Winter is Here!

Lumelang kaofela!

Let me start off my saying… hoa bata (it’s cold)! Winter has arrived in Lesotho, and boy oh boy am I freezing my tush off. Not having central heating is quite an interesting challenge. But anyway, this blog post is going to be a doozy, because it’s been an insanely busy couple of weeks! Let me start with the workshop that kicked off my month and a half madness, GRS.

Grassroots Soccer (GRS): So this was a week-long workshop with 12 volunteers from health and our two counterparts from our communities (one man, one woman). It was a really fun and informative workshop, that was so unlike the others we’ve had. It was very hands-on learning of the culture of GRS, and the curriculum. Our counterparts are responsible for leading the interventions in the communities, and us as PCV’s are there for support. There are three curriculum for GRS, PC Skillz (co-ed), Skillz Girls, and Skillz Guys. Either counterpart can lead the co-ed intervention, but the skillz girls and guys is strictly one or the other, since we are attempting to make a safe-space for youth. Youth may feel more comfortable relating and opening up to a coach of the same gender. So that was a great experience and I’m glad my community has the opportunity to experience GRS! Mme Keke is one of my counterparts, she is teacher at the primary school in my village. She and I will be starting the first intervention with primary school girls in late August, early September. It is a twelve session curriculum, and we are planning on twice a week for six weeks. In addition to actually holding the sessions with the youth, we have to be sure to plan for the session, translate phrases into Sesotho, and talk about what questions might be brought up and how to handle them. Before we even start, we need to also get parental consent, accept up to 25 girls, and have community meetings about this program. There is a lot to be done, but GRS is an amazing preventative measure for HIV, and it also opens important discussions to youth about their own bodily autonomy, self-efficacy, self-worth, and conversations surrounding gender roles. I am very excited to start implementing this program, and I feel lucky that I have such motivated counterparts to lead the youth.

After GRS, I took a bit of a hiatus from site, as I felt it would be time consuming and stressful to go all the way back to site, just to be there for four days before leaving again. (Since I had a vacation planned the next weekend.) So I went to the district of Thaba Tseka to visit some friends there. TT is in the center of Lesotho, and is extremely mountainous and high altitude (SUPER COLD)! I got really car-sick on the way there, since the road is super windy… it was not fun. But my time there with my friends was really wonderful, and I got to celebrate my friend Michelle’s 29^th birthday, which was a blast. It was nice to see the work she is doing as well, because she’s working with a hospital which has more resources than my rural clinic. It gave me some ideas for projects, but also an idea as to what is likely not going to work out at my site. We also watched the end of Game of Thrones… highly disappointing season. Put a real damper on her birthday. I tried to make up for it with brownies (she has an oven!), but it just was too devastating. If you want the full breakdown of my thoughts on this matter, feel free to message me. I’m just putting my hope in the idea that my buddy George R.R. will right the wrongs of the show in his next two books. A girl can hope!

Bushfire: So after a lovely, but very VERY cold couple of days in Thaba Tseka, Michelle and I traveled to Butha Buthe, the north-most district to meet up with all the other volunteers, and to get ready to depart for eSwatini (the former Swaziland). Bushfire, if you’re unaware, is a very popular music festival which takes place in eSwatini that many people and also other volunteers from southern Africa attend. So about 50 volunteers from my cohort went, so we organized a bus to take us from Lesotho to the festival. We got on the bus at around midnight and traveled the whole night long—sans a brief couple stops to go through borders! We stopped in South Africa around 7am to for a McDonald’s breakfast extravaganza. If you thought it was impossible to spend an hour and a half at McDonald’s, I challenge you to get a bunch of tired and hungry Peace Corps Volunteers who crave American style food in one place at one time. They’ll prove that notion false. So after that excessively long breakfast stop, we traveled some more, and finally got to the eSwatini border, and then to the Bushfire grounds!

Before I talk about the amazing time I had at my first music festival, I’ll just talk a bit about eSwatini. So eSwatini is a full monarchy, there is no parliamentary government. I learned that the King makes all the decisions, and apparently he is the one who changed the name of their land from Swaziland to eSwatini recently, and everyone just kind of had to adapt! The names are kind of used interchangeably, and most people I spoke to in Lesotho about it aren’t really aware of the name change. eSwatini shares a border with South Africa and Mozambique, so their economy is not only reliant on South Africa as a neighbor, unlike Lesotho. It’s also quite mountainous, but definitely not as much as Lesotho, and it was much hotter and more humid during the day (excellent for my hair I might add), but very chilly at night. I wish I could have gotten to see more of the country, but we were kind of confined to the venue for three days. My impression of the area was great though, and I noticed a difference in the amount of infrastructure that exists there versus in Lesotho. There seemed to be much better roads and quality of buildings, but that could just be based on the small area I saw. Peace Corps exists in eSwatini (actually, their newest cohort left to start their service the U.S. a day after we did!), so they are assisting on projects there, similar to Peace Corps efforts in Lesotho.

Back to the fun! So it was a three day festival, and we stayed at the campgrounds in tents for three nights. We ended up camping near volunteers from other countries in Southern Africa (Mozambique, Botswana, South Africa, eSwatini), which was super fun! So cool to meet Americans from all over the U.S. who have the same interest in social justice and community service. I also met with an old friend from high school who is in PC Botswana! It was really cool  and quite comforting to see someone from home, even though we haven’t spoken since high school. Overall, the music was great, but honestly to me, the best part was the food. There was a LOT of variety of food, and it was all delish. There were vegan options, Indian food, and cool fusions of food like African-Vietnamese fusion (for example, a very delicious fried chicken style banh-mi). Also I had SO much good coffee. So that part was great, and it was a really chill atmosphere at the festival. There were a couple main stages, there was also a crafts market that had a lot of local made goodies. I got some earrings! On the last day, there was an open mic slot at one of the performance spaces, so I signed up for a 10 minute spot to do some standup! It was an absolute blast, because all the Peace Corps Volunteers from all over that we met came to see me perform (the word got around real fast). It was fun to have that kind of support, and also an American audience was much appreciated! If you want to see the video, reach out to my family! So that was a great way to end the weekend and gave me a pretty good boost of self-confidence. We left the last night around 11pm and got back into Lesotho around 5am the next day. Then spent the entire day traveling back to my site, about 10 hours or so. It was a miserable day, honestly… too much sitting on crowded taxis.

When I returned to my site, disaster struck! Half way through my walk home, I realized that my phone was missing. I had it on the taxi ride back to my site, so I ran into the local shop and asked Ntate Thuso (the shop owner) to call my phone. Nobody answered, but then he called the taxi driver who ended up having my phone which was a huge relief. Before I knew that he had it though, I was in a bit of a panic, and basically everyone who was in or around the shop came to comfort me and ask if they could help. Also, I had left my sitemate on the main road with some of my things because I basically ran to the shop in a panic, and some women who were around the shop went down the road to stand with her until I got back. The shop owner even called a friend of mine who lives on the main road to ask if she would just come outside her house to stand with my sitemate. When I finally got my phone, the taxi driver even drove me down the road back to where my sitemate was standing so I didn’t have to walk alone for that short distance. It made me feel like the community really cared about my safety and well-being, and it was incredibly touching. The fact of the matter is, they would come together like this for anyone. It really is so unique the way everyone looks out for each other here, and it is one of my absolute favorite things about Lesotho, and about my village.

Committee Meetings: I’ll try to keep the rest short and sweet! After a week or so at site, I had a meeting in Berea for the Gender Equity Lesotho (GEL) committee. We met with PC Staff and our staff liaisons to make a plan of action for this coming year, and to start discussing about training for the next cohort of volunteers (which is coming up really soon—September!!). There are three volunteers from 88 on the committee, myself included, and three 87 volunteers. So we’re basically going to be taking over their projects and working on some new ones of our own. We are mostly focused on putting together a database of resources for gender projects in Lesotho, as well as creating trainings for more intersectional discussions of gender and sexuality in the context of Lesotho and also volunteer experiences in Lesotho. So that’ll give me some more work to do, but I am excited about working with gender in this way!

PDM- Project Design Management Workshop- So now this brings us to letsatsie lena (today)! After four days back at my site after committee meetings, I returned to Berea last Monday for the last Peace Corps workshop I will be attending for a while! I brought with me a counterpart, the same guy who was trained with me for GRS. He is a nurse at the clinic who is motivated to work with adolescent health in my village. At this workshop, we talked about PC Grants we can apply for, planning, managing, and implementing sustainable projects, and some other useful information about youth friendly services. So we thought of a lot of ideas for our community at this workshop, and I’m excited to get started on some of them!

After this, I’m finally going to be back at my site with no plans to travel anywhere for the rest of June, July, and the beginning of August. It’s time to hibernate for winter! I have a lot of ideas going back, and I’m really excited to start on some of them. But first is data collection. So with the help of clinic staff, we will be creating and translating surveys for youth and start planning visits to neighboring villages to give out the surveys. These will basically be questioning youth on reasons why they don’t access the clinic, and when they are most available to access it during the week and on weekends. Then we can compile the data, and create a plan of action that is beneficial for the most amount of youth in the area as possible. It will be great to see neighboring communities to get to know my area better, and I’m excited to begin the important first steps of this adolescent health project.

So that’s it for now! Feeling very optimistic, re-energized from a great week with my Health family, and ready to start the real work! That’s all for now, until next time!

Sala hantle!