Growing up in Maryland, I equated the Lenten season with springtime - the dark, wet days of late February giving way to March's reticent warming. In the southern hemisphere, or course, Easter is an autumn holiday. There is a slippery familiarity to all of this: the Catholic rituals of my childhood enacted in an unfamiliar language, Hail Marys recited in the soft a and rounded r of the local accent. But the nights have noticeably cooled and the rosebushes in our yard are past bloom. I wore sweaters twice this week. This is the rainy season, the river-rising season, and the clouds haven't lifted for days. In the absence of solar-heated water, I bathe with a bucket of boiled water and a plastic pitcher, a paraffin lamp positioned at the edge of the sink.
I cannot remember the Sesotho name of the village where I live, except that it translates to "ghost village." It appears on no map I've seen thus far; in the spirit of oral tradition, we have been told the name. Here, there is no telephone or regular electricity, only a few houses and the mission. The packed dirt road from the capital more or less ends at St. Rodrigue's sandstone mission church. Across the valley and on the slopes of nearby mountains are other villages, sometimes marked by no more than a cluster of round houses and the smoke of a cooking fire. Friday afternoons substantiate the village name when school ends early and most of the teachers catch the bus for Maseru. The students disperse, too-returning to their home villages or walking to the village of Mpatana for groceries. In the hours before the herd boys return home, one hears little sound, save the tin cattle bells on distant slopes and the occasional horse hooves striking the road. Those late afternoons, I read or write letters on a blanket in the front yard while cooing mission doves land on the gate post with a heavy flapping of wings. Sometimes I watch the red dust rise from the road in anticipation of a storm, and try to imagine how early twentieth-century missionaries ever arrived in a place this remote.
In the evenings, we resist lighting lamps as long as possible, waiting for the generator to turn on. Usually, it doesn't; when we can on longer distinguish fine shapes in the dark, we light candles. I've quickly become familiar with the sound of the match-head scraping flint and the paraffin lamp wick taking up the flame. Even the faintest sound acquires texture in a place this quiet. Later, the dogs bark, the noise carrying across the valley and against the mountains.
It is tempting to discuss living in an undeveloped village and say that time here has stopped, or slowed, or otherwise broken free of the succession of minutes and hours that mark life in America. This would be over simplification. When I arrived in January, I couldn't make sense of time or season. I slept without dreaming, woke earlier each day, and, in one exhausted moment, wondered aloud if the sun in southern hemisphere rises in the west. By February, those disoriented weeks gave way to time moving the way it does here: individual hours passing slowly, waits interminable, but the days opening and closing in steady progression. The referents are certainly different, but the progression of time here is every bit as inevitable as insistent and it is elsewhere. (Perhaps more so - Lesotho's average lifespan is tragically short and many of the St. Rodrigue students are years behind in their schooling.) I sleep nine hours a night, wake to the church bell on Sundays, and listen for the school bell during weekdays. When the cattle herds begin to come in from the hills, I leave for my afternoon run. I read the weather in the strength of the lunchtime wind.
The mountains make for a muted quality to this place, color and clarity always shifting. They enclose this mission and the village and shrink the sky. They swallow the sun in late afternoon, throw vast shadows, and hurry the dark. In the evening, the taller range to the east turns shades of blue. One recent afternoon, I watched from a steep slope as fog seeped into the valley between mountains and zigzagged low over the riverbed. Strange that this geology feels so familiar after two months.
Other familiarities come more slowly, but I'm forever looking for confluence. Waiting at the bus stop on mornings when we go to town feels a little bit like waiting for the school bus years ago: the shivering, shuffling of feet, clouds breaking overhead. Except not I look over a ragged valley, the driver emerges from a tin-roofed shack, and mottled dogs crouch under the bus. I spent a few afternoons in February rummaging through dusty shelves of the school library looking for poems to read out loud to my classes. I found a mid 1940's Catholic literature reader, donated years ago by way of some Catholic high school in Massachusetts. Between poems, out fell a business card for a school supplier in Basotholand (Lesotho's name in the era of colonization) and thin pages of notes written in beautiful script. The night sky is full of unknown constellations and planets in new positions: I've found Mars close to the eastern mountains, but Venus eludes me.
I feel my attention shift, as if I can concentrate only on the very great and the very small. In late February, the peaches ripened and I found myself standing long moments under the trees, assessing the harvest a singe peach at a time, trying to find the fruit that is ready to fall. This narrowing focus has become my way of perception. It is how I listen to people here, how I understand voices despite accent and sentence structure, how I learn the students' names. It is tenuous, but I have so little time here that I want to remain carefully grounded, want to do things well.
At the same time, the scope and scale developed world gains ethereal status. Rachel and I traveled to Bloemfontein in mid-February. One night, a flock of swallows circled over the city's stadium, their bellies lit the silver by the high-wattage lights. They reminded me of the silvery moths that circle our paraffin lamps, but multiplied by hundreds. I could hardly look away. Early the next morning, we waited for a minibus taxi to Maseru. Having arrived too early, we wandered a block in Bloemfontein's hazy, garbage-smelling streets. Above a closed shop, we saw people moving in the tall window of a warehouse space. They were dancing under a fluorescent light, their tired rhythm carrying through from night to the already-exhausted day. It was as if movement alone could conquer that Sunday morning slum, could challenge time itself. I longed to be nowhere, to owe nothing, to stand at that littered intersection and take it in.
After all that, do I long for known words? Not really. Sometimes I expect to feel as if I'm at the bottom of a continent. I expect to perceive the very tension of distance, like a thread stretched taunt between here and everything else I know. What I feel instead, drawn here, already remembering the turns in the dirt road that mark the way to St. Rodrigue. Later that Sunday, we took the long bus ride back to the mission. When I saw a St. Rodrigue student on the bus wearing her blue cotton dress and clumsy black shoes, I felt nearly home.
Time moves and I sleep and turn and teach through it. All the while, St. Rodrigue shifts and moves around me. We're past the peach growing season: when the fruit fall from the trees and hits the packed dirt road, the sound is exactly as you'd expect it to be: a rustling of leaves and a heavy thud. When I go running, I sometimes see schoolgirls turning off the road and cutting through the fields, their uniforms bright blue against the late summer maize. They are busy and anxious; their lives assume a rhythm different from mine, but move forward nonetheless. One evening, I passed two women walking at the edge of the valley, balancing bright plastic buckets on their heads. They never turned or stumbled or quickened their step, just continued steadily through the grassy ridge to whatever place they called home.
