Month: May 2013

It has been a long and winding road for The Mountain School to get back home, but it has finally landed back in Lesotho at the Museum Store in Morija. This is the store attached to the country’s only real museum, and Morija is the town where the country’s first foreigners (the Frenchman Eugene Casalis and company) arrived to stay back in the 1830’s.

The Morija Museum’s curator, Stephen Gill, is a great resource who has received the stock of books I sent and placed them for sale at M190 each, which is almost $20. But this was as low as we could make the price; it’s inordinately expensive to ship to Africa! Nevertheless, it feels great to know that my friends in Lesotho can now have a real-life look at the book.

Up until now that wasn’t possible because people in Lesotho are very limited in their ability to purchase things online. Very few have credit cards, and many don’t have addresses or post office boxes at which to receive items. For them, there is simply no option of ordering something from Amazon and having it delivered.

Beyond that, even for those who have a computer there is trouble downloading. I don’t know the technical background involved, but I’ve worked with Lemeko, my most computer-literate former student, for months trying to get an e-book onto his laptop without success. So really the only choice is boxing up physical books in the U.S.A. and personally shipping them to a physical bookstore — and hoping customs fees are not unreasonable. That’s how it was done.

Again, thanks to Stephen Gill and the Morija Museum for being so helpful with the logistics, and also for the enthusiastic reception and review of the book. I love the idea of The Mountain School being there in the cultural heart of Lesotho.

Read more about Morija and the Museum here.

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We may have come full circle in our intelligence in America: We’ve become so smart that we’re stupid; we’ve learned so many new things that we no longer remember the most basic and important things.

I was listening to an interview on NPR’s Science Friday with the writer Michael Pollan, who is one of my favorites and who is touring for his new book Cooked. He talked of these amazing ways in which the bacteria in our guts transform the food we eat. They are aided, or inhibited, by the way we cook and ferment and otherwise prepare our food before we put it into our mouths. Fascinating stuff. Smart.

Yet on the heels of these elucidations came the stupidity. Pollan talked with intrigue of learning to bake bread while writing his book. He cooked over fire and also played with fermenting cabbage. These processes were so novel to him; he spoke with child-like effulgence.

I thought: Only children should be speaking like this. In Lesotho, by the time you’re a teenager you’ve got these things down.  All of my students in Lesotho made their own bread. The boys slaughtered pigs and roasted them over a fire built right next to the principal’s office. And in Lesotho, a girl’s prospects of being married go down if she can’t make a good motoho, a traditional fermented drink. One day the teachers at Ngoana Jesu Secondary School ridiculed the chief’s daughter when she brought a gift of motoho for the staff that wasn’t up to par.

And here is Michael Pollan, professor at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, winner of many food-writing awards, called a “foodie intellectual” by The New York Times. He is 58 years old.

Nevertheless, I wanted to pardon Pollan. He may write about food, but he is after all only a journalist. He’s not claiming to be an expert of any kind. Next, however, Science Friday went on to interview Dr. Robert Hutkins, professor of food microbiology at the University of Nebraska.

“Would it be fair to call you a pickle expert?” the interviewer asked.

“Well, I guess I’m an expert in fermented foods, and a pickle is a fermented food, so I guess that’s fair enough.”

Interviewer: “Could you walk us through a recipe for a fermented pickle, for someone who wants to try this at home?”

Dr. Hutkins: “So I have to tell you that I’ve not done this myself. So with that caveat, you know — and actually, I would probably recommend sources online that you could find to do this.”   

Wait, wait, wait. Did the doctor of fermented food really just say he has never made fermented food? But how . . . ? Why? Hasn’t he skipped a step? He can explain all of the workings of the microorganisms involved in the fermentation process, but he has never actually made it happen?

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he has fermented other foods, just not pickles. Still!

Where are we as Americans when our National Public Radio interviews our country’s best authors and they tell us stories about learning to do things that children in poor countries do every day? And then we listen to doctors of food who have never made food?

How is it that our knowledge has not been built in a more linear fashion, where we learn the basics — like how to cook food — and only then do we learn the molecular details about what happens to the food when we cook it and eat it?

Makes me wonder if we’re studying the wrong things these days, or at least learning things in the wrong order.

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During all my years in Lesotho, I spoke to a Chinese only once. I encountered many Chinese at the shops they own in villages and towns throughout the country, yet I really only conversed with one man who drove his pick-up truck to our school in the countryside one afternoon to deliver heads of cabbage. Our principal knew the man from the capital, Maseru, where she lived, and had purchased the cabbage from him for our school lunches.

“This lechaena knows Sesotho,” Principal Tsita told me. I couldn’t believe it. I’d yet to meet a Chinese who knew the local language.

“This lekhooa knows Sesotho,” Principal Tsita told the Chinese man.

So the Chinese man said to me, “Ho joang, abuti?” — How’s it going, brother? His pronunciation was spot on. We chatted for a minute about my living alone out here on the outskirts of a small village. When he left, I stood impressed with his language skills. I had to admit that his Sesotho was farther along than mine.

I’d love to have talked with him more and picked his brain about his living in an African capital behind barred windows and armed guards. Chinese are not exactly loved in Lesotho, as in much of the rest of Africa, or so I hear. But I never have heard much of the Chinese side of the story, until stumbling upon Mothusi Turner’s work.

Turner is a student at Oxford University who knows Mandarin, has roots in Lesotho, and is studying and writing about the Chinese in Africa. An enlightening piece you might want to read is “Setting up Shop in Lesotho: How the Chinese Succeeded.”  I had always wondered how many Chinese were in Lesotho, where their money came from and where it went, not to mention how in the world they first ended up in this little mountainous enclave that few people in the greater world even know exists. Turner goes toward answering these questions. And there on his blog are a number of other important and unique articles. As far as I know, he is the only one doing this research.

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