Sign says: Do not pee here. It is against the law.
I walked up behind a group of four women and then stepped onto Caledon Road to pass them. They were walking so slowly, balancing on one foot like a flamingo each time before putting the next one down. One woman carried a large sack on her head. Another turned to me as I came up beside them and said, “We are looking for work.”
It was all coming back to me: How slowly Basotho walk, how women carry things on their heads, how when they see a white person they often ask for a job.
As I continued down the street, more memories flooded in. Next to the sidewalk a guy was pissing on a wall. He looked back at me and then turned around again to his business. Oh yeah, I recalled, people do that here.
Every house I saw was surrounded by spiked walls. Windows were all barred. Many homes had guards at the gate, some with machine guns. This is Maseru West, the poshest neighborhood in the capital city and indeed all of the country. I'm staying here with a friend I met while in Peace Corps, and her house even has a “cage” inside because robbers commonly come wielding guns at night. The cage is a set of iron bars that locks off the hallway leading to the bedrooms.
I was on my way into town to run an errand, and as I went to cross an intersection a black Toyota sedan pulled in front of me flashing blue lights on its roof and whining a siren. Then up behind it came a black Mercedes-Benz with a red license plate. Red plates are government. A minute later another black Mercedes passed, led and followed by black Toyota sedans, flashing and whining.
A Toyota Land Cruiser passed with a charity organization emblem stuck to the side panel. A Land Rover passed with diplomatic plates, which were easy to recognize as they are blue and start with the letters CD. The government and the foreigners still drive beautiful cars.
When I got downtown, onto Kingsway Road, the taxis were honking up a storm. I darted across the street like Frogger, as pedestrians are never given the right of way.
And then I entered a cellphone store, Vodacom, and sat down on a couch which functioned as the line. Fifteen minutes later I was the next one to be helped by a technician and a woman came up and asked the customer beside me where the end of the line was. “It's at the guy with the black shirt,” the customer said to the lady.
“I'm behind you,” said the lady to the guy with the black shirt, and then she walked back out of the store to do other shopping. I wasn't there to see it, but I'd bet the lady returned fifteen minutes later and jumped in line right behind the guy with the black shirt. And the others let her. That's how it's done here. I remember well.
That rule always irritated me, but I had another “oh yeah” at lunch which I always found amusing: People drink from their cans of Coca-Cola through straws.
But my first oh yeah had woken me up that morning, in the form of a rooster's call at 4am. So it was all coming back to me from the moment I got out of bed. I started remembering what life is like in Lesotho as soon as I was called from my dreams by the cackle of that chicken. For even in the richest neighborhood in Lesotho, where some people drive luxury cars, you never feel far from the village, you're kept grounded.