31 October 2016: Sala ka khotso, Lesotho (Stay in peace, Lesotho)!

This morning (woah, was it really this morning? This has been a loooong day.), I got my worldly possessions together, which consist of my big backpack and a tote bag with my camping stuff, and went to the Qacha’s Nek taxi rank. A short ride later, we were at the border. I made sure to mentally prepare to argue with the border agent to give me 90 days in South Africa, and I checked to see if I still had a copy of an official letter stating that Americans get 90 days. At other border gates, especially the one at Maseru and those on the west side of the country, people have had a lot of trouble getting more than 7 days in South Africa even though we are legally allowed 90. But none of this preparation was necessary, because after I told the border guy I’d be in South Africa for about a month and a half, he gave me 90 days no problem. Sweet. Everyone got back on the taxi and enjoyed the view on our way to the closest town in South Africa, Matatiele. Once you leave Lesotho, one difference becomes very apparent: properties are protected by fences. It’s weird, since almost no one has a fence in Lesotho.

                In Matatiele, I got on another taxi to Durban for another 4 hour drive. As we got closer to the coast, the landscape got greener and more tropical-looking, with more plants and palm trees. Then there it was: the ocean! The beauty of the ocean never gets old to me. Driving into Durban was kind of a shock- tall buildings everywhere! Giant factories! So many cars and people! I definitely felt like the country mouse coming into the big city. We arrived at the Durban taxi rank and I started walking toward my hostel. I could have gotten a taxi I guess, but it was only 3km and I wanted the exercise for my stiff legs. I arrived at the hostel, sticky and sweaty from the humidity (Oh humidity, how I haven’t missed you…), and immediately took advantage of the showers. To add to my “country mouse” feeling, I shortly went to a Super Spar, which is like a mega grocery store, and had to catch my breath from all the choices. And the bakery! Omg. Maybe soon enough I’ll get used to being out of the undevelopedness of Lesotho.

                Right now, I’m sitting at a picnic table at the hostel, and the neon lights reflect, blurred by the rain drops, in the pool. It’s hitting me now that I’m on vacation, and on vacation alone. I don’t really like the “alone” part of that, but I’ve been getting better at making vacation friends, so hopefully I’ll meet some cool people to hang out with.

                I have officially left Lesotho. That `part hasn’t quite hit me yet, but I think soon enough it will. I might leave with a slightly bitter impression of my school administration and how they handled tough situations, but almost every single other experience I had in Lesotho was fantastic, I tend not to dwell on the negative, but instead take it as a reality and try to react to it in the best possible way, making the best of a situation I can’t change. That being said, overall I know I’ll have vastly positive memories of Lesotho. So sala ka Khotso, Lesotho (stay in peace, a kind of formal farewell phrase). All I can say is that it’s been real.

30 October 2016: Halloween in Qacha’s Nek

                Colleen and I, somewhat weary from our long trek, walked to Tyler’s house, which thankfully wasn’t too far from the rank, as he lives in town. We met Tyler and his German girlfriend Ann at his house with a “trick or treat!”, and he soon broke out the enormous assortment of candy that he had acquired for the occasion. He admitted that he got some weird stares from the clerks at Pep (a clothing store that has oddly has a good selection of candy at the registers) because he was buying so much candy. Ann had brought two pumpkins all the way from where she lives in Maseru, and we quickly got to work carving them. With the pumpkin innards, we also made some awesome pumpkin pies. Somewhere along the line, Ann was talking about the less-than-comfortable aspects of living in Lesotho, like the occasional scorpion. Once, she found a scorpion in her house and she took care of it by whacking it with a pizza box and flushing it down the toilet. You know you’re living in a developing country when your mind doesn’t go to “Ew, a scorpion!” but “Woah, pizza and toilets!”

Tyler hard at work carving the pumpkin

Taxi driver ntate pumpkin and old ntate pumpkin

'Me pumpkin

                The next day, our dear Mohale’s Hoek friend Emily showed up to the party. After making faux lasagna and getting more hopped up on candy, we decided to have a “séance” in Tyler’s yard, among the glowing faces of our carved pumpkins. It was less of a séance and more of us being super hyper from the candy and dancing/rapping/setting small piles of trash on fire, asking the pumpkins to help us call upon the ancestors, whoever they were. This is what happens when indoor kids get turned loose outside, I guess.

An indoor kid's halloween costume: a stegosaurus

                The rest of the Halloween shenanigans involved getting some great braai at a place called Dallaz (I’d like to think they were repping my home city, but it was probably just a play on the word Dollars), watching/sleeping through the old Hocus Pocus movie, playing a sandwich-themed card game at the pond, and playing a semi-complex board game we lovingly refer to as the “nerd game.” Halloween success.

Chesa nama = hot meat

Braai day

The pond

26 October 2016: Nomad adventures continue in Mohale’s Hoek and into Qacha’s Nek

                After a fantastic taxi nap (the best way to pass the time on a hot/loud taxi) back from Jeff’s house, I decided to waste some time in Mafeteng town by going to the braai place for some lunch. There, I met a lady who used to work at the clinic in my village as a nurse practitioner. She said that she was there for 4 years in the early 1990s, and found it funny that this was around the time I was born. Not having been back there, she was quite surprised that there was a secondary school now and that the area called Plenty was no longer active as an agricultural organization planting produce, soy, and trees, and doing different projects like fisheries, and that now it was an orphanage with around 100 kids living there. She didn’t seem to remember her time there with much fondness, noting its remoteness and bad road, but it was fun talking to her anyway.

                The next stop on my nomadic journey would be to my district-away-from-home of Mohale’s Hoek. It was a nice couple of days spent making homemade samosas, intending to work out in the hotel’s gym but not wanting to be stared at by creeper bo-ntate in there, and hilariously paying for things at the bar with only brown change (the equivalent of paying for something in only pennies and nickels). Then I decided to go a bit out of town to stay with a friend who doesn’t get out very often and who I hadn’t seen in a while. In preparation for the tacos we had planned to make, I went to the butchery and bought what I thought was normal mincemeat. It was super cheap, but I didn’t really pay any mind. Turns out it was ground up random leftover parts or something, because after we made our tacos and started eating, there was the occasional plink of a hard fragment hitting the plate as we were spitting out the bone and cartilage bits that were ground in there. Yum.

                My last stop in my Lesotho farewell tour would be to go to the way-out-there district of Qacha’s Nek for a Halloween party at our friend Tyler’s house. I found Colleen in town after sending some last-minute postcards from the post office, and we got a 4+1 taxi to the edge of town to hitch south to Quthing. On the way there, our hitch driver missed a stop sign at a police stop, but realized his mistake, stopped, and backed up. Honestly, he probably should have just kept driving, because the police were just chilling in the shade on the side of the road and probably didn’t even notice. But, TIA, and he had to pay the cop 50 rand to get out of it. Shortly thereafter, he dropped Colleen and me off at the rank in Quthing just as the taxi to Qacha’s Nek filled up and started to leave. Not wanting to wait forever for the next one to fill, we walked to the road and unsuccessfully tried to hitch. About 20 minutes later, the Qacha taxi conductor came up to us on the road and told us that the taxi was almost full, and that we should probably get in. He added that he would beat anyone who tried to pick us up. “How?” we asked. “They’ll just drive away…” and that next time, we should at least walk up and over the hill so we’d be out of sight of the taxi drivers. So, thanks, to pay weekend and people having money to travel, we got into the almost-full taxi. 4 hours and R100 later, we were finally in Qacha. The route was beautiful as we climbed higher through the curvey roads of the mountains.

                Stay tuned for the mellow antics that ensue when you get a few Americans and a German together for a holiday that isn’t celebrated in this country.

A billboard for Lesotho's 50 year anniversary of independence. The words below the 50 say something like, "Together we are a nation of cows." Basotho like to think of King Moshoeshoe the First (founder of the Basotho nation) as the OG cow, and themselves as the calves.

The only things holding this taxi together are threads and dreams

Kids playing on the slackline at the orphanage

Thank god for ice guava on a hot taxi ride

23 October 2016: Hilariously shipping a box / start of being a Lesotho nomad

                My next stop after leaving my village was to Quthing camp town to finally ship that dang box of mine (see “shipping” post for the struggle that was trying to ship it a few weeks before). I made sure to bring enough cash with me this time. At the post office, I endured a downright comical process of wallpapering my box with R1623 of stamps, the highest denomination of stamp being R5. So here I am, taking a glue stick to entire pages of stamps and slapping them on the top and each side of this box, which is also almost entirely covered by red duct tape at this point just to keep it from falling apart. I told the post lady that in the US, they can just print one stamp with the total amount on it. “Oh, we’re far, far from that,” she said. I really hope it all works out and that this dang box arrives alive. I did get a tracking number though, so hopefully that’ll lessen the chances of it being totally lost in the ether. 

Finally free of that burden, I walked out of town and quickly found a hitch to Mohale’s Hoek with an architect guy who pointed out this skeleton of a building that he designed. The whole time I’ve been in Lesotho, that frame has been just like that, never being built on, but he didn’t seem to find it too problematic.

                After a couple days doing the usual shower/chicken/internet in Mohale’s Hoek, I got a taxi to the town to the north, Mafeteng, then got on another taxi to my friend Jeff’s site, where I’d be spending a few days. Yeah, I was out of my village, but I wanted to do kind of a farewell tour and go to a few friends’ houses before I left for my Southern Africa wanderings.

                Hanging out with Jeff usually results in spontaneous music-making and/or getting into some kind of hilarity, mostly because he goes nowhere without his ukulele or bass, and because he can just instantly make friends with anyone, this “anyone” usually leading to some adventurous situation. This time, it proved true on both accounts.

                It was a Saturday, and normally at Jeff’s school, they have Saturday study, which consists of some students showing up to school to do some extra lessons. But mostly, Jeff is the only teacher there. It was exam time for the students taking their national exit exams, so the Form Cs and Es were looking for help studying for their upcoming math(s) exam. I went in to help the Form Cs, since I’d never taught Form E before, and we went through a bunch of questions on an old exam. I thought it went well, and was confirmed of that fact when some students came over to Jeff’s house later that day and thanked me for helping them, and that they had understood well what I had reviewed with them. Ah, I kind of missed teaching right then, being away from teaching at my own school for a few weeks at that point.

                Then our pal Ben showed up and told us about the sh*tstorm happening in his village, the details of which I won’t go into here, but which forced him to vacate his village for at least a few days, leading him to stay with Jeff. As soon as he arrived, we got working on what we had been excited to make: a podcast. Now, what we call a “podcast” here among the volunteers is mostly just a long and rambling voice note, mostly on a specified topic, broadcast in our Whatsapp groups. Jeff had taken the concept to the next level with actual production and editing and sound mixing, leaving the rest of us in the dust, and I wanted to make a legit podcast with him. Our podcast, which I think I posted here a long time ago, was about Martin Gray Marvin Gaye’s song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and how it’s really about a mountain-loving pig and how the whole concept is just a sham. Have a listen, if you haven’t. It’s great.

                So there’s the music-making (our podcast did include original musical interludes), and here’s the hilarious situation. One night after some skillet pizza-making, we followed the sound of drumming to the chief’s house, which was for the chief’s daughter’s first birthday party. We got there and the mofumahali (female chief/chief’s wife) took me into this big tent that was set up near their house. What was happening inside was an important cultural celebration, and only married women with children were allowed to go in, so I felt very privileged to peek in. I have been sworn to secrecy as to exactly what the women were doing in there, but I will tell you that I sat down next to one ‘me (who was explaining to me what was going on, and spitting all over me whenever she opened her mouth) and watched the secret dance that the women do at these one-year-old birthday parties. The chief later explained to me that everyone has a big one-year party for babies, and that it’s very important. Other birthdays don’t really matter so much, though. What goes on in this tent is a closely-guarded secret kept from men. Just to see, I asked some men standing outside what they thought was going on inside, and they said that they had no idea, just some secret women’s rituals that they were not allowed to know about. This kind of thing goes both ways, though. When boys go to initiation school, they are also sworn to secrecy about what goes on up on the mountain for those few months, even to other boys who haven’t been.

                After I left the tent, Ben, Jeff, and I went into the chief’s house and we were sitting on buckets/water containers and just talking with the chief and some of his friends. As is typical of Basotho, they totally didn’t believe me that I was just friends with Jeff and Ben, and not either married or otherwise involved with either (or both) of them. And that just about covers the funny situation side of things, other than some punny photos we took:

Bassin' in the basin 

22 October 2016: Selling my hair / leaving the village

After photographing all over the village, I went back to school and found one of my Form Cs who I’d been conspiring with. I walked up to him, half smirking, and unslung my backpack and took out my ponytail. Yes, readers, the ponytail that had been cut off my head two years ago. I kept it. This student and I had been talking about how I might go about selling the thing, as I heard that I could get some decent cash money for my ponytail of lekhooa (white person) hair. This being one of the last days I’d be in the village, I decided that I would just sell it to him, who could then turn around and sell it to this ‘me he knows who is a traditional doctor. He only had R12 on him, which he gladly gave me, because he said he could probably get at least 50, if not several hundred rand for my hair. Does this count as an income-generating activity for my village?

                The day before I left the village, I prepared by packing, burning yet more trash, giving away more things I wouldn’t need and giving the cherished orphanage staff members American flag pins and thanking them for everything. One of the bo-‘me who works in the kitchen, and who was also my neighbor next to my host family’s house, was especially sad. She was the one who had given me my puppy, was always so kind to me, and was eager to feed me any time I came to the orphanage to do English lessons. I went to give her a hug, but she kind of pushed me off because Basotho don’t really do hugs, and I think she was embarrassed that she was starting to cry. I’m gonna miss her so much!

                On my last day, I gave the key to the visitor’s house to this same ‘me, who was in the kitchen giving peanut butter-smeared papatas to the kids for breakfast. She dug around in the pile for an especially good-looking one and gave it to me as I left. I walked across the ridge and over to the taxi stop for the last time.

One last hike with the ever-photogenic Bo Dog

My Ausi and another girl at the mokhukhu shop they work at

My new house for a couple weeks at the orphanage

The decorative rondavels where the boys live

A peek inside the old shepherd school, where herdboys could take classes because they were missing school due to herding. 

Another one of the houses, this one outfitted with a solar water heater

A view of my school from below the cliff. If you look carefully, you can see the students lined up for morning assembly. 

21 October 2016: The Ha Makoae Homes Tour

                For the past few days, I’ve just been chilling at the orphanage, playing with the slackline (and by playing, I mean like 5 minutes of me on it, then the nuggets notice and want to do it, and then it’s another hour of me holding tiny hands as they wobble their way across), eating papatas (little bread loaves) that they make in the kitchen here, and playing with the directors’ one-brown-eye-one-blue-eye dogs.

                I went to say hi to the students at school in the morning on my way to photograph some houses in the village, which I present below as the Ha Makoae Homes Tour.

Your basic rondaval

Round rocks 

Rocks between sticks

The start of an outer layer outside of the rocks and sticks 

All mud exterior

Smoothly smeared, nice touch with the half and half door 

This house may be made of stones, but they've also got a huge satellite dish

Six-sided thatched house

Pink rocks between sticks 

And of course, along the way I acquired a large nugget following 

My nkhono's (grandmother's) house, smooth pink rocks with turquoise accents

A newly-built cinder block house

All the sticks

Sometimes there are designs cut into the thatch

Showing off her house

Designs around the door can be carved in...

Or painted on

I spy some heart-shaped rocks 

A bigger cinder block house that's been smeared with concrete 

Sticks on sticks

You never escape people wanting you to take their photo while carrying around a camera. This woman is standing in front of the mill that she runs, her face covered in yellow cream to protect from the sun. 

We can't have a complete tour without including a latrine. A Very Important Poop may be happening in this Ventilation-Improved Pit. 

16 October 2016: Yet another episode in the quarterlife mystery that is my life: what is growing up?

                It’s a rainy Sunday, and the only thing I’ve done today is laze around, listening to podcasts, reading, and play with the orphanage directors’ dogs. I was particularly struck by one episode of the podcast “Millennial,” in which our melodramatic hero Megan interviews a guy who sailed around the world after college about postponing growing up and trying to be Peter Pan. He tells a story about a friend who is married, has a stable job he likes, a house and a dog, and sailor guy feels like he “need[s] to start sprinting just to catch up.” Megan asks why he wants to be Peter Pan, what he’s afraid of. He says that he’s afraid of “missing out on what [he] really want[s].” Megan uses this opportunity to go off on a soliloquy and says that at some point, she knows that she needs to “face [her] shit,” go through the storm, and deal with her problems/insecurities/uncertainties head on. Now, after this guy has done what he thought he really wanted, which is sail around the world, he doesn’t know what he wants next, or at all.

                Megan then switches gears to talking about how she sees social media presences differently now. “When my friends are standing in front of a volcano or on top of a mountain in a far-away country,” she wonders if those smiles are forced, if they’ve actually got real problems they’re trying to deal with that you don’t see in these happy posts. Wow, girl, sounds like you’re just trying to make yourself feel better, given the fact that you’re having problems with your boyfriend and getting rejected from fellowships and things. “Are they climbing this mountain because they don’t want to grow up?” she asks. Ouch. Right in the feels, that one. Are these posts, she asks, “the best way to hide what is actually happening?” OK there, sweetheart. First of all, climbing mountains in a far-away country (AKA my life) doesn’t mean that I’m escaping tons of problems at home, and that I’m trying to put oft growing up. I think she has a skewed idea of what “growing up” actually means. No one really knows for sure, but I don’t see it as having to face problems instead of running away from them. You do this literally your entire life, not just when you enter “adulthood.” Growing up may mean that you have to solve these problems more independently, or that you build character by learning to deal with new and different problems, but a no point in my childhood could I get away with not facing my own problems head-on. Growing up doesn’t mean that you can’t go out and have fun and climb mountains It doesn’t mean that you have to be stuck in one place and start turning into stone. You don’t have to be sucked into that mindset. Just because that happens to some (most?) people as they “grow up” doesn’t mean that you have to accept that as the status quo and do the same. If you need to feel included in a club of people going through the same experiences as you, there’s not just one way to do that. You don’t have to only join the club of people who get cubicle jobs, get married, have some kids and ferns on the windowsill, and plant some immovable roots and turn into a boring old person. There are so many other (legitimate/successful/respected) life paths you can follow.

When asked about growing up, a faithful and wise friend said that it is “in a sense, yes, being tied down. Putting something besides oneself first: job, SO, kids, whatever. When you’re not #1 anymore, then you’re grown” So there’s another perspective to think about.

                Now this begs the question, did I join Peace Corps and move to Lesotho and learn to climb mountains to escape my problems and put off growing up? Absolutely not. Sure, I did it in part because I didn’t really know what it was I actually wanted out of life, like sailboat boy, but my time here has helped me narrow down what it is that I do want. I wasn’t so naïve that I thought I could run away from my problems by coming here. Whatever problems I may or may not have had, I would be taking them along with me. There’s no such thing as leaving your baggage at the door. I have taken these two years to try to solve my main problem, which at the moment is “WTF am I gonna do with my life?” and have spent a lot of time hashing out my many options. So, in a way, “escaping” to Lesotho has really helped me solve my problems, not run away from them. Lesotho has not postponed my growing up. In so many ways, it has forced me to grow up as I have navigated a new country/culture and too many unforeseen speed bumps (and also many successes!) along the way.

                I read in This Side of Paradise that the joy of youth is actually the loss of it by experiencing new things. Then there are fewer and fewer things to do for the first time, until you may (if you’re not careful) stop looking for new things to do. This is when you’ve lost our youth: by failing to seek out new places/people/experiences. So I guess, in a way, coming here has scratched that itch of losing my “haven’t done”s but at the same time, my youth-ometer isn’t dwindling because I’m crossing things off. The level is the same, maybe even rising, because I’ve seen just a taste of what there is still left to do and where there is still left to go out there. 

10 October 2016, part 4: Moving into the orphanage / final tasks

When I arrived to the orphanage after getting off the taxi, I was so happy when I walked in and saw that the new directors, a South African and American couple with the fattest-cheeked baby ever, had set up a slackline just outside the dining hall. “I’m never leaving,” I thought. I brought my bags up to the top of the cliff, past the boys’ houses, an old shepherd school, and a leaky cistern where I would be staying in one of the guest rondavals. It was pretty secluded back there, which was nice, plus it had great views of the valley and surrounding mountains, but it was close enough to where the kids are so I could go hang out.

The next day was really nice, starting with a good run on the road, then I went to school where I gave each Form C student a photo of their whole group and me. A lot of the students were really happy to see me again since I’d been away for the school break. Then I walked up to the little shop where my second oldest ausi works, and she was so excited to see me, telling me that she missed me. This girl is the sweetest.

A few days later, after hanging out at the orphanage with the kids and the staff where they were all so welcoming and loving toward me, I went up to my old house to give my host ‘me and nkhono (grandmother) photos of them that I had also printed out. They weren’t there, probably out working in the fields by then, but I found my ausi and gave her the photos to hand out to my host family. I also had some little American flag pins to give them, and I pinned one on my ausi’s shirt. She was beaming, saying that it looked “so wow!” Then I went down to the primary school to find some of my neighbors who always came over to my house to play or get help with homework. I found them outside and gave them each a photo. The first girl I found took her photo and ran off, so excited, to show the other kids. They were genuinely so happy to have these photos (at last, after me promising them for so long) and said “rea leboha” (we thank you) so sincerely. Lastly, I went down to my school to give my principal a copy of the photo of the Form Cs and me, as I had an extra. She seemed to really appreciate it, and hung it up on her bulletin board.

You thought it was all rainbows and butterflies, did you, dear reader? Well don’t be fooled. After I gave her the photo, I asked her how the recommendation letter that I asked for was coming. She had said that she would write something for me, but now she said that maybe I should just write it, because she didn’t really know how I needed it to be like, and she would sign it and stamp it. That’s all good, but here’s the kicker. I asked her what kinds of things I should include, since it’s supposed to be from her after all. What do you think I did well over these past two years? She just shrugged and nervously laughed it off. No really, I pushed, my tone changing to be more serious. Anything you can tell me that was good? Even anything that I could have improved upon? Again a shrug, a fake smile, and she turned to go back into her office. Wow, how unprofessional. I’m asking you what you genuinely thought of my work at your school over the past two years, like any standard employee performance review that is so common in every workplace in the US, and you respond by acting like a child who doesn’t want to talk to me, just turning away. So that’s what you think of me, huh? It was insulting, actually, the way she smiled, like my simple request was either so cute or absolutely absurd. Wow. At that point, I was pretty annoyed at how, once again, my school was going back on its commitment to me, and at that moment was pretty happy about the prospect of leaving that environment very soon. Don’t get me wrong. I loved being around most of the students, and a select few really made an impact on me, but as far as the administration went, I was done.

At least here at the orphanage, I’m helping some kids with their homework and having a chance to relax and catch up on writing, reading, organizing, etc. in a very peaceful and welcoming environment. For now, I’m just trying to further plan my post-Lesotho travels and focusing on the future.

The Form Cs and me (and Bo)

The girls