Back to school, back to school, I'm going back to school...

I am done my first day of school! It was a good day. I was introduced this morning to a nice ovation, and felt very welcome. From everything I've been told, this was one of the least disorganized first days of any school in Lesotho. What I mean is, we actually had classes. We took attendance. Lunch was served. I gave homework, sort of. At the morning assembly, our Vice Principal announced that "Unlike other schools, who will not begin teaching for the first few weeks of school, we are going to start teaching today. So tell your friends, we are starting to teach today."

But, in saying this was not that disorganized for Lesotho, I am only saying so much. For the first few weeks of classes, while our actual school is still being built, we are a "combined school," meaning we are borrowing a few classrooms from the nearby primary school. As a result we have to condense a lot. The different sections of Form A and B (aka grade 8 and 9) are combined into a single section, and Form D (grade 11) is just not coming to school at all for a few weeks.

From a personal perspective, the bad news is that I had a class of 60 Form A's today (I'm told this will be more like 100 once they all show up), in a room that would be better suited to hold 30. The good news is that instead of teaching 26 credits per week, right now I am only teaching 13. 'Tis a great way to ease in.

I wasn't too nervous as I entered my math class at around 9:30 this morning. I planned to lay down some ground rules, encourage them to participate in class, encourage them to tell me when I am speaking too fast, and then get through some pretty basic material. The class went fine, I suppose, but far from perfect. They were exceedingly shy; this is a problem throughout Lesotho classrooms, and exacerbated by this being their first day of secondary school. And, they indeed had a lot of trouble understanding me at times. I still need to work on speaking more slowly, clearly, and British-like. Getting an answer to a question was often like pulling teeth, but by the end of class, we had accomplished a decent amount.

In my science class this afternoon, I taught the same kids, and did something I considered very daring. I went against the customs of the school, of the entire country even, and told the students explicitly, "I dislike corporal punishment, and I am not going to hit you." Now, the teachers at school realize I'm not down with child beating, and despite some light prodding ("Come on, you know you're going to hit them, wait till you see Mare do it, you'll want to do it!"), they have no choice but to respect my stance. Still, there's a difference between us teachers knowing I'll never do it, but still being able to hold it over the kids as a threat, and the kids knowing I won't do it. I've sensed in the past, though, that part of students' reluctance to speak in class is for fear of punishment for wrong answers, and I want more than anything for my students to participate, to keep their minds active, and to think. So, in the interest of learning, I showed my cards.

I expected the kids to be really excited and relieved to hear the good news. But, sadly, they just stared at me blankly.

So, what went wrong?
(a) They're so overwhelmed by being in secondary school that they just were soaking it all in.
(b) I completely misread the situation.
(c) I just said the whole thing too fast and they heard gibberish.
(d) All of the above.

Ha ke tsebe. Who knows.  In any case, the rest of the class went fine, but apparently 8th grade science in Lesotho is far less interesting than say, college physiology in the states. I taught them what a thermometer is.

I waited for science class to end, and when no teacher came at the start of the next period, I was confused. 10 minutes after class was supposed to be over, I walked out, went to the teachers' room, and asked if anyone was supposed to be teaching. No one had any idea, but upon consulting the master schedule, one teacher smirked, stood up, grabbed some chalk and hurried over to the class. I laughed. Though there is clearly room to improve efficiency, I love the laid back culture here. That said, I suspect we'll run a relatively tight ship at our school, which would be great for the kids.

My coworkers are all very nice, and the lunch the school served today (rice and some kind of gravy made of pasta and carrots and potatoes) was solid. Teachers get to eat on glass plates with real silverware. The students bring their own bowls to receive their lunch. Bowls range from actual bowls, to half-melted old plates, to cut-in-half soda bottles, to old plastic bags. For utensils, it's usually just your hand, but I did occasionally see a plastic spoon, and one girl used her ruler (watching her eat rice with gravy with a ruler out of an old plastic bag was kinda sad).

The only homework I assigned was to write down one question you have about anything, and one thing you want to accomplish this year. My hope is that they'll all have questions for me that they otherwise would be too timid to ask. During practice teaching, this was pretty effective, but those were all pretty serious students, so we'll see.

Today I taught two 80-minute periods, and I had lots of down time. Tomorrow I only teach 2 40-minute periods, so, I'll bring a book to read. Despite some challenges, so far, so good.

Idle Wanderings...

(written at various times over the past few days)

- I love being shut in my room when its pouring rain outside. This is the only time it feels cool in my room, and the tin roof makes it seem 10x more intense than it actually is. It's extremely soothing somehow - despite some really heavy rains so far, it has yet to cross over into irritating. Granted, I have not yet had to pee during a rainstorm, I guess it's only a matter of time. My latrine is a good 30 second walk from my door, and Peace Corps staff misplaced my pee bucket during moving. So my opinion on the rain might change when that day comes. I should probably just invest in a new pee bucket.

- My African peanut butter consumption rate (PBCR) has hovered around +/- 10% of my American PBCR. On a related note, a warm shout out to my sweet sweet mother for mailing me Reese's.

- There is a legend here that Michael Jackson is from Leribe, a district in the north of Lesotho. There is another legend that Barack Obama is from another district called Mafeteng. No explanation where these legends came from. 

- This week has been quite boring, but I guess I could call it formative boredom. I  was forced to explore the area a bit, walk down to the closest town, Morija (about 45 minutes), and climb a mountain with no idea how easy it would be or how long it would take. I also sat out on the curb of the main road to fill out some paperwork, just to invite small talk from locals walking by.

- On the other hand, I was so bored I played Freecell using an actual deck of cards. I was also so bored that I started a thread of facebook messages with other PCV's titled "I'm so bored I..." We all seem to have similar stories while we're waiting for our jobs to start.

- I really, really hate when I can hear the mosquito flying around my head in the dark at night, and can't find it.

- I have a really cute, hyperactive 4 year old neighbor named Selobelo. She speaks Sesotho faster than any 4 year old I've seen, and I barely understand her. Today I was hanging out with her and she joyfully started doing the dance move where you put your hands on the ground behind you, and launch your hips up and down in the air. It felt very much like watching the end of Little Miss Sunshine, but more lewd, and with an even younger girl. I wanted very much to stop looking, but she was grinning at me as she did it, wanting my approval. So I watched, kind of, and applauded.

- Procrastinating writing lesson plans as a teacher feels very much like procrastinating doing homework as a student, except I never had this blog to write on when I was a student.


By the way, school starts tomorrow morning. Should be quite an experience. Our school isn't built yet, so we'll be combining classes and condensing everything into 3 spare rooms in the nearby primary school for the first couple weeks. Also, something like 70% of the kids show up on the first day usually.

Tales from Real Life

(written 1/11)

The last few days have been really great. Got sworn in as a volunteer (I'm not a trainee anymore), got to attend the annual All Volunteer Conference, which was at times boring but overall a great way to meet the rest of Peace Corps Lesotho, and got to partake in some pretty great parties (albeit parties that end at 11:30pm, but they start at 6pm so it seems much later (side note: this timetable fits harmoniously with my pre-existing love of happy hour back stateside (I miss happy hour))).

As of today, though, I'm at my site for good. I am not allowed to leave the Maseru district for the first 3 months. School doesn't start till next Monday. I don't know many people here yet, and I have nothing to do. My house is about 100 degrees inside at the height of the day. So, I'm not sure how I'll get through the next week, but I'll figure it out.

For now, a couple more anecdotes.

So as I mentioned, it's my first real day at site. I woke up a few hours ago, tried to wrap my mind around what I will do all day and how I will escape the oppressive heat of my room that will arrive soon. I leisurely made breakfast.

11:00 am: A nice kid named Relebohile (translation: We are thankful) has knocked on my door, saying "I just wanted to see you." He's a Form C (10th grade) student at my school, and has heard about me. We talk for a while. In the course of our conversation, I mention to him that WWE is fake, and I can literally see his heart break. Poor guy... though the fact that he has a TV at all makes him EXTREMELY privileged here.

6:00 pm: A torrential downpour has come along in the past 20 minutes. I'm holed up deep inside my room, whose tin roof is exceedingly loud in the rain (I find this very relaxing). A very beautiful teenage(ish) girl has just knocked on my door. I am unsure what she could be doing here in this massive storm. Though, throughout the day students from my school have been coming by to introduce themselves to me, so perhaps she's doing the same. But no, I quickly realize I'm wrong - she speaks absolutely no English, and she does not go to my school. After some awkward stumbling over my poor Sesotho, I understand that she wants to give me the umbrella she has with her. Evidently it belongs to my host mother, who is not on the premises. So she hands me the umbrella and walks away into the storm. I yell at her that perhaps this is not the ideal time to relinquish the umbrella, but she just smiles and continues on.

More to come...

Tales from Summer Camp

(written today!)




So, this is a pretty sweet part of training, in that I’m doing virtually nothing. Between my return from visiting my new site and January 5, we have occasional training sessions surrounded by huge amounts of free time. We spend it wandering around Maseru a bit, but mostly at the training center. We play cards, volleyball, and wiffleball, watch movies, enjoy some local beverages, dance around, and generally come up with random crap to do. One guy made a fire pit and a makeshift hookah. We sleep 6 people to a room. Long story short, my regret of having never gone to summer camp as a kid feels largely redeemed. It’s pretty hard to find a difference between this and Wet Hot American Summer (just watched that by the way, great movie). Except that we’re in the Kingdom In The Sky, I suppose.

And now, a couple other stories I forgot about from earlier.

On one of our last days at CBT, we had a potluck with everyone staying in Maqhaka. Adam and Shanthi and I decided to make a homemade gnocchi with cheese sauce, following a recommendation from some other volunteers that it's extremely easy to make. This turned out to be a big lie, and we ended up very, very late to the potluck. Carrying a huge pot of pasta, we decided to run down the mountain (normally a 20 minute walk) to reach the place a little faster. We figured, we're usually dripping sweat after arriving anywhere as is, so why not. But, the air is very thin here, and pretty quickly we found ourselves gasping, so we periodically stopped to walk. One of th etimes we stopped, we happened to pass by two of the girls we knew from around the village, probably 10 years old. They saw me panting, and a girl named Morongwe, carrying a sack over her shoulder, yelled out to me "Abuti Mpho, u khathetse joalo ka fariki!" (Eric, you are tired like a pig!) I turned around a bit in disbelief. I figured I heard her wrong, and I asked her "Fariki? Hobaneng fariki?" (Why pig?) A huge grin broke over both of their faces, and they started slapping the sack on Morongwe's back. The giggled as the sack started convulsing and squealing. Evidently, Morongwe was carrying a piglet in a sack down the mountain. We laughed, caught our breaths for another moment, and kept on running and laughing about the poor pig in a sack.

My host family from CBT gave me a few gifts before I left. It was really sweet, I got a shirt, a hand-painted crafts thing with scenes from traditional Basotho culture, and a nice little analog alarm clock. The clock is hilarious – you set the alarm for when the HOUR hand reaches the spot you want, and the alarm sounds when it gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15 minutes of the time you set. To me, this is so Lesotho. Maybe it’s all of Africa, I’m not sure. But the concept of time is just so different here. Punctuality and deadlines are extremely loose, and an alarm clock that rings +/- 15 minutes from when you are supposed to hear it is so representative of the entire culture.

That guy Pule I wrote about before turns out to be a creep. Apparently he doesn’t work for the school at all, but he does like to tell people he does. He then follows this up by telling people the principal has sent him to request money for various fake reasons. My Vice Principal tipped me off about this, so, I’ll keep an eye out. As long as I know, I mean, I guess he’s still a nice guy.

In other news, my family in my new home has decided to give me a new Sesotho name, so I think I’m no longer Mpho. I’m now Refiloe, same as my little sister from CBT.

Sweet pictures

These were taken by my friend Ryan, another trainee who has a sweet camera and apparently a really good system for uploading pics. Not sure if I'm in many of these, I've barely looked, but overall they depict PC Lesotho life pretty well.

http://ryanmcclaine.com/pictures

First Visit to New Home

(written 12/27/09)
Whew, big day today. After spending the past few days hanging out/playing games at the PC training center, I woke up today at 6am to leave for my new home in Masite Nek. I am spending two days here, settling in, meeting people, and learning the village, before going back to Maseru for 2 final weeks of training. A group of 6 shared one van headed south from Maseru, loaded up with all our crap, plus many bags of non-perishable food (this is the one time we take a private car to site, so we stocked up a bit). Since I live pretty close to Maseru, I was the first stop, and I was in my new house by 8am. I spent the day touring Masite Nek and neighboring Basotho cultural hub Morija, unpacking, and playing darts (!!!). I’ll get back to this more, but first, the rundown on my new abode.
Masite Nek is a small village, 30k from the capital, Maseru. My host family lives on a nice sized property. I realized after calling my last property ½ an acre that I have a terrible concept of acreage, and that it was a good bit smaller than that. This, on the other hand, is probably ½ an acre or more. We are situated at the intersection of two pretty “major” roads, but the houses are set back from the road (that I live on a PAVED road is mind-boggling; that there two is doubly so). I look out from my front door onto rows and rows of peach trees, maize, beans, butternut squash, and watermelon, all surrounded by some nice flowers (sorry my flower describing skills are lacking, but they’re quite pretty). None of the crops are very big right now. I imagine it will be even more beautiful when it gets near time to harvest. There are small mountains in the not-too-far distance. In fact, I’ll be climbing one every morning to get to my school.
My home is one room, maybe 12x14’, occupying one side of an L-shaped house. Plenty of room. Good, new-looking furniture, full bed, 3-burner stove, space heater for winter. I have no running water or electricity, but the water pump is 10 feet from my door, and I’ll probably install a solar power rig. I will get a water filtration system soon (for now I am just boiling my drinking water, and might start straining it through a t-shirt cuz it looks a bit chunky). My roof is tin, meaning it’s extra hot in the summer, extra cold in the winter. The other side of the L is divided into three rooms. One room is shared by two students from my school (haven’t met them yet). One room is for another teacher from my school (met briefly, nice guy). Then, the third room! The third room is completely empty, except for what looks like a beat up bench from a school bus in one corner, and in the opposite corner, an old, filthy, glorious, honest to god, dart board. I. Am. So. Happy. About. This. Dart. Board. I thought I’d given up darts for two years, but tonight I played a few games with my Ntate (host father), who is pretty nasty at it. I won one game out of three, which should be enough to keep him wanting to play.
Earlier in the day I toured around Masite Nek and Morija with my Ntate and two people from my new school. First I was taken to the moreneng (village chief’s house) to meet the chief. We walked up to the front of this small, traditional style house to find a group of men circled around a young man speaking. I was informed we were witnessing a court case of some kind. The chief was in the circle playing the role of judge in the hearing. Sadly, I couldn’t understand much of the Sesotho, except for catching the guy saying “I did not know” something something. I later saw the local police station (very quaint) and hospital (surprisingly decent). I also saw the Morija Guest House, a nice bed and breakfast with a beautiful view, where I was treated very nicely. Note, if you come visit me, and don’t want to rough it, you can stay here, it’s pretty sweet.
This afternoon I started walking around my street, and somehow became friends with a guy named Pule, who drives a bus at my school. We stopped by the shopong (small shop), which is one minute from my house. The shopong owner is very cool, and speaks good English. I bought a soda, and he, Pule, and I talked for a while as I drank it. I was surprised to find that he has a freezer, and he sells a few frozen meats. I told him I was excited because I expected to be unable to keep meat around my house without a fridge, so now at least I can eat frozen chicken. He told me any time I buy meat at a grocery store in Maseru, I can store it in his freezer. This is huge. I am pumped. I had heard this can happen if you befriend your local shopong guy, but I figured it would take a lot of schmoozing. I think I’ll buy some ground beef and make us a couple cheeseburgers to say thanks.
So now, Jerry Springer’s Final Thought. There are a lot of forms that being happy with your site can take. Some people got placed in the middle of huge, breathtaking mountains. Some people are near a lake. Some got running water and/or electricity, or a three room house. One guy actually has everything I just listed. For me, I’ll be less than an hour from the capital, and visiting other volunteers will be pretty quick because of my location. But on a daily basis, I’m still completely in my own world (and I love being lost in my own world, heh heh). I’m walking distance from a very nice town, Morija. I live on a beautiful property, I’ll be teaching at a pretty nice, sparkling new school, I have good furniture in my house, I have a freaking dart board, and great competition in my Ntate. So, long story short, I’m very pleased.