Let's get fariki: the life and times of the Matholeng Hog Squad

I have received a number of requests for information about my school’s piggery project. Often these requests come in the form of post-midnight anonymous phone calls which begin with strange, unsteady breathing, followed by such complete silence that I think the call has been lost, and finishing with a loud, bourbon-soaked voice crying, “HOW. ‘BOUT. THEM. HOGS?” In the interest of ending these calls, I’ll give you all a quick, just-the-facts narrative of the project’s life so far.

June 2014

My counterpart (Mr. Shakhane Thamae, as you will recall) attended the Peace Corps Project Design & Management workshop.

August 2014

Shakhane and I held a meeting with community members to determine what they deemed the community’s most pressing needs. The takeaway was that we would build a piggery. I was not satisfied with how the meeting progressed; I felt like the teachers talked too much and the community members too little. This was not a good thing for the very practical reason that a lack of voice might indicate a lack of interest and a lack of buy-in (as we say in the biz), which would be a good way to sink a community project before it launched.

October 2014

We held a second community meeting after I ran through some of the issues I had with the previous one. Mrs. Mathapelo Makoae, my colleague and grade 4 teacher at Matholeng, facilitated the meeting. The community generated a list of 17 needs, then narrowed down the list with an eye towards which needs we could practically address. Eventually, they settled on supporting our Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVCs). Mrs. Makoae then led them in coming up with ideas for projects which could possibly achieve this. The community members settled on a piggery. This time, however, I felt more confident that this was what they wanted.

December 2014

After a couple of weeks of work with Mrs. Faso, the school’s principal, I submitted our grant application to the Peace Corps for review.

January 2015

We received some comments/suggestions to strengthen our proposal from Peace Corps staff.

February/March 2015

I really wanted to make sure that the project would be economically sustainable, so I spent a lot of time researching expected costs and timetables to try and put together a projected budget for the project. This information is not asked for in the application, which I agree seems like a gap.

April 2015

I submitted the final application through the Peace Corps online grant portal (a device seemingly designed to exclude host country counterparts from involvement in the process – ask me to vent about this some time!).

June 2015

Peace Corps concluded its presumably rigorous and time-consuming grant review process and put a tidy sum of Maluti into my bank account, which I withdrew and kept in a black attaché case handcuffed to my wrist.

July 2015

Shakhane and I bought the construction materials from a local hardware store.

August 2015

Part of the Peace Corps grant agreement is that the community must put up at least 25% of the project cost, which can be given in cash or as an in-kind contribution of labor or materials. Our in-kind contribution consisted of gathering and transporting sandy soil and stones for construction of the sty. For a few weeks, the children would come together after school to carry big stones from past the soccer ground all the way to the garden.

September 2015

The contractors finished construction of the sty.

October 2015

Mrs. Faso and I purchased the pigs, 500 kg of pig feed, and medicine.

Of course, the project is over only insofar as my own involvement goes; hopefully, it will continue and eventually provide funds to assist our OVCs.

Lifariki li teng.

Climbing up Thanthanyana

I've been derelict in my duty and did not tell you all about my new host brother Liteboho, who has been here at the Thamae compound for at least 6 weeks. He is a lot of fun and is going to start high school next year.

The tallest mountain behind my village is called Thanthanyana (I bet someone out there even knows what it means!), and I've always wanted to climb it (in a very lackadaisical, maybe-I'll-climb-it, maybe-I-won't way). But on Saturday, I brought up that I'd like to attempt it, and Liteboho said he would accompany me. So I found myself committing to climb on Sunday. I'll give you the full run down over the plate of buffalo wings and cold American lager you're all probably just itching to buy me, but here are a few highlight photos, including Springboks (matsa) and me trying out my camera's panorama function.

Some random observations

Here's a few things that have happened recently. The first two are about sheep.
1) Twice in the past two days, a very young sheep has wandered into my empty classroom while I was sitting at my desk. The first day, it poked around the student desks and made a few contented bleats before eventually leaving of its own accord. The second day, 'M'e Sekatle (you will remember as the teacher of grade 2), called out to me "Ntate Rethabile! You have got a new learner!" Then, a boy in grade 2 came in, made a few conciliatory noises, coaxed the sheep into his arms, and brought it back outside. I wish this happened every day of my life.
2) I was riding a taxi to Ha Sekake yesterday when we pulled up on the narrow shoulder next to a young sheep (perhaps an age mate of the fellow from school). The conductor jumped out, peered around up and down the surrounding mountains, scooped up the sheep, and hopped back into the taxi. I eyed the other passengers to see if this was all on the up-and-up, but wasn't able to tell. Then, the driver spotted a herd of sheep hidden in a fold of the mountain to our right, and inquired whether the herder was missing one of his flock. We drove about two minutes on, stopped, and the conductor cajoled an old man passing by to accept the sheep.
3) Tuesday was an exceptionally clear day, and I was staring out at the mountains when I noticed a few protuberances on the western slope of the largest mountain. I grabbed my binoculars and got a better look. Turns out there are quite a few houses up there, along with a road cut into the side of the high peaks. I'd never noticed this before. It's fun to learn something new!
4) Today, a student in class 6 asked me to use the pencil sharpener (I have said many times that they are free to use the pencil sharpener whenever they like, but they insist on asking. This is one of those things you just have to accept). I was writing on the board, and over my shoulder I heard her panicked cry: "SIR! It is not there!" Her tone of voice was what you would use if you'd just discovered the Mona Lisa had gone missing under your watch.
5) Yesterday, my principal 'M'e Faso and I selected three of the finest, choicest hogs in Ha Sekake to bring home to school, along with a healthy 500 kilograms of Pig Grower (accept no substitutes!). This is the final step of the first phase of my community's secondary project, and I couldn't be happier to see it underway. While I won't be able to see these three get to producing beautiful litters (I'm told the pig-stork brings them), I am excited to see Caliban, Mrs. Prendergast, and Herbert Hooves-er making themselves at home. I hope to make a blog post which gets into the nitty-gritty of the secondary project process.
6) I am four days away from the two-year mark here in Lesotho, and I've reached that stage of equanimity which one feels at the end of things. As you would do in my place, I spend my free time reading Ecclesiastes, picking up soil from the yard and then letting it fall from my stretched fingers into the breeze while making a deep, knowing "mmmmm" noise, and drinking tumblerfuls of bourbon as I sit on my stoop and squint at the setting sun.

English Club

At the beginning of this school year, I taught the grades 3 and 4 together. A few lessons in, it became apparent that only one or two of the students in grade 4 could read anything at all, and none of the students in grade 3. This was a problem, because the topics and assignments in the government curricula for grades 3 and 4 clearly expected some level of literacy. I talked with ‘M’e Makoae, their class teacher, and she said it would be ok if I organized them into small groups and worked with them on reading and writing during the morning and lunch breaks. So, from about February on, I’d work with 3 or 4 grade 3 students during the morning break, and 3 or 4 grade 4 students during the lunch break.

We began by just copying out the alphabet a few times to get familiar with the letters, and then went on to working through the 7 sets of letter sounds I found in the grade 4 Teacher’s Guide. I’ll stress here that this English Club was not informed by any broad overarching strategy, and more by a sense of desperation that these students were far behind where they should have been, and it didn’t seem like anyone was going to do anything to get them back on track (because so much emphasis is placed on the results of the Primary School Leaving Examination that all grade 7 students take, the school values their instruction far more highly than that of the lower grades – often a student will coast through the early years without learning a whole lot, only to have a stressful final year during which they learn all of the grade 7 material in addition to everything they missed on the way up [this approach is in accordance with the principle that when you build a house, you don’t need to work too hard on the foundation, the floors, the walls, or the rafters, but you should make sure you have a really pretty roof (hope I don’t sound bitter!)]).

I can’t say then that this was an A+ effort on my part and all of the students who couldn’t read at the beginning of the year are now highly literate. It took us a while to find a groove in terms of making measurable progress. But there were positive effects. The students really seemed to benefit from the smaller-group instruction, which had the ancillary effect of making classroom management and learning during the scheduled English classes a lot easier. I got the impression that the students became more comfortable with me as a teacher because they’d gotten to work with me in another environment in which they could sort of understand what we were trying to do, rather than having their sole experience with me be the class time, where I may have just been the loud frustrated sweating man speaking in tongues.

By the end of the semester, a fair number of students (maybe half  of grade 4 and a quarter of grade 3) were able to read most of what they saw in the first portion of Hop on Pop. Progress! My favorite page of the book is of course “HE. ME. He is after me. JIM. HIM. Jim is after him.” It doesn’t get any better than that.

So we’ll see where the next semester takes us, but it’s been a fun learning experience.

"Ah, sir, you can draw!"

The coliseum.

Cool short film about English-medium education

My close personal friend Andrew "Andy" Maguire sent me this link to a movie made my some secondary school students in Zanzibar. It relates to some of the things I talked about in this post: http://dftmk.blogspot.com/2014/12/what-exactly-am-i-doing-here.html

Watch the movie here:
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/06/25/417174187/teens-make-film-in-broken-english-to-explain-why-theyll-fail-english

A half-hearted excuse for why I've been delinquent in posting

Friend of the People Mike Middleton recently sent me a box full of books (thanks, Mike!) and among them was Peter Matthiessen's The Tree Where Man Was Born.

In one part, Matthiessen writes about one of the people he's going to visit out in some rural station (the book takes place in East Africa): "But a letter sent me in Nairobi gave me confidence that we would get on all right: 'I think if you allow yourself two weeks here,' he wrote in part, 'you would be able to get a fair insight into the valley and its mysteries; if you stay longer, you might well end up at my position, knowing nothing at all. It seems the longer one stays at a place, the less one has to say about it.'"

That seems like a pretty good description of where I'm at now: I know nothing at all. Not in a bad, despairing way (some of my best friends know nothing at all).

But it could also be apathy. I'll try to get some more posts up over the coming months, possibly dealing with some of the following topics:

• a visit from my family back in December-January
• a visit from friends to Cape Town
• my new fascination with making charts for my classroom
• something on my secondary project
• the English Club
• a searing indictment of the cows and chickens who, with blatant disregard for property rights, ate all of the spinach from my garden (and cut down the okra before it even had a chance)

A visit from Dylan

My good friend Dylan Riessen came and visited during December. He's working in Cape Town this year for Grassroot Soccer (GRS), and was able to come out during the holiday break. We had a terrific trip in Lesotho and South Africa, and were accompanied by fellow PCV Mary and other GRS intern Sam. No pictures are currently known to exist of the South Africa portion, but I will update this post if I receive any new information. Maybe some day you'll run into me or Dylan and we'll tell you all about it. One highlight was our rental car, a Nissan Hardbody. See if you can spot it.

UPDATE: Mary has found a picture from South Africa.

Dylan took a picture of me in my natural habitat.

http://youtu.be/hQo1HIcSVtg?t=49s

"To drivin' some of the hottest cars New York has ever seen."

Michelle (my fellow volunteer who lives in the area), Sam, and I in a big cave.

Dylan and I outside the cave.

Atop a mountain in Sehlabathebe National Park.

Scenic overlook. It was just overlooking some waterfalls or something.
But take a look at that Hardbody!

The mighty Senqu River.

Hardbody, just glistening in the sun on a beautiful day.

Fog, Hardbody, tents at Sehlabathebe National Park.

Dylan and Mike, cooking up some old fashioned "Sauce and Cheese."

Do they have horses at Sehlabathebe National Park? You bet!

On our way to Tsoelikane Falls, ascending a hill with a fine rock outcropping.

Tsoelikane Falls. The water was cold.

Look at that!

Sam reading in the Hardbody.

The mountain behind my rondavel with some clouds lit by the setting sun.

Dylan doing an honest day's washing.

When my host father heard we were going to town and then saw how dirty
 the Hardbody was, he said "The know me in town, and they know I do not
 like things to be dirty." Together, we gave the Hardbody a thorough cleaning.

Dylan and I, Christmas Eve.

Mary and I, at the beach in Durban.

Gardening

Back in December, I decided it was time to get my act together and start gardening. I chose to build a keyhole garden, which is a garden inside a circular stone enclosure about waist-high. These gardens were originally designed to help people living with HIV/AIDS grow nutritious foods without the strain of constantly bending down. With the help of some neighborhood kids, I built the stone enclosure and then filled it with the proper layers: crushed tin cans, chopped-up aloe, and then, repeating until full, ash, manure, and soil. My host father helped me to plant the seeds (I truly know nothing about gardening), and I have finally been reaping the rewards these past few weeks with fresh spinach in all of my meals.

I enjoy going out to water my garden in the mornings and evenings and, when the mood strikes me, loudly proclaiming to no one in particular, "Ah! But it is good to work with one's hands!" or "Can there be anything finer than tending one's garden?"

Look at that soil!

The cinderblock structure on the right is my rondavel, for reference.