by: Helina Dinsa

We were all piled into the white VW Bug, my father and the four of us - two boys, two girls, just as though they'd planned it that way. We'd spent a few surreal days being hosted by some friends of my father's - Ethiopians in Maseru?! - and now we were on our way to his house in the mountainous region of Mohale's Hoek, two hours south of Maseru.

By the time we were approaching Mohale's Hoek, it was already dark, the kind of star-studded, black velvet darkness crowned with the light of the voluptuous African moon that sits low in the sky - close enough to kiss in my imaginative child's mind.

After we left the Maseru city limits, much of our drive was over rough terrain, a dusty, rocky path cut into the dry ground by other vehicles making the same pilgrimage to and from Mohale's Hoek. For miles on end, there were no city lights, no sign of life as I'd come to recognize it through my Addis/Nairobi citified eyes. Then suddenly, way up high in the darkness, so high their yellow lights nearly blended in with the silvery ones of the stars, our father directed our eyes to the night signs of Mohale's Hoek. From the vinyl backseat, I jockeyed for position between my older brother and my younger sister so I too could peer out of the windshield at the lights that represented our new home in Lesotho. I trained my eyes to the distant lights and tried to harden my heart against the solidifying notion that there was no going back to the warmth of my mother's arms, left behind in the tank and bullet riddled Ethiopian hell called Qey Shibir.

Our new home, a modern three-bedroom structure, sat in an African style, unplanned community, it's huge ghibi demarcated by a barbed wire fence that was obviously of no deterrence to the neighborhood children, much less your average night critters - the four-legged and two-legged kind. That night, we were introduced to our stepmother and our new brother. The next day, my sister, FiQirte - screaming at the top of her lungs, and running for dear life on her short seven-year-old legs - was introduced to Tiny and Pancho Gonzales, our new pet dogs.

July in Mohale's Hoek felt like January in Chicago - without the snow. It was so cold and so windy, we had to wear woolen ski masks if we wanted to play outside. My oldest brother, Gabriel, occupied his time poring over National Geographic magazines and volume after volume of Encyclopedia Britannica, randomly redrawing the map of the world. I remember - I was queen of Indonesia for a while. He, of course, ruled over greater Abyssinia. No, don't ask! My second brother, Mikael, and I had forged a unique relationship as children. He was my master and I was his willing slave. I followed that boy everywhere. In the scant two months we were in Mohale's Hoek, he and I canvassed what I must now loosely refer to as the urban center of the town as though we were a pair of aspiring cartographers. When bad weather (read: rain) left us trapped inside, we entertained ourselves by throwing our Siamese cat, DimuTi, onto poor, maltreated Pancho. (The worst thing you can be in Africa is a dog, I think.) We had no TV, no radio, no toys...nothing. So Mikael would construct wire cars out of stray pieces of shibo and attach the tires he would have ripped off our new brother's toy car. He designed them in such a way that we could actually "drive" the cars, walking behind them, turning the shibo steering wheel this way and that. No wonder we were able to canvass downtown Mohale's Hoek with relative ease!

Basotho people are humble, polite and tihoot, and not in that only-to-your-face Abesha way, either. There was something like an unwritten cultural law that mandated strangers to greet each other in passing. You would spend your day saying, "Dumélang, indadé; Dumélang imé" to any strangers you passed by on the road. We soon became used to their familiar form, always wrapped in their famous blankets, oft balancing the unique Basotho hat on their head, walking with their unhurried gait as they went about their daily business. We took part in the unwritten cultural law that mandated strangers to greet each other in passing. On the road, child or adult, any stranger will meet your eyes and politely say: "Dumélang, indadé" or ; Dumélang imé"²

We were never made to feel extraterrestrial because we were not Basotho, but once we moved to Maseru, the capital city, where we attended the one international school, Maseru Prep, we began to learn to look down on the natives. Somehow, after we started mixing with international children, we began to look down on our Basotho counterparts, our view of our Basotho counterparts changed for the worse. When offered a choice between a free period or a Sesotho class, of course we all opted for the free period. In retrospect, I wish Sesotho had not been an elective course offered in a half-hearted manner. I also wish that I had come down off of my cultural high horse long enough to learn their beautiful language.

Maseru, the largest city in Lesotho, was also the most urban. The beauty of Maseru lay in the landscape - mountains of all shapes and sizes everywhere. You could spy Table Mountain and Saddle Mountain from our house in Maseru. The Basotho king, Moshweshwe I, was reported to have traded off his arable land to the Boers and Englishmen for horses (well, that's how those who wrote the history choose to tell it, anyway). So, Lesotho was known for it's hardy horses, it's dry brown land, it's gentle people and it's mountains.

Way up on the side of one nondescript mountain was a prison, whose residents I could see every morning, wearing their uniform red blankets, making their way single file down from the mountain to come down to the city and perform some form of civil service to fulfill the terms of their sentence. They were never rude, never unruly and never had to be chained together like the chain-gangs of the American south.

And if there was one thing that was blessedly predictable in Lesotho, it was its fair weather. In the Winter (as we came to learn immediately upon our arrival) the highland air was frigid and made almost unbearable by the wind chill factor. The weather in the lower altitudes of Maseru was much more bearable. In the summer, we enjoyed sunny days until about 4 p.m., then the clouds would start to gather and by 5 or 6 p.m., the heavens would let loose in a gentle thunderstorm. Then, as though God Himself were turning off the faucet, the rains would stop and the sun would come shining forth. Sunset was between 7 and 7:30 p.m. The descending clouds would turn colors to display their magnificent coats of royal blue and purple with a lacing of deep pink and gold as they chased the golden orb of the sun down behind the ridge of a mountain. But, despite the undeniable beauty of the sunset, my favorite moment was watching the moon. My bed was right under the window and I would stay up until about 10 p.m. or so, - sometimes reading, sometimes just staring out at the Southern Cross - waiting... . Then, just as my tired eyes were beginning to reluctantly capitulate to sleep, the moon would slide into magnificent view, tantalizingly low, and would lay its gentle light across my bed to lull me to sleep.

When we arrived there in Maseru, the main roads were paved in asphalt and there was a hospital and two hotels (the Hotel Queen Victoria and the Holiday Inn). Our favorite hangouts were the Maseru Club where we went to swim and play tennis, and Maseru Café, a small, street-side kiosk. And aside from my father's friends, who had left shortly after we moved to Maseru, we were the only Ethiopians in town. By the time we left in 1980, the city had a new library, a grocery store, a new hotel, the Hilton, and the first set of traffic lights at the main intersection of Kingsway and New Europa Roads, just down a block from Maseru Café. There were also four more sets of Ethiopian families, one set even related to us.

First came my cousin with his wife and his baby son who quickly became my most favorite human being on earth. His father, whom everyone called Johnny, was our pal, our big brother. He played Deemo (now called Pepsi) with us, took us out for ice cream and out of the city on picnics. In return for all the joy he brought to my life, I gladly babysat for him. Then came Giovanna, a tall, thin, model-beautiful Ethiopian of Eritrean origin who was married to a short, dorky looking, bearded Irishman. Giovanna and her husband had a very showy, morning routine where she followed him out to the car and they stood there smooching by his powder-blue VW Bug. I also learned from Johnny's wife that Giovanna was trying to conceive but had had no luck so far. I spent the rest of the year before I left Lesotho waiting for her stomach to grow. At the ripe old age of ten, I had yet to see a pregnant woman up close and personal. (Come to think of it, I'm still waiting). Then came Paulos and Nini with their baby daughter, Mimi. Paulos was the new Hilton's manager. Shortly before we left, Tesfaye and his wife came to Lesotho. Tesfaye's wife had brought bags of salt with her, convinced by someone that Maseru was such a rural city they didn't even have salt in their grocery stores.

We lived in an international community with neighbors who came from Cyprus, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Africa, Egypt, US, UK, France, Italy, Switzerland, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, China, India and (the then-)USSR. For the most part, we co-existed peacefully. Certainly, the children got on wonderfully well. The mountains of Lesotho shielded us effectively from South Africa's insidious culture of apartheid. In our Elysian field, the children of all the races, from all nationalities, were living Dr. Martin Luther King's dream.

Yeah, sometimes, in my head, as I pass by a stranger, I still say a soft, Dumélang, and smile to myself.