The last few posts don't have photos because I live in Stone Age Africa and the Internet/uploading situation is as you would expect. Soon I'll try to edit them in.
The morning of swearing-in at the training village, I was packing up all the stuff I originally brought plus all the junk I acquired along the way, including the stuff I bought in the malls in Maseru when the PC took us for a shopping trip there. While at one of the malls, Kyle and I were searching all over for a cast iron skillet like the one Lee had found on sale for M300 ($30). They did not have any kind of cast iron skillet, on sale or otherwise. Sad. Anyway. Later that morning, we got a message that the PC bus was at the pink shop ready to pick people up to take them to the soccer field where the ceremony would be. I was still sweaty from working out and in the middle of eating breakfast, so I was just thinking “haha, nope,” and continued to leisurely eat. I knew that we didn’t have to drive to the field- it was walking distance away- and that even if we left now, the ceremony wouldn’t start for another few hours because we’re on Basotho time. After breakfast I took a bath and got dressed in my new seshoeshoe [patterned cloth] skirt and shirt that one of the LCFs had made. She made dresses or skirts or shirts for a bunch of us for quite a reasonable price. On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being Covered Wagon Pioneer, I felt like I was at an 8 in that outfit.
Officially a PCV!
I need this flag.
A few of us walked together from our houses to the field where there a bunch of tents set up for the dignitaries, for us, for the bo’me, and for any other village people who showed up. We killed time (even though a bunch of us showed up late on purpose, we still had a few hours to waste until it started) by taking photos and eating copious amounts of makoenyas [fried dough balls] and popcorn from the nearby shop. When the ceremony finally started, there were a whole bunch of speeches by a lot of “important” people, including our country director, the US ambassador, the PC Lesotho education director, some ministry officials, etc. The country director’s speech was reminiscent of all the things we had done at training, and she indirectly called me out twice by mentioning the rapping/ukulele performance at thanksgiving and by saying that sometimes a change of fashion was necessary, i.e. chopping all your hair off. Then the mic was handed to Neel who would make a Sesotho speech on behalf of all of us. He scored highest on the LPI, so he would speak for all of us. He strutted up there wearing his red blanket like he owned the place. And he kind of did- his speech was awesome and all the Basotho loved that he did it in Sesotho. They probably think that he’s 100% fluent, but he said that he just wrote a sketchy draft and one of the LCFs helped him make it grammatically correct and sound fancy. Next, they made us do this weird oath and called us up one by one. Almost everyone had awesome seshoeshoe clothes on- so many cool colors and patterns!
Seshoeshoe rainbow!
With my boyz Lee and Neel
Yes, this pretty much sums up Jeff’s attitude about life at all times
Orange Crew: Colleen, Chelsea, and Rob. Fun fact: I was supposed to get orange and Colleen was supposed to get blue instead, but our color preferences got written down wrong when we were measured at the same time.
Kyle and me
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