Mabuleng Rock City

So anything I said about there nothing happening at my site has been completely and utterly wrong since the beginning of March. Or my standards for entertainment have dropped considerably. Probably both.

Last post I mentioned that I had been at my site for 3 weeks and nothing happening. I have spent all the time between then and now at my site as well, but Mabuleng has been hopping. Initiation School – which is the super secretive transition from boy to manhood and lasts 6 months, the last 3 hidden from view up in the mountains – has just ended and one of my brothers (who I did not know existed) was one of the graduates. Supposedly these schools used to be much larger when they were compulsory (as recently as 10 years ago) with hundreds of boys in each class, but in this class there were 8 only with eight teachers. At the end of the school, there is a big feast for a few days and lots of singing and drinking the African homebrew, joala.Thursday the 11th was a national holiday so we had school off and I spent it brewing up the beer with a bunch of the old women from my village. We brewed 2 55gallon batches. The festivities started the next Monday. We slaughtered 2 sheep and the bo-me cooked it up. Delicious. I was cutting it with a spoon. Also had samp (it’s kind of like cream corn) mokuana (fried dough balls) and some good bread. Plus joala. I like that a lot. It’s a little sour, made with sorghum, wheat meal, and maize meal and served in communal 2L pitchers. These drinking fests would last until after midnight (basically the equivalent of until sunrise in America). Nobody there spoke English, so I would wander from one group of people to another exhausting my Sesotho before moving on. As I drank more joala, I definitely got better at it though. I was telling them all about my plans to teach the animals to sing and dance but how I needed help stealing chickens because they were the best singers. Or I was just yelling excited jibberish. Could have gone either way, but they were definitely enjoying it.

There was one downside to the Initiation ceremony fun. It was held in the middle of the day, so me and another teacher (so I didn’t do anything stupid. Like touch their sticks. If you are at ever at an Initiation School Ceremony in the rural mountains of Africa, do NOT touch their sticks, I found this out) would go to my house when we didn’t have classes. Normally this is fine, but there was also a teacher out sick. Another teacher had gone to visit her and see how things were going. Another teacher was at the store room making sure that the farm tools were put away. We only have 5 teachers, so that was the lot. Children were running wild at the school with no teachers around. This was when the Ministry of Education decided to show up for a surprise visit at the school. He was not happy with us. Sara, who works in a different department at the ministry in the camptown knew about the situation by the next day. And one of our teachers who went into the office the next day to drop off paper work heard about it.

On Saturday the 13th we had a track and field meet in Mapholaneng. We managed to get a few taxis full of our students down there. The ride down was a lot of fun. Our taxi had an electric sunroof (which the kids were amazed at and kept making me open and close it because they have never seen electric windows before) and one of those new Britney Spears albums that is kind of techno-y. I was in a taxi with all girls and they acted exactly how a bunch of teenage girls in America would. Hanging out the sunroof, singing. There also might have been a white dude in his mid 20s doing the same thing. By far the most entertaining part of the day.

The meet itself went pretty terribly. All my students were afraid to run and only one girl finished above 2nd to last place. She was 2nd overall in the district for 100m. She won last year, but our school couldn’t afford to send her to Maseru for nationals. Being at the track meet was a little frustrating because I could see what my school was missing out on. One school came with a giant flatbed with a speaker system on the back that they would play whenever they won a race (which was often), almost all the other schools had track suits to match their school uniforms, lots had running shoes, and glasses, and basically looked like they were about to compete in the Olympics (coincidentally, the high school with the speakers is where all the best athletes – including the ones that compete on the national team – go to school). My students were running barefoot and in skirts. We had a few old powder-blue Team USA jerseys that they got god-knows-where and were traded between the runners. We had enough to outfit the entire relay team, so it worked. For lunch that day, students got ½ loaf of bread and a slice of paloni (baloney’s crappier, cheaper cousin). The other schools had cooked food that I could smell, and it smelled good.

I managed to get 30 lesson plans done for while I was away and went to hand them into the teachers to give the students so they could write notes on the board. They decided not to do that, so my students will be sitting and doing nothing while I am away. Kind of depressing considering all the time I put in and all the material the students are going to be behind.

I left for Maseru on Friday morning. Caught a ride down with my new friend Nelson. If I get 3 friends, he will drive us anywhere in the country. Great man to know in this country. He drove a Nissan so we bonded. I made it down to Mokhotlong early and we had our quarterly district meeting. Then, me and Sara crashed at the VRC and left early on Saturday morning. We made it in really good time, about 7 hours. Coming down out of the mountains and driving through the big cities of the lowlands (which Canton Center would easily put to shame) was a bit of a culture shock for both of us. It is amazing how fast you get adjusted to life in the middle of nowhere, and I can now appreciate how volunteers who finish their service and go back America have to deal with some pretty severe reverse culture shock. We met a few other volunteers and had some drinks. It was my first chance to spend money and I did. It was a fun night out in the big city.

The next day (Sunday), all of the other volunteers arrived and it was fun to see everybody and hear all their stories. I’ve been compiling some of my favorites and I think I’ll start posting some of those after I get back to site and have nothing new to report on.

On Sunday night we went to a friend’s house who works at the embassy. We had wildebeest steak, sausages, and pepper burgers. Those things are SO good. I would really like to go hunting in South Africa and throw a party next summer. I can very easily see how people get addicted to living in Africa. A little money goes a VERY long way here and you can live like a king if you are willing to make a few compromises. Hell, I live pretty well compared to most people here and I make about $300 a month.

I think we finally have the World Cup tickets sorted out. The FIFA lady was super nice as soon as we got transferred up the ladder enough. We were able to scrub about $10-11k worth of tickets. Still waiting for the money to go back in the bank, but the tickets have been officially cancelled. Hopefully that turns up soon. Ideally I would like to have it by the end of the month so I can buy a solar panel, a bunch of new sheets and blankets (it has been getting chilly up in the mountains), and a few other odds and ends to get ready for the next few months out in the bush and into winter. Right now the plan is to do 5 nights in Joburg and go to the Brazil v Ivory Coast Game on June 20 and Germany v Ghana on June 23. Hopefully there will be some games going on in between that we can watch in the city during the inbetween days.

Another reason I want to get that money before the end of the month is because a bunch of us are going on vacation in Durban. It is supposed to be a great time. We are already planning trips to the Southern Hemisphere’s largest water slide, the IMAX theatre to see Avatar, and lots of time at the beach and bars. I should be able to knock the third ocean off my swimming list with the Indian. We are also hoping that we can rent some Hobies or something there to screw around on. I also think I am going to start getting my SCUBA certification. I guess there are good deals in Durban for that where you can set up a schedule to go every couple of months. I’d rather spend my money on something like that than bungee jumping or skydiving.

Phase III News

One of the most popular secondary projects in Lesotho, and often one of the most rewarding for volunteers is getting libraries in their schools. To do this we used an organization called African Libraries Project (ALP). To get a library, all you had to do was raise 1000 books and $500 in the US (which could be arranged through ALP) and that included all the shipping and costs. There are currently 120+ ALP libraries in country with books for 60 more just arrived. This program has been extremely popular and was something that many of us – including me – had already brought up with our communities, school committees, and fellow teachers and were looking forward to starting and participating in. We were supposed to start working on projects like these when we returned after Easter. Unfortunately, tonight, we had some pretty bad news on this front. ALP in Lesotho is being suspended for 1 year before being reconsidered. In all of the other countries where the project is run, there is a local liaison that runs most of the project. In Lesotho, Peace Corps runs it. They have been trying for almost 2 years to find a local to take over, but no such luck. The funding required to keep the project alive has fallen out enough that there is no money to start up new libraries. In addition, there is currently no money to fund the required trips to consult and check on the current libraries although they are hoping a grant comes through to fix that soon.

These events have all combined to be a pretty terrible night for everybody when the news broke. This was a project just about everybody was looking forward to. Some people had already gone so far as to start collecting books and money. One girl’s mother has 650 books sitting in her garage. Many of us have meetings with the school committees after we get back in April when we were planning on discussing the necessary requirements and paper work needed to get a library at our school. I know I am going to have some very disappointed people when I get back. I didn’t promise anything to anybody, but mentioned the project and what I knew about it and that I was planning on having meetings about it while I was away. People at school got their hopes up a little too high, perhaps, and I don’t know how they are going to take it. Overall, the mood in that room when it was announced there would be no new ALP libraries in Lesotho for the next year was probably the most negative I have seen during our entire time here.

Phase III also brought us the confirmation that one of the people from my group is leaving. She will be gone on April 8th. It was something that had been rumored for a little while now, but still a surprise to many. To go with the information that we are losing one, is that we are gaining 25 more in June. The next CHED group is huge. Was supposed to have been only 10, but PEPFAR gave a ton of money to get more volunteers. We are pushing to get 2 in Mokhotlong.