by Will McGrath
It is later, in this layered and overgrown bazaar, that I will appreciate the importance of speaking a little Sesotho, when I greet some locals clustered around an overturned cardboard box, raucously playing seven-card something. At my single phrase of Sesotho they begin trying to explain the rules of the game to me, but it is far too complex, and I would much rather just watch these four sharps go at it, slapping their cards down with fast-twitch vigor as onlookers laugh and elbow me. Djahseethat? Helele!
Even later still—not far from here—I will briefly become a celebrity to a yardful of shrieking teenage schoolgirls as I step out of a sports car with rising gull-wing doors, a vehicle driven by a friendly Indian man named Mohammad whom I have just met. But, as I said, that is perhaps a story for another time. Because the only thing I know right now—in this present moment, as I drift through the streets of Maseru in my low-riding minivan—is that I have found Reid.
It is an hour into our separation. By now I have made peace with, have come even to love the well-lodged children’s tape that is permanently bonded to the tape player.
I can sing all the words now. And I do.
I am singing when I see those fifty-five-gallon petrol drums standing up like two neon green cooling towers. Reid has pulled the white pickup truck over in a parking lot and is squinting out toward the road, his hand shading his eyes. I pull in and hug him, surging with brotherly love, with adelphia. We have been searching for each other, cruising aimlessly, then waiting to be found. And now we are found, although still lost.
“You realize that Nthabeleng’s map is wrong?” Reid asks me. He is holding the crumpled napkin in his hand. “I followed it all the way. It goes nowhere.”
I nod. We consider our situation. Together, we can probably find our way back to the friend’s house where we borrowed the minivan and cell phone, but this would leave our business unfinished. Nthabeleng has tasked us with just two things: get Rapitsoe to fix the white pickup, then fill the fifty-five-gallon drums with petrol. Driving back across the entire country to Mokhotlong with business unfinished will be unacceptable. Nthabeleng will not care that she herself provided us with a hand-drawn map going nowhere.
“So how are we going to find Rapitsoe?” Reid asks.
I shrug.
The man standing next to us in the parking lot says, “I am Rapitsoe.”
Reid and I look at him. The man has been sitting here on an overturned oilcan, talking with another Mosotho, in this unnamed lot near the center of town.
“Pardon?”
“I am Rapitsoe,” the man says again. His tone is matter-of-fact, almost apologetic.
The other guy nods. “This one is Rapitsoe.”
Reid and I look at each other, but we both understand it to be true.
Before I go on, I need to emphasize one last thing—one of the fundamental truths of Lesotho. It is a country of two million souls, a sovereign kingdom of the African continent, but it is a small town, maybe the smallest town in the world. There is some dizzying beauty in this paradox: the towering span of the mountains, the infinite spread of the sky, the land outsized in every way, yet somehow so small—a country that is a village, a nation that is a neighborhood, a place where all paths must cross and re-cross.
“I think,” says the man who is Rapitsoe, “that you are the ones for ‘M’e Nthabeleng? To fix the car?”
So it was right, of course, that Nthabeleng’s map was wrong. Nthabeleng is never wrong. The map did not take us to Rapitsoe’s shop because Rapitsoe wasn’t at his shop. He was chatting with a friend in town, despite the fact that he had an appointment. The right map would have left us with business unfinished. The map leading us nowhere was, in the end, the only proper solution.
“Yes,” says Reid, “we are the ones for ‘M’e Nthabeleng.”
“Okay, I will take you there,” he says, and without further discussion Rapitsoe jumps into the passenger seat of the minivan. He guides me out toward the edge of Maseru, with Reid and the white pickup truck behind us. We slip past single-story neighborhoods, the houses built from cinderblock, the corrugated metal roofs held in place by rocks or old tires. Soon we reach a mechanic’s shop, the surrounding dirt yard filled with vehicles in various states of repair and disrepair. Rapitsoe’s office is a stranded campervan up on blocks, an aluminumsided oven, and inside he hands us two cans of Coke pulled from a Styrofoam cooler with no ice in it.
Reid and I sip our hot Cokes while the wind eddies around us, staring off in the direction of Mokhotlong. Out beyond the limit of vision, dense walls of agave sprout in the foothills, the plants looking like something from a Seussian fever dream: porcupines of flat waxy leaves, tall as a man, with thin trunks jutting from their centers and pods of extraterrestrial broccoli branching skyward. The hills plane out and then cleave into dongas, deep narrow rifts where water has cracked open the earth. Mesas stand on the horizon, mountains beyond them, and the terrain is punctuated with odd spears of rock and mammoform hills where the ancient gods plucked up the fabric of the land with cosmic fingertips. The highlands wait there like a dream.
THE UNLIKELY GRADUATION OF TSELI MOELETSI
The sound carries across the hills, a dull thumping, like someone rhythmically knocking dust from a carpet. Ellen and I are walking with Nthabeleng, heading out toward the pitso ground for her daughter’s kindergarten graduation, strolling along the main road through Mokhotlong camptown, this rural hub of seven thousand people. The main drag is lined with merchants’ shanties and caravans missing wheels, improvised offices where people notarize passports or charge mobile phones or weave hair extensions. Beyond the road, the grass hugs tightly against the earth, manicured by perpetually grazing animals. Small boulders are strewn across the rolling terrain like bocce balls. Still the sound percusses the air, a steady thwack, tedious and dispassionate.
Finally I can see the source: a young shepherd is coming up the road toward us, all ten years of him, with his donkey a few steps ahead, plodding under a load of maize meal sacks. The boy is beating his donkey with a molamo, a wooden shepherd’s club, cranking up his tiny body and unleashing, over and over again, and with each blow a little cloud of animal hair and dandruff rises off the animal’s ribs.
I can feel Nthabeleng coiling beside me. Then, as we pass them, she strikes, launching into a high-velocity stream of Sesotho invective, which sounds not unlike the ignition of a fireworks warehouse. The boy’s eyes go coin-shaped. Nthabeleng is yelling some question at him, punctuated occasionally by the word uena—you!—and the boy is trying to put distance between them, quickening his step down the road. The donkey shuffles forward, unchanged. Nthabeleng is still yelling at him over her shoulder, and as long as we are within eyesight, and then earshot the boy lays off the carpet-beating.
“Maybe in my next life I can run a safe home for donkeys,” Nthabeleng says.
Nthabeleng Lephoto is about four feet tall, a tiny dynamo, and one time she tried to strangle me. Here in the mountains, she runs a safe home for children orphaned by AIDS and directs an outreach team that ventures into the loneliest corners of this alpine district—all in service of a small local organization that fights against the ravages of HIV, which affects 25 percent of Lesotho’s adults. (Compare, perhaps, against the US at 0.6 percent, or the UK at 0.2 percent.)
What can you say about Nthabeleng? She is the show-runner, the point guard, the boss of the Basotho and the mookameli of Mokhotlong. Above all else, she is a fixer. Can’t get antiretroviral meds? She’s the person to talk to. Don’t have food for the baby? She’ll hook you up. Need a ride to the clinic? Hop in. She sees all, hears all, knows all. Out of a sense of benevolence, she may let you think you are getting away with something. You are not. She lives in your thoughts and dreams. She knows your malfeasance before you fease it mal. She speaks better English than you do. She tells funnier jokes in her third language than you do in your first. She is ferocious in the way that only the very tiny can be. When Nthabeleng walks by construction sites, nails plun
ge themselves through wood. Cement mixes itself. The only way to capture even a glimpse of her true self is through the words of our great philosopher-king, the former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal—listen when he tells you: Nthabeleng Lephoto is the motherfucking Truth.
But this story isn’t about Nthabeleng. It’s about her daughter, Tseli, who is graduating from kindergarten today. As we amble down the main road, the sun high overhead, Nthabeleng preps us for the ceremony we are about to witness. We head out toward the grain warehouse and pass the chassis of an ancient flatbed delivery truck that has sunk into the earth, wheels and engine long gone, just the shell remaining. It is half-submerged in the landscape, sculptural now. The earth accepts all things, eventually.
We aim for the soccer pitch, the pitso ground. The pitso ground is the official gathering place in Mokhotlong, where people assemble to attend to community business—and in most rural outposts like this, the pitso ground doubles as the local soccer field, maybe the only flat stretch of land for miles. Two rusted rectangles stand netless at opposing ends of the grounds, attempting to frame the mountains and failing dramatically.
As we arrive, Nthabeleng comments with some measure of disgust that events like these often stretch on for hours. One local potentate after another will ramble on about what he has done for Mokhotlong, she says, while conveniently forgetting that this is a ceremony for five-year-olds. There are no seats for the children or their families and Nthabeleng wonders aloud at how the speakers have provided a large shade tent and seats for themselves but nothing for the elderly bo-nkhono and bo-ntate moholo who have shuffled out to this baking plateau to see their grandchildren graduate.
So we stand with Nthabeleng—shifting our weight, trying to create shade where there is none—and listen to self-aggrandizing Sesotho monologues. The men and women from district councils, chieftaincies, and local law enforcement agencies spout shopworn speeches about how the children are our future. As we watch the ceremony, I am trying to figure out why exactly Nthabeleng wanted us to come with her. She is openly scornful as we stand here sweltering, making snide comments about the speakers, making no effort to lower the volume of her voice, daring someone to silence her. I try to remember if people in the United States make a big deal about kindergarten graduation. I ponder the question of what, exactly, is so difficult about graduating from kindergarten. You show up. You play with glue. You nap. You go home.
The speakers now begin to call the names of the graduates, who are decked out in adorable miniature caps and gowns. The kids walk shyly up to the tent, receive their diplomas, and pose for a picture. They are uniformly terrified. Then we hear Tseli’s name called. Like the children before her, she approaches the stage haltingly, trying not to trip over her gown. She looks back at us with some measure of trepidation.
Nthabeleng has darted from our side. She runs up in front of the crowd, a step behind her daughter, and begins to dance and ululate—to lilietsa—interrupting what has been a remarkably solemn and grandiose ceremony. Tseli seems unsure what to make of her gyrating mother. Nthabeleng starts shaking her skirt rhythmically, making the backside leap up in the air like a peacock’s fan. She struts. She mugs for the audience. The crowd of gathered families is laughing, egging her on, lilietsa-ing along with her.
Now the seal is broken. As other children proceed to the front, their mothers, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers run up behind them, doing hilarious dances, shaking their asses, singing, screaming, waving at their children, shaking their arms in astonished blessing, then staggering back to the rest of the family, bodies sagging under the weight of hilarity and joy. The graduation has become a graduation party. People are openly talking, pointing at these mini adults, hugging them, dancing. And then, as the metaphorical cumulus clouds part, I understand why Nthabeleng wanted us to come.
Tseli was one of the first children Nthabeleng’s organization took in, over five years ago now. She was half-dead when they found her. The two former Peace Corps volunteers who founded the safe home—before they recruited Nthabeleng to run it—told me that the squalid hut where Tseli had been abandoned was one of the worst they had ever seen, reeking of shit, death-haunted. Tseli’s mother was in jail for burning down the house of a rival. Her father had moved on to another wife in another village. And by the time she graduates from kindergarten, Tseli’s mother and father will both be dead, part of a generation of parents and caregivers that AIDS is in the process of reaping.
Tseli Moeletsi died and was resurrected in that hut. There is no good reason that she is alive and thriving today. There is no logical reason she shouldn’t be tucked into a tiny grave in the low terraced cemetery by her father’s village, with only a small wirework decoration marking the spot. Like so many children before and after, throughout this region, throughout this country, Tseli should be forgotten.
But she is not. She stands before us now, grinning in her too-big robe, amused by Nthabeleng, this madwoman who adopted her, raised her, coaxed her back from the dead. But for the dedication of a few people who turned their home into an orphanage, Tseli would not be here, in this goofy outfit, at this ridiculous ceremony. She is a laughing, knee-scraping, mischief-making slap in the face of despair. She is a rebuke to submission, to giving up, to accepting the inevitable—to the fact that children die all the time in Lesotho.
It is Easter Sunday for Tseli, for Nthabeleng, for all the mothers out here, scores of them standing in this furnace, dressed in colorful seshoeshoe dresses, running up to dance behind their children, who receive a diploma that says they have lived to age five, unlike so many siblings and cousins. In the Western world, we feel entitled to our long lives, are aghast that we might not receive our full eighty plus. So many of the women in this crowd have lost three-year-olds, one-year-olds, three-week-olds. Ellen shared the story of a grandmother in one of the outer villages who said that, of her ten grandchildren, six were dead, two were HIV positive, and two were healthy. These are not uncommon numbers. This is the reason for celebrating kindergarten graduations, here and everywhere in the world.
As we walk back toward the safe home, challenging Tseli and her tiny friends to footraces and games of tag, I understand what Nthabeleng wanted to say but never would—that despite all the self-important speechifying and the blistering heat, all she could hear were the words: “Tseli Moeletsi, please come accept your diploma.”
JINK
When they ask me, I smile, but actually it’s more of a smirk. Outward smile, inward smirk. Maybe they don’t realize that English is my first language.
“No, no, join us,” they say, after I decline again. “We like to play each day at lunch.”
I have started working at the high school, and my new colleagues have already been incredibly welcoming. Ntate Baholo, my direct supervisor, is the head of the Math and Science Department. Ntate Lebo teaches English, Ntate Katleho chemistry, Ntate Makalo civics, Ntate Linkoe and Ntate Pheko computers. These six friendly Basotho men are trying to get me into a midday game of Scrabble.
“It is so important,” they tell me, “to refresh the mind during lunchtime.”
But I am working through a tricky calculus in my head. My position at the school is tenuous, and the last thing I want is to squander any staff room goodwill. They have taken a significant chance on me: a teacher who has never run a classroom before. I spent the previous year student teaching outside Detroit, but the undertaking was a dubious one; one of my notable achievements came when I located a forgotten faculty-only bathroom where I could sleep-hide during passing periods. Sometimes I was able to attain a position of delicate balance there, leaning up against a ledge with my forehead pressed to the cool tile, where I could briefly forget how very bad I was at my job.
My classroom management skills were, perhaps, underdeveloped. I once watched in amazed horror as one of my students threw a primed rat trap at his best friend. It is unclear to me whether the rat trap was found in the classroom or was brought from home, but either way, not ideal. Jayden, the
thrower, was a notorious ladies’ man who told me he modeled in his spare time, and I did once catch him surreptitiously circulating an eight-by-ten glossy around the classroom, a picture of him stretched shirtless on a faux tiger rug. Cameron, the throwee, was just over five feet tall and was well known to be the strongest person in the school, who could have bench pressed me if inclined. He showed up to senior prom in a cream white suit, cream white shoes, lavender shirt and tie, and a bejeweled Hello Kitty medallion the size of a grapefruit that hung from his neck. And while I had no control over these boys (I can still see the rat trap frozen in midair, full of potential, as Jayden calmly told Cameron: “Catch.”), I did love them in an older-brotherly way. While they spent each school day probing the methods of my psychological downfall, they spent their weekends making YouTube videos where they freestyled over instrumental hip-hop tracks, mostly rapping about food they hoped to consume in the very near future. (One video was a diss track aimed at a Subway employee who had skimped on sandwich toppings.) Whenever they had a video they considered especially good, they would send it to me for adult critique. I think they appreciated the fact that I took their nonsense seriously. This is perhaps my finest attribute: I take all nonsense seriously.
Jayden and Cameron were not alone in testing the dimensions of my authority. (There was none to test, but they persisted anyway.) Toward the end of that year I discovered another one of my favorite students, a girl on the basketball team, sitting in my empty classroom during free period. She was sweaty, her feet up on the desk, wearing only a sports bra and basketball shorts—fresh from a workout, apparently. I walked into the room and immediately turned on my heel to exit.
Separated by a good fifteen feet, we haggled over why I felt it was incredibly important for her to put on a shirt. After a few minutes of negotiation she sighed and said, with a certain bemused exasperation, “It’s okay! I’m not even into guys!” From the hallway, I explained to her that I was happy she felt comfortable talking to me about this, but I was certain my future parole officer would find her logic unpersuasive.