Lowland workshop and a welcome guest

Before I left for Peace Corps, my girlfriend, Sarah, had gone on her own adventure to Kenya.  She was studying abroad in Nairobi for the fall semester, and then stayed in country until June, doing everything from helping to edit World Bank grant proposals for the government, to volunteering at a home for rehabilitating street kids.  I was somehow able to convince her to leave the equatorial weather of Kenya to come visit me in one of the coldest places in Africa during winter.  After an adventurous journey, she met me in the lowlands of Lesotho.  She was able to stay around for about a month, but unfortunately the beginning of her time here coincided with a week-long Peace Corps workshop I was attending.  We got to spend some time together during it, but mostly she wandered around exploring the town each day while I was in the meeting.
    The workshop itself was probably one of the best and most useful we have had to date.  It involved our entire group of Education volunteers and each of us brought a Basotho counterpart.  This could be a colleague, supervisor, or community member, but someone who would be willing to work with us on community projects.  The first few days were all about designing and managing what Peace Corps calls “secondary projects.”  This can be anything from starting a support group to ringing electricity to your village, namely anything you do that is not your primary assignment (teaching high school).  We were given a ton of great ideas for such projects, as well as many of the tools for making sure they will be and remain successful even after our departure.  A few of the possible ideas for my community that myself and my principal came up with were building a fence for our school grounds to prevent overgrazing on that land, and a project he had tried in the past whereby paper from the school is recycled into dense little bricks that can be used as a fuel source for cooking fires.  Though these both seem like cool ideas to me, we learned at the workshop that a major reason that projects fail is lack of community involvement or sense of ownership.  So, before we start to put any such plan into effect, we will need to make time to sit down with members of the community and hash out what it is they really want, need, and will support.
    The second half of the workshop focused on educating us and our counterparts further on HIV and AIDS, specifically in Lesotho.  We learned more about the disease itself and it's history in this country.  We also found out about many of the organizations working in our particular districts to combat the epidemic.  Considering that around 24% of all adults in Lesotho are HIV positive and that the country has the 3rd highest HIV prevalence rate in the world (topped only by Botswana and Swaziland), this was an immensely important set of meetings.  It was also interesting to hear our counterparts' viewpoints and questions on the topic, with them having grown up as the disease spread in a culture where sex just isn't discussed openly.  All in all the workshop, as I said, was very valuable and informative.  It also didn't hurt that we got fed and had a place to take an honest-to-goodness shower for a week!