Lesotho Infinity And Beyond: 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.