 |
"Water, water, everywhere," says Leslie.
I agree. In the fist two weeks of the new semester, more rain fell than in all of my first semester. Lesotho had the heaviest rainy season for twenty years. Leslie's first trip to town was a watery confusion, a river flowing down Kingsway, Maseru's main road; a crowded Friday-night bus, rain leaking in the windows, a fight in the back, the conductor leaping and hoisting himself in through a side window to pull men off each other because there is too little room to move down the aisle. Leslie four days into Lesotho, seeing this all for the first time, me wanting to promise that Lesotho isn't really a waterworld, there's not always mud up to your kneecaps or deafening pounding on the tin roof.
And yet there was not enough water. Our house is conveniently equipped with running taps, a bathtub, a flush toilet. Even a solar heater that provides hot water on sunny days. When there is water. Which, these days, there is not. Our running water has been out since a week before the school year started, which is now two months ago. There is a pump down the road which we use to fill up buckets for flushing the toilet, drinking, bathing, doing laundry, washing dishes. Then the village up the hill who have rights to the source of the water shut off the pump, as the 250 students at hostel were using too much water. Fair enough, but then we had none. We asked the other teachers where we should get water. "Yes, there is no water," they agreed.
What can we drink? How can we bathe? Can we do this? Can we have school with no water? The girls drank water from the convent's rainwater tanks, and from the river. Some got sick, because they didn't boil the water. We slumped on our couches, looked at each other confused, what can we do?
That night, Ntate Mahipi and Natate Paulosi, the convent's resident fix-it guys, and our personal heroes, stood with us in the pouring rain, collecting water in buckets as it poured off our roof. Once the rains abated, girls came down from the convent with huge white plastic buckets balanced on their heads, brimming with water. We didn't have enough buckets and containers for all our newly found water. "It never rains, it pours?" I suggested. In the next days, Ntate Mahipi and Ntate Paulosi fixed our faucetless and sieve-like rainwater tank, scraped out the inches of mud at the bottom, cleaned it with laundry detergent, welded patches in the holes, and painted it bright silver. It's almost beautiful. We share it with all our neighboring teachers. And now the pump down the road is almost always on.
I write so much about water because I like to think that it is our greatest struggle. It is a concrete and respectable problem which is beyond our control. We can deal with it, stoically or otherwise, but that is all we can do. The truth is, there are many things with which I am struggling whose intangible nature makes me unsure of whether they are in my control or not. I worry about being a good enough teacher, about whether my students are learning about what rights or obligations I have to make changes. I am a class teacher for the A2's, 40 eighth graders, with birth years ranging from 1987 to 1992 - 18 to 14 years old. I love my class. They're often naughty, but I think they're pretty hilarious. Lirontso, my class prefect, takes her duties with great seriousness and once handed me a sheet of paper listing all the girls who talked during study. Out of 40 girls, there were 26 names. But I worry that the poor combination of my limited Sesotho and their limited English means that they won't or can't
communicate to me their problems and needs. I am their advocate in many ways, their mediator with other staff or school administration. When other teachers don't show up to teach my class, to what extent can I complain to them?
I am still very unsure about some things. This is my school, but only for one year. This is my home, but only for another few months. This is not my country, this is not my culture. The desks adjacent to mine in the staff room belongs to two very nice male teachers, who I like a lot and get along with well. The Ntate who sits next to me likes to pose scientific and philosophical questions to the staff room, he is kind and supportive, and the Ntate who I face I work with coaching sports, and he has helped me practice phrases in Sesotho. But both of these men often leave their beating sticks on my desk when theirs are overflowing with books and papers. There are three beating sticks on my desk right now.
I don't know how to feel about being white. In a region where massive white oppression is a very recent historical reality, I feel pretty trite saying it, but it is difficult for me to be a white woman in Lesotho. I wrote in my first report about the joys of running with school children, but now I dread the site of children on my runs. The great open spaces in Lesotho sometimes mean that herd boys and children can see my glaring white skin coming from miles off. In my better moments, I can admit the hilarity of myself running desperately from a village, followed by a crowd of a dozen or more shouting and screaming children. But at the end of a long run, pushing and struggling up the last steep hill, my heart sinks when I hear shouts of, "Lekhua! Whitey! What is the time!" or the crude propositions of young men and boys. In Maseru, harassment is more aggressive, men grab our arms, pound insistently on our bus or taxi windows.
I am much more angered, however, when I see men making advances on my students. Secretly, I want my students to be fierce feminists and revolutionaries, to reject a resignation to being housewives, washing babies, doing laundry, cooking dinner for drunken abusive husbands. At least until there is more gender equality in Lesotho, and the world. It's not that I'm a misandrist. It's not that I think there is gender equality in the states. But when my students tell me that St. Rodrigue should be co-ed because boys are better at math and sciences, or a young man visitor in our house tells Leslie and me that he wants a wife because he's tired of doing his own laundry, I want my students to stand up for themselves and change things.
I find that the longer I am here, the more I change my mind about things. After almost 8 months, Lesotho is not less beautiful. Teaching is not less rewarding. But after this period of time, things which were once challenges that I accepted as part of life now take on a different quality. I rather enjoy living without telephone, cell reception, television, internet, and usually electricity. Transport is slow, but making a trip to town once every two or three weeks is enough groceries and communication for us. But I am realizing that these things which are merely inconveniences for me are actual hindrances to improving the infrastructure and possibilities for a rural community like St. Rodrigue. My students want to take computer classes, but this is an obvious impossibility with not only no computers, but such limited electricity. It takes a long time to organize events with other schools because of very slow communications- getting messages to St. Rodrigue is difficult; we rely on the evening bus to b
ring up messages from Maseru. If there is a change of date for a sports competition, the organizers must write a note to pass on to us, and we may no hear until a day or two before the rescheduled event.
My experience in Lesotho is not all struggles with resources, rights, race and gender. It still has a lot to do with living in a postcard world of beautiful mountains, with growing radishes and squash, eating peaches until I make myself sick, and then canning 19 pint jars of peach halves, spiced peaches and peach chutney, and drying tray after tray of peach slices. It has a lot to do with nuns being some of the funniest people I know, and feeling great pride when the track and field athletes, who Leslie and I have been helping to coach, win race after race in inter-school competitions-especially when the winner of the 3200 meter race was my own class perfect, who well out-ran me when I accompanied the long-distance runners on a 5k during practice.
The first quarter of the new year is coming to a close. Nationwide, schools will be cancelled for two weeks in mid-April to facilitate a national census. We heard last week. This means that the semester will be extended another week into July, making my time in Lesotho one week longer.
At the time that I am sending this report, the convent has bought a new generator. We now have running water almost all the time.
|
|
