Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Long Overdue Update

Wow…it has been a very long time since we have updated. I apologize for the long entry up front!

Since the last time we blogged, we had Thanksgiving at our house. Seven other volunteers spent the weekend with us and we had a wonderful meal complete with pumpkin pie and stuffing. Not too bad for Thanksgiving Peace Corps style! If you want to see the pictures, go to www.flickr.brandiandwes.com. It is easier to put all of our pictures in one place as opposed to having to put them here and on facebook.

A week after Thanksgiving we headed back to Maseru for a week of Peace Corps training with the group of volunteers we came with in June. We stayed with the families we lived with during training. I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out (most groups get to stay at the Peace Corps training center in Maseru, but because of heightened security this is now off limits), but it ended up being really nice. It was good to spend time with our host family again. Our ‘M’e is a great cook and made all three meals for us that week. It was great not having to do dishes or cook for a while! We really enjoyed getting to see some other volunteers as well. Our closest volunteer is between 2 and 3 hours away from us by public transportation, so we are pretty isolated. Furthermore, a lot of the people we went through training with have sites in the northern regions of Lesotho, so we rarely get to see them outside of Peace Corps events.

I had an interesting conversation with my host ‘M’e the last morning that we were there. We were talking about how we were going back to America to visit, and she was talking about how she would like to know America (to go there). Wes and I told her that America was nice, but we really liked Lesotho too. She then said, “But in America there is money,” And we responded with something along the lines of, yes, there is money, but a lot of people are very unhappy. To that, she answered, “but in Lesotho we have peace.” This is one of the biggest lessons that I have learned since being here. We tend to look at Africa and see everything they don’t have, and assume because they don’t have all this stuff that they are so much worse off than we are in America. I found out very quickly that you do not need electricity and running water to make you happy. Don’t get me wrong, it is nice to have those things, but they alone don’t bring about happiness and contentment. I have met a lot more people here who are happy with nothing than people in America who are happy with all their stuff. From an American standpoint, Basotho life isn’t easy by any means. Just thinking about what my ‘M’e did around the house, with the animals, and in the fields makes me tired. But she finds peace in her circumstances, no matter how difficult life becomes. It is a lesson that I hope to take away with me.

On a sad note, we found out when we arrived back in our training village that the Chief had passed away the week before. He was a fairly young man with small children. They explained that he had had a really sharp pain and went to the clinic. The clinic gave him medication but the pain got worse and the next day he died. It is heartbreaking because you know that if he was in a place with better healthcare there may have been something that could have been done to save his life.

At the end of that week Wes and I left Lesotho and headed to Johannesburg. We spent the night in a really nice hotel. It was the first time I truly realized how “Peace Corps” we had become. After 6 months of bucket bathing and very few real showers, I didn’t realize until we walked into the hotel lobby just how dirty we were! The hotel employee helping us with our bags had to ask us if we were sure that we were staying at that hotel. It was pretty embarrassing! The first thing we did was go up to our rooms, shower, and change. Johannesburg was great though. The area around our hotel had a lot of shops and restaurants so we didn’t have to wander too far out into the city.

The next day we got on a flight back to the United States. Because of everything going on with my mom’s health, Peace Corps allowed us to take 28 days of unpaid leave. I really struggled with the decision about whether to go home or not, but I am really glad that we did. It was wonderful getting to spend time with my family and friends. I even got to surprise my Grandma by being home for Christmas! Thank you for everyone who has been praying for my family and my mom. She continues to improve and is doing great on her medication!

We arrived back in Lesotho on January 8th and fell quickly back into our normal routine here. I was a bit concerned with how the community would accept us after we had been gone for more than a month, but we were welcomed back like we never left. We came back to a slightly better internet connection and running water on our compound! The plumbing to our house doesn’t work, so we don’t have running water inside yet, but having it around the compound has been really nice. We even have one toilet that flushes now! I was amazed to see how much the crops have grown since we left. There was nothing growing in December, and now we have peaches, grapes, tomatoes, squash, pumpkin, spinach, carrots, onions, and more. We even found a new place to eat that isn’t one of the food trailers!

Since being back, I have been working on our library. So far we have around 375 books and I have inventoried all of them on the computer, made a library catalogue, separated them into categories, and put a spine label on all of them. This took me about two weeks. I didn’t realize how time consuming running a library is! I have a lot more respect for librarians now. Wes has just started up his computer classes again. I am writing the Microsoft Word curriculum for him. I never realized how complicated of a program Word is until having to detail how to do every little thing step by step. So far it is 29 pages long, and I still have A LOT left to do. It has been fun doing it though. In a few weeks we will open the youth center. The plan is to have the library, computers, games, and toys available to the youth two days a week, and then spend the rest of the time working with interest groups. Because SMARTD is an agricultural organization that works with over 30 villages, we are trying to develop agricultural clubs at many of the schools around the area. We plan to teach better farming techniques, as well as how to use the crops they grow for income generation. We will do this in cooperation with the SMARTD employees who work in these areas. Eventually we will have a journalism club where the youth create their own monthly newsletter that will go out with the SMARTD newsletter. We will also hold a variety of workshops and fun days for the youth around the area. Our goal is two fold: give the kids something to do so we can get them out of the bars and away from other temptations (sex), and to teach them skills that help them make money, get a job, or help them support themselves (subsistence farming). Wrapped up in all this is teaching the kids to make good decisions to keep themselves healthy.

We have been blessed to have a great primary school that we have worked with on all of these things so far, and hope to use that relationship as a model for all of the other schools. We have a lot of ideas and want to do a lot of things, but we must remind ourselves to take it slow and ensure that we are working alongside the community and addressing their needs, not just doing what we thing should be done.

Many people have asked what exactly we have been doing here since August, and because we just wrote our first Peace Corps trimester report, it is easy to list those things here. Here we go: we developed a transportation schedule for SMARTD, taught basic budgeting to the book keeper and the accountant and developed and trained them to use excel spreadsheets to keep up with the money, conducted an HIV and AIDS workshop, taught lifeskills classes for the teachers at the primary school, designed educational murals that had healthy messages about confidence, nutrition, and hand washing and had them painted by a local artist, set up the library, set up the youth and resource center, taught computer classes, facilitated the youth action week, helped the drop out school that meets on our compound, attended and helped set up 3 seed fairs, developed computer curriculum, researched internet options, and assisted in purchasing. I think it sounds like a lot more than it really is.

We both really enjoy working alongside SMARTD on all of these projects. They are a great organization and are really taking good care of us.

Other than that, we are just working on planning out all of the vacations that we are going to take in the rest of our time here, and reading…a lot. We have spent a lot of time in the house after work because it has been raining for almost three weeks straight.

Thank you everyone who has been keeping up with us. It makes it a lot easier knowing that we have a group of people at home who are thinking about us and praying for us!

Until next time,

Brandi