hey all
still here,
i ran out of sleeping pills and laid around half awake all last night, listening to the activity. (two people were sick and one couldn't sleep and so was wandering the halls). i don't want to ask for more, sleeping pills suck. my stress reactions are all totally flipped around, usually i undereat and oversleep when i'm stressed, but so far i have been overeating and undersleeping with this one. all the eating makes me feel kind of bloated, and my belly sticks out. another trainee commented that i would look cute pregnant because i always have this little potbelly or something.
this morning i had my language assessment, and i think i did pretty well, i talked a lot. i think i remembered all my pronouns (it's an oral only test), so now i can relax and maybe have some whiskey tonight for new years eve. we leave teh 2nd for our site visit for 3 days, to see our site and move in a little and everything. i'm kind of afraid to go sleep alone in a roundavel in the mountains. i know nothing will happen and i need to get over it, but i'm still pretty apprehensive. another volunteer's site is like 30 mins away or something, and she offered to stay the night with me, and i may take her up on it. i need to talk to the country director about it and stuff.
we're having a talent show tonight for new years. my talent is nija-ism and banditry. meaning i'm invisible and a silent killer/stealer. i'm still trying to decide if i want to be a bandit, a ninja, or a spelunker when i grow up... right now i'm leaning towards spelunking because it's the most fun to say. bandits are cool though because they can wear bandannas, but ninjas get to wear black pajamas and jump around, so really i'm stumped. i guess i still have a couple years before i have to decide what to do with my life.
oh, and it's awesome, the trading cards have made their way into teh vernacular of the group, they say stuff like, oh that'll up/down your attack/defense points! or hey add that to your stats! etc. it's lucky for my co-trainees that i rock so hard and made these keepsakes for them.
crappy out of time
i am so glad to get the emails from everyone, they mean a lot to me, and are really helping,
so thank you!
love love love and what>? muffins! (i ate one today and it was monate) (= tasty)
Monday, December 31, 2007
Friday, December 28, 2007
Scorpions, Christmas, and Rapists... Oh My!
So, this past week has had a higher number of firsts than usual for me.
I got bedbugs, which SUCKS. I had like 20 bites across the back of my calf, and another 10 or so on my foot, and bedbug bites start small, then swell up like little tumors, then turn weird and purple, and itch like hell the whole week or so they last. I DOOMed the hell out of my bed and blankets and sheets etc. and killed the motherfudgers.
Then when I was at language lessons I was standing on the stoop to my teachers house, and the thatch roof overhangs a bit, and I bumped my head against it a couple times for no particular reason, then stepped off the stoop and felt something fall into my boot (the boot goes about 1/2way up my calf) and I thought it was thatch so I reach and and holyshitmotherfuckerbitchasshoebag my finger hurt!!! so I took off my shoe and a scorpion fell out! it hurt SO BAD> the tip of my finger was stabbing, and there were shooting pains going down the rest of my hand. it got better like half an hour later after I took advil. but the rest of the day the whole finger felt like pins and needles when I touched it. (I was poking my finger a lot and giggling about the funny feeling). This happened Christmas eve. We played a game called smackDOWN in Sesotho class, which was meant to be a friendly competition with the trainees from the next village but quickly devolved into all the language trainers screaming and arguing and yelling smackDOWN! smackDOWN! over and over in a hilarious basotho accent. we trainees had no fun whatsoever though. it was so stressful and stupid. so afterwards we had breakfast for brunch, I made banana pancakes, mad made AWESOME cinnamon rolls and we also had this potato onion egg cheese bake thing and hung out and had a great time.
Then it was Christmas! I made “peach cobbler” a.k.a. peach goo, that looked funny, especially after i dropped it, but my ninja skills (i've been honing them) allowed me to catch the pot right before it hit the ground. but teh sideways flight caused all the topping to get mixed into teh runny (no cornstarch) peaches. but it still tasted good. everyone made amazing food and we all got together in one of the classrooms of the primary school and ate and drank and it was so much fun. and my presents I made for everyone were a HUGE hit. I made these “peace corps trading cards” one for each person, with a cartoon of them on the front, and something I associate with them in the background, and I gave everyone an element (earth air fire water) that made up the border of the pic. Then on the back they had “stats” there were attack and defense stats, and also stats appropriate to the person and different on each card like “inappropriate question asking ability” or “bullshit production” “underwearlessness” etc. etc. The whole group loves them and wants copies of everyone elses and stuff. I’m really glad, because I had these visions in my head of everyone being like “…so… what do I do with this?” but that didn’t happen. I also got a lot of semi-surprised "so you're like, a real artist... i always thought you just doodled" which i'm not sure what that means, because i do just doodle. i don't "do art" or whatever...
oh and I have a Christmas story: so a week or so ago when I was hanging out with village friends and the song white Christmas came on the radio (they are super into Christmas carols here. ugh.) the two girls giggled and looked at me funny, so I was like “hay you whats yer prob,” and they were like, “well, that song… about white people” and giggled again, and then I was confused. then lightbulb, they thought white Christmas meant white people Christmas. because Here Christmas comes in the summer. there is no snow. so I had to explain about winter time and wishing for snow. I’m not sure they fully believed me, about the song or about the fact that in America Christmas is in wintertime, like they didn't understand how teh same day, at the same time, it's summer here and winter there. I was not in the mood to try to explain these concepts, so i left them in their ignorance (woo! i'm a born teacher.)
So then Christmas night I went to sleep all snug in my bedat around 10 pm (which is super late and crazy here, for me at least). a while later, I was woken up by a bang, and I looked up and my window was open, and I was all groggy and like “wha? must be the wind” so I got up to close it. (the window was held shut only by a crappy little bent nail that you rotated, so I wasn’t surprised it opened on its own) and then I went back to bed. (p.s. here in Lesotho, the nighttime is DARK. like solid pitch black no light whatsoever) and as I was turning over onto my side, a hand came out of nowhere and pinned my wrist down, and I screamed. Then the hands closed over my throat and cut off my scream and choked me, and I tried to push him away, but I don’t know how hard, because I couldn’t breathe for so long, and I don’t even know if my vision was going black because it was all the same black if I closed my eyes or opened them. and I know the man’s face was inches from mine, I could feel his breath, but I couldn’t see him, just solid blackness. and I couldn’t thrash, my neck was so well pinned down, so I punched him in the side of the head over and over, finally I got both feet together with my knees and hips bent and pushed him off me with both feet. and I tried to scream and only a rattle came out. and I kicked him again and got a breath and screamed. but the noise that came out of me was not a sound i've ever heard, or could really describe. it was, I don’t know, this hoarse pterodactyl howl, this unreal noise. He got freaked out ( don’t think he was expecting me to fight so much) and opened the door and ran out and I kept howling as I locked the door and checked the window and found my flashlight so I could see, and got a big chopping knife and sat on the bed attempting to do deep breaths. after some time, I have no idea if it was 30 seconds or 10 minutes, a knock came at my door and I just howled again. then a minute or so later another knock came and it was my ‘M’e and my brother, I just screamed, and then I opened the door for them and I lost my deep breathing and hyperventilated a little, trying to mime what happened because neither of them speak any English. and they kept saying (in Sesotho) there is no man here, we don’t see a man. your window is closed a man could not have gotten in. And I couldn’t handle trying to reason with them or convince them, I just kept repeating my broken ass Sesotho version of what happened. Then my ‘me brought in a blanket and slept on my floor for the rest of the night (this all happened around midnight). But every time she heard me sniffle, she yelled at me to go to sleep. All I wanted was to turn on my flashlight and make the darkness stop, and to cry and cry. I couldn’t sleep. I laid in bed clutching my flashlight and trying desperately to see through the darkness, and trying to cry silently until it got light at about 4am and I finally fell asleep. She got up and left at about 5. I got up, drank a nalgene full of water, then puked it all up. Then I sat and waited for someone to come find me, and tried to keep deep breaths, so I wouldn’t fall out of control. Thank god Madeline thought we had language at 8:30 so she came to get me for class, and I told her what happened and she ran to the language trainers house. The trainer had “heard about it” I guess. My ‘me had gone over there that morning and told her I had a nightmare. then the chain of whatever was set into play, and the country director (big head boss of Lesotho peace corps) came and got me and took me to the capital to stay in the volunteer transit house. I got to take Madeline with me for moral support.
I’ve been staying in the T-house since. I got my voice back by the end of teh next day, and could eat again (at first it hurt my throat to swallow food.) I can’t sleep, I can’t lay down in a dark room. disembodied hands keep coming out to strangle me, and the crazy hoarse howling noise I made keeps echoing in my mind. They gave me unidentified pills to help me sleep, but I still can’t get it out of my head when I’m awake. They’ve filed reports with the chief of the village, the police, the pc director for central/south Africa, pc headquarters in wash. dc, and aren’t using that village anymore for training. There’s no way to catch him, I couldn’t see anything, except when he was silhouetted in the doorway running away I saw his head was shaved. which doesn’t help at all really, because 80% of basotho men keeps their heads shaved. I don’t really know what to do with all of this. my co trainees have been very supportive, but they kind of look at me like they aren't sure what to do around me or say to me. On teh morning after christmas when i was being taken to the capital they found out and some cried i guess and it was a big thing, and i've gotten a few cards and notes of encouratement, etc. but I keep thinking about what if I ran away back home to portland. I’ve been wondering why I’m here since I got here. Before I left, I had a few excuses for when other people asked why I was doing peace corps, but really I never had a good reason for myself. I just did it. I don’t want to leave yet, because that would be giving up. I want to be stronger than that. I haven’t even seen my actual site yet (which will have burglar bars on the windows and door). I want to see what it’s really like living in Lesotho, not just during training. At least for now I have 3 floor to ceiling bookcases full of SO MANY BOOKS, it’s super awesome, and there’s an incredible movie library at the t-house (transit house), too. I’ve been averaging about 3 movies a day, because I can’t sleep, but I’m too tired to concentrate on reading anything except old celeb gossip magazines from august that other volunteers have gotten in the mail. There’s a big ‘end of community based training’ feast tomorrow. they’re going to slaughter a cow and have traditional dancing and everything, and I’d like to see it in theory, but I can’t bear to go back. Every man with a shaved head will freak me out, and also the whole village has heard my story so they’ll all be staring at me (even more than usual). and I don’t think I would be able to go through it and not cry. So I’m going to sit around the t-house and wait for all the other trainees to come back to maseru (the capital, where I am) in the afternoon, and have them tell me about it.
If I want to talk to a therapist or anything, I have to do it by phone with some random person in Washington d.c. which I really don’t want to do. I hate talking on the phone forever, and I don’t like therapists as a rule, anyway. But I’m not sure how to deal with this, or how to make the repeating flashbacks of the night stop. Just time I guess.
Once more, and forever more, i love you all so so much, and miss you now more than ever.
I got bedbugs, which SUCKS. I had like 20 bites across the back of my calf, and another 10 or so on my foot, and bedbug bites start small, then swell up like little tumors, then turn weird and purple, and itch like hell the whole week or so they last. I DOOMed the hell out of my bed and blankets and sheets etc. and killed the motherfudgers.
Then when I was at language lessons I was standing on the stoop to my teachers house, and the thatch roof overhangs a bit, and I bumped my head against it a couple times for no particular reason, then stepped off the stoop and felt something fall into my boot (the boot goes about 1/2way up my calf) and I thought it was thatch so I reach and and holyshitmotherfuckerbitchasshoebag my finger hurt!!! so I took off my shoe and a scorpion fell out! it hurt SO BAD> the tip of my finger was stabbing, and there were shooting pains going down the rest of my hand. it got better like half an hour later after I took advil. but the rest of the day the whole finger felt like pins and needles when I touched it. (I was poking my finger a lot and giggling about the funny feeling). This happened Christmas eve. We played a game called smackDOWN in Sesotho class, which was meant to be a friendly competition with the trainees from the next village but quickly devolved into all the language trainers screaming and arguing and yelling smackDOWN! smackDOWN! over and over in a hilarious basotho accent. we trainees had no fun whatsoever though. it was so stressful and stupid. so afterwards we had breakfast for brunch, I made banana pancakes, mad made AWESOME cinnamon rolls and we also had this potato onion egg cheese bake thing and hung out and had a great time.
Then it was Christmas! I made “peach cobbler” a.k.a. peach goo, that looked funny, especially after i dropped it, but my ninja skills (i've been honing them) allowed me to catch the pot right before it hit the ground. but teh sideways flight caused all the topping to get mixed into teh runny (no cornstarch) peaches. but it still tasted good. everyone made amazing food and we all got together in one of the classrooms of the primary school and ate and drank and it was so much fun. and my presents I made for everyone were a HUGE hit. I made these “peace corps trading cards” one for each person, with a cartoon of them on the front, and something I associate with them in the background, and I gave everyone an element (earth air fire water) that made up the border of the pic. Then on the back they had “stats” there were attack and defense stats, and also stats appropriate to the person and different on each card like “inappropriate question asking ability” or “bullshit production” “underwearlessness” etc. etc. The whole group loves them and wants copies of everyone elses and stuff. I’m really glad, because I had these visions in my head of everyone being like “…so… what do I do with this?” but that didn’t happen. I also got a lot of semi-surprised "so you're like, a real artist... i always thought you just doodled" which i'm not sure what that means, because i do just doodle. i don't "do art" or whatever...
oh and I have a Christmas story: so a week or so ago when I was hanging out with village friends and the song white Christmas came on the radio (they are super into Christmas carols here. ugh.) the two girls giggled and looked at me funny, so I was like “hay you whats yer prob,” and they were like, “well, that song… about white people” and giggled again, and then I was confused. then lightbulb, they thought white Christmas meant white people Christmas. because Here Christmas comes in the summer. there is no snow. so I had to explain about winter time and wishing for snow. I’m not sure they fully believed me, about the song or about the fact that in America Christmas is in wintertime, like they didn't understand how teh same day, at the same time, it's summer here and winter there. I was not in the mood to try to explain these concepts, so i left them in their ignorance (woo! i'm a born teacher.)
So then Christmas night I went to sleep all snug in my bedat around 10 pm (which is super late and crazy here, for me at least). a while later, I was woken up by a bang, and I looked up and my window was open, and I was all groggy and like “wha? must be the wind” so I got up to close it. (the window was held shut only by a crappy little bent nail that you rotated, so I wasn’t surprised it opened on its own) and then I went back to bed. (p.s. here in Lesotho, the nighttime is DARK. like solid pitch black no light whatsoever) and as I was turning over onto my side, a hand came out of nowhere and pinned my wrist down, and I screamed. Then the hands closed over my throat and cut off my scream and choked me, and I tried to push him away, but I don’t know how hard, because I couldn’t breathe for so long, and I don’t even know if my vision was going black because it was all the same black if I closed my eyes or opened them. and I know the man’s face was inches from mine, I could feel his breath, but I couldn’t see him, just solid blackness. and I couldn’t thrash, my neck was so well pinned down, so I punched him in the side of the head over and over, finally I got both feet together with my knees and hips bent and pushed him off me with both feet. and I tried to scream and only a rattle came out. and I kicked him again and got a breath and screamed. but the noise that came out of me was not a sound i've ever heard, or could really describe. it was, I don’t know, this hoarse pterodactyl howl, this unreal noise. He got freaked out ( don’t think he was expecting me to fight so much) and opened the door and ran out and I kept howling as I locked the door and checked the window and found my flashlight so I could see, and got a big chopping knife and sat on the bed attempting to do deep breaths. after some time, I have no idea if it was 30 seconds or 10 minutes, a knock came at my door and I just howled again. then a minute or so later another knock came and it was my ‘M’e and my brother, I just screamed, and then I opened the door for them and I lost my deep breathing and hyperventilated a little, trying to mime what happened because neither of them speak any English. and they kept saying (in Sesotho) there is no man here, we don’t see a man. your window is closed a man could not have gotten in. And I couldn’t handle trying to reason with them or convince them, I just kept repeating my broken ass Sesotho version of what happened. Then my ‘me brought in a blanket and slept on my floor for the rest of the night (this all happened around midnight). But every time she heard me sniffle, she yelled at me to go to sleep. All I wanted was to turn on my flashlight and make the darkness stop, and to cry and cry. I couldn’t sleep. I laid in bed clutching my flashlight and trying desperately to see through the darkness, and trying to cry silently until it got light at about 4am and I finally fell asleep. She got up and left at about 5. I got up, drank a nalgene full of water, then puked it all up. Then I sat and waited for someone to come find me, and tried to keep deep breaths, so I wouldn’t fall out of control. Thank god Madeline thought we had language at 8:30 so she came to get me for class, and I told her what happened and she ran to the language trainers house. The trainer had “heard about it” I guess. My ‘me had gone over there that morning and told her I had a nightmare. then the chain of whatever was set into play, and the country director (big head boss of Lesotho peace corps) came and got me and took me to the capital to stay in the volunteer transit house. I got to take Madeline with me for moral support.
I’ve been staying in the T-house since. I got my voice back by the end of teh next day, and could eat again (at first it hurt my throat to swallow food.) I can’t sleep, I can’t lay down in a dark room. disembodied hands keep coming out to strangle me, and the crazy hoarse howling noise I made keeps echoing in my mind. They gave me unidentified pills to help me sleep, but I still can’t get it out of my head when I’m awake. They’ve filed reports with the chief of the village, the police, the pc director for central/south Africa, pc headquarters in wash. dc, and aren’t using that village anymore for training. There’s no way to catch him, I couldn’t see anything, except when he was silhouetted in the doorway running away I saw his head was shaved. which doesn’t help at all really, because 80% of basotho men keeps their heads shaved. I don’t really know what to do with all of this. my co trainees have been very supportive, but they kind of look at me like they aren't sure what to do around me or say to me. On teh morning after christmas when i was being taken to the capital they found out and some cried i guess and it was a big thing, and i've gotten a few cards and notes of encouratement, etc. but I keep thinking about what if I ran away back home to portland. I’ve been wondering why I’m here since I got here. Before I left, I had a few excuses for when other people asked why I was doing peace corps, but really I never had a good reason for myself. I just did it. I don’t want to leave yet, because that would be giving up. I want to be stronger than that. I haven’t even seen my actual site yet (which will have burglar bars on the windows and door). I want to see what it’s really like living in Lesotho, not just during training. At least for now I have 3 floor to ceiling bookcases full of SO MANY BOOKS, it’s super awesome, and there’s an incredible movie library at the t-house (transit house), too. I’ve been averaging about 3 movies a day, because I can’t sleep, but I’m too tired to concentrate on reading anything except old celeb gossip magazines from august that other volunteers have gotten in the mail. There’s a big ‘end of community based training’ feast tomorrow. they’re going to slaughter a cow and have traditional dancing and everything, and I’d like to see it in theory, but I can’t bear to go back. Every man with a shaved head will freak me out, and also the whole village has heard my story so they’ll all be staring at me (even more than usual). and I don’t think I would be able to go through it and not cry. So I’m going to sit around the t-house and wait for all the other trainees to come back to maseru (the capital, where I am) in the afternoon, and have them tell me about it.
If I want to talk to a therapist or anything, I have to do it by phone with some random person in Washington d.c. which I really don’t want to do. I hate talking on the phone forever, and I don’t like therapists as a rule, anyway. But I’m not sure how to deal with this, or how to make the repeating flashbacks of the night stop. Just time I guess.
Once more, and forever more, i love you all so so much, and miss you now more than ever.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
I'm the most grown up mature well worded lady you've ever done met
Yeah! Wooo! Almost christmas!! And I just ate a ham and cheese sandwich and it was super fantastic. (notice the lack of cursing in that sentence. See me grow, change, become a better, less offensive person) AND it’s almost Christmas and I have the best presents evar that I made for all my co trainees but I can’t discuss them here because my blog is read by the wrong people. Also, Ben Klein’s mom, if you’re reading this, whut up. I hear you’re major cool.
So a couple weeks ago we lekhooa (white people) got to present a concert! Where we sing! And yes, it was as horrible as it sounds, especially because EVERYONE here from the age of 3 sings amazing and can harmonize perfectly. So we get up there in front of this audience of all my students and neighbors and family and everyone from the next 3 villages around and sang. We did some awesome sesotho songs, and some American ones. THE BEST was the umbrella song. Everybody in Lesotho loves it almost as much as I do. It’s like I’m home here, among my peers and fellow rihanna lovers. Anyway, anticipating the awful awful embarrassment of this occasion, Madeline and I had a little wine before hand. Possibly a lot of wine. It made me not care so much. OH also I should mention here that music concerts here are not like they are or may be in the states. Here it’s like a battle or something, people can pay any amount of money and call out any one or group of people to sing any song, or a song of their choosing. And you have to top that bid to get out of it. And I got called out to stand in front of the group and sing and dance, and another time when the students were singing I got called out to go up with them. I blushed a lot, and most of you know how truly bad my singing voice is, so that certainly didn’t help. But I got to call out a few of my extra cocky students to go sing. Unfortunately they don’t care because they’re all pop stars. Oh well.
And last week, we got to go hike a mountain, and then afterwards swim in the stream swimmin’ hole that you could slide down the rocks into a pool and it was a perfect day. Then we went and had a huge feast and danced around in circles to the Lesotho music (that i swear is all voiced by ja rule's cousin or something) with all of our language trainers. Then today we hiked a smaller mountain with no stream, but a lot of history. It’s where king moshoeshoe I (pronounced mah-shway-shway) freed his people from the boers and Lesotho came into existence. And I made a thousand pounds of fudge last night for another trainee’s birthday today. Last week I also made bread for the first time with mad and it came out great. I’m going to be sally homemaker by the time I return to the states. I’ve gotten really into indulging myself culinarily. I’ve become the pancake whisperer, last time I made peanut butter banana pancakes and they rocked. I like pancakes because I can make a bunch for dinner, and save some batter to have more for breakfast. And I often eat waay too much fudge in a sitting and get a tummy ache. And i made tortillas for breakfast burritos, and they turned out really well.
I got my first package! Thank you momma! It is just taking a long time because of Christmasi think, and the pension system ties up like 80% of the mail system here. But nobody but me is wearing my jacket and vest! And also I would like to congratulate my parents on being the awesomest married couple for 30 years now. Love you guys! Oh, and next package you send, can you throw in my jansport backpack? It’s in the box on my bookshelf in the closet I think.
Chicken thing update: I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re dinosaurs. I gave them corn the other day. I like them as long as they don’t come too close to me. I’m still afraid they’ll peck my face off. They are like chickens, but have longer legs and necks. And their only feathers are on their wings. They make meep meep noises. when they run past teh doorway to my roundavel i feel like i'm in prehistoric times with dinosaur herds milling about.
Things I now know, but did not before:
1. speed bumps here are called "humped zebra crossings", there are not specified areas for mutant zebras to cross the road.
2. when using my pee bucket multiple times at night, I need to wipe the rim, because condensation is not a myth.
3. if you stand in a doorway for too long, you will have a heavy flow.
4. if a woman walks through a herd of animals, she will become infertile.
5. vanilla banana oatmeal is very tasty
6. in sesotho, “banana” means little girls, and no I do not put them in my pancakes.
7. my 'me can open 40s of beer with her teeth. (they're denchers)
8. a good side effect of everyone thinking my freckles are a rash is that i haven't had a single marriage proposal yet, whereas all the other girls in my group have had several.
9. leatherman knives are sharp, and stabbing your hand with one hurts, and bleeds a LOT.
10. jamie lynn spears is preggers. OMG.
11. here you don't get pregnant, you fall pregnant. it's like a disease.
12. i have a recipe for muffins, i want to make them.
13. ke situlo, u 'na lula (that one's for diana. you know what it means. phonetically: kay see-too-lo, oo nnah doo-lah)
Hope everyone has good holidays!
So a couple weeks ago we lekhooa (white people) got to present a concert! Where we sing! And yes, it was as horrible as it sounds, especially because EVERYONE here from the age of 3 sings amazing and can harmonize perfectly. So we get up there in front of this audience of all my students and neighbors and family and everyone from the next 3 villages around and sang. We did some awesome sesotho songs, and some American ones. THE BEST was the umbrella song. Everybody in Lesotho loves it almost as much as I do. It’s like I’m home here, among my peers and fellow rihanna lovers. Anyway, anticipating the awful awful embarrassment of this occasion, Madeline and I had a little wine before hand. Possibly a lot of wine. It made me not care so much. OH also I should mention here that music concerts here are not like they are or may be in the states. Here it’s like a battle or something, people can pay any amount of money and call out any one or group of people to sing any song, or a song of their choosing. And you have to top that bid to get out of it. And I got called out to stand in front of the group and sing and dance, and another time when the students were singing I got called out to go up with them. I blushed a lot, and most of you know how truly bad my singing voice is, so that certainly didn’t help. But I got to call out a few of my extra cocky students to go sing. Unfortunately they don’t care because they’re all pop stars. Oh well.
And last week, we got to go hike a mountain, and then afterwards swim in the stream swimmin’ hole that you could slide down the rocks into a pool and it was a perfect day. Then we went and had a huge feast and danced around in circles to the Lesotho music (that i swear is all voiced by ja rule's cousin or something) with all of our language trainers. Then today we hiked a smaller mountain with no stream, but a lot of history. It’s where king moshoeshoe I (pronounced mah-shway-shway) freed his people from the boers and Lesotho came into existence. And I made a thousand pounds of fudge last night for another trainee’s birthday today. Last week I also made bread for the first time with mad and it came out great. I’m going to be sally homemaker by the time I return to the states. I’ve gotten really into indulging myself culinarily. I’ve become the pancake whisperer, last time I made peanut butter banana pancakes and they rocked. I like pancakes because I can make a bunch for dinner, and save some batter to have more for breakfast. And I often eat waay too much fudge in a sitting and get a tummy ache. And i made tortillas for breakfast burritos, and they turned out really well.
I got my first package! Thank you momma! It is just taking a long time because of Christmasi think, and the pension system ties up like 80% of the mail system here. But nobody but me is wearing my jacket and vest! And also I would like to congratulate my parents on being the awesomest married couple for 30 years now. Love you guys! Oh, and next package you send, can you throw in my jansport backpack? It’s in the box on my bookshelf in the closet I think.
Chicken thing update: I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re dinosaurs. I gave them corn the other day. I like them as long as they don’t come too close to me. I’m still afraid they’ll peck my face off. They are like chickens, but have longer legs and necks. And their only feathers are on their wings. They make meep meep noises. when they run past teh doorway to my roundavel i feel like i'm in prehistoric times with dinosaur herds milling about.
Things I now know, but did not before:
1. speed bumps here are called "humped zebra crossings", there are not specified areas for mutant zebras to cross the road.
2. when using my pee bucket multiple times at night, I need to wipe the rim, because condensation is not a myth.
3. if you stand in a doorway for too long, you will have a heavy flow.
4. if a woman walks through a herd of animals, she will become infertile.
5. vanilla banana oatmeal is very tasty
6. in sesotho, “banana” means little girls, and no I do not put them in my pancakes.
7. my 'me can open 40s of beer with her teeth. (they're denchers)
8. a good side effect of everyone thinking my freckles are a rash is that i haven't had a single marriage proposal yet, whereas all the other girls in my group have had several.
9. leatherman knives are sharp, and stabbing your hand with one hurts, and bleeds a LOT.
10. jamie lynn spears is preggers. OMG.
11. here you don't get pregnant, you fall pregnant. it's like a disease.
12. i have a recipe for muffins, i want to make them.
13. ke situlo, u 'na lula (that one's for diana. you know what it means. phonetically: kay see-too-lo, oo nnah doo-lah)
Hope everyone has good holidays!
Friday, December 14, 2007
I am attempting to use less offensive potty mouthage in this post
Hey lovelies! I’m back in action!! I just found out where I’m going to live for two years today!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHH! I’m in Thaba-Tseka (if you want to check a map). It’s waay in the mountains, and takes forever to get to, and has the best view! I will be very high up, in a roundavel (traditional round house with a thatch roof) that seems pretty big, and the inside is painted blue! Woo! And I get electricity! So I won’t go blind from reading by candlelight. I am living on a family compound, and another volunteer is a 5 min walk from me, and one of my favorite volunteers (Victoria, has been mentioned here a couple times) is like a 15 min taxi ride away, and another awesome volunteer Lindsey is like 30 mins away., so even though I’m far far away in the beautiful mountains which I will climb, I will have friends around and not be a lonely mountain woman. I’m super psyched.
I’ve been cooking for myself and everything the past couple weeks, and it’s much nicer, my ‘me stays out of my face mostly, and we get a long. She’s kind of a drunk though. She stumbles home all wasted pretty often, and her drunk old people friends visit a lot. They’re really funny. She ululates all the time, and does a funny old person dance. I still get all lonely sitting around my roundavel at night, but I need to get used to it. I think a lot of what I’m missing doesn’t really exist any more, and I need to move on a little I guess. I have a lot of fun hanging out with mad (a.k.a. lebohang, new nickname lebu) who’s my neighbor and we commiserate. Oh, and my ‘me calls me tah-bey for short now. I like it. I like my sesotho name, it’s nice
We finished practice teaching today. It was fine. I had 56 kids in my form B class (like 9ht grade) they were ages 13ish to 23ish in one class. Luckily I’m good at making kids think I’m cool, so they liked me and I got them all excited about learning to round to a specified number of significant figures. And my form E (12th grade) had 11 kids, 3 of which had chem. Before, the others hadn’t so I had 3 know it all jerkfaces, and 8 nice kids. It was hard to juggle them, because the three knew everything about metals and shit, and the others didn’t know what an electron was. It was ok. All form E passed my exam. For form B I literally had the range. There were 3 100%, and one 0%, a few 8%s… etc. here passing is at 40%, and less than half usually pass. It was really nice to get to practice teach and see how I need to be different for Lesotho schools. For one, I have to speak like a slow-motion retarded british person. They don’t understand the American accent with all of our “r’s” and such. Also a lot don’t really know much English, period. So I have to write down almost all I say, and speak VERY SLOW> it’s cool though.
Sucks though, today my friend mad’s foot got ran over by a car!! She’s at the hospital now, they called and said she’s ok, they don’t think any bones are broken. Now I’m super paranoid and jumpy when walking around because drivers here are CRAZY.
. if you send me any sort of package, please lie on the customs form! list boring things! it really makes a difference for getting the package or not. And i am slowly gettign stuff in the mail to you guys letters are boring to write so i've been drawing comic strips of my life. i expect them to be proudly displayed on refrigerators all over the US.
i'm one of the only trainees to not receive a single piece of mail yet, i think the customs people are living vicariously through me or something. oh and there was a request for a day in the life of rebecca. i will attempt to write it here...
6:15ish am: wake up, then i heat some water for bucket baths, then i bucket bathe, and wash my hair, then i wash socks and undies from yesterday in my soapy bath water (it's what you do here, apparently). then i make breakfast, usually a pb and j, or toast, or oatmeal and some fruit. the peaches here are tasty. i've been making pancakes a lot, i make them for dinner and save some batter for breakfast. then i sweep my roundavel, tidy up, look over my lesson plan, dump my old water, boil my drinkng water for the day, get creeped out by the pseudo chickens my 'me bought that sometimes wander in my house. ( i keep thinking of that scene in jurassic park 2 or 3 wehre the guy is eaten by little dinosaurs the size of chickens). then i go to mad's house, then we walk to the bus stop and get teh bus to school.
then i teach/ observe from 8-12:30, with a tea break from 10:15-10:30. (my biscuit intake has skyrocketed!) then we go home for lunch. i've been eating a shoot ton of pasta here. sometimes i powernap. or read. i just finished Blind Assassin from Margaret Atwood and her writing is freaking incredible!! i reccommend it to all my blag audience.
then i go to sesotho lessons from 2:30-4:30/5 then i wander around, or talk to the willagers. or hang with mad. or hide in my roundavel because i want some personal time (which is unheard of here. you must be sick or something to want to stay home by yourself.) also i write my lesson plans during this time. then i make dinner and dishes and eating things from like 6:30-7:30. then i hang . then i do excersizes and stretches from like 730 or 8 for 30-45 mins. then i go to bed and lay around for a while until i fall asleep around 9:30 (i think. my broken alarm clock makes 8 and 9 look the same. same with 5 and 6, which sucks for waking up knowledge).
and that's my day! gotta scooooot
love love love and muffins! (and also maybe a juicebox for liz)
I’ve been cooking for myself and everything the past couple weeks, and it’s much nicer, my ‘me stays out of my face mostly, and we get a long. She’s kind of a drunk though. She stumbles home all wasted pretty often, and her drunk old people friends visit a lot. They’re really funny. She ululates all the time, and does a funny old person dance. I still get all lonely sitting around my roundavel at night, but I need to get used to it. I think a lot of what I’m missing doesn’t really exist any more, and I need to move on a little I guess. I have a lot of fun hanging out with mad (a.k.a. lebohang, new nickname lebu) who’s my neighbor and we commiserate. Oh, and my ‘me calls me tah-bey for short now. I like it. I like my sesotho name, it’s nice
We finished practice teaching today. It was fine. I had 56 kids in my form B class (like 9ht grade) they were ages 13ish to 23ish in one class. Luckily I’m good at making kids think I’m cool, so they liked me and I got them all excited about learning to round to a specified number of significant figures. And my form E (12th grade) had 11 kids, 3 of which had chem. Before, the others hadn’t so I had 3 know it all jerkfaces, and 8 nice kids. It was hard to juggle them, because the three knew everything about metals and shit, and the others didn’t know what an electron was. It was ok. All form E passed my exam. For form B I literally had the range. There were 3 100%, and one 0%, a few 8%s… etc. here passing is at 40%, and less than half usually pass. It was really nice to get to practice teach and see how I need to be different for Lesotho schools. For one, I have to speak like a slow-motion retarded british person. They don’t understand the American accent with all of our “r’s” and such. Also a lot don’t really know much English, period. So I have to write down almost all I say, and speak VERY SLOW> it’s cool though.
Sucks though, today my friend mad’s foot got ran over by a car!! She’s at the hospital now, they called and said she’s ok, they don’t think any bones are broken. Now I’m super paranoid and jumpy when walking around because drivers here are CRAZY.
. if you send me any sort of package, please lie on the customs form! list boring things! it really makes a difference for getting the package or not. And i am slowly gettign stuff in the mail to you guys letters are boring to write so i've been drawing comic strips of my life. i expect them to be proudly displayed on refrigerators all over the US.
i'm one of the only trainees to not receive a single piece of mail yet, i think the customs people are living vicariously through me or something. oh and there was a request for a day in the life of rebecca. i will attempt to write it here...
6:15ish am: wake up, then i heat some water for bucket baths, then i bucket bathe, and wash my hair, then i wash socks and undies from yesterday in my soapy bath water (it's what you do here, apparently). then i make breakfast, usually a pb and j, or toast, or oatmeal and some fruit. the peaches here are tasty. i've been making pancakes a lot, i make them for dinner and save some batter for breakfast. then i sweep my roundavel, tidy up, look over my lesson plan, dump my old water, boil my drinkng water for the day, get creeped out by the pseudo chickens my 'me bought that sometimes wander in my house. ( i keep thinking of that scene in jurassic park 2 or 3 wehre the guy is eaten by little dinosaurs the size of chickens). then i go to mad's house, then we walk to the bus stop and get teh bus to school.
then i teach/ observe from 8-12:30, with a tea break from 10:15-10:30. (my biscuit intake has skyrocketed!) then we go home for lunch. i've been eating a shoot ton of pasta here. sometimes i powernap. or read. i just finished Blind Assassin from Margaret Atwood and her writing is freaking incredible!! i reccommend it to all my blag audience.
then i go to sesotho lessons from 2:30-4:30/5 then i wander around, or talk to the willagers. or hang with mad. or hide in my roundavel because i want some personal time (which is unheard of here. you must be sick or something to want to stay home by yourself.) also i write my lesson plans during this time. then i make dinner and dishes and eating things from like 6:30-7:30. then i hang . then i do excersizes and stretches from like 730 or 8 for 30-45 mins. then i go to bed and lay around for a while until i fall asleep around 9:30 (i think. my broken alarm clock makes 8 and 9 look the same. same with 5 and 6, which sucks for waking up knowledge).
and that's my day! gotta scooooot
love love love and muffins! (and also maybe a juicebox for liz)
Saturday, December 1, 2007
I apologize for bad language featured in this blog and other emails.
First post-living in a village blog! I now live in a one room roundavel in ha Mofoka. Here instead of multi-room houses, families have 2-4 one room houses. I live with a curmudgeony old lady named ‘Me Malineo Mosoue. She is nice and means well, but she is still a curmudgeon. She doesn’t speak a word of English, so we have a lot of misunderstandings and arguments about everything from my curtains (open or close) to the arrangement of my stuff in my house, to my clothes, to when I leave for school, etc. All the other volunteers (as far as I can tell) have siblings at least who can help translate. Not me though! I guess my stories of current happenings with the ‘me (‘me means mother) are fun for my co-volunteers to hear about. My new name is Nthabeleng (en-tah-bee-leng), which means something along the lines of “happy”, which (this comment is for portlanders only) reminds me of Happy, that dour grumpy woman who works at the slev on 28th and steele.
It has been very rainy here, and when it rains, it really RAINS. With earth shaking heart stopping thunder, and lightning that seems like fireworks outside my window. And rain dumping buckets and buckets until I feel like I’m going to float away…
ok, so i'm feeling much more normal now, but to be truthful about me, i'm going to transcribe some of my journalyness i wrote yesterday. Since i'm on the other side of the world and am communicating through this weird third party (my blag), i'm going to be more honest about what's going on inmy head.
so it's really really lonely here a lot. i'm so isolated, i can't speak to my 'me at all, all the people in the village are pretty cool, but still only want to talk to me because i'm white, and because they want my earrings or my shoes or for me to take them back to america with me. the language barrier is really tough. and having small children follow me and giggle everywhere i go. My friend Madeline (a PCV who live next to me) had some nightmares, and woke up the other morning expecting to be comforted by familiarity, but instead had to realize "holy shit, i'm living in a hut in africa"... which pretty much sums up my nights and mornings too. it's a lot to get used to.
Regina Spektor came on my ipod the other day, and i almost wept, it reminded me so much of portland, of driving around in the rain, of riding my bike through oaks bottom on my way to work, of rain on the willamette. No matter all the hot sunny summers, portland will always be rainy in my mind, i think. anyway it got me to thinking of things i miss, here are some:
the feeling of holding someone's hand in mine, of swinging our linked hands back and forth while we walk, of kisses on the forehead, i miss pie societies, back when they were at tessa's house on 51st. I miss sitting around tessa's basement all day long watching bad tv shows, steadily working our way through bottles of wine, i miss trivia at the gladstone with unmitigated disaster, i miss pool at the pub at teh end of the universe, shuffleboard at the yukon, talking to dan, listening to dan, laying on the grass in sellwood park all day, getting sunburnt. i miss lazy sundays on the couch with jen, of going out to breakfast with my housies (lots and bri), rock climbing, kickball, joe, riding around in cait's car blasting cheesy music, barbeques, staying up drinking until 6 or 7 am joking around with diana mark and dan, sitting on the porch at the hedge house, drunken nights in bill and abe's (now just abe's) basement, fireworks, OMSI, the chemlab office/social room, Reed college and all the awesome dorks that gravitate there, and i miss my gigantic bed with all the down comforters. Mostly i miss my best friends, whom i can say or do anything around. My co-volunteers here are totally awesome but it isn't the same. Hopefully i'll feel better when i'm settled in my own place, not living with a crazy old lady and having all my clothes in a suitcase.
Also, i miss flushing toilets that don't have their own fly population.
I really don't mind teh no plumbing/electricity thing, except teh pit latrines are stinky and fly-ey. I actually used the fly population as an analogy for the electron cloud in metal atoms when teaching. yeah science!
The taxi music here totally rocks. there are two types: one is really cheesy house music, which i LOVE. and the other is Lesotho's own brand of music, which involves a button accordion, a casio keyboard, and some guy with a gruff voice yelling in sesotho. i don't know how the button accordian came to be so popular here, but man is it. also sometimes there are synthesized animal and or baby noises. i don't like those so much. THey blast the music SO LOUD here though.
i start practice teaching on monday. ack! i'm teaching form b maths and form e chemistry ( form a= 8th grade, and so on to e=12th) my form b class has about 50 kids i think, and form e is 11. that's how the schools are here, there is a tiny fraction of each grade that progresses on to the next one.
THe food here is SO BLAND> breakfast is lesheleshele, which is sorgum porridge, apparetnly it's like cream of wheat. i'm not a huge fan. then all other meals are papa (maize meal, a.k.a styrofoam, and moroho, which is shredded greens, mostly cabbage, cooked in a pound of oil) everything here has a pound of oil and a pound of salt. today we get to shop so from now on we cook for ourselves. i can't wait!! the food wasn't too bad this past week, just i like deciding what i eat. also i like deciding what i wear, where i go, etc. everybody here is all up in my business! if there is one tiny spot on my skirt i can't wear it to class (these are peace corps culture/policy/health/sesotho classes. not formal.) so i've become paranoid about getting dirty or my 'me will yell at me.
oh! the names,. it's cool. there are no words to refer to other people impersonally, like "guy" or "lady". all young males are abuti (brother) all young females are ausi (sister) older men are ntate (father) and older women are 'me (mother). i like it. also everyone really does act like family. it's taken Madeline a week to figure out who's in her family and not, because all the brothers sisters cousins, distant relatives, neighbors, etc. all act like they are one family and take care of each other.
we made friends with 4 girls, they're all like 18 or 19, (but are in forms A and B...) and they are so funny. they didn't think there were mountains or trees in america, and if there were, they must be some alien species. also they think hiv/aids is only in lesotho and s. africa, and the rest of the world ignores it and doesn't care because it's not affected. they still don't believe us that it's in america. and it's treated likea n inevitable thing here. one girl said she tested negative, but by the next time she'll prob be + because it's just this inevitable thing that happens and you can't do anything about it. crap times up
this blog was looong!
p.s. love the emails, you are all bad friends it's true. and please send me christmas cards! oh! and someone in portland, can you send me cajun spice and sweet hungarian paprika from limbo!
love you all!!
It has been very rainy here, and when it rains, it really RAINS. With earth shaking heart stopping thunder, and lightning that seems like fireworks outside my window. And rain dumping buckets and buckets until I feel like I’m going to float away…
ok, so i'm feeling much more normal now, but to be truthful about me, i'm going to transcribe some of my journalyness i wrote yesterday. Since i'm on the other side of the world and am communicating through this weird third party (my blag), i'm going to be more honest about what's going on inmy head.
so it's really really lonely here a lot. i'm so isolated, i can't speak to my 'me at all, all the people in the village are pretty cool, but still only want to talk to me because i'm white, and because they want my earrings or my shoes or for me to take them back to america with me. the language barrier is really tough. and having small children follow me and giggle everywhere i go. My friend Madeline (a PCV who live next to me) had some nightmares, and woke up the other morning expecting to be comforted by familiarity, but instead had to realize "holy shit, i'm living in a hut in africa"... which pretty much sums up my nights and mornings too. it's a lot to get used to.
Regina Spektor came on my ipod the other day, and i almost wept, it reminded me so much of portland, of driving around in the rain, of riding my bike through oaks bottom on my way to work, of rain on the willamette. No matter all the hot sunny summers, portland will always be rainy in my mind, i think. anyway it got me to thinking of things i miss, here are some:
the feeling of holding someone's hand in mine, of swinging our linked hands back and forth while we walk, of kisses on the forehead, i miss pie societies, back when they were at tessa's house on 51st. I miss sitting around tessa's basement all day long watching bad tv shows, steadily working our way through bottles of wine, i miss trivia at the gladstone with unmitigated disaster, i miss pool at the pub at teh end of the universe, shuffleboard at the yukon, talking to dan, listening to dan, laying on the grass in sellwood park all day, getting sunburnt. i miss lazy sundays on the couch with jen, of going out to breakfast with my housies (lots and bri), rock climbing, kickball, joe, riding around in cait's car blasting cheesy music, barbeques, staying up drinking until 6 or 7 am joking around with diana mark and dan, sitting on the porch at the hedge house, drunken nights in bill and abe's (now just abe's) basement, fireworks, OMSI, the chemlab office/social room, Reed college and all the awesome dorks that gravitate there, and i miss my gigantic bed with all the down comforters. Mostly i miss my best friends, whom i can say or do anything around. My co-volunteers here are totally awesome but it isn't the same. Hopefully i'll feel better when i'm settled in my own place, not living with a crazy old lady and having all my clothes in a suitcase.
Also, i miss flushing toilets that don't have their own fly population.
I really don't mind teh no plumbing/electricity thing, except teh pit latrines are stinky and fly-ey. I actually used the fly population as an analogy for the electron cloud in metal atoms when teaching. yeah science!
The taxi music here totally rocks. there are two types: one is really cheesy house music, which i LOVE. and the other is Lesotho's own brand of music, which involves a button accordion, a casio keyboard, and some guy with a gruff voice yelling in sesotho. i don't know how the button accordian came to be so popular here, but man is it. also sometimes there are synthesized animal and or baby noises. i don't like those so much. THey blast the music SO LOUD here though.
i start practice teaching on monday. ack! i'm teaching form b maths and form e chemistry ( form a= 8th grade, and so on to e=12th) my form b class has about 50 kids i think, and form e is 11. that's how the schools are here, there is a tiny fraction of each grade that progresses on to the next one.
THe food here is SO BLAND> breakfast is lesheleshele, which is sorgum porridge, apparetnly it's like cream of wheat. i'm not a huge fan. then all other meals are papa (maize meal, a.k.a styrofoam, and moroho, which is shredded greens, mostly cabbage, cooked in a pound of oil) everything here has a pound of oil and a pound of salt. today we get to shop so from now on we cook for ourselves. i can't wait!! the food wasn't too bad this past week, just i like deciding what i eat. also i like deciding what i wear, where i go, etc. everybody here is all up in my business! if there is one tiny spot on my skirt i can't wear it to class (these are peace corps culture/policy/health/sesotho classes. not formal.) so i've become paranoid about getting dirty or my 'me will yell at me.
oh! the names,. it's cool. there are no words to refer to other people impersonally, like "guy" or "lady". all young males are abuti (brother) all young females are ausi (sister) older men are ntate (father) and older women are 'me (mother). i like it. also everyone really does act like family. it's taken Madeline a week to figure out who's in her family and not, because all the brothers sisters cousins, distant relatives, neighbors, etc. all act like they are one family and take care of each other.
we made friends with 4 girls, they're all like 18 or 19, (but are in forms A and B...) and they are so funny. they didn't think there were mountains or trees in america, and if there were, they must be some alien species. also they think hiv/aids is only in lesotho and s. africa, and the rest of the world ignores it and doesn't care because it's not affected. they still don't believe us that it's in america. and it's treated likea n inevitable thing here. one girl said she tested negative, but by the next time she'll prob be + because it's just this inevitable thing that happens and you can't do anything about it. crap times up
this blog was looong!
p.s. love the emails, you are all bad friends it's true. and please send me christmas cards! oh! and someone in portland, can you send me cajun spice and sweet hungarian paprika from limbo!
love you all!!
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