I wanna hold your hand

                Do you remember in middle school the first time you held someone’s hand?

                I remember it being absolutely terrifying.  I remember the thoughts running through my mind: “what if my hand is too sweaty?  Am I squeezing his hand too hard?  Everyone is staring at us.  Does he want to let go?  Is he uncomfortable?  Oh my gosh, my fingers are totally sweating.”

                Hand holding was a big step back then.  Maybe it still is.  I sure do enjoy it a lot more now than I did when I was in 7^th grade.  I myself am partial to fingers laced, with my thumb on the inside of his.  I like holding hands all over the place—walking, driving, watching a movie—it makes everything seem like you’re together, and like you’re a couple, and like you’re in love.

                Everyone holds hands in Lesotho.  

                When you shake hands with someone, often times they’ll hold your hand for an uncomfortably long time while they continue chatting with you.  I remember the first time this happened to me.  It was with one of my teachers after we had just met.  It was an awkward moment when I tried to pull away too soon.  The next few times it happened, I’d pretend to motion to something with my hand while I was talking in order to break free from the embrace.

                A few other times, I’ll be walking to class or to the toilet with one of my teachers and she’ll catch hold of one of my fingers and won’t let go.  I can only hold on for so long, and then I get that creeping feeling that my fingers are sweating or that it’s been an oddly long time that our fingers are laced.

                I’m trying to get used to the hand-holding.  I’m not yet to the point where I’ll initiate it, but I can hold on for quite some time before the grasp is released.  Of course, I’m still always consciously aware of the seconds ticking by while I hold this persons hot, sweaty hand.  But I can hang in there.

                Basotho don’t seem to mind.  Boys and boys, girls and girls, boys and girls, friends, colleagues, family…they all hold hands.

                I was watching my kids’ choir practice last week.  They’re getting ready for a district competition on Friday.  The girls stand in the front of the choir and the boys stand in the back, naturally.  The shorter boys pull up stools to stand on in order to be seen above their towering classmates’ heads.

                Hand holding is big during choir.  My students must feel their knuckles grazing those of the person next to them and instinctively intertwine their fingers.  It’s actually kind of cute seeing them clasp and unclasp their hands while they’re singing, especially the little boys.  They don’t even seem to notice that they are holding hands, and just as suddenly as it started, they break free from each other once the song is over.

                Why is it that in American culture, we have this “personal space bubble” that can’t be invaded?  This isn’t the first time living abroad that I’ve noticed that we Americans don’t like being touched.  While I was in Argentina, I remember several male classmates being disgusted by giving the customary one-cheek beso to other males.  More than once, I was referred to as la Americana fría—the cold American.

                Although I’m still not totally into it, I’m growing used to holding hands.  I actually think it’s kind of sweet.  When Maphoka and I hold hands on the way to the shop, I feel a really close bond between us as sisters.  When my teacher grabs onto me while we’re at a cultural competition, I feel like she’s doing it to be protective of me in a crowd.  And when a stranger won’t let go during that first conversation we’re having, I see it as them being genuinely interested and engaged in meeting me.

                What I wouldn’t give to see my conservative Dad sweating and uncomfortably holding hands with my male principal for a full five-minute conversation.  J

little brothers

                I didn’t really know Moeketsi Tsepe. 

For starters, he was in the first grade, and my interactions with those kids are pretty limited to waves of “hi!” and “goodbye!” when I’m coming and going from school.  But Moeketsi’s older sister, Nthati, is one of my 7^th grade girls.  She and all of her friends used to drag him around the school grounds during lunchtime, showing him off to the teachers and making him do things that only 14-year old girls could think of doing.

                Nthati was a really proud big sister.  I could just tell.  The way she talked about him and forced him to play with her and her friends, smiling and teasing him the whole time, reminded me of my own brothers when we were little.

                Moeketsi passed away in the hospital last weekend.  Everyone said “he was sick, he was a quiet boy, he never ate, something was wrong with him…”

                We let school out today at 11am so the students could wait alongside the road for the hearse to pass and sing hymns for it.  Except that when it arrived it wasn’t really a hearse at all; his coffin was so small that it fit inside the back seat of an SUV.

                The car slowed and turned down the dirt road towards its destination, and we formed two solemn lines along both sides of the car.  We walked steadily through the village singing hymns as loudly as we could.  People came out of their houses and stood in their yards watching us pass. We walked all the way to the family’s house, where we surrounded the car as the back seat doors were opened.

                The coffin was small enough that it only took two men to lift it out.  When it emerged, one of my 6^th grade boys who was standing directly in front of me turned around to face away.  His eyes were filled with tears.  He looked at me until I told him it was OK to turn around again.  As the coffin was carried into a nearby hut, we stood around in a clump and continued on with our hymns.

                It must have been one of the family members who ushered us into the hut to pray around the coffin.  My students filed in one-by-one, and the teachers waited until all the kids were inside to enter. 

                I wasn’t ready for it.

                I wasn’t ready to see Lineo, my smartest 7^th grade girl, sobbing on her sister’s shoulder.  I wasn’t ready to see Kamohelo, a troublesome, talkative 5^th grader, wiping tears off of his cheeks.  Lehlohonolo, who never talks in class and hardly lifts his head up when he answers, looked over at me with big, watery eyes.  Nthati was crying and moaning out loud. 

My little, humble school was packed in this crumbling hut, praying over a tiny coffin, mourning the loss of one of us.  Suddenly, we weren’t teachers or students anymore.  We were a family, and we were all suffering the same.

The funeral is tomorrow.  But I think that today was almost more special, more private, more personal than the actual funeral will be.  On our way home, one of the villagers explained to me that since Moeketsi was so young, he wasn’t able to meet many people in his life.  Our school was his everything.  Apart from his sister and mother, we were his family.

Tlaleng

                The first time that I saw her, I thought she was a boy. 

Tlaleng was wearing gray trousers and a white shirt, which is the usual boys’ uniform at our school.  She had a high, wrinkled forehead that looked like she was always raising her eyebrows.  Her jawline was strong and defined, and her lips were always curled up in a wry smile.  Every time she talked to me, she tilted her head down and peered up at me through thin, shy eyelashes.  The way she was always stealing glances at me during morning assembly and class, I thought she was just a nervous 7^th grade boy.

                Within the first few weeks at school, I knew she’d be a special student.  One day, she came to me at lunch with a poem to read.  It was called “In My Life”.  The first few lines went something like this: “In my life, I have suffered/I have seen many things/Happening to me, in my life/But what could I do?  Nothing, because I was too young”. 

                I read it and didn’t know how to respond.  I didn’t know if she wanted my opinion on her grammar usage, or if this was a cry for help.  I told her that it was great work and that it takes a lot of courage for a poet to write about traumatic events in life.  She smiled and said “thank you madam” and walked out of the room.  Thereafter, I was the one caught stealing glances at her during class.  I was completely captivated by her.

                Tlaleng lost her mother some years back.  I don’t know when and I don’t know how.  She lives with her father now, in a village somewhere near our school.  To my knowledge, she doesn’t have any siblings.  I know she was very close to her mother.  She talks a lot about playing with her mother’s hair while she was still alive.

                 Tlaleng’s English is excellent.  It’s nearly the best of all the students in my class.  She sits in the front row towards the left side of the room.  Even though she’s brilliant, she is very shy about answering out loud in class.  Only when I’ve asked a very difficult question with no response from the rest of the class will she raise her hand and self-consciously answer me correctly.  She shuffles her feet while she answers, and always says “I think that…” before explaining her reasoning.

                When I connected my 7^th grade class to my sister’s class in America last semester to be pen pals, I immediately decided that Tlaleng should write to my sister Lindsay.  I wanted Tlaleng to know that I had chosen her to be Lindsay’s pen pal and that she was special. 

I only came to find out after reading our first round of letters that Tlaleng is 19-years old.

                This morning, while I was walking to school with my principal, she told me that last Friday Tlaleng had decided to drop out of school.  I felt like my heart was breaking.  She told her classmates that she wanted to instead attend a traditional “initiation school” in the mountains.  She wanted a female circumcision and to learn how to become a real Mosotho woman.

                The other teachers at my school had obviously noticed how remarkably clever Tlaleng is, and they were infuriated with her.  Leaving early from classes on Friday, they marched over to Tlaleng’s house and demanded that her father take responsibility for her decision and force her to come back to school.  They even threatened to have him arrested by the police if he didn’t ensure that she was back in classes on Monday.

                Sure enough, Tlaleng was at school today before 8am.  Her father also came, accompanied by an uncle of hers, to discuss Tlaleng’s behavior.  I was called into the office to talk to Tlaleng and her father directly.  It was shocking to see Tlaleng’s family; she is so intelligent and well-spoken, and her father was dirty and wore an old farmer’s suit and had an unshaven, ratty beard.  It made me wonder what her mother was like.  Since he didn’t speak English, the principal translated what I said.

                While she peered up at me through those eyelashes, I told Tlaleng that she was one of the most intelligent girls I knew.  I told her that she would be ridiculous to throw away all of her talents by leaving school in the 7^th grade.  I told her that I knew she would go to high school—and even college—if she kept working hard in her classes, hard enough to earn scholarships.  I told her that, in a country like this, education is everything.  If she wanted to work for the Ministry of Education to help orphans like herself, as she had told me once in one of her compositions, then she needed to complete 7^th grade at the very least.

                She promised me she’d stay in school.