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."