Eventful few days

The past few days haven't really been all that busy. I still spend a few hours each day sitting around my apartment trying to find ways to pass the time (I just finished reading Fountainhead, a 695 page book that I got extremely sucked into... or is it better grammatically to say "into which I got extremely sucked"... eh whatever, that's not the point). But it's been highly eventful.

Last Saturday I went to a wedding, as the... guest? date?... of a coworker of mine. Her friends got married. I went into it unsure if I was meant to be her date, or just an American who would be curious to see a Basotho wedding. Even now, it's still very hard to say. But indeed, I was very curious to see it, and it was fun. The whole service was much more energetic than an American wedding service. There was a marching band/choir that paraded through the aisles. The pastor, in an effort to play matchmaker, made all the single folks stand up in their seats and say hello to each other. There is a dance/techno song  called "Marry Me" (by DJ Call Me, if you're curious) that is ridiculously popular in Lesotho and South Africa right now. It cracks me up, because the lyrics are "If I marry you, will you marry me," which makes very little sense. I hear it daily, blasting from the windows of my neighbors houses or the tarven across the street. At the wedding, there were rented 16-person taxis driving us from church to reception and such... in the taxis, Marry Me was on a continuous loop, at full volume, and people were going nuts for it. Really, really fun. The rest of the party was OK, though surprisingly little dancing. The weather wasn't great, maybe that's why. And, they slaughtered sheep, not cows, which was a bummer. I really don't like mutton. But I went home and made myself 2 cheeseburgers for dinner. I have been wanting a cheeseburger for 3 months, it was glorious (side comment, Ellen, I'm glad my hunger for beef amuses you so much, and I'm really excited to hear you're reading the blog!).

So that was all really fun, but on the other end of the spectrum... today, the other teachers and I went to visit the mother of a recently deceased student. [WARNING: This paragraph is horribly depressing.] We ended school two hours early to go there. (Back story: The girl had recently become pregnant, and when the mother found out and confronted her, she became scared. Supposely she was mostly scared of what the father was going to do when he found out. She drank rat poison. She was a Form C student; I didn't know her.) We walked in to the mother slumped on a mattress on the floor, covered in tattered blankets, facing the wall with her head in her hands. The teachers all began to sing Sesotho hymns, which were intense and had a lot of emotion in them, but were unable to drown out the mother's wailing. It was one of the most heart wrenching things I can remember. But the way in which we entered the house, spoke very little, and sang traditional songs for about 30 minutes was very beautiful. Some of the teachers who led the songs didn't even know the girl, but they were no less sincere, and it felt totally natural. There is a level of camaraderie, a certain easiness, among Basotho that does not exist in America.

In other news, my Form A students (now 106 of them) were so terrible yesterday morning that with 20 minutes left in class, I told them I was too angry to teach anymore, and I gave them a big homework assignment to write about what they all did wrong (talking incessantly, throwing paper, cheating on a quiz, whining about not having a pencil, etc), and left the room. I had to teach them again in the afternoon, which began with them apologizing, and then me giving them a long lecture about how much they are wasting each others time. Also about how Lesotho is poor, and someone, parent or otherwise, is struggling to pay money for them all to get an education, and they are wasting it. I was really pissed. But today was improved. Also, I am now underway teaching Form D biology. I have on 21 students in there, and it's amazing. I think about how a baseball player swings two bats in the on-deck circle, so when he steps up to the plate the one bat feels light. That's how 21 Form D students feels... it's a breeze.

I'm also trying to teach some kids at school frisbee. I'm hoping to eventually start having Ultimate Frisbee games, if they have the patience to learn how to throw. OK, TTFN.