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.
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| Arrival after 20+ hour travel time |
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| 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.
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| The house I'm being hosted in during training |
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| 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.
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| 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:
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| One side of my room |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Visitors are common, including the uninvited |
