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!

Half-way through training

Well, today is the half-way point in training. We've been here 4 weeks, but already America seems like a lifetime ago. However, today we also got our schedules for the next 4 weeks and they are jam-packed with teaching and field trips, so I think these next 4 weeks will fly by. Today we also got the list of potential permanent sites, so that's pretty exciting.

I've had weird week. Monday we played sports all day at our training center, but I believe I drank some of the wrong water there! I was sick as hell and running to the latrine all night. The next day I felt terrible, but had to sit through a bunch of classroom observations. Afterwards I skipped language class to sleep all afternoon. That seemed to do the trick and I started to feel a lot better afterwards. The next day we all got water filters (I suspect I had a small part in that) so at least some good came out of it. Also, I took some extra Sesotho lessons to catch up on what I missed, but I think I actually got a lot more done in those 1-on-1 lessons than I was otherwise, so that was good too. I think I really learned a bunch of Sesotho this week and various parts of it all seemed to fall into place. However, tomorrow we have our mock language test, so we'll see if any of that is true. After the language test tomorrow morning, we are going back to TY to buy foodstuffs as we finally get to start cooking for ourselves. So that's pretty exciting. Today I saw my host dad for the first time since the first couple days in village. He works construction, and so has to go live wherever there is work. For the past few weeks he was at a job up in Leribe. So now he's home for a couple days to see the family and drop off some money, then he's off to live at some other job for a while. My little brother Kananelo got to go on a field trip to Maseru today as well, so everyone was very excited about that. In all it was a very good day in the Kose household!

Wandering the streets of Teya-teyaneng

I think today was the best day I've had in Lesotho thus far. It was a Saturday, so we had the day off of training to travel to a nearby town called Teya-teyaneng (TY) for shopping. It turns out that TY is all of 2 streets, so our shopping only took a couple of hours. It is a nice camp town though with lots of food and necessities. After we bought our stuff, we all went and spent the afternoon at the Blue Mountain Inn. This place is a nice little tourist hotel with a pool, bar, and a restaurant. Needless to say, we spent most of the day and most of our money there eating good food and drinking together in the shade by the pool. While there, I saw the first ice cubes I've found in this country. However, they were only to be found in the urinals and not in our glasses. Go figure... Afterwards, Ed and I went searching for the infamous 'pork place' of TY. It is a well known PC hangout where you buy a bunch of raw pork and they grill it up real nice for you. Well, after a bit of looking and a chance meeting with a current volunteer, we found ourselves eating some of the best pork I've had in a long time. I think we'll definitely end up back there a few times. After we got back to Berea, we went on a nice long hike with tons of gorgeous views. And now I am writing this by candlelight with a brandy and warm water by my side. The perfect end to such an awesome day!