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'Good morning! What is the time!' shout the primary students and herd boys. 'Hurry!' I warn my students, 'we don't have much time!' 'Ah, this African mentality of time,' Nate Mokone replied when we asked what time to expect a visitor he'd promised. 'Maybe 6:00,' he said to appease us. 'It's 6:15 now,' we tell him. 'Oh really?!' and we all laughed because his reaction so perfectly illustrated his previous comment and because in this moment we all recognized the cultural gap that challenges us, frustrates us, yet in this moment brought us together. I've addressed this matter of time before in my reports but it seems to be increasingly prominent element of my life in Lesotho.
Three years ago (at this time) I was in London, one of the most cosmopolitan and time-driven cities on earth. Each morning I boarded the Piccadilly Line at South Kensington for my commute to school, one of the many train service on the London Underground by which one could set her watch. And if the tube wasn't running there was always Big Ben keeping perfect time as he chimed out the hours and quarter hours with an authority over London time comparable to that of the Pope over the Catholic Church. A year ago I was teaching 7th and 8th grade at Grinnell Middle School where a bell schedule shuffled students and teachers through their days and weeks. Time here in Lesotho passes quite different ways. Tube stops and bells have been replaced by other, less official markers of time. While a bell does ring here at St. Rodrigue High School to signal the end of one class and the simultaneous start of the next, our bell doesn't seem to have the same power as Big Ben. If the Form E's, the students responsible for
ringing the bell, are otherwise occupied the bell may not ring. If and when it does ring, it seems to serve more as a suggestion that teachers move on to their next class or free period…..if they hear it.
I arrived in Lesotho last January; I often tell people that the first week or 10 days felt like the longest of my life. Now, I'm astounded by how fast the time suddenly seems to be passing. I 'm equally amazed by how acutely aware I am of that passage. I make the time in half a dozen little ways. Every Monday I turn the page in my planner/journal, then on Wednesdays the page in my lesson plan book. I marvel that another week has evidently passed, as I am once again sitting on the wall outside the B2 classroom waiting for our headmistress Sister Armelia finish up her Wednesday morning religion lesson. ('Oh! I'm sorry!' she always says as she passes.) Every Thursday Kara and I treat ourselves to homemade chili for dinner, always with a variety of beans and local maize staple called samp. On Fridays and Sundays we watch and episode of a cancelled American TV series on Kara's portable DVD player (thank you Mr. and Mrs. Moskowitz!). Every four episodes we change discs; there are seven discs and we complet
ed disc three just last night. The bottle of 300 vitamins that I brought in January is about ¼ full now (see Mom, I have been taking my vitamins!), a sure sign that my time here is dwindling.
It's a running joke in southern Africa that we are 2 hours ahead of Greenwich Meridan Time and therefore we have to do things slowly. Truly there does seem to be more time here in the peaceful valleys of Mountain Kingdom. This is generally very nice. 8 months ago I'd have found it nearly impossible to sit, just sit, doing next to nothing for more than a couple of minutes. Now, I can easily pass 20 minutes sitting outside in the African sun, trying to escape the perpetual cold of the library or staff room. In those 20-or-so-minutes I amaze myself with my ability to do nothing but sit, perhaps absent-mindedly watch the bo-'m who sell fatcakes (fried balls of dough, guaranteed to titillate your taste buds and clog your arteries for less than a dime a pop) as they also bask in the sun 50 yards away. My new found ability to sit, clearing my mind and warming by body would impress Yoga masters everywhere-believe me I know, as I've found ample time to take up Yoga this year. After 4 years at Grinnell and a sem
ester of student-teaching it's nice to have so much time to practice Yoga, read and write, bake bread, and sit. Among other things, Lesotho has given me the gift of time.
And yet, there's not enough time. My students and I still struggle to communicate. It is September and I have students who still can't write a paragraph or, in at lease one case, even a cogent sentence for that matter. This session I am teaching a writing course, aptly named composition. I've enjoyed teaching this class as it has allowed me a lot of time to work with students in small groups, even one-on-one. If they drive me nuts during out semi-weekly lectures to a class of around 40 students, I always love them again after working with them individually. While their ideas aren't particularly creative, their grammar markedly flawed, their rationale often shallow and non-compelling, I enjoy working with the students in this context. These meetings give me a chance to get to know each student a little better and address those elements of her writing which are weakest. These meetings are also nice because both of us can just work, without the distraction of 39 other people. It is at this time that I s
ee my students 'giving it their best shot' and it gives me a warm bubbly feeling inside to know that maybe, they do care, they do want to improve their writing , and perhaps I could be the one to help them. I wish I could give them more time, really. It pains me to have to say, 'Oh, time's up, sorry! Next!'
I'm reminded constantly of what a process learning English is. There's not an easy way to remind students to conjugate their verbs correctly. Before every composition I remind the, knowing full well that it's mostly ineffective, to "Make sure you use a capital letter and full stop in each sentence. Pay attention to verb tense and subject verb agreement! 'I likes to eat papa??? No! I like to eat papa. Right? Use your dictionary to look up words you don't know how to spell. Pay attention to your nouns and pronouns! A man is he!" (Got it, kids?). While marking a Form A compositions the other day I noticed that may students wrote "food ball" instead of "football". I underlined the mistake in each composition and returned them for the students to correct themselves, a part of our multiple period examination on the writing process. One student changed the work from "food ball" to "feed ball." I chuckled and shared her change with Kara, but I was dismayed at the same time. I wish I could teach them every
thing they need to know. I wish I could take 40 minutes with every student every week to help her with her writing. I think this must be one of the perpetual frustrations of teachers everywhere. A year is just not long enough.
My students are away of the constant lack of time, too. I was teaching Form C Guidance and Counseling, but after the students wrote their mock Exams in August they no longer wanted to meet for this course. They wanted more time to study the subjects on which their upcoming Junior Certificate Examination will test them. I give class work and students glance at the clock and lament that there is not enough time. Their protest last so long that I lament that they waste time even telling me this. But how will they know that they should wait to hear everything and then ask questions if I don't tell them. It would take less time to explain things were not for the language barrier. I use extra words to say what I could say with one word because they don't yet have the vocabulary. If I want to give them a new word I have to explain it. Today I used the word participated and then had to explain that it means to 'take part in'. So instead of 'should Form A's and B's take part in the English in the English Day
debate?' I have to say 'should Form A's and B's take part in the English Day Debate?' When I speak to Form A and B students I have to say each word. very. distinctly. Adding words makes it take. up.more.time. Time we can't get back.
I'm often frustrated by all this wasted or otherwise lost time. My frustration was probably inevitable, really. I am a Westerner living in Lesotho. Also, on my mother's side, my ancestors were Puritans. (I didn't stand a chance….) 'Idle hands are the work of the Devil.' 'Time is money.' While I like to think I don't necessarily subscribe to such notions, perhaps these gems form the American cultural fabric help to explain my frustrations when things don't go quite how it seems to me that they should. I have to take a mental time out when one day a teacher says to a colleague, 'Slow down, my brother. This is Africa,' and the next day asks me to trade class periods with him-----already 5 minutes into his period--- because he has not yet finished preparing. I was planning to give a test. So was he. It's not as though one can really say no to these sorts of requests and so sometimes one simply has to oblige. So, I went back to B2 and gave the first part my test. What else could I do? It's not an en
tirely negative reflection of Basotho culture. People help each other out. Everyone is not for him-or herself, only. But when it comes to class time, well, it's as precious as gold, diamonds, water in February 2006 Lesotho (see previous reports), to some of us. I don't mind being a part of this helpful culture, but I still wish there were more planning on the part of many of my colleagues, less taking for granted the fact that if you do end up needing to borrow a class period generally people will let you. I suppose it's actually very Western of me to even think of time as a commodity, something tangible which one can give or take, willingly or unwillingly. Trying to break with the nothing that time is one's personal property---is that what the expression 'time is money' really means? -would help to alleviate some of my frustration, I imagine. 'How dare you think you can waste your classmates and my time' I occasionally scold my unruly students, but maybe I'm the one who's got it all wrong.
Certainly I'm not the only person around here who thinks about time, everyone does. Generally, it seems like everything takes longer here at St. Rodrigue, in Lesotho, in Africa. People give themselves what seems to me an absurd amount of time for some activities-one two teachers left our village at 1:00 to catch a 4:00 bust at Mpatana-about a 20 minute walk away, 30 if you walked quite slowly. Kara and I say them at about 3:45 and asked them why they left St. Rodrigue so early. "We had to go to the shop," they answered, referring to a shop on the walking route at which they purchased only a box of juice and a small snack from what we could tell. Another co-worker lamented that she'd never finish her marking. She has a lot-5 classes---but she also said she had about 5 weeks to do it. "Do you think I can manage?" she asked me. She wanted me to help her, but I couldn't really. I had my own work to do. And I certainly felt that she could manage. I'd always heard the jokes about 'African time' but truly
I never have imagined that I'd be witness to such strikingly different ideas about time.
In less than three months I'll get on a plane in Maseru. That plane will take me to Jo-burg then I will cross the Atlantic on another plane. That plane will probably leave more or less on time and some 18 hours later I'll be back in a world of clocks and schedules, people rushing from place to place, road rage when someone misses the green light. And I'll sit behind the wheel of my car in the left turn lane thinking fondly of another world. A world where teachers swap class periods like kids in America sway Pokemon cards, (do kids sill swap Pokemon cards? I feel so out of touch…..), where time goes by more slowly, more simply. Time will propel us all forward at the same rate. And, as the light changes back to green I'll roll through the intersection and continue on my way, amazed at how time is going by everywhere just the same.
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