1st point of business: it’s officially been a month since I’ve been in Lesotho. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Yesterday we were able to go to Teyateyaneng (TY), our district camptown [by the way, if I didn’t explain, a camptown is like the capital of the district. Sometimes it’s the only thing resembling a town in the whole district.] to shop for more “exotic” foods other than the basics we could find at our village’s pink shop. Finally we will be able to cook our own food! No more papa and incredibly salty moroho. No more bread and fries for dinner. The only thing I might adopt is the lesheleshele [sorghum porridge]. I did find some oatmeal in TY, but I think lesh is more protein-ey. I also found some almost legit peanut butter. There are a few widespread brands and they are all shitty, but there’s one rare beast called Nutty P, which actually moves when you tip it around instead of being one static mass of hydrogenated peanut product. After shopping, the usual crew (me, Chelsea, and Kyle), went to Lee’s house for cards and cooking. This has been our afternoon routine lately. We made burritos and what we called a “group muffin,” aka a mini banana bread smothered with peanut butter and melted chocolate. Nommm. We are all getting quite good at playing Canasta too.
While stuffing ourselves with group muffin and playing cards, we talked about the “readiness to serve” assignment we have to turn in. It’s basically a bunch of super politically correct/culturally sensitive BS questions to prove that you are “integrating well” and that you will use PC methods for doing your projects and all. It’s like “how did you overcome such and such culture shock blah blah blah diversity womp womp coping mechanisms and behavior change models and icebergs and whatnot.” It’s just too much. I overheard, “if I rolled my eyes any harder, they’d pop out of my head,” regarding this ridiculosity. I’ll probably just write it while they’re making us sit through another pointless training session that does not teach us anything practical. I have heard that in other countries, the trainees spend way longer on language every day and they actually spend more than a total of two hours over two months teaching you how to teach in this cultural context. I guess that’s not the case here. Why don’t I tell you how I really feel, you ask? This is probably the point in our program where the PC would like me to remind you that this blog is my opinion only and not the formal position of the PC or US government or whatever. Duh. Now back to the show. Again.
The other event of the day was that in the morning a few of us went to Thaba [mountain] Sefika. On the way up, there were a bunch of awesome geodes and cool looking layered and speckled rocks. After the schlep to the windy summit, it was such a beautiful view and so refreshing after the climb. Somehow there’s a big concrete pillar up there with no obvious purpose, so of course I decided that I needed to sit on top of it and play queen of the mountain
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