I’m writing this all curled up in a bed on which I have arranged all the pillows from the other beds in the room plus two extra fluffy blankets. It’s like a cocoon. How did I even get here, you ask? Good question. It’s a long story. Take my hand and I’ll lead you the journey that was my past week.
It all started when Neel announced that he was going to ET [early termination, aka quit PC]. Jeff jumped forward to “take care of” a going-away party of sorts at Neel’s house on Saturday. The day earlier, Friday, was May 1st, Worker’s day (Labor Day), so I left the boonies to head up to Mohale’s Hoek. After the obligatory hotel shower, I found Lee and Jeff at the chicken place, probably pissing off the workers by ordering more and more chicken sandwiches. The three of us proceeded to Thaba Mokhele, a ginormous, steep, flat-topped mountain that loomed in the near distance from Mohale’s Hoek town. After not ten minutes of walking out from the hotel, we were clearly out of the town and in a field, headed across the expanse to the dirt road that would lead us to the base of the mountain. After following this road for quite a while, we found a place to start climbing. And by climb, let me explain myself. I mean straight up bushwhack. Through trees, bushes, and spiky grasses. If there was a path, we obviously never found it. I was a little slower than the other two hiking speed demons, so I got separated at one point, but this herder and his tiny dog led to me where I could see Jeff, and he told me to climb almost straight up through the ravine of boulders. Climbing the conveniently human-sized boulders with Jeff was so much better than getting snagged and scratched by trees and plants. By then, Lee was long gone up the mountain. Near the top, the ravine turned into a cliff, so we had to go to the side and whack bushes once more. By this time, we heard Lee testing the mountain acoustics by either singing or yelling back and forth to a herd boy up there- we couldn’t really tell. The sun was setting when I got near the top, and I turned around to a surreal view. It was almost like looking down at a topographical map, a nearly flat, open spread of land with a few lumps and ridges of smaller mountains and hills scattered throughout.
Jeff had scurried ahead, and I heard him yelling and cussing at the trees he was whacking through. I didn’t blame him, though. Those trees had turned into the trees from Snow White where they grab you and don’t let you pass. I don’t think there was much apple-throwing. That would have been preferable, actually. A snack. Taking the cries of distress as a sign to avoid that path, I decided to go rock scrambling instead. In order to do this, I had to just grit my teeth and trudge through some spiky plants. Thank bog I had on long pants (unlike the other two suckers), so I didn’t get nearly as scratched up as they did. So here I was, climbing up an innocent enough slope on my hands and feet, but at one point it got so steep that I was clutching to microscopic rock bumps for dear life. If I fell (into those spiky bushes, mind you), that would have absolutely sucked. Oh, and let me add that this was in the dark, with only the light of my headlamp to guide me, as the sun had already set. My fingertips must have gotten that adrenaline strength that a mother gets when she has to lift a car off her baby. I finally stumbled to the flat top of the mountain under the light of the full moon that had popped up on the other side of the mountain as I ascended. The boys had made a nice fire by the time I got up there, and we broke out the marshmallows, chocolate, and crackers we had brought to make smores. We tried not to eat too many, though, because we all had almost run out of water a long time ago, and the smores would only make us thirstier than we already were. I don’t know why we didn’t bring more water; maybe we assumed we would find a stream or something. In any case, we were all probably dehydrated. I ate one of two apples I had brought and gave the other to Lee, and he said he had never appreciated the juiciness of an apple so much in his life.
The three of us rolled out the tarp and slept super bundled up in our sleeping bags, our noses poking out of small openings from cinching up the elastic cords around the top. It was so cold and windy up there, and the full moon was blazing like a circular celestial night light. In the morning, we were all sick of being cold and trying to sleep, so we quickly got ready to (make like a baby and) head out. Our trek up the day before was so miserable that we decided to go down on the other side of the mountain, hoping maybe it wouldn’t be so crazy steep or full of rogue trees. Now here’s where the drama starts. We’re all happily bouncing along when we come to a small drop. Jeff half-climbed, half-jumped down. I started to climb down, using the trusty grass roots’ grip on the soil to help me not plummet to my death. But guess what. They ripped out and I fell down the first drop, then down another smaller one. Not to my death, entirely, but to the death of my foot. I sat there for a minute, not immediately able to get up. After noticing that the underside of my right foot was absolutely in pain, but stand-on-able, I stood up. Lee then climbed down the drop as daintily as you like, but not before letting a huge rock tumble down, fly past me just in front of my legs, and bounce just in front of Jeff’s face before ricocheting to the side. Close call. It was clear at this point that I had done something to the bottom of my foot because every step on it was stretching those ligaments out and very painful. I knew that no bones were broken, but that it was one or more of those underside ligaments that was injured. As I slowly and excruciatingly hobbled down the rocks, Jeff and Lee bounded ahead, stopping a few times to wait for my sorry self to catch up. Eventually, I just told them to go ahead down the steep part and I would try to go across on an easier, more level trajectory, and that I would meet them at a certain spot on the road. Having to walk on the outside edge of my foot, I trudged ahead slowly, arriving at the spot about an hour and a half after they did.
We returned, slowly, walking the 9 or 10 miles to town (where I was limping faster than the Basotho in town were walking. They must learn to walk from turtles). We got some much-needed sit and food at the braai restaurant, then caught a sprinter (small bus-like taxi) to Neel’s house for his going away party.
At Neel’s, it was packed. Almost 20 people showed up to send our Sesotho champion off. He’s leaving because he is really frustrated with his school. He tries to implement new techniques and teaching strategies, and initially the teachers are enthusiastic, but then don’t make any moves to change or improve their own teaching. One of the goals here is to teach teachers better ways to teach, like how to teach critical thinking and things like that. Neel asked specifically to be placed in a school whose teachers were open to change, and it turns out they weren’t. He said that when he would have left after two years, nothing would have changed, so nothing would last beyond him when he went home. Apparently it was just a constant struggle at school every day, and that he would be much “better used” in America. Uselessness: a sad, but true phenomenon that I think we are all facing right now, but I guess he thought things just wouldn’t get better. So we had a grand old time at his house and everyone crammed in there to sleep. This seems like a common theme, cramming way too many people in one space and trying to sleep.
The next morning, I hitched out of there with a guy in a janky, rattling white sedan with a black hood. He was kind of way too interested in my life story, so I immediately made up a fake name, fake village, fake husband in America, the works. It’s so sad how even after an imaginary partner is thrown into the mix, you’re still propositioned because you don’t have a husband in Lesotho. This is actually a really big problem, that it’s quite common to have many romantic partners, and one of the reasons why AIDS is so rampant. Anyway, then he picked up his friend, a police special investigator with a really high-pitched voice. He was absolutely convinced that as a PCV, I must actually be a soldier, collecting intelligence for the US. He was confused why I “posed” as a teacher in a village instead of living in town, because you can’t get good information in a village. He advised me to move to town to have more access to intelligence. Yeah, dude, so this kind of proves that I’m not a spy if I live in the sticks. He still wasn’t convinced. What kind of intelligence is there to collect in Lesotho anyway? I’ve come to study your advanced way of life to teach the highest-ranking officials of the US government. Right.
So this whole time, as you may recall, my foot is still dead. It probably didn’t help that I had walked on it almost ten miles back from the mountain to town right after I had hurt it. I arrived in my village and walked [limped] to school on Monday morning. I would have already been limping due to my sore quads, but add a bum foot to the mix and I must have been stumbling around like an idiot. I had noticed some splotchy, pink bruises that had emerged on the bottom of my foot, and a purple one on the side, so I called the PC medical office. They told me not to go to work that day (oops) or walk on it (double oops), and told me to come to Maseru the next day. I did just that. The current doctor in our game of PC medical musical chairs was a Ukrainian guy. I told him exactly what I knew was wrong, and he was at first convinced that it was my ankle. Did you even listen to me? I told him that I was 99% sure that it was the ligaments and not the bones, so guess what he did- scheduled an x-ray for me the next day. Come on.
I found Neel in the VRC [volunteer resource center] attached to the PC office, taking care of some exit medical tasks and paperwork. We went to dinner, his last supper, at Piri Piri, a great restaurant near the PC office. He signed the wall among many other visitors’ sharpie scrawlings, “Sala ka khotso, Lesotho” [a formal goodbye, literally stay with peace, Lesotho]. We took a taxi to Foothills, a b&b PC has some kind of a deal with, where he wrote and we recorded the last one of his many song parodies, then we sent it out to our friends in our Whatsapp group.
The next morning, we found Kristin in the breakfast room, in Maseru for her fourth trip to the dentist for a root canal/crown. Neel and I headed back to the PC office so he could do his paperwork and so that I could visit with the medical people. The medical secretary drove me to the Maseru private hospital, a deserted building, where I got 2 x-rays on my foot. There was no one to tell me what was wrong, just someone to take the x-rays, so they would have to send them to Bloemfontein to a doctor there to analyze them, then up to a week later, they would get back to me. No wonder the PC doctor was complaining about the state of medical care in this country and its inefficiencies. Back from the hospital, I got dropped off at the mall so I could do some grocery shopping (avocados!) and clothes shopping (there was one pair of pants in that entire mall that came even close to fitting me. I bought it anyway because my current 2 pairs of pants that I wear to school every day are sure to wear out very soon). After checking literally every store in that mall, and others in Mohale’s Hoek, I still have yet to find another decent pair of running/hiking shoes that costs less than R1300. Sigh. I walked the short distance back to the PC office, and with unlimited internet at my disposal, bought tickets for Namibia for a small group of us. Woo! I’m pumped for that.
After finally arriving back in my village on Friday afternoon, I had gotten away with a one-day school week. I really think that the teacher laxness and lack of hesitation to miss/cancel classes is one of the many issues at the root of the education system’s problems, but at the same time it’s kind of nice to take advantage of. Does that make me a horrible person?
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