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Wil, 2 April 2010
Lesotho , Maseru 26°

First Impressions

27 March

There is a pop concert going on right behind our house and the din is deafening, even with all the windows closed. The ‘poverty-stricken’ youth of Lesotho is celebrating. No chance of getting any sleep for the time being, so great opportunity to catch up with the blog.

There was a concert like this on Meshoeshoe (pronounce mshéshéDay, (the death date of the founder of the Kingdom of Lesotho) 2 weeks ago. Then we did go and have a look. It was dead boring. Just lots of noise, kids hanging around, or dancing and getting steadily drunk. Traffic in the whole area was blocked by cars full of kids trying to get in.

Today we are not bothering. No idea what they are celebrating this time, but the streets were full of excited kids long before the ‘music’ even started and there are traffic jams all over the place again. I am not too worried that I won’t sleep at all. I still get so tired on account of the altitude that at some stage I just collapse and sleep like the dead most nights, noise or no noise. Very often, I am in bed before 9! Mel, as usual, has no problems any which way. The altitude doesn’t bother him, and he always sleeps as soon as his head hits the pillow anyway. You will understand that I am green with envy.

Mel arrived here in January, but I wanted to spend time home with my offspring and friends a little longer and didn’t travel until 28 February. I have been here almost 4 weeks now, and it has been like a holiday. Lesotho is breath-takingly beautiful. We live in the capital, Maseru, which is a small, somewhat chaotic town with a very relaxed population. We are bang in the center of things here.

Although where we stay is officially a hotel, we have our own little, very comfortable house.The hotel itself is very small, but the compound is huge. Most guests have their own house set in the beautiful gardens. The smallest houses are built in the style of the traditional Lesotho housing, called rondaevels, round huts with straw roofs, which you still find all over the country. We have a rectangular semi-detached house with a high pointed roof of corrugated iron, painted green. The house has a living room with open kitchen a big bathroom with bath and a separate shower a bedroom and a mezzanine. The mezzanine floor is not really suitable for living as it only covers half the living room and is completely open. But it does add to the sense of space. I use it to do my yoga exercises. Such luxury to have a room set aside just for that.

Unfortunately, the job I thought to have lined up for me never materialized. Mel had put an ad for me in the Maseru News and in response to that I got an email from the administrator of the Montessori International School asking if I was prepared to teach English. I replied yes, and attached my cv, and that was it, I had a job, I thought ...

Once I had overcome the fatigues of about 24 hours of travel, mainly at night, I sent out an email to report my arrival. When that didn’t lead to a response, I called and was told I would be called back. I wasn’t.

So, I went to the local tourist information office, got myself a city map and set out in search of the school to see what was going on. Everything here is within walking distance, be it uphill-downhill and most of the streets have good pavement.

Sonette, the administrator received me with enthusiasm and immediately departed on a long story that I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. At first they had wanted me as a replacement for a teacher who was leaving Lesotho, but now the teacher was staying to the end of the school year. However, the founder and principal of the school had suddenly died a few weeks earlier, and on the basis of my CV they had thought I was a godsend. Could I take over as Principal?

It just hadn’t occurred to anybody to check on how long I would be in Lesotho. When she realised we would leave again in August, the bottom fell out from under her existence. But then it was no use to offer me even the English teaching! Schools close in June and the new academic year starts in August! I totally agreed with her, but after some thinking and talking it over with Mel, I said I might be interested in doing the job, at a decent salary, however, and with perks like them helping us find a house and a car thrown in. That, in turn, they needed to consider. They would come back to me.

They are still considering. I haven’t heard from them anymore and my emails remain unanswered, even though I offered to help them out for free until the closure of the school year. So I am not holding my breath. And there are plenty of other things to do. A few individuals responded to Mel’s add asking me if I would be prepared to do some coaching, which I do now for the manager of PACT, and for a school teacher.

Apart from pop concerts that occasionally spoil our Saturday nights, this is the most pleasant place we have been so far. Lesotho is really beautiful. It is a third-world country, but we notice very little of it. Everybody here looks well-dressed and well-fed. And it is soooo refreshingly not a Muslim country for a change.

Most women here are big to enormous and they love to show off their assets: their huge behinds forced into too narrow trousers, leggings or short skirts, their equally impressive breasts dangling from over-narrow, overly low-cut tops and their feet forced into dazzlingly high heels. The hairdos are sober. No intricately interwoven hair pieces to offset the big buts here. Quite a few women simply shave their heads or wear their hair in neat cob rows, which brings out the beauty of their faces even more. I feel tiny and provincial beside them.

I hear that there is a lot to be improved with regard to women’s rights, but what I see in the streets is men and women that seem to communicate on equal footing and there is a lot of kissing and hugging in public. Nobody wears black, not a headscarf or veil in sight, let alone a niqab, face mask or burqua.

There are plenty of shops here and the supermarkets are really huge and better stocked than many a supermarket in the Netherlands. Most of them are in walking distance and I could choose to go to a different one every day, were it not that they all seem to have the same assortment.

Unfortunately, for me, it is all very American. We have a hard time finding plain stuff. Everything seems to be pre-salted, pre-sugared, pre-flavoured and with added vitamins, colorants, preservatives and what have you. And the quantities seem to cater for families of 10 at least only. Meat is of the very fatty stuff and comes in huge packages called with little attention to political correctness 'housewife pack'.

Another thing that is very striking here is that Lesotho has obviously been free of all the ugly consequences from Apartheid. There is no or very little self-consciousness in the way blacks and whites relate to each other. And the automatic reverence black people in any 3rd-world country show for white faces, seems to be lacking. And that too is very refreshing.

1 April

As time goes by, we do start to notice the typical characteristics of the 3rd world. The typical non-functioning of the public sector, the corruption, the hidden unemployment, or rather , the over-employment, and, surprisingly hidden, grinding poverty.

Usually I smell it before I see it, that typical sewer smell in places where there is no open sewer, and which I only happen to pick up because the wind blows my way. In fact the only open sewer I have seen so far is at the hospital of all places. One of the most dismal places here in Lesotho and one I never hope to set a foot for medical reasons.

When I look where the smell comes from, sure enough, hidden by the bushes are the have-nots camping out, very often no more than kids. It breaks my heart to see them, time and again. And these are never the kids asking for money. That comes only from kids who obviously don’t need it. The kids in school uniforms, who seemingly don’t lack all that much in anything. They ask routinely for money of any white face they come across. Is seems to be the only English they know sometimes. It is a phenomenon we have come across everywhere in Asia as well as in Africa. If this is what all this donor aid adds up to, the forever asking for money rather than working for it yourself, I’d say let’s pull out all of us and immediately! But that’s not how donor aid works, of course.

The kids in the bushes I can’t help, but I can do something for the school drop outs. I have met a Dutchman called Gerard Mathot here, who has set up a self-learning center for kids who cannot go to school for one reason or other. I offered to do some tutoring and running a language clinic there. It is a 45-minute pretty steep climb up the hill to the center and an equally steep climb down, so very good for building up my condition, which is zero at this altitude. The work was pretty rewarding from the start. On my first day I was approached by one student. The second day I had 5, and more waiting in the wings. So, now I am getting some time table sorted out for after Easter, so that students know when to find me.

It might also prove to be good as a project. I had already heard from one of the other tutors that she thought none of the kids could really read. I knew from my experience in Zanzibar that reading in itself is not the problem, making sense of what they read is.

All the kids I worked with here are working for the Cambridge O-level exam. These exams are set especially for Eastern Africa. All the same, the text they were wrestling with was about the Olympic Games. The first paragraph explains when the games started and where.

And that’s where the trouble starts too. None of these kids has a linear perception of time. To them time is circular. Their lives are determined by the seasons. So, 3000 years ago means nothing to them. However, they were aware of the winter games in Canada, so that’s what they related the first bit of information to. The next hurdle is their knowledge of the world. They had never heard of Greece and only vaguely of Europe. Was that somewhere in Lesotho? Next, how do you explain the advantages of living on an island to kids who live in the mountains and have never seen the sea?

With all this lack of understanding, a simple question like, ‘why was it an advantage to hold the games in Olympia’ was unanswerable, not because they cannot read, but because to them there IS no advantage. Planes and trains go everywhere don’t they? Well, not 3000 years ago, which is a very, very, very, very long time ago. Then how do you travel to an island? Believe it or not, none of these kids has ever seen a boat! And when I told them that airplanes were only invented when my grandmother was a little girl (a perception of time they DO understand), they took it for granted there were no boats either until then.

Like my Zanzibari charges these kids do need reading practise, but what they need to read up on is geography, history, biology etc. All that stuff that we have had poured into us from primary school onwards. I am not sure yet how I am going to do that, but I am sure we will work something out.

2 April, Good Friday

This is obviously the most important holiday of the year. The staff here has been reduced to half its size and the people who are working, work a half day. Only idiots like white consultants go to work. There is nobody else in their offices. Outside I can hear people singing and dancing in the fields around Lancers Inn rather than in churches. It is a very African sound. African religious music sounds the same wherever we have been so far.

There isn’t a shop open anywhere, which should give you an idea of the importance of the day as shops don’t even close on Christmas Day, I have been told. I am going to give up on being active and responsible too now, and will take on my accompanying spouse role for the rest of this day. I will be by the pool with the other wives, should you be looking for me.

For the photos go to facebook, where I will shortly place a few albums with Lesotho pics.

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