"Objectified," a blog post by my friend Aline

https://alineinlesotho.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/objectified/

Aline perfectly captures the issue of Basotho men objectifying women here. The kind of things she experiences are enough to make her not want to leave her house sometimes. Although I get annoyed at the fact that I am occasionally mistaken for a man, a lot of times I am thankful for it. Sometimes when I'm in town, not in the mood with dealing with men's BS, I put on my herdboy hat in hopes that I will be mistaken on purpose, just to avoid the kinds of comments and conversations she's talking about. That being said, I fully admit to being very lucky that I can do that. Others can't exactly cover up their female-ness so easily, and the struggle, as they say, is real. Props to Aline for staying strong and enlightening others about the fact that this normalized behavior is unacceptable. 

"What's in a name?" A blog post about Basotho names by Katie

My friend Katie posted a great blog post about the intriguing culture of names in Lesotho. Check it out!

http://wanderlustkrizzo.blogspot.com/2016/08/whats-in-name.html

"Kenya's Unique Approach to Rape Prevention" article

Having just taught a self-defense course to my high school girls and at a girls' leadership camp, I know the empowering effects of assertiveness and self-defense training. However, this is only a minor part of the problem. Hopefully programs like this, that teach boys not to assault and harass women and how to intervene, will be rolling out in more places.

http://www.upworthy.com/kenyas-unique-approach-to-rape-prevention-should-have-the-rest-of-the-world-taking-note

June/July break 2016: Maputo, Mozambique

                We had opted to fly to Maputo instead of take the Intercape bus. Though it was more expensive, we figured it would be worth it for the time saved. The flight on LAM Mozambique was quick, but they still fed us sandwiches and juice. Jen said it felt like flying in the 90s, with plenty of leg room, good food, etc. After landing at Maputo airport, we got the obligatory new-country sim cards and airtime, and called our hostel Fatima’s to come pick us up. Fatima’s backpacker’s is pretty cool: colorful, muraled walls, upstairs areas and other lounge areas to chill, etc. I could have done without the three Justin Bieber songs on loop, though. We had heard of this famed fish market, so we took a taxi (300 Meticais/75 rand! So much! Why are all taxis outside of Lesotho so expensive?) to this fish market, where we just put our heads down and marched through lots of dudes trying to get us to go to their restaurant stalls. We couldn’t handle it (harassment in Lesotho seemed so mild now that I was experiencing it elsewhere), and we just walked out the other side of the restaurant area, popping out at the beach behind it. I did my obligatory touch-the-ocean and watched some fishing guys with their colorful boats bobbing in the surf.

We decided to walk down the sidewalk parallel to the beach for almost an hour as we looked for whatever else could possibly be the fish market. Rows and rows of restaurants were not exactly a market, so we thought it was somewhere else close by. The only thing we saw was people grilling whole chickens on braai stands made of half-barrels, next to displays of drinks for sale: cokes, beers, wines, anything you could think of, just on the side of the sidewalk. 

Then we turned and went back to the harassey restaurant place, realizing that this place was actually the fish market. Literally right where we had been dropped off, had we turned right instead of turning left and putting the blinders up, we would have found the seafood for sale. Inside, the clams were spouting water, and there were many piles of other fish, squid, prawns, and lobsters. We went back and braved the restaurant area, just plopping down at a random table, and way overpaid for squid, prawns, and fries, while hawkers tried to sell us the same old crap over and over and wouldn’t leave us alone. Overall, it wasn’t a great experience. We both agreed it had been a very weird day.

Back at Fatima’s, we sat and talked with a Finnish girl and a Slovakian guy named Matus (who, unknown to us at the time, would soon become our best vacation friend ever). I went to bed fairly early, as we had to be ready to go at 4:45 for our 5am bus pick-up the next morning to go to Tofo.

June/July break 2016: Pretoria, South Africa

          Ever since last year, in order to go to Mozambique, you need to get a visa ahead of time. In South Africa, you can go to the Mozambique embassy in Pretoria to get it, so off we went. After a 4 or 5 hour taxi ride from Ficksburg, we arrived at the Pretoria rank. After getting new sim cards and airtime in the mini-mall next to the rank, we inquired about taxis to take us to our guest house. We learned that a taxi would have cost R70 (an insane sum compared to R6.50 for Lesotho’s 4+1 taxis), so we decided to walk down the street and catch a passing kombi (minibus taxi). But that didn’t happen, so we just ended up walking the few km to the guest house. Compared to walking around Joburg, Pretoria seemed much nicer looking, and had lots of parks and things. We arrived at Pretoria Backpackers (highly recommended) in a really pretty neighborhood. They had two huge dogs, a pool (we almost felt like jumping in after that long walk, despite it being the middle of winter), and…wait for it…A TRAMPOLINE! Many back tucks were had and it was enough to soothe my gymnastics-less soul. For some reason, that night they had accidentally overbooked, so they drove us to a nearby guest house, which was quite comfy. We walked to Woolworth’s Food, a swanky grocery store, where we bought nacho ingredients, then made amazing nachos that nearly brought tears to my eyes. I had definitely gotten my share (but not necessarily my fill) of Mexican food, what with having tacos two nights in Lesotho.

                The next day, Jen and I brought our stuff back to Pretoria Backpackers where we ate breakfast, and the husband/owner François drove us (in their huge sprinter) to the Mozambique embassy. The security guard filled us in on a place around the corner where we could get passport photos taken. Then we came back, filled in the application, and gave the lady proof of our flights and hotel reservations. We then had to go to an FNB bank a few blocks down to deposit R750 each into their account. The lady said that we should come back the next afternoon to pick up our passports with the visas inside.

                We then walked to a music store where Jen bought a ukulele (a favorite instrument among Lesotho PCVs), then went back to the guest house and we played with it. And by “we played with it,” I actually mean that I commandeered it and plucked out a few tunes. Then the wife/owner came over and talked to us about what we could go see nearby in the city. She convinced us that we should go to the Union Buildings and the giant Mandela statue in the surrounding gardens. We arrived walking between the rows of jacaranda trees to the Union building, which was a huge, sandstone government building presiding over terraced garden, where a giant Madiba (Nelson Mandela) outstretched his arms, watching over the “good people” of the city.

                On our way back, we stopped by Harry’s Pancakes for some kind of sweet potato-filled pancake wrap with yogurt sauce. Then, we got an Uber (Uber actually exists here in civilization) ride to Capital Craft, a restaurant whose menu was full of pages and pages and pages of different beers, ciders, etc. I got one beer from Clarens (a city just north of Lesotho) with a hazelnut flavor. I sipped that alongside my ice cream- and berries-topped red velvet waffle. Drool. I was in sugar heaven. Another Uber back to the guest house, and Jen and I soon found ourselves taking advantage of the fastest wifi we had ever encountered in Southern Africa to take care of important business: catching up on Jimmy Fallon lip sync battles on YouTube. Very official stuff.

                We were in the middle of enjoying Ellen Degeneres and Emma Stone killing it when Husband and Wife Owners knocked on our door. They said that either the US Embassy or the PC had called to make sure we were ok among the violence/riots/car burnings/looting in the townships outside of Pretoria. There was outrage over the government dismissing a voted-for mayoral candidate who was supposed to crack down on corruption, and instead planning to install some other guy to maintain the corrupt status quo. Yeah, we were fine, safe in the fancy part of town, but it was weird to be so close to so much violence.

                The next day after breakfast, the wife took us to Brooklyn Mall because she happened to be going there, and we needed to kill some time before picking up our visas. We just farted around for a few hours, getting a new charger for Jen’s computer at the Apple store, enjoying Mugg and Bean (an awesome restaurant), and then practically crying over finding Pop Tarts, Reese’s cups, peanut butter Oreos, and Dr. Pepper at a candy store. Then, the son of the guest hosue owners showed up in the huge sprinter and drove us to the Mozambique embassy where we picked up our visas. Quick and easy. Then, he was super nice and even drove us to the Gautrain (pronounced like a phlegmy “KHAO-train”) station. They didn’t want us to take taxis or even go to the rank for fear that it might be too dangerous amid the riots. R70 later, we had our shiny new Gautrain cards and enough to get us to Johannesburg Park Station. It had been about two years since I rode any kind of train, and it was cool to look out the window as Pretoria slowly turned into Joburg. We called Brown Sugar, the hostel in Joburg we were staying at, for their free pick up, and soon enough we were on the way to the hostel. We dropped our bags at the dorm upstairs and walked to China town for my obligatory bubble tea fix. Jen got some spring rolls to go (“take away” here) and we walked back as it started to get dark. We happily sat in our bunk beds eating, then fell asleep, only to soon be woken up by a crying girl and some guy trying to console her. Jen later told me that the guy was trying to make her feel better for whatever this other guy, her traveling companion, had said or done, and he was just cursing the entire male race, trying to get her to stop crying.  I only heard muffled blurbs of this middle-of-the-night sob fest, but it was still really obnoxious. Earplugs for the win.

                At 6am, we got another Uber to the airport to fly to Maputo, Mozambique. As you will soon see, sleeping was not one of the main themes of this vacation.

June/July break 2016: Mohale’s Hoek, Lesotho

                This post will start a series of posts about my vacation for winter break in June/July that took me from Mohale’s Hoek to Pretoria to Southern Mozambique to Northern Mozambique to panic at the border to Malawi and back through South Africa to Lesotho. There’s some good stuff in here. Plot twists at every turn. Stay tuned.

                One of the Healthy Youth volunteers (I’ll just call him HY) in Mohale’s Hoek was COSing (close of service…ing) and planned a huge party, so I left my site in time to go up there a day early for the pig and sheep slaughtering. No party is complete without a braai (BBQ) and tons of nama (meat). From Quthing, I got a hitch with a very fashionable ‘me who was looking for people to pick up so she wouldn’t be bored on her drive. She dropped me off in Mohale’s Hoek and I walked to HY’s house. I arrived to find a bunch of his students from the vocational school and some other bo-ntate who had just finished slaughtering the sheep. I got there just in time to watch the pig go down, though. They wrestled it down, wrapped a rope around its snout so it wouldn’t scream (too much), then they very matter-of-factly got to work sawing at its neck. It was alive for so long, kicking and trying to breathe but just gargling through its blood-flooded windpipe (you’re welcome for those details, faithful readers). Then, after they got the head fully off, they poured paraffin all over the body and burned the hair off, scraping it down with a shovel. Then, they washed off the burnt stuff and shaved it with razors. Then, they put it on its back, cut the stomach skin off, and got to work on the organs. It was all super interesting to watch. HY looked pretty squeamish at first, but he ended up helping cut out the organs. The previously-slaughtered sheep’s organs had been stewing for a while at this point, and they were ready to eat. We all grabbed some papa and handfuls of stomach/intestine/liver stew. Not half bad. The macaroni-like intestine “noodles” were my favorite. Some of the men filled up cups with the leftover broth to drink, but HY and I found it more gag-inducing than drinkable, so we passed on that.

 Stewing the innards

 De-furing the pig

Organs out

                The next day, another Healthy Youth volunteer who had arrived at HY’s house and I climbed this big rock formation called Castle Rock, where you got a great view of the whole town. Then we walked into town, passing through the combination pizza hut and taco bell pitso (meeting) field and overgrown-with-weeds horse track. There were zillions of people lining up there. Someone said they saw a helicopter land there earlier too. I asked some of them what they were waiting for, and they answered that they were in line to get their name in some lottery to get a public works job for a week. The desperation for jobs is so high that people will wait all day to get into a work lottery where their chances are less than miniscule, and only have that job for a week. So that’s the situation in this country…

                It’s at this point in our story where everything kind of spirals into the abyss. In short, HY was not having a good day. Just that morning, he had to go to the hospital in town after getting a bad infection on his leg that wasn’t getting better. To literally add insult to injury, as two other volunteers and I were at the hotel, HY notifies us on whatsapp that he got into some kind of fight with a supervisor at the vocational school he taught at, the guy called PC and said god knows what, and HY was notified by PC security that he would be picked up that day to be taken to Maseru for his safety. This, the day before his big party that he had spent lots of money on and had been planning for weeks. I really wonder what this dude told PC. Must have been something between “I’m mildly annoyed with your volunteer” and “Your volunteer is a dead man.” We will never know. But we all kept up hope that he would be able to return the next day for his party.

                The next day, the three of us (2 new Healthy Youths, plus me, minus HY) finished up cheesy chicken taco leftovers from the night before, then we went back into town. HY informed us that he wouldn’t be coming back for another 4 days, “staying safe” in Maseru, whatever that meant. This was another case of PC being too big and too centralized, as Lesotho staff (and even the guy he chewed out) said he was ok to come back to his site, but DC/Headquarters staff said no. This is just PC covering their butts again, like with Lea, like with all the other bull honkey that’s gone down recently. Every time another snafu like this happens, it confirms that I made the right choice to leave PC. So, the point is, he wouldn’t be attending his own party, which really sucks for him and everyone hoping to see him and wish him well.

                We somberly walked over to the venue, where we found some of HY’s coworkers and some other PCVs playing corn hole (for you non-mid-westerners like me who needed an explanation, corn hole is a game where you throw bean bags at an elevated/angled board with a hole in it) and chilling in the grass. The afternoon/night was full of many games, braai-ing of the meat I watched get slaughtered, a DJ and dancing, a repeat performance of my Thanksgiving rap with Jeff, and just the general kind of silliness that ensues when a bunch of us get together.

 Pat and Joni

The art of the man bun 

 Lovely!

Jen and me 

Kali the babushka

                The next day, we introduced all the non-Mohale’s Hoekers to the wonder that is the chicken basket, then I got Jen and we got the weirdest hitch to Maseru. It was with an Indian guy who was really hard to figure out. He was talking about how he loved to travel, and how awesome his life is, and how he didn’t work, but we later realized that he actually owned a bunch of shops in Lesotho. Yeah, that counts as work. Then he started spouting all this crazy stuff (prefacing his statements with, “People think I’m crazy, but…” Yeah, dude, you are crazy, and saying something like that doesn’t lend any credibility to what you’re about to say.) like how no one goes to bed hungry in Africa, how Lesotho lies right over an enormous patch of natural gas and uranium that they’re just keeping secret, and then the biggest load of steaming horse excrement I had ever heard, about how the Chinese are taking over business wise (which is true), but he went on to say that all the Chinese shop owners are really soldiers, and that they’re injecting that Basotho population with HIV in order to weaken them so that they can take over. Based on his questions after he learned I taught about HIV, it was clear he didn’t even know how HIV worked, but was convinced that the downfall of the entire continent was pre-planned by the Chinese. He looked at my concerned/confused facial expression, saying, “Don’t stress, don’t worry. But in 4 to 5 years, it’s gonna be all over. They’re taking over. But for now, don’t worry.” How am I supposed to react to this? I straight up told him that I, too, thought he was crazy.

From Maseru, we got some other hitches north to Maputsoe to our bud Catie’s house, where she was awesome and fed us tacos and stovetop-baked cookies. After crashing on her floor for the night, we got a taxi to the border gate and got on a taxi to Pretoria, our next destination in the Great Sleepless Adventure that would be our vacation to Mozambique.             

Corn hole 

 Beautiful Jen

 Jim and Patricia

 Nick and me

 Edward and Jody

   Austin:" Throw it away, forget yesterday, we made the greeeeaaattt escaaaapppe.”

15 June 2016: School’s out

                The first semester is officially over! I am happy about that, but not so happy about how my students did on their exams. For the form Cs, I gave them a full JC (junior certificate, the form C exit exam to move on to the last 2 years of high school) test, composed of 2 question papers, a short-answer paper covering more topics, and a longer-answer paper going more in depth with fewer questions. After I graded those tests, only 4 of my 16 students passed, meaning that they got 40% or above. Several more were pretty close to passing, but the majority weren’t even close. It’s just frustrating because I know they could do better if the questions were in Sesotho, or classes weren’t frequently cancelled for little to no reason. Paper 2 was two and a half hours and 18 pages long. Some of them just got so bored and tired of writing the test that they just gave up. I could tell that some of them were getting really frustrated when they realized that, after only an hour, they realized how much more of the test they still had to complete. I recorded their grades and one-line teacher comments on their semester reports, said bye to the students, and got out of there. I was so tired of marking and writing the reports and just ready to be done that I completely forgot about going to the orphanage to tutor English. Oops.

                Ever since I came back from Bushfire, I’ve been feeling some sickness coming on, then earlier this week, it hit me hard. I had a sore throat, headache, fever, cough, the world. Except for going to school to give these exams, I’ve just been hibernating for a week, which is murder on my body, with my joints getting achy because I’m not using them. It was also the first time that I felt like I did last winter, just bone cold, standing over the stove and burning trash just to get warm.

                PC rant (once again): What I’m not so pumped about is that a PCV from my group, who just returned to the country after being medically evacuated to the US and moved to my district, is having (different) medical problems, and PC is making him get medically evacuated again, and will separate him (kick him out of PC) if he refuses treatment. What madness is this? The story is obviously a little more complicated, but there are some perfectly sane alternative options that they are refusing to consider, and they’re just making him jump through all these hoops. It’s ridiculous how inhumane this too-big organization acts sometimes. I understand that they have regulations in place for reasons of protecting their reputation and answering to Congress so they can get their funding. But when those regulations make peoples’ lives way more complicated than they need to be, or cause undue extra hardship to people when another solution is much more practical, that’s when you need to decentralize a little bit. Or a lot.

10 June 2016: Nearing the end of the first semester

                After I got back from Bushfire, my school started giving exams. So far, I’ve given two out of three. I gave the form B exam and paper 1 for form C. I have a gap of a few days where I’m not giving exams, so I decided to leave my village for a few days to get some business done, as well as do some grocery shopping, and of course meet up with the usual suspects. Paper 2 will have to wait until after I get back, then I just have to grade it, then I’m done done done with the semester.

                On Tuesday, I gave the form Cs their paper 1, then after school I stayed late to copy paper 2 so it would be ready for next Monday when I would be back at school. I graded like a fiend that night and put all the scores in my computer, then early Wednesday morning, I dropped them off in the deserted form C classroom, then caught the taxi to Quthing as it came down the road. I stopped at the immigration office in Upper Moyeni to get my residence stamp transferred into my new passport. Good, now I won’t have to carry around 2 passports anymore. I decided to grab some enormous makoenyas [fried bread balls] and a banana from the ladies who set up shop outside, who called me ntate (thanks, herdboy hat). My new kick is making makoenya sandwiches. I’ll rip open the little bread ball and stuff in whatever is convenient- a piece of banana, Russian (sausage), cheese, whatever. It’s all delicious.

                After stopping at the hotel down the hill to attempt to upload photos using the non-functioning wifi, I headed north from town to get a hitch to Mohale’s Hoek. I got a ride with some oil delivery guy who picked me up a few months before. I didn’t even flag him down. I was walking along a curve, and I thought it unwise to try to stop cars there, but he stopped anyway because he recognized me and stopped. Cool beans! I love it when stuff like that happens. I got into Mohale’s Hoek and finished uploading my stellar Bushfire photos with their hotel’s actually-functioning wifi while I hung out with Jen and Taylor at the hotel’s public bar (as opposed to their private bar, which is only open to hotel guests I guess, and is much more expensive). I ventured out with Taylor to this quite unreliable tshirt shop to find him a Mohale’s Hoek-themed shirt to bring back to the US with him. He successfully bought one saying Mzuku, which was the original name for Mohale’s Hoek. After a cringe-worthy, but very necessary, shower with only a trickle of glacial water, Jen and I headed back to her village. On the taxi, the dude in front of us wouldn’t stop just staring at us, and the guy next to Jen thought I was a 16 year old boy. Cool. Thanks again, herdboy hat.

                The next morning, I went with Jen to her school. I watched her Standard 7 in her Life Skills class give presentations on their “findings” of a survey they gave to people in their respective villages about HIV. I have heard legends, but I witnessed first-hand how difficult it is to communicate with primary students in English. Jen had to speak super slowly, and her box talk game is strong. She says she especially struggles to communicate with the grade 4s. I can’t imagine. I don’t think I could keep any shred of sanity if I taught at a primary school. When the students greeted us, it was so robotic. “How are you?” Jen would ask. “WE-ARE-VERY-FINE-THANK-YOU-HOW-ARE-YOU-TEACHER.” they’d respond. Jeez.

                After those presentations, we escaped (to the disappointment of her teachers, even though she literally had nothing else to do at school, since they had already given exams and this life skills class was the only thing she taught all day) into town for some chicken baskets and groceries. I also had a little incident where I sliced my hand with a pocket knife whose tip snapped off and the knife went diving into my thumb while trying to pry open Jen’s broken computer charger. Thankfully, I was able to wrap it up pretty fast, but let this be a warning that this is what happens when you try to do jungle surgery on electronics.

We returned and met Cassie on the road, and Jen made some awesome black bean and cheese empanadas for all of us. I’ve gotta get more creative with my cooking! I have the same 4 meals of lentils/rice/soya mince/eggs with whatever vegetables I have (mainly onions) on repeat. Boring. The good news is that now that it’s orange season, I’m absolutely stuffing myself with the things. I probably won’t get scurvy after all…