Welcome to Lesotho. Ali and I sit and write by paraffin lamp light, listening to Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan sing "Girl from the North Country" over Ali's fist sized speakers. Even six cubic inches of tinny black plastic and two AA batteries can't render Johnny Cash's voice any less beautiful.
We try to be thrifty about batteries. Your relationship to trash changes when the place you dump it is your backyard. We laugh to see the warnings on batteries or instant cold compresses: "DO NOT open compress under any circumstances. Dispose of properly after use." Dispose of properlyâ¦where?? For a moment we think, we'll just take this stuff home and throw it away there. Less guilt-room to pretend trash disappears, room for pleasant delusion--but any less a sin? Things would be different in the USA if everyone had to live with the things they use and discard.
I'm getting preachy. I even said the word "sin." Now the discman's singing Doc Watson. "I am a pilgrim and a stranger, traveling through this wearisome land." How ironic to be trying to write about Lesotho to bluegrass music! It's late here, past 10. Feels like we must be the only people awake in Lesotho. Ali's across the table from me, absent mindedly wearing her head lamp while she writes. Now her attention turns to a small white moth fluttering around the lamp. She does not ignore insects because insects are her enemies. None shall pass. She's crunching it on the table with the edge of the pencil can. Gross.
Speaking of trash and tin cans, we're cooking up ideas for an art club, focusing on using recycled materials---cans, cardboard, metallic candy wrappers, toilet paper rolls---to make cool stuff, like pencil or candle holders, boxes, picture frames, wind chimes, books, and bookmarkers. We'll try to use all available and recycled materials. If anyone passing by this report has arts and crafts ideas involving recycled materials, please send them our way.
How can I give you a taste of this place? I've never felt more American in my life, never been so conspicuous. Sometimes, poking around the house, cooking macaroni and cheese or washing dishes or listening to satellite NPR, we forget how foreign we are. Sometimes we'll leave the door open and a cluster of people will gather outside on the road to watch us through the doorway. Who knows what strange things the white women do in their house? We pass people on the paths and hear them laughing hysterically behind us. Ali likes to sing circus music and practice descending invisible staircases. Neither of us has ever been this funny, especially without trying. We're thinking of getting some round red foam noses, starting an act---why not capitalize on this hilarity? 30 lisente (cents) to watch the white women rake some dirt or teeter up the hill dragging a pail of water! Cash would roll in.
I find myself generalizing about Americans more than I ever have, without a single scruple. I'll say, "The Americans, you see, they walk very quickly, like this." The other day a herd boy asked Ali why she carried a bucket of water with her arms and not her head, like the Basotho women. Well, see, those Americansâ¦Did Americans ever carry heavy things on their heads? We would like some insight into this question.
There's an honesty to people's curiosity. It's hard and uncomfortable to be laughed at and stared at, but gradually we understand that people mean no malice. God knows we must be a strange and funny sight.
We have developed a teensy phobia of the primary and elementary school kids, however. It's mainly the very small ones, four feet and under; they see us and start skipping in our direction in little grinning trends, looking cute and innocent, and we'll whisper to each other, "Run away!" Contrary to instinct we don't run at all, just keep walking, feigning confidence, until they surround us. Then they start speaking alien chipmunk English: "Good morning!" and "I love you!" then, slightly more forcefully, "cheletes!" (money!) for "bon bons!" (sweets!). We say "No" and walk a bit faster, and they chase us, indignant chipmunks, and mad, shouting "I love you!" and "cheletes!" It's like being harassed by the African Lolly Pop gang.
Sometimes Ali and I sit outside at night on the front steps, talking and watching the clouds pass before the moon. The moon was full three nights ago, all edges sharp. We keep close tabs on the universe. Under that full moon we talked about bats. Ali told me about the biggest, the fruit-eating Fly Fox, with a 6-foot wingspan, and the Bumblebee Bat. I told her about the moon, which we're studying in geography: 1/3 the size of the earth, the size of a small planet, but belonging to us--our natural satellite. We talked about teaching. Somehow, ungracefully but earnestly, I find myself wearing these new clothes-teacher. It's the most consuming work I've ever done, requiring all my patience and all my creativity, all my endurance and compassion and flexibility. The subject I'm loving most is math--digging past the tricks and brainless algorithms to the meat and bone of numbers. I love to begin with a concept so familiar it has become empty and rote, and then walk backwards, figuring out all the tools you need in your belt to "get it" and then go give those tools to my kids.
It's so hard, and a lot of the time they don't get it. We have days we feel existentially hopeless and useless, like we'll never get through, like we're wasting everyone's time. And then we have moments of modest triumph--something worked, something got through--flight! And we tell each other about it that evening over rice and curried lentils and scrambled eggs, over our nightly cribbage game. And we sleep a beautiful seven or eight hour night, dream of old friends, and lost places, and get up and do it again--amen.
My uncle sends me words that strike me as so true I taped them to the wall: "Our first need is not to release the tension, but to live the contradictions, fully and painfully aware of the poles between which our lives are stretched." (Parker Palmer, In the Belly of Paradox, Pendle Hill). Have I ever felt so stretched between the poles of my life? Between two hemispheres, two countries, an old identity and a tenuous new one? Living the contradiction aches in that good growing way, and I'll take it all.
Lesotho my friend, my adopted mother, thank you for brining me to your soil.
Peace and wellness to you back home.
