It has been one month since I returned from Africa. I am home now, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I am at my parents' house, writing this report on my laptop. It is summer here, families are riding bicycles in the park across the street. In Lesotho, it is the middle of winter, and Leslie and Kara are probably still wearing long underwear and wool sweaters. I am wearing shorts and a tank top. I have started writing this report several times. I think part of the problem is that these two worlds and continents are so separate, existence in one seems to preclude the reality of the other.
But I will try again. As this report is about leaving Lesotho, that is where I will start:
After we marked exams at the end of the semester in June, Leslie and I were impatient to go on vacation, to get out of the frigidly cold (though beautiful) mountains, get someplace warmer, ASAP. We barely had time to fill out all the report cards before I got on a plane in Maseru and found myself in Johannesburg. Leslie and I went together to Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Tanzania, and then after several days of sunning on perfect beaches and getting lost in Stone Town, we parted ways in Zanzibar. In total, I backpacked for about five weeks, mostly in southern and East Africa, though I spent a week in Morocco on my way back.
In St. Rodrigue, we didn't often meet other ex-pats or internationals, but while traveling, it is very easy to meet other foreign people. Hostels and backpackers are full of travelers, other volunteers like ourselves, international aid workers on holiday. When internationals get together to talk in Africa, it always seems there is an immediate attempt at gauging status. There is a hierarchy of "hardcore": who has the most difficult living situation, who has been in the most intense situations, who is getting the most "real" experience. In an earlier version of this report, I made up chapter titles for a book that would compare situations in the US to the same situations in St. Rodrigue: Going Shopping, Making a Phone Call, Getting a Glass of Water, etc. But you knew before you started reading this report that life in Lesotho would be more difficult than life in the US. As I knew before I left for Africa. The difficulty and challenges are an easy way to justify to yourself what you're doing, and surely, living in a relatively difficult situation can be a very eye-opening, character-building experience. But I don't think that should be the point.
On July 16 of this year, I arrived at the Chicago O'Hare airport, exactly one year from the date I departed. The day I left for Lesotho I went to the Oshkosh farmers' market with my parents and they introduced me to some of their friends. "This is our daughter, Molly. She's leaving for Africa on a flight this evening." I felt marked, like people could actually see something in me that made apparent, This girl is going to Africa. I wondered if my year in Lesotho would be even more obvious in my face upon my return.
In some ways, having just returned from Lesotho is still (a month later) one of the biggest parts of my identity right now. But I find myself not wanting to bring this up in conversation (or write a report about it). Because I find that I don't really have that much to say. Or maybe really it's that I have too much to say that is not concise or clear. I can't write this report about how difficult and challenging life was in Lesotho compared to life in the US, and how this really helped me grow. Probably it was, and probably it did. But how did I grow? How did I change? Am I now a better, more empathetic, more deeply understanding person? I guess that probably was part of the point originally in going to St. Rodrigue, but a year later, I feel perhaps only more confused and more poorly able to express myself. Maybe a year ago I was a little bit more sure about what I believed and what I was going to do.
Someone said to me, "It must have been really hard for you to leave Lesotho, leaving behind all those people who are so needy." This is maybe what I saw myself doing when I left for Lesotho: helping to teach all of the underprivileged schoolgirls at St. Rodrigue. And then I fumbled through a year of teaching, made a lot of mistakes, and was moderately unconvinced at the end of it all that I had actually made much, if any progress in my classes: my cleverest students would probably have figured it all out anyhow, and my slowest students were still failing to grasp even the basics.
But don't lose hope. The point isn't that having a really hardcore year makes me able to offer pity truths about how living in Lesotho truly helped me grow and change. And I certainly can't claim that after a year of volunteer teaching in St. Rodrigue I turned everything around and made a huge difference in my students' lives. But probably the greatest product of the experience was overcoming my own preconceptions: Africa is a hard concept for us Americans to grasp, it seems so far away, and so different. But whatever having a "real" experience in the "real" Africa means, my life in Lesotho was no less or more real than my life in America. The "needy" students that I went to Lesotho intending to help turned out to be very capable and very funny young women that I really enjoyed getting to know. And I would hope that, so some extent, I became a little more real for them, too.
