Notes of Facebook Past

Old posts from FB....

On the way back from vacation, the taxi traveled through Golden Gate National Park on the South Africa side and my jaw was dropped the whole time. I mean that literally. We were coming through in the early evening, with clouds and Jesus rays in abundance, and the scenery was spectacular. Towering sandstone mountains covered in lush green praries, deep valleys and a reseviour lake. Everything untouched by human development, it looked literally like the land before time. I was expecting dinosaurs to come out screeching at me at any moment (if they could catch us that is, the taxi going a steady 160+ km/hr on the old, twisting park road).

Now that I’m back at site, I’ve been assaulted by a barrage of mixed feelings. The predominate one seeming to be lethargy. I have some great new ideas for projects in my community that center around developing creativity in the kids. Im just tired of being the only one who’s excited about projects of any kind. People here want money, jobs, roads, the kind of stuff I CANT give them. So how do you convince a community who is poor, sometimes hungry, a community that lacks basic infastructure that having an art/drama club is important? That their children should be reading books in the library, looking at pictures of other places, animals and people, should be drawing and LEARNING (because yes it has to be learned) to express themselves instead of hauling water and working in fields?

The other day I had some kids over at my home, we were coloring/drawing pictures outside. These kids were between the ages of 3-10. Two of the boys were all snotty, and when the older boy caught me staring at the long dribble of snot hanging down little Tsepos face (hes about 6) he reprimanded him and he promptly sniffed it all back in. I kinda gagged at that. (Side note: the only real nasty thing about summer here are the flies. They are everywhere and they harass any living thing. They try to get into your eyes, nose, face, everywhere, and are impossible to get rid of. They start buzzing at you around 5:30 in the morning, assalting your face and swarming onto the bed. One time, when I was hanging out with another volunteer and the flies were being extra nasty, she commented that she felt particularly third-world when the flies are attacking us. I had to laugh at that). So anyway, these kids and I are covered in stupid annoying flies, the flies especially attacking the children’s cuts and scrapes, while they obliviously color and giggle away.

At one point I brought out some magazines for them to look at and they kept pointing at various pictures, trying to outshout each other asking me what this or that picture was. They asked what a polar bear was (a dog? They thought), what a geothermal plant was, there was a picture of the Mars lander on one page, and planets on another. It broke my heart not being able to tell them what they were looking at. There was this moment when I was trying my hardest to explain that stupid Mars spaceship when I looked around at them, all snot-covered, with those damn flies swarming us, and them with their expectant little eyes, and I couldn’t do anything. I was lost. I wanted them so badly to see and understand what that damn polar bear was too, where it lived, why it was endangered and why it wasn’t a dog. Language, language, language. The biggest barrier I face here. I can get over the fact that I cant talk to the adults, it’s my inability to communicate with children that really hurts me. They’re the ones that care about what a polar bear is, the adults just want to know how much money it costs to go to America and where my husband is.

I think my biggest struggles so far have come from trying to adapt to a culture that is so homogenous. In the states, there are so many different…well EVERYTHING. Here there is one language, one culture, one way to make papa, or sweep, one way to think really. And its so hard to really understand this and try to work within that kind of framework. As Americans we value individualism (or at least the outward apperance of that individualism). So there are days when I think, “well, that’s it I guess. I’ve been here for 8 months, learned about the culture and there is nothing left to surprise me, because everyone and everything is the same…” Of course this isn’t true, there is a lot I am sure to never see, or understand because I am a foreigner who cant speak in the local languge well enough. But there are days when I just throw my hands up in the air, because I cant grasp how a society can be so painfully slow to change anything. I think that these frustrations don’t reflect the reality of change in Lesotho, because it is happening, I think it’s a reflection of my need to be surrounded by diversity of life. As one friend puts it, we’re under stimulated here. I’m not joking when I say that at the football tournament the DJ (and the crowd) preferred to listen to the same ten songs on repeat rather than my American music that I brought (which I have heard played in Maseru), and that EVERY single Mosotho I interviewed said their favorite food was pap and meroho (greens), and that at the art competition every single child in the sculpture part sculpted a cow, and every child that drew, did a variation of a house and a taxi. And if one child drew a flower, the two children next to her copied her exact flower. I ask young girls what they want to be when they grow up, there is one answer (if they plan on going to college): Nurse. They all want to be nurses. Well, what else is there? There are polar bears, and maybe if they knew about them, some little girl would really want to be a nurse for the polar bears. And that would be a step in the right direction for all of us.