Giant, man-eating spiders

In a few days I’ll be headed to Nampula for PC’s Regional Conference. I hear there’s a pool at our hotel, and I’m already making a list of things that I need at the grocery store. Shampoo, curry powder, soy sauce… Since green peppers rarely exist in our market, I’ve been buying them in gross quantities. Today I had a crazy craving for variety in my diet, and decided to make stuffed peppers with fried yellow rice. Pure heaven.

Have I mentioned that 90% of the time I eat rice with tomato sauce, spaghetti with tomato sauce, and rice and beans. That’s it! I crave pad thai and juicy burgers and palaak paneer and mozzarella. I feel like I don’t take as many culinary chances because I Dionisio and I eat together. Dionisio, my scrawny Mozambican teenager, is possibly the least athletic person I’ve ever met… he shrieks like a schoolgirl if a soccer ball comes within a meter radius of him. Not too adventurous, if you catch my drift. When I was alone for those few awful months, I used to make a horrible looking concoction that consisted of onions, scrambled eggs and kidney beans, and it was delicious. I called it bachelor chow, but it looked more like puppy chow. No one in their right mind would eat it, and I certainly wouldn’t subject Dio to it. I miss bachelor chow.

Today, as part of my duty as Directora de Turma, I collected information about my students in 8E. Full name, date of birth, age, responsible, etc. It seems that a lot of the kids don’t know how to calculate their age from their birthday. Case in point, during English the other day, I asked one kid “How old is your mother?”, and she responded, “My mother is 24-years-old!” I asked her how old she was, and she replied 16, and I told her to subtract her mother’s age with her own. And then I asked her if it were possible for her mother to have given birth to her when she was eight years old, to which she responded, “No”. After all that, I asked her again, “How old is your mother?” and she responded, “She is 24-years-old!”

I have a new pet spider. She hangs out in the avocado tree growing out of our latrine. She's the size of my hand, with spindly red-tinged legs and an opalescent white and yellow thorax. She’s still growing, and she will eventually double in size, and – out of morbid curiosity – I’ve made everyone promise to let her be so that I see her grow to her full size. Frankly, she really creeps me out. Every time I pass under the tree I make sure that I know exactly where she is, and at night I shine my flashlight first on the tree, and then on the uneven path below my feet. I will endure deep discomfort and the constant fear of a giant spider landing on my head, all in the name of science. Sometimes I watch her dismantle and reform her giant, silky web. She experimented one day by re-constructing her web onto an electric wire running between the house and the latrine. She found it unsuitable and the next day I caught her skillfully cutting each silky thread connected to the wire, and by the afternoon the web was back in the tree.

Pictures will come!