Sylvia's Journal

I am back in Pretoria, a touchdown that is supposed to be a bit longer than the previous touchdowns. My return trip to the US has been rescheduled for March 26. I will have managed to have spent most of the two worst winter months in the southern hemisphere. It is worth living in hotels for 6 weeks.

I left Maseru under heavy clouds and thunderstorms and arrived in Jo’burg a little ahead of these same (?) clouds and thunderstorms. I still react poorly to the loud thunderclaps, looking quickly around me to see whether anyone is alarmed. No one is; in fact people here love what I would call bad weather here as it cleans the air and lowers the temperature.

I left Lesotho on Moshoeshoe Day – it was not clear whether it was his birthday (would anyone know?) or the day of his death (surely recorded by the missionaries as it was the day before his christening). At the hotel all the staff was dressed in traditional costumes and the ladies behind the reception counter couldn’t help wiggle their impressive behinds on the beat of the local band that played in the bar area.

Across town and across the nation there were lots of sport games; we had seen busses stuffed with uniformed school children amassing in various towns on our way back from Butha Buthe. But it was not a day off for the immigration officer at the airport who told me, with a sad face, that she didn’t get to celebrate the nation’s founder’s death day. For her it was about death, not birth. Maybe that’s why she didn’t get the day off.

I am back in the lovely guesthouse on the outskirts of Pretoria. It has as its byline ‘the discerning businessman’s choice.’ This is odd because I have so far only seen one business man here (from Texas) and the rest were all women. The rooms are decorated with a woman’s touch for a woman’s taste.

Everything is greasy, my smartphone, my computer keyboard, my glasses. I emerged from my weekly massage with a thick coat of oil. It was Patience once again who covered me with oil and started to knead my sore and unused muscles in a way that made me flinch. This time I asked her to be a bit gentler, so I could enjoy the massage even more. She didn’t use the smooth and slippery stones this time, burning hot in a nice way; I guess I forgot to specify this detail.

The rest of the day was about completion – completing multiple reports – and closure of a magnificent two weeks in Lesotho. I didn’t mind the work, after all, what else is there to do when you are in a hotel on the top of a hill? In the morning my colleagues joined me on their day off – consultants are a lot of extra work. We sat on the terrace looking out over the vast plains around Maseru under a blue sky with a nice cool breeze and discussed work, language, congruence and philosopy.

We sent our youngest colleague home after an hour, knowing that his young wife, 9 months pregnant, was waiting for him in the car outside. We couldn’t get her to come in and sit with us – a clear demarcation between work life and personal life that I didn’t want to impose any longer than needed. We reviewed some critical documents that serve as a basis for all the work planned for the future, including the phasing out of our presence and resources. Rarely do projects have exit strategies but this one is trying to get it on paper – not an easy task.

The team leader joined me for dinner in the hotel’s Chinese restaurant and we talked for hours – he likes talking and I like listening, making us a well-balanced pair. I continue to learn more about the dynamics of the project through these conversations and hope that I can bend some of them around into more productive avenues in the next few weeks. I am not quite sure how but, as a good Quaker, I know ‘way will open.’

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Late Wednesday afternoon we drove some two hours northwest of Maseru, along the South African border for a good part of our journey. We passed the Chinese textile factories – many of them closed now – in a town that grew up around these factories – I don’t think it was about hand in hand what happened there although it was employment while it lasted.

Employment is a huge problem here. I have never seen so many primary and high schools driving two hours out of the capital city. Everywhere we saw boys and girls in uniforms streaming out of schools and homeward. It was sobering to think of these kids, high school diploma in hand, applying for the dwindling jobs in these factories that were closing.

We spent two days in a workshop (the participants referred to it as ‘being workshoppped’) with a multidisciplinary team that has been given the mandate to protect children in this district. Never have I seen so much power in a room to do something good for children: lawyers from the High Court and the Magistrate’s Office, teachers from schools, nurses and counselors from hospitals, social workers from the government, a pastor from a collection of churches, a police woman, someone from the prison system and a registrar of vital statistics. The leader of the team was a young woman, appointed by the District Council Secretary.

But the group felt all but powerful – bewildered about a long list of functions that assumed they would report on statistics that weren’t there and enforce legislation and policies that they hardly knew, contained in thick tomes of which there was only one copy in the entire district.

We helped them discover their own understanding of why they were there and spent much time dreaming about what could be. The second day we came down from the lofty and far away future to put some wheels under their dreams and start moving, however slowly, to a place where their power would begin to show.

At the end of day one I drove with my two colleagues to a nearby set of caves where the nation’s founder had spent some time before his ascent of Thana Bosiu. The caves have ancient drawings on their walls from the San who lived here long before the Basutho moved in. The light was just fading when we got there. Thanks to our smart phones we were able to see some of the most amazing and ancient drawings before the light disappeared.

The second day we struggled through periods of high and low energy. The best antidote, we discovered, to low energy was simply turning up the music: Hugh Masekela, Don Laka, the Soweto String Quartet, Jimmy Dludlu or Mahala Jackson – everyone started to dance.

In the end the district team made a commitment to attend to the small actions that will move them, however slowly, towards fulfilling their role in the government’s grant scheme to protect the nations children. My MSH team mates performed with great talent and skill. They will conduct a similar event in another district next week. They are all riled up and confident, and so am I.

At the end everyone was treated to a braai, the South African version of barbecue, a favorite pastime in this part of the world during the weekend, with lots and lots of meat, sausage and chicken.

I was told by a neighbor, over Skype, that I am on the ballot and will probably make it onto the town democratic committee. I now vaguely remember, during a cold wintry evening visit by one of the organizers in town, that I was gently encouraged to participate in the grassroots democratic process. I said yes, not knowing exactly what I was getting into. We will see.

This same neighbor, who makes a virtue out of knowing trivia, told me that the lowest point in Lesotho is the highest lowest point in the world. Fancy that!

Some other facts about Lesotho are not so cool: In Lesotho, the HIV prevalence rate of 23% is the third highest in the world, with a much higher percentage among women (27%) than men (18%). The HIV prevalence among 25-29 year olds is 35% for females and 18% among males (Lesotho Democratic Health Survey 2009). An unpleasant side effect of this is that the number of orphans (0-17) has gone up from 130,245 in 1996 to nearly a quarter of a million reflecting a 41% rise over a ten-year period according to the last population census, which happened 6 years ago. Children are made vulnerable by HIV and AIDS long before their parents die. Although there are no data available on the number of other vulnerable children, it is most likely that it exceeds the number of those who are orphaned.

And so this is reason why we are here, as an organization, with a project that has as its aim to help the government of Lesotho make sure that these children are taken care of, get the medical and psycho-social services they need, school fees paid and what not. This is the only way that they will have a shot at growing up to be productive citizen and take over the task from their elders to get people to change their behavior and reduce rampant poverty and all its deleterious side effects.