Thursday, August 27, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
WWOOF
It was my last art class of the school year, and I had a notoriously wild group of first graders whose classroom teacher shocked the entire staff by making the masochistic decision to move with them to second grade to teach them for one more year. The art open house had been the week before, portfolios had already been sent home and my patience and creativity were at a low point. I had my students bring their sketchbooks and pencils to the art room. I told them they could draw whatever they liked, so long as they did it “soooo quietly, that I can hear the sound of your pencil points . . . Don’t you love that sound? Good.” The usual disruptors prompted many refrains of “I can’t hear your pencils!” while others struggled to whisper below the sounds of graphite on paper. When I thought quiet drawing had reached its expiration, I had the children share what they were going to do after the school year ended that Friday. When the last child had spoken I told the class, “When school ends on Friday, I am going to work on a farm. I am going to be a farmer!” Without pause, the king of class disruptions shouted, “No you’re NOT! You’re going to be the farmer’s WIFE!” I responded, while choking back laughter, “No, I am going to be a farmer’s wife, and when I get married, it will be to a farmer’s husband.” The children stared at me blankly and the laughter subsided in my throat.
Last week, I returned from my first experience as a WWOOFer (Willing Workers On Organic Farms). South Africa has a couple dozen farms that participate in the program, which is a network of organic farms and people willing to work on them in exchange for room, board and experience and insight in the world of organic farming. When you register as a WWOOFer, you have access to details about various farms that take volunteers and contact information for the farmers. After receiving several positive responses to my inquiries, I enlisted the help of the first grade teacher whose intuition I frequently solicit to narrow down the list.
For my first farm, we settled on a place far off in the Karoo. When I received the email saying I would be welcome to WWOOF on this particular farm in late June and early July, the last line of the message was “Love River.” I pondered what a Love River was before discovering that River is the owner’s name and he apparently loves me, but not the comma. I checked out his website which prominently featured nature-themed stream of consciousness poetry, from which I gathered I would be spending two and a half weeks with an aging hippie, basking in his aura and talking about transience under the big, blue Karoo sky. Ms. Masochist, teacher of the child who pronounced me a farmer’s spouse, started referring to me as River’s mail order bride. The list of tasks I would potentially be responsible for included herb propagation and pruning olive trees. My impressions about River made me somewhat suspicious about the herbs in question and I was very excited about the olive trees because I love olives, olive oil and all of the things you can make with those ingredients.
When I got off the bus in Laingsburg, The town closest to the farm, I kept my eyes open for gray shoulder-length hair, scraggly beard and paisley. But before I could spot River, a pickup truck pulled up to me and through the glare of its windshield a finger pointed at me in recognition. While he looked more like a skinhead than a deadhead, I must have been closer to how he pictured me, which saved me from a lot of parking lot wandering.
River doesn’t come to town often, so while he took care of errands, he left me at the flood museum. The only notable thing about Laingsburg, South Africa besides its convenience as a petrol stop on the major road to Cape Town is the devastating flood that flattened the town and claimed more than 100 lives nearly 30 years ago. So I spent well over an hour pouring over the English newspaper clippings about the flood (most were in Afrikaans) and chatting with the curator, who had been quoted in several of the yellowed articles.
When River had finished his errands he thrust a chicken pie at me and proceeded to talk with little pause for the drive to the farm about Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, his various careers before farming (accounting school drop-out, yoga instructor, health food store owner, plumber, electrician), Judaism and vision quests. He told me that he fasts one day a week and requires my attendance at 7 am every morning for “class” that consists of listening to Stephen Covey on tape and discussing his philosophies. He quickly moved to the topic of his employees (all of whom, except for the manager, are coloured), whom he finds sub par. He complained that they lack work ethic and initiative, drink too much, and frequently leave their jobs/the area for weeks or months at a time and then return for work. River’s discontent with his employees becomes a rant on everything wrong in South Africa since the end of apartheid that lasts until we reach the farm.
The farm is one of several in a row nestled in a valley with green rolling hills to one side and more angular, snow covered peaks on the other. Water is provided by a dam and tastes so good they call it champagne. The main income generated from the farm seems to be from table olives, olive oil, lucerne, pigs, sheep and cows. There might be other produce that they harvest in the summertime. They have accommodation on the property in the form of small cottages, and there were some paying guests I came across during my stay. They keep the milk and eggs for themselves, and so it seems, the herbs and vegetables in the nursery and permaculture land and the citrus from the fruit trees in their backyard. Or else they sell these items in very small quantities. The peacocks, guinea fowl, turkeys and ducks seem to be purely for amusement, and when chicken was cooked, it was from the grocery store, not the yard. If it were not for the fact that River’s wife works in Cape Town, the farm could not support them, or possibly, itself, which I found somewhat disappointing.
The first stop on my tour of the farm was the olive trees. The olive harvest had just finished and it was now time to prune the trees. I tried my hand at pruning, but couldn’t seem to get the knack, so my job was collecting branches and bringing them to the chipper, where they were chopped up into cow food. The manure the cows produced from this diet was fed into the worm farm, and after the worms did their thing, it went back to fertilize the olive trees. On the way to the worm farm, River asked me, “Do you like worms and manure?” He asked as though it was a standard thing to know if you like or dislike, like if someone likes bananas, or biking. I said I wasn’t sure, and he continued, “My friend says he could spread worms and manure on a sandwich . . . he’s kidding of course.” I helped dump crates of chopped olive branches in the dairy, sinking up to my ankles in the manure already there. Then I watered the worm farm and checked the different layers of dirt to see the worm production. I wasn’t repulsed, but there also wasn’t much to do, it’s worm’s work, not people’s work, and once we watered, we were done. From there I was taken to the permaculture land and as a mongoose darted out in front of the car, Rivers yappy, annoying dog, Freckles, jumped straight into to the windshield as if it was an open window. We stopped briefly to let Freckles engage in a fruitless pursuit of the mongoose and then continued on our way.
I was then taken to the permaculture land. It is my understanding that all permaculture is organic, although not all organic farms use permaculture. Permaculture aims to eliminate the use of machinery and petro-chemicals, to design carefully to make the most of the farms natural features (for example, slope planning- making sure dams are above houses and gardens to use gravity to pump water rather than a mechanical pump). Energy cycling is employed so reusing waste is very important (through compost, collecting rainwater, etc). Diversity is also instrumental to permaculture. The goal is to create more diversity than there is naturally, choosing plants based on the functional connections between them (for example, if you want to grow a particular vegetable that attracts a particular pest, you might surround those vegetables with grasses that attract the same pest, so you can save the vegetable without pesticides). I ate my way through the garden, trying pineapple sage, coriander, celeriac and the sweetest carrots I’ve ever tasted.
Just as my last morning hour before the work day begins was usurped by the Stephen Covey workshop session, and my pleasure reading was taken away so I could study permaculture and microorganism manuals, so too was my daily run stolen in service of giving the dogs exercise. River has four dogs, and his wife brought hers to make it five when she came to stay for a week a few days later. Not only do the dogs fight with each other, but they have a particularly ferocious boerbul that terrified me, named Athena. She had already severely bitten a neighbor and a worker in her time on the farm, and she took a liking to me that made me quite uneasy. River taught me how to call her and warned me not to try to kiss her face as that “spooks” her (um, that would make two of us.)
The next morning we had our first Stephen Covey meeting in the living room with its exposed brick painted red, dingy carpets, non-upholstered couches covered with sheets for the dogs, curtains with an African mask motif and a hideous peach arm chair with dark wood accents that made it appear to be on crutches. Besides me, “class” consisted of River and the farm manager, an Afrikaans guy who is about my age and looks after the animals. The doors are left open at all times so the dogs can roam in and out and I was freezing and there were birds flying all around the living room crashing into walls and knocking over picture frames. Athena licked me, and put her paws on my knees and bashed her head into me knocking me around the couch and River yelled at her, “Athena! This is inappropriate! We are in class!” I don’t find Stephen Covey any more inspiring or insightful than a Disney movie or Chicken Soup for the Soul series and just as irritating.
I spent the morning collecting olive branches with a brief break to see the autopsy of a cow that had died suddenly. In the afternoon, I worked with the domestic helper to rinse olives and change the brine, a mixture of tap water, salt and white vinegar. I had been warned by River that Hansie “does the STUPIDEST things,” although I found he was quite competent and versatile in the types of things he can do. We rinsed the olives in a bathtub, my bathtub in fact, and I was happily up to my wrists and elbows in olives, thinking about what it would be like to bathe in a tub of olives and sampling as we went. I spent the last part of the day removing the peas from pods had been saved and dried from the harvest that will be planted next year.
In the morning, at the conclusion of our next “class,” River asked if the manger or I had any issues to raise. The farm manager said he would like to take me to town that night for a bible study social. River responded, “Does she want to go with you?” I said, “um, sure,” and wondered what a bible study social in rural South Africa would entail. Well, I would never find out, as instead, River had the farm manager arrested for some dispute over sheep. Of the bits of information that were shared with me, I gathered the original accusation was that the manager had stolen sheep from the farm and then had them slaughtered to make money, but I think what probably actually happened was the sheep belonged to the manager but he allowed them to graze on the farm without permission. In any case, the rest of my time on the farm was made awkward by the tensions that ensued and it became a regular thing for me to be kicked out of the living room so the farm owners could berate the manager, at the conclusion of which they would insist he stay for dinner and over dessert, River would spin a fable with a moral about honesty and trust.
The morning after the manager had been arrested and soon released, it came to light that a couple of teenagers in the valley were vandalizing and stealing from different farms. So one day River is calling the police on the manager, and the next, they are cruising around in a pickup together with their guns and some rope about to make a citizen’s arrest (which never did happen though they tried for two weeks). River’s wife, Beverly was due to arrive that day. It was also pouring rain and these two factors led River to assign me to a bunch of cleaning and cooking and busy work to prepare for her arrival. River told me I should clean out the storage rooms with Hansie, and in the process, “teach him how to think.” I was instructed to do so by asking repetitive and rhetorical questions and making Hansie’s ideas seem ridiculous. The cleaning seemed to involve arbitrary moving of stuff from one storage room to another, and the shelves of one storage room were completely blocked up by hanging sides of beef from the autopsied cow (because the cow died from an injury, the meat was still good, but because it was autopsied rather than butchered right away, it was to be used for the dogs). So I spent two hours walking back and forth contorting myself around these curtains of beef, getting fat grease on my face and blood on my coat. When I was sent to clean ashes out of the fireplace, I felt like a real Cinderella and that this Beverly character must be an evil witch. I spent the last few minutes of the day shelling peas and when River reprimanded me for wasting time by throwing the shells away in a bag (which took precious microseconds to open) rather than in a trash bin, I took a deep breath and counted down the minutes until five o’clock.
When Beverly finally arrived, she was lovely. She squeezed orange juice and gave me vitamin C for my cold and cooked and pushed food nonstop. She was only going to stay for the weekend, but she was determined to have a real vacation, and with all of the things she had to take care of on the farm, it took her ten days until she was satisfied.
She was also great at finding interesting and more varied things for me to do. I started feeding the chickens in the morning. Chickens are unbelievably stupid creatures. When they saw (heard? sensed?) me approach, they would run to the feeding containers. But they are afraid of the food falling on them so they freak out and flap away and we repeat the process a dozen times until their food containers are filled. She also sent me to the dairies in the morning where the manager and the other workers hook up two jersey cows to milking machines. Though I have no pumping experience to relate this to, and it doesn’t hurt them and they get to eat while being milked, I was still in pain for them. Then I poured the milk into coke bottles and affixed an udder-shaped attachments to them and fed the calves. There was very little left over for people to drink, especially cream, because the cows hold onto it for their calves. When I wondered aloud “why not let the claves drink directly from the cows?” I was told that when the owners got the farm this was the way it was done and cows don’t like change. I also assisted with vaccinating the cows. Two had died while I was there so they were all given antibiotics and some sort of tick repellent or medicine. My job was to rinse syringes and on occasion, fill them with medicine. For certain shots, the needle would be jabbed into the cow and then the syringe was attached which I thought was an odd way of doing things based on my own experiences with vaccinations. The holding pen to keep the cows still for their shots was too big so they kept jumping over or trying to crawl under, mooing like crazy and trying to escape the dairy altogether. One of the cows had recently had an abortion because she was too sick to survive the pregnancy and then she got an infection so I cringed as I watched the manager put on a shoulder length glove and lose his arm inside the cow while he inserted the vaginal suppository.
In terms of working with the growing side of things, Beverly suggested I also prune lavender while working in the olive fields as there are lavender bushes in between all the trees. Lavender bushes are quite unruly and I often felt like I was wrestling with them to form mediocre half globes. I also removed fungus from aloe plants by painting them with olive oil. The fungus can be used to make a red pigment, so although it was white, it made a clay-colored gunk when I brushed it with oil. Cleaning the brush off on rocks, I thought of the cave paintings I have seen and wondered what they actually use this pigment for. Ironically, although aloe has healing properties, it has sharp spines that shredded my hands.
The only task gave me that I didn’t particularly enjoy was gripping on those huge hanging sides of beef to hold them steady while the manager butchered it into dog food. Then I had to help Hansie pack the hunks of meat with their lumpy, squishy, yellow fat, into freezer bags, and pluck the blood clots from the bucket to clean up. This, combined with all of the meat Beverly cooked while I was there is pushing back toward my vegan ways. I just don’t want to know what happens to meat before it is ready to eat, and if I don’t want to know, that I don’t think I should eat it.
Beverly also suggested that I might like to go with the manager the day he works with the sheep. “The lambs,” she told me, “are lovely.” So I went out that morning with the manager, and we first had to bring the sheep and pigs to their respective pastures. It’s crazy that people count sheep to go to sleep because actually trying to count sheep hurts your brain. The piglets were tiny and incredibly fast and pigs really do eat like, well, pigs. Bringing the cows to their pasture was more difficult as the field was farther and they were more stubborn. We herded them by running around them on the opposite side of the way we wanted them to go. It was not all that different from herding preschoolers. It was a little easier, but cows are bigger and have horns. There was lots of grass between the dairy and the pastures and they wanted to stop and graze. The manager kept getting frustrated saying, “I don’t know why they want to stop, they know we’re going to a better place with more grass.” But apparently they didn’t.
We finally headed to the other farm to the lambs. The lambs were lovely as Beverly said, but what we did to them (castration, docking tails and tattooing ears) was not lovely. My job was to mainly hold different castration/docking/tattooing tools. The manager told me the tails are docked because the sheep store their fat there and the meat doesn’t taste as good. (Although later an Australian friend who grew up on a farm told me that if you don’t dock the tails, flies infest the space underneath the tails and cause infection). Castration, I was told, prevents uncontrolled reproduction, “and balls make the meat taste funny.” Tattooing is obviously for identification. Castration and docking is basically the same. A tight, thick rubber band and stretched on a pair of pliers, snapped around the appropriate body part and sprayed with antiseptic. Blood flow is cut off and within three weeks it drops off. The lambs flinched for a moment and then ran off. To tattoo, green ink was smeared on the ears, and needles in the shape of initials were clamped over the ear, squeezed and released. The lambs flinched a little bit more, but I was surprised at how unbothered they seemed, although I still didn’t like it.
Meanwhile River was irritating me to no end, coercing me into art therapy sessions and droning from the I Ching or sharing his “aha” moments. He had a sign in his bathroom that said “I, River, recognize myself as a beautiful and unique facet of this evolving Universe,” and despite the fact that he was sharing his work and his home with me, I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. When I stumbled across his self-published chapbook of poorly written and self-indulgent poetry, he insisted on reading to me from it, and then that I finish it on my own. So there I was reading 30 year old accounts of acid trips and a vignette about an encounter with a prostitute (in a book dedicated to his WIFE!
. . .whom he is no longer married to). Maybe if he practiced the compassion or humility or patience he preached, I would have appreciated him more, but within a few days of living in his house, I wanted to interact with him as little as possible. I admired Beverly for calling him out and not taking his guru aspirations too seriously. After watching an environmental documentary with the two of them (when all Beverly wanted to do was watch recorded episodes of Gray’s Anatomy and I wanted to read my book), River insisted on summarizing the whole film that we had all just watched, and then went on to explain how this film really reinforced that he is among the elite who save the planet with their organic farming (never mind that he owns several cars/tractors/gas guzzling machinery). Beverly said something along the lines of “yeah, yeah, can I have my organic Gray’s Anatomy now?”
On the day I was due to leave I packed early and was fidgeting around the house, waiting for River to be ready to bring me to the bus. I opened a clay pot that was the centerpiece of the coffee table and expected to either find it empty or filled with some kind of nut or something that I had seen River shelling on and off during my stay. It was actually filled to the brim with tiny squares of white paper folded into fourths. I tentatively removed one, carried it to the bathroom and opened it. It said 42. Later, when relating this story to a friend, I learned that in the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the meaning of life. And on that note, I headed home.
Last week, I returned from my first experience as a WWOOFer (Willing Workers On Organic Farms). South Africa has a couple dozen farms that participate in the program, which is a network of organic farms and people willing to work on them in exchange for room, board and experience and insight in the world of organic farming. When you register as a WWOOFer, you have access to details about various farms that take volunteers and contact information for the farmers. After receiving several positive responses to my inquiries, I enlisted the help of the first grade teacher whose intuition I frequently solicit to narrow down the list.
For my first farm, we settled on a place far off in the Karoo. When I received the email saying I would be welcome to WWOOF on this particular farm in late June and early July, the last line of the message was “Love River.” I pondered what a Love River was before discovering that River is the owner’s name and he apparently loves me, but not the comma. I checked out his website which prominently featured nature-themed stream of consciousness poetry, from which I gathered I would be spending two and a half weeks with an aging hippie, basking in his aura and talking about transience under the big, blue Karoo sky. Ms. Masochist, teacher of the child who pronounced me a farmer’s spouse, started referring to me as River’s mail order bride. The list of tasks I would potentially be responsible for included herb propagation and pruning olive trees. My impressions about River made me somewhat suspicious about the herbs in question and I was very excited about the olive trees because I love olives, olive oil and all of the things you can make with those ingredients.
When I got off the bus in Laingsburg, The town closest to the farm, I kept my eyes open for gray shoulder-length hair, scraggly beard and paisley. But before I could spot River, a pickup truck pulled up to me and through the glare of its windshield a finger pointed at me in recognition. While he looked more like a skinhead than a deadhead, I must have been closer to how he pictured me, which saved me from a lot of parking lot wandering.
River doesn’t come to town often, so while he took care of errands, he left me at the flood museum. The only notable thing about Laingsburg, South Africa besides its convenience as a petrol stop on the major road to Cape Town is the devastating flood that flattened the town and claimed more than 100 lives nearly 30 years ago. So I spent well over an hour pouring over the English newspaper clippings about the flood (most were in Afrikaans) and chatting with the curator, who had been quoted in several of the yellowed articles.
When River had finished his errands he thrust a chicken pie at me and proceeded to talk with little pause for the drive to the farm about Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, his various careers before farming (accounting school drop-out, yoga instructor, health food store owner, plumber, electrician), Judaism and vision quests. He told me that he fasts one day a week and requires my attendance at 7 am every morning for “class” that consists of listening to Stephen Covey on tape and discussing his philosophies. He quickly moved to the topic of his employees (all of whom, except for the manager, are coloured), whom he finds sub par. He complained that they lack work ethic and initiative, drink too much, and frequently leave their jobs/the area for weeks or months at a time and then return for work. River’s discontent with his employees becomes a rant on everything wrong in South Africa since the end of apartheid that lasts until we reach the farm.
The farm is one of several in a row nestled in a valley with green rolling hills to one side and more angular, snow covered peaks on the other. Water is provided by a dam and tastes so good they call it champagne. The main income generated from the farm seems to be from table olives, olive oil, lucerne, pigs, sheep and cows. There might be other produce that they harvest in the summertime. They have accommodation on the property in the form of small cottages, and there were some paying guests I came across during my stay. They keep the milk and eggs for themselves, and so it seems, the herbs and vegetables in the nursery and permaculture land and the citrus from the fruit trees in their backyard. Or else they sell these items in very small quantities. The peacocks, guinea fowl, turkeys and ducks seem to be purely for amusement, and when chicken was cooked, it was from the grocery store, not the yard. If it were not for the fact that River’s wife works in Cape Town, the farm could not support them, or possibly, itself, which I found somewhat disappointing.
The first stop on my tour of the farm was the olive trees. The olive harvest had just finished and it was now time to prune the trees. I tried my hand at pruning, but couldn’t seem to get the knack, so my job was collecting branches and bringing them to the chipper, where they were chopped up into cow food. The manure the cows produced from this diet was fed into the worm farm, and after the worms did their thing, it went back to fertilize the olive trees. On the way to the worm farm, River asked me, “Do you like worms and manure?” He asked as though it was a standard thing to know if you like or dislike, like if someone likes bananas, or biking. I said I wasn’t sure, and he continued, “My friend says he could spread worms and manure on a sandwich . . . he’s kidding of course.” I helped dump crates of chopped olive branches in the dairy, sinking up to my ankles in the manure already there. Then I watered the worm farm and checked the different layers of dirt to see the worm production. I wasn’t repulsed, but there also wasn’t much to do, it’s worm’s work, not people’s work, and once we watered, we were done. From there I was taken to the permaculture land and as a mongoose darted out in front of the car, Rivers yappy, annoying dog, Freckles, jumped straight into to the windshield as if it was an open window. We stopped briefly to let Freckles engage in a fruitless pursuit of the mongoose and then continued on our way.
I was then taken to the permaculture land. It is my understanding that all permaculture is organic, although not all organic farms use permaculture. Permaculture aims to eliminate the use of machinery and petro-chemicals, to design carefully to make the most of the farms natural features (for example, slope planning- making sure dams are above houses and gardens to use gravity to pump water rather than a mechanical pump). Energy cycling is employed so reusing waste is very important (through compost, collecting rainwater, etc). Diversity is also instrumental to permaculture. The goal is to create more diversity than there is naturally, choosing plants based on the functional connections between them (for example, if you want to grow a particular vegetable that attracts a particular pest, you might surround those vegetables with grasses that attract the same pest, so you can save the vegetable without pesticides). I ate my way through the garden, trying pineapple sage, coriander, celeriac and the sweetest carrots I’ve ever tasted.
Just as my last morning hour before the work day begins was usurped by the Stephen Covey workshop session, and my pleasure reading was taken away so I could study permaculture and microorganism manuals, so too was my daily run stolen in service of giving the dogs exercise. River has four dogs, and his wife brought hers to make it five when she came to stay for a week a few days later. Not only do the dogs fight with each other, but they have a particularly ferocious boerbul that terrified me, named Athena. She had already severely bitten a neighbor and a worker in her time on the farm, and she took a liking to me that made me quite uneasy. River taught me how to call her and warned me not to try to kiss her face as that “spooks” her (um, that would make two of us.)
The next morning we had our first Stephen Covey meeting in the living room with its exposed brick painted red, dingy carpets, non-upholstered couches covered with sheets for the dogs, curtains with an African mask motif and a hideous peach arm chair with dark wood accents that made it appear to be on crutches. Besides me, “class” consisted of River and the farm manager, an Afrikaans guy who is about my age and looks after the animals. The doors are left open at all times so the dogs can roam in and out and I was freezing and there were birds flying all around the living room crashing into walls and knocking over picture frames. Athena licked me, and put her paws on my knees and bashed her head into me knocking me around the couch and River yelled at her, “Athena! This is inappropriate! We are in class!” I don’t find Stephen Covey any more inspiring or insightful than a Disney movie or Chicken Soup for the Soul series and just as irritating.
I spent the morning collecting olive branches with a brief break to see the autopsy of a cow that had died suddenly. In the afternoon, I worked with the domestic helper to rinse olives and change the brine, a mixture of tap water, salt and white vinegar. I had been warned by River that Hansie “does the STUPIDEST things,” although I found he was quite competent and versatile in the types of things he can do. We rinsed the olives in a bathtub, my bathtub in fact, and I was happily up to my wrists and elbows in olives, thinking about what it would be like to bathe in a tub of olives and sampling as we went. I spent the last part of the day removing the peas from pods had been saved and dried from the harvest that will be planted next year.
In the morning, at the conclusion of our next “class,” River asked if the manger or I had any issues to raise. The farm manager said he would like to take me to town that night for a bible study social. River responded, “Does she want to go with you?” I said, “um, sure,” and wondered what a bible study social in rural South Africa would entail. Well, I would never find out, as instead, River had the farm manager arrested for some dispute over sheep. Of the bits of information that were shared with me, I gathered the original accusation was that the manager had stolen sheep from the farm and then had them slaughtered to make money, but I think what probably actually happened was the sheep belonged to the manager but he allowed them to graze on the farm without permission. In any case, the rest of my time on the farm was made awkward by the tensions that ensued and it became a regular thing for me to be kicked out of the living room so the farm owners could berate the manager, at the conclusion of which they would insist he stay for dinner and over dessert, River would spin a fable with a moral about honesty and trust.
The morning after the manager had been arrested and soon released, it came to light that a couple of teenagers in the valley were vandalizing and stealing from different farms. So one day River is calling the police on the manager, and the next, they are cruising around in a pickup together with their guns and some rope about to make a citizen’s arrest (which never did happen though they tried for two weeks). River’s wife, Beverly was due to arrive that day. It was also pouring rain and these two factors led River to assign me to a bunch of cleaning and cooking and busy work to prepare for her arrival. River told me I should clean out the storage rooms with Hansie, and in the process, “teach him how to think.” I was instructed to do so by asking repetitive and rhetorical questions and making Hansie’s ideas seem ridiculous. The cleaning seemed to involve arbitrary moving of stuff from one storage room to another, and the shelves of one storage room were completely blocked up by hanging sides of beef from the autopsied cow (because the cow died from an injury, the meat was still good, but because it was autopsied rather than butchered right away, it was to be used for the dogs). So I spent two hours walking back and forth contorting myself around these curtains of beef, getting fat grease on my face and blood on my coat. When I was sent to clean ashes out of the fireplace, I felt like a real Cinderella and that this Beverly character must be an evil witch. I spent the last few minutes of the day shelling peas and when River reprimanded me for wasting time by throwing the shells away in a bag (which took precious microseconds to open) rather than in a trash bin, I took a deep breath and counted down the minutes until five o’clock.
When Beverly finally arrived, she was lovely. She squeezed orange juice and gave me vitamin C for my cold and cooked and pushed food nonstop. She was only going to stay for the weekend, but she was determined to have a real vacation, and with all of the things she had to take care of on the farm, it took her ten days until she was satisfied.
She was also great at finding interesting and more varied things for me to do. I started feeding the chickens in the morning. Chickens are unbelievably stupid creatures. When they saw (heard? sensed?) me approach, they would run to the feeding containers. But they are afraid of the food falling on them so they freak out and flap away and we repeat the process a dozen times until their food containers are filled. She also sent me to the dairies in the morning where the manager and the other workers hook up two jersey cows to milking machines. Though I have no pumping experience to relate this to, and it doesn’t hurt them and they get to eat while being milked, I was still in pain for them. Then I poured the milk into coke bottles and affixed an udder-shaped attachments to them and fed the calves. There was very little left over for people to drink, especially cream, because the cows hold onto it for their calves. When I wondered aloud “why not let the claves drink directly from the cows?” I was told that when the owners got the farm this was the way it was done and cows don’t like change. I also assisted with vaccinating the cows. Two had died while I was there so they were all given antibiotics and some sort of tick repellent or medicine. My job was to rinse syringes and on occasion, fill them with medicine. For certain shots, the needle would be jabbed into the cow and then the syringe was attached which I thought was an odd way of doing things based on my own experiences with vaccinations. The holding pen to keep the cows still for their shots was too big so they kept jumping over or trying to crawl under, mooing like crazy and trying to escape the dairy altogether. One of the cows had recently had an abortion because she was too sick to survive the pregnancy and then she got an infection so I cringed as I watched the manager put on a shoulder length glove and lose his arm inside the cow while he inserted the vaginal suppository.
In terms of working with the growing side of things, Beverly suggested I also prune lavender while working in the olive fields as there are lavender bushes in between all the trees. Lavender bushes are quite unruly and I often felt like I was wrestling with them to form mediocre half globes. I also removed fungus from aloe plants by painting them with olive oil. The fungus can be used to make a red pigment, so although it was white, it made a clay-colored gunk when I brushed it with oil. Cleaning the brush off on rocks, I thought of the cave paintings I have seen and wondered what they actually use this pigment for. Ironically, although aloe has healing properties, it has sharp spines that shredded my hands.
The only task gave me that I didn’t particularly enjoy was gripping on those huge hanging sides of beef to hold them steady while the manager butchered it into dog food. Then I had to help Hansie pack the hunks of meat with their lumpy, squishy, yellow fat, into freezer bags, and pluck the blood clots from the bucket to clean up. This, combined with all of the meat Beverly cooked while I was there is pushing back toward my vegan ways. I just don’t want to know what happens to meat before it is ready to eat, and if I don’t want to know, that I don’t think I should eat it.
Beverly also suggested that I might like to go with the manager the day he works with the sheep. “The lambs,” she told me, “are lovely.” So I went out that morning with the manager, and we first had to bring the sheep and pigs to their respective pastures. It’s crazy that people count sheep to go to sleep because actually trying to count sheep hurts your brain. The piglets were tiny and incredibly fast and pigs really do eat like, well, pigs. Bringing the cows to their pasture was more difficult as the field was farther and they were more stubborn. We herded them by running around them on the opposite side of the way we wanted them to go. It was not all that different from herding preschoolers. It was a little easier, but cows are bigger and have horns. There was lots of grass between the dairy and the pastures and they wanted to stop and graze. The manager kept getting frustrated saying, “I don’t know why they want to stop, they know we’re going to a better place with more grass.” But apparently they didn’t.
We finally headed to the other farm to the lambs. The lambs were lovely as Beverly said, but what we did to them (castration, docking tails and tattooing ears) was not lovely. My job was to mainly hold different castration/docking/tattooing tools. The manager told me the tails are docked because the sheep store their fat there and the meat doesn’t taste as good. (Although later an Australian friend who grew up on a farm told me that if you don’t dock the tails, flies infest the space underneath the tails and cause infection). Castration, I was told, prevents uncontrolled reproduction, “and balls make the meat taste funny.” Tattooing is obviously for identification. Castration and docking is basically the same. A tight, thick rubber band and stretched on a pair of pliers, snapped around the appropriate body part and sprayed with antiseptic. Blood flow is cut off and within three weeks it drops off. The lambs flinched for a moment and then ran off. To tattoo, green ink was smeared on the ears, and needles in the shape of initials were clamped over the ear, squeezed and released. The lambs flinched a little bit more, but I was surprised at how unbothered they seemed, although I still didn’t like it.
Meanwhile River was irritating me to no end, coercing me into art therapy sessions and droning from the I Ching or sharing his “aha” moments. He had a sign in his bathroom that said “I, River, recognize myself as a beautiful and unique facet of this evolving Universe,” and despite the fact that he was sharing his work and his home with me, I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. When I stumbled across his self-published chapbook of poorly written and self-indulgent poetry, he insisted on reading to me from it, and then that I finish it on my own. So there I was reading 30 year old accounts of acid trips and a vignette about an encounter with a prostitute (in a book dedicated to his WIFE!
. . .whom he is no longer married to). Maybe if he practiced the compassion or humility or patience he preached, I would have appreciated him more, but within a few days of living in his house, I wanted to interact with him as little as possible. I admired Beverly for calling him out and not taking his guru aspirations too seriously. After watching an environmental documentary with the two of them (when all Beverly wanted to do was watch recorded episodes of Gray’s Anatomy and I wanted to read my book), River insisted on summarizing the whole film that we had all just watched, and then went on to explain how this film really reinforced that he is among the elite who save the planet with their organic farming (never mind that he owns several cars/tractors/gas guzzling machinery). Beverly said something along the lines of “yeah, yeah, can I have my organic Gray’s Anatomy now?”
On the day I was due to leave I packed early and was fidgeting around the house, waiting for River to be ready to bring me to the bus. I opened a clay pot that was the centerpiece of the coffee table and expected to either find it empty or filled with some kind of nut or something that I had seen River shelling on and off during my stay. It was actually filled to the brim with tiny squares of white paper folded into fourths. I tentatively removed one, carried it to the bathroom and opened it. It said 42. Later, when relating this story to a friend, I learned that in the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the meaning of life. And on that note, I headed home.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Happy 10th
I’ve spent the past 2 weeks in the company of beautiful Angela, a friend from highschool. She just took her medical board exams and I am at the end of my first year of teaching in an international school. Besides celebrating those two things, we have also dubbed this visit our 10th anniversary, as we became friends in June of 1999 when we joined the Westfield High School Cross Country team. The traditional gift one gives on a 10th anniversary is aluminum or tin. Www.findgift.com reccommends a nice piece of aluminum jewelry (?) but we figured aluminum also houses beer. . .
I didn’t know Angela’s flight number, nor which country her flight to Johannesburg originated from. Nonetheless, I sent a taxi driver to collect her, giving made up flight details, and she was miraculously found and brought to the guesthouse where I was waiting for her.
I didn’t give her much time to settle or recover from the travel before I took her to the Apartheid Museum. It was a pretty intense introduction to the country. The exhibits were dense and we spent two hours moving in chronological order before reaching 1948, the year apartheid actually began. The museum was incredibly powerful and solidified some of my prior knowledge about this part of South African history. In our fourth hour at the museum my capacity to take in any more information diminished and I saw a poster for the Women’s Movement Peace Party and misread it as Women’s Movement Dance Party. We took this as a cue to leave and we stopped at the gift shop on the way out and saw it was selling t-shirts reading “Whites Only” or “Blacks Only,” modeled after signs that were hung in restaurants, public toilets, etc during apartheid, much like one would have seen in the American south during segregation. I checked with Ang to make sure I was not misreading the t-shirts but she confirmed what I saw. I can’t imagine what would possess anybody to buy or wear a t-shirt emblazoned with such a statement.
The taxi driver, Simon, who picked us up from the museum said he’d never been inside the building. He doesn’t feel he needs to see what is there because he lived through it. Simon said he would like to bring his daughters though, when they are older. I asked him how old they are, expecting him to say something like four and six, but he said they are fifteen and nineteen.
Simon brought us to a nearby mall that I chose as our next destination because of the great flea market on the roof, selling everything from the usual flea market junk to paintings, African crafts, baked goods, fancy soap, novelty light switch covers, etc. Ang and I bought many grams of olives, dry seasoned rice to take camping, and matching paintings. We bought soup and pastries for dinner and took it back to the guesthouse and ate on the bed with the electric blanket turned up all the way.
The next morning we headed to Nelspruit on a bus that televised a public service announcement from Jesus. It was in Nelspruit that I discovered I had no way of taking more cash out of the ATM as I was using a new card and forgot to memorize or write down and bring along with me, the pin number. On top of this unhappy fact, the likelihood of us reaching Kruger National Park the next day via public transportation was seeming less and less likely. Luckily we met two Israeli brothers who had rented a car and were heading to the same camp site. They offered to drive us there and drove us around the park the next day.
The national park is about the size of New Jersey and the day we arrived we drove 200 kilometers looking out for animals. We saw a couple of zebra, a few giraffes and elephants, and a baby hyena that moved like a bobbing head doll. But as one of the Israelis said, “you see a lot of shit but you don’t see shit” (trans.: “There sure is a lot of poop here but where are all of the animals who created it?”) They were pretty disappointed we didn’t see any of the big cats and said, “We’re not leaving till we see lions and tigers.” I don’t know if this was an English vocab mix-up or if they truly thought that tigers live in the African bush. I didn’t want to be the one to correct or deliver disappointing news so I just sort of nodded, “yup, tigers.” Maybe they were joking. We did see a lot of impala though. At night trying to fall asleep in the tent Ang said, “I see impalas when I close my eyes.” I felt badly that Ang didn’t get to see more animals but as she said, “Looking and not finding is part of it too. If I wanted to be guaranteed seeing a lion, I would go to the zoo.”
After pitching our tent, we went to check out the kitchen. The facilities did not have the promised pots, which made peanut butter sandwiches the only thing we were likely to eat for the next three days. Then we realized, the kitchen also lacked the promised cupboards for storing food, and the walls, which didn’t even close all the way around the building, were plastered with monkey warnings. We went out in search of people with a car, which was not difficult as we are apparently the only people who thought it would be great to enter the park without our own car. We walked up to a nearby caravan, and Ang, using her most friendly voice (which somehow lent itself to using the word "y’all") got some middle age people who thought we were pretty unintelligent to store our peanutbutter and bread.
The following day at Kruger, we decided it would be prudent to figure out how we were getting out of the park. For one thing, there were several kilometers from the rest camp to the nearest park entrance that can only be traveled by private vehicle. Then we needed to get from the gate to the downtown area on a route that public transportation didn’t travel. Once we got there, which was starting to seem an unlikely prospect, we could take a minibus taxi to the nearest city and from there we already had bus tickets back to Johannesburg. We had heard that the manager named Albert had a friend named Lucky who could get us as far as we needed to go. Only Albert was nowhere to be found. The receptionists started to giggle when they saw us approaching for our hourly inquiries and Albert apparently has a lot of “meetings.” We knew he existed because his photo was framed on the wall in reception but looking for a tall dark man in camouflage in a sea of tall dark men in camouflage was like a Where’s Waldo book. After several hours of alternating trying to spot African wildlife and trying to spot Albert, we were called into his office. He sat us down, spread open his hands and shrugged. “Shit,” I thought. But he surprised both of us by offering to drive us himself.
Thus, the next morning, Ang was on her first minibus taxi marveling at the fact people brought chickens on board while I was equally surprised by the tiny woman balancing a huge computer tower in lap. Animals I’ve seen, but the PC surprised me. Everything went smoothly and we were back in Johannesburg in time for an early dinner in front of a glowing fireplace.
From there we headed back to Lesotho where we stayed in Malealea, a community nestled in a beautiful section of the Drakensburg Mountains. I was relieved when Ang said she had no interest in pony trekking, and we spent the day hiking around waterfalls and rock paintings. Ang was so enchanted that she decided to stay on an extra day, while I had to finally go back to work. Perhaps one of my favorite moments of the trip was Ang’s visit was coming home from work that day and having someone I love already there waiting, instead of a dark empty house.
We spent the rest of the week in Maseru being very domestic, sweeping, cooking dinner, baking, hanging laundry on the lines. Some days I took her to tour my life in Lesotho. She came to school, visited the orphanage, and met my friends, including a dinner out, en route to which, our taxi driver ran out of petrol in the middle of the intersection while running a red light. I sent her out on a private tour of local rock art and to a pediatric AIDS clinic to shadow a young, American doctor. In the evenings, we sat in front of the space heater, eating on the floor. On days we went separate ways, we shared what happened since breakfast. Actually, we did that even on days we spent together and it was amazing to hear her perspectives and to remember the things that used to challenge and surprise and amuse me when I first arrived and everything was new and fresh.
The shuttle picked her up from my house almost 24 hours ago, but she was flying out of an airport several hours away and she left several more hours early in case of traffic. So right now, as I sit on my floor typing, warming myself in front of the heater with my mittens stretched over my frozen feet, she is somewhere over the Atlantic headed toward summer in New York. In two days, she will be on an ob/gyn rotation in a city hospital while I will be on spending my school vacation picking herbs on a farm. And in two months from now, she will be on her next medical rotation while I will be back in the classroom teaching. And 12 months from now, who knows where either of us will be, but it will be our 11th anniversary and that’s the year of steel.
I didn’t know Angela’s flight number, nor which country her flight to Johannesburg originated from. Nonetheless, I sent a taxi driver to collect her, giving made up flight details, and she was miraculously found and brought to the guesthouse where I was waiting for her.
I didn’t give her much time to settle or recover from the travel before I took her to the Apartheid Museum. It was a pretty intense introduction to the country. The exhibits were dense and we spent two hours moving in chronological order before reaching 1948, the year apartheid actually began. The museum was incredibly powerful and solidified some of my prior knowledge about this part of South African history. In our fourth hour at the museum my capacity to take in any more information diminished and I saw a poster for the Women’s Movement Peace Party and misread it as Women’s Movement Dance Party. We took this as a cue to leave and we stopped at the gift shop on the way out and saw it was selling t-shirts reading “Whites Only” or “Blacks Only,” modeled after signs that were hung in restaurants, public toilets, etc during apartheid, much like one would have seen in the American south during segregation. I checked with Ang to make sure I was not misreading the t-shirts but she confirmed what I saw. I can’t imagine what would possess anybody to buy or wear a t-shirt emblazoned with such a statement.
The taxi driver, Simon, who picked us up from the museum said he’d never been inside the building. He doesn’t feel he needs to see what is there because he lived through it. Simon said he would like to bring his daughters though, when they are older. I asked him how old they are, expecting him to say something like four and six, but he said they are fifteen and nineteen.
Simon brought us to a nearby mall that I chose as our next destination because of the great flea market on the roof, selling everything from the usual flea market junk to paintings, African crafts, baked goods, fancy soap, novelty light switch covers, etc. Ang and I bought many grams of olives, dry seasoned rice to take camping, and matching paintings. We bought soup and pastries for dinner and took it back to the guesthouse and ate on the bed with the electric blanket turned up all the way.
The next morning we headed to Nelspruit on a bus that televised a public service announcement from Jesus. It was in Nelspruit that I discovered I had no way of taking more cash out of the ATM as I was using a new card and forgot to memorize or write down and bring along with me, the pin number. On top of this unhappy fact, the likelihood of us reaching Kruger National Park the next day via public transportation was seeming less and less likely. Luckily we met two Israeli brothers who had rented a car and were heading to the same camp site. They offered to drive us there and drove us around the park the next day.
The national park is about the size of New Jersey and the day we arrived we drove 200 kilometers looking out for animals. We saw a couple of zebra, a few giraffes and elephants, and a baby hyena that moved like a bobbing head doll. But as one of the Israelis said, “you see a lot of shit but you don’t see shit” (trans.: “There sure is a lot of poop here but where are all of the animals who created it?”) They were pretty disappointed we didn’t see any of the big cats and said, “We’re not leaving till we see lions and tigers.” I don’t know if this was an English vocab mix-up or if they truly thought that tigers live in the African bush. I didn’t want to be the one to correct or deliver disappointing news so I just sort of nodded, “yup, tigers.” Maybe they were joking. We did see a lot of impala though. At night trying to fall asleep in the tent Ang said, “I see impalas when I close my eyes.” I felt badly that Ang didn’t get to see more animals but as she said, “Looking and not finding is part of it too. If I wanted to be guaranteed seeing a lion, I would go to the zoo.”
After pitching our tent, we went to check out the kitchen. The facilities did not have the promised pots, which made peanut butter sandwiches the only thing we were likely to eat for the next three days. Then we realized, the kitchen also lacked the promised cupboards for storing food, and the walls, which didn’t even close all the way around the building, were plastered with monkey warnings. We went out in search of people with a car, which was not difficult as we are apparently the only people who thought it would be great to enter the park without our own car. We walked up to a nearby caravan, and Ang, using her most friendly voice (which somehow lent itself to using the word "y’all") got some middle age people who thought we were pretty unintelligent to store our peanutbutter and bread.
The following day at Kruger, we decided it would be prudent to figure out how we were getting out of the park. For one thing, there were several kilometers from the rest camp to the nearest park entrance that can only be traveled by private vehicle. Then we needed to get from the gate to the downtown area on a route that public transportation didn’t travel. Once we got there, which was starting to seem an unlikely prospect, we could take a minibus taxi to the nearest city and from there we already had bus tickets back to Johannesburg. We had heard that the manager named Albert had a friend named Lucky who could get us as far as we needed to go. Only Albert was nowhere to be found. The receptionists started to giggle when they saw us approaching for our hourly inquiries and Albert apparently has a lot of “meetings.” We knew he existed because his photo was framed on the wall in reception but looking for a tall dark man in camouflage in a sea of tall dark men in camouflage was like a Where’s Waldo book. After several hours of alternating trying to spot African wildlife and trying to spot Albert, we were called into his office. He sat us down, spread open his hands and shrugged. “Shit,” I thought. But he surprised both of us by offering to drive us himself.
Thus, the next morning, Ang was on her first minibus taxi marveling at the fact people brought chickens on board while I was equally surprised by the tiny woman balancing a huge computer tower in lap. Animals I’ve seen, but the PC surprised me. Everything went smoothly and we were back in Johannesburg in time for an early dinner in front of a glowing fireplace.
From there we headed back to Lesotho where we stayed in Malealea, a community nestled in a beautiful section of the Drakensburg Mountains. I was relieved when Ang said she had no interest in pony trekking, and we spent the day hiking around waterfalls and rock paintings. Ang was so enchanted that she decided to stay on an extra day, while I had to finally go back to work. Perhaps one of my favorite moments of the trip was Ang’s visit was coming home from work that day and having someone I love already there waiting, instead of a dark empty house.
We spent the rest of the week in Maseru being very domestic, sweeping, cooking dinner, baking, hanging laundry on the lines. Some days I took her to tour my life in Lesotho. She came to school, visited the orphanage, and met my friends, including a dinner out, en route to which, our taxi driver ran out of petrol in the middle of the intersection while running a red light. I sent her out on a private tour of local rock art and to a pediatric AIDS clinic to shadow a young, American doctor. In the evenings, we sat in front of the space heater, eating on the floor. On days we went separate ways, we shared what happened since breakfast. Actually, we did that even on days we spent together and it was amazing to hear her perspectives and to remember the things that used to challenge and surprise and amuse me when I first arrived and everything was new and fresh.
The shuttle picked her up from my house almost 24 hours ago, but she was flying out of an airport several hours away and she left several more hours early in case of traffic. So right now, as I sit on my floor typing, warming myself in front of the heater with my mittens stretched over my frozen feet, she is somewhere over the Atlantic headed toward summer in New York. In two days, she will be on an ob/gyn rotation in a city hospital while I will be on spending my school vacation picking herbs on a farm. And in two months from now, she will be on her next medical rotation while I will be back in the classroom teaching. And 12 months from now, who knows where either of us will be, but it will be our 11th anniversary and that’s the year of steel.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Chicken Pox and Chocolate Truffle Cake
(May 23rd)
I just got home from a leisurely lunch over the South African border with a fellow teacher. Born 10 days apart, she is my partner in crime at the international school. Back in August, we were the two new American teachers moving into neighboring classrooms. Together, we pondered the unwarranted hostility of the school nurse (who eventually grew on us), the challenges of working with assistant teachers, the purpose of our powerless school board, and who the culprits in our collective classrooms are who would pee everywhere in our shared bathrooms except the toilets. Together, we navigated together through the Office of Labor for our work permits, tried yoga (followed by Indian food to be festive) for the first time and had a slumber party while watching Barack Obama get elected.
We ate slowly and talked incessantly for three hours in the garden over salads with gooseberries, and little quiches, the smell of her cappuccinos reminding me of convenience and home. After discussing with the waitress our various dessert options (wait, there are two choices with the word “truffle” in it? . . . which one is bigger?) we each got a massive slice of chocolate truffle layer cake topped with fresh raspberries and little pitchers of raspberry sauce on the side. Neither of us believes in mixing fruit with chocolate so we made divisions on our plates, cake to one side, produce to the other. It was like having two desserts.
Sitting there, my morning seemed years rather than hours away, spent in the dingy nursery of the orphanage where I volunteer. Chicken pox is going around, a disease I didn’t even know existed in Lesotho until this week. As usual, I started the morning by bathing the children one by one in a couple inches of warm water in a plastic basin. I wipe their noses with their dirty clothes to keep the mucus out of the water, and for the children in diapers there are always dirty bottoms to clean as the caregivers won’t change them in the mornings before their baths. Then I soap them up and scrub away at the crust around their eyes, ears and noses, a task that takes an increasing amount of time the colder it gets. Those without chicken pox got their usual smear of lotion before being dressed. Then the sick ones got their spots attended to, prescription antibiotic applied with rubber gloves for the HIV positive ones and calamine lotion with tissue for the others. None of the children, even those with compromised immune systems due to HIV/AIDS have particularly bad cases, still, I didn’t realize how much poxy children can turn my stomach. They weren’t even scratching very much, but somehow my skin just crawled for them.
I tried not to think of this in the café as the word “chicken” popped up again and again on the menu. I think at some point, a morning spent with sick, dirty and parentless babies followed by a luxurious meal would have left me feeling guilty or at least have a certain sense of disconnect. I think (and hope) it is not my compassion that is decreasing, but that my expectations have shifted to encompass such wide disparity in such narrow geography.
Even within the orphanage itself, my experiences and observations also gather along opposing poles. Whether it’s children stealing food from one another one minute and sharing the next, or my own conflicted feelings at the arrival of a new baby (joy at one more tiny creature to love, sadness at the probable circumstances that brought the baby, and if the baby was brought by a parent or family member for a “better life”, uncertainty about whether the orphanage can and will live up to that promise). On the rare occasion when a child leaves, collected by some family member or another, I know children are better off with families than in institutions, but I hate to see them go. My favorite caretaker in the baby’s room is having her last day tomorrow, leaving to do a correspondence course in English in the hopes that she will eventually attend bible college in South Africa. I feel the same way about her departure as I did about the round-faced and dimpled three-year old who went to live with her grandmother. Meanwhile, the cynic in me thinks another preacher is the last thing this country needs. And I wonder, through my nascent understanding of what this woman believes it means to be a good Christian, how she can get any closer to doing “God’s work” than the work she is doing at the orphanage.
My own view of the orphanage, if it is doing all that it can under the circumstances, and if the children really are better off there than they were wherever they came from or wherever else they could go, changes daily if not hourly. A few weeks ago, a 13 year-old girl, who ran away to the orphanage after living with an abusive uncle, was taken to the hospital with a sexually transmitted infection she contracted from being raped by a relative of the pastor who runs the orphanage. The opinion of the hospital social worker was, “Some girls like that and get paid for it.” Girls and young women at the orphanage get kicked out if they become pregnant although pregnant, unwed teens on the street are routinely taken in. Am I happy that Makhatatso did not get pregnant on top of everything else that has happened in her short life, or do I wish that she had so she could get away from this place?
Situations like that make me glad that I work mainly with the babies. Even though it is usually with the youngest children that the prolonged illnesses and the rare funerals occur, it is also the age where life and growth is most evident and there are first steps to celebrate and new teeth pushing up through soft gums to marvel at. Even among the youngest age group, “elders” emerge, and I once witnessed a four year old bite off a huge chunk of his apple and press it into the hand of a one year old and coo at her to eat. She only has a few teeth and doesn’t eat anything much harder than bread. Still, I let her clutch and suck as she was obviously delighted with the apple and I didn’t want to discourage a rare moment of sharing. I was worried she might choke so I kept her close to me, and it was probably this proximity that allowed her, once she had managed to bite off a piece of apple, take it out of her own mouth and put it in mine.
Most days I’m there, I witness fascinating and often disturbing encounters between children and food. Usually, there is no sharing, and when there is, it is calculating and based on alliances. One five year old will knock down a two year old who is eating while a second five year old will grab a handful of food from the two year olds bowl. The two five year olds run to the corner and gobble the food between them while the two year old wails and I try to wrestle it from them to return to the “rightful eater” before it is all gone. Usually everyone ends up in tears. There’s the stealing and there’s also hoarding. I watched preschoolers savor some candy bars recently, they drooled on and licked the wrappers for about an hour while the chocolate slowly melted. I’ve seen one child eat another’s vomit on more than one occasion. The same goes for children drinking out of the toilet. I don’t know how much of this behavior is physical hunger and thirst, and how much it is the body telling them they are malnourished or dehydrated (some children are malnourished at the orphanage but not most) and how much is it the association of food and drink with comfort and security. The children are simply never satisfied. There isn’t much variety in the food although it could be much worse (a standard meal is papa, a maize meal staple with a thin meat gravy and vegetables). The meals are also not served with any kind of routine. This is partly due to the Basotho concept of time (or lack of it), the countless mishaps that can happen when one person is preparing food for 130 people, and the general disregard for the importance of routines for children. And if a child has special dietary needs, he will sooner starve than be accommodated. An HIV positive boy arrived at the orphanage moderately malnourished and after three months is now severely malnourished. The nurse tried to fatten him up on Plumpy Nut, although he couldn’t stomach it and no one with any power to do so at the orphanage would make sure he had the amount of protein (more beans, more eggs, less maize meal) the doctor ordered. Even when the nurse buys him powdered protein drinks herself, the caretakers rarely see that he actually consumes it three times a day.
One of the hardest things at the orphanage for me is to have to confront my own incompetence in caring for a roomful of small, Basotho children. Having to learn how to change (cloth) diapers from a nine year old was a very humbling experience. I dress the children in the wrong clothes, and get their hands slapped by allowing them to put their filthy fingers in my hair. The children aren’t any safer or better nourished or less sick since I have started volunteering. There are many things I would like to do, like bring Thabo, the malnourished boy, protein-rich food from home, that would never be allowed, nor is it a sustainable solution. So in between the incompetence and the powerlessness, I often wonder what good I can do for a place that has taught me so much about this country and culture, about children and about how much my own heart can stretch and my own eyes and mind can open.
Well, the babies, smile when they see me and they put out their lips for me to kiss. With all their poxy, snotty faces it’s getting harder and harder to find a clean spot to kiss, but I kiss them anyway. The slang word for kiss is one of the first words I learned in Sesotho, followed soon after by the word for “again.” Kiss is “mba” (mmmm-ba) because of the sound you make when you do it. When I think about what value the work I’m doing at the orphanage really has, I think about things like that. I think about the children involuntarily absorbing moments of comfort and love and storing them in their bodies and minds. And I think these things stay with children permanently, regardless of whether they consciously remember the actual moments, and that experiences of trauma and neglect can outweigh these moments but not take them away.
Overall, what I do at the orphanage varies with no predictable pattern. Some days, a caretaker reprimands me for “spoiling” one child or another, and other days when I walk in, one will nod to a crib saying, “you like this one,” an invitation for me to spoil away. Some days I rock babies for hours next to the propane heater and some days I scrub preschool uniforms in buckets until my knuckles bleed. Some days I stay doing one thing or another until dusk, then speed walk through the questionable part of town with my phone and money hidden in my bra, home to eat standing up and exhausted. Other days I leave while the sun is still shining, drive over the border and eat chocolate truffle cake.
I just got home from a leisurely lunch over the South African border with a fellow teacher. Born 10 days apart, she is my partner in crime at the international school. Back in August, we were the two new American teachers moving into neighboring classrooms. Together, we pondered the unwarranted hostility of the school nurse (who eventually grew on us), the challenges of working with assistant teachers, the purpose of our powerless school board, and who the culprits in our collective classrooms are who would pee everywhere in our shared bathrooms except the toilets. Together, we navigated together through the Office of Labor for our work permits, tried yoga (followed by Indian food to be festive) for the first time and had a slumber party while watching Barack Obama get elected.
We ate slowly and talked incessantly for three hours in the garden over salads with gooseberries, and little quiches, the smell of her cappuccinos reminding me of convenience and home. After discussing with the waitress our various dessert options (wait, there are two choices with the word “truffle” in it? . . . which one is bigger?) we each got a massive slice of chocolate truffle layer cake topped with fresh raspberries and little pitchers of raspberry sauce on the side. Neither of us believes in mixing fruit with chocolate so we made divisions on our plates, cake to one side, produce to the other. It was like having two desserts.
Sitting there, my morning seemed years rather than hours away, spent in the dingy nursery of the orphanage where I volunteer. Chicken pox is going around, a disease I didn’t even know existed in Lesotho until this week. As usual, I started the morning by bathing the children one by one in a couple inches of warm water in a plastic basin. I wipe their noses with their dirty clothes to keep the mucus out of the water, and for the children in diapers there are always dirty bottoms to clean as the caregivers won’t change them in the mornings before their baths. Then I soap them up and scrub away at the crust around their eyes, ears and noses, a task that takes an increasing amount of time the colder it gets. Those without chicken pox got their usual smear of lotion before being dressed. Then the sick ones got their spots attended to, prescription antibiotic applied with rubber gloves for the HIV positive ones and calamine lotion with tissue for the others. None of the children, even those with compromised immune systems due to HIV/AIDS have particularly bad cases, still, I didn’t realize how much poxy children can turn my stomach. They weren’t even scratching very much, but somehow my skin just crawled for them.
I tried not to think of this in the café as the word “chicken” popped up again and again on the menu. I think at some point, a morning spent with sick, dirty and parentless babies followed by a luxurious meal would have left me feeling guilty or at least have a certain sense of disconnect. I think (and hope) it is not my compassion that is decreasing, but that my expectations have shifted to encompass such wide disparity in such narrow geography.
Even within the orphanage itself, my experiences and observations also gather along opposing poles. Whether it’s children stealing food from one another one minute and sharing the next, or my own conflicted feelings at the arrival of a new baby (joy at one more tiny creature to love, sadness at the probable circumstances that brought the baby, and if the baby was brought by a parent or family member for a “better life”, uncertainty about whether the orphanage can and will live up to that promise). On the rare occasion when a child leaves, collected by some family member or another, I know children are better off with families than in institutions, but I hate to see them go. My favorite caretaker in the baby’s room is having her last day tomorrow, leaving to do a correspondence course in English in the hopes that she will eventually attend bible college in South Africa. I feel the same way about her departure as I did about the round-faced and dimpled three-year old who went to live with her grandmother. Meanwhile, the cynic in me thinks another preacher is the last thing this country needs. And I wonder, through my nascent understanding of what this woman believes it means to be a good Christian, how she can get any closer to doing “God’s work” than the work she is doing at the orphanage.
My own view of the orphanage, if it is doing all that it can under the circumstances, and if the children really are better off there than they were wherever they came from or wherever else they could go, changes daily if not hourly. A few weeks ago, a 13 year-old girl, who ran away to the orphanage after living with an abusive uncle, was taken to the hospital with a sexually transmitted infection she contracted from being raped by a relative of the pastor who runs the orphanage. The opinion of the hospital social worker was, “Some girls like that and get paid for it.” Girls and young women at the orphanage get kicked out if they become pregnant although pregnant, unwed teens on the street are routinely taken in. Am I happy that Makhatatso did not get pregnant on top of everything else that has happened in her short life, or do I wish that she had so she could get away from this place?
Situations like that make me glad that I work mainly with the babies. Even though it is usually with the youngest children that the prolonged illnesses and the rare funerals occur, it is also the age where life and growth is most evident and there are first steps to celebrate and new teeth pushing up through soft gums to marvel at. Even among the youngest age group, “elders” emerge, and I once witnessed a four year old bite off a huge chunk of his apple and press it into the hand of a one year old and coo at her to eat. She only has a few teeth and doesn’t eat anything much harder than bread. Still, I let her clutch and suck as she was obviously delighted with the apple and I didn’t want to discourage a rare moment of sharing. I was worried she might choke so I kept her close to me, and it was probably this proximity that allowed her, once she had managed to bite off a piece of apple, take it out of her own mouth and put it in mine.
Most days I’m there, I witness fascinating and often disturbing encounters between children and food. Usually, there is no sharing, and when there is, it is calculating and based on alliances. One five year old will knock down a two year old who is eating while a second five year old will grab a handful of food from the two year olds bowl. The two five year olds run to the corner and gobble the food between them while the two year old wails and I try to wrestle it from them to return to the “rightful eater” before it is all gone. Usually everyone ends up in tears. There’s the stealing and there’s also hoarding. I watched preschoolers savor some candy bars recently, they drooled on and licked the wrappers for about an hour while the chocolate slowly melted. I’ve seen one child eat another’s vomit on more than one occasion. The same goes for children drinking out of the toilet. I don’t know how much of this behavior is physical hunger and thirst, and how much it is the body telling them they are malnourished or dehydrated (some children are malnourished at the orphanage but not most) and how much is it the association of food and drink with comfort and security. The children are simply never satisfied. There isn’t much variety in the food although it could be much worse (a standard meal is papa, a maize meal staple with a thin meat gravy and vegetables). The meals are also not served with any kind of routine. This is partly due to the Basotho concept of time (or lack of it), the countless mishaps that can happen when one person is preparing food for 130 people, and the general disregard for the importance of routines for children. And if a child has special dietary needs, he will sooner starve than be accommodated. An HIV positive boy arrived at the orphanage moderately malnourished and after three months is now severely malnourished. The nurse tried to fatten him up on Plumpy Nut, although he couldn’t stomach it and no one with any power to do so at the orphanage would make sure he had the amount of protein (more beans, more eggs, less maize meal) the doctor ordered. Even when the nurse buys him powdered protein drinks herself, the caretakers rarely see that he actually consumes it three times a day.
One of the hardest things at the orphanage for me is to have to confront my own incompetence in caring for a roomful of small, Basotho children. Having to learn how to change (cloth) diapers from a nine year old was a very humbling experience. I dress the children in the wrong clothes, and get their hands slapped by allowing them to put their filthy fingers in my hair. The children aren’t any safer or better nourished or less sick since I have started volunteering. There are many things I would like to do, like bring Thabo, the malnourished boy, protein-rich food from home, that would never be allowed, nor is it a sustainable solution. So in between the incompetence and the powerlessness, I often wonder what good I can do for a place that has taught me so much about this country and culture, about children and about how much my own heart can stretch and my own eyes and mind can open.
Well, the babies, smile when they see me and they put out their lips for me to kiss. With all their poxy, snotty faces it’s getting harder and harder to find a clean spot to kiss, but I kiss them anyway. The slang word for kiss is one of the first words I learned in Sesotho, followed soon after by the word for “again.” Kiss is “mba” (mmmm-ba) because of the sound you make when you do it. When I think about what value the work I’m doing at the orphanage really has, I think about things like that. I think about the children involuntarily absorbing moments of comfort and love and storing them in their bodies and minds. And I think these things stay with children permanently, regardless of whether they consciously remember the actual moments, and that experiences of trauma and neglect can outweigh these moments but not take them away.
Overall, what I do at the orphanage varies with no predictable pattern. Some days, a caretaker reprimands me for “spoiling” one child or another, and other days when I walk in, one will nod to a crib saying, “you like this one,” an invitation for me to spoil away. Some days I rock babies for hours next to the propane heater and some days I scrub preschool uniforms in buckets until my knuckles bleed. Some days I stay doing one thing or another until dusk, then speed walk through the questionable part of town with my phone and money hidden in my bra, home to eat standing up and exhausted. Other days I leave while the sun is still shining, drive over the border and eat chocolate truffle cake.
Monday, May 11, 2009
And Sometimes We Lose It
When my neighbor and colleague lost her chap-stick, she predicted her mind would be next. “Is it going to be like your box of tissues?” she asked turning her car into the school driveway. “Is my missing chap-stick going to be the thing that pushes me over the edge?”
At least I’m smart enough to laugh. I laughed then and I am laughing now as I sit here typing outside a shopping mall in Bloemfontein where Mother’s Day is being observed by young men in tuxedos handing out roses to every female who looks old enough to reproduce (a category which I apparently do not fall into) and a woman with a severe, Elvira look about her is serenading diners with the Afrikaans rendition of “Memories.”
A year ago at this time I was finishing my last grad school papers, and recently looking back through some of the writing I did, I have no idea what I was talking about. I can only vaguely recall when research meant more than typing, “play dough recipe” into Google, most things I read these days begin “once upon a time,” and if I happen to pick up a piece of text with no pictures, my eyes begin to glaze over. I graduated from Harvard and all I have to show for it is trigger finger from bending 100 coat hangers into bee’s wings for school play costumes.
Please don’t think I take myself seriously because I went to Harvard. I don’t. I generally avoid letting people here know that fact about me because then they want me to do math in my head and spell things for them. Or we have conversations like this:
New Acquaintance: What did you do before you came here?
Me: I was in school.
New Acquaintance: Where?
Me: Massachussetts
New Acquaintance: Where, though?
Me: Um, sort of near Boston.
New Acquaintance: No, I mean which school?
Me: Harvard
New Acquaintance: And you teach preschool?
Then there was the conversation I had with a middle-aged, Ugandan colleague after watching a screening of a Barack Obama documentary on election night. Commenting on Obama’s Kenyan father attending Harvard University, Norah said, “For an African at that time, he must have been very clever to get to Harvard.” I agreed that it was quite an accomplishment given the odds. She continued, “That is why I am afraid of you.” “Sorry?” “You must be so clever to go to Harvard so I am afraid of you.” By so clever, I don’t know if she was referring to the time I got lost on the way to work and ended up at the Chinese Embassy, or the time I went without electricity at home for 36 hours because I didn’t check the circuit breakers and see they were turned off, or the time I melted a piece of Tupperware to a burner on the school stove. I assured her I possess nothing that she doesn’t except for an expensive piece of paper and ten years worth of student loan payments to prove it.
My school does not take professional development seriously. My school does not take preschool seriously. On good days, (and most days are good), I tackle assignments I give myself and believe in the importance of the work that I do. Then there are less good
days . . .
It may be the fact that the expansion of the early childhood program I proposed sounded great to my boss a month ago, but now he’s rethinking it because if I take that on, who will assistant teach swimming (perhaps somebody who actually knows how to swim would be a start)? Or it may be my stress level has been heightened since my health insurance company shut down without bothering to inform me (at a time when I feel very compelled to see a dentist, an allergist, and after reading the rest of this post, some of you may suggest adding psychiatrist to the list). Or was it the teenage girl that knocked on my door looking for work cleaning and asked to speak to my parents? Or maybe it was the man who sold me electricity, who when I asked what to do with the pin number on my receipt said to me, “you bring it home and ask your husband.” Perhaps it is the fact that my boss is giving me a hard time about taking a few days off in June when I have not taken a single day off all year, that I taught while burning up with tick-bite fever, and when I had a stomach virus, excused myself from art class, regurgitated in an empty classroom and returned to finish the lesson. Perhaps it’s that I live in a place where the most stimulating evening I’ve had recently was spent getting dizzy off a turpentine bath following painting my coffee table. Even Bob, my 57 year-old neighbor and another teacher at the school, who spends most weekends in his classroom and most evenings stretched out in front of his gas heater reading historical fiction or thinking up new spam recipes, tells me I need to get out more.
But it was the tissue box, the empty tissue box that really got to me. I had gone into school on a Saturday, to do a little pedagogical preparation, but mostly to tidy up the classroom. I straightened the blocks on the shelves, mended broken books, scrubbed paintbrushes and all those other little things implied in the job description of preschool teacher that there never seems enough time to do during my prep periods. I put Monday’s schedule on the wall, selected the story I would read, pushed all the chairs into the tables and made sure we were stocked up on paper and cups and tissues. Yes, tissues. Before I went home, I even stood in the doorway smiling at my perfect classroom. I remember the contentment well. On Monday, I arrived at school an hour early (an hour and 15 minutes before the bell rings) as usual. I filled up the water pitchers and turned on the electric space heaters. It gets chillier and chillier every morning. I have started this season’s perpetual winter sniffles. I reach for the tissues. Nothing but the cardboard bottom of the box. It was the missionaries. The goddamn missionaries. The goddamn Louisiana missionaries who pay rent to invade my classroom on Sundays with their obesity and saving and baptismal wading pool and tissue-stealing flock. (And since it’s Mother’s Day, I’m now going to apologize to my mom for writing “goddamn” because I know she doesn’t like it, and also for using “goddamn” and “missionary” together, as she is probably offended on their behalf even though she’s Jewish and they condemn her to hell every Sunday.)
So what did I do next? I threw the empty tissue box at the wall, and stomped around campus for next thirty minutes in a silent temper tantrum. I thought of this as Karen launched in the “i-lost-my-new-chap-stick-get-no-respect-from-the-boss-and-my-students-don’t-do-their-damn-homework” blues. The blues morphed into a rant that nothing ever changes here, and ranting loves company. I reminded her that when I first arrived, I was invited to a “single’s dinner” by an American diplomat. It was him and his wife, Bob, and a short-term intern from a college in DC. We ate soup and played with the cats, and for about two months, I thought we (not including, of course, the diplomat and his wife) were the entire single expatriate population of Lesotho. This was a year ago next month. Other than the fact that I have found quite a few more young foreigners (which isn’t really the reason I moved overseas), I reminded Karen that not much changed. In fact, I had spent the weekend simmering a pot of soup on the stove and scrubbing cat piss out of the spare room carpet. I don’t have a cat, but one’s urine was there none-the-less. “Soup and cats again. I’ve gone full circle.” Then Bob piped up from the back seat, “Full circle means you’ve gone somewhere. That’s not full circle. That’s staying in one place, not moving at all. . . You really need to get out more.” I laughed until I cried, and Karen said, “One day you’re going to think about this and only cry.”
She was right, except I already had cried. At the conclusion of my stolen-tissue foot stamping, I sobbed briefly and gracelessly into a roll of toilet paper, locked in the bathroom with another teacher. My choked out words were something along the lines of “Why did I come here?” My bathroom companion reminded me that we had this exact conversation six months ago, except she was the one crying and I was the one saying it wasn’t that bad. I have since come to the conclusion that living in Lesotho is a little like having a carbon monoxide leak; it slowly and stealthily suffocates you.
My yoga teacher tells me to breathe well, and I think this is good advice. He tends to say it when I am having trouble sitting still (standing still, lying still), which tends to be all the time. Yoga, which I am new to, is difficult for me for this reason. The class takes place in my room at the school and the instructor is the grandfather of one of my students. His wife is often the only other student besides me. She does yoga in her sari, he teaches in khaki pants and a polo shirt stretched over his potbelly. I wear whatever I taught in that day, and am glad there is no spandex involved in the situation. So I sit or stand or lie and fidget in pinstripe pants and a green tie-dye dress while Raj tells me to “breathe well.” He also lets me know that I am pretty bad at yoga. This doesn’t bother me. He says it as if, as a new student, there isn’t anything else I could or should be. I like this advice too.
Then there’s this advice, too, from my brother. “hows about you pick the antelope and ride it to the nearest bus, and take that to the nearest town and get to the nearest phone and call....someone who wants to hear you complain.” I like that also. I have to laugh, right?
At least I’m smart enough to laugh. I laughed then and I am laughing now as I sit here typing outside a shopping mall in Bloemfontein where Mother’s Day is being observed by young men in tuxedos handing out roses to every female who looks old enough to reproduce (a category which I apparently do not fall into) and a woman with a severe, Elvira look about her is serenading diners with the Afrikaans rendition of “Memories.”
A year ago at this time I was finishing my last grad school papers, and recently looking back through some of the writing I did, I have no idea what I was talking about. I can only vaguely recall when research meant more than typing, “play dough recipe” into Google, most things I read these days begin “once upon a time,” and if I happen to pick up a piece of text with no pictures, my eyes begin to glaze over. I graduated from Harvard and all I have to show for it is trigger finger from bending 100 coat hangers into bee’s wings for school play costumes.
Please don’t think I take myself seriously because I went to Harvard. I don’t. I generally avoid letting people here know that fact about me because then they want me to do math in my head and spell things for them. Or we have conversations like this:
New Acquaintance: What did you do before you came here?
Me: I was in school.
New Acquaintance: Where?
Me: Massachussetts
New Acquaintance: Where, though?
Me: Um, sort of near Boston.
New Acquaintance: No, I mean which school?
Me: Harvard
New Acquaintance: And you teach preschool?
Then there was the conversation I had with a middle-aged, Ugandan colleague after watching a screening of a Barack Obama documentary on election night. Commenting on Obama’s Kenyan father attending Harvard University, Norah said, “For an African at that time, he must have been very clever to get to Harvard.” I agreed that it was quite an accomplishment given the odds. She continued, “That is why I am afraid of you.” “Sorry?” “You must be so clever to go to Harvard so I am afraid of you.” By so clever, I don’t know if she was referring to the time I got lost on the way to work and ended up at the Chinese Embassy, or the time I went without electricity at home for 36 hours because I didn’t check the circuit breakers and see they were turned off, or the time I melted a piece of Tupperware to a burner on the school stove. I assured her I possess nothing that she doesn’t except for an expensive piece of paper and ten years worth of student loan payments to prove it.
My school does not take professional development seriously. My school does not take preschool seriously. On good days, (and most days are good), I tackle assignments I give myself and believe in the importance of the work that I do. Then there are less good
days . . .
It may be the fact that the expansion of the early childhood program I proposed sounded great to my boss a month ago, but now he’s rethinking it because if I take that on, who will assistant teach swimming (perhaps somebody who actually knows how to swim would be a start)? Or it may be my stress level has been heightened since my health insurance company shut down without bothering to inform me (at a time when I feel very compelled to see a dentist, an allergist, and after reading the rest of this post, some of you may suggest adding psychiatrist to the list). Or was it the teenage girl that knocked on my door looking for work cleaning and asked to speak to my parents? Or maybe it was the man who sold me electricity, who when I asked what to do with the pin number on my receipt said to me, “you bring it home and ask your husband.” Perhaps it is the fact that my boss is giving me a hard time about taking a few days off in June when I have not taken a single day off all year, that I taught while burning up with tick-bite fever, and when I had a stomach virus, excused myself from art class, regurgitated in an empty classroom and returned to finish the lesson. Perhaps it’s that I live in a place where the most stimulating evening I’ve had recently was spent getting dizzy off a turpentine bath following painting my coffee table. Even Bob, my 57 year-old neighbor and another teacher at the school, who spends most weekends in his classroom and most evenings stretched out in front of his gas heater reading historical fiction or thinking up new spam recipes, tells me I need to get out more.
But it was the tissue box, the empty tissue box that really got to me. I had gone into school on a Saturday, to do a little pedagogical preparation, but mostly to tidy up the classroom. I straightened the blocks on the shelves, mended broken books, scrubbed paintbrushes and all those other little things implied in the job description of preschool teacher that there never seems enough time to do during my prep periods. I put Monday’s schedule on the wall, selected the story I would read, pushed all the chairs into the tables and made sure we were stocked up on paper and cups and tissues. Yes, tissues. Before I went home, I even stood in the doorway smiling at my perfect classroom. I remember the contentment well. On Monday, I arrived at school an hour early (an hour and 15 minutes before the bell rings) as usual. I filled up the water pitchers and turned on the electric space heaters. It gets chillier and chillier every morning. I have started this season’s perpetual winter sniffles. I reach for the tissues. Nothing but the cardboard bottom of the box. It was the missionaries. The goddamn missionaries. The goddamn Louisiana missionaries who pay rent to invade my classroom on Sundays with their obesity and saving and baptismal wading pool and tissue-stealing flock. (And since it’s Mother’s Day, I’m now going to apologize to my mom for writing “goddamn” because I know she doesn’t like it, and also for using “goddamn” and “missionary” together, as she is probably offended on their behalf even though she’s Jewish and they condemn her to hell every Sunday.)
So what did I do next? I threw the empty tissue box at the wall, and stomped around campus for next thirty minutes in a silent temper tantrum. I thought of this as Karen launched in the “i-lost-my-new-chap-stick-get-no-respect-from-the-boss-and-my-students-don’t-do-their-damn-homework” blues. The blues morphed into a rant that nothing ever changes here, and ranting loves company. I reminded her that when I first arrived, I was invited to a “single’s dinner” by an American diplomat. It was him and his wife, Bob, and a short-term intern from a college in DC. We ate soup and played with the cats, and for about two months, I thought we (not including, of course, the diplomat and his wife) were the entire single expatriate population of Lesotho. This was a year ago next month. Other than the fact that I have found quite a few more young foreigners (which isn’t really the reason I moved overseas), I reminded Karen that not much changed. In fact, I had spent the weekend simmering a pot of soup on the stove and scrubbing cat piss out of the spare room carpet. I don’t have a cat, but one’s urine was there none-the-less. “Soup and cats again. I’ve gone full circle.” Then Bob piped up from the back seat, “Full circle means you’ve gone somewhere. That’s not full circle. That’s staying in one place, not moving at all. . . You really need to get out more.” I laughed until I cried, and Karen said, “One day you’re going to think about this and only cry.”
She was right, except I already had cried. At the conclusion of my stolen-tissue foot stamping, I sobbed briefly and gracelessly into a roll of toilet paper, locked in the bathroom with another teacher. My choked out words were something along the lines of “Why did I come here?” My bathroom companion reminded me that we had this exact conversation six months ago, except she was the one crying and I was the one saying it wasn’t that bad. I have since come to the conclusion that living in Lesotho is a little like having a carbon monoxide leak; it slowly and stealthily suffocates you.
My yoga teacher tells me to breathe well, and I think this is good advice. He tends to say it when I am having trouble sitting still (standing still, lying still), which tends to be all the time. Yoga, which I am new to, is difficult for me for this reason. The class takes place in my room at the school and the instructor is the grandfather of one of my students. His wife is often the only other student besides me. She does yoga in her sari, he teaches in khaki pants and a polo shirt stretched over his potbelly. I wear whatever I taught in that day, and am glad there is no spandex involved in the situation. So I sit or stand or lie and fidget in pinstripe pants and a green tie-dye dress while Raj tells me to “breathe well.” He also lets me know that I am pretty bad at yoga. This doesn’t bother me. He says it as if, as a new student, there isn’t anything else I could or should be. I like this advice too.
Then there’s this advice, too, from my brother. “hows about you pick the antelope and ride it to the nearest bus, and take that to the nearest town and get to the nearest phone and call....someone who wants to hear you complain.” I like that also. I have to laugh, right?
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Cape Town
I flew into Cape Town on one of Mango's (a South African budget airline) neon orange planes. In my imagination, the plane had a crew dressed as mangoes and an in-flight meal of mangoes and eventually ended by crashing into the Atlantic Ocean. My fears about flying in an aircraft that is the namesake of a fruit proved, thankfully, to be unfounded and I even got a free pack of gum upon disembarkation.
I spent my first day in Cape Town on a wine tour led by a professor whose second job is playing piano in lounges and third job is apparently this. Besides the two of us, there was an Irish family of four led by a cricket-obsessed matriarch. The drinking age in South Africa is 18, and still, when we arrived at the winery for our first tasting, I was asked if I intended to drink, I believe, their polite way of asking if I am old enough to drink. We visited four wineries, and the tastings were surprisingly unpretentious and they didn’t make us spit. I wished there was somewhere spit out the brandy though; it was vile and turned the gentle alcohol-in-the-morning pulsing behind the eyebrows into a pounding headache which I quelled later with an enormous bowl of pea soup. Brandy should not be in the same sentence at 10 am. Ever. In between wineries, we had time to walk around Franschhoek, a vineyard town. It was there I stumbled upon a locally famous chocolate shop run by two coloured (not to be confused with the outdated American term for African Americans, these South Africans would perhaps be defined in America as bi or multi-racial of African and European descent) chocolatiers who were sponsored to learn the art of chocolate making in Belgium and now run their own very successful business. I sampled their creations in the form of truffles of the amarula, peppermint, coffee and honey and anise varieties.
The following day, which happened to be Easter, I spent in around the Cape of Good Hope. I watched seals frolic from a glass-bottom boat and penguins waddle in the most fantastic way on the beach in Simon’s Town. And I saw one penguin sitting on eggs! I get that’s what they are supposed to do, but I was still surprised somehow. Similarly, when the water splashed over the rails of the glass bottom boat and I tasted salt on my lips, I thought “weird” and then had to remind myself that I was on the ocean. I guess I’ve gotten used to being landlocked.
I was surprised and a little disappointed to find little open on Easter Monday, but I did get the opportunity to laze and sweat in the Long Street Baths. There was only one other person using the sauna, steam bath and plunge pool, and shortly after she left, when I thought I had maybe sweat out a little too much (my hair was dripping and plastered to my face although I hadn’t submerged my head under water), I decided to get out myself before I passed out alone. I showered and fell asleep in the bed provided in my changing stall. Then following the sage advice of the cleaner and various posters, I stumbled to a corner store to rehydrate with orange juice. I walked in slow motion (with the sidewalk seeming to swing up toward my face with every step) to a shopping mall at the waterfront to buy a book to take with me to the Botanical Gardens. After purchasing two books, I was on my way out the door when I was tempted by a movie theatre showing Slumdog Millionaire, and a restaurant with a glass case featuring several varieties of chocolate cake. I never did make it to the gardens but it was a blissful day.
I visited various museums while in Cape Town, and was most enamored with the National Gallery. The last time I was in an art museum, I was performing with a pan-African dance and music ensemble at a fundraiser at the Fogg in Cambridge, MA. The last time I was in a museum to look at art? I have a vague and fuzzy memory of wandering a Karen Walker exhibit with my friend Josh. I remember sitting outside and talking about what we saw and him telling me “good eye,” like a kind-hearted T-ball coach. I can’t really tell you about any of the exhibits I saw in the National Gallery; I was simply satisfied walking through rooms of art to the sound of my echoing footsteps. I also loved the District 6 Museum, a small but powerful museum documenting the black and coloured families who were displaced from the area of Cape Town known as District 6 during apartheid when the neighborhood was designated a whites only area.
I spent one morning on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and others were imprisoned during apartheid. Although the tour guides are all former inmates, I found the experience oddly stark and unemotional, and I couldn’t tell if I found the experience so compelling despite or because of that. Perhaps the moment that I most appreciated was when our guide said, “I didn’t decide to come back to the island and give tours because I want to talk about happened to me here everyday. I came because I needed a job.” Taking a taxi back to the hostel from the ferry, the driver, upon hearing that I live in Lesotho said he would never live there because “there are too many black people there.” That comment juxtaposed against a morning spent on Robben Island left me feeling strange all day and I was already in my room before I realized I was still thinking about how to respond to the driver and hadn’t said anything.
The next day I moved from my hostel to stay with friends. Zoey is in South Africa from NYU law school for a semester of study and an internship and Shingi, who assisted my pre-Soweto Marathon carbo-loading, temporarily relocated from Johannesburg to Cape Town to be with her. Although Zoey and I grew up minutes from each other in New Jersey and both went to NYU, we didn’t meet until we both studied in Ghana, so it seemed particularly fitting to meet up in Africa. She took me to a little specialty foods store to stock up on tofu, nuts and tahini, and a craft store that made me manic with the overwhelming variety of glues. Zoey made me stir fry and pancakes and introduced me to bunny chow, a South African specialty (from Durban in particular) that consists of a hollowed loaf of bread filled with curry. We bought some around the corner from her house, and ate it outside along with fancy chocolate leftover from Easter. Cheap curry followed by expensive chocolate- I love eating with Zoey! Mostly, I read on Zoey’s couch while she did schoolwork, or went through my Sesotho flashcards while Shingi studied his Zulu beside me and we compared languages. We went out one night to a movie theatre. Ok, not just any movie theatre, the Labia Movie Theatre, and the unintentional crude comments that emerged as we planned our outing to the Labia were far more entertaining than the movie itself, as was the fact that wine was on sale at the concession stand and the ticket-takers thought nothing of the fact that we brought a huge chocolate bunny with us.
My last night in Cape Town, the three of us went to see a performance of Cinderella by the Cape Town City ballet at my reqeust. Given a variety of dance performance options, I normally wouldn’t choose a ballet, especially a classical ballet, especially Cinderella. But, there weren’t choices, and like art museums, a dance performance is something I haven’t experienced in awhile. The sets were beautiful as were the costumes, and the diversity of the cast and the fact that the women weren’t emaciated was very refreshing. But the dancing was awful. The women wobbled in their pointe shoes, and I held my breath on every lift waiting for the men to drop their partners. By the first pas de deux, I was telepathically and profusely apologizing to my companions. At intermission, Zoey and I exchanged a look of mutual disappointment, while Shingi tried to keep an open mind about his first ballet experience and commented on the strength of the women’s toes, the prominence of the male genitalia in tights and wondered whether or not the ballerina playing “Winter,” was actually a man. I was wondering the same thing myself but, sadly, we never found out because the theatre charged for programs, a fact we found more ridiculous than the dance-off between the ugly stepsisters.
The morning my flight took off, I had a great run in a downpour. Running at sea level was a treat after all these months in the mountains. I ran once or twice very day I was in Cape Town, and I had to move my legs so fast to get out of breath I thought I was going to trip over my own feet. All week, despite enjoying the clear skies, I thought the only thing that would make for a more perfect run was a mile or two of teeming rain. Well, I got it, and one moment, I was wringing out my sopping wet t-shirt so I could pack it and the next I was waiting in line to get stamped at the border with my neighbor commiserating that school holidays are never, ever long enough.
I spent my first day in Cape Town on a wine tour led by a professor whose second job is playing piano in lounges and third job is apparently this. Besides the two of us, there was an Irish family of four led by a cricket-obsessed matriarch. The drinking age in South Africa is 18, and still, when we arrived at the winery for our first tasting, I was asked if I intended to drink, I believe, their polite way of asking if I am old enough to drink. We visited four wineries, and the tastings were surprisingly unpretentious and they didn’t make us spit. I wished there was somewhere spit out the brandy though; it was vile and turned the gentle alcohol-in-the-morning pulsing behind the eyebrows into a pounding headache which I quelled later with an enormous bowl of pea soup. Brandy should not be in the same sentence at 10 am. Ever. In between wineries, we had time to walk around Franschhoek, a vineyard town. It was there I stumbled upon a locally famous chocolate shop run by two coloured (not to be confused with the outdated American term for African Americans, these South Africans would perhaps be defined in America as bi or multi-racial of African and European descent) chocolatiers who were sponsored to learn the art of chocolate making in Belgium and now run their own very successful business. I sampled their creations in the form of truffles of the amarula, peppermint, coffee and honey and anise varieties.
The following day, which happened to be Easter, I spent in around the Cape of Good Hope. I watched seals frolic from a glass-bottom boat and penguins waddle in the most fantastic way on the beach in Simon’s Town. And I saw one penguin sitting on eggs! I get that’s what they are supposed to do, but I was still surprised somehow. Similarly, when the water splashed over the rails of the glass bottom boat and I tasted salt on my lips, I thought “weird” and then had to remind myself that I was on the ocean. I guess I’ve gotten used to being landlocked.
I was surprised and a little disappointed to find little open on Easter Monday, but I did get the opportunity to laze and sweat in the Long Street Baths. There was only one other person using the sauna, steam bath and plunge pool, and shortly after she left, when I thought I had maybe sweat out a little too much (my hair was dripping and plastered to my face although I hadn’t submerged my head under water), I decided to get out myself before I passed out alone. I showered and fell asleep in the bed provided in my changing stall. Then following the sage advice of the cleaner and various posters, I stumbled to a corner store to rehydrate with orange juice. I walked in slow motion (with the sidewalk seeming to swing up toward my face with every step) to a shopping mall at the waterfront to buy a book to take with me to the Botanical Gardens. After purchasing two books, I was on my way out the door when I was tempted by a movie theatre showing Slumdog Millionaire, and a restaurant with a glass case featuring several varieties of chocolate cake. I never did make it to the gardens but it was a blissful day.
I visited various museums while in Cape Town, and was most enamored with the National Gallery. The last time I was in an art museum, I was performing with a pan-African dance and music ensemble at a fundraiser at the Fogg in Cambridge, MA. The last time I was in a museum to look at art? I have a vague and fuzzy memory of wandering a Karen Walker exhibit with my friend Josh. I remember sitting outside and talking about what we saw and him telling me “good eye,” like a kind-hearted T-ball coach. I can’t really tell you about any of the exhibits I saw in the National Gallery; I was simply satisfied walking through rooms of art to the sound of my echoing footsteps. I also loved the District 6 Museum, a small but powerful museum documenting the black and coloured families who were displaced from the area of Cape Town known as District 6 during apartheid when the neighborhood was designated a whites only area.
I spent one morning on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and others were imprisoned during apartheid. Although the tour guides are all former inmates, I found the experience oddly stark and unemotional, and I couldn’t tell if I found the experience so compelling despite or because of that. Perhaps the moment that I most appreciated was when our guide said, “I didn’t decide to come back to the island and give tours because I want to talk about happened to me here everyday. I came because I needed a job.” Taking a taxi back to the hostel from the ferry, the driver, upon hearing that I live in Lesotho said he would never live there because “there are too many black people there.” That comment juxtaposed against a morning spent on Robben Island left me feeling strange all day and I was already in my room before I realized I was still thinking about how to respond to the driver and hadn’t said anything.
The next day I moved from my hostel to stay with friends. Zoey is in South Africa from NYU law school for a semester of study and an internship and Shingi, who assisted my pre-Soweto Marathon carbo-loading, temporarily relocated from Johannesburg to Cape Town to be with her. Although Zoey and I grew up minutes from each other in New Jersey and both went to NYU, we didn’t meet until we both studied in Ghana, so it seemed particularly fitting to meet up in Africa. She took me to a little specialty foods store to stock up on tofu, nuts and tahini, and a craft store that made me manic with the overwhelming variety of glues. Zoey made me stir fry and pancakes and introduced me to bunny chow, a South African specialty (from Durban in particular) that consists of a hollowed loaf of bread filled with curry. We bought some around the corner from her house, and ate it outside along with fancy chocolate leftover from Easter. Cheap curry followed by expensive chocolate- I love eating with Zoey! Mostly, I read on Zoey’s couch while she did schoolwork, or went through my Sesotho flashcards while Shingi studied his Zulu beside me and we compared languages. We went out one night to a movie theatre. Ok, not just any movie theatre, the Labia Movie Theatre, and the unintentional crude comments that emerged as we planned our outing to the Labia were far more entertaining than the movie itself, as was the fact that wine was on sale at the concession stand and the ticket-takers thought nothing of the fact that we brought a huge chocolate bunny with us.
My last night in Cape Town, the three of us went to see a performance of Cinderella by the Cape Town City ballet at my reqeust. Given a variety of dance performance options, I normally wouldn’t choose a ballet, especially a classical ballet, especially Cinderella. But, there weren’t choices, and like art museums, a dance performance is something I haven’t experienced in awhile. The sets were beautiful as were the costumes, and the diversity of the cast and the fact that the women weren’t emaciated was very refreshing. But the dancing was awful. The women wobbled in their pointe shoes, and I held my breath on every lift waiting for the men to drop their partners. By the first pas de deux, I was telepathically and profusely apologizing to my companions. At intermission, Zoey and I exchanged a look of mutual disappointment, while Shingi tried to keep an open mind about his first ballet experience and commented on the strength of the women’s toes, the prominence of the male genitalia in tights and wondered whether or not the ballerina playing “Winter,” was actually a man. I was wondering the same thing myself but, sadly, we never found out because the theatre charged for programs, a fact we found more ridiculous than the dance-off between the ugly stepsisters.
The morning my flight took off, I had a great run in a downpour. Running at sea level was a treat after all these months in the mountains. I ran once or twice very day I was in Cape Town, and I had to move my legs so fast to get out of breath I thought I was going to trip over my own feet. All week, despite enjoying the clear skies, I thought the only thing that would make for a more perfect run was a mile or two of teeming rain. Well, I got it, and one moment, I was wringing out my sopping wet t-shirt so I could pack it and the next I was waiting in line to get stamped at the border with my neighbor commiserating that school holidays are never, ever long enough.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Nursery University. . .
I recently heard about a documentary entitled Nursery University about the crazy and competitive process of enrolling a child in preschool in New York City, an ordeal exacerbated by the post- 9/11 baby boom.
When I first heard of the premise of the film, I spent a good hour trying to download a trailer of it, certain that I would see a parent or school I knew from my time living in New York City and working in two preschools there. Sure enough, I saw two shots of the first teacher I worked for. Also named Sarah, she was a burnt-out and flighty hippie who filled my closet with patchwork skirts and guazy blouses that no longer fit her. When I joined her class, she became Big Sarah and I became Little Sara and she was a wonderful person to have as a mentor.
I don't know if I would have found the trailer so amusing if I was not thousands of miles away from any place where this situation could possibly exist, but I laughed with tears running down my cheeks. And thankful to be here where the pressure and anxiety in this field is not nearly so high.
Check it out the website, go see the movie for me, and keep your eyes and ears open for the DVD.
www.nurseryuniversitythemovie.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aESkMeVksvs
When I first heard of the premise of the film, I spent a good hour trying to download a trailer of it, certain that I would see a parent or school I knew from my time living in New York City and working in two preschools there. Sure enough, I saw two shots of the first teacher I worked for. Also named Sarah, she was a burnt-out and flighty hippie who filled my closet with patchwork skirts and guazy blouses that no longer fit her. When I joined her class, she became Big Sarah and I became Little Sara and she was a wonderful person to have as a mentor.
I don't know if I would have found the trailer so amusing if I was not thousands of miles away from any place where this situation could possibly exist, but I laughed with tears running down my cheeks. And thankful to be here where the pressure and anxiety in this field is not nearly so high.
Check it out the website, go see the movie for me, and keep your eyes and ears open for the DVD.
www.nurseryuniversitythemovie.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aESkMeVksvs
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