Molly Offer-Westort's Reports

A few afternoons ago, I went for run, after a long day full of classes and shouting girls. Our house is just down the hill from the convent and a primary school, so many primary children walk past our windows in the morning and afternoon. On my run, as I started down towards the bottom of the hill, a group of primary children stood in the road staring at me, waiting to watch me jog by. It is not unusual for one child out of a group of onlookers to become bold and run alongside me for a few paces, while his friends and I laugh at his clowning. As I me this group of primary students, however, they decided all of them to run with me, eight or so children laughing as they clopped down the hill in their school shoes. "Where are you going?" I pointed towards the turn-off ahead, my usual run up towards the bus stop.

"No! Go here! Go here!" they motioned further down the road into the valley. My runs are very solitary lately, so I consented to company for a little farther. After all, I thought, they will probably only stay with me for another minute or two. We dipped down into the donga, a miniature eroded gorge, and forded the stream at the bottom, which is still thin from a dry winter. We scrambled up the steep rocky path on the other side, and my companions continued to stay with me. The youngest boys dropped off to follow a differently path, but as we passed another homeward-bound group of students, they laughed to see us, and some of them joined in. A white girl running alone often provoked stares and laughter, but this time I think we were probably an especially curious spectacle, me in sneakers and a t-shirt, along with a whole junior running team, in worn and torn school uniforms, their books bags flopping on their backs. We caught the road out of the valley, an uphill, dirt path, which clings to the mountain we can see from our front door, and winds up the far side until it levels out at the top and carries on along a ridge between two valleys. I was surprised that even on the increasing incline, my runners were sticking with me. I asked them if they weren't tired.

"Yes, we are tired. We are tired because we are hungry. We did not eat today," more an explanation than a complaint. I imagine it is difficult to pay attention in school all day on an empty stomach, with one teacher for a class of one hundred. Primary education has just become free in Lesotho. This is a great success, in that now many, many students are coming to school for a basic education. The program is still working out problems, however, as there aren't enough school buildings to teachers to accommodate the sudden increase in students.

Usually I fear primary students. They are the most aggressive in accosting us, mimicking what I dread they think our English sounds like, in bizarre, high-pitched voices. Any time of the day we walk over the field towards the convent, we cannot avoid nasal screeches of "What is your name! What is the time!" and "Good afternoon!" or "Good morning!" invariably at the wrong time of day. This time, I felt a special affinity towards my rag-tag running team, however, as they explained to any questioning onlookers where we were going, where we came from, and they kindly humored my basic Sesotho. Little by little they dropped off to walk or to follow homeward paths, and finally the last girl waved me off to finish my run alone. By now, I had got quite far up on the hill, but looked up to see that there was still a long uphill run before me.

After becoming accustomed to the gentler rolls of Iowa, sometimes when I am at the bottom of the valley and I see the surrounding slopes, I do not genuinely believe I will ever be able to run over them. But when I am halfway up the hill like this, I can see the patchworks of the fields and now tiny houses, where a quarter of an hour ago, I have just waved at women taking in their laundry and preparing food for dinner over pots and outside the door. Karen Blixen claimed that there is no other way to see Africa than from the air: in a tiny moth machine she saw tortoise shell plains and herds of wildebeests. She wrote from a different Africa, colonial Kenya of the 1930's, but I am at least half in agreement with her. We do not need an airplane to catch glimpses of stampeding herds of animals-Liz and I have more than once found ourselves surrounded on four sides by lowing cattle, while running on narrow paths. But being in the mountains can lift your perspective out of the valley. Our lives are very close in the valley: we listen to the BBC on short-wave, but it sometimes feels as though otherwise we would never receive news of the outside world. We don't watch television, the closest telephone is a two hour hike away, and there are rarely English newspapers. While the nuns take the truck one day a week to get mail, sometimes they forget the post office box key, and we are left for another week waiting for any letters from home or friends. Sometimes we don't leave St. Rodrigue for weeks or a month on end, and as our days do not often greatly differ, it can be easy to get caught up in daily frustrations.

When I am up on the side of a mountain, though, and I can see across the valley the clusters of rondavals and tin-roofed houses, fields of maize rolling up to the rocky ragged slopes, dotted with tiny pink blossoming peach trees, I feel in a different world. When I can view my life from above, and see how tiny it is, it seems less heavy and important. The shapes of endless mountains in all directions are still so strange and unfamiliar to me, I am content that the best description I have heard of them is a moonscape.

On this run, when I finally neared the end of my ascent on the upward dirt road, the top of the hill in front of me led to more mountains but only sky. I have been confident that most maps and globes are incorrect, because it is impossible, as high up and close to the sky as we are, that we are not in fact somewhere near the top of the world, not so near to the bottom. I even have felt that I would not be surprised if, upon reaching the top of a mountain, I would not see another valley and hills on the opposite side, but instead arrived at a cliff, with sky stretching downwards forever, as if the end of the world were here in the mountains of Lesotho.

It is at this point where my thoughts are most dreamy that my head is inevitably pulled out of the clouds. This time I was startled by a shout of "Lekhooa!" from a herd boy sitting on a nearby rock. He had most likely been observing me huffing all the way up the hill, and had been laughing for quite a while. I should have remembered that Lesotho, while its mountains may have been inspiration for JRR Tolkiens's Mordor, is in fact a very real place; a small kingdom, surrounded by South Africa, at the bottom of a very large and troubled continent. While we may sometimes feel as though we are at the end of the world, when the ships go another week without even fresh apples for produce, we haven't been to town for weeks and the nuns have left the mail again, Lesotho is not at all distant to the problems of the continent. At an HIV prevalence rate of between 31 and 35%, according to 2004 government reports, this tiny kingdom has the third highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world, trading spots annually with its nearby neighbors, South Africa, Swaziland, and Botswana. A rural, all-girls Catholic school is no safe place from AIDS, either. A few weeks ago, we attended the funeral of a former teacher from St. Rodrigue, who had fallen ill with TB over June-July vacation, and, though in his thirties, suffered an extremely rapid decline in health. TB is a highly opportunistic disease for those with damaged immune systems, and is now much more common even in non-HIV/AIDS affected populations, as it is also very contagious.

At our school, it is not uncommon for our students to have lost one or both parents. I recently discovered that one of my students, with who I had been very frustrated for her irregular attendance this quarter, lost her father to illness two weeks ago, and her mother unexpectedly died this Wednesday, leaving her an orphan. Rachel informed me of this announcement on the staff room board on Friday. I had taught the student in class on Thursday, when she handed in her weekly journal assignment, as usual, the day after her mother's death.

The students themselves, though young, are not innocent. Students drop out every quarter to pregnancy and marriage. When I arrived, already halfway through the school year, I was assigned to teach Guidance & Counseling for forms A, B and C, (grades eight, nine and ten). While topics they had covered earlier this year included getting along with others and accepting themselves, certainly important life skills, with no syllabus I decided the central topics in my curriculum would be STDs and pregnancy. Though highly under qualified, I was enormously aided by Where There is No Doctor, an excellent and easily understandable health care book (for future fellows who have been patient enough to read this far, there is a copy available at the house and one at the school library, on reserve). Though nervous about the strict morals of a Catholic school, I had great success with a condom-on-the-banana lesson, and was really impressed with the student's candor in questions. I did, however, cringe when asked, "If I don't have sex, is it true I can go crazy?" An American ex-pat we met told us her plumber asked whether it was really true if, unlike Basotho men, American men wouldn't die if they didn't have sex. Lesotho is fighting an uphill battle against AIDS, against some very firmly ingrained misconceptions.

On my run, by the time I was conquering the last hill before home, my mind was out of the mountains and very much back on the day to day, dinner, piles of grading, and getting students to think, like me, that grammar is fun. My enthusiasm for grammar has not yet proved entirely contagious, but Liz and I have seen greatly encouraging participation in our new Reading Club, an incentives program to get students to read in their free time. The library, where I am assistant librarian to Sr. Monica, is visited by students now in increasing numbers. Our excellently stocked (though badly jumbled) shelves are getting some use, as Liz and I have also incorporated an education on using the library into our classes.

When I arrived at our gate, I was glad Liz and Rachel were home from school, happy to be back at our snug home, and appreciative of the fresh mounds of dirt and manure in our recently planted garden. I hope we will have some semblance of the success in gardening of past fellows. While I have barely known its former residents, I sometimes feel as though we have inherited the house from relatives, with whose ghosts we still live. We have their burnt potholders, photographs, and postcards, and we read in old reports of the nights they spent by kerosene lamps, reading, writing letters, sleeping in the same rooms in which we now do the same things. We read their books, left on our shelves, and wonder who brought which titles, and in whose handwriting the funny notes in the margins are written (I especially wonder abut the marginalia in Mere Christianity).

Having left home eight weeks ago, my time in St. Rodrigue has not been long. My frustrations are still young, life is still new and exciting. Our small accomplishments, such as successful experiments in granola and yogurt making, are sources of great pride. Our plans for the future, the garden, a bucket refrigerator, and group research projects on other countries, may be successes or failures, but at the moment they are all-engrossing. I am aware that the future weeks and months will be filled with good and bad, and in this time St. Rodrigue will lose its newness. But for now, every time I come back from town or a long run in the mountains, I'm very glad I come home to here.