The Gym

I said I would never join. I hate gyms. People who know that I run ask me if I run at the gym. The gym doesn’t even have a track. Only treadmills. And if you run on the roads you know that we say people who run on the treadmills are (gasp!) not real runners. Sure, they’re putting one foot in front of the other, and unlike in walking, there is a point in each stride where two feet are off the ground, but we generally think if you have legs and you’re not an astronaut in outer space, your running should happen on the pavement, grass, dirt or track, not some soulless, mechanized strip of rubber rotating round and round in front of a television or mirror or other miserable gym-goers doing the same thing and going nowhere.


But I signed up for the Comrades Marathon. At 89 kilometers (about 56 miles) it is an “ultra marathon,” more than twice the distance of a standard marathon (ex: New York, Boston or London marathons). It’s between Durban and Pietermaritzburg in South Africa. The race switches direction every year, which matters because it’s hilly. This year is a “down” run. What I’ve heard this means is that for at least a while you have no idea you’re running mostly down, because there seems to be quite a bit of uphill as well. Later on, when you have dozens of kilometers on your legs, and all the fatigue and lactic acid that come with it, you really start to go down which apparently “rips your legs apart.”

I’ve been told by Mike, the elusive running god of Maseru, going to the gym once or twice a week will . . . well I don’t think he made any exact promises but something about the race destroying me less. He’s run the Comrades about 20 times, and although I have yet to meet him, I do whatever he tells me. Although in this case, I had to get a few people to translate his e-mail which was written in gym-speak, a dialect of English I had never come across before. (And I later found out it indicated I should be lifting weights).

Two teachers smugly drove me over with them (smug because of all the times I refused their offers to join them saying that gyms in general and treadmills in particular embody everything wrong with the modern world.)

When I arrived at the gym, I asked reception something apparently very stupid, which was could I try the gym for a day and then sign up (pay)? In a way it was a silly request because I had already decided to join the gym and there is really only one gym in Maseru, but this is standard procedure in US (which I only know because of how many free trials I rejected over the years). Well, they were pretty dumbfounded that I wanted to enter the gym without paying, so I meekly insisted on at least a tour. Then when I tried to pay with a debit card they said they didn’t have the facilities to accept payment with a card. I asked them where the nearest ATM is and they told me to just pay another day (which was what I had asked to do in the first place- pay after my first day- but I didn’t remind them of that).

The gym is pristine and modern in a way that for a moment made me forget entirely that I am in Africa. This inspired a short-lived feeling of unbelievable relief followed by immediate guilt. The membership card was one of the aspects that most transported me back to America. It’s like a Charlie card (for those of you who frequent Boston public transportation), you don’t even have to swipe, just tap against the turnstile (without even removing it from your wallet). So when I enter the gym, at least I can pretend I’m descending into the Porter Square station with a bagel in hand (Massachusetts are stale, tasteless, ring-shaped rocks in comparison to New York, but at this point I’d take it gladly).

Once I got away without paying, they were displeased at my lack of lock (for the locker room) and sweat towel. My colleagues offered to share and then I was left with the task of tying up my long hair with no elastic or clip (and I couldn’t find anyone with a spare). I know this doesn’t seem like a big deal but I have a lot of hair and I ended up using a strapless bra (colleagues confirmed that worn in the hair, it no longer appears to be an undergarment). So I was off. They told me I couldn’t use the gym for my first three times without a trainer to show me how to use the machines. This was good because

1. All the machines look identical.
2. Most of the machines resemble torture devices (the kind that crush you to death or tear your                limbs apart) and I was naturally terrified.
3. I couldn’t figure out what on earth to do with most of them despite the illustrated instructions.

Here is a sampling of what I was introduced to that first day:

1. The leg press: you lie on your back with the weights attached to a platform you hold up with your toes directly over your face (with no safety catch, say a few inches above where your head is). I asked what happens if your feet slip off the far end of the platform and the trainer said, “Hospital!”
2. Some chairs identical to the ones in my gynecologist’s office but with weights instead of speculums.
3. Abdominal things (I’m pretty sure they are not machines because they have no moving parts) that I am obviously too short for and that left me dangling precariously upside down gripping on with the tips of my toes like a sloth.
4. The scale. They scale is actually at the reception desk, not the locker room. In my experience (and my experience of gyms as you know is limited), weighing is something people generally like to do privately. So my gym machine tutorial awkwardly included the scale (because I don’t know my weight in kilograms which I was told I would have to enter on the bike). I don’t mind if people know what I weigh, I mind if they know that I care. (And I haven’t used the scale since my tutorial so I either really don’t care what I weigh or really mind that people think that I do and I can’t decide which).

I went home that first day irritable and with unbelievably sore armpits. Actually, I didn’t go home. I went with the teachers to one of their houses for their post gym ritual of “shredding.” (following a workout video horribly named The Shred*, you know that feel the burn, no pain no gain sort of crap led by women with impossible abs wearing technicolor spandex). I tried to keep a straight face but I totally lost it when the head instructor said, “Now jump rope!” I turned to my friends and said, “I don’t have a jump rope,” and they said you don’t need one. Apparently I was supposed to swing my arms around and jump up and down with no actual rope. In the process of my flailing and laughing, the bra flew out of my hair and I kicked it under a piece of furniture. I momentarily disappeared and I scrambled around looking for it with a sense of urgency; one of the teachers is the daughter of the U.S. ambassador, and we were “shredding” in front of the TV in his bedroom.

My second trip back to the gym was rather unpleasant. I was first chastised by security for walking through the vehicle gate instead of the adjacent (and camouflaged) pedestrian gate, then by the receptionist for being five minutes late, and finally by the trainer for not remembering how to use the tricep machine. When I was finally on my own though, I couldn’t remember how to use most of the machines, or how to adjust them to my height. When I did figure out how to adjust them, I didn’t feel strong enough to actually pull out the pins and turn the screws, let alone use those machines to lift large amounts of weight. So I wandered around a bit aimlessly and picked out a guy who seemed to be doing the same stuff as me and watched him carefully so I could use the machines after him. Of course he was taller than me, so after he vacatred a machine, I tried to not forget what I was supposed to do as I struggled to compress the machines to their minimum size. At one point, I went to get a manager to help me adjust a machine and I noticed there were more working than usual and they were dressed in suits rather than the usual workout clothes. I started to approach one but he was so standoffish I turned around and headed to a foolproof machine I wouldn’t need help with. Later my neighbor told me that those “managers” were the king’s bodyguards, and that guy I was following around (or stalking as the bodyguards may have interpreted) was the King of Lesotho.

*Apparently this was really popular in the US about a year ago, but being here, I only ever heard of it a couple weeks ago.

A Different Kind of Culture Shock

Last week, I went for the first time to the school librarian’s house. She is a good colleague and friend. We share many of the same incompetencies (swimming, driving, whistling) and one great passion (books). And other than swapping book recommendations and bad day stories, our interactions generally revolve around her trying to feed me or find me a “suitable boy” (She even lent me a book by the title, followed by Born Confused about an Indian girl from Jersey who falls in love with an NYU boy- what she was suggesting, I have no idea . . .when her husband heard of her plans he made me a fictitious J Date profile which initially inspired my anger and then a good laugh). While the afternoon early childhood program (my baby) at the school gets off to a glacial start, I head into the library after lunch and assist her in her various duties. So I spend a lot of time with her. Her husband has frequently acted as a default chauffeur, a task he gladly undertakes for the pleasure of watching me (and capturing on film) struggle to open the sliding minivan door against the steep slope of my driveway. I also taught her niece, and frequently take yoga class with her father-in-law. I have been the recipient of many plastic containers of Indian food left over from family gatherings and Indian clothes that she thinks I’ll fit into. But oddly, I have never been inside her house, where she lives in addition to her husband and baby, her in-laws and the niece who spends so much time there she might as well live there.
Last week the niece moved with her mother to Malawi and I wanted to say goodbye to if not a favorite student, certainly one of my biggest fans. This happened to coincide with a night I was meeting her neighbor, to discuss plans to travel to Namibia later this month. I thought it would be fairly simple to pop in, say hello, say goodbye and head next door to pore over Lonely Planet guides.

It was dark and raining, there were no streetlights and the taxi had no headlights. My homemade map was fairly useless under these conditions, but once the driver realized that I figured out he had no clue where we were going and that he didn’t understand a word I was saying, he grabbed my map, and while steering the index finger of his left hand studied it upside down, nodding and swerving all over the road. I snatched my map back from him and he drove me to Leseli Flats, a compound inhabited mainly by expats. This was not my destination and I started saying “dirt road” over and over again. I pointed at the road we were on “good road, good road,” and “Please, I want a bad road. With dirt and rocks.” Miraculously we got there, and their dog didn’t eat me as I ran up the rain-soaked driveway.

I told them I could only stay about ten minutes, which was more than enough time to rile up the 2 year old daughter and 4 year old niece by doing absolutely nothing but being there. Of course, the first thing I was asked as I got in the door was if I ate dinner. It was about 9 o’ clock, so of course I had. I emphasized that this dinner was very big and recently consumed when I saw the food-pushing gleam in the eyes of the women of the house. “Good,” I was told as various cookies and crackers were shoved at me. When I gathered my things at the predetermined 10 minutes after arrival, I was told, “We are making you some vegetarian food. It will be ready in about 15 minutes.”

At this point, I was very late for my next meeting. And the women kept going back and forth to the kitchen doing something that looked elaborate. So I continued to rile up the children and fret about the time. The husband, sensing my White Rabbit of Wonderland anxiety, suggested we call the neighbor over to eat with me but the women stamped their feet and said there would not be enough food. He agreed and turned to me and said, “Don’t worry, he’s Indian, he’ll understand that we have to feed you before we let you go.” And before I knew what was happening, he had called him up and asked for my impending lateness to be excused. The phone was handed to me and a voice not at all amused on the other end asked how much longer I’d be. I posed this question to my captors and as a chorus of “15 minutes” rang out, I cupped the receiver and said, “Ten minutes. Max.” At last the tablecloth on the coffee table was changed, the table shoved toward me and bowls and pots and plates of food were carried out. There were dosas and chutneys, some bread that looked like Ethiopian injera, various vegetables and an entire melon. Twelve different dishes in all. They looked at me expectantly. As I waited for the others to sit down, they said, “Eat, eat!” “I’ll wait for you,” I told them. They shook their heads at me and cast identical looks my way that said, “Poor, dumb American.” “We have already eaten.”

Up For Grabs

The first time my three-year-old neighbor Tamar grabbed my breast and said, “mine,” I thought it was just an extension of our typical conversations (she grabs hold of my necklace, glasses, headphones, etc and says, "mine.") But recently, she’s gotten a bit bolder, and recently managed to cram her chubby arm down the high, snug neck of my t-shirt. As I struggled to extract it without tearing my top or dislocating her shoulder, I said, “What are you doing in there?!” “Eat it!” she replied, “eat it!”

I assured Tamar that I am not a vending machine, a cow or her mother. “I have no milk,” I told her. “There is nothing in there for you.” She regarded me suspiciously. Betty, her mother assured me that she no longer breastfeeds, but then added that, “Sometimes Tamar sneaks it.” For goodness sakes, it’s not a cookie, it’s your flesh! How can someone sneakily suck fluid from your body? Well, breastfeeding here is not like being served in a restaurant, it’s more like a buffet and as soon as the babies are old enough to grasp, they help themselves.

Then Betty says, “I tell her, ‘Don’t drink that, you will get sick!’” “‘Sick?’ I asked her. “No, breast milk is good for children.” So Betty explains to me that since she doesn’t breast feed regularly, she's afraid the milk gets sour inside her body. Although I have no personal experience to draw from, I told her that sounds pretty impossible. But we were getting off topic so I just asked her to please reiterate to Tamar that I don’t have milk on tap.

Here is Lesotho, children breastfeed until a much older age than they do in the states. I think (for HIV negative mothers) this is a good thing. It’s free, nutritious and comforting. In Lesotho where formula is unaffordable for many, HIV positive mothers are recommended to breastfeed babies until they are 6 months old provided that they don’t give the babies any other food or drink. For some reason, exclusive breastfeeding is a much lower risk than breastfeeding along with giving other food and drink for HIV transmission.

When a mother no longer has milk, the nipple is employed as a sort of a pacifier. In fact, any woman’s nipples, mother or not, are fair game for this purpose. I learned this fairly early in my Lesotho teaching career. When Basotho students cried, I would pick them up and they would immediately go for it, their little white teeth shining like vampire fangs. Hence, “Don’t do that” was one of the first Sesotho phrases that I learned.

So one day, I’m walking around campus, the rest of my body preceded by my milkless communal pacifiers, and a girl in another class asked me if I would like a sticker. She had brought them to school to celebrate her 7th birthday. I said, “of course.” She then asked me if I would like two, and if she should put them on me. I regrettably answered in the affirmative to both questions. I should have known better. The precision and symmetry of her sticker placement could not have been more unfortunate, and the stickers themselves were starbursts emblazoned with the word, “PARTY!”

And I wore them the entire day.

There's Something On Your Floor

Last night the yogi (who holds free sessions in my classroom) walked in and said, "There's something on your floor." He said it like some pieces of trash fell on the floor and randomly arranged themselves into geometrical figures. Nope, I'm just trying to address one of our math learning targets with good ole masking tape. I believe we are only responsible for teaching circle (the one shape I failed to create with tape), square and triangle, but I figured we might as well throw down a rectangle, diamond, trapezoid and hexagon since these shapes routinely crop up in our toys.

Anyway, I say "I believe" that is the learning target because when I arrived at the school, my curriculum was about three lines long that contained bullet points so random that more cohesion could have been achieved had the entries been picked out of a hat.

This was fine with me, since I don't like cookie-cutter themes (pumpkins in October, snowflakes in January). I mean, I don't like them anyway, but especially when we use northern hemisphere guides in Southern Africa (if it's gonna snow, it certainly won't snow in January). I don't like drilling animal sounds into kids' heads (Do pigs really say oink?! Really?!). Who decides three-year olds need to memorize made-up sounds of farm animals?

So last year, we did class projects on topics the children were interested in: insects, cars, ocean life, gardening and construction. And the literacy and math and motor skills fit in in the contexts of these explorations and the normal routine.

Then the Middle States Association scrutinized our school for accreditation and decided that we needed to rewrite the curriculum. So in a blur of head aches and more salt water than I'd like to admit, my colleagues and I pumped out a cumbersome, hurried document. And for the most part, it has been totally useless to me.

Now, in a more reflective and methodical way, we are rewriting the curriculum again, to make it something we (gasp!) actuall use! In fact, the students are going home early today to give us some more time for writing in the afternoon.

But for now, here's what we've been up to. After the children settled in, we did Around the World with Preschool, which involved jumping in paint and leaving our footprints on our home countries on the class map, Basotho dancing, Dutch Christmas cookies, Indian sweets, Chinese spring rolls, German songs and fairytales, Maori music, learning Swahili words, singing Woody Guthrie, making lots of flags and, as always, reading lots of books. We concluded by reading How to Make and Apple Pie and See the World, and of course made our own pie.

After that, we focused on feelings and emotions and I learned many interesting facts about my students, like Charlie gets sad when a dinosaur bites him and Isabella is happy when she smells cake. This sort of fizzled out, or rather became an on-going project and we are now becoming storytellers and puppeteers. In between donning sock and paper bag puppets on our hands and performing many an Eric Carle tale on a make-shift stage, we have been experimenting with color-mixing. I first tried to do this by dying water and oil (ex: making red water and blue oil). I figured when shaken together in a jar, the new color would form, and then the colors would separate out again so the children could repeatedly see how the primary colors combine to make other colors. This didn't work out so well because dyes that are soluble in water are not in oil. I tried several times, but all I succeeded in doing was coating my skin in yellow food coloring which made me look jaundiced. I settled for dealing only with colored water and have resigned myself to the fact that I will be mixing batch after batch of colored water until my little scientists get bored.

This, is necessary preparation for the annual tie-dye project, the day (when after a week of rubber-banding t-shirts) children squat around vats of steaming dye in their underwear, dipping in their white shirts to create hippie-esque materpieces and go home with their skin stained all the colors of the rainbow.

On Being Thankful, and Then a Little Less Thankful

This was my first African Thanksgiving. I don’t count last year, because I did nothing remotely Thanksgiving-y. No orange vegetables or pie or Turkey Trot or seeing people you haven’t seen in a while or a parade of any sort. This year, I was invited to a small dinner at the U.S. ambassador’s house: he and his wife, their daughter (my colleague), the ambassador’s brother (who happens to be the ambassador to Botswana), his wife, and two single diplomats.
I had my first feast of the day at a café over the border with the school librarian and her family (including her niece, my former student). I had a huge glass of a fuchsia berry juice and a delicious breakfast of warm bread and good-smelling things and green things and then the five of us crowded around a fat slice of chocolate truffle cake. I bought my own loaf of bread on the way out the door, which I tore off chunks of throughout the afternoon, while baking a sugar-dusted nectarine tart and goopy brownies (spraying powdered sugar and liquid chocolate on shirts I changed in quick succession after ruining for the night, three in total).

I was unprepared how very weird it is to have Thanksgiving with someone else’s family. No matter how wonderful they are, everything they do just seems wrong. (What is this cranberry sauce that appears to contain actual whole cranberries? Why isn't it a gelatinous cylinder that maintans this perfect shape after sliding out of the can? Where are all the noisy children and sullen teenagers and uncles who drop things and old ladies who down handfuls fo pills with sparkling grape juice? How can you have a white tablecloth? You should settle for a more practical and pessimestic burgundy to anticipate red wine spills. Why isn't anyone fighting? And where is my dad's yams with technicolor marshamallows depicting pilgrim scenes and my mom's laugh rattling the dishes in the china closet? It was wonderful, but not the same as being home.

The post-meal food coma was at least the same.  I had a nice refresher at the bathroom sink though, when I turned on the faucet, and unprepared for the splendid water pressure at diplomatic residences, thoroughly doused my chest. The water splotches were so dramatic that when I arrived back at the table I felt compelled to interrupt the conversation and explain my appearance, which was quickly one-upped by an embassy security person enthralling us with tales of assisting autopsies, being bombed, her new taser and vivid descriptions of executions. Direct Thanksgiving Table Quote: “What you couldn’t see on the televised version was that they actually shot him before they beheaded him. So, like, he was already dead when they started to cut the head off. And that gurgling sound you could hear--”

She was cut-off at this point by a more weak-stomached dinner guest and the topic of conversation changed abruptly (to gallstones, if you’re interested), much like I’m going to do right now.

I spent the majority of the next three days in the Chinese internet café. I had planned to hole myself up in my classroom for the break, to tackle pages of to-do lists full of stressful entries, things related to grad school, licensure, jobs, and words like transcript, Praxis, International Baccalaureate, Krakow and Kampala were crashing around in my head, when I realized the entire school had no internet.

And so, I ambled to the internet café, stopping en route to purchase some chocolate. I am not a fan of this establishment, namely because of the hostility of everyone working there. Secondly, I don’t like how the computers put weird things on my flash drive. Don’t ask me what these things are. And if you know, please don’t tell me. Thirdly, I don’t like paying for things that come free with my job; they can’t give us health care, but they sure don’t mind if we want to work weekends! I don’t even like computers to begin with and I especially don’t like a room full of them and stressed out people tapping away on them.

Day two I was there, a Mosotho couple was seated at the monitor next to me. Their baby was at another computer nearby, sliding a mouse back and forth across the table, hypnotizing herself with the psychedelic swirls the cursor made across the Facebook homepage. Her parents were doing something else, or not doing something else, much to their frustration. They called over one of the men who works there and the following conversation, which eventually escalated to shouting ensued.

Computer Confused Man: Can you help me [fill in the blank, I sort of missed this part].
Man Who Works in the Internet Cafe: No, you should know how to use a computer.
Computer Confused Man: Yeah, but can you please show me how to [fill in the blank]
Man Who Works in the Internet Cafe: No I’m busy!
Computer Confused Man: You are too busy to run your business?!
Man Who Works in the Internet Cafe: IT’S NOT MY JOB TO HELP YOU!!!

Computer Confused Man’s wife started begging the guy to help her husband, which he eventually conceded to do with a great deal of audible sighing and banging on the keyboard and mouse.

At least my eavesdropping prepared me for a quieter but equally unhelpful experience I was about to have.

Me: What are your hours tomorrow?
Girl at the Desk: Today or yesterday?
Me: No, tomorrow.
Girl at the Desk: TO-DAY or YES-TER-DAY?
Me: Um . . .
Girl at the Desk: Today?
Me: No.
Girl at the Desk: Yesterday?
Me: Sure.
[A long conversation in Chinese ensues between Girl at the Desk and another woman across the room].
Girl at the Desk: 8-6:30.
Me: Great, thanks.

I arrived the next day shortly after noon and asked for two hours on a computer.

Different Girl at the Desk: No.
Me: . . .
Different Girl at the Desk: We close at 1:00. You can have 45 minutes.
Me: [arrrrrrgggggggg]

So the Girl at the Desk really was telling me the hours for the day before, but I didn’t think she could possibly believe that someone would actually ask, “What are your hours yesterday?”

Back at work now, where the internet is obviously working again.

A Few Pictures

Sean, age 3, hands this drawing to me and says, “Here is a crocodile opening its mouth and eating you. You are in the picture and those are little red dots of your blood.”

A couple weeks ago, the school librarian asked me to design a display stand and storage container for the Big Books (you know, those massive picture books meant to be read to read to a large class of antsy little ones). For the display stand, I suggested an easel that can be folded flat when not in use. I found the request to design the storage container a little puzzling though. It should really be just a big box, and so long as the builder knows the size of the biggest book, and how many we have/intend to have, I didn’t think I could offer any special insight in terms of design. I explained this, but the librarian and the builder both insisted that I make a sketch. I drew what I thought indicated a box with an open top, with dimensions that enable it to hold the books standing upright. (See drawing).

However, the builder interpreted the diagonal lines of my attempt at perspective as a request for a crooked box. And blatantly ignoring the written label, he understood the indication that the books stand upright inside the box as a request for a plank of wood serving no function whatsoever nailed to the bottom of the box. (See photo).

It's the Time of Year For. . .

...Spring? Over the past couple of months, pouring rains have rinsed the dusty city revealing a brighter, greener place. Gardens flourished (my assistant teacher asked me if I wanted some spinach from her yard and when I answered in the affirmative, delivered it to me in a bag so enormous it was like being handed a sack of trash) and were then ruined by the hail that followed. The hail stripped the evergreen trees of their needles and for once, the school campus, which never seems to get green no matter how much it rains, appeared to have a lawn. For days, the gardeners did nothing but collect these clumps of needles in their wheelbarrows, slowly restoring the natural beige and removing the intoxicating smell of wet pine. There were several thunderstorms, so rhythmic they lulled me to sleep, and a few that had me jumping out of my skin in accordance with my relatively new fear of lightening (getting struck by lightening is more common in Lesotho than in most places and my neighbor can attest to this fact from personal experience). Then we had a string of several breezy, sun burnt days, the kind of days that are perfect for hanging laundry to dry. I had my classroom heaters put in storage yesterday, and replaced with a fan just in time for cold, gray rains. In complete denial, I braved the day with no jacket and no umbrella and then, for the second time as of late, ended up having to go to the library to strip and lay my clothes out to dry. (I use the library for this purpose because it is really the only place on campus without generous windows and because the librarian doesn’t get startled when I say, “Can I take my pants off in here?”)

The other good thing about the hail stripping leaves of their foliage is that it restored the line of sight to my far off classroom and I got internet again!

Nice green campus. . .

…Harvesting stone fruits. Subsequently, the Cherry Festival (just a little ways over the border into South Africa) is taking place this weekend. It’s really just a mediocre fair in what is probably the dullest part of the country, and my determination to attend despite these facts is a true testament to the fact that I have been in Lesotho too long. My equally determined colleague agrees and our attempts to remain excited border on pathetic. She’ll say something about the food being good, and I’ll say, “yeah, if you don’t mind what it tastes like so long as it’s served on a stick.” Then I’ll say something about the quality of the crafts and she’ll call it boardwalk junk. Then I’ll mention two stands out of one hundred that had nice crafts (which I only remember because I bought things at them) before conceding that even those weren’t that nice. “Pony rides?” I’ll say, helpfully. “Cherry liquor?” she’ll reply in the same tone.

...Thanksgiving. This same teacher invited me to celebrate Thanksgiving with her family. I asked if they go around the table and make everyone say what they’re thankful for. She confirmed that they do not participate in this awkward ritual so I agreed to come bearing a stone fruit inspired dessert. Last year at this time when I was constantly stir-crazy, I had planned a long weekend at the beach for the Thanksgiving break. What should have been a five-hour ride on public transportation became a 36 hour string of zigzagging rides on public transportation to four different towns. In three of them, as I walked around, cars pulled up alongside me and two Afrikaaner and one Indian driver told me to get inside and that I was crazy to walk around. In one of these towns I ended up having to stay overnight, and my hotel room had accidentally been double-booked for a play pump-building (www.onedifference.org/water/projects/playpumps) South African who gave me quite a shock when he appeared in the doorway. I think I’m ready for a calmer, less mobile holiday this year.

…A new cohort of Peace Corps volunteers descends on the capital. This matters only to me as an elementary school friend I have not seen in more than a decade is among the freshly arrived. As you know, Peace Corps gave me a hard time about meeting up with her at first, but finally a friend in the office took pity on me and gave me a detailed list of instructions on how to find her. I have never before in Africa entered a roomful of white people and have them all turn around and stare. They had been locked up in the training center for five days and were seriously lacking contact with the outside world. We had a brief but joyous reunion that mostly consisted of us taking turns saying, “this is soooo crazy!” She was even more disoriented than I with the jet lag, culture shock and general confusion that results from newly moving overseas. A crowd of volunteers surrounded me and attempted to pump me for information about Lesotho but I kept my mouth shut, one of the conditions of being allowed to infiltrate the training session.

…Parent-Teacher Conferences. I have five hours to talk about 20 children with no breaks in between. And what do we talk about? Well, I am slightly concerned about the way one only child is approaching the impending birth of his first sibling, whom he has named named Spritzel (Spritzy for short) while in utero, and wants to christen Dino Ghost after birth. There is another parent who I can show no samples of student work (drawings, paintings, etc) except every available surface of the classroom that Refiloe took the liberty to scribble on. Then there is Isabella, with the most endearing quality of being attracted to expensive and/or dangerous appliances like a moth to a flame, until her curiosity was somewhat curbed recently when she peered at the book scanner in the library and accidentally scanned her own eyeball. I’m looking forward to a pounding headache and a parched throat by Wednesday evening. A far more experienced teacher than I told me that if parents ask an uncomfortable question about my teaching methods, I should tell them they should believe half of what their children say about school and I will believe half of what their children tell me about them!

I'll be thinking about all you far away people on Thursday. Watch out for the tofurkey. . .

Biological Warfare in Early Childhood Education

Oh, Sean. My little friend. Bright and bright-eyed with the personality of a puppy dog. He's like my shadow, but closer, more like an enormous tumor on my hip. I usuall don't mind it, because he's a pleasant little tumor. He is often found wrapped around my leg, or trailing so close behind me that it's become a game that I stop short and he crashes into me.

This week, though, I am on playground duty. And it's hard enough to keep 50-something kids between the ages of three and six from breaking their limbs on mokey bars, slides and swings, skipping around the parking lot, and stealthily sneaking into the tetanus emporium (drill bit, chainsaw and rusty nail-infested tool shed), without having 35 extra pounds pasted on one side of my body.

Sean is also developing a bit of a bossy streak, not to mention very particular needs (the same spot to sit in every day on the rug, total control of the windows of the playhouse, and all of me all the time) that result in copious tears if they are not met.

So yesterday I told Sean what I tell the kids to say to each other if someone is getting too close to them: "I need some space." I told him he should go play so I can watch allllll of the children (not just you) and keep eeeeeeeeeeeeverybody safe (not just you). He wasn't particularly pleased with my assessment of the situation, but he did go off to play. To the playhouse in fact, where he wrestled another child away from the window and started swinging it open and closed.

Tactic #1: Negative attention seeking behavior. And I totally fell for it. Now I had to go over and remind him that we don't shove people out of the way to get something that we want, that the window is for allllllll the children (not just you), and to please stop swinging the window before it hits someone.

Tactic #2: Negative attention seeking behavior AND defiance. He gave the window one last shove and it swung back and hit him in the temple. He was a little stunned but not hurt. "I told you so" would have been an unneccesary yet personally satisfying response, but I refrained and turned back to the rest of the playground.

Tactic #3: Copious tears. I ignored.

Tactic #4: Biological warfare. Now he was really mad. He stomped around to the other side of the playhouse, squatted and burried his tear-streaked face in his hands, and defecated at me. Yes, at me. (And no, not on me). If he knew any derogatory gestures, or the phrase "f*** you," I'm sure he would have employed those, but he's three, and his weapons are pretty much limited to 1) biting and 2) pooping in pants.

The former would not have been funny at all, since last year when a child bit the assistant teacher, her arm swelled up and the school nurse sent her for a tetanus shot. The latter was only funny (in it's own disturbing way) because I was on playground duty, therefore, someone else had to go clean him up.

AND Sean just skipped into the room, smiling, gave me a big hug. The bell has't rung yet, so he's gone out to the playground where I hope he won't express any emotions in the form of bodily functions.

The Kid Who Did Nothing With Blocks Except Throw Them at Other Children and Dump Them On the Floor for Two Months Makes the Taj Mahal

Seriously. The first few weeks this child was in my class, I would dazedly stumble into the principal's office, croak out the child's name while throwing my hands in the air, and return to class in a disoriented blur. There was no way to describe what this child was doing that wouldn't end with the words, "and I quit." Refiloe drank paint, threw stuff at me, threw himself on other children, scribbled on every available surface in the room, dumped out the contents of any box, basket or bucket he could find, tore pages out of books one by one. And he did all of these things non-stop. Cleaning up after him was a full-time job and he wrecked my room with a peculiar disinterest in the fantastic messes he was making. The principal once observed Refiloe rip the alphabet from the wall. He apologetically handed me a mangled letter and said, "He didn't mean to tear your W, but he did mean to steal it."

In the beginning, I would actually dream about this child, and wake up soaked in sweat. I started working with him one-on-one, mainly with language, and while he became less disruptive, to a point, he didn't do much of anything with purpose and seemed to be getting very little out of his time here. And then today, out of nowhere, he looked at the pictures of the famous architecture I laminate and post near the blocks, and methodically, intentionally, constructed the Taj Mahal. (It was even more elaborate than the pictures suggest, but I had to crop some of the building out since I avoid posting the child himself). Today, I practically skipped to the principal's office, cried, "Refiloe!" and dragged him to the room for once showing him something that wasn't an utter disaster. Later today, Refiloe jumped on a sand toy and broke it in half, tore apart the reading area while I read Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse, and drank the backwash out of everyone's water cup, but baby steps, baby steps.

The World: How Facebook Made it Smaller and How Peace Corps Made it Bigger Again

When I was in third grade, a girl, hereafter to be known as Long Lost Friend (LLF)* moved to my hometown. She joined my third grade class and we quickly became friends. I remember her lighting the menorah at my house on Chanukah, and joining her as an angel in the Christmas pageant at her Methodist church. I swam in the pool in her backyard, and she came to my dance recitals. Her mom taught me how to decoupage (an embarrassingly formative moment of my life). When we were in fourth grade, we went to the public library together to gather research for the report and diorama about the animal of your choice project. She chose a panda bear and I chose a koala. The research session was cut short by my becoming suddenly ill, and later that evening she dropped off a get-well card at my house. On the front was a koala bear hugging a eucalyptus tree. The message printed inside read, “Sorry you’re feeling ‘down under.’” Maybe I even still have it somewhere.
I also remember when at the end of fourth grade, she called me crying, to tell me that she was moving. I for some reason know that she was sitting on her father’s lap when she made this phone call, but have no idea of how I came to have this knowledge. I have a photo somewhere of the two of us with my sister hanging onto the back of the moving truck, and there is an identical photo of both of our brothers.

That was fifteen years ago. Soon after she moved, we saw each other a few times, but the most memorable part of these visits was the time her grandparents attempted to drive me across the border to Canada (she was living in Toronto then). I had no passport then, just a hand-scribbled note from my mom asking the patrol to allow her daughter to cross an international border with Mr. and Mrs. X. The guards were not impressed, but let me through anyway after giving us the requisite hard time. LLF eventually moved from Canada back to the states, and I think I saw her once in Massachusetts. After that, we lost touch for more than ten years.

A month or so ago, I received nearly identical e-mails from my brother and sister in quick succession (both more social networking on the internet savvy than I) alerting me to LLF’s Facebook status. Apparently, she joined the Peace Corps, was assigned of all places to Lesotho, and had enthusiastically posted this information on her profile. I immediately tried to contact her and subsequently, we sent a few exclamation point-riddled emails back and forth. She said in one that she had chills. So did I. She of course had some questions about Lesotho. I unfortunately did not have many answers; most were along the lines of “wait and see and enjoy being challenged and surprised.” And of course, we made tentative plans to find each other when she touched down in the mountain kingdom.

This did not seem like it would be difficult. She would actually be staying down the street from my work for a little while. Even while attending the same elementary school, we did not live in such close proximity. We will practically be in shouting range of each other, and certainly close enough to meet up. In my mind, this grand reunion takes approximately five minutes. Why? Because I can’t just leave 21 preschoolers to go play with my friend, and I am sure her training schedule is packed. But five minutes with someone you haven’t seen in more than a decade, half way around the world from where you met, in a country most people have never heard of, promises to be a pretty amazing five minutes. (Of course, I imagine the first five minutes will lead to other and longer meetings after she settles in to her more permanent placement on a mountaintop somewhere). I started thinking about how these sorts of unbelievable coincidences must happen all the time, and if it was not for Facebook, how few we would know about! Everything seemed perfect and perfectly easy.

Then Peace Corps heard about the intended reunion, and in a display of stunning paranoia informed me that LLF and I are not allowed to see each other until she swears in, early next year, and becomes an official volunteer. Apparently, trainees may not make any “trips.” Apparently, walking down the street qualifies as a trip, as trainees may not step foot out of the training center during their stay in the capital, except on the supervised and bussed trip to Shop-rite (also around the corner). I have also been told to not attempt to stop by where she is staying. Why? Peace Corps trainees may only have contact with Peace Corps employees and selected volunteers and trainers. I was told, bluntly, that were I to see LLF, I am liable to give her wrong and/or prejudiced information about Lesotho!

Wouldn’t want that. Too bad about Google, Wikipedia and the blogs of disgruntled PC volunteers and expats (this one included) that LLF is probably obsessively searching for information, any at all, about her home for the next two years. Too bad about Facebook where I can discover a long-lost friend is headed to Lesotho, and within seconds can give her all the wrong and prejudiced information I want about Lesotho.

Yeah, I could do that in person too, but mostly, I just want to see her face, so that when I run into her on the street, I know that it’s her I’m running into. But now two buildings on the same street seem no different than two buildings on different continents, though thoughts of a furtive encounter in the frozen foods aisl of Shop-rite seems an appealing option. Meet you at the fish fingers, LLF.

*I don’t want to use her real name, or a real-sounding fake name, because although I think my blog is fairly difficult to find without the address, I don’t want to get her (or someone with her pseudonym) into trouble with Peace Corps. BUT if you’re curious who this mysterious ex ‘field-dweller is, particularly Tamaques grads, shoot me a line. If you guess it, you definitely win something.

(And in my own display of paranoia- it is my heritage after all- after noticing that my blog is getting significantly more hits than usual, since I am writing so often about work, I've tried to more or less remove my name from the postings, though again, the blog does not come up on Google or anything like that.)

How I Came to Africa and Became a 16 year-old Chinese Muslim

If you’re pale and go to Africa, you have to get used to being addressed as White Person. Or obrunni. Or mzungu. Mulungu. Toubab. This is sometimes followed by a list of countries. England? Australia? You come from Germany? America, ah! Go Obama! I was often called “ama” (mother) in Malawi, “sistah” in Ghana or by one man, “small small American” (the additional “small” replacing the word “very” in Ghanaian English vernacular).

Here in Lesotho, I should be Lekhooa. Though I find Ausi (sister) or ‘Me, (mama) or even banana or nana (little girl and baby respectively) preferable to being called by a color, for every one time I hear “Lekhooa,” I get about ten “Machinas.”

Machina, if it is not obvious to you, means Chinese person. I must have been called Machina for months before I realized it. In May, when my Sesotho was at its most competent, while running in the morning, I heard clear as a bell, “Ha uena, Machina” (“Hey you, Chinese person”). I stopped in my tracks turned back to the two men who had passed me and said, “Are you blind?!” They laughed and said, “Oh!” and my neighbors and I had a good laugh about it on the way to school.

But since then, I started noticing that I was being referred to as Chinese in various ways at least two or three times a week. As I said, more often than being called “Lekhooa,” I am addressed as Machina, Chinese, Chinesey and Mao Tse Tung by Basotho of all ages from toddler to the elderly and seemingly of a variety of social classes. I am often greeted on the street with a “Nia hao” (hello in Mandarin). On more than one occasion, I have been taunted with streams of fake Chinese (including once by a group of students in the uniform of a prestigious international secondary school). At the bank, the teller once stared at me dumbfounded when I told him I wanted to make a deposit. After an awkwardly long pause, he came to, and said, “Sorry, I was just surprised you are speaking English because you look so Chinese.” (Where to start? “There are Chinese people in America?” “There are Chinese people who speak English?” “You were a moron to think that in the first place, and an even bigger moron to say it aloud?” “Shut up and process my damn deposit before I scream?”)

Oh, by the way, in general, I think it is fair to say that the Basotho hate the Chinese. The Chinese own successful businesses, not just in Maseru, but seemingly in every small village and town in the country. They own the textile factories, which along with mining provide more jobs to Basotho than any other profession. The main complaint of Basotho people is that the Chinese steal business away from the locals. One of my dearest colleagues also informed me “they keep dirty houses.” Needless to say, it’s not nice to be associated with a group that attracts so much animosity (more bluntly, it’s not nice to be hated), and arguing that I’m not Chinese in some ways seems like a tacit agreement that “Chinese” is indeed something to be ashamed of.

Also, by the way, in case it’s been so long since you’ve seen me that you forgot what I look like, I have pinkish skin, herbal tea-colored hair (no milk) and eyes wide and round enough to suggest a thyroid disorder. And whether it is right or wrong, accurate or not, un-PC and racist, I associate none of these features with those of Chinese people. I’ve started surveying people of various ethnicities and nationalities (American, Indian, New Zealander, Zambian, Italian), as well as Basotho with varying degrees of education to ask them what the heck is so Chinese about me. Most of them act completely shocked and only one Mosotho finally conceded with, “Do you have a Chinese grandmother?” This suggests that most Basotho do not think I’m Chinese, but those that do feel compelled to remind me of it. Most agreed that my height (five feet) could be a contributing factor. Round face made sense enough. Some Basotho said it was probably my hair style and glasses. I didn’t think that the haphazard arrangement hanging down from my scalp counts as a “style,” and moreover, whether I’m wearing glasses or contacts, or have my hair in a bun, tied back, braided or hanging loose, seems to have no bearing on my presumed racial/national identity of the day.

When I told my boss about this phenomenon he said incredulously, “You’re definitely a WASP.” Well he got the W right (despite what the Basotho think). Being a Jew in Lesotho has it’s own set of complications. I have yet to meet a Basotho who isn’t Christian and when you befriend one, it isn’t long before they invite you to their Mormon, Pentacostal, revivalist or non-denominational Christian church. The following is a compilation of various conversations that then ensue.

Me: No thank you, I’m not a Christian.
Christian: You don’t like Christians?
Me: No, I just happen to not be one, and churches are for Christians.
Christian: Are you a Muslim?
Me: No, I’m a Jew.
Christian: Oh. Is that some kind of Muslim?
Me: No.
Christian: So what do you do?
Me: You don’t know what Jews are? You know, the people who live in Israel that aren’t Muslims? They follow only the old testament of the bible? Jesus was a Jew?
Christian: Jesus! So Jews believe in Jesus!
Me: Nope.
Christian: Why?
Me: Because they don’t. Christians believe it, Jews don’t. That’s why they are two different religions.
Christian: But I don’t understand. Jesus was a Jew. And he’s for Christians. But you are not a Christian?
Me: Correct.
Christian: And you still don’t like Jesus?
Me: It’s not that I don’t like him. But if I have to be any religion, I’m going to go with the one I was born with, and in that religion, Jesus is not prophet or the son of god any more than anyone else is a child of god, just a nice guy who liked to build stuff.
Christian: But you accept Him as your personal savior, right?
Me: I accept that you believe He is your personal savior.
[awkward pause]
Christian: So you go to the mosque?

One of my colleagues is a praying machine. She prayed that my class would settle down, she prays that I will find a husband, she hasn’t admitted it but I’m pretty sure she prays I’ll convert or at the very least not end up in hell, and once she told me, “I will pray that you never leave Lesotho. I will pray even though you don’t believe in god.” I replied that I never said I don’t believe in god, only that I don’t believe in Jesus. The Fijian-British librarian overhearing the conversation thought this was a hilarious statement, so I once again patiently explained this apparent irony, meanwhile wanting to scream that I did not ask to be the spokesperson of the Jewish people, and if they could know the most basic information about world religious, I could go back to being a heathen instead of disgruntled Hebrew school teacher.

On only one occasion did the church invitation end up going down a different road. When I told the Ugandan kindergarten teacher that I don’t go to church because I’m Jewish, she told me, “I see. Yes, we have Jews in Uganda.” I almost kissed her for saving me from a mind-numbing conversation about why Jews don’t believe in Jesus and are also not Muslims. Hoping she could offer some insight on my prior conversations, I asked her how the Basotho could know nothing about Jews, especially when there are Jews in South Africa. She said simply and disappointingly, “Because Basotho are ignorant and small-minded.” So much for insight.

So apparently tolerance (see Chinese example) and world religions are not taught in schools, and I should know, because apparently I’m sweet sixteen (with a massive case of deja vous). Although I got stopped a couple of times in the NYC Port Authority by police thinking I’m a runaway teen, and my driver’s license got mercilessly scrutinized in the doorways of bars, my birthdays have never been sliced off so dramatically as they are in South Africa and Lesotho. If I mention the word “school,” people ask what grade I’m in. Other expats ask what my parents do (as in, which NGO or embassy or mission do they work for and why have they let me out at night alone). Teenage girls looking for cleaning jobs knock on my door and ask if my father is home, high school boys hit on me, middle school boys hit on me, fourteen year old girls link their arms in mine and want to be my friend. And the first time we met, at least one colleague and one parent thought I was a student, not a teacher (and the school only goes up to eighth grade)! When people find out my age, or ask me, and I make them guess, 16 is the most popular answer, followed closely by 15.

While WWOOFing on the farm of a woman with two teenage sons in July, we met their friends for a picnic in the forest. Chatting with the 10 year-old son of the other family, he was surprised to hear me mention teaching. He looked slightly disturbed and asked how old I was. When I said 24 his eyes widened further and he said, “But how can you be Matt’s girlfriend?” Unbeknownst to me, the matriarch of the family friends informed her kids that I must be Matt’s (the sixteen year old son of the farmer) girlfriend. When I had finished choking on the last of my laughter-induced tears. Both mothers conversed rapidly about my young looking skin and wondered if it was an American thing. Matt guessed South Africans have more stress than Americans which contributes to aging, although I thought the sun was the likelier aging culprit on the South African side of things. But what do I know? I’m just a teenager who can’t speak English and has a one-way ticket to hell.

3 Good Omens and the Second 42

The Good Omens

1. Wednesday: It was one of my last training runs before the marathon- a quick and easy three miles. The sky was overcast, but that's nothing new for the time of year. After about two miles, the sky opened up and threw down hail and rain by the bucketful. Having never experienced hail before coming to Lesotho, I used to be quite amused by the phenomenon, witnessed from the snug confines of my house. No more. Hail hurts. I slung my left arm (which now looks like someone took a bat to it) over my head and took off my glasses and sprinted blindly home, up to my ankles in water and screaming obsenities at the sky. (Why this is a good omen, I have no idea, but it somehow seemed a sign that the race would be ok).
2. Friday: Last year for Halloween I dressed as a tree (brown pants with vertical bark-esque stictching, shirt with a leaf pattern and paper leaves and flowers wound around my arms and head). No one had any clue what I was supposed to be ("Eve" was one guess, "mother nature" another). Two days after Halloween, I had an abysmal marathon and discovered bad costume = bad marathon. I thought it would be wise to steer clear of flora this year, but ended up dressing as a strawberry. Nobody mistook me for a biblical figure or philosophical concept and a couple even knew what I was supposed to be.

3. Saturday: On my college cross country team, we had several people superstitious about their bib numbers. When they got their number, the first thing they would do was try to figure out some sort of mathematical, personal or historical significance of the numbers. When I picked up my number for the marathon, it was 2345. It doesn't get any better than that!

The 42 Kilometers

I have been pondering running the comrades marathon (http://www.comrades.com/) which has a qualifying time of sub 5 hours. I have run much faster, but on this course, which is quite hilly, I have also run much slower. I was told to aim for 4:45 to give myself some room for cramping, fatigue and other small disasters. Except I got so excited that I took off in the low 50s for the first 10 k, under 2 hours at the half way point, slowing down the next 10 k, and from 31 k on, fantasizing about lying down in the road and being trampled by the other runners. I got a disproportionate amount of cheers to those around me, partially because I was often the only woman in a pack of men (go lady! strong woman!) but mostly because people probably thought I was far younger than I am due to my stature and fat head (wow baby girl! look at that little girl go!) The cheers were encouraging but I still hobbled up the last few hills, sure those around me could hear the screeching feeling in my hips. I missed the markers for the last three kilometers, and was stunned when I saw the finish line approaching. My time was about 4:48, fast enough to qualify for comrades. . .

Some Bad Luck (With a Little Good Luck For Me)

A fellow Maseru expat who was also a stranger to me until Saturday, was kind enough to wait for me at the finish line. He had run the 10 k race earlier that day and was part of a big international contingent that came up from Lesotho. He found me as soon as I finished and before I had time to catch my breath and wipe the salt off my face, said, "I'm going to tell you some bad news in one minute." All I could think was that the bag with my passport had been stolen out of someone's car and I now had to live in Soweto. Well, it turned out that of the four cars from Maseru that drove to the races, one had been stolen and two had been broken into. People lost in addition to car, wallets, ipods, phones, etc. By a ridiculous and random stroke of luck, the car that contained my stuff was the only car that hadn't been broken into. All of these cars had Lesotho plates, and I was later told that 7 other cars with Lesotho plates had been stolen from the parking lot, that cars with Lesotho plates are targeted in South Africa because they are difficult to trace, and that the race organizers cut the security by two thirds and put that one third on the course, looking for bandits (people that don't register or pay for races but run the course anyway).

And a Little Bit More of Good Luck

I decided to sign up for the comrades today, just in case I decide to run it. Although registration only opened yesterday and there are 5,000 spots for new runners, the spaces were expected to fill quickly because of the world cup. I almost gave up because the credit card info wasn't going through and finally decided after some internal debate to use my American card. I signed up and 2 hours later when I went to look something up, I saw the registration was already entirely fille up! Whew, just made it!

PS

I didn't see any protesters.

The Stand-In

On Sunday I will be running in the Soweto Marathon. Amidst what has now become an annual scramble to find transport to and from the race, a place to stay, and a night-before pasta source, I was informed by another runner about a silent and stagnant protest that will occur on the starting line.

The following has been posted on various running websites: “All runners are advised of the Silent Protest schedules at the Soweto Marathon on 1 November. At the firing of the starter’s gun at 6am, runners will remain standing on the start line for 2 minutes in a show of athletic ubuntu.* The protest, done in the presence of national TV and leading South African media, is to remind the national federation and local organizing province that those two bodies have failed in their collective essence undermined the sporting code. Furthermore, the athletes wish to prompt and to urge all administrators to consider the hundreds and thousands of mainly recreation and some part time professional athletes in this country, that as elected officials; acting free of race, gender, religious or political conviction, they are accountable for their actions and that they must follow clear governance with good consciousness and restore the credibility of the sport. This we demand for the benefit of athletes, supporters, sponsors, all administrators and other athletic stakeholders in South Africa.”

My various thoughts upon reading this were:

1. Huh?
2. Really?
3. Sigh.

Huh? I had to read the thing a few times to wrap my head around what is actually being protested. First of all, it is impossibly vague. Second of all, the word “run” has no mention within the actual explanation of the protest and an Indian colleague had to remind me that in British English, “athletics” refers specifically to running and not, as it does in America, to all sports. After that, I realized the protest is probably in response to Caster Semenya, winner of the women’s 800 meter World Championships. The drastic improvement in her performance, the margin by which she won and Semenya’s physical appearance lead her sex (whether she was unknowingly intersex) to be called into question. Details that should have remained confidential about gender tests were made public and the International Association of Athletics Federation has been accused of racism, in addition to the more obvious disregard of her privacy. 

Really? So I think I get what the protest is about, and it seems compelling enough that some runners would want to organize and participate in the protest. But it seems unlikely to work (and by “work,” I mean for the vast majority of marathoners to participate, otherwise the start of the race will look no different from the start of any other race) for the following reasons:

-Elite runners have money and titles to win. Are they going to risk that when the gun goes off without knowing whether or not their opponents are going to take advantage of a two-minute head start?

-Many runners have times they are aiming to run for personal satisfaction or to qualify for other bigger and more competitive races that require qualifying times. Again, are they going to risk that for the protest?

-Some people are simply not going to want to take part in this protest or any protest.

-Not all runners are going to be aware of the protest unless they have stumbled across the above blurb on running websites.

Sigh: I fall into the category of people who would like to run certain times to stroke their egos and qualify for other races. I am not confident that I can spare two minutes to stand around in ubuntu, in addition to the time it would already take me to get to the starting line when I am seeded yards and yards behind it. If the protest is going to go better than I expect, I’m going to have a really irritable two minutes, getting worked up about the time I will no longer finish in, all with a lot of bumping, shoving, tripping, general chaos and anger that is not a good way to start 26.2 miles of warm and hilly running. Lastly, just as I am annoyed when someone tries to prevent me from protesting (ie: the police), I will be annoyed if someone tries to force me to protest (if the people in front of me don’t move, I can’t move).

There are going to be thousands of runners in this race and the starting line can only be as wide as the road, trail or path you are running on. Runners line up according to the time they are expected to run, which is based on previous races whenever applicable. The fastest runners are at the front and the slowest at the back. When the gun goes off, only those near the front start running and the rest of us run when those in front of us have started moving. This can take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes and in really big races you can’t even see the starting line until you are running across it. The race sponsors are not sponsoring the protest and I don’t know that any of the protest organizers will be timing the two minutes and alerting the protesters when it is time to begin. So I’ve decided that as I always do, I will start running a stride after the person in front of me, glance at my watch as my sneakers cross the starting line and struggle to make it to the finish. And maybe at the end of the race, or later on the news, I will find out if I protested or not.   

*means humanness or community, I think in Xhosa

Zambia, Again

My first time in Zambia, about 2 and a half years ago, I spent my time in South Luangwa National Park turning my head left and right, from elephant to lion to zebra, twitching from spending too many hours sitting inside a vehicle. Last year, I went to Zambia again, where I very memorably emptied the contents of my stomach on bus, car and canoe from the Malawian border to Victoria Falls to an island in the Zambezi River and allllll the way back to Lusaka, the capital.

I am back in Lusaka for the Association of International Schools in Africa conference, along with four other teachers and our new director. While my last visits were marked by (other than motion sickness) wildlife spottings of both the intentional and accidental variety, spottings of a disproportionate number of people with disfiguring facial growths and a personal bristling against Zambian aggression (which is apparently relative as coming from Malawi I definitely felt this the first two times, but coming from Lesotho, Zambians don't seem aggressive at all), this time around, I'm much more in conference-land than Zambia-land, with all the powerpoint presentations and over-cooked buffet food that implies.

I've had the chance to run a bit every morning before plenaries, institutes and workshops (which still does not seem to balance out all the sitting I'm being required to do) and I am completely and amazingly ignored by my fellow early-rising pedestrians. Unlike Maseru, it really smells like "Africa" here, which to me means blossoms on trees, burning trash, rotting fruit and fresh dirt. This is all the more noticeable in the early morning, before car exhaust competes with these other scents.

My neighbor and assistant teacher from last year asked me to do her a couple of favors while in Zambia, her country of birth, namely to deposit some money for her into her father's account and to pick up some mopane worms for her (dried caterpillars) to eat. I asked her where to deposit the money, and she said "any bank." Betty does not have a bank account herself and I had to explain to her that it would have to be deposited at the bank in which he has an account. She wrote down all the details for me, and luckily the receptionist at the hotel directed me to a nearby branch. When I asked the teller for a deposit slip, he gave me an eighth of a torn up piece of printer paper. I said, "oh, those, I already have one," and handed him the scrap of looseleaf Betty had given me. I felt a little shady handing over Betty's cash given the circumstances, but the receipt looked legitimate.

Hunting down mopane worms in the city market place was a tougher task. They seem to be out of season. I told Betty before I left that I might not be able to bring worms through customs, and she said, "if you can't bring me caterpillars, get kapenta." Kapenta is a small fish you can buy dried. I explained that if they confiscate caterpillars, I assume they would confiscate fish. My nose found the fish before my eyes did and I promptly decided that I would NOT be transporting them in my duffel bag, tote bag or pockets (sorry Betty!)

The conference itself is not as relevant to early childhood education as I would like, and so far has not been as stimulating and engaging as I found it to be last year. Yesterday morning there was a keynote address by the man who inspired the movie Fly Away Home. Who knows what this has to do with education, but at least the title of the talk did not have a colon in it (ie: Unpacking [Fill in Big Words Here]: The Implications of Big Word and Big Word on Big Word). I have my last workshop tomorrow and the presenter is a singer/storyteller. It lists "laughing" in the handout under what participants will do in the workshop, and you can't go wrong with that.

"You grow, you grow, you grow and then you die"

This is what 3 year old Charlie announced to the class during morning meeting after I explained to them why I keep drawings, photos, notes and observations about them in an obese binder (so they and I can see how much they are growing).

Meet My Students, Part III

Only a few more. . .
The Bulldozer enjoys any number of not so endearing past times including, drinking water that is blackened with paint from dirty brushes, throwing his body on other children or the table, throwing his body on the table and wriggling around until everything on the table is on the floor, and dumping everything on the floor which on one occassion most unfortunately included an 800 piece lego set. His aunt, who raises him, is truly an idiot. While discussing Refiloe's infantile speech (this child is seriously delayed) the aunt said "he doesn't know how to speak because I am too busy to talk to him." When I asked what this child spends most of the waking hours he is not in school doing, she said, "He watches wrestling on TV."

Roshina, from Pakistan, used to be inseparable from her denim hand bag and animal print sunglasses. Thankfully, I have weaned her to the point where these items can rest on her hook in the hallway without causing a major crisis.

Imogene is one half of the German, Chinese, Malaysian twins. She is trilingual (German, English and Cantonese) with scarily advanced fine motor skills.

Ellen is Imogene's partner in crime and is discernible from her sister by the unrulier hair and mischievous grin.

If Toloana wasn't such a happy, oblivious child, I might find her rather annoying sometimes. Whenever I sit next to her, I end up with bruises on my thigh the exact size and shape of her small, pointy elbows. She also begins every sentence with "I want my. . ." so "May I go to the bathroom" becomes "I want my toilet" and so on.

Tlotliso is all but silent, although his parents tell me he is a chatterbox at home and gets into all kinds of trouble. I've seen the latter but I'm still waiting for the former. The only occasion in which I heard a steady stream of words come out of his mouth was when I gave him a simple direction in Sesotho (take this chair) but I couldn't catch a word of his response.

Katleho is so quiet and sweet and easy that half of the time, I forget he exists. And whenever I am writing about the children or need to recall a list of their names in my head, I always get up to 20, then search my brain before I remember "Katleho!" Sorry buddy, you're last again but I still love you.



Random Funny Stories:

The other day Sean was sitting on my lap and my hands were resting on his lap. His shorts felt disconcertingly damp, but then again, we had just been drinking water and he isn't all that coordinated. I pointed and said, "What's that?" He looked down and said, "Um, that's my penis." Oh child, I was asking what's on your pants, not in them. . . at least no one entered the room halfway through the exchange.

Chinzera brought a yellow plastic gun to school one morning and amused himself by pointing it at his friends and whispering gun shot noises. Charlie, of the pseudo neo-hippie parents, glanced at the gun and said, "Hey, I like your leaf blower." This very same leaf blower fan had a major accident on the playground (which was during my planning period). He romoved the soiled clothing, trod in his feces and proceeded to continue playing, while trailing his excrement around campus. I spotted him from the window wearing nothing but a yellow rain slicker!

Meet My Students, Part II

I introduced you to some of my students in my last post, and thought I should get around to the next batch. I’ll start with the students I had last year. (And no, they did not fail preschool. Because the roster wasn’t full in August, the school admitted newly-turned three year olds in January. Now they are three-and-a-half and so not yet old enough for the next class).

Some of you may remember Sean, the main character of a gross anecdote I e-mailed upon request, its contents too graphic for me to post on the blog. Thank goodness he is now fully toilet trained. Sean is like a puppy, a golden-haired, yappy, giggly, nuzzly puppy boy. Today he told me, "Ms. Sawa, I was dwiving to kindermusik and I saw you wunning. You were wunning on the on the woad. You should wun on the gwass!" So busted.

I wouldn’t know if Janelle is a night owl, but her morning time grumpiness is more fitting for a teenager than a three year old. She is blindly affectionate and encounters with her often leave me feeling border-line violated. Physically she is the epitome of a Dutch girl stereotype and her father is so tall that on family reading night, while reading the book Actual Size by Steven Jenkins (a non-fiction picture book of size superlatives in the animal kingdom), I had him stand on his toes with his arms over his head to depict the approximate height of an Alaskan brown bear.

Esther is actually just old enough to move to the next class but since her family is moving to Tanzania today
:( and she would only be in the class a month, her mother preferred she stay with me. I spent a good portion of last year holding this crying, mopey child. This year she was far more independent and I kind of missed the snuggling (and her constant German babbling before she sucked it up and tried speaking in English).

Jenna is South African by birth and has the lovliest New Zealand accent she picked up from her adoptive mother. She is just about the happiest, easiest, squishiest child, and it's just my luck that I only have her in my class a short time while her mother is working here temporarily from South Africa.

Palesa is the baby of the school and she knows it. She’s the youngest, tiniest, most awkwardly running person on campus. No one can resist scooping her up, especially when she cries . . .and especially the particularly heartbreaking variety of weeping in which tears roll soundlessly down her cheeks.

Kevin’s crying is a little more resistible. He prefers an ear-splitting screech to using words. His language development is quite delayed so it’s understandable, and he’s obviously used to having his screeches responded to at home. When he’s not screeching, he has the smiliest face. . . and some pretty cool robot-esque dance moves.

Kabelo: Class Biter.

Back to Maseru: Shaving the Proverbial Armpits

There is no painless way to return to the 9-5 (by which  I mean 7-3) life in a dusty city after two months mucking around barefoot, off the grid and drunk on sunshine. But a quick way to switch gears is to invite a little panic into that window in which you've already unpacked but haven't put anything away. And for me that was to look at my class roster.

TWENTY-ONE THREE YEAR OLDS.

TWENTY-ONE THREE YEAR OLDS SPEAKING 12 LANGUAGES.

Do you have any idea of the volume of separation anxiety tears 21 children can produce? Do you have any idea the gallons of nervous pee just waiting to flood tights, jeans and floor? (The number of accidents are, for obvious reasons, far greater at the beginning of the school year, and I swear I can see the evidence on the mottled brown carpet like rings on a tree). Do you have any idea how much confusion can ensue when you put 21 children who have never been to school before in one room? And the way the confusion multiplies when there is .5 different languages per capita and I speak fluently a grand total of one?

Although my neighbor and colleague teaches fifth grade, she understood enough to buy me a back to school gift of a botle of Amarula (a South African liqueur). This after I asked her, "screwdrivers are part of a balanced breakfast, right?"

Dressed in polka dots and red maryjanes, I hung name tags around my students' necks like leis at a Hawaiian airport. I shook dozens of parental hands and collected their dutiful offerings of lunchboxes, spare changes of clothing and epipens. Then I smiled them out of the room and met my new students.

Charlie is the obvious product of having two cool parents and three years of overhearing conversations peppered with SAT words. One of his classic moves is to start immediately screaming my name at any given point he can't see me. Then when he spots me, he runs over, head butts me in the crotch and says, "Pop! I'm right here!" He is more than a little dramatic, and the day after his best friend went away, he threw himself on the dusty ground of the playground, clawing at the earth and bellowing her name, "BELLA! BELLA!," in what ammounted to an unintentional farce of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Rebecca is a tiny Kenyan who is fiesty as hell. She hits, spits and giggles as if her life depends on it. She even cries with gusto and after vigorous weeping sessions she is known to vomit, a quirk made all the more memorable to her teachers by the vibrantly colored yogurt drinks she consumes each day at snack time.

Assefa comes from Ethiopia and her striking beauty is made that much more startling by her faint unibrow. Her English is unintelligible and she doesn't understand a damn word I say, but the way she enthusiastically responds "ok!" to everything nonetheless has a irresistable appeal amidst the general preschooler rebellion.

Alpa is . . . well, I pulled the mother aside one day and asked, seriously and without exaggeration, if her child ever sits down. . .

Isabella's manly Italian accent is shockingly inconguous to the sweet, blond pigtails. She was fine the first day until her 8 year old brother stomped over to my class midway through the morning to check up on her. In his uncannily identical voice he told her, "You are a big girl, you must be brave," followed by an affectionate shove that sent her sprawling, and the rest of the day wailing and calling for him despite the fact that he knocked her flat. These days she is my faithful shadow. The first time she got picked up from school by a family friend, she refused to go with him, clinging to me, crying, "I don't want to go. I don't want to go. AHHHHHHHHHHH! I love you! I want to go with you!" I had to carry her kicking and screaming to the neighboring UN where he works, rushing past the guard as I didn't have the requisite passport on me, and place her apologetically in his car. Now she is more compliant thanks to a chocolatey bribe (from him, not me).

Chenzira is significantly quieter than the others. He likes to limit his vocal exertion by whispering, remaining silent, or contriving other ways to reduce his need to speak. Raised eyebrows, I've learned, means "yes."

It is Maria's personal philosophy that a kiss (or several) cures everything. One day after several disruptions during a book I was reading, I put the book on my lap and informed her that I was upset that she was not listening and disturbing the story for other children. Her eyes widened. "You are upset? Ms. Sara is upset, guys." She got up and walked toward me stepping on (inviting cries of pain) and stumbling over several children on the way, kissed my hand elaborately about a dozen times and said, "You're better, ok?" She sort of missed the point but how could I stay upset after that?

And that's  just a third of my students, not including the bulldozer who was suspended until a second assistant teacher could be hired. . .

Here's to nine more months of tears, kisses, giggles, pink vomit and happy (hopefully) chaos!

Jamboree

Moments after the farm owner picked me up from the bus station she said, “I have a shit load of watermelon that is going to go off pretty soon so you’ll probably be making a lot of jam.” Watermelon is my favorite food so the only thing better to me than an organic and freshly picked one is a shit load of them, and I hoped I would get to graze to satisfaction before jam-ifying them. Upon arriving at the farm I saw that indeed there was a shit load of watermelon, but there was an even bigger shit load of a larger melons, lighter and more monotone in color, and those were what would soon relocate to shelves of sanitized recycled jars. “These are the makatons,” Janet told me. “Makaton jam on toast is lekker.”



I asked her how to spell makaton and she shrugged saying, “I don’t know because they’re really called kafirlemoen (kaffir watermelon in English), but we’re not supposed to say that anymore. Makaton must be some Boer word but I don’t have a cookin’ clue what it means, fucking Boers.” Kaffir, if you are unaware is a derogatory South African term for a black person. And Boers, if you are unaware are the South African settlers of Dutch descent. Janet, white and of British descent, had pretty much something derogatory to say about every race, ethnic and cultural group in the country, including her own. It struck me as a bit incongruous to the crunchy organic lifestyle, but then again I could never figure out if she really hated everyone or if she just had a bizarre way of showing affection. And if you find the term “kaffir watermelon” nonsensical in addition to offensive, I learned that makaton is indigenous to the Karoo and was (maybe still is) traditionally grown as cow fodder. It is unbelievable tasteless; if you could turn water to a solid at room temperature, it would taste like makaton. So at the time the most sense I could make of the moniker is that at its christening, the melon was considered to be fit only for consumption by animals or black people. Although while googling around trying to find the correct spelling of makaton, I came across this blog posting which explains how (and somewhat why) there are several South African plants and animals whose names begin with “kaffir” and that it may be an (outdated) geographical description.

http://bornagainredneck.blogspot.com/2006/09/we-are-all-kafirs-now.html



Makatons are hard as rocks. Preparing them for their two day soak in a slaked lime solution was like being asked to remove the outer layer of a boulder with a vegetable peeler, hack it into attractive cubes and stab repeatedly with a fork (for maximum slaked lime penetration). The lime is meant to soften the melon and does so to no discernible degree. Perhaps makaton’s most amazing property is that despite the fact that I couldn’t taste a drop of sweetness in any granite-esque chunk I sampled, it managed to leave an unbelievably sticky residue on my hands, hair, clothes, the counter and the kitchen floor, which I tracked onto other floors via my sticky-squeaking sneakers.



Two days later I made makaton jam for eleven hours. Janet met me in the morning and instructed me to rinse the melons and use the lime solution to water the grass. Then she explained how to make the syrup I would cook the melon in. And with the sugar: water: ginger: melon ration in my head, a kitchen scale and a pen and scrap paper, I set to dealing with bucket after bucket of melon. It seemed simple enough; boil the sugar, water and ginger, then simmer the melon in it. When the melon chunks get soft, cool in steel bowls and dump the next batch went into the syrup pot.



Things seemed to go smoothly at first. The air in the kitchen turned cloying and steamy; the melon chunks were rectangular and browning. But then something strange started happening. The fruit turned brittle and the syrup began to bubble like a swamp in a 1950s horror movie. Attempts to stir the fruit with a ladle created boiling strings of sugar lava oozing all over the counter. Blobs fell off the ladle and solidified mid-drop, then snapped like icicles. I was fascinated and slightly wary as hot sugar causes the most horrific burns, worse than grease, worse than probably anything but steam. The syrup was no longer glossy and clear and the whole thing started to resemble a cesspool that froze over trapping animal dung mid-float. But, oh my, it was delicious! The melon chunks appeared fossilized but had a delightful caramelized crunch. The syrup, now toffee, was amber-like in its ability to capture pieces of ginger as it hardened. It was accidental home-made candy and I was in heaven.



BUT. It was not jam. It was the least jammy substance I could have possibly concocted with the given ingredients. Janet was out and she wouldn’t pick up her cell phone. I left the pot sitting to further congeal while waiting for her to appear before finally realizing she may not return anytime soon, so tried to extract the melon remains, toss them in a bowl, soak the pot and whip up a new patch of syrup. When Janet finally did come home she was aghast, yet bemused. She said the problem was water evaporating out of the syrup making the sugar content too high and causing it to crystallize. The problem was obvious enough as was the solution of adding more water after a certain period of cooking. On the other hand, I had been told to follow the ratios exactly and the subtext of “don’t fuck with it,” seem to bar the much needed replacement of water. Janet told me to chill. She salvaged what was salvageable and told me to chuck the rest (although I pocketed a few pieces of the “ruined” melon) and she started another pot on the stove.



As she measured a kilo of fruit, she noticed a white powder clinging to the melon. “Is this melon in lime or water she asked?” I told her it was lime and she cursed and started rinsing. Apparently this was not good. She put the melon in bowls of fresh water and my heart started pounding. Apparently this was what I was supposed to have done to the five kilograms of fruit I had already cooked (not including the one kilogram we had just thrown away). And apparently Janet didn’t know that I skipped this step. Janet is a mite volatile and I still had a few weeks left on the farm so for several long moments it seemed wise to keep my mouth shut. One kilo of ruined fruit was clearly forgivable but I doubted another five would be. Then I started to worry that the lime was poisonous, or that it would make the jam go bad inside the jars.



“Janet.” I tried to not let my voice wobble. “Why’s that melon soaking in water?” “To rinse the lime,” was her expected reply. “Ummm. I didn’t rinse the lime from any of the other melon.” My voice got quieter and more wobbly. “I didn’t know it needed to be rinsed.” Her voice was scarily calm. She said, “I know.” The only response I could come up with was “oh.” Then she said, “It was the first thing I told you to do.” It certainly wasn’t. I became more confident. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know. Or maybe I didn’t hear you correctly. But what will happen to the jam?” She shrugged and told me consuming a large amount of lime isn’t healthy but this wouldn’t be enough to do anything bad to the jam or the people consuming it. I hadn’t breathed for about a minute. I exhaled and apologized and she told me not to worry about it. She told me I could rinse the rest of the melon and then dump the lime solution on the grass outside. When I picked up the bucket and started hauling it outside I remembered. She had told me to rinse the lime off the melon. It was the first thing she told me. “Shit,” I said. “I remember now.” I started to profusely apologize for my second jam screw up of the day and she laughed. When I returned from lime disposal feeling sufficiently foolish, Janet left me with the rest of the jam to finish.



As my first batch post-disaster softened in the late afternoon, I brought a sample to Janet. She was on the phone so I silently held it out to her and she pressed it with a finger. She smiled and mouthed “yes.” A little happy noise escaped from her throat. She must have startled the person on the other end of the line because she said, “No, it’s the WWOOFer lady. She had a dismal morning making kaffir watermelon jam. . .” It was well past dark by the time the sterilized jars had been packed with jam, de-bubbled, sealed and wiped down, and the sugar-encrusted pots and ladles were soaking in hot soapy water. The thought of standing at the stove one more minute seemed unnecessarily abusive so I ate a baked potato from the microwave and a persimmon for dinner. And, lucky for me, there was one linty piece of accidental melon candy in my pocket for dessert. It was delicious.