We have a big update tonight. This morning our Country Director, Program Directors, and the rest of the staff in charge of selecting our sites announced where each of us would be spending the next two years of our lives and what we will be doing.
For those who are not in the loop, site placement is a long process and is probably the most nerve-racking and important thing we do in training. There were 33 sites available this year across the country. As couples, only 5 were available to us. We had to rank those sites and justify our rankings with personal preferences and qualifications. The Peace Corps staff then looked at our qualifications and essays and assigned sites.
We got our first choice. We will spend the next two years in the Qacha’s Nek district. Qacha’s Nek is in the highlands, and has few volunteers at this time. We will be in a small town, but will still be relatively isolated.
Brandi will be assisting our partner organization with youth development. She will be traveling to other villages to work with local youth, as well as assisting with developing youth programs.
I will be assisting the same organization as they set up a technology resource center. I will help with planning and ordering equipment, setting up the lab and training staff to maintain it, and designing curriculum.
We will both have many opportunities to work with area youth and with other area projects, as well as collaborating on each other’s jobs.
We could not be more excited about our placement. We are really looking forward to working with our Basotho counterparts in Qacha’s Nek.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Time for Me to Update
Hello everyone!
I started writing this two weeks ago and never finished...here it is anyways...
Wes has done all of the posts lately, so I thought I would add something too. We are still doing well. We are in Maseru today and were able to get some AMAZING pizza at a local Italian restaurant. I never liked pizza much at home, but now I am so excited to get it.
As promised, I will talk about my site visit week before last. It was wonderful! The volunteer I visited lives in a beautiful valley. She works at a local clinic with a support group and at a primary school teaching teachers life skills. I was really impressed with the clinic. They had a large supply of medications, and were very organized. I was surprised to learn that they have a high immunization rate among the children that they serve, and that they provide family planning services. For 5 rand (less than a US dollar) you can buy a medical book to keep all of your records. Once you have that, you can go to any clinic and get any prescription needed for free. This includes all ARV therapy for HIV as well. These services are subsidized through the government, FBO's, and NGO's.
Karolina (who I visited) lives in a nice rondaval with on her host family's property. The second day I was there we climbed to mountain behind her house (something I never thought I would do!). It was beautiful!! Hopefully I will be able to post pictures soon.
This past week we also visited a pediatric HIV and AIDS clinic run by Baylor. It was amazing! It was really awesome to see the work that they are able to do here with the children and their families. Lesotho has the 3rd (sometimes 2nd) highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world, and its ravaging effects are everywhere. We will write a post soon (hopefully) discussing HIV and AIDS more directly.
We just finished our 5th week of training. I can't believe that we have been here for that long. It is no longer strange to us that we live in Africa. Things that used to seem so bizarre to us now seem so commonplace (using pit latrines, pee buckets, hand washing clothes, cows blocking the road on the way to school, animal noises waking us up at all hours of the night, living by candlelight after about 6pm, etc). Today we were walking to the shop in our village and 20 or so sheep went barreling by us. It didn't even strike me as odd. Lol...I guess I didn't expect to adjust so quickly.
We are really close to the other volunteers in our village. They have become our second family. It will be hard in a month when we are all split up to go to our separate villages. However, I am sure that we will make sure to keep in touch.
We should be getting the packet with all of the possible site placements tomorrow. Everyone is VERY excited! We know that we have been very spoiled living in the training village. Every Saturday we have been taken to Maseru where we are allowed to spend the day shopping, using the internet, seeing movies, etc. You can get pretty much anything you want in Maseru from KFC to new release movies to sushi to great grocery stores. However, once we go to our sites, it is likely that we will not have quite the selection of goods and entertainment, so we are taking advantage of it now!
The pace of life is very slow here, and I enjoy that very much. Even though we are busy in training most of the day, we have plenty of time at night to read, drink tea, cook, and hang out. The training center in Maseru has a library with a ton of books. I have read Stolen Lives about a family who was jailed in Morocco for 20 years and the Lovely Bones. Both were very good!
That's where I left off a couple of weeks ago. We are now halfway through week 7. We should find out at the end of the week where our permanent site will be. We are pretty sure that we will be in one of the southern districts called Qacha's Nek. It is in the highlands, so we will have cold winters, but our house will most likely have running water and electricity. Wes wanted the highlands and I wanted electricity, so it works out for both of us. Once we know our actual job, I will make sure that we update again. Nothing else has really changed. We are both still doing well. I have definitely become a much better cook! I have learned to make all sorts of breads and tortillas from scratch. We are eating very well right now while we can still get a good grocery selection from Maseru. It will probably not be this way once we get to site.
We would really like to hear from people! Let us know what is going on with you, how things are at home, etc. You can send us facebook messages or emails. My email is blacorte02@yahoo.com and Wes' is weshelm@gmail.com.
At some point I will post a wish list of things that we would love to have in care packages. Right now we are doing well, but I am sure that we will be missing some things once we get to site.
Thank you to everyone that has been praying for us and Wes' family during this hard time. It has been hard for Wes to not be with his family, but we know that we are where we need to be and that Gran is at home with Jesus.
Brandi
I started writing this two weeks ago and never finished...here it is anyways...
Wes has done all of the posts lately, so I thought I would add something too. We are still doing well. We are in Maseru today and were able to get some AMAZING pizza at a local Italian restaurant. I never liked pizza much at home, but now I am so excited to get it.
As promised, I will talk about my site visit week before last. It was wonderful! The volunteer I visited lives in a beautiful valley. She works at a local clinic with a support group and at a primary school teaching teachers life skills. I was really impressed with the clinic. They had a large supply of medications, and were very organized. I was surprised to learn that they have a high immunization rate among the children that they serve, and that they provide family planning services. For 5 rand (less than a US dollar) you can buy a medical book to keep all of your records. Once you have that, you can go to any clinic and get any prescription needed for free. This includes all ARV therapy for HIV as well. These services are subsidized through the government, FBO's, and NGO's.
Karolina (who I visited) lives in a nice rondaval with on her host family's property. The second day I was there we climbed to mountain behind her house (something I never thought I would do!). It was beautiful!! Hopefully I will be able to post pictures soon.
This past week we also visited a pediatric HIV and AIDS clinic run by Baylor. It was amazing! It was really awesome to see the work that they are able to do here with the children and their families. Lesotho has the 3rd (sometimes 2nd) highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world, and its ravaging effects are everywhere. We will write a post soon (hopefully) discussing HIV and AIDS more directly.
We just finished our 5th week of training. I can't believe that we have been here for that long. It is no longer strange to us that we live in Africa. Things that used to seem so bizarre to us now seem so commonplace (using pit latrines, pee buckets, hand washing clothes, cows blocking the road on the way to school, animal noises waking us up at all hours of the night, living by candlelight after about 6pm, etc). Today we were walking to the shop in our village and 20 or so sheep went barreling by us. It didn't even strike me as odd. Lol...I guess I didn't expect to adjust so quickly.
We are really close to the other volunteers in our village. They have become our second family. It will be hard in a month when we are all split up to go to our separate villages. However, I am sure that we will make sure to keep in touch.
We should be getting the packet with all of the possible site placements tomorrow. Everyone is VERY excited! We know that we have been very spoiled living in the training village. Every Saturday we have been taken to Maseru where we are allowed to spend the day shopping, using the internet, seeing movies, etc. You can get pretty much anything you want in Maseru from KFC to new release movies to sushi to great grocery stores. However, once we go to our sites, it is likely that we will not have quite the selection of goods and entertainment, so we are taking advantage of it now!
The pace of life is very slow here, and I enjoy that very much. Even though we are busy in training most of the day, we have plenty of time at night to read, drink tea, cook, and hang out. The training center in Maseru has a library with a ton of books. I have read Stolen Lives about a family who was jailed in Morocco for 20 years and the Lovely Bones. Both were very good!
That's where I left off a couple of weeks ago. We are now halfway through week 7. We should find out at the end of the week where our permanent site will be. We are pretty sure that we will be in one of the southern districts called Qacha's Nek. It is in the highlands, so we will have cold winters, but our house will most likely have running water and electricity. Wes wanted the highlands and I wanted electricity, so it works out for both of us. Once we know our actual job, I will make sure that we update again. Nothing else has really changed. We are both still doing well. I have definitely become a much better cook! I have learned to make all sorts of breads and tortillas from scratch. We are eating very well right now while we can still get a good grocery selection from Maseru. It will probably not be this way once we get to site.
We would really like to hear from people! Let us know what is going on with you, how things are at home, etc. You can send us facebook messages or emails. My email is blacorte02@yahoo.com and Wes' is weshelm@gmail.com.
At some point I will post a wish list of things that we would love to have in care packages. Right now we are doing well, but I am sure that we will be missing some things once we get to site.
Thank you to everyone that has been praying for us and Wes' family during this hard time. It has been hard for Wes to not be with his family, but we know that we are where we need to be and that Gran is at home with Jesus.
Brandi
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Training, Weeks 1 - 4
As promised, here is a wrap-up of our first four weeks here in Lesotho.
We arrived on June 4th, and were brought to the Peace Corps Training Center, where we stayed two nights. The training center is a nice place, with running water, electricity, and hot showers. We got to know our group and got basic introductions to language, safety and security, and culture.
On day three, we received our village placements for Community Based Training. Our group of 28 was split in to three and placed in small villages near Maseru. We re-packed our things and were brought to our village that afternoon, where we were greeted by the village kids and many excited bo-m’e (moms). We were introduced to our host m’e, who then gave us our Sesotho names. Unfortunately, we were mistakenly introduced as twins and received Sesotho names accordingly (Ntate Neo and M’e Lineo). This has led to some confusion, but I am starting to get good at explaining in Sesotho that we are married, and I am not sleeping with my sister, to many bo-ntate. Good times.
After the ceremony, a bunch of kids carried our stuff to our house, where we got to meet more of our family. I can’t tell you how many bo-ausi (sisters) and bo-abuti (brothers) we have across Lesotho, but we have four bo-ausi and two bo-abuti living with us. Our M’e and Ntate both speak a little English, and have been great at taking care of us and teaching us new words and phrases. One of our ausis is fluent in English, and has also been very helpful.
We live in a family farm compound at the edge of town. Our family lives in a tin-roofed cinder block house with a kitchen and living room, and we live in a small one-room house of the same construction adjacent to the main house. Outside, our family has cattle and pig pens, a chicken coop, and a large garden. We have no running water or electricity, but we have adapted easily, though our latrine is a bit fuller than our noses might prefer. We heat our house (while we are awake) with a small propane heater, and bath using large buckets (bathing is very cold, by the way). Water for bathing, cleaning, and cooking is kept in two large buckets. All our drinking water must be boiled. It frequently drops below freezing at night; so staying warm is sometimes a problem. I usually sleep under two thick blankets while wearing layers, while Brandi prefers to sleep on top of the bed inside a 20* sleeping bag.
Our Ntate and Abuti, along with herd boys from the village, take the cattle and sheep our daily to graze outside the village. Our M’e and bo-ausi, as well as our youngest abuti, spend the day around the house keeping things running.
Our days in the following weeks consisted of Sesotho lessons in the morning from 8:30 – 9:45 or 10:00, followed by tea. One of the perks of training is free tea, cookies, and fruit daily. We then catch a small bus to the central village hosting trainees, where we receive morning and afternoon sessions in a variety of subjects, including Peace Corps policy, HIV/AIDS, culture, agriculture, business, health, nutrition, and youth. The sessions are intensive, and we get a ton of information thrown at us each day. It can be overwhelming at times, but we are learning quickly.
During the first two weeks, our M’e cooked all our meals for us. Breakfast was corn flakes or lesheleshele (a type of sorghum porridge), peanut butter on bread, and hard-boiled or baked eggs. Dinners included traditional Papa le Moroho, a stiff corn meal with bitter green vegetables, with tuna in tomato sauce; chicken, either boiled or fried (fried is outstanding), with moroho and mokupa (mashed pumpkin, which is kind of like sweet potatoes), fish and chips (our favorite), and spaghetti with a strange, but good, meat sauce. Lunch was always a peanut butter sandwich on homemade bread, either with cheese and tomato or hard-boiled eggs.
On the second week our M’e showed us how to cook things like papa, lesheleshele, and bread, as well as how to do dishes and wash our cloths. You have to re-learn everything here, as nothing is the same as the states. Everything takes twice as long and four times as much effort here. We often joked that we were back in high school, learning chores, with a dog-enforced curfew, and concerned moms back home wondering where we were and concerned with our safety and well being.
On the third week, we started cooking for ourselves and doing all our own chores. At this point, our days looked something like this:
6:15 – I wake up and turn on the heater and set the water to boil, then dive back in bed to stay warm.
6:30 – We get up, start getting ready, make breakfast, take out waste water and dump the pee bucket (Yes, we have a pee bucket. Remember, it is below freezing at night and there are dogs outside. You don’t go out if you don’t have to.)
8:15 – Say goodbye to the family and walk to school for Sesotho.
8:30 – 4:00 – School
4:00 – Most days, we walk 30 minutes back to our village. If we are feeling lazy, sick, or it is super cold, we catch the bus, but it takes longer since it has to go to another village before ours, and time is of the essence since sun down is around 6:30.
4:00 – 5:00 – We usually hang out with our family or with other trainees. One day we went and watched a chicken get slaughtered. Entertainment can be hard to come by, though we did get to see all the USA world cup games, up until USA decided that sucking was more fun than actually playing well.
5:30 – 7:30 – We cook dinner sometime in here, clean dishes, study Sesotho, and get ready for bed.
8:00 – 9:00 – We go to bed. By this time, you have exhausted all your options and there isn’t really much reason to stay up. I am getting more sleep over here than I ever have in my life.
On the second Saturday we went in to Maseru for the first time to do a little shopping, buy cell phones (e-mail me for the number), and explore the taxi rank. The taxi rank is a sprawling complex of vendor sheds, combis (small buses), and buses. As you walk through, everyone screams for your attention and business, and you are very conscious that you stand out. We have been through it a few times now and are getting used to it and growing in confidence, but it was a little intimidating at first.
The third Saturday, we went to TY, a camp town in Berea to do our shopping. On the way, we explored traditional cave houses built under a rock overhang. It was a living museum, as the houses were still occupied, and we got to meet and talk with their residents. Where Maseru looks like a modern, western town (well, outside the taxi rank), TY looks like you would expect Africa to look. The whole place is bustling with activity along one main drag, where we explored shops trying to find the staples we needed to cook for ourselves. It is in these types of towns that most of us will do our shopping once we reach our permanent homes, so it was good to see what will be available.
On the fourth week, we were sent out on site visits. We traveled back to Maseru early Saturday morning to meet up with current volunteers, who would take us out to their sites via public transport. I was paired with another female trainee (Brandi went elsewhere), and we met up with our volunteer, a guy living Mohales Hoek. We bought some groceries in Maseru and headed for the rank, where we caught a nicer combi called a Quantum. We rode this with 15-20 other passengers to the Mohales Hoek camp town about two hours away. We had a couple hours until our bus left, so we dropped our stuff off on the bus and explored the town a bit (in general, you can trust people you know to take care of your stuff, and our volunteer knew half the people on the bus). Afterwards, we crammed in to the bus and rode four and a half more hours out to his site. Public transport is nothing like the states. For one, even on that long of a bus ride, you cram in. The aisles were full and we were all three crammed in to one bench seat. The bus had no air conditioning and was scalding hot in the afternoon sun, but you still have to fight to keep the window open because the Basotho prefer them closed. Also, every bus in Lesotho is a party bus – there are no open container laws here, so the bo-ntate in front of us were hammered by the time we arrived. Oh, and the paved road ended thirty minutes in to the trip. That said, your expectations here change rapidly, and the ride was labeled overall as “not too bad”.
Our volunteer has a gorgeous rondaval (a round, thatched-roof building) divided in to two rooms in a river valley. The country was gorgeous and we got to do a good deal of hiking, mainly because you have to hike to get anywhere (including down a steep slope and across a river to get to the shop). We also got to spend a lot of time with his “crew”, a group of teenagers that came over and hung out outside his house at all hours of the day and night. We had a great time talking with them. Highlights included introducing possibly the first game of air hockey to ever be played in Lesotho via my iPad with the drums of the sangoma (traditional healers) sounding off in the distance, and teaching the guys to sing “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” and other great songs in the middle of the night.
Brandi got to visit a female volunteer working with a clinic near TY. I’ll let her talk more about that in her own post, as I probably wouldn’t do it justice.
We got back to Maseru last Wednesday, where we did some shopping, enjoyed a cheeseburger, got more shots, and headed home to the village. We did laundry, relaxed in the sun (we are going through a warm snap), and did a nice Mexican potluck with the other five volunteers in our village. We are down by two, as one trainee had to drop out and another had to return home for a short time (though she will be back on Monday!), so pray for us in that regard- our village has been hard-hit with difficulties, though we are a scrappy bunch.
Things are certainly different here, but we love it. God is definitely looking out for us and challenging us in many ways. We are adjusting quickly to the new language, new ways of doing things, and the new culture. Our jobs are going to be very difficulty, bordering on impossible, so pray for lots of little miracles when we reach our site placement in August. Despite the difficulty, this is exactly where we want to be, and we are going to be doing exactly the kind of work we want to be doing. We are truly blessed to be here, and we are more aware of it each day. With the difficulty of our new lives comes enormous reward.
We will try to write some articles about Basotho culture and other subjects we are learning in the coming weeks, so check back here. We will also keep you updated on what is going on in our day-to-day lives. Also, we would love to here from you guys back home – it is easy to feel really out of touch, so even mundane stuff makes us feel connected. Shoot us e-mails or facebook Brandi if you think about us – contact from home makes hard days easier. We miss everybody, but we couldn’t be happier about where we are!
-Wes and Brandi
We arrived on June 4th, and were brought to the Peace Corps Training Center, where we stayed two nights. The training center is a nice place, with running water, electricity, and hot showers. We got to know our group and got basic introductions to language, safety and security, and culture.
On day three, we received our village placements for Community Based Training. Our group of 28 was split in to three and placed in small villages near Maseru. We re-packed our things and were brought to our village that afternoon, where we were greeted by the village kids and many excited bo-m’e (moms). We were introduced to our host m’e, who then gave us our Sesotho names. Unfortunately, we were mistakenly introduced as twins and received Sesotho names accordingly (Ntate Neo and M’e Lineo). This has led to some confusion, but I am starting to get good at explaining in Sesotho that we are married, and I am not sleeping with my sister, to many bo-ntate. Good times.
After the ceremony, a bunch of kids carried our stuff to our house, where we got to meet more of our family. I can’t tell you how many bo-ausi (sisters) and bo-abuti (brothers) we have across Lesotho, but we have four bo-ausi and two bo-abuti living with us. Our M’e and Ntate both speak a little English, and have been great at taking care of us and teaching us new words and phrases. One of our ausis is fluent in English, and has also been very helpful.
We live in a family farm compound at the edge of town. Our family lives in a tin-roofed cinder block house with a kitchen and living room, and we live in a small one-room house of the same construction adjacent to the main house. Outside, our family has cattle and pig pens, a chicken coop, and a large garden. We have no running water or electricity, but we have adapted easily, though our latrine is a bit fuller than our noses might prefer. We heat our house (while we are awake) with a small propane heater, and bath using large buckets (bathing is very cold, by the way). Water for bathing, cleaning, and cooking is kept in two large buckets. All our drinking water must be boiled. It frequently drops below freezing at night; so staying warm is sometimes a problem. I usually sleep under two thick blankets while wearing layers, while Brandi prefers to sleep on top of the bed inside a 20* sleeping bag.
Our Ntate and Abuti, along with herd boys from the village, take the cattle and sheep our daily to graze outside the village. Our M’e and bo-ausi, as well as our youngest abuti, spend the day around the house keeping things running.
Our days in the following weeks consisted of Sesotho lessons in the morning from 8:30 – 9:45 or 10:00, followed by tea. One of the perks of training is free tea, cookies, and fruit daily. We then catch a small bus to the central village hosting trainees, where we receive morning and afternoon sessions in a variety of subjects, including Peace Corps policy, HIV/AIDS, culture, agriculture, business, health, nutrition, and youth. The sessions are intensive, and we get a ton of information thrown at us each day. It can be overwhelming at times, but we are learning quickly.
During the first two weeks, our M’e cooked all our meals for us. Breakfast was corn flakes or lesheleshele (a type of sorghum porridge), peanut butter on bread, and hard-boiled or baked eggs. Dinners included traditional Papa le Moroho, a stiff corn meal with bitter green vegetables, with tuna in tomato sauce; chicken, either boiled or fried (fried is outstanding), with moroho and mokupa (mashed pumpkin, which is kind of like sweet potatoes), fish and chips (our favorite), and spaghetti with a strange, but good, meat sauce. Lunch was always a peanut butter sandwich on homemade bread, either with cheese and tomato or hard-boiled eggs.
On the second week our M’e showed us how to cook things like papa, lesheleshele, and bread, as well as how to do dishes and wash our cloths. You have to re-learn everything here, as nothing is the same as the states. Everything takes twice as long and four times as much effort here. We often joked that we were back in high school, learning chores, with a dog-enforced curfew, and concerned moms back home wondering where we were and concerned with our safety and well being.
On the third week, we started cooking for ourselves and doing all our own chores. At this point, our days looked something like this:
6:15 – I wake up and turn on the heater and set the water to boil, then dive back in bed to stay warm.
6:30 – We get up, start getting ready, make breakfast, take out waste water and dump the pee bucket (Yes, we have a pee bucket. Remember, it is below freezing at night and there are dogs outside. You don’t go out if you don’t have to.)
8:15 – Say goodbye to the family and walk to school for Sesotho.
8:30 – 4:00 – School
4:00 – Most days, we walk 30 minutes back to our village. If we are feeling lazy, sick, or it is super cold, we catch the bus, but it takes longer since it has to go to another village before ours, and time is of the essence since sun down is around 6:30.
4:00 – 5:00 – We usually hang out with our family or with other trainees. One day we went and watched a chicken get slaughtered. Entertainment can be hard to come by, though we did get to see all the USA world cup games, up until USA decided that sucking was more fun than actually playing well.
5:30 – 7:30 – We cook dinner sometime in here, clean dishes, study Sesotho, and get ready for bed.
8:00 – 9:00 – We go to bed. By this time, you have exhausted all your options and there isn’t really much reason to stay up. I am getting more sleep over here than I ever have in my life.
On the second Saturday we went in to Maseru for the first time to do a little shopping, buy cell phones (e-mail me for the number), and explore the taxi rank. The taxi rank is a sprawling complex of vendor sheds, combis (small buses), and buses. As you walk through, everyone screams for your attention and business, and you are very conscious that you stand out. We have been through it a few times now and are getting used to it and growing in confidence, but it was a little intimidating at first.
The third Saturday, we went to TY, a camp town in Berea to do our shopping. On the way, we explored traditional cave houses built under a rock overhang. It was a living museum, as the houses were still occupied, and we got to meet and talk with their residents. Where Maseru looks like a modern, western town (well, outside the taxi rank), TY looks like you would expect Africa to look. The whole place is bustling with activity along one main drag, where we explored shops trying to find the staples we needed to cook for ourselves. It is in these types of towns that most of us will do our shopping once we reach our permanent homes, so it was good to see what will be available.
On the fourth week, we were sent out on site visits. We traveled back to Maseru early Saturday morning to meet up with current volunteers, who would take us out to their sites via public transport. I was paired with another female trainee (Brandi went elsewhere), and we met up with our volunteer, a guy living Mohales Hoek. We bought some groceries in Maseru and headed for the rank, where we caught a nicer combi called a Quantum. We rode this with 15-20 other passengers to the Mohales Hoek camp town about two hours away. We had a couple hours until our bus left, so we dropped our stuff off on the bus and explored the town a bit (in general, you can trust people you know to take care of your stuff, and our volunteer knew half the people on the bus). Afterwards, we crammed in to the bus and rode four and a half more hours out to his site. Public transport is nothing like the states. For one, even on that long of a bus ride, you cram in. The aisles were full and we were all three crammed in to one bench seat. The bus had no air conditioning and was scalding hot in the afternoon sun, but you still have to fight to keep the window open because the Basotho prefer them closed. Also, every bus in Lesotho is a party bus – there are no open container laws here, so the bo-ntate in front of us were hammered by the time we arrived. Oh, and the paved road ended thirty minutes in to the trip. That said, your expectations here change rapidly, and the ride was labeled overall as “not too bad”.
Our volunteer has a gorgeous rondaval (a round, thatched-roof building) divided in to two rooms in a river valley. The country was gorgeous and we got to do a good deal of hiking, mainly because you have to hike to get anywhere (including down a steep slope and across a river to get to the shop). We also got to spend a lot of time with his “crew”, a group of teenagers that came over and hung out outside his house at all hours of the day and night. We had a great time talking with them. Highlights included introducing possibly the first game of air hockey to ever be played in Lesotho via my iPad with the drums of the sangoma (traditional healers) sounding off in the distance, and teaching the guys to sing “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” and other great songs in the middle of the night.
Brandi got to visit a female volunteer working with a clinic near TY. I’ll let her talk more about that in her own post, as I probably wouldn’t do it justice.
We got back to Maseru last Wednesday, where we did some shopping, enjoyed a cheeseburger, got more shots, and headed home to the village. We did laundry, relaxed in the sun (we are going through a warm snap), and did a nice Mexican potluck with the other five volunteers in our village. We are down by two, as one trainee had to drop out and another had to return home for a short time (though she will be back on Monday!), so pray for us in that regard- our village has been hard-hit with difficulties, though we are a scrappy bunch.
Things are certainly different here, but we love it. God is definitely looking out for us and challenging us in many ways. We are adjusting quickly to the new language, new ways of doing things, and the new culture. Our jobs are going to be very difficulty, bordering on impossible, so pray for lots of little miracles when we reach our site placement in August. Despite the difficulty, this is exactly where we want to be, and we are going to be doing exactly the kind of work we want to be doing. We are truly blessed to be here, and we are more aware of it each day. With the difficulty of our new lives comes enormous reward.
We will try to write some articles about Basotho culture and other subjects we are learning in the coming weeks, so check back here. We will also keep you updated on what is going on in our day-to-day lives. Also, we would love to here from you guys back home – it is easy to feel really out of touch, so even mundane stuff makes us feel connected. Shoot us e-mails or facebook Brandi if you think about us – contact from home makes hard days easier. We miss everybody, but we couldn’t be happier about where we are!
-Wes and Brandi
Friday, July 2, 2010
We have internet now (3G and EDGE signal are available across most of Lesotho), so we will start updating this more regularly. We are currently in Community Based Training in a small village, and will be here until mid-August. We will write up a summery of everything that we have been doing for the past month soon, but for now, here are a few ways our lives are different:
-I am posting this by the light of a paraffin lamp.
-Unless we are in town, we make everything we eat using a two burner propane stove.
-The closest thing to running water we have used in a month is pouring water out of a pitcher.
-Our refrigerator is the floor under our table, next to the wall. It stays cold enough 24/7 to keep cheese and butter fresh.
-We wake up to the sound of the cows being taken out to graze, the rooster crowing, and the pigs being fed. This all occurs within about 50 feet of where we sleep. And I thought barking dogs were bad at home.
-We have a sun-down curfew. It is enforced by wild dogs.
-We can see the southern cross and the milky way every night.
-We have four sisters and two brothers living in our family compound. There are more than I can remember elsewhere.
-Ke bua sesotho hayane, empa hamonate. Ke tla ithute ho bua sesotho hoholu, le ho kopane batho ba Lesotho ka motse oa ka.
We will post more later, but for now, we miss everybody but we are having a blast. I still don't think it has completely settled in that we live in Lesotho, and it definitely hasn't set in that this is really my job. I can't believe I am getting paid for this. We are very, very blessed. Please feel free to e-mail us... it may take us a few days to write back, but we would love to hear from everyone back home!
-Wes
-I am posting this by the light of a paraffin lamp.
-Unless we are in town, we make everything we eat using a two burner propane stove.
-The closest thing to running water we have used in a month is pouring water out of a pitcher.
-Our refrigerator is the floor under our table, next to the wall. It stays cold enough 24/7 to keep cheese and butter fresh.
-We wake up to the sound of the cows being taken out to graze, the rooster crowing, and the pigs being fed. This all occurs within about 50 feet of where we sleep. And I thought barking dogs were bad at home.
-We have a sun-down curfew. It is enforced by wild dogs.
-We can see the southern cross and the milky way every night.
-We have four sisters and two brothers living in our family compound. There are more than I can remember elsewhere.
-Ke bua sesotho hayane, empa hamonate. Ke tla ithute ho bua sesotho hoholu, le ho kopane batho ba Lesotho ka motse oa ka.
We will post more later, but for now, we miss everybody but we are having a blast. I still don't think it has completely settled in that we live in Lesotho, and it definitely hasn't set in that this is really my job. I can't believe I am getting paid for this. We are very, very blessed. Please feel free to e-mail us... it may take us a few days to write back, but we would love to hear from everyone back home!
-Wes
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