July 10

The South Africa National Arts Festival had been in the back of my mind for a long time as something I might like to visit during my time off. The timing was convenient, held every year in July, when I knew classes would be out. And I thought I should take advantage of a chance to go to a festival during the off-season for tourism. Plus, art! Art of every flavor, all from the South African perspective.

The festival is held in Grahamstown, which is a relatively small college town (Rhodes University being the central institution) in the province of Eastern Cape. To get there I first needed to take a bus to Port Elizabeth, a larger city on the coast. I spent a day in Port Elizabeth (and again on my way back). Check out the google maps image of the hostel I stayed at and see if you can spot THE OCEAN. Nothing tells me I’m on vacation like long stretches of white sand and the sound of crashing waves. Living just a couple minutes walk from the beach I naturally spent a lot of time just wandering along the shore or plopping down on a bench with my book and the view. There was a pretty impressive walking/biking trail running alongside the beach for a couple miles, and on the sunny Sunday afternoon I was there it was full of families walking their dogs and riding bikes.

After a day of lazing about the beach I caught an early morning bus to Grahamstown. Back in Maseru I had bought tickets to a few shows online, including one concert that started at 1:00 Monday. Even though I arrived in town before 10:00 I was anxious about having enough time to walk to my hostel, drop my stuff, get info about the festival, find a place to pick up my tickets, and find the concert venue.

Luckily I found the hostel okay (even though I had to modify the route I’d jotted down) and the staff there was super helpful. They even gave me a free festival program, a thick magazine-like publication containing information about all the artists, exhibits, and performances and, most importantly for me, a map of the town marked with all festival-related locations. So I was quickly on my way to the central hub of the festival.

Walking through Grahamstown on a peaceful morning in weather that felt like early summer to me (compared to Lesotho), my first impression was that it could pass for a small college town in the US. Lots of shady residential streets, plenty of pretty churches and stately buildings with interesting architecture. A noticeable increase in cafes and bars as one drew closer to campus. I could have been walking through Grinnell if I ignored one glaring difference – the charming houses and well-tended gardens of Grinnell are not separated from the sidewalk by fences topped with coils barbed wire, security system warning signs, and hyper-vigilant dogs.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to reconcile the jarring visual juxtaposition of South Africa’s beautiful landscapes and the fortified neighborhoods that make up so many towns. It’s just so far removed from the leave-your-keys-in-the-car world I group in. Or even China, where the close mingling of humanity is an accepted inevitability. Not that I don’t understand where this wariness in South African comes from. I get that they’re still healing from a very turbulent history, and high crime rates are still a pressing issue. I just have a hard time imagining living that way long-term.

Anyway, in St. Rodrigue may be more neighborly (no fences required) but we also don’t have tree-lined sidewalks and traffic that yields to pedestrians. So I enjoyed these things as I made my way toward the ticket office. In the end I had plenty of time to get a good seat at that first concert, which was a band called Laurie Levine and the Folk Collective. They were a South African group playing songs that fell pretty firmly in the Appalachian-inspired modern bluegrass genre (liberal doses of accordion, fiddle, and melancholy). It was interesting to hear a South African band essentially doing American folk music. They mostly played original songs, but threw in some Johnny Cash and Springsteen covers too. It was a good show and a pleasant way to kick off my festival experience.

I stayed in Grahamstown for four days, and spent a lot of time running all over town catching shows and wandering into art exhibits. Sometimes I’d have unexpected success, like when I stumbled upon an exhibit examining the relationship between China and Africa. But I definitely also spent an afternoon hunting down a theater, getting very lost, finding the show only to discover tickets sold out, and returning with only blistered feet and empty water bottle to show for my efforts.

Nevertheless, I did see several interesting shows, one of which was a production of the David Mamet play Race. Obviously the idea of seeing a play about race (specifically US white/black relations) in South Africa was intriguing. (Although as I was sitting in the theater waiting for the show to start I overheard a conversation between a couple British folks behind me in which one of them said wearily, “It seems like every show we’ve seen is about race…”)

The production of the show was good, as were the actors, but I was less impressed with the play itself. The crux of the conflict seemed less about race and more about the moral challenges of representing a client you don’t like and/or believe to be guilty. And I’ve seen more compelling, nuanced treatment of that concept on episodes of The Good Wife. There was also a confusing plot line that seemed to tackle affirmative action, which I’ve always had a hard time seeing as controversial. Basically, I didn’t find the play that edgy or challenging, but what was interesting was listening to the audience’s reactions. Most of the people I met/heard at the festival were South Africa, so I assumed that to be true of the play’s audience too. Based on the loud laughs at jokes and heavy silences at tense moments it seemed they were pretty engaged with the performance. There was one joke about illegal Mexican immigrants that got a big laugh, which surprised me. Not because of the joke itself (which was pretty tepid, neither offensive nor very funny) but because the context was so embedded in American attitudes toward Mexican immigrants I was surprised it translated culturally.

My favorite show was a concert of “indigenous” (the program’s word, not mine) African music. The name of the show was Orifins: Ekugaleni, and was made up of 7-8 musicians who started by playing very simple instruments in a traditional manner. (I assume – I’m basing this off their program notes. Generally speaking I’m pretty ignorant on history of African music.) Gradually their songs began acquiring more modern instruments and rhythms. So they started with minimal percussion and singing, then added musical bows and horns. Buy which I mean actual kudu horns (or a similar animal – my horn identification skills are also not very polished) that they blew into to create a cool, horn-of-Gondor type sound. And eventually they worked their way up to marimbas and djembes.

What made their performance really impressive (besides just solid musicianship) was the fact that they performed for about an hour with barely any pause between songs, and seemed to get more energetic as they went. They all seemed like they were having a blast, which made it that much more enjoyable for us in the audience. If I were scouting I would book them on a US tour stat. I should also mention that the concert was held in a beautiful little chapel with great acoustics.

Overall I’m really glad I made it to the Arts Festival, but I also wish I could come back next year now that I’ve acquired all this experience. I think I would book shows a bit more aggressively – there weren’t as many visual art exhibits as I’d expected. But I did pack a lot into the few days I was there. I did have to return to Lesotho within a week though. Weirdly enough, my Lesotho residence permit means I can only get a 7-day visa at the border (as opposed to the 3-month visa usually available to American citizens). I could’ve applied for a longer visa, but I decided to skip the hassle, cross the border, then turn back around and take another trip. I’m staying at St. Rodrigue for a couple days to do some laundry (so very necessary) and plan my next trip. There’s far too many choices, but I’m pretty sure a beach will be part of the equation.

Stray thoughts:

• I should stress that any point on my trip when I had electricity and was not boiling water felt blissful and luxurious.
• 4^th of July came and went and I didn’t really celebrate it. I even left the red shirt I meant to bring at home, so I couldn’t advertise my nationality. But that’s okay – I’ll just enjoy the picnics and parades twice as much next year.
• Speaking of outdoor eating, the festival concentrated all its food trucks/stalls in one area, which I thought was pretty silly. When I attend a festival I want overpriced refreshments near me at all times.
• There was a joke in the Race play about the DA that exactly one person laughed at, and maybe some were like me, busy composing mental lists of flaws in the play, but I’m guessing a lot just didn’t know it stood for District Attorney, or what a DA does. Which made me wonder about whether lawyer/cop procedurals have much of a market outside the US. Are there enough assumptions about knowledge of the legal system to create a (boring) cultural barrier? 
• For a couple days I shared my dorm room with three Mexican girls, and one morning they asked if I would use the internet on my phone to google the results of the Mexican presidential election. I, of course, was completely oblivious such an election had taken place, and was happy to oblige while they filled me in on the candidates. When I announced the results they all groaned – their favorite, Josefina Vázquez Mota, came in third. The winner, according to my roomies, is high on appearances and low on substance. My existing knowledge of Mexican politics is embarrassingly limited, so I expressed sympathetic outrage on behalf of my roomies. I’d be interested to know how the election was covered by the media in the US.

 

 

June 29

Classes ended for most students and teachers at St. Rodrigue three weeks ago, but many form Cs and Es (reminder: form C = 10th grade,  E = 12th grade) opted to attend extra “winter classes” through the end of June. The Cs and Es will take the Cambridge International Exams sometime in October, and winter classes serve as a way for students to catch up on difficult subjects and avoid losing ground over break.

Typically one teacher handles each subject taught during winter classes (as there are only two grades to teach). This year none of the other math teachers were able to stay for the winter, so I volunteered to teach math to both the Cs and Es. At first I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to give up  nearly half of my vacation time – technically I had time off from June 9th until July 31st. But the chance to have full control over my lesson plans and teach whatever I wanted from the curriculum, as well as have more time to meet students outside of class, was just too good to pass up.

One of the changes I made to the classroom routine was to give weekly quizzes to both my classes. I think I’ve mentioned before that I can only assign students a little, if any, homework, because many students don’t have the time and/or suitable conditions outside of school to complete it. As a result most math teachers will assign a few problems in class and grade those problems individually, pointing out errors and giving extra help where needed. My main complaint about this method is that it consumes a huge amount of class time. I also dislike the pressure placed on students who don’t yet fully understand the topic at hand. Once a threshold number of students have completed a problem, the rest will become more concerned with hurrying up and writing down the answer than with grasping the underlying concept, so that they aren’t visibly falling behind their peers.

Quizzes also take up a lot of class time, but I liked the results of giving them often for a few reasons. First, they basically served the role of enforced homework time. Under other circumstances the questions on the quiz would be those I’d assign as homework and grade outside of class in order to monitor individual progress as well as take the temperature of the class as a whole. Second, after grading the quizzes and handing them back the next day, I’d write the answers on the board and explain the solutions to any problems still confusing students. This is so much more efficient than correcting mistakes individually in class. Third, the Cs and Es especially need all the practice they can get using test-taking strategies.

Another issue I’d notice during first term and tried to address during winter classes was the inability of students in all forms to quickly solve simple multiplication problems. I fully blame the scarcity of quality primary education available in rural Lesotho. No one taught these girls that they should memorize the answers to simple multiplication problems, and there’s really no substitute for learning your “times tables.”

From my perspective, if students had to begin multi-step problems on the Cambridge exams by working out 7×9 through addition they’d be at severe disadvantage, wasting time and risking simple mistakes (regardless of whether they remembered how calculate surface area). But I also understood that teachers already felt like they didn’t have enough time to cover all the topics in curriculum, let alone basic computation skills.

So during winter classes I tried a little experiment. I made a deck of flash cards from 0x0 to 12×12, shuffled them, and asked students to answer as many cards as they could in one minute (with no mistakes). These drills took place one-on-one, before or after school, in the library. I made each student come once, and then as many times as they chose after that.

The program went reasonably well at first, but it really took off when I started posting a list of the top ten scorers in the library window. A little competition goes a long way – I did offer prizes (probably candy) to the students with the best scores at the end of winter classes, but I may not have needed to sweeten the deal. They loved seeing their names on display. (I got crafty and used pretty paper to decorate the honor roll and make it celebratory-looking.)

On a sidenote, it was fun for me to make something to cheerfully decorate a wall, which is something that I, for better or worse, associate with primary and secondary teaching. One of the downsides of having teachers move between classes when the bell rings instead of students is that I don’t get to treat a certain classroom as my particular domain and visually create whatever environment I think most facilitates learning. There are advantages to the setup of course – I know a lot of high schools in the US treat hallways between classes as place where a lot of behavioral issues can originate. But I’m still disappointed – I like bulletin boards and posters.

Anyway, the multiplication competition gave students a lot of incentive to keep meeting with me and trying to improve their skills. And some did improve, markedly, others less so. But at least I reminded all of them that this is something they should focus on, and ideally master, before their exams. During winter classes I limited this little pilot project to the Es, but I’m hoping to open the competition up to all forms when classes resume in August.

Aside from teaching, living in St. Rodrigue in June has been an interesting experience. The main changes in my daily life are that my co-fellow is gone, so I’m living by myself, and that it’s really quite cold now. Every morning there’ s a pretty thick frost on the ground, but it melts by midday and the ground doesn’t seem completely frozen. On sunny days the difference in temperature between the shade (i.e. my cold house) and the sunshine is really dramatic.

It’s funny how much the weather can dictate my activities for the day. The cold isn’t unbearable or anything, but my actions start to revolve around what I can do to feel warm and cozy. I sit on my porch and soak up the sun with my solar chargers whenever possible and my long johns have basically become a second skin. One of my least favorite chores is now doing dishes because the water feels like it must be 33 degrees. I try to do them as quickly as possible before my hands start getting too numb. Whenever I make pasta I always plug up the sink before draining the pasta – there’s no way I’m dumping all that heated water down the drain. Actually a lot of the water vaporizes immediately – the windows in the kitchen steam up completely in seconds. But the rest of it stays in the sink and makes doing the dishes much more pleasant.

Living in the house by myself is pretty quiet, so I was glad for the opportunity to go to Maseru and hang out with some expats. One of the people I stay with in Maseru was very involved in putting together a production of Little Shop of Horrors. She and some friends founded an amateur theater company this year, and I was really impressed with the show they put together.

The cast was a mix of expats and local Basotho, and they gave two performances using the small auditorium at a Maseru high school. (“Small” is a very relative term here – the idea of having a stage with lights and sound system and backstage at St. Rodrigue is mind-boggling. The seating was limited, but it was a very well-equipped space.)

The show itself was wonderfully fun and endearing, full of the enthusiasm and energy that really makes community theater enjoyable. My favorite bit was that they set the story in Lesotho and added lots of little details to the script and set that the audience just loved. Some of those little touches were as simple as using names of southern African restaurant chains and maloti instead of dollars. But they also had people on the street selling airtime and simbas (cheetos, basically) and imitations of local newspapers and radio hosts.

Coming to Maseru to watch the musical (on opening night!) was a fun little weekend escape, but for the most part I’ve enjoyed the relaxed pace of winter classes at St. Rodrigue. It was very satisfying to feel like I was using my classtime efficiently, and I had a lot of fun study sessions with the girls outside of class. Nevertheless, I now have vacation time until late June, and I plan to use it to visit South Africa. I’m starting with the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, but I’m not sure where I’d like to go after that. In any case I’m looking forward to spending some time in places a little less isolated than St. Rodrigue, and a little bit warmer.

Stray thoughts:

• The upside of the cold weather is that it’s definitely cold enough to keep butter in the house now, and food just lasts longer in general. So I’ve had fun cooking things that require butter, like apple crisp!
• I thought that, having lived in St. Rodrigue for five months, I had become thoroughly familiar with everything there is to see nearby, or at least on the short walk from my house to the school. But one day I was walking through the convent and I realized that an unremarkable looking tree that I had walked by nearly every day was actually a lemon tree, as evidenced by the branches now heavy with bright yellow lemons. (I swear that happened overnight – one day just green leaves, the next day fifty bajillion lemons). So I guess St. Rodrigue still has surprises for me.
• Because I’m so dependent on the sunshine for charging my phone/kindle/batteries and warming my chilly toes it was really a bummer when the weather turned unceasingly rainy for nearly a week. I thought the winter was the dry season, so I was surprised when we got over 4 inches of rain, plus some pea-sized hail, over the course of a weekend.
• The Es are reading the first few chapters of “Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard” over the winter in preparation for their lit class next term. A lot of students were having trouble getting started on it – they couldn’t hash out the setting or the main characters or the plot line. Which is understandable – it’s a challenging book for their level of English, but definitely doable. So I had several sessions of reading the book paragraph by paragraph with a small group of students and helping them with vocabulary or metaphors that gave them trouble. It turned out to be one of my favorite things I did during winter classes. It was just a lot of fun to explain words like sooty, billowing, and somersault, as well as show them where Sweden is and discuss metaphors.

“A Delightful Country Like Lesotho”

It’s true, Lesotho is super delightful. And I like many other things said in this New York Times article. 

I also like the very, very rare occasions when I can check up on the news and feel ahead of the curve, and not like I’ve been living under a rock.