Last night I ate a plain can of pilchards (fish in tomato sauce) and I almost barfed. I don't recommend it.
If you don't say hi to people every day, they will koko on your door until you answer it, and they'll just be like "I'm just saying hi." Then leave. It's annoying.
There is not an egg to be bought in my entire village. Sigh. I guess I'll just be super farty trying to get all my protein from beans.
Sweet, I got the pink party taxi to Quthing. Decked out in speakers, grill and windshield wiper bling, and little lights. I'm worried for the impending famu though...
Mucha bomba y poco chicle. All bark and no bite. (Describing the thunder here)
One of the latrines in my village has VIP painted on it- Very Important Potty?
"I have to do some work do now...for school...because, uh, you know, I'm a teacher and all." = get out of my house so I can watch a movie or take a nap in peace.
Just chillin with my door open for the breeze, and I don't even notice that a chicken walks in until it's like 2 feet away from me. Get out of my house, feather ball.
Whenever someone, like one of my siblings, leaves my house to go do something, they say, "I am coming." No, you're leaving. Unless you meant to say that you're coming back. Which you probably won't.
The worst thing about watching movies is seeing the food. It's weird- no matter what's going on in the scene, I just can't take my eyes off whatever they're eating. Like once this lady was taking a simple cheese and meat tray outside for her son's birthday party. It had little decorative tufts of lettuce on the periphery of the dish. I was like first of all, I would kill for a tray of meat and cheese. Second of all, what a waste of lettuce that no one is going to eat. I haven't had lettuce in forever- I'd totally eat that lettuce that nobody's going to touch. And then don't even get me started on the feast scenes in Harry Potter. Drool.
Speaking of HP, I'm helping my younger ausis practice reading by having them switch off paragraphs of Harry Potter. Little do they know that this is not only English practice, but an essential cross-cultural exchange.
Everyone picks their nose here like it's no big whoop. It's so dry, everyone's got crusty little boogers, so it's kind of essential.
A few years ago, when I would ask people their rules to live by, one person said, "Don't be a dirty pirate. Bathe more than twice a week." I am officially a dirty pirate. Especially if the waterfall counts as a shower.
This small thought is entitled "Running on the road: a case of mistaken identity."
This morning I ran through my village and then onto the main road a bit to loop back closer to my house. As I was straying a bit farther from my usual hangout, the people obviously didn't know who I was. I got the entire spectrum of gender/age greetings: abuti (brother), ntate (father), ausi (sister), and 'me (mother). The moral of this story is that I am androgynous as hell, especially with this haircut.
Then while walking up the hill from the road to my house, these two little boys (it always seems to be little boys who do this) kept calling me "lekhooa" (white person, literally English person). I said about ten times that no, I wasn't "Lekhooa," and that I had a name. No, not Lekhooa, I'm Senate. No. Senate. Shut up, you little snotty punks, I thought. Oh well. In due time.
New core breakfast: coat my shitty aluminum pot in an ungodly amount of oil (it's not so ungodly when you think about the burned mess I'm avoiding scrubbing off of said shitty pot), cook some chopped tomato and moroho, and pour in two beaten eggs. Nom.
Getting moroho out of my 'me's garden is becoming a risky maneuver what with all the squash or strawberry or whatever plants all over the place with spiky/stinging leaves. Yowza.
Update: I just fell in one of the two streams I have to cross to get from my school to my house. I literally did a forward roll down a minuscule waterfall. I'm gonna blame it on the fact that it was getting dark out. Good thing no one saw me do it. One 'me saw me climbing back up afterward, though, so naturally news will be all over the village by tomorrow.
Update #2: I learned to knit
The PCV across the valley has determined that the cell tower must be somehow solar powered, because at night after a cloudy day it never seems to work.
I find myself googling the weirdest things. For example, "how to wash white hair in sub Saharan Africa," you know, bc shampoo doesn't exist here. For now I'm just going with the water-only method. Bar soap makes my hair crunchy. Though it's a thousand times easier with short hair than the two times I attempted to wash it in a bucket when it was long.
My principal is asking me to come up with a mission statement and vision for the school. Idk what her school is all about. If it were up to me, realistically it should be "To decrease teaching quality at the school and make classes turn into chaotic jokes by hiring a volunteer who doesn't have any idea what she's doing"
When my ausi was teaching me how to play this game kind of like jacks, I was having trouble catching the rock and she asked me what hand I eat with. An American would have asked me what hand I wrote with, so that shows the importance of eating over writing.
People must think I'm the clumsiest person on the planet, what with slipping and scraping my leg on the way up the hill to my house about a month ago, falling into the stream last week, an now yesterday I slipped in the same spot on that hill going down, so now I have an even bigger scrape on my other leg. Sigh.
I just found a bat in my curtain. That would explain all the flapping sounds last night...
Update: my ausis and I slid it off the curtain with a peanut butter tub, captured the tiny beast, and threw it into the bushes.
A toilet haiku-
Found in my latrine:
Lizards, bees, and black widows.
Never poop alone.
Sesotho seems like such a limited language. Not only do they use the same words for "a lot" an "too much" and "again" and "and then," there are simply not enough specific words to express what an English-brained person would like to express. For example, anything resembling nice, good, delicious, etc. is one single word in Sesotho. Also, the words for hear, feel, and taste are a single word.
On the other hand, it has some crazy specific words like (let me just flip through the dictionary here...ok let's explore a few pages of T.) "tlou" means to either place a grain bag on a pack ox sideways or to lie on one's back with bent knees. "Tanya" is to throw balls of clay into a pool of water in such a way that they go in without disturbing the water. "Tanyetsa" is to eat bread and then milk a cow into one's mouth. "Thethetha" is to beat out meal left over in a basket. And another I mentioned in an earlier post, "titimela" which means to run away to initiation school and get circumcised without your parents' permission.
Haha ok over to the Q section (by the way, the q is a click sound): "qaa" is to force papa into the mouth of a baby. "Qachela" is to catch thrown food with one's mouth. "Qapha" is to go up and down in a boiling pot. "Qathola" is to spoil a mud floor by trampling on it. "Qefetsa" is to crush something soft and fleshy. "Qoqa" is to choose cattle amongst those captured from the enemy. I could go on.
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