My Impoverished Village isn’t so Poor

I have recently begun to see my village in a new light. Going on vacation, spending time with people who’ve never lived in a developing country (basically me nine months ago), made me realize how much Lesotho has changed me. I think Peace Corps changes everyone. Scott one of my friends back home, told me before I left that I could come back a different person, and the idea terrified me. Living in completely new place, with my surroundings changing drastically was not nearly as scary a thought as myself changing. But with one-third of my service done, I think it’s been very good for me. I’m not afraid of many things that I used to be, like spiders and poverty. I’m much more patient and stronger. Sometimes I worry that I’m becoming hard-hearted. People here live off the land and have very hard lives. They’ve become accustom to seeing people all around them die from AIDS. I have to let my students out early on Fridays because it’s funeral day. When I get upset with witnessing something cruel or tragic, it’s a comfort to know that I haven’t become numb to it.

Hauling water up a hill and walking up to seven miles a day aren’t easy, but the physical hardships are minor compared to the mental ones, adjusting to life in an entirely different culture and language. As with any culture there are inspiring and frustrating aspects. And often I get caught up on the frustrating ones. Like my lack of privacy, even when I’m at home. A friend recently visited me and commented on how much everyone smiles here. I had stopped noticing. Almost everyone I meet smiles and greets me, and I had stopped noticing how wonderful it is. When I first got here, I was happy that the Basotho are such a clean people. Lately I had become annoyed that I’m expected to keep everything so clean, while nothing remains clean for long. I just can’t bring myself to mop the floor every day. I happily did when I first arrived, I guess I’ve just become dirtier, like the Peace Corps stereotype.

Being in Lesotho has given me a new perspective. Many of the people here are happier than the average person back in the states. While they still often want material things that are beyond their reach, the culture is mostly based on community ties and socializing. When my parents visited in February, our car got stuck in the mud. Neighbors in that village, who I had never met before, took off their shoes, rolled up their pants and helped dig us out. (They don’t have toeing services in rural Lesotho – just neighbors). And when my roof needed rethatching before the rains started, a neighbor climbed on my roof and sewed new thatch on it for me. This social capital that makes up village life here, seems more valuable than any material capital we have back in the US. In a much more independently minded and materialistic America, I think we’ve lost something. It makes me nervous about going back home in a year and a half. I can now see why most volunteers have a hard time readjusting when they return home. That and I can’t seem to keep my shoes on in public places anymore.

Getting Away in Lesotho

My parents came to visit me in Lesotho a week ago. I tried to talk them into staying in my hut without electricity or running water with me, to see what my life was like. But when they heard I had bedbugs they decided the local five star lodge sounded a bit better. I go to the lodge for work twice a month, where I get internet access and to see my friends that work there. Even though I only go twice a month I have gotten close to many of the staff. It’s much easier to form close friendships when people can speak English and understand me. I am still learning Sesotho, but can’t have deep or meaningful conversations yet. My lodge days are always very happy days. But getting to be “a guest” while my parents were staying there was a real treat. I not only got to see my friends for four days straight, I also got to take long hot showers and eat maybe the most delicious food I’ve ever had. Maliba Lodge is only an hour walk from my village hut but the contrast between the two is very dramatic. Only five kilometers from my village and I had gotten completely away to a beautiful mountain sanctuary.

Getting Away

After eight months in Lesotho, having not left the tiny country except for a couple day trips to South Africa, I was more than ready for a vacation. Volunteers in Lesotho are in an unusual position of living in a developing country that is entirely surrounded by a developed country. And the contrast between Lesotho and South Africa can be pretty drastic. The Lesotho landscape is made up of small traditional thatched houses with small gardens and farming plots. There are animals, goats, cattle, chickens, wandering around the villages in search of green grass and grubs. Shortly after crossing the border to South Africa the landscape changes, it looks a lot more like America. There are large plantations with mechanized agriculture and concrete houses in rows in towns. In Lesotho small houses constantly dot the landscape. The areas I passed through in South Africa all had electricity, which is definitely not the case in Lesotho. But it also meant that the cooking fires and laundry lines drying clothes were missing. The public taxis were much newer, and with the stricter law enforcement, they were never over packed. We went to Durban, a large beach city. I was thrilled to eat out and take hot showers, two things I had really been missing in my village. There were beaches, a waterpark, shops, restaurants and bars, and for those four days I felt anonymous and America. We went to a huge mall, big even by American standards, and it was a bit overwhelming after living in a rural area for so long. I tried to imagine what it would be like for someone from my village to be in that mall. Most of them have never been in a mall of any kind, and it just felt worlds away. While it was a wonderful trip, and really great to get away, it did not feel like home, even though it felt much more American. My little village in Lesotho, while not always being an easy life has definitely become home.

Church with Capes and a Candle

I haven’t written in a while because schools are closed, so my work which had really started to get going, has mainly been put on hold until schools resume at the end of January. So most of my time now is taken up with gardening, reading and playing with neighbor kids, while it’s been a lot of fun, it’s not very interesting to write about. So I’ll talk about one of my stranger experiences that happened to me a couple of weeks after arriving to site.

The second Sunday after arriving in my village my host mom and her friend asked me to go to church with them. I thought it would be a great way to meet more of the community, so I agreed. I asked where it was and she pointed to the road beside an abandoned metal shack, which I took to meant that we would need to take a taxi to get there. It turns out that the metal shack, with one small boarded up window, was the church. My host mom and sister then got out capes (not cloak-like capes, but super-hero-style capes) and puffy chef hats with crosses on them, and put them on. It was pretty strange. My host mom said it was a “universalist” Christian church, which sounded pretty broad, probably with a wide scope of followers. But at the point when my host family put on their capes and puffy hats, I started to become skeptical.

When we entered the metal shack, the room was almost completely dark except for one candle in the middle of the dirt floor and many people standing along the walls singing and wearing the same capes and hats. It didn’t feel like any church I had ever been to. Once the singing started back up, someone from the crowd started running in circles around the candle, their cape flying behind them. They were joined by a couple of other people running around the candle. My experience just kept getting stranger and stranger.

For the two hours I was there almost everyone ran around the candle. The point seemed to be to get really dizzy and stumble back to your spot on the wall. A couple of times a person got so dizzy they fainted, which got the whole room really excited. The man that was wearing a special leopard cape and hat seemed to be in charge, and when someone fainted he would put his cape over their head and blow whistles in their ears until they were revived. One girl that was not revived by this was taken outside, while people continued to run in circles around the candle.

Sometimes they would splatter water around the candle. I believe this was symbolically asking for rain. And they once read from a book – I assume the Bible – in Sesotho. It was the only Christian tradition that I was familiar with that occurred while I was in the church. When I got too hot and tried from standing (and weirded out) I left with my host sister. The service, with everyone standing, singing and running around the candle lasted five hours. It felt much more like traditional African beliefs and religious practices, with a bit of Bible and Christianity thrown in. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it, although it did not bring rain for another month and a half. I want to go back, but it has taken several months for me to recover from my initial culture/church-shock to really want to go back. In a country that has lost so many of its cultural traditions to modernization it was encouraging to see some still thriving.

What a Week!

Many of the problems that I have had living at site for the past six and a half months, seemed to happen again within the past week and a half. I got bed bugs again, but much worse, my legs look like I got come kind of pox. They should be easy enough to get rid of once it stops raining for long enough that I can take all my bedding outside. About a month after getting to site I had stuff go missing from my house, mainly cash and cookies, but I had a long talk in Sesotho about it with my host mother and it seemed like it had gotten resolved. But last week stuff started going missing again, fruit and cookies and my radio had been turned on. Nothing major (and I no longer keep cash in my room) but it still is a terrible feeling that someone is coming into my room and going through my things. And my host mother under the impression that we will soon be getting electricity (I’m very skeptical that it’ll be anytime soon) dug up a large part of my garden to put the electric pole. Hours and hours of work and all my little onion and carrot seedlings were destroyed. She seemed to think this was a necessary sacrifice for electricity, and was surprised that I was not excited at the prospect. All these issues are something that I am perfectly capable of dealing with, but when they come all at once it’s overwhelming. I did have a couple really good moments when I received Christmas packages from home along with a couple unexpected letters! And the upside to this difficult week is that I will soon be on vacation on the beaches of Durban for new years!

My Adventures in a Hospital in Lesotho

I’ve been surprisingly lucky that I’ve gone six months in rural Africa without so much as a cold. But a couple of weeks ago I caught a stomach virus that was going around the peace corps volunteers. I started throwing up and couldn’t stop. It was after dark, so there wasn’t any more transportation to the nearest town or hospital. I called the lodge and they came and picked me up and drove me to the hospital, but not before I had thrown up eleven times in two hours. I’ve had food poisoning and the stomach flu before, but this seemed worse. I am so lucky that I have a host organization like Maliba Lodge that was so easy to contact and helpful in getting me to the hospital. The hospital was in the camptown closest to my village, Butha-Buthe. Even though it was after hours nurses were there and they gave me a charcoal drink and a shot to stop the stomach pains (though there was no alcohol swab or bandaid with the shot). I felt a lot better almost instantly, but was too weak to leave. Throughout the night I kept asking for water, and the nurses told me there was none. Finally they turned on the tap to show me that it was dry and there was no running water. So I had no water (I did have an IV though) until another volunteer came and visited me the next day and brought me some. I also needed to go to the bathroom after 2 IVs , but they were all closed because of the lack of running water. I asked the nurse what I should do, I stayed for over 16 hours and really had to pee, she said she did not know. I eventually got a bed pan. I have to admit the lack of water was not the hospitals fault, but the idea that a hospital could lose their running water and nothing would be done about it for days shocked me. Besides that, it was actually pretty nice, there weren’t many people there at all (hospitals are expensive to stay in overnight) and the food was much better than what I’ve had in American hospitals. I probably got more attention than I would have in a hospital at home too. But I almost was made to stay for another night when the accounts office closed at 3pm. The staff wanted to keep me another night (and pay for it) because I could not settle my bill while the accounts office was closed. With the help of Lauren, the volunteer visiting me, we convinced them that I could leave a deposit and settle the account with Peace Corps the next day. While I never would want to go to the hospital here again, I was pleasantly surprised with my experience there, and I left a little weak, but cured.

Settling in: salads and a radio

I’ve now been in Lesotho for almost six months, and in my village for three and a half. It’s taken a while, but I finally feel at home. My work has developed, so that I have two tasks to do everyday. Being busy and productive has made a big difference on how content I feel. On an average day I’m woken up by my host family calling to each other and getting ready as early as 6am, but I don’t get up till 7. I then spend a little time cleaning and then an hour or two working in the garden. Usually I get dirty enough that I have to take a bucket bath. But since it’s hot it is a lot more pleasant than it was in the winter. I then read a bit and review my lesson plan for then day before walking for an hour or so to school. I teach lifeskills for one period and then meet with the agriculture group. Lately we’ve been planting, but before that we spent most meetings planning, writing needs assessments, and developing a seasonal calendar. I believe I am making a difference in my lifeskills classes, most of the kids had a very limited knowledge of HIV/AIDS. But in the agriculture clubs, I can actually see the difference, and see the plants grow, it has been very rewarding.

As I settle into a routine with work I’ve also become much better at filling my free time. Without electricity, tv and computers I used to spend a lot of time just sitting and looking at the mountains, which was pleasant but pretty boring. Now I’ve taken up knitting and have started a garden, which has been a lot of fun. I’m trying to grow greens that you can’t get in Lesotho, they don’t have uncooked salads here. I can’t wait to have a nice green salad! One of my favorite parts about my village are the children, they come and visit me almost everyday, I have gotten some colored pencils and now they sit outside my door and color, much nicer than just standing there and staring at me. And the rains have started, so everything is green. The peaches on the peach trees have started to ripen. And a waterfall that wasn’t there in the winter, started up a couple of weeks ago. I woke up to the sound of new waterfalls and a very full river, at first I thought my fan was one, then I realized I have no fan, and no electricity to run a fan. And it’s gotten hot here, my house is on a hillside and gets a nice breeze, but the walk to the schools is very sweaty. The weather here in summer is very dramatic, it hails on a weekly basis and I have twice seen lightening strike a nearby mountain and set it on fire.

While I still have my frustrating moments, I’m very happy here and feel settled. Two years still sounds like a long time, but not as frighteningly long as it did before. One of my frustrating moments happened two weeks ago when was trying to handle two six-week old puppies in my purse on a bus. They were being a handful and a woman who I’d never seen before came up to me and told me to give her my puppy. I said no, not unless she gave me one of her cattle. She was quiet for a while after that, then saw that I had two puppies, and said that I needed to give her one since I had two. My patience in Lesotho has been surprisingly good, a lot better than at home, I think it’s because I get so much sleep. But I ran out of patience at that moment and just ignored her. It’s a cultural difference, here you don’t say “please can you lend me,” you say “I’m asking for” or “give me,” I’m still getting used to it. I think politeness is a cultural subtlety that is very difficult to grasp. I probably have been impolite myself without realizing it.

Last week I got a radio! Its screen might not work and it only gets a few stations, but it has been wonderful. I spent a very pleasant evening last week sitting watching the sunset behind the mountains with my host sister listening to old American r&b.