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