Today is the last Saturday of October. Ali and I are sitting out on the back porch, not talking, united in this struggle to write our third of four quarterly reports for Grinnell College. We're really late. I can't explain it. We've been mutually irresponsible, an unspoken pact: both of us does it or neither. That observed, the logical conclusion is to blame Africa, where one acts with her community around her. Here you all do it together. You work together, you behave or misbehave together, you accompany each other not matter how far out of the way her destination is. One doesn't do things alone. One should sacrifice her own interests for the larger good of her community. Such sensibilities sound very good, but you'd be surprised how hard they've been to assume. Americans don't do it that way. They're bold, proud individuals. To hell with it if no one else is doing what you are-do it anyway!
The Sisters bought a photocopy machine. It sits on a far wing of the convent, glowing and humming like a meteor (and breaking down regularly, like a â¦.photocopy machine). It's a chip off the mother ship we came from, that far-away hemisphere that associates October with pea coats and leaf-filled gutters and jack-o-lanterns, the full-swing of fall semester, the buzzing computer labs and late nights at the library and dorm room coffee makers sitting on linoleum floors. Home-colder, faster. Set it alongside right-now Lesotho: late Saturday morning peace, sun, ladies down the path sitting talking over tubs of laundry. Next door spring chickens are picking through the grass. 'Me Augustina's goose is honking from its puddle at the tap and some Nuns just walked past wearing backpacks and carrying umbrellas to protect their complexions.
The place is quiet today because everyone got paid this week. Every month end the migratory school population goes home to parents or husbands and children. The stores and buses and taxis will bulge with people for a few days at the height of it. Then everybody will travel back to their jobs or classes, their temporary homes, well-stocked for a few weeks. They'll come back to St. Rodgigue on a bus squashing-full with bodies and grocery bags, walk slowly back up the hill to the mission grounds balancing suitcases and basins of the month's supply on their heads, and on Monday the new month-the last month the school year-will begin.
Ali and I are happy to be staying home this weekend. We like the couple of days of quiet. People ask "won't you be bored?" We won't- we never are. We read and rest, we walk to the next village for onions or candles or flour, we scrub and hang and iron laundry, we plan next weeks' classes and mark last weeks' tests, we clean the house. I like to get up early and worry the garden, pulling up the grass that sneaks in, over watering, waiting for the tomato plants to come up. I like to greet the people who walk by. Tonight maybe we'll play cribbage or jotlo (our new favorite) over popcorn and spiked lemon soda. Or maybe we'll retire early to enjoy a late night reading in bed among a shrine of candles. Or maybe we'll still be finishing these damned reports. Our time by ourselves at home balances between companionship and solitude with plenty overlap. We often think the equilibrium we've struck here must be what marriage feels like: sharing the housework, ageeing and compromising on how to keep our common spaces, accepting each others' eccentricities (like my love for putting dry beans in glass jars, for instance, or Ali's perpetually morphing hair length). We've learned a lot about space and privacy needs.
Last week a bug bit Ali on the eyelid while she was sleeping, (she asked me to mention for the record, that I myself haven't gotten "a single bug bite" in the midst of her suffering. And I sleep with the windows of my bedroom wide open.) She woke the next morning with her eye swollen shut, so she stayed home for a couple days. News of this misfortune spread quickly among her students and brought them in throes to our house to visit her. Sometimes they visited while Ali was sleeping and I was still at school. In the states a person resting in her home might feel free and entitled to ignore the doorbell and the telephone, but not in Lesotho. Here people will knock until you answer. They will knock on the front door and then move to the back, knocking and yelling your name, and if it's unlocked they'll let themselves in. They know you're in there. "In Basotho culture," a teacher explained to me, "you always visit the sick. And visitors are very important. You must stop whatever you're doing when you're having a visitor."
That same swollen eye took us to the clinic last week. By coincidence we arrived the same time the Form Bs (sophomores) were coming for their bi-annual "check-up" (euphemism for pregnancy test via abdominal massage). We heard them approaching the clinic from a long ways off, walking slowly in a group, singing a warrior-going into-battle song. The nurse opened the door and they became silent, stepping into the clinic one by one. No news of pregnancies yet.
Many of our students, from Form A up, could unequivocally be considered women. They live independently and perform all household labor, including childcare. They are socially, domestically, and sexually mature, which means a handful of pregnancies are discovered every term (despite the students' attempts to conceal it-made more impossible considering their classmates rat on them). Pregnant students pack their bags and go home. This is, after, an all-girls Catholic school.
Maybe this is a logical and moment to mention HIV. Part of the students' independence and maturity, socially, sexually, and otherwise, grows out of necessity: there are no other parents at home to do the work. A large minority of the students have lost both of their parents. According to a census project in my geography class, 8 out of 44 students were full orphans and another 13 had lost one parent. That makes 48% of the class who have lost one or both parents. Nearly every week brings another notice or two chalked on the staff room blackboard: "so and so in A2 lost her mother last week-may her soul rest in peace". People talk about the orphans and funerals, but not about AIDS. Not directly, anyway. Not as something that happens in their own families.
A month ago some people visited school to speak about HIV/AIDS. The keynote speaker was a petite, vivacious, educated woman from Maseru. She wore wire-rimmed glasses, high heels, and a tailored tan suit. Power and clarity filled her presence. 450 students and 20 teachers sat electrified by her words-she was speaking in Sesotho-when another teacher leaned over and whispered to me, "she's living with HIV."
The AIDS consciousness movement is big here, as it should be. We heard on the radio that one in three young adults in Maseru is HIV positive, and the New York Times recently reported Lesotho to have the fourth highest HIV rate on the planet. Yet incredibly, our parish priest condemns condoms as "Satanic."
I was talking to the Principal, Sister Armelina, about it one day. I said dumbly, "It must be nice to be a sister and not worry about AIDS." "Oh, no, " she said seriously. "This AIDS affects all of us, Sisters included. Sisters are no holier or more perfect than anybody else." It reminds me of the American spiritual: if one of us is chained, none of us is free. Everyone here feels the deathly presence of AIDS. If only everyone thought like Sister Armelina-if only HIV/AIDS could cease to mean you've sinned any worse than anyone else.
A few minutes later Sister told me about her false front teeth. She takes them out every night and brushes them before she goes to sleep. Sometimes she puts them in her apron pocket and forgets where they are, then enlists the whole neighborhood to find them. "They try to hide it," she says, "but I can see them laughing at me. Laughing to be searching the ground for a Nun's front teeth." She invites me to have a good look at them, and I do. I tell her they're beautiful.
People laugh a lot here. I laugh here too, more than I ever have. I laugh with Ali, with the students, with the teachers. I laugh until tears come to my eyes.
In English class last Thursday someone farted right out loud. Now, someone farts in every class, very consistently, but this one really had a tone. The students giggled. They were supposed to be taking a test. They giggled and the fanned the air and opened the windows and pulled sweaters over noses-the typical daily (no kidding) reaction. I was trying to chill them out when I noticed the likely offender, her face wrinkled in exaggerated disgust, her bottom high off her seat at she leaned across her desk to viciously fan her nose, pointedly mocking a sincere fanner, she caught me staring and quickly sat down, wide-eyed, her hand covering her mouth. I wish I could describe it better for you. I laughed about it for a long time.
Underneath my struggles and joys are rhythms here a quiet sadness moves in. How will I say goodbye to this place and these people I love? I don't know. I can't think about it yet.
