Permanent site visit

This past week I was visiting my permanent site for the first time. They sent us out to get a lay of the land, meet people, see the school, and figure out what stuff we need to get for moving into our houses. I will be living in the Mokhotlong district. I will be staying in my own rondavol with the chief's family. My new name is Tsepo Sekonyela(Tsepo means hope, but I don't know if Sekonyela means anything). The place is very remote, but beautiful. Huge rolling hills and massive mountains form the horizon. Winding around through the valleys is a nice little river which I will definitely have to investigate. The school itself is quite nice as it was built in 2007. It was the first government school in this district of Lesotho. It looks new and the massive staff room has electricity and seven or eight desktop computers. The teachers are all rather young and seem nice enough. It was difficult to get a good grasp on how the school normally operates as is was exam time. This meant that each day there were only two exams, each around an hour and a half long. The rest of the time the students studied and the teachers hung out in the staff room grading exams or watching movies. Not having any exams to grade, I spent much of my time doing the latter. The only thing that really threw me though was the weather. People warned me that it would be cold, but this was a bit much. It's getting close to mid-summer and today it rained 3 times, hailed 5, was sunny and warm for a few fleeting moments, and was windy and cold the rest of the time. I was hoping that I would escape the cold by going to Africa, but it seems my fate to dwell in the cold places of the world. Hopefully the constant changing of weather will at least be a change from the cold gray doldrums of Wisconsin winters! I guess we will see.

P.S. I later learned that some anomalous weather swept into Lesotho that week and even the lowlands received a few doses of hail. Thanks climate change!