POTATOES

I spent the better (and chillier) part of a month digging up litapole (like this: dee-ta-pole-ay). At first it was a veritable treasure hunt, every time a student or I would find our starchy buried gold we’d yell a Sesotho form of “eureka.”
“Ma-shuetla!” I believe is the equivalent of “Big Potato!” in Sesotho. We cried it as we dug nearly 300 lbs. of potatoes out of the mucky soil. I think the cries became less enthusiastic as the harvest wore on. The bounty from the fields is either used in our school kitchens to feed students at lunch time, or sold as income generation to help with our shaky financial situation. After calculating how many potatoes a plethora of piggy students can polish off (it’s very close to how much wood a woodchuck can chuck), we saved the remaining tubers to be sold. I thought that my lot would be thrilled because I gave the workers a hefty compensation of spuds AND they were getting to scoff their fill o’ taters at lunch. Alas, I learned my lesson.

“An empty sack cannot stand up. A starving belly doesn’t listen to explanations.”
– Creole Proverb-

The students at my school are by no means starving, but come the end of the month, most of them have no money left for food. This is not for lack of money, but mostly for lack of budgeting and binge drinking at the beginning of the month. The fact that food money goes to beer makes me feel less than generous, however once I read the above Creole Proverb I realized that no matter how much logic I applied, tummies were still empty.

There is a large group of ruffian boys who were the main culprits in threatening the potato harvest. They told me if I did not give them potatoes they would steal them at night. This made every American tendon in my body tense because I grew up reading the story about the Little Red Hen. (If you have never encountered this lovely fable, the long and short of it is that you reap what you sow, and that in a just world lazy barnyard animals go hungry.) Slowly the rigidity in my self-righteous, hard-working spine is being rubbed out by an unfamiliar phenomenon dubbed food-insecurity. I have never really been hungry. I recall reading the Grapes of Wrath in high-school and being shaken to the core, realizing never a day in my life have I feared hunger. I have never worried for the bellies of friends or family. Granted, in Lesotho I can rationalize that better planning could stave off hunger for nearly the entire population, but that still does not address the fact that there are empty sacks grumbling about in my midst.

I gave those boys lots of potatoes. They complained that they were too small. All I really wanted to hear was thank you. What is the word? Grace? Being given what we don’t deserve. It’s coming to life as I wash my calloused hands and boil a few potatoes.