More on our life in Peace Corps Lesotho -

You know you are a Peace Corps Volunteer when:

Not "showering" for 3 (or more) days doesn't bother you and you are completely comfortable talking about it

The ability to get a good radio station at your house incites jealousy (same can be said with a good cell phone/internet signal)

9pm is a late night

You are in your twenties (or older) and you aren't allowed to drive

Happy Valentines Day Everyone!

To celebrate I'd like to share a poem I wrote with you all -

We've been together for many years

We are such a good fit

I wasn't sure about you when we first met

Now time has passed and I know we'll be together until the end

Always together - always on a new adventure

With miles of road, layers of dust, even by air and water we've endured

Meeting new people and learning together

As we age, we stay together, accepting and going on

With memories behind us and possibilities before us

My friend, helper and lifeline -

My backpack

I've titled that one - Ode to my backpack

Shane liked it and was convinced it should go on the blog - and I'm sure it is appropriate for today!

Today is also my Grandma Fox's birthday, I'm so excited that she gets to celebrate another year and our thoughts are with her. Also, we just got a Valentines day card and two other treats in the mail. the card was sent at the begining of January! We've got big plans to celebrate with a bottle of bubbly Rosé wine, the movie Date Night and we are even splurging on take out pizza! This is big stuff for a Peace Corps date:-) We still aren't sure what to do for Shane's birthday which is coming up on Sunday. However, he's very happy because his Ju jit su classes are starting tomorrow.

We spent last week both at a Peace Corps training and I got to go to one of the big water project dams in Lesotho called Mohale Dam for the WFP staff retreat. I'll post a few more photos on the "Real Thing" page. We had several days of heavy rain at the end of the week so the photos at Mohale show that. We came back on Saturday via the bus. Please keep in mind that there is pretty much one road that goes through all of the districts in the north and one other that goes through all of the districts in the south -let's talk about infrastructure. We live in the highlands, as a result we have to pass through several districts to get out to ours - we are pretty much at the end of the road. There is one spot on our main road where, I think last summer, a large gully formed from eroding soil, washing out that portion of the tar road. To go around they made a dirt road going down and around and coming back up to the main road. Well, we were on the bus going along, when it stopped - and all of the people started getting off pretty much in the middle of nowhere. We were confused and of course everything was in Sesotho, so we followed people over to look at the road, and the dirt road bypass had been partly washed out from all of the rain we'd had. It was too narrow and fragile for the bus to go across, and there wasn't any way around it! - This was a bit crazy after we had been talking about Disaster Risk Reduction and preparedness at the WFP meeting! Fortunately a few men went down and started piling up stones (of course some decided to watch instead, along with all of the women) but the photo above is of them working together - Shane is standing next to the guy on top of the culvert and his superviosr is wearing black to the right of the bush. It ended up being a successful endeavor but it was another wake up call of how lucky we are in the states, even with the flooding in ND the infrastructure was there to make it possible to go around even if it was inconvinient, and how vulnerable you can be without alternatives. The WFP trucks can't pass either if the bus can't... Also, I was really glad we are here with Peace Corps because if we wouldn't have been able to get back to our house, I'm sure we would have had their support. 

Another interesting tidbit, is that Shane had his first experience with BEDBUGS! He picked them up from the place we usually stay in Maseru - he counted and had more than 45 bites on one leg! Fortunately, one of the things that was not on the packing list for Lesotho that we brought was part of our collection of homeopathic remedies - we had one for bug bites and it really helped especially when combined with the anti-itch stuff fromt he Med kit. I did ask him to always remember who still loved him when he was covered in bedbug bites.

So, I'll write a little bit about our diet here, but will do a to be continued next time (again)...

You can see from the pictures that we are enjoying the challenge presented to us by the limitations of availability. We do what we can though, finding a lot in our village and in town, but also knowing what we need to get when we go to Maseru (wine) and even from S.A. if possible. Also, we love the infusions from our care packages of things we just can't get at all here. One of our biggest challenges is protein, we aren't very comfortable eating meat here - not just because of our usual reasons (industrial animal farming is present is S.A. and most of the meat comes from there) but other, general food safety reasons - such as consistency of refrigeration and other things. So, fortunately we are accustomed to getting protein from other sources. Unfortunately, without a refrig and because, again of cost and availability we aren't able to get as much variety of protein from things like nuts and seeds, yogurt, cheese and quinoa as we did in America. So, we eat a lot of dry legumes pinto beans and peas we can get here and we found a store in Maseru that even has chickpeas, we've even been eating lentils too, but we can't buy them locally - we sometimes sprout them for extra deliciousness. We also eat a lot of eggs, like, we buy them in trays of 30 and usually finish that in a week and a half! Same goes with peanut butter, we've eaten something like 15kgs of PB since being at site. We also buy the boxed UHT milk in .5L boxes in packs of ten, again lasting about a week and a half. I liked Central America because you could get chocolate UHT milk and the chocolate would cover up the wierd UHT taste. I've thought about trying to make cheese here with the funny tasting milk, but still not sure how that would work out especially with culturing it.

I can see that this has gotten a bit long, so we'll leave off here. I promise we'll wrap up this subject in the next post, so we can talk more and show more pictures of our projects!

Lots of love and happiness to you today,

Shane and Carol

Finished with the Cape Town pics!

Hello,
We've been keeping busy now that we are back in Lesotho, but we were just able to finish posting the glut of pics from our wonderful trip to Cape Town. We hope you enjoyed seeing some of the things we found interesting while we were there, and us being able to talk about the vacation mostly in photos was fun. Just wanted to let you know that you can check out the Cape Town page now for the full story. We will not be around really next week, so we won't be doing any posts but when we get back maybe I'll finish up the food conversation. In the meantime please just click a button to vote on the poll of what we should talk about next and we'll go back to "The real thing" page to post pics of our normal life again.
As always our best to all, and we hope you enjoyed the photos.
Love from Lesotho,
Shane and Carol

Not finished with the Cape Town photos yet!

 

Hello again,

So, our trip was like 2 weeks long - We used all of our leave allowance and our money - so you won't have to worry about more vacation photos any time soon after we finish with these. I'm going to begin posting the photos actually from Cape Town next. We had kind of an interesting experience at the begining of the Cape Town segment. We had booked this hostel on an organic farm - in an eco village even, in one of the nearby suburbs. The hostel was even next to the train station - OMG public transport! So, we got there on the train and the train itself was a bit dodgy (not terrible but important to keep the gaurd up while riding) so we weren't particularly keen on riding it more than 2X a day for the next 9 days from the begining. We got to the hostel and it was terrible, run down, no sign of a farm, and the other people staying there made us a bit nervous too, also the walls were paper-thin and, especially I, did not get more than two hours of sleep.

The next day we had planned to go to the farmer's market and (yay!) the Phantom of the Opera, so we decide that we'd do that and then the following day find a new place. That day we also had the pleasure, of touching base with the family of one of our friends from back home that lives near Cape Town. In short, we are so grateful to them, they actually came and picked us up and invited us to stay in their guest house for 2 nights while we regrouped and found a new place. It was such a lovely time, and it was so fun to meet and visit with such a nice family. Their house was great and they even had a pool (wonderful for the hot days!), they also commercially grow basil:-) and were just generally great. It was really fun to stay with them also because it reminded us of "real life." The whole family, and house with running water (showers) - even a washing machine! Electric ovens and generally comfortable atmosphere. It really turned a bad experience into a really great one. I'm sorry to say that their family has since suffered a tragic loss, and we would appreciate if our other friends and family could keep these lovely, kind, people in their thoughts.

So, the Farmer's Market was great and so was the Phantom! We really tried to not let the bad hostel experience over shadow those fun times. We then moved into a very cute little appartment that was let out for holiday stays. It was really reasonably priced, especially for the location - which was great, really close to everything! So, then we pretty much finished out our stay doing normal tourist stuff: Table Mountain, beaches, the Waterfront, Greenmarket Square and the Aquarium that you will see in the ample quantity of photos. Shane was really happy too, because he got to do Ju jit su while there - which he hasn't really gotten to do at all since we left. (Though now he is making a plan to start a Ju jit su club here). Basically, it was very lovely overall and a great little respit from some of the challenges here in Lesotho. We got to shower in a real shower every day of the trip! And, we ate a lot of perishable food because we always had a fridge! We found a smoothie shop near our appartment and I think we had like 5 smoothies while we were gone!

Coming back has been fun, friendly faces and familiar rountines, our cat is bigger and is a boy (don't remember if I've said that or not yet). We eased ourselves back in culinarily by bringing back real butter, cheese and even heavy cream! Which we've had to pretty much binge on before it spoils, that hasn't been so bad though! Still enjoying the Cook's Illustrated cookbook a lot, it has been fun to have butter. I made a chocolate chip cookie recipe where they said you should brown the butter first to add depth of flavor - they were amazing, thanks for the chocolate chips! We even made blueberry pancakes, just so we could put the real butter on them:-) (also thanks for the dried blueberries!).

I wanted to share the above photos, they are both from work that I  (Carol) have been doing. The one with all of the women is one of the groups that I have been working with. We had a few seeds in the office, just sitting here - so I gave them to a couple of the groups I work with. Unfortunately, a lot of the seeds aren't exactly "culturally appropriate" like the zucchini, but I told them that they could grow it and I would teach them how to cook it. So, I got to the village (before we left) hoping to do a composting demo, then it started raining as soon as we got into the garden! I noticed that their zucchini was ready so, we decided to do the cooking demo. I told them I was going to teach them to cook it like KFC (really, really big here!), so we made fried zucchini slices -  they liked them, but added a bunch of salt. I know that I'm supposed to be teaching healthy stuff, but that recipe it just so delicious and I was sure they'd like it because of the KFC thing, and it was easy. It was really fun though, and maybe you can see that they aren't very used to getting their photos taken! This group is great though. This time, as soon as we pulled up they welcomed me by giving me a jar of canned peaches to take home! My collegue explained to me that "even though Basotho people can be counted among the poorest of the world, they will still give anything they have to make you feel welcome."

The second photo is of the bakery I've been working with. For a long time they have just been in that shipping container, but with no sign or anything. The bakery is great too, it makes these bars, that I swear are exactly like the Nature Valley granola bars, as well as custom baked cakes. So, I've been encouraging them to make a sign - even just paint something on the side so people know what it is. They told me that when we got back from Cape Town, it would be done - and guess what - they had done it! No small gratification in the greater scheme of PC projects! So, I see I've been verbose again, and you still need to go look at more pictures so, I'll leave it at that. As always, our best wishes to everyone who is keeping up with us. Lots of love from Lesotho!
Shane and Carol

PS- please don't forget to write and tell us how you guys are doing!

Back from Cape Town!

Greetings from Lesotho!
We hope this post finds you all well!
I noticed that my good friend Sarah just posted a comment about how long it has been since we have posted - we have been in the winelands and Cape Town since the 9th, we just got back on Saturday pretty late after about 15 hours of straight travel we just made it (in drenching rain) through the border gate to Lesotho before it closed, after waking up in Cape Town. The wonders of modern transportation! We've created a new page that I'm slowly loading photos onto - the internet connection - though wonderful to have is still very slow and, bear with us, we've got a ton of photos! I'm trying to narrate through the trip using the photos, so please for this post, check out the Vacation pics page to hear too much about wine, and to see pictures of food and flowers. As of today I've gotten the pics uploaded for 3 nights we spent in the winelands (where I also got my first haircut since May - yay!). We'll ease up on the food pics for the Cape Town section, but I couldn't help myself on all of the cool plants on top of Table Mountain! So stay tuned as well.

We are now back home in Lesotho - there I said it "back home" after 8 months here! It has been fun to come back to familiar and friendly faces, our "jobs," house and our kitten who isn't so tiny any more! The change in weather has been extreme. It was swealtering hot in Cape Town, and here it has been rainy/misty and coldish and so it goes. We send our love, hugs and best thoughts and wishes to you.
Carol and Shane

Happy New Year!

Hello Everyone!

We hope that your holidays have been wonderful and we hope all of the best for you in the New Year. In Sesotho: selemo se secha semonate le mahlohonolo. We have had a pretty quiet holiday, just trying to save and prepare for our upcoming Cape Town adventure. We are so grateful for the gifts and phone calls we recieved, as it was one of the first Christmases ever without our family nearby. Shane wanted pizza for our Christmas feast so we made taco pizza and a mediteranean one as well. We had that and amazing chocolate cake! Otherwise we just rested ang hung out. We went to midnight mass at the church, but we have been going to bed much earlier here and we are not used to staying up so late, and it was in Sesotho so we couldn't really understand. There was a lot of beautiful singing though - we wish we could share that with you as well. Basotho in general like to dance and singing - it is unbelieveable, you can take small children and they will be able to easily sing in mulitpart harmony together. The group at the mass is a group of youth that come and practice singing together almost every week - it was amazing. I think that Grandma Dar would have loved to hear that beautiful singing! Above is a photo of the church, it is actually from about 1 month ago so things are even greener now, but I thought this was a good - very typical photo. Note not only the "free range" cows but also the cell tower on the hill in the background.

For New Year's Eve we had a small get together with some of the Peace Corps Education program volunteers, that was pretty fun. We had butternut squash ravioli (homemade by one of the new volunteers), carmelized onion foccocia bread and chocolate cake - this chocolate cake is really amazing! We tried a new wine, Nederburg's Cape Reisling, it was very drinkable and delicious. We also lit sparklers, and two super-sized bottle rockets! That was also fun. Then Shane and I had to kiss of course to start the New Year off right.

We even got to take yesterday off. We hiked up the mountain behind our house to the cattle post of Shane's supervisor, that was interesting to see but unfortunately we forgot the camera - they build a house for the "herd boy" to live in until May, and a corral from stones. All of the men working up there looked very tired. All of the men from the village of Shane's supervisor, stay near each other at the cattle posts too. The posts are pretty much just summer pasture. Shane's supervisor had a heard of over 120 sheep and goats up there too! From the top of this mountain was such a beautiful view. I know some time we will go up again and then upload the photos. We also found some onion starts for sale that we planted yesterday, the ones we started from seed died because it was too dry. We played Scrabble and also read our books. Shane is reading the Small Wonder book by Barbara Kingsolver, and I am reading When the Emporer was Divine. Both are good.

I know that this is a bit off subject, but I'm not sure if I've talked about how many immunizations that we have had since we've been in Lesotho. When we went to training last month we got even more. We are officially immunized for everything, tetanus, rabies, hepatitis of every kind, yellow fever, I honestly don't even know what else. The whole first week we were in the country we got an injection every day in each arm! We got even more when we went back last month. Hopefully that will be it until the give us the mandatory flu shot next winter! Maybe this is a testament to how committed I am to being here, between the shots that I am extremely afraid of, the dogs and even the snakes!

Also, a bit more from the training last month, something I have learned is that I am no longer suprised by anything. We had a goat come in to our classroom during our Sesotho lesson, and I thought it was fun and cute and tried to take a picture to share with you all - but suprised, I wasn't. The hetero young guy in a pink scrunchie topped shirt obviously made for a woman - still not suprised. The Barbie doll in a cake that makes her dress that I just saw in my favorite bakery - not suprised there either. 

Another thing that I'd still like to share with you from riding the bus home from the training last month is another attempt to describe the bus. I wanted to take a lot of photos, I can't because I shouldn't take out my camera because that will make me stand out even more and Shane will reprimand me for living through my camera. So I have to tell you about the beautiful friendly little girl about 2 and a half with butterfly hair clips in her hair, her name was even the same as my Sesotho name. Also I have to write about the beautifully freshly painted red doors and the replowed tiered fields and the rangeland finally turning green to everyone's relief. Those sights were tied in to the Sesotho music and other sounds and smells of the bus, like the smell of Makoenya grabbed as a snack, even the smell of beer on the morning bus - no chickens this time though.

I think that I do have a lot more to say about food, but for now I am just trying to talk a bit about the holidays and some of our activities, I'm sure that I won't post until after Cape Town, but be prepared for PHOTOS! We are so excited and we really appreciate all of your support and encouragement as the adventure continues. So, I have been trying to talk about some of the ridiculous things we've been eating while I'm giving general updates, and I'll probably talk a bit more after our lives get back into the normal groove and I don't have very much material!  

We both hope you are all very well, and as always we think of you often.

Best and hugs,

Carol and Shane