Meeting Moms

It was the morning of December 7th and we had a special assignment.  One of the most difficult and harrowing that we will likely experience while in Africa.  Parents were visiting.  My mom, Kathy Mast was arriving in Johannesburg at 4 that afternoon.  Another volunteers parents were on the same flight.  A third would be accompanying us to the airport.  But it was 7AM, and Johannesburg was a long ways away.

Our hangovers did not help matters as we tried to pack our things and get cleaned up.  A wonderful, car-owning friend was kind enough to drive us to the border post before heading to work.  The taxi was nearly full, but we scarfed a box of chips (french fries) and downed a couple of cokes for breakfast before loading up and heading off.  We were all very excited and pleased with how easily and efficiently we had got underway.  As luck would have it, we even ended up in a vehicle known as a "quantum".  Unlike the ubiquitous mini-bus taxi, or kombi, this has individual seats for each passenger and an aisle down the center.  This means that they can't cram extra people in and you don't end up squished between two large women, a box of chickens and someone's suitcase. 

We sailed along smoothly for a few hours, making a quick bathroom/gas/smoking stop.  We had made great time and would be able to make it to the airport with hours to spare.  When only about an hour outside of the city, our luck finally gave out.  In the middle of a long stretch of straight, flat highway, beneath a country-road overpass, the driver pulled to the side of the road and stopped.  He got out and popped the hood open.  There was no smoke or strange smells coming from underneath, so we weren't too worried.  However, after poking around the engine and a fruitless search in the glove box, he told everyone they can get out of the car and rest.  The car had burned through its oil and no one had thought to bring extra.  Now, with the condition of most public transportation vehicles, stopping to top off the oil on a long journey is not uncommon.  But, that requires bringing the stuff with you.

After a year of such mishaps though, we were un-phased.  As the driver tried to call his fellow drivers and figure out a plan, we crawled up under the overpass and found a nice place to sit and chat.  While the things we talked and gossiped about probably did constitute "chatting", with the traffic roaring by and the apparent love of motorcycling people had that particular day, we mostly just shouted at each other.  This went on for a good hour or two until a replacement vehicle arrived from the city to take us.  That time was sufficient for me to uncover a small mystery, but not to solve it.  There was a colony of birds that had taken up residence under the bridge.  I'm not sure what they are called, but I've seen them all over Southern Africa.  They make a sort of nest out of mud.  They collect it a mouthful at a time and form a little pocket on the underside of some surface, usually roof overhangs or things like bridges.  Anyway, there had to have been hundreds of them and the overpass was nearly solid with their dwellings.  That is, only one side of the overpass was.  The side we sat on was that of the northbound lane and not a single nest was to be seen on our side of the center line.  The southbound side, as I said, was teeming with the things.   But, the day was hot and I was tired, so I didn't think to much about it.  I'm still not sure what it was all about though.  Was it just chance?  Something with wanting shade from the embankment in the morning but sun after noon?  Or do the birds just like to crap on everyone heading away from Johannesburg?

Anyway, we eventually got underway again, though now with those extra hours we had thoroughly gone.  We finally arrived at the taxi rank in Jo-burg, but now had to find our way out to the airport.  Though time was short, one of our party insisted we find a bathroom first.  This irked me, but turned out to be the best plan for, as she wandered into the confines of a sketchy bar, I chatted with some of its patrons.  Each having made his way through several quarts by this, the early afternoon, they were more than friendly and eager to chat.  After talking a bit they learned where we were headed and very kindly told us the cheapest way to get to the airport which ended up saving us some R300!

Following their directions, we made our way through the crowded taxi rank and found the one that took us to the airport.  Once at the airport, we grabbed a couple pizzas to chow on since it was by now around half past three and none of us had eaten since breakfast.  I can't describe the eagerness with which we waited.  As soon as the big board indicated the flight was disembarking, we were amongst the crowd peering in anticipation at the set of doors through which they would come.  We each held signs (crudely fashioned from our pizza box lids) welcoming our respective family members to the continent.

As I waited for what seemed ages, a thousand paranoid thoughts flit through my head.  What if she missed the flight and no one felt like telling me?  What if she had been arrested by customs for trying to bring in too much cheese or too many knives?  What if she made it here, but has emerged through some secret, hidden exit that leads not into the airport lobby, but via extensive underground caverns, to some massive, dangerous Johannesburg slum?  What if she made it here and had already come out, but we had both changed so much in a year that neither would recognize the other?  Oddly enough, none of these things happened.  After a few moments she came strolling out of the correct doors, without police escort, and looking much the same as I remembered.

Waving my sign madly, I pushed my way through the crowd and welcomed her to the continent with a big hug!  Some how I thought that her being here would be strange.  Its a whole different place and culture and everything and figured seeing her dropped into the midst of this new life I have would feel odd.  However, after a few minutes I realized how strangely normal it was to be with her.  The land and the people, the transport, the weather, everything else was vastly different, but our relationship was the same as always, and in a short time it seemed, in some way, as though she had always been here.

End of my first school year

My first school year in Lesotho ended in a flurry of activity.  There were tests to make and administer and cheaters to catch.  Then, a mountain of papers to grade.  In this respect I am fortunate to be teaching math and science, which I have to imagine, are MUCH easier and more straightforward to mark than something like English. 

Any extra time I may have gained, however, was put to good use.  I had been working on a rudimentary grade report program for our school.  In the final days before the reports had to be made, I certainly had my hands full working out last minute bugs in the program and helping my fellow teachers learn how to use it.  We pushed things to the wire but managed to get everyones reports made and printed in time for the big parents meeting, held at the end of every year.

The next day I left my village for what would be a a multi-part journey.  This first day was spent at my camp town with fellow volunteers from my district, as well as a couple from the lowlands, having a belated Thanksgiving party.  Those must be very good friends indeed to have made such an unpleasant journey just to sit around and drink wine with us in the mountains for a day!

The next morning I was off again.  I was taking a dozen of my students down to Maseru (Lesotho's capitol, pronounced something like "Mah-sare-oo") for a 3-day life skills camp put on by a group called "Phela".  In Sesotho, "phela" is a verb meaning "to live".  A common greeting here is "U phela joang?", meaning, "How are you living?", or "How are you?"  The group Phela works here to promote healthy lifestyles among youth.  They are funded heavily by Ireland and the UK and, in addition to putting on these camps, produce and distribute a series of full color magazines, talking about everything from self-esteem and decision making to HIV/AIDS and contraception use.

Phela totally funded the whole thing, sending buses to ever district in the country to pick up over 1000 kids from dozens of schools and bring them to the capitol.  They provided a place to sleep and meals for the entire time.  This camp was a wonderful opportunity for my students, a few of whom had never been to Maseru.  Our bus was full of very excited kids from 6 school in Mokhotlong.  The sound track to the journey was the students singing Basotho songs and hymns, occasionally punctuated with the excited cry of "Maseru!"

Maseru is not a big city.  You can stroll from one end of downtown to the other in about 30 minutes.  It is, however, the largest city (and probably the only place I would give the rank of "city") in this country of 2 million people.  As we made our way through the afternoon traffic towards our destination, I literally saw jaws drop.  One of my students leapt from his seat and cried out upon seeing a junkyard with a hundred or so cars in it.  They about hit the ceiling when we drove past the large (and rather nice) soccer stadium where they have countless times watched their favorite teams playing on television.  I'm sure we looked quite a site from the outside, with everyone standing up, peering and pointing out the windows at almost everything we passed!  We made a quick stop so the students could grab some food and, after an initial scare at having lost 2 students only 15 minutes after arriving, continued on to Moshoeshoe II High School, where the camp was to be held.

There were some initial logistical hang-ups with providing bedding for 1000 kids, but despite the spartan lodgings, everyone was cheery and excited.  The next couple days were pretty fun for everyone.  I met a bunch of cool teachers from all over the country and the students all made lots of new friends.  There were debates and games with topics on HIV/AIDS and self confidence.  They even had one of those gruesome STI slide shows that do a decent job of scaring everyone away from sex.  A couple schools also put on dramas addressing relationship issues.  On the last day we all took a long hike to the top of a nearby mountain where we enjoyed a beautiful view over some of the lowlands including the King's Residence.  We had a quick lunch up there and then scurried down and back to the school as a massive afternoon thunderstorm rolled in.  The final night was all fun with dance competitions and rap battles.  My students were easily identified as a bunch of shy country kids, but even I was surprised at how outgoing and self-confident many of the lowlands kids were.  They weren't afraid to get up in front of 1000 other kids and sing or dance or do whatever.

The next morning students were loaded up on the buses again and headed back home.  As a treat for their good behavior during the camp, the bus from my district took the kids to the Pioneer Mall for an hour before departing.  This, naturally, was the first mall many of the kids had ever been to.  More than once I saw astonished students looking at the expensive clothes displayed in storefronts and sneaking a picture or two with their camera-phones.  I ordered a big cappuccino (at one of the few places in Lesotho where one can get real coffee) and chuckled to myself as high school students from the mountains took the escalators up and down like some sort of carnival ride.

All too soon, their hour was up and they boarded the bus and headed back to the mountains.  I stayed behind, as I had another part of my journey to embark on.

A little home project

Before school had started, I used some of my free time on this little project.  It's a set of shelves made from a tree I cut down in a donga.

Fancy Phones

Bring to mind your stock image of a Peace Corps Volunteer. Reading this blog, maybe it's a kid from Wisconsin, somewhere in Africa. Its a hot afternoon and he is relaxing in the shade of the grass roof of his stone house. About the small room can be found the expected scant furnishings; a table and chairs, a small stove and a bed. A beat-up old guitar in one corner and a backpack lying on the floor. But lo! Where there should be stacks of beat-up novels and worn out old books, we find, of all things, a kindle! And our subject is found reposing in his bed, furiously typing away on a Blackberry! Come night time, he will munch away on his simple dinner of samp and beans while watching the latest episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” on his laptop.

This social, cultural, and technological concoction is the common stew of Africa today, and the PCV is but an extreme example of this norm. We get our water from taps (or even hand pumps) and bathe from a bucket while listening to an iPod. Transplanted Americans are not the exception here, and even the dirtiest, blanket clad herd boy is usually equipped with a cell phone with which he can text his buddies or wirelessly transfer money to his family. It's not an uncommon sight to find a bush-taxi driver at the local internet cafe, cruising websites in search of good deals for his next vehicle.

From my house, the immediate view is of stone rondavols with thatch roofs and a few cinder-block dwelling sporting corrugated metal roofing. As you raise your eyes, the fields, freshly plowed by oxen or donkey teams, give way to mountains and a jagged brown horizon. The distant gleam of aluminum pit-latrines betray far-away villages which would otherwise blend into the rocky mountains from which they are constructed. Finally, to both the east and west, one can see the omnipresent cell phone towers. Though no one in sight has indoor plumbing, only a small number of families will be found lacking a cell phone or two.

This is Africa. A land, to the outsider, chock-full of seeming paradoxes and frustrations. Though still quite the outsider myself, I have learned that things really do have an order and reason to them. The problem is the very culture and context in which everything exists is just so very different from anything I am used to. This important underlying structure is not always, at least to me, transparent, accessible, or easy to grasp.

Some thing are now clear to me: with Africa's generally rural and decentralized layouts, things like land-line phone systems never made any sense and were thus generally passed over in the progress of communication technologies here. However, other things, like the accepted use of perpetually crowded, unreliable, and unscheduled minibus taxis as a primary mode of transportation, will probably win over my Americanized logic.

First Funeral...

Today I attended my first funeral in Lesotho. I was one of the few people in my group who still hadn't been to one in this, our first year in country. The funeral was for one of my students and, in a land of rampant HIV/AIDS, poverty, disease, etc., was particularly tragic in that the boy had thus far been fortunate enough to avoid these common fates only to meet his end, at the age of 24, in the rushing waters of the, now swollen, Senqu River. Though there were no witnesses and the poor boy's body was not found for over a week, the assumption is that, while watching his cattle on horseback, he tried to cross the river when he fell in and was drowned.

Now, funerals in Lesotho are always held on Saturday. Accordingly, this morning, I accompanied some of my fellow teachers to the home of the boy's family, where the service was held. The ceremony was not wholly unlike those we hold in the States. Some Bible verses were read and different friends and family got up before the group to share memories of the boy or to do a little preaching. There was a whole lot more singing than I am used to, though probably no more than at the mass of any of the more musical religions.

There were a couple of things that did stand out to me as being a little different from what I am used to. Firstly, I had heard the dress code at such things was formal or semi-formal, but it turned out this was very open to interpretation with everything present, from full suits and black dresses to jeans and bright T-shirts. Next, being held outside at the family's home, all manner of chickens, pigs, and other such farm animals managed to keep up a small racket throughout the entire proceedings. A few of the local ragged dogs also kept wandering through the midst of everything. However, no one seemed to find this odd nor did they let it take away from the solemnity of the occasion. Another interesting thing was that the mother of the deceased was afforded a special spot in the front of the group where, upon a pile of blankets and pillows, she lay on the ground. The idea being, I was told, that the mother is supposed to be so grieved that she is weak and faint is thus given this setup where she could be seen laying and weeping for the duration of the ceremony. She was also always attended by two other women who were on either side of her to physically support her.

After everyone spoke their turn, the group walked in a procession with the casket at front, to a small plot nearby with five or six other graves. The casket was placed in the grave, some more verses were read, and then each person took a turn at tossing some soil into the grave. The men would each take up a shovel and heave a few loads in, while the women would each take a handful and drop it onto the casket. Eventually this was done and, a couple of small, rough stones being placed for a headstone, we returned to the family's place where everyone was fed a good meal of of beef, samp, and potatoes.

It was difficult to bury one of my students, but the whole ceremony was very nice and as good a way as any to say goodbye.

Back at School

So first off, yes; I'm getting increasingly bad at keeping this thing up to date. Part of it, I suspect, is that the longer I'm here, the less certain things surprise me, so that something that would have seemed shocking months ago (like the school kitchen blowing away the other day) now gets relegated to the lowly life of a facebook post. But, this is no excuse for leaving you, dear reader (readers?) out of the loop. So, here comes another quick round of updates from my life in the Kingdom in the Sky.

The day-to-day life at school is much the same as before. My math and physics students are doing well, though we are now a few weeks behind schedule due to some out of the blue snow days at the beginning of August. Recently, we have sent those students home who, to date, have yet to pay their school fees in full. This resulted in my class sizes dropping from 50-60 kids per class to 20-30. Teaching with all those empty desks in the room is a little sad. Knowing that those students (most of whom are very clever and hard working) are missing out on part of their education because of money issues is a little sobering. However, with such great student-teacher ratios, I am able to address everyone's questions and spend individual time with almost every student each class period! So I guess my current strategy is to simply focus on doing the best I can for those kids who are still here and hope that those others find their way back to school soon.

Winter Vacation

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After waffling back and forth between going to the Dolphin Coast near Durban, the Cape Town Wine Route, or up to Mozambique, Sarah and I decided to spend her last week here traveling to the warmer beaches of Mozambique via Swaziland. Due to our combined inability to make solid decisions or plans, (too) early one morning we headed to the border post at Ficksburg. We had been hoping to catch a direct ride to Swaziland from Lesotho, but found that the only public transport route was via Johannesburg. This was not unanticipated, but did make the journey to Swaziland's capitol, Mbabane, a dawn to dusk affair, ending with a thrilling/teeth-grinding kombi ride to our hostel, as the driver tried to drop us off before he raced back to the border before it closed for the day. We never did find out if he made it, but bless that guy for hauling us all over the place in search of an elusive hostel and putting himself at risk of sleeping in his taxi all night, stuck in Swaziland!

We spent a couple of days in Swaziland, checking out the markets and wandering around. We really only spent time near the bigger cities, and I was impressed with the quality of their infrastructure. It is a country that has been made easily accesible to tourists.  The roads were all well marked and maintained. I'm not sure if that is also the case in more rural parts of the country however. Swaziland has the highest HIV prevalence of any country in the world and it is the last absolute monarchy in Africa. The HIV epidemic may not have an end in sight (though it hasn't worsened considerably either) but we got the sense that the Royalty are in for some trouble. I was surprised to find how vocal many of the citizens were about their dislike for the current government and the abuses of power they saw. A copy of the daily paper in Manzini, one of the larger cities, was almost entirely filled with stories of government ministers and departments making off with absurd amounts of money and giving each other raises, while the people's basic needs go unmet. 

The paper didn't have much direct criticism of the King himself, but the displeasure with him was apparent. A couple taxi drivers we talked with had no qualms about bashing “His Majesty.” King Mswati III has something like 9 wives (he can take any woman he wants, married or otherwise for his wife) and draws silly amounts of money from the public coffers for his family and friends. Meanwhile teachers and factory workers have been striking for better pay, workers rights, and such things. The country was actually closed to visiting Peace Corps Volunteers a few months back during a large factor worker strike. Rubber bullets and teargassing seem to have become the normal police and military reaction to the protests. With tales of officials absconding with large sums of money, my general impression was that many people see the inevitable change and are getting away with as much as they can while they still can. Let me reiterate that this blog represents my personal views and in no way reflects the stance of the Peace Corps or the U.S. government. That being said, I would not be surprised if this last monarchy sees it's end before I return to the States. The transition seems inevitable with about 1 million unhappy citizens, lets just hope it happens peacefully. I have confidence that it will, especially since Swaziland has such good examples in it's neighbors, South Africa, Lesotho, and Mozambique.