Monday, January 19, 2009
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Christmas in the Sahara with Malian Monroe
When I left Johannesburg, South Africa for Bamako, Mali I oddly found myself on a plane bound for New York City. Unbeknownst to me until check-in, flights from Tambo International Airport to JFK stop in Senegal to refuel. Darker is the final destination for only a handful of passengers, and a layover for apparently just me. Flying up the continent I contemplated how possible it would be to not disembark in Dakar, to call my parents from JKF, and wait for them to pick me up while eating an everything bagel. It was impossible for me not to think this while sitting between passengers bound for the city that makes me drool over soy buttermilk biscuits from Sacred Chow and the public library system in equal measure. But really, I was thrilled to be heading to Mali. Once I took a job that pays in maloti, I assumed air travel would be out of the question until I’m shipped back to America at the end of my contract. I got ridiculously lucky. For once, my work, my traveling whims, and the opportunity to see a far-flung friend were not at odds. Although I got kicked out of the NYC bound plane in Dakar, I was sent hurtling toward Dogon country, Timbuktu and my favorite peace corps volunteer on the planet, a fabulous slice of Jersey right here in Africa.
I’d love to skip straight to the part where Kate and I gallop off into the sunset on twin camels in a kola nut induced euphoria, and I will skip most of the unpleasant and boring details between unplugging my refrigerator in Lesotho and reuniting on a staircase in Bamako. But I just want to say that if the airport in Dakar were a Jelly Belly it would be licorice, namely a waste and a disappointment of a transit hub. Once they let you check in, it’s bearable; there are a few souvenir shops and duty free stores where one can purchase m&ms in varying quantities, and a couple of bar/cafes. However, I was held captive in the transit area for 12 hours. The room was freezing and the chairs seemed purposely slippery so that if you tried to lean back and relax the slightest bit you would slide to the floor. Toilet paper, toilet seats, and soap were not considered necessary bathroom features, and the water worked only intermittently. But the worst part for me was that there was no place to buy food until they let you check in. I had to break into the bag of marshmallows I was bringing to toast with Kate on a propane stove so I could take my malaria prophylaxis. After about six hours of transit room, a vendor rolled in selling $8 pink-meated sandwiches. My hunger equaled my disgust at whatever lay between the bread, so what would have been a really expensive baloney sandwich became a ridiculously expensive soggy roll once I flicked off the spongy animal matter.
Fast forward, and food seems a good place to start. Many people have an image of Africans eating a diet solely of airlifted USAID food and grubs. Despite what I’ve seen and moreover, consumed, to the contrary, I had not imagined Malian food could be so pleasing. I mean, it’s one of the poorest countries in the world and largely desert for goodness sake. Of course, the diet I could afford has considerably more variety and nutrition than the average Malian’s, but I was still surprised, usually in a good way. Street food was it’s own wonderful microcosm, my favorites being spicy, fried sweet potatoes and bissap, a frozen hibiscus juice. My first foray into street food was for scrambled eggs on baguette. It seemed simple enough, although the cook asked if I wanted my scrambled eggs topped with hardboiled eggs. Um. . .? Luckily Kate was there to translate, as I tend to nod when I have no idea what someone is saying. This is how three weeks later, when I was on my own, I ended up with a hard boiled egg, plantain, onion, tomato, cucumber and fish juice sandwich. It was a delicious accident, let me tell you. I was treated to a different kind of food entirely in the village where Kate does her work. A neighborhood family has adopted Kate and feeds her and by extension, me, twice a day. The women and children share one bowl, eating with their hands, and on the other side of the yard, the men do the same. When I asked Kate about Malian table (mat on the dirt) etiquette, she said, “Just eat a lot.” No matter how much I ate of the always fresh, and usually delicious meals, it was never enough for the food pushing mamas. This was especially true the day we had tô with okra sauce, an incarnation of a food I was served in Ghana and hoped to never come across again. Tô, a mashed ball of millet is quite pleasant, especially once I confirmed it was not "toe," and the taste of okra is also good, but when okra is cooked in a stew it becomes a gelatinous mound of slime, and appears, not unlike an upper respiratory infection symptom. It quivers as you swallow it and strings from your fingers and lips no matter how carefully you try to eat. I thought I beat the tô and okra sauce system by scooping an untouched chunk of millet from the middle of the ball. But it slid from my slimy fingers and bounced on a pool of okra sauce before sinking to the bottom of the bowl. As if as punishment, the cow, slurping from her own bowl of okra sauce spit some up in my flip flop before closing her green lips around my ponytail.
Fortunately Mali is the African country where I for once don’t feel completely guilty about leaving food on my plate. In Mali it is a common practice for families to give up one boy to Koranic school where he will stay, usually far from home, for about seven years. The mother gets a free ticket to heaven, and the child gets an education and his basic needs met. The system’s idea of providing the boys, known as garibouts (gairiboos), with food consists of the teachers sending their students to beg for food and change on the street, and restaurants and families often leave leftover food to them. They walk around with plastic buckets and are a quiet, constant presence. Before I understood who they were, I found their presence very hard to swallow. After an explanation of how the schools work, I came to view them as legitimate beggars- whatever that means- and eventually I stopped noticing them. When I was a camp counselor, I had an Animal Planet loving camper with Aspergers. He would frequently head butt me in the spine and when I tried to encourage him to keep his head to himself, he would shrug and say, “I’m just bein’ a caribou.” When the children thrust their buckets at me and mumbled in French or a local language I imagined they were saying, “I’m just bein’ a garibout.”
I found myself guessing what people were saying often, as my French is terrible, my understanding of African accents speaking French even worse, and my knowledge of local Malian languages nonexistent. Because Kate can carry a conversation in French and Koro Boro, I frequently found myself in the presence of conversations I could not understand a word of. When I worried Kate was getting irritated by the incessant translating, I annoyed her even more by “translating” the conversations myself:
Is your friend mute or just unfriendly?
No she is just American.
Ah, yes, I can tell by the girth. Is she married?
No she is highly available and yours for six goats, six sheep and a camel.
Deal.
The only words of Koro Boro that I learned were “thank you” and “peace only,” which I used regardless of situation.
Your feet are very dirty.
Thank you.
What is your name?
Peace only.
I also learned, but had less occasion to use the Koro Boro phrase “anasar kang buu,” which means “dead white people’s clothes.” When Americans and Europeans donate clothes to charity, they often end up being sold for pennies in markets in the developing world. Malians are quite aware of where these clothes come from, but they conclude that the owners of the clothing must be dead if they are being given away.
While in Mali, I celebrated several holidays having little or nothing to do with this predominantly Muslim country. A Christmas Eve party was held in the regional capital and Gao and the peace corps volunteers of that area and their visitors trudged in for the festivities. One magical volunteer is like the Martha Stewart of the desert. She typed up caroling songbooks, sewed African-print stockings (filled with jewelry she crafted herself), and a built a gingerbread house with sculpted sugar snowmen that no one was allowed to touch, not even the slab of cookie implausibly placed over the top of the chimney (how was smoke supposed to get out and Santa in?) At dusk she slipped into a one-shoulder dress she rigged up herself by strategically wrapping and tying a pearly green turban around herself, and reigned serenely over the merriment. Noelle quickly evolved into a bachelorette party for a volunteer bride-to-be who was dressed in Christmas decorations. We hit the town for a scavenger hunt, and whenever anyone inquired as to what all the Toubabs (white people), especially the glittery one, were up to, Kate told them that on American Christmas, the newest bride is dressed like a fool and paraded around town. One man, upon hearing this said, “May you have twenty children. Then you send me five boys form America to sell turbans in my shop.” Shortly thereafter, Kate and I threw a Chanukah celebration. I made latkes (potato pancakes) and Kate fashioned a dreidel. I tried explaining the rules to the goyim (“this means you take half” “this means you get nothing”) but there was an oversight in terms of gelt, the chocolate coins you play for. Strip dreidel was the inevitable conclusion. Spin a shin, put an item of clothing into the pot, spin a gimmel, and you may end up with your friend’s sweaty bandana. Before nudity could enter the scene, the tournament relocated to the local bar where gelt was replaced with beer. And finally, there was New Year’s to celebrate, which Kate and I did by crashing a high school dance party. I didn’t know then, nor do I know now what possessed us. It was literally inside a high school, desks pushed to the edges of linoleum, glaring florescent lights, and chalked equations unerased on the blackboard. The high schoolers didn’t take any particular notice of the overage Toubabs crashing their party, and I believe I was more surprised than they were to find myself there.
I also had the opportunity to experience some more traditional Malian events, namely the Dogon Dancing Mask Festival, a celebration of various arts forms in and around Dogon Country. We paid our 4,000 CFA ($8) entrance fee and found ourselves, unsurprisingly with an entrance fee like that, surrounded by other foreigners. We listened to music led by a Willie Nelson-esque Malian and watched a dozen women dressed in indigo cloth kick up clouds of dust in their exquisite out of sync dancing. Then the gates opened up and hundreds of Malians flooded the audience. The children especially went wild over the traditional warfare segment. Adolescent boys donned three pairs of shorts each and locked in a sort of head to shoulder embrace. Between Kate’s translations of the commentary and my own observations, the object seemed to be to wedge your thumbs into the waistbands of your opponent’s shorts, lift him up in this manner and drop him to the ground. Finally, we were treated the mask dancing in which men swing their heads around topped with masks several meters tall that they held in their teeth.
Kate and I followed this with a visit to a Dogon village. My favorite part was seeing a local courthouse. The ceilings are purposely low (maybe four feet high) to keep people’s anger in check; the threat of concussion makes someone think twice before jumping up and shouting. The US ambassador to Mali was touring the village at the same time. Kate requested an introduction by our guide and he returned to us with someone who was clearly not the ambassador but perhaps her child or intern. Following this disappointment, we climbed some rocks for an aerial view of the mosques, complaining of the inappropriate attire (pants, tank tops) of our fellow countrywomen. We gazed at the village spread out below us while a gust of wind blew our skirts to our faces.
We were spending the 15 kilometres away, and inquired to our guide about the likelihood of hitching a ride at least part way. We assume he meant to be reassuring when he said, “a car will see you walking small small and will take you by force.” This turned out to be true, but not before we crossed paths with a very long and very dead (but freshly killed) black mamba.
Things were more deserty (lanky blond camels grazing on the side of the road) and less snakey in Kate’s neck of the country. I found myself continually amazed at Gao (regional capital) traffic. It was dizzying trying to keep track of the 4x4s, donkey carts, pedestrians, livestock and motorbikes which often contained entire families, kids straddled between their parents and babies tied to their mother’s backs, all sharing the road and kicking up the sand. I didn’t even notice when in Southern Africa, I became adjusted to keeping on the left side of the road, but back in Mali, where traffic sticks to the right, I almost gotten taken out a couple of times by a motorbike. Kate and I biked all of our errands, which I found particularly challenging on the sand. It was even more challenging when I rode for several minutes with the front wheel turned backwards without noticing, keeping half of my concentration on clamping my skirt over my knees and the other half wondering why I couldn’t get my fingers around the brakes.
Gao is also located on the Niger River so I also got to experience water transportation, namely, being canoed through the rice fields with a bamboo pole. I was headed toward the Rose Dune, a big ole hump of sand where all the sorcerers meet in the night. Fact: If you meet someone who claims to be a sorcerer and he has never heard of the Rose Dune, he is not a real sorcerer. I don’t think Mali is cool with sorceresses, so I didn’t get to hang around after dusk. However, I did see a bunch of scarab beetles. When I first saw their footprints in the sand, I thought they were bicycle tracks. They are pretty incredible creatures.
Although Kate’s village is located on a major road, things were considerably calmer than in then center Gao. We did laundry in buckets that turned the water black, read and giggled. If people couldn’t remember or didn’t know my Malian name, they referred to me as Kate’s “hangasine.” I don’t know of an English word that means the equivalent but Kate explained that it refers to someone in your age group who you are with all the time. Kate was also like a village cruise hostess. She cooked me porridge and bean powder, read David Sedaris to me when she decided I wasn’t laughing aloud enough while reading it to myself, and kept the house stocked with water, which watching Kate carry on her head is just the prettiest sight. We made s’mores over Kate’s stove and ate them with the South African wine I brought. Alcohol is a major taboo in much of the country, so Kate did not want to be left with the wine, nor did I want to take it with me. She suggested I give it to the cow that routinely disturbs the peace with its incessant groaning to shut it up, but I can’t imagine a drunk bovine is any quieter than a sober one. Nor is wine an acceptable contribution to a garibout’s bucket, so we splashed the leftover in the dirt and I carted the bottle back to the city to leave no trace in Kate’s village.
One of Kate’s colleagues commented that I look like I sleep easy in the village. She meant that I looked at ease, but it was also literally true. I slept like a champ in all of Mali. If there was a mat on somebody’s floor, I was dreaming by the time my head hit the ground. After New Year’s Eve dinner, I dragged myself to a bar with Kate, and slept in a chair until I was roused at midnight. I even slept through the early morning calls to prayer and the swarms of mosquitoes sucking on my face and ankles on a roof in Timbuktu.
I didn’t sleep quite as well on the bus, and the bus was where I spent a good chunk of my time, familiarizing myself with such cultural institutions as local toilets (in lieu of toilet paper, stripy plastic teapots filled with water), getting my passport checked- and even stamped- crossing from one region to the next, and bus station food (one day Kate and I managed to cover a single food group- fried). Then there was the practice of rushing the door to the bus to get the best seats despite the fact that the drivers admit one passenger at a time, and call the names from a list in the order the tickets were purchased. Baffling. When I first met up with Kate she said, “Hi, good to see you, we’re getting on a bus in 8 hours for 24 hours and you’re to go by the name of ‘Zeinaba Maiga.’” I spent many hours on the bus staring out the window, my eyes shocked by how flat the landscape is. I’ve gotten so used to being in the mountains that the flatness made the land appear somehow damaged to me. When we traveled in areas with more varied terrain, that seemed even weirder somehow; in Dogon country there are peaks and cliffs that seem sort of stuck in the sand every so often like the whole region is a massive, spread-out sculpture garden. Of course, this was not the first all day bus ride. In fact, we started 2009 by rolling along, sucking on a ring pop and singing a “full day bus ride” to the tune of “Good Day Sunshine,” which eventually and senselessly devolved into replacing the chorus of Labamba with “black, black mamba, barack obamba.”
The buses are pretty organized, but the bachet system seemed much more haphazard. Bachets are more for local transport and look sort of like a cross between a pick up truck, covered wagon and hayride. Everywhere I’ve been in Africa has some version of the bachet, the vehicle filled to bursting, that never arrives or leaves when you wish it would, and is falling apart. There are benches rather than seats, and bless whoever gets in last, and has to sort of sit on two people until gravity pushes the person down to the bench. Once the conductor said to a rather robust Malian who fruitlessly tried to walk to the back, “Excuse my language, but you must enter with the ass first.” It would be a joke to ask when a bachet is going to leave, but the unspoken rule is that you leave in T minus sheep in a bag. Yeah, they bag the livestock, and I do mean live, but at least they try to be humane about it and don’t bag them until the last possible moment. Once Kate and I were confused when our animal passenger was nowhere to be seen, yet we were pulling out of the station. Then the stream of pee coming from the ceiling told us that the sheep was very much with us, and not only inside a bag, but inside a bag strapped to the roof.
Kate is banned from going there by Peace Corps, but she threatened to put me on a bus to Timbuktu if I irritate her. Well, I decided to go there anyway, so I was on my own for my last week in Mali. I met a Scottish guy who was going the same direction as I was and thank goodness I only had to spend about eight hours with him. If Kate had met him, she would have sent him to Timbuktu. He was the sort of person who names all of the countries he’s been to without being asked, and who “doesn’t believe in tour guides.” He was appalled that I hadn’t been to the famous mosque next door to where we were staying. “But it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site!” I mean, I biked past it a dozen times with Kate on the way to a restaurant for steamed dough in date and moss sauce, or on the way back from ordering a dress from the tailor. Kate pointed it out once, and said something like, “That mosque is old and famous . . . Hey! Do you want to see this other mosque that looks like a penis?” So I missed out on a couple UNESCO sites, Timbuktu has plenty of those guys.
The ride from the major transportation crossroads to Timbuktu is pretty painful. The dust is so thick that I longed for a turban to cover my face like everyone else. I tried to use my scarf, but it didn’t keep the dust out and only made my face sweat. I coughed nonstop for the four hours we were on unpaved roads, and blew mud out of my nose for hours after. The road ended and we had to take a ferry across the river with about a hundred cows. No, make that bulls. With really long horns. They got pretty rowdy and annoyed when the herders tried to get them on the boat. They were bucking and running with their heads down low, and the herders would grab them by the tails and yank them back in line. When they were all on board, they started sliding and falling down with their knees buckled all over the wet floor which was made worse by their nervous urination. I was pretty sure I would end up gutted.
Timbuktu itself is sort of a strange place. Its history is massive and long, but you would really never know that just by looking. It just looks like a beige city, roads, sky, houses, mosques and all. I think to really enjoy Timbuktu, you have to remain in the frame of mind of, “woah, I’m in Timbuktu.” I had a local guide take me around the city and explain to me what beige things I was looking at. There are a bunch of old buildings named after European explorers, and I could never figure out why. The guide would say things like, “And this guy tricked us into thinking he was an Arab by learning the local languages, but then we figured out he was lying because he couldn’t eat couscous with his hands . . . and this guy tricked us into thinking he was a Muslim by reading from the Koran, but then we figured out he was lying when we saw the bible hidden underneath.” I just didn’t get it. I slept on the roof of a hotel wrapped in Kate’s UN refugee blanket. Either from the dust, or the clouds, I could barely see the stars, but Timbuktu is situated against sand dunes and that is quite beautiful. I didn’t stay in Timbuktu long because most of the sites you can see in a day. Plus the city was overrun with over-tie dyed, over-excitable Europeans on their way to the Festival in the Desert (I met one couple who drove from Switzerland to Timbuktu in two weeks just to make it to the festival) and they were just a little hard to take.
I headed back to Bamako to get a good look at the capital and to get on the plane. I came across several Peace Corps volunteers in the city for training, and there were rumors that Gao, Kate’s region had been evacuated just after I left. Kate had suspected that might happen, since the homes of political leaders were attacked as we were riding there on a bus New Year’s day. Excuse me, there was no attack, just a “hand grenade incident” according to Kate’s supervisor. When I heard there may have been an evacuation, I was not worried about Kate’s safety, but at how annoyed she would be to have to stop working on her various health and sanitation projects. I found out later that I need not have worried. Apparently, Kate’s village is too far to evacuate her, and they would have had to bring her through the area experiencing unrest to get her out of the region.
I got back to Lesotho early Monday morning, and spent the first hour of my 24th birthday waiting on line at the border to get my passport stamped. Home sweet inefficient home.
I’d love to skip straight to the part where Kate and I gallop off into the sunset on twin camels in a kola nut induced euphoria, and I will skip most of the unpleasant and boring details between unplugging my refrigerator in Lesotho and reuniting on a staircase in Bamako. But I just want to say that if the airport in Dakar were a Jelly Belly it would be licorice, namely a waste and a disappointment of a transit hub. Once they let you check in, it’s bearable; there are a few souvenir shops and duty free stores where one can purchase m&ms in varying quantities, and a couple of bar/cafes. However, I was held captive in the transit area for 12 hours. The room was freezing and the chairs seemed purposely slippery so that if you tried to lean back and relax the slightest bit you would slide to the floor. Toilet paper, toilet seats, and soap were not considered necessary bathroom features, and the water worked only intermittently. But the worst part for me was that there was no place to buy food until they let you check in. I had to break into the bag of marshmallows I was bringing to toast with Kate on a propane stove so I could take my malaria prophylaxis. After about six hours of transit room, a vendor rolled in selling $8 pink-meated sandwiches. My hunger equaled my disgust at whatever lay between the bread, so what would have been a really expensive baloney sandwich became a ridiculously expensive soggy roll once I flicked off the spongy animal matter.
Fast forward, and food seems a good place to start. Many people have an image of Africans eating a diet solely of airlifted USAID food and grubs. Despite what I’ve seen and moreover, consumed, to the contrary, I had not imagined Malian food could be so pleasing. I mean, it’s one of the poorest countries in the world and largely desert for goodness sake. Of course, the diet I could afford has considerably more variety and nutrition than the average Malian’s, but I was still surprised, usually in a good way. Street food was it’s own wonderful microcosm, my favorites being spicy, fried sweet potatoes and bissap, a frozen hibiscus juice. My first foray into street food was for scrambled eggs on baguette. It seemed simple enough, although the cook asked if I wanted my scrambled eggs topped with hardboiled eggs. Um. . .? Luckily Kate was there to translate, as I tend to nod when I have no idea what someone is saying. This is how three weeks later, when I was on my own, I ended up with a hard boiled egg, plantain, onion, tomato, cucumber and fish juice sandwich. It was a delicious accident, let me tell you. I was treated to a different kind of food entirely in the village where Kate does her work. A neighborhood family has adopted Kate and feeds her and by extension, me, twice a day. The women and children share one bowl, eating with their hands, and on the other side of the yard, the men do the same. When I asked Kate about Malian table (mat on the dirt) etiquette, she said, “Just eat a lot.” No matter how much I ate of the always fresh, and usually delicious meals, it was never enough for the food pushing mamas. This was especially true the day we had tô with okra sauce, an incarnation of a food I was served in Ghana and hoped to never come across again. Tô, a mashed ball of millet is quite pleasant, especially once I confirmed it was not "toe," and the taste of okra is also good, but when okra is cooked in a stew it becomes a gelatinous mound of slime, and appears, not unlike an upper respiratory infection symptom. It quivers as you swallow it and strings from your fingers and lips no matter how carefully you try to eat. I thought I beat the tô and okra sauce system by scooping an untouched chunk of millet from the middle of the ball. But it slid from my slimy fingers and bounced on a pool of okra sauce before sinking to the bottom of the bowl. As if as punishment, the cow, slurping from her own bowl of okra sauce spit some up in my flip flop before closing her green lips around my ponytail.
Fortunately Mali is the African country where I for once don’t feel completely guilty about leaving food on my plate. In Mali it is a common practice for families to give up one boy to Koranic school where he will stay, usually far from home, for about seven years. The mother gets a free ticket to heaven, and the child gets an education and his basic needs met. The system’s idea of providing the boys, known as garibouts (gairiboos), with food consists of the teachers sending their students to beg for food and change on the street, and restaurants and families often leave leftover food to them. They walk around with plastic buckets and are a quiet, constant presence. Before I understood who they were, I found their presence very hard to swallow. After an explanation of how the schools work, I came to view them as legitimate beggars- whatever that means- and eventually I stopped noticing them. When I was a camp counselor, I had an Animal Planet loving camper with Aspergers. He would frequently head butt me in the spine and when I tried to encourage him to keep his head to himself, he would shrug and say, “I’m just bein’ a caribou.” When the children thrust their buckets at me and mumbled in French or a local language I imagined they were saying, “I’m just bein’ a garibout.”
I found myself guessing what people were saying often, as my French is terrible, my understanding of African accents speaking French even worse, and my knowledge of local Malian languages nonexistent. Because Kate can carry a conversation in French and Koro Boro, I frequently found myself in the presence of conversations I could not understand a word of. When I worried Kate was getting irritated by the incessant translating, I annoyed her even more by “translating” the conversations myself:
Is your friend mute or just unfriendly?
No she is just American.
Ah, yes, I can tell by the girth. Is she married?
No she is highly available and yours for six goats, six sheep and a camel.
Deal.
The only words of Koro Boro that I learned were “thank you” and “peace only,” which I used regardless of situation.
Your feet are very dirty.
Thank you.
What is your name?
Peace only.
I also learned, but had less occasion to use the Koro Boro phrase “anasar kang buu,” which means “dead white people’s clothes.” When Americans and Europeans donate clothes to charity, they often end up being sold for pennies in markets in the developing world. Malians are quite aware of where these clothes come from, but they conclude that the owners of the clothing must be dead if they are being given away.
While in Mali, I celebrated several holidays having little or nothing to do with this predominantly Muslim country. A Christmas Eve party was held in the regional capital and Gao and the peace corps volunteers of that area and their visitors trudged in for the festivities. One magical volunteer is like the Martha Stewart of the desert. She typed up caroling songbooks, sewed African-print stockings (filled with jewelry she crafted herself), and a built a gingerbread house with sculpted sugar snowmen that no one was allowed to touch, not even the slab of cookie implausibly placed over the top of the chimney (how was smoke supposed to get out and Santa in?) At dusk she slipped into a one-shoulder dress she rigged up herself by strategically wrapping and tying a pearly green turban around herself, and reigned serenely over the merriment. Noelle quickly evolved into a bachelorette party for a volunteer bride-to-be who was dressed in Christmas decorations. We hit the town for a scavenger hunt, and whenever anyone inquired as to what all the Toubabs (white people), especially the glittery one, were up to, Kate told them that on American Christmas, the newest bride is dressed like a fool and paraded around town. One man, upon hearing this said, “May you have twenty children. Then you send me five boys form America to sell turbans in my shop.” Shortly thereafter, Kate and I threw a Chanukah celebration. I made latkes (potato pancakes) and Kate fashioned a dreidel. I tried explaining the rules to the goyim (“this means you take half” “this means you get nothing”) but there was an oversight in terms of gelt, the chocolate coins you play for. Strip dreidel was the inevitable conclusion. Spin a shin, put an item of clothing into the pot, spin a gimmel, and you may end up with your friend’s sweaty bandana. Before nudity could enter the scene, the tournament relocated to the local bar where gelt was replaced with beer. And finally, there was New Year’s to celebrate, which Kate and I did by crashing a high school dance party. I didn’t know then, nor do I know now what possessed us. It was literally inside a high school, desks pushed to the edges of linoleum, glaring florescent lights, and chalked equations unerased on the blackboard. The high schoolers didn’t take any particular notice of the overage Toubabs crashing their party, and I believe I was more surprised than they were to find myself there.
I also had the opportunity to experience some more traditional Malian events, namely the Dogon Dancing Mask Festival, a celebration of various arts forms in and around Dogon Country. We paid our 4,000 CFA ($8) entrance fee and found ourselves, unsurprisingly with an entrance fee like that, surrounded by other foreigners. We listened to music led by a Willie Nelson-esque Malian and watched a dozen women dressed in indigo cloth kick up clouds of dust in their exquisite out of sync dancing. Then the gates opened up and hundreds of Malians flooded the audience. The children especially went wild over the traditional warfare segment. Adolescent boys donned three pairs of shorts each and locked in a sort of head to shoulder embrace. Between Kate’s translations of the commentary and my own observations, the object seemed to be to wedge your thumbs into the waistbands of your opponent’s shorts, lift him up in this manner and drop him to the ground. Finally, we were treated the mask dancing in which men swing their heads around topped with masks several meters tall that they held in their teeth.
Kate and I followed this with a visit to a Dogon village. My favorite part was seeing a local courthouse. The ceilings are purposely low (maybe four feet high) to keep people’s anger in check; the threat of concussion makes someone think twice before jumping up and shouting. The US ambassador to Mali was touring the village at the same time. Kate requested an introduction by our guide and he returned to us with someone who was clearly not the ambassador but perhaps her child or intern. Following this disappointment, we climbed some rocks for an aerial view of the mosques, complaining of the inappropriate attire (pants, tank tops) of our fellow countrywomen. We gazed at the village spread out below us while a gust of wind blew our skirts to our faces.
We were spending the 15 kilometres away, and inquired to our guide about the likelihood of hitching a ride at least part way. We assume he meant to be reassuring when he said, “a car will see you walking small small and will take you by force.” This turned out to be true, but not before we crossed paths with a very long and very dead (but freshly killed) black mamba.
Things were more deserty (lanky blond camels grazing on the side of the road) and less snakey in Kate’s neck of the country. I found myself continually amazed at Gao (regional capital) traffic. It was dizzying trying to keep track of the 4x4s, donkey carts, pedestrians, livestock and motorbikes which often contained entire families, kids straddled between their parents and babies tied to their mother’s backs, all sharing the road and kicking up the sand. I didn’t even notice when in Southern Africa, I became adjusted to keeping on the left side of the road, but back in Mali, where traffic sticks to the right, I almost gotten taken out a couple of times by a motorbike. Kate and I biked all of our errands, which I found particularly challenging on the sand. It was even more challenging when I rode for several minutes with the front wheel turned backwards without noticing, keeping half of my concentration on clamping my skirt over my knees and the other half wondering why I couldn’t get my fingers around the brakes.
Gao is also located on the Niger River so I also got to experience water transportation, namely, being canoed through the rice fields with a bamboo pole. I was headed toward the Rose Dune, a big ole hump of sand where all the sorcerers meet in the night. Fact: If you meet someone who claims to be a sorcerer and he has never heard of the Rose Dune, he is not a real sorcerer. I don’t think Mali is cool with sorceresses, so I didn’t get to hang around after dusk. However, I did see a bunch of scarab beetles. When I first saw their footprints in the sand, I thought they were bicycle tracks. They are pretty incredible creatures.
Although Kate’s village is located on a major road, things were considerably calmer than in then center Gao. We did laundry in buckets that turned the water black, read and giggled. If people couldn’t remember or didn’t know my Malian name, they referred to me as Kate’s “hangasine.” I don’t know of an English word that means the equivalent but Kate explained that it refers to someone in your age group who you are with all the time. Kate was also like a village cruise hostess. She cooked me porridge and bean powder, read David Sedaris to me when she decided I wasn’t laughing aloud enough while reading it to myself, and kept the house stocked with water, which watching Kate carry on her head is just the prettiest sight. We made s’mores over Kate’s stove and ate them with the South African wine I brought. Alcohol is a major taboo in much of the country, so Kate did not want to be left with the wine, nor did I want to take it with me. She suggested I give it to the cow that routinely disturbs the peace with its incessant groaning to shut it up, but I can’t imagine a drunk bovine is any quieter than a sober one. Nor is wine an acceptable contribution to a garibout’s bucket, so we splashed the leftover in the dirt and I carted the bottle back to the city to leave no trace in Kate’s village.
One of Kate’s colleagues commented that I look like I sleep easy in the village. She meant that I looked at ease, but it was also literally true. I slept like a champ in all of Mali. If there was a mat on somebody’s floor, I was dreaming by the time my head hit the ground. After New Year’s Eve dinner, I dragged myself to a bar with Kate, and slept in a chair until I was roused at midnight. I even slept through the early morning calls to prayer and the swarms of mosquitoes sucking on my face and ankles on a roof in Timbuktu.
I didn’t sleep quite as well on the bus, and the bus was where I spent a good chunk of my time, familiarizing myself with such cultural institutions as local toilets (in lieu of toilet paper, stripy plastic teapots filled with water), getting my passport checked- and even stamped- crossing from one region to the next, and bus station food (one day Kate and I managed to cover a single food group- fried). Then there was the practice of rushing the door to the bus to get the best seats despite the fact that the drivers admit one passenger at a time, and call the names from a list in the order the tickets were purchased. Baffling. When I first met up with Kate she said, “Hi, good to see you, we’re getting on a bus in 8 hours for 24 hours and you’re to go by the name of ‘Zeinaba Maiga.’” I spent many hours on the bus staring out the window, my eyes shocked by how flat the landscape is. I’ve gotten so used to being in the mountains that the flatness made the land appear somehow damaged to me. When we traveled in areas with more varied terrain, that seemed even weirder somehow; in Dogon country there are peaks and cliffs that seem sort of stuck in the sand every so often like the whole region is a massive, spread-out sculpture garden. Of course, this was not the first all day bus ride. In fact, we started 2009 by rolling along, sucking on a ring pop and singing a “full day bus ride” to the tune of “Good Day Sunshine,” which eventually and senselessly devolved into replacing the chorus of Labamba with “black, black mamba, barack obamba.”
The buses are pretty organized, but the bachet system seemed much more haphazard. Bachets are more for local transport and look sort of like a cross between a pick up truck, covered wagon and hayride. Everywhere I’ve been in Africa has some version of the bachet, the vehicle filled to bursting, that never arrives or leaves when you wish it would, and is falling apart. There are benches rather than seats, and bless whoever gets in last, and has to sort of sit on two people until gravity pushes the person down to the bench. Once the conductor said to a rather robust Malian who fruitlessly tried to walk to the back, “Excuse my language, but you must enter with the ass first.” It would be a joke to ask when a bachet is going to leave, but the unspoken rule is that you leave in T minus sheep in a bag. Yeah, they bag the livestock, and I do mean live, but at least they try to be humane about it and don’t bag them until the last possible moment. Once Kate and I were confused when our animal passenger was nowhere to be seen, yet we were pulling out of the station. Then the stream of pee coming from the ceiling told us that the sheep was very much with us, and not only inside a bag, but inside a bag strapped to the roof.
Kate is banned from going there by Peace Corps, but she threatened to put me on a bus to Timbuktu if I irritate her. Well, I decided to go there anyway, so I was on my own for my last week in Mali. I met a Scottish guy who was going the same direction as I was and thank goodness I only had to spend about eight hours with him. If Kate had met him, she would have sent him to Timbuktu. He was the sort of person who names all of the countries he’s been to without being asked, and who “doesn’t believe in tour guides.” He was appalled that I hadn’t been to the famous mosque next door to where we were staying. “But it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site!” I mean, I biked past it a dozen times with Kate on the way to a restaurant for steamed dough in date and moss sauce, or on the way back from ordering a dress from the tailor. Kate pointed it out once, and said something like, “That mosque is old and famous . . . Hey! Do you want to see this other mosque that looks like a penis?” So I missed out on a couple UNESCO sites, Timbuktu has plenty of those guys.
The ride from the major transportation crossroads to Timbuktu is pretty painful. The dust is so thick that I longed for a turban to cover my face like everyone else. I tried to use my scarf, but it didn’t keep the dust out and only made my face sweat. I coughed nonstop for the four hours we were on unpaved roads, and blew mud out of my nose for hours after. The road ended and we had to take a ferry across the river with about a hundred cows. No, make that bulls. With really long horns. They got pretty rowdy and annoyed when the herders tried to get them on the boat. They were bucking and running with their heads down low, and the herders would grab them by the tails and yank them back in line. When they were all on board, they started sliding and falling down with their knees buckled all over the wet floor which was made worse by their nervous urination. I was pretty sure I would end up gutted.
Timbuktu itself is sort of a strange place. Its history is massive and long, but you would really never know that just by looking. It just looks like a beige city, roads, sky, houses, mosques and all. I think to really enjoy Timbuktu, you have to remain in the frame of mind of, “woah, I’m in Timbuktu.” I had a local guide take me around the city and explain to me what beige things I was looking at. There are a bunch of old buildings named after European explorers, and I could never figure out why. The guide would say things like, “And this guy tricked us into thinking he was an Arab by learning the local languages, but then we figured out he was lying because he couldn’t eat couscous with his hands . . . and this guy tricked us into thinking he was a Muslim by reading from the Koran, but then we figured out he was lying when we saw the bible hidden underneath.” I just didn’t get it. I slept on the roof of a hotel wrapped in Kate’s UN refugee blanket. Either from the dust, or the clouds, I could barely see the stars, but Timbuktu is situated against sand dunes and that is quite beautiful. I didn’t stay in Timbuktu long because most of the sites you can see in a day. Plus the city was overrun with over-tie dyed, over-excitable Europeans on their way to the Festival in the Desert (I met one couple who drove from Switzerland to Timbuktu in two weeks just to make it to the festival) and they were just a little hard to take.
I headed back to Bamako to get a good look at the capital and to get on the plane. I came across several Peace Corps volunteers in the city for training, and there were rumors that Gao, Kate’s region had been evacuated just after I left. Kate had suspected that might happen, since the homes of political leaders were attacked as we were riding there on a bus New Year’s day. Excuse me, there was no attack, just a “hand grenade incident” according to Kate’s supervisor. When I heard there may have been an evacuation, I was not worried about Kate’s safety, but at how annoyed she would be to have to stop working on her various health and sanitation projects. I found out later that I need not have worried. Apparently, Kate’s village is too far to evacuate her, and they would have had to bring her through the area experiencing unrest to get her out of the region.
I got back to Lesotho early Monday morning, and spent the first hour of my 24th birthday waiting on line at the border to get my passport stamped. Home sweet inefficient home.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Baby You Can Drive My Car
Since August, my preschool class has had a collective and fervent obsession with cars. As if my chubby cheeked, sticky fingered, thigh high learners have carburetors for hearts and petrol for blood, long before I attempted to harness this interest to a pedagogical purpose, books became steering wheels in the Cozy Corner, wooden blocks drove on the tables during Free Play and the steady throb of engines rattled in my students’ throat every time I tried to speak (often to say, “books are for reading,” “blocks are for building,” and “now is not the time to make that noise.”) I thought every now and then about developing a car unit of study, but had visions of being run over by zealous vehicle-loving three year olds and losing any semblance of order I had developed over the past three months. I steered them toward the wonder of colors and the magic of spiders and insects. I let them get loud and wet and outside at every opportunity, but there was no way around it. My class decided what they wanted to learn about, and that was cars.
I started the unit with a tour of the cars in the parking lot, talking about the colors and sizes of different cars during which I fruitlessly tried to convince my students that silver is not white (so much for learning about colors in September). The entire thing turned into sit on the damn walkway in case a car pulls in or out because I am not mopping up your blood session, and threats of not letting them make a crayon license plate rubbings if they so much looked in the direction of a moving vehicle. Now may be a good time to mention that I have a particular dislike for cars. Even if I hadn’t been knocked off my bike here and there in New York City, and even if cars didn’t destroy the planet, the drivers here are particularly nuts. I was once in a taxi (“taxis” are minibuses and “four plus ones” are taxis) in which the driver leaned out the window to punch a car that wasn’t making a turn into oncoming traffic. I’d like to say that I loosened up somewhat about my class’s proximity and interest in moving vehicles as the weeks of this project went on, but I don’t think I’m self-aware enough to make that call.
As if I didn’t have my own neuroses to deal with, I had parents of girls question why I was devoting some much time in the school day and over the term to a “boy’s” subject. Meanwhile, I was wrestling the pink Hot Wheels corvette out of their daughter’s snatching, polished fingers. “But pink car is for giiiiiirls!” they patiently explained to me as if I am very, very stupid, which at this point, I was starting to think I was.
I regrouped. I let the children dip the wheels of toy cars in paint and make technicolor tire tracks on the biggest paper I could find. I scrounged up cardboard boxes that we painted, and affixed with construction paper headlights, taillights and windshield wipers (pardon me, windscreen wipers, oy, British English), tin foil windows and paper plate tires and steering wheels. I added elaborately conceived, but not structurally sound toilet paper tube steering columns (they kept stabbing the children and/or falling off). The children scrawled out letters and numbers with their whole-fisted crayon grips to make license plates, and I tied string corner to corner so the children could drive Flintstones style. I masking taped a road to the floor the children could drive on and I had to remind myself to tell them to stay on the right side of the road, and more importantly, to look right, then left, then right again when crossing. Crashing proved more fun than I had anticipated and I resorted to arresting the reckless drivers, and sentencing them to merciless tickling. I soon found when walking from the door to my computer, or from the bookshelf to the bathroom, I became very uneasy if I was not walking inside the taped boundaries, and noticed that when other adults passed through our room, they compulsively veered toward the right side of the masking tape road.
I stripped the library of every car book, and reveled in my brief status as a Bostonian as I read Make Way For Ducklings to a class of enraptured preschoolers practically wetting their pants with the suspense of whether Mack, Pack, Quack and co. would escape the likely outcome of road kill. I gathered the lyrics and music to relevant songs ranging from the practical “I Want to Cross the Road,” to the annoyingly contrived, “Twinkle, Twinkle Traffic Lights” to our first Beatles song of the year, “Drive My Car.” But the class wide favorite was definitely Woody Guthrie’s “Take Me Riding in the Car,” which includes verses made entirely of noises and tongue twisting lyrics that made my octolingual, Zambian, co-teacher’s head spin. When one of the custodians heard it, she made me play it on repeat for 30 minutes, and said, “this is so melodious and entertaining!”
Maseru isn’t a very fieldtrip friendly city, and the Lesotho school systems are very traditional (sit, stare at the blackboard, don’t move), so when I went to the local Toyota dealership (hereafter to be known as “The Car Store”) to inquire about a field trip, I got a long blank stare from the manager. This was followed by the request that I repeat myself in the style of a formal proposal that was taken as dictation on several yellow post-it notes. I got a phone call a week later in the form of an official invitation to The Car Store, followed by several apprehensive questions about what they were supposed to do with a dozen three and four year olds.
The first part of the fieldtrip consisted of practicing crossing the road in front of the school and it took even longer to load into the school bus, which riding in was one of the most exciting parts of the field trip. When we arrived at the car store, the managers gasped, “they are even smaller then we thought!” But they were fieldtrip host superstars. They let the kids bounce around the showroom, leave their greasy handprints on the car doors and clamber on the seats with their muddy shoes. They let the kids climb into the trunk, open the door for the gas, raise and lower the windows, turn the steering wheel while the car was on and roll down the wheelchair ramp like it was their own personal playground (all of which was followed by frequent teacher interjections of, “do NOT try this at home.”) We were then led into the garage where the mechanics raised the cars up and down to the tireless delight of my class, and then explained that cars can break, as their audience nodded dubiously. We left the garage for the car washing area and threatened to bathe our class. Then we went into storage and the managers blew their minds by showing them disembodied car parts (wait, rearview mirrors don’t grow from the windshield?) Finally my over-stimulated children were bestowed with Toyota-emblazoned bears and replied with a rendition of “Take Me Riding in the Car,” that accurately reflected their level of exhaustion.
After a few days of discussing what we learned at the car store, we wrote the following treatise for our fabulous Toyota guides: “We liked two cars. A little red car. We were driving. ‘Mé Nthatisi showed the steering wheel. We went in the bonnet. The car was coming up. It was a 4x4. A man was fixing it. Washing the car. It was a man. The water is coming, you need a wiper to go up and down. Food for the car goes in a hole in the side you to open. You can’t eat it. Thank you for cars and for teddy bears. We liked it.”
Then I decided to end the unit with a schoolbus washing party. This idea was received well due to the popularity of swimsuits, water and the school bus driver. The school bus driver is Ntate Fred. Ntate (“nn-dotty”) means father but is also used as the title, like Mister. Although he is the current class celebrity, most of the children cannot get his name right, and he becomes either “Dr. Fred” or “Ntate Friend.” The kids stripped and struggled to get into their swimsuits, and squirmed while we slathered them with sunscreen. They burst out of the classroom and we blasted Putamayo World Playground while they soaped up the car and each other. When everyone and everything was more than squeaky clean, I introduced the children to the concept of water balloons. The children were afraid to pick them up, so the water balloon toss turned into the teachers pelting the children. After that we filled up little pools of water for swimming. Justin claimed his shorts were cold, so he took them off, peed in a pool and bolted. And this is how our car unit ended: with a little yellow haired, pink cheeked, three year old streaking across campus wearing nothing but a celestial motif, batik sunhat.
I started the unit with a tour of the cars in the parking lot, talking about the colors and sizes of different cars during which I fruitlessly tried to convince my students that silver is not white (so much for learning about colors in September). The entire thing turned into sit on the damn walkway in case a car pulls in or out because I am not mopping up your blood session, and threats of not letting them make a crayon license plate rubbings if they so much looked in the direction of a moving vehicle. Now may be a good time to mention that I have a particular dislike for cars. Even if I hadn’t been knocked off my bike here and there in New York City, and even if cars didn’t destroy the planet, the drivers here are particularly nuts. I was once in a taxi (“taxis” are minibuses and “four plus ones” are taxis) in which the driver leaned out the window to punch a car that wasn’t making a turn into oncoming traffic. I’d like to say that I loosened up somewhat about my class’s proximity and interest in moving vehicles as the weeks of this project went on, but I don’t think I’m self-aware enough to make that call.
As if I didn’t have my own neuroses to deal with, I had parents of girls question why I was devoting some much time in the school day and over the term to a “boy’s” subject. Meanwhile, I was wrestling the pink Hot Wheels corvette out of their daughter’s snatching, polished fingers. “But pink car is for giiiiiirls!” they patiently explained to me as if I am very, very stupid, which at this point, I was starting to think I was.
I regrouped. I let the children dip the wheels of toy cars in paint and make technicolor tire tracks on the biggest paper I could find. I scrounged up cardboard boxes that we painted, and affixed with construction paper headlights, taillights and windshield wipers (pardon me, windscreen wipers, oy, British English), tin foil windows and paper plate tires and steering wheels. I added elaborately conceived, but not structurally sound toilet paper tube steering columns (they kept stabbing the children and/or falling off). The children scrawled out letters and numbers with their whole-fisted crayon grips to make license plates, and I tied string corner to corner so the children could drive Flintstones style. I masking taped a road to the floor the children could drive on and I had to remind myself to tell them to stay on the right side of the road, and more importantly, to look right, then left, then right again when crossing. Crashing proved more fun than I had anticipated and I resorted to arresting the reckless drivers, and sentencing them to merciless tickling. I soon found when walking from the door to my computer, or from the bookshelf to the bathroom, I became very uneasy if I was not walking inside the taped boundaries, and noticed that when other adults passed through our room, they compulsively veered toward the right side of the masking tape road.
I stripped the library of every car book, and reveled in my brief status as a Bostonian as I read Make Way For Ducklings to a class of enraptured preschoolers practically wetting their pants with the suspense of whether Mack, Pack, Quack and co. would escape the likely outcome of road kill. I gathered the lyrics and music to relevant songs ranging from the practical “I Want to Cross the Road,” to the annoyingly contrived, “Twinkle, Twinkle Traffic Lights” to our first Beatles song of the year, “Drive My Car.” But the class wide favorite was definitely Woody Guthrie’s “Take Me Riding in the Car,” which includes verses made entirely of noises and tongue twisting lyrics that made my octolingual, Zambian, co-teacher’s head spin. When one of the custodians heard it, she made me play it on repeat for 30 minutes, and said, “this is so melodious and entertaining!”
Maseru isn’t a very fieldtrip friendly city, and the Lesotho school systems are very traditional (sit, stare at the blackboard, don’t move), so when I went to the local Toyota dealership (hereafter to be known as “The Car Store”) to inquire about a field trip, I got a long blank stare from the manager. This was followed by the request that I repeat myself in the style of a formal proposal that was taken as dictation on several yellow post-it notes. I got a phone call a week later in the form of an official invitation to The Car Store, followed by several apprehensive questions about what they were supposed to do with a dozen three and four year olds.
The first part of the fieldtrip consisted of practicing crossing the road in front of the school and it took even longer to load into the school bus, which riding in was one of the most exciting parts of the field trip. When we arrived at the car store, the managers gasped, “they are even smaller then we thought!” But they were fieldtrip host superstars. They let the kids bounce around the showroom, leave their greasy handprints on the car doors and clamber on the seats with their muddy shoes. They let the kids climb into the trunk, open the door for the gas, raise and lower the windows, turn the steering wheel while the car was on and roll down the wheelchair ramp like it was their own personal playground (all of which was followed by frequent teacher interjections of, “do NOT try this at home.”) We were then led into the garage where the mechanics raised the cars up and down to the tireless delight of my class, and then explained that cars can break, as their audience nodded dubiously. We left the garage for the car washing area and threatened to bathe our class. Then we went into storage and the managers blew their minds by showing them disembodied car parts (wait, rearview mirrors don’t grow from the windshield?) Finally my over-stimulated children were bestowed with Toyota-emblazoned bears and replied with a rendition of “Take Me Riding in the Car,” that accurately reflected their level of exhaustion.
After a few days of discussing what we learned at the car store, we wrote the following treatise for our fabulous Toyota guides: “We liked two cars. A little red car. We were driving. ‘Mé Nthatisi showed the steering wheel. We went in the bonnet. The car was coming up. It was a 4x4. A man was fixing it. Washing the car. It was a man. The water is coming, you need a wiper to go up and down. Food for the car goes in a hole in the side you to open. You can’t eat it. Thank you for cars and for teddy bears. We liked it.”
Then I decided to end the unit with a schoolbus washing party. This idea was received well due to the popularity of swimsuits, water and the school bus driver. The school bus driver is Ntate Fred. Ntate (“nn-dotty”) means father but is also used as the title, like Mister. Although he is the current class celebrity, most of the children cannot get his name right, and he becomes either “Dr. Fred” or “Ntate Friend.” The kids stripped and struggled to get into their swimsuits, and squirmed while we slathered them with sunscreen. They burst out of the classroom and we blasted Putamayo World Playground while they soaped up the car and each other. When everyone and everything was more than squeaky clean, I introduced the children to the concept of water balloons. The children were afraid to pick them up, so the water balloon toss turned into the teachers pelting the children. After that we filled up little pools of water for swimming. Justin claimed his shorts were cold, so he took them off, peed in a pool and bolted. And this is how our car unit ended: with a little yellow haired, pink cheeked, three year old streaking across campus wearing nothing but a celestial motif, batik sunhat.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
The First Forty-Two
The First Forty-Two
Last week I ran the Soweto Marathon, a 42 kilometer (26.2 mile race). Soweto is a township of Johannesburg, South Africa, and this was my first time to experience the city outside of the airport. The race is advertised as an interesting and surprisingly good way to get a flavor of Soweto, which, as once the center of apartheid resistance and home to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, has a significant place in South African history.
Registering was easy enough and I even arranged to have the day off from work post race. But getting myself there was trickier. As much as I like to believe I am an incredibly lucky person and can outrun the bad guys (and gals), even I know that to be in taxi rank at night in Johannesburg is an idiotic risk (although I did try to manipulate a few people into admitting it can’t be that bad). I couldn’t find any other marathoners in Maseru, but as my search for a lift circulated through the expatriate grapevine, about a dozen people conspired to keep me out of the exhaust fume, mugging zone jungle of public transportation. In the end it was my supervisor’s wife’s colleague’s friend who gave me a ride. People were appalled that I considered arriving in Jo’burg in the evening alone on public transportation, but no one thought twice at the idea of me driving across international borders with a man I’d never met before.
We planned to leave on the afternoon of Halloween, but being the last Friday of the month (pay day), I knew that the lines at the border would be hours long, so I went there at 5 am when the border post is fairly deserted. I was following the popular but shady advice of stamping out of Lesotho and into South Africa, and then coming back into Lesotho without getting a stamp. Thus you come back to the border any time that day and can skip the lines because you already have a stamp with the correct date. Even though people do it all the time, I felt like a fugitive and was utterly paranoid that all of the immigration police were intentionally surrounding me. (They weren’t. They were more or less sleeping while standing up). In any case, no one paid any attention at all to me as I “snuck” out of one country and into another, but just in case, I tried to look as lost and stupid as possible (“Wait, which way is South Africa? Oh, right, there’s that gargantuan ‘Welcome to South Africa’ sign. But how the heck am I supposed to get there from here?’ Oh, the sidewalk. Ok, well thanks for your help”).
After a day of over-stimulating Halloween festivities at the school, I was off. We drove into the city at twilight, and it was the closest thing I’ve seen to America since I watched New York City peel away from the airplane when I took off in June. The highways were like those you’d see anywhere back home, and lights glowed in the windows of high rises. Melville, the neighborhood of Jo’burg we arrived in, reminded me a bit of Williamsburg, Brooklyn- bars and bookshops and bakeries and nice restaurants and a tattoo parlor. About a dozen of us from Maseru-dwelling foreigners met up for dinner, where I was really excited to try ostrich, but was really disappointed with what ostrich actually is- a slab of red meat (although surely not to those with a more sophisticated carnivorous palate). A woman sitting across from me kept saying over and over again that she couldn’t believe we haven’t met. She seemed really distressed by this fact, like I was missing very important meetings of the Pale People in Lesotho Club. The following night- the night before the race- I met up with a friend and he and his family loaded me up with my favorite carbs- pasta, couscous and chocolate cake.
On race day, my biggest initial concern was how to adjust my brain to pace myself in terms of kilometers. Even in cross country races or road races in which the total distance is measured in kilometers (a 5K race, for example), the splits are still marked by mile. Until now, I never thought about how weird it was to talk about 6 minute miles in a five-kilometer race. ANYway, this shouldn’t have been my concern because although there were kilometer markers, there were no clocks to go with them and I didn’t even have a watch. Plus, at about the time I realized that I would have no way of timing myself (kilometer 3 or so), something inside my body I have yet to identify was threatening to turn off and I decided I would be lucky just to finish. I didn’t get any blisters, the chafing was not as comprehensive as it could have been, I had no pain and even my knee that gets funky from time to time behaved itself, but I was dragging myself the whole way. The woozier I felt, the slower I went, so the later it got and the hotter it got, which made me even more woozy.
But the internal revolts I felt in my body are hardly as interesting as what I saw (blurred vision and all) and heard around me. Lining up for the race, I strategically positioned myself alongside a circle of runners singing and dancing. The race officials gave all of the instructions in Zulu and Afrikaans, and if they were also speaking English, between the crackle of the sound equipment and South African accents, I didn’t recognize it as my language. So even as I felt myself inching forward with the crowd I didn’t know the race had started. Suddenly I was passing over the starting line through a stream of confetti, boxed behind a man whose shirt said, “I run for Jesus.”
It was 6 am and we were in a residential neighborhood of tiny one-story homes. People were standing outside in their pajamas looking doubtfully at us. One large woman in too-big, metallic gold negligee was holding out a tub of Vaseline for the runners. We ran by a hair salon and a man on the roof blew his horn for us. Passing the gas station all of attendants looked up from their pumps or from underneath cars and cheered. On street corners here and there, people stood holding messages scribbled on cardboard signs, and shouted in languages I didn’t recognize. At nearly every kilometer, people of all ages handed out plastic bags of water. When the crates of water emptied, mothers put their babies inside to sleep and pulled them into the shade. There were also the same sachets filled with sticky, colored sugar water and a dozen meters from each “juice” table were a slew of neighborhood kids begging the runners for their drinks. One man grabbed about ten and carried them for several minutes before depositing them into the hands of shirtless, sweaty children who shrieked with delight.
As the day wore on, the heat from the sun was staggering and relentless. The lack of trees along the route, and the black asphalt made it all the more suffocating. Sympathetic spectators stood on their lawns spraying hoses at the runners. Others filled buckets with water, dipping a single mug into it again and again, offering it to any runner passing by. Still others invited the passing crowd into their homes to use the toilets or fill their bottles from the tap. I was a bit wary of the share-the-mug-with-a-thousand-other-people method, and I had a feeling that if I went inside someone’s home, I would never want to leave. So I drank sachet after sachet of water that tasted more like the plastic bag than any other experience I’ve had with H2O.
As the morning wore on, I saw many more people going about their daily business who just happened to be in the path of the race. Young people hawked produce on the side of the road, old ladies walked out of churches singing and I even went by a backyard wedding. For several kilometers I ran alongside a man with yellow sunglasses and long dreadlocks, who periodically told me to “take it easy baby.” At one point we ran through the neighborhood in which he lives, and he pointed out his neighbors, his doctor, his minister among the spectators to me. I wouldn’t have guessed he knew any of the spectators if he hadn’t said anything, not because they weren’t cheering for him, but because they were cheering for everyone. All of the spectators were just screaming for the runners as if they knew them personally. Part of that is just marathon culture, but there was a much more intense level of commitment to the runners on the part of the spectators than I’ve seen in New York or Philly or Boston. And I think I can say the same for the level of commitment from one runner to another. When I finished the race, I stood swaying in the grass, trying to unsuccessfully open a bottle of water. An equally sweaty and exhausted, if more lucid, South African mom in shining armor scooped me up into her car and drove for ages to her home for lunch and then way back across the city to my hotel. So ended my first 42 kilometers in South Africa.
Last week I ran the Soweto Marathon, a 42 kilometer (26.2 mile race). Soweto is a township of Johannesburg, South Africa, and this was my first time to experience the city outside of the airport. The race is advertised as an interesting and surprisingly good way to get a flavor of Soweto, which, as once the center of apartheid resistance and home to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, has a significant place in South African history.
Registering was easy enough and I even arranged to have the day off from work post race. But getting myself there was trickier. As much as I like to believe I am an incredibly lucky person and can outrun the bad guys (and gals), even I know that to be in taxi rank at night in Johannesburg is an idiotic risk (although I did try to manipulate a few people into admitting it can’t be that bad). I couldn’t find any other marathoners in Maseru, but as my search for a lift circulated through the expatriate grapevine, about a dozen people conspired to keep me out of the exhaust fume, mugging zone jungle of public transportation. In the end it was my supervisor’s wife’s colleague’s friend who gave me a ride. People were appalled that I considered arriving in Jo’burg in the evening alone on public transportation, but no one thought twice at the idea of me driving across international borders with a man I’d never met before.
We planned to leave on the afternoon of Halloween, but being the last Friday of the month (pay day), I knew that the lines at the border would be hours long, so I went there at 5 am when the border post is fairly deserted. I was following the popular but shady advice of stamping out of Lesotho and into South Africa, and then coming back into Lesotho without getting a stamp. Thus you come back to the border any time that day and can skip the lines because you already have a stamp with the correct date. Even though people do it all the time, I felt like a fugitive and was utterly paranoid that all of the immigration police were intentionally surrounding me. (They weren’t. They were more or less sleeping while standing up). In any case, no one paid any attention at all to me as I “snuck” out of one country and into another, but just in case, I tried to look as lost and stupid as possible (“Wait, which way is South Africa? Oh, right, there’s that gargantuan ‘Welcome to South Africa’ sign. But how the heck am I supposed to get there from here?’ Oh, the sidewalk. Ok, well thanks for your help”).
After a day of over-stimulating Halloween festivities at the school, I was off. We drove into the city at twilight, and it was the closest thing I’ve seen to America since I watched New York City peel away from the airplane when I took off in June. The highways were like those you’d see anywhere back home, and lights glowed in the windows of high rises. Melville, the neighborhood of Jo’burg we arrived in, reminded me a bit of Williamsburg, Brooklyn- bars and bookshops and bakeries and nice restaurants and a tattoo parlor. About a dozen of us from Maseru-dwelling foreigners met up for dinner, where I was really excited to try ostrich, but was really disappointed with what ostrich actually is- a slab of red meat (although surely not to those with a more sophisticated carnivorous palate). A woman sitting across from me kept saying over and over again that she couldn’t believe we haven’t met. She seemed really distressed by this fact, like I was missing very important meetings of the Pale People in Lesotho Club. The following night- the night before the race- I met up with a friend and he and his family loaded me up with my favorite carbs- pasta, couscous and chocolate cake.
On race day, my biggest initial concern was how to adjust my brain to pace myself in terms of kilometers. Even in cross country races or road races in which the total distance is measured in kilometers (a 5K race, for example), the splits are still marked by mile. Until now, I never thought about how weird it was to talk about 6 minute miles in a five-kilometer race. ANYway, this shouldn’t have been my concern because although there were kilometer markers, there were no clocks to go with them and I didn’t even have a watch. Plus, at about the time I realized that I would have no way of timing myself (kilometer 3 or so), something inside my body I have yet to identify was threatening to turn off and I decided I would be lucky just to finish. I didn’t get any blisters, the chafing was not as comprehensive as it could have been, I had no pain and even my knee that gets funky from time to time behaved itself, but I was dragging myself the whole way. The woozier I felt, the slower I went, so the later it got and the hotter it got, which made me even more woozy.
But the internal revolts I felt in my body are hardly as interesting as what I saw (blurred vision and all) and heard around me. Lining up for the race, I strategically positioned myself alongside a circle of runners singing and dancing. The race officials gave all of the instructions in Zulu and Afrikaans, and if they were also speaking English, between the crackle of the sound equipment and South African accents, I didn’t recognize it as my language. So even as I felt myself inching forward with the crowd I didn’t know the race had started. Suddenly I was passing over the starting line through a stream of confetti, boxed behind a man whose shirt said, “I run for Jesus.”
It was 6 am and we were in a residential neighborhood of tiny one-story homes. People were standing outside in their pajamas looking doubtfully at us. One large woman in too-big, metallic gold negligee was holding out a tub of Vaseline for the runners. We ran by a hair salon and a man on the roof blew his horn for us. Passing the gas station all of attendants looked up from their pumps or from underneath cars and cheered. On street corners here and there, people stood holding messages scribbled on cardboard signs, and shouted in languages I didn’t recognize. At nearly every kilometer, people of all ages handed out plastic bags of water. When the crates of water emptied, mothers put their babies inside to sleep and pulled them into the shade. There were also the same sachets filled with sticky, colored sugar water and a dozen meters from each “juice” table were a slew of neighborhood kids begging the runners for their drinks. One man grabbed about ten and carried them for several minutes before depositing them into the hands of shirtless, sweaty children who shrieked with delight.
As the day wore on, the heat from the sun was staggering and relentless. The lack of trees along the route, and the black asphalt made it all the more suffocating. Sympathetic spectators stood on their lawns spraying hoses at the runners. Others filled buckets with water, dipping a single mug into it again and again, offering it to any runner passing by. Still others invited the passing crowd into their homes to use the toilets or fill their bottles from the tap. I was a bit wary of the share-the-mug-with-a-thousand-other-people method, and I had a feeling that if I went inside someone’s home, I would never want to leave. So I drank sachet after sachet of water that tasted more like the plastic bag than any other experience I’ve had with H2O.
As the morning wore on, I saw many more people going about their daily business who just happened to be in the path of the race. Young people hawked produce on the side of the road, old ladies walked out of churches singing and I even went by a backyard wedding. For several kilometers I ran alongside a man with yellow sunglasses and long dreadlocks, who periodically told me to “take it easy baby.” At one point we ran through the neighborhood in which he lives, and he pointed out his neighbors, his doctor, his minister among the spectators to me. I wouldn’t have guessed he knew any of the spectators if he hadn’t said anything, not because they weren’t cheering for him, but because they were cheering for everyone. All of the spectators were just screaming for the runners as if they knew them personally. Part of that is just marathon culture, but there was a much more intense level of commitment to the runners on the part of the spectators than I’ve seen in New York or Philly or Boston. And I think I can say the same for the level of commitment from one runner to another. When I finished the race, I stood swaying in the grass, trying to unsuccessfully open a bottle of water. An equally sweaty and exhausted, if more lucid, South African mom in shining armor scooped me up into her car and drove for ages to her home for lunch and then way back across the city to my hotel. So ended my first 42 kilometers in South Africa.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
20 Questions
I have recently become the subject of interview for a charming class of fourth graders. They are studying the fifty states under the direction of their incredible Masotho teacher, who is teaching in an American school, and therefore American geography, for the first time. The three other American teachers and the American director have also been pulled into similar service of answering questions about “their” state. Originally, I was to be interviewed by three different students on three separate occasions and thought, “I’ll talk about a different state- NJ, NY and MA- for each interview to widen the scope of their 50 states knowledge.” I went with NJ first, because I was being interviewed by a fourth grader and I attended fourth grade in NJ. It seemed like a good idea.
My first interviewer happened to my brother’s Fijian born twin- same coloring, facial features (especially the ears), visible ribs, sense of humor- they even run the same and it’s a little freaky. I was all ready to talk about the Jersey shore and toll booths and all the undeserved crap NJ takes from the bigger, more boring states. But this kid wanted to know how many people live there (No idea. Pass). He asked what the economy is like (I don’t even know what that means. Pass.) He wanted to know what people eat there (I said, “tomatoes. Well, I eat them anyway.”) When he asked if New Jersey is safe, I told him that the smaller towns are quiet and safe, but that urban areas are more dangerous because of crime. I looked over his shoulder and saw that he wrote “safe and dangerous.” When he asked about natural resources, I told him about lumber from the Pine Barrens (I don’t even know if that’s an actual resource. I mean, the Pine Barrens are full of trees, and people cut down trees, but for all I know it could be a protected area) and all of the things you can grow in Garden State soil. Under natural resources he wrote, “Wood. Dirt.”
Despite the success of that first interview, the teacher reworked the process and decided to have me come in and be interviewed by the whole class. This time, I knew the questions so I was better prepared. I was able to jot down the answers I knew and look up ones that I didn’t, so I wouldn’t appear completely oblivious and ignorant. When I got through the history, economy, politics questions, I was able to move on to the good stuff, like diners and autumn leaves and Spanish and trains to New York City. I then got into a passionate exchange with two students who claimed they ate bagels in India and China (please don’t accuse me of ethnocentrism, but impossible!). I tried to explain to these poor bagel-deprived children that they were merely eating bread with a hole in the middle. Another kid tried to compare a bagel to a doughnut, and I almost lost it. When I went through all of the questions on the list, they asked me more, like how New Jersey is one of the wealthiest states in America, while Newark one of the poorest cities in the country (anyone?) and how to spell “Representative”- slightly easier, easier than “Appalachian,” anyway. After my interview, one of the Virginian teachers asked me if I talked about the mafia. In turn, I asked him if he talked about rednecks, and he said, “yes.”
While I’m still in interview mode, I’ll move along to some of the questions some of you have been asking me:
What country are you in again?
This question is from my brother. Really. Lesotho. And please, it’s pronounced, Le-soo-too.
Why don’t I get notified when you update your blog?
If you mean, why don’t I email you when I update the blog, it’s because that would defeat the purpose. Namely, unwanted emails can become annoying and I tend to ramble. The blog is available for perusal whenever you feel like it and easier to ignore. But if you mean, why doesn’t blogspot email you when I update the blog, I have no idea how that stuff works.
Why is Lesotho inside South Africa?
I’m still trying to work that one out myself. From what I gather, the story may go something like this:
Early-mid 19th century Basotho people (in what is now Lesotho and the Free State of South Africa) fought Boer (people of Dutch Calvanist descent) and British invasion.
Basotho perceived the Boers as a bigger threat (I think?) and asked England for protection.
Britain annexed the land and called it Basotholand.
When the Union of South Africa was formed, Basotholand was a British protectorate and so, not included.
For 45 years, Basotholand remained a British protectorate and then became independent. And became Lesotho.
My neighbor thinks Lesotho shouldn’t exist and says the only it hasn’t become incorporated into South Africa is because “South Africa doesn’t want another two million problems.” He loves Lesotho.
How is veganism in Africa?
Ha! In Africa, or rather from my experiences in Ghana, Malawi, Lesotho and places in between, you eat what’s around, you eat what people serve you, you eat what makes sense. You also eat what is fresh and local and often that includes fish, meat, eggs, (but my disgust with milk long predates my veganism and I don’t think that will ever change). I ate all sorts of Indian Ocean treats in Mozambique, and I’m curious to try South African game- kudu or ostrich or something like that. Basotho carnivore staples are beef and chicken, and to a lesser extent, goat and lamb and those options are less appealing to me.
What is the town you live in like?
It’s hard for me to judge the scope of Maseru, but for the capital city, it seems small. The downtown is small anyway, but the outskirts seem to sprawl and I can’t get a definitive answer about where Maseru ends and begins. There are a few major streets, and many, many smaller ones, which often don’t have names, such as mine. My neighborhood, which contains a little cluster of Americans, is very small, although I don’t know my neighbors (outside of my compound). There are banks and Kentucky Fried Chicken and a few South African chains here and there. There is one café where you can get filter coffee, and a pizza place that has good food although not actually pizza (the other pizza places are foul- one place makes a pizza they call Rustica, which among other things contains bananas, hotdogs and thousand island dressing). I got back recently from a conference in Swaziland, and the other American teachers and I couldn’t stop making comparisons. One described Mbabane, the capital of Swaziland as Maseru on steroids. Another heard Swaziland described “like Lesotho that learned.” I thought it was more like “Lesotho with stuff.” There are just a lot of things you can’t get here like construction paper and fat markers and tahini and vanilla and big picture frames.
What is your school like?
The school is small and close knit. We follow an American style curriculum and go from preschool to grade 8. Just over half of the students are Basotho and others come from America, Holland, Germany, France, Australia, Mali, Kenya, Palestine, Phillipines and more countries than I can remember. Staff hails from here, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Sweden, America, Australia and DRC. The school used to be USAID housing so it’s made up of small buildings and looks like summer camp.
What do your days look like in Lesotho?
I teach preschool in the mornings and early afternoon and then I teach art to first, third and fourth graders. And I assistant teach P.E. (Ha!) I’ve been trying to get out of that since day one, but perhaps someone will listen when we begin swimming lessons. Anyway, when I’m not teaching something or other, I’m at a local orphanage washing and feeding and tickling and changing babies. And when I’m not doing that, I’m running.
What have been the most challenging aspects of your time so far? The most joyous?
Relocating to a new place, especially one halfway around the world is just inherently challenging. I have to get used to doing things that are completely stupid and hilarious to locals, and not be offended when they are amused. I have to train my brain to think in rand and Celsius and liters and meters, and say “bin” and “jumper,” so I don’t get blank stares when I tell students to put their tissue in the “garbage can” and their “sweater” on the hook. But I refuse to say “trousers.” It’s a horrible word.
I get lost more than usual here, and the public transportation system is senseless.
Learning Sesotho has made me long for the French I used to dread, or even Hebrew. Simply reading my students’ names on a list makes me feel illiterate: an “l” followed by a vowel sounds like a “d,” “t” followed by “l” becomes a gurgly k, “h” followed by “l” becomes phlegm, and “q” is an explosive click I will never master. “Oe” sounds like “way,” “oa” sounds like “wa,” “u” sounds like “o,” and as you’ve all learned, “o” sounds like “oo,” sometimes anyway. I have a student named Lehlohonolo for goodness sakes, and another who has four vowels in a row in his name. And then there’s learning how to actually speak in sentences. The school custodian who is tutoring me insists that I’m making progress, but I don’t know the word for “liar.”
Lastly, it can be a little confining living in gates inside gates, and being told I can’t walk around alone at night. Not that there’s much to do, or any light to see by, but I’d like the option.
Many of the challenges are also the most satisfying aspects of being here- being forced to see everything freshly, to always be aware and alert and interested in some little thing you pass by.
Joyous? Happy children. And less so, happy parents and happy colleagues. Beautiful runs.
Are you dancing?
Yes. I sing with my students every day and this often involves dancing. I also teach a dance class once a week for my preschool class and the first grade. I’m going be teaching dance after school for the next few terms, and I may have been tricked into putting something together for the play in December. (It’s so tricky, I don’t even know if I was tricked or not). I’m still looking for dance classes and spaces for me though.
Are you meeting many new people?
There are a lot of people here. And I didn’t know any of them when I arrived. So . . . yeah? I mean, it’s impossible not to, but I could probably be more proactive- about finding people who share my interests for instance.
What is surprising you about this place?
This neon pink meat everyone loves. It looks like baloney. They call it paloney.
What is the expat community like where you are living?
Small, incestuous and drunk. Or small, incestuous and Jesus-loving. Overall good people, but I am trying not to get sucked in to having a convenient, ready-made group of friends. I mean, I didn’t come all this way to hang out with a guy from Connecticut. People look out for each other though, and that’s nice.
What is the funniest thing a kid has said or done so far?
I can’t pick one. I have one student for whom English is a second language. Somehow she learned to say, “I don’t want” instead of “I want.” Before I realized this, we had a few conversations that went like this:
Child: I don’t want to paint
Me: Ok, you don’t have to paint.
Child: (Louder) I don’t want to paint!
Me: That’s fine. Don’t paint. I won’t give you paint.
Child: I DON’T WANT TO PAAAAAAIIIINNNNNNT!!!
ME: OKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!
I have another child who refused to go the music room with the rest of the class so I said, “You have a choice. You can walk to the music room, or I can carry you.” He flung himself under a table, so I had to crawl under after him, extract him and carry him kicking and screaming with the rest of the class to the music room. When we got there, he threw himself on the floor sobbing, “I have no choices! I have no choices!”
In one of my art classes, the students had the option of making a drawing at home on the theme “world harmony” to celebrate the world harmony run, a relay race that is going through Lesotho the first time this year. One girl didn’t quite understand the torch part of it (they will be carrying something like the Olympic torch) so drew three girls holding hands with torches on their heads, and they look like they are burning to death. Another boy missed the theme entirely and brought in a picture of a scuba diver being eaten by sharks.
The funniest things I’ve done so far was take a colleague’s advice that it’s really fun for kids when you make popcorn with the lid of the air popper off, letting the popcorn fly all over a clean sheet on the floor, and having the kids eat off the sheet. I failed to take in the part that the children should stand back while the kernels are actually popping. I think I even told the kids to “gather ‘round” to see better. If you have keener foresight than me, you may be envisioning the children being pelted with scalding hot kernels. I had to kiss a lot of popcorn wounds that day, but no one was scarred or blinded and I didn’t even get fired.
What are the ways you take care of yourself and maintain yourself?
I don’t know if this counts, but I go to the only store in the country that sells M&Ms and I buy a bag. I run. I write letters to all of you or read the ones you have sent. If I have a reason to vent, I find other Americans and do it at them. I read. Listen to good music by good people:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=11140956
www.myspace.com/amylousings
www.myspace.com/joshlerner
www.myspace./laurameyermusic
Does it hurt your feelings that when I see barf bags I think of you?
Not in the slightest. (This questions from the Kate Lechstar, in a letter that she wrote on a barf bag).
MY TURN:
What color(s) are the leaves outside your window right now?
What are you going to be for Halloween?
How do you feel about the upcoming election?
When are you coming to visit?
My first interviewer happened to my brother’s Fijian born twin- same coloring, facial features (especially the ears), visible ribs, sense of humor- they even run the same and it’s a little freaky. I was all ready to talk about the Jersey shore and toll booths and all the undeserved crap NJ takes from the bigger, more boring states. But this kid wanted to know how many people live there (No idea. Pass). He asked what the economy is like (I don’t even know what that means. Pass.) He wanted to know what people eat there (I said, “tomatoes. Well, I eat them anyway.”) When he asked if New Jersey is safe, I told him that the smaller towns are quiet and safe, but that urban areas are more dangerous because of crime. I looked over his shoulder and saw that he wrote “safe and dangerous.” When he asked about natural resources, I told him about lumber from the Pine Barrens (I don’t even know if that’s an actual resource. I mean, the Pine Barrens are full of trees, and people cut down trees, but for all I know it could be a protected area) and all of the things you can grow in Garden State soil. Under natural resources he wrote, “Wood. Dirt.”
Despite the success of that first interview, the teacher reworked the process and decided to have me come in and be interviewed by the whole class. This time, I knew the questions so I was better prepared. I was able to jot down the answers I knew and look up ones that I didn’t, so I wouldn’t appear completely oblivious and ignorant. When I got through the history, economy, politics questions, I was able to move on to the good stuff, like diners and autumn leaves and Spanish and trains to New York City. I then got into a passionate exchange with two students who claimed they ate bagels in India and China (please don’t accuse me of ethnocentrism, but impossible!). I tried to explain to these poor bagel-deprived children that they were merely eating bread with a hole in the middle. Another kid tried to compare a bagel to a doughnut, and I almost lost it. When I went through all of the questions on the list, they asked me more, like how New Jersey is one of the wealthiest states in America, while Newark one of the poorest cities in the country (anyone?) and how to spell “Representative”- slightly easier, easier than “Appalachian,” anyway. After my interview, one of the Virginian teachers asked me if I talked about the mafia. In turn, I asked him if he talked about rednecks, and he said, “yes.”
While I’m still in interview mode, I’ll move along to some of the questions some of you have been asking me:
What country are you in again?
This question is from my brother. Really. Lesotho. And please, it’s pronounced, Le-soo-too.
Why don’t I get notified when you update your blog?
If you mean, why don’t I email you when I update the blog, it’s because that would defeat the purpose. Namely, unwanted emails can become annoying and I tend to ramble. The blog is available for perusal whenever you feel like it and easier to ignore. But if you mean, why doesn’t blogspot email you when I update the blog, I have no idea how that stuff works.
Why is Lesotho inside South Africa?
I’m still trying to work that one out myself. From what I gather, the story may go something like this:
Early-mid 19th century Basotho people (in what is now Lesotho and the Free State of South Africa) fought Boer (people of Dutch Calvanist descent) and British invasion.
Basotho perceived the Boers as a bigger threat (I think?) and asked England for protection.
Britain annexed the land and called it Basotholand.
When the Union of South Africa was formed, Basotholand was a British protectorate and so, not included.
For 45 years, Basotholand remained a British protectorate and then became independent. And became Lesotho.
My neighbor thinks Lesotho shouldn’t exist and says the only it hasn’t become incorporated into South Africa is because “South Africa doesn’t want another two million problems.” He loves Lesotho.
How is veganism in Africa?
Ha! In Africa, or rather from my experiences in Ghana, Malawi, Lesotho and places in between, you eat what’s around, you eat what people serve you, you eat what makes sense. You also eat what is fresh and local and often that includes fish, meat, eggs, (but my disgust with milk long predates my veganism and I don’t think that will ever change). I ate all sorts of Indian Ocean treats in Mozambique, and I’m curious to try South African game- kudu or ostrich or something like that. Basotho carnivore staples are beef and chicken, and to a lesser extent, goat and lamb and those options are less appealing to me.
What is the town you live in like?
It’s hard for me to judge the scope of Maseru, but for the capital city, it seems small. The downtown is small anyway, but the outskirts seem to sprawl and I can’t get a definitive answer about where Maseru ends and begins. There are a few major streets, and many, many smaller ones, which often don’t have names, such as mine. My neighborhood, which contains a little cluster of Americans, is very small, although I don’t know my neighbors (outside of my compound). There are banks and Kentucky Fried Chicken and a few South African chains here and there. There is one café where you can get filter coffee, and a pizza place that has good food although not actually pizza (the other pizza places are foul- one place makes a pizza they call Rustica, which among other things contains bananas, hotdogs and thousand island dressing). I got back recently from a conference in Swaziland, and the other American teachers and I couldn’t stop making comparisons. One described Mbabane, the capital of Swaziland as Maseru on steroids. Another heard Swaziland described “like Lesotho that learned.” I thought it was more like “Lesotho with stuff.” There are just a lot of things you can’t get here like construction paper and fat markers and tahini and vanilla and big picture frames.
What is your school like?
The school is small and close knit. We follow an American style curriculum and go from preschool to grade 8. Just over half of the students are Basotho and others come from America, Holland, Germany, France, Australia, Mali, Kenya, Palestine, Phillipines and more countries than I can remember. Staff hails from here, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Sweden, America, Australia and DRC. The school used to be USAID housing so it’s made up of small buildings and looks like summer camp.
What do your days look like in Lesotho?
I teach preschool in the mornings and early afternoon and then I teach art to first, third and fourth graders. And I assistant teach P.E. (Ha!) I’ve been trying to get out of that since day one, but perhaps someone will listen when we begin swimming lessons. Anyway, when I’m not teaching something or other, I’m at a local orphanage washing and feeding and tickling and changing babies. And when I’m not doing that, I’m running.
What have been the most challenging aspects of your time so far? The most joyous?
Relocating to a new place, especially one halfway around the world is just inherently challenging. I have to get used to doing things that are completely stupid and hilarious to locals, and not be offended when they are amused. I have to train my brain to think in rand and Celsius and liters and meters, and say “bin” and “jumper,” so I don’t get blank stares when I tell students to put their tissue in the “garbage can” and their “sweater” on the hook. But I refuse to say “trousers.” It’s a horrible word.
I get lost more than usual here, and the public transportation system is senseless.
Learning Sesotho has made me long for the French I used to dread, or even Hebrew. Simply reading my students’ names on a list makes me feel illiterate: an “l” followed by a vowel sounds like a “d,” “t” followed by “l” becomes a gurgly k, “h” followed by “l” becomes phlegm, and “q” is an explosive click I will never master. “Oe” sounds like “way,” “oa” sounds like “wa,” “u” sounds like “o,” and as you’ve all learned, “o” sounds like “oo,” sometimes anyway. I have a student named Lehlohonolo for goodness sakes, and another who has four vowels in a row in his name. And then there’s learning how to actually speak in sentences. The school custodian who is tutoring me insists that I’m making progress, but I don’t know the word for “liar.”
Lastly, it can be a little confining living in gates inside gates, and being told I can’t walk around alone at night. Not that there’s much to do, or any light to see by, but I’d like the option.
Many of the challenges are also the most satisfying aspects of being here- being forced to see everything freshly, to always be aware and alert and interested in some little thing you pass by.
Joyous? Happy children. And less so, happy parents and happy colleagues. Beautiful runs.
Are you dancing?
Yes. I sing with my students every day and this often involves dancing. I also teach a dance class once a week for my preschool class and the first grade. I’m going be teaching dance after school for the next few terms, and I may have been tricked into putting something together for the play in December. (It’s so tricky, I don’t even know if I was tricked or not). I’m still looking for dance classes and spaces for me though.
Are you meeting many new people?
There are a lot of people here. And I didn’t know any of them when I arrived. So . . . yeah? I mean, it’s impossible not to, but I could probably be more proactive- about finding people who share my interests for instance.
What is surprising you about this place?
This neon pink meat everyone loves. It looks like baloney. They call it paloney.
What is the expat community like where you are living?
Small, incestuous and drunk. Or small, incestuous and Jesus-loving. Overall good people, but I am trying not to get sucked in to having a convenient, ready-made group of friends. I mean, I didn’t come all this way to hang out with a guy from Connecticut. People look out for each other though, and that’s nice.
What is the funniest thing a kid has said or done so far?
I can’t pick one. I have one student for whom English is a second language. Somehow she learned to say, “I don’t want” instead of “I want.” Before I realized this, we had a few conversations that went like this:
Child: I don’t want to paint
Me: Ok, you don’t have to paint.
Child: (Louder) I don’t want to paint!
Me: That’s fine. Don’t paint. I won’t give you paint.
Child: I DON’T WANT TO PAAAAAAIIIINNNNNNT!!!
ME: OKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!
I have another child who refused to go the music room with the rest of the class so I said, “You have a choice. You can walk to the music room, or I can carry you.” He flung himself under a table, so I had to crawl under after him, extract him and carry him kicking and screaming with the rest of the class to the music room. When we got there, he threw himself on the floor sobbing, “I have no choices! I have no choices!”
In one of my art classes, the students had the option of making a drawing at home on the theme “world harmony” to celebrate the world harmony run, a relay race that is going through Lesotho the first time this year. One girl didn’t quite understand the torch part of it (they will be carrying something like the Olympic torch) so drew three girls holding hands with torches on their heads, and they look like they are burning to death. Another boy missed the theme entirely and brought in a picture of a scuba diver being eaten by sharks.
The funniest things I’ve done so far was take a colleague’s advice that it’s really fun for kids when you make popcorn with the lid of the air popper off, letting the popcorn fly all over a clean sheet on the floor, and having the kids eat off the sheet. I failed to take in the part that the children should stand back while the kernels are actually popping. I think I even told the kids to “gather ‘round” to see better. If you have keener foresight than me, you may be envisioning the children being pelted with scalding hot kernels. I had to kiss a lot of popcorn wounds that day, but no one was scarred or blinded and I didn’t even get fired.
What are the ways you take care of yourself and maintain yourself?
I don’t know if this counts, but I go to the only store in the country that sells M&Ms and I buy a bag. I run. I write letters to all of you or read the ones you have sent. If I have a reason to vent, I find other Americans and do it at them. I read. Listen to good music by good people:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=11140956
www.myspace.com/amylousings
www.myspace.com/joshlerner
www.myspace./laurameyermusic
Does it hurt your feelings that when I see barf bags I think of you?
Not in the slightest. (This questions from the Kate Lechstar, in a letter that she wrote on a barf bag).
MY TURN:
What color(s) are the leaves outside your window right now?
What are you going to be for Halloween?
How do you feel about the upcoming election?
When are you coming to visit?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)