The Cat in the Hat... Our newest addition!

Hello again everyone,
I don't have much time this morning to write - I'm sure that is a relief after the last really long post. However, we finally got our kitten on Saturday and we are VERY excited about it and so we thought we'd share with you. It is the most adorable tiger pattern, even having a "ring tail." On Saturday we walked to a neighboring village to get it, and at the end of the day my pedometer read 20,000 steps! Our Sesotho tutor (the very tough, 70 year old sister) came with us and picked up one of our kitten's sisters. They will be neighbors and will have very different lives. The photo above shows the result of it living in our house and recieving entirely too much attention from us - after the bath and putting on the flea collar we decided to have it try on our souvenier traditional Basotho hat. We have also been cuddling it a lot, and taking pictures of it, a photo of it napping with Shane on the first evening of its arrival will be posted sometime soon. It is adjusting rather well. Here, cats are fed cooked maize meal (papa) with milk. We put actual soil in the litterbox - wish us luck with that. The jury is still out on the name, it will likely be in Sesotho - we'll keep you posted. Have a lovely week!
Lots of Love,
Shane and Carol

Our Peace Corps house...

Lumelang (Doo may lah ng) - or Hello everyone,
      We both hope this post finds you all as happy and healthy as can be. We are so happy that you all seem to be still reading. We've heard that the weather "up there" may really be starting to turn to winter - all the best wishes as that progresses and we sincerely wish you all of the best with your central heating! Here, it has been fluxuating between hot and cold, not quite hourly... and it is getting very dry. There is actually a growing amount of concern over the usual summer rains coming so late this year. Many creek beds have completely dried up only leaving garbage and dried algae. Even some of the community pumps in villages are drying up because the water is becoming so low. We are hauling water to our garden almost daily, and it takes several trips from the tap with both watering cans, especially as our garden is expanding to accomodate our ambitious vegetable planting. We are luckier than most that we can water by hand so conviniently. As my work takes me to schools and villages to talk about gardens, I begin to appreciate our (seemingly basic) accomodations even more.
   
      So, I'm sure you've all looked at all of our awesome pictures that were uploaded from training. So, now that we are reasonably caught up, maybe I can begin the blog post with one or two photos either taken very recently or that are related to the theme. So, I see from the poll that some of you actually voted (thanks!) and the majority of you voted for us to talk about the house. I'll post some more photos under "the real thing" page for you to get the full effect, but for now you can see from the above photos that we really do live in an octagon! The lower picture is the first view we got of our house when we arrived. This house is loosely based on the traditional rondavels, but this one is made from concrete blocks - it is called a Mokhoro.
      So, there are an amazing array of different syles of houses in Lesotho, and I believe you will find a PCV in every type of house (except one like the ambassador's really fancy house). There are the traditional round house made with mud, stone, stick and cow dung houses called rondavels, you will often find the roofs thatched with a special type of grass. I believe the photos will show those, there is also a square version of those same construction materials - but more commonly you may find those with a tin sheet metal (only) roof, that will be tied down with wires and weighted with stones so the very strong winds that we get here don't blow them away. There are also concrete block houses and brick houses, they are usually square but as you can see with ours, sometimes they are "roundish." Sometimes you will find a block house with a thatch roof, the combinations are endless. And though many people have a sheet metal latrine (also weighted down for the wind), not very many houses seem to be constructed with just sheet metal; however, this is common for some of the small business buildings that are often along the streets in towns.
    So, we live on a mission, the priest is our closest neighbor and our "host father" here at our site. We have even been given his last name to go by while we are here. It is actually very beautiful, at the base of a mountain, with a pond nearby and a lot of trees. The previous priest was also really interested in agriculture so there are many fruit trees and a nice garden area, an old kind of run down rain-water collection system, I even think I saw an old root cellar! There are also really nice flowers all around including a lot of nice roses, and and amaryllis that is blooming right now. There is a small community on the mission including several unmarried young women, many school children and the older nuns have a convent near our house. The community has been very welcoming to us, especially when we are out working in our garden. Many people pass us, greet us and talk to us as they are collecting their water from the communal tap that is just past where our plots are.
     We are very lucky with our housing situation - compared to many Basotho and even other PCVs; because we actually have electricity now, and running water in our house. So in our house we have one big room that is our almost-everything-room, kitchen, bedroom, dining room, office, even our yoga/excercise space, and it is actually where we take our bucket baths as well. It has a very high ceiling that is wood panel lined tin and we have a wood-tile floor. So, because many of the houses in Lesotho only have one room, we were told in training about the importance of meticulously separating the space so that Basotho don't think you take a bath in your "kitchen"which is dirty and the strategic placement of your "night bucket" so you will not be considered a totally disgusting heathen.We fortunately don't have to worry about the "night bucket" because with running water we actually have a toilet! So, that is actually our other small room, the bathroom. Our water comes from there -only. The bathroom sink sees a lot more use than most bathroom sinks, even if we decide that we want to use the actual bathtub that is there, we have to use a plastic pipe and secure it to (one of) the faucets on the sink and then run it into the tub. Also, if we want hot water, it must be heated on the stove, but WE HAVE A BATHROOM IN PEACE CORPS. I was not expecting to come to Lesotho and have the weekly chore of cleaning the bathroom, it is kind of funny to do - but I mind it a lot less here! Consider that the next time you have the toilet brush in hand (by the way ours is hot pink!). We also have a small closet, something that has actually been coveted by other volunteers. We are also very happy to have that to put miscellaneous stuff like the manure tea for our garden.
     Our kitchen is comprised of a 4-burner stove and gas oven combo - which is amazing and for that I am also very, very thankful, especially the oven - because it allows me to continue the hobby that you almost all of you know is very near and dear to me (and to Shane!). There is also a little cupboard with a table top surface, I prep food on it and we store our food/dishes in it. There is another little table that is kind of the dish station, it also has the water filter on it and we have hung our pots and pans from it underneath and we also store things under it a bit like a refrigerator. Next to that is one of the two electrical outlets that we have - it kind of blew up, so we are down to one actual outlet. Above the outlets we have hung all of the nice cards we have recieved since being here. We have a decent dining room table with really unstable chairs that get used a lot because that is really the only place to sit in the house except for our rocking chair (yay!) or the bed. As you can see we have nice big windows on our house and currently there are seedlings in long-life milk boxes and lentil sprouts sitting in the sill. The windows have deep purple curtains, they are pretty. We have a carpet on the floor that we sweep with a traditional stiff bristled grass broom. The carpet was essential because of the cold floor. We also have a desk and one of the ghetto brick and wood stacked bookshelves. We have a couple very warm blankets, we went for a duvet with an orange and brown motif. The duvet was strategic because washing an entire blanket in a basin is a real b#$*h. Next to our bed on one side we have hung all of the pictures of our family and friends (that's you guys) that we brought, on the other are the glow in the dark stars and planets that we also brought because we are fun like that. We also have a wardrobe for our clothes that we share, it also has some games and other miscellanous stuff that doesn't go in the closet. We have the small gas heater that I have mentioned before and also this funny fire place that the priest said is supposed to burn anthracite coal(???). We will probably try to figure out whatever that means sometime next winter. Finally we have the door, it is wooden and blue and it doesn't have a very tight seal with the door jam, so we put a blanket curtain up on the inside of it that we close at night when it is cold. We have also gotten several polar fleece blankets and hung them across the middle of our room to help with the heating - yay for being from MT, and it also divides the room a bit. Lastly, you will see on the photo that we have wrapped our mosqito net around our burglar bars so that we have a nice screen door - this idea was a really good one that we copied from another volunteer. I think this is long enough, so I won't talk about the garden any more right now, I'll try to post more pics on the other page for you to see what I've been describing. I'll also get on more of those "you know you're in PC when." I think that is most everything for now. It has been a good week and we just had a visit from the PC program director, that was a treat especially because he brought us a few goodies from Maseru like cheese and avocados, even a little chocolate! Tomorrow I teach a small computer class, then next week is WFP distribution and then I will participating in a postive deviance program training with WFP - this is a really interesting program that is starting here to help in the goal of combating malnutrition. So, sorry this got a bit long but I wanted to get it out there before I got even more busy. Shane has been staying busy himself, in addition to beating me at Scrabble and working with his primary project at the park he has been working with the prison to get the program going to teach life skills and also another project with the child and gender protection unit to help raise awareness of recently revised sexual assault laws. We have also been sporadically attending a really fun youth group when we have a chance on Saturdays, we're planning on going again this Satuday but - we are finally (hopefully) going to get our new kitten and we may be tempted to just stay home and play with it. We are too excited about it! Sorry that got long - don't worry you'll have a couple week break. Lots of love and good wishes to you all from Lesotho!
Carol and Shane

More On Our Lives as PCVS: Part 4

Hello Everyone,
We hope you are all well and enjoying settling into fall as we continue into spring here - which, like Montana is often characterized by 4 seasons in one day!
Hopefully you have gotten a chance to check out some of the photos and that you have been enjoying our posts. Last time I talked about transportation, a few things I forgot to mention were: that the paths where we walk, scathe my agroecological soul because they are everywhere causing soil compaction and killing the plants and generally contributing to erosion - though most of the "paths" here are not always what we may think of as an actual place where a human being is able to walk. We were walking straight up a mountain path/rock face with a wonderful 70 year old Catholic Sister (our Sesotho tutor) on independence day, on a path that we did not think was possible, and she was going faster than us! We walk up and down mountains, on these "paths" through dongas (where there is sometimes a creek, but is just identified by the voluminous soil erosion) that are strewn with garbage and reeking of sewage. Even now there are some trees blooming that smell nice near one of the dongas we walk every day, sometimes I take a deep sniff in to enjoy the tree smell and end up with a big whiff of sewage - can't wait 'til summer really comes!
  In general Basotho walk everywhere, kids will walk several Km, even more than an hour just to get to school, the women come to WFP food distributions on foot and carry the food home on their heads. Also, it is common for Basotho to ride horses or even donkeys. More on our walking around though is the Fishbowl effect that they tell us about before we come, that doesn't really sink in until we get here. We really are the only white people that live in the village/town, so people always notice us and stare, often they ask us for things: candy, money, sunglasses, clothes, shoes... really anything, I think some of it is because they think we have money, some of it I think is the African "sharing" culture, and some of it is just an excuse to talk to us I think. It is actually true that most people look at our shoes whenever they see us, I'm not sure why - but it might be some sort of status thing, if you have money, you can afford good shoes. I've seen many different kinds of footwear here, from fancy men's dress shoes, Converse All Stars are big here, high heels and fancy sandals, boots, the school students shoes (Grasshoppers), bedroom slippers for normal footwear and flip flops to play basketball. All of these kinds of footwear are also seen in varying stages of repair and, as the case may be disrepair, we've also seen Tom's shoes - on one end being on volunteers, and on the other end being worn by orphans because the company legitimately donates them http://www.toms.com/.
As we walk around we greet everyone, that is another part of the culture here - our first Sesotho words were Lumela (doomehla) - Hello and O phela juang - how are you? and it is mandatory to greet and disrepectful if you don't... sometimes it takes much longer to get places because you must greet everyone. It is also common to be asked where are you coming from and where are you going; but, the fishbowl effect is so much that in training village our host mother would already know all of that even before we got home and she was able to ask us.
So, there is greeting and then there is good byes, if there is any English that Basotho children know, it is "bye-bye." When we first got to our site, we found the group of small children that live near us would scream - really scream like that reverberating mostly unpleasant sound - "bye-bye" every time they saw us, coming or going. It has been one of our Peace Corps Volunteer goals to teach them a little more than that. Now, when they see us, some times they will scream "hello" instead, but usually only if we say it first. We are almost at "how are you?"
The Fishbowl effect is also sometimes very confusing, because almost everyone in town knows us, especially because for me (Carol), I have been working - and introducing myself all over the district where we live. So, many people know our names - but it is uncommon for us to be able to smoothly reciprocate, especially because many Sesotho names are extremely difficult to hear, say, generally understand and remember...

So, I will wrap up with a few "you know you are in Peace Corps when..."
...you have people over for dinner, and they have to use a tupperware lid as a plate and nobody notices for the worse
...you have a clothes line in the middle of your house with all of your underware on it and you are so used to it, you forget to be embarrassed by it when you have company
...you start keeping a tally of how many Kg's of peanut butter you have consumed
...you also start keeping a list of books you have read and how many games of Scrabble you have played
...you have a hardcore party and everyone goes to bed at 11pm
Next time I will talk more about our jobs and I will talk to Shane about more "you know you are in Peace Corps when..."

It is very beautiful here, we enjoy the beauty of this mountainous country every day and the beauty of the people. We are coming along on our garden, but have been having a bit of problem with either a sheep or a goat getting in and eating our green! We'll try to get some more of the training photos up so we can keep more up to date with the photos. We are doing well, both working hard. Shane was on the National Lesotho Television News, and has been teaching some escape classes to kids. He has also been beating me at Scrabble! Last night he got a score of almost 450! However, I got almost the highest possible cribbage hand Monday night, the one with all of the 5's and the face card! We have also been reading, Shane just finished "Mountains Beyond Mountains" and is reading "The 4-hour Body" he has really enjoyed them! I just finished "Small Wonder" by Barbara Kingsolver and it was really good, I think a lot of you would really enjoy it - you know who you are! Also, just to add to the walking tidbit - I have lately been wearing a pedometer and have been easily averaging 8,500 steps in a day, even if I spend a good amount of time in the office or in the car! That is the news for now.
All the best to you all, and sending all of our love and hugs!
Carol and Shane

By Reader Demand: Our Lives as PCVs Part 3

Dear Friends and Family,
We do hope that you are continuing to enjoy our blog. We were able to get some photos up, please check them out under the Philly and Training page, sorry about the non-logical order. There is one if you haven't seen, under "The real thing" page. I really like that one, it is probably the best one that I've taken in Lesotho so far. Please enjoy. We are happy to say we just got our first piece of mail at our new addy - thanks so much Grandma Gloria, Grandpa Jerry, Auntie Kirsten and Casey - you guys are fantastic!
General news in Lesotho is that local elections are coming up this weekend and the Lesotho Independence Day is October 4, so there will be celebrating and everyone has the day off - yay!
So, I have finished for now talking about the basic lack of luxuries like electricity and how that impacts our lives, but I also will take a moment to describe a bit more what it is like to live without any car. I have touched on this in previous blogs where I mentioned the buses. To get to Maseru (the capital city and the only town of reasonble size in the country), is anywhere from 5-8hrs by bus. The buses are often crammed with people, with even the aisle stuffed like a sardine can so that you are practically suffocated by people, some of whom may not bathe as often as we'd like to hope and some of them are also the big, beautiful African women. Sometimes the bus even blares music - music of all genres such as gospel, rap, Dolly Parton is also big here, other African music, traditional Sesotho music and even the Famu music of Mafeteng which largely consists of shouting to a beat. Though I have had at least one experience with this, where we were riding on some incrediablly scenic roads (while standing) and listening to the very loud African music and it was a real reminder of being here and having a very cool, very African experiece. Another thing is, because it is so often cold here, the Basotho people in general feel it is very important to be excessively warm whenever the opportunity presents itself, so that means no open windows on the bus. At this point, the bus drives on either of two roads in the country, the north road or the south road. *Moms should stop reading at this point* Both, are very winding and mountainous in general. If you are on an actual charter bus, there is frequent stopping and going to pick up people and drop people off, which can be quite disturbing if you can really picture how crammed these things can get. If you are on a minibus/kombi/sprinter/quantum/taxi thing, usually they go straight through to your destination, but that means they go extremely fast - which can be a bit worrisome for several reasons, such as that we are in Africa and their maintenence standards aren't quite what we are used to from the States. Also, since roads are roads they are often the easiest for people to walk along or on, there is also frequently livestock on the road or crossing it - I live in constant fear of being in a vehicle when it hits a cow or a person. Even in some villages the soccer field (which they have in every village) is directly adjacent to the road, so if the ball goes out of bounds a child must run into the road to get it back. Fortunately, so far, I have only been in a vehicle when it has hit a dog. There are also normal car taxis, we don't take those very much because of the cost but again there is the maintenence standard and often the drivers smell like the local libations. To catch any of these modes of transportation from a town, you find yourself having to got to the "taxi rank" notoriously glamorous places the world over, the most marked impression of the taxi rank for me is the olfactory experience, it smells like garbage, B.O., street food, and often sewage but at least urine. There are vendors of all kinds, taxi drivers hasseling you in Sesotho, bad English, good English, Afrikans... there are many people, a lot of traffic and generally a lot going on. Oh yeah, and then the fact that we are the only white people there makes us stick out like nothing else! Needless to say that being country bumpkins from MT, we don't exactly thrive in the taxi rank, and public is not the most comfortable part of our experience here.
There is also the way we get around the most in any given day: walking. We now walk a lot! The place where we live is extremely mountainous and we have now figured out how it is possible to walk uphill both ways to somewhere, as was described by our grandparents in stories from "the hard olden days." This varies a bit for some PCVs here, but I think it is very safe to say that we all walk a lot here. So, to get to work for me, I walk down the hill our house is on, then up the next hill to get to the road, then I walk down that hill and through the village and then get to my work which is halfway up another hill, this takes about 25 minutes now, down from when we first got here and it took about 40 minutes. Shane, being generally awesome, will often walk me to work and then walk through the village and up yet another hill to his work - and then he will walk a little bit farther even, to go work out... Anyways, this is just in the morning, sometimes with WFP, we go to do monitoring for school feeding and can walk anywhere from 1km up a mountain to, I've done about 5-6km so far, but I think they have been breaking me in slowly, I've heard though that maybe after 10 km we try to rent horses. Again, I have mentioned that if we buy grocerys we have to walk to town and then carry them back usually in our backpacks, Shane even carried bricks one day so we could build our ghetto bookshelf. Really to get anywhere is a pretty long walk, Shane's boss walk about an hour one way everyday from his village. Even to visit the other volunteer here "that lives in the same town" is about 45 minutes walking. Also, for safety reasons we have somewhat of a curfew, in that it is generally a good idea to be home before dark. This has put a bit of a damper on our social life and Shane is still trying to figure out how (and when) to do Jiu Jit Su and still make it home before dark. For the most part I am lucky though, because any place I go with work we do take the WFP car, so I have the luxury of not having to ride public as much as maybe I would otherwise. Even with all of this walking neither of us has had any marked change in weight, good for Shane - I am still undecided about myself though. I will close with two unrelately small bits of news in our lives, Shane as I write is learning to plow with oxen - I am jealous! However, I did beat him last night at Scrabble with a score of over 400, this may be a new record for me. On that note we both send you all our best thoughts and wishes and I will hopefully get another chance to post within the next two weeks.
Love,
Carol and Shane

By Reader Demand: Our Lives as PCVs Part 2

Hello Everyone! My IT problems are resolved and I'm back online. A quick shout out to the McFarlands (not us - the original ones) for the great care package, thank you so much - we loved and appreciated it and really enjoyed thinking of you, also thanks to Dad Froseth for taking care of our business stuff while we are here - I know it kinda sucks especially with all of those Victoria's Secret Catalogs! We also appreciated the anniversary cards we recieved - Thanks again everyone!
We both hope you are all well and enjoying the onset of fall in the Northern Hemisphere, we believe the weather may be identical in both places at this time (at least for our friends in family of the great state of MT). Cold mornings, temperate afternoons, dry, dusty and smoky. The main difference being that we are going into our first spring in a year. We have been enjoying planting our garden with all the normal stuff - peas, beets, carrots, tomatoes, spinach, onions, beans, squash, potatoes, and of course - chard. We are looking forward to eating our own fresh veggies again. My favorite thing so far about the spring here is the pink peach trees blooming across the hillsides in all of the villages - it really is beautiful!
The end of last week we just spent celebrating the 50th Birthday of Peace Corps. We had a big celebration with all of the volunteers in country coming, along with the US Ambassador (Michelle Bond) and King Letsi III. There was a lot of food - including the 5 cows the Prime Minister donated to honor the PCV he was taught by a long time ago, traditional dancers, singing, and us the CHED 11's got to swear in and become real volunteers again! We will try to post some video or photos but you may find a youtube link along with other Lesotho volunteers' blogs here http://www.peacecorpsjournals.com/?Country&country_id=44&full_page=1. It was a good time. Then Shane came back home and I went with some other volunteers to "Pony Camp"at the house of one of the Ed volunteers who is about to go home. It was exciting, I have now ridden horses in 4 countries, but I still have a hard time really "being one" with them. We also almost had a close encounter with one of culturally iconic initiation schools for young men, they actually started chasing us - danger!, but we were on horses and fortunately we had no problems getting away from that area quickly and were able to replan our ride for the day. Got home last Sunday night and was graced with a visit from the flu, I have now been sick in almost every way possible since getting here - bummer! Which is amazing considering we've had about 10 immunizations since being in country. Oh- well, Shane takes great care of me even if there is no laying on the couch and watching movies here -  and I am now invincible again!
So, I'll talk a little more of the inconviniences that were the main subject of the last post. We have since hired out the washing of our laudry, because my "real job" doesn't really afford us the time to spend about 4 hours washing our clothes by hand in large basins and the rest of the day watching all of our expensive REI-esque things dry on the line so they don't get stolen. But we have done it for several months - long enough to appreciate the washing machine and dryer we left back home. Also,  the Basotho are very clean, meticulous people. For example, our host father in training village once was watching us wash and the next week our host mother told me that he had instructed her to teach me how to make sure that Shane's socks were white-white when they came out of the washing bucket. I was greatful that I did not pack white socks myself. Also, I swear we will post pictures soon - and washing photos are among them.
Of course electricity is a pretty fantastic convinience. One of my favorite reasons for it is central heating. As we bid farewell to winter in Lesotho, I can only savor every moment of warmth that stands between me and next winter in our cement block octagonal house, with vaulted tin roof and single pane windows. Next winter I will be hugging our gas heater with its 3 2"x4" panels (we actually can't afford to consistently use all three on the Volunteer Stipend), because it really only heats about a one foot radius around the front and I've already melted one skirt by getting too close out of desperation. Again, we are welcoming spring with open arms! Also, we never really realized how much of a contributer electricity is to what we Americans generally think of as productivity. Without it, it is difficult to see to cook dinner, study afterwards, or even have a reasonalbe length evening. Without it, our bedtime was about 8pm - it even put a damper on our Scrabble games! Even now, as we have it, we have one outlet for a pretty sketchy lamp, charging cell phones, and our electric tea kettle. We have one overhead flourescent tube lightbulb and one (hanging from wires) compact flourescent in the bathroom - it makes a huge different. It is not however, reliable. Also, as you may have guessed, I have a computer at my office. Unfortunately, I could not use it much of the week before last because there was no electricity in the building, a few days the electric all over town has been out - for like, a whole weekend. - One of the reasons we have not been eating meat here is because of sketchy refrigeration! I will close with the aptly stated rule on modern conviniences in Peace Corps - if you have any luxury you can only have two out of three at any one time (the three being phone/internet, water or electric). For example if you have working power and water, the cell phone tower will be down. Or if you have access to the internet, you will go home and the water will be off. You get the idea. I will post again before a month has gone by again, work has been keeping me in the field and the electric being out put a damper on the blogging. We have been loving it here, and have been thinking of you all from here and wishing you the best of the best.
Sincerely,
Carol and Shane