Lesotho reflections: #3

October 1, 2012

I wish you could see what I see now.  I'm sitting in front of my two-room house in Malealea village.  It's been warm today, but it's late afternoon and the sun is just starting to cool.  On my right, there is a row of huge aloe plants separating our house from the neighbors'.  A group of three small children, one with a baby on her back, just ran by and we talked a little in Sesotho.  They laughed gleefully in their four-year-old voices; the youngest one jumped up and down when she told me her name.  At the end of the aloe row, I can just barely see the pump where we draw our water.  There are women gathered there with brightly colored plastic buckets to carry water.
I can see three buildings ahead of me, round brick homes with straw roofs.  Straight ahead there are trees in a row, but to the left the trees and bushes are lower and I can see the mountains.  They are massive, a jagged ridge against the blue expanse of sky without a single cloud.  The mountains here are not covered with trees; instead they are a gray-brown color from a distance, like rock chiseled into slopes and pyramids and dusted with a light cover of grass.
Everyplace with grass is covered with the same yellow flowers.  The soil is richly clay-colored, but dusty.  Sometimes you can see a faint sheen of dust on the air.  The entire village is connected by small dirt paths, so people often walk past, sometimes wrapped in a seana marena, the traditional blanket of the Basotho people.  I see a horse grazing, and I would only have to walk a few steps to see chickens, pigs, and dogs.  Any direction you look gives you a view of the mountains rising taller than anything, far above the plateau of our village.  When the sun sets behind the mountains, their ridges turn dark in a stunning clarity against the still-blue sky.  I wish you could see what I see.

Changing perspectives

Bad luck:  having a gigantic splinter rip itself into my left hand, right where it touches the neck of my violin, and then having to teach a violin lesson before I could take it out.
Optimism:  feeling thankful that it didn't happen five hours earlier, when I was about to walk onstage to perform.

Cynicism:  griping because of the new sign stating that students aren't allowed to use the microwave in the music office.
Humbling:  getting an email that there's now a new microwave for student use in the music lab.

I feel like my perspective is changing a lot these days, as I'm reflecting on the parts of my identity that will need to be relinquished in the next few months...and the new parts that will be added in the months after that.    I have no idea what some of these changes will be, but I know they're inevitable.  Ambiguity is not the most comfortable house to live in, but it's a house that everyone visits.  At least I'm not alone.