Livin' the Basotho Lifestyle

The Christmas season sure has a different atmosphere when you’re wearing shorts and a t-shirt. And “White Christmas” doesn’t have quite the same ring it with sweat dripping down your face. Anyway, I’m sure many of you are curious exactly what rural life in Lesotho is like, so let’s talk about a few of the aspects that make up the Basotho (people of Lesotho) lifestyle.

Diet

The typical diet among the Basotho is quite simple. For breakfast, Basotho often eat bread or a porridge called lesheleshele (always fun to pronounce). An extremely common meal that can be eaten for lunch and dinner consists of papa (cornmeal) and moroho (microscopically chopped leafy greens). Papa can be white or yellow depending on the corn used, and looks somewhat similar to hardened mashed potatoes, but it lacks much taste. This is because it is meant to be eaten with other things like moroho, which is usually heavily salted and seasoned to complement the papa. Basotho eat this meal with their hands, using the papa as a spoon to scoop up other food on the plate. I have yet to become capable with this method of eating, and all of my previous attempts have resulted in laughter from my host family.

Lesheleshele (and Corn Flakes)

Papa (yellow), moroho (green), and veggie/egg mix

In rural areas, meat, especially beef, is consumed infrequently and usually eaten for special occasions due to lack of refrigeration. However, chicken is the one of the more common meats available. And fresh chicken, boy, is it delicious! My host grandparents who lived next door gave me a live chicken as a gift. My host mother did the honor of slaughtering the chicken (details I will exclude), and I helped feather the chicken after it was placed in boiling water to loosen the feathers. After my host mother did her magic with cooking the gift, we gorged on literally every part of the chicken that was edible. I passed on the head and feet, but I definitely ate many parts of the chicken I had never encountered before, namely some organs. Watching my little host brother gnawing vigorously on a chicken foot protruding from his mouth was quite amusing. Needless to say, no meat was left behind that day.

In the nearby camp towns, however, I can purchase a large variety of foods like rice, canned foods, and an array of fruits and vegetables. Refrigerated food like cheese and meat are also available if I’m feeling spoiled.

Laundry

Laundry. Oh, laundry. This chore truly makes you appreciate the invention of the washing machine. So here, the whole process of laundering clothes is performed by hand. It’s very straightforward but it uses up a lot of water, time, and energy. After filling three basins with water, the first basin is filled with powdered detergent. This is where most of the exhausting work is done as you scrub every part of the clothing article against itself and become satisfied with the amount of dirt you just extracted (it can get very dusty here). When finished with this step, you wring out the soapy water out from the cloth and toss it into the second basin which is full of clean water. Basically, now you try to remove as much soap from fabric as you can by soaking it in the water then squeezing it out repeatedly. The third basin serves the same purpose and you wring out the last remains of soap (some Basotho exclude this step). Now it’s time to dry!

Having a blast

Drying is performed the old fashioned way with a clothesline and clips. The sun is your best friend. Having clothes still wet by evening means you’ll have to take the clothes down and put them back up the next day. As weird as it sounds, on sunny days I might find myself thinking, “Great day for laundry,” before remembering how much I dislike it. You also have to keep a sharp eye on the weather. Obviously, rain is counterproductive to what you want so that warrants an exodus of damp clothes from the line. Excessive wind and dust are also your enemies. I often forgot that I had clothes still on the line whenever such conditions presented themselves. Luckily, my host mother during training was always aware. Her Basotho sense would be tingling whenever an ominous cloud approached, so my clothes haven’t suffered any abandonment. As I am writing about this, my laundry bag continues to grow in size…

Fruits of labor

Trash to ash (we burn our trash)

Outlet towers we built whenever the electricity generator was available

End of Training

So after a roller coaster training period of 10 weeks, we finally shed our label of “Trainee” and were officially sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers last week. The ceremony was held in our training village, so many delighted, familiar faces were present. The U.S. Ambassador for Lesotho, who also served in the Peace Corps, swore us in, and the Basotho danced and sang for us. Apparently, we our swearing-in ceremony was televised on national television, which really shows the appreciation this country has its long ties with Peace Corps, whose roots have been established in Lesotho since 1967. We said our goodbyes with our training host families and exchanged hugs before departing the following morning. For me, parting with my host family was difficult because of the close relationship we had built over the past few months, but I’m comforted by the fact that we will be able to visit each other.

We made it!

Now, I’m in my site that I will remain in for the rest of my service. Moving in was a bit of an adventure; I swear I’ve never killed so many spiders in my life, which I think helped relieve my fear of them just slightly. I’m still in the process of being able to feel “at home” and am trying to personalize the place. Because school is on break and I live by the school, things have been very quiet. It appears it will remain peaceful until school resumes near the end of January and I begin my teaching escapades. For now, I’ll patiently work on integrating into my new village, the place where I will eventually call home.

My new school in hibernation mode

Tracing My Footsteps

Here I am, after surviving the blazing Arizona summer to cross the equator and enjoy a second serving of summer.

After wanting to start a blog for a while now, I’ve finally rooted in my first post a month and a half after arriving in Lesotho. There are so many observations and miscellaneous things that I want to talk about, but I’ll try to keep it concise in order to avoid exhausting the reader. Because of the belated start of this blog, some details may be missing, but I have the opportunity to look back at my experience so far holistically. From my initial interest in joining the Peace Corps in February, to Googling the country of Lesotho to find out where the heck it is after being nominated to it, and to the excitement of being invited to serve in Lesotho, the process of me setting foot in Africa took a span of about 7 and a half months. However, this was done under the old, slower application process, so you can shave off a few months now.

Arrival after 20+ hour travel time

Welcoming celebration from the training village women

Support from friends and family have been extremely encouraging prior to my departure, and helped me to solidify my decision. I have also been able to learn more about people close to me and even strangers based on their input regarding my decision, especially with respect to outlooks on life and long term goals. So even before leaving, new avenues of conversation and knowledge became visible.

To briefly explain my current situation, Peace Corps volunteers go through two and a half months of training in order to learn as much as we can about the language (Sesotho), culture, safety, how to survive here, and, importantly, how to teach in this foreign education system. All the new volunteers are huddled in a training village lacking electricity and running water in order to condition us to the rural life many of us will have at our sites after training. After completing training, we are dispersed to our sites throughout the country for the next two years.

The house I'm being hosted in during training

Toilet/latrine which is a seat over a large hole

So we each live with a host family, who have been teaching us the ways of the Basotho (people of Lesotho) lifestyle, including how to bucket bathe, how to cook Basotho food, and how to speak Sesotho. Needless to say, I adore my host family. They are probably the youngest host family in the village, so we can definitely relate more. In fact, I’m older than my host mother by one month (I found out a solid month after meeting her, to which my jaw dropped). I have a 3-year-old host brother who has really gotten comfortable in my presence. Initially, he would be found staring at me with his round eyes, unresponsive to any verbal communication, but now, he’s a jubilant ball of energy who enjoys playing with me. My host father is very laid-back and easy to talk to, and he enjoys teaching me things such as Sesotho, gardening, and taking care of animals. An important detail is that my host parents speak English very well, so we can converse with only a few speed bumps due to the language barrier.

Host family!

The transition to living without first world amenities was surprisingly smooth. The most difficult aspect to get used to was the lack of running water, where, instead, villagers have to fetch water from water taps (usually with the assistance of donkeys and cows) and scoop water out of buckets to use. Though this makes tasks more time consuming, I can really tell I’m using just a tiny fraction of water compared to what I used in the States. Electricity, on the other hand, is much easier to work around. You can simply use minimal electronics, or use alternative methods of charging like solar power. Phone and 3G data work country-wide and each camp towns has at least one internet café, so you can’t completely escape the reach of the Cloud. For lighting, Basotho use kerosene lanterns and candles, but once darkness falls, the country falls asleep at around 8 PM.

I’m constantly reminded I’m in Lesotho every morning at around 5 AM when the roosters chant their cock-a-doodle-doos. After stepping outside the house, you can find donkeys, horses, and cows (herded by shepherds) roaming about. Each house usually owns a dog simply to act as security, and cats are used to catch rats. Essentially, each animal serves a practical function and the idea of owning pets in Lesotho is largely foreign. Consequently and understandably, animals aren’t looked at through the lenses of affection and companionship.

The room I’m staying in looks like this:

One side of my room

The other side

As you can see, everything is done in the room except toilet business, in which we do own a pee bucket for late night urges (also for pooping for extreme emergencies). The kitchen consists of two stoves that are gas powered, and bucket baths are just done in the middle of the room. I use water from the green buckets by the kitchen for bathing and cooking, and we use rain water collected in the green tank at the front of the house for washing clothes and dishes. So using water conservatively is incentivized by our limited amount of water as well as the effort needed to fetch water at the tap.

We’re a little more than halfway through the onslaught of information from training, and just last week, we all visited our respective sites we will be living in next month! I have been placed in the Leribe district, and I’ll be teaching mathematics at Fobane High School. My area is considered to be in the lowlands, so winters will (hopefully) be bearable for my desert-conditioned skin. My anxiety was relieved after visiting my future site, and I’m very satisfied with the placement. Though visiting for only four days might be too short for assessing my site, the people in the village were the defining quality of the visit.

My future home with door replaced

Looking back now, I think about one of my reasons for coming here in the first place: to learn more about myself through completely new experiences. Already I have experienced so many things, and I have high hopes for the sights and emotions that I’ll experience in the days and months to come. There are so many details that I haven't mentioned, but I figured I should at least get a blog started and provide a little insight into my life in Lesotho. 

Visitors are common, including the uninvited