Almost….there….!

Hey gang!

First a quick update on the weather in Ha Lejone!  The sun doesn’t rise now until around 6:50am, which makes it really hard to be motivated to wake up in the mornings.  The temperature doesn’t help to inspire me to leave my bed, either.  Today I slept in until a record(for a school day) 7:10am.  I had 25 minutes to take care of my business and get to school!

Still no snow, but the weather’s been incredibly clear the last few weeks.  It turns out you don’t need snow to wake up to a white world, anyway…a hard enough frost gives the same effect.  It is really is beautiful, to step outside into a brisk, white world.  The dammed water has a pretty cool effect, as well(no puns intended).  Since the water is so deep, it has stayed relatively warm.  The fast temperature drops at night make it so in the morning there is an eerie, stationary cloud that suspends itself only 200 feet or so above the river…exactly the height of the plateau of my valley.  I can almost let myself imagine that I’m living in a village that floats upon the clouds.  Gorgeous.

The main thing that sucks about the weather…besides the biting cold, is that my village is in the shadow of a mountain before I’m even home from school.  The sun nestled itself behind the mountain at 3:56pm today.  That leads to an early night.  I can feel it affecting my mood a little.  I’m anxious for school to be over and my teachers are driving me nuts with midterm tests.

Procrastination wasn’t an option for my fellow teachers before, as they had to give their tests to the secretary a week before so they could be type-written and duplicated, a very time consuming process.  I’ve made the mistake of introducing a functioning laser printer and scanner to the staff.  They’ve been running me ragged.

Now there is nothing wrong with procrastination…as long as you still produce quality work and you’re not affecting others.  I like to consider myself a bit of a master of the trade.

Today, though, one of my teachers kept bringing me back and back and back to help her out.  I wanted to work on my own things.  Ugh.  She was driving me crazy.  By the time 2:35 rolled around, we were about half way done printing her 14 page(no joke) exam.  “Ah, maybe i won’t be able to have my kids take their exam today!”  I was surprised.  Afternoon exams were supposed to start at 2:00.  There was no WAY we could have the tests printed by 3:30.  School gets out at 4:00.  Needless to say, I was annoyed, and really surprised.  She’s one of the better teachers at my school.  She should do better.  Her kids deserved better.

This is the worst case, but it’s been like this ever since last Wednesday.  EVERYONE is running me ragged trying to get these things to work.   ‘Ryan!  Do this for me!  Ryan!  I need help!  My test is soon!’  I don’t mind the legitimate requests but a lot of time they are just lazy and know that I can type faster than they can.  Drives me nuts.  You get ten people pulling you in ten directions at any given moment, and you’re bound to feel spread a little thin.  I mean…what do these people think!? That I actually came to Lesotho to HELP or something!?

I’ve also been working on organizing the pen-pal replies back to America.  This has been genuinely fun, in spite of some surprises.  It’s most of my students’ first time ever writing a letter.  Surprisingly, they seemed to understand the idea pretty well.  They handed them in Monday.

I started reading.  They were GREAT, I was really impressed with their English skills, they were asking great questions, drawing pictures, teaching Sesotho.  Then, I came across what seemed to be a love letter.  Hm?  Strangely enough there was another…and another…and another.  Uh-oh.  My heart dropped(and laughed a little….okay a lot).  These kids had misunderstood something vitally important.  I had told them they were writing to FRIENDS, but culturally that translated to something different…they thought I was setting them up with Americans back home!

After crushing their spirits(“Sorry guys, you’re just writing letters, not getting married), I asked them to write new letters.  Some of them felt violated because I had shown them to the other teachers in an effort to get a better understanding of how this miscommunication had occured.  I felt like i was falling through a hole.  I had spent the last 3 months building trust with these students and suddenly this cultural mishap was stripping it away.

It’s difficult to explain, but there is an important cultural lesson to be learned from this.  Not so much on my part as for my students.  Basotho have an odd construct of relationships and romance that doesn’t serve them well.  That being if you have any friendship with someone of the opposite sex it is expected to be taken further.  (No one believes me when I say that me and so-and-so are ‘just friends’.  I have girls at my house all the time which means my skills with the ladies are seriously overestimated by the villagers.  The irony in this country is wonderful.)  There are no divorces in Lesotho, but truly loyal marriages are a RARE thing.  It is this lack of loyalty and responsibility that has been proven to be one of the main factors in the 28% HIV infection rate here.

With any luck, an understanding of a cross-gender friendship sans romance will help them to open up a new window in their minds, maybe through this, they can see things a little bit differently…that boys and girls CAN be just friends.  In some abstract way this little blunder can help to heal the culture of the Basotho…who knows.

Anyways…just 6 more days of this craziness before I get to enjoy a craziness of a different sort.  I can’t wait.

Tagged as: letters, staff, tests, weather