For the past few days, PC has “graciously” allowed us to leave site visit other people over the Christmas holiday. It just wish it were a bit later in, though, because I just moved to site a week ago and I don’t really miss people to a large enough extent to “need” to leave my site for my mental sanity or whatever. Tuesday morning, my ‘me was hurrying me along, telling me I was going to be late, so I dumped a bunch of stuff into my big backpack and walked with my little ausi on the path down the hill to the taxi stop. All the taxis that came by were full because everyone in Lesotho is trying to get somewhere else for xmas. After finally cramming into a taxi, I met up with Colleen in the Quthing camptown and we hung out at the hotel where they gave us the wifi password. It was so slow that it barely did anything, but at least it was nice to know that it exists. Somehow, that’s comforting. Then we made the taxi trek to the next camp town north, Mohale’s Hoek, where, from the side of the road, we found Neel waving us up to his house where we also met up with Laurel. We were all making a preliminary pit stop at his house before we made it all the way to Mafeteng to Jeff’s. We cooked, hung out outside, and then went into his host dad’s house where we watched the news. The news was mostly boring and unintelligible, as it was in Sesotho and things around here are normally uneventful. Then after the news, some American crime show came on, and it was really weird seeing something like that after a while of not seeing any kind of TV. Somehow I got really bored during this and started thinking about papa, and how I could rewrite the words of Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” to be a new song about papa, called “Papa Ball”. Don’t ask me how my mind came to think about a ball of corn mash while I watched a crime drama. Our group is quite adept at writing song parodies, so I thought I would work on it and present the results a few days later at Jeff’s place. Overcoming boredom at its finest.
The next day, xmas eve, we headed to Mafeteng, the next town north, and went to the big grocery store Shoprite. I was in charge of babysitting all our bags outside, since I had nothing I really wanted to buy. By this point, we hd already gone to several Chinese shops for other foodstuffs, including a hilariously large 3 foot long, 2kg bag of Cheetos I was planning to give as my Secret Santa gift. The other three who went into Shoprite said that they spent over an hour in the checkout line because everyone and their mother was in there trying to buy stuff for Christmas. I reminded them to get butter and cheese and chocolate, this being one of the only places around you can find that stuff. There are so many cows, but I have never seen people milk cows. I guess refrigeration isn’t that prevalent, so it would be hard to sell milk in the villages [update: I have since seen people sporadically selling milk]. The line to get in the store was, by this point, all the way down the shopping center and approaching the street. Basotho are either very resilient or very patient- they put up with a lot of inconvenience, like waiting for hours even to get into the grocery store. After I spent my time bag-sitting by reading, rewriting Wrecking Ball, and posting stuff to facebook, I ran to this holest of hole in the wall Chinese shop (this time not just owned by a Chinese person selling the same ol same ol, but actually selling Chinese foods) and found a 2 liter (!) bottle of soy sauce. I’m pretty sure this is the only place in the country you can find soy sauce- it’s not even in Maseru! Hopefully this will last me a little while, haha. After we were done at Shoprite, we walked to the taxi rank. The whole town was so packed! We walked with our bounty like loaded-up mules through hoards of people, squeezing through people at the taxi rank, me knocking into people with my huge bag of Cheetos resting sideways behind my neck. We met Lee in the taxi rank. He got the roomy front seat while the other four of us all squeezed into the back seat, each of us with a huge backpack, several 5 liter bottles of water, and other grocery bags. I opened the window because if my arm weren’t hanging out the window, there’s no way I would have been able to fit, much less breathe, back there.
We made it to Jeff’s house in due time, and breathed a sigh of relief and exhaustion. That night, we made awesome burritos, with homemade tortillas, and then went to this big rock formation where we just lay there and looked at the stars. With no light pollution, it’s amazing what you can see, even lots of shooting stars. The next morning, Neel and I decided that we would take the initiative to prepare the chickens Jeff had bought yesterday, which we lovingly named Gladys and Helen. We brought them to the far end of the yard and then brought them into their next life. Lee killed the first one, taking the knife and cutting its head off, the bird kicking and flapping the whole time as Neel held it down. Then it was my turn. Neel, the champ that he is, held down the chicken’s feet and body while I held the head. I was really hesitant at first, but without thinking I just went for it. I got the artery right away, but the bone itself was really hard to cut clean off. The eyes were still blinking, which was rather disturbing. After several more attempts at sawing the bone, I gave the knife to Neel and he got the job done. We took our two headless chickens and dunked them in a big pot (it looked like a big cauldron) of boiling water over a small fire to help get the skin/feathers off. Thank you, Google, for teaching us how to prepare chickens this way. After they boiled for a little while, we de-skinned them. I need to take a moment to reminisce about Paris Thanksgiving and how Milea and I gutted a turkey. Turns out Chickens are much simpler to disembowel, etc. After scooping out the guts and such, we cut them up into large sections and put them into the cauldron again to cook. We shredded up the meat and cooked it with vegetables. Delish.
In the morning, after basically no sleeping, we packed up and left for the bus. Let me tell you about this bus. It was white and green, and so rusty and janky except for a really nice speaker system, which proceeded to blare Famu in my ears for the next three (yes, three) hours. What had probably taken less than an hour on a taxi took us three hours on this sweltering, rolling hippie-era contraption which was packed to the max with people in every seat and squished into the aisle. It was like my own personal hell. I was so sleep deprived, however, that I was able to nap a bit. I got off the bus in a daze, and three taxis later, I was back to my village at last. By this point it was raining pretty hard, so the muddy path up to my house was really slippery. I was sliding all over the place and at one point fell sideways and my whole leg was slopped in mud. Two of my ausis saw me and came running down the hill to help me carry stuff up. Now I am sitting in my house finishing writing this and trying to get warm/dry/non-muddy. It will be a lazy rest of the day to say the least. Tomorrow I’ll probably sleep forever.
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