The Perks of Being a Volunteer

There are very few things I am sure of in life.  If you asked me 4 years ago, Aparna, do you see yourself living with no electricity and doing your buisness in an outhouse, I probablly would have turned around and walked the other way at how insane your question was.  Yet here I am.
Being a volunteer, and let me be specific, a Peace Corps volunteer, is hard and I don't say that enough.  In no other position would you be living under rules you would never follow follow in any other job (no car, can't leave the country with out permission, etc.), living in a place you would never live in under any other circumstance, and surviving with out all the amenities your parents worked so hard to provide for you.  There are many a times that I question my sanity in deciding to come here and it's going to be a VERY long time before I decide to volunteer like this again.
But being a volunteer has its perks.  For one, I have complete job security.  For the most part I can't be fired.  As long as I am doing something (which doesn'y have to be my job) I get to stay here and I get my measly pay check every month.  I don't really have sick days, or vacation days from my job.  What I mean is that I can be sick for as I need, I can come to the capital to see my doctor, and there are no reprecusions.  I can also decide that I have something better to do than go to school and tell my principal I'm not coming to school the next day.  I don't do this often, but if I need to, then I do.
This leads me to my next point: I get paid no matter what I do.  I don't have to be a good teacher to get my little stipend.  I just have to try.  And trust me, if I were being paid by my successes as a teacher I'd have had to leave the program a few months after joining.  That also means I get no money incentives or bonuses for doing extra work.  Therefore any projects I decide to do outside my primary assignment is done purely because I want to.
But above all, being a volunteer means very little worries about life.  I don't worry about being promoted because I can't be.  I don't worry about paying rent or any other bills because I don't.  I don't worry about improving my quality of life because it's temporary.  Being a volunteer is about being free and I'm going to miss it once I get back in to the grind.  So yes, being a volunteer is hard, but is anything worth doing easy? I think not.

10...9...8...

There’s a point in Peace Corps or your career, or any commitment really, when you stop counting up and you start counting down.  Gone are the days with Facebook statuses exclaiming “3 months as a PCV,” or “6 month anniversary in Lesotho” and so begin the days of “only 7 more months left.”  I started my countdown on January 3^rd 2013.

I guess it’s a bit unfortunate that my countdown began so close to my one-year mark as a PCV.  I had just spent Christmas with some fellow PCVs and for New Year’s I was in Capetown celebrating the end of 2012.  Capetown reminded me a lot of the US; the mix of people from all over the world, staying in the city surrounded by different types of cuisines, feeling like I was part of something bigger than myself.  You see, for the longest time I had difficulty imagining myself outside of Lesotho.  I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do once I left the country (other than living under my parent’s roof) and I felt comfortable in this foreign country.  I knew what I was doing, I felt reasonably happy with my work here (as much as any PCV can be), and somehow the temporariness of it made it that much more enjoyable.  Until I got a taste of what life would be like when I returned and since then I have been counting down the days.

PCVs do their countdowns in various ways.  Some download a countdown application on to their blackberries to constantly remind them, other create art-work such as chains where they remove a link for every day.  Personally I prefer the casual countdown, in my head and usually just the number of months left: I’m leaving in December and it’s June so that’s 6 months left.

I’m not desperate to leave and I’m definitely not unhappy.  It’s hard for me to describe how I feel right now than to say I’m happy with the work I’ve done, I'm excited for the projects I am yet to finish, and I'm at peace with leaving a country that has hosted me for two years.  I’m appreciative of my experiences here but I’m ready and excited to move on to the next chapters of my life.  In some ways I’ve lost the fantasy of being in Peace Corps and in Africa and have removed my rose colored glasses to realize how hard it is to stay in a village by yourself, to use the unpredictable and often frustrating public taxis as your sole means of transportation, and above all how lonely it is to be the only foreigner in the area. Lesotho will always be in my heart but I’m looking forward to going home.  But before that I still have some work to do.

Learning the Lingo

Before leaving for the Peace Corps I would tell all my friends "I'm going to Lesotho to speak Sesotho to the Basotho."  People would laugh for I'm sure there are a finite number of countries where the name of the people, the local language, and the name of the country all rhyme.
At that time I was doing my best to learn a little bit of Sesotho.  My family never failed to remind me how difficult it is to learn a new language and I didn't want to be behind.
At this moment I can sadly say that I am no where close to being fluent in Sesotho.  I have my excuses: I teach in English and I make it a rule to never speak to my students in Sesotho so that they have to practice their English.  And Sesotho is a very difficult language with a completely different structure from Latin based languages.  But I know enough to survive quite comfortably.  The truth is that most Basotho speak pretty decent English but to really understand it you have to learn the quirks about Lesotho English.  I wanted to share some of my favorite phrases.  And for anyone who plans on traveling to Southern Africa, these phrases work outside of Lesotho too.

Sharp: One of the first "lingo" words I learned in Lesotho.  You hear it all the time and it can be used in a variety of situations.  In a basic context it translates into "good" or "fine."  For example:
Person 1:How are you doing today?
Person 2: I'm sharp!
Or
Person 1: Here is food you ordered.
Person 2: Sharp!
I use it a lot when people are trying to sell me things.  It's rude to tell someone you don't want what they're selling so you either lie and say you don't have any money (Ha ke na chelete) or let them know that you're good (Ke sharp).

Yebo!: This is another phrase that has multiple meanings.  I've heard people use it to mean "yes" or just as a happy expression.  It's most commonly heard when kids are piled into a taxi for a school trip.  The taxi driver pumps up some House music to a decibel level where the bass begins to vibrate your body and the kids lean out of the window screaming "Yebo!"  In this context it is equivalent to an American "Woot!"

Too much: This expression is really more bad English than a real expression but I hear it all the time here.  It's used instead of "very." For example.
Person 1: It's cold today.
Person 2 (in agreement): Too much.

Now: "Now" in a Lesotho context has a different meaning that the American English "now."  For example, it's almost exam time at my school and this was a conversation my colleague and I were having:
My colleague: The Forms Cs are going to be writing their Sesotho exam now
Me: What! Their writing it today?
My colleague: No! Sometime next week.
When you say "now" in Lesotho it means sometime in the definable future.  When my host mother tells me that she's leaving for church now she means sometime before lunch.  When I tell my students I want their assignments completed now, they understand it to mean by the end of today.  Part of this has to do with Basotho's sense of time.  My colleague told me a joke once: In Lesotho there are only three hours to a day: morning, afternoon, and night.

Now now: So that brings me to the unique Southern African expression of "now now." "Now now" is equivalent to an American "now." For example:
Person 1: When will you be leaving?
Person 2: Now.
Person 1: No, I need to leave now now!

I could add a few more expressions on this list but these are my favorite.  Hope you enjoyed them!

Technology at its best!

Today I found something amazing.  I'm sitting in an internet cafe, trying to figure out what young people do on the internet these days, waiting for my computer to charge, when I thought I might try to find my village on google maps.  And I did!


View Larger Map

My location: -30.069639,27.380488

To give you a bit of direction.  Zoom in first.  The structure in the middle is my host family's compound.  The red roof is my host family's house and the tin roof is a building with four rooms, one of which (the square farthest from the house) is my little room.  Yes, it is that small.  The three plots to the left of the house belong to my family and the property stretches to five trees on the right.
If you scroll past those trees (staying along the path) you will come to my school (past the long building on the left on the right side of the road)  It's composed in a rectangle with the southern side having no buildings.  The northern building has three classrooms: Form A, B1, and B2.  The east side has the kitchen (north east most building) the office (in the middle) and the staff room.  The west side has the store room (small northwest building) and three more classrooms for Form C, D, and E.
If you continue to follow the road you will reach the primary school (the schools are walking distance from each other).
In between the schools you will see our tap.  It's quite large.
If you follow the road north and east you will see the orphanage on the right side of the road (just before a lot of trees on the left)

Enjoy (I know I am).

Failures and Praises

I like having things go my way; don’t we all?  True, I have those moments where I just don’t try and I receive a mediocre result but when I put in time and effort I get results.  It’s always been that way.

Being a teacher is therefore very, very frustrating for me.  There are just too many variables that I can’t control: the weather, the materials available, but mainly my students.

I spent a long time thinking and writing this post and I’ll let you know that I’ve thought long and hard how I want to approach this.  I don’t want to complain; I do it enough and I don’t need the whole world hearing it.  But I want to be honest and share my frustrations with my friends and family.  So here is my compromise.

I may have mentioned before that I was involved with training the new education volunteers during the end of last year.  Training was still eye opening the second time around because the first time around I was so overwhelmed (and a little bored) that I missed some things.  Doing it the second time gave me a new perspective and strangely reminded me how unaccustomed I’ve become to the American way of things.  For example, teachers in the U.S. never really deny students use of the bathroom.  There may be consequences for using it during class but no teacher will ever tell a student that they can’t use it.  I deny that right to my students all the time.  I’m not proud of it but I have to maintain a sense of discipline and order in my class and if I let one student go then in ten minutes another student will ask to go too.  In America teachers don’t send kids to buy them items from a shop, fill up their water bottles, and clean their dishes.  Students here are also responsible for keeping their own classrooms clean; we don’t have a janitor.

You can blame these differences on different values and different culture but it really comes down to school isn’t just about learning; it’s about learning how to be a good citizen.  So students are made to fetch, clean, and everything else in hopes that when they become adults they will be able to do it all themselves.  Therefore students end up missing class for a variety of reasons.  The boys take turns fetching water for the cook and often miss class for that (the girls missed class for a week because the cook's daughter had a baby and was absent and someone had to cook lunch).  We miss class for mass since we are a church school and attending church is a priority.  We will miss class to practice for competitions.  Teachers will refuse to teach a class if they feel it is unkempt.  It’s been one of my biggest frustrations here because I like to plan ahead and when I miss a class I have to redo my plan for the week.  I have learned to only plan my lessons a day in advanced to reduce my frustrations but I still have to have some idea when I’m teaching a lesson or when I will be doing an activity with the class.

But my biggest frustration is my students.  As a teacher I want all my students to do well and I put in the effort to do as much as I can to make sure they do as well as they can do.  In the end, I’m always disappointed with the results.  I know there are many reasons why my students don’t do well.  For example a lot of my students have tough family situations.  They are orphans and are responsible for their younger siblings or have chores they are responsible for.  Or they stay with grandparents (which is very common here even if both parents are living) and have to help them.  I would say very few of my students have a family where they are encouraged to study and do homework at home.  I don’t mean that they are not encouraged to do well at school.  It’s just that school is at school and at home you have to work.

Other students struggle with English and all classes except Sesotho are in English.  As a school we punish students for speaking Sesotho so that they will improve and become more comfortable in their second language.  Recently I also helped the school open a library containing books in English.  But it’s still a struggle for my students and I know part of the reason the assessments are so poor is because they simply can’t understand what the question is asking.

The school also has many students who repeat grades.  I was oblivious to them last year but this year I am very aware of them since I know them from last year.  My school lets students take a class three times before it refuses to take a student back.  And I have quite a few third time repeaters in my classes.  And the reason they are repeating is not because they failed but because they failed miserably (we still let students who fail go to the next grade).  So two years of failing miserably and they aren’t doing any better this year.  How do you explain that?  And it’s not just one or two subjects but everything.  Maybe it’s a learning disability but to be honest I wouldn’t know how to spot one.  And with all the other reasons for students not to be doing well it’s not like such a student would stick out.  And some students just don’t care.

But in the end, when I try to reason it all out, I’m left with the possibility that maybe it’s me.  Maybe I’m not a very good teacher or maybe I’m just not trying hard enough.  It’s moments like this that I have to remind myself that I’m not in control of everything and I just have to let it go.  There’s only so much I can do for my students and only so much I can do with the time I have here.  So while all these concerns may bring me down I just have to wash my hands of it and look at what is working.  Maybe that’s not the best decision, maybe not even the right one, but it works for me.

Cultural Day 2013

On April 11^th my school celebrated Cultural Day.  I had missed the celebration last year since I was away for a Peace Corps workshop so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  In the end I had a lot of fun, ate some great food, and learned more about Basotho culture.  The students all came dressed in traditional Basotho outfits (some were dressed for their presentations).  As you can see blankets are a huge part of Basotho traditional wear.

Usually, I was told, the students wear the very traditional Basotho dress: animal skins.  Back in the day before fabric and Christianity came to Lesotho, Basotho used to wear animal hides.  The school would rent these costumes on Cultural Day and the students would them.  My teachers showed me pictures from previous Cultural Days; the girls are usually topless with an animal skin skirt and the boys where fur.  For whatever reason the school decided against it this year (it might have been because of the weather).  But one of my students did end up wearing the traditional Basotho garment.

 

Food

We required all the students to bring some sort of traditional Basotho food for the day (if you didn’t bring food, you didn’t eat).  Some of these foods Basotho still eat, others they rarely make.

Maize: the staple food of Basotho.  Maize to Basotho is like rice to Asians.

Pumpkin: Both steamed and cooked.  The green item is made with baby pumpkins (still green).

Papa (finely ground maize mixed in boiling water) and greens

Fried Papa

Maize and whole grain mix

Steamed, home-made bread

Dried peaches: Peaches grow everywhere in Lesotho

Fried Maize that was ground: apparently this is travel food

Skits

For the past few weeks, during their Sesotho class, the students have been preparing skits to present on this day.  They show various traditional cultural activities.

When a baby is born the mother is not allowed to leave the house.  On the next full moon the mother invites young people to the house to do various activities.  If the baby is a girl she will invite teenage girls to grind maize (the girl sitting on the ground in the pictures), sweep, and collect water.  If it’s a boy (there was no skit of this) then teenage boys will play with sticks.

Basotho women carry their babies (or in this case stuffed animals) on their backs, supported by many blankets.  This allows them to care for their child while giving them the motility to continue with their daily work.

This skit showed men catching rats in the field.  One set of men scare the rate (which would be found in long grass) towards one side of the field while another set of men wait to catch the rats when they come their way.

Traditional witch doctors are still found in Lesotho.  These girls depict a few scenes where villagers see a witch doctor for various reasons.  The girl in white is the doctor, the girl in orange is her assistant, and the other girl is a customer.

Boys doing a traditional dance.

The Form Bs depicted a traditional wedding.  The girl in the orange blanket is the bride, the boy in the teal and black blanket with a hat is the groom and the boy in the middle is the grandfather conducting the ceremony.  During a traditional wedding the family slaughters a cow and the bile is poured over the new couple to signify their new union.  The cow is then slit evenly between the two families and some of it is eaten.

Back in the day, when a woman was barren, they would have the woman walk around the village carrying a stone on her back.  They would then place the stone in a well and she would have to drink the water from the well.  This was supposed to give her children.

Gum boot dance: many Basotho men go to work in the mines and these boys did a dance commonly done there.  The mine culture is very unique since all the workers come from different countries and therefor have different cultures and languages.  I’ve heard the language spoken in the mine is a combination of all the different host languages.

These boys are showing a traditional sword fight.

And lastly the teachers broke out in song and dance to end the events.

I Bless the Rains Down in Africa

If there’s one thing I can say proudly about my time in the Peace Corps it’s that I have greatly reduced my carbon footprint.  I only use electricity to charge my cell phone and laptop; I do not own a car and I use public transportation or I walk; and I use very little water…well that may not be affecting my carbon footprint but it’s still good for the earth.

Lesotho has an interesting history with water.  Did you know that Lesotho sells water to other countries (Lesotho breaks all stereotypes about Africa)?  I don’t know where the water comes from (neither do any of the locals), nor does anyone know where that money goes.  But Lesotho does have quite a few dams to hold water.  Yet people still complain about water problems…

Water has a strange roll in my life now.  Like any person in the developed world I still drink it, I still cook with it, and I still use it when washing but I am so much more aware of how much water I use.  I have three buckets I use for water in my house: 2 large 20L buckets that I store drinking water in and 1 smaller bucket (maybe 5L) that I fetch washing water with (I will explain why I separate the two in a second).  I know that the drinking bucket will last me about 5 days (more or less depending on the weather) and my washing bucket is more than enough for a good bath and to wash my dishes.  Therefore on a typical weekday I usually only fill my washing bucket once a day.

I am also more aware of where my water comes from.  I take my washing water from rainwater.  My family keeps large, open containers outside to collect rainwater.  I never use this water for drinking because I doubt my host family cleans these containers very often and it’s not uncommon for me to find tiny organisms swimming in the water.  If I did have to drink the water I would boil it and filter it.  I get my drinking water from the ground.  In Lesotho you will commonly see a tap (basically looks like a faucet) bringing water from the ground to us village folks; my family has a hand pump on their property that I use (in other words I’m going to have some nice arms when I get back).  I filter this water since it always has a slight brown color.  Most volunteers use only a single source of water for their nutritional and hygiene needs.  The only reason I started using two is because the hand pump will occasionally bring up water infested with insects or that has a stronger brown color than usual.  During these instances my family will take a wheelbarrow with containers to collect water from a communal tap and I will get my drinking water from that.  Since this water is not as easy to collect we use the rainwater (or the insect infested water) for all our other uses.   There are also other times where our water source “runs out.”  Strangely this always happens when it rains.  It’s not a permanent problem and the water some how comes back by the next morning but having another source of water is always nice.  The other lesson here is to hoard your water when you have it.

But the role of water in the typical Mosotho life doesn’t end there.  Lesotho is a country full of farmers.  Everyone has sheep and cows and everyone grows maize (many Basotho also have smaller gardens where they grow other vegetables but maize is grown in large quantities).  Therefore water is essential for watering the crops and like most of the world, there just never seems to be enough water to go around.  Basotho are always telling me that we need more rain.

Unfortunately when it rains it usually pours and that affects other parts of Lesotho life.  On rainy mornings we get only half of our students.  Most of your students walk quite a distance to come to school and the school will even scold students for letting their parents send them to school when it’s raining.  Students are also extremely worried about dirtying their shoes and books so they will walk to school barefoot for their shoes stay clean.   And in areas where there is a lot of snow fall schools will simply cancel school until students can walk to school.  This is frustrating for me as a teacher since all the students are still responsible for the material I teach on those days yet only half my students are getting the information.

You also have to remember that Lesotho has very few paved roads.  There is literally one paved road that runs through the country.  And this road is full of potholes, uneven, and in general poorly made.  Lesotho is also a hilly, dry country.  What I am trying to say is that when it rains it makes getting places harder.  The dirt here just doesn’t soak up that much water so instead of mud you have large puddles of water.  Places are made without consideration of draining the water so the roads and pathways become flooded and it’s impossible to go anywhere with out traveling through a few inches of water.  And don’t forget that most people have to walk quite a bit before they are able to access a paved road with transportation.  So if it rains people aren’t able to get a lot done; traveling is just too tiresome in the rain.

As for me, I’ve never liked the rain, even in California when pouring constitutes a mild shower.  I like it even less here.  It’s not so bad if I have my rain boots on (assuming they haven’t started leaking).  Because when water, water’s everywhere I’d rather be inside with a good book, a warm blanket, and a cat sleeping on my lap.