Every Rose Has it's Thorn

This week my friend Thabo (I don’t call him by his American name so there’s no reason for you to) texted me, "Does it ever blow your mind how some days you’ll feel like rock bottom and the next you’re flying in the sky?"

In a word, yes. And that’s what this post is about: how quickly and dramatically my feelings can shift here, sometimes multiple times in a day.

One Saturday night a few weeks ago, my brother knocked on my door. After telling him to come in and asking him how he was, he responded, "I am not fine", and proceeded to tell me that he had just been walking from the grounds (what they call a soccer field here) with his friend when a group of boys had suddenly come out of the shadows and begun insulting them and beating them with sticks. Beating them on their backs, their heads and all over. He didn’t know who they were and didn’t know why they had beaten them, and he was obviously upset. Not crying but close to it, he lifted up his shirt to show me the marks on his skin. Immediately I went over to hug him, and he hugged me back in the way that boys and men who don’t get hugged very much do when they let their guard down.

We often eat dinner and watch movies together on the weekends, and that night I could feel his need for company profoundly. It was after seven already and I hadn’t started cooking, so he just sat at the table and we listened to the radio and I cooked. He wasn’t in a chatty mood and I was content to chop my veggies and sing along to the radio, and it was nice to experience that feeling of comfort in not speaking, and just being, with him. Eventually, the curry was finished and we sat down and watched "Forgetting Sarah Marshall", which is high up on my (long) list of rom-coms and he liked it a lot too. I was still thinking about what had happened to him as he was getting up to leave, and right before he left I said, "I’m sorry that happened to you." "I even forgot about it", he said with a smile and a little shrug, and left.

Last Sunday one of the high school students, the best friend of my runaway host sister, knocked on my door and asked me for help with a debate she had to do for her English class. I agreed to help her, and it was nice to sit outside in the sun and do my washing while I helped her formulate her ideas. Nice to feel useful and nice to have a visitor.

After we were done, the conversation turned to Polo, my 15-year-old host sister who ran away almost as soon as I got here and had just returned for a day only to run away again. I said something about how I was worried about her and hoped she wasn’t having sex with lots of people, mentioning something offhand about the high rate of HIV/AIDS here. Selinda responded, just as casually, by saying "Polo has it. She has the HIV". All of a sudden and all at once, my heart dropped, my stomach lurched and I felt like I was going to cry. I didn’t, but I continued to feel this sense of hopelessness as she told me how Polo had been running away since she was 12, how she never listened when her friends told her to be careful and stay here and how she was probably not taking her ARV’s. But there was nothing to do in that moment except finish my washing and wave goodbye when she said she had to leave.

Last week my school gave a welcome lunch for me complete with chicken (meat!) and Tassenberg (Classy Tassy), the cheap dry red wine of choice for volunteers and Basotho alike.

Go head 'm'e

 It was really sweet of them, and they even gave me another Seshoeshoe.

Well, not wearing this at home

Naturally, the meal was supposed to start around 12 and actually started around 2, so we were all famished and sat around chatting and having a merry time for a while after we were done eating. All of a sudden, the mood was broken when a student came running up to the entrance of the office, crying so hysterically that she fell to her knees, saying that another student had beat her when she was walking home ("beat" doesn’t just mean an ass-whooping here. It’s the catch-all English word for physical violence). In the moment, the teachers just comforted her and told her to go home and they would deal with it tomorrow. And the next day when both girls were called to the office to sort it out, the other teachers brought up the history of terrible abuse that the girl who had done the beating had, saying, "we know why you ran away. We know you were hurt. We know that’s why you came to this school", and questioned to each other why she would beat another person. And in my head I was just thinking about how you can never assume that what seems obvious to you is obvious to everyone. The teachers didn’t bring her history of abuse in front of a roomful of people because they are insensitive people, but because a) there is hardly any value placed on privacy here and b) very little knowledge of the relationship between how one’s experiences affect what they do e.g. people who are hit are more likely to hit others.

And a few days ago, I was exhausted after a long day typical of what my long days are like here: The grade 5’s had been extremely rowdy during an activity and I was forced to stop the activity and give them boring sentence writing work after trying a multitude of things to get them to pay attention. The grade 4 boys were even harder to engage than usual, and I was feeling the absence of the grade 6 teacher (she left at the end of last week for a job with the ministry of education). I also got the lowdown from the other teachers about how my school principal didn’t prepare for that loss at all (they knew it was coming) or for the quickly approaching maternity leave that the grade 7 teacher would be on. There are no substitutes in the works and certainly no one permanent, I and began to realize that she’s not a very good principal at all. So I was feeling down about all of that and thinking about how much she is failing the grade 7 students, some of whom are already in their late teens, who will take crucial, future-deciding exams at the end of the year, and the grade 6 students, who will next year, by not preparing for these eventualities earlier. And then about all of the ways that the larger school system fails them (sound familiar, America?). So I decided to play some music out of my phone on my walk back, and just like that, 6 pre-teen girls were dancing and walking in step to the Backstreet Boys right along with me. And I was laughing and smiling right along with them.

Also, I sprained my ankle (again) on Sunday. On the down side, my ankle is sprained and I’m off aerobic activity for a bit. But on the upside, I ate a melted iced guava (like a popsicle in a pouch) every day last week, which I was using as an ice pack. (I know it’s hard for all you East-Coasters reading this to imagine a popsicle being an enjoyable thing right now, but it’s real treat in this other side of the world heat I’m experiencing.)

More often than not, I can’t control these things. I can’t make Polo stop running away or take her ARV’s. I can’t reverse the bad decisions that my principal made in the past. I can’t make Basotho value privacy more (nor would I want to). And, try as I might to be less clutzy, that particular trait of mine seems to be a pretty permanent one.

I’m still a generally happy person, but on any given day I am genuinely and sometimes extremely angry, saddened, frustrated, bewildered or what have you. What I’m learning how to do is to both let myself feel whatever emotion I need to, figure out what I need to do to make myself feel better and then move on. I always ask myself what I can do to make whatever it is better in the future. Sometimes it’s foreseeably nothing-if her best friends couldn’t help Polo change her behavior I highly doubt I can. Most of the time it’s just doing the best I can at my tiny piece of a very big puzzle. I’m not equipped to and nor do I want to be the class teacher for grade 6 or 7, but I can be a good English and life skills teacher. I can be a knowledgeable and supportive resource when and if the kiddos need one.

I’m learning to ride the waves. Waves which are more frequent because they are rooted in deep differences in culture and outlook on the world, in a teeny country with the second highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the entire world.

But, tomorrow is always a new day, wherever in the world we are.

Welcome lunch=lace tablecloth

Teachers! (minus grade 7 teach)

Cat brought in to kill a rat. But only slept. All week.

Look, I write letters!

Everyone!