by Aaron Barlow
So, Elise decided to have a go at the foreign device. It took her several minutes; I do believe she was nervous about using it correctly. Meanwhile, I contemplated a world that allows such a massive difference in septic technology. They dig holes, squat in the forest, and use sticks or corncobs for toilet paper. Not all facets of Togolese life are on par with the Western world.
I snapped back when I heard Elise flush. She practically fell out of the stall. I showed her the sink, soap dispenser, and paper towels. She was unsure of the hand-washing process and kept muttering, “Les Américains-la,” those Americans. She couldn’t believe that clean water came from the faucet all the time. She didn’t have to walk a few kilometers, collect it, and then walk back with the heavy basin balanced on her head. It was so easy and clean. She stood there and watched the water just run for a full minute.
Finally we returned to the table and Elise ordered her brother to go wash. I think she wanted Jean to have an eye-opening experience like hers. He took me with him to explain, but he wasn’t as much fun. He had seen and used both a toilet and sink before.
We returned to the table to find Elise looking at our meals, no idea what to do. I explained garnishes and showed them how to pick up a cheeseburger with both hands and take a bite. Yum. Elise was horrified. Eat with BOTH hands? To use the left for anything but wiping was probably the biggest taboo in Togolese culture. I had to explain toilet paper and soap and that it doesn’t matter because we consider ourselves, and both hands, clean.
I told her to cut the burger in half and just eat it with her right hand. She happily munched away and really enjoyed it. Her brother also cut his burger in half, but began eating it with a fork. He ate it one ingredient at a time, forking the bread, then the cheese, then the meat, etc. I tried to explain to him the culinary delights of the melding of all these into one bite. Unsuccessful, I tried a different approach. I explained that to eat this dish with a fork would be like eating pâte with a fork. No one does it. He didn’t care.
Following our trip, Elise and I had several conversations about technological advances and women’s rights. I was left with deep frustration because she understood suffrage and technological improvements, but she never wanted to do anything about them. C’est la vie en Afrique. Life in Africa revolved around that fatalistic attitude, stunting development and making it difficult to accomplish much. The villagers in Katchamba thought that it would be great to have latrines, running water and electricity, but would not work to accomplish these goals.
Instant gratification worked perfectly. Why save money when we may not be here tomorrow to use it? Death was such a huge part of life that it became their reason for not looking into the future. Let the women spend hours upon hours collecting potable water and send the children off into the woods to defecate. Why save money for the future when they must feed their families now?
We had several village meetings to discuss building latrines or an accessible well in Katchamba. People wanted them; they just wanted someone else to buy and build them. I refused to do it myself without help from the village in planning, saving money, and implementing the project. The chief and other elders told me to continue my work with the health clinic and not worry about building something the village won’t work to maintain.
I believe the women knew the benefits potable water and less waste could offer the village. And that it would make life less exhausting. But every argument ended with the men saying no. The women continued arguing, but their husbands just walked away. One day, maybe, these women will learn to stand up for what they believe and follow their sisters from fifty years ago in women’s suffrage. Maybe, just maybe…
Jennifer L. Giacomini served in Togo from 1999-2001, after graduation from Hamilton College. She is now the Executive Director at Grand County Rural Health Network in Colorado.
Mokhotlong
Allison Scott Matlack
You can’t learn a culture without attempting its language.
There is a girl outside my red wooden door.
Her world is there. She does the family’s washing and cooking in her patched skirt and bare ebony feet, two meters from my front step. She plays games there, sings hymns there. And she communicates with the neighbors from there through the tremendous trumpeting power of her tiny lungs.
Her name is Sebueng, and while my Sesotho is not at all fluent, I think her name would translate to “in the place of the one talking.” Basotho children are named after the circumstances of their births; perhaps her mother was busy in conversation when her baby took her first breath, or perhaps someone was talking with her to try and distract her from birthing pains.
At any rate, the Sesotho language is grammatically simpler than English. The se- prefix generally indicates that the noun is a person (although not always) and the—ng suffix denotes “in the place of.” It is when the Basotho throw idioms about cows and entrails at me that my language skills falter. But, as they say here, “Seqanqane se seng le se seng sea iqomela”: Every toad jumps for itself.
Welcome to Lesotho.
Its claim to fame is that it has the highest low point of any country on Earth, and thus it proudly calls itself “The Kingdom in the Sky,” or, more commonly, “The Mountain Kingdom.” And it is believable: as I looked this morning at the tips of the mountains of my humble village (elevation approximately 3,200 meters) surrounded by billowy clouds looking as if their rocky heads had punctured the cap of the world, it truly felt like I was in the sky. In fact, just a hop, skip, and really long hike away is the mountain Thabana-Ntlenyana, the highest point in Southern Africa.
I live in the village of Thoteng, an offshoot of Ha Senkoase in the district of Mokhotlong. Mokhotlong, if you remember that suffix, translates to “in the place of the Mokhotlo.” The Mokhotlo is a very strange-looking bird, a bald ibis in the books. I have heard it referred to as “that Dr. Seuss bird.” With its shimmery blue-black feathers and tremendously long, thin, curved-yet-somewhat-pointy reddish beak and white head, I think the good doctor would have approved. Out of all ten districts in Lesotho, ours is (supposedly) the birds’ only home.
I saw three Mekhotlo on the day I moved in, and they continue to be an ominous yet oddly comforting presence. They somehow herald change, earmark already memorable occasions, and remind me that life, full of weird little creatures like them and me, should never be taken too seriously.
While one might think my spelling of Mekhotlo a typographical error, it was spelled so on purpose. Nouns in Sesotho belong to one of about six different classes based on prefixes, and the formation of plurals and pronouns, ubiquitous in ways unimagined by native English-speakers, dictated by the appropriate noun class.
These noun classes present problems for new Lesotho PCVs who just want to know the word for this. Had our infinitely patient trainers begun to explain the intricacies of noun classes in week one or two, saying that the word this could be ena, tsena, mona, or a number of other words, depending on its referent, our brains might well have exploded, so we had to grit our teeth and accept the response, “Oh, don’t mind, we’ll get to that later.”
With this, we began our long journey to fully understand the definition of the word mamello—“patience.”
I thought I was patient in America. I had become a good listener. I did not yell when web pages took longer than thirty seconds to load or when I was stuck in traffic. I meditated occasionally. I even steadily trudged along through diet and exercise until, over the course of a year or so, I had lost sixty pounds.
But I had never waited for a taxi (in the form of a Toyota minibus, which holds fifteen passengers) for over four hours to fill so that I could go home. I had never tried to teach before, much less English (which must be the hardest subject to teach due to unexplainable, illogical idiosyncrasies), in dirt-floor rooms packed with seventy-plus teenagers who spoke a language that I didn’t know. I had never lived without electricit
y or running water, and believe me, that takes patience.
And walking suddenly became a problem. At my slowest natural stride, I soon realized I outpaced everyone else in the vicinity. “Why are you running?” they ask as I amble slowly up a hill. “You are always in a hurry!”
Above all, I had never before had to lose myself—let go of my ingrained habits and assumptions—in order to be able to even start to understand folks from a different culture.
Meetings, for instance, take place ka nako ea Basotho, “at the time of the Basotho,” or, as we Volunteers like to say, on Basotho Time. Things start when people are there—meetings, taxis, funerals—and once I let go of preconceived notions I wasn’t even aware I had, I realized that this method of living is actually relatively free of stress. You’ll get there when you get there, and chances are that we’ll wait up for you. It’s no Motel 6, but it’ll do.
One serious problem I had with the Sesotho language is its lack of vocabulary revolving around the word love. To say, “I love you,” one says kea o rata. However, to say, “I like tea,” one says ke rata tee.
What does this mean? Does this mean the intensity of your love for tea rivals your love for me? Or does this mean your love for me is so commonplace that it equals your love for your morning cup of tea?
The Basotho have a term for white people, makhooa (singular is lekhooa, part of the “le/ma” class), but they also use it as a derogatory term for people who believe they are better than everyone else, people who act superior.
I don’t like it, and I don’t tolerate it when used in reference to my friends or me.
I had never been personally exposed to racism in America. At least, not to the extent that I have seen it in South Africa. But all I have seen here, in Lesotho and just across the border, makes me extremely sensitive to judging people based on their color. And to point me out as different—as a lekhooa—that puts me on my guard. We are all, underneath the multicolored clothes of culture, human.
We all celebrate. We all dance and sing. We all cook and eat, even if the ingredients differ slightly. We all ask questions. We all have seen strange birds, but I swear the strangest live here. And we all suffer loss, each accepting and facing grief in his own way, in his own time—perhaps even in Basotho Time.
One can even see similarity in the languages. When I told a coworker that my cat was pregnant, he said, “E jele yeast!” “It ate yeast,” only a baby step away from “she has a bun in the oven.” And that same man, when he accidentally hurt my hand, took it and kissed my palm, a manifestation of “kiss and make it better.”
“Eseng lekhooa; ke ‘M’e Thandiwe Kao,” I say. “Na, ke ngoana oa Moshoeshoe. Ke motho joalo ka oena.” (“Not lekhooa; I am Madam Thandiwe Kao. Me, I am a child of Moshoeshoe—the founder and first king of Lesotho. I am a person, just like you.”)
I even live with you, here behind my red wooden door. I work with you, for you and for your children. I have given up my own family and friends to be a part of your lives for this short time, to be a part of a new family. I am a mother of over 200 children whose faces light up when I walk onto campus. Their pain—your pain—is my pain. And my hope is that one day, you will not see me for my skin, but for the laughter I have shared, the knowledge I have imparted, the hard work I have done, and the tears I have shed in this beautiful place: the place of the Mokhotlo—my home.
After graduating summa cum laude from Appalachian State University in 2005 (B.A. English), Allison Scott Matlack served in Lesotho as an education volunteer (English teacher) from 2005-07. She got married in October 2008 to a fellow ed volunteer (see, Peace Corps romance does work out!) and they are busy readjusting to “the real world.” The complete version this story is excerpted from what sealed her acceptance to the Sewanee School of Letters, an M.F.A. creative writing program. She keeps her eyes open for a bald ibis or two. Rea le hopotse, Lesotho!
Changing School
Sandra Echols Sharpe
Collisions of culture and necessity are not necessarily limited to those from far away.
In January of 1965, I bought all of the necessities to fill my Mbeya, Tanzania, school compound: reading materials, science equipment, paraffin (kerosene), some clothes, a book locker, and my certification from NYU-Syracuse that assured my qualification to teach as a Peace Corps Volunteer. But when you are in Mbeya, should you do what the Mbeyans do? Meca, the Land Rover driver, loaded my paraphernalia, drove through the town, turned onto the Chunya road, and headed uphill toward a church mission compound six miles from the center of Mbeya.
Ah! Wonderment...a stream-washed cloth, sun-dried...draped around a linearly plaited hill...a multiplicity of potato plants all growing in magnificent brown-green rows.... Mud houses, maize fields, people carrying fruit and vegetable baskets, local buses, and fields of pyrethrum flowers traverse the Rift Valley road. In less than thirty minutes, Meca’s unbridled Rover turns left wildly onto a narrow clay strip, jerkily pot-holing its way down a gradual incline. As it crosses an eroding one-lane wooden bridge, we roll past the dispensary and come to a full halt in front of a row of teachers’ houses.
The view on the left is of a white stucco building, that dispensary. It has a faded rouge porch with an open door. It looks vacant and hollowed out like an old gourd. Medicines have long since evaporated with the cool, misty, morning rains of the season. In front, five slab-mud, cement-covered homes are nested in a valley of rolling hills, picturesque and soothing to a tiring traveler. A morning rain plays a mighty drum roll on the corrugated roofs, welcoming me to the compound. Stately eucalyptus trees hurl down, from scented branches, rolls of raindrops.
At eight o’clock, Meca unloads all of my worldly possessions in my home, wishes me well and leaves.
One hundred steps from the teachers’ quarters are the classrooms. The elongated mud-brick building features windowless windows and doorless doors. The dark entrances empty their content of sky-blue A-line dresses, white shirts, and khaki pants. The teachers inspect them and beckon to me to join them. The students stand at attention. As I walk toward the school compound, a huge round field appears. In the dry season, it will host sports events, community ceremonies, and school events. On the far side of the field are the gardens and storage buildings, which house dried beans, rice, and other foodstuffs. I am introduced and asked to take my place with the teachers. Now we wait for the new headmaster.
Smiling, an older teacher, a traditional man, watches the road as a new headmaster comes to replace him.
Striding in to the rhythmic music of his irimba (thumb piano), Mr. Mpacama arrives at the Ngoba Upper Primary School to begin his duties as headmaster. The Board of Missionaries placed him here to upgrade the school. Because he is a strict, punctual man, they expect him to be a great disciplinarian.
With the changing of the guard, indulgences disappear. If I want coffee or tea, I must bring it in my thermos every morning. I must also supply my own biscuits (cookies). Early, around 6:30, the pounding feet of children run to the middle of the school compound to receive assignments. The headmaster tells group one, “Sickle the high grassy areas around the school only, and then sort the cuttings into a compost heap.” He says to another group of older students, “Begin kitchen duty.” They clang large pots and pans as lunch is prepared. The cutting and simmering of large quantities of vegetables, boiling of rice and tea and the slicing of papaya or seasonal fruits are daily routines. The sweeping of the compound, and mopping the storage areas, and liming the latrines are a necessity for maintaining sanitary conditions. The headmaster even initiates the inclusion of a sewing class. It is scheduled at the end of every day, therefore lengthening the average amount of time students spend in school.
Mr. Mpacama checks each group’s work, then signals for the students to return to the front of the school and line up. He blows the whistle and says, “Tusagewa, begin the exercises! Let them run one mile around the school co
mpound!”
“Yes, headmaster!”
While most students run and chant, a small group remains to whisk away footprints from the drying schoolyard.
Promptly at 8:00, I ascend the concrete steps to the headmaster’s office. The smooth, mud-finished interior wall and the recently scrubbed concrete floor lend a muddy creek-water smell to the khaki pants and white shirt he is wearing. The headmaster says, “Welcome again to my office. Please sit down. Let me see your lesson plans for the week! I’m happy to see you are including the sewing lessons after school as part of your teaching load! The bolt of fabric, newspaper for making dress patterns and the needles and threads will be in the storage cabinet by 4:00 p.m. for you to use.”
“Thanks,” I say. “May I also use the microscopes tomorrow for the unit on one-cell organisms, and may I show pictures during geography class of the flora and fauna of the Indian Ocean coastline, around Dar es Salaam?”
“Yes,” he replies.
I continue, “Sarah and I share photos and borrow reading materials from other Peace Corps Volunteers’ book lockers. We pool information when we can illuminate the ecology of the coast. Our students are now seeing the natural beauty of the area.”
The headmaster replies, “Please feel free to exhibit resource materials in your classroom.” I leave his office and head toward the teacher’s workroom.
My feet keep walking, but my mind is a whirling cloud, drifting into history. Zanzibar: I will have to teach about the diaspora! I will have to teach about Mombasa.
Rain comes! RAIN. RAIN. RAIN. Foamy gray water, gallons of it make the compound, in an instant, look like thick mud soup, with our small teachers’ cottages stewing around in the middle.
The cold rain subsides. The one village car and the cottages shake off the vision, fill up and look like sanctuary. Now the chanting of the math students and the lecturing voices of the other teachers become louder as rainwater trickles into the compound.