Month end

For those who have never lived in places where virtually every person is paid at the end of the month (or at the best, twice a month), there is very little to compare the phenomenon that is month end, especially here in January where many people are short on money because they spent a lot on the holidays. Plus the new school year just started two weeks ago so people need cash to pay school fees (all high schools in the country have tuition fees, books, uniforms, etc that parents ad guardians have to fund).
What does this mean for daily life here in Lesotho? It means that last weekend was a very quiet one in town with precious few taxis full of people speeding towards town. This week was the complete opposite. Everyone from the suburbs around Maseru and even many rural areas have to come into town to use the banks and ATMs to access their cash. So from about Thursday there were enormous lines at all the banks. And by enormous I mean sometimes they stretch for two blocks and people will wait over an hour to use an ATM. Today as I was running through the center of town at 7.30 AM, there were already long queues at all the banks even though they would not open for at least another hour. I guess it pays to get their early and get out. This means that the stores and the shopping areas of town, like the bus station, were also totally packed as people make their necessary purchases.
It is also a time to kick back and relax with friends, so when I ran past a public bar at 6.30 this morning there was already a loud-speaker set up blasting out the local famo music (which is accordion and guitar based with guys singing over the top of a bass riff...I find I don't really mind it unless I am sitting in a taxi with the volume turned up to 11 and the speaker right next to my ear) and people already hanging out. There are always more parties and get-togethers at month end as people can afford to spend a bit more on food and drink.
I can't say that I really like month-end. Going back to my teaching days, riding the bus at month-end was always a unique experience as it was the most crowded (and hot) time as the conductors continued to cram people in long after it was over-full. Now living in Maseru, month-end means there are more people on the roads who might have had a few too many drinks and it is harder to take care of errands as all the stores and offices are more crowded. However, to really experience and understand life here you need to be aware and sensitive to the ebbs and flows of the cash cycle. Sorry I don't have any photos for you this time, but my camera needs batteries and I wasn't going to get in the crush today just to get those!
Stay well.

Human nature and diverse experiences

So yesterday I had three very different experiences that sort of sums up the different circles I run in around here. During the day I spent my time in a small village out near the mountain where the first King of Lesotho gathered together a disparate group of individuals and made them into the Basotho people of today offering them shelter and security in a time of great unrest in exchange for loyalty and fighting for him in battle when it was needed. The old men I was interviewing (with the help of a Mosotho friend as my Sesotho language skills wasn't quite good enough for full-length interviews) were both prophets in an African independent church that was formed in the 1920s and takes its name from the founder of the nation, Moshoeshoe. Both of them emphasized during the interview that they are not the ones controlling their message and that Moshoeshoe himself must have had a deeper understanding of religion (ie sent from a higher power) because while he invited missionaries of different denominations into his country (in the 19th century, a time when denominational differences between various Christian groups mattered a lot more than they seem to today in the West), he himself never joined any of the churches. He saw them as useful to his mission and for his people but stayed above them in order to try to preserve peace in his country.
Then in the late afternoon I found myself sweating on the hot streets of Maseru running hill repeats with a disparate group of Basotho ranging in age from late teens to well over 50 who all meet in the afternoons to do some training. It is mostly a junior development running group for aspiring national-class runners, but there are some serious trainers who happen to be older and slower as well. A fun group to train with and the hill repeats certainly burn the lungs and legs at 5500 feet! I try to meet up with them at least once a week to get in a good quality workout and a couple of them might even make it to the St. Louis marathon this year to race in the US.
Finally, I made it with two minutes to spare to a get-together in the backyard of some friends' who were hosting an inaugural-watching party for a group of 30-40, of whom probably 2/3rds were American. We watched the pageantry on the Mall unfold, the excited coming together for the peaceful transition of power and heard a speech that echoed some of the great figures and speeches from the American past.
Doing all these things on the same day may sound like a disparate day of acts not connected, but in all of them, the theme ran through that we are all human and need to treat each other as such and life not only can and will go on, but can improve for all people. All the people I came across were working not only to better themselves but had also come together with others to make life better for a wider circle of people. While I did not understand much of what the prophets of the independent church were saying (even when they were translated into English), some of what my running colleagues were saying in Sesotho or what all the people watching the speech in Washington, Maseru or anywhere else in the world were thinking, it made me reflect that the most powerful acts come from people coming together to understand each other and work for good.
While the news reports of conflicts and death in many places (and ignores others, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but that should be another post), only listening to/watching or reading the news can cause us to lose the human perspective--that everyday throughout the world, people are coming together to better understand each other and work for good. It isn't reported in the news, but it is what makes the world go on and gets me out of bed in the morning.
Stay well.

More Lesotho on the BBC

For those of you who don't have the BBC Africa page bookmarked (and I am in that category as well), they have updated some of their stories from St. Rodrigue, Lesotho--which is the community where I taught high school in 2002. It is a story about how people in rural Lesotho are coping with the HIV/AIDS crisis. It is extremely well written, dare I say beautiful. The link below takes you to the story of a primary school teacher. The other links are on the right side of the page. Only the first four have been updated since the first time I posted this link, but if you haven't checked them all out, please do so.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7806217.stm

Stay well.

Not so 'funny' money

On a more serious note, on my travels I was right on the Zimbabwean border at Livingstone, Zambia. There the street vendors were selling what you see in the photo as tourist curios. I gave a guy all the Namibian change I had left in my pocket (less than $1) to get this note from him. It is what passes for Zimbabwean currency these days, although if you look closely, you will note that it has already 'expired'. How money can expire is beyond my comprehension, but then so too is money that is worth 50 billion anything. And I didn't have enough change for him to give me the 100 billion note.
It really is a sad commentary on a country that is destructing right now. The Robert Mugabe-led regime in Zimbabwe is currently making a mockery of that country and while I don't know what the solution is, more awareness of the problems the country faces can't hurt. People there are starving and dying of a disease that is easily treatable in a country with working health systems--cholera. International condemnation by 'the west' (aka Britain and the US) has so far backfired in that Mugabe just twists whatever is said to present himself as the victim. I would like to think it couldn't get worse, but it really could. Right now Mugabe can't really govern because he slipped up and let the opposition win Parliamentary elections last March--he most likely lost the presidency as well but delayed the results long enough to rig them. It could get worse if he declares a state of emergency and is able to govern without the small level of checks he (and the heads of the police and army, who currently hold the real power) has now. So, while I don't have an easy solution to the problem, the least I can do is help raise awareness and showing the joke that passes for 'money' right now there is a powerful image.
I don't know if writing Congresspeople, Senators, President-elects, Members of Parliament or whoever your local representatives might be will help, but the least you can do is to not skip another newspaper article about Zim that is buried on page 8 of the local paper and to add your voice to those calling for peaceful and meaningful change there.
Stay well.

Happy New Year

Hi everyone. Just wanted to wish you a happy new year and give a sampling of photos from my travels. I managed to see quite a bit of southern Africa in a few weeks of travel. I spent time in and around Cape Town with Lauren (my fiancee for those who don't know her)--the shot of us on Table Mountain comes from that part of the trip. We hiked up and down and the clouds even cooperated to give us good views and cool breezes. The second part of the trip (once she went home) was a road trip up through Namibia into Zambia and home via Botswana and South Africa with some friends from Lesotho. You can see Victoria Falls here (from the Zambian side), along with the spectacular Fish River Canyon of southern Namibia and a photo taken in northern Namibia of a lion crossing the road and running into the bush. That was quite the stroke of luck as there was a very short window for our paths to cross and they did. Seeing lions in the real wild was incredible and left my friend Matt and I both buzzing for a while (it was a National Park but one with no fences so the animals wander back and forth between Angola, Namibia and Botswana--it was in the Caprivi Strip for those familiar with geography). Anyway, much like most of you I am now back to work and will post more boring work stories as they arise! Take care and have a safe and happy new year.

Some travel

Hey, quick post here. I am leaving for some travels here over the next few weeks so I might not be posting as regularly. Just wanted to leave you with some views from around here. The sunset picture with the city in it was taken from my yard the other night with a couple of big thunderstorms passing us by. The other two were taken just across the border in the Free State province of South Africa and were taken from the top of a small mountain a couple of friends and I climbed. If you look carefully, parts of Maseru are visible in the background of the one with all the farmland. Have a safe December and I will be in touch!

Public Spotlight

So I went to the grocery store, as I often do on Thursdays because it is the day one of the two weekly English-language newspapers comes out. So in addition to my fruits and veggies, I catch up on the latest goings on here and what a smattering of English language news sources from around the world have decided is important (they run stories from the Guardian (UK), Yahoo (US), BBC, Reuters, South African papers). It is always interesting. Today's issue was very heavy when I picked it up--the paper averages about 45 pages--4 or 5 in Sesotho, 10 on random business stuff cribbed from other sources and a bunch of pages announcing government contracts in addition to a few pages of local news and sport. Getting home I wondered if it was full of Christmas adds (despite the 80 degree plus Fahrenheit temperatures we have been having with lots of big summer thunderstorms), but I quickly realized it was the start of a different season here: exam result season.
Sitting in every newspaper purchased (for five rand...about 50 US cents), was a 130 page supplement that showed the results of the Primary School Leaving Exam. Every student in the country, every school in the country, listed in black and white for every other person in the country to examine. This was just the results of those who finished their 7th (and final) year of primary school. The other students who have to take the big, high-stakes exams (those who finished their 3rd year of high school--basically sophomores--and those seniors who finish high school) will also get the same royal, or ignominious, treatment when their results are announced in the New Year. Now there are some advantages to the system--I could check and see how the children of my friends who were finishing primary did this year, right down to the individual subjects (they show the results for English, Sesotho, Science, Social Studies and Math for primary), which was nice, so I can congratulate her next time I see her. And you can check to see which schools are not getting very many students to pass. I know students use these numbers to see which schools they want to attend to get the best results and parents peruse it to see which school is going to best serve their children.
But in another light, it assumes that all schools and students are equal and by pasting the results there for all to see, the students and schools who didn't do as well are there too for everyone to see and potentially criticize. Is it really fair to compare an English-medium primary school in Maseru whose students are children of government ministers, whose school has running water and electricity and access to internet and all the modern amenities Americans would expect from a primary school to a small mountain primary where the students come part-time when they aren't herding animals, that has no electric, possibly a communal tap for water if they are lucky and is hours on foot from the nearest post office, not to mention telephone service or internet access, which struggles to recruit qualified teachers because it is so remote.
As a once and future teacher I think accountability is important in education, as in any other field, and low-performers need to find ways to bring up the level of education for their students' sake. However, I feel that this particular rite of summer here is one that doesn't necessarily contribute to the furthering of educational aims here. People accept it, however, and even look forward to the results coming out every year. It is great for those who do well (they also publish the Top 10 list of students who got the best average), but I can't help but feel it is a bit unfair. I remain unconvinced on some level that this public shaming of schools and students that are not starting from a level playing field, but are being treated like they are, does some harm. What exactly the harm is I cannot say, but my impression is that it does not encourage those who have not passed to try again for fear of being named two years in a row, publicly, as a failure. There is no rule that says students can't try again next year, but especially for the Primary School exam, this naming and shaming seems a bit harsh.