14 May 2015: Medical BS rant

               Last week, I trucked it to Maseru to have most of what I had to say completely ignored by the medical staff and to be told that I needed an x-ray of my foot at the hospital. They had sent them to Bloemfontein, so the results would take a few days. I called yesterday to be told that the radiologist was on vacation. Great. But then later that day, the PC doctor called me and told me, in a distinctive Eastern European accent, that the x-ray showed no fractures. Duh. I knew that. I told everyone it was my ligaments and not my bones. I knew exactly what was wrong with my foot one day one and no one listened to me. I asked the doc how I should proceed- keep wrapping it, perhaps? “Wow, what a good idea,” he replied (he didn’t actually say that).“Yes, wrap it up and keep taking ibuprofen and elevating it at night.” Ok…but that’s for swelling. It’s far from being swollen any more. And, as far as the wrapping my foot with the ace bandage, that’s not even a good idea. It’s not strong enough (too stretchy) to provide any support, but if I stretch it tight enough to do anything, it’s just elastic enough to make my entire foot hurt and turn my toes blue. I’ve been wrapping it in the cloth athletic tape I brought from home because the paper tape in the medical kit is worthless. If I didn’t know the basics of taping injuries (thank you once again, gymnastics, for many a life lesson), simple anatomy, common-sense first aid skills, or god forbid how to google things, I’d be absolutely screwed to be at the mercy of this medical office. The internet (not any doctor that I saw) tells me that I have a midfoot sprain with one or more of my plantar ligaments, and that the treatment is to keep off of it as much as possible for about 6 weeks, wrap it in tape in a certain way, and wear stiff shoes to avoid stretching the ligaments farther than necessary so that they can repair themselves. This is just adding to my feeling that the only person I can really rely on is myself. Ugh. End of rant.

14 May 2015: Latrine fishing

          Today and tomorrow are Ascension Day (whatever the heck that is) and Why-not-take-the-Friday-off-and-blame-it-on-sports Day, respectively. Today, I haven’t left my rondaval- it’s about 1pm- thanks to the technology of my purple pee bucket and having lots of food (avocados!) here inside. I blame the laziness (and watching an entire season of Arrested Development) on my foot. But I’ll talk about that in my next post/rant. First let me explain the hilarity (in retrospect) that was dropping my diva cup down my latrine.

                Being of the XX persuasion, I deal with certain a certain female phenomenon with a diva cup. If you don’t know what that is, I’m sure Google can help you out with that one. The alternatives in this country are slim to one. I have never seen tampons sold in stores, even the big ones in Maseru, so if I didn’t have this cup, I’d have to use pads. Laughable. I do have a pee bucket that I was previously reluctant to use, considering that a bucket of pee in my house is less than desirable. This leads me to use the latrine for all my bathroom needs. A few days ago in the morning, I took a trip down to use my latrine. Somehow, in the process, my diva cup slipped and plunged down into the depths of the poo pit. My first reaction was disbelief, then horror (if you follow my “small thoughts” posts, you may recall that this very blunder has recently surpassed “being locked in a steam room” on my list of fears). Then for a second I considered it a lost cause; the cup had successfully and of its own volition escaped and jumped down the latrine. Maybe it deserved to stay down there and make friends with the excrement and paper disintegrating around it. No, wait, I thought. The alternative to using it is, as I said, not happening, and god knows how long it would take for someone to order another cup online, ship it all the way over here, and for me to mosey on to the PC office in Maseru to collect it. Plus, that thing cost me almost $40. I converted the sum. 400 Rand! A fortune! I made up my mind that I absolutely had to retrieve it.

                Near my latrine, my family keeps a pile of firewood consisting of long tree branches. Perfect. I grabbed one, stripped off the twigs and leaves, and maneuvered it down the toilet seat and down the hole to the bottom, maybe 2m deep. I couldn’t see anything down there, though, so I went back in my house and grabbed my trusty headlamp. That thing is so handy. Anyway, equipped with the long stick and Mr. Headlamp, I leaned over the hole and managed only to poke the cup around a little bit. I don’t know what I had expected. I hadn’t thought about the grabbing part. I went back to the pile of sticks and got another long one. It was at this point I was thankful that none of my siblings or neighbors happened to see me and ask what I was doing, digging around in my latrine like that. These sticks are long, crooked, and heavy, so carefully trying to pick up the slippery little thing with the sticks was like trying to pick up a peeled grape with two gigantic, unwieldy chopsticks in the near dark. Several minutes into this, I realized this was not going to be successful. 

I needed a new plan. It was then that I briefly considered either dangling my little abuti down there or diving in myself. Then I thought I could build something. I ended up cutting off the bottom of a plastic bottle and tying it with wire to the end of one of the sticks as a kind of scooper. Surprisingly quickly, I managed to scoop up the little bugger. It was absolutely doused in poop and god knows what else, so gave it a preliminary dunk in a puddle outside, then washed it with soap several times inside, then doused it in hand sanitizer. Let’s just say that (at the suggestion/chastising of Colleen), I’ll be making a lot more use out of my pee bucket from now on. The scooper remains leaning up against the latrine in case I drop something else of value down there, but I hope never to have to go latrine fishing ever again.

The scooper

The dark abyss

The beast itself

6 May 2015: Hike/Neel’s ET/Foot adventure, or Don’t trust your life to roots (or to PC Medical)

                I’m writing this all curled up in a bed on which I have arranged all the pillows from the other beds in the room plus two extra fluffy blankets. It’s like a cocoon. How did I even get here, you ask? Good question. It’s a long story. Take my hand and I’ll lead you the journey that was my past week. 

                It all started when Neel announced that he was going to ET [early termination, aka quit PC]. Jeff jumped forward to “take care of” a going-away party of sorts at Neel’s house on Saturday. The day earlier, Friday, was May 1^st, Worker’s day (Labor Day), so I left the boonies to head up to Mohale’s Hoek. After the obligatory hotel shower, I found Lee and Jeff at the chicken place, probably pissing off the workers by ordering more and more chicken sandwiches. The three of us proceeded to Thaba Mokhele, a ginormous, steep, flat-topped mountain that loomed in the near distance from Mohale’s Hoek town. After not ten minutes of walking out from the hotel, we were clearly out of the town and in a field, headed across the expanse to the dirt road that would lead us to the base of the mountain. After following this road for quite a while, we found a place to start climbing. And by climb, let me explain myself. I mean straight up bushwhack. Through trees, bushes, and spiky grasses. If there was a path, we obviously never found it. I was a little slower than the other two hiking speed demons, so I got separated at one point, but this herder and his tiny dog led to me where I could see Jeff, and he told me to climb almost straight up through the ravine of boulders. Climbing the conveniently human-sized boulders with Jeff was so much better than getting snagged and scratched by trees and plants. By then, Lee was long gone up the mountain. Near the top, the ravine turned into a cliff, so we had to go to the side and whack bushes once more. By this time, we heard Lee testing the mountain acoustics by either singing or yelling back and forth to a herd boy up there- we couldn’t really tell. The sun was setting when I got near the top, and I turned around to a surreal view. It was almost like looking down at a topographical map, a nearly flat, open spread of land with a few lumps and ridges of smaller mountains and hills scattered throughout. 

This is only part way up but you kind of get the picture. 

Jeff had scurried ahead, and I heard him yelling and cussing at the trees he was whacking through. I didn’t blame him, though. Those trees had turned into the trees from Snow White where they grab you and don’t let you pass. I don’t think there was much apple-throwing. That would have been preferable, actually. A snack. Taking the cries of distress as a sign to avoid that path, I decided to go rock scrambling instead. In order to do this, I had to just grit my teeth and trudge through some spiky plants. Thank bog I had on long pants (unlike the other two suckers), so I didn’t get nearly as scratched up as they did. So here I was, climbing up an innocent enough slope on my hands and feet, but at one point it got so steep that I was clutching to microscopic rock bumps for dear life. If I fell (into those spiky bushes, mind you), that would have absolutely sucked. Oh, and let me add that this was in the dark, with only the light of my headlamp to guide me, as the sun had already set. My fingertips must have gotten that adrenaline strength that a mother gets when she has to lift a car off her baby. I finally stumbled to the flat top of the mountain under the light of the full moon that had popped up on the other side of the mountain as I ascended. The boys had made a nice fire by the time I got up there, and we broke out the marshmallows, chocolate, and crackers we had brought to make smores. We tried not to eat too many, though, because we all had almost run out of water a long time ago, and the smores would only make us thirstier than we already were. I don’t know why we didn’t bring more water; maybe we assumed we would find a stream or something. In any case, we were all probably dehydrated. I ate one of two apples I had brought and gave the other to Lee, and he said he had never appreciated the juiciness of an apple so much in his life. 

                The three of us rolled out the tarp and slept super bundled up in our sleeping bags, our noses poking out of small openings from cinching up the elastic cords around the top. It was so cold and windy up there, and the full moon was blazing like a circular celestial night light. In the morning, we were all sick of being cold and trying to sleep, so we quickly got ready to (make like a baby and) head out. Our trek up the day before was so miserable that we decided to go down on the other side of the mountain, hoping maybe it wouldn’t be so crazy steep or full of rogue trees. Now here’s where the drama starts. We’re all happily bouncing along when we come to a small drop. Jeff half-climbed, half-jumped down. I started to climb down, using the trusty grass roots’ grip on the soil to help me not plummet to my death. But guess what. They ripped out and I fell down the first drop, then down another smaller one. Not to my death, entirely, but to the death of my foot. I sat there for a minute, not immediately able to get up. After noticing that the underside of my right foot was absolutely in pain, but stand-on-able, I stood up. Lee then climbed down the drop as daintily as you like, but not before letting a huge rock tumble down, fly past me just in front of my legs, and bounce just in front of Jeff’s face before ricocheting to the side. Close call. It was clear at this point that I had done something to the bottom of my foot because every step on it was stretching those ligaments out and very painful. I knew that no bones were broken, but that it was one or more of those underside ligaments that was injured. As I slowly and excruciatingly hobbled down the rocks, Jeff and Lee bounded ahead, stopping a few times to wait for my sorry self to catch up. Eventually, I just told them to go ahead down the steep part and I would try to go across on an easier, more level trajectory, and that I would meet them at a certain spot on the road. Having to walk on the outside edge of my foot, I trudged ahead slowly, arriving at the spot about an hour and a half after they did. 

A neglected herd post

We returned, slowly, walking the 9 or 10 miles to town (where I was limping faster than the Basotho in town were walking. They must learn to walk from turtles). We got some much-needed sit and food at the braai restaurant, then caught a sprinter (small bus-like taxi) to Neel’s house for his going away party. 

                At Neel’s, it was packed. Almost 20 people showed up to send our Sesotho champion off. He’s leaving because he is really frustrated with his school. He tries to implement new techniques and teaching strategies, and initially the teachers are enthusiastic, but then don’t make any moves to change or improve their own teaching. One of the goals here is to teach teachers better ways to teach, like how to teach critical thinking and things like that. Neel asked specifically to be placed in a school whose teachers were open to change, and it turns out they weren’t. He said that when he would have left after two years, nothing would have changed, so nothing would last beyond him when he went home. Apparently it was just a constant struggle at school every day, and that he would be much “better used” in America. Uselessness: a sad, but true phenomenon that I think we are all facing right now, but I guess he thought things just wouldn’t get better. So we had a grand old time at his house and everyone crammed in there to sleep. This seems like a common theme, cramming way too many people in one space and trying to sleep. 

                The next morning, I hitched out of there with a guy in a janky, rattling white sedan with a black hood. He was kind of way too interested in my life story, so I immediately made up a fake name, fake village, fake husband in America, the works. It’s so sad how even after an imaginary partner is thrown into the mix, you’re still propositioned because you don’t have a husband in Lesotho. This is actually a really big problem, that it’s quite common to have many romantic partners, and one of the reasons why AIDS is so rampant. Anyway, then he picked up his friend, a police special investigator with a really high-pitched voice. He was absolutely convinced that as a PCV, I must actually be a soldier, collecting intelligence for the US. He was confused why I “posed” as a teacher in a village instead of living in town, because you can’t get good information in a village. He advised me to move to town to have more access to intelligence. Yeah, dude, so this kind of proves that I’m not a spy if I live in the sticks. He still wasn’t convinced. What kind of intelligence is there to collect in Lesotho anyway? I’ve come to study your advanced way of life to teach the highest-ranking officials of the US government. Right. 

                So this whole time, as you may recall, my foot is still dead. It probably didn’t help that I had walked on it almost ten miles back from the mountain to town right after I had hurt it. I arrived in my village and walked [limped] to school on Monday morning. I would have already been limping due to my sore quads, but add a bum foot to the mix and I must have been stumbling around like an idiot. I had noticed some splotchy, pink bruises that had emerged on the bottom of my foot, and a purple one on the side, so I called the PC medical office. They told me not to go to work that day (oops) or walk on it (double oops), and told me to come to Maseru the next day. I did just that. The current doctor in our game of PC medical musical chairs was a Ukrainian guy. I told him exactly what I knew was wrong, and he was at first convinced that it was my ankle. Did you even listen to me? I told him that I was 99% sure that it was the ligaments and not the bones, so guess what he did- scheduled an x-ray for me the next day. Come on. 

                I found Neel in the VRC [volunteer resource center] attached to the PC office, taking care of some exit medical tasks and paperwork. We went to dinner, his last supper, at Piri Piri, a great restaurant near the PC office. He signed the wall among many other visitors’ sharpie scrawlings, “Sala ka khotso, Lesotho” [a formal goodbye, literally stay with peace, Lesotho]. We took a taxi to Foothills, a b&b PC has some kind of a deal with, where he wrote and we recorded the last one of his many song parodies, then we sent it out to our friends in our Whatsapp group.

                The next morning, we found Kristin in the breakfast room, in Maseru for her fourth trip to the dentist for a root canal/crown. Neel and I headed back to the PC office so he could do his paperwork and so that I could visit with the medical people. The medical secretary drove me to the Maseru private hospital, a deserted building, where I got 2 x-rays on my foot. There was no one to tell me what was wrong, just someone to take the x-rays, so they would have to send them to Bloemfontein to a doctor there to analyze them, then up to a week later, they would get back to me. No wonder the PC doctor was complaining about the state of medical care in this country and its inefficiencies. Back from the hospital, I got dropped off at the mall so I could do some grocery shopping (avocados!) and clothes shopping (there was one pair of pants in that entire mall that came even close to fitting me. I bought it anyway because my current 2 pairs of pants that I wear to school every day are sure to wear out very soon). After checking literally every store in that mall, and others in Mohale’s Hoek, I still have yet to find another decent pair of running/hiking shoes that costs less than R1300. Sigh. I walked the short distance back to the PC office, and with unlimited internet at my disposal, bought tickets for Namibia for a small group of us. Woo! I’m pumped for that.

                After finally arriving back in my village on Friday afternoon, I had gotten away with a one-day school week. I really think that the teacher laxness and lack of hesitation to miss/cancel classes is one of the many issues at the root of the education system’s problems, but at the same time it’s kind of nice to take advantage of. Does that make me a horrible person?

30 April 2015: Dodging a bullet / HIV committee meeting

                Last week on Thursday and Friday, I was supposed to go to Butha Buthe (way north) and to Maseru (middle) with the school for their “educational trip.” I thought it was assumed that I would go but when I talked to the teacher in charge on Thursday to talk about some details, he was like, “Oh, I didn’t know you wanted to come. The cars are all full. There is no space.” At first I was slightly disappointed, but then I almost immediately became super excited because I could have a super long weekend. It actually turned out really well for me, though, that I didn’t go, because the drivers took them to Butha Buthe to see whatever kind of historical things they were supposed to see there, then refused to take the students to their other scheduled places near Maseru because they demanded more money. These kids don’t get to do anything outside the village, so it really sucks for them that this happened. The cars had been booked for months and the price had been agreed upon way in advance. Such a shame. The best thing for these students would be to get them out into the bigger towns and let them see what else is out there besides a life of herding.

Another bullet I dodged was that driving to Butha Buthe would take about 8 hours, so in order to be at their scheduled place in the morning, they had to leave Wednesday late at night. I was thinking about 8 hours in a taxi trying to get some sleep among a dozen students who were not about to try to get any sleep. Shudder. In order to accommodate for their 11pm departure, classes “knocked off,” as the teachers say, after break (11:00) instead of after lunch (13:00), with the excuse that the kids who lived far away needed 12 hours instead of 10 to walk home, pack up, and walk back to school. Ridiculous. I really hate when my classes are cancelled, especially if I’m told about it as I’m walking out of the staff room with a pocket full of chalk and pens ready to go teach. 

But another opportunity for the weekend had also come up- a meeting of the HIV committee in TY (the town just to the north of Maseru). I decided to go to it because 1) I had time, and 2) I wanted to be involved in something else besides teaching. So I left Thursday morning to go to the hotel in Mohale’s Hoek and take a shower, one of the few luxuries I so often miss at my site, and grab something akin to chicken nuggets at this great chicken place. I met up with my partner in crime Lee and we decided to hitch to Maseru. We found a ride with one guy who had actually picked up Cassie before, which was weird. We did some serious shopping damage at the grocery stores at the mall and got some Indian food at the top of this building shaped like a Basotho hat. Ah, food with flavor, I had missed you so. Lee went back home and I continued northward to TY, meeting up with Hillary and going to her house. It was a 4+1 (small taxi) ride and about an hour walk away. By the end, it was getting dark, and we were guided to her house by the light of an occasional lightning strike. The next day, we both headed to the hotel for the committee meeting. The meeting was just so that we could try to get the committee started again since it had kind of dissolved in past years- which is weird, because Lesotho is consistently in the top 3 countries for HIV rate worldwide (It’s about 23% of the population).We also started to plan what kinds of events we can do, like testing events or weekend camps for kids. I had planned to start heading home after the meeting, seeing as it was so very far to Quthing. But the meeting ran later than I expected, and I picked up a new errand of needing to go to the Peace Corps office in Maseru. So going home wouldn’t be happening that day. The next day, Sunday, I made it as far as Mohale’s Hoek and then caught a car to Quthing from there on Monday morning. 

In Mount Moorosi, where I normally stop for groceries before the taxi ride to my village, I was shopping in this one store when this one dude was trying to tell me something in Sesotho. I told him I didn’t understand him, so he ran to the back of the store and grabbed a lotion bottle, the brand of which was “Girl Friend.” I shut that down so fast. I was also really not happy about the fact that he was calling me “’Me Lakhooa.” The guy at the register commented that my Sesotho had gotten better, hearing the conversation.  I had whipped out my trusty “I refuse” and finished it off with a “you’re crazy.” Ain’t no creepy rando getting away with anything around here.

19 April 2015: Musings from my (warm) bed

                I’m laying here all huddled up in my bed, wearing sweats and nestled under both my sleeping bag (unzipped open, my usual bed covering) and that ugly maroon and yellow blanket. It’s a lazy day, being the weekend. It’s starting to get cold, so being inside protects me from the wind, but being outside shows me the warmth of the sun, something so important in a place as dry as this is. It’s been about a week and a half since I got back from vacation, and I already miss it so much. I think I’m addicted to travelling in the sense that it probably gives my brain dopamine or some other “happy chemicals,” and now I’m on some sort of adventure withdrawal. Some on the hike said that this was the best vacation ever taken. It’s cool that I can be a part of people’s best times. I’ve found that it’s most often the people you’re with make up the bulk of the happiness, and we ended up with a pretty rad group of people. Before I get too caught up in wanting to jet off somewhere else, let’s move on, shall we? Yes? Good.

                Adventures ‘round the old homestead: This morning, my ‘me killed a little mouse by whacking it with a stick. It was running around outside my rondaval. It wasn’t trying to enter my house, just living its little happy life outside. But then my ‘me hands me a stick and expects me to help her corner it or something. I don’t want to kill it. Despite this silent wish, she relentlessly whacked that thing until it was twitching. Nice image, I know. Let’s move on once more.

                At school, I continue to be out of the loop for most everything, including a concert. I was informed of this basically as it was happening. This concert was a fundraiser where people pay for someone to sing something or do something else, then the nominee either does the thing or pays more than the first person. I ended up having to dance with the school choir as they sang. Nothing big, just like one two three kick to the left, one two three kick to the right. But I may have hammed it up a little bit, and the students were laughing so hard. After this display, I went back to sitting at the back, supposedly watching the door? I don’t know. But I let a few students escape because that’s exactly what I wanted to do myself. Run free, kids. Run while you can. The point is, I am trying to remedy the non-communication with a calendar I put up next to the clock book to mark events like this or when someone’s going to decide to cancel school after lunch for some idiot reason.

                In other news, my garden is bursting with…….leaves. It’s three different kinds of leafy greens- mustard spinach, Swiss chard, and English rape. I really don’t want, nor can I eat all of, this moroho [the Sesotho word for any kind of leafy plant like these]. I eat some every day, mostly mixed into scrambled eggs, but it’s still so much. I probably should be watering it more often, but I don’t generate enough gray water to do that and my lazy but doesn’t want to collect more water from the tap. 

Later today, I’m venturing over to the orphanage to each gymnastics to the older kids. Last week, the first time, went pretty well. A lot of them are pretty good already. I think the director wants me to focus on the conditioning aspect, as she thinks that some of the kids are a little overweight. It was funny to hear that, as I’ve only hear Basotho give complements about fatness. Being British, she has a bit of a different worldview.

Photos from training/Easter break

Taxi lyfe

On the way to Tsehlanyane 

Chewing on grass?

Cassie and Jeff

John Lee

On top of the world 

Camp out 

Kyle is either in mid chew or in awe of the view 

Obligatory handstand 

The group

The big river crossing 

Teeny tiny hikers

About to embark on the natural slip and slide 

Lee

Kyle and Chelsea

One of the many places we filled up for water

Views from the heights

It's like they're the Brady bunch or something

See all those tiny lines going across? Those are all sheep paths. 

Mapping our route 

Jeff rocking his new leopard tank

Random village boy 

Washing clothes in the river while a bunch of kids stare curiously

Not tall enough to reach the line

Playing Agricola 

Beautiful Motete

How more Lesotho can you get?

Yup

Approaching the mine

Kyle and Chelsea

Chelsea is pumped 

Hello, goats 

The group that stuck it out

Hahah Chelsea

It was at this point when I got bored waiting for our food at the restaurant 

A-frisky

9 April 2015: Training/Easter Break

        Note: This post is very long. It takes place over about two weeks, and I like details, ok? With this said, you may carry on.

PC service is divided up into 3 phases, phase 1 being the first 2-3 months of pre-service training in the training village, phase 2 being the first 3 months at site where you’re not supposed to leave your site except to go to your camptown to go shopping (the intention here being integration, because what else is there to do anyway?), and phase 3 being the 21ish months after that. As our 3 months at site came to an end, it was time for phase 3 training. I was so happy to be able to see everyone again, but at the same time I was not so happy anticipating all the sessions. Hopefully they would be more useful than those at pre-service training. Arriving back in the training villages was weird, and I was not excited about having to rely on my host family for all my food and even hot water. I didn’t like it at the beginning of phase 1 and I wasn’t about to start now. 

Training progressed as expected. The most useful session was the first one where we explained our successes and failures after 3 months at site. My successes included getting along really well with my family, getting my garden going, and starting to become involved with the orphanage. The struggles included the ever-present communication barrier, the laziness of teachers and lax attitude of the school environment, and general boredom at school. It was good to throw around different ideas to see what experiments had and hadn’t worked at other’s sites. This session was followed with some other fairly useless sessions, as I had anticipated, but some of the language lessons were very helpful. In one of the sessions, we were introduced to PC committees, which I really want to become involved with to break up the monotony of teaching. Some committees include VAC (volunteer advisory committee), DSM (district security manager), DAR (district aids representative), GEL (gender equality Lesotho), and PSN (per support network). 

I’d like to think that all was made well with a free pizza lunch at the hotel on the last day. In my book, almost anything can be made OK with free food, especially food with lots of cheese, a delicacy I can not easily find in my district. After the loveliness of the pizza, a bunch of us went food shopping in anticipation for our upcoming multi-day hike in the north during our week of vacation. This meant that I got a 1kg bag of peanuts and a dozen of the highest protein candy bars I could find (which means, not very much protein at all). In the process of doing this, as I tried to withdraw some cash from the ATM, the machine ate my bank card. It seems I had forgotten my pin, as I really don’t spend a lot of money and hence don’t need to use it very often to get cash. I went inside the bank and my eyes widened at the horrific line that stretched before me. Figuring I could get away with not standing in line, I asked an employee what to do. He ushered me to the “enquiries” window, which only had one person in line. Perfect. I gave them my passport (as you need to do with any bank interaction here) and after like half an hour of them dawdling around doing god knows what, I finally got my card back. 

That afternoon, we 8 hikers plus Catie rode to her house which was on the main road in the direction we planned to go the next day. At one point, we were quite annoyed that the taxi driver made us get out and switch to another taxi, because we all had tons of stuff to move, but it turned out to be a good thing because we ended up on this awesome party taxi with van-shaking bass and blinking ceiling lights. With the little room we had, each person having a big backpack in their lap and squished against the people next to us, we bobbed our heads and jammed out for the next little stretch to Catie’s house. From her front step, you could see a bunch of bright lights in the near distance, this being the border to South Africa. It was obvious where the demarcation was between the rich country and the country stuck in the Stone Age. 

                After a night of sleeping all crammed into her house (some people just slept outside to have more room, but ended up soggy with dew in the morning), we headed off to the north, stopping along the way to drop excess stuff off at another volunteer’s house. As we were unloading, I managed to nearly pull off a stellar April Fool’s joke, for a moment convincing Lee that I had called the peanut butter brand that he is addicted to (Nutty P.) only to have them tell me that they have stopped producing peanut butter entirely, and that the last of their stock is what is left in stores right now. For about five seconds, the look of horror on his face was priceless.

                The crew soon rolled up to Tsehlanyane national park, the starting point of what was planned to be an all-day hike to Kyle and Chelsea’s house in Motete village in the district of Butha Buthe. We paid M20 each to get in and headed straight to the swimming hole, where I just dunked in my head. Several hours of hiking with wet underwear just wasn’t on my to do list that day. After a few of us cleaned off a nearby tree of its ripe peaches, we headed out. Being the village rats that we had turned into, it didn’t seem right to pass up this free fruit opportunity. We walked for a few hours to this huge waterfall where I took a trip down the massive natural water slide. Hurricane Harbor, you’ve got competition. We continued hiking, stopping occasionally for a water fill-up. To sterilize the spring water, we either used iodine tablets or a tiny UV light stick. After climbing basically straight up the mountain for the last bit, at the top we decided it was going to be really stupid to try to keep going. It was getting dark and the other side of this mountain looked steep and treacherous. Due to frequent breaks and ending up moving much slower as a group than we had intended, it turns out we were only about halfway through what we had planned only one day for. The new plan was to camp out on top of this mountain and continue in the morning. It was probably the most ideal place we could have found to sleep. We prepped our sleeping spot: cut the tall grasses to make a soft bed, laid a tarp down on top of that, all crammed together on top of it, and put another tarp on top in case of dew or rain. It was really comfy and quite warm in there with all of our body heat, though it got kind of cramped. We lined up all our bags near our heads and made a short rock pile on the foot side in order to protect against wind. There were tall bluffs on either side of our grassy spot. Our spot was nice and sheltered, with tall bluffs on either side of our grassy patch. Kyle and Lee even scouted out a little cave maybe a minute walk from our sleeping spot in case of a downpour. We planned night watch shifts in case any herdboy, who Kyle had said might be aggressive at the sight of especially women, gave us any trouble, which they didn’t.

                In the morning, we made a fire pit (aka a circle of rocks) where we burned our trash and some of our grass bedding (with a little methylated spirits (like purple rubbing alcohol) for extra fire power). Then we all ate handfuls of peanuts/raisins and chocolate for breakfast (mind you, this was all we ate for the entire hike) and started up the bluffs to the top of the ridge. Wow the parentheses are abundant. Anyway, Lee and Kyle took our coordinates with the GPS and planned out route with the paper maps printed from the Land Authority Office in Maseru. Apparently, the GPS hadn’t triangulated or something, and they determined that we were in a different place than we thought we were. They later realized that we ended up going down the wrong valley, going down one and having to cut over to the one we wanted. This added another few hours to our hike, to the chagrin of some people in our group, but to the indifference of others of us who just enjoyed the beautiful views of one of the most remote valleys in the country. We passed by many cattle posts, which are essentially crudely built stone and thatch shelters that herd boys stay in while they take their cows to the mountains to graze in the summer months. We were advised not to get too close to them because if there were dogs there but no herders, the dogs would just run after us until they caught us. Not an ideal situation. We spent the long day of walking playing “spot the herd boy” on the mountain side as they whistled to us, either saying hello or trying to herd us away from the dangerous posts. Sometimes they would come bounding down the side of the mountain to see what was up with this group of white people, and we obliged them by some courtesy greetings. If we engaged them, most asked for food, but we had to tell them that we didn’t have any extra food, as we were hiking a long way and needed what little we had for ourselves. At one point, we stopped to rest, and some herders and their dogs came and sat down with us. One of them had a puppy who adorably flopped down to rest against me, grateful for the giant patch of shade that my big backpack was providing.

                The afternoon progressed slower than we had wanted, due to people needing frequent breaks, but we trucked on. We made it to this insanely remote village, no road or anything leading to it, no tin or foreign materials to be seen anywhere. After this village, we came to a big river where we rolled up our pants and waded across a big river crossing. We had asked herd boys along the way if it was crossable by foot, and they had said yes. We saw several people crossing on horses too. A horse would have been nice, though, because the water was toe-numbing freezing and came up almost to my waist in places. We had to keep chugging on through the darkening night because we were so close to Motete. To the light of headlamps and a bit of moonlight, we finally arrived at Kyle and Chelsea’s house. We were all so tired, some of us a little irritable about the extra length from the wrong valley, but relieved to be off our feet. My feet felt like they had just gone through a week of touristing around a new city combined with a day at 6 flags, plus they were disgustingly dirty (thanks, mesh shoes). 

                Let me just say that their house is the most enormous rondaval I have ever seen. It’s like a circus tent. And Kyle has ingeniously installed a gravity shower with a bucket that can be filled with hot water, raised with a rope to the tippy point of the ceiling, and lets water out through a hose at the bottom. Brilliant. A little leaky, but brilliant.

                The next day, being sore and tired, we barely left the rondaval except to buy food (including 3 flats of eggs- that’s 90 eggs. And we ate them all.). We cooked and played Agricola for a good chunk of the day. For those of you who are not familiar with Agricola, it’s the most complicated board game I’ve ever played, where you have to build up a farm while figuring out how to feed your people. Going in turns around the table, you play and pick up different cards, and pick different action spaces where you can do things like build a fence, buy  a sheep, harvest your field, bake bread, upgrade your house, etc. You have to plan like 4 moves ahead. It was a great game, not to mention a fantastic time suck for our lazy day.

                The next day, our task was to wash clothes. Now, normally I abhor washing clothes. You have to wash everything by hand, obviously, it just takes forever, and I don’t think anything actually gets 100% clean (the way I wash, anyway. If I paid some ‘me in my village to wash my clothes, they would be sparkling, but they would also be in rags with all the scrubbing). The way Kyle and Chelsea wash their clothes is at the river, a short walk down the hill from their house. It was the most fun I’ve ever had washing clothes. I would definitely do it again. We had a really good system going, with one person scrubbing a piece of clothing in a bucket of suds, who would then toss it to the person standing at the rapids and rinse it out in the current, and that person would toss it to the person standing at the rocks who laid the clothes out to dry a little bit. We tried to keep the suds in the buckets and poured out the soapy water in the grass so that we would get as little soap as possible in the river.

                Due to anger at the whole situation, feeling ill, and feeling obligated to stay with the person feeling ill, we lost three members of our posse the next morning. They took off on the taxi the next morning. The rest of us 5 decided to take another rest day at the village because it was supposed to rain or something. We spent the day attempting to catch fish, swimming/wading in the swimming hole, and making an awesome stew of potatoes, onions, carrots, chakalaka (spicy canned vegetables), and Russians (hot dogs). Nommm. 

                After three days at Kyle and Chelsea’s house, the next day we woke up at the butt crack of dawn to hike to Afriski. Afriski is a really nice ski resort, the only one in Lesotho. As you are probably an intelligent human, you can tell that Afriski is a combination of the words Africa and Ski, hence pronounced “Afra-ski.” One in our group didn’t quite make that connection at first and thought it was called “A-frisky.” The rest of us thought that was a much better pronunciation, so we all started calling it that. A frisky little ski resort. We walked along a dirt road for most of the morning, took off our shoes to wade across at least 5 river crossings, and reached a mine under construction. This area of the country has a lot of diamond mines, and you can see lots of places where people have done prospecting, with slabs of earth cut out of the mountain. It was after this mine that the road abruptly ended, and we continued on mountainside paths. We basically followed the river all the way up, following so many S-bends. It was cool, though, because every time we came across another bend, there would be a new view with a beautiful cascade or rugged cliffs with caves. TLC would not have approved of our hike, because we were certainly chasing many waterfalls. As soon as we caught sight of one of the Afriski buildings, we forgot our tiredness and just booked it up there. We sloshed through a soggy meadow on the final stretch and ogled at the view, just barely being able to see a mountain we had been on just a few days before.

                The resort was really nice, full of Afrikaners and other white people. It was so weird. I stared at them like Basotho stare at me. Now I understood. We paid M115 each for a bed in the backpacker’s hostel. Each room was made out of a shipping container- pretty cool construction. We all took suuuuper long hot showers, reveling in the unlimited stream of steamy water, and then headed to dinner at the Afriski restaurant, the highest altitude restaurant in Africa. We woke up to frozen puddles and everything covered in frost. Elevation will do that. We said goodbye to Kyle and Chelsea as they headed back to their village down the path we had come up on. That left me, Lee, and John Lee. We were told it would be pretty easy to hitch back to the camptown from the road, as lots of people drove on this stretch of road. I ended up convincing this old Italian man to give us a ride (“Where are you headed?” I asked. “First, hello,” he replied. Oops. This happens to me way too often. You’d think I would have learned that most cultures value greetings. You’d think.). He was actually headed the other way, but he was like “OK, it’s a holiday.” And took us to the Butha Buthe camptown like an hour away. He had been living in Africa for many years and was working on the roads up here. He was pretty bitter about life, thought his kids were wimps, and preferred Putin to Obama. But it was a free and fast ride in a nice truck. Then from Butha Buthe we got a ride from a young mom with a baby in the back seat to Hlotse. We picked up that stuff we had dropped off (remember that? Yeah.) at the one volunteer’s house in town and then found a ride with a very interesting professor from the University of Lesotho. He was probably the most intelligent and reasonable Mosotho I’d ever encountered. John Lee got off to go to his site, so then it was just Lee and me, the usual partners in crime, riding with him to Maseru. We taxied to Mohale’s Hoek, then got shoved of that taxi and got put on a different one, which happened to have a bunch of PCVs on it, heading back from Durban for their vacation. What are the chances? 

                Phew! I finally made it back to my site the next day, exhausted and ready to go back to school. Congratulations. You’ve made it through the (long) story of training and Easter break hiking, easily the best hike I’ve ever done, hopefully one of many more in the mountain kingdom.

A shout out to my mom

on this Mother's Day. Many moons ago, she hauled me around inside of her for the better part of a year, let a doctor slice her open and remove me, taught me how to do everything tiny humans are supposed to do, tolerated my whining, dedicatedly cheered me on at every gymnastics meet, took me everywhere I needed to go for my many activities (until I got my license and enthusiastically stepped aside to let me drive myself to diving practice at 5:30am), and then not so enthusiastically stepped aside as I left for college, and then for Lesotho. You eventually stopped crying. So thanks, Mom, for being my source of advice and venting when I call you from my rondaval, offering to send me anything I might ever need, promising to be my world traveler adventure buddy again, and showing your love in many other ways.

Small thoughts 7

I may or may not be becoming dependent on mayonnaise.

Taxi names: cannibal, paradise, alpha, blackberry, Ben 5, Ben 10, navigator, destination warrior, apologize, bobo, legacy, president, mummy boy, come closer

Bus company name: Ghetto Tours

Ke parle français hanyanito

Other teacher to me: "your hair is silky, hakir? You just wash, dry, and you don't fear the comb, like I do. You can even run your hand backward through it and destroy the style and it still looks ok."

This old woman hassles me for the taxi's window seat because she gets hot, she tells me. Fine. A respecting-elders sort of person, I swap with her. She has proceeded to keep the window only barely cracked the whole time while I'm over here roasting. Maybe next time you can just take off your sweater-blanket combo in this 80 degree weather and let me have the window.

Today marks 6 months in Lesotho. Whaaattt?

I am actually eating something (mustard greens maybe?) I grew from seed to food in my own garden. This is so cool. 

My worst fear used to be being locked in a steam room. It is now dropping my diva cup down my latrine. Ain't no way that thing's coming back out of that sewer pit. This is closely followed by the fear that my gas will run out mid-cooking session, especially if I'm making something fancy on the weekend. 

How many episodes of Boy Meets World have I watched today?

I realized I'm going a bit stir crazy when the thought "there's nothing more fun than burning trash" ran through my head this morning.

Omg the bigger of the two shops in my village actually had yogurt and eggs and honey flavored lesheleshele. It's food Xmas at the Sushi House. 

Leaving school after I'm done teaching as opposed to waiting in the staff room and doing nothing until the end of the school day probably accounts for like 80% of my gross daily happiness. 

If all else fails, at least I will have left this country being able to tell the difference between different animals' poo. 

In life skills class-

Me: "Why do you think the government set a legal drinking age at 18 years old?"

...Crickets...

Form C boy: "Because if you are younger than 18, you have no money to buy alcohol."

That was the only reason the class could think of on their own.

I'm at my school's choir concert, watching the kids who were forced to attend escape out the back door, but I'm not stopping them because I want to do the same thing. 

My search history is so weird. Thanks, life skills. 

It go pretty cold, so today I'm chasing a square of sun coming through my window, scooting myself across the floor to stay in its warmth. 

More taxi names: Shhh!, Exploitation, Whatz up, Baby Bo, Taliban, Rock My Soul, Gladiator, Untraceable, Lion King, Le Coq Sportif, Anaconda, Motivation, Famo, Valentine, Never Give Up

For Basotho, the world is their trash can. I just saw a lady open the taxi window and chuck out a plastic bag with a styrofoam container. The chicken bones in that container might decompose some time soon, but that other stuff won't.

Taxis are for suckers. Mine just got a flat. I knew I should have hitched.

This guy in the shop was trying to talk to me, but he was speaking bontate, aka mumbling and being generally incoherent. I told him I didn't understand, and he ran to the back of the store and showed me a bottle of lotion called "girl friend". Oh that's what you were sputtering about. I told him I refuse and that he was crazy, and that my name wasn't "'Me Lakhooa." The guy bagging my food was impressed at my ability to make this guy go away with my Sesotho skillz. 

The song "tax man" by the Beatles makes me think of old timey superhero theme songs. Tax Man, protecting the streets from offshore accounts?

The peanut butter I got tastes stale. Maybe that'll prevent the temptation to eat the whole 1kg tub in one sitting. 

Traveling all day in taxis. It's so taxing. I'm so punny.