Bryan Boyce's Reports

I wake at five to the still-unfamiliar staccato of a beeping sportswatch. Silence it. My room is cold, quiet, black as I cradle alarm in hand and curl further under covers for that precious fifteen to thirty minutes of sleep between waking and getting out of bed. Made less precious by the snooze alarm cawing at five-minute intervals. Though it's near-obscenely early, I work up the courage to slink out of my down sleeping bag and pull on a wool sweater. Am now attuned to the morning, crank flashlight in hand. I am to meet Sister Lucia at six for reasons patently unclear to me.

In the kitchen I fill a frying pan with leftover rice and moroho before lighting one, two matches for a burner and cracking three brown eggs into the pan. As these sizzle I pour last night's boiled pots of water into a clear bucket on the floor, for drinking, and gather books and keys and a few crumpled bills from my desk. Outside the world grows lighted, a curtain rising, yet the sky's spotted by gauzy stars and a half moon still. Running at this hour would be risky. Back inside. My underattended eggs are cooked, overcooked in places. I swap the skillet with a kettle of water and crouch into a chair to eat my eggs with a spatula. Am still cold. Hands are cold especially. It's maybe ten to six.

Five to. Six. Five, ten after. Stars fade. Duh; Basotho time. I can make tea after all. And so abandon the long underwear, fill my red water bottle with slow swooping scoops from the bucket. Steep rooibos. Wrestle with the idea of brushing my teeth. Outside again to track the breaking dawn, I exchange greetings with curly-haired 'M'e Moleboheng. She's waiting for the same van: bus leaves at seven, not six thirty. My hands are cold. Six fifteen would be the ideal time to start a run.

The pickup honks brusquely from a dirt road outside our house. Is not a van. Sister Lucia is sitting in the driver's-nay! passenger's seat-and instructs me to climb into the bed of the truck. I more than oblige. In fleece and wool and silk the rushing air feels good as we hurtle down the mountain, bounding over bedrock along the road and toward the bus stop. I curl my hands stiffly around the plastic mug of rooibus. Drink carefully from a cup that still tastes like baking cocoa and tortilla soup mix. My bent legs and lower back bracing me in the bed of the truck. As we round a bend in the road the color and stillness and cold of the crisp red sunrise spill from a distant mountain into the sorghum- and cornfields below and I remember, as I sometimes do, how terrifically beautiful and unreal it is to be a part of this, this Africa of The Lion King and Ernest Hemingway.

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Teaching Things Fall Apart here is interesting because the students side with the missionaries. Catholicism and education, Sister Lucia and I walk side by side through dusty Motsekuoa to a meeting of regional literature teachers to discuss a standardized quiz. Past shops and donkeys, men in black masks carrying crooked sticks. Uphill, in impossible sunlight. And slowly. All heels and habit, Sister Lucia moves at a pace that is difficult to match, and I make a game of measuring the distance between steps (about half a shoe's length) as we plod through the red dirt. After minutes of silence I ask why she became a nun. "Really I cannot say," she responds. Meaning, I only guess, she doesn't know.

When we arrive at the school I dart from student to teacher to learn the location of the bathroom, then nod at a few wide-eyed onlookers and retreat to a lone cinder block to sit and read my book. Should have taken one of Jenny's granola bars. And am now too hot, the sun nearing full height, but see nowhere to lay shed clothing without covering it in red dust. A man's voice interrupts me. Do I need my water bottle filled? Yes but with boiled water, please, and I feel stupid and neurotic-sounding and glaringly American. The man gestures to two regal-looking girls, who promptly scoop up my bottle. "You will find us in the science lab," he calls as they walk away, toward which they will return slowly with the red metal bottle, speaking in quiet Sesotho and trying not to burn their fingers.

To business: the science lab is cool and we start talking Things Fall Apart. Each teacher has come prepared with a set of ten questions for the group to vet. Unsure of my exact role in this, I cautiously weigh in on a question about the book's historical context, making vague claims about Nigerian independence and African unity. Not that I know what I'm talking about. But I did read this novel three times in college; figure my take's got to count for something. The comment goes over well, so I try my luck again and argue for a question about figurative language. Success, but it stops when I want to ask the students which character most fully shares their values. Ultimately, my most helpful contribution seems to be clarifying the often awkwardly worded questions and answers. We move to Macbeth, my restive fidgeting and note-taking turn inward, and I sink into a hungry, fantastical stupor.

It's a schoolyard chant too. Things fall apart. Things fall apart. Rhythmically, legs swinging like saloon doors. Things fall apart. Somewhere between a ghostly skip rope rhyme and an over-the-top Broadway routine. Things fall apart. Scary, like the cover of that Roots album. Things Fall Apart. Things fall apart.

For my own part, I do my best to honor Basotho readings of the novel (the answer key to our quiz calls the killing of Ikemefuna "senseless brutality . . . done through the command of an inhumane god") while trying to point out that maybe Achebe's angle is a little more complicated than that (Genesis 22, yeah?). I did get to ask my students the values question. And I have a genuine, affectionate respect for their admiration of brave little Nwoye, even if my heart's always gone out to Ezinma. And if this particular rejection of things indigenous was unexpected, it's not altogether surprising, but rather underscores a striking point from a religious studies class I took last year: that in numbers, anyway, the center of global Christianity lies decidedly outside the West. Still, though. It's hard to be anything but amazed by the supreme irony of both white American and black African teenagers reading this book and saying God, what were we thinking?

A teacher enters the lab. In hand bags of sliced bread and a tray of pink, quivering meat. Lunchtime: it's a little uncomfortable watching her work, but I'm glad to eat. The meeting ends. Sister Lucia and I return to our stop, where the bus is packed-absolutely, staggeringly, a bag of marshmallows swelling in wet summer heat. I wedge myself sideways between a bump in the floor and the steel cage enclosing our drivers. Bag in my lap, various crotches in my face. At each lurching stop the front two dozen passengers exit or otherwise shift to clear an aisle for departures. Then rush back like the tide to retie their delicate human tangle, and exit again. Noticing the humor I find in this, a woman next to me smiles and says, "Just wait until someone hands you a baby." As if on cue, a small dangling child appears to our left, swinging limb to limb, bosom to bosom down the makeshift family of riders. Out the door, alighting safely on the solid red earth.

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Weeks later. Bass beats rattle my ears. We're returning from the quiz, an inter-school competition that turns out to have been more what I'd call a quiz bowl. The taxi this time filled comfortably with students. A golden trophy held high, indiscreetly in the front window. The form E's have placed first in Macbeth, the D's second, a single point from first in Things Fall Apart, and though I as a new teacher can claim virtually no credit for this success, it's impossible to overstate the swell of pride that rose in my chest when Dotina Pasane stood, hands clasped behind her back, and dutifully recited, "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger." That, at least, I taught her. Even if the difference between the district commissioner's book and Achebe's is, in the words of more than one short answer response, that the commissioner's is "about peace."

I smile wearily as the students shout along to the music, happy but a little surprised by their undying enthusiasm for the hours-long ride. The winter sky darkens. When we reach the last hill before St. Rodrigue, barefoot children flock to our vehicle, and it starts to hit me: they're taking a taxi. They're listening to music at a rare, obscenely loud volume. They, least expensive high school in Lesotho, have just won a regional literature competition; pulled a SuAnne Big Crow of sorts. And so the young children strut in our taxi's music and headlights. Trail us up the road like a band of plucky orphans, which after all some are. I quietly ignore my stop at the teacher's compound. The thumping van rolls into the convent grounds, where we're met by students and Sisters eager for news. My students, spilling from the vehicle, whooping and embracing, dancing in the dirt as the trophy passes from hand to hand. The taxi driver silent, battery on, bathing us in white light and music a few minutes longer before the slow, solitary drive home. Sister Tsiki, careworn headmistress herself, hopping up and down with the students. For the moment, a schoolgirl again. On her face I see a special pride, one that erodes barriers of age and authority. I'll see it in the smiles and chatter of days to come, yes, but even weeks later, more tellingly, as when my form A's volunteer a verb that agrees with their school as subject-St. "Rodrigue is number one in literature." It shines from our corner of this mountain darkness, stirs the ground beneath our shuffling feet. And I revel in it. Tonight, in the white light of the taxi, amid students, under soaring Lesotho stars, it's a pride I too will call my own.