A Routine Entry . . .

It has come to my attention that I have been abysmal at describing what my Lesotho life is actually like to you ardent readers. I have to admit that life has settled into a routine and I have never been good at describing routine. My sister and I were experts at stone-walling our parents “How were your day at school questions.” We usually just grunted in-between bites of stir-fry and hoped the conversation would move towards something else. Perhaps, it was because we knew any answer would only lead to more questions from our mother.

So I’ll do my best to tackle the monster that is the banality of routine in attempts to bring you closer to me. Work of course is the first ogre to slay. Morija Printing Works is my home five days a week. At least it’s not your stereo-typical 9-5 shift, rather 8-5. I work in what is called room “Number 1”. We are in charge of getting our customer’s documents (books, calendars, pamphlets, newspapers, programmes etc.) into the proper layout so we can print them to film. We develop the film in the dark room and then transfer the film to plate. The plate heads to printing press to get printed. Most North American printers now run on computer to plate technology, which cuts out the film step and a whole lot of time. Morija Printing Works is set to acquire computer to plate technology in May. I find myself getting quite excited about this; almost Sidney Crosby overtime golden-goal excitement. Speaking of which, it’s going to be a bit embarrassing in the future when people ask me where I was when Crosby scored. Ummm I was following the game in my thatched hut in Lesotho via espn.com chat. I did a victory lap in just boxers at 1 a.m. after reading: “Crosby!!!!!!!!!”

But back to the ogre at hand. I do various things in room number 1. I have designed book covers and calendars, been a typist, taken-up the role of resident IT guy, taught Microsoft Excel and am in the process of making a website. I work with two others in my office. Ntate Bataung has been with me the whole year and he is a joy to work with. We share a lot of good laughs together. He tricked me into thinking he had three wives. I haven’t been able to top that yet. I’m the over-protective mother of the computers in our office. I don’t trust any of the kids they play with. So when a customer comes in with their project on a Flash drive I lock eyes with Ntate Bataung so he knows to scan for viruses before using. When I first arrived there was no anti-virus software and I was asked why their main computer wasn’t functioning properly. “It has viruses,” I state emphatically. Bataung, of course chimed in, “It’s got H1N1 and HIV AIDS man. It’s the outhouse of Lesotho.” Upon installing free anti-virus software, the first scan revealed 4,500 infections. The nickname outhouse has stuck. “Bataung, where is the Auditor’s report?” “It’s in the outhouse.” About 95 percent of flash drives in Lesotho have viruses. The problem is pretty rampant worldwide with the Flash Drive or memory stick or USB.

It’s tough working with computers in Africa. They are a terrible investment because things get out of date so quickly. But at a printer you have to be running the same software as your clientele. It seems rather unjust to me that in Lesotho we have to pay the same price for an Adobe program as Toronto. We don’t have the same budget to drop money on technology year after year. So a lot of the problems we encounter in room number 1 revolve around not having the right program. Business, for the most part, is done in person because the internet is far from universal. People don’t just email us a PDF, rather they make an hour drive to drop off the PDF. So jobs often get prolonged while we drive the document to and fro down the tarred road instead of the information super highway. South Africa is far more developed in terms of internet access then we are here in the geographically rugged Lesotho.