Change

We're dancing here. Many because he's a black man but some because we believe he's a good man. Wednesday at 530 am I was in a lift to get to Maseru and as soon as we cleared the pass my phone started buzzing with messages. From Canada, Montana, Michigan, South Africa, Lesotho the texts and calls were all the same. I jumped out of the flatbed truck that brought me to the outskirts of Maseru and got into a taxi to take me to CashBuild (our version of Home Depot only... well, see below) and with accordion music blasting I danced with my fellow passengers. I danced to accordion music. That was the mood for the day. When my lift back to Ramabanta picked me (and my lumber purchase) up outside CashBuild at 9am, she greeted me with: "You must be having a good day." I feel as though I need to say no more; for 8 years I've been let down and now after a year of disappointments in Lesotho things are turning around on this continent, too.

CashBuild. I bought R500 of pine to build a bookshelf for our classroom library at Fatima. 1.8 m boards, I grabbed 5 and after paying asked the nearest employee to cut 3 of them in half for me to serve as the shelves. He said he wasn't sure if the saw was "still around." 'How do you lose a power tool?' I'm thinking, but say nothing. I stepped out to see him measuring "half" with hand saw - not the electric kind, the old school kind; metal blade and yellow plastic handle. So this is the leading hardware/lumber supplier in Maseru, but we're still in Lesotho. I ask if maybe he could find the halfway point with a tape measure since they need to be exactly 90 cm each to have a semi-functional shelf. "I have no tape measure."

"We're at a hardware store. I could get one from inside..."

So we measure one and he stacks them on top of each other to cut through all three at once. I'm starting to fee both guilty for telling him how to do his job and irritated that he's not especially good at it. "Ntate, maybe one at a time?" While he does this I take the other two boards and, instead of putting a single dot at the halfway point, measure 90cm in two places to draw a line across. To make a long story short, this is what I ended up with:

And to answer that age old, never offensive or irritating question as to whether chicks make good carpenters:

Despite the efforts of others to hinder us. I had to use the small saw on my swiss army knife to attempt to even out the boards. The only other saw in my village was a bow saw for firewood. I was desperate enough to try that, but came back to my good old 2 inch saw blade.

Things are pickin' up. Mohair/wool spinning, library workshop, maps and gardening. Life is good.