This is what it sounds like: you are awakened in the middle of the night by the arythmic percussion of heavy rain on a zinc roof. Sometimes it's hail that beats down, smashing into windows, walls, peach trees, everything with a force it's hard to believe these targets will survive. The lightning is vivid: clear lines from heaven to the mountains surrounding you - you are sure on your hike tomorrow you'll see the scars. In a few minutes the storm abates, you sleep again.
Hours later, when the sun has risen, water again: the hollow rushing of someone's early morning trip to the water tap just down the road. This staple sound is embellished by others: the bells on the cattle ready to go out for the day, also vaguely drum like - when heard from afar they resemble the steel drums of more exotically distant locations. You can tell time by the voices outside: on a school day the influx of students crescendos around 6:45 as dozens of young female voices chatting in Sesotho roll past your window. On unlucky days a herdboy is your alarm clock, striding by up the road. Clad in a construction worker jumpsuit, blanket, and gumboots, his pastoral charm is spoiled by the massive boom box on his shoulder, serenading the countryside with crystal clear accordion music overlaid with masculine shouts. Maybe it's time to get up.
Soon the house is filled with what are - for Lesotho - normal early morning sounds. The hiss of the gas stove, the slow build of singing metal that lets you know the water's boiling - and thus safe to drink. Some days, the peculiar sucking sound of running water without any water coming out. The chickens crow, the boys next door cry and blow whistles. You fight your way through the iron "burglar-proof" grate with your hands full and it's off to school.
Wandering up the dirt road to the convent gates you are likely to be stopped by primary students in ragtag uniforms. The girls in navy skirts and sweaters striped in yellow and the boys in their grey pants and shirts. Desperate to practice English on a white person, they pipe up with "Good morning," "What is your name?" and "What is the time?" In the middle of the day the stray children, who never all seem to be in classes, may emerge from the tall grasses and beg, "Please, a money," or "Give me some sweets." You wonder if they ever expect to get anything, as they must have been trying for generations of Grinnell fellows now. But hope seems to be passed down nonetheless - like the used juice cartons pressed into service as water bottles.
The high school smells of dust and chalk and sometimes the mingled burning of rubbish. The neat brick oven with an open top next to the chicken house cooks a daily casserole of papers, plastic bags, and foil packaging. In the hot weather a classroom full of students is an oppressive scent all its own. Although they all carefully rise at dawn to bathe, more than half of them follow by tramping - and sometimes running - several miles to school. In winter you're more likely to smell the paraffin of the small heater the sisters use in the library or instant coffee brewed by the teachers at frequent intervals to stave off the cold. But on many days the smell is the best in the world: wet earth and air cleaned by rain. Rain that terrorizes students by turning the deeply gashed creeks into surging muddy rapids, but which serves not only to keep the pernicious dust down but to coax new life from the dried grass hillsides where much of the population still subsists on farming and herding.
Throughout the day you will see them: white dots on green or brown or burnt black hills, which seem so steep and distant the dots must be rocks or bushes in flower, until they move accompanied by a far off whistle of a herdboy or a barking dog. On Saturday the hills above the dongas will also be splashed with color as women washing blankets spread them in the sun. If the other teachers have stayed in town for the weekend (which means it's nearly the end of the month so they're all flat broke) every surface available will be covered with laundry out to dry: fences, clotheslines, roofs. When the clouds gather, as they often do in late summertime afternoons, a flurry of activity will pull all this carefully scrubbed wealth inside to be scrupulously pressed in the early morning hours before school begins each day.
But despite these flares of human activity this is a place dominated by the land. Hills which are mountains but look too kind, too gentle to be called so. Their slopes rise through terraces - human or natural - to smooth flat tops or rounded peaks. The only jagged ridges are where soil has fallen away to expose sandstone weathered into pyramids or conical spikes which seem to imitate the tall cylindrical shape of the locals' straw hats. This shape is in turn imitated by stocking caps worn just clinging to the heads of their owners, the rest pushed up to make the key central projections.
The view at night is equally magnificent. Unimpeded by telephone wires or electric lights, the Milky Way burns brightly and a full moon means freedom to wander at night without recourse to electric flashlights. And the students do so, in packs to avoid the dogs' or herdboys' wrath. They go up and down the road chatting or singing pop songs which they'll later demand you sing for them at school. On those days, if you're not careful, you'll find yourself surrounded by inquisitive girls, begging to be told for the 100th time how much Levi's cost in America and sneaking a hand up to stroke your hair or - if you're very generous - to plait it. But this is part of the landscape too: the paths along the hills aren't made for nature lovers but by people who live full lives here, going to school or doing their shopping on foot or with a sturdy (and often overburdened) donkey.
Walking along those paths, as I often have in spite of warnings about herdboy mischief and one mishap with a boys' initiation school, you feel keenly their height. At their bases you can wander up a donga and forget your location, but if you scale the peaks you'll pass quickly into a new climate zone. Dry scrubby bushes impede your progress and swarms of colorful crickets dodge each step. At the summit as you lie on bared rock you feel sure the nearness of the sun will cut open your chest and cook your heart. All frustrations: of poor power supply for your duties as school typist, of teaching too many students in one class, of three-hour staff meetings, of cultural mishaps, or of desperate cravings for inaccessible foods, will be scoured away.
Lesotho you have driven me crazy like this for ten months. Struggling to teach girls with no way to even understand my English and dying for a bowl of yogurt, I have definitely had my bad days. But it's worth it for the moments when my class, forced to debate, won't stop discussing the topic even into their break time or the cries of shock and dismay when I mentioned I'd be gone forever in less than a month. I will never know if I made a difference here. As with the garden I helped to plant in August, I see few of the fruits of my labor. Have I been trying to teach English to the next crop of herdboys' wives? Will even one of my kids pass maths, ever? There is no way to be sure. I can only hope I have given any one of these girls as much as they have given me. Farewell Lesotho, I wish you all the best and plenty of all three necessities invoked in your national motto: Khotso, Pula, Nala. Peace, Rain, Prosperity.
