Everything Lost Is Found Again by Will McGrath

Author:Will McGrath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Perhaps this sounds like a difficult life: five young siblings being raised by two decrepit elders. Assuredly it is. And in Lesotho, especially up here in the mountains, it is a far-too-common way of life.

But I must note, to be accurate, that Retselisitsoe and his siblings do have something special going for them—that maybe their situation isn’t the absolute worst. This is because Retselisitsoe’s grandparents are among the most endearing and resilient human beings I have ever encountered. But before I explain what is most striking about Retselisitsoe’s grandparents, a bit of context on male-female interactions. In these outer reaches of Mokhotlong District, it is still culturally accepted, although now technically illegal, for a man to perform chobeliso: the kidnapping of a girl from her bed in dark of night to claim her as a wife. I have heard this practice—with the most disturbing of euphemisms—referred to as “proposing.” Walking through town, I once saw a married couple pass within feet of each other and not make eye contact. Another time, as I walked into a party with a Mosotho friend, the mountain wind whipping around us, I realized that he was intending to leave his wife sitting there in the passenger seat of the car, where she would patiently await our return from the celebration. And while I am certain that many Basotho would raise eyebrows at some of our own dissolute Western behaviors, the simple fact is that gender interactions here often strike my outsider eyes as bizarre.

What is shocking then—against this backdrop—is that Ma and Pa Mohlomi, these two crusty souls eking toward their eighties, seem deeply happy to be married. Proud, perhaps, of their shared decades scraping together a living in an earthen hut on the side of a mountain.

And perhaps that raises a question. When two people do share decades in an earthen hut on the side of a mountain, how exactly do they scrape together a living, especially when that side of a mountain is in eastern Lesotho, notoriously devoid of arable land?

That answer, like all worthy answers, lies at the bottom of a bucket of joala.

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