Top Quotes: “Everything Lost Is Found Again: Four Seasons in Lesotho” — Will McGrath

“It’s a place where board games are carved into boulders and the phone company texts you about the king’s birthday party.”

“The kingdom has the second highest HIV prevalence rate on the planet, 25 percent of the adult population — a figure that leads inexorably to the number of orphans in Lesotho. Of the 766,000 children in the country, around 211,000 have lost one or both parents, nearly 28 percent.”

“The speakers now begin to call the names of the graduates, who are decked out in adorable miniature caps and gowns. The kids walk shyly up to the tent, receive their diplomas, and pose for a picture. They are uniformly terrified. Then we hear Tseli’s name called. Like the children before her, she approaches the stage haltingly, trying not to trip over her gown. She looks back at us with some measure of trepidation.

Nthabeleng has darted from our side. She runs up in front of the crowd, a step behind her daughter, and begins to dance and ululate — to lilietsa — interrupting what has been a remarkably solemn and grandiose ceremony. Tseli seems unsure what to make of her gyrating mother. Nthabeleng starts shaking her skirt rhythmically, making the backside leap up in the air like a peacock’s fan. She struts. She mugs for the audience. The crowd of gathered families is laughing, egging her on, lilietsa-ing along with her.

Now the seal is broken. As other children proceed to the front, their mothers, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers run up behind them, doing hilarious dances, shaking their asses, singing, screaming, waving at their children, shaking their arms in astonished blessing, then staggering back to the rest of the family, bodies sagging under the weight of hilarity and joy. The graduation has become a graduation party. People are openly talking, pointing at these mini adults, hugging them, dancing.”

“Ellen shared the story of a grandmother in one of the outer villages who said that, of her ten grandchildren, six were dead, two were HIV positive, and two were healthy. These are not uncommon numbers. This is the reason for celebrating kindergarten graduations.”

“The lowest point in Lesotho is 1,400 meters above sea level — almost 5,000 feet up — the highest low-point in the world.”

“At the height of his power, Moshoeshoe even defeated the British, twice. In 1851, the Brits, who had always been looming in the distance, decided it was time to assert their authority over this native rabble-rouser. A soon-to-be-disgraced Major Warden sent a force of one thousand men up the mountain; Moshoeshoe promptly sent them back down again. A year later, a British force of twenty-five hundred arrived, led by a man named Cathcart. They were properly equipped this time and intent on humbling Moshoeshoe in front of any other indigenous troublemakers who might be watching. The British invaders were quite surprised then when Moshoeshoe and his rifle-wielding Basotho cavalry fought them to a standstill — a second very public humiliation for the colonizers.

But Moshoeshoe was a pragmatist, a man who knew his limits. By the mid-1860s, he was starting to lose the total control he had once exercised and he was unsure who his successor would be. Even worse, the Boers — Dutch Calvinist frontiersmen — were chipping away at his territory in increasingly bloody battles. Over the course of just thirty years, Moshoeshoe had coaxed a fragile nation of almost 200,000 people from a handful of decentralized farmers and cattlemen. He wanted to see that nation endure.

The Razor was no bridge-burner; he had left his interactions with the British on honorable terms. After repulsing Cathcart in 1852, Moshoeshoe famously sent a letter declaring Cathcart victorious in his loss, an olive branch that was snatched up by the British. In 1866, Moshoeshoe reached out with an offer of annexation. The Basotho would voluntarily come under British rule as long as they could maintain a sense of national identity.

In 1868, the British colony of “Basutoland” came into existence.

By 1870, Moshoeshoe was dead.”

“Once I saw two male police officers walking down the main road, holding hands. Uniforms crisp, batons dangling, pistols holstered, fingers linked. They looked fierce, hidden behind mirrored aviators, bonded at the fingertips.

I tell Ellen about these policemen. She tells me she rode in a truck out to a distant village. Two men were squeezed into the front seat beside her, and one placed his hand on the other man’s thigh for the duration of the trip. His hand rested there with the casual familiarity of a lover.

Everyone holds hands here. Everyone touches. Men with men, women with women, tough teenage boys with tough teenage boys. It is not uncommon for a stranger to take your hand as he walks beside you, asking where you are going or what has brought you to Lesotho.”

“We have nineteen in the minibus already — this vehicle designed for sixteen passengers — when we stop to pick up a mother with two small children along the side of a high mountain pass. It is late. There are no more taxis coming this way tonight.

They slide the door open and the mother passes her nine-month-old baby up to me. I cradle her in my arms while the mother wedges beside me and situates her six-year-old daughter on her lap. We sit slotted like an overstuffed box of crayons, shoulders around our ears, twenty-two riders now. In this posture, I pantomime fatherhood, playing peek-a-boo with the baby nested in my arms, curious to see how this new costume might fit.

Eventually, though, the child becomes upset and begins to cry, so to stave off commotion in our hyper-condensed state, the baby’s mother unwraps her top, pulls out her breast, and begins to feed the child I am still holding in my arms.

Soon the child relaxes and falls asleep. The mother leaves her breast out of her shirt for the duration of the trip. It is just a few inches from my face and, if so inclined, I too could lean over and sip. I do not.

The baby is drowsing in my arms, the breast close at hand, and the mother looks over at me and smiles. As the taxi jostles along, I see the woman’s head nod briefly, then she rests it against my shoulder and falls asleep.”

“Over the course of its short national history, Lesotho, which gained independence in 1966, has seen every shade of putsch, coup, attempted coup, military ouster, constitutional suspension, contested election, and state of emergency — many of them prominently involving the Lesotho Defense Force. And while elections from 2002 to 2012 were generally peaceful and democratic, another attempted military coup in 2014 resulted in political upheaval after LDF soldiers opened fire on Prime Minister Tom Thabane’s security detail and forced the PM to flee into South Africa for a week.”

“While Mokhotlong camptown is quite rural, it is the district hub and thus modernized to an extent. (Point: there is an ATM in Mokhotlong. Counterpoint: the people withdrawing money from the ATM often arrive on horseback.)”

“As I walked into a party with a Mosotho friend, the mountain wind whipping around us, I realized that he was intending to leave his wife sitting there in the passenger seat of the car, where she would patiently await our return from the celebration.”

“When I ask one of the teachers what is going on, he turns to me and says: “Oh, they are mocking them.” He is surprised I don’t know that today is the day the student body gathers to mock the first-year students.

Then he comments casually, “And now they will beat them.”

This is how the rock fight begins.

A granite hail pours from the heavens, falling first upon Form A students, flung skyward by the gathered upperclassmen, and then, in retaliation, a return volley from Form A, the air alive with projectiles, chunk after chunk thudding: rock, pebble, stone, knot, brick, clod, clot. Children are running, screaming with hilarity and fear, looking for cover, looking for ammo.

Perhaps it is inevitable.

Nkhopoleng — she of widest eye and sweetest smile and so very very small — Nkhopoleng staggers away from Form A, swaying woozily, her wide eyes glazed now, her eyelids beginning to droop, her head streaming blood in bright red rivulets, a little delta across her forehead.

Nkhopoleng slumps over like wet snow coming off an angled roof.

It is then that the teachers begin yelling at everyone to stop the rock fight — For shame! — this rock fight they all knew would happen.”

““He doesn’t understand when people are saying his mother is dead. He only sees that I am the one giving him food, that I am the one sweeping and cleaning, doing laundry, doing everything — so he says I am his mother.””

“If you ask any Basotho whom the best caregivers are, the answer is always women, fundamentally and unchangeably women. Yet Kapoko’s skill and dedication in raising his children and grandchildren is indisputable, and so he and the few others like him remain a marvel out here in the mountains, referred to in female terms, unable to fit neatly within an established paradigm, incomprehensible as solely male even to himself.”

“Now we are climbing higher, the truck’s engine churning. The housing here is no longer rectangular but circular, like the thatch-roofed rondavels we know in Mokhotlong. Our surroundings quickly turn deep country, with any lingering ninety-degree angles windblown into curves. A donkey roaming the mountainside brays at us. There is no longer anything resembling a road.

As we continue up the mountain, we begin to develop a small entourage. Children follow our truck, Pied Piper style, as we aim skyward. They have emerged from fields of maize, from behind boulders. We are moving so slowly across the terrain that this cadre of shoeless children can jog beside us, behind us, in front of us — we look like a miniaturized version of a presidential motorcade, the children ringing our truck like a complement of very cheerful Secret Service agents. Two boys are running beside my window, laughing and calling out “Ke kopa lifti! Ke kopa lifti!” and as I lean out to say “Sorry, no lift,” Ellen slows to cross a gap in the non-road. One of the boys grabs hold of my hand, has now suddenly jumped onto the runner of the moving vehicle — “No,” I’m telling him, “you’ve got to get down!” —and before I can do anything, before I can process what is happening, the boy has climbed in through the open window and plopped himself onto my lap. The second boy nimbly follows suit and suddenly I have two village boys, ages seven and nine, piled on top of me, laughing wildly at their boldness. Ellen stops the truck. There is really no other option.

Now the floodgates open: the throng sends up a cheer and the remaining children clamber into the car. They are sitting on top of each other, stacked in a mad jumble of scrawny limbs. I do a quick head count. In addition to Ellen, myself, and our original guide, eleven more kids have packed into our truck — ranging between four and twelve years old — putting a total of fourteen passengers in the 4WD, a whole clown car’s worth of child endangerment.

Watching all of this from the doorway of her rondavel is an old nkhono. She shakes her head, coughs out a rickety laugh, and waves us on. Ellen sets us into motion again and puts some famo on the radio, the accordion and bass rattling the speakers, and with this we have completed our transformation into a fully operational Basotho taxi. We continue along in a state of hilario-chaos, the kids stomping their feet and singing along to Phoka, belting the lyrics with atonal gusto, laughing and toasting the two boys who breached the siege wall.”

“Lesotho has no medical school at this time, no doctors of its own, so the staff here have come from other countries, mostly Zimbabwe and the Congo.”

“Hitchhiking: Is awesome. It is practiced frequently in Lesotho and — since most vehicles are some type of pickup truck — it is relatively easy to do. Just hop in the back. Unlike in America, the recognized “please pick me up” signal is not a thumbs-up gesture but something more like a paddling motion, where both hands are extended, palms down, and waved in unison like flippers.”

“At the time, I didn’t know if we would be back again. Our separation from Lesotho felt somehow permanent. I didn’t know that we would return again and again, that we would always return, that we would live there with our own small children.”