With girls hanging around outside their classrooms laughing and shouting to one another, you could feel the last day of school excitement in the air. We, the teachers, had been told that the students were going to clean in the morning and take their final exam in the afternoon. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just run up to school, they'll clean, and I'll have time to come back and cook a nice leisurely brunch before 'invigilating' my literature exam." Little did I know that they meant marathon cleaning. Since I was never told the cleaning kick-off time and no one else really seemed to know, I just showed up at 8 am and was just in time for Sister Armelina, our principal, to call all the class teachers together. Seeing that only five people out of the twenty-two person staff were present, we received a tough talk from Sister about the importance of 'being punctual' and setting a 'good example' for the kids. Then she gave us our marching orders and sent us on our way to whip the girls into little cleaning machines.
We were told to send some girls to clean the school's assembly hall, others to clean the library, staffroom, and surroundings, and we were told to select a handful of girls that "we could easily control" to clean our respective classrooms. As I am the class teacher for the B2s (grade 9), the notoriously rowdy and disruptive class, her instructions were not so subtly directed towards me.
I entered the B2 classroom amid girls cheering, shouting, furiously erasing pencil marks in their books, and a select few sleeping despite the cacophony around them. When the girls quieted down for thirty seconds, I had to seize the moment. Wasting no time to think about which girls to select, I sent the already pre-selected girls to the hall and library, and then randomly selected girls to stay. "Ach-e, 'M'e Megan," said the girls who were selected to stay (ach is an expression to show frustration, anger, or disapproval). The rest, however, cheered with delight. They were excited to be one of the hordes that were under Sister's command, undoubtedly hoping that they might just blend into the crowd enough to avoid any real cleaning.
Then the cleaning began.
The girls swept with handle-less, Basotho brooms (pieces of straw joined together by a string at the top), shoved all 25, two-person desks to the back of the classroom and then to the front, 'carefully' stacked all 51+ chairs on top, and one girl mopped the dirt smeared floor alongside several others on their hands and knees scrubbing with rags. Once the floor was mopped and semi-dry, the girls polished the floor with floor wax. Throughout the cleaning process, girls scrubbed the walls top to bottom, and all ten windows were cleaned inside and out. The chalkboard was washed with a rag at least three times, though in the end it still looked as though it hadn't been cleaned as a thin layer of chalk residue clung desperately on the board despite the girls' gallant efforts. At one point, with one girl mopping the same spot five times, another next to her scrubbing with all her might on all fours, another girl dangling out the window to wash it and dry with a wadded up piece of paper, another standing on the desk in the front of the room-hardly a teacher's desk but where I stored my books while teaching-reaching up as far as she could to scrub the walls, and others throughout the classroom scrubbing and cleaning diligently, I thought about how this would never had happened at Grinnell High School (GHS), where I student taught for a trimester.
I chuckled to myself imagining what would happen if I had to oversee such a cleaning process at GHS. I'm sure I would have received at least one note saying, "Please excuse ______ from cleaning. ______ is allergic to cleaning agents." I'm sure the kids themselves would have said, "Ms. Straughan, we are not janitors. Hire some if you want a clean classroom. I quit." Now, I should give them the credit they deserve. During our school wide recycling project, the kids did have to sort through a slew of used tissues and chewed gum, empty out partially filled soda and flavoured water bottles, and clean up any paper/soda that had gotten on the classroom floor during the sorting process. However, they did have plastic gloves at their disposal and even the most snot rag filled bin could not compare to the cleaning these girls did.
The girls had only two small basins filled with cold tap water and a healthy dose of Omo laundry detergent at their disposal. The basins were changed when the water became black, and let me tell you, the basins were emptied out and refilled with fresh water multiple times. The girls also had to improvise with cleaning devises. I was given only two small sponges and two small rags. I had to rescue the mop allocated to our classroom from the thieves in B1, and I brought them the floor wax via a small, plastic box that had once been home to Bic pens. There were roughly fifteen girls cleaning-many of whom I hadn't called but stayed to help anyway-and all were using something to clean. I'm not even sure where they got some of the things they were cleaning with but I appreciated their ingenuity nonetheless.
I also enjoyed the atmosphere the girls created while cleaning. With no radio or stereo to speak of, the girls made their own music. They sang and 'danced' (i.e. shook their bottoms in the air in rhythm with the beat while they washed and polished the floor with their hands). The girls even regulated themselves. Other girls from B2 came into the classroom and tried to walk on their clean floor with their shoes on. The cleaning crew was not about to let that happen. They shooed and shoved those girls right back out of the classroom and begged me to lock the other girls out (incidentally, the classroom door is broken, and locking it is the only way to really keep the door shut). One girl, Thakane, was very enthusiastic about staying in the classroom to help and quickly began cleaning. However, she left her two windows streaky and looking more dirty than when she started (note: Thakane was not originally selected because she did not fall under the "easily controlled category"). The other girls were not pleased with her work. They yelled at her to fix the windows in Sesotho and when that didn't work, other girls stepped in to finish the job without any prodding from me.
And, boy, did that classroom sparkle when they were through. I was truly impressed with their cleaning abilities. Naturally, I think if I had left them unsupervised, they wouldn't have done nearly as good of a job. Nonetheless, fifteen adolescents scrubbing their classroom-a really large classroom-clean for over three hours without a riot? That to me was miraculous. To them, it was just another day of cleaning, albeit maybe slightly more cleaning than normal.
Indeed, in Lesotho, cleanliness really is next to Godliness-and it is a religious country. Houses are expected to be spick and span at all times, white clothes are expected to be white, and people are expected to bathe at least once a day if not twice or three times. Now, you may be thinking, "I may be American, but that sounds pretty normal and reasonable to me." Yes, it is, but you have to remember Lesotho isn't America. Keeping things clean and cleaning things are no small tasks here. You must remember, we have no hot running water (supposedly the Grinnell Corps house does, but it has been broken for the four months I've been here), no shower, no heat (elevation is over 6,000 feet), no electricity (this also supposedly exists but I have yet to see the two hours of electricity a night), mops are scarce, and washing machines, dryers, and vacuums are, of course, non-existent. Even your everyday stainless steel cooking pots are expected to shine and must be polished weekly, at the very least. Also, there are no paved roads around St. Rodrigue, which means we live in a dust bowl when it is sunny and a mud pit when it rains.
This cultural emphasis on cleaning has certainly affected me. I think my mom would say it has been for the better. Before coming to Lesotho, as my parents and past roommates can attest, keeping my room neat and clean was never a priority for me. My room often became cluttered to the point where I couldn't walk in my room without walking on at least a load's worth of laundry or industrial garbage can's worth of debris. Only when I could no longer manage to find something in, what I called, my "organized mess" did I begrudgingly embark on the hours it took to clean my room, inevitably misplacing anything and everything of importance in the process. That is not to say that I didn't appreciate clean common spaces or take pride in the cleaning I had to do for my food service jobs. Even my neat-nick older sister can admit I did my fair share of dishes and the Grinnell Dining staff can back me up when I say that I made the dining hall's grill sparkle. It is just that I never set aside time during the weekend to clean my own house. Why would I? How much dirt could I really track into my house?
Not so in Lesotho. I have become a cleaning machine. Well, by my standards anyways. I must admit, my room still manages to make itself messy, but I clean it weekly, do my laundry weekly, during which I soak my socks and really dirty clothes and hand scrub each one of my socks individually, I sweep, mop, and polish the floor weekly, and generally make sure our house is in a constant state of Basotho approved cleanliness. What's more is that I have even found myself on two sunny, Friday afternoons shining our house's pots with my fellow female teachers. Never in my 22 years did I ever think that I would even consider shining a pot, let alone actually make one shine myself. In fact, I'm not sure I even knew that people shined pots or that pots needed to shined. That to me is the ultimate example of my dedication to assimilate into Basotho culture.
Unfortunately, the burden of cleaning and keeping things clean falls entirely upon the shoulders of women and girls. Men are NOT expected to do any cooking, cleaning or laundry. Often while I am hanging out with the other female teachers, they tell me I need a Basotho man, and then launch into a description of all the things (ie cooking, cleaning, and laundry) that I would have to do as 'his wife.' The rigidly defined gender roles and rampant sexism in Lesotho have been two of the hardest parts of living in St. Rodrigue. While there currently exists no equality between women and men, I am hopeful that the next generation of educated women and men will begin to erode this inequality and work towards less clearly defined gender roles. As I teacher at an all-girls school, I can only hope that some of my students will lead the way.
