Me again! So, I have less than three months left in my Peace Corps service, and I’ve decided to call out all of you who promised to send me packages. Time to pay up.
The Semonkong Youth Center is barren. There’s a big room with a pool table, the felt of which looks like the surface of the moon (a dirty, oddly reddish-brown colored moon), and that’s it. No board games. No sports equipment. Not even a deck of cards. A few herdboys hang out in there during the winter, mostly to get out of the cold. There’s NOTHING TO DO there.
To be fair, the Semonkong Youth Center is currently closed, not that I could see any discernable difference between “closed” and “open.” The Center was officially closed by the Ministry of Youth and Recreation back in March, after an adjoining computer/business skills classroom was robbed by friends of the guy who had the only key to the room. Since meeting with the Director of Youth last month, I have been working with local principals and teachers to rebuild the Center’s leadership staff in anticipation of officially reopening in January 2011. In the meantime, we need to get stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. We can get the most dynamic youth leaders imaginable, but the kids still won’t come if there’s nothing to do.
Here’s where you come in. Instead of going out and buying snacks and books and whatnot to send to me (like you PROMISED), go through your basement, garage, attic, closets, roommates’ closets, and glove compartment and throw a bunch of stuff into a box. What kinds of stuff? All kinds of stuff. Want some examples? Here you go:
-Board games, especially the ones that little kids have outgrown, even if you have to cut the board into pieces and send the game in a ziplock bag.
-Playing cards and card games.
-DVDs and VHS tapes, for when one of the kids steals a TV from the neighboring village (kidding, kidding, we just borrow it).
-Any sports equipment, from balls (inflatable, please!) to jump-ropes to ping-pong paddles. And on that note, a ball pump or two would be useful.
-Sneakers, any condition, for boys or girls or men or women, anything smaller than a men’s 10 (Basotho generally have small feet).
-Sports bras! They don’t exist here. Ladies! Send a sports bra or two, and make some high school girls much, much more comfortable; it’s bad enough that during “Athletics” they have to run laps in skirts, sweaters, and dress shoes.
-Broken Crayons- Teachers! Parents! People who like to color! You know all of those little end stubs of crayons that you throw out when your fingers start cramping? Save them! Collect them from other teachers and parents! Put them all in a ziplock bag and put it in the box! We peel off the paper and melt all the little bits in metal ice cube trays, making these really nifty multi-colored “stained glass” crayon blocks. You should try it too, but send me a bag of them first. Oh, and any and all other art supplies will be greatly appreciated as well!
-Books! Books! Books! Anything! The Center has a small “library” in a locked storage room, but I plan on emptying it by the end of October. After nearly two years collecting dust, these books are going out into the schools and the communities, where they belong. Many of these books will never be returned to the Center, and that’s the idea; this way, the community becomes the library. Send books, any level, any subject. Please, please, please send books!
Those are just a few ideas and suggestions. And the best part of the whole deal is that you don’t have to buy a thing! In fact, I’d rather you didn’t buy anything. I’m not asking for charity- I’m asking for a morally and economically imperative reapportionment of existing and available material resources! You have stuff that you’re not using and don’t need, stuff that could and would be used and enjoyed by dozens, possibly hundreds of children and teenagers from the Semonkong area. Pack a bunch of it in a box, take it to the post office, and cough up the $50 postage to ship it off to poor kids in Africa.
Send the boxes to my address, below. Even if some of them don’t get here before I leave (packages generally take 3-5 weeks to get here from the States), they will be taken care of by another local volunteer. So get on it!
Khotso Foulo
PO Box 100
Semonkong, 120
LESOTHO
SOUTHERN AFRICA (for good measure)
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Gimme some lovin!
So, many of you have said that you want to send me a package, and asked what I want. As it is, I have pretty much everything that I need, though every once in a while I get a craving for something that I can’t get here. More than anything, I just want fun stuff. Surprise me! Without further ado, here’s my wish list:
Food Stuffs:
Cheese-Its (reduced fat)
Wheat Thins (reduced fat)
Pop Tarts (do they actually make them without frosting, or was the last box I got a fluke? I like the no frosting ones. The regular ones give waaaay too intense a sugar rush. Though you can send them anyway, I can trade them for a wide range of goods and services.)
Fruit Snacks (the bags of little gummy things- I like the organic/real fruit ones. Come to think of it, bonus points for a bag of organic gummy bears!)
Trail Mix (anything delicious!)
Granola Bars (I really like the crunchy Hidden Valley ones)
Frosted Mini Wheats (I’m currently rationing the crumbs from the bottom of my last box. Think about that the next time you walk down the cereal aisle. Any cereals will be greatly appreciated!)
Instant Mashed Potatoes (a bowl of cheesy mashed potatoes can turn the worst day into a win)
Hot Sauce (Frank’s, Cholula, or anything habanero, chipotle, or nifty)
Spices (chipotle, or any good Mexican mix specifically)
Dried black beans (can’t get them here!) or kidney beans (cans are no fun to take on the bus)
Beef or turkey jerky
Coffee!!!!!!! (a bag of Starbucks or Kona gets you a postcard!)
Canned chicken or roast beef (I know it sounds gross, and I never would have touched it back home, but here it can make my life worth living for one more day)
Oreos (for bribes- you’d be amazed at what most PCVs would do for an American oreo)
Trader Joes Stuff:
Seriously, TJs needs to open a store in Lesotho. The volunteers and other expats here alone would keep it in business.
Peanut butter filled pretzels (no salt)
Chili pineapple or mango
Plain dried pineapple, mango, bananas, apples, etc….
Good dark chocolate (dear god, please!)
I especially like Trader Joes surprises!
Other Stuff:
Hand sanitizer (you have no idea how much I need this! You think the kids in American schools are filthy?)
Movies and music (throw a bunch on some CDs/DVDs for me, I need new music and movies! Desperately!)
DVDs/VHS (anything you have lying around the house and never watch- even burned/recorded stuff- will go in the PCV library, and you will be a hero to many)
Photos/pictures/letters/anything to go on my walls and remind me of home
Stickers
Magazines
World Maps (for my classrooms; furthermore, any kind of educational posters will be put to very good use)
Q-tips (the ones you can get locally are no good, especially in the face of the types of deposits that grow in my ears here)
Incense (I like vanilla or cloves; it helps to mask the smell of cow/donkey/chicken/pig shit perpetually drifting in through my windows)
X-Acto knife blades
Chalk (the stuff here crumbles instantly)
Flintstones vitamins (with extra vitamin C)
Bonus: Anyone with access to a running store that sells Gizmo brand socks (for example, Village Runner in Henderson) can become my favoritest person in the whole wide world. I don’t really care about colors/patterns (older designs are often on clearance), and my shoe size is 11 (I think that’s a large). All of my good socks are developing gaping holes faster than I can sew them. A couple of new pairs will make me happy in ways that you can’t possibly imagine.
That’s about it. Anyone who sends me a package will be handsomely rewarded in some fashion or another.
In unrelated news, I’m doing really well here. Having officially separated myself from the Lesotho College of Education, I’m now based permanently in Semonkong, and much happier for it. I have two primary schools that are my main focus; I’m currently trying to set up pen pals (still need American teachers for partners!), and have turned the dusty, unused books at the local youth center into a mobile library, getting the books out to five local primary schools and rotating every 2 or 3 months (ideally; even if the rotation system breaks down, at least the books are out at the schools and being used by the kids, as opposed to sitting in locked cabinets). I’m teaching a life skills/ guidance class one day a week at Semonkong High School for Form A, B, and C students (equivalent to 8th, 9th, and 10th grades in the States), and will soon be starting a remodel of the school library. I’m also in the process of developing the more or less defunct teacher resource center in town, which will also serve as a collection site for a town-wide can and paper recycling program that I’m developing with one of my schools, which will hopefully help raise some money for instructional materials. Plans for the near future include teaching a general fitness class at the youth center (starts next week) and a tree planting campaign to begin in October, possibly at several sites across the country (if the people at the Ministries with which I’m working can pull it together). And as soon as I finish the application, we’ll be starting to raise money to replace a roof and build a new classroom at a local school (if you’re interested with helping me to fundraise at your school/work, let me know, I’d really appreciate any help I can get!). Needless to say, I’m keeping myself very busy.
More soon.
Oh, and my address:
Ro Gluck
PO Box 100
Semonkong, 120
LESOTHO
(On the customs form, under contents, put "religious books and materials." And if you write "Jesus loves you" and whatnot on the box, the people at the post office won't mess with it.)
Food Stuffs:
Cheese-Its (reduced fat)
Wheat Thins (reduced fat)
Pop Tarts (do they actually make them without frosting, or was the last box I got a fluke? I like the no frosting ones. The regular ones give waaaay too intense a sugar rush. Though you can send them anyway, I can trade them for a wide range of goods and services.)
Fruit Snacks (the bags of little gummy things- I like the organic/real fruit ones. Come to think of it, bonus points for a bag of organic gummy bears!)
Trail Mix (anything delicious!)
Granola Bars (I really like the crunchy Hidden Valley ones)
Frosted Mini Wheats (I’m currently rationing the crumbs from the bottom of my last box. Think about that the next time you walk down the cereal aisle. Any cereals will be greatly appreciated!)
Instant Mashed Potatoes (a bowl of cheesy mashed potatoes can turn the worst day into a win)
Hot Sauce (Frank’s, Cholula, or anything habanero, chipotle, or nifty)
Spices (chipotle, or any good Mexican mix specifically)
Dried black beans (can’t get them here!) or kidney beans (cans are no fun to take on the bus)
Beef or turkey jerky
Coffee!!!!!!! (a bag of Starbucks or Kona gets you a postcard!)
Canned chicken or roast beef (I know it sounds gross, and I never would have touched it back home, but here it can make my life worth living for one more day)
Oreos (for bribes- you’d be amazed at what most PCVs would do for an American oreo)
Trader Joes Stuff:
Seriously, TJs needs to open a store in Lesotho. The volunteers and other expats here alone would keep it in business.
Peanut butter filled pretzels (no salt)
Chili pineapple or mango
Plain dried pineapple, mango, bananas, apples, etc….
Good dark chocolate (dear god, please!)
I especially like Trader Joes surprises!
Other Stuff:
Hand sanitizer (you have no idea how much I need this! You think the kids in American schools are filthy?)
Movies and music (throw a bunch on some CDs/DVDs for me, I need new music and movies! Desperately!)
DVDs/VHS (anything you have lying around the house and never watch- even burned/recorded stuff- will go in the PCV library, and you will be a hero to many)
Photos/pictures/letters/anything to go on my walls and remind me of home
Stickers
Magazines
World Maps (for my classrooms; furthermore, any kind of educational posters will be put to very good use)
Q-tips (the ones you can get locally are no good, especially in the face of the types of deposits that grow in my ears here)
Incense (I like vanilla or cloves; it helps to mask the smell of cow/donkey/chicken/pig shit perpetually drifting in through my windows)
X-Acto knife blades
Chalk (the stuff here crumbles instantly)
Flintstones vitamins (with extra vitamin C)
Bonus: Anyone with access to a running store that sells Gizmo brand socks (for example, Village Runner in Henderson) can become my favoritest person in the whole wide world. I don’t really care about colors/patterns (older designs are often on clearance), and my shoe size is 11 (I think that’s a large). All of my good socks are developing gaping holes faster than I can sew them. A couple of new pairs will make me happy in ways that you can’t possibly imagine.
That’s about it. Anyone who sends me a package will be handsomely rewarded in some fashion or another.
In unrelated news, I’m doing really well here. Having officially separated myself from the Lesotho College of Education, I’m now based permanently in Semonkong, and much happier for it. I have two primary schools that are my main focus; I’m currently trying to set up pen pals (still need American teachers for partners!), and have turned the dusty, unused books at the local youth center into a mobile library, getting the books out to five local primary schools and rotating every 2 or 3 months (ideally; even if the rotation system breaks down, at least the books are out at the schools and being used by the kids, as opposed to sitting in locked cabinets). I’m teaching a life skills/ guidance class one day a week at Semonkong High School for Form A, B, and C students (equivalent to 8th, 9th, and 10th grades in the States), and will soon be starting a remodel of the school library. I’m also in the process of developing the more or less defunct teacher resource center in town, which will also serve as a collection site for a town-wide can and paper recycling program that I’m developing with one of my schools, which will hopefully help raise some money for instructional materials. Plans for the near future include teaching a general fitness class at the youth center (starts next week) and a tree planting campaign to begin in October, possibly at several sites across the country (if the people at the Ministries with which I’m working can pull it together). And as soon as I finish the application, we’ll be starting to raise money to replace a roof and build a new classroom at a local school (if you’re interested with helping me to fundraise at your school/work, let me know, I’d really appreciate any help I can get!). Needless to say, I’m keeping myself very busy.
More soon.
Oh, and my address:
Ro Gluck
PO Box 100
Semonkong, 120
LESOTHO
(On the customs form, under contents, put "religious books and materials." And if you write "Jesus loves you" and whatnot on the box, the people at the post office won't mess with it.)
Friday, October 2, 2009
More random jibberjabber
5 Albums That I’ve Been Listening To Lately In No Particular Order:
The Avett Brothers, Emotionalism
Good, solid folk. “The Ballad of Love and Hate” is at the top of my Most Played list.
Format, Interventions & Lullabies
Their sound is somewhere between Simple Plan and All-American Rejects, decent pop-rock musicians with songwriting that almost makes you nostalgic for teenage angst (almost). Great running music.
Modern Skirts, Catalogue of Generous Men/Fruit Bats, Mouthfuls
I put these together because I can’t decide which one I like more. I would group these bands with others like Filligar, Vampire Weekend, and Phantom Planet in the post-Weezer indie-pop genre. Fun, creative melodies with a lot of experimentation, good for road trips.
Nick Cave, B-Sides and Rarities
I love Nick Cave. I’ll listen to Leonard Cohen once a month or so, and Tom Waits will always be one of my favorites, but I have a special place in my heart for a man who can make a song about murder sound like a love ballad and vice versa. This three-disc collection features some incredible acoustic tracks, the creepiest version of “Black Betty” that you’ll ever hear, and a duet with Shane MacGowan (of the Pogues) on “What a Wonderful World.”
Better Than Ezra, Deluxe
I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite albums from high school, and this is my pick for this week. Their follow-up album, Friction Baby, is decent as well, though not as consistently solid as the first. Next week, I’m going to be spending some quality time with the Smashing Pumpkins.
As much as I really miss Limewire, eMusic, and iTunes (in that order), not having high-speed downloading capacity has been good for me. I’ve accumulated a staggering amount of music over the last few years, and there’s a significant portion of it that I’ve listened to once, if that. Lately I’ve had the chance to go through my library and clean it up a bit. For example, I just realized that Built to Spill is kind of crap. Deleted! And yes, I DO use my Strongbad voice whenever I do that.
And now, my cats.
My cats are wonderfully forgiving, patient creatures, two qualities that seem to be necessary for anyone in my immediate vicinity. Most recently, I left them alone for a week while I attended a party and then a workshop in Maseru, and they were kind enough to only vomit on a few of my important documents (as opposed to leaving me other more odiferous gifts, which they did last time). They are probably aware by now that they are the two most spoiled cats in the Semonkong region, never having to worry about finding a warm place to sleep, being eaten by feral dogs, or winding up as a hat (well, dinner and THEN a hat). I got them at about 8 weeks old back in early May from a fellow PCV’s Basotho counterpart. When I arrived at his house one rainy (and slightly hungover) morning, I was taken to the shed out in the back, at which point I was told that the mother had been hit by a car the week before and the kittens had been on their own since. There were five (possibly six) kittens in the litter, and not one of them seemed to keen on being picked up by his neck and stuffed in the cardboard box that I had brought with me for this purpose. What I was expecting was a basket of sweet, fluffy kittens from which I could pick the two that I judged to be the sweetest and fluffiest. What I got was a 90-minute ordeal involving five grown men scrambling and cursing as we attempted first to coerce the kittens into surrendering quietly before scrapping this plan in favor of a more traditional corner-and-grab approach (with an occasional try-to-throw-a-blanket-over-it maneuver tossed in for good measure). My selection criteria quickly shifted from “two females, preferably the brown ones” to “the first two that we can catch.” When all was done, four of us were bleeding from one or more wounds and I had two furry balls of murderous rage and indeterminate gender in a cardboard box, a box that then had to be wrapped in a large plastic bag as there was no way that the flimsy folded lid was going to stop them from launching themselves at my face, claws first, in a desperate bid for freedom. I took the taxi back to Maseru, stopping on the way back to the Training Center to buy a more suitable cat carrier (read: duffel bag and cheap towel). The kittens tried to escape twice while in the store, and I had a hell of a time convincing the security guard checking bags at the door not to make me open the box for inspection; luckily, a quick shake of the bag and five seconds of resultant yowling finally won her over. Two days later I was at last able to bring them to their new home, which they promptly began to systematically explore and destroy. They earned their names fairly quickly: Metsi (the Sesotho word for water) was the first of the two to fall into my waste water bucket, and Chesa (meaning fire) was the first one to burn off half of her whiskers on my stove. I say “the first” in both cases, as both of them fell into the water bucket before I got a new one with a lid, and both have lost fur to my stove, heater, or candles on more than one occasion.
While the two of them have grown quickly, until recently they have always been approximately the same size. Returning home from my most recent trip to Maseru, I immediately noticed that Metsi was now about 10% bigger than her sister. I watched them for the next few days, but couldn’t see anything unusual about their eating habits or overall health that might explain the sudden growth of the one but not the other. Two nights ago, I woke up a little after 4 a.m. to an unsettling symphony of chewing, crunching, and growling noises coming from somewhere close by. Fumbling for my flashlight and doing a quick sweep of the floor, I see my cats facing off in the middle of the room. Metsi is unleashing all manner of unhappy kitty noises, mostly from the “back off” end of the spectrum, and tightly clutching in her mouth something about the size and shape or a rolled-up pair of woolen socks. My first thought wondered how she got my socks out of my closet. My second thought wondered why my socks had a long, skinny tail. Torn between my desire to document her first observed kill and my equally pressing desire to not have a rat disemboweled on my carpet (there’s not a steam cleaner to be found for at least 200 miles), I went with the latter impulse, threw Metsi and her midnight snack outside, and went back to sleep. In the morning, all that remained were a few squiggly grey bits on the ground and the satisfaction of knowing that I had finally solved The Case of the Mysteriously Bulky Cat. As it turns out, all of those Scooby-Doo marathons that I watched in college WERE more important than the classes that I skipped in order to watch them.
Two days later….
Chesa got her first confirmed kill today. Middle of the afternoon, I walk into my room to see her under my table, a respectable-sized rat in her jaws. I think that she’s been going up into the roof from the outside (hopefully I’ll get video up in the next few weeks so you can see), but wherever she got it from, I think that the kill was more for sport than hunger. After batting it around for a bit and trying to sneak it back into the room after I had thrown it down the hill (yes, I played fetch with my cat and a dead rat), she finally left it in front of the door and came inside for a nap. Mind you, all of this is happening while I’m trying to give the dog a haircut.
So, my family has this dog. She’s about 7 months old with shaggy white fur, and has spent most of her life chained to a tree on the side of the property. She has shelter under the tree and is fed regularly (scraps and whatnot), though her chain often gets tangled on roots. I wasn’t particularly concerned about her at first, but coming back from Maseru and finding her absolutely filthy made me decide to share some of the finer points of pet care with my family. The Basotho do not look at animals, specifically dogs and cats, the way that Americans do (it’s been my experience that nowhere else do people treat dogs and cats the way that Americans do, but that’s another matter). Dogs are for guarding homes and cattle, and cats are for killing rodents; the Basotho definitely aren’t unique in this respect. What sets them apart is the way that they treat their other service animals. Cows are told which way to walk by having rocks thrown at them. Donkeys with three 50 kg sacks of grain tied to their backs are encouraged to walk by being smacked with a heavy stick. I’ve seen men riding horses and donkeys down the road, hitting them the entire time with a stick. I’m not talking about a tap on the side, I’m talking about a smack on the spine that can be heard from 100 feet away. There is simply no respect for the animals and their wellbeing.
Back to my point. Dogs are almost universally tied up because most are mistreated, and so would run away if given the chance. Eddie, as I’ve been calling my family’s dog (Basotho generally don’t name their pets) hadn’t been mistreated as much as simply neglected. Despite her fur being thickly matted and generally filthy, she is a surprisingly cheerful and friendly dog. It took her a while to get used to being petted, but now every time I go to untangle her chain I’m subjected to a fairly standard happy puppy attack. I’m planning on putting a runner line for her across the front of my family’s property, as well as building her a proper shelter, but that comes later. First, I needed to clean her up a bit. My first plan involved an old set of clippers, but they were too dull and her fur was too matted to do much good, and so were quickly abandoned in favor of a big pair of craft scissors. Here we begin to run into problems. First off, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I’ve always thought the idea of professional pet groomers to be a bit ridiculous, but now I know better. Seriously, you might sneer when you see the “Barks n’ Bubbles” van parked in front of your neighbor’s house, but it’s harder than it looks. I’d even go as far to say that it’s harder than being a human hair stylist, because deep down my barber knows that even if I really hate my haircut I’m not going to try to eat his face. Eddie wasn’t entirely sure what was going on either, and it didn’t help that Chesa kept hanging around with that “I’m taking great joy in your suffering” look on her face that cats often get. After about two hours of trimming whichever part of her body was closest to me at any given moment, I decided that we both needed a break. Her legs and belly still look like she’s been living in the dumpster behind a Supercuts, but from the middle up she looks like a distractible kindergartener tried to give her racing stripes with a pair of safety scissors (and he was using those lefty scissors that never cut properly, even if you use your left hand). Tomorrow, I’ll finish the trim and then don heavy protective gear before breaking out the flea and tick shampoo. If I’m still in possession of all of my fingers when this is all over, I’ll tell you how it goes.
The Avett Brothers, Emotionalism
Good, solid folk. “The Ballad of Love and Hate” is at the top of my Most Played list.
Format, Interventions & Lullabies
Their sound is somewhere between Simple Plan and All-American Rejects, decent pop-rock musicians with songwriting that almost makes you nostalgic for teenage angst (almost). Great running music.
Modern Skirts, Catalogue of Generous Men/Fruit Bats, Mouthfuls
I put these together because I can’t decide which one I like more. I would group these bands with others like Filligar, Vampire Weekend, and Phantom Planet in the post-Weezer indie-pop genre. Fun, creative melodies with a lot of experimentation, good for road trips.
Nick Cave, B-Sides and Rarities
I love Nick Cave. I’ll listen to Leonard Cohen once a month or so, and Tom Waits will always be one of my favorites, but I have a special place in my heart for a man who can make a song about murder sound like a love ballad and vice versa. This three-disc collection features some incredible acoustic tracks, the creepiest version of “Black Betty” that you’ll ever hear, and a duet with Shane MacGowan (of the Pogues) on “What a Wonderful World.”
Better Than Ezra, Deluxe
I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite albums from high school, and this is my pick for this week. Their follow-up album, Friction Baby, is decent as well, though not as consistently solid as the first. Next week, I’m going to be spending some quality time with the Smashing Pumpkins.
As much as I really miss Limewire, eMusic, and iTunes (in that order), not having high-speed downloading capacity has been good for me. I’ve accumulated a staggering amount of music over the last few years, and there’s a significant portion of it that I’ve listened to once, if that. Lately I’ve had the chance to go through my library and clean it up a bit. For example, I just realized that Built to Spill is kind of crap. Deleted! And yes, I DO use my Strongbad voice whenever I do that.
And now, my cats.
My cats are wonderfully forgiving, patient creatures, two qualities that seem to be necessary for anyone in my immediate vicinity. Most recently, I left them alone for a week while I attended a party and then a workshop in Maseru, and they were kind enough to only vomit on a few of my important documents (as opposed to leaving me other more odiferous gifts, which they did last time). They are probably aware by now that they are the two most spoiled cats in the Semonkong region, never having to worry about finding a warm place to sleep, being eaten by feral dogs, or winding up as a hat (well, dinner and THEN a hat). I got them at about 8 weeks old back in early May from a fellow PCV’s Basotho counterpart. When I arrived at his house one rainy (and slightly hungover) morning, I was taken to the shed out in the back, at which point I was told that the mother had been hit by a car the week before and the kittens had been on their own since. There were five (possibly six) kittens in the litter, and not one of them seemed to keen on being picked up by his neck and stuffed in the cardboard box that I had brought with me for this purpose. What I was expecting was a basket of sweet, fluffy kittens from which I could pick the two that I judged to be the sweetest and fluffiest. What I got was a 90-minute ordeal involving five grown men scrambling and cursing as we attempted first to coerce the kittens into surrendering quietly before scrapping this plan in favor of a more traditional corner-and-grab approach (with an occasional try-to-throw-a-blanket-over-it maneuver tossed in for good measure). My selection criteria quickly shifted from “two females, preferably the brown ones” to “the first two that we can catch.” When all was done, four of us were bleeding from one or more wounds and I had two furry balls of murderous rage and indeterminate gender in a cardboard box, a box that then had to be wrapped in a large plastic bag as there was no way that the flimsy folded lid was going to stop them from launching themselves at my face, claws first, in a desperate bid for freedom. I took the taxi back to Maseru, stopping on the way back to the Training Center to buy a more suitable cat carrier (read: duffel bag and cheap towel). The kittens tried to escape twice while in the store, and I had a hell of a time convincing the security guard checking bags at the door not to make me open the box for inspection; luckily, a quick shake of the bag and five seconds of resultant yowling finally won her over. Two days later I was at last able to bring them to their new home, which they promptly began to systematically explore and destroy. They earned their names fairly quickly: Metsi (the Sesotho word for water) was the first of the two to fall into my waste water bucket, and Chesa (meaning fire) was the first one to burn off half of her whiskers on my stove. I say “the first” in both cases, as both of them fell into the water bucket before I got a new one with a lid, and both have lost fur to my stove, heater, or candles on more than one occasion.
While the two of them have grown quickly, until recently they have always been approximately the same size. Returning home from my most recent trip to Maseru, I immediately noticed that Metsi was now about 10% bigger than her sister. I watched them for the next few days, but couldn’t see anything unusual about their eating habits or overall health that might explain the sudden growth of the one but not the other. Two nights ago, I woke up a little after 4 a.m. to an unsettling symphony of chewing, crunching, and growling noises coming from somewhere close by. Fumbling for my flashlight and doing a quick sweep of the floor, I see my cats facing off in the middle of the room. Metsi is unleashing all manner of unhappy kitty noises, mostly from the “back off” end of the spectrum, and tightly clutching in her mouth something about the size and shape or a rolled-up pair of woolen socks. My first thought wondered how she got my socks out of my closet. My second thought wondered why my socks had a long, skinny tail. Torn between my desire to document her first observed kill and my equally pressing desire to not have a rat disemboweled on my carpet (there’s not a steam cleaner to be found for at least 200 miles), I went with the latter impulse, threw Metsi and her midnight snack outside, and went back to sleep. In the morning, all that remained were a few squiggly grey bits on the ground and the satisfaction of knowing that I had finally solved The Case of the Mysteriously Bulky Cat. As it turns out, all of those Scooby-Doo marathons that I watched in college WERE more important than the classes that I skipped in order to watch them.
Two days later….
Chesa got her first confirmed kill today. Middle of the afternoon, I walk into my room to see her under my table, a respectable-sized rat in her jaws. I think that she’s been going up into the roof from the outside (hopefully I’ll get video up in the next few weeks so you can see), but wherever she got it from, I think that the kill was more for sport than hunger. After batting it around for a bit and trying to sneak it back into the room after I had thrown it down the hill (yes, I played fetch with my cat and a dead rat), she finally left it in front of the door and came inside for a nap. Mind you, all of this is happening while I’m trying to give the dog a haircut.
So, my family has this dog. She’s about 7 months old with shaggy white fur, and has spent most of her life chained to a tree on the side of the property. She has shelter under the tree and is fed regularly (scraps and whatnot), though her chain often gets tangled on roots. I wasn’t particularly concerned about her at first, but coming back from Maseru and finding her absolutely filthy made me decide to share some of the finer points of pet care with my family. The Basotho do not look at animals, specifically dogs and cats, the way that Americans do (it’s been my experience that nowhere else do people treat dogs and cats the way that Americans do, but that’s another matter). Dogs are for guarding homes and cattle, and cats are for killing rodents; the Basotho definitely aren’t unique in this respect. What sets them apart is the way that they treat their other service animals. Cows are told which way to walk by having rocks thrown at them. Donkeys with three 50 kg sacks of grain tied to their backs are encouraged to walk by being smacked with a heavy stick. I’ve seen men riding horses and donkeys down the road, hitting them the entire time with a stick. I’m not talking about a tap on the side, I’m talking about a smack on the spine that can be heard from 100 feet away. There is simply no respect for the animals and their wellbeing.
Back to my point. Dogs are almost universally tied up because most are mistreated, and so would run away if given the chance. Eddie, as I’ve been calling my family’s dog (Basotho generally don’t name their pets) hadn’t been mistreated as much as simply neglected. Despite her fur being thickly matted and generally filthy, she is a surprisingly cheerful and friendly dog. It took her a while to get used to being petted, but now every time I go to untangle her chain I’m subjected to a fairly standard happy puppy attack. I’m planning on putting a runner line for her across the front of my family’s property, as well as building her a proper shelter, but that comes later. First, I needed to clean her up a bit. My first plan involved an old set of clippers, but they were too dull and her fur was too matted to do much good, and so were quickly abandoned in favor of a big pair of craft scissors. Here we begin to run into problems. First off, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I’ve always thought the idea of professional pet groomers to be a bit ridiculous, but now I know better. Seriously, you might sneer when you see the “Barks n’ Bubbles” van parked in front of your neighbor’s house, but it’s harder than it looks. I’d even go as far to say that it’s harder than being a human hair stylist, because deep down my barber knows that even if I really hate my haircut I’m not going to try to eat his face. Eddie wasn’t entirely sure what was going on either, and it didn’t help that Chesa kept hanging around with that “I’m taking great joy in your suffering” look on her face that cats often get. After about two hours of trimming whichever part of her body was closest to me at any given moment, I decided that we both needed a break. Her legs and belly still look like she’s been living in the dumpster behind a Supercuts, but from the middle up she looks like a distractible kindergartener tried to give her racing stripes with a pair of safety scissors (and he was using those lefty scissors that never cut properly, even if you use your left hand). Tomorrow, I’ll finish the trim and then don heavy protective gear before breaking out the flea and tick shampoo. If I’m still in possession of all of my fingers when this is all over, I’ll tell you how it goes.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
It's about time....
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.
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.
Monday, January 19, 2009
2 months in, and no monkey attacks yet!
Ok, so, chapter 2.
We boarded the plane for Maseru, and had a fairly uneventful flight. That was, uneventful up until the point where the pilot came on the intercom and told us that he couldn't land. Apparently, there was a cloud over the airport, and between the plane and the airport they didn't have the capabilities to do an instrument landing. Sooo, the plane turned around and took us back to JoBerg. We sat around in the airport departure lounge for about 5 hours before they decided to cancel the flight. On the bright side, that meant that we got to spend another night at the Southern Sun. It took us another hour to get our bags back, or at least most of our bags, which had spent the previous night in storage at the airport. Bad idea. Several people's bags were missing, and when they finally showed up in Lesotho a few days later, they had been opened and hundreds of dollars worth of shoes, clothes, and electronics had been stolen (on the bright side, whoever took John's clothes replaced them with a white tracksuit almost exactly his size- we're still trying to get him to wear it out one night). The following morning, we returned to the airport, and actually made it to Maseru, on time and (mostly) intact.
Lesotho is a beautiful place. In the lowlands around Maseru, the landscape reminds me very much of southern Utah/ northern Arizona. As soon as we got out of the airport, I got my bearings, pulled out my compass, and realized that I was completely wrong, having forgotten that I was in the Southern Hemisphere and therefore the sun was to the North. Between that and all of the constellations being different (Orion is upside down, for one), it took me a few days to not feel like everything was backwards.
As for training, it mostly consisted of language instruction, cross-cultural awareness, health & safety, and the occasional field trip. After 3 weeks, we broke into our sub-groups (teacher trainers, english teachers, and math & science teachers) and left Maseru for Community Based Training (CBT). My group was placed in Mokema, a small village about 45 minutes outside of Maseru, and I moved into my first rondaval. If you haven't seen any pictures yet, a rondaval is a circular structure with walls made out of anything from mud to cinder blocks to cow manure (smells great in the summer!) and a thatch roof. Now, the roof deserves a little more discussion. When it comes to temperature control, you can't beat the thatch roof- it keeps the rondaval cool in the summer, and holds in heat in the winter. When it comes to spider control, however, it's another story. I referred to my handy field guide at least once a day, and counted 6 distinct species of spider at one point or another. The jewel of the collection was a Brown Button Spider, complete with an egg sack in the thatch. To visualize a BBS, imagine a black widow spider with a mottled brown, black, and red body and an affinity for steroids. I caught it in a glass for further study, and when I was done, I reached for my can of DOOM. Doom is an insect spray, and as you might judge from the name, it's fairly effective. I lifted the lid over the glass and gave a liberal spray. Whereas any earthly insect would have perished instantly, this spider walked up the the side of the glass and gave me the finger (or, at least, he would have, had he had fingers). I had to spray the little bastard 3 times before he finally died, and even then, I let it sit for a day before I burned the carcass (I had to wait for a full moon, just to be sure). As for the egg sack, I stood up on a chair and coated a good 2 square feet of the ceiling with Doom. In the process, I'm pretty sure that I inhaled enough of it to ensure that my children will have flippers.
I'm not sure what else to say about training. Most of it was fairly straightforward, including practice teaching and running workshops for area teachers. We had the benefit of many of the previous year's PCVs helping with training, coming out to our village every day to lead sessions and observe lessons. Hopefully, next year I'll be doing the same thing for the next group of trainees. We returned to Maseru for good on Christmas Eve, and proceeded to have a proper evening about which most of us can remember very few details (which is probably a good thing). After a couple days break, we all headed out for a 3 day visit to our permanent sites.
The road to my site, Semonkong, is usually described as "getting better." An hour on paved roads heading southeast from Maseru gives way to another 2 hours on a "dirt" road winding upwards through the mountains. I put the word "dirt" in quotations because a straight-up dirt road would be a vast improvement. There are some patches where it seems that a road crew test-paved a 100-yard stretch, but did so by dropping piles of asphalt randomly across the width of the road. In other places, a single-lane bridge (often covered with water during the rainy season) will be just wide enough for the bus to pass, provided that the driver lines the bus up exactly right and nobody looks out the window (both for the sake of the balance of the bus and the sense of safety of the passenger). Regardless of the perils of the trip, the destination is well worth the 10-15% chance of death in transit. Semonkong means "Place of Smoke", named after the mists that often surround the waterfall just outside of town. The waterfall is one of the main draws for the area, and this combined with some of the best horse trekking and hiking in southern Africa makes Semonkong one of the main tourism centers. Also, at over 600 ft., the waterfall has the highest commercial abseil (rappel) in the world, which I will definitely be checking out as soon as I can. One of the lesser-known recreational opportunities in Semonkong is the Donkey Pub Crawl, which seems fairly self-explanatory. The next PC pub crawl is slated for late February, so around then I'll let you all know what it's like to get drunk ON my ass for once (that joke never gets old, by the way).
My home is on the top of a hill, overlooking the town, with a view of all of the surrounding hills and an amazing gorge that's about a 15 minute walk away. I have a nice little 12'x12' square room, part of a row house off to the side of my family's house. The 2 days I spent there in December were mostly spent fixing the place up- the walls were the most upsetting shade of seafoam/teal/light-turquoise-death that I've ever seen, and the paint on the ceiling looked like my buddy Brett's face a couple of days after an 8-hour hike without sunblock (he looked like he was molting, it was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen). I scraped down the ceiling, painted the walls a nice Smurf blue, pulled up the weird vinyl stuff on the floor, and rearranged the scant furniture, and now the place is almost livable (hopefully I'll get some before & after pics up soon). I'm looking forward to getting back up there later this week, at which point I can begin to build shelves and whatnot. Luckily, there is a hardware store in town. It's no Home Depot, but they have lumber, nails, and paint, which is really all that I need. I'm also planning on getting a couple of cats, and will be taking suggestions (possibly in the form of a contest) for their names.
I'm out of time now, but I'll be back tomorrow to talk about my job and what I'm actually going to be doing here. I really like to get mail here, even just a letter and maybe some pictures, so please write! Any letters, photos, and drawings will go up on my wall, and I have a lot of wall space to fill!
We boarded the plane for Maseru, and had a fairly uneventful flight. That was, uneventful up until the point where the pilot came on the intercom and told us that he couldn't land. Apparently, there was a cloud over the airport, and between the plane and the airport they didn't have the capabilities to do an instrument landing. Sooo, the plane turned around and took us back to JoBerg. We sat around in the airport departure lounge for about 5 hours before they decided to cancel the flight. On the bright side, that meant that we got to spend another night at the Southern Sun. It took us another hour to get our bags back, or at least most of our bags, which had spent the previous night in storage at the airport. Bad idea. Several people's bags were missing, and when they finally showed up in Lesotho a few days later, they had been opened and hundreds of dollars worth of shoes, clothes, and electronics had been stolen (on the bright side, whoever took John's clothes replaced them with a white tracksuit almost exactly his size- we're still trying to get him to wear it out one night). The following morning, we returned to the airport, and actually made it to Maseru, on time and (mostly) intact.
Lesotho is a beautiful place. In the lowlands around Maseru, the landscape reminds me very much of southern Utah/ northern Arizona. As soon as we got out of the airport, I got my bearings, pulled out my compass, and realized that I was completely wrong, having forgotten that I was in the Southern Hemisphere and therefore the sun was to the North. Between that and all of the constellations being different (Orion is upside down, for one), it took me a few days to not feel like everything was backwards.
As for training, it mostly consisted of language instruction, cross-cultural awareness, health & safety, and the occasional field trip. After 3 weeks, we broke into our sub-groups (teacher trainers, english teachers, and math & science teachers) and left Maseru for Community Based Training (CBT). My group was placed in Mokema, a small village about 45 minutes outside of Maseru, and I moved into my first rondaval. If you haven't seen any pictures yet, a rondaval is a circular structure with walls made out of anything from mud to cinder blocks to cow manure (smells great in the summer!) and a thatch roof. Now, the roof deserves a little more discussion. When it comes to temperature control, you can't beat the thatch roof- it keeps the rondaval cool in the summer, and holds in heat in the winter. When it comes to spider control, however, it's another story. I referred to my handy field guide at least once a day, and counted 6 distinct species of spider at one point or another. The jewel of the collection was a Brown Button Spider, complete with an egg sack in the thatch. To visualize a BBS, imagine a black widow spider with a mottled brown, black, and red body and an affinity for steroids. I caught it in a glass for further study, and when I was done, I reached for my can of DOOM. Doom is an insect spray, and as you might judge from the name, it's fairly effective. I lifted the lid over the glass and gave a liberal spray. Whereas any earthly insect would have perished instantly, this spider walked up the the side of the glass and gave me the finger (or, at least, he would have, had he had fingers). I had to spray the little bastard 3 times before he finally died, and even then, I let it sit for a day before I burned the carcass (I had to wait for a full moon, just to be sure). As for the egg sack, I stood up on a chair and coated a good 2 square feet of the ceiling with Doom. In the process, I'm pretty sure that I inhaled enough of it to ensure that my children will have flippers.
I'm not sure what else to say about training. Most of it was fairly straightforward, including practice teaching and running workshops for area teachers. We had the benefit of many of the previous year's PCVs helping with training, coming out to our village every day to lead sessions and observe lessons. Hopefully, next year I'll be doing the same thing for the next group of trainees. We returned to Maseru for good on Christmas Eve, and proceeded to have a proper evening about which most of us can remember very few details (which is probably a good thing). After a couple days break, we all headed out for a 3 day visit to our permanent sites.
The road to my site, Semonkong, is usually described as "getting better." An hour on paved roads heading southeast from Maseru gives way to another 2 hours on a "dirt" road winding upwards through the mountains. I put the word "dirt" in quotations because a straight-up dirt road would be a vast improvement. There are some patches where it seems that a road crew test-paved a 100-yard stretch, but did so by dropping piles of asphalt randomly across the width of the road. In other places, a single-lane bridge (often covered with water during the rainy season) will be just wide enough for the bus to pass, provided that the driver lines the bus up exactly right and nobody looks out the window (both for the sake of the balance of the bus and the sense of safety of the passenger). Regardless of the perils of the trip, the destination is well worth the 10-15% chance of death in transit. Semonkong means "Place of Smoke", named after the mists that often surround the waterfall just outside of town. The waterfall is one of the main draws for the area, and this combined with some of the best horse trekking and hiking in southern Africa makes Semonkong one of the main tourism centers. Also, at over 600 ft., the waterfall has the highest commercial abseil (rappel) in the world, which I will definitely be checking out as soon as I can. One of the lesser-known recreational opportunities in Semonkong is the Donkey Pub Crawl, which seems fairly self-explanatory. The next PC pub crawl is slated for late February, so around then I'll let you all know what it's like to get drunk ON my ass for once (that joke never gets old, by the way).
My home is on the top of a hill, overlooking the town, with a view of all of the surrounding hills and an amazing gorge that's about a 15 minute walk away. I have a nice little 12'x12' square room, part of a row house off to the side of my family's house. The 2 days I spent there in December were mostly spent fixing the place up- the walls were the most upsetting shade of seafoam/teal/light-turquoise-death that I've ever seen, and the paint on the ceiling looked like my buddy Brett's face a couple of days after an 8-hour hike without sunblock (he looked like he was molting, it was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen). I scraped down the ceiling, painted the walls a nice Smurf blue, pulled up the weird vinyl stuff on the floor, and rearranged the scant furniture, and now the place is almost livable (hopefully I'll get some before & after pics up soon). I'm looking forward to getting back up there later this week, at which point I can begin to build shelves and whatnot. Luckily, there is a hardware store in town. It's no Home Depot, but they have lumber, nails, and paint, which is really all that I need. I'm also planning on getting a couple of cats, and will be taking suggestions (possibly in the form of a contest) for their names.
I'm out of time now, but I'll be back tomorrow to talk about my job and what I'm actually going to be doing here. I really like to get mail here, even just a letter and maybe some pictures, so please write! Any letters, photos, and drawings will go up on my wall, and I have a lot of wall space to fill!
Saturday, December 6, 2008
3 weeks in....
Greetings from Lesotho, the Kingdom in the Sky, the Switzerland of Africa, the farthest possible point on the globe from a decent sushi joint!
So, my adventure so far:
I arrived in Philly on Monday, Nov. 10th. The Peace Corps put us up in the Sheraton University city- not bad digs considering what I imagined I was getting myself into. Went out that night with Phil, another trainee who got in that night. Had a few beers, had a few more, sang Otis Redding songs on the corner with some random drunk guy, as you do. The next day was Staging, a full afternoon of icebreakers and your standard don't-do-anything-stupid lectures. There are 19 of us, 11 girls and 8 guys, and thankfully I'm not the oldest one in the group. We have two older women who are back for their second tour in the PC, one of whom was in Liberia back in '64. I can't imagine how different the overall structure of the PC must be now in comparison. Anyway, most of us went out that night for pizza and beers, then went to sleep fairly early.
Wednesday morning, we all convene with all of our baggage in the hotel lobby. The chaos wasn't helped by the fact that there was also a group if 40 new trainees headed to Kenya at the same time. We had to take a bus from Philly to JFK, a bus that was apparently being driven by a guy who had just arrived in the northeast. I don't know how familiar all of you are with the Philly-JFK route, but let's just say that there's no good reason why we had to drive trough Manhatten. Even considering the fact that he had already made a massive detour, the driver still wouldn't let me get off the bus to get a hotdog. He also knocked off his side mirror in a tunnel (which had to be fixed at one of the seediest-looking mechanics I've ever seen, while we sat and waited. A few more minor collisions later, and we were at JFK.
Now, at this point, I had been in Mother Hen mode since about 4 in the morning when I got up. I, along with 3 others, was in charge of making sure that everyone stayed together, got their passports, etc. Maybe it's the elementary school teacher in me, but I was stopping every 2 minutes to do a head count, and then having minor panic attacks when people hadn't come through security yet because they had gone outside for one last smoke. Thankfully, we all made it on the plane- 17 hours to JoBerg via Dakar. The flight was fairly uneventful, with nobody getting thrown off the flight for drunk and disorderly conduct, despite best efforts. Once we landed in JoBerg, we went right to our hotel shuttle after customs- as we were flying out the very next morning, our baggage was spending the night at the airport.
We were shuttled over to the Southern Sun Hotel, just around the corner from the airport. Bless the PC for its paranoia in wanting to keep us close to the airport, because this is one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed at (not saying much, but still). This is the kind of the place where you walk into the lobby and they hand you a glass of wine and point you towards the cheese & crackers tray. We checked in, showered (we were all more than a little rank by now), and met for a kickass buffet dinner. A few of us stayed up for a while, but we had to be up early, so I was asleep by 11, then up by 3. We had to take 3 separate shuttles to the airport, as some people took their sweet time getting downstairs. Once we all checked in, we headed to the gate, only losing Kelly once (a remarkable feat, as she tends to wander off). Once at the departure lounge, we handed in our tickets to board the bus that would take us to our sardine can with wings. All of us, that is, except for John. For some reason, when he got to the gate, John had his boarding pass, but not his actual ticket. After wrangling with the gate agents, John ended up running back out to the ticket counter, buying himself a new ticket, and then sprinting back to the bus with about 30 seconds to spare. Soaked in sweat, he joined us on the bus (interesting postscript to this story, we found the ticket last week. Apparently, it was in Phil's bag).
We waited for about 20 minutes, watching as the ground crew struggled to cram all of our bags onto this tiny little prop plane.
More later, my internet time is up!
So, my adventure so far:
I arrived in Philly on Monday, Nov. 10th. The Peace Corps put us up in the Sheraton University city- not bad digs considering what I imagined I was getting myself into. Went out that night with Phil, another trainee who got in that night. Had a few beers, had a few more, sang Otis Redding songs on the corner with some random drunk guy, as you do. The next day was Staging, a full afternoon of icebreakers and your standard don't-do-anything-stupid lectures. There are 19 of us, 11 girls and 8 guys, and thankfully I'm not the oldest one in the group. We have two older women who are back for their second tour in the PC, one of whom was in Liberia back in '64. I can't imagine how different the overall structure of the PC must be now in comparison. Anyway, most of us went out that night for pizza and beers, then went to sleep fairly early.
Wednesday morning, we all convene with all of our baggage in the hotel lobby. The chaos wasn't helped by the fact that there was also a group if 40 new trainees headed to Kenya at the same time. We had to take a bus from Philly to JFK, a bus that was apparently being driven by a guy who had just arrived in the northeast. I don't know how familiar all of you are with the Philly-JFK route, but let's just say that there's no good reason why we had to drive trough Manhatten. Even considering the fact that he had already made a massive detour, the driver still wouldn't let me get off the bus to get a hotdog. He also knocked off his side mirror in a tunnel (which had to be fixed at one of the seediest-looking mechanics I've ever seen, while we sat and waited. A few more minor collisions later, and we were at JFK.
Now, at this point, I had been in Mother Hen mode since about 4 in the morning when I got up. I, along with 3 others, was in charge of making sure that everyone stayed together, got their passports, etc. Maybe it's the elementary school teacher in me, but I was stopping every 2 minutes to do a head count, and then having minor panic attacks when people hadn't come through security yet because they had gone outside for one last smoke. Thankfully, we all made it on the plane- 17 hours to JoBerg via Dakar. The flight was fairly uneventful, with nobody getting thrown off the flight for drunk and disorderly conduct, despite best efforts. Once we landed in JoBerg, we went right to our hotel shuttle after customs- as we were flying out the very next morning, our baggage was spending the night at the airport.
We were shuttled over to the Southern Sun Hotel, just around the corner from the airport. Bless the PC for its paranoia in wanting to keep us close to the airport, because this is one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed at (not saying much, but still). This is the kind of the place where you walk into the lobby and they hand you a glass of wine and point you towards the cheese & crackers tray. We checked in, showered (we were all more than a little rank by now), and met for a kickass buffet dinner. A few of us stayed up for a while, but we had to be up early, so I was asleep by 11, then up by 3. We had to take 3 separate shuttles to the airport, as some people took their sweet time getting downstairs. Once we all checked in, we headed to the gate, only losing Kelly once (a remarkable feat, as she tends to wander off). Once at the departure lounge, we handed in our tickets to board the bus that would take us to our sardine can with wings. All of us, that is, except for John. For some reason, when he got to the gate, John had his boarding pass, but not his actual ticket. After wrangling with the gate agents, John ended up running back out to the ticket counter, buying himself a new ticket, and then sprinting back to the bus with about 30 seconds to spare. Soaked in sweat, he joined us on the bus (interesting postscript to this story, we found the ticket last week. Apparently, it was in Phil's bag).
We waited for about 20 minutes, watching as the ground crew struggled to cram all of our bags onto this tiny little prop plane.
More later, my internet time is up!
Sunday, November 9, 2008
And I'm off!
Ok, now that the formatting on my previous posts has been completely screwed up, it's time for me to go! I'm off to Philly tomorrow morning, and then after staging on Tuesday, we fly out of JFK on Wednesday morning. 17 hours on a plane later, we arrive in Johannesburg, South Africa, where we spend the night before flying down to Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, Thursday morning.
For now, my mailing address is:
David Gluck, PCT
c/o U.S. Peace Corps
P.O. Box 554
Maseru, 100
LESOTHO
Please send letters and pictures, and I'll send postcards. I'll post the links to some other blogs and info sites on the sidebar, but in the meantime, check this out:
http://www.travelandleisure.com/slideshows/the-worlds-scariest-runways/5
I'm totally going there.
Be good, keep in touch, and don't get too crazy without me (or at least send me the pictures).
Oh, and in case you were wondering, Africa is REALLY BIG:
For now, my mailing address is:
David Gluck, PCT
c/o U.S. Peace Corps
P.O. Box 554
Maseru, 100
LESOTHO
Please send letters and pictures, and I'll send postcards. I'll post the links to some other blogs and info sites on the sidebar, but in the meantime, check this out:
http://www.travelandleisure.com/slideshows/the-worlds-scariest-runways/5
I'm totally going there.
Be good, keep in touch, and don't get too crazy without me (or at least send me the pictures).
Oh, and in case you were wondering, Africa is REALLY BIG:
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