How not to be scared in the Peace Corps

The month before I joined the Peace Corps, I talked to the youth group at my church, St. Rose of Lima, about my coming service. Afterward, some high school-aged girls approached me to ask me if I’d be scared, living by myself so far away. I bravely told them no, but I understood where they were coming from, so I wanted to give some advice on keeping your wits about you and not giving into fear while you serve in the Peace Corps:

• Don’t think about the aliens from the movie Signs.
• Don’t think about how the aliens from Signs can almost completely camouflage their bodies, so that you only see them when they want you to see them.
• Don’t think about how the first reported sighting of the aliens in Signs took place not in the U.S.A., not in a major city, but in a rural place in the developing world, not unlike your site.
• Don’t think about how one of those aliens from Signs could, with little difficulty, stand in front of the window in front of your kitchen area at night as you wash your dishes, concealed by the reflections on the window, so that the first time you saw it, it just blended in with the image of your room, until you move one way and it moves just so slightly the other way, and you lock eyes, and you see its face move every so slightly and then, instead of making any move to harm you, instead of rapping or scratching menacingly against the window, it just disappears.
• Don’t think about how the aliens from Signs possess super human strength, able to run very quickly and jump over barns, among other things. Don’t think about how, with your protein intake reduced chiefly to eggs and what you can combine from beans and rice, along with your lack of any weight-lifting regimen, your muscle density has decreased greatly since coming here, and that even if you were at your absolute peak shape, it would probably still be no contest in a physical struggle.
• Don’t think about how the aliens from Signs can only really be stopped with water, which is poison to them, or how this relates to the fact that you live in a country where water is scarce, a country that, just last year, did not have any rain for a full six months, and that were the community taps to run dry and you were going off what you had stored, you might at some point be faced with the unenviable choice of using your water to drink, in which case you would die by Signs aliens, or using your water to destroy the alien, in which case you would perhaps live, but perhaps die from dehydration on your journey across the scorched, desiccated Earth looking for water. 

Don’t think about any of theses things, and you should be fine!

Food Thoughts I

There is a universally observable phenomenon, exacerbated in groups, that occurs with travelers of a certain age: a person or group of people will, at some point, begin talking about some food that is not immediately available. I have seen this happen on trips as long as 4 or so months and as short as 16 days. Usually the food is Chipotle. People get really worked up about Chipotle. In this spirit, I will now present a list of foods that have, over the past few months, preoccupied my mind and haunted my dreams.

1. First, foods from the snack bar type thing at Colby College, which is called the Spa:  The quesadilla: basically your standard white-flour tortilla with the perfect amount of little brown circles on the outside, crisper on the edges and positively stuffed with shredded yellow-and-white cheese, this one actually needs to be further divided into its three principal variations. First, the classic quesadilla, as described above: this is a slim item, an ideal to-go food that can be folded up into six triangular slices and tucked into the big pocket on the back of your bike shirt for a 20 – 40 mile ride. Second, the vegetable quesadilla: with all those onions and peppers, this one’s closer to a salad than a snack food—great for brunches. And last, the buffalo chicken quesadilla. Here’s your heavy hitter. This dilla is packed with tender, artisanally-shredded chunks of white chicken bathed in buffalo sauce, baked in among the cheesy-ether that holds everything together. Each one comes with a small paper-serving cup filled with salsa and sour cream. They will try to give you bleu cheese with the buffalo chicken quesadilla. Insist on sour cream.
2. Cheese fries: Take those bowling-alley cheese fries you’re thinking of and get them out of here. We’re talking about a piece of art here. At their best, these fries are curly fries, not those large diametered-ones that pass as curly fries but the authentic article, tight little curls wrapping the fry around itself like a tiny potato slinky, dense but fully exposed to the frying oil all the way around. Take these, and use some of that aforementioned yellow-and-white shredded cheese liberally, put the whole thing in the conveyor-belt oven contraption, and you’ve got a perfect study break.
3.  Breakfast Sandwich: You know the drill here: basic components are a bagel, an egg patty, cheese, and a meat. You want an everything bagel to get more out of your dollar, naturally. You ask for the egg, you ask for the cheese, no problem. But here’s the crucial moment.  The menu tells you that your options for meat are Sausage, Bacon, OR Ham. This is a false choice. You can, in fact, ask for sausage, bacon, AND ham. They are not restricted by what the menu says. They may not ask you to babysit their children anytime soon, but they will make the sandwich.

Second, foods from the greater Waterville area:

1.  The Caveman Pizza from Grand Central Pizza: this is a pizza covered in a sinful amount of meat.
2.  The quesadillas (steak, chicken, or vegetarian) from Buen Apetito: this is your favorite quesadilla’s favorite quesadilla, just a real student of the craft, and comes with enough refried beans and yellow rice to sleep in, which you will want to do after the enormity of the quesadillas themselves. And I of course have to mention their endless supply of tortilla chips and homemade salsas, which have the same effect as the Lotus flowers in the Odyssey, and I would recommend that you have a sturdy person with you who can carry you out when it’s time to go.
3.  The Chicken Pad Thai from Pad Thai Too: A big old mess of Pad Thai, which you can double (or “Colby size”) for like three dollars. People from big cities like to say that this is not very good Pad Thai, and that is because they are elitists.

Third, foods from home in New Jersey:

1.  Pizza from the Village Trattoria: I will focus here on what I consider to be the crown jewel of the Trattoria menu: the buffalo chicken slice. The crust is neither thin nor thick, and its texture and taste complement each other so perfectly that if a person with no sense of taste and a person with no sense of touch, who had never met each other and were in fact in separate states at the time of the experiment, were to eat slices from the same pie at the same time, they would use the exact same words to describe it. The chicken gets plenty of buffalo sauce, and then a little more is splashed around for good measure. I play a fun game with the person I order from, in which I tell them that I want the slice with the smallest amount of bleu cheese possible, and he nods, turns around, and thinks to himself what’d he say? Something about bleu cheese? I’ll grab this slice, it’s got plenty, and I’ll throw on some more just to make sure.
2. Burrito from Chipotle: I’m no better than anyone else. I want one of these. Mine’s going to be on a whole-wheat burrito, brown rice, black beans, the shredded beef, cheese, sour cream, hot salsa, guacamole, onions and peppers, done.
3. Hamburgers and fries from Five Guys: So you have your grease-bespotted brown paper bag, and inside, under an amount of fries technically called “large,” which in this reporter’s opinion is like calling Usain Bolt “pretty quick,” you will find a foil-wrapped object. Open it. In your hands, you hold a double burger with melted cheese and bacon, sautéed onions, jalapeno peppers, and ketchup. You will not finish this meal, but the glory, my friend, is in the attempt.
4. Bloomin’ Onion from Outback Steakhouse: This food item, a photo of which is my current phone background, is a delicacy along the New Jersey Route 22 corridor, and consists of an onion that has been cut across its equator and then delicately cut along its longitude lines and peeled back layer by layer until it resembles some rare flower of the Amazon. This flower is then fried in oil and served with tartar sauce.

Last, foods that my mom and dad make, which facetious words wilt before because these foods are made with love and destroy all that is false and unserious, like Voldemort before the infant Harry Potter:

1. Pasta Primavera
2. Salmon with some wild rice and green beans
3.  A big old pot of chili, either vegetarian or with beef, garnished with corn chips and shredded cheese
4. A grilled-cheese sandwich
5.  A peanut butter and jelly sandwich; grape jelly, accept no substitutes
6. Pancakes with pecans and blueberries nestled inside
7. Beignets
8.  Pasta with kidney beans, tomatoes, and Swiss chard
9. Homemade pizza

Ntlafatso

I was not, before entering the Peace Corps, particularly aware of the mountain of literature written and research conducted about Development. A few college friends were anthropology majors (they’re really not such bad people once you get to know them), and I would occasionally pick up different snippets of information on the topic, but I did not attempt to engage any further. I think the only thing I read remotely related to Development (far more related to colonialism, I suppose) before coming to Lesotho was a sort of dark-ironic book called How To Win Friends and Oppress People, composed of fragments from Victorian-era travel literature. It’s been a while since I read it, but I will hazard to say that the book’s advice was probably not terribly politically correct.

But naturally, Peace Corps attracts the type of person who is very interested in Development, and for a while I sat on the periphery of their conversations, sometimes interjecting highly amusing comments to the effect of “Sachs and Easterly? When are those two going to make out, huh?” So I was quickly excluded, and forced to conduct my own research. In the weeks before coming, I met a gentleman on an Idaho horse ranch (naturally) who told me, after learning of my plans, that he had read a book specifically about Development (ntlafatso) in Lesotho during college. I picked this book (The Anti-Politics Machine) up and, along with William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden, it has given me some needed background into this big, big project that I’m a small, small part of.

One of the central ideas in Easterly’s book (excluding those that used confusing economics-related terms, like “market”) was that development agencies are responsible to the people who fund them rather than people they provide services to, so there isn’t much incentive to gather data from the latter group and see if things are actually, you know, working.

School at Matholeng Primary starts each day at 7:45 with the morning assembly, which includes a hymn, recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, greetings, presentations, and a marching song. My favorite part is the  presentations. Each week, a new topic is given, and 5 students present on it each morning. The first two topics were “Resolved: Children’s Rights Are Spoiling the Kids” and “Resolved: Adolescence is Nothing But a Time of Trouble.” After a full week of arguments against “adolescents making sex without condoms,” one of the teachers stood up to make a correction. “Students. We do not make sex. Is it something you can look at? Can you hold it in your hands? No, we do not make it. We perform it.”

One massive Development organization is the World Food Programme (WFP), which provides meals to schoolchildren. This is, at face value, terrific. Free meals for going to school is a great incentive, and students who have been fed can naturally pay attention and get more out of school than students who are, for example, angry and upset from being hungry, or too dizzy to focus on the board. And according to the menu distributed by WFP’s Qachas Nek office to schools, the students are getting balanced, nutritious meals.

When this week’s topic, “Resolved: WFP is good” was announced, I was very interested to see what the kids had to say; I was about to see something that, according to Easterly, is incredibly rare (or was in 2006; again, I have read very little on the topic, and don’t know how the Development complex has responded to his criticisms): direct, unfiltered feedback about a Development program from the people that program aims to serve. The students on the pro-side (and there were more of these) argued things like “Yes, they are good because they give us food, and we can listen in class now.” The students on the con-side argued: “No, they are not good because they give us fish everyday, and only little food so we don’t get satisfied.” They also said “they give us the fish with the worms,” but I am convinced that this is more a school-age rumor along the lines of I hear the meatloaf is made from the kids who get detention than it is a real, observable phenomenon (talking with Ntate Shakhane confirmed this, telling me that this rumor likely stemmed from the fact that some food aid is sometimes rotten or tainted, but that WFP’s school lunches are safe).

I had wondered about the preponderance of fish. Every day save the first two or three, the students have gotten for lunch a few scoops of papa (corn meal and water, the staple food of Lesotho) with canned pilchards. We have had meroho (translates to vegetables, but usually Swiss Chard) once, maybe twice, but apart from that it’s been papa and pilchards. According to the WFP menu, students are served fish only two days each week.

These observations are drawn from just one month, at a particular primary school in a particular district in a particular country served by the WFP, so I do not mean at all to make any broad insinuations about the programme overall. But it’s very (for lack of a better word) interesting to be on the ground and see the daily implementation of one of these huge aid operations that you hear about back home and maybe hear someone praise or gripe about on the news every once in a while.

I also appreciated the simplicity of the question “Is WFP good?” because the academic writings on Development avoid value statements of that nature, so it’s refreshing to see the topic tackled by schoolchildren who can outright answer “yes” or “no.” It was a funny counterpoint to the reassurances in the Ferguson book that he was utterly uninterested in labeling development “good” or “bad,” while at the same time excoriating the project that was the book’s focus. The takeaway was something like: well, the Thaba-Tseka Development Project did not accomplish any of the things it set out to do, a failure it masked by setting out to accomplish even bigger things while simultaneously (a) bringing a single-party-controlled government’s bureaucracy into the rural areas that were the only pockets of resistance to said government and (b) displaying a stupefying ignorance of local cultural norms and eventually collapsing under the weight of its own bloated incompetence but really, who am I to say that this is somehow a “good” or a “bad” thing?

Co-teaching

My official job here is “Primary English Co-Teacher,” which means that I should be teaching English, at a Primary school, with another teacher. This was impossible because of the teacher shortage detailed in previous posts. But due to some clever reallocation of teachers (here’s the short of it: ‘M’e Makoae now taking 4^th grade, Ntate Shakhane now taking 5^th grade, and ‘M’e Faso now taking a class combining the 6^th and 7^th grades), we are now in the co-teaching business.

I love it. Having the school’s teachers in the classroom with me is especially helpful in the area I was worst at, classroom management. My classes before were sort of chatty, and my lessons were peppered with me exclaiming useless things like “Hey, don’t do that!” Now they are eerily quiet, and I’ve noticed that lessons that lasted a full single or double block previously now take half the time, as I’m no longer juggling classrooms of kids who basically just want to hit each other and tell on each other.

In the combined 6^th and 7^th grade classes, something in the 40-students range, there is complete silence. Occasionally I will be writing on the board and will hear ‘M’e Faso reprimand “Stop moving around so much.” It’s terrific.

In the 5^th grade class, Ntate Shakhane backs me up on all classroom management, usually to the surprise and confusion of the students. For example, when checking homework, I might ask a student to see his homework, and when he said that he didn’t write it, I would ask “Hobaneng?” After a few seconds with no response, Ntate Shakhane would translate “Why?” which would create the funny sequence of the native English speaker asking the question in Sesotho, the native Sesotho speaker asking the question in English, and the Mosotho student looking skeptically at both. I was quickly reminded that the students were not refusing to answer the question for lack of understanding. Rather, their lack of response was their answer. They didn’t know why they didn’t do the homework: they just didn’t do it. And remembering what I can of being their age, I’m not sure I could have produced a logical reason for more than 7% of my actions, so it hardly seems reasonable that I’m asking one of my students why he didn’t do his homework.

Family trees

I have, in the space of one week, gotten to use family trees to teach different things in all of my English classes. In the 5^th grade, we were doing the topic “male and female words”: things like brother & sister, mother & father, uncle & aunt. I was asking if they knew any other words that complemented each other, one male and one female. One student offered “boy & girl,” which I put on the chalkboard. Another said “doctor & nurse,” which I was very excited about because it meant I could incorporate a little interdisciplinary action and bring in Life Skills. I hit the class with a quick “Could a man be a nurse? Could a woman be a doctor?” And the student nodded her head. I refrained from shouting “Or did I just totally challenge your assumptions about gender?”

In the combined 6^th & 7^th grades, the topic was step-relations, which I of course took to basically sing the theme song to The Brady Bunch, filling in locally appropriate names. “Here’s the story/of a man named Tsepang/who was something something etc. etc.”

Visit from PC staff

On Monday, I was visited by the excellent Ntate Clement and ‘M’e Masechaba, two Peace Corps–Lesotho staff members and very familiar faces from training. This is part of the routine site check-ins whereby staff goes out to make sure that everything’s going smoothly. They observed me teach, checked out my rondavel, and talked to my colleagues at Matholeng Priimary. Ntate Clement has a fun sense of humor. Ostensibly he should have been supporting me as a new volunteer, but this took the form of him, when we were walking through my yard, asking “do you have snakes here?” I responded in the negative, and then a little while later he said “I feel like you probably have snakes here.” This was not a ridiculous assumption, as we have waist-high grass in the yard, but it was funny to hear from Peace Corps staff.

They also conducted a quick little check-up type interview thing, asking about settling-in, housing, work, integration, etc. It went something like this. Ntate Clement’s questions are presented verbatim. My answers are not.

            Ntate Clement: How’s everything with the rondavel?

            Me: Oh, fine, nothng to complain about.

            Ntate Clement: And have you managed to stave off insanity so far?

            Me: I have.

            Ntate Clement: How?

            Me: Oh, you know, reading, hiking, talking with the homunculus who lives in the thatching in my roof about how to control the goats, that sort of thing.

            Ntate Clement: Good, good.

Brief Introduction to my colleagues

'M'e Sekatle teaches Grades 1 and 2 here, and she is very funny. After one very long meeting in which we were figuring out the new teacher-class allocations after losing some teachers, two other teachers were still talking about how to manage their classes, and 'M'e Sekatle said "You can talk about it later. Please, do not invite us."

A few days later, 'M'e Sekatle, 'M'e Makoae (Grade 4), and 'M'e Faso (Standard 7) were waiting outside the office a few minutes later than we usually start, and after a minute or two talking, Ntate Shakhane came up with the keys and opened the office. As they filed in behind him, each teacher commented in succession:

'M'e Faso: I thought you were ill!

'M'e Makoae: I thought you were on strike!

'M'e Sekatle: I thought we were going to have to get the wheelbarrow!

Two snapshot interactions

Snapshot One

When I was first putting my little photo array up on the walls, Likheto, who is a student in my standard six but at that point was just another one of the Matholeng kids who came over to my house to play Uno before school started, asked me a question that really hammered home how different some things are here. It was as much the casual way he asked it as the question itself. I had introduced him to the family and friends who were in the photos, and after looking at a picture with my parents, he asked "are both your parents alive?" After telling him yes (and desperately looking for a way to continue the conversation while processing the implications of the question and remembering that Lesotho has the third highest HIV/AIDS infection rate and that, in a country of about 2,000,000 people, there are about 150,000 orphans due to AIDS-related deaths), I tried to respond as honestly as he did and asked, "how about you? Are both your parents alive?" He shook his head. "No, just my father."

Snapshot Two

I was walking home from school one day and saw a man with an eyepatch and two aluminum braces to help him walk. He was walking from one of the fields with his black, shaggy dog. We ran into each other and went through the standard greetings:

Lumela, ntate!

E, lumela ntate!

U phela joang?

Kea phela, uena?

I should note that in Lesotho it's customary to shake hands for a pretty long time, moving back and forth between the straight handshake and the more angled thumb-clasp one (during training, we were taught that an appropriate amount of time was "before your hands get too warm"). So we were doing the extended handshake thing, and he knew a fair bit of English. He asked where I was from, and when I said "America," he responded "America! That is the country I love more than is necessary, because they care enough to send you here where the people are suffering." I thought briefly about explaining that there is in fact no upper bound to how much a person can love America, but instead settled on "Yes, kea leboha ntate, we do what we can."