I'm finishing this report (due on 22 January) on 21 January. Exactly one year after leaving for Lesotho I am back in Albuquerque. I've been home just over a month now. I've attended a wedding (my sister's), a job interview, a New Year's celebration with wonderful friends from Grinnell, elementary school classes, several church services. I eat whole pieces of fruit in one sitting, rather than rationing a banana or an apple throughout the day. I can drink water straight from the tap without worrying about incurring an intestinal infection. I sometimes go days without seeing a baby. Unlike the convent dogs at St. Rodrigue, our Labradors are so sweet and friendly that they're actually driving me a little crazy. And the only kids who ever want to talk to me anymore are my mother's 4th and 5th graders.
But other things are not so different. I almost feel as though I was lifted out of my life here in America, at which point everything was placed on hold while I went off and had my adventure. Lesotho feels like another world in another universe, not connected to my life here, yet so profoundly a part of me. When I see scenes from Africa on TV or in movies it's not pictures of children orphaned by AIDS but a deleted scene from the film 'Love Actually' in which a mother tells her friend that her daughter 'is in love with an 'idiot,' but then aren't we all?' that drives me to tears. It's so real. It's my friends, my students, my other world. It's precisely what I've taken from my experience thus far.
People ask me all the time, "How was your year in Africa?" Their interest is genuine and my desire to share what I can with them is larger than time ever allows for. I relish the chance to attempt to articulate what I've just experienced - even as I struggle to find the right words. I tell them it was wonderful, challenging, difficult, but absolutely worthwhile. Most everyone seems to want to learn more and I've already booked time with the 4th and 5th grade teachers at the school where my mother teaches as well as at the church in which I was raised to share what I can with people.
However, I don't know quite how to go about sharing Lesotho. I put off writing this report because I wasn't sure what exactly I should write about. Initially I thought I'd write about teaching Guidance and Counseling, an experience I often cite when telling people what I 'liked best.' But I can't figure out how to capture what I want to say in that contextâ¦or in any context. I want to be fair, both to Africa and to the world to which I've returned. I'm afraid of generalizing or glossing over an experience for the sake of a nicely polished report or a laugh or a look of surprise. I find I have an easier time talking about Lesotho, when my words can find themselves, than writing about it, when my words feel forced and not quite accurate. Yet, in summing up my reflections on my students and friends in Lesotho I usually say something totally lack-luster and all too-obvious like, 'they're just people.' It feels appropriate in a way. It seems that many people I talk to want to hear that the students just 'crave' education. They expect to hear that the girls were perfect angels in class. I'm sometimes asked if I saw a lot of people with HIV/AIDS. With about a third of the population infected of course I did, but I couldn't have pointed them out on the busâ¦or in my classrooms for that matter.
My students taught me so much more than I imagined they would. I had illusions of perfect angels sitting in perfect rows in their perfect uniforms, hanging onto my every word, standing and stating in soft clear English the adverb in the sentence, "The students read carefully." Before going to Lesotho I think I'd deluded myself into thinking that the students would somehow be different from my American students. In the end it was my students' similarity to American middle- and high-schoolers that was one of my most refreshing realizations. Though many of them spent holidays working in the fields helping their families they delighted in much needed time away from school. Upon returning they'd always inform me that their break was 'too nice.'
Rather than the perfect angel-children I expected to meet, my students tested me constantly in class. They would ask to leave for water or the toilet, they'd not bring their homework, they'd sleep. They'd ask question after question after question in Guidance and Counseling, sometimes, I think, trying to horrify me. And other times they would ask questions at which I truly was appalled. One day in Guidance and Counseling a student suggested that drinking bleach was an effective form of birth control - a misconception which I had to dispel in all 6 of my classes, ASAP. I often cite this experience when talking to people at home, because it's compelling, it makes people want to talk more, and it was a truly shocking moment in my teaching. But I worry that I'm not being fair, to my students back in Lesotho or to my fellow conversationalist. My story seems to be a simplification of Lesotho and of what Americans can understand about Lesotho. My students were intelligent and complex and in their teens, and naturally their lives cannot be summed up in a 5 minute discussion. When I talk to people I get the sense that they care and they want to understand what Africa is like. As the resident expert in my various social circle people want me to have the answers. I most definitely do not and so sometimes I fear that I'm grasping for anything which could possibly be put into words. Even in writing I can't find the words to explain the complexity of my little conundrum.
Still, I talk about Africa with people. We talk about AIDS. We talk about wild animals and transportation and electricity and food. I try to tell them my experience, but frankly I'm still processing my experience and probably will be for quite some time. And yet I want to talk about it. I was asked the other day, "What was your best experience?" I sighed a deep sigh. The man to whom I was talking laughed understandingly, 'Okay, pick one.' And so I talked about teaching. I talked about Guidance and Counseling and the opportunity the class gave me to connect to my students in a way I didn't believe I could - even up to the last month of the year. Molly can probably attest to the fact that I went into Guidance and Counseling kicking and screaming. I was freaked out by the prospect of talking to a bunch of strangers about sex and HIV and condoms. 'Am I seriously supposed to say vagina in front of 40 Basotho school girls?! Oh noâ¦' And yet, through some act of mercy, on the part of God or the students or someone/something I ended up enjoying the class. It took time. It took effort. The students had little to no incentive to take the class seriously, as it's neither tested nor graded, nor did we even have a proper syllabus. By the end of the year, however, I was mostly loving the course. We just talked. They asked questions, I answered. I asked questions. They answered. We listened. I didn't always have answers for them. "M'e Leslie," a student asked, "I want to know, what causes feelings?" She was referring to the 'butterflies in your stomach' sensation you get when you like someone. Of course I could relate, but I couldn't give her a scientific explanation like I could for why birth control pills work or why HIV is such a powerful virus. Perhaps there is a scientific explanation for 'butterflies' but I didn't know it, and in a way it didn't matter. She's in love and she's a teenager and I was her teacher who was willing to talk to her about it. For me that was everything.
Perhaps the reason I fumble for words in conversation and 4th quarter report writing is because I find that I cannot capture what I want to capture in 5 minute discussions and 2 page reports. There's nothing tangible to which I can point to show what my year in Lesotho meant to me. My experiences come back to me in spurtsâ¦photos on the computer screensaver, loaves of bread I bake from scratch, a letter from a former student which appeared in my parents' mailbox the other day. I expect Lesotho to continue to turn up time and again in my life, even in the most unexpected of times and places. As I start a new chapter in my life I find myself wondering how I'll compare my adult life of teaching and living in America to what I knew in Lesotho, another world which, to me, doesn't feel so different anymore.
