19 March 2015: My mokete

                Whenever there is an unplanned change in the set routine, that normally stresses me out, especially if I have planned something like, oh I don’t know, having class at its normal time? In preparation for my mokete (which I mentioned in the last post is a feast/celebration), in which the school was going to formally welcome me to the valley. Nevermind that they had already done a miniature version of this exact thing five months ago at site visit. So anyway, the afternoon classes were cancelled and somehow no one managed to inform me (story of my life). I was grabbing chalk to go teach form B math when another teacher was like “where are you going?” “To class…?” I replied. “Why?” she retorted, confused. In my head I was like well, it’s on the schedule that form B has math class right now, and I actually have a plan for these kids to get through the syllabus for once, and if classes keep getting knocked off for no good reason like they are all the time, that ain’t gonna happen. I did not win this tiny battle and the form Bs slithered away that day without math class. Instead of having classes, the kids were cleaning the classrooms and doing god knows what else around the school to prepare it for the next day’s mokete. The afternoon proceeded with some bontate slaughtering and cutting the guts out of a sheep right outside the staff room. That was cool to see, but the whole grounds smelled like sheep stomach acid for the rest of the day. After lunch (yes, I managed to eat lunch after watching them disembowel that sheep. I have developed a bit of an iron stomach here.), the students were either singing, practicing dances, or playing soccer in the grass. What a great use of cancelled class time. I was kind of weirded out that they were making so big of a deal out of everything, and that I was the reason why. I promptly went on a good run after I got back home to sort of deal with all the craziness that was going on, but I couldn’t really escape, as the songs the choir was practicing earlier echoed through my brain to the beat of my stride. On my way back, I ran into a bunch of little kids playing a game (somewhere between hide and seek and carin building- one kid tries to finish building a rock stack while another one runs and hides and another tries to knock the rock stack over by throwing another rock at it…or something like that) and they promptly abandoned their game to follow me, running behind me all the way back to my house, racing me on the last stretch to my front yard.

                So then yesterday, I get to school around 8 for the mokete that supposedly starts at 10. The other teachers had planned on getting there at like 6 or 7. One of the teachers was even like “oh, you woke up late, huh?” and I was thinking nope, I know this thing isn’t going to start for another several hours, so I’m fine. And I was. There were lots of people preparing food outside and in the staff room. They gave me a big plate of sheep intestine (not bad) and stomach (green, had the texture of a hardened fuzzy sweatshirt on the inside, gross). To kill time until people actually started to arrive, the boys were having a house music dance party in the computer lab and the girls were watching them through the windows. Some of those kids can really dance! I was impressed. 

I also killed time by taking photos of my students, which they enthusiastically posed for. 

At about 1pm, the thing starts. There were rows of school chairs set up on the netball ground behind one of the classrooms for parents/guests to sit in, and then a line of desks and chairs were set up facing the mass of chairs where I, the teachers, and other “honored guests” would sit. There were speeches on speeches, songs by the school choir, and dances. One was a traditional dance called the Litolobonya with three girls in grass skirts with bottlecaps underneath to make noise as they popped their hips. To counter the girls’ dance, some of the boys hilariously dressed up in gumboots, balaclavas, and blue jump suits with cushions stuffed in the butt or the stomach to make them look like fat, old bontate. They did one of the men’s dances where they kind of do a step team routine, slapping their gumboots and legs with their hands to the rhythm. But, it already being funny with exaggerated butts and bellies, they made sure to ham it up even more so that the entire audience was laughing so hard. They’re such goofballs, especially the form C boys. Then one of the teachers took me up to the office to put on one of their presents to me, a new red seshoeshoe skirt. It was a bit too big for me, since the lady measured me with a few extra cm, saying “u tla nona” [”you’ll get fat.” Thanks, ‘me...]. I was then outfitted with a matching bandana thing tied around my head and a straw hat. I walked back to the ground in my new outfit, and as I was about to make my speech, some of the bo’me in the audience draped me in a maroon/mustard colored blanket. 

I couldn’t have been dressed in more traditional Basotho clothing if I tried, and the blanket just topped it all off. (I mentioned later that this would be nice to sleep under as the weather turned colder, and my principal was aghast that I would even suggest doing anything other than keeping it in my wardrobe and taking it out only to wear on special occasions. She seems to be aghast at a lot of things that aren’t the “proper thing to do.”) I finally made my speech (in Sesotho, with lots of help from another teacher to make it sound grammatically coherent) and then it was time to eat. Finally.

Some of the primary teachers from the next village stuck around for an after party of sorts. 

One of them was trying to tell me that Lesotho’s life expectancy was higher than that of the US (oh, really?) because they drink untreated water and eat dirty produce but they still live a long time because they’re blessed by god, or some such drunken logic along those lines. Then another teacher told me that the country is going to go down the tubes with the new government. She just went on and on and on about the horrors of our future political situation. After quite enough of feigning interest, I put on my jacket to go home, but my principal and Ms. Politics weren’t having it, saying that it was dangerous for me to go home at night (only halfway correct), even though I had a light and a pocket knife and a mean jab-cross. I was escorted by the groundskeeper to my principal’s house to sleep. At like 4:30am, after pretending for too long to be asleep, I started to leave, trying to scoot out the door before my principal could say anything to stop me. It was dark and lightly raining, but I really didn’t care; I just wanted to go back to my house and put some clean clothes on and brush my teeth before I had to go back to school in a few hours. Now I’m at school about to fall asleep in the staff room because I only got a few blinks last night. I’m gonna crash so hard tonight.

16 March 2015: Breaks in the monotony

These past few weeks have been kind of same ol’ same ol’ in terms of life and teaching and settling into a routine. Some things have not changed: I still hate grading homework, the form As still give me blank looks when I say almost anything, and I’m still stumbling my way through pretending like I can teach life skills. I have been reading a lot more at school. I finished A Clockwork Orange, which was fun to read, but I don’t know who besides me would have been able to pick that one up from the library and comprehend it.

Last week (or was it 2 weeks ago? I can’t keep the monotony straight.) the orphanage had a mokete (feast/celebration) to thank the Ministry of Agriculture for giving them more land and to thank everyone who helps the orphanage run. In true mokete style, there were tents set up for people to sit under, a long series of speeches, singing, and of course food. Lauren and I helped serve the food in their dining hall. She said that at important events like this, it’s traditional to serve all the men first, but I was like pfff, and we just served the people in the order they were sitting. To round out the after-meal entertainment, the director had the kids prepare a series of skits. They were very good and quite funny. The orphanage kids must know a lot more English than the average village kid out here because of stuff like these skits (which apparently are a favorite of the director’s and happen quite frequently).

Another break in the day-by-day came last Wednesday for Moshoeshoe’s Day [Moshoeshoe, as the kids learn in school, was the “founder of the Basotho nation.”]. Old ‘Shoe’s day is a day to run (obviously…). All the primary schools in the valley would be competing in races at the secondary school (my school). I was told that the festivities would start around 8am, so at noonish, I sleepily stepped out of my rondaval and into my yard. I looked across the valleys and could see that people were starting to congregate on the soccer field to watch the primary kids run against each other around a severely sloped rectangle that served as the field. One secondary student was put in each race just for fun, and to practice for their district competition coming up. My students have been training for the district competition by running long distances on the road. I wanted to run with them one day, and the teacher in charge of sports naively told them that I should be the pacesetter. Hah. Soon most of the kids, the majority dressed in their school skirts or pants and stiff, leather school shoes, zoomed past me, some grabbing peaches off of branches along the way and eating them as they ran up and down some killer hills. Later that week, they were running really far to the next village, so I just waited for them to come back. The other teacher was like “I’m going to the shop to buy something,” which in bontate language means “I’m going to the bar. I may or may not be back. Peace.”  At least an hour and a half later, they came back and I did some conditioning and stretching with them. Anyway, back to Moshoeshoe Day, it was really fun to watch the kids race, including my oldest ausi who is really fast. She is definitely going to race at the district competition [update: she placed high enough to go to Maseru to compete, but placed 4^th in her event when they take the top 3 to South Africa to compete. Sad.].

After standfast and the weekend after that, I hadn’t been out of the village for at least 3 weeks, and I was sort of testing the limits of my sanity. Yep, 3 weeks was pushing it. I promptly decided to go to Mount Moorosi, meet up with another volunteer, and eat some meat and chocolate. I’m getting pumped for phase 3 training in a few weeks, where I will be able to see all of the other volunteers again. Then we’re going on vacation hiking in the north. Woo!

2 nights ago, there was this insane lightning storm. No rain, but there was just lightning for hours. There was hardly a 2 second span of darkness with all the electricity streaking across the sky. Then it started ailing like nobody’s business, which, sadly crushed the little sprouts in my garden. They have bounced back a little, though, which is promising. That night, I was just lying on the floor of my house on my rug, half trying to sleep, half watching the windows light up and listening to the thunder that continuously growled and echoed through the mountains. 

Kids playing seesaw with a log in the crook of a tree

28 February 2015: Elections, life skills, fun day

No school from Wednesday afternoon after lunch until Monday, assuming that the country doesn’t implode over the weekend. Supposedly, the school closed so that the teachers could go vote in their respective areas. None of them actually live in the village permanently, so they have to go back to their districts and vote there. I don’t even know if any of them actually vote, though and probably neither will any of the students who are old enough, so it’s just another excuse not to have school I guess, which most everyone is always in favor of. The teachers were surprised that I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, but first of all, I live in this village and staying is the norm, and second of all, PC put us on “Standfast,” which is one of the steps leading up to a potential emergency evacuation. This means that we are sort of on lockdown, not supposed to leave our sites or go to towns in order to avoid any rallies or anything that could potentially turn violent. I have to, at this point, “prepare for consolidation” (the next step, which they had to do in September after the coup) by packing a bag and labelling the stuff in my house (to ship home, to give to ____) in case we don’t return, but I’m not gonna do that. I’ve heard conflicting opinions about the outcome of the election. Some people say they don’t even bother to vote because it’ll just be the same shit, different day: politicians trying to get rich and not doing much about the people and their issues The army and police are at odds and corruption is rampant. One of my friend’s students was supposedly poisoned by political opponents or something. Politics is such a messed up game pretty much everywhere; it’s borderline idiotic. But the break from school is pretty nice, considering everything that could go down.

                In other news, I’ve finished those oh so lovely phase 2 assignments, with a little help of my form Cs in life skills class. I used two whole classes having them make a men/women/children yearly tasks and daily tasks calendar/schedule. Then, under the guise of getting to know potential role models, I told them to talk to old people and ask them about village life in the past. Here’s what they helped me come up with:

“According to some older people in the community, life here in the past certainly had its differences. Several said that in the past, they were much more respectful to their elders, always greeting them when they saw them, and being taught primarily by their parents how to do things. Also, people back then used to get married at an older age, and now they see young people falling in love and getting married much younger. People used to pay lebola [bride price] with animals only, and now they can pay it with cash. In the past, people made all their own clothes and grew all their own food to eat, and your money seemed to go further a long time ago. Another thing I found interesting was that young children did not eat eggs, fish, or animal intestines, or peanut butter, and now they do. Women used to only wear dresses, and now it is acceptable to wear trousers. As for structural changes to the area, there did not used to be electricity, roads, or schools, whereas these things have all come into existence in the valley, most recently being electricity a few years ago and the cell tower last year.”

                On Wednesday, the school decided to have a fun day fundraiser where the students wore crazy clothes and the teachers wore uniforms. In order to wear these clothes, the students paid like 2 rand and the teachers paid about 10. The two male teachers borrowed some of the tall form C boys’ gray pants, I borrowed my ausi’s gray uniform skirt and white button down shirt. I was the only female teacher to don the uniform because none of the other women would have fit into any of those girls’ skirts. So they either dressed as village men (gumboots, ratty tshirt, blanket pinned around the shoulders, balaclava, and herding stick) or women in the field (straw hat, long dress, apron thing). For the first five minutes of my classes, I even pretended to teach Sesotho instead of math. I t was great. It was super fun and funny for both the teachers and students, and a good fundraiser to help buy some of the vulnerable students things they needed like food, soap, etc.

The teachers on fun day

28 February 2015: Garden madness

                This past weekend, I made about half of my pacman garden. What is a pacman (keyhole) garden, you ask? Well, scroll through my past posts somewhere and you can get yourself an education about that. Anyway, it started with me wheelbarrowing rocks by myself, then pretty soon my ausis, ‘me, and neighbor were all helping. We made the pacman outline, filled that with aloe leaves that we cut from a nearby aloe plant, and then dumped in several bags of cans that I had collected from the primary school (they eat canned fish for lunch some days, so they have lots of cans lying around). We put one of the empty flour sacs in the middle as sort of a compost bag. We covered the aloe and cans with some dry grass that we got from a neighbor, then got some manurey dirt from another neighbor’s cow corrall and shoveled that on top. Yesterday, some neighbor boys, my ‘me, and I all finished the garden. We built it up some more with rocks and filled it with dirt and manure up to the top. We planted all the usual leafy green suspects (mustard greens, swiss chard, etc.) in rows coming from the compost bag and radiating outward. Cool, now I won’t be super deprived of vegetables. Coming soon, I will attempt to plant carrot seeds in between the rows of leafy things, just for kicks.

Step 1: pacman outline 

Fill it with stuff

Add dirt

Neighborly helpers

Woo!

Growth! Now put sticks around the edge so sheep don't jump in and eat all the leafies again.

17 February 2015: Ramblings

1)      Valentine’s day is a thing here, as I learned while I was trying to explain it to my students. They were all like “we know” and I even saw a few heart-shaped cards going around. If they knew the extent that candy was involved in an American Valentine’s day, they would go crazy. I swear, some of these kids only live for sugar.

2)      It’s been 3 or 4 weeks of teaching, and as you have probably already read, I’m bored of it. I’ve been making the form A and Bs make flash cards to help correct their abominable multiplication skills, and teaching my form C life skills class how to z-snap and how to say things like “wasup” and “peace out,” mostly because I have no idea what I’m doing in life skills class.When I’m in class actually teaching, it’s great, but the suckiest thing is grading- especially homework, because most of the kids just copy off each other anyway, so it doesn’t even matter. Then at school, there’s just a lot of waiting around, wondering if we’re actually gonna have sports after school, seeing what banal task one of the teachers wants me to do (type anything, see which computer mouses work, install software, etc.). Half the time, like the students I guess, it feels like I’m going to school for the free lunch, which is really not half bad. I’ve foregone breakfast mostly out of laziness, so by the time 1pm lunch rolls around, it’s quite satisfying. Other than that, there is a lot of teacher absenteeism, especially on Friday afternoons if a truck passes by and they want to go home for the weekend.

3)      Last week, two staff members came to my village for site visit, obligatory at least once a year for each volunteer. They rolled up to my school in their white SUV and proceeded to kind of tour around and talk to my principal. Then we all drove on the “road” back to my house where they were able to talk to my ‘me and ask me some very PC-esque questions about integration and the like. Then they gave me two packages, one from Mom and one from the JCC. I was so happy. Double presents! I forgot that super useful and/or quirky stuff even existed for a minute until I saw some of the wonders in the boxes.

4)      This past weekend, I went to Mohale’s Hoek, the camptown north of Quthing, and went to this really bad excuse for a jazz concert at one of the hotels there. It was advertised as starting at 4pm, but being in Lesotho, by 6pm they were just getting around to doing sound check. Then I went to the VRC [volunteer resource center] at the other hotel. The wifi! The flushing toilets! The pool! The shower! The books! The chicken burger! The cheese slice on the chicken burger (I haven’t had cheese in forever)! Yes, it’s the little things, and they were so needed.

5)      Getting a 4+1 (a small sedan-like taxi) in Mohale’s Hoek, after I put my big backpack in the trunk, I instinctively went on the right side of the car to where, before I came to this country, the passenger’s seat has always been. Obviously, the driver was already sitting there, so I was like whoops, and went around to the left side. As I got in, the driver was dangling the keys out, laughing and asking if I was planning on driving. He then immediately asked if I was American. It’s like that scene in Inglorious Basterds where the guy asks for 3 glasses with the American 3 (index, middle, and ring fingers) as opposed to the German 3 (thumb, index, and middle). Dead giveaway.

6)      I am eating peaches on peaches on peaches, as well as cactus fruits. My little abuti likes to climb the trees and pick the peaches on the high branches.

Sun-drying peaches outside

7)      I’m teaching the form Bs how to do Sudoku. They’re really getting into it!

8)      When someone sneezes here, people don’t say “bless you” or any kind of Sesotho equivalent. In fact, during training, one of the other volunteers made a point to ask a lot of Basotho what you say after someone sneezes, and they all told him something different, because you don’t really say anything. And that’s how I think it should be everywhere. Your heart isn’t stopping. You don’t need to be blessed. Just have your bodily moment and move on.

9)      The most popular beer here, made in Lesotho, is called Maluti, after the Maluti mountain range. The national currency is also named after these mountains. Sometimes when people say they’re going drinking, they say that they are “supporting the currency.”

7 February 2015: Wasting time at the café

                I’m sitting here in the café thing next to the (newly functional!) ATM in Mt. Moorosi doing what Basotho do best: wait. I’m eating some kind of super questionable battered fish bone thing (blech) which is like they tried to batter and fry a piece of fish, but instead it’s only the spine and bones. Where’s the meat? Am I supposed to try to eat the bones or just eat around them? I’m waiting here for at least 2 more hours until the taxi leaves. I maybe should have brought those quizzes to grade. Maybe. Yesterday being Friday, the day I have established as Quiz Day, I just gave two quizzes to forms A and B and started to grade them. Yesterday I was in a weird mood after classes were over. I think I just felt kind of useless I’m sitting or standing around most of the time. I don’t really know if/when I can go home, what I can be doing in my spare time, or if I should be trying to be useful. On the plus side, this has won me some extra reading time. I never really liked reading until now, but I’m reading Lord of the Rings and a Clockwork Orange at the moment, both from the school library that no student actually uses. The other hard thing, besides being bored, is feeling constantly out of the loop, mostly because all the students and other teacher talk to each other in Sesotho, and I can’t really contribute. Most of the time I’m ready to head out way before the other teachers at the end of the day. I don’t really want to wait around for the chitter chatter and then walk back with them for the sole reason that they walk so freaking slowly. I literally could crawl faster than they walk. And it’s not as if Basotho are physically incapable of going fast- yesterday morning my little ausi was booking it to get to school because she didn’t want to walk with some kids who were coming up behind us.

                This wobbly table sucks. Why does every table in this country have uneven legs. Maybe I should start a new PC sector besides education and healthy youth: Table Brigade. Yes, I spent two years in this country as a Table Brigader evening out sucky table legs. You’re welcome. Hmm, I’ve wasted only half an hour here, eh? Better keep writing.

                It feels like I have a chunk of that stupid fish bone in my throat. If I die, that’s why Here lies Sushi, killed, ironically, as she cannibalized another fish, its bone lodged in her esophagus, forever poking into her flesh. May Bog rest her food-adventurous soul. I wonder how long I can get away with sitting here. A lady just walked by outside holding a live chicken by the wings. Casual.

                Yesterday my ausi gave me some of the food my ‘me was cooking. I already ate some popcorn and a stellar rice/peas mixture, but I was like what the heck, sure. Plus it was meat, which is cool. I don’t know what kind of meat it was, exactly (story of my life), probably pork. But there was some super grody piece that was definitely like some kind of kidney or something. I fed it to the pig. Does that make me a bad person, letting the pig eat a piece of its own brethren? Ashes to ashes, pig to pig, like a phoenix.

                After I finish this page, I’m gonna go find somewhere else to bum around, maybe buy some bananas, go back to the china shop and buy a ton of eggs, then go wait at the taxi rank and read my kindle or something. Then since I’m early I’ll get my choice of seat on the taxi (window control!). I like wearing this baseball cap because I can creep on people without them seeing my eyes. Sneaky sneaky. It also keeps my ever-increasingly misbehaving hair in line, aka smushed down so that I don’t have to worry about it.

                Doot da dooooo

                I want a horse. Or an indestructible bicycle whose tires won’t pop on the rocks that are the road. I’m bored. I’m really not good at waiting. A Mosotho I am not. There are cars with flags and huge megaphones cruising up and down the town for their political party’s candidate. Apparently some mess is going down in Maseru- some people got shot over some political kerfuffle. If they evacuated us, I’d definitely go to another country for PC, especially after all that medical and legal and application circus I had to go through, as long as the training was better organized. Today I’ve been in Lesotho for 4 months- almost my longest stay abroad in one place. OK, enough paper wasting. Hasta la bye bye.

5 February 2015: School slump

I am in a bit of a slump today, you see, so I will take advantage of this nice empty space to explain the slumpiness that is my life. School’s novelty has worn off. Yesterday I was losing my voice and it was nearly impossible to teach, then the day before, one of the other teachers was asking me why I wasn’t further along in the material with the Form As. I think it’s better to stay on one topic until they understand rather than moving on just because I got through that chunk of the syllabus, leaving 95% in the dust. Plus I’m indirectly teaching them English too because I can’t explain math in Sesotho, so that’s also why it takes more time to teach them. So in some way, I’m filling a small chunk of their English class as well. Does this make me an accidental English teacher? Anyway, I usually get frustrated with the slow pace of learning when I’m grading homework or quizzes and the results are not as I’d hoped. Passing here is 40%, and I’m lucky if half my students do pass. When I get frustrated like this, sometimes I fall into the habit that the Basotho teachers do, and start to blame it on the students’ base intelligence. But they’re not dumb kids, really; their country’s school system has just not been up to par so far. When I asked another teacher what kinds of things they learn in primary, she just said “bana ba bapala.” The kids play. It’s hard to look at the bigger picture and realize that progress takes time, and that my impact as a teacher may not even be felt by a student until years after I’m gone. That’s what people tell me, at least.

                Also, at school, there’s a weird dynamic. I am of the mindset that you should put 100% into what you are doing, even if it does make you slumpy, and the other teachers are always like, “oh, you have so much energy” when I’m just going about as normal. I don’t, contrary to popular opinion, like to just sit in the staff room and do nothing. The other teachers make students do everything for them- take stacks of graded notebooks back to the classroom, fill up their water bottles at the tap, go to the shop to buy them things like food or airtime, even giving a student the keys to their home to fetch something. Really? And maybe it’s just my American view here that everyone, regardless of age, should be respected, but they don’t even say thank you, even after they have completed one of these tasks or after the students bring the teachers their plates of food for lunch. Also, a lot of the other teachers treat me like a child, probably because I’m a lot younger than most of them. They are always telling me things like that I’m holding my pen wrong or that I shouldn’t sit on the concrete outside or whatever. I am, by definition of age at least, an adult. If I didn’t want to sit on the concrete, I would have gotten a chair. Let me do what I want. Psh.

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.