I'm pretty sure I'll always associate the smell of paraffin lamps with Lesotho.
The mission generator broke sometime in October and we spent the final two months of the school year without electricity. We typed final examinations by using the mission computer on solar power on sunny days, and one of the nuns made frequent trips to Maseru to make copies. I was, as always, behind on marking the stacks of language exams and completed many of them by headlamp. Sometime past nine o'clock on our last night at St. Rodrigue, a day after most of the Basotho teachers had left for the Christmas holiday, the lights all came on; magic.
I could fill reports with such anecdotes of life in a developing country, but it seems appropriate now to reflect more broadly upon Lesotho as a struggling country and the role of the Grinnell Corps fellowship at St. Rodrigue. We talked about these things often at the Grinnell house, often over candlelit dinners while the night settled in. Late in 2005, there was a great deal of international talk about forgiving loans, increasing aid money, and fostering development in poor countries. Paul Theroux, a writer and former volunteer teacher with Peace Corps in East Africa, recently wrote a letter to the New York Times that criticized the blind outpouring of aid to the developing world. He argued that Africa doesn't need unlimited monetary resources or armies of volunteer teachers and doctors, but rather good governance and a sustainable plan for development. Africa's best and brightest find work in the developed world, he said, and entrust the poor to volunteers from the rich world. The cycle of poverty and aid dependency continues.
In some ways, Theroux is right. I signed up for a volunteer work in Africa and wrote home, as expected, about the slums that ring Maseru, the treacherous mountain passes, and village women washing clothes in rivers. I wrote about absurdly overcrowded transportation and the way students twisted used notebook pages between their hands to make toilet paper. What Rachel, Molly, and I could control, we did. We took on some of the largest and most difficult classes in the school, taught during free periods, and tried to give our students the consistency and compassion they deserved. Meanwhile, other teachers frequently missed class, the Form B students learned literature without books for most of the year (government oversight), and the national exams given to Form C students were rife with errors.
For three Americans with battery-operated headlamps and a sense of adventure, a couple of months without power or week without running water were no big deal. Three days of unannounced class cancellations, a broken Xerox machine at exam time, students cramming their desks together against the cold-we Americans complained at home, but we dealt with it, anyway. After all, what would be unacceptable in America is expected in Lesotho. It was easy most days to accept Lesotho and all its frustrations as part and parcel of a developing world experience. Like every other well-intentioned volunteer from abroad, I knew I'd eventually return home.
If I had to quantify my contribution during a years' work, it wouldn't amount to much. I taught about 180 students. Some made it through to the next level; some didn't. Whether many of them will successfully complete even another year of school depends on factors far beyond my control: their motivation, their teachers' commitment, and the ability of their families to continue paying school fees. I saw at St. Rodrigue the extent to which willing American volunteers sometimes become a crutch to the school's improvement.
Here's where I disagree with Paul Theroux's assessment of volunteer work in the developing world. True, I couldn't greatly improve St. Rodrigue alone. Nor will the years of Peace Corps and Grinnell Corps involvement transform the school or pull up the country, though they'll surely affect a few lives for the better. In the end, we don't change St. Rodrigue, but St. Rodrigue changes us.
Truth is, when you think about it enough, Lesotho is heartbreaking. When Sister Armelina and I picked up Molly from the airport in July, we were delayed by an improbably long motorcade: Bill Clinton had just made a gift of millions of dollars for the care of HIV-positive Basotho children, and Lesotho's entire government was escorting him to the airport. There, in the dusty winter twilight, were twenty or thirty shining Mercedes sedans with government plates rushing past the dilapidated outskirts of the capital to the concrete terminal. In Maseru, the garment industry crashed in 2005 as European textile quotas expired and factories relocated to Asia. When we read a poem about a prostitute in literature and discussed why a woman might become a prostitute, a student from Maseru suggested that perhaps the woman had lost her job and had to pay a child's school fees. That particular student's father was dead; her mother worked in the factories, but twice asked me to help her find additional scholarship money. These girls are worried. Lesotho's HIV prevalence rate is among the highest in the world. For a foreigner, it's an invisible epidemic. In Lesotho, one does not see (as I naively expected) emaciated men in the cities or deathly ill children on public transportation. Rather, a teacher died of tuberculosis, the staff room chalkboard became a litany of losses, and old women in minibuses carried babies on their backs. My favorite kid in the neighborhood, a boy who always greeted me with a "'M'e Elisabeta!" and frenetic jogging motions, had tuberculosis so bad you could hear him coughing when he walked by the house on his way to school. One night over dinner, we wondered aloud whether Lesotho would even exist as a country in another twenty years.
Despite all this, it would be wrong to assume that the Basotho desire all that we as Americans enjoy. In the midst of my frustration and sadness over Lesotho, this was one of the greatest lessons I learned. In the second half of the year, I asked my Form B class to imagine a better Lesotho. Some students argued for the abolition of school fees, others suggested that the mountains be blasted away to make way for flat roads, and a few wrote about improving health. But a surprising number suggested that Lesotho return to its traditional roots: a Sesotho-speaking, agricultural society free of AIDS and urban sweatshops and overcrowded buses. These are inventive girls who sing and dance beautifully, play intricate board games with pieces of broken glass on concrete, and voice definite opinions about their world. Like teenagers everywhere, the St. Rodrigue students worry and have falling-outs. They cheat on exams and write impassioned journal entries about how their teachers have wronged them. They hide candy in their desks and sit on the sandstone walls to gossip at lunchtime. They want a better world, but they'll do it on their own terms.
I think that we risk perpetuating an image of Africa as a continent beyond redemption, where poorly governed countries riddled with fatal illnesses slip farther and farther into darkness. Since leaving Lesotho and spending six months in Nigeria, I have acquired even greater respect for the work carried out by Sister Armelina and the Good Shepherd Sisters. There is a lot to celebrate in a place like Lesotho, where tradition remains intact, literacy is encouraged, and families won't leave one another destitute. The girls I taught displayed admirable resiliency and courage, even as they struggled through their teenage years. They're proof of potential in a tiny country that sometimes seems hopeless. I am honored to have spent a year with them.
For me, Lesotho gave away its secrets right up through the end: A waterfall that dropped into a tiny swimming pool in the narrow canyon below the mission. Hawks and abandoned rondavels in the hills to the east. A quiet student who turned out to be a passionate actor. Bursts of clarity in drowsy afternoon classes. These are the memories I take away. As December approached and the weather got warmer, I became restless. As always, the cemetery edge was where I went for quiet. There, I watched yoked cattle plough the field below and listened for the sound of aircraft overhead. Evening came slowly: the shadow of the hills fell over the village of Mpatana, moved gradually across the valley floor and up the side of the mission hill. When there were no more children walking on the paths through the maize field and no more patches of sun on the hill, it was time to go home.
