2 February 2015: Poems, groundhog day

                My ausi asked me to find her some short poems that she would try to memorize or something. These are some nice ones, and seemingly relevant to my situation.

Hans Christian Anderson-

“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,

To gain all while you give.

To roam the roads of lands remote,

To travel is to live.”

Risk by Anaïs Nin-

“And then the day came,

When the risk to remain tight in a bud

Was more painful

Than the risk it took to blossom”

Groundhog day: The Sush popped out of her rondaval before the sun was even up, so there was no shadow to be seen, Even so, she jumped back inside because it was so cold, which only means one thing: 8 more months until spring.

2 February 2015: One week down

                The first week of school is over. Considering that there are 100 school days in the first semester, that means that I am 5% done until winter vacation. Is it bad that I’m already thinking about vacation? So far, A has about 50 students, including my oldest ausi. The first thing I tried to each them was how to take notes. I had to tell them like five times to get their notebooks out of their backpacks, open them, and write. They really don’t understand much of any English, which is frustrating. The primary schools are supposed to start teaching only in English at some point, but obviously that doesn’t happen. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I have a weird accent to them or that it’s all English instead of mostly Sesotho with a smattering of English or that they’re new to high school, but hopefully they will get into a rhythm. The other thing they’re not used to is asking questions when they don’t understand. Every time I ask if they get it, they automatically respond, “Yes, teacher.” I think if I said some jibberish like “whale toenails are a formidable precipitation in Mongolian chloroplasts. Understand?” They would say, “Yes, teacher” in a choir-like response. This is just what they are taught to do in primary school. If they don’t understand or if they get an answer wrong, they are normally stick-whacked by the teacher. It’s funny that they call me and the other teachers “Teacher” because I distinctly remember that when I was little, my teachers would get mad if someone called them teacher instead of their name.

                I am getting conflicting information on the homework front. The other math teacher said that I should give homework every day because the kids go home and do nothing, but another PCV I talked to says he rarely gives homework because a lot of the students walk for hours to get home, then they have chores, then they have neither the light nor the tables nor the time to do homework. So I’m trying to find a balance for now. I’m thinking homework twice a week and a weekly quiz on Fridays.

                Absolutely the most annoying and time-sucking part of class is checking classwork. I’ll give them a few problems to do in their notebooks, and every single kid needs a red checkmark in their notebook saying that it’s correct. I made the mistake of using my blue pen to check work and my ausi told me that she needs me to use a red pen. The kids bring their notebooks home to their parents, and the parents look for the red checks to make sure that the kids are doing well or whatever. So in summary, these kids live for red checks. I figured out that I could bring a bunch of red pens and give them to the students who finish first, then they could go around and check other people’s work for me. I also figured out that I can get a smart one to explain something to the class in Sesotho so that they might at least halfway understand better. The way that they “learn” is by copying exactly the words on the board and then memorizing these strings of words. They don’t really understand the actual meaning to well, I think. My ausi was practicing some history definitions, and she can tell me what an archaeologist is in terms of some other big words that she doesn’t know, but I’m sure she doesn’t really understand. Their tests are like that, too. What is ______? And then they fill in the blank with the exact phrases that have been drilled into their skulls. We’re gonna have to work on that, slowly of course.

                Form A computer was hilarious. The first class, none of the computers were set up (again, lack of preparation), so I just went into the classroom and drew a computer, a screen, a keyboard, and a mouse, and sort of taught them those words and verbs like click and type. For the second class of the week, I actually went in ahead of time and set up the computers. If it hadn’t have been me, I don’t think the computers would even be set up yet, even though there are two other teachers who teach computer. Because there was some situation with one of the Form A students, I took all of them into the computer lab where normally I would just take the ones who have paid the M300 computer fee. So here are like 50 students all cramped around like 12 computers. I stood on a chair to get their attention, not knowing it only had 3 legs, and I fell straight on my butt. The computer lab also serves as staff room to two of the teachers and storage room for chairs and desks that need to be repaired. I got up, ain’t no thang, and found a four legged chair on which to give my instructions. I told them to turn it on, find Microsoft word, open it, type the alphabet and their names, save the document, and shut it down. That took the entire 40 minute time slot. A lot of them were looking a little scared to even touch the computer, as most of them had never used on before.

                Form C is the best by far. I only have to act as their “spirit guide,” as one of my friends called it, and teach them life skills. Their English is much better, and one of them was even bold enough to tell me that I was speaking too fast for them to understand. That would have never happened in form A. I kind of asked them what they wanted to do career-wise, and a lot of them are quite ambitious, wanting to get out of this village and do things like be accountants, nurses, and teachers. I also started an anonymous question jar where they can ask anything, so I think that will help me both fill some of the extra time and help me come up with new lessons.

                Lunches are pretty good. In order, this week we had samp, papa and peas, papa and moroho and an egg, papa and moroho, and papa and beans. So much papa, but it’s really not bad food. I’m sure I’ll get sick of it sooner or later, but for now it’s nice to have a hot meal that I didn’t have to cook. There are two girls who are assigned to serve the teachers their lunch and then wash the dishes afterward. The kids bring plates or Tupperware containers and line up outside the kitchen to get lunch. On Fridays, the students clean and work around the school, sweeping and mopping all the floors, cutting the tall grass (the girls braided the cut grass into a rope and played jump rope with it), weeding the gardens, cutting trees for firewood, and things of that nature. The kids are always well-behaved in that they do what needs to be done (unless it’s taking notes…).

                When I don’t have class, there is a lot of down time, so when I finish planning for the next lesson, I mostly read. It gets pretty boring. I’m probably the one who uses the library the most. I’m sure some of the kids don’t even know that’s what that room is for. I’m getting along with the other teachers well, but I don’t talk to them a lot, mostly because they’re talking to each other in Sesotho. Overall, the moral of this story is that I survived the first week mostly intact except for a nice purple bruise on my butt from that deceitful chair.

26 January 2015: First day of school

              First day of school! Man, I never thought I’d ever utter those words after I graduated. But now it’s different because I’m on the other side of it. America’s schools would be peeing themselves if they saw the lack of preparation in the schools here. Today I had planned to do some actual math, but the other teachers said that I should just give them a warm welcome and do intro stuff like class rules and such. The form As were 1) new to this school, 2) probably freaked out because they hadn’t met me like the other grades had during my site visit, and 3) utterly confused by my English. Plus, they were the biggest grade, so that was hard comparatively [from the beginning of the school year to the time that I’m typing this out, each grade has at least doubled in size…A has 64, B has 34, and C has 22 now. This just tells you that getting enrolled and attending school at the beginning is not a super priority for the students/parents]. The form Bs were a much smaller group and more comfortable with me and my English, so they were much easier. I just did name games, explained about myself a little bit, explained how math(s) is useful in pretty much any occupation, and sort of explained what we would be learning about soon. There was a ministry of education inspector at the school who was overly cordial to me, and I was told that he would be back in the near future checking lesson plans and such [update: no such checking has occurred, nor do I think it ever will]. I was thinking that actually being up there in front of the kids would be more stressful, but it was fine. It was kind of boring, actually, waiting around in the staff room for classes to pass or waiting for lunch. I went to the school’s library (a very small room where books were stuffed into sideways, open cardboard boxes as shelves) and got a book to curb my boredom. In summary, I survived. Woo!

Some of the Form Bs

22 January 2015: hair angst / school prep

                I’m really digging the faux-hawk thing my hair is doing right now. It only works like that when it’s semi greasy. It’s too fluffy if it’s fresh-out-the-bucket clean. I tried to just wash it with water yesterday and woke up with gray-looking hair because of the metric ton of crud that I had just managed to evenly distribute through my hair. I proceeded to wash it with bar soap and now it’s too poofy and looks weird. I need to read up on the “no poo” movement and figure out how to get this mass of unruliness under control.

                I start school in four days, and none of the teachers are going to be here until Saturday night. I have tons of questions about school, but those will have to wait until Sunday or afterward, I suppose. If this were the US of A, we would have had stuff like teacher development and setting up the school and planning and whatnot for at least a week. School here is not taken nearly as seriously as many other places; maybe this is why I’m here trying to help out their struggling education system. There would not even be a class schedule by now if I didn’t insist that we make one. I guess my school is better than some, though, as some PCVs won’t even know which classes they will be teaching until school is already underway.

My ausi and me, both with experimental hair styles 

19 January 2015: Visiting, klutzy, and bats

                I’m sitting here on the pink rocks again watching two of my three ausis running back and forth and doing situps and pushups in the grass. I think I have definitely inspired them in the exercise department, plus it’s the school vacation boredom stretch, so they’re just entertaining themselves. I have also been reading Harry Potter with them on my kindle, and giving my oldest ausi some English and math assignments to get ready for the school year. She in particular is very inspiring how she wants to learn, and it’s quite smart of her to take advantage of me living with them so she can ask me for extra help 

                The first thing that’s starting to get on my nerves is that there are always people knocking at my door (“koko!”) just to say “I am visiting you.” Uh, yes, I can see that, thank you. Then there’s an awkward “OK then…” and wordless standing around, then they say bye and leave. A few days ago, one of the Form C girls came in, and after a few minutes of nothingness and standing around, I told her I was working and that I would see her later. I opened the door and she was like “oh, it’s so hot out” so I just told her she could stay inside but that I needed to write some things on my computer. I had some music on, and it was a long while later when I thought that if I turned the music off, maybe she would leave. Bingo. It’s like the same, but opposite, phenomenon of when those stores would play classical music or that high pitched noise to make loitering teenagers to away. In this case, it’s the absence of house music that deters them.

                Last Wednesday at the nearby orphanage, I had lunch with Lauren (my across-the-valley PCV mate) and Jill (the old, British lady who is the director of the orphanage) at the orphanage. It’s an orphanage for orphaned/abandoned/abused kids, and just hearing about how some of the kids came to live here was really saddening. It’s really big, with lots of animals and trees and it seems very well-run. The area is called Plenty after Plenty, Canada, the place the people were from who started the orphanage and some other agricultural and water projects around here many decades ago. Jill is all about helping these kids because it’s relatively easy and inexpensive to change a life around completely. After talking and eating lunch, I went back to Lauren’s house and she showed me how to knit. One of those things I was never interested in is now going to help save me from my boredom. As I was coming back to my village from her house (I’m gonna blame this incident on the fact that it was getting dark out), as I was crossing one of the streams, I was actually thinking to myself, “wouldn’t it be funny if I fell down this little raised part and into the water?” and I must have jinxed myself. Somehow, in slow motion, I did an entire forward roll down the three-foot drop and landed on my butt in the mud/water. No one saw me fall, fortunately, but one ‘me did see me climbing back up, so naturally everyone knows. There’s also the fact that I slipped on the path going from my house down the big hill as I was coming back from xmas vacation, so everyone probably thinks I’m a super klutz. 

                In other news, I’ve been hallway trying to do these oh-so-lovely Phase 2 Assignments that PC gave us to do. There are so many questions to answer- a selection of the questions include: meet-and-greet profiles, description of my school, organizations working in the community, healthcare, shopping, business, community dynamics, and key community figures. Basically, what it amounts to is busy work for people to get out of their huts and to explore the world around them and talk to people instead of being a hermit. 

                In other other (more exciting) news, I found a little bat chilling in my curtain. This would explain all the flapping noises last night. I thought it was a bird flying around outside, but nope, it was a bat inside. Good thing I have this mosquito net, or I might be a superhero with bat-like powers by now. Or rabies. My oldest ausi tried to get it off the curtain with my broom, but I thought this might just cause it to fly around chaotically inside the house, so I got up on a chair with a peanut butter container and somehow kind of scraped it off the curtain, trapping it between the curtain and the container. It was kind of squealing or squeaking or chattering or whatever bats do, which was pretty unnerving, but I got the little sucker in there and threw it in the bushes outside. I have since seen many bats flying around at twilight, and it seems that they live in the underside of the roof outside. I must remember to close my windows after it gets dark, or I may actually return as Bat Girl. 

1 January 2015: New Year

I’m basically bored to tears here. I have almost a month more before I start teaching. I have been passing the time by watching movies on my laptop, wandering around the village, and occasionally working out. Right now, I’m perched up on these little pink rock cliffs slightly up the hill from my house, right above the water tap. There are a bunch of kids around me, trying to read what I’m writing. They don’t really know enough English to read this, but they are just curious to see what I’m doing. So I guess it’s 2015, huh. The year of the start of my work here. The year of self-reliance, of trusting, of learning, of screwing up, of exploration, of building new relationships and trying to hold on to old ones, to inevitable frustrations and hopeful exhilarations. The year of the pursuit of the interests I have had but never had time to follow through on. I’m not making any resolutions, per se, because the start of a year shouldn’t be any different from any other new day. I’m already making tremendous forward strides in terms of learning new things and hopefully growing in other ways, and this is just a reminder to myself to keep it going. Onwards and forwards.

My Basotho nkhono (grandmother), two siblings, and a cousin

My abuti is so sassy

Holding my little ausi, this after she decided to comb my hair

29 December 2014: Mountain climb

                Yesterday I ventured across the smaller valley to the shop to buy some eggs, beans, etc, and on my way back, my ‘Me saw me and called me over. She was working in the field next to the store, behind the house that was her childhood home. Chatting with the women was nice and they even gave me some moroho to take with me. Score! This morning, I got up with the intention of climbing the mountain that my house is toward the bottom of. My littlest ausi and her friend (the same one who accompanied me in the Great Propane Cyllinder Adventure) wanted to go with me. We started to climb up, and they told me that they had never climbed this mountain before. I guess when you live somewhere like this your whole life, doing things like climbing mountains isn’t on your to-do list. The girls needed to stop and rest every few minutes, but that was ok. My ausi was wearing slip-on sandals that were way too big for her, so I have no idea how she made it up (or down) the slope. At the top, the view was unreal. I could see the valley stretch out to both sides, and I had a full view of the villages below and of the ridges extending outward. I wanted to keep going along the ridge, but the girls were hungry and wanted to go home. On the way down, we had fun pointing to things we saw and asking each other how to say them in English or Sesotho. Toward the bottom, the girls ran as fast as they could through the pine forest that is above our houses, occasionally slipping in the pine needles. They ran inside and told my ‘me that we had just come from the mountain, and she was really surprised, like “why would you want to do that?” I have been getting this question a lot here…

26-27 December 2014: Xmas vacation

                For the past few days, PC has “graciously” allowed us to leave site visit other people over the Christmas holiday. It just wish it were a bit later in, though, because I just moved to site a week ago and I don’t really miss people to a large enough extent to “need” to leave my site for my mental sanity or whatever. Tuesday morning, my ‘me was hurrying me along, telling me I was going to be late, so I dumped a bunch of stuff into my big backpack and walked with my little ausi on the path down the hill to the taxi stop. All the taxis that came by were full because everyone in Lesotho is trying to get somewhere else for xmas. After finally cramming into a taxi, I met up with Colleen in the Quthing camptown and we hung out at the hotel where they gave us the wifi password. It was so slow that it barely did anything, but at least it was nice to know that it exists. Somehow, that’s comforting. Then we made the taxi trek to the next camp town north, Mohale’s Hoek, where, from the side of the road, we found Neel waving us up to his house where we also met up with Laurel. We were all making a preliminary pit stop at his house before we made it all the way to Mafeteng to Jeff’s. We cooked, hung out outside, and then went into his host dad’s house where we watched the news. The news was mostly boring and unintelligible, as it was in Sesotho and things around here are normally uneventful. Then after the news, some American crime show came on, and it was really weird seeing something like that after a while of not seeing any kind of TV. Somehow I got really bored during this and started thinking about papa, and how I could rewrite the words of Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” to be a new song about papa, called “Papa Ball”. Don’t ask me how my mind came to think about a ball of corn mash while I watched a crime drama. Our group is quite adept at writing song parodies, so I thought I would work on it and present the results a few days later at Jeff’s place. Overcoming boredom at its finest.

                The next day, xmas eve, we headed to Mafeteng, the next town north, and went to the big grocery store Shoprite. I was in charge of babysitting all our bags outside, since I had nothing I really wanted to buy. By this point, we hd already gone to several Chinese shops for other foodstuffs, including a hilariously large 3 foot long, 2kg bag of Cheetos I was planning to give as my Secret Santa gift. The other three who went into Shoprite said that they spent over an hour in the checkout line because everyone and their mother was in there trying to buy stuff for Christmas. I reminded them to get butter and cheese and chocolate, this being one of the only places around you can find that stuff. There are so many cows, but I have never seen people milk cows. I guess refrigeration isn’t that prevalent, so it would be hard to sell milk in the villages [update: I have since seen people sporadically selling milk]. The line to get in the store was, by this point, all the way down the shopping center and approaching the street. Basotho are either very resilient or very patient- they put up with a lot of inconvenience, like waiting for hours even to get into the grocery store. After I spent my time bag-sitting by reading, rewriting Wrecking Ball, and posting stuff to facebook, I ran to this holest of hole in the wall Chinese shop (this time not just owned by a Chinese person selling the same ol same ol, but actually selling Chinese foods) and found a 2 liter (!) bottle of soy sauce. I’m pretty sure this is the only place in the country you can find soy sauce- it’s not even in Maseru! Hopefully this will last me a little while, haha. After we were done at Shoprite, we walked to the taxi rank. The whole town was so packed! We walked with our bounty like loaded-up mules through hoards of people, squeezing through people at the taxi rank, me knocking into people with my huge bag of Cheetos resting sideways behind my neck. We met Lee in the taxi rank. He got the roomy front seat while the other four of us all squeezed into the back seat, each of us with a huge backpack, several 5 liter bottles of water, and other grocery bags. I opened the window because if my arm weren’t hanging out the window, there’s no way I would have been able to fit, much less breathe, back there.

                We made it to Jeff’s house in due time, and breathed a sigh of relief and exhaustion. That night, we made awesome burritos, with homemade tortillas, and then went to this big rock formation where we just lay there and looked at the stars. With no light pollution, it’s amazing what you can see, even lots of shooting stars.  The next morning, Neel and I decided that we would take the initiative to prepare the chickens Jeff had bought yesterday, which we lovingly named Gladys and Helen. We brought them to the far end of the yard and then brought them into their next life. Lee killed the first one, taking the knife and cutting its head off, the bird kicking and flapping the whole time as Neel held it down. Then it was my turn. Neel, the champ that he is, held down the chicken’s feet and body while I held the head. I was really hesitant at first, but without thinking I just went for it. I got the artery right away, but the bone itself was really hard to cut clean off. The eyes were still blinking, which was rather disturbing. After several more attempts at sawing the bone, I gave the knife to Neel and he got the job done. We took our two headless chickens and dunked them in a big pot (it looked like a big cauldron) of boiling water over a small fire to help get the skin/feathers off. Thank you, Google, for teaching us how to prepare chickens this way. After they boiled for a little while, we de-skinned them. I need to take a moment to reminisce about Paris Thanksgiving and how Milea and I gutted a turkey. Turns out Chickens are much simpler to disembowel, etc. After scooping out the guts and such, we cut them up into large sections and put them into the cauldron again to cook. We shredded up the meat and cooked it with vegetables. Delish. 

                In the morning, after basically no sleeping, we packed up and left for the bus. Let me tell you about this bus. It was white and green, and so rusty and janky except for a really nice speaker system, which proceeded to blare Famu in my ears for the next three (yes, three) hours. What had probably taken less than an hour on a taxi took us three hours on this sweltering, rolling hippie-era contraption which was packed to the max with people in every seat and squished into the aisle. It was like my own personal hell. I was so sleep deprived, however, that I was able to nap a bit. I got off the bus in a daze, and three taxis later, I was back to my village at last. By this point it was raining pretty hard, so the muddy path up to my house was really slippery. I was sliding all over the place and at one point fell sideways and my whole leg was slopped in mud. Two of my ausis saw me and came running down the hill to help me carry stuff up. Now I am sitting in my house finishing writing this and trying to get warm/dry/non-muddy. It will be a lazy rest of the day to say the least. Tomorrow I’ll probably sleep forever.

Goodbye, chicken dearest

De-gutting

Leonard eating the heart

QuThings dance party

The view from Jeff's yard

10 January 2015: Stuck here

              It’s about 6:30 am and I walked up to the pink rocks to write this, thinking that I can get away with not being bothered because it’s pretty early. Nope- on my way up here, one ‘me called out to me “U ea kae, Senate?” [Where are you going, Senate?]. Now I am in general pretty sick of being asked this question like ten times a day, so I just pretended not to hear her and continued climbing to the top of the rocks. I just want to sit here, watch the sun come up over the mountains, and write in silence, OK? Now then.

                It’s been quite boring here. I’ve finished all the small projects I can do with what I can get my hands on around here, I have hiked up this mountain and to a waterfall, I have read and written, watched lots of movies, and just laid on my bed staring up at my bug net wondering what to do. (Disclosure: If you ask PC for a mosquito net, they have to give it to you, even if you are not in a malaria country, as Lesotho is not. It’s mostly for the scraps of thatch that fall from my roof and for the inevitable huge spider that will one day decide to drop on my pillow. It’s nice for flies, too.)

                On Monday I was supposed to meet the other Quthing PCVs in town, but since everyone was going back from that funeral after being in the village for the weekend, and since there are only three taxis that leave my village only in the morning, they were all full. I waited around for a few more hours, and I could have gotten into the back of pickup that drove by. All the other leftover travelers jumped in, but that would have been 1) insanely uncomfortable, especially with so many other people squeezed in there, bumping around for at least an hour and a half, and 2) against PC policy because it is clearly stupid and dangerous. So I decided that today would not be the day to go to town. I just walked up the road, past my school, and to the bigger shop in my village. I bought a lot of food- basic stuff like corn flour, normal flour, oil, rice, beans, etc. I already had my big backpack with me in anticipation of buying food in town, so I thought, why not. The next day, I managed to get a taxi to Quthing to do other non-basic shopping. I went to this “internet café” which was like a little copy shop with one computer. I had brought my hard drive, so I was able to use this one computer to post some things online. After buying a bunch of food and things, I went to the taxi rank where the was a guy somehow selling ice cream that he was scooping into cones. I hadn’t seen ice cream in months, so I immediately got some and ate it on the sweltering taxi before we left the rank. Then on the way back, in the in-between town of Mount Moorosi, I bought a flat of 30 eggs, because there wasn’t an egg to be bought in my village. 

                The next day, I went to the waterfall and climbed down to the base of it, taking an exhilarating but very cold shower in my clothes, then laid out on some rocks to dry. It was awesome just relaxing there and having the sun bake me dry.

          In other news, I realized that I need to learn how to balance a water bucket on my head like all the bo’me do here. They’re so heavy, though, especially when full; my neck is not strong enough for that.

Sushi out.

With a neighbor 

4 January 2015: Funeral

                Yesterday, I went to a funeral for my ‘me’s brother. My little ausi told me that it would start around 9am, so naturally my older sister and I started to head over at about noon. She grabbed my hand and we walked hand in hand across the first small valley to the house. Holding hands here is seen as a sign of friendship, and you will even sometimes see grown men holding hands. At first it was weird, but now I think it’s a nice gesture. I had on my blue seshoeshoe skirt and woven straw hat. Everyone was dressed up nicely for the funeral, but it wasn’t the usual black you see at American funerals. Every color was represented; my ausi had on hot pink shoes, a lime green, sparkling skirt with a purple belt, and a bright blue polo shirt. There were also a lot of cocktail-looking, short dresses worn too. A lot of the men wore blankets and some even had their gumboots on, but most were dressed nicely. I think that pretty much anything goes for clothes here for special occasions, as long as it’s clean and presentable. Also, in general, nothing is considered tacky. People will wear just about anything and it’s not weird or ironic. In the camptowns it’s more usual to see more stylish clothing, but out here in the sticks, it’s whatever.

                Despite the nature of the occasion, I was glad for a break from my monotonous life. There was a wooden casket with silvery metal handles sitting on two red and green plastic chairs in the yard, surrounded by a sort of semi-circle of people sitting on blankets on the ground or on chairs under the lip of the house for a tiny sliver of shade. One by one, people would come up and make little speeches, and as one went back and another came up, the onlookers would sing these sad-sounding songs. At the end, everyone stood up around the casket and put a coin or two into this plastic dish, then some bontate put the casket into the back of a pickup and rode in the back with it to the burial spot. Meanwhile, the crowd of guests followed, walking slowly behind it. My ausi and some other girls and I went back to the house to help the family prepare styrofoam boxes of food for all the people. My ‘me said that she and her family had been cooking all night. It was pretty good food, too, and for so many people it must not have been cheap. 

                When my ausi and I went to leave, this weird dude started talking to me not believing that my name was Senate or that my ausi was my ausi. He was not letting go of my hand during this particularly long handshake, and my ausi grabed my hand away and told me not to talk to him anymore. Then he walked away saying something to the other bontate about the “lekhooa” [white person], to which I kind of yelled in Sesotho that I had a name and that it wasn’t “the lekhooa.” One of the ‘mes there was like ‘yeah, don’t call her “lekhooa.”' People are getting to know me better now and taking me in as part of the village, defending me against skeptical outsiders. Also, props to my ausi for standing up for me and protecting me like that. PC taught us to be very friendly and to talk to everyone, but sometimes I forget that I don’t have to entertain every conversation, or that I don’t have to put up with a creepy handshake. I am finally feeling like I am becoming closer to my family here and that people are really accepting and defending me.