July, August, September, October, and now November. It's as if I move through the months in Lesotho completely unaware of the time passing. With the beginning of each new month, I am caught by surprise. The months seem to sneak up on me and try to tiptoe past my unwatchful eye.
Of course, Lesotho in comparison to the U.S. is a much less time-oriented society. Lateness is taken for granted as a daily reality, and calendars are a rare treasure (especially, it seems, for the year 2006). But I am not sure this is really the reason for my obliviousness to the passing time. At first, I proudly explained to myself that my lack of awareness of time was simply a product of my own adjustment. I thought I had really adjusted to life and routine here. Time was just moving quickly. And maybe that is a part of it; each school week does fly by. Yet, I know that is not quite the whole story. I feel that there is no centering force for the passage of time here. It's as if there is no gravity keeping me grounded. And I am almost certain that my lack of grounding is due very simply to weather. As if being in the Southern Hemisphere isn't confusing enough for my inner time system, it appears that Lesotho's weather patterns are ruled by some capricious god keen on allowing only one adequate descriptor for the weather here -- unpredictable. Every instinct, every learned notion and every clairvoyant bone in my body has been deemed worthless by this force of unpredictability.
It thunders. The sky turns dark. Surely, I think to myself, we will have an afternoon storm. Nope. It is warm and sunny out so Leslie and I go for an afternoon hike up a nearby mountain. An hour later we find ourselves sprinting down the side of the mountain completely drenched and cowering as the lightening gets closer and closer. The sun burns my skin for two straight afternoons. The next day I go home from school during my free period to get a warm cup of tea and some more layers to wear. Seasons seem to blur with one another. When did winter end and spring begin? Is it summer yet? I can't seem to decide. It all feels too soon anyway. And how did I go from just arriving in Lesotho to having lived here for four months?
Maybe it is slightly unfair, or at least misleading, to call Lesotho's weather completely unpredictable. Since my arrival, the temperature has steadily increased. Though, that's not to say that if I made a graph of the temperature between July and November it wouldn't be filled with puzzling, sharp drops and rises. In fact, for this very reason, I had long been fighting the urge to put away some of my heavier winter clothing -- scarves, hats, wool socks, thick fleeces -- as "summer" was supposedly fast approaching. When I finally decided it was safe to do so last week, there was a terrible cold front the very next day alongside 48 hours of seemingly unending rain. That Lesotho weather god must have been taunting me for my audacity.
Weather's unpredictability has usurped quite a bit of power over life here in Lesotho. When I first arrived in July, it snowed for three straight days. The first morning after the snow, I crawled reluctantly out of my warm sleeping bag into the unheated house and shivering, got ready to brave the elements. Leslie and I grumpily trudged through the cold snow on our short walk to school. As we passed the convent, Sister Angela, a fellow St. Rodrigue teacher, poked her head out the window and threw us the keys. We looked up at her baffled. 'There's no school today,' she said as if we were crazy for leaving our house. Coming from the Midwest, this was quite the mild snow storm (not nearly enough for an Ohio school cancellation). But here, in a place where some students walk four miles each way to and from school, across fields, on dirt roads, and even across rivers, it was definitely enough. How did everyone but us know not to come to school, though? Maybe there is some sort of unspoken sign? For Leslie and me, it remains a mystery. The Basotho teachers said succinctly, 'It snowed,' as if this in itself was an adequate explanation.
Even now, during the spring, the weather plays a pivotal role in school attendance. A cold rainstorm began on Thursday morning. At the start of the day, I had 38 students in class and two students absent. After break, I had about 35 students present, and after lunch there were 20 students in class. The next day at school, I had 25 students present, and 15 absences. It had rained so much that some of the roads were impassable. Unpredictable to me, but here this kind of thing is expected. In Lesotho, this is the way things work.
Even though I love to point my finger at Lesotho's weather, it is not the sole source of unpredictability in this country. I often depend on Leslie, my more knowledgeable and experienced counterpart, for information. She has stopped trying to answer my unrelenting questions, because she says every time she feels sure about something it changes, 'When will the teachers give us their final exams to type on the computer?' I ask. 'Oh, not until the very last minute. It will be really stressful,' Leslie tells me. This term we received exams to type a month and a half in advance.
On another occasion, during an afternoon hike, Leslie and I were relishing the quiet, peacefulness of the mountain scenery when we heard a young boy calling us. 'Wait. STOP!' he yelled urgently again and again. 'Do you think he actually wants something?' I asked Leslie (in my usual role as persistent questioner), not quite certain if we should stop. Children talk to us on a daily basis, namely for nothing more than the thrill of speaking to such novelties as ourselves. 'No,' Leslie replied confidently, 'He just wants to say hi.' The boy persisted, though, and sprinted quite a ways just to catch up to us. As he stood panting before us, his first words were, 'Good morning. How are you?' Leslie snuck me a knowing I-told-you-so look. But, the boy finally caught his breath, and we somehow managed to discern through his gasps and broken English that there was a woman on the mountain who wanted to speak with us. Of course, after hundreds of Baotho children have wanted nothing more than to greet us or ask the time, the minute we doubt the motivations of a random boy we don't know, he actually has a real message for us. And, as it turns out, the woman he led us to was an acquaintance of Leslie's who had spotted us hiking. Unpredictability is surely supreme in this country.
Planning anything seems nearly impossible in this country ruled by irregularity. Even my plans for a lesson can go completely awry in a moment's notice. My teaching schedule was still being changed a month into the school year. When I try to go teach a Thursday afternoon composition class with the Form A3's, I find another teacher already in the class. 'The schedule has changed,' she apologized to me. 'You now teach composition to the A3's on Tuesday mornings.' 'But now I've missed this week's class,' I wanted to insist. Yet, I knew my complaint would do no good. Just this morning, as I sat in the staffroom reworking today's lesson plan, a teacher put up a notice that the Form A's would go to the clinic for check-up this afternoon. I guess I will just have to save that lesson for another day. I have come to expect this-the unexpected; planning has become almost trivial.
Even the supposedly predictable and well-planned aspects of life as a teacher in Lesotho often surprise me. On the last Friday of each month, school begins a half hour early at 7:30am and we have shortened periods so that students can attend English Mass. On some last Fridays, the teachers remember and make it to school on time. On most last Fridays, maybe a third of the teachers remember, classes actually begin around 7:45 am and those teachers who forget just miss their first class. On the last Friday of October, Leslie and I had arrived at school, as usual, to an empty staffroom. When a couple other teachers finally showed up, we reminded them it was last Friday. They, of course, had forgotten. Then, for some inexplicable reason, first period was delayed until 8 am and the last period of the day was cancelled. It seemed nonsensical to us because we were prepared to begin teaching first period at 7:30 am as planned. But, that's the thing with schedules in Lesotho -- one never really knows if it will go according to plans. Will the teachers remember or forget? (In fact, it's hard to say if the priest will even remember to prepare the mass.) Will we miss first period or last period, or maybe even both? I just can't say. But this is the way things work here.
The past weekend we had planned to take a teacher trip to Malealea, a Lesotho tourist attraction. Maybe I should have known this trip was fated for disaster, simply because it involved too much preparation. But I'm naпve and hopeful; I thought all would go smoothly. We had been discussing this trip literally for months. A week ahead of time, though, we still had not arranged private transport and many of the teachers had not paid their money. At the last minute we had to switch from a 15-seat vehicle to a 10-seat vehicle. For a while, it seemed as if the trip would have to be cancelled. But, miraculously (!), all the teachers came through and paid by the end of the week and one simple telephone call to a minibus operator in our area was enough to organize the transportation.
It is Saturday morning, 8 am. We are supposed to be happily on our way to Malealea. But we are waiting. And waiting. And. Waiting. A couple of teachers hike a mountain to get cell reception and call the driver. They don't return until noon. Malealea -- the trip I had excitedly penciled into my planner months in advance -- is cancelled. But, we make do. We go to the local shops and buy some meat to braai (barbeque) with our papa (local maize staple). While the meat is cooking, we dance to some local favorites, and joke that the teachers' houses are the Malealea lodge. 'Isn't it beautiful here?' we ask, though we can't keep a straight face.
All this irregularity has completely confused my sense of time. Nothing seems to advance linearly. For every two steps forward we seem to simultaneously take one step backwards. In which direction is the time moving? In the end, I had a great time just hanging out with the teachers here at St. Rodrigue instead of going to Malealea. Sure, it wasn't what we had planned, and the modest teachers' housing is certainly not a tourist attraction, but it was enough just to enjoy the company of my friends. Lesotho surprises me daily, but it's okay, it's even good. In what other place can I wear winter and summer clothes on back-to-back days? And, where else can I hike what appears to be an uninhabited mountain only to meet up with the acquaintance of a friend? All of these anecdotes may seem completely absurd, but this is just the way things work here. Anything can happen. I am often frustrated with the lack of certainty here. But, it is growing on me. And maybe, just maybe, this is will turn out to be one of Lesotho's most wonderful attributes for me. Because, it certainly wouldn't be the same if life here was predictable.
