celebrate the small stuff

They say that in the Peace Corps, you learn to celebrate the small victories.  They say that you will affect people in ways that you might not see, maybe not until twenty years from now.  Indeed, our Education Director was taught by a Peace Corps volunteer many years ago in high school, which inspired him to eventually work for Peace Corps Lesotho.  

They also say that you will fail.  Many times.  Unfortunately, I think I’ve already failed quite a bit.  It’s hard not to get upset, because I had this spectacular idea about all the things I would accomplish in Lesotho before I arrived.  I planned on changing the world.  I’ve come to realize, slowly and depressingly, that I won’t do that.   

But I am celebrating the small stuff.  In particular, three great things have happened to me this week.  And it’s only Tuesday.

I guess I’ll start with the first and the biggest.  One of my schools had several boxes of children’s books donated to them several years ago.  The boxes had been sitting in the principal’s office collecting dust, because no one had bothered to take the time to even tear off the packaging tape and peek inside.  When one of the teachers mentioned that the boxes were filled with donated American books, I was shocked to imagine that someone from my home country had taken the time and effort to organize and package these books, and they were sitting around useless in a dirty office corner.  The teachers didn’t even know what kind of books they were. 

I knew that unpacking these six-foot tall boxes would take at least three weeks, but I had to do it.  No one else would.  So two weeks ago, I opened three boxes and organized the books on a dusty locker shelf.  That Friday, I was spending my last day at that particular school and wouldn’t be returning for another week.  One of the teachers unpromisingly mentioned that he would try to help out with arranging the books.  I thanked him, but was severely doubtful that anyone would even glance in the direction of the book corner while I was gone. 

Yesterday, I came back to this same school.  I walked into the office to find dingy, dented locker shelves neatly piled one on top of the other, completely filled with books.  The cardboard boxes were nowhere to be seen.  I couldn’t believe it.  I don’t think I’ve smiled that big for awhile.  The teachers said that they wanted to have it finished by the time I came back to visit their school.  They were so proud to have assisted in something that was so important to me.  Now, I’m organizing the books according to reading level (easy, medium, hard) and color-coding them, which seems to ring more clearly with the Basotho people than a Dewey Decimal system. 

Accomplishment number two: I grew a pea!!!  My first ever pea.  I was just out at the garden this afternoon, pulling weeds and flicking grasshoppers off the beanstalks, when I reached over to pluck away a wilted pea plant.  I have to admit, I’ve been neglecting my peas.  I’ve got some troublesome bugs that keep gnawing away at the stems of the plants, so I had all but given up on any peas for this season.  BUT!  I noticed one decently-sized pea just dangling from the end of the plant.  I hesitated to eat it; I wasn’t sure if it would get any bigger or not.  But I figured, better me than the grasshoppers.  It was so sweet and crunchy.  I didn’t even wash the dirt off.  I just ate it there right next to the garden. 

Accomplishment number three: my cat jumped on the bed.  Did I mention that we celebrate the small stuff in the Peace Corps? ;)  I’ve befriended my host family’s cat, Pumpkin, in hopes that he’ll eat any rats that manage to creep into my hut this winter.  I’ve also heard that just having the scent of a cat around your home will deter rats. 

So every morning before school, I let Pumpkin into the house and give him a little bit of condensed milk from an old tuna can.  After he’s finished eating, he’ll usually hang around and let me pet him, or just follow me around the house while I’m getting ready, trying to rub himself against my shins.  I guess I tried too hard to domesticate him once, because when I picked him up and plopped him on the bed, he freaked out and ran outside.

But today after school, Pumpkin and I were just hanging out… I was reading on my bed, and he was walking around and rubbing his head over anything that would give him a good scratch.  He walked over to my bed, hesitated for a second, and then jumped up.  He even made himself comfortable in the crook of my legs and took a nap!  These are the kinds of things that make me happy these days. 

taxi rides

                My house is about a three-minute walk from the main road, down a steep, rocky path.  At the road, I can catch a taxi north towards the capital or south towards the King’s home.  The taxi stop is a little dirt clearing right next to the high school volleyball court.  There isn’t a designated sign that says taxi stop; you just have to know to wait there.

                Because there are no true taxi stop signs, I figured that you could ask the driver to pull over whenever you needed to get out.  I found out the hard way last weekend that this is not so. 

Going into Maseru, I’m never quite sure where exactly the taxi is going to end up.  Sometimes they drive right down the main road in town; in which case, I hop off whenever I feel like I’m close enough to the Peace Corps office (which is usually my first stop when I’m in town).  Sometimes they drive straight into the taxi rank and stop the car.  Last weekend, we were driving down the main road headed straight towards where I needed to be.  Suddenly, the driver took a sharp left, and we were on a totally unfamiliar back road.  I immediately tapped the conductor on the shoulder and told him I needed to get off, and he laughed and said that there wasn’t a stop.  I didn’t know what to do; I was going to be completely lost.  I think he noted the panic in my voice, because he said something to the driver in Sesotho, and they eventually pulled over.  He asked if I needed to go to the police for some reason.  I smiled and said no, and found my way back to the office.  

A “taxi” in Lesotho is not at all like the yellow cabs we have back at home.  It is an unmarked, usually broken-down, old white van.  The kind of unmarked white van that your mother told you not to crawl into when you were a kid.    

When you’re walking towards the road, if you’re lucky, a taxi will be coming along headed in the direction that you want to go.  The “conductor”—a guy who sits in the passenger area of the van and collects the money—will hang half of his body out the window and shout at you, asking if you’re getting on.  I still don’t understand how they can tell if a person is getting on or not.  The potential passenger usually stares at the van for a minute or so, slowly walking toward the road, while the conductor keeps shouting at them.  Eventually, the taxi will either pull over and wait or keep driving.

If the taxi is nearly empty, it will crawl along at literally 5mph, hoping to pick up more passengers along the way.  It’s very frustrating, especially if you are in a hurry.  The conductor and driver are constantly scanning the stretches of field along the road with their eagle eyes, looking for people hobbling towards the road.   Sometimes, they will pull over and five minutes will pass before I can even see the passenger walking along. 

Under these circumstances, you develop a sort of camaraderie with the other passengers in the taxi.  You are all hoping to jam in as many people into the van as quickly as possible, just to get going to where you need to be.  Even though I don’t speak Sesotho, I can usually understand what people are talking about inside the taxi.  Everyone participates in this game of trying to pick up more passengers along the way.  People will shout out “Someone over there, to the left!”  or mumble “Oh no, she’s not getting on.  Definitely not getting on.”   

I stick out like a sore thumb on the local taxis, being white.  Sometimes, I don’t mind.  If I’m sitting next to someone who speaks decent English and can carry on an interesting conversation, I’ll chat them up for the entire 45 minutes from town back to my house.  I’ve met some interesting people; last week, I met a teacher from a nearby high school who was also my host mother’s sister.  The week before, I coincidentally met a teacher from a fellow volunteer’s school.  I’ve met people coming home for the first time in years to see their families.  I meet lots of people who dream of someday coming to New York. 

Sometimes, though, I’ll get stuck next to a creepy old man who asks for my phone number or to marry me.  I usually say that I don’t have a phone, or that I’m already married.  Even worse, sometimes I’ll get stuck next to an enormous woman who takes up two and a half seats, though she insists on squeezing in and sweating all over me.  And speaking of sweating, apparently no one likes to ride in the car with a window cracked.  It doesn’t matter if the taxi is overflowing with fat ladies and kids and smelly men, no one will open a window.  It smells disgusting and I always arrive at my destination dripping wet with sweat. 

This weekend, I’m going to visit my dear friend Heather who lives about an hour and a half from me.  I’m already prepping myself for the taxi ride.  It’s always an interesting experience riding in a Lesotho taxi.   

Thankful

Last Saturday, I decided to go to Maseru for shopping, lunch, and cold beers with my friend Heather.  Meeting up with Heather every weekend is my guilty pleasure here in Lesotho.  We are lucky to live close enough to town that going shopping is like a getaway into a completely different world from the small villages where we live.  We even found a restaurant that looks like an Applebees on the inside and serves draft beer and burritos (on a side note, I haven’t tried the burritos yet.  The last time we went, I was worried that they would turn out awful and ruin my cloud nine feeling).

We began last Saturday just like any other weekend in town.  We met at a small café inside the mall and sipped on mugs of dark roast drip coffee, bitching about problems with our houses, problems with school, problems with our friends.  We charged up our iPods and read the local newspaper.  Heather ordered yogurt with granola.  We planned out everything that we would do in town: first the post office before it closed at 11am, then shopping at Fruit ‘n Veg for bulk oatmeal, then schwarmas for lunch, then Pick ‘n Pay for grocery shopping… then, finally, our long-awaited beers at Spurs. 

It was a great day.  I send two letters home, bought mango and green peppers at the store, ate an incredible beef schwarma, ran into a few friends in the mall, and ended the day with two frosty, cold Castles.  By late afternoon, I was ready to get home and catch the tail end of the local soccer game that was being played next to my house.

Heather and I shared a cab to the taxi rank.  I got off before her.  I quickly made my way through the lines of dirty white taxi vans.  I was carrying my backpack filled with food, my clutch wrapped around my wrist, and a grocery bag in my hand.  I pushed my way through the crowds of people and found the taxi labeled “Morija/Matsieng” and crawled in.  Once I had settled into my seat, I reached down to pull out the 15 rand it costs to get home, and realized my clutch was gone.  My heart dropped.  I had it wrapped around my wrist only seconds before, and now it was nowhere to be found.  I started frantically looking under my butt, under the seat, inside my backpack, around the floor… it was nowhere. 

The woman seated beside me noticed that I was looking for something, and she asked for my phone number so that she could start calling my phone to see if we could hear the ringing and track down the clutch.  She said that it was turned off.  Strange, because only minutes before, I knew that it was “on” inside my purse.  I just knew that someone had to have cut the clutch off my wrist and turned off the phone, hoping to steal everything.

The worst part of it all was that I had made a trip to the ATM just that morning.  I wasn’t entirely sure of my PIN number, so I had written it down on a small slip of paper inside my clutch, tucked in nicely right next to the ATM card.  Surely by now, someone must have bolted to the ATM and taken all of my money.  I started to cry.

                By the time I got off the taxi at my stop, my eyes were red and watery, and all I wanted to do was to get home.  The soccer game was still going, and as I rushed past, I heard people calling out my name.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone, let alone allow them to see me crying.  My host sister came running over and I told her what happened, and she quickly ushered me home to call the Peace Corps.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t much that they could do at 6pm on a Saturday.  They said that early Monday morning, they would call the bank and cancel my card, and I was to come back to Maseru to report the incident to the police station.

                I got drunk alone on Saturday night and went to sleep, hoping to forget about everything.

                Sunday morning, I woke up to my sister knocking on my door and the sound of a man’s voice outside.  I peeped outside to see Maphoka’s smiling face telling me that they had found my phone.  One of the teachers from my school was standing next to her.  I thought it was a joke.  The teacher, Thabo, told me that I should get dressed and come with him.

                Walking to a nearby village, he explained to me that he had seen me exiting the taxi the night before, visibly upset, and tried calling to see what had happened.  My phone was still off.  He tried calling again on Sunday morning, and a woman answered my phone, asking him if he knew the owner of the phone.  He said he did, and she said to meet her in a nearby village.

                We waited along the side of the road, seated in the shade next to a shop.  I think Thabo knew that I was nervous, because he tried to distract me by chatting casually about American basketball.  All I could think about was how careless and stupid I had been in the taxi rank.  About a half an hour later, the woman pulled up in a taxi.  She got out and slowly made her way over to us.  She was a big lady wearing a floppy white hat.  She addressed Thabo, not me.  They spoke for a few minutes in Sesotho, and then she asked me what I had lost.  I tried my best to answer her in Sesotho, waving my hands in the air to tell her that everything was gone.  She reached down, unzipped her purse, and pulled out my clutch, smiling.

                I jumped forward and started hugging her, and she was laughing.  She told me to look inside and make sure that everything was there.  She confessed that she had taken 10 rand to cover the taxi fare to come meet me.  I took out a 100 rand note and gave it to her.  At that point, I would have given her everything.  It was hard to express how thankful I was in Sesotho; I just started babbling in English to her about how she had saved me.  All she replied with was: “you are my friend!”    

                We walked back along the road together, and she and Thabo talked.  Later, he explained to me that she had seen someone pick up the clutch from the ground in the taxi rank.  She approached them and saw the contents of the purse, and told them that she knew the owner of the purse.  Apparently, she lives in a nearby village where I teach, and she had seen me walking around last week.  She took the purse and got in a taxi headed towards Morija.  When she got there, she pulled out my photo I.D. and started showing it to random people along the road, asking if they knew who I was.  They told her that I lived in Matsieng.  So she went to Matsieng and did the same thing.  It wasn’t until Thabo called that she headed in the right direction towards my village.

                I know that I am very lucky.  Everyone that I have talked to says that these kinds of things never happened.  The woman could have easily made off with my phone, cash, and access to my entire savings account in Lesotho.  Instead, she skipped work for an entire day to look for me.  She didn’t make any phone calls with my phone.  She took a little bit of cash for transport, and she was honest about it.

                The worst part of the entire situation is that I didn’t even ask for her name.  This angel just appeared out of nowhere, and I have no idea who she is.  I’m determined to find her again, just like she found me.