The longer I stay here the more subtle my powers of observation pick up of my environment. Just the other day I was in Ha Sethua-Majoe (the village name means ‘the stone cutters’) a village north west of town. By this time I have visited quite a few villages, been in many homes to sit down with a cup of matoho while people surround the place to watch me drink the fermented sorghum. This gives me a context with which to view these homes as statements of the people that live in the compound.
I come to Semonkong with little history of the people living here. The numerous villages I work with all have their wealthy, their poor, their active and intelligent, and the lazy of the whole bunch. That simply resembles the human dynamic that generally exists among all kinds of people. Novelty arose in the observation of how someone may have used multiple different pieces of scrap to construct a fence, link that to a shelter for a set of animals, or integrate all of this into a simple farming system that allows more efficient collection of farm manure to be used in the fields. I recognized a tinkerer in my visit to Ha Sethua-Majoe. This was the home of an older man with him, his wife and their two grand children. The first thing that caught my eye was the amount of things lying around his place. Instead of a random junk look there was an organization and intent within the chaos. Noticeably much of the material used to construct his animal pins, shelters, even a storage building—something I rarely see outside of the house people live in—all this utilized the collection of ‘junk’ this man had amassed.
I’ve similarly noticed a woman in Maseru who owns a plate place—a place where you can buy a ‘plate’ of food as Lesotho’s version of a simple restaurant. In a tin building inside the rank are a line of different vendors all selling ‘plates’ and at first glance everyone looks to fend for themselves. The first time I walked into this place I could tell much but this woman caught my eye as she formed a conveyor of Styrofoam containers for multiple orders. To get at idea of the best, I found the busiest! I also later noticed that it was not just her working but that she was directing three other people.
Maybe I am getting excited about something simple but delegating tasks in a business and doing it well are a skill that even managers in the states struggle to do successfully. It’s also a relatively big step from your own little stall to a multi-station unit that requires multi-tasking.
Anyway, my powers of observation just give me a better chance to give props to this woman and all those successful people doing well in their communities.