15 January 2016: Meetup with the duQlings

Earlier this week, I escaped my village to meet up with Hanna and Melinda, the new PCVs in Quthing district, whom I refer to fondly as the duQlings. After a few days in Quthing town, I can see myself not having to be dependent on Mohale’s Hoek for pizza, friends, and wifi. In the morning, I took the taxi all the way up to Upper Moyeni where my first stop was the bank. I signed up for text alerts for my bank account [update: this never happened] and asked to get a PIN for online banking. They took my phone number and passport scan and said they’d get back to me when their machine that prints PINs is working again [update: this never happened either]. My next stop was the post office where I bought stamps for postcards. My third stop was at the Orange River Lodge to inquire about pizzas. Confirmed: the rumors are true- they do make pizzas there. Then I traipsed down the switchback road to drop my stuff at the hotel in Lower Moyeni where our relatively new VRC (volunteer resource center) is. I settled into a small couch, logged on to the wifi, and tinkered around with my 2 grants on PC’s grant website.

Then Hanna, and shortly Melinda, showed up, joining me on the couches for some good old fashioned human (maybe “American human” is a better description) contact, which they admitted was lacking in their villages. Ahhh I remembered first moving to site a year ago and how awfully boring it all was.

We soon 4+1ed it to the Orange River Lodge to get some long-awaited pizzas. We were met by an unusually stylish and energetic guy at the front desk with flawless English, who was quite excited to chat with us. There was some kind of agriculture conference at the hotel, so it was packed with people. Without fail, as we sat in the lobby waiting for our pizzas to be ready, every person who passed by at least said hi to us. In the US, would you go out of your way to have a conversation with three random strangers? Nope. But in Lesotho, when you see three white girls sitting there, apparently you do just that. After a long wait, we finally got our glorious pizzas, packed with more cheese and meat than I’d seen in quite a long time. After we ate, super stuffed, we headed back down to Lower Moyeni and did some grocery shopping, then got into Hanna’s taxi to her village, about 45 minutes from town. Her taxi driver was super cool, and we asked him where to find “Quthing, my natural habitat” shirts that we had seen several people wearing around town. On his way down the main road, he pulled off next to a tin shack, yelled some stuff out the window, then turned back to us saying that they’d have the shirts for us tomorrow. Ask and you shall receive!

On the way to Hanna’s, there was a drunk old man who was saying ridiculous things. At one point, when the sliding door wouldn’t open, he said (in English), very matter of factly, “we are going to die.” No we won’t, I thought. This van is packed with at least 12 bottles of soda and several huge, 300-count bags of what looked like old, stale biscuits. If we couldn’t climb out the sunroof, we could survive off this food for at least a few days before having to cannibalize other passengers. We arrived at Hanna’s house and we ate our leftover pizza as Melinda told us about her year living in New Zealand and her multiple trips to Nepal and Mount Everest base camp with her wilderness-rescue uncle.  Hanna, it turns out, has lived in Sweden almost her whole life (with one American parent and one Swedish parent), which was also very interesting to hear about. Hanna’s puppy Leli (short for lelinyane, which means any kind of baby animal) was super cute, tiny, hyper, and spoiled. We had fun playing with her as she squirmed around. The next morning, Melinda and I headed back to town. After getting some soft serve and hot makoenyas (fried bread balls), we taxied to Mount Moorosi. There, we parted ways as she got on a taxi to her village and I got on a taxi to mine.

Even though there is a grand whopping total of 3 PCVs in the entire district (compare this with Mohale’s Hoek, which has at least 13), I think it’s a great little group. Here’s hoping for more fun meet-ups to come!