A Hard Life

It’s a hard life.

This Christmas we had the blessing of family visiting from Canada. Part of our time spent with them was taking the traditional tourist pony trek into the mountains. I was not sure what to expect, and I think I got more than I anticipated.

Yes, I had the expected saddle sores and stiff walking, but what stood out for me as we passed village after village travelling deeper and deeper into the mountains was the daily grind of life faced by those Basotho who live where few roads run.

For many women, laundry day is still a trip to a near by stream.

And cooking dinner means bringing home the fire wood before the cooking begins.

Grinding corn for one's daily maize meal is a donkey trip to the nearest mill, which in the deep mountains may be a day trip to get there and back.

Last fall’s peas have been harvested, and now this elderly woman was carefully sorting through them, separating the dirt and chaff from the peas.

Oxen were in use everywhere in the fields, plowing and cultivating, as were villagers with their hoes.

Gum boots, blanket, and a stick, in this case with a thong of leather tied to its end: the uniform of the herd boys who spend their days enduring the heat or cold, wind and rain, pasturing and watering their herds and flocks.

The ubiquitous blanket - everyone has their own to ward off any chill.

… even the tiny ones.

It is one thing to hear about walls and floors spread with cow dung and mud. It was quite another thing to witness a woman out in the cattle kraal early one morning collecting the dung. It wasn’t dried out dung she was collecting, she was out in her bare feet and bare hands with a container collecting the fresh dung after the cattle had been taken out to graze. The dung would be mixed with soil and water and then spread out on a floor (or wall) that needed redoing.

Preparations to re-“wax” a floor, fresh dung and dirt.

Drinking water is often collected from a nearby spring, and while not the all day walk undertaken by women in other parts of Africa, it still includes carrying the water home on one’s head.

This “dweeb” was the butt of some village laughter for engaging in a “woman’s” work. The spring is down by the dark trees on the right of the picture, and no, I did not carry the water all that way on my head.

As we travelled through the mountains, it was hard not to ask myself by what good stroke of fate or chance I was born where I was, when I was. I could just as well have been born deep in the mountains of Lesotho, or in any multitude of locales where life would have been hard and short. How is it that I was blessed to be born when and where I was? I have been given so much, essentially as a birth right. Again I am reminded that I must be ever thankful for all God has given me, even though I still struggle and do not understand why others must get by with so much less.

~Benno~

Photo Credits: All photos courtesy of Robert Greig