Sunday, March 19, 2006
Time in Lesotho getting short
This blog will be posted a week late since Saturday, March 11 is Moshoeshoe Day (more on that later) and the internet café is closed. I have moved on to my new school, St Charles HS in a place called Seboche. Not that it matters, but Momohau was due south of Leribe for about 2 ½ hours and St Charles is north-east about an hour and half. I went on Thursday. I was supposed to be picked up at noon but it was more like 330 (this is about typical for how things work here). On the way we stopped seven times for various reasons (again this is typical). Had an interesting experience at one of the stops. There was someone riding a donkey toward the truck and it looked like the donkey was going to keep going straight and run into the truck until the rider directed him away. I now have a better understanding of the intelligence level of these animals.
St Charles is in the foothills in a pretty remote spot with some beautiful mountains not far away. I may try to climb one scenic mountain that looks about 1 km away but may be further than that. The school is quite attractive and about 750 m from where I am living (all downhill on the way there). I am renting a lovely rondavel from a lady. It is a beautiful compound with her house next door (her teenage son lives there). This is the nicest rondavel I have seen (I hope to post pictures when I get back to Canada). It is so well-kept that she even sweeps the dirt in the driveway (she has no car) with a broom leaving an interesting pattern. The pit toilet is not far and well-built and very clean. Water is at a community tap about five minutes away. The only problem is that there is a mouse there. I bought some rat/mouse killer but apparently it takes a few days to work. I will spread this on Sunday and hope it works quickly I have already lost a loaf of bread and I have tried to hang a bag with food from the roof of the rondavel. Will find if it works when I go back.
Leaving Mamohau was a bittersweet experience. The staff and kids were sorry to see me go (one of the older teachers – a very dear soul, said it was sad I was going because “you have become one of us”) At the same time I had come to realize that significant changes were not likely to happen there. The situation at St Charles seems very different from Mamohau. At the former the staff (or at least the department heads that I had a long meeting with) seem very keen and very professional. At Mamohau, the teachers were not like this. The kids at Mamohau work very hard with multiple study sessions each day (including 7 am and 730 pm). At St Charles, the kids apparently are not committed to academics and, since the school is not for boarders, they go home to do chores and have homes without electricity. I do not have electricity and know what it is like to read by candle and oil light. More on St Charles later …
Back to King Moshoeshoe … He created the nation of Lesotho (it was called Basutoland in British protectorate days) in the 1840s. At this time, the Zulus under a king named Shaka and the Matabele under Mzilikazi created a time of ethnic cleansing called the Mfecane in the area to the north and east of here. Moshoeshoe was the chief of a small tribe and he led his people into the mountains of northern Lesotho for safety. Other tribes came here and he came them protection in return for their acceptance of him as king. Over time this came to be a largish group and the Basuto nation was formed. It was more of a confederacy than a tribe. One of the results of this is that the people here share a language but not an appearance. Especially in the mountains there is considerable variation in how the people look. Some have very light complexions – in some cases about my colour with the tan I have. Others have faces with features that look distinctly oriental. Anyway, today is Moshoeshoe Day which is one of the few national holidays. BTW, the political leadership has gone downhill since Mo the Great – who did clever things like welcoming French missionaries into the country to give him advice about how to deal with the British.
White people are called Mahoa (singular is Lahoa). When you meet Mahoa, you can virtually always assume that they are aid workers of one sort or another. Friday night at the Leribe Hotel seems to be Mahoa night. A recent one had a group of Welsh teachers, a US Peace Corps guy, a Canadian doctor who works at the Ontario Health Association clinic here, a French woman who works with World Health Organization, and half a dozen of us from Help Lesotho. When I was in Maseru getting my visa extended, we met two Germans who were doing something with the establishment of local governments here. In the whole time I have been here, I have seen a total of about 6 tourists.
I have been doing some work with getting sponsorships in Canada for students here. One of the things that is really hard is to ask kids how many of their parents are alive since the sponsorships are aimed for those who are single or double orphans. In Canada, we take it for granted that kids have parents (not always the case); but here, most of the kids seem to have one parent at most. I interviewed 8 students for sponsorships and there were a total of 7 parents for them with 2 of them described as ‘very ill’ which means one thing here unfortunately.
This brings me back to funerals – they are just so common here. It is by far the most important social event. Every week I know one or more people who have funerals to go to. It is just so depressing that no one even questions it.
In the ‘Only in Africa’ category:
- the internet café is called something like Cecil Business Services, but should be called Cecilia Business Services since it is run by Cecilia. It seems like having a woman’s name does not work here
- today we went for lunch in South Africa! This involves a fairly short journey to a town called Matputsoe. From here you walk across a bridge with lots of barbed wire and go through customs/immigration there. We walked into the very Boer town of Ficksburg and had lunch in a hotel there and then reversed the process. What a difference! You get there and the houses are nice, it is cleaner, the cars are fancier and there are trees everywhere. There are some white people there but many more blacks and it all seemed pretty prosperous.
- One of the volunteers is at a school where they have a double class of almost 100 students with two teachers. There is an empty classroom next door and when she asked about why they did not split the class she was told that near the end of last year the key broke off in the lock of the door (a common occurrence here since the locks have sort of skeleton keys and they are made of a soft metal) and it has not been fixed.
-- MONEY ALERT --
I am asking if anyone would be interested in contributing money to help complete the community hall (which will be used as a classroom to get the kids out of the tent) at Makhlefekane. The community will be building it from local stone that they collect from the fields but have no money for the windows, doors and roof. I have a lot of use for these people because they are trying to do their best for their children in a community where there is virtually no money and often not enough food. One of the volunteers is raising money to buy shoes for children who walk to school barefoot – even in winter with snow on the ground. If you want to donate for that instead, that would be great.
I have prices for the roof and if anyone would like to chip some money to buy a roof truss, a piece of corrugated iron roofing or something else, that would be great.
If you would like to think of it like this, here are the costs of various things if you would like to buy something:
- a roof truss (shaped like a triangle with bracing – we need 14) is about $40
- a piece of corrugated roofing (we need 42) is about $20
- a piece of translucent fiberglass (so there is more light inside the building – we need 16) is about $30
- the steel door and frame is $140
- depending on size, windows are $30 or $60 (we need two of each)
Donations are tax deductible and should be sent to Help Lesotho, 11 Keefer St., Ottawa, K1N 2J9. Can you indicate with your donation that it is to go to “Makhelefane roof project” and could you drop me an email so I know how much money has been raised for this. Thanks to everyone.
*** It is March 20th and I can update the blog and get it posted.
St Charles is turning out to be great. I wish that I had been here first. The staff are really trying to improve their school and they work hard. Also (teacher) attendance it much better here as well. There are problems though. The students do not do very well on the national exams, I think largely because they do not do much homework. Almost no students have electricity in their homes and quite a few families cannot even afford candles. I have helped my landlady’s son with math by lantern light which was an experience to be sure. As fall comes on here it gets dark earlier and earlier.
I figured out my house!. I thought it looked vaguely familiar and now I realize that it is a Hobbit house from Lord of the Rings. This is more than a coincidence since Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein which is in South Africa not far from here. He left as a child but the image of the rondavel stayed in his mind apparently. Me Francisca, my land lady, is the Martha Stewart of the area. The inside of the house is finished in a salmon colour with off-white patches about 4” by 2”. I thought it was paint but it is actually two colours of mud applied with a wool pad. It is very attractive indeed.
I have won out over the rat with the rat killer. I found it dead under my bed mid-week. It was pretty large and nasty.
There is a young Peace Corps volunteer from North Carolina at the school a few days a week. She was actually here to work with the agriculture department but a very nasty sexual harassment situation has developed there and the Corps have withdrawn her from that job. She is teaching biology and health even though she has no teacher training. Quite a challenge with classes of fifty or so in a language the students do not know well. Apparently the students can understand her slight Carolina drawl more easily than my accent. She is somewhat involved with a situation where a step-father has been raping a 9 year old child. This sort of thing happens pretty often around here unfortunately. A real complication is that if (when) the man is put in jail (likely to happen) the family will have no financial support. I checked with the Sister who is the principal at the school and she said the protocol is that the chief is informed. He investigates and brings in the police. It is also his responsibility to look after the family.
This weekend four of us went to one of the few well-developed tourist facilities in the country – Malealea lodge. There where about 30 or so tourists there including some on adventure tours of Southern Africa in an off-road bus (a large powerful vehicle to be sure), some long-distance hikers, some aid workers taking a break. They have comfortable accommodation and showers that produce large amounts of hot water. This may not sound like much, but when you are used to a trickle it matters! I had not had a proper shower since mid-January in Jo’burg. We went ‘pony-trekking’ for three hours. These are actually small horses very used to the rough terrain. It was great fun and my new friend Waldo the Wonder Horse let me feel like I was steering except for moments when he really wanted to be in charge (over rocks or down steep bits). We went out of an hour or so and then hiked down into a gorge to look at San (Bushmen) rock paintings that are something more than 10,000 years old. The San have been dated in the area to 27,000 years ago but the paintings are newer.
Enough for now. I am off to the mountains in an hour or so. Apparently they are getting frost there some nights now.
St Charles is in the foothills in a pretty remote spot with some beautiful mountains not far away. I may try to climb one scenic mountain that looks about 1 km away but may be further than that. The school is quite attractive and about 750 m from where I am living (all downhill on the way there). I am renting a lovely rondavel from a lady. It is a beautiful compound with her house next door (her teenage son lives there). This is the nicest rondavel I have seen (I hope to post pictures when I get back to Canada). It is so well-kept that she even sweeps the dirt in the driveway (she has no car) with a broom leaving an interesting pattern. The pit toilet is not far and well-built and very clean. Water is at a community tap about five minutes away. The only problem is that there is a mouse there. I bought some rat/mouse killer but apparently it takes a few days to work. I will spread this on Sunday and hope it works quickly I have already lost a loaf of bread and I have tried to hang a bag with food from the roof of the rondavel. Will find if it works when I go back.
Leaving Mamohau was a bittersweet experience. The staff and kids were sorry to see me go (one of the older teachers – a very dear soul, said it was sad I was going because “you have become one of us”) At the same time I had come to realize that significant changes were not likely to happen there. The situation at St Charles seems very different from Mamohau. At the former the staff (or at least the department heads that I had a long meeting with) seem very keen and very professional. At Mamohau, the teachers were not like this. The kids at Mamohau work very hard with multiple study sessions each day (including 7 am and 730 pm). At St Charles, the kids apparently are not committed to academics and, since the school is not for boarders, they go home to do chores and have homes without electricity. I do not have electricity and know what it is like to read by candle and oil light. More on St Charles later …
Back to King Moshoeshoe … He created the nation of Lesotho (it was called Basutoland in British protectorate days) in the 1840s. At this time, the Zulus under a king named Shaka and the Matabele under Mzilikazi created a time of ethnic cleansing called the Mfecane in the area to the north and east of here. Moshoeshoe was the chief of a small tribe and he led his people into the mountains of northern Lesotho for safety. Other tribes came here and he came them protection in return for their acceptance of him as king. Over time this came to be a largish group and the Basuto nation was formed. It was more of a confederacy than a tribe. One of the results of this is that the people here share a language but not an appearance. Especially in the mountains there is considerable variation in how the people look. Some have very light complexions – in some cases about my colour with the tan I have. Others have faces with features that look distinctly oriental. Anyway, today is Moshoeshoe Day which is one of the few national holidays. BTW, the political leadership has gone downhill since Mo the Great – who did clever things like welcoming French missionaries into the country to give him advice about how to deal with the British.
White people are called Mahoa (singular is Lahoa). When you meet Mahoa, you can virtually always assume that they are aid workers of one sort or another. Friday night at the Leribe Hotel seems to be Mahoa night. A recent one had a group of Welsh teachers, a US Peace Corps guy, a Canadian doctor who works at the Ontario Health Association clinic here, a French woman who works with World Health Organization, and half a dozen of us from Help Lesotho. When I was in Maseru getting my visa extended, we met two Germans who were doing something with the establishment of local governments here. In the whole time I have been here, I have seen a total of about 6 tourists.
I have been doing some work with getting sponsorships in Canada for students here. One of the things that is really hard is to ask kids how many of their parents are alive since the sponsorships are aimed for those who are single or double orphans. In Canada, we take it for granted that kids have parents (not always the case); but here, most of the kids seem to have one parent at most. I interviewed 8 students for sponsorships and there were a total of 7 parents for them with 2 of them described as ‘very ill’ which means one thing here unfortunately.
This brings me back to funerals – they are just so common here. It is by far the most important social event. Every week I know one or more people who have funerals to go to. It is just so depressing that no one even questions it.
In the ‘Only in Africa’ category:
- the internet café is called something like Cecil Business Services, but should be called Cecilia Business Services since it is run by Cecilia. It seems like having a woman’s name does not work here
- today we went for lunch in South Africa! This involves a fairly short journey to a town called Matputsoe. From here you walk across a bridge with lots of barbed wire and go through customs/immigration there. We walked into the very Boer town of Ficksburg and had lunch in a hotel there and then reversed the process. What a difference! You get there and the houses are nice, it is cleaner, the cars are fancier and there are trees everywhere. There are some white people there but many more blacks and it all seemed pretty prosperous.
- One of the volunteers is at a school where they have a double class of almost 100 students with two teachers. There is an empty classroom next door and when she asked about why they did not split the class she was told that near the end of last year the key broke off in the lock of the door (a common occurrence here since the locks have sort of skeleton keys and they are made of a soft metal) and it has not been fixed.
-- MONEY ALERT --
I am asking if anyone would be interested in contributing money to help complete the community hall (which will be used as a classroom to get the kids out of the tent) at Makhlefekane. The community will be building it from local stone that they collect from the fields but have no money for the windows, doors and roof. I have a lot of use for these people because they are trying to do their best for their children in a community where there is virtually no money and often not enough food. One of the volunteers is raising money to buy shoes for children who walk to school barefoot – even in winter with snow on the ground. If you want to donate for that instead, that would be great.
I have prices for the roof and if anyone would like to chip some money to buy a roof truss, a piece of corrugated iron roofing or something else, that would be great.
If you would like to think of it like this, here are the costs of various things if you would like to buy something:
- a roof truss (shaped like a triangle with bracing – we need 14) is about $40
- a piece of corrugated roofing (we need 42) is about $20
- a piece of translucent fiberglass (so there is more light inside the building – we need 16) is about $30
- the steel door and frame is $140
- depending on size, windows are $30 or $60 (we need two of each)
Donations are tax deductible and should be sent to Help Lesotho, 11 Keefer St., Ottawa, K1N 2J9. Can you indicate with your donation that it is to go to “Makhelefane roof project” and could you drop me an email so I know how much money has been raised for this. Thanks to everyone.
*** It is March 20th and I can update the blog and get it posted.
St Charles is turning out to be great. I wish that I had been here first. The staff are really trying to improve their school and they work hard. Also (teacher) attendance it much better here as well. There are problems though. The students do not do very well on the national exams, I think largely because they do not do much homework. Almost no students have electricity in their homes and quite a few families cannot even afford candles. I have helped my landlady’s son with math by lantern light which was an experience to be sure. As fall comes on here it gets dark earlier and earlier.
I figured out my house!. I thought it looked vaguely familiar and now I realize that it is a Hobbit house from Lord of the Rings. This is more than a coincidence since Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein which is in South Africa not far from here. He left as a child but the image of the rondavel stayed in his mind apparently. Me Francisca, my land lady, is the Martha Stewart of the area. The inside of the house is finished in a salmon colour with off-white patches about 4” by 2”. I thought it was paint but it is actually two colours of mud applied with a wool pad. It is very attractive indeed.
I have won out over the rat with the rat killer. I found it dead under my bed mid-week. It was pretty large and nasty.
There is a young Peace Corps volunteer from North Carolina at the school a few days a week. She was actually here to work with the agriculture department but a very nasty sexual harassment situation has developed there and the Corps have withdrawn her from that job. She is teaching biology and health even though she has no teacher training. Quite a challenge with classes of fifty or so in a language the students do not know well. Apparently the students can understand her slight Carolina drawl more easily than my accent. She is somewhat involved with a situation where a step-father has been raping a 9 year old child. This sort of thing happens pretty often around here unfortunately. A real complication is that if (when) the man is put in jail (likely to happen) the family will have no financial support. I checked with the Sister who is the principal at the school and she said the protocol is that the chief is informed. He investigates and brings in the police. It is also his responsibility to look after the family.
This weekend four of us went to one of the few well-developed tourist facilities in the country – Malealea lodge. There where about 30 or so tourists there including some on adventure tours of Southern Africa in an off-road bus (a large powerful vehicle to be sure), some long-distance hikers, some aid workers taking a break. They have comfortable accommodation and showers that produce large amounts of hot water. This may not sound like much, but when you are used to a trickle it matters! I had not had a proper shower since mid-January in Jo’burg. We went ‘pony-trekking’ for three hours. These are actually small horses very used to the rough terrain. It was great fun and my new friend Waldo the Wonder Horse let me feel like I was steering except for moments when he really wanted to be in charge (over rocks or down steep bits). We went out of an hour or so and then hiked down into a gorge to look at San (Bushmen) rock paintings that are something more than 10,000 years old. The San have been dated in the area to 27,000 years ago but the paintings are newer.
Enough for now. I am off to the mountains in an hour or so. Apparently they are getting frost there some nights now.
