I won’t bore you with a month-by-month recap; instead I’ll break this up into what I hope are semi-coherent sections. Within the next few days I’ll get my first video up somewhere, so that you can see my home and whatnot. In the meantime, this will have to do.
My Home
This past Saturday, I hooked up my new solar panel. It’s a low-end 30W model, and with extra cable and a roll of electrical tape it cost me 1900 Rand (about $250 these days). I now have (semi) reliable electricity- 8 hours of solid sunlight just about fully charges the car battery under my bed, which then gets me about 8 hours of work time or 3 hours of video on my laptop. I hadn’t originally brought my laptop to Lesotho with me, as I was looking for the “authentic” experience. Soon realizing that I’m about 35 years late for anything even approaching “authentic,” I had my laptop sent to me via a fellow PCV who was visiting the States, and my productivity instantly dropped. I now had weeks worth of movies and TV shows at my fingertips, and of course I went out and bought the wireless modem. The only problem was electricity- I had none.
Some PCVs get three-room homes with indoor toilet, electricity, and hot(!!) running water. I am not one of them. I live in a 12 foot square cinderblock room, sharing a wall with one other room (the occupant of this room, Ponso, disappeared back in April; we just found out that she’s working in South Africa). This duplex and another next to it sit at a right angle to my family’s home, a very nice house by local standards. There’s even a satellite TV dish over the front door, though it’s not actually connected to anything. We are on the top of a hill, overlooking Semonkong center, with a spectacular view all the way around. The only downside of being on the top of the hill is the wind- between that and the large tree that blocks the north face of my room, it’s usually about 10 degrees colder in my room than it is immediately outside my door. I have a tin roof with a drop ceiling- cardboard panels nailed into support beams. The drop ceiling serves three basic purposes: to trap heat during the summer, to loose heat during the winter, and to provide rent-free housing for an undetermined number of rats. Now, I’m lucky- I’ve never had one in my room, and since I got my cats, I rarely hear them in the ceiling. But every time there’s a day of really strong winds (like today), the roof shifts back and forth and there’s a light rain of rat droppings from the small gaps around the edge of my ceiling.
My place has these little quirks, but I have a pretty good setup. After properly cleaning and repainting the room, I moved some furniture around, built some shelves, and found that I really have all the space that I need. Kitchen in one corner, bed across the room, wardrobe, bookcase, desk, and heater filling the rest of the walls, I still have enough floor space to stretch out in most directions. I’ve covered my walls with photos, letters, drawings, and maps, and I’m happy here. Except that I really want to use my laptop, and the power lines don’t come by our hill. Semonkong has widespread access to electricity compared to national standards, as there’s a small hydroelectric plant on the river about a mile up the road from town. Sometimes the guy running the place goes for a beer and forgets to go back, in which case people do what they did every night of their lives before the plant was built- they light candles or paraffin lamps. So there I was with my laptop, a car battery, and an inverter, ready to rock. Unfortunately, the battery ran out after only 3 episodes of House. My ability to use my laptop became limited to the frequency with which I was willing to carry the battery down the hill to the shop, pay 10 Rand, then pick it up the next day and carry it back up the hill (call me what you will, those things are heavy- and don’t even get me started about propane cylinders). After putting off the decision for just under three months while I was stuck in Maseru (more on that later), I finally bought the panel, and my life is just a little bit better. Just a little- it’s been cloudy for the better part of the last two days, and now I’m too stubborn to carry the battery down to the shop.
My Town
Semonkong is the Wild West of southern Africa. You ride your horse into town, tie him up in front of the bar, and when it’s time to go, the horse knows the way home (of course, I’ve never done this, mostly because I don’t have my own horse). There are 7 bars (and several street shacks selling homemade beer) along the half-mile stretch of dirt road that is the town center, convenient when you want to have some friends up for a donkey pub crawl (which is exactly what it sounds like). We have several shops, including a PEP, which came in about a year ago and caused about as much fuss as the first Krispy Kreme in Buffalo. We have a small airstrip used infrequently to deliver medical supplies to the two clinics in the area; there’s a youth center, a high school, a Catholic Mission, an orphanage, and 5 primary schools within about 2 miles of the center of town. Down the hill, on the river, is the Semonkong Lodge. Jhonno and Armelle, the owners, are extremely supportive, letting us come down on occasion to shower and use the electricity for free. They’re also more than happy to give one of us a bed for the night, especially if it’s not clear that we’d be able to make it home without passing out under a tree (not me, but true) or being attacked by a pack of dogs (also true, also not me). In return, we bring in a fair amount of other business and tend to drop at least 5% of our Living Allowance into their pool table. A 45-minute hike along the river from the Lodge brings you to Maletsunyane Falls, one of the most popular natural attractions in southern Africa, and the site of the world’s highest commercial abseil (that’s rappelling, for those of us from the States), certified by Guinness. There’s one point on the way down where the rock face drops away from your feet and the rope swings you around to face out over the river valley. The spectacular natural beauty is tempered only by the sneaking paranoia that the stitching in your harness is starting to give. So, to review: we have a waterfall, a Lodge, lots of bars, a human-to-horse ratio of about 2:1, and more rabid dogs than you can shake a stick at. But don’t actually shake a stick at them, it only makes them angrier. Find a big rock instead, and make peace with the fact that you might actually have to kick a dog in the face at some point between the shop and your house.
Transportation
This is a country where luggage and livestock are not mutually exclusive. I’ve seen a sheep, legs tied together, put on the luggage rack on top of a bus. The sheep was alive, mind you, and not terribly pleased. A few months later, while waiting to board the 6 a.m. bus from Semonkong to Maseru, I watched as the conductor opened the underside luggage compartment (it was one of the few nicer, newer buses) only to be knocked over by a very frantic sheep as it came bolting out. That bus had arrived at around 5 p.m. the day before, and apparently somebody forgot his sheep. In the guy’s defense, it’s quite easy to forget your sheep, especially when you’ve got half a dozen live chickens tied up with grocery bags on the overhead luggage rack to worry about.
There are three forms of public transport in Lesotho: the bus, the taxi, and the 4plus1. A 4plus1 is what we’d call a taxi in the States (4 passengers plus 1 driver, get it?); they operate mostly in Maseru and cost R4.50 (about $0.75) for a trip within the city center. You can also hire one as a “special” to take you pretty much anywhere. The taxis are (generally) 15-passenger white vans that run between the taxi ranks in Maseru and nearly everywhere else in Lesotho accessible by road (though not to Semonkong- I can get about halfway by taxi, then hitch a ride the rest of the way). The special charm of these vehicles lies in the ability of the conductor (the guy who collects the money) to cram upwards of 27 bodies into a space meant for 15. It’s not uncommon for passengers have to get off at the bottom of a hill and walk up because the taxi can’t make it up full. The trick is to get there early, get a seat with a window, and never let anyone tell you to close it, even if the woman in front of you is convinced that her child will get TB from the open window and so accuses you of wanting her baby to die. The only difference with the buses is that you have to get there even earlier to get a seat, and sometimes they drive off the edge of the road and roll down a ravine until a really big rock gets in the way. Then there are days when you get lucky and get the good bus (there’s no set schedule as to which buses run when, it usually comes down to which driver is the most sober), in which case you grab a window seat, close your eyes, and hope that nobody throws up on you. Did I mention that most of the roads aren’t that great?
Getting from Semonkong to Maseru takes about 2 hours in a 4WD car or truck, 3 and a half hours on the good bus, and 4 and a half in the not-so-good bus, provided the brakes don’t fail coming down from the mountains (then it’s a bit quicker). There are usually 2 or 3 buses a day in either direction, and a one-way ticket costs 30 Rand (about $3.50). If I’m lucky, I can sometimes catch a ride from the lodge or the DHL guy, but generally I just have to hope that the accordion music being blasted through the bus’s speakers gets turned off before my ipod dies.
Work
So, what exactly do I do here? On paper, I am a “Primary Resource Teacher,” an incredibly broad job description that basically boils down to going around to the primary schools in a certain area and helping the teachers with curriculum development through workshops and observations. I am also assigned directly to the Lesotho College of Education, working under the director of the Distance Teacher Education Program (DTEP). A few years back, the Ministry of Education announced that all teachers needed to have a certain level of certification in order to be considered “qualified” (sounds familiar). At the time, the DTEP was more or less the only option for most teachers, who needed to take the necessary courses while still keeping their jobs. During the school term, the teachers are working out at their schools, and 3 times a semester they travel to a central location for weekend workshops. When school is out, all of the teachers in the DTEP travel to Maseru for two weeks of review sessions and exams. My main functions as Site Tutor are organizing the weekend workshops in Semonkong, leading review sessions, and proctoring exams. Oh, and grading several hundred assignments and exams. I’m not going to get into much more detail about this job, as my future with LCE is not entirely certain at this point, and Peace Corps staff tend to read our blogs. Suffice to say that it’s a predominantly administrative job, though it does have its perks. During the inter-term sessions, while we are required to be living and working in Maseru, LCE puts us up in a fairly nice guesthouse (which had its own whole set of problems), and they (usually) send cars for us when we need to come to Maseru for work. All in all, with the exception of the months in Maseru, this job takes up very little of my time.
Main (Secondary) Project
Most of you know that environmental education is one of my primary areas of interest. After my first few months here, I began to come up with some ideas, including teaching workshops on using recycled materials, working with the area schools to have a community clean-up day, and raising funds to put trash cans along the road in town. Soon after, I learned about a now-defunct Peace Corps group called ALOE: Advocates for Lesotho’s Own Environment (the spiral aloe, found only in Lesotho, is an extremely important plant in Basotho culture and is protected by law- more on the plant some other time). Started in 1999, it was established as an income-generation project to raise funds for any PCV to hold a conservation-based workshop or camp. After 5 years of considerable success, the group dissolved due to lack of PCV leadership and interest. And so, my plan is to get ALOE up and running again, with a few improvements. The only hitch right now is funding, which I’m hoping to clear up within the next month or two (at which point, if you feel like doing a tax-deductable good deed…more on that later). Here’s how this is going to work. First, we (the other PCVs involved in this project and I) need to get donations from home. We will use these funds to produce a children’s coloring/activity book as well as stickers, t-shirts, and shopping bags with various environmental-themed designs on them. Proceeds from sales (mostly through cooperating lodges and gift shops around the country) then go into a fund to be made available to PCVs who want to lead a workshop or camp in their area. Whereas workshops in the previous incarnation of ALOE were focused more on sustainable farming practices and agroforestry, with a few community clean-up days thrown in, my vision for ALOE involves the development and distribution of a practical environmental education curriculum for primary schools. I don’t just want to have kids pick up trash; I want the students, teachers, and other community members to learn how to conduct their own community clean-up days and what to do with all of the trash at the end of the day. I want to help the teachers here feel confident in their abilities to teach (as well as model) the importance of environmental stewardship. A significant portion of Lesotho’s income is derived from tourism, and some of the most scenic locations in the country are slowly filling up with trash. This is a beautiful country, as long as you don’t look down at your feet. It all comes down to a rapid influx of western amenities without any concurrent education. Back in the States, we grew up with Big Bird telling us not to litter. It’s imprinted on our brains from an early age, reinforced by highway signs threatening steep penalties. While we might have a serious overabundance of packaging everywhere, at least we know what to do with it. Here, it’s only been in the last 5 years or so that cell phones have become ubiquitous. With power lines reaching new villages every week, the number of people who buy TVs, radios, and other appliances continues to grow. Plastic bags are often used for a single item (this drives me nuts- one of the first Sesotho phrases I learned was “I do not want a plastic bag!) and are just as often discarded as soon as the customer leaves the shop. Before the advent of all of this packaging, most waste was organic, and an apple core or rotten egg can be thrown into a ditch with little ill effect. This behavior has not changed, and the result is fields covered in bits of shredded plastic. To a large extent, household trash is simply burned in a pit out behind the house. When people are not at home, though, most of them will simply drop their trash on the street, even if there is a trash bin ten feet ahead of them. Our hope is that, by focusing on the primary school students and teachers, we’ll be able to reach a significant number of Basotho children (and adults) over an extended timeline, and maybe in 50 years there will be some noticeable improvement. For now, though, I’m just as excited about the first phases of this project, including designing and printing the activity book, stickers, and shirts. Expect a progress update on all of this around January.
Other Projects (in no particular order)
Pen Pals I’m working on setting up a pen pals program between schools here and classes back in the States. So far I have 3 classes in Vegas; if you’re interested and I haven’t talked to you about it, let me know, I have plenty of interested classes here. In the next month or so, I’ll be putting together video profiles of my town, the schools, and the students to send to cooperating teachers back home.
Video Lessons As an extension of the pen pals program, I’m planning a series of educational videos, mostly short science lessons on Lesotho’s environment, that I’ll eventually post online. Best of all, I’m going to be buying a donkey to be my co-host. I’m planning on making her a Facebook page, which will give me a central place to post these videos, as well as pictures and stories and whatnot; this will let me give access to all of these resources without giving people access to my personal page. For now, just keep an eye open in the next few weeks for a friend request from Professor Sniffles.
HIV Testing Event At some point while I’m here, I’d like to set up and host an HIV testing day in Semonkong. There are several national and international organizations that will come out to a site, set up tents, and provide free testing. The problem with any testing event, though, lies in getting people to show up. Even when there is a large turnout for an event (usually as a result of something else being offered as well, whether it’s a free concert or free immunizations), the vast majority of the people getting tested are women; men tend to not even attend such events, and if they do, they spend the day hanging out off to the side with the horses. My plan is to hold a testing day for men only, on the theory that many more men will come out to test if there aren’t a few hundred women hanging around watching them. I’m still working on how to encourage attendance; as of now, I’m looking for funding options to pay for a barbecue (free food will bring people in from miles around, especially the herdboys, who are notoriously difficult to get in for testing).
Resource Center The LCE has a resource center in Semonkong, right now just an empty one-room building in the middle of town, that I’m hoping to get stocked, furnished, and used for weekend workshops. We have a fair number of teacher resource books that were donated through a former volunteer that are currently collecting dust in a closet at the Youth Center, and if I can convince the College to pay for bookshelves, desks, and chairs, we’ll be halfway there. I’d like to also be able to set up the resource center as a collection site for recycling in the town- I’m planning a series of workshops on making instructional aids from recycled objects, and collecting materials on site will make this easier. The resource center also happens to be on a decent plot of land surrounded by a high fence, and so I’ll be plowing and planting the field next week as a trial project. Eventually, we would like to see gardens at other resource centers as small-scale income generation projects, the profits from which would go to buying supplies for the resource centers.
Mobile Library There is a small storage room at the Youth Center in Semonkong that is filled with hundreds of books donated through a former volunteer, books that I’m determined to get out to the schools in the area. While we’d like to have a permanent library set up at the Youth Center, a friend of mine working there had the idea to establish a mobile library, taking boxes of books out to each of the area schools and rotating once a month or so. This idea is still in its very beginning stages, so I’m sure I’ll have more to talk about on this later.
School Roof A few months ago, I was approached by the principal of a primary school a few hours west of Semonkong who has been trying to find funding to repair his school. The roof of the existing building was blown off in a storm about 4 years ago, but since the school was initially built by the Evangelical mission in Lesotho, the Ministry of Education has been no help. I’m in the middle of the grant application process, going through a program called Peace Corps Partnership. This program finds donors in the States and connects them with various PCV projects such as this one, although I need to submit a list of potential donors with the application. My plan is to appeal to Evangelical churches in the States or elsewhere, so if anyone has any contacts of this sort, please let me know. Altogether we need to raise about $5000, which will allow us to replace the roof and construct a second classroom building, effectively tripling the number of children from the surrounding communities able to attend school on a regular basis.
PCV Cookbook I’m also involved with the Nutrition Committee, a small PCV group working on developing and distributing a nutrition education curriculum for both children and adults, with emphasis on nutrition for people living with HIV/AIDS. Part of our group’s work (and my job in particular) includes producing the PCV cookbook, which took up a few weeks of my time back in July, and which I’m hoping to revise and improve for a new edition due in January. It’s a fairly general book right now, containing recipes that can be made using the limited ingredients and facilities available to us here, though we’re working on expanding the content and will be marketing them outside of the Peace Corps next year.
Environmental Center One the way from the Semonkong Lodge to the waterfall, there’s a small disused building that Jhonno and Armelle (the owners of the lodge) want to rent and turn into an environmental education center for the falls area. If and when that starts to come together, I’m going to be working with them on various aspects of the project.
Getting out of Lesotho
Compared to others PCVs, I haven’t traveled much outside of Lesotho. I spend a lot of my time in Maseru (sometimes by choice, sometimes not), and so I often go into South Africa for the day. If I just need groceries or want a decent lunch, I’ll go to Ladybrand, which is about a 15-minute drive across the border. The closest city is Bloemfontein, 2 hours away, which has 2 malls (with movie theatres) and a handful of good restaurants. Bloem also has a sports stadium for rugby, football, and cricket, and some of the World Cup games next year will be played there.
I’ve taken two trips since coming here. The first was down to Cape Town back in early April. I went with a group of around 10 other PCVs, and most of us went there to run in the Two Oceans Half Marathon. I didn’t get to see much of the area, as we arrived on the Thursday evening before Easter, and so we were there for Good Friday, the race on Saurday, Easter Sunday, and then left on Monday. My second vacation was just last month, when I went with three friends out to Sodwana Bay on the eastern coast (just south of the Mozambique border). My friends were there to complete a SCUBA certification course; I spent a few days sitting on a deserted beach with a book while they were going through their instruction, and then I joined them for a few of their open ocean dives. The best part of the week for me was a deep sea fishing trip that we took on our last day there, and the obscene amount of fish that we ate over the next few days (I think I still have a couple of mackerel steaks in the freezer at the Training Center in Maseru). Top on my travel list at this point are Durban (out on the east coast), Mozambique, and Nigeria. I promise, I’ll take more photos next time.
The Next 15 Months
It’s hard to believe that I’ve been here for over 10 months already, especially considering how little I have to show for it so far, but that’s how things work here. I only have two years in total as a PCV, and so I want to spend as much time planning in order to make sure that when I finally do start to get my various projects up and running I’ll have a greater chance of success than I would by following my normal policy of simply jumping into a project and figuring it out as I go along (don’t worry, I’m still maintaining a suitable amount of stubborn recklessness). I hope that everything that I’ve written here has given you an idea of where I am right now, but situations can change quickly here, and probably will again in the very near future. I have more than enough on my plate right now, and so I haven’t given much thought to what I’ll be doing when I leave here. It’s looking very likely that I’ll be in Lesotho for the full two years (PCVs can leave up to months before their two-year mark, and many do), though I’d like to be able to travel for a month or two before returning to the States. Ideally, I’d like to travel overland from Cape Town to Cairo up the eastern side of Africa via Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and a few other places, possibly into Israel, and eventually go somewhere in Europe for a week or two before flying back to the States. After that, it’s anybody’s guess- right now it’s looking like I’ll end up in the SanFran/Berkeley area, probably teaching, but who knows what will happen over the next year and a half.
There are times when I look at pictures from back home, think about my family and friends, and wonder what I’m doing in the mountains of Africa. It’s been a year since I left Vegas, but when I close my eyes I can still see, hear, smell and taste everything about my life there (especially sushi, Mexican food, and really good beer- 10 months without a volcano roll, carne asada burrito, or Blue Moon). While I’ll never pretend to be a fan of that city, I have to say that I had a fantastic life there. I had some of the best friends I’ve ever known, I had a job that I loved, and all in all I thought I was doing pretty well for myself. There are some people here who joined the program as a way to escape from their lives back home, but that was never the case for me. I left because I felt that it was time for me to leave, time for me to do something else. Saying goodbye to my friends was heartbreaking, but necessary.
I know that I often begin my letters and calls with an apology for not being better about keeping in touch. The thing is, I have quite a lot of free time, free time that could often be better spent writing emails and sending postcards. Time is not my problem. My problem is the persistent feeling that I’m living on another planet. Wrapping my head around life here has required my full attention, and there are still days when I have absolutely no idea where I am.
(My body, on the other hand, adapted relatively quickly to its new environment. For one, I smell different. Supposedly it happens to everyone, but I admit I was a bit freaked out when I first noticed [why does my shirt smell like that… oh my god, that’s me…]. It would take me another full page to describe all of the physiological changes brought on by this place, and you should be thankful that I don’t. Nearly every PCV conversation contains at least a brief overview of what fresh tortures this country has devised for our intestinal tracts.)
Back to my point. When I’m lapse in writing or calling, it’s not because I’ve forgotten. Quite the opposite. Every day I think about the people who have sent me letters and emails to which I haven’t responded. Part of me doesn’t want to write back, doesn’t want to cross that one off my to-do list, because I like the daily mental reminders that make me think of all of you. My life here is different. Not better, not worse, just very, very different. All I can say is that I love each and every one of you very much, and I promise that once I’ve wreaked all the havoc that I can over here, I’ll be coming back home to pick up where I left off. Don’t think that you can get rid of me that easily. Oh, and more pictures, videos, and stories will be up soon!
On a related note, getting letters and packages from back home still makes my week. There are no Twizzlers or pretzel rods to be had anywhere, and Pop Tarts are often used as currency (I don’t think that I’d be able to walk into a Whole Foods right now without bursting into tears of overwhelming joy). My mailing address is:
PO Box 100
Semonkong, 120
LESOTHO
Southern Africa
Put this last line on to be safe, as some USPS workers have no idea where Lesotho is and packages sometimes get shipped off to who knows where. And whatever you do, never write “candy” on a customs slip, as I’ll never see the package. Listing the contents as “religious materials” is usually enough to keep the thieves away. More than anything, I want pictures and drawings and other random things to cover my walls. Oh, and if you send me a bag of good coffee, I’ll get someone to name a baby after you.
