I think that one of the most amazing things about Machanga is that you could travel for fourteen hours and still have another five to six hour day ahead of you, just to get here. Just looking at the geography of Mozambique, if you look for the biggest cities around Machanga, they are Chimoio (eight hours away), Beira (nine to thirteen hours away, depending on how many flats the chapa gets) and Maputo (two days travel). Vilanculos, which is far from a city is only five and a half hours out and that's all I had to cover today. Compared to yesterday's fourteen hours, this would be a piece of cake.
Even though I went to bed at an absurdly early hour last night, I still managed to sleep until 7:30. I felt refreshed, alive, ready for another day travel. I packed up the few things I had taken out last night and headed toward the chapa stop. The lack of a Mambone chapa was disconcerting, but I was quickly reassured by someone that the chapa was in Vilanculos and it would be returning soon. Sure enough, thirty minutes later, the car arrived. This was a different car than the ones we usually take, but it seemed okay.
I kept myself entertained with a local newspaper which, to my surprise, had a brief interview with Bono. Apparently, he was in Maputo for some ONE Campaign event. Dude, you come all the way to Mozambique and you don't tell me?! Come on, Bono!
Aside from the regular annoying stops along the EN1, the ride was pretty smooth. For a change, we barely made any stops over the last 45 kilometers, which probably shaved an hour off our time. My good fortune continued when I got to the river. Somebody was already there waiting to cross and the boatman was ready to cross with only two people -- nice!
The rest of my afternoon in Machanga was relaxing. I did all the terribly boring things that have to be done after traveling -- unpacking, sorting laundry, blah blah. I also managed to catch up on my writing. Being away for five or six days makes this journal tough to keep.
The evening was equally relaxing. I didn't want to work too hard at dinner, so I made myself some spaghetti and used one of the sauce packets we have. You can go ahead and call me lazy.
As usual, I had no classes on Monday, which gave me the opportunity to take care of stuff concerning the rest of this trimester. We only have three weeks left in this trimester and there's still I lot that I want to cover. Thus far, I have covered present tense and future tense, which are each easier that past tense. It will take me the entire three weeks just to review the grammar of past tense. I also figured out what was going to be on my final exam. These students are going to kill me. Every single question on this exam is taken from National Exams from past years. They are all loosely related to what they have learned this trimester but not as clearly as I have presented it. It should be interesting to see how they do. Just from this exam, I will have a good idea of who will pass the National Exam come November.
My afternoon was committed to numbers, both for entertainment and for work. After lunch, I did some Sudoku and kakuro to keep my mind occupied. Later, one of the math teachers doing university work came over for some help with complex numbers. I came so close to figuring out this one problem, but screwed up somewhere along the line. I must have done it four or five times, but every time, I had a plus sign where I should have had a minus sign. Aggravating , to say the least.
With Richie still gone, I was on my own again for entertainment. His computer tends to work much better when it comes to watching DVDs but I was not going to let that deter me. Following dinner, I watched a couple episodes of "Seinfeld".
Monday was the last day, at least for a little while, that I'd be alone here. Richie was on the road on Tuesday heading for Machanga. I was happy to finally have some company not named Sozinho. That kid is going to drive us to insanity. Eight more months. I was happy to not have anything to do on Tuesday morning because Monday night was probably the worst night of sleep I've had all year. I didn't fall asleep until after midnight, and after that I was up almost hourly. Frustrating would be putting it lightly.
Just before lunch, I took a look at what I was teaching in the afternoon: a quick lesson on possessive adjectives -- my, your, his, etc. I kind of knew that this was going to be a tough lesson for these kids to get because while the Portuguese has just one word for possessives, we use two in English. For example, "minha" can be "my" or "mine" depending on when it is used in the sentence. I'm sure it will cause fits on the exam.
Richie returned within an hour of my classes being done. There wasn't much to do for the afternoon. I think he was pretty tired and I didn't have to worry about work until late tomorrow afternoon. With the exception of a haircut for me, we pretty much did nothing until the energy was on. After a long travel day, Richie wanted to watch something funny, so we jumped back into "How I Met Your Mother" for a little while until the energy was shut down.
I slept in late on Wednesday. For some reason, I had a headache as I went to bed and I woke up with the same headache in the same place. That can't be good. I was prepared to drug myself up, but decided to go the natural route first and pound a bunch of water. By mid-morning, the headache had subsided. I was on my own for a lot of the morning as Richie had classes for the better part of the morning, so I buried myself in kakuro.
There was a ton of shrimp going around Machanga and we decided to get in on the buying spree. We gave all the shrimp to Sozinho to deshell and cook, but the asshole decided that he was only going to deshell enough for him to eat. I really don't mind eating shrimp, but peeling it is a huge pain in the ass. It used to be that I didn't like seafood because it smells horrible. Now, I don't mind the taste and even the smell is okay, but if there's one thing about my food, it is this: I don't want to have to fight with my food to be able to eat it. And eating shelled shrimp is exactly that It's a fight. I swear, if Sozinho manages to survive this year alive, it's because whatever god he believes in decided to restrain Richie and me from killing him.
After my non-shrimp lunch,.I got to work on my lesson for the day. I was meeting with only one of my classes today and today was our first of many discussions on past tense. Past tense in English is easier than Portuguese in some ways and harder in some ways. With the exception of the verb "to be" there is only one conjugation in English, clearly easier than the six that Portuguese offers. The downside is that English has far more irregular verbs than Portuguese. After a year and a half of being here, I still can't conjugate some Portuguese irregular verbs in past tense, so I'm going to say the English is easier.
What I didn't count on was the fact that some of the vocabulary associated with past tense would be so difficult for these kids to comprehend. For the life of them, they could not understand when we use "last" -- when there is only one unit of time, like last year (one year in the past) or last month (one month in the past) and when we use "ago" -- when it is more than one unit, like "three weeks ago". I needed to explain it three times before kids understood what was happening. And even then, I'm pretty sure some didn't understand. These are the ones that might fall under the category of "lost cause".
Richie and I made a late afternoon run to the market. We decided that we were sick of buying rice one kilo at a time, so we stocked up for the year and bought a 25-kilo bag of rice. It will require us to eat a little less than a kilo of rice a week, and considering Sozinho eats more than the both of us combined, this should not be a problem. He has his doubts, but I'm pretty sure that Richie and I could get through the 25 kilos, even without that garbage disposal of an empregado.
There was a party on Wednesday night for one of our colleagues. She has been trying to transfer out of Machanga for at least a year -- can you blame her? -- and she finally got her wish. This lucky soul is out of her on Saturday and I can't see why she would return here. Instead, she will probably be living a life in Beira, a real city with an actual infra-structure. A couple of people spent all day cooking and we were banking on some of this food. But 7:00, then 8:00 then 9:00 rolled around and the food still wasn't ready. I gave up, made some spaghetti, and ate it just before the energy went out.
Sometime around 10:00, two colleagues came over and pounded on our door. Apparently, food was ready. I was horizontal and my head was hurting anyways. The last thing I needed was booze and loud music. I chose sleep over free food and beer, but even in America, I think I would make that choice.
The headache I had last night survived all the way until the morning. This was slightly disconcerting because I usually don't get headaches and to have one last twelve hours is highly irregular. I figured it would go away on its own, like most headaches do.
Even though we missed the party, there were leftovers of everything, and I was hungry. I wandered over to our colleague's house and feasted on rice and beans. Success! Then the beers came. At 8:00 in the morning. Many a Mozambican would consider 8:00 a late start. I can't tell you how many times I've been on a chapa and seen someone drinking at 6:00 or 6:30. I was going to have just my one breakfast beer, and then escape. But one became two and two became five and I had to teach at 12:30. I'm in for a lovely afternoon.
I only had a pair of classes and they had plenty of stuff to copy for this class. If there were ever a good time to not have it all together for a class, this was the one. Considering my condition, the class went pretty well. I also had the benefit of having taught the same class yesterday to a different group, so I knew where the difficulties would be. Richie, who was done with classes by mid-morning, took care of making lunch and I ate a late lunch after my classes.
I had the rest of the afternoon to relax. My head was still hurting, but I don't know if it was from the beer or the headache. I'm blaming the beer. I didn't do much of anything all afternoon. Having sobered up, and with my head still hurting (guess i wasn't the beer), I took the focus away from my head and put it into doing some kakuro.
As Richie took care of lunch, it was only fair that I cooked dinner. The last couple times that I have cooked beans, they have been disastrous. With some failures, like gnocchi, I'm reluctant to try again for a long time, but I know how to cook beans. I just need to put some energy into it. Since beans take forever to cook, we decided to entertain ourselves with "Public Enemies", the Johnny Depp film about the bank heists during the Depression. Between the bumping music outside and Richie's poor speakers on his computers, we barely heard anything, but seeing everyone die was pretty cool. The beans, by the way, were phenomenal, probably the best beans I've cooked. The flavor was right on and the texture was the Mozambican, slightly liquidy texture that has eluded us to this point.
Just as I stepped up my game with beans tonight, the headaches stepped up their game in making my head feel like the inside of a volcano. I don't know why I can't just be healthy. I had absolutely no problems last year, and this year has been nothing but. I get rid of one problem and the next one comes on. Well, two can play this game. I popped an ibuprofen and slept for at least a couple hours.
I woke up around midnight and it felt like a pick ax had been driven into my skull above my right eyebrow. I'm starting to think that this could be a little more serious than just a little headache. I asked someone at home to do some research as to what this could be. The result: a cluster headache. Just sounds painful. There's much that I can do about it. Rest, water, and aspirin. Oh yea, I can also inhale pure oxygen for 20 minutes, which may help, or I can pop some caffeine. I really don't want caffeine. And more than that, I really don't want to go all the way to Maputo to see a doctor about this. I'm fighting this one, and if it becomes truly unbearable, I'll deal with it then.
I started to think about what I could be doing or not be doing that could be giving me this headache. I thought that maybe it was from dehydration, but that's ridiculous since I'm drinking an insane amount of water. I thought it could be hunger. We definitely don't get as many calories as we should be getting. I thought it could be some form of malnutrition. Ditto on the not getting enough vitamins and minerals. So I decided to attack on all fronts. I ate breakfast for the first time in months, I took a multi-vitamin and I drank even more water than I've been drinking.
But this headache is holding on, no matter what I do, and it seems to be holding to a pattern. Not terrible in the morning, almost gone in the afternoon, medication-worthy at night. At least I know when the pain is coming on.
Richie went to Mambone late in the morning to pick up some things and see our colleague over there. While he was gone, I had some time to think about the rules of adding "ed" to form regular past tense verbs, and I came to the following conclusion: there is very little rhyme or reason to how and why we conjugate regular verbs in past tense. Some rules are very sturdy. With verbs that end in "e", all we need is to add a "d" -- "like" becomes "liked". With verbs that end in a consonant and a "y", we use "ied" -- "hurry" becomes "hurried". But aside from that, it's pretty random. Sometimes we repeat the last letter, sometimes we don't and every time I tried to think of a sturdy rule for these verbs, I just found more exceptions.
I had a couple hours to relax after classes before heading to this new English practice group. I had no expectations for what this group was going to be. The new English teacher decided that he wanted to do some extra work with the students, and I told him that I'd help him where I could. I told my students about the group and hoped that some would turn up; lord knows that some of them could use the help.
What I witnessed was shocking on a lot of levels. First of all, the room was packed with students of all ages. My first thought was, "Wow, some people really want to learn English". My second thought was more sobering -- there were going to be so many levels here that this group would need to be broken into at least three. I knew it was going to be problematic when they started with ABC's. Just to illustrate the difference in the levels of students , there were some students who it seemed like they were learning this for the first time and there were some who could probably do it backwards.
I mostly played the role of observer during this event. The shocks continued as the night moved on. At one point, one of the teachers asked a student to come write a word on the board. The teacher spelled out the word letter by letter "T-E-A-C-H-E-R". What came on the board wasn't quite "teacher": "T-I-A-S-I-A". Oh, this is not going to help my headache.
I won't lie. I was really hoping that this would be a more advanced group. I was hoping that this would be for students who had a good base of English and needed the opportunity to practice more, to refine their speaking. I was wrong. This is going to be madness, and until they can figure out how to divide this group into reasonable levels, it's going to be difficult.
Following that hour, I needed a laugh or two. We ate dinner and watched "How I Met Your Mother". I threw down a couple advil and a bottle of water and went to bed in not too much pain.
The English group was scheduled to meet again at 10:00 on Saturday and the other teachers wanted to meet at 8:00 to figure out what to do. I dutifully woke up at 7:50, put on some clothing, and sat outside, waiting for the other teachers to say they were ready to meet. But no one ever came over. With reason -- today was some sort of culture day, which meant that there would be dancing and singing and stuff at the second school. I did my regular thing and didn't go. Richie decided to endure. I was happy when I received the text message "all of these dances are the same". And it was hot. I was happy to sit on my porch doing kakuro.
My morning was marked by one event. My GRE scores were posted online, and I was only slightly scared to see what they were. I remembered the feeling of being completely defeated seven weeks ago, and now my fate would be written in a couple numbers. What turned up wasn't so horrifying. 630 on the verbal, 710 on the math, 4.5 out of 6 on the writing. I hoped for better, expected worse, and pretty much did exactly how I should have. One every aptitude test of this sort -- SAT 2's, SAT's, and now GRE's -- I have never had higher than 660 on verbal or a 720 on math. So there's room for improvement, sure, but the difference is so thin that it won't be worth taking it again.
The afternoon was far more eventful. There was a soccer game between two groups of teachers and we thought it would be good to watch. After all, we had been invited to the post game beerfest which would have no less than four cases of beer. We owed it to the teacher who invited us to watch the game. Our group of teachers ended up winning. We stayed for most of the game, but left with 15 minutes to go. It's soccer. It's boring.
The drinking commenced shortly after. It's been a good while since I've drank with other teachers and it ended up being a good time. We managed to get through almost six cases instead of the anticipated four. And I was happily interrupted by a phone call from my brother. It's been a while since I've caught up with him, so it was nice to talk to him. Certainly a nice way to end a week filled with headaches.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Year 2 - Week 14: The Game
The party lasted well into the morning. The discotheque doesn't really get going until 1 in the morning. We ended up staying out until around 3 o'clock. Under normal partying circumstances, this would be okay, because normally I have absolutely nothing to do or nowhere to go the day after.
Today, however, was different. The truth is, I could have stayed in Chimoio on Sunday and gone back on Monday. But I had 100 papers to grade, and doing that after a long travel day would not be pleasant. So instead of sleeping all day, I lay on the hardwood floors for 90 minutes -- until 4:30 -- and then made my way out. This should be lovely.
The day did not start out promising. When I got to the chapa stand, everything heading south to Maxixe, Vilanculos, or Maputo was gone. This day was going to require some luck. Then, while at the chapa stop, I got stopped by two police officers who asked for my passport. I busted out the Peace Corps ID as well and explained what I was doing here. They then asked me for some money so they can have some beers (really, at 5 in the morning?). I then straight lied to them. I told them that I made as much as a first year Mozambican teacher, which is almost true. We make about fifty percent more, but fifty percent of a small amount is still a small amount. They understood, and I walked away paying nothing. The most shocking part of this scene for me though was that even though it was 5:00 in the morning, and I had been up for 24 consecutive hours, my Portuguese was still on point.
This was only the beginning of a long week of travel for me. With a trip to Maputo coming up on Wednesday, this would be week-long contest between me and Mozambique's transportation "system".
Just as I finished talking to the officers, a chapa pulled up heading for the EN1. Perfect. I got in, and for most of the rides, looked at the backs of my eyelids. I was never really asleep, but I might as well have been. As we got to the crossroads, the sun was just making its way up. I figured it was better to get there early and wait then get there late and miss something good.
My planning paid off. After thirty minutes of waiting, a sweet truck pulled up. I thought he was going to blow by me, but he stopped just ahead. He was going way south -- beyond the crossroads for Machanga, and even beyond the crossroads for Mambone. It was in that moment that I made a major decision: fuck Machanga, I'm going via Mambone.
The car didn't go as fast as I hoped, but it was steady, and it was a whole hell of a lot faster and more comfortable than a chapa. And even though the man had music pumping at an absurd level for the ride, I still slept the entire way. This day was actually shaping up. Muzungu: 1 - Mozambique: 0
I arrived at Maluvane in good time and only had to wait about fifteen minutes for a truck to head into town. This ride was slow, and we had to make a small detour off the main road, but I was still at the river by 11:30.
And then the wait began. Sundays are always a slow day at the river, and midday is a never a good day. There were three of us waiting at the river, and the boatman needed five people to cross. We sat for a while, waiting for two more people to show up. We asked if we could just go, but he insisted on getting his fifty Meticais for his work. Fifteen minutes later, I made another decision: I offered to cover the additional twenty Mets. I stayed patient long enough, and if a measly twenty Mets is all I need to pay to get us going, this is money well spent. Once across, I walked back to Machanga. I was home by 1:30. Not bad, seeing as the chapa from Beira won't get in until at least 4:15.
Being home early afforded me the luxury of eating a quick lunch and then passing out for most of the day. This was a good sleep, and I knew that even after the nap, I would still sleep well during the night.
Without Richie here, things are uneventful at night. I made a quick dinner, checked some email, and then crawled into bed early with a book.
Sunday was literally the first night this year that I slept through the entire night. It didn't matter that my fan went off sometime in the middle of the night. There was a slight breeze as it was, and I was gone.
Hour for hour, Monday was probably the most I've worked this school year. I was grading papers by 8:30. I committed myself to finishing one of my classes before lunchtime. It was painful, especially since this was the, uh, slower of my two classes. Even so, they still did well. Most of them did well, although there were some epic failures.
I made myself a quick lunch, and right after eating, I was back to work with my better class. As I expected, this class did much better. 95% of this class passed -- as opposed to 76% in the other class. Despite the actual grading being easier, it still took my three hours to get through the exams.
I had a couple hours to relax before the energy came on, but once the energy was turned on, I was back to work. The math teacher here came over with a request for me to type up some exams. Seeing as there was nothing else to entertain me tonight, I used this to fill my night. I got done all of one exam and half of another before the lights went out. All in all, an extraordinarily productive day.
There was more work to be done Tuesday morning and fortune was on my side. When I woke up, there was something very different going on. The energy was on. And it stayed on. This is awesome. So this is what civilization is like. I spent the entire morning banging out the second exam from last night, and then another two exams. In between exams, I also made myself a delicious stir fry brunch. A day without using charcoal: what a beautiful thing.
I didn't have much of a class to give today. I saw both of my classes today and all I had to do was return and go over exams. But that didn't mean my work was done. The math teacher caught me peeking in his class, and he asked me to come in. I was happy to do so.
This day got interesting though. They were doing work on permutations on combinations, which I haven't done since, oh, high school. So I learned the stuff with these kids. But then, the teacher put up a problem that just didn't seem right to me. We ended up getting into a rather humorous argument about the whole thing. He was convinced he was right, and I wasn't sure. This was years behind me, after all. I still stuck by my guns.
Once I was out of the class, I went online in search of some information about this particular problem. And what did I find: nothing! Absolutely fuckin nothing. I was riding high, but then, another math teacher burst my bubble and said he was right. I asked for the proof in the book, but neither of them could find it. I'm inclined to believe them, but I'd be more convinced if I saw the actual rule in a book.
On this third night without entertainment, I was feeling it a little bit. This place does get lonely when it's only one of us here. I managed to keep myself busy with cooking and cleaning. And before I knew it, it was time to go to sleep.
Day two of the game between Mozambique and me began early. I was on the move for Maputo at 6:30. I knew this was going to be a long day. It was just a matter of how long it would be. Right off the bat, I had luck on my side. Three people were waiting at the river and I was the fourth to fill out their boat. I didn't have to wait long for a truck to head to the EN1. Then things got good.
I got a ride in a Land Cruiser down to Inhassoro. The guy did 120 kilometers per hour the entire way, and I didn't have to pay for the ride. It was by far the fastest I have ever arrived in Inhassoro. After a quick chapa ride to Vilanculos, something truly amazing happened: I got a ride from a guy in a Mitsubishi Pajero heading all the way down to Maputo. 2-0 Muzungu. And I only had to pay half price. 3-0 Muzungu.
My original plan was to take my time on this trip, stopping in Maxixe on Wednesday, Xai Xai on Thursday and arriving in Maputo on Friday around noon. But we were in Maxixe so early that I might be able to arrive in Xai Xai. It was a gamble, and well, I like to gamble. "March on" I said, and so we went.
This is where things got interesting. As the sun started to set, we started to slow down. Significantly. I was not happy about this. Even on the shitty road north of Xai Xai, he should have moving at a decent clip. And then I realized why we were going 40 kilometers per hour: the car's headlights were barely on. Great. After not being passed by a single car on the first half of a trip, we got passed by every car possible after 4:30. It was like the Eleventh Commandment: "Thou shall pass Lee's formerly awesome boleia". Point for Mozambique. 3-1.
And then the rains came. This was an incredibly angry, one of the storms that you could hear before you could see. The sky rumbled like there was an earthquake in the clouds, and lightning provided far more illumination than the car's shitty headlights could provide. Finally, just as we arrived into Xai Xai, the rains came and they did not stop, like the Cahora Bassa dam was just emptied. My ride told me that he could not take me where I needed to go in Xai Xai because it required passing a police check point and they would have dinged him hard for his headlights. He was also going to stay in Xai Xai for the night and would pick me up tomorrow morning to Maputo.
So he leaves me in an absolute torrential down pour. Thanks. A lot. By good luck, a taxi pulled up behind me and I was able to get a ride to where I needed to go. 450 Meticais later, I was nearly broke. Just to put that in perspective. I spent a total of 355 Mets to cover the hundreds of kilometers from my house to Xai Xai, and then paid 450 more to cover the last 15 kilometers. Add another point for Mozambique, 3-2 Muzungu.
My night in Xai Xai was brief and uneventful. I ate dinner with my Volunteer host and we discussed the March Madness bracket. I have seen exactly zero minutes of college basketball this year so I had no idea what was happening. I was in bed by 10:00, knowing that I had to be up at 4:30 to get my ride to Maputo.
One of the things about traveling here is that you as the traveler have absolutely no control. You don't control when your car arrives. You don't control how fast it goes. The only semblance of control the traveler has is how much you pay. On chapas, the price is fixed and generally known and consistent. Boleias tend to run equally as pricy or cheaper. With such little control, you really have to put a lot of trust in other people. And I, even after the ride last night, put a lot of trust in this guy.
Ilidio told me to be on the main road at 5:00 on Thursday morning. Of course, 5:00 came and went without seeing him pass. But then, at 5:15, here it came: a Mitsubishi Pajero. And then it just kept going, right on by me. You asshole. This was bad news. I hoped for the best. There has to be more than one Mitsubishi Pajero in this country. I called Ilidio and asked where he was. He said he as ten minutes away. Phew, okay. Ten minutes later, the correct Pajero rolled in and it stopped for me. We were on the road to Maputo, cruising. 4-2 Muzungu.
I was in Maputo by 11 in the morning, a whole day ahead of when I was expecting to arrive. With all this extra time, and my doctors appointment a whole day away, I decided to go to the Peace Corps office to hang out. I didn't do anything for much of the day. The Peace Corps office has internet so I spent a fair amount of the day doing absolutely nothing productive.
Before heading out to dinner, I went to drop off my stuff at my hotel. The hotel where Peace Corps usually puts us was being renovated, so I was staying at some random place not particularly close to anything. But there was hope: the sign at the entry boasted about television, WiFi and a pool. True to their word, there was a pool with a swim-up bar, a router, a television -- and air conditioning and bathroom with a toilet and hot-water shower -- you know, luxury items.
A whole group of us that were in Maputo went out for Indian food. The Indian restaurant in Maputo is pretty good. Every time I've been there, I've ordered something spicier, so I asked what their spiciest item was. I thought I could handle it. I was wrong. I managed to get through all the meet on my plate, but I could not finish the rice. It was just too spicy. There is a fine balance that needs to be hit between spiciness and flavor. As long as a food is flavorful as well as hot, I'm okay with it, but this was hot for the sake of being hot. Still pretty good though.
My optimism about the hotel quickly faded. The router was down and the television only had three working channels. At least there was still a hot shower and air conditioning. I went to sleep clean and cold, just like in America.
The appointment I had with the doctor wasn't scheduled until 5:00, so I made my way back to the office Friday morning to hang out. Besides the benefits of internet and comfortable couches, the Peace Corps office was a particular item of interest to us Volunteers: satellite television. With ESPN. Which was airing a replay of the Kentucky-East Tennessee State opening round game. I was glued. Hell, I was entranced. I could sit here all day and just watch this. But after ten minutes of game time, people wanted to head out. I begrudgingly left, but at least I had some deliciousness in my future.
A group of three of us headed downtown to Maputo Shopping Center, one of the best parts about Maputo (for me, anyways). One of the Volunteers claimed that there was soft-serve ice cream on the top floor. You don't have to tell me twice -- I was there. This vanilla soft serve was delicious, and only ten Mets. It was so good and so cheap that all of us indulged and got a second. I also purchased a new cell phone. The phone that I've had for most of my time here is all but destroyed. There is no longer a keyboard -- just a big white pad where keys used to be.
I had a couple hours yet before my appointment, so I headed toward the doctor's office and went on the hunt for an internet cafe. It was just late enough in the morning that people in California might be awake enough to talk. I'm fortunate to have some early-risers amongst family and friends.
This was a truly stupid doctor's appointment. It was just a check-up to make sure I was feeling okay. I didn't really need to doctor to tell me I was feeling okay. I knew I was feeling okay, and the only way he was going to know was by asking "How are you feeling?" But Peace Corps wanted me to have this appointment, so I came down for it. Of course, the appointment lasted all of five minutes. At least I didn't have to wait three hours, like last time. The appointment went as I thought. He asked how I was, I said I was fine, and that was about it. Wonderful -- so glad I drove two days for a five minute appointment.
I went to the Peace Corps office straight from the doctor's office to drop off my results. I could have dropped them off in the morning, but doing so would have meant not being able to return on Saturday, and I really wanted to get out of Maputo. It's funny: Maputo has all of the amenities, but I'm always so anxious to get out. The thing about Maputo is that everything is so damn expensive. We eat in Machanga for less than fifty Meticais a day. A meal in Maputo can easily cost 300 or 400. I like internet and air conditioning, but I also like not being broke. As such, I decided not to go out for dinner, but found some place that delivered and was relatively cheap. I ate quickly, showered slowly, and went to bed early, knowing that another long travel day was ahead tomorrow.
My alarm was set for 5:00. Having packed last night, I was on the move by 5:15. For the first time, I caught a chapa to the bus stop instead of taking an expensive taxi. I know exactly where the buses for Vilanculos are and I was heading in that direction when some guy asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to Vilanculos and he said that's where his chapa was going. I was skeptical, but I decided to take my chances. This chapa looked far more comfortable than a regular bus and I decided it was worth the risk.
I was very much wrong. Even though I got on the chapa at 6:30, we didn't leave until 8:00. People were pissed off. I was pissed off too, but I stayed stoic. Other people were a lot more, um, expressive. Around Xai Xai, the driver decided to put up a sign for Maxixe. I asked the cobrador (money-collector) if this would arrive in Vilanculos and he said no. I thought I was pissed, and then I saw the lady behind me. She was outraged. I would be okay as long as I got some of my money back, which is always a task. Once those guys have their money, they do not like to give any back, but I managed to get my 100 Meticais back.
The woman behind me was not so lucky. She was heading in the right direction but wanted to arrive in different town, which would require a boat or a separate chapa. She, like me, was lied to by the chapa guys. While I took my misfortune in stride, she decided to get angry. When she, along with another lady, got out of the car, she went nuts. I've seen people get angry, and I've seen people get angry on chapas, but this was the first time I've ever seen anyone hit the driver and cobrador. On an otherwise slow travel day, this brought a smile to my face. I'm calling this ride a draw. 5-3 Muzungu.
The truth is, I should have stayed in Maxixe on this night, but the gambler in me wanted to make it to Vilanculos. If I made it to Vilanculos by the night, I could take the chapa to Mambone on Sunday. I headed out to the street and tried to catch a ride. Everything that passed me was staying local. There was one more car heading my way and then I would try to get a chapa. The gods, once again, were on my side. This car was heading all the way to Beira and he wanted to move. 6-3 Muzungu.
While the road was good, he did 160 kilometers per hour, the fastest car I've been in during my time here. But then we hit the infamous Massinga road, where the recommended speed is 60. He took this to mean 100. I would have been okay with this, but then we hit this huge pothole and the car bounced so high that I hit my head on the roof of his car. At this point, I felt that a seat belt would be a wise choice, because if we got into an accident, I would be the only one walking away from it. Once we got through the misery of the Massinga road, he was back to doing 160. I got to Pambarra around 6:30 and after catching a truck to Vil, I was in town by 7:30. Just another ho-hum fourteen-hour travel.
I got to the backpackers where I like to stay and ordered food immediately. This was a fast night. Cheeseburger and french fries -- the only food I had the entire day -- a quick shower, a glass of water, and in bed by 8:30. There was more travel to be done tomorrow, but this would be quick and easy -- one chapa and a boat road.
No matter how badly it goes tomorrow, Mozambique can't overcome my 6-3 lead from this week.
Today, however, was different. The truth is, I could have stayed in Chimoio on Sunday and gone back on Monday. But I had 100 papers to grade, and doing that after a long travel day would not be pleasant. So instead of sleeping all day, I lay on the hardwood floors for 90 minutes -- until 4:30 -- and then made my way out. This should be lovely.
The day did not start out promising. When I got to the chapa stand, everything heading south to Maxixe, Vilanculos, or Maputo was gone. This day was going to require some luck. Then, while at the chapa stop, I got stopped by two police officers who asked for my passport. I busted out the Peace Corps ID as well and explained what I was doing here. They then asked me for some money so they can have some beers (really, at 5 in the morning?). I then straight lied to them. I told them that I made as much as a first year Mozambican teacher, which is almost true. We make about fifty percent more, but fifty percent of a small amount is still a small amount. They understood, and I walked away paying nothing. The most shocking part of this scene for me though was that even though it was 5:00 in the morning, and I had been up for 24 consecutive hours, my Portuguese was still on point.
This was only the beginning of a long week of travel for me. With a trip to Maputo coming up on Wednesday, this would be week-long contest between me and Mozambique's transportation "system".
Just as I finished talking to the officers, a chapa pulled up heading for the EN1. Perfect. I got in, and for most of the rides, looked at the backs of my eyelids. I was never really asleep, but I might as well have been. As we got to the crossroads, the sun was just making its way up. I figured it was better to get there early and wait then get there late and miss something good.
My planning paid off. After thirty minutes of waiting, a sweet truck pulled up. I thought he was going to blow by me, but he stopped just ahead. He was going way south -- beyond the crossroads for Machanga, and even beyond the crossroads for Mambone. It was in that moment that I made a major decision: fuck Machanga, I'm going via Mambone.
The car didn't go as fast as I hoped, but it was steady, and it was a whole hell of a lot faster and more comfortable than a chapa. And even though the man had music pumping at an absurd level for the ride, I still slept the entire way. This day was actually shaping up. Muzungu: 1 - Mozambique: 0
I arrived at Maluvane in good time and only had to wait about fifteen minutes for a truck to head into town. This ride was slow, and we had to make a small detour off the main road, but I was still at the river by 11:30.
And then the wait began. Sundays are always a slow day at the river, and midday is a never a good day. There were three of us waiting at the river, and the boatman needed five people to cross. We sat for a while, waiting for two more people to show up. We asked if we could just go, but he insisted on getting his fifty Meticais for his work. Fifteen minutes later, I made another decision: I offered to cover the additional twenty Mets. I stayed patient long enough, and if a measly twenty Mets is all I need to pay to get us going, this is money well spent. Once across, I walked back to Machanga. I was home by 1:30. Not bad, seeing as the chapa from Beira won't get in until at least 4:15.
Being home early afforded me the luxury of eating a quick lunch and then passing out for most of the day. This was a good sleep, and I knew that even after the nap, I would still sleep well during the night.
Without Richie here, things are uneventful at night. I made a quick dinner, checked some email, and then crawled into bed early with a book.
Sunday was literally the first night this year that I slept through the entire night. It didn't matter that my fan went off sometime in the middle of the night. There was a slight breeze as it was, and I was gone.
Hour for hour, Monday was probably the most I've worked this school year. I was grading papers by 8:30. I committed myself to finishing one of my classes before lunchtime. It was painful, especially since this was the, uh, slower of my two classes. Even so, they still did well. Most of them did well, although there were some epic failures.
I made myself a quick lunch, and right after eating, I was back to work with my better class. As I expected, this class did much better. 95% of this class passed -- as opposed to 76% in the other class. Despite the actual grading being easier, it still took my three hours to get through the exams.
I had a couple hours to relax before the energy came on, but once the energy was turned on, I was back to work. The math teacher here came over with a request for me to type up some exams. Seeing as there was nothing else to entertain me tonight, I used this to fill my night. I got done all of one exam and half of another before the lights went out. All in all, an extraordinarily productive day.
There was more work to be done Tuesday morning and fortune was on my side. When I woke up, there was something very different going on. The energy was on. And it stayed on. This is awesome. So this is what civilization is like. I spent the entire morning banging out the second exam from last night, and then another two exams. In between exams, I also made myself a delicious stir fry brunch. A day without using charcoal: what a beautiful thing.
I didn't have much of a class to give today. I saw both of my classes today and all I had to do was return and go over exams. But that didn't mean my work was done. The math teacher caught me peeking in his class, and he asked me to come in. I was happy to do so.
This day got interesting though. They were doing work on permutations on combinations, which I haven't done since, oh, high school. So I learned the stuff with these kids. But then, the teacher put up a problem that just didn't seem right to me. We ended up getting into a rather humorous argument about the whole thing. He was convinced he was right, and I wasn't sure. This was years behind me, after all. I still stuck by my guns.
Once I was out of the class, I went online in search of some information about this particular problem. And what did I find: nothing! Absolutely fuckin nothing. I was riding high, but then, another math teacher burst my bubble and said he was right. I asked for the proof in the book, but neither of them could find it. I'm inclined to believe them, but I'd be more convinced if I saw the actual rule in a book.
On this third night without entertainment, I was feeling it a little bit. This place does get lonely when it's only one of us here. I managed to keep myself busy with cooking and cleaning. And before I knew it, it was time to go to sleep.
Day two of the game between Mozambique and me began early. I was on the move for Maputo at 6:30. I knew this was going to be a long day. It was just a matter of how long it would be. Right off the bat, I had luck on my side. Three people were waiting at the river and I was the fourth to fill out their boat. I didn't have to wait long for a truck to head to the EN1. Then things got good.
I got a ride in a Land Cruiser down to Inhassoro. The guy did 120 kilometers per hour the entire way, and I didn't have to pay for the ride. It was by far the fastest I have ever arrived in Inhassoro. After a quick chapa ride to Vilanculos, something truly amazing happened: I got a ride from a guy in a Mitsubishi Pajero heading all the way down to Maputo. 2-0 Muzungu. And I only had to pay half price. 3-0 Muzungu.
My original plan was to take my time on this trip, stopping in Maxixe on Wednesday, Xai Xai on Thursday and arriving in Maputo on Friday around noon. But we were in Maxixe so early that I might be able to arrive in Xai Xai. It was a gamble, and well, I like to gamble. "March on" I said, and so we went.
This is where things got interesting. As the sun started to set, we started to slow down. Significantly. I was not happy about this. Even on the shitty road north of Xai Xai, he should have moving at a decent clip. And then I realized why we were going 40 kilometers per hour: the car's headlights were barely on. Great. After not being passed by a single car on the first half of a trip, we got passed by every car possible after 4:30. It was like the Eleventh Commandment: "Thou shall pass Lee's formerly awesome boleia". Point for Mozambique. 3-1.
And then the rains came. This was an incredibly angry, one of the storms that you could hear before you could see. The sky rumbled like there was an earthquake in the clouds, and lightning provided far more illumination than the car's shitty headlights could provide. Finally, just as we arrived into Xai Xai, the rains came and they did not stop, like the Cahora Bassa dam was just emptied. My ride told me that he could not take me where I needed to go in Xai Xai because it required passing a police check point and they would have dinged him hard for his headlights. He was also going to stay in Xai Xai for the night and would pick me up tomorrow morning to Maputo.
So he leaves me in an absolute torrential down pour. Thanks. A lot. By good luck, a taxi pulled up behind me and I was able to get a ride to where I needed to go. 450 Meticais later, I was nearly broke. Just to put that in perspective. I spent a total of 355 Mets to cover the hundreds of kilometers from my house to Xai Xai, and then paid 450 more to cover the last 15 kilometers. Add another point for Mozambique, 3-2 Muzungu.
My night in Xai Xai was brief and uneventful. I ate dinner with my Volunteer host and we discussed the March Madness bracket. I have seen exactly zero minutes of college basketball this year so I had no idea what was happening. I was in bed by 10:00, knowing that I had to be up at 4:30 to get my ride to Maputo.
One of the things about traveling here is that you as the traveler have absolutely no control. You don't control when your car arrives. You don't control how fast it goes. The only semblance of control the traveler has is how much you pay. On chapas, the price is fixed and generally known and consistent. Boleias tend to run equally as pricy or cheaper. With such little control, you really have to put a lot of trust in other people. And I, even after the ride last night, put a lot of trust in this guy.
Ilidio told me to be on the main road at 5:00 on Thursday morning. Of course, 5:00 came and went without seeing him pass. But then, at 5:15, here it came: a Mitsubishi Pajero. And then it just kept going, right on by me. You asshole. This was bad news. I hoped for the best. There has to be more than one Mitsubishi Pajero in this country. I called Ilidio and asked where he was. He said he as ten minutes away. Phew, okay. Ten minutes later, the correct Pajero rolled in and it stopped for me. We were on the road to Maputo, cruising. 4-2 Muzungu.
I was in Maputo by 11 in the morning, a whole day ahead of when I was expecting to arrive. With all this extra time, and my doctors appointment a whole day away, I decided to go to the Peace Corps office to hang out. I didn't do anything for much of the day. The Peace Corps office has internet so I spent a fair amount of the day doing absolutely nothing productive.
Before heading out to dinner, I went to drop off my stuff at my hotel. The hotel where Peace Corps usually puts us was being renovated, so I was staying at some random place not particularly close to anything. But there was hope: the sign at the entry boasted about television, WiFi and a pool. True to their word, there was a pool with a swim-up bar, a router, a television -- and air conditioning and bathroom with a toilet and hot-water shower -- you know, luxury items.
A whole group of us that were in Maputo went out for Indian food. The Indian restaurant in Maputo is pretty good. Every time I've been there, I've ordered something spicier, so I asked what their spiciest item was. I thought I could handle it. I was wrong. I managed to get through all the meet on my plate, but I could not finish the rice. It was just too spicy. There is a fine balance that needs to be hit between spiciness and flavor. As long as a food is flavorful as well as hot, I'm okay with it, but this was hot for the sake of being hot. Still pretty good though.
My optimism about the hotel quickly faded. The router was down and the television only had three working channels. At least there was still a hot shower and air conditioning. I went to sleep clean and cold, just like in America.
The appointment I had with the doctor wasn't scheduled until 5:00, so I made my way back to the office Friday morning to hang out. Besides the benefits of internet and comfortable couches, the Peace Corps office was a particular item of interest to us Volunteers: satellite television. With ESPN. Which was airing a replay of the Kentucky-East Tennessee State opening round game. I was glued. Hell, I was entranced. I could sit here all day and just watch this. But after ten minutes of game time, people wanted to head out. I begrudgingly left, but at least I had some deliciousness in my future.
A group of three of us headed downtown to Maputo Shopping Center, one of the best parts about Maputo (for me, anyways). One of the Volunteers claimed that there was soft-serve ice cream on the top floor. You don't have to tell me twice -- I was there. This vanilla soft serve was delicious, and only ten Mets. It was so good and so cheap that all of us indulged and got a second. I also purchased a new cell phone. The phone that I've had for most of my time here is all but destroyed. There is no longer a keyboard -- just a big white pad where keys used to be.
I had a couple hours yet before my appointment, so I headed toward the doctor's office and went on the hunt for an internet cafe. It was just late enough in the morning that people in California might be awake enough to talk. I'm fortunate to have some early-risers amongst family and friends.
This was a truly stupid doctor's appointment. It was just a check-up to make sure I was feeling okay. I didn't really need to doctor to tell me I was feeling okay. I knew I was feeling okay, and the only way he was going to know was by asking "How are you feeling?" But Peace Corps wanted me to have this appointment, so I came down for it. Of course, the appointment lasted all of five minutes. At least I didn't have to wait three hours, like last time. The appointment went as I thought. He asked how I was, I said I was fine, and that was about it. Wonderful -- so glad I drove two days for a five minute appointment.
I went to the Peace Corps office straight from the doctor's office to drop off my results. I could have dropped them off in the morning, but doing so would have meant not being able to return on Saturday, and I really wanted to get out of Maputo. It's funny: Maputo has all of the amenities, but I'm always so anxious to get out. The thing about Maputo is that everything is so damn expensive. We eat in Machanga for less than fifty Meticais a day. A meal in Maputo can easily cost 300 or 400. I like internet and air conditioning, but I also like not being broke. As such, I decided not to go out for dinner, but found some place that delivered and was relatively cheap. I ate quickly, showered slowly, and went to bed early, knowing that another long travel day was ahead tomorrow.
My alarm was set for 5:00. Having packed last night, I was on the move by 5:15. For the first time, I caught a chapa to the bus stop instead of taking an expensive taxi. I know exactly where the buses for Vilanculos are and I was heading in that direction when some guy asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to Vilanculos and he said that's where his chapa was going. I was skeptical, but I decided to take my chances. This chapa looked far more comfortable than a regular bus and I decided it was worth the risk.
I was very much wrong. Even though I got on the chapa at 6:30, we didn't leave until 8:00. People were pissed off. I was pissed off too, but I stayed stoic. Other people were a lot more, um, expressive. Around Xai Xai, the driver decided to put up a sign for Maxixe. I asked the cobrador (money-collector) if this would arrive in Vilanculos and he said no. I thought I was pissed, and then I saw the lady behind me. She was outraged. I would be okay as long as I got some of my money back, which is always a task. Once those guys have their money, they do not like to give any back, but I managed to get my 100 Meticais back.
The woman behind me was not so lucky. She was heading in the right direction but wanted to arrive in different town, which would require a boat or a separate chapa. She, like me, was lied to by the chapa guys. While I took my misfortune in stride, she decided to get angry. When she, along with another lady, got out of the car, she went nuts. I've seen people get angry, and I've seen people get angry on chapas, but this was the first time I've ever seen anyone hit the driver and cobrador. On an otherwise slow travel day, this brought a smile to my face. I'm calling this ride a draw. 5-3 Muzungu.
The truth is, I should have stayed in Maxixe on this night, but the gambler in me wanted to make it to Vilanculos. If I made it to Vilanculos by the night, I could take the chapa to Mambone on Sunday. I headed out to the street and tried to catch a ride. Everything that passed me was staying local. There was one more car heading my way and then I would try to get a chapa. The gods, once again, were on my side. This car was heading all the way to Beira and he wanted to move. 6-3 Muzungu.
While the road was good, he did 160 kilometers per hour, the fastest car I've been in during my time here. But then we hit the infamous Massinga road, where the recommended speed is 60. He took this to mean 100. I would have been okay with this, but then we hit this huge pothole and the car bounced so high that I hit my head on the roof of his car. At this point, I felt that a seat belt would be a wise choice, because if we got into an accident, I would be the only one walking away from it. Once we got through the misery of the Massinga road, he was back to doing 160. I got to Pambarra around 6:30 and after catching a truck to Vil, I was in town by 7:30. Just another ho-hum fourteen-hour travel.
I got to the backpackers where I like to stay and ordered food immediately. This was a fast night. Cheeseburger and french fries -- the only food I had the entire day -- a quick shower, a glass of water, and in bed by 8:30. There was more travel to be done tomorrow, but this would be quick and easy -- one chapa and a boat road.
No matter how badly it goes tomorrow, Mozambique can't overcome my 6-3 lead from this week.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Year 2 - Week 13: When Trying To Be Inconspicuous, Yellow Is A Bad Choice
You ever have that feeling when you're lying in bed that there are bugs crawling all over you? It's a terrible feeling, isn't it? Except here's the thing: the bugs that are imaginary for you are real for me. It doesn't really that I have a bug net. Those sneaky bastards always find a way to get in. The proof is all over my ankles. And on my sheets that are speckled in perfectly straight lines of dried blood, crystal clear evidence of bed bugs. I'd like to think that I've adjusted to it, but I still find myself boxing myself when some six-legged freak has found it's way in my ears.
Last night was especially bad. The fan helped, but good god, I think I was up every hour from something buzzing in my ear. Needless to say, I didn't sleep particularly well. Good thing I had absolutely nothing to do on Sunday. I killed some time making a run to the market. Market runs on Sundays are tough because so few of the stores are open. And we were out of beans. It took me three shots, but I finally found beans.
It was an otherwise slow day. I found myself buried in "The Tortilla Curtain", a book my grandmother sent me a couple months ago. It's a pretty good read about two couples in LA -- one Mexican, one American -- and how their lives run together. I'm usually not one for novels, but this one is alright.
Alexis came over in the afternoon. One of her colleagues from Tete (a long ways away) was visiting. I don't know what brought him down here, but this isn't exactly a tourist destination. So while he was here, Alexis dragged him over to our place. He's doing some food security/irrigation project in Tete and Manica, which seems pretty cool. They chilled here for an hour and left before the sun started making its descent.
I was in charge of beans tonight, as this is my job. The beans turned out delicious, as usual. While the beans cooked, we watched a couple episodes of "30 Rock". Then it was back to my bug-filled world.
I got a couple phone calls from family members, first from my parents then from my brother. It's been a good while since I talked to my brother so it was nice to catch up with him.
Normally, my Mondays are slow and uneventful. Today was anything but. Alexis and her colleague, John, went to the market for coffee and they invited me to join them. This was a shockingly good way to kill the morning. I was in the market all the way up until lunch time.
Richie had already started lunch by the time I got home. He had prepped, so it was only fair that I took over the cooking duty. With no classes in the afternoon, I thought I was going to be in for a relaxing afternoon with my book. I was wrong. The physics teacher came over asking me for some help typing an exam. Or I should say, two exams. This wasn't really a problem. If I'm not going to be teaching, I might as well be helpful some other way.
I was able to bang out one and a half exams before my battery gave out. Having nothing else to do, and wanting to get away from words, I folded myself into a Kakuro book. I then spent the remaining part of the afternoon failing miserably at putting numbers into boxes. After a nice run of success, I am back to sucking at it.
When the energy came on, I went right back to work on the exams. I really wanted to get these things knocked out. Usually, typing up physics or chemistry exams sucks because there are so many words with accents, subscripts, and superscripts, but these exams were shockingly devoid of these frustrations. After a pasta dinner (in which I ate my dinner, along with 75% of Richie's -- he just can't eat pasta anymore), we settled in to some "30 Rock".
I committed myself to finishing "The Tortilla Curtain" oon Tuesday. I had no obligations until 12:30 in the afternoon and only 150 pages to knock out. So far, it's been a very fast read. As long as I can avoid distractions, I'll be on easy street. I sat myself on the patio, plugged in my iPod -- making it clear that I didn't want to talk to anyone -- and went to work.
By mid-afternoon, after lunch and following two quick classes on the future tense, I succeeded in my task. What do I do now? I pulled out the kakuro book once again and, with the exception of one puzzle, failed horribly again. It's really frustrating to mess up on these puzzles because it's just basic addition and logic, and yet it has a way of seriously fucking with my head.
Just before the energy came on, the new philosophy teacher came over with a request for a typed test. I was sitting in my house, listen to the angry rhymes of Immortal Technique. When he came to the house, his ears perked up. He said "Is this Immortal Technique?" Yea man, it is. And then he said something I wasn't quite expecting: "Yea, Immortal Technique! I love this motherfucker!" I can't say I'm responsible for teaching him that nice piece of American vocabulary, but man, it was funny.
Having another test to type in front of me, there was no way I could really pay to attention to anything that we were watching. Richie wanted a break from comedy, se he turned to "Blow", the Johnny Depp flick about drug hustling. It's a movie I had seen before a couple times, so I could go in and out of it with little trouble.
With all of the failure I'd had with kakuro in the first part of the week, I didn't have expectations of myself for Wednesday morning. But shockingly, my mind was working decently and I was able to knock out three puzzles in an hour. Great success! As I sat on the patio, one of Richie's students from last year came over for some English help. He needed some help writing a composition. I knew this was going to be trouble. He had already written the passage in Portuguese and just wanted help translating. This is a bit frustrating for me, because I believe that you should at least try to write the thing in English. I passed him a dictionary and told him to look up the words, try to write the paragraph, then we'll mold it into something readable.
The hits kept coming throughout the morning and into the afternoon. One of the English teachers from the secondary school came over for the 12th grade curriculum, a math teacher came over for some help in his university studies -- complex numbers, which I could help with, and some advanced calculus, which I couldn't really help with. It's been too many years since I've studied calc. Then a physics teacher came over requesting help with differential equations. I almost laughed at this request. If I can't do basic calc, I'm fucked on differential equations. And then another student came over for help on writing a composition. Like the other student, this student came without having attempted to write in English. I gave him the dictionary, and told him he could come back when he had at least tried to write something. And on top of that, I had a class to give. Wow.
When the energy came on, I had one important job, and it wasn't cooking (Richie wanted to take a crack at cooking beans tonight). I had a whole line-up of documents to print out: two physics tests, a philosophy test, a letter for science fair, and a letter from our school director to Peace Corps. While I was in the director's office printing these documents, another teacher came in wanting to print his exam. This thing was an absolute formatting disaster spread over two pages. I spent 20 minutes cleaning it up, making it beautiful. He laughed, and told me that what took me 20 minutes would have taken him days to figure out. It's nice to be helpful.
This was by far the busiest, and not coincidentally, the fastest day I've had here in a while. I can't say that I'm mad that I have a light teaching load this year. 25 hours all in the afternoon is not easy. But a busy afternoon makes for a fast afternoon.
Richie's beans were okay, but he wasn't particularly satisfied with how they came out. He told me that the job is officially mine. We turned to one of our old favorites for entertainment: "How I Met Your Mother". We watched three episodes when we realized that we could easily blow through the entire disc in one sitting. Showing remarkable restraint, we transitioned into "30 Rock" before heading to bed.
Thursday was back to the regular slow pace of life in Machanga. Richie had a couple classes in the morning, so I was on duty for the market run. Generously, Richie paid for groceries today. I needed the help. I'm running low cash. We can't get to Chimoio fast enough.
Following a helpful, busy, fast Wednesday, Thursday dragged on and on. Nobody came over for help. Nobody came with a request to have a test typed. The most we had was a request or two for the bike.
Adding to the slowness of the day, I only had one class to give, and I didn't even have to lesson-plan for it. This was the same lesson that I gave to my other students yesterday -- on first conditional. I got through the lesson, and told the students what they needed to know for their exam. After a 20 minute review, they claimed to be ready. We'll see. After the first round of exams, I have my doubts, but I'll be happy if they prove me wrong.
After a boring afternoon of sitting on the patio, failing again at kakuro and starting another book, "Somebody Knows My Name", we ate dinner. Richie and Sozinho ate fish and xima, two foods I choose to avoid on a regular basis, so I made myself some spaghetti. We went away from comedy again and watched "Good Will Hunting". This was another movie that I had seen previously, so I didn't really pay attention. I tried to play catch-up with some people with whom I've fallen out of touch. The movie ended just after the energy went out.
I was back to being busy on Friday. I wanted to give an exam before heading out for the weekend and Friday is the day that I have both classes for two periods. Most of the morning was spent writing the exam. This is a two step process: first I need the questions, then I need to write them on oversize paper so I dont have to write them on the board twice. Usually this is taken care of on the patio, where the morning light is good and the breeze keeps me a little cool. However, as we have Sozinho around the house, I had to write the exam in the dark, sweaty confines of my room. Writing an exam should not qualify as an activity that requires a shower after it.
Alexis swang over just as I was preparing myself for a full cleaning -- head shave plus shower. She got to witness the full transformation. While she was here, we also cooked lunch. We offered her our monotony of potatoes and eggs in place of her monotony of rice and tiny shrimp, but she denied it. Strange, but it just means more food for Richie and me.
We all know how much I love exam days here. In all honesty, though, today's weren't so bad. I had to move a couple people around because of wandering eyes or blabbering mouths, but other than that, there were no "indisciplinados". There was only one student who particular pissed me off today. I know I'm not supposed to hold grudges, but this girl has earned it. Twice I have taken phone credit from her because I've caught her using her phone in class, which drives me up a fucking wall. She has a record of not putting in any effort whatsoever. She has missed multiple exams (she missed the first one from this year, as well as bunch last year) and the ones she has taken, she usually fails.
What she did today, however, topped everything. She walked into the classroom just as I was putting up the big sheets of paper, grabbed her things, and left. If she thought she went unnoticed, she was wrong: the bright yellow shirt she was wearing did not help her cause. And here's where the story gets good. Half way through the exam, she has the audacity to enter my classroom, sit down in the front row, and then...do work for another class. All I could think was "Are you out of your fucking mind?!" I already know what is going to happen. When I see her on Tuesday, she is going to say "Mr Lee, I didn't take the test on Friday". And I'll say "Why not?" but in my head, I'll be thinking, "no shit you didn't take it, and now you'll be getting zeroes for both exams". Then she will give some bullshit excuse, I'll call her out, tell her she's getting zeroes, and she probably won't even fight it. She knows she's screwed.
After that event, I had no motivation to correct exams, but I did find the little energy I needed to put the exams in alphabetical order, making my job of correcting and grade-inputting significantly easier. Aside from that, I relaxed for the rest of the afternoon, recounting the story of the yellow-shirted girl to Richie.
Sozinho and Richie wanted to do fish tonight, so I was on my own for food tonight, which means spaghetti. Richie always gives me shit for not eating fish here. Quite frankly, I'm not interested in starting at an entire fish -- and having the fish stare back on me. Tonight, my pickiness was vindicated. The fish that they bought was terrible. Richie got two bites into it before he threw it out. Meanwhile, I sat there happily enjoying my spaghetti and "30 Rock".
We knew what we were in for come Saturday morning. Richie, Alexis and I were all heading out of town. Alexis was taking care of some business outside of Machanga (AKA getting out of Machanga because it's starting to make her crazy). Richie and I were headed to Chimoio just to go to a party. Richie actually was going to stick around because he had a meeting that required him to go to Beira later in the week, and there's no sense of traveling north twice. I, however, would be coming immediately back to Machanga.
We got to chapa stand around 5:00, anticipating a 6:00 leave. By 7:00, the chapa was still not moving and we were done with it. We collected our stuff and headed for Mambone. Once again, Mambone proved itself to be far superior to Machanga. We didn't even make it to the villa before we had a car to the crossroads. And once we got to the crossroads, we only had to wait about fifteen minutes for a ride half-way to Chimoio that ended up being free. From there, we only had to wait about thirty seconds to get a car continuing north. All said, we got to Chimoio around 3:30, eight and a half hours after starting to move. Not too bad.
Needless to say, we were exhausted. And hungry. After doing a bit of shopping for the evening's festivities, four of us went for pizza. Chimoio probably has the best pizza place in all of the south and central of Mozambique. Real crust, real sauce, real mozzerella. This is happiness.
Then the evening really began. Having missed the first Central party of the year, I had a lot of people to meet. While our departed Moz 12 friends are truly irreplaceable, this group of Central Moz 14s proved to be pretty good. Everybody seemed to be having a good time, and we were just getting started.
Following dinner, we were conned into participated a ridiculous scavenger hunt. Among other things on this scavenger hunt, we had to chug a beer with a Mozambican while not wearing shirts. At some point, I licked someone's face. But the highlight of the evening was walking a chicken on a leash that happened to be my belt. Seriously, this scavenger hunt was fucked up, but really fun. The drinking continued until late into the evening, and by the wee hours of Sunday morning, we were at the disco. This should make for an interesting ride home tomorrow.
Last night was especially bad. The fan helped, but good god, I think I was up every hour from something buzzing in my ear. Needless to say, I didn't sleep particularly well. Good thing I had absolutely nothing to do on Sunday. I killed some time making a run to the market. Market runs on Sundays are tough because so few of the stores are open. And we were out of beans. It took me three shots, but I finally found beans.
It was an otherwise slow day. I found myself buried in "The Tortilla Curtain", a book my grandmother sent me a couple months ago. It's a pretty good read about two couples in LA -- one Mexican, one American -- and how their lives run together. I'm usually not one for novels, but this one is alright.
Alexis came over in the afternoon. One of her colleagues from Tete (a long ways away) was visiting. I don't know what brought him down here, but this isn't exactly a tourist destination. So while he was here, Alexis dragged him over to our place. He's doing some food security/irrigation project in Tete and Manica, which seems pretty cool. They chilled here for an hour and left before the sun started making its descent.
I was in charge of beans tonight, as this is my job. The beans turned out delicious, as usual. While the beans cooked, we watched a couple episodes of "30 Rock". Then it was back to my bug-filled world.
I got a couple phone calls from family members, first from my parents then from my brother. It's been a good while since I talked to my brother so it was nice to catch up with him.
Normally, my Mondays are slow and uneventful. Today was anything but. Alexis and her colleague, John, went to the market for coffee and they invited me to join them. This was a shockingly good way to kill the morning. I was in the market all the way up until lunch time.
Richie had already started lunch by the time I got home. He had prepped, so it was only fair that I took over the cooking duty. With no classes in the afternoon, I thought I was going to be in for a relaxing afternoon with my book. I was wrong. The physics teacher came over asking me for some help typing an exam. Or I should say, two exams. This wasn't really a problem. If I'm not going to be teaching, I might as well be helpful some other way.
I was able to bang out one and a half exams before my battery gave out. Having nothing else to do, and wanting to get away from words, I folded myself into a Kakuro book. I then spent the remaining part of the afternoon failing miserably at putting numbers into boxes. After a nice run of success, I am back to sucking at it.
When the energy came on, I went right back to work on the exams. I really wanted to get these things knocked out. Usually, typing up physics or chemistry exams sucks because there are so many words with accents, subscripts, and superscripts, but these exams were shockingly devoid of these frustrations. After a pasta dinner (in which I ate my dinner, along with 75% of Richie's -- he just can't eat pasta anymore), we settled in to some "30 Rock".
I committed myself to finishing "The Tortilla Curtain" oon Tuesday. I had no obligations until 12:30 in the afternoon and only 150 pages to knock out. So far, it's been a very fast read. As long as I can avoid distractions, I'll be on easy street. I sat myself on the patio, plugged in my iPod -- making it clear that I didn't want to talk to anyone -- and went to work.
By mid-afternoon, after lunch and following two quick classes on the future tense, I succeeded in my task. What do I do now? I pulled out the kakuro book once again and, with the exception of one puzzle, failed horribly again. It's really frustrating to mess up on these puzzles because it's just basic addition and logic, and yet it has a way of seriously fucking with my head.
Just before the energy came on, the new philosophy teacher came over with a request for a typed test. I was sitting in my house, listen to the angry rhymes of Immortal Technique. When he came to the house, his ears perked up. He said "Is this Immortal Technique?" Yea man, it is. And then he said something I wasn't quite expecting: "Yea, Immortal Technique! I love this motherfucker!" I can't say I'm responsible for teaching him that nice piece of American vocabulary, but man, it was funny.
Having another test to type in front of me, there was no way I could really pay to attention to anything that we were watching. Richie wanted a break from comedy, se he turned to "Blow", the Johnny Depp flick about drug hustling. It's a movie I had seen before a couple times, so I could go in and out of it with little trouble.
With all of the failure I'd had with kakuro in the first part of the week, I didn't have expectations of myself for Wednesday morning. But shockingly, my mind was working decently and I was able to knock out three puzzles in an hour. Great success! As I sat on the patio, one of Richie's students from last year came over for some English help. He needed some help writing a composition. I knew this was going to be trouble. He had already written the passage in Portuguese and just wanted help translating. This is a bit frustrating for me, because I believe that you should at least try to write the thing in English. I passed him a dictionary and told him to look up the words, try to write the paragraph, then we'll mold it into something readable.
The hits kept coming throughout the morning and into the afternoon. One of the English teachers from the secondary school came over for the 12th grade curriculum, a math teacher came over for some help in his university studies -- complex numbers, which I could help with, and some advanced calculus, which I couldn't really help with. It's been too many years since I've studied calc. Then a physics teacher came over requesting help with differential equations. I almost laughed at this request. If I can't do basic calc, I'm fucked on differential equations. And then another student came over for help on writing a composition. Like the other student, this student came without having attempted to write in English. I gave him the dictionary, and told him he could come back when he had at least tried to write something. And on top of that, I had a class to give. Wow.
When the energy came on, I had one important job, and it wasn't cooking (Richie wanted to take a crack at cooking beans tonight). I had a whole line-up of documents to print out: two physics tests, a philosophy test, a letter for science fair, and a letter from our school director to Peace Corps. While I was in the director's office printing these documents, another teacher came in wanting to print his exam. This thing was an absolute formatting disaster spread over two pages. I spent 20 minutes cleaning it up, making it beautiful. He laughed, and told me that what took me 20 minutes would have taken him days to figure out. It's nice to be helpful.
This was by far the busiest, and not coincidentally, the fastest day I've had here in a while. I can't say that I'm mad that I have a light teaching load this year. 25 hours all in the afternoon is not easy. But a busy afternoon makes for a fast afternoon.
Richie's beans were okay, but he wasn't particularly satisfied with how they came out. He told me that the job is officially mine. We turned to one of our old favorites for entertainment: "How I Met Your Mother". We watched three episodes when we realized that we could easily blow through the entire disc in one sitting. Showing remarkable restraint, we transitioned into "30 Rock" before heading to bed.
Thursday was back to the regular slow pace of life in Machanga. Richie had a couple classes in the morning, so I was on duty for the market run. Generously, Richie paid for groceries today. I needed the help. I'm running low cash. We can't get to Chimoio fast enough.
Following a helpful, busy, fast Wednesday, Thursday dragged on and on. Nobody came over for help. Nobody came with a request to have a test typed. The most we had was a request or two for the bike.
Adding to the slowness of the day, I only had one class to give, and I didn't even have to lesson-plan for it. This was the same lesson that I gave to my other students yesterday -- on first conditional. I got through the lesson, and told the students what they needed to know for their exam. After a 20 minute review, they claimed to be ready. We'll see. After the first round of exams, I have my doubts, but I'll be happy if they prove me wrong.
After a boring afternoon of sitting on the patio, failing again at kakuro and starting another book, "Somebody Knows My Name", we ate dinner. Richie and Sozinho ate fish and xima, two foods I choose to avoid on a regular basis, so I made myself some spaghetti. We went away from comedy again and watched "Good Will Hunting". This was another movie that I had seen previously, so I didn't really pay attention. I tried to play catch-up with some people with whom I've fallen out of touch. The movie ended just after the energy went out.
I was back to being busy on Friday. I wanted to give an exam before heading out for the weekend and Friday is the day that I have both classes for two periods. Most of the morning was spent writing the exam. This is a two step process: first I need the questions, then I need to write them on oversize paper so I dont have to write them on the board twice. Usually this is taken care of on the patio, where the morning light is good and the breeze keeps me a little cool. However, as we have Sozinho around the house, I had to write the exam in the dark, sweaty confines of my room. Writing an exam should not qualify as an activity that requires a shower after it.
Alexis swang over just as I was preparing myself for a full cleaning -- head shave plus shower. She got to witness the full transformation. While she was here, we also cooked lunch. We offered her our monotony of potatoes and eggs in place of her monotony of rice and tiny shrimp, but she denied it. Strange, but it just means more food for Richie and me.
We all know how much I love exam days here. In all honesty, though, today's weren't so bad. I had to move a couple people around because of wandering eyes or blabbering mouths, but other than that, there were no "indisciplinados". There was only one student who particular pissed me off today. I know I'm not supposed to hold grudges, but this girl has earned it. Twice I have taken phone credit from her because I've caught her using her phone in class, which drives me up a fucking wall. She has a record of not putting in any effort whatsoever. She has missed multiple exams (she missed the first one from this year, as well as bunch last year) and the ones she has taken, she usually fails.
What she did today, however, topped everything. She walked into the classroom just as I was putting up the big sheets of paper, grabbed her things, and left. If she thought she went unnoticed, she was wrong: the bright yellow shirt she was wearing did not help her cause. And here's where the story gets good. Half way through the exam, she has the audacity to enter my classroom, sit down in the front row, and then...do work for another class. All I could think was "Are you out of your fucking mind?!" I already know what is going to happen. When I see her on Tuesday, she is going to say "Mr Lee, I didn't take the test on Friday". And I'll say "Why not?" but in my head, I'll be thinking, "no shit you didn't take it, and now you'll be getting zeroes for both exams". Then she will give some bullshit excuse, I'll call her out, tell her she's getting zeroes, and she probably won't even fight it. She knows she's screwed.
After that event, I had no motivation to correct exams, but I did find the little energy I needed to put the exams in alphabetical order, making my job of correcting and grade-inputting significantly easier. Aside from that, I relaxed for the rest of the afternoon, recounting the story of the yellow-shirted girl to Richie.
Sozinho and Richie wanted to do fish tonight, so I was on my own for food tonight, which means spaghetti. Richie always gives me shit for not eating fish here. Quite frankly, I'm not interested in starting at an entire fish -- and having the fish stare back on me. Tonight, my pickiness was vindicated. The fish that they bought was terrible. Richie got two bites into it before he threw it out. Meanwhile, I sat there happily enjoying my spaghetti and "30 Rock".
We knew what we were in for come Saturday morning. Richie, Alexis and I were all heading out of town. Alexis was taking care of some business outside of Machanga (AKA getting out of Machanga because it's starting to make her crazy). Richie and I were headed to Chimoio just to go to a party. Richie actually was going to stick around because he had a meeting that required him to go to Beira later in the week, and there's no sense of traveling north twice. I, however, would be coming immediately back to Machanga.
We got to chapa stand around 5:00, anticipating a 6:00 leave. By 7:00, the chapa was still not moving and we were done with it. We collected our stuff and headed for Mambone. Once again, Mambone proved itself to be far superior to Machanga. We didn't even make it to the villa before we had a car to the crossroads. And once we got to the crossroads, we only had to wait about fifteen minutes for a ride half-way to Chimoio that ended up being free. From there, we only had to wait about thirty seconds to get a car continuing north. All said, we got to Chimoio around 3:30, eight and a half hours after starting to move. Not too bad.
Needless to say, we were exhausted. And hungry. After doing a bit of shopping for the evening's festivities, four of us went for pizza. Chimoio probably has the best pizza place in all of the south and central of Mozambique. Real crust, real sauce, real mozzerella. This is happiness.
Then the evening really began. Having missed the first Central party of the year, I had a lot of people to meet. While our departed Moz 12 friends are truly irreplaceable, this group of Central Moz 14s proved to be pretty good. Everybody seemed to be having a good time, and we were just getting started.
Following dinner, we were conned into participated a ridiculous scavenger hunt. Among other things on this scavenger hunt, we had to chug a beer with a Mozambican while not wearing shirts. At some point, I licked someone's face. But the highlight of the evening was walking a chicken on a leash that happened to be my belt. Seriously, this scavenger hunt was fucked up, but really fun. The drinking continued until late into the evening, and by the wee hours of Sunday morning, we were at the disco. This should make for an interesting ride home tomorrow.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Year 2 - Week 12: Blue Skies Shining on Me
Richie was wrong. It rained. And rained. And rained. And then it rained some more. I fear for what the town looks like. We didn't have a choice but to find out. There was no food in the house. This should be fun.
Major negotiations went down before we went to the market. We have one pair of boots and one rain slicker. Richie claimed the boots and I was okay with that. I didn't want to get wet and I'm okay walking in the mud. As we made our way out the school, we walked passed another teacher's house and he offered up his boots to me. Who's the sucker now?
The boots were pretty much useless. We came to find out that boots are really helpful with mud, but not helpful with rain, because the rain fell straight into the boots. And they are not really helpful when the lake that is now sitting in the road is knee high. By the time we got to the river, we both had to take out boots off just to empty the water out.
This turned out to be quite the market run. We didn't have any food in the house and we really didn't want to go back to the market any time soon. So we stocked up on everything -- potatoes, onions, eggs, spaghetti, phone credit, anything we could get our hands on. Walking back with all the groceries was worse than walking to the market. We had to endure the same rain, the same lake in the middle of the road, except now we had ten pounds of food with us.
If there was ever a day to just give up, this was it. We couldn't go anywhere without getting wet and covered in mud. Hell, even our beloved patio was taking a beating, thanks to the wind that blows the rain in just the right way. This was grounds for spending the day in bed.
Sozinho decided to take the lead on this. He said he wasn't feeling well. He didn't need to give us a reason to lie down. I felt perfectly fine and I stayed horizontal for most of the day. I spent almost the entire day doing Kakuro -- and actually getting them right -- before the energy came on.
Following dinner, we wanted to watch something that involved things blowing up. For this, we turned to a movie called "12 Rounds". Any movie that stars a WWE wrestler has to either involve death, fighting, stuff blowing up, or all of the above. We were not disappointed. The movie itself kinda sucked. It was probably one of those straight to DVD films. But it sated our appetite for destruction
Sozinho, meanwhile, remained on his back. He seemed to be struggling. I've stayed in bed for long periods of time, but eight hours in the afternoon is a lot even by my standards. After all that rest, he should feel bette
At least, I thought. Come Monday morning, he was still catatonic. He claimed it was malaria, and who am I to tell him it's not? With Richie having to work on Monday, it looked like I was in charge of the house. This was actually a bit of a blessing. I had no obligations and I really needed something to do.
I can't begin to express how happy I am to be done with February. That was one horrifying month. February has not treated us well in this country: not this year, not last year. Thankfully, the next time we see February we will be in America. It sort have felt like there was a conspiracy amongst the health, school, and weather gods to make February suck.
But now that we are in March, things seem to be looking up. School seems to be picking up bit by bit. We're back into the flow of things. Aside from a small cold courtesy of the weather change, I'm back to healthy. And what is that? A patch of blue sky!
I can't really say I did a whole lot on Monday, but at least what I did was productive. I did dishes, twice. and since it didn't rain much, a had the chance to give the patio and the bathroom a good cleaning. This is the stuff we brought Sozinho to do, but hey, he can't do it if he has malaria. I understand that.
When I wasn't cleaning, I had the Kakuro book in front of me, and I was dominating. It's funny how that game treats me. Sometimes, I can't figure out a damn thing, and other times, they're very easy. Before this week, I hadn't got one right in a long time. Now I was at six in a row. I'll blame my failures on the fact that it was February.
We decided on beans tonight. Foolishly, we thought that putting them on charcoal would be smart. Beans always take forever to cook, so any extra time on the stove helps. Of course, today was the day that they decided to turn the energy on early. The pot was on the charcoal for no more than ten minutes before the energy came on. As long as the charcoal was going, we used it. No use in wasting it. Plus the beans tend to cook better on charcoal. For our entertainment tonight, we decided to watch "Sex Drive", a comedy that only sends like a porno.
The weather gods decided to be extra kind to me for my birthday. I woke up to blue skies from horizon to horizon. If this holds up, Richie and I will be able to go to the vila for food tonight.
The morning was abnormally busy. I wasn't doing anything except talking and replying to text messages. In lieu of receiving physical gifts, hearing people's voices is pretty good. Between all of the phone calls and text messages, my morning was all but gone.
I believe that there should be a rule that you don't have to work on your birthday. I say this especially because my birthday always seems to fall on a Monday or a Tuesday. I can't properly party mid-week. The truth of the matter is I could have cancelled classes today. Who is going to tell me I can't? But my conscience kicked in. I only had to teach two hours today. That wouldn't be a problem.
I gave myself a well deserved nap after classes, waking up at 4:00 for a meeting. This was a big meeting. The education administrator for the district was here. This meeting went on. And on. For two awful hours. I spent the last thirty minutes looking for something I could use to slit my wrists. I just wanted to go out and get drunk.
Finally, at 6:00, we were liberated. Richie and I headed straight to Madinha's place for food and drink. She cooked up some chicken and rice for us. Madinha is very much hit and miss with food. Some of the stuff she gives us, like the stewed beef she makes, is amazing. This wasn't so great, but it's chicken. It's tough to fuck it up too much. With a couple beers in our bellies, we bought a bottle of whiskey and brought it back to our house to drink with colleagues.
At this point, I made what I thought was a wise decision. I told our school director that we had a bottle of whiskey and we needed help drinking it. He invited us to drink his case of beer last month and I felt like I owed him. And he's usually good for providing more booze when the bottle disappears.
As I thought he would, when our bottle was gone, he brought out more alcohol. But instead of bringing whiskey, he chose to bring terrible boxed wine. Why? Why do you torture us so? Well, we weren't going to say no. The box of wine went, and we felt miserable. At least we had enough liquid courage to ask our director to leave in November instead of December. He said it was not a problem. Now we just need Peace Corps to help us out.
I woke up Wednesday feeling like death. Like a truck ran over me, put it in reverse to see what was hit, then run over again after they realized that it was nothing important. At least I wasn't alone. Richie felt just as terrible. And our colleague who also made the beer to whiskey to felt equally bad. At least misery had company today.
Misery also had good luck today. I didn't have to teach until 4:00 in the afternoon, leaving me all afternoon to get my head and my stomach back together. I can't really say I did much. Sozinho was back to feeling better, so he took care of the dishes and cleaning. I took his place and spent plenty of the day in bed reading an "Economist".
I went into class at 4, minutes after the rain had started to fall lightly. When I got to my class, some students told me that I should go quickly because they had to go back to Mambone and they wanted to get back before it really started raining. I have no problem moving quickly. It was a pretty basic lesson today, as it was -- just a review of present continuous. It didn't need the entire two hours, so I cut it down to about half of the time.
We were indecisive about dinner tonight. More than anything, we just didn't have much in the house. Why does it seem like we're always out of food? RIchie, it turns out, wasn't so hungry. He just had a peanut butter sandwich. Being on my own for dinner, I made pasta. Richie is once again done with pasta, so I will take any opportunity I can to eat it. For our viewing pleasure, we watched a couple episodes of "30 Rock". NBC may not have that one hit show, but between "30 Rock" and "The Office" they've nailed certain niches.
The hard rain didn't come until the middle of the night. It didn't last that long, not even long enough to wake us up. It lasted just long enough to make itself recognized by the puddles in the morning.
Sozinho is back ot fully functional and with that I am back to my regular laziness when it comes to going to the market. Sure, I could have gone, but why should I go when we have him to do it for us? Instead of going, I sat around doing Kakuro and cleaning my room. I was up to nine in a row when I got greedy and went for ten and fucked up. Eh, it was a good run.
Class was quick and easy today. I managed to nearly fill the two hours today. that took only an hour yesterday. I'm moving fast with these kids, so they were probably happy to move bit by bit today.
As I got toward the end of class, the twelfth grade math teacher -- the one who thought it wise to bet me five beers -- asked me if I could help out with this class. I told him that it was no problem. I thought this would entail sitting in the back of the room, watching him teach and telling him if something was not correct.
I was wrong. "I'll teach the first half, you teach the second half", said he. Mmm, okay. What am I teaching? Absolute values in inequalities. Alright, fine. There was still a lot of vocabulary I didn't know, so I sat in the back in the first half and listened, trying to pick up the terminology.
My part of class went shockingly well, seeing as I had about 30 minutes to prepare. One of the kids told me he learned more in that math class than he had learned in the previous English class. I don't know if I should take that as a compliment to my ability to teach math in Portuguese or an insult to my ability to teach English in English. Either way, I think that they'll be slightly more prepared when they have to take their exam.
I was in charge of doing dinner tonight. Beans again. Richie and I believe that we can eat beans just about every night. It's cheap, it's easy to make, and it's delicious. And as long as Sozinho is not cooking them, they generally don't take three hours to make. While the beans cooked, I helped another student with some math problems and watched some episodes of "30 Rock".
As if typing up the test and teaching half of a math class wasn't enough, I got roped into proctoring the exam on Friday afternoon. . The last way I want to spend my Friday afternoon is watching kids cheat on a math test. Unpleasant. At least I had the morning to myself. My kakuro dominance went away. I hit a bad streak and apparently, I can no longer solve these damn puzzles. It comes and goes.
My classes went by decently in the afternoon. I finished a little early in both my classes and offered my math services to my students. Both classes jumped at the opportunity. Even though it's a struggle to teach math, especially sicne I have to remember how to do stuff, it's still more fun than teaching English. I don't know how much my teaching helped, but there was no shortage of talking and wandering eyes. If this were an English exam, I'd be taking papers and dropping zeroes like it was nothing. But this was not my class, so I did not care.
At least the teacher who asked for help rewarded us with bottles of wine. So we sat around and drank. And when we got hungry, I did the cooking. The couple hours of drinking, paired with the five straight hours in the classroom, did me in. Richie, however, wanted to go out. I told him I would be staying in for the night. It was a good decision.
Richie rolled in around 2 in the morning. I was awake when he walked in because I'm always awake at 2 in the morning. I don't think I would have made it until 2. And even with a good night's sleep, I woke up feeling tired. I wanted to really just spend the day in bed, so I indulged and stayed in the sheets until 8:30. When i found the motivation to get out of bed, I made a run to the market. I would have gone later in the morning but Richie wanted the bike.
The governor of the province of Sofala was in town to talk to the good people of Machanga. I, as usual, had no interest in going to this type of event. I know the deal: we get there when it's supposed to start, we wait three hours in the sun for the guy to show up, he makes a mediocre speech in Portuguese that requires translation into dialect, and then we leave, asking "Why the fuck did we go watch that?" So I made the decision to not go through all of those steps. Sitting on the patio couldn't be worse than that.
Throughout the event, Richie was texting me. The guy didn't show up until noon. My decision was validated immediately when I heard that news.
Richie came back mid-afternoon and upon his return, we ate lunch. After that, it was just a relaxing afternoon. Each of us napped for some period of time and I read a newspaper from December.
Sozinho cooked dinner tonight. Actually, he started coking last night. This meal took a full two nights to cook. There are a lot of parts of Mozambique that I like, but there food is not high on my list. One of the things I really liked about living without live-in help is that we had complete control of the food. Sozinho wanted Mozambican food so we obliged. Richie enjoyed it. He thought it was sweet. I find at best bland and at worst bitter.
The nightly entertainment was "Funny People". I think it would have been better if we could hear the movie, but it's tough to hear with the beats of Akon rocking in the background. But it seemed like a good film.
I must say, this birthday week was much better than last year's. And I know that next year's, when I'm back with family and friends, will be even better.
Major negotiations went down before we went to the market. We have one pair of boots and one rain slicker. Richie claimed the boots and I was okay with that. I didn't want to get wet and I'm okay walking in the mud. As we made our way out the school, we walked passed another teacher's house and he offered up his boots to me. Who's the sucker now?
The boots were pretty much useless. We came to find out that boots are really helpful with mud, but not helpful with rain, because the rain fell straight into the boots. And they are not really helpful when the lake that is now sitting in the road is knee high. By the time we got to the river, we both had to take out boots off just to empty the water out.
This turned out to be quite the market run. We didn't have any food in the house and we really didn't want to go back to the market any time soon. So we stocked up on everything -- potatoes, onions, eggs, spaghetti, phone credit, anything we could get our hands on. Walking back with all the groceries was worse than walking to the market. We had to endure the same rain, the same lake in the middle of the road, except now we had ten pounds of food with us.
If there was ever a day to just give up, this was it. We couldn't go anywhere without getting wet and covered in mud. Hell, even our beloved patio was taking a beating, thanks to the wind that blows the rain in just the right way. This was grounds for spending the day in bed.
Sozinho decided to take the lead on this. He said he wasn't feeling well. He didn't need to give us a reason to lie down. I felt perfectly fine and I stayed horizontal for most of the day. I spent almost the entire day doing Kakuro -- and actually getting them right -- before the energy came on.
Following dinner, we wanted to watch something that involved things blowing up. For this, we turned to a movie called "12 Rounds". Any movie that stars a WWE wrestler has to either involve death, fighting, stuff blowing up, or all of the above. We were not disappointed. The movie itself kinda sucked. It was probably one of those straight to DVD films. But it sated our appetite for destruction
Sozinho, meanwhile, remained on his back. He seemed to be struggling. I've stayed in bed for long periods of time, but eight hours in the afternoon is a lot even by my standards. After all that rest, he should feel bette
At least, I thought. Come Monday morning, he was still catatonic. He claimed it was malaria, and who am I to tell him it's not? With Richie having to work on Monday, it looked like I was in charge of the house. This was actually a bit of a blessing. I had no obligations and I really needed something to do.
I can't begin to express how happy I am to be done with February. That was one horrifying month. February has not treated us well in this country: not this year, not last year. Thankfully, the next time we see February we will be in America. It sort have felt like there was a conspiracy amongst the health, school, and weather gods to make February suck.
But now that we are in March, things seem to be looking up. School seems to be picking up bit by bit. We're back into the flow of things. Aside from a small cold courtesy of the weather change, I'm back to healthy. And what is that? A patch of blue sky!
I can't really say I did a whole lot on Monday, but at least what I did was productive. I did dishes, twice. and since it didn't rain much, a had the chance to give the patio and the bathroom a good cleaning. This is the stuff we brought Sozinho to do, but hey, he can't do it if he has malaria. I understand that.
When I wasn't cleaning, I had the Kakuro book in front of me, and I was dominating. It's funny how that game treats me. Sometimes, I can't figure out a damn thing, and other times, they're very easy. Before this week, I hadn't got one right in a long time. Now I was at six in a row. I'll blame my failures on the fact that it was February.
We decided on beans tonight. Foolishly, we thought that putting them on charcoal would be smart. Beans always take forever to cook, so any extra time on the stove helps. Of course, today was the day that they decided to turn the energy on early. The pot was on the charcoal for no more than ten minutes before the energy came on. As long as the charcoal was going, we used it. No use in wasting it. Plus the beans tend to cook better on charcoal. For our entertainment tonight, we decided to watch "Sex Drive", a comedy that only sends like a porno.
The weather gods decided to be extra kind to me for my birthday. I woke up to blue skies from horizon to horizon. If this holds up, Richie and I will be able to go to the vila for food tonight.
The morning was abnormally busy. I wasn't doing anything except talking and replying to text messages. In lieu of receiving physical gifts, hearing people's voices is pretty good. Between all of the phone calls and text messages, my morning was all but gone.
I believe that there should be a rule that you don't have to work on your birthday. I say this especially because my birthday always seems to fall on a Monday or a Tuesday. I can't properly party mid-week. The truth of the matter is I could have cancelled classes today. Who is going to tell me I can't? But my conscience kicked in. I only had to teach two hours today. That wouldn't be a problem.
I gave myself a well deserved nap after classes, waking up at 4:00 for a meeting. This was a big meeting. The education administrator for the district was here. This meeting went on. And on. For two awful hours. I spent the last thirty minutes looking for something I could use to slit my wrists. I just wanted to go out and get drunk.
Finally, at 6:00, we were liberated. Richie and I headed straight to Madinha's place for food and drink. She cooked up some chicken and rice for us. Madinha is very much hit and miss with food. Some of the stuff she gives us, like the stewed beef she makes, is amazing. This wasn't so great, but it's chicken. It's tough to fuck it up too much. With a couple beers in our bellies, we bought a bottle of whiskey and brought it back to our house to drink with colleagues.
At this point, I made what I thought was a wise decision. I told our school director that we had a bottle of whiskey and we needed help drinking it. He invited us to drink his case of beer last month and I felt like I owed him. And he's usually good for providing more booze when the bottle disappears.
As I thought he would, when our bottle was gone, he brought out more alcohol. But instead of bringing whiskey, he chose to bring terrible boxed wine. Why? Why do you torture us so? Well, we weren't going to say no. The box of wine went, and we felt miserable. At least we had enough liquid courage to ask our director to leave in November instead of December. He said it was not a problem. Now we just need Peace Corps to help us out.
I woke up Wednesday feeling like death. Like a truck ran over me, put it in reverse to see what was hit, then run over again after they realized that it was nothing important. At least I wasn't alone. Richie felt just as terrible. And our colleague who also made the beer to whiskey to felt equally bad. At least misery had company today.
Misery also had good luck today. I didn't have to teach until 4:00 in the afternoon, leaving me all afternoon to get my head and my stomach back together. I can't really say I did much. Sozinho was back to feeling better, so he took care of the dishes and cleaning. I took his place and spent plenty of the day in bed reading an "Economist".
I went into class at 4, minutes after the rain had started to fall lightly. When I got to my class, some students told me that I should go quickly because they had to go back to Mambone and they wanted to get back before it really started raining. I have no problem moving quickly. It was a pretty basic lesson today, as it was -- just a review of present continuous. It didn't need the entire two hours, so I cut it down to about half of the time.
We were indecisive about dinner tonight. More than anything, we just didn't have much in the house. Why does it seem like we're always out of food? RIchie, it turns out, wasn't so hungry. He just had a peanut butter sandwich. Being on my own for dinner, I made pasta. Richie is once again done with pasta, so I will take any opportunity I can to eat it. For our viewing pleasure, we watched a couple episodes of "30 Rock". NBC may not have that one hit show, but between "30 Rock" and "The Office" they've nailed certain niches.
The hard rain didn't come until the middle of the night. It didn't last that long, not even long enough to wake us up. It lasted just long enough to make itself recognized by the puddles in the morning.
Sozinho is back ot fully functional and with that I am back to my regular laziness when it comes to going to the market. Sure, I could have gone, but why should I go when we have him to do it for us? Instead of going, I sat around doing Kakuro and cleaning my room. I was up to nine in a row when I got greedy and went for ten and fucked up. Eh, it was a good run.
Class was quick and easy today. I managed to nearly fill the two hours today. that took only an hour yesterday. I'm moving fast with these kids, so they were probably happy to move bit by bit today.
As I got toward the end of class, the twelfth grade math teacher -- the one who thought it wise to bet me five beers -- asked me if I could help out with this class. I told him that it was no problem. I thought this would entail sitting in the back of the room, watching him teach and telling him if something was not correct.
I was wrong. "I'll teach the first half, you teach the second half", said he. Mmm, okay. What am I teaching? Absolute values in inequalities. Alright, fine. There was still a lot of vocabulary I didn't know, so I sat in the back in the first half and listened, trying to pick up the terminology.
My part of class went shockingly well, seeing as I had about 30 minutes to prepare. One of the kids told me he learned more in that math class than he had learned in the previous English class. I don't know if I should take that as a compliment to my ability to teach math in Portuguese or an insult to my ability to teach English in English. Either way, I think that they'll be slightly more prepared when they have to take their exam.
I was in charge of doing dinner tonight. Beans again. Richie and I believe that we can eat beans just about every night. It's cheap, it's easy to make, and it's delicious. And as long as Sozinho is not cooking them, they generally don't take three hours to make. While the beans cooked, I helped another student with some math problems and watched some episodes of "30 Rock".
As if typing up the test and teaching half of a math class wasn't enough, I got roped into proctoring the exam on Friday afternoon. . The last way I want to spend my Friday afternoon is watching kids cheat on a math test. Unpleasant. At least I had the morning to myself. My kakuro dominance went away. I hit a bad streak and apparently, I can no longer solve these damn puzzles. It comes and goes.
My classes went by decently in the afternoon. I finished a little early in both my classes and offered my math services to my students. Both classes jumped at the opportunity. Even though it's a struggle to teach math, especially sicne I have to remember how to do stuff, it's still more fun than teaching English. I don't know how much my teaching helped, but there was no shortage of talking and wandering eyes. If this were an English exam, I'd be taking papers and dropping zeroes like it was nothing. But this was not my class, so I did not care.
At least the teacher who asked for help rewarded us with bottles of wine. So we sat around and drank. And when we got hungry, I did the cooking. The couple hours of drinking, paired with the five straight hours in the classroom, did me in. Richie, however, wanted to go out. I told him I would be staying in for the night. It was a good decision.
Richie rolled in around 2 in the morning. I was awake when he walked in because I'm always awake at 2 in the morning. I don't think I would have made it until 2. And even with a good night's sleep, I woke up feeling tired. I wanted to really just spend the day in bed, so I indulged and stayed in the sheets until 8:30. When i found the motivation to get out of bed, I made a run to the market. I would have gone later in the morning but Richie wanted the bike.
The governor of the province of Sofala was in town to talk to the good people of Machanga. I, as usual, had no interest in going to this type of event. I know the deal: we get there when it's supposed to start, we wait three hours in the sun for the guy to show up, he makes a mediocre speech in Portuguese that requires translation into dialect, and then we leave, asking "Why the fuck did we go watch that?" So I made the decision to not go through all of those steps. Sitting on the patio couldn't be worse than that.
Throughout the event, Richie was texting me. The guy didn't show up until noon. My decision was validated immediately when I heard that news.
Richie came back mid-afternoon and upon his return, we ate lunch. After that, it was just a relaxing afternoon. Each of us napped for some period of time and I read a newspaper from December.
Sozinho cooked dinner tonight. Actually, he started coking last night. This meal took a full two nights to cook. There are a lot of parts of Mozambique that I like, but there food is not high on my list. One of the things I really liked about living without live-in help is that we had complete control of the food. Sozinho wanted Mozambican food so we obliged. Richie enjoyed it. He thought it was sweet. I find at best bland and at worst bitter.
The nightly entertainment was "Funny People". I think it would have been better if we could hear the movie, but it's tough to hear with the beats of Akon rocking in the background. But it seemed like a good film.
I must say, this birthday week was much better than last year's. And I know that next year's, when I'm back with family and friends, will be even better.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Year 2 - Week 11: Rainy Days Are Here Again
The constant rain that finally found its way to Machanga last week has decided to stick around. It's been a much different rainy season this year. Last year, when it rained, it poured and poured and poured. And the rains started in December and kept up a good pace through March and April. We didn't get our first rain this year until January, and it's been far from a wet rainy season. Until this week.
It's a pesky rain that we've had, raining in fits and starts. Strong winds have kept clouds moving in and moving out. I don't think it's rained for more than an hour at a time, but when it rains, it's a good rain. Such was the rain on Sunday. It stayed just dry enough to not make the roads miserable, but it was also just grey enough to keep us from going very far.
I spent most of the day sitting around reading, catching up on news from August. Who knew that six month old news could be so intriguing. I did manage to get one thing done: I finished correcting the rest of the exams from Friday. In a strange reversal from last year, the letters kids did better than the science kids. I know that seems counter-intuitive. The letters kids should do better at English. But it really comes down to one simple fact: the science kids are smarter.
There have been two major upsides to all of this rain. The first is that the bugs have been kept at bay. The monster grasshoppers – the ones that are big enough to eat (we haven't tried them...yet)– seem to have all but vanished. The ants that invaded our beloved porch have mostly disappeared. And mosquitoes have yet to really make an appearance. The other upside is that with the cooler weather, it has been significantly easier to sleep. It's still fuckin hot, don't doubt that. But it's not wake-up-with-the-sheets-soaked hot. It's more like struggle-to-fall-asleep hot. Regardless, it's a step up.
Sunday evening to Monday morning was catch-up time with the family. I got a call from my grandparents Sunday night and “woke up” to my parents on Monday morning. Of course, I was awake 90 minutes before they called, but I was still drowsy. They caught me up on real news and I caught them up on, well, nothing.
It was rainy again on Monday. Luckily, the furthest I had to go was to the school. The dreaded call from the director came. I'm starting to not fear these calls anymore. This one was about the basketball court that we are trying – and failing – to build. This meeting basically confirmed the fact that what we are trying to do is near impossible. Under different circumstances, like being in America, I'd say this were possible. But as we know, things move at the speed of smell here. This does not look promising.
Other than the meeting, it was a slow day. One of the great benefits of my family was I got a new computer battery. This means that I can now get some work during the day. I did the work that I dreaded doing: punching in all the names into a spreadsheet. At this moment, I was extremely thankful for only having 113 students (as opposed to the 260-some I had last year).
I didn't do much for the rest of the afternoon. I got a bit of a nap in and read a magazine and tried to not get completely drenched when the wind blew the rain into our house.
I was in charge of dinner again tonight. We were doing beans again, and we actually had tomatoes tonight to do it properly. For some reason, though, I think they were better with just the tomato paste. Strange. For our entertainment for the night, we got away from sitcoms and went for straight, stupid humor - “Step Brothers”. John C. Reilly. Will Ferrell. Boats and Hoes.
As usual, I had a slow Tuesday morning. I should come to embrace these mornings because come second trimester, I'm putting an end to it. It's a little late in the game to start computer lessons for this trimester, especially since I'll probably be in Maputo, again, in the middle of March. I want to have some continuity, so I will wait until April to get going. I spent the morning perched on the patio, reading an Economist from way to long ago.
The morning was especially slow because I didn't have to lesson plan. I only had 45 minutes with each of my classes and all I had to do was return exams. The students, for the most part, did alright. There were no grade disputes, other than three miscalculations I made. And I'm pretty sure I made an enemy for life out of the girl who I called out for cheating. She didn't admit it at first, but after I showed her the exams, she had no choice but to agree. I was kind with her: I only took half the points instead of giving her a zero, like I usually do.
I was happy to have a short work day because I had some work to take care of for some other teachers. As usual, a couple teachers turned to me to type up an exam. I have no problem with this, but I have come to like the social science exams a lot more than the hard science and math exams. There is way to much notational stuff – square roots, subscripts, other stuff I've never seen – and it ends up being a royal pain in my ass. Regardless, I made my way through this math exam. It took me a couple nights and one afternoon to finish.
When the energy came on, all I had to do was print out the exam for the teacher. We cooked up some beans and watched “500 Days of Summer”. I had no expectations for this movie, and it turned out to be pretty funny. It had a great humor about it.
I had an extraordinarily productive Wednesday. I used to the first couple of weeks to get my students acquainted to the idea of reading comprehension. This really was a three week shock-and-awe assault for them. I have grand plans to teach these students the actual national curriculum, but this can't start until I get the book. Until then, I'll be reviewing grammar with them. This morning, I figured out how I was going to get a year of grammar (the stuff I taught them last year) into six weeks. They should, in theory, know the stuff, but I know they need to see it at least a couple more times before it kind of sticks.
The afternoon wasn't nearly as productive. I didn't have to teach until 4:00 and I didn't have a lot to do until then. I cleaned up a little around the house. My room was in dire need of a decent cleaning. I didn't get so far as to mop, but at least my room was recognizable again.
Class went okay. The students seem to understand what I was getting at. At least, I hope they did. Present simple is like Day One of seventh grade English. They should know this stuff like the back of their hand, but I have to teach to the lowest of the low.
In comparison to my day, Richie's day was brutal. He gave exams for almost the entire day. As we have said time and time again, giving exams is one of the most painful experiences we have here. We constantly have to fight the cheaters and keeping a tight eye on those students is seriously exhausting. Anyways, he took about a quarter of the exams from one class. That's just depressing. So I treated him to a beer at the market. And I cooked dinner.
We didn't watch anything tonight because Richie wanted to get all of his exams corrected. I won't forgive him for this. Until tomorrow.
For the first time all week, we didn't have any rain. It was still grey for most of the day but not a single drop fell. This was highly fortunate for Richie. After teaching a couple of classes, Richie decided to embark on a journey that we not yet done: the one-day bank run to Inhassoro. Usually we take at least two days to go to Vilanculos, but Richie was poor and he didn't want to spend the night anywhere. Due to his classes, he got a late jump – around 9:30 – but with some luck, he'd get back.
Before he left, I made a run to the market. I figured that if he's going to be taking money out of the bank for me, I should at least get him some bread to eat before leaving. He only told me after that he had a loaf of bread before class. This is what I get for trying to be nice.
I spent the morning trying to do some Kakuro. I put the emphasis on trying. I failed miserably on almost every possible. I fell into a pattern. I'd move pretty well through the puzzle, get stuck, make as educated a guess as possible and inevitably be wrong. It's frustrating having to look at the answers to see where I fucked up. At least my mind was busy.
I taught first and second period in the afternoon, which was nice. Given the choice, I think I would much rather teach in the morning and just get it done. But since I don't have that luxury, the least I could ask for is getting the classes done as quickly as possible in the afternoon. With the exception of Wednesday, I teach first period every afternoon. The scheduling gods were on my side.
The afternoon was spent on the patio. Around 2:00, I got a text from Richie saying that he was “going for it”. He really wanted to make it back to day. God bless that child. It's a lot of travel for one day, even though it's not more than 250 kilometers. I kept wondering when he was going to make it, if he was going to make it at all. In the worst case scenario, he could stay in Mambone for the night, but that sort of defeats the purpose.
Around 5:30, Richie rolled up to the house. It took eight hours and a lot of sunburn, but we both had money. I owed him, big time. I cooked up dinner. He wanted to watch “Hitmen” – some movie with a lot of killing – because he said he wanted to kill everyone today. I can't blame him. After eating, we watched some random Michael Jordan highlights and “Parks and Recreation”.
Much like last Friday, I awoke to a math challenge, although this time the other teacher learned his lesson and chose not to make a wager. This was especially beneficial for me because had a bet been made, I probably would have lost. The problem involved solving an inequality with two absolute values. I know how to do inequalities with one absolute value, but it's been many years since I learned the rules of inequalities with two. Thankfully, my handy internet USB thing was working decently and I was able to get some information.
I worked at this problem for a good hour or two, and the answer finally came to me. I don't know if it's the best way to solve it. I'm sure it wasn't the best way to solve it, but it was correct nonetheless. If there are any math wizards who want a crack at solving it, here it is: |x-3<|2x-3|. The answer is x<0 and x>2. Anyone who sends me an eloquent manner of solving this gets an acknowledgment I'd offer a cookie or a toy or something, but I'm a bit far away.
It's a little funny: over the year-plus that we've been here, Richie and I have fallen into certain roles. Richie is the person that people come to with news of a death. I don't know why. Richie is also the person who is also more willing to go to public events. I, on the other hand, am the problem man. If there is a computer issue, they come to me. A math problem can't be solved: they send it to the “dono da matematica”.
The technology helper is the role I especially like. Sure, there are other people who can probably figure out a physics problem, but the Casa do Muzungu is the last line of defense for computers. A couple nights ago, one of the teachers from another school came over with his virus-riddled computer. It's taken me days to get it back to functioning. This morning, I made it half way through the virus scan and managed to get rid of no fewer than 290 infected files. There will be more work to do later.
All of this problem-solving took up the entire morning. I must say that although I like having down time, I think I'd rather be too busy than too bored. The time just drags on when there's nothing to do.
On this day, however, a short break would have been nice. I went straight from problem-solving to teaching. I was due for four periods of English. I filled two periods with the first group with no problem. The second class was more challenging, even though I was teaching the same material. Two-thirds of the class wasn't there, and they ones that we're there were not really all together there. They had already started their weekend, so I promised we would move quickly. I finished class a half hour early and everyone was grateful.
I knew what I was in for when I got back to the house: drinking. Richie wanted to drink, a colleague wanted to drink, and who am I to say no? It would have been nice to drink something other than pineapple flavored gin, but we made it work. I took care of dinner – rice with shrimp. I'm no fan of shrimp, but after tonight, I am convinced that anything can taste good if you drown it in enough butter, garlic, and lemon juice.
The drinking recommenced after eating. We knocked out another flask of gin and then Richie thought it would be a good idea to go to the villa for beers. I knew as soon as I stepped out of the school that this was a bad decision. We sat around drinking for another three hours. By midnight, I was done. Richie and our colleague wanted to keep drinking. They tried to convince me to stay, but I know when I've had my fill.
My timing could have been better, but it could have been a lot worse. Three hundred yards from the house, the deluge began. I was soaked in seconds, but luckily the roads didn't turn to mud immediately. I made it home without incident, just soaked.
I found out Saturday morning that Richie wasn't so lucky. They came back at 3 in the morning. And the roads were finished. Richie simply gave up: he took off his shoes so he could trudge through without getting stuck in the mud.
We had a school meeting scheduled for 7:30 in the morning, which was just dandy. Richie and I both felt miserable. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't even bother going to this type of meeting. I know that that most of the time, these meetings don't really mean much to us. They are usually administrative things that don't apply to us Peace Corps Volunteers. And yet, on this day, we chose to go.
There was another mistake that we made. There has yet to be a meeting that has started on time, yet we chose to arrive at 7:25. What the fuck were we thinking?! The meeting didn't start until 8:30 and there was, as anticipated, nothing of importance for us. After an hour, I got up, pretending to take a very important phone call. I told Richie that he had to leave and we made our great escape.
We were both useless for the rest of the day. It was a perfect day to spend in bed. I did absolutely nothing of value and neither did Richie. The cloud cover gave us another reason to stay in. It never really downpoured like it did last night, but the constant drizzle and the threat of a drenching was enough to keep us in.
Following dinner, one of our colleagues came over with something new and interesting: white wine. People here love their red wine. They usually mix it with Coca-Cola. I refuse to taint red wine like that, but Richie says it's good. Anyways, this new white wine was pretty good. Add the fact that it was cold and I was very happy.
The clouds never left and Richie was full of hope. “It won't rain tonight, probably tomorrow”. I'll trust him for now.
It's a pesky rain that we've had, raining in fits and starts. Strong winds have kept clouds moving in and moving out. I don't think it's rained for more than an hour at a time, but when it rains, it's a good rain. Such was the rain on Sunday. It stayed just dry enough to not make the roads miserable, but it was also just grey enough to keep us from going very far.
I spent most of the day sitting around reading, catching up on news from August. Who knew that six month old news could be so intriguing. I did manage to get one thing done: I finished correcting the rest of the exams from Friday. In a strange reversal from last year, the letters kids did better than the science kids. I know that seems counter-intuitive. The letters kids should do better at English. But it really comes down to one simple fact: the science kids are smarter.
There have been two major upsides to all of this rain. The first is that the bugs have been kept at bay. The monster grasshoppers – the ones that are big enough to eat (we haven't tried them...yet)– seem to have all but vanished. The ants that invaded our beloved porch have mostly disappeared. And mosquitoes have yet to really make an appearance. The other upside is that with the cooler weather, it has been significantly easier to sleep. It's still fuckin hot, don't doubt that. But it's not wake-up-with-the-sheets-soaked hot. It's more like struggle-to-fall-asleep hot. Regardless, it's a step up.
Sunday evening to Monday morning was catch-up time with the family. I got a call from my grandparents Sunday night and “woke up” to my parents on Monday morning. Of course, I was awake 90 minutes before they called, but I was still drowsy. They caught me up on real news and I caught them up on, well, nothing.
It was rainy again on Monday. Luckily, the furthest I had to go was to the school. The dreaded call from the director came. I'm starting to not fear these calls anymore. This one was about the basketball court that we are trying – and failing – to build. This meeting basically confirmed the fact that what we are trying to do is near impossible. Under different circumstances, like being in America, I'd say this were possible. But as we know, things move at the speed of smell here. This does not look promising.
Other than the meeting, it was a slow day. One of the great benefits of my family was I got a new computer battery. This means that I can now get some work during the day. I did the work that I dreaded doing: punching in all the names into a spreadsheet. At this moment, I was extremely thankful for only having 113 students (as opposed to the 260-some I had last year).
I didn't do much for the rest of the afternoon. I got a bit of a nap in and read a magazine and tried to not get completely drenched when the wind blew the rain into our house.
I was in charge of dinner again tonight. We were doing beans again, and we actually had tomatoes tonight to do it properly. For some reason, though, I think they were better with just the tomato paste. Strange. For our entertainment for the night, we got away from sitcoms and went for straight, stupid humor - “Step Brothers”. John C. Reilly. Will Ferrell. Boats and Hoes.
As usual, I had a slow Tuesday morning. I should come to embrace these mornings because come second trimester, I'm putting an end to it. It's a little late in the game to start computer lessons for this trimester, especially since I'll probably be in Maputo, again, in the middle of March. I want to have some continuity, so I will wait until April to get going. I spent the morning perched on the patio, reading an Economist from way to long ago.
The morning was especially slow because I didn't have to lesson plan. I only had 45 minutes with each of my classes and all I had to do was return exams. The students, for the most part, did alright. There were no grade disputes, other than three miscalculations I made. And I'm pretty sure I made an enemy for life out of the girl who I called out for cheating. She didn't admit it at first, but after I showed her the exams, she had no choice but to agree. I was kind with her: I only took half the points instead of giving her a zero, like I usually do.
I was happy to have a short work day because I had some work to take care of for some other teachers. As usual, a couple teachers turned to me to type up an exam. I have no problem with this, but I have come to like the social science exams a lot more than the hard science and math exams. There is way to much notational stuff – square roots, subscripts, other stuff I've never seen – and it ends up being a royal pain in my ass. Regardless, I made my way through this math exam. It took me a couple nights and one afternoon to finish.
When the energy came on, all I had to do was print out the exam for the teacher. We cooked up some beans and watched “500 Days of Summer”. I had no expectations for this movie, and it turned out to be pretty funny. It had a great humor about it.
I had an extraordinarily productive Wednesday. I used to the first couple of weeks to get my students acquainted to the idea of reading comprehension. This really was a three week shock-and-awe assault for them. I have grand plans to teach these students the actual national curriculum, but this can't start until I get the book. Until then, I'll be reviewing grammar with them. This morning, I figured out how I was going to get a year of grammar (the stuff I taught them last year) into six weeks. They should, in theory, know the stuff, but I know they need to see it at least a couple more times before it kind of sticks.
The afternoon wasn't nearly as productive. I didn't have to teach until 4:00 and I didn't have a lot to do until then. I cleaned up a little around the house. My room was in dire need of a decent cleaning. I didn't get so far as to mop, but at least my room was recognizable again.
Class went okay. The students seem to understand what I was getting at. At least, I hope they did. Present simple is like Day One of seventh grade English. They should know this stuff like the back of their hand, but I have to teach to the lowest of the low.
In comparison to my day, Richie's day was brutal. He gave exams for almost the entire day. As we have said time and time again, giving exams is one of the most painful experiences we have here. We constantly have to fight the cheaters and keeping a tight eye on those students is seriously exhausting. Anyways, he took about a quarter of the exams from one class. That's just depressing. So I treated him to a beer at the market. And I cooked dinner.
We didn't watch anything tonight because Richie wanted to get all of his exams corrected. I won't forgive him for this. Until tomorrow.
For the first time all week, we didn't have any rain. It was still grey for most of the day but not a single drop fell. This was highly fortunate for Richie. After teaching a couple of classes, Richie decided to embark on a journey that we not yet done: the one-day bank run to Inhassoro. Usually we take at least two days to go to Vilanculos, but Richie was poor and he didn't want to spend the night anywhere. Due to his classes, he got a late jump – around 9:30 – but with some luck, he'd get back.
Before he left, I made a run to the market. I figured that if he's going to be taking money out of the bank for me, I should at least get him some bread to eat before leaving. He only told me after that he had a loaf of bread before class. This is what I get for trying to be nice.
I spent the morning trying to do some Kakuro. I put the emphasis on trying. I failed miserably on almost every possible. I fell into a pattern. I'd move pretty well through the puzzle, get stuck, make as educated a guess as possible and inevitably be wrong. It's frustrating having to look at the answers to see where I fucked up. At least my mind was busy.
I taught first and second period in the afternoon, which was nice. Given the choice, I think I would much rather teach in the morning and just get it done. But since I don't have that luxury, the least I could ask for is getting the classes done as quickly as possible in the afternoon. With the exception of Wednesday, I teach first period every afternoon. The scheduling gods were on my side.
The afternoon was spent on the patio. Around 2:00, I got a text from Richie saying that he was “going for it”. He really wanted to make it back to day. God bless that child. It's a lot of travel for one day, even though it's not more than 250 kilometers. I kept wondering when he was going to make it, if he was going to make it at all. In the worst case scenario, he could stay in Mambone for the night, but that sort of defeats the purpose.
Around 5:30, Richie rolled up to the house. It took eight hours and a lot of sunburn, but we both had money. I owed him, big time. I cooked up dinner. He wanted to watch “Hitmen” – some movie with a lot of killing – because he said he wanted to kill everyone today. I can't blame him. After eating, we watched some random Michael Jordan highlights and “Parks and Recreation”.
Much like last Friday, I awoke to a math challenge, although this time the other teacher learned his lesson and chose not to make a wager. This was especially beneficial for me because had a bet been made, I probably would have lost. The problem involved solving an inequality with two absolute values. I know how to do inequalities with one absolute value, but it's been many years since I learned the rules of inequalities with two. Thankfully, my handy internet USB thing was working decently and I was able to get some information.
I worked at this problem for a good hour or two, and the answer finally came to me. I don't know if it's the best way to solve it. I'm sure it wasn't the best way to solve it, but it was correct nonetheless. If there are any math wizards who want a crack at solving it, here it is: |x-3<|2x-3|. The answer is x<0 and x>2. Anyone who sends me an eloquent manner of solving this gets an acknowledgment I'd offer a cookie or a toy or something, but I'm a bit far away.
It's a little funny: over the year-plus that we've been here, Richie and I have fallen into certain roles. Richie is the person that people come to with news of a death. I don't know why. Richie is also the person who is also more willing to go to public events. I, on the other hand, am the problem man. If there is a computer issue, they come to me. A math problem can't be solved: they send it to the “dono da matematica”.
The technology helper is the role I especially like. Sure, there are other people who can probably figure out a physics problem, but the Casa do Muzungu is the last line of defense for computers. A couple nights ago, one of the teachers from another school came over with his virus-riddled computer. It's taken me days to get it back to functioning. This morning, I made it half way through the virus scan and managed to get rid of no fewer than 290 infected files. There will be more work to do later.
All of this problem-solving took up the entire morning. I must say that although I like having down time, I think I'd rather be too busy than too bored. The time just drags on when there's nothing to do.
On this day, however, a short break would have been nice. I went straight from problem-solving to teaching. I was due for four periods of English. I filled two periods with the first group with no problem. The second class was more challenging, even though I was teaching the same material. Two-thirds of the class wasn't there, and they ones that we're there were not really all together there. They had already started their weekend, so I promised we would move quickly. I finished class a half hour early and everyone was grateful.
I knew what I was in for when I got back to the house: drinking. Richie wanted to drink, a colleague wanted to drink, and who am I to say no? It would have been nice to drink something other than pineapple flavored gin, but we made it work. I took care of dinner – rice with shrimp. I'm no fan of shrimp, but after tonight, I am convinced that anything can taste good if you drown it in enough butter, garlic, and lemon juice.
The drinking recommenced after eating. We knocked out another flask of gin and then Richie thought it would be a good idea to go to the villa for beers. I knew as soon as I stepped out of the school that this was a bad decision. We sat around drinking for another three hours. By midnight, I was done. Richie and our colleague wanted to keep drinking. They tried to convince me to stay, but I know when I've had my fill.
My timing could have been better, but it could have been a lot worse. Three hundred yards from the house, the deluge began. I was soaked in seconds, but luckily the roads didn't turn to mud immediately. I made it home without incident, just soaked.
I found out Saturday morning that Richie wasn't so lucky. They came back at 3 in the morning. And the roads were finished. Richie simply gave up: he took off his shoes so he could trudge through without getting stuck in the mud.
We had a school meeting scheduled for 7:30 in the morning, which was just dandy. Richie and I both felt miserable. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't even bother going to this type of meeting. I know that that most of the time, these meetings don't really mean much to us. They are usually administrative things that don't apply to us Peace Corps Volunteers. And yet, on this day, we chose to go.
There was another mistake that we made. There has yet to be a meeting that has started on time, yet we chose to arrive at 7:25. What the fuck were we thinking?! The meeting didn't start until 8:30 and there was, as anticipated, nothing of importance for us. After an hour, I got up, pretending to take a very important phone call. I told Richie that he had to leave and we made our great escape.
We were both useless for the rest of the day. It was a perfect day to spend in bed. I did absolutely nothing of value and neither did Richie. The cloud cover gave us another reason to stay in. It never really downpoured like it did last night, but the constant drizzle and the threat of a drenching was enough to keep us in.
Following dinner, one of our colleagues came over with something new and interesting: white wine. People here love their red wine. They usually mix it with Coca-Cola. I refuse to taint red wine like that, but Richie says it's good. Anyways, this new white wine was pretty good. Add the fact that it was cold and I was very happy.
The clouds never left and Richie was full of hope. “It won't rain tonight, probably tomorrow”. I'll trust him for now.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Year 2 - Week 10: These Are A Few of My Favorite Things
Sunday. Another travel day. Does it ever end? Thankfully, today it does. At least I slept well. With all the people at the house, there was a severe shortage beds. But I found something better than a bed: sand. Between the girls' house and the ocean is a lovely patch of sand that the tide does not reach. Two other Volunteers and I found our way there and slept beautifully. The only downside was that I woke up with an ant in my ear.
I got to the chapa stand on the early end, which was fortunate. The chapa from Mambone never arrived and it wasn't going to. This wasn't the first time that this happened and we know how to handle it. After a year plus, I hope we know how to handle just about any situation here.
We left earlier than usual and we got home later than usual. Our rides were on the slow side. And when we got to the river, it was just the two of us. No one was crossing the river today, and we told the boat person this. He, however, did not believe this. "You can pay double or we can wait for two more people", said the boatman. We told him that it would happily wait. We had nowhere to go and it would only get cooler as the day went on. This was a showdown for the ages, but we were committed to winning this battle. We sat there for an hour, in the shade of a pile of beer crates.
But we won. I think the boatman went especially slow on our trip across the river, just to spite us. We labored our way from the river to our house and...no one is home. Damn it, Sozinho. Why can't you just be home when we get home? After a couple minutes, he showed up, and we gave up for the rest of the afternoon.
I don't think anything happened when we were asleep. The night was pretty good. We ate spaghetti, I talked to my parents, and we watched "Glee". "Glee" has quickly climbed the list of our favorite television shows. And once again - and I hate to this - I was happy to be back in Machanga. Or maybe I was happy not to be going anywhere for a while.
It was back to work on Monday. I spent the morning figuring out how to march on with my eleventh graders. They've been doing such a great job and I just wanted to keep them marching forward.
This was the last day that I would teach present simple to those students. All we did in class was question writing. A couple of kids were a little slow to pick it up, but I think they got it for the most part.
Teaching five hours in the afternoon can be exhausting, no doubt about it. I think that the travel day from yesterday did not help my cause. But man, I was wiped. I didn't want to do anything, but I didn't manage to cook a pretty tasty stir fry. We ate, watched "Glee" and went to sleep.
I was called into the director's office early Tuesday morning. I hate this, so much. Everyone in the director's office usually speaks really fast. And for some reason, I always think that if I'm being called to the director's office, I must be in trouble, something must have gone wrong. Usually that something going wrong is a computer, but there was no computer today -- just the two assistant directors. One of them began: "You were really busy last year, 26 hours per week". Yup. "And you're busy again this year". Check. Where are we going with this. "How about you only teach 12th grade this year?" Yes. Yes. Y. E. S.
Now, given the choice between keeping 11th grade and keeping 12th grade, I think I would have preferred to keep 11th grade. They seem more enthusiastic and I feel like there is a lot more that they can learn. But it's really hard to argue with a teaching schedule that doesn't have me teach on Mondays and has me teaching no more than four hours on any other day. If there is any downside to this, it was realized right away. It usually doesn't take me long to lesson plan, but it does take up a small portion of my morning. When I got back to the house, I just sat down. I had no planning to do. What the hell am I supposed to do now? In the weeks and months that come, I'd like to fill these mornings with computer classes, but for now, there is nothing to do.
I had two classes in the afternoon, a whole 90 minutes of work. After such an exhausting day of teaching, I clearly deserved a nap. Richie, I believe, now hates me for my glorious teaching schedule. But he really is in no place to complain. Even with his "strenuous" 18 hours a week, he still has a day off. And he only taught eight hours a week last year. And oh yea, Richie doesn't teach on Tuesday afternoons, so we made our way to the villa to buy some stuff. Mostly, we just wanted to buy tomatoes so we could have some decent beans tonight.
We thought that one of the benefits of having Sozinho live with us would be his cooking. It's not just that Mozambican beans are pretty tasty; it's that we wouldn't have to do anything except eat them. What we didn't count on would be Sozinho taking an unholy three and a half hours to cook dinner. Unlike Sozinho, who eats three to four times a day (who knew having kids would be so damn expensive? Oh, wait...), Richie and I rarely eat more than twice a day -- lunch and dinner. We really can't wait 10 hours in between those meals. That's just wrong. Plus he didn't even use the tomatoes in the beans. He half-assed it tonight, and at that point, I vowed to myself that I would be taking over in the kitchen.
Due to the mild bought of starvation last night, I did sleep pretty well. I was in for another rough day of teaching -- 90 minutes with the same group of kids. Since the first day of class this year, the 12th graders have been doing only reading comprehension. This makes up 25% of the national exam and most of them fail this part miserably. So I have been trying to give them a paragraph to read every day, followed by questions. I would say most of the students get 60% or more right. But there are some who still ask me for the definition of cognates, like "What is 'independence' in Portuguese?" Uhh, independencia. The first eight letters are the same. Come on.
Before I had the pleasure of doing more reading comprehension with my students, I was called into duto for tech help. A teacher who was here last year was transfered into the District Education building, a promotion to say the least. With promotions, apparently, come computers and his was having issues, so he turned to me. I have to say that these moments make me the happiest. I feel useful in these moments. I went over to his new office and fixed his problem and another computer issue. I'm a hero
Today's paragraph was about something I thought the students would appreciate: telephones. Even in the bush of a developing country like Mozambique, everyone and their mothers have cell phones. Under normal circumstances, I'd say that the students would enjoy reading about their beloved tele-communication babies. But this was for English class, so they hated it. Again, the students kill me with the cognates. The question was simple: This paragraph is about ________. I even made it multiple choice for them. A) correction B) communication C) collection D) corruption. I was astounded by the number of students who managed to answer something other than B.
This was only mildly depressing. After Richie finished with his classes, we headed over to the villa for a soda. And we managed to find some beef, which was good news since we had no idea what we wanted to do for dinner. We went back to an old favorite: Mexican rice bowls. It's Mexican food without the pain in the ass of tortilla-making. After filling our bellies with delicious Mexican food, we watched "Parks and Recreations", a knock-off of "The Office". It's pretty good, not great, but I think it will take some time to come around on.
Thursday was a lot like Wednesday, except for the tech help. Same lesson, different students, same mistakes, same agony. I won't get into the frustration that was this lesson. Instead I'll address the frustration that is the "voting up system" in the education system here. I can't address the exact details of this system, mostly because it's so outrageous that I reguse to participate in it. Unlike American schools, where you are required to pass subject by subject (for example, you need to pass Spanish 1 before Spanish 2), students in Mozambique pass an entire grade collectively. So they can still fail subjects but pass the overall year. But there's a limit on how many subjects one can fail. Except, there is voting up. If a person fails one too many subjects, they can be voted up by a teacher to pass a subject. This is why some of my 12th grade students have the education level of say, an 8th grader. There are a lot of things I won't miss about this school system, and this sits close to the top of the list.
Moving on to Friday, which was far more exciting. Friday was exam day for all of my students. This should be interesting to say the least. There were questions about topics: Mozambican politics and airplanes. Half was multiple choice, half were question and answer. I'd like to think that most of the students would get the multiple choice questions right. We'll see. From the exams that I looked at, it seems like students were more or less doing okay. I think most will pass.
Being Friday, we had to do something. One of our colleagues thought it would be a good idea to drink wine on our patio, and who were we to object. It started with one bottle, then two, and by dinner time, there were five bottles knocked off. At one point, I called Richie a prostitute. He agreed. He has big plans to open a brothel here, but he needs the seed money to do it. To raise this money, he will sell himself. Come get him, ladies.
I took care of the bean cooking tonight. This prompted him to call me "the wife" in the relationship. I guess I deserved that, you know, since I called him a prostitute. Following the disaster that was Sozinho cooking beans, I've decided to take matters into my own hands. I cooked beans American-style - chili. And I won over the Mozambican crowd. This can only be a considered a victory for America.
I woke up Saturday morning at 6:30, feeling good, to the vibration of my phone. A colleague texted me, in English, saying he had a question. Coming from this teacher, I knew this had to be a math question. For some reason, the school decided to give a chemistry teacher the responsibility of teaching math. I can see some logic in this -- sure, there is some basic algebra used in chemistry, balancing equations and such -- but I don't think a lot of calculus is required for high school chemistry. Regardless, this teacher wisely consulted me for some help. Of course, I was happy to do so.
I explained a few things for him, and he seemed to understand my logic. But we had a disagreement about a particular problem involving square roots. He believed he was right and was willing to put up a wager of five beers on the problem. This was his mistake. These are a few of my favorite things: beer, gambling, and math. And he chose to throw them all together. Being certain in my answer, I took the bet and shut up. He, however, continued to talk until we saw the answer guide. "I'm going to win". "The beer is mine". This is when I knew I had victory. There is nothing like the sound of false confidence.
The assistant director came over with the answer and I was write. The teacher who bet me was left saying "the answer sheet is wrong". Right. I smiled and awaited my five beers. The assistant director laughed at the teacher. "You bet him five beers?!" Even he realized what a mistake this was.
Basking in the glory of my victory, I decided to keep the academic momentum rolling. I spent most of the morning correcting one set of exams. The kids seem to be doing alright. I'm still appalled by their lack of ability to write a sentence in present tense, but they are at least understanding most of the information.
The afternoon was slow, almost painfully slow. I made my way through a couple of magazines from November. I have no idea where we stand on things like healthcare in America. All I do know is that the Democrats really fucked things up in Massachusetts. Either way, it's still news to me. At some point, I gave up on reading and just fell asleep.
Our night was also less than exciting. We ate spaghetti, mostly out of laziness and because we had tomatoes. It's down season for tomatoes now, so the market rarely has them, and when they do, they're expensive. After dinner, we watched "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist". I could have done with just the soundtrack. The actual film sucked.
I got to the chapa stand on the early end, which was fortunate. The chapa from Mambone never arrived and it wasn't going to. This wasn't the first time that this happened and we know how to handle it. After a year plus, I hope we know how to handle just about any situation here.
We left earlier than usual and we got home later than usual. Our rides were on the slow side. And when we got to the river, it was just the two of us. No one was crossing the river today, and we told the boat person this. He, however, did not believe this. "You can pay double or we can wait for two more people", said the boatman. We told him that it would happily wait. We had nowhere to go and it would only get cooler as the day went on. This was a showdown for the ages, but we were committed to winning this battle. We sat there for an hour, in the shade of a pile of beer crates.
But we won. I think the boatman went especially slow on our trip across the river, just to spite us. We labored our way from the river to our house and...no one is home. Damn it, Sozinho. Why can't you just be home when we get home? After a couple minutes, he showed up, and we gave up for the rest of the afternoon.
I don't think anything happened when we were asleep. The night was pretty good. We ate spaghetti, I talked to my parents, and we watched "Glee". "Glee" has quickly climbed the list of our favorite television shows. And once again - and I hate to this - I was happy to be back in Machanga. Or maybe I was happy not to be going anywhere for a while.
It was back to work on Monday. I spent the morning figuring out how to march on with my eleventh graders. They've been doing such a great job and I just wanted to keep them marching forward.
This was the last day that I would teach present simple to those students. All we did in class was question writing. A couple of kids were a little slow to pick it up, but I think they got it for the most part.
Teaching five hours in the afternoon can be exhausting, no doubt about it. I think that the travel day from yesterday did not help my cause. But man, I was wiped. I didn't want to do anything, but I didn't manage to cook a pretty tasty stir fry. We ate, watched "Glee" and went to sleep.
I was called into the director's office early Tuesday morning. I hate this, so much. Everyone in the director's office usually speaks really fast. And for some reason, I always think that if I'm being called to the director's office, I must be in trouble, something must have gone wrong. Usually that something going wrong is a computer, but there was no computer today -- just the two assistant directors. One of them began: "You were really busy last year, 26 hours per week". Yup. "And you're busy again this year". Check. Where are we going with this. "How about you only teach 12th grade this year?" Yes. Yes. Y. E. S.
Now, given the choice between keeping 11th grade and keeping 12th grade, I think I would have preferred to keep 11th grade. They seem more enthusiastic and I feel like there is a lot more that they can learn. But it's really hard to argue with a teaching schedule that doesn't have me teach on Mondays and has me teaching no more than four hours on any other day. If there is any downside to this, it was realized right away. It usually doesn't take me long to lesson plan, but it does take up a small portion of my morning. When I got back to the house, I just sat down. I had no planning to do. What the hell am I supposed to do now? In the weeks and months that come, I'd like to fill these mornings with computer classes, but for now, there is nothing to do.
I had two classes in the afternoon, a whole 90 minutes of work. After such an exhausting day of teaching, I clearly deserved a nap. Richie, I believe, now hates me for my glorious teaching schedule. But he really is in no place to complain. Even with his "strenuous" 18 hours a week, he still has a day off. And he only taught eight hours a week last year. And oh yea, Richie doesn't teach on Tuesday afternoons, so we made our way to the villa to buy some stuff. Mostly, we just wanted to buy tomatoes so we could have some decent beans tonight.
We thought that one of the benefits of having Sozinho live with us would be his cooking. It's not just that Mozambican beans are pretty tasty; it's that we wouldn't have to do anything except eat them. What we didn't count on would be Sozinho taking an unholy three and a half hours to cook dinner. Unlike Sozinho, who eats three to four times a day (who knew having kids would be so damn expensive? Oh, wait...), Richie and I rarely eat more than twice a day -- lunch and dinner. We really can't wait 10 hours in between those meals. That's just wrong. Plus he didn't even use the tomatoes in the beans. He half-assed it tonight, and at that point, I vowed to myself that I would be taking over in the kitchen.
Due to the mild bought of starvation last night, I did sleep pretty well. I was in for another rough day of teaching -- 90 minutes with the same group of kids. Since the first day of class this year, the 12th graders have been doing only reading comprehension. This makes up 25% of the national exam and most of them fail this part miserably. So I have been trying to give them a paragraph to read every day, followed by questions. I would say most of the students get 60% or more right. But there are some who still ask me for the definition of cognates, like "What is 'independence' in Portuguese?" Uhh, independencia. The first eight letters are the same. Come on.
Before I had the pleasure of doing more reading comprehension with my students, I was called into duto for tech help. A teacher who was here last year was transfered into the District Education building, a promotion to say the least. With promotions, apparently, come computers and his was having issues, so he turned to me. I have to say that these moments make me the happiest. I feel useful in these moments. I went over to his new office and fixed his problem and another computer issue. I'm a hero
Today's paragraph was about something I thought the students would appreciate: telephones. Even in the bush of a developing country like Mozambique, everyone and their mothers have cell phones. Under normal circumstances, I'd say that the students would enjoy reading about their beloved tele-communication babies. But this was for English class, so they hated it. Again, the students kill me with the cognates. The question was simple: This paragraph is about ________. I even made it multiple choice for them. A) correction B) communication C) collection D) corruption. I was astounded by the number of students who managed to answer something other than B.
This was only mildly depressing. After Richie finished with his classes, we headed over to the villa for a soda. And we managed to find some beef, which was good news since we had no idea what we wanted to do for dinner. We went back to an old favorite: Mexican rice bowls. It's Mexican food without the pain in the ass of tortilla-making. After filling our bellies with delicious Mexican food, we watched "Parks and Recreations", a knock-off of "The Office". It's pretty good, not great, but I think it will take some time to come around on.
Thursday was a lot like Wednesday, except for the tech help. Same lesson, different students, same mistakes, same agony. I won't get into the frustration that was this lesson. Instead I'll address the frustration that is the "voting up system" in the education system here. I can't address the exact details of this system, mostly because it's so outrageous that I reguse to participate in it. Unlike American schools, where you are required to pass subject by subject (for example, you need to pass Spanish 1 before Spanish 2), students in Mozambique pass an entire grade collectively. So they can still fail subjects but pass the overall year. But there's a limit on how many subjects one can fail. Except, there is voting up. If a person fails one too many subjects, they can be voted up by a teacher to pass a subject. This is why some of my 12th grade students have the education level of say, an 8th grader. There are a lot of things I won't miss about this school system, and this sits close to the top of the list.
Moving on to Friday, which was far more exciting. Friday was exam day for all of my students. This should be interesting to say the least. There were questions about topics: Mozambican politics and airplanes. Half was multiple choice, half were question and answer. I'd like to think that most of the students would get the multiple choice questions right. We'll see. From the exams that I looked at, it seems like students were more or less doing okay. I think most will pass.
Being Friday, we had to do something. One of our colleagues thought it would be a good idea to drink wine on our patio, and who were we to object. It started with one bottle, then two, and by dinner time, there were five bottles knocked off. At one point, I called Richie a prostitute. He agreed. He has big plans to open a brothel here, but he needs the seed money to do it. To raise this money, he will sell himself. Come get him, ladies.
I took care of the bean cooking tonight. This prompted him to call me "the wife" in the relationship. I guess I deserved that, you know, since I called him a prostitute. Following the disaster that was Sozinho cooking beans, I've decided to take matters into my own hands. I cooked beans American-style - chili. And I won over the Mozambican crowd. This can only be a considered a victory for America.
I woke up Saturday morning at 6:30, feeling good, to the vibration of my phone. A colleague texted me, in English, saying he had a question. Coming from this teacher, I knew this had to be a math question. For some reason, the school decided to give a chemistry teacher the responsibility of teaching math. I can see some logic in this -- sure, there is some basic algebra used in chemistry, balancing equations and such -- but I don't think a lot of calculus is required for high school chemistry. Regardless, this teacher wisely consulted me for some help. Of course, I was happy to do so.
I explained a few things for him, and he seemed to understand my logic. But we had a disagreement about a particular problem involving square roots. He believed he was right and was willing to put up a wager of five beers on the problem. This was his mistake. These are a few of my favorite things: beer, gambling, and math. And he chose to throw them all together. Being certain in my answer, I took the bet and shut up. He, however, continued to talk until we saw the answer guide. "I'm going to win". "The beer is mine". This is when I knew I had victory. There is nothing like the sound of false confidence.
The assistant director came over with the answer and I was write. The teacher who bet me was left saying "the answer sheet is wrong". Right. I smiled and awaited my five beers. The assistant director laughed at the teacher. "You bet him five beers?!" Even he realized what a mistake this was.
Basking in the glory of my victory, I decided to keep the academic momentum rolling. I spent most of the morning correcting one set of exams. The kids seem to be doing alright. I'm still appalled by their lack of ability to write a sentence in present tense, but they are at least understanding most of the information.
The afternoon was slow, almost painfully slow. I made my way through a couple of magazines from November. I have no idea where we stand on things like healthcare in America. All I do know is that the Democrats really fucked things up in Massachusetts. Either way, it's still news to me. At some point, I gave up on reading and just fell asleep.
Our night was also less than exciting. We ate spaghetti, mostly out of laziness and because we had tomatoes. It's down season for tomatoes now, so the market rarely has them, and when they do, they're expensive. After dinner, we watched "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist". I could have done with just the soundtrack. The actual film sucked.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Year 2 - Week 9: Reclamation
Maputo on Sunday is an interesting place. Sure, a lot of cities around the world slow down on Sundays, but I'd say that most stores are open. There is still action in the streets. This is not at all the case in Maputo. Maputo comes to a near standstill. You can count the cars on the road on one hand and even the normally-bustling Maputo Shopping Center doesn't officially open until late in morning..
It would have been nice to have the last piece of information before we made our way downtown on Sunday morning. We had a couple of things we needed to get done and we were lucky that they were all in the same general area: there was shopping to be done at Hiper Supermarket, test results to be picked up, and a bus ticket to be bought. The bus depot, supposedly open at 8:00, wasn't open when we got there at 8:30. I picked up my test results – of course they meant nothing to me – and we made our way to Maputo Shopping Center, hoping that we could get some shopping done.
We walked around Maputo, trying to find a way to kill some time, quench our thirst and sate my hunger. We stumbled across a hole in the wall with an aroma emanating from the open door. I followed my knows and came across what have to be the best french fries in all of Mozambique. If I were in a better financial situation, I would have bought a second order. In this morning of small defeats, this was a huge victory.
Maputo Shopping didn't open until 10:00, and even then, it didn't really open. Sure, the doors were open, but Hiper was closed. Conveniently, a drug store sat right next to the supermarket. It then became a three-way race of what would open first: the supermarket, the drug store, or the bus depot. The drug store opened it's doors first, but the supermarket allowed customers in first. Point goes to the supermarket.
In the holiness that is the supermarket, it would be easy to go crazy. But after blowing through thousands of Meticais this weekend on medical stuff, food, and hotel rooms, I would have to be restrained. I managed to escape just buying Listerine and garlic salt, things impossible to buy in Vilanculos.
Our slow-starting day picked up quite quickly. Right after leaving the supermarket, I dropped into the pharmacy to pick up the last of my three drugs needed to treat my malady. And before heading to pick up the bus ticket, I enjoyed a couple shwarmas. This is why I love Maputo: for the shwarma – and the other international cuisine.
The rest of the day was pretty calm. Knowing that I would be on my way out of here soon, I wanted to soak in the hotel room. It's a pretty barren room – everything you need, nothing you don't. CNN had sufficient coverage of the Super Bowl and National Geographic had a hilarious show on called “Monkey Thieves”, based in Jaipur, India. Those monkeys are hilarious.
Super Bowl Sunday doesn't really feel the same in Mozambique. There is no hype, there are no commercials and it's nearly impossible to watch the game. Due to the time difference, the game didn't come on until 1 AM. Hell, it's no longer Super Sunday – it's Super Monday, and that just doesn't sound right. Whatever – I'll wake up Monday morning, hoping to hear news of a Saints victory.
This wasn't a particularly fair Super Bowl for the Indianapolis Colts. If they were playing a team from any other city, the division amongst fans from outside the city would be a little more evenly split. But given the recent history of New Orleans, people from outside of the Midwest couldn't help but root for this team. I include myself in this group. I was thrilled to see 31-17 score on Monday morning. And as if I wasn't pissed off enough at the Chargers for consistently choking in the playoffs, I became even more pissed at them, knowing that they discarded Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees. Stupid, just stupid.
We had a very busy Monday. Peace Corps was holding this big annual internal planning meeting. There's no need to get into details, but it was fascinating to see a lot of things that us Volunteers really don't see from the outside. Although it sometimes seems like the office is out of touch with Volunteers in the field, we could tell that they were doing their best to make our lives as easy as possible. And it was really interesting to see where Peace Corps in Mozambique is heading in the next couple of years.
The meeting lasted all day, 8:30 to 5:30. As happy as I was to participate in this meeting, I was happier to get out of there. After all, Monday is two-for-one pizza night at Pirata, a restaurant one block away from our hotel. Of course the pizza was good, but this night was made by one particular event. As we sat waiting for our food, a man walked by with a huge black and white painting of the now-iconic image of Obama, looking slightly up and to the future. I had no interest in buying it, but I had to at least see the price tag.
The 700 Meticais the man wanted was laughable, so I figured I'd bargain with him, just to see how low I could go. First I played the “I live here” card: down to 600. Then I pulled the “I'm an American, this is my president” ploy: down to 500. I offered him 250, and he said 300. I told him I'd consider it. I shared the news with my colleagues, telling them that they could get it for 250. Girls definitely have an advantage in this: a man is much more likely to reduce the price for a pretty face than for a bearded mug.
I stayed up late Monday night, getting in as much internet and TV time as possible. Even though I know I have to come back to Maputo in March, knowing that I'm going to go five weeks without life's little luxuries made me want to get the most out of them. This decision – to stay up late – would come back to bite me. I was up at 4 in the morning to catch the Suicide Bus to Mambone.
Why do we call it the Suicide Bus? you ask. Because if you sat on a bus for fifteen hours and still not arrive at home, you'd want to kill yourself too. Plus, it's a piece of shit. This bus looks like it's been through a war. And yet, it still runs. This bus typically leaves at 6 in the morning, but for some reason today, it didn't leave until 7:45. Of course, this was frustrating, but it's not like I had control of the situation. I would laugh hours later when the driver got pissed off that we would arrive at night. All I could think was, “Your the asshole with the keys. You have control of this situation”.
The day was rather uneventful. The roads, save for a small, recently paved stretch north of Xai Xai, still suck. I made the huge mistake of sitting on the wrong side of the bus. That's right, the wrong side of the bus. I had the sun on my side of the bus for most of the trip. The ride sucks as it is; having the sun on your face for the entire trip only added to the pain.
We pulled into Mambone just after 9 at night. I know where Gary's house is, but he was still waiting for me on the side of the road. I should correct that last statement: I know where Gary's house WAS. His school plowed it so they could put up the teacher housing. In the meantime, Gary is living with his school director – awkward to say the least. He cooked me up for dinner and I happily slept on the floor.
The whole point of getting all the way to Mambone last night was to be able to teach on Wednesday. I still felt like shit after the fifteen-hour bus ride. Being dehydrated, even though I'm making an effort to drink more, didn't help. I knew as soon as I walked out of Gary's house that I wouldn't be teaching. My teaching schedule conveniently allowed me to cancel class without screwing everything up.
I spent the afternoon, for the most part, asleep. I was very happy, even in the horror that is my bed. When I wasn't out like a light, I was busy sweating and reading a magazine, a much better alternative to teaching.
After dinner, we decided to try something new. Of course we watched something, but we have a pretty standard viewing schedule. “Glee” would be something new. Something very, very new. I've heard that it does a decent job of mocking the “High School Musical” series, and I'm all for any show that goes after that disaster of a movie series. I must say, it's a pretty good show. The music is pretty good, it's got plenty of plot to it, and the humor is just enough to keep you interested.
There were no excuses for missing work on Thursday. Richie, on the other hand, found one. He canceled class on Wednesday because he was sick. His fever returned again on Thursday. Lucky him. In the meantime, I went about planning my eleventh grade classes. I wanted to pick up where I left off last week, continuing with present simple. I've come to realize that I like this kind of stuff a lot: the absolute basics. Teaching the more complicated concepts is interesting and all – I've learned how much English and other languages are alike in the more complex forms – but we rarely use those forms in conversation. I like the basics.
And there is definitely a connection between teaching what you like and how well the class goes. This class went beautifully. It seemed like the kids really understood what was going on. And I like these kids, which helps. Most of them seem to want to learn, and if they don't, they're doing a hell of an acting job. They also seem more prepared than last year's eleventh graders.
Classes were fine and all, but I was on a far more important mission Thursday afternoon. Sozinho had taken over a fair portion of my room. Some of it I willingly conceded. I figured if I just gave him an assigned space, he would stick to it. I was wrong. As much as he does to keep our house clean, he has limited my privacy and sense of personal space just as much. This had to change.
I have kept a school desk top under my bed as support for my back. I weighed the pros and cons and came to the conclusion that my personal space was more important than my back. The desk, put together with some nails and wire quickly became a closet for Sozinho. It took a total of one hour to get Sozinho completely out of my room. This is nothing short of a huge victory for me.
The night could only get better at this point. We made sandwiches for dinner, watched some “Glee” and I turned into my – yes, my! – room. It was at this point that I regretted my decision to get Sozinho out of my room. As I crawled into bed, I completely understood when Ron Burgundy when he says “I immediately regret this decision”. The board that became Sozinho's closet was the only thing keeping my mattress comfortable. It sagged like the economy, and probably produced more discomfort than the economy too! I wasn't able to fall asleep until 1:00.
As soon as I woke up, I sought a solution. I had one other board that I kept under my mattress, but this one ran long and skinny. I think that I managed my way onto it last night. It would be the last night that the long board stayed as one piece. I broke out a saw, cut the one board into two, and had what seemed to be better back support. Once again, a huge victory.
Classes today were okay, at best. I intended to have a conversation about celebrities in my twelfth grade class. For some insane reason, the curriculum calls for a this topic of discussion. I don't know how they expect people to talk about celebrities when they can barely say, “Hi my name is Joao”. Regardless, I went for it. And it tanked. It was an interesting study though: of the American celebrities mentioned, the first two were Barack Obama and Michael Jackson. After that came a flood of rappers, dead and alive: Tupac, DMX, Eminem, and more. This is what gets exported to Mozambique – rap music. Excellent.
I was on my own for food tonight and we had no food in the house. So I went to the reserves. Thankfully, we had just enough butter and powdered milk for me to make mac and cheese. It's been a good couple months since I've had said delicacy. It was a lovely taste of America.
I slept far batter Friday night than I did on Thursday. I actually beat my alarm to it today. I wanted to be out by 7:30 to get to Vilanculos. Yes, I was on the road again. There was a really big part of me that did not want to travel. I've been away from Machanga so much in the last couple weeks. And it's not that I miss Machanga, but it's tough not being situated. Regardless, I didn't want to miss a second party. GREs pinned me in Maputo during the Central party, and I just couldn't miss the first North Inhambane party.
The long walk to the river started exactly at 7:00. Unlike a lot of my travels from the last couple weeks, the traveling today went pretty smoothly. I didn't have to wait for a canoe at the river, and I only had to wait for one of the three cars I needed to get to Vilanculos. There were only two downsides to this trip. The first was that on the ride out of Mambone, I was pinned against a rice sack full of fish, leaving me smelling like the worst parts of then ocean. The second downside was that for the majority of the day, I was in the back of a truck, leaving me burnt to a crisp. By the end of the day, I smelled like a Red Lobster, and looked like one too.
The day in Vilanculos was largely uneventful. Of course, I got my hamburger at one of our favority hole-in-the-wall places. There was rumor that the new twelfth grade English book was around town. I failed to find it. I'll believe it when I see it. And in an effort to cool down from a 100-degree day, we went swimming in the ocean. However, the ocean was so hot that you could almost use the water for coffee or tea. It helped, but not much.
This would be an interesting party. I think us Moz13ers wanted to see how the new Moz14ers partied. It's impossible to really compare our old friends, the Moz12 group, with this group. It's a whole different dynamic, different personalities, and we just haven't had that much time with the new group. They held their own, for sure. Many games of flip-cup and beer pong were played and, all in all, it was a good time. And as is usual, our party night in Vilanculos ended at AfroBar. This was probably the only disappointing part of the evening, but hey, it can't be perfect all the time.
It would have been nice to have the last piece of information before we made our way downtown on Sunday morning. We had a couple of things we needed to get done and we were lucky that they were all in the same general area: there was shopping to be done at Hiper Supermarket, test results to be picked up, and a bus ticket to be bought. The bus depot, supposedly open at 8:00, wasn't open when we got there at 8:30. I picked up my test results – of course they meant nothing to me – and we made our way to Maputo Shopping Center, hoping that we could get some shopping done.
We walked around Maputo, trying to find a way to kill some time, quench our thirst and sate my hunger. We stumbled across a hole in the wall with an aroma emanating from the open door. I followed my knows and came across what have to be the best french fries in all of Mozambique. If I were in a better financial situation, I would have bought a second order. In this morning of small defeats, this was a huge victory.
Maputo Shopping didn't open until 10:00, and even then, it didn't really open. Sure, the doors were open, but Hiper was closed. Conveniently, a drug store sat right next to the supermarket. It then became a three-way race of what would open first: the supermarket, the drug store, or the bus depot. The drug store opened it's doors first, but the supermarket allowed customers in first. Point goes to the supermarket.
In the holiness that is the supermarket, it would be easy to go crazy. But after blowing through thousands of Meticais this weekend on medical stuff, food, and hotel rooms, I would have to be restrained. I managed to escape just buying Listerine and garlic salt, things impossible to buy in Vilanculos.
Our slow-starting day picked up quite quickly. Right after leaving the supermarket, I dropped into the pharmacy to pick up the last of my three drugs needed to treat my malady. And before heading to pick up the bus ticket, I enjoyed a couple shwarmas. This is why I love Maputo: for the shwarma – and the other international cuisine.
The rest of the day was pretty calm. Knowing that I would be on my way out of here soon, I wanted to soak in the hotel room. It's a pretty barren room – everything you need, nothing you don't. CNN had sufficient coverage of the Super Bowl and National Geographic had a hilarious show on called “Monkey Thieves”, based in Jaipur, India. Those monkeys are hilarious.
Super Bowl Sunday doesn't really feel the same in Mozambique. There is no hype, there are no commercials and it's nearly impossible to watch the game. Due to the time difference, the game didn't come on until 1 AM. Hell, it's no longer Super Sunday – it's Super Monday, and that just doesn't sound right. Whatever – I'll wake up Monday morning, hoping to hear news of a Saints victory.
This wasn't a particularly fair Super Bowl for the Indianapolis Colts. If they were playing a team from any other city, the division amongst fans from outside the city would be a little more evenly split. But given the recent history of New Orleans, people from outside of the Midwest couldn't help but root for this team. I include myself in this group. I was thrilled to see 31-17 score on Monday morning. And as if I wasn't pissed off enough at the Chargers for consistently choking in the playoffs, I became even more pissed at them, knowing that they discarded Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees. Stupid, just stupid.
We had a very busy Monday. Peace Corps was holding this big annual internal planning meeting. There's no need to get into details, but it was fascinating to see a lot of things that us Volunteers really don't see from the outside. Although it sometimes seems like the office is out of touch with Volunteers in the field, we could tell that they were doing their best to make our lives as easy as possible. And it was really interesting to see where Peace Corps in Mozambique is heading in the next couple of years.
The meeting lasted all day, 8:30 to 5:30. As happy as I was to participate in this meeting, I was happier to get out of there. After all, Monday is two-for-one pizza night at Pirata, a restaurant one block away from our hotel. Of course the pizza was good, but this night was made by one particular event. As we sat waiting for our food, a man walked by with a huge black and white painting of the now-iconic image of Obama, looking slightly up and to the future. I had no interest in buying it, but I had to at least see the price tag.
The 700 Meticais the man wanted was laughable, so I figured I'd bargain with him, just to see how low I could go. First I played the “I live here” card: down to 600. Then I pulled the “I'm an American, this is my president” ploy: down to 500. I offered him 250, and he said 300. I told him I'd consider it. I shared the news with my colleagues, telling them that they could get it for 250. Girls definitely have an advantage in this: a man is much more likely to reduce the price for a pretty face than for a bearded mug.
I stayed up late Monday night, getting in as much internet and TV time as possible. Even though I know I have to come back to Maputo in March, knowing that I'm going to go five weeks without life's little luxuries made me want to get the most out of them. This decision – to stay up late – would come back to bite me. I was up at 4 in the morning to catch the Suicide Bus to Mambone.
Why do we call it the Suicide Bus? you ask. Because if you sat on a bus for fifteen hours and still not arrive at home, you'd want to kill yourself too. Plus, it's a piece of shit. This bus looks like it's been through a war. And yet, it still runs. This bus typically leaves at 6 in the morning, but for some reason today, it didn't leave until 7:45. Of course, this was frustrating, but it's not like I had control of the situation. I would laugh hours later when the driver got pissed off that we would arrive at night. All I could think was, “Your the asshole with the keys. You have control of this situation”.
The day was rather uneventful. The roads, save for a small, recently paved stretch north of Xai Xai, still suck. I made the huge mistake of sitting on the wrong side of the bus. That's right, the wrong side of the bus. I had the sun on my side of the bus for most of the trip. The ride sucks as it is; having the sun on your face for the entire trip only added to the pain.
We pulled into Mambone just after 9 at night. I know where Gary's house is, but he was still waiting for me on the side of the road. I should correct that last statement: I know where Gary's house WAS. His school plowed it so they could put up the teacher housing. In the meantime, Gary is living with his school director – awkward to say the least. He cooked me up for dinner and I happily slept on the floor.
The whole point of getting all the way to Mambone last night was to be able to teach on Wednesday. I still felt like shit after the fifteen-hour bus ride. Being dehydrated, even though I'm making an effort to drink more, didn't help. I knew as soon as I walked out of Gary's house that I wouldn't be teaching. My teaching schedule conveniently allowed me to cancel class without screwing everything up.
I spent the afternoon, for the most part, asleep. I was very happy, even in the horror that is my bed. When I wasn't out like a light, I was busy sweating and reading a magazine, a much better alternative to teaching.
After dinner, we decided to try something new. Of course we watched something, but we have a pretty standard viewing schedule. “Glee” would be something new. Something very, very new. I've heard that it does a decent job of mocking the “High School Musical” series, and I'm all for any show that goes after that disaster of a movie series. I must say, it's a pretty good show. The music is pretty good, it's got plenty of plot to it, and the humor is just enough to keep you interested.
There were no excuses for missing work on Thursday. Richie, on the other hand, found one. He canceled class on Wednesday because he was sick. His fever returned again on Thursday. Lucky him. In the meantime, I went about planning my eleventh grade classes. I wanted to pick up where I left off last week, continuing with present simple. I've come to realize that I like this kind of stuff a lot: the absolute basics. Teaching the more complicated concepts is interesting and all – I've learned how much English and other languages are alike in the more complex forms – but we rarely use those forms in conversation. I like the basics.
And there is definitely a connection between teaching what you like and how well the class goes. This class went beautifully. It seemed like the kids really understood what was going on. And I like these kids, which helps. Most of them seem to want to learn, and if they don't, they're doing a hell of an acting job. They also seem more prepared than last year's eleventh graders.
Classes were fine and all, but I was on a far more important mission Thursday afternoon. Sozinho had taken over a fair portion of my room. Some of it I willingly conceded. I figured if I just gave him an assigned space, he would stick to it. I was wrong. As much as he does to keep our house clean, he has limited my privacy and sense of personal space just as much. This had to change.
I have kept a school desk top under my bed as support for my back. I weighed the pros and cons and came to the conclusion that my personal space was more important than my back. The desk, put together with some nails and wire quickly became a closet for Sozinho. It took a total of one hour to get Sozinho completely out of my room. This is nothing short of a huge victory for me.
The night could only get better at this point. We made sandwiches for dinner, watched some “Glee” and I turned into my – yes, my! – room. It was at this point that I regretted my decision to get Sozinho out of my room. As I crawled into bed, I completely understood when Ron Burgundy when he says “I immediately regret this decision”. The board that became Sozinho's closet was the only thing keeping my mattress comfortable. It sagged like the economy, and probably produced more discomfort than the economy too! I wasn't able to fall asleep until 1:00.
As soon as I woke up, I sought a solution. I had one other board that I kept under my mattress, but this one ran long and skinny. I think that I managed my way onto it last night. It would be the last night that the long board stayed as one piece. I broke out a saw, cut the one board into two, and had what seemed to be better back support. Once again, a huge victory.
Classes today were okay, at best. I intended to have a conversation about celebrities in my twelfth grade class. For some insane reason, the curriculum calls for a this topic of discussion. I don't know how they expect people to talk about celebrities when they can barely say, “Hi my name is Joao”. Regardless, I went for it. And it tanked. It was an interesting study though: of the American celebrities mentioned, the first two were Barack Obama and Michael Jackson. After that came a flood of rappers, dead and alive: Tupac, DMX, Eminem, and more. This is what gets exported to Mozambique – rap music. Excellent.
I was on my own for food tonight and we had no food in the house. So I went to the reserves. Thankfully, we had just enough butter and powdered milk for me to make mac and cheese. It's been a good couple months since I've had said delicacy. It was a lovely taste of America.
I slept far batter Friday night than I did on Thursday. I actually beat my alarm to it today. I wanted to be out by 7:30 to get to Vilanculos. Yes, I was on the road again. There was a really big part of me that did not want to travel. I've been away from Machanga so much in the last couple weeks. And it's not that I miss Machanga, but it's tough not being situated. Regardless, I didn't want to miss a second party. GREs pinned me in Maputo during the Central party, and I just couldn't miss the first North Inhambane party.
The long walk to the river started exactly at 7:00. Unlike a lot of my travels from the last couple weeks, the traveling today went pretty smoothly. I didn't have to wait for a canoe at the river, and I only had to wait for one of the three cars I needed to get to Vilanculos. There were only two downsides to this trip. The first was that on the ride out of Mambone, I was pinned against a rice sack full of fish, leaving me smelling like the worst parts of then ocean. The second downside was that for the majority of the day, I was in the back of a truck, leaving me burnt to a crisp. By the end of the day, I smelled like a Red Lobster, and looked like one too.
The day in Vilanculos was largely uneventful. Of course, I got my hamburger at one of our favority hole-in-the-wall places. There was rumor that the new twelfth grade English book was around town. I failed to find it. I'll believe it when I see it. And in an effort to cool down from a 100-degree day, we went swimming in the ocean. However, the ocean was so hot that you could almost use the water for coffee or tea. It helped, but not much.
This would be an interesting party. I think us Moz13ers wanted to see how the new Moz14ers partied. It's impossible to really compare our old friends, the Moz12 group, with this group. It's a whole different dynamic, different personalities, and we just haven't had that much time with the new group. They held their own, for sure. Many games of flip-cup and beer pong were played and, all in all, it was a good time. And as is usual, our party night in Vilanculos ended at AfroBar. This was probably the only disappointing part of the evening, but hey, it can't be perfect all the time.
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