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