The Crazy Lady on the Bus
Public Letter #14 – June 12, 2008
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain. ~ Emily Dickinson 1

First we smelled her. The rambling, overcrowded bus had come to a stop between the highway
and the road to Ribaneng. The overpowering stench of a human being made people cover their noses with
handkerchiefs. I looked up, to find a Masotho woman, maybe in her 20’s, taking a seat across the aisle
from me. She was crying, spitting at the soft-spoken man who was accompanying her. She had no shoes.
I was sitting about ¾ of the way back, and raised my head to find everyone in the bus was staring at her.
A rape victim, I thought at first. Something about the way her clothes were disheveled, the tears, and
her disdain for the man with her.
“Oh my god,” said Anne – Marie, another Peace Corps Volunteer who was sitting with me. “Look at
her hands. I’m going to cry.”
At first I saw her hands, swollen big from the elbow down – maybe some kind of injury or illness. It
took half an hour before I realized that she was tied up. The man with her – “my husband,” she said to us
in English – would yank on the rope whenever she got out of control.
This would make her spit at him. She’d hiss, “Devil! Devil!” in English. He’d pull the rope tighter.
I looked at my watch. Something told me this was going to be a long bus ride. We had 3 hours to go
before Ribaneng, where we were scheduled to get off at Volunteer Sasha’s remote site. Four of us were
going to do a teachers’ workshop the following day.
The lady was jabbering a mile a minute in Sesotho and it was no time before the word “lehua” cropped
up in her speech. That’s the word for “white person” and we white people, who hear it referring to us
hundreds of time in a day, can hear it even if someone says it clear across the street. Before I could blink,
the lady leaned across the bus aisle and put her head in my lap. It was an affectionate gesture. Anne-Marie
and I tried speaking to her in English, and her English was, well, garbled.
“Good morning. Good afternoon. I am a girl. Be quiet! Sit down!” she spit out in our faces. At this
the whole bus laughed, thinking, “Yes, that’s the way her life must have been in school. “Be quiet! Sit
down.”
No one really wanted to interact with her, but heads kept craning around, keeping an eye on her antics.
As soon as no one seemed to be paying attention to her, she’d stand up and butt at someone, a stranger, just
like a goat. This inevitably produced an eruption: the stranger would scream in surprise and alarm; the
husband would yank the woman to her seat; and the woman would turn her attention back to her him, again
hissing, “Devil! Devil!”
“For once,” Anne Marie leaned over to whisper, “No one is the least bit interested in us.”
The woman was entertaining -- unpredictably coherent, impish, childish, affectionate, then explosive.
We heard she’d been to Maseru, but no one said why. It was hard to tell how many of the regular riders
knew her, but since she created quite a sensation, I took it that the trip wasn’t frequent.
Women treated her kindly, like a child, saying in Sesotho, “Sit down now. Be calm. Be quiet.” But
men reacted violently. Her husband spoke quietly and seemed like a nice guy, but Anne Marie and I were
soon objecting to how tightly he was binding her. When she jumped into the seat behind me and tore off
my head scarf, in the process grabbing a wad of my (now pretty long) hair, the husband pushed her under a
bus seat and held her there a good 30 minutes. While under there, another guy helped him bind her legs.
She whimpered, and I got involved in the struggle, trying to put my hand between her chafed ankles and the
rope. “It’s too tight, Ntate,” I said in English, wondering how to say, “tight” in Sesotho. “Please loosen it.”
What was “loosen” in Sesotho? Always a word short of coherent.
Nothing in my experience could put a name to her mental illness, especially when a passenger told me
she was a neighbor, “just fine” until a month ago. Then she got “sick” and started acting like this, getting
more and more crazy.
1
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), U.S. poet. Much madness is divinest sense (l. 6–8). . . The Complete Poems
of Emily Dickinson. Thomas H. Johnson, ed. (1960).
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“Syphilis?” mused Anne-Marie. “Late stage AIDS?”
She was still on the bus when we got off, one of the last stops on the line. Our tolerance had been
pushed to the limit, as had her husband’s. Just before we exited, he exasperatedly pinned her down in a
seat, and slapped her face repeatedly, producing wails from her, and bringing tears to the eyes of Anne
Marie and I as well as we got off the bus. Some battles you don’t take on.
That very week we’d been studying special education in my college in-service workshops. I’d been
assigned to teach everything about special education not in a term, not in a week, but in an hour. To my
surprise, I found the students very interested. So I just packed in the information – categories of special ed,
names and pantomimes of disabilities, causes, possible teacher interventions. I kept one eye on my watch
and simply stopped when the hour was up. It was one of my more successful lectures. They seemed
especially interested in the story of a US President with a sister who was developmentally disabled and the
long fight, primarily by parents, for passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. A vision of change.
Here, in an entire year and a half, I’ve seen only two old fashioned wheelchairs in the villages between
my town and Moyeni, the camp town an hour away. A few people use home-made crutches. But as you’d
expect in a poor country, people with disabilities are hidden away, as they were in our own country not too
long ago. The absence of children with disabilities in classrooms is notable, in comparison to the US,
though the emotional needs of children here (orphans, rape victims, children exposed to violence) would be
easy to document.
Not only “big” disabilities – even small ones go untreated. One seldom sees a child wearing glasses,
much less a child with braces on her teeth. I taught teachers how to use the “E” eye chart this week, and
suggested that they move students who can’t see well to the front row. A whole roomful of teachers
nodded as if this was an excellent and easily do-able idea.
Lesotho College of Education is developing a new curriculum to add special education study for all
student teachers, and plans to create a certification strand. It’s badly needed, if only a drop in the bucket to
address needs of already existing teachers and children. The college has major funding issues at the
moment, however, so adding special education is another item on an overwhelming list of challenges.
On the other hand, children with disabilities are part of village life. Every teacher says there are
children with disabilities in her school, and I recognize several children in Mt. Moorosi who have special
needs. They may not have the help they’d have in a richer country, but they are accepted and protected to
some extent. I’m not being naïve here, just saying that maybe it’s not as bad as stories that came out of the
Illinois institutions for the developmentally disabled in the 1960’s, where children lived naked among their
own feces, and were hosed down a couple times a day.

Did I make you go insane?
Did I turn up your earphone and let a siren drive through?
Did I open the door for the mustached psychiatrist
who dragged you out like a golf cart?
Did I make you go insane? ~ Anne Sexton 2

A major difference between witches and psychotherapists is that witches see the mental health of women
as having important political consequences. ~ Naomi R. Goldenberg 3
Madeline
ADDRESS:
1/2007 – 11/30/08
Madeline Uraneck / ('M'e Lerato)
PO Box 172
Mt. Moorosi, 750 (Quthing District)
LESOTHO ** * AFRICA
Anne Sexton (1928–1974), U.S. poet. “Anna Who Was Mad.”
Naomi R. Goldenberg (b. 1947), U.S. author. As quoted in The Political Palate, ch. 1, by Betsey Beaven,
et al. (1980).
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E-mail –globalmaddy@gmail.com I get to an Internet sites about every 3 to 6 weeks.
On the other hand, I love "real" mail! 92 cents to air mail a letter from USA to Lesotho
After 1/2009:
C/o Marilee Sushoreba
1818 Adams Street
Madison WI 53711 *** USA
(608) 255-0772
E-mail: msushore@facstaff.wisc.edu
PREVIOUS PUBLIC LETTERS BY MADELINE ARE NOW ON THE INTERNET.
http://www.globalmaddy.moederogall.com/
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First Impressions (November 11, 2006)
First Impressions Continued: A Mountain Village (November 16, 2006)
HIV/AIDS in Lesotho (December 4, 2006)
Published in WorldView Magazine:
http://www.woldviewmagazine.com/issues/dispatches.cfm?id=44
What's Your Name? 4 Weeks in a Basotho Village (December 31, 2006)
One Day Down: 724 to go (January 3, 2007)
Collecting Best Days (February 26, 2007)
What Can I Send You? (March 24, 2007)
Madeline Learns about Orphans (April 18, 2007)
Hello, Neighbors: Swaziland (May 20, 2007)
9 Vignettes – Books, Bribes & Baths (June 9, 2007)
Why Lesotho Doesn't Work, 5 Funerals, 1 Mountain (September 1, 2007)
Candles on My Christmas tree (December 1, 2007)
Published in Dec 2007 Web page of Wisconsin Network for Peace & Justice
http://www.wnpj.org/node/9206
Down the Other Side of the Mountain (April 29, 2008)
The Crazy Lady on the Bus (June 12, 2008)
My article about Lesotho, published on the first page of Madison, Wisconsin's August 2,
2007 weekly independent newspaper Isthmus:
http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=8019
won the 2007 Wisconsin Newspaper Assn Award in the "Best Feature" category.
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