How We Got Married: A Love Story

I am married to a Mosotho woman.   How did this come about?  It’s a story that stretches over years.  During my fifth and final year as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Lesotho when Qenehelo was working at Catholic Relief Services, and where I was friends with the staff, we got in the habit of having Friday dinners together in the room where she was living.   I would come in from Matsieng, call her at CRS, buy some chicken, vegetables and wine, and go to her room.  She cooked and we dined by candlelight.   The latter was partly for atmosphere and party because there was no choice: there was no electricity.  Basically we were two friends who enjoyed each other’s company.

When it was time for me to go to Washington to begin my training for the Foreign Service, Qenehelo was at the airport to see me off.  Over the nine months of training we sent each other letters.  We were allowed to say where we would like our first posting to be and, needless to say, I chose Africa, resulting in my being posted to Zambia.  So in September I set off, with a detour through Lesotho, where I met again with Qenehelo, and spent my nights visiting my old school in Matsieng.  Before I was scheduled to leave for Lusaka, I went to Qenehelo’s new house on the hills above Maseru to say goodbye and to invite her to visit me in Zambia at Christmas time

Alas she wasn’t there.   I waited for what seemed to be a long tine and finally decided to bag it.   Just as I was leaving I heard a familiar voice saying “U ea kae uena,” where are you going you?  We happily met, I invited her to visit, and my spirits were lifted.  We’ve often speculated since then that if I had left a few minutes earlier or she had arrived a few minutes later, we never would have gotten married.

Fast forward to December: Qenehelo arrived and we had a great time, touring the city, visiting a game park, and meeting my colleagues.  This time we were sure: we decided to get married!   We were so happy that we went to the church of the Order of Poor Claires, where I had been teaching English to a few nuns, to give thanks.

There are many steps that have to be taken before getting married in Lesotho: after Qenehelo returned home, I wrote a letter to her mother asking permission to marry her daughter and her mother replied that I had done the right thing by asking permission, but I must be sure this wasn’t a “whirlwind romance,” (her brother translating).  In June of that year Qenehelo returned to Zambia to stay with me.

By December we decided to do the deed and returned to Lesotho.  First I had to negotiate with Tumisang, Qenehelo’s older brother and, with the passing of their father, the head of the family, over lobola, the bride price.  I was happy to be able to provide some financial backing for her mother.  Then I was interviewed, one by one, by several village women.   A woman would come into Qenehelo’s hut, heave a sigh, sit down and quiz Qenehelo’s mother.   After a while she woul nod her head positively and leave.   Finally I had to visit the village chief, so he could approve the marriage since lobola had been paid.

On December 23^rd Qenehelo, Tumisang and I went to Maseru to ask the district administer to marry us.  Alas Christmas celebrations were well underway; administrators were dancing and crying out “Happee, happee!”   A lost cause.   We returned on December 28, went into the administrator’s office where we found a secretary with her head on the desk.   The administrator was at the bank; try coming back in the afternoon.  In the meantime, Tumisang laid down a gratuity and we had a license.

At 2:30 in the afternoon, we returned and were told the administrator would marry us at 3 pm.   Woah!   Thirty minutes to prepare emotionally!   But we did and were married with two other couples amid stern warnings that I faced jail time if I had another wife.   Next stop, Morija where we woke up a minister who prayed for us.  Then to Qenehelo’s house and off to our honeymoon in Mauritius; a lovely island in the Indian Ocean.

That was thirty one years ago and we’re still happily married.

 

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.

 

When I Was Young and Reckless

My daughter Palesa has informed me that I don’t have to be profound in my blog.   This sets my mind at ease.

If anybody can stand an old gasbag reminiscing about in his past, I’m going to talk about an 18 month adventure which virtually shaped the rest of my life.  In 1973, after 13 years of high school teaching, I decided to throw off restraint, resign my job, discharge myself of most possessions and hit the road, Jack Kerouac style.

I had a back pack, a sleeping bag, a two man tent, cooking utensils, and a small gas stove.  Since I was in Connecticut at the time, the logical direction was west, so I stood out on the street with my thumb out.  Hitchhiking, with its many qualities at the time, was a great was to meet new people.  In a few days I found myself in Boulder, where I went to the local office of the state employment agency.   They sent me to a dude ranch where my job was picking up bales of hay and loading them onto the back of a truck.  This led to work cleaning out the horse stables. 

This led next to peach picking in western Colorado where for two or three weeks I shared a cabin with seven other pickers.  They would have been described as hippies.  Whatever, they were great people and all were vegetarians.   Not wishing to be disruptive, I too became a vegetarian and remain one to this day.  My rationale: I didn’t want to kill animals to feed myself.

We decided as a group to set off for apple picking in the Yakima Valley of Washington, using the car of one of the pickers.   After spending a few days in Yellowstone National Park, we wound up at an orchard where we were put in another pickers’ cabin.  We prepared food in a central eating shack with about twenty other “hippies.”  All were on various religious experiments: as a result it took at least five minutes for various contributions to grace from reciters of “Om” to fervently Christian prayers.  We were paid $15 for filling a 25 bushel bin.   Many of our co-pickers were Canadians.

Flushed with picking cash, I bought an old station wagon for $195 and headed west for hiking in the Cascades Mountains and then the Olympic range where my tent, sleeping bag and stove were mighty handy.

I next headed south with a couple of hitchhikers I had picked up and wound up at a lily bulb farm in northern California.   I hadn’t known there was such a thing a lily bulb farm, but we learned to  climb on the sides of a potato picker, a tractor with a digging fork, a conveyor belt and places for the men to stand.  As the belt moved we picked the bulbs up as they passed by and loaded them into boxes.   The farm had an assembly line where the bulbs were potted in soil, all ready to bloom in time for Easter.  We slept in an abandoned farm amid the cow stalls.  

After a stop in San Francisco at the home of a friend of my two hitchhiker friends, I gave away the station wagon preparing to head south.   Before leaving I went to the Berkley employment office where there were pamphlets for the Marines and the Peace Corps and others.   While I was waiting for a job, I filled out a Peace Corps application and mailed it in.  I essentially forgot about it until months later a letter showed up in my rental P.O. Box in Boulder inviting to become a Peace Corps Volunteer in Lesotho.  How little we know that small acts can lead to big changes: I went to Lesotho, where I taught for five years, met my wife, applied for the Foreign Service in which I served fourteen years, all the result of filling out an application while waiting for a day labor job.

I next went to Yuma, Arizona, where I picked lemons.   Many of our co-workers were Mexicans.  There were border guards in spiffy uniforms and whenever we saw them we alerted the Mexicans who magically vanished until we gave the all clear.  To this day, I’ve been partial to undocumented immigrants and am an enthusiastic supporter of legislation granting them a path to citizenship.

Finally I left Arizona and headed south eventually to Mexico City where I joined the North-American-Mexican cultural institute and started taking Spanish lesson.   To support myself, I took to playing my recorder (which I had packed) in the streets.  I earned enough to support myself, but, alas, I was picked up by the police for working without a permit.  This led to five days in jail where I continued to play my recorder to the applause of the other inmates.  Eventually I was escorted out and we headed for the airport.  But my backpack was in a $1.50 a night hotel and I begged to go pick it up.   Not possible.   I was put on a plane which eventually wound up in San Antonio, Texas.  There I was with no possessions, little money, and nowhere to go.

How I survived and thrived is another story for another time.

What will I do with the rest of my life?

What will I do with the rest of my life? People looking forward to retirement often have idealized pictures of what it will be like: after a lifetime of work, with all its stresses, we dream of a hammock under a palm tree near the ocean or travel to exotic places. Rest is surely deserved after so many years of work. But ultimately we have to ask, what will I do now, one of life’s truly existential questions. The past is history beyond our power to change; regardless of how old we may be, the only thing we can control is what lies ahead. Two wonderful examples come to mind: Mother Teresa, who devoted her life to working with the poorest of the poor, “the least of these my brethren.” The other is my personal hero, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his struggle against apartheid. He later became the model of forgiveness as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a man who has known great suffering and who is capable of great joy. But living well is not always so easy for people who are old. What will Pope Benedict, by his own admission frail and tired, do at Castle Gondolfo? Or there is the case of a friend of mine, now in an assisted living facility, who says he gets most depressed in the morning, thinking nothing lies ahead in the day but sitting in a chair, watching TV or reading. When I retired at age 76, I resolved I’d keep myself busy volunteering. So for five years I taught ESL, Mondays and Wednesdays at our day labor center (now closed) and Saturdays at our local human resources center. All of my students were Latino immigrants, wonderful people whom I loved working with. I also volunteered at our local homeless shelter giving me the reward of working with another group of great people. Saturday evenings I ushered at George Mason University Center for the Arts. I got to sit in on half of the concerts while getting to know my fellow ushers. Why was volunteering important? I was doing it because I wanted to, not for pay. It was great to have everybody smiling and laughing and enjoying learning a new language. By chance three of our students lived next door to us and you can imagine how happy I was to get a bear hug from a student I met at the grocery store. It was also a revelation to get to know homeless people as people and to listen as a friend to their stories. But after five years I had to admit that I was no longer up to these activities. So all I do regularly is go to the gym in the morning and to church on Sundays. Thank God for my family and my church, but I’m still looking to improve the quality of my life and surely that’s why I’ve taken to writing this blog.

Matters of faith, God, and heaven

I find that questions about God and heaven are far more important to me than before.   When I was a kid, I sang in the boys choir (75 cents a week!) then became an altar boy and received awards for perfect attendance at Sunday school.   But I confess I didn’t give it much thought; the sermons tended to be dry and pedantic, not having much relevance to how I lived my life.

Since then I’ve been an off and on churchgoer, but truthfully I was a lapsed Episcopalian until about five years ago.  That’s when my son Thabie pointed me towards St. Matthews Church in Sterling, VA.  What a terrific place with wonderful rectors, Rob, and his assistant, Anne, and a friendly congregation.   Amazingly, having doubts did not disqualify anyone from membership.  “If you have doubts,” Rob once said, “this is the place for you to be.”    About three years ago, Rob preached a series of sermons on faith and doubt and sponsored a series of mid-week discussions in which we learned that even the saintly Mother Teresa was a famous doubter.

In fact I believe that approaching key questions from the perspective of doubt leads to convictions that are stronger than they would have been if we just accepted someone’s word.   I recently read a book titled, Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt.  Holt, a professional philosopher, visits philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, asking why is there something rather than nothing? Is Nothingness even conceivable?   Did the universe have a beginning?   I confess that some of the theories (using quantum physics, mathematics, philosophical logic) left my head spinning,   Consider the Big Bang theory which holds that the universe originated from a colossal explosion occurring 16 billion years ago.   Can you imagine the density of the substance that exploded?

I concluded that the answers to these fundamental questions are beyond human knowing.  If Nothingness is inconceivable (who’s observing the Nothingness?) then both space and time are infinite.   But since we live in a finite world in which everything has a beginning and an end, we can’t conceive of infinite space going on without end, or infinite time.  Since these infinities exist beyond human comprehension, it’s fair to posit a mind, a being who created the universe, who has always existed, whom we call God.

Further, I had a talk with Rob in which I asked him why he believed in God (Can you imagine the nerve of asking your minister such a question?)   Rob said he believed in evolution but that the result was far too intricate (everybody has vital organs, eyes, ears, mouths, fingers, etc.) to be random.   Therefore God the Creator exists.  And it makes no sense for a Creator not to love his creation.   One of my favourite  definitions in the Bible is “God is Love.”

I’m also newly and keenly interested in whether there is life after death.   To this end I’ve read four books claiming to prove that heaven is real: 90 Minutes in Heaven, Heaven is for Real, To Heaven and Back, and Proof of Heaven.   The first three weren’t especially persuasive (heaven is a place with gold paved streets and angelic choirs in the sky) but the last, written by a neurosurgeon who was in a nine day coma, was more convincing.   The writer knew the brain intimately and the areas of his brain that dream were completely shut down.   All the while he had a vivid and detailed experience of heaven that cannot easily be dismissed.   So I’m cautiously optimistic!

My wife, Qenehelo, and I returning from Easter church.

What's it Like to Be Old

What’s it like to be old?   Today an older woman at the gym asked me, “How are you feeling, Bill?”  It’s a question which invites more than the standard, “fine.”   After I in fact made the standard reply she detailed the information that she’s had a partial hip replacement and part of her lung had been removed.   It’s the way we like to talk even though younger people aren’t much interested.

We have the inspiring examples of people like the 101 year old who’s been running marathons, the Willard Scott centenarians, Betty White (90), Dick Van Dyke (88) New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg (88), Robert Redford (76) Sophia Loren, that is the type of people AARP likes to feature in its magazine.   More power to them, I say.  We also have the residents of nursing homes with their canes and walkers.

But most younger people don’t like to think about getting older, nor should they, except as it makes them resolved to live their lives to the fullest.

I have an idea that there’s a duality when we think about our age at least that has been the case with me: there’s our rational awareness that whatever our age, it’s passing, and our emotional sense that we’re not really getting older. 

I actually was rather surprised to discover that I’d gotten old.  I even said to my wife, “I’m sorry for getting old so soon,” to which she smilingly and mischievously replied “You’re in trouble.”   And then there was the witty observation of Tennessee Williams (I think it was he) that “I know everybody has to die but I always thought an exception would be made in my case.”  Or Tolstoy who wrote “Old age is the most unexpected thing to happen to a man.”

So what’s it like?  My dermatologist, as I update her on my general health, sympathetically replies “Old age is not for wusses.”

True enough, but it’s vastly preferable to the alternative.  I try to convince myself that I’m now living with new parameters and not without considerable blessings.   Most importantly I have my wonderful family: my dear wife who has been a pillar of strength, my son, Don, the AP bureau chief in Brussels, my daughter Sue, a web designer in Vermont, my son, Thabie, a piano teacher in Virginia, and my daughter Palesa, a contractor for UNDP in New York.

And the fact that, though I may totter slowly down the street, I still go to the gym every day and I’m pretty sure I’ve still got my wits about me so I can read lots of books.  And I go to church every Sunday and chart with our wonderful rectors.

What I need, though, is more socializing beyond just the gym and church.