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.