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.