothers were kind enough to give a ride to a group of us, not just to the crossroads, but all the way to Muxungue, the truck stop that sits in between Beira and Vilanculos. I made a stop in the gas station shop, praying that I would find chocolate for cookies, when I noticed another muzungu sitting in the front seat of a chapa. This couldn’t be a South African – I don’t think they would be caught dead in a chapa – and I was pretty sure it wasn’t another Peace Corps Volunteer. Whatever – it wouldn’t bother me.
I joined Richie a little further down the road in hopes of catching a ride down to the crossroads for Machanga. The bus in which the other muzungu sat stopped had stopped just in front of us when I heard “Hey, San Diego!” I walked over to the bus and after one question, we were on the same page. Seth, a PhD student at Duke, had emailed me a couple of months ago about coming to Mozambique. I didn’t hear from again, until we met at the side of the road. He had planned to go to Vilanculos and we were really hoping to hit a private car to take us back, but all of us changed our plans: we got in the chapa and Seth came back to Machanga with us.
We sat at our crossroads for what felt like forever. It proved to be both a nice chance to get to know each other and for everyone to have some Portuguese practice. Seth already speaks a pretty good albeit Brazilian brand of Portuguese; with a background in Spanish and a Brazilian girlfriend in his ear, he is pretty much on par with us. Around 2:00, the chapa from Beira arrived at the crossroads. We boarded and made our way into Machanga.
While Richie went home, Seth and I knocked out some shopping for the couple days that he would be staying. I thought it would be a cold day in hell before we got visitors, but after seven months of being at site, Richie and I wouldn’t be the only people sleeping in our house. By the time we returned home, it was late enough in the day to begin preparing dinner. We treated to him to our regular spaghetti and tomato sauce. For him, it was the first tomatoes he’d eaten since arriving in country a couple weeks ago. After dinner, I got pinned helping some people in the computer lab, but for the most part, they worked independently. We spent the rest of our night swapping stories before the lights went out.
Having guests is one of the best things that has happened to us here. It’s been awesome to having another person around. As much as I enjoy living with Richie and as easy as it has been to live with him, it’s still a treat to hear another voice and see another face. Aside from the conversations, it was also nice to have someone to do to the dishes. For the first time in seven months, neither Richie nor I did the dishes, as Seth was eager to throw in a helping hand.
The three of us made a morning market run to stock up on some things, mostly for me. Seth is due to leave tomorrow and Richie has to head up to Beira to start preparing for science fair. When we got back to the house, we talked about where we had traveled and what we had done with our lives, which revealed more coincidences. Seth and I have both been to Cuba, which is rare for a couple of Americans let alone total strangers. We also discovered that both of us played tennis through high school until switching over to racquetball in college (we both like racquetball more) and that we both have 21 year old sisters. It’s kind of eerie.
There was no special treatment for lunch. Seth got the same crap that we eat every day. After lunch, Richie and I both had just a bit of work to do. Richie had to yell at his students about cheating while I had to tell mine that I couldn’t return their exams until every student had taken the exam. One student followed me back to the house to do his exam. He scored well – 17.5 out of 20 – but told me that his head was right. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me something I didn’t expect but wasn’t surprised by: it’s said that a child in Africa dies every thirty seconds from malaria, and in this case, that child was that of my student’s. It kind of shook me. And Richie. And Seth.
We got away from it from going on a walk, hoping to get to the ocean. We ran into some very drunk men who gave us conflicting information. One told us the ocean was just two kilometers away while the other just said it was “muito longe”. Fair enough. Eventually, we shook them. Along the way, Seth took a ton of pictures. Another benefit of having a guest is that while it is awkward for us to take pictures of here (as this is just life for us), it’s totally okay for him to take pictures at will.
When our energy came on, we exchanged media. I stole Seth’s pictures and in exchange burnt him a CD of whatever he wanted from my music library. Along the way, we showed each other our pictures of Cuba, his pictures of northern Mozambique and mine of Southern Mozambique. All this time, Richie was workmanlike, putting together a delicious chili. This time, with a guest here, we didn’t hold back and added the cheese sauce, which was delicious. I made cookies while we introduced Seth to “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which had us laughing until we went to bed.
Richie, to my surprise, wake up at 4:00 – again – to take the chapa up to Beira. I wasn’t traveling but it was still a travel day for me. I woke up just before 7:00, and with Seth already packed, we headed for the river. If Mambone were on the EN1, I’d be comfortable just putting him on a boat and having him catch a car. But with Seth being unfamiliar with the area, I figured it would be best if I got him set up. I crossed over with him, found a truck that was heading out to crossroads, and we said our goodbyes. I suspect that I’ll catch him on more time before he heads back stateside.
In five hour span, I went from being in a house that was perfectly loud and too small for three to a house that was hauntingly quiet and too big for just one person. Richie and I have each done at a night alone in the house, but this will be a new record: I’ll be flying solo until I leave for Beira with some students on Monday.
At least I had a lot to do in the morning. Dishes needed to be done and I wanted to rearrange my room. In college, I changed my rooms around every couple months just because I didn’t like having the same room all the time, and that habit will probably remain here. I turned around my bed, put up another shelf/desk and cleaned up decently. I like the new look. It is definitely more open than what I had. Enough space was created that I may invest in a comfortable chair for reading.
I didn’t have much lunch to speak of, for two reasons. First off, cooking for one just sucks. But more pressingly, we ran out of charcoal last night cooking the beans for chili. I enjoyed a couple loaves of bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, sufficient for getting me through the afternoon. My afternoon was surprisingly busy. I was going to hand back exams to four of my six classes, but with teachers not being around, I was able to hand out exams for everyone. All that means is I’ll have no work for the rest of this lonely week.
The busy afternoon made the day pass quickly. Before I knew it, the energy was on and I had to think about preparing dinner – spaghetti for one. Sad. After checking email, a colleague invited me over to watch something on TV: “Memorial de Michael Jackson”. I don’t know why, but Mozambicans have a serious obsession with Michael Jackson. Ten of us huddled around a television to watch performances and speeches. When Al Sharpton came on, I gave up. That was enough for me. I turned for home, light some candles just before the energy went out and read before going to bed.
I woke up to a shockingly quiet house. Normally, Richie is up before me, and although he is rarely causes me to wake up, I can usually hear him making some noise in the morning. Not on this morning though – just silence. Committed to eating a real lunch, I walked over to the market to buy a bag of charcoal. I forgot both how heavy the bag of charcoal is and how far the walk is from the market with charcoal in hand. A few people offered me help, but in reality, it’s a lot easier to carry over my shoulders than side by side with another person.
The rest of the morning past by pretty quickly. I got lost in the numbers of Kakuro and before I knew it, it was nearly noon. I fired up my freshly purchased charcoal and prepared the standard eggs and potato pancakes, albeit for one.
The afternoon picked up where the morning left off. I knocked out a couple of Kakuros – and screwed some up along the way – before diving into yet another page of GRE vocab. With no one here, this is probably the best opportunity I’ll have to work undistracted. By the end of all this studying, I hope that I can nail down somewhere between 400 and 500 new words. It should be enough to give me a decent verbal score.
With nothing better to do, I squeezed in a nap just before the energy came on. After dealing with the loneliness last night, I felt a little more prepared to deal with it tonight. What I wasn’t at all prepared for was the energy going out at 5:45. Well, fuck. I hoped for a quick return, but the energy gods would have none of it. Now I was especially happy with my decision to pick up charcoal in the morning. I once again lit carvão and cooked up stir fry. I held out for a little while, with the help of a candle and a magazine, but by 8:45, I gave up.
Going to bed so early meant an early wakeup for me on Thursday. By 4:30, I was pretty wide awake. I watched the sky change from black to blue before going back to bed until about 8:00. Once I lifted myself out of bed, I gave the house a good cleaning, including a Mozambican-style ass-up hands-down mopping of the entire house. The house was by far the cleanest it’s been since we’ve arrived, which doesn’t speak to how dirty we are (we are actually quite tidy), but to how clean the house was. I could walk around the house barefoot and not feel like I was walking on soil.
All of that cleaning got me to about, oh, 9:15. Just three hours until lunch. Three lonely hours. The morning, up until preparing for lunch, followed yesterday’s track. I spent a lot of time in the Kakuro book before quizzing myself on the GRE vocab from yesterday. On the whole, I did pretty well – forgot one out of 22, which now I will never forget.
Just like yesterday, and this morning, the afternoon was boring. Not only is the absence of Richie glaring, but there are fewer and fewer teachers, fewer and fewer students here. As the trimester break nears, this place has become more and more of a ghost town. The silence just gives me more incentive to study and read. I started reading Aristotle’s “The Art of Rhetoric”, which has a 60-page introduction by a British translator. The intro itself is dense, filled with great GRE vocab – there were three solid GRE words in one sentence. It may be judgment based very narrowly, but between reading the “Economist” and this intro, it seems that the British have such a better command of vocabulary than we Americans do.
I prepped for dinner insanely early. I did not like preparing in the dark on bit last night. I hoped that the energy would make a return, but I expect – and received – the worst: another night in the darkness. Add to it that my phone battery was on its last legs and it made for a very quiet night. I cooked dinner in near pitch darkness, aided only by a candle and the light coming off of the charcoal. The blackest of clear black skies revealed an explosion of stars, only to be wiped out by a rising full pearl-white moon. Having blown out my candle, I ate dinner in admiration of the soft yellow halo around the moon. Being bitten up by mosquitoes forced me inside, where I read some more of the intro to “Rhetoric” before going to bed on the early end.
Another early bed time, another early wakeup. Picking up where I left off last night, I dove back into “Rhetoric” for about 45 minutes before welcoming the day. On what was the hottest day in probably the last three weeks, I walked over to the market to buy groceries, hopefully for the last time until I head to Beira. I managed to buy everything in one shop before hitting the outdoor market, which had bell pepper for only the second time. The things that get me excited these days.
Day three of loneliness meant day three of spending my morning in a book. After cleaning up, my face was planted either in the Kakuro book, the vocab book, or the intro to “Rhetoric”. By late morning, I started going crazy. I needed to hear a voice other than my own, even if it wasn’t in English. But I was blessed by good fortune: I found the BBC on Richie’s short wave radio, where I heard briefly about Obama’s first trip as president to Africa – to Ghana, my first African love.
After lunch, I got a break from my now regular nothingness. The students heading up to Beira needed some help with one of the projects. I am about as helpful in the sciences as a three year-old, and in Portuguese, forget it. Nonetheless, I stuck it out for about an hour before being relieved of duty and getting back into my books.
I prepared for dinner early again. There was no sign of energy coming on anytime soon. It seems like the gods of Machanga are trying to test me. Full-time energy should be arriving any day, but before I get it, I need to endure no energy. It’s a really sick joke, but it’s a joke I’ve accepted. Just as it started to get dark, I lit up carvão, and cooked up some egg fried rice. As I took my last bites, a fanatical scream came from the dormitories: the energy was back! I fired up the computer, bumped some music and caught up on emails under my glorious 60-watt light bulb, before the energy went out at 9:30.
I had what was probably the best night of sleep I’ve had in a long time. I woke up feeling good, like I could actually do something productive today. But what was there to do? There was no market run to be made, no papers to correct, and, on this first official day of break, very little regular company to enjoy. Shockingly, though, this morning passed by faster than any other morning this week. I showed one kid a card trick and it drew a crowd of six or seven other kids. Most of the morning was spent entertaining these kids, although the most entertaining part of it for me was watching them trying – and failing – to replicate the tricks.
Lunch was standard fare, although a bit more delicious than usual with the addition of bell pepper. The afternoon that followed was pretty slow. I filled out a couple Kakuro grids, and when I thought it was about time to start thinking about dinner, I went inside to prepare. The only problem was it was 4:00. With time to spare, I went on a massive cleaning binge, sweeping and mopping the entirety of the house after doing dishes.
The night was the busiest I’ve been all week, although that is not really saying much. I prepared my grades for turning in, wrote a letter for another teacher, burned a CD for a friend and went on a successful hunt to find the transcript of Obama’s speech in Ghana. All that “work” made me pretty hungry for what I hope was my last spaghetti dinner for a while. I read both the Obama speech – amazing – and a bit more of “Rhetoric” before kissing the week goodbye.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Year 1 - Week 29: Custa Muito
Returning to Machanga yesterday was the best travel decision I’ve made in a long time,. After four days of quasi-chaos – between Independence Day and the trip to Vilanculos – I was happy to have a day to recuperate. Within minutes of waking up, my parents called. They had tried to call yesterday, but the network would not cooperate with us.
The morning, to my liking, was peaceful. Nobody came to visit, the neighbors were shockingly quiet, and I was left to sit on the patio, a bit of sun shining through, with my Kakuro book. I wanted to spend the morning with numbers, knowing that a lot of my afternoon would be committed to my GRE word list. Only toward the latter end of the morning did one of our neighbors come by to visit. He’s one of Richie’s ninth grade students. He’s smart, but doesn’t really apply himself, which is frustrating for Richie. We know he’s smart because he’s the only student who has learned Su Doku. I tried to teach him Kakuro, but all he could say was “Custa muito”: literally “it costs a lot,” but figuratively meaning something along the lines of “it takes a lot of effort.”
We put Richie’s food idea into action for lunch. We had our regular scrambled eggs, but we could not care less about the eggs. Lunch was all about the cheese fries. Sprinkled with a little bit of beef jerky, it tasted like America. Those few moments after finishing were both some of the most satisfying moments and some of the saddest moments we’ve had. If only there were more…
Richie headed off to watch a soccer game around mid-afternoon. I had no interest in going, not because I didn’t want to watch, but because I didn’t want to walk the mile to get to the field. I do enough walking as it is; if I don’t have to walk, I’m not going to. Instead, I pulled a chair out to the sun and studied vocab. After memorizing another page of words, I took a small stroll around school, just to get my mind away from the words. Upon my return, I tested myself, and all the words stuck with me. Now I just need to do that another 20 times and I’ll be good to go for the GRE.
Once Richie returned, we threw around the Frisbee for the couple of minutes before energy turned on. Richie took care of dinner while I typed up a physics exam for a teacher. What a royal pain in the ass that turned out to be: way too many subscripts and superscripts and words with “ção,” which requires ridiculous keystrokes. That, along with making edits on a chemistry test, took up the bulk of my night.
With thirty minutes left of energy, we went over to the villa to try to catch the USA-Brazil soccer game, the final of the Confederation Cup. We walked at an American pace to bar, only to find darkness. The generator that powered the only television in the villa ran out of gas. Sigh. As we walked back from the villa, I received a text from a friend: “1-0 USA.” Nice. Must have been a fluke, since Brazil doesn’t give up goals. Before I set foot in the school, hoping to catch the last few minutes of the first half at another teacher’s half, I got another text: “2-0 USA!” What the hell is going on?! I ran to a house with a TV to watch until the power went out.
Somebody pulled some strings and the energy stayed for the entirety of the game. Unfortunately, Machanga had more energy in the second half than the US side did. One minute in, Brazil scored, and you knew then that America was in trouble. If you let a team like Brazil hang around, they will bite. Final score, predictably: 3-2 Brazil. At least I could go to bed disappointed instead of wake up to bad news.
I slept a beautiful sleep until waking up at 4:15. The interruption, though, was brief and I slept until almost 8:00. This week and next week are finals weeks for the school, and I was scheduled to give mine this week on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. My morning wide open, I chilled on the patio with my Kakuro book until lunch time.
Three of my six classes took their exams. This was by far the least painful test day I’ve had here. I only had to move a couple of people and the wandering eyes were kept to a minimum. I think the students were satisfied with the multiple choice exam. I thought it was an easy exam – until I saw I girl wag her head from side to side and then straight down to the exams. The consensus at the end of the day was positive. It wasn’t too easy, it wasn’t too hard, but just “custa muito”.
I returned home to the sight of Richie cooking beans. We turned back to the chili tonight, but restrained ourselves from using cheese. After all, we only have one more packet and we’re not going to waste it too quickly. Richie also took care of typing an exam for a chemistry teacher, leaving me to format it. After eating, I ran to the computer lab to print it, where I was held hostage by a physics teacher. He needed help printing, but needed more time to type up “just two more questions.” In hunting-and-pecking time, that means at least thirty minutes, and there was no way in hell that I was going to wait that long. I took the keyboard, pounded it out in five minutes, formatted the exam and escaped. The rest of the night was spent with an “Economist”.
Before going to sleep, I pulled the blanket out of my bag. For more than six months, that blanket has sat in my suitcase. But the way the wind blew all day, I knew we were in for a cold night. We’ve had cold nights before, but I was just too lazy to take it out of the bag. But I finally broke. I was extraordinarily happy when I woke up at 4:30, shivering. I wrapped myself up and slept for a few more hours before waking up for good.
I had a busy morning ahead of me – 110 exams to correct. If my students were happy to have multiple choice, I was elated. Grading multiple choice exams is so much easier than questions and answers. Even so, I still only finished two-thirds of the exams before lunch. Our lunch was especially delicious today: we saved some of the chili from last night to throw in our eggs. It tasted like a delicious breakfast burrito.
My last set of exams were especially easy to grade. I don’t know why, but the classes on the science track always outperform the letters track. After the first student failed his exam, I had no other failures. Correct answers certainly facilitate grading. I had a little time to relax before giving another exam, which I spent throwing the Frisbee with Richie.
Most of the students in today’s class knocked out the exam quickly. For the most part, students were finished by the end of the first class period. As always, though, one of my best students stuck around until the very end, to discuss the exam. He scored well, as usual, although he didn’t seem satisfied with his 92%. I guess that’s good – he’s driven and expects perfection of himself. But in a system where 50% is passing, 92% is pretty damn amazing.
As Richie took care of dinner last night, I felt obligated to take care of dinner tonight. I made stir fry, with the addition of a few ingredients purchased in Vilanculos: bean sprouts and fake hot dogs. Okay, so it’s not gourmet, but at this point, meat is meat. I helped out a colleague with some computer issues before our nightly watching of “South Park.” Once the lights went out, I lit up the candles to do some reading before going to bed.
I woke up around 3:30 to the sound of rain. Great – another cold day to come ahead. When we woke up for good, Richie and I knew that it would be a day that would need to end with cookies. There were two factors that caused this: for one, Richie was giving exams today, so he knew he would be pissed off by the end of the day; the more important factor is that we are celebrating the beginning of July. We have had this date pegged for a while. We’re on the downside of the year, on the brink of reaching vacation. We know that July will treat us well.
Today was committed to work, my last real work day for a long time. And even this work day wouldn’t be a full day’s work. I had one set of exams to grade, for a class that has done well throughout the year. And this exam was no exception: only one out of 40 students failed, by far the best of my classes. With my work done quickly, I spent the rest of the morning with Kakuro.
I had to face two more classes after lunch, one of which was my big cheating class. I did not look forward to seeing them one bit. But much to my surprise, both my cheating class and the other class were pretty good. Between the two classes, I only had to move four students – four who typically have wandering eyes. When I graded there exams, though, it became evident why so many in that group have cheated: they’re not the brightest bulbs in the room. Even on the multiple choice exam, some students found a way to fail, miserably: I didn’t think it was possible, but at least two managed to “earn” fifteen percent on the exam.
My work day ended once the energy came on. With all of the exams graded, I punched them into my gradesheet, ready to be turned in next week. Richie, on the other hand, had a lot of work to do. Three of his classes took exams and he was not happy when he came back from his classes – too many cheaters. While Richie worked, I took care of dinner. Luckiy, grading for him went quickly, so I stuck him with making the cookie batter. We spent the night with cookies and “South Park.” As soon as those first cookies were eaten, all was forgotten, all was right with the world. I spoke to my sister before turning in to bed for some reading.
The clouds from yesterday stayed around just long enough to cause a bit of trouble. We were really hoping that this rain would be just a one-day thing, but nature has decided otherwise. It’s fuckin freezing – at least to us, now that our bodies are used to heat. It’s kind of ridiculous being bundled up in a long-sleeve shirt, sweatpants and a sweatshirt. This is the kind of weather that makes you want to stay in bed all day.
But there were things, albeit few, to be done today. I made an uneventful quick run to the market early in the morning. Richie came back from his class within minutes of me returning to a locked house, and he was more pissed off than yesterday. As he thought would happen, students from yesterday’s classes told the students from today’s class what the questions were. On his game, Richie changed all of the questions last night. I sat next to him on the patio as he graded, waiting, almost hoping, that someone would get a zero, banking on getting a perfect score using the answers from the last class. It took some time, but it actually happened – quite impressive. Once complete, we knocked off the rest of the cookies from last night, and everything was better.
The rest of the morning was quiet. Grading took up quite some time: by the time he finished, it was already 10:00. We spent the rest of the morning trying to answer questions out of a Mensa book. Put together, Richie and I almost make an intelligent human being. Regardless, it proved to be a nice distraction, especially from studying GRE vocab. I had planned to study for a lot of the day, but why study when there are puzzles to be solved?
After lunch, I ran over to the school to make an announcement to all of my classes. Today would be the last opportunity for any students to take the final. There were just a few absences, maybe five or six out of all of the classes, so you can understand my frustration when only one student showed up. Well, it’s one less that I have to run down next week. Or I could just give them all zeros. We’ll see what kind of mood I am in after the weekend.
We returned to stir fry dinner tonight, which was pretty good. It’s such a quick and easy meal to make that we were left with almost two and half hours to do nothing. We watched an hour of “South Park” before Richie went to read. I cleaned up a little – less that we have to do tomorrow – before folding myself into a magazine.
When we woke up at 4:00, neither of us really wanted to go anywhere. But were committed: Mangunde or bust. The Volunteers in Mangunde were kind enough (and probably crazy enough) to host a Fourth of July party. So for the first time in a long time, we headed northerly. The 4:00 wake up is enough to remind us why we choose to travel south instead of north.
The road out from Machanga was in the best shape that we have seen it. The government is pouring more than a million Meticais into the road and it’s starting to show. It should be lovely until the next rainy season. We got onto the high with no problem, but then bad luck hit: we popped a tire a good ways away from our destination and the driver had no spare. Idiot. The driver eventually got a ride into the next closest town, probably some 60 kilometers away. We decided that if we could get a boleia, we would take it. A few cars passed us by before a red car stopped for us. The exchange that occurred was a little strange: I asked all the questions in Portuguese and all of the responses came back in English. Either way, we got ourselves an awesome ride from a lawyer named Jamal. He spoke fluent English and drove like an American, getting us to the crossroads in amazing time.
We expected to wait a long time at the crossroads for Mangunde. A car was due to pick us up late in the afternoon, but we were fortunate to catch a ride sitting on top of crates of sodas and beers. The drive into Mangunde is beautifully empty: I don’t think we passed a house in the first 15 kilometers of the trip. If it’s possible to have less nothing than the road to Machanga, the road to Mangunde has it. But once we arrived, we were pleasantly surprised. Mangunde is one of the four schools under the ESMABAMA umbrella, which also includes Machanga, Estaquinha, and Barrada. From what we have heard, it is the most developed of the four sites. They are on the same three hour energy cycle that we currently sit on. And paradoxically, they lack reliable phone coverage but have wireless internet.
We arrived at the very tail end of lunch, which proved to be beneficial. The Brazilian Brothers from the church had cooked up a feijoada (beans and shaved pork) that was out of this world. The also had actual beef, the first beef I’ve eaten in a long time. Full of energy after eating, I played a little basketball with Edgar – our Portuguese friend – and some students from the school.
The night was pretty relaxing. The Volunteers’ empragada cooked up some killer food for us and we spent the night drink in hand, catching up with other Volunteers who made their way in to town later in the afternoon. As we are used to, the lights went out at 9:00 and we made our way into bed.
The Fourth of July was celebrated in style. The morning was casual. The host Volunteers took us for a tour of the school grounds, which was significantly larger than the school in Machanga. After walking around for a while, we alternated between drinking and playing Frisbee and football with some kids. Sometimes, we did both at the same time. We ate a lunch full of carbs before more Volunteers, drunk off their asses already, arrived into town.
The Brazilian Brothers took care of dinner for us. The pork that was used in the feijoada was just the beginning: they were going to roast the remainder of the pig, Brazilian barbeque style, for dinner. I’ve never been one to eat pork, but this dinner changed all of that. As they cooked it, a small crew gathered around the barbeque and starting taking samples, direct from barbeque to hand to mouth – no plate necessary. And I was just drunk enough to sample the heart, which wasn’t that bad, and the brain, which I would not recommend to anyone. To wrap up the night, and a pretty good week, we put up a little bonfire and continued catching up with long-lost souls.
The morning, to my liking, was peaceful. Nobody came to visit, the neighbors were shockingly quiet, and I was left to sit on the patio, a bit of sun shining through, with my Kakuro book. I wanted to spend the morning with numbers, knowing that a lot of my afternoon would be committed to my GRE word list. Only toward the latter end of the morning did one of our neighbors come by to visit. He’s one of Richie’s ninth grade students. He’s smart, but doesn’t really apply himself, which is frustrating for Richie. We know he’s smart because he’s the only student who has learned Su Doku. I tried to teach him Kakuro, but all he could say was “Custa muito”: literally “it costs a lot,” but figuratively meaning something along the lines of “it takes a lot of effort.”
We put Richie’s food idea into action for lunch. We had our regular scrambled eggs, but we could not care less about the eggs. Lunch was all about the cheese fries. Sprinkled with a little bit of beef jerky, it tasted like America. Those few moments after finishing were both some of the most satisfying moments and some of the saddest moments we’ve had. If only there were more…
Richie headed off to watch a soccer game around mid-afternoon. I had no interest in going, not because I didn’t want to watch, but because I didn’t want to walk the mile to get to the field. I do enough walking as it is; if I don’t have to walk, I’m not going to. Instead, I pulled a chair out to the sun and studied vocab. After memorizing another page of words, I took a small stroll around school, just to get my mind away from the words. Upon my return, I tested myself, and all the words stuck with me. Now I just need to do that another 20 times and I’ll be good to go for the GRE.
Once Richie returned, we threw around the Frisbee for the couple of minutes before energy turned on. Richie took care of dinner while I typed up a physics exam for a teacher. What a royal pain in the ass that turned out to be: way too many subscripts and superscripts and words with “ção,” which requires ridiculous keystrokes. That, along with making edits on a chemistry test, took up the bulk of my night.
With thirty minutes left of energy, we went over to the villa to try to catch the USA-Brazil soccer game, the final of the Confederation Cup. We walked at an American pace to bar, only to find darkness. The generator that powered the only television in the villa ran out of gas. Sigh. As we walked back from the villa, I received a text from a friend: “1-0 USA.” Nice. Must have been a fluke, since Brazil doesn’t give up goals. Before I set foot in the school, hoping to catch the last few minutes of the first half at another teacher’s half, I got another text: “2-0 USA!” What the hell is going on?! I ran to a house with a TV to watch until the power went out.
Somebody pulled some strings and the energy stayed for the entirety of the game. Unfortunately, Machanga had more energy in the second half than the US side did. One minute in, Brazil scored, and you knew then that America was in trouble. If you let a team like Brazil hang around, they will bite. Final score, predictably: 3-2 Brazil. At least I could go to bed disappointed instead of wake up to bad news.
I slept a beautiful sleep until waking up at 4:15. The interruption, though, was brief and I slept until almost 8:00. This week and next week are finals weeks for the school, and I was scheduled to give mine this week on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. My morning wide open, I chilled on the patio with my Kakuro book until lunch time.
Three of my six classes took their exams. This was by far the least painful test day I’ve had here. I only had to move a couple of people and the wandering eyes were kept to a minimum. I think the students were satisfied with the multiple choice exam. I thought it was an easy exam – until I saw I girl wag her head from side to side and then straight down to the exams. The consensus at the end of the day was positive. It wasn’t too easy, it wasn’t too hard, but just “custa muito”.
I returned home to the sight of Richie cooking beans. We turned back to the chili tonight, but restrained ourselves from using cheese. After all, we only have one more packet and we’re not going to waste it too quickly. Richie also took care of typing an exam for a chemistry teacher, leaving me to format it. After eating, I ran to the computer lab to print it, where I was held hostage by a physics teacher. He needed help printing, but needed more time to type up “just two more questions.” In hunting-and-pecking time, that means at least thirty minutes, and there was no way in hell that I was going to wait that long. I took the keyboard, pounded it out in five minutes, formatted the exam and escaped. The rest of the night was spent with an “Economist”.
Before going to sleep, I pulled the blanket out of my bag. For more than six months, that blanket has sat in my suitcase. But the way the wind blew all day, I knew we were in for a cold night. We’ve had cold nights before, but I was just too lazy to take it out of the bag. But I finally broke. I was extraordinarily happy when I woke up at 4:30, shivering. I wrapped myself up and slept for a few more hours before waking up for good.
I had a busy morning ahead of me – 110 exams to correct. If my students were happy to have multiple choice, I was elated. Grading multiple choice exams is so much easier than questions and answers. Even so, I still only finished two-thirds of the exams before lunch. Our lunch was especially delicious today: we saved some of the chili from last night to throw in our eggs. It tasted like a delicious breakfast burrito.
My last set of exams were especially easy to grade. I don’t know why, but the classes on the science track always outperform the letters track. After the first student failed his exam, I had no other failures. Correct answers certainly facilitate grading. I had a little time to relax before giving another exam, which I spent throwing the Frisbee with Richie.
Most of the students in today’s class knocked out the exam quickly. For the most part, students were finished by the end of the first class period. As always, though, one of my best students stuck around until the very end, to discuss the exam. He scored well, as usual, although he didn’t seem satisfied with his 92%. I guess that’s good – he’s driven and expects perfection of himself. But in a system where 50% is passing, 92% is pretty damn amazing.
As Richie took care of dinner last night, I felt obligated to take care of dinner tonight. I made stir fry, with the addition of a few ingredients purchased in Vilanculos: bean sprouts and fake hot dogs. Okay, so it’s not gourmet, but at this point, meat is meat. I helped out a colleague with some computer issues before our nightly watching of “South Park.” Once the lights went out, I lit up the candles to do some reading before going to bed.
I woke up around 3:30 to the sound of rain. Great – another cold day to come ahead. When we woke up for good, Richie and I knew that it would be a day that would need to end with cookies. There were two factors that caused this: for one, Richie was giving exams today, so he knew he would be pissed off by the end of the day; the more important factor is that we are celebrating the beginning of July. We have had this date pegged for a while. We’re on the downside of the year, on the brink of reaching vacation. We know that July will treat us well.
Today was committed to work, my last real work day for a long time. And even this work day wouldn’t be a full day’s work. I had one set of exams to grade, for a class that has done well throughout the year. And this exam was no exception: only one out of 40 students failed, by far the best of my classes. With my work done quickly, I spent the rest of the morning with Kakuro.
I had to face two more classes after lunch, one of which was my big cheating class. I did not look forward to seeing them one bit. But much to my surprise, both my cheating class and the other class were pretty good. Between the two classes, I only had to move four students – four who typically have wandering eyes. When I graded there exams, though, it became evident why so many in that group have cheated: they’re not the brightest bulbs in the room. Even on the multiple choice exam, some students found a way to fail, miserably: I didn’t think it was possible, but at least two managed to “earn” fifteen percent on the exam.
My work day ended once the energy came on. With all of the exams graded, I punched them into my gradesheet, ready to be turned in next week. Richie, on the other hand, had a lot of work to do. Three of his classes took exams and he was not happy when he came back from his classes – too many cheaters. While Richie worked, I took care of dinner. Luckiy, grading for him went quickly, so I stuck him with making the cookie batter. We spent the night with cookies and “South Park.” As soon as those first cookies were eaten, all was forgotten, all was right with the world. I spoke to my sister before turning in to bed for some reading.
The clouds from yesterday stayed around just long enough to cause a bit of trouble. We were really hoping that this rain would be just a one-day thing, but nature has decided otherwise. It’s fuckin freezing – at least to us, now that our bodies are used to heat. It’s kind of ridiculous being bundled up in a long-sleeve shirt, sweatpants and a sweatshirt. This is the kind of weather that makes you want to stay in bed all day.
But there were things, albeit few, to be done today. I made an uneventful quick run to the market early in the morning. Richie came back from his class within minutes of me returning to a locked house, and he was more pissed off than yesterday. As he thought would happen, students from yesterday’s classes told the students from today’s class what the questions were. On his game, Richie changed all of the questions last night. I sat next to him on the patio as he graded, waiting, almost hoping, that someone would get a zero, banking on getting a perfect score using the answers from the last class. It took some time, but it actually happened – quite impressive. Once complete, we knocked off the rest of the cookies from last night, and everything was better.
The rest of the morning was quiet. Grading took up quite some time: by the time he finished, it was already 10:00. We spent the rest of the morning trying to answer questions out of a Mensa book. Put together, Richie and I almost make an intelligent human being. Regardless, it proved to be a nice distraction, especially from studying GRE vocab. I had planned to study for a lot of the day, but why study when there are puzzles to be solved?
After lunch, I ran over to the school to make an announcement to all of my classes. Today would be the last opportunity for any students to take the final. There were just a few absences, maybe five or six out of all of the classes, so you can understand my frustration when only one student showed up. Well, it’s one less that I have to run down next week. Or I could just give them all zeros. We’ll see what kind of mood I am in after the weekend.
We returned to stir fry dinner tonight, which was pretty good. It’s such a quick and easy meal to make that we were left with almost two and half hours to do nothing. We watched an hour of “South Park” before Richie went to read. I cleaned up a little – less that we have to do tomorrow – before folding myself into a magazine.
When we woke up at 4:00, neither of us really wanted to go anywhere. But were committed: Mangunde or bust. The Volunteers in Mangunde were kind enough (and probably crazy enough) to host a Fourth of July party. So for the first time in a long time, we headed northerly. The 4:00 wake up is enough to remind us why we choose to travel south instead of north.
The road out from Machanga was in the best shape that we have seen it. The government is pouring more than a million Meticais into the road and it’s starting to show. It should be lovely until the next rainy season. We got onto the high with no problem, but then bad luck hit: we popped a tire a good ways away from our destination and the driver had no spare. Idiot. The driver eventually got a ride into the next closest town, probably some 60 kilometers away. We decided that if we could get a boleia, we would take it. A few cars passed us by before a red car stopped for us. The exchange that occurred was a little strange: I asked all the questions in Portuguese and all of the responses came back in English. Either way, we got ourselves an awesome ride from a lawyer named Jamal. He spoke fluent English and drove like an American, getting us to the crossroads in amazing time.
We expected to wait a long time at the crossroads for Mangunde. A car was due to pick us up late in the afternoon, but we were fortunate to catch a ride sitting on top of crates of sodas and beers. The drive into Mangunde is beautifully empty: I don’t think we passed a house in the first 15 kilometers of the trip. If it’s possible to have less nothing than the road to Machanga, the road to Mangunde has it. But once we arrived, we were pleasantly surprised. Mangunde is one of the four schools under the ESMABAMA umbrella, which also includes Machanga, Estaquinha, and Barrada. From what we have heard, it is the most developed of the four sites. They are on the same three hour energy cycle that we currently sit on. And paradoxically, they lack reliable phone coverage but have wireless internet.
We arrived at the very tail end of lunch, which proved to be beneficial. The Brazilian Brothers from the church had cooked up a feijoada (beans and shaved pork) that was out of this world. The also had actual beef, the first beef I’ve eaten in a long time. Full of energy after eating, I played a little basketball with Edgar – our Portuguese friend – and some students from the school.
The night was pretty relaxing. The Volunteers’ empragada cooked up some killer food for us and we spent the night drink in hand, catching up with other Volunteers who made their way in to town later in the afternoon. As we are used to, the lights went out at 9:00 and we made our way into bed.
The Fourth of July was celebrated in style. The morning was casual. The host Volunteers took us for a tour of the school grounds, which was significantly larger than the school in Machanga. After walking around for a while, we alternated between drinking and playing Frisbee and football with some kids. Sometimes, we did both at the same time. We ate a lunch full of carbs before more Volunteers, drunk off their asses already, arrived into town.
The Brazilian Brothers took care of dinner for us. The pork that was used in the feijoada was just the beginning: they were going to roast the remainder of the pig, Brazilian barbeque style, for dinner. I’ve never been one to eat pork, but this dinner changed all of that. As they cooked it, a small crew gathered around the barbeque and starting taking samples, direct from barbeque to hand to mouth – no plate necessary. And I was just drunk enough to sample the heart, which wasn’t that bad, and the brain, which I would not recommend to anyone. To wrap up the night, and a pretty good week, we put up a little bonfire and continued catching up with long-lost souls.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Year 1 - Week 28: "Before you go to sleep..."
Richie discovered the secret to not waking up at 2:30 in the morning: staying up drinking until 3. I was long asleep by the time he returned and I was out to the point that I didn’t hear him stumble in. I was out cold until 8:30 and Richie was dead until 9.
It’s not just the sleep that was beautiful. Waking up late came with its own gifts. Having a morning that is only three hours long is much more manageable than a morning that starts at 5 AM. And waking up at 9 meant we only had two wait two hours to start preparing lunch. Needless to say, we were very happy.
Along with putting lunch together, Richie cleaned up and soaked some beans in advance of making chili tonight. The first go around was good enough to deserve another shot and tonight is the night. After lunch, the afternoon was productive. I sat on the patio in numbers and words, switching between copying GRE word lists and finishing Kakuro puzzles.
The chili that we made was a step up from what we made the last time, at least in my book. We threw in a can of salsa, which gave it some serious kick. I was very happy with the level of spiciness; Richie sweated it out. We spent the better part of our time with energy getting through most of “Blood Diamond.” It’s cool to watch here because almost all the parts filmed in the city were filmed in Maputo. We can pull out little things like license plates and mCel posters, telltale signs of Mozambique. My parents called late-night, just before our energy went out.
But my night didn’t end there. I’ve decided to try something new that could benefit me in many ways. Once the power went out, I spent the next hour in bed reading by candlelight. I figure that not only will this help me improve my vocabulary – I noticed at least 20 GRE vocab words while reading “The Economist” – but a later bed time may mean I can sleep later.
My master plan worked, although not as brilliantly as I had anticipated. I slept solidly until 4 (!), the latest I’ve made it without the help of alcohol. I rolled around for a bit before going back to sleep until 8:30. The rest of the morning was spent on the patio, between Su Doku and plotting out the types of questions for my final exam.
As we have closed in on the waning weeks of the trimester, our work loads have rapidly decreased. I have moved into review mode, getting my students as prepared as they can be without giving them the answers to the exam. Only one of my three classes today received new material, and it’s only because they were a week behind due to the holidays a couple of weeks ago. The reviews went pretty well. The students definitely do better at multiple choice than they do at having to write full answers; it should produce some encourage results.
After a few days of doing without – or more accurately, after a few days of trying to avoid it – we turned back to spaghetti and tomato sauce. And garlic bread made a glorious return. It was good, but it’s definitely worn on us. It’s more about the bread than the pasta at this point. We finished off “Blood Diamond” and snuck in an episode of “South Park” before the lights when out. Once the lights went out, the candles were lit. I read for an hour before going to bed.
I made it straight through to 4:00 again, but I woke up totally refreshed. Well what the hell am I supposed to do now? I relit the candles and knocked out another hour in “The Economist” before squirming around in bed for a couple more hours.
There was little to be done in the morning. I took care of the dishes and swept the inside of the house before “lesson planning” – writing the lyrics to “Beautiful Boy” on giant paper. I have a little more flexibility to do fun things with my eleventh graders for a multitude of reasons – more hours per week, no national exam, another year with them next year. And I know from teaching in San Diego that people tend to enjoy listening to music, even if it’s something they’ve never heard.
The plan went off pretty well. I had an easy day in the classroom and the kids got a nice break from constantly hearing my voice as the only English that they hear. When I came back from school, I was locked out of the house. Thanks, Richie. He came back within minutes of me getting to the door, so the petty crime was forgivable.
When the energy flipped on, I was asked to reproduce a planning form that teachers have to plan out. I told the person who asked me that I would need tens. I assume that he thought that meant ten minutes Mozambican time because he was shocked when I actually was done in ten minutes. While I dealt with the computer lab, Richie cooked dinner. The rest of the night was pretty standard: dinner, “South Park” and bed.
Wednesday was my last day of classes for the trimester, which is amazing since the trimester doesn’t officially end for another two weeks. But that is how things work here: test prep a few weeks out from the end, give the exam the second to last week, and return it the last week of the trimester. Normally, I’d go to the end of the week, but Mozambican Independence Day is tomorrow, which means school will be cancelled officially on Thursday and unofficially on Friday. With just two classes of test prep to give, I had the morning to myself.
I expected to be out of my classes quickly. These two groups of kids do not like to ask questions, so I gave them the information for the exam, asked if there were any questions (to which of course they said, “no questions, teacher”), and left. The only problem with leaving my first class early is that I had about an hour until the next class.
I filled the void by taking in a French class, which was interesting, but not for the reasons you would think. It was interesting because of how little the teacher – who happens to be one of our best friends here – actually did. He gave the exercises to a student to write on the board, during which time he sat under a tree. He continued to sit there as students copied down the material. Once they finished, he gave a 10-minute explanation on the material – the imperative form of verbs, not exactly a difficult topic – then left again while students did the exercises. It was amazing to watch. For the entire 90-minute class, he was in the room for maybe 15 minutes. More than anything, it made me realize that even though I do so little in the classroom, it’s still a hell of a lot more than the students here usually get. Even just walking around the classroom to help students with their exercise is different for them.
The afternoon was short. I prepped dinner before the energy came on. We shifted around our food schedule to have potato pancakes tonight, knowing that we had a long, long night of drinking ahead of us. Our neighbor came over with three terrible bottles of table wine, all of which went before we arrived in the villa. Then the beers came, followed by a terrible bottle of brandy. Mixing two types of alcohol usually spells trouble; mixing three is just stupid. By the end of the night, my world was spinning.
I was not happy in the morning. Not happy at all. My head was pounding and the yelling coming from our neighbor’s house was not helping one bit. I spent the vast majority of the morning in bed, torn between sleeping and reading. Just before lunch, I started to feel better. Judging the level of my headaches was simple: at 9, my head couldn’t stand the sight of anything; by 10, looking at a Kakuro puzzle hurt my head; and by 11:30, I was finishing them with little trouble.
Despite resting for the entire morning and eating a decent lunch, neither Richie nor I was right for the afternoon. Our neighbors helped our cause by bringing over some food – freshly killed chicken! – but even as we approached our normal dinner time, neither of us was in the mood for anything…except cookies. So for Mozambican Independence Day, we stayed in the house, watched “South Park” and ate cookies. And we could not have been happier.
While we stayed in, the rest of the country was partying. When I woke up at 3:00, the music was still pumping out of the barracas. Considering that just about every teacher was out, it became quite clear earlier in the evening that there would be no school on Friday, opening up a window of opportunity for me to make a quick trip to Vilanculos.
All in all, the transportation was pretty smooth. The toughest part of this trip was getting out of Machanga. Apparently, all of the drinking got to the boat people also because there was only one boat running across the river. Once I got to Mambone, though, things went by beautiful. I got a car going to the crossroads before I even hit the villa. And within minutes of getting to the crossroads, a car – with Greg and his girlfriend – arrived, offering a free ride all the way to Vilanculos. Excellent.
The only downside to the whole day was that I arrived during the two-hour lunch break for businesses, so everything was closed. I killed the time at a Volunteer’s house, just catching up. Once businesses opened, however, everything went smoothly. I got all of my shopping done in one store – a rarity – and my photocopies of my exams were done at a reasonable speed and price.
The rarities didn’t stop there. Usually when I go to Vilanculos, there are two common factors – Richie is there, and there is always a party. But this time, Richie stayed behind, wanting to experience Machanga alone, and everyone was quite tired from the holiday weekend. Instead of the typical party, we ate pizza and watched “Angels and Demons.” It was a good deviation from the norm.
I trucked out early on Saturday, committed to finishing up some last-minute shopping. Chocolate, which was hard to come by everywhere else in town, was readily available in the villa, and vegetables are always cheaper outside at the market than inside the grocery stores. Stocked up, I got on the chapa, which made decent time, and hauled back to Machanga.
Just as I was about to reach the school, I ran into Richie and some other teachers, who were heading over to watch a soccer game. Exhausted, I had no interest in going. The keys exchanged, I continued home for an afternoon of relaxation and reading.
For a change, we actually looked forward to dinner. One of the new items I found in Vilanculos was cheddar cheese sauce. This could be a game-changer for us in the interval before we get full-time energy (and therefore, the ability to refrigerate real cheese). We made spaghetti sauce, but more importantly, we made garlic cheese bread which was AMAZING! Then the ideas starting flowing in – cheese fries, improvements to the chili. We were very happy. After dinner, we watched one episode of “South Park” and I spoke to my brother before closing my eyes on another week.
It’s not just the sleep that was beautiful. Waking up late came with its own gifts. Having a morning that is only three hours long is much more manageable than a morning that starts at 5 AM. And waking up at 9 meant we only had two wait two hours to start preparing lunch. Needless to say, we were very happy.
Along with putting lunch together, Richie cleaned up and soaked some beans in advance of making chili tonight. The first go around was good enough to deserve another shot and tonight is the night. After lunch, the afternoon was productive. I sat on the patio in numbers and words, switching between copying GRE word lists and finishing Kakuro puzzles.
The chili that we made was a step up from what we made the last time, at least in my book. We threw in a can of salsa, which gave it some serious kick. I was very happy with the level of spiciness; Richie sweated it out. We spent the better part of our time with energy getting through most of “Blood Diamond.” It’s cool to watch here because almost all the parts filmed in the city were filmed in Maputo. We can pull out little things like license plates and mCel posters, telltale signs of Mozambique. My parents called late-night, just before our energy went out.
But my night didn’t end there. I’ve decided to try something new that could benefit me in many ways. Once the power went out, I spent the next hour in bed reading by candlelight. I figure that not only will this help me improve my vocabulary – I noticed at least 20 GRE vocab words while reading “The Economist” – but a later bed time may mean I can sleep later.
My master plan worked, although not as brilliantly as I had anticipated. I slept solidly until 4 (!), the latest I’ve made it without the help of alcohol. I rolled around for a bit before going back to sleep until 8:30. The rest of the morning was spent on the patio, between Su Doku and plotting out the types of questions for my final exam.
As we have closed in on the waning weeks of the trimester, our work loads have rapidly decreased. I have moved into review mode, getting my students as prepared as they can be without giving them the answers to the exam. Only one of my three classes today received new material, and it’s only because they were a week behind due to the holidays a couple of weeks ago. The reviews went pretty well. The students definitely do better at multiple choice than they do at having to write full answers; it should produce some encourage results.
After a few days of doing without – or more accurately, after a few days of trying to avoid it – we turned back to spaghetti and tomato sauce. And garlic bread made a glorious return. It was good, but it’s definitely worn on us. It’s more about the bread than the pasta at this point. We finished off “Blood Diamond” and snuck in an episode of “South Park” before the lights when out. Once the lights went out, the candles were lit. I read for an hour before going to bed.
I made it straight through to 4:00 again, but I woke up totally refreshed. Well what the hell am I supposed to do now? I relit the candles and knocked out another hour in “The Economist” before squirming around in bed for a couple more hours.
There was little to be done in the morning. I took care of the dishes and swept the inside of the house before “lesson planning” – writing the lyrics to “Beautiful Boy” on giant paper. I have a little more flexibility to do fun things with my eleventh graders for a multitude of reasons – more hours per week, no national exam, another year with them next year. And I know from teaching in San Diego that people tend to enjoy listening to music, even if it’s something they’ve never heard.
The plan went off pretty well. I had an easy day in the classroom and the kids got a nice break from constantly hearing my voice as the only English that they hear. When I came back from school, I was locked out of the house. Thanks, Richie. He came back within minutes of me getting to the door, so the petty crime was forgivable.
When the energy flipped on, I was asked to reproduce a planning form that teachers have to plan out. I told the person who asked me that I would need tens. I assume that he thought that meant ten minutes Mozambican time because he was shocked when I actually was done in ten minutes. While I dealt with the computer lab, Richie cooked dinner. The rest of the night was pretty standard: dinner, “South Park” and bed.
Wednesday was my last day of classes for the trimester, which is amazing since the trimester doesn’t officially end for another two weeks. But that is how things work here: test prep a few weeks out from the end, give the exam the second to last week, and return it the last week of the trimester. Normally, I’d go to the end of the week, but Mozambican Independence Day is tomorrow, which means school will be cancelled officially on Thursday and unofficially on Friday. With just two classes of test prep to give, I had the morning to myself.
I expected to be out of my classes quickly. These two groups of kids do not like to ask questions, so I gave them the information for the exam, asked if there were any questions (to which of course they said, “no questions, teacher”), and left. The only problem with leaving my first class early is that I had about an hour until the next class.
I filled the void by taking in a French class, which was interesting, but not for the reasons you would think. It was interesting because of how little the teacher – who happens to be one of our best friends here – actually did. He gave the exercises to a student to write on the board, during which time he sat under a tree. He continued to sit there as students copied down the material. Once they finished, he gave a 10-minute explanation on the material – the imperative form of verbs, not exactly a difficult topic – then left again while students did the exercises. It was amazing to watch. For the entire 90-minute class, he was in the room for maybe 15 minutes. More than anything, it made me realize that even though I do so little in the classroom, it’s still a hell of a lot more than the students here usually get. Even just walking around the classroom to help students with their exercise is different for them.
The afternoon was short. I prepped dinner before the energy came on. We shifted around our food schedule to have potato pancakes tonight, knowing that we had a long, long night of drinking ahead of us. Our neighbor came over with three terrible bottles of table wine, all of which went before we arrived in the villa. Then the beers came, followed by a terrible bottle of brandy. Mixing two types of alcohol usually spells trouble; mixing three is just stupid. By the end of the night, my world was spinning.
I was not happy in the morning. Not happy at all. My head was pounding and the yelling coming from our neighbor’s house was not helping one bit. I spent the vast majority of the morning in bed, torn between sleeping and reading. Just before lunch, I started to feel better. Judging the level of my headaches was simple: at 9, my head couldn’t stand the sight of anything; by 10, looking at a Kakuro puzzle hurt my head; and by 11:30, I was finishing them with little trouble.
Despite resting for the entire morning and eating a decent lunch, neither Richie nor I was right for the afternoon. Our neighbors helped our cause by bringing over some food – freshly killed chicken! – but even as we approached our normal dinner time, neither of us was in the mood for anything…except cookies. So for Mozambican Independence Day, we stayed in the house, watched “South Park” and ate cookies. And we could not have been happier.
While we stayed in, the rest of the country was partying. When I woke up at 3:00, the music was still pumping out of the barracas. Considering that just about every teacher was out, it became quite clear earlier in the evening that there would be no school on Friday, opening up a window of opportunity for me to make a quick trip to Vilanculos.
All in all, the transportation was pretty smooth. The toughest part of this trip was getting out of Machanga. Apparently, all of the drinking got to the boat people also because there was only one boat running across the river. Once I got to Mambone, though, things went by beautiful. I got a car going to the crossroads before I even hit the villa. And within minutes of getting to the crossroads, a car – with Greg and his girlfriend – arrived, offering a free ride all the way to Vilanculos. Excellent.
The only downside to the whole day was that I arrived during the two-hour lunch break for businesses, so everything was closed. I killed the time at a Volunteer’s house, just catching up. Once businesses opened, however, everything went smoothly. I got all of my shopping done in one store – a rarity – and my photocopies of my exams were done at a reasonable speed and price.
The rarities didn’t stop there. Usually when I go to Vilanculos, there are two common factors – Richie is there, and there is always a party. But this time, Richie stayed behind, wanting to experience Machanga alone, and everyone was quite tired from the holiday weekend. Instead of the typical party, we ate pizza and watched “Angels and Demons.” It was a good deviation from the norm.
I trucked out early on Saturday, committed to finishing up some last-minute shopping. Chocolate, which was hard to come by everywhere else in town, was readily available in the villa, and vegetables are always cheaper outside at the market than inside the grocery stores. Stocked up, I got on the chapa, which made decent time, and hauled back to Machanga.
Just as I was about to reach the school, I ran into Richie and some other teachers, who were heading over to watch a soccer game. Exhausted, I had no interest in going. The keys exchanged, I continued home for an afternoon of relaxation and reading.
For a change, we actually looked forward to dinner. One of the new items I found in Vilanculos was cheddar cheese sauce. This could be a game-changer for us in the interval before we get full-time energy (and therefore, the ability to refrigerate real cheese). We made spaghetti sauce, but more importantly, we made garlic cheese bread which was AMAZING! Then the ideas starting flowing in – cheese fries, improvements to the chili. We were very happy. After dinner, we watched one episode of “South Park” and I spoke to my brother before closing my eyes on another week.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Year 1 - Week 27: The White Man with the Red Pen
Taking part in all the science fair activities was like a travel a day: a lot of sitting, waiting, sitting in one place, until finally arriving. The only difference was that we didn’t have our requisite walk, thankfully. Either way, it knocked me out. In spite of a decent night’s sleep, I woke up exhausted. Luckily, there were very few things I had to do for the day.
While many of the teachers started drinking at a very early hour – nothing like boxed wine at 8:30, right? – I sat on the patio grading papers. Grading exams puts me in a terrible mood; grading this particular class was awful. This class was by far my worst class and I was especially angry with them because this was the class where I caught my cheaters. If there is one thing that they should have learned by now, it’s that you don’t piss off the white man with the red pen. By the time I got finished with that class, one in three kids had failed. Even when they cheat, they can’t pass. Ridiculous.
The afternoon was pretty calm. After clearing my mind with a couple of Kakuro puzzles, I finished grading my last set of exams. This class did much better. There were two near-perfect scores which, in my mind, justifies the difficulty of the exam. If one person can do that well, then there’s no reason – other than laziness – that others can’t.
Having worked for most of the day, I gave myself the rest of the afternoon off. I squeezed in a nap before our energy turned on. We were feeling particularly lazy, so we dug in to some of the supplies that my aunt sent me – a can of chili, which was delicious, and a can of ravioli, which was not as good, but still pretty damn good (I mean, it’s ravioli!). Just after we ate, our neighbor came over with a bottle of gin. Neither of us really wanted to drink, but we’re not going to turn down free gin. As we drank, we watched this terrible movie that he brought over. Sadly, it kept freezing on us. So eventually, we just gave up and turned to reliable episodes of “South Park” before going to sleep.
I was in a deep sleep when I woke up, refreshed, at 11:30 at night, to the sight of electricity. What happened? Now I’m just confused. I flipped the light out and went back to bed, slightly dazed. That incident in the past, I slept through the rest of the night just fine.
When I woke up, I knew I didn’t want to teach. I was still pissed off from grading, and having to give another round of exams this week, I knew I was going to be in for more crappy exams. I decided that I would give my classes busy work: they could use the practice anyway. I planned out my lesson, taken from a couple different books, and altered the exam just a bit before heading off to class.
The class that got the exam today was definitely a better class – more mature, harder working, and probably better cheaters than my Friday class. After all, I didn’t catch anyone cheating and only had to move one person and their wandering eyes. The other classes did decently with their work. They actually got done with it much faster than I expected which was good news for me. I’ll happily take the time that they give me. I got back from class with just enough sunlight left to throw around the Frisbee with Richie.
Neither of us was in the mood for spaghetti, but we didn’t really have a choice. Our tomatoes were on the brink of going bad and the bell pepper wasn’t going to last much longer. We cooked up our sauce but only a little spaghetti, instead choosing to commit the sauce to delicious soon-to-be-stale Mambone bread. It was a good call. After dining, we got the movie from yesterday to work, and watched some “Curb Your Enthusiasm” following the movie. Richie gave up shortly after and I followed suit.
Another morning, another day of grading papers. I’m very happy that I only have to do this a couple of times a year, although it sure as hell makes the morning pass by. With the little time I had left after correcting exams, I knocked out a couple of Kakuro puzzles.
The afternoon passed by quickly. I gave one quick class on prepositions to one set of twelfth graders. I gave my 11th graders the day off. After an exam and a day of tedious busy work, they earned it. Plus I’ve reached the end of my curriculum for this trimester. In order to keep a balance between the eleventh and twelfth graders, I’m almost always forced to cancel an eleventh grade class. To end the afternoon, I gave my exam to one last group of twelfth graders. Just another group to correct.
Following the exam, one of my students came over for some English help. He had a tenth grade curriculum with him. Maybe he was just practicing English – I wouldn’t be shocked, as he is one of my better students – but my guess is that he was helping out a friend. It was shocking to see what they expect the tenth graders to know. There is some vocabulary in there that definitely should not be taught.
Richie was feeling ambitious tonight. He was in no mood for spaghetti. I don’t blame him: we are getting seriously burnt out on our regular foods. We looked through our recipe book and found a recipe for vegetarian chili. Richie did most of the work while I corrected papers, and I got to eat a pretty delicious result. Of course, there was room for improvement, but for a first shot, I won’t complain. Usually, the first time we make things, they turn out awfully. This, however, we are not scared to try again. I entered my last set of grades and watched a bit of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” before going to sleep.
I had no work to do on Wednesday. No lesson to plan, no place to go, nothing to do. It was beautiful. The lesson for today was the same busy work that my eleventh graders got on Monday, so I was left to do what I do best: sit on the patio. With nothing to do, the morning proved to be amazingly long. The truth is I’d rather be busy than not, but outside of the classroom there is just not a lot to do. I figured I should make the best of my time, so I spent about an hour in a GRE book, brushing up on high school math.
The afternoon was an easy one. No real teaching to be done – just write exercises on the board and have the students practice. Lord knows that these classes need it. With my classes done on the early side, I made a late afternoon run to the market to stock up on bread and materials from cookies. We heard some utterly shocking news this afternoon that warranted making cookies: a teacher told us that even though energy would light up the entire town, it would not reach the school. Bull. Shit. We asked another teacher, and he said it would get here. So now we are just confused, but sadly, it is easier to believe the former than it is the latter. This place has a way of being upside-down sometimes. A lot of times, actually.
We went back to our regular spaghetti, although these days, it’s been more about the bread and less about the spaghetti. Richie claims he just can’t eat spaghetti anymore. Coming from an Italian family, he should be ashamed of himself. Dipping bread in our sauce, though, never gets old. Plus, tonight wasn’t about dinner: it was about wiping out the horrible news with delicious cookies. We downed half of our cookies while watching “South Park.” One step closer to diabetes, we went to bed.
With Thursday’s arrival, we got to the downside of the week. I had another easy day ahead of me. All I had to do was return exams to two classes. It’s amazing how much time gets wasted on stuff like this. Giving a test isn’t just giving a test – there’s a day to prep, a day to take the exam, and a day to go over all of the answers. That means that three weeks of every 11 week trimester are eaten up by exams. It’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s what they are used to.
The day passed by even faster than it should have. The class that I was supposed to teach during fifth and sixth period didn’t have a teacher during fourth period. I don’t ask why anymore. If there is an open class, I take it. Just as I was finishing up, the teacher showed up. And it was probably the wrong teacher to anger – one of the pedagogical directors. Oops. That’s going to require an apology for sure.
We were scheduled to have a meeting at 4:00, which everyone knew meant 5:00. So instead of showing up on time as we should have, we watched the Brazil – U.S.A. slaughtering of a soccer game. It’s awfully tough for a team to win when they only get one shot on goal. And Brazil just plays beautifully.
Two hours late, the meeting began. It wasn’t so much a meeting as it was a lecture. Our Portuguese friend was giving a talk on the history of education. It was nothing new for us, but it was probably a good lesson for the Mozambican teachers here. More important for us was the food that came after. The Brazilian Brothers from the church brought these killer egg and hot dog sandwiches and juice. Yes, I will happily take this food and juice. As delicious as it was, we were still left hungry. With most of the night – and therefore, most of our energy – taken up by the meeting, we went the lazy route and heated up some canned ravioli that tasted like dog food. We watched one episode of “South Park” before the energy closed out our day.
I had the same agenda for Friday as I had for Thursday. All I had to do was hand back exams. I was happily enjoying my book of Kakuro when a teacher came to our house. He said that the director needed to talk to me. Crap. I hate talking to the director, not because I don’t like the guy, but he is just intimidating. This is a guy with a lot of power – definitely not the type of guy to piss off. I thought he was going to give me a talking-to about his son’s English grade, which is quickly falling. Instead, he just wanted me to set up a computer. Okay, I can handle that. He was happy that it worked well. Even when he is happy, though, he looks like his eyeballs are about to pop out of his head. I did get some good news while I had the director in the room with me – he said that energy would arrive to the school. Score.
I quickly handed back my exams. Of course, no one had questions about the content. It’s always “Easy, teacher. No questions” when I go over it. With but a few questions about grades, I was off the hook early. I spent a lot of the afternoon trying to save Richie from a neighbor. This guy means no harm, but he is just annoying. First I distracted the neighbor, then I got Richie to throw around the Frisbee. But like a mosquito, this guy just kept coming back. Eventually I gave up. It’s Machanga – giving up is what we do.
Our energy came on a bit on the early side. Our neighbors said that they would cook us some food and we gladly accepted the offer. The last time they cooked for us, we got some delicious couve out of it, and we were hoping for the same time though. What arrived, though, was bitter – at least to my taste buds. Richie found it sweet. While he enjoyed, I turned to ever-reliable spaghetti. We watched an episode of “South Park” before Richie’s dad called. By the time he was off the phone, the energy was out, and the night was over.
I slept beautifully until about 3:30. I woke up for no reason other than having enough sleep, which was a bummer. Once we have energy, it won’t be a problem. With control of our own energy, we can go to bed as late as we want and we won’t be refreshed at 3:00. Regardless of feeling good, I stayed in bed – not a lot I could do about it.
There was a bit of activity going on in Machanga today. There was some ceremony – flower-laying or something – to commemorate the birthday of someone. Richie chose to go, but like the event with the governor, I opted out. I didn’t need to stand in the heat, wait, and then be disappointed by whatever was happening. Instead, I made a run to the market, where I stocked up on all the necessities plus some liquor for the night’s festivities.
With most people out and about, the day was pretty calm. It was a good day to start seriously studying for GREs. I cracked open the book and copied out word lists. Those lists will be a thorn in my side for months to come, but it’s a necessary pain. In between getting through lists, Richie and I threw the Frisbee, both by ourselves and with some kids.
The rest of the night could be calm or could get out of control. After dinner, the party will begin. Cheap whiskey is never a good idea, but we all okayed it. I expect myself to be useless for most of tomorrow.
Happy father’s day to one and all tomorrow.
While many of the teachers started drinking at a very early hour – nothing like boxed wine at 8:30, right? – I sat on the patio grading papers. Grading exams puts me in a terrible mood; grading this particular class was awful. This class was by far my worst class and I was especially angry with them because this was the class where I caught my cheaters. If there is one thing that they should have learned by now, it’s that you don’t piss off the white man with the red pen. By the time I got finished with that class, one in three kids had failed. Even when they cheat, they can’t pass. Ridiculous.
The afternoon was pretty calm. After clearing my mind with a couple of Kakuro puzzles, I finished grading my last set of exams. This class did much better. There were two near-perfect scores which, in my mind, justifies the difficulty of the exam. If one person can do that well, then there’s no reason – other than laziness – that others can’t.
Having worked for most of the day, I gave myself the rest of the afternoon off. I squeezed in a nap before our energy turned on. We were feeling particularly lazy, so we dug in to some of the supplies that my aunt sent me – a can of chili, which was delicious, and a can of ravioli, which was not as good, but still pretty damn good (I mean, it’s ravioli!). Just after we ate, our neighbor came over with a bottle of gin. Neither of us really wanted to drink, but we’re not going to turn down free gin. As we drank, we watched this terrible movie that he brought over. Sadly, it kept freezing on us. So eventually, we just gave up and turned to reliable episodes of “South Park” before going to sleep.
I was in a deep sleep when I woke up, refreshed, at 11:30 at night, to the sight of electricity. What happened? Now I’m just confused. I flipped the light out and went back to bed, slightly dazed. That incident in the past, I slept through the rest of the night just fine.
When I woke up, I knew I didn’t want to teach. I was still pissed off from grading, and having to give another round of exams this week, I knew I was going to be in for more crappy exams. I decided that I would give my classes busy work: they could use the practice anyway. I planned out my lesson, taken from a couple different books, and altered the exam just a bit before heading off to class.
The class that got the exam today was definitely a better class – more mature, harder working, and probably better cheaters than my Friday class. After all, I didn’t catch anyone cheating and only had to move one person and their wandering eyes. The other classes did decently with their work. They actually got done with it much faster than I expected which was good news for me. I’ll happily take the time that they give me. I got back from class with just enough sunlight left to throw around the Frisbee with Richie.
Neither of us was in the mood for spaghetti, but we didn’t really have a choice. Our tomatoes were on the brink of going bad and the bell pepper wasn’t going to last much longer. We cooked up our sauce but only a little spaghetti, instead choosing to commit the sauce to delicious soon-to-be-stale Mambone bread. It was a good call. After dining, we got the movie from yesterday to work, and watched some “Curb Your Enthusiasm” following the movie. Richie gave up shortly after and I followed suit.
Another morning, another day of grading papers. I’m very happy that I only have to do this a couple of times a year, although it sure as hell makes the morning pass by. With the little time I had left after correcting exams, I knocked out a couple of Kakuro puzzles.
The afternoon passed by quickly. I gave one quick class on prepositions to one set of twelfth graders. I gave my 11th graders the day off. After an exam and a day of tedious busy work, they earned it. Plus I’ve reached the end of my curriculum for this trimester. In order to keep a balance between the eleventh and twelfth graders, I’m almost always forced to cancel an eleventh grade class. To end the afternoon, I gave my exam to one last group of twelfth graders. Just another group to correct.
Following the exam, one of my students came over for some English help. He had a tenth grade curriculum with him. Maybe he was just practicing English – I wouldn’t be shocked, as he is one of my better students – but my guess is that he was helping out a friend. It was shocking to see what they expect the tenth graders to know. There is some vocabulary in there that definitely should not be taught.
Richie was feeling ambitious tonight. He was in no mood for spaghetti. I don’t blame him: we are getting seriously burnt out on our regular foods. We looked through our recipe book and found a recipe for vegetarian chili. Richie did most of the work while I corrected papers, and I got to eat a pretty delicious result. Of course, there was room for improvement, but for a first shot, I won’t complain. Usually, the first time we make things, they turn out awfully. This, however, we are not scared to try again. I entered my last set of grades and watched a bit of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” before going to sleep.
I had no work to do on Wednesday. No lesson to plan, no place to go, nothing to do. It was beautiful. The lesson for today was the same busy work that my eleventh graders got on Monday, so I was left to do what I do best: sit on the patio. With nothing to do, the morning proved to be amazingly long. The truth is I’d rather be busy than not, but outside of the classroom there is just not a lot to do. I figured I should make the best of my time, so I spent about an hour in a GRE book, brushing up on high school math.
The afternoon was an easy one. No real teaching to be done – just write exercises on the board and have the students practice. Lord knows that these classes need it. With my classes done on the early side, I made a late afternoon run to the market to stock up on bread and materials from cookies. We heard some utterly shocking news this afternoon that warranted making cookies: a teacher told us that even though energy would light up the entire town, it would not reach the school. Bull. Shit. We asked another teacher, and he said it would get here. So now we are just confused, but sadly, it is easier to believe the former than it is the latter. This place has a way of being upside-down sometimes. A lot of times, actually.
We went back to our regular spaghetti, although these days, it’s been more about the bread and less about the spaghetti. Richie claims he just can’t eat spaghetti anymore. Coming from an Italian family, he should be ashamed of himself. Dipping bread in our sauce, though, never gets old. Plus, tonight wasn’t about dinner: it was about wiping out the horrible news with delicious cookies. We downed half of our cookies while watching “South Park.” One step closer to diabetes, we went to bed.
With Thursday’s arrival, we got to the downside of the week. I had another easy day ahead of me. All I had to do was return exams to two classes. It’s amazing how much time gets wasted on stuff like this. Giving a test isn’t just giving a test – there’s a day to prep, a day to take the exam, and a day to go over all of the answers. That means that three weeks of every 11 week trimester are eaten up by exams. It’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s what they are used to.
The day passed by even faster than it should have. The class that I was supposed to teach during fifth and sixth period didn’t have a teacher during fourth period. I don’t ask why anymore. If there is an open class, I take it. Just as I was finishing up, the teacher showed up. And it was probably the wrong teacher to anger – one of the pedagogical directors. Oops. That’s going to require an apology for sure.
We were scheduled to have a meeting at 4:00, which everyone knew meant 5:00. So instead of showing up on time as we should have, we watched the Brazil – U.S.A. slaughtering of a soccer game. It’s awfully tough for a team to win when they only get one shot on goal. And Brazil just plays beautifully.
Two hours late, the meeting began. It wasn’t so much a meeting as it was a lecture. Our Portuguese friend was giving a talk on the history of education. It was nothing new for us, but it was probably a good lesson for the Mozambican teachers here. More important for us was the food that came after. The Brazilian Brothers from the church brought these killer egg and hot dog sandwiches and juice. Yes, I will happily take this food and juice. As delicious as it was, we were still left hungry. With most of the night – and therefore, most of our energy – taken up by the meeting, we went the lazy route and heated up some canned ravioli that tasted like dog food. We watched one episode of “South Park” before the energy closed out our day.
I had the same agenda for Friday as I had for Thursday. All I had to do was hand back exams. I was happily enjoying my book of Kakuro when a teacher came to our house. He said that the director needed to talk to me. Crap. I hate talking to the director, not because I don’t like the guy, but he is just intimidating. This is a guy with a lot of power – definitely not the type of guy to piss off. I thought he was going to give me a talking-to about his son’s English grade, which is quickly falling. Instead, he just wanted me to set up a computer. Okay, I can handle that. He was happy that it worked well. Even when he is happy, though, he looks like his eyeballs are about to pop out of his head. I did get some good news while I had the director in the room with me – he said that energy would arrive to the school. Score.
I quickly handed back my exams. Of course, no one had questions about the content. It’s always “Easy, teacher. No questions” when I go over it. With but a few questions about grades, I was off the hook early. I spent a lot of the afternoon trying to save Richie from a neighbor. This guy means no harm, but he is just annoying. First I distracted the neighbor, then I got Richie to throw around the Frisbee. But like a mosquito, this guy just kept coming back. Eventually I gave up. It’s Machanga – giving up is what we do.
Our energy came on a bit on the early side. Our neighbors said that they would cook us some food and we gladly accepted the offer. The last time they cooked for us, we got some delicious couve out of it, and we were hoping for the same time though. What arrived, though, was bitter – at least to my taste buds. Richie found it sweet. While he enjoyed, I turned to ever-reliable spaghetti. We watched an episode of “South Park” before Richie’s dad called. By the time he was off the phone, the energy was out, and the night was over.
I slept beautifully until about 3:30. I woke up for no reason other than having enough sleep, which was a bummer. Once we have energy, it won’t be a problem. With control of our own energy, we can go to bed as late as we want and we won’t be refreshed at 3:00. Regardless of feeling good, I stayed in bed – not a lot I could do about it.
There was a bit of activity going on in Machanga today. There was some ceremony – flower-laying or something – to commemorate the birthday of someone. Richie chose to go, but like the event with the governor, I opted out. I didn’t need to stand in the heat, wait, and then be disappointed by whatever was happening. Instead, I made a run to the market, where I stocked up on all the necessities plus some liquor for the night’s festivities.
With most people out and about, the day was pretty calm. It was a good day to start seriously studying for GREs. I cracked open the book and copied out word lists. Those lists will be a thorn in my side for months to come, but it’s a necessary pain. In between getting through lists, Richie and I threw the Frisbee, both by ourselves and with some kids.
The rest of the night could be calm or could get out of control. After dinner, the party will begin. Cheap whiskey is never a good idea, but we all okayed it. I expect myself to be useless for most of tomorrow.
Happy father’s day to one and all tomorrow.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Six Months at Site: Shout into the Darkness, Squeeze out Sparks of Light
Six months. One-fourth of the way done in Machanga. One-third of the way done with Mozambique. It’s a nice milestone. For half a year now, we have lived in the mato (the bush), the only muzungus in sight. And the truth is, even though there are still difficulties here, our lives are pretty easy.
Of course, there are still small obstacles, with our Portuguese – or our Mozambican Portuguese – still not up to par or with all the travel that we have to do just to get simple iteas. For now, the language remains the greatest frustration: we know that our Portuguese is pretty good because we have no problem speaking with native Portuguese speakers, but we still struggle to communicate some of the most basic ideas with colleagues and friends.
School also comes with its frustrations. There are still times – especially after giving an exam – that I feel like what I’ve been assigned to do here is pretty worthless. But I’ve accepted the fact that there are only so many things I can control, and the things that I can control, I should. What I can control the most at this point are the things I do outside of my assignment. And that is when I feel best about what I’m doing.
For example, one of my classes asked me if I could help them with math. Even after my long days of teaching, I am excited to help them with math, and I think they are happy to receive my help. It’s a situation where everyone wins: I get my best Portuguese workout, they improve at math, and we have a pretty good time doing it. It’s not in my job description to teach math, but to put it simply, we are here because we want to help.
Our helping is not just limited to students. I was approached by one teacher about trying to acquire a computer. I told him I would do my best. Then another teacher wanted one. In the end, it became its own project. Now, with the help of my mom and a wonderful non-profit, we will have computers coming here in July. It’s exciting – and it will be more exciting after I teach them how to work with them.
And in spite of the pains that my students often give me – whether it is their attempts at cheating or lack of participation – they are for the most part pretty good. On the whole, I don’t know how much they are retaining. But it can be seen in individual cases. It’s evident when kids come borrow dictionaries and hold on to them for weeks, or when they ask for magazines, or when they come over to the house just to practice speaking. Even if they butcher the language, it doesn’t matter – they are trying, even though they sure as hell don’t have to. And when they get it right, it’s even better. It may be just a small percentage who listen, who get it, who care. But that’s what my job is – give what I can, and let them take what they want. All I can do is shout into the darkness and squeeze out those sparks of light.
Of course, there are still small obstacles, with our Portuguese – or our Mozambican Portuguese – still not up to par or with all the travel that we have to do just to get simple iteas. For now, the language remains the greatest frustration: we know that our Portuguese is pretty good because we have no problem speaking with native Portuguese speakers, but we still struggle to communicate some of the most basic ideas with colleagues and friends.
School also comes with its frustrations. There are still times – especially after giving an exam – that I feel like what I’ve been assigned to do here is pretty worthless. But I’ve accepted the fact that there are only so many things I can control, and the things that I can control, I should. What I can control the most at this point are the things I do outside of my assignment. And that is when I feel best about what I’m doing.
For example, one of my classes asked me if I could help them with math. Even after my long days of teaching, I am excited to help them with math, and I think they are happy to receive my help. It’s a situation where everyone wins: I get my best Portuguese workout, they improve at math, and we have a pretty good time doing it. It’s not in my job description to teach math, but to put it simply, we are here because we want to help.
Our helping is not just limited to students. I was approached by one teacher about trying to acquire a computer. I told him I would do my best. Then another teacher wanted one. In the end, it became its own project. Now, with the help of my mom and a wonderful non-profit, we will have computers coming here in July. It’s exciting – and it will be more exciting after I teach them how to work with them.
And in spite of the pains that my students often give me – whether it is their attempts at cheating or lack of participation – they are for the most part pretty good. On the whole, I don’t know how much they are retaining. But it can be seen in individual cases. It’s evident when kids come borrow dictionaries and hold on to them for weeks, or when they ask for magazines, or when they come over to the house just to practice speaking. Even if they butcher the language, it doesn’t matter – they are trying, even though they sure as hell don’t have to. And when they get it right, it’s even better. It may be just a small percentage who listen, who get it, who care. But that’s what my job is – give what I can, and let them take what they want. All I can do is shout into the darkness and squeeze out those sparks of light.
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