Beke e fetileng, ke ile ka itutha ho khotola le bo-‘Me’ ka Ha Selomo!

Last week, I learned how to khotola with the women in Ha Selomo!

It’s June in Lesotho, and that means one thing- Time to harvest maize! Basotho leave maize in the fields long into the dry, winter season to help it to dry thoroughly on the stalk, before harvesting… So while my students were busy revising for their winter midterms, the rest of the village took to the fields in droves to pick the dried maize (sheathed in razor sharp husks) by hand. Afterwards, the stalks are also cut down to the base by hand to feed to the herd-animals throughout the winter season. Every day, donkey carts of dried maize and empty stalks were hauled back to the village from the fields… And THEN the real work begins.

 

Khotola- a word for which there is no literal English translation- is the incredibly labor intensive process of scraping hardened kernals of corn from their cobs. Every single cob is done by hand by the village women who sit, hour after hour, masterfully separating these stubborn kernals. The end result, dried kernals, are then cleaned, and taken to the local mill (which we’re lucky to have right in our village!) to be ground into papa (maize meal). A decade ago, however, before the mill was built in Ha Selomo, the village women would have painstakingly ground every single kernal by hand between roughened stones until it was a fine white powder. To say it’s a laborious process, would be the understatement of the century… But in my little community of subsistence farmers, it’s a necessary part of ensuring that your family eats for the next year. And as I quickly discovered, the women all gather to pitch in and turn this necessary work into hours full of chatter and laughter.

When I first showed up at ‘Me’ Mantebo’s house, and told her I was there to help khotola, she almost died laughing. But her delight at my interest in Basotho culture was obvious and she and the other bo-Me quickly introduced me to the “art of khotola!” And believe me, it’s not as easy as it looks! Within my first hour, I had a bleeding gash on one finger and countless scrapes on the others. The women laughed and laughed in good fun at my inability to do what most Basotho girls can do from the age of five. :) But the truly priceless part of the day was not the massive pile of kernals we created or the sunburn and cut-up fingers I went home with… It was the new relationships I’d built with several of the bo-Me in Ha Selomo. Days like this are why I joined Peace Corps.

With Love from Lesotho… –Mary E.