Volunteering in Lesotho

 

I know I have pontificated on the fact that the past is beyond our reach, that the only thing we can control is the present and the future.   So why do I continue to waltz down memory lane?  Because that’s what old guys like to do.

But wait!  At the end of my last posting I had just been deported from a Mexican jail, dropped off in the San Antonio airport with no money, possessions, nor anywhere to go.  Aha!   I had my wallet and in it was a Gulf Oil card which also worked at Holiday Inns.  I called the van and if the driver wondered about a scruffy guy with no luggage who smelled like a barn, he didn’t let on.   Soon I had a clean room, a phone, and access to a tasty salad bar.  I called the US Embassy in Mexico City and persuaded them to retrieve my luggage and send it to San Antonio.

The next day I went to the state employment office and got a job as a landscaper.   When the owner of the house heard my story he gave me some spare shirts and jeans.  After work I went to a $15 a week hotel, said I didn’t have any money but I would soon.   Amazingly he let me stay.  With my earnings, a trip to the Salvation Army store, I almost didn’t need my possessions when they arrived three weeks later.

Eventually I wound up again in Boulder, Colorado, and found in my post office box a letter from the Peace Corps inviting to go to Lesotho to teach English.   I didn’t even know that Lesotho was the name of a country in Southern Africa.  Wow, here were people lived and grew up in a part of the world I knew nothing about.  I accepted with enthusiasm.

In Lesotho, after three weeks of Sesotho language training, a week in a village, I found myself in Matsieng, a lovely village set on a hill overlooking a valley.  Everybody lived in round mud huts with thatched roofs.  It was the traditional village of the king and the site of Moshoeshoe II High School.   I stayed in a brick house with two other volunteer teachers.    I was assigned two eighty minute classes.   I had radical ideas about education, creativity and self expression.  My students quickly let me know they were not interested in writing original poems on the blackboard; they wanted help preparing for exams.

I loved the daily life of the village.  Breakfast with my house mates, morning assembly, classes, and lunch in the cafeteria where the daily menu was corn meal mush (called “papa”) and fried cabbage.  After afternoon classes some students always visited me and danced to the music on my short wave radio.   They were determined that I shouldn’t have to be alone.   They taught me Sesotho -sometimes mischievously.    Apparently the word for clouds and the human posterior was the same causing gales of laughter as I tried the new word.

Once, when I was in bed with a nasty cold, a group of students pooled their resources, went to the tiny store made of cinder blocks bought some “Woods Wonderful Peppermint Cure” and brought it to me.  I doubt that the medicine had much effect on my cold but it did wonders for my spirits

I was also an informal medical resource.  A girl once came to me with a swollen and infected finger.  I soaked it in hot salty water and wrapped it in gauze.  Another student was stabbed n a fight rare) and I cleaned the wound, applied iodine, and covered it with gauze.

I once played peace-maker during the “war” between the day scholars (who lived in Matsieng) and the boarders (the majority).  The weapons were stones.  The boarders asked me to accompany them at night as they walked to their dorm.   It was risky because the day scholars were lying in wait in the dark.  The boarders shone their flashlights me (a respected neutral presence) as we walked by.   No stones were thrown and a lasting truce was established.   I think it was the most scary thing that happened to me over my five years there.

Another time I was summoned to the girls’ dorm because several girls were hysterical.   When I got there they were yelling and thrashing about.   I couldn’t talk to them or calm them down so I rushed to the village clinic, staffed by a nurse, and almost literally dragged her to the girls’ dorm where she had no luck.  My next step was one of our Tanzanian teachers who had a pickup truck.   I loaded the girls into the back and asked the teacher to dive them to the hospital, five miles away.  Nothing serious was the diagnosis, just something adolescent girls go through.

I loved the teaching, reading prescribed texts (set by the examining board) and talking about them.   In large classes the problem was the not all students had a chance to talk.   So I used six so-called “extensive readers” divided the class into six groups, each with a separate book, and prepared discussion questions.   Then we went to the library where six student discussion leaders led class discussions in English while I strolled around.  Each of the books was on the exam.

On weekends we usually took a forty minutes bus ride to Maseru, the capital, where we stayed with other volunteers and bought provisions for the next week.   We had no refrigeration so buying food for a week was a challenge.   We bought vegetables from women who sat in a field with the produce from their gardens.  I was the default cook.   One of my dishes my housemates named (not entirely seriously) was “cabbage delight.”   I cooked rice on the bottom of a big pot, later added a load of chopped cabbage and onion, and topped it off with cheese.   Not high gourmet food, but we ate it once a week.  Our stove was a primus kerosene pressure cooker, about like cooking with a blow torch.

I knew after about three weeks at the school that the usual two year stint for volunteers would not be enough.  So I “re-upped” for a third year, after which I went home for a few months, and missed Lesotho so much I bought a one way ticket back.  I re-enrolled in the Peace Corps and remember fondly my return to Matsieng.  When I arrived all the students came out of their classes (the principal stayed in his office) and started dancing and singing “Ntate Bill (as I was known) is back.”  I was so happy.

A word about Sesotho which I was moderately able to use socially.  “Ntate” was a title with the respect of “father” and the warmth of “dad.”

Towards the end of my fifth year, the chairman of the trustees arrived, fired the principal and the Basotho teachers (a long standing feud) and left me in charge.   I had two Tanzanian teachers and an Iranian woman who was primarily interested in promoting the Bahai faith, and 500 students.   I led the morning assembly as I had been doing for some time (hymn, prayer and announcements) taught my English classes, but ultimately had to send home all the students except those preparing for exams.   It was a challenging end to the best five years of my life.

When the board chairman asked me to be the principal for the next year, I knew it was time to move on to the next chapter of my life: the Foreign Service.