Ahh... "The Switzerland of Africa"

Blag No More

2009-11-15T20:53:00.003+02:00

As tempting as it is to continue to blag about my snafu-ridden reassimilation to american culture, the purpose for this blag is through. I'll update one more time when i get a cell phone to advertise my number.

Those of you who kept up with me, thank you.

Those of you who actually got off your sorry asses and wrote me letters, or at least emails, THANK YOU, you helped me to survive these past couple years. Your new task is to call/text/email me now that i'm here so we can have a real-life relationship!

Love you all,

Goodbye FOREVER

Rebecca Reilly: Stoic in Paisley

2009-10-28T09:09:00.004+02:00

It's been requested that I write a 'farewell' post, summing up my experience here, saying goodbye, etc.

I can't do it.

These past two years aren't some seperate segment of my life that i can just 'sum up'. It's my life, and this is my home, and i do love it here. There's too much to think about, and i'm all spazzed out right now anyway with all these peace corps exit procedures and tests and saying goodbye to all my family and friends and neighbors and home and school etc etc etc. People keep requesting adages and bon mots and specific emotions from me. I have wrapped my feelings and thoughts about this up in a ball and hid it waay down in my psyche somewhere, and maybe i'll let them out nervous breakdown style when i'm safely back in the spare room at mom and dad's house in California.

I am very happy to leave, there is nothing more I can do here in Lesotho. I'm probably aiding them by departing because overzealous international aid is one of this country's biggest problems. That said, I've loved, learned, grown, done all sorts of cheesy things, in more ways than I can say, or know. I'm beyond happy that i was able to have this experience, and i will leave you with some pictures of my 'hood.

With my principal in my NEW TRACK SUIT!! it's the most amazing thing ever. Everything's funnier when wearing a tracksuit.

At the farewell my school did for me, some students did the gumboot dance, i think they call it 'stomp'ing or something like that in America, they stomp and beat the sides of their gumboots in cool dancy rhythms, started by the diamond mine workers in south africa. Anyway, they're wearing the mining outfit, and the one in front is the 'foreman', wearing a terrifying hand-knitted boss-man mask. The dance was SO COOL

Walking to school with some form D students

With friends

My host brother gifting me with a traditional basotho blanket to take home, it's so warm and pretty. As you can see, i'm super excited about this. also, please note: the dress i'm wearing I sewed myself with fabric from mozambique!

boo-tee-full

races

that scooped-out looking mountain behind the burned ruin is the one we call 'brokeback'

the view from my stoop

F- This List, I'd Rather Play Some Whist!

2009-10-22T16:32:00.004+02:00

Things I've Lied About Recently
1. Being sick
2. Having important paperwork/appointments/etc. outside of school
3. How the car got scratched
4. My nationality (Russian)
5. How much money I have
6. Why I am leaving Thaba-Tseka so soon
7. My formative years spent at a boarding school in Germany
8. My familial relationship with Kelly Clarkson
9. What I think of my coworker's new weave

Things I've Stared at for Far Too Long
1. My ceiling
2. Brokeback mountain
3. The bit of stained glass hanging from my wardrobe
4. Raw meat
5. Crossword puzzles
6. Sheep
7. The growth behind the taxi driver's ear
8. My fingernails
9. Cliffsides
10. Cinderblocks
11. Blank pages
12. Car wrecks
13. Dirt paths
14. The surface of my desk
15. Clouds

P.S. I would like to announce that I am NO LONGER A RESIDENT OF THABA-TSEKA!!!!!
As of now I am enjoying the bright lights of the big city, then as of November 2 I will no longer be a volunteer, then as of November 11 I will no longer exist on the continent of Africa

COS conference party pics

2009-09-28T09:01:00.001+02:00

the Thaba-Tseka girls (linds, vic, mad, me)

uh oh face

cardboard chris conz, who met his untimely death later that evening

George Washington's Wooden Teeth Feature Strongly

2009-09-28T08:44:00.004+02:00

15 Sept.
This past weekend there was a life skills day camp for 20 high schoolers which I had little to no part in helping, except for organizing food. Anyway I sat in on a session. It was agree/disagree scenarios and one of them caused particular strife for me. It was “a woman who carries a condom in her purse/pocket is ‘easy’” we (the PCVs) had just started to convince the kids that it was ok because she is looking out for her personal interests because of the ‘provider’ class (people aged 18-50, anyone able to work and provide for their family) 50% are HIV positive. ONE OUT OF TWO, holy hell. Anyway these bitch mediators from Catholic Relief Services went off about how condoms are bad, abstinence is the only solution, and even had the kids do an abstinence chant. These people are annihilating themselves and it’s hypocritical women like these that are making the problem so.much.worse. These kids are so lost and confused, half the people are telling them condoms are bad, and the other half are handing them out like candy.
It makes me feel so angry and hopeless! I like to pretend I’m doing some amount of work in the positive direction while I’m here, but instances like these make me re-realize that nothing I’m doing here will stick without local support, which is dubious at best. It’s exhausting and depressing and I’m tired and my spirit’s broken, so I’m quietly, guiltily sneaking back to my cushy carpeted insulated house complete with refrigerator and amenities, etc. in America.
Everyone (almost) that I’ve met here thinks that because I’m foreign/white/etc., I have some magical ability (in the form of money, candy, or other) to make their lives ok. I obviously do not possess this trait and so everyone around me is constantly/consistently disappointed in me, no matter what I accomplish, which admittedly hasn’t been a lot. After 2 YEARS of working on simple skills (adding and subtracting whole numbers), my students still don’t know it. I can’t get through to them; they will not/ cannot conceptualize anything. If it isn’t memorizable, they won’t ‘learn’ it. The weight of this has also contributed to the Breaking of Rebecca’s Spirit.
I came here so smug, thinking ‘I don’t expect to change or ‘help’ anything here anymore than I do by teaching in America, so therefore I can’t be disappointed when the inevitable happens and I do not, in fact, do much. But then I got here and this became my home and it’s dying. Not slowly or metaphorically but this country is in fact collapsing at an incredible rate and how can anyone sit back and watch this happen? I want so badly for this place to be at least OK, at least still in existence after 2040. I have this optimism and hope all inside me that won’t go away no matter how much I try to be logical and look at things realistically. And I want to believe even me, just as one person, can do something besides tell my students about George Washington’s wooden teeth for hours on end. People helping people. Maybe some student that actually listened to more of what I said than my nonsensical stories will go on to make a change, to do something good.

Things I’m Not Into, Lately
1. Shingles
2. Multiple food babies at one time from going for seconds/thirds at the boofay
3. Glitter in my eyeball
4. My students getting hard-ons when I’m trying to explain ‘combining like terms’ to them
5. The new science teacher doesn’t go to class, so the kids all complain to me.
6. I’ve had a cough/sore throat for 6 weeks
7. Listening to that R. Kelly ‘Believe’ song on repeat for 6 HOURS in the staff room because that’s all a coworker has on his cell phone, and Basotho seem to be immune to getting tired of repetition, song-wise
8. Flying rocks/debris hitting me when I walk home through the almost constant windstorms
9. Wearing a skirt without tights in windy weather around my students

Things I’m Into, Lately
1. My ‘me lent me some sheets! No more bare mattress
2. Tuna pasta
3. Carrot burgers
4. My close-of-service date was approved! Nov. 2: outta here
5. I’m getting cash in lieu of a plane ticket home and Peace Corps only uses American carriers, so if I buy my own ticket I save about 800USD! Cape Town, here I come!
6. My teaching experience here qualifies me for a teaching credential in California
7. Cutting my hair. I really want it to grow out, but whenever I’m bored in my hut I can’t help grabbing some scissors
8. Cuddling with the three remaining puppies, the professor, and parker
9. I ate insane amounts of cheese from the boofay
10. I finally made a playlist of all my very favourite songs, it makes me so happy! Every song is amazing, one after another!
11. Any movie featuring Robert Downey Jr. - I love him
12. “Imagination grill cheeses”- I butter and grill bread, and when I eat it I pretend there’s melty delicious cheese on it
13. Shouting punk rock lyrics/ the Lesotho national anthem into the wind when I walk home
14. Wearing sleeves, shades, and a scarf over my head/face (because of the wind) and a) pretending I’m riding in a convertible or b) seeing if people think I’m an albino and therefore leave me alone
15. Doing tai-chi with my overstressed students to calm/centre them

Future Vacation Highlights
1. Highest (commercial) bungee jump in the world! 710 feet, I’MA DO IT
2. Ghetto wine tour (includes sneaking into the backyard of a vineyard to drink wine from the bottle)
3. Dancing like a Fly Girl circa 1992
4. Hot Stone Massage
5. Buying fun boots and pretty dresses
6. Eating weird bush animals from MamaAfrica in Cape Town
7. Plundering the touristy craft stalls for local art
8. Gawking into N. Mandela’s former jail cell
9. Getting myself on a one-way San Diego bound plane

rock out....

2009-08-27T10:23:00.002+02:00

General Updates
1. There are 5 puppies who think i am their mother because the professor abandoned them
2. While being super cute, they smell really bad (like dead sheep) and whine a lot
3. all my sheets and towels were lost during a transportation snafu, so now i sleep on a bare mattress with just blankets (i feel like a college boy)
4. i love chocolate much more than i ever have before
5. i've cried in public 7 times in the last month
6. My immune system no longer exists, i have multiple viruses attacking my body at all times
7. Thanks for the birthday wishes, gramma and uncle jim!
8. My principal continues to view me as free labor to exploit as much as possible before i leave
9. teenagers' BO smells really funky
10. spring is coming!
11. there was a 3 hour assembly at school informing the students about swine flu and advising them to be vigilant
12. Parker came home! after 4 months she reappeared, heavily pregnant. woo small fuzzy animals!
13. There's graffiti on the back of a road sign in TT that's supposed to say "all people like sex" but the paint on the s dripped, so it looks like it says "all people like bex" and this makes me smile to myself
14. I JUST FINISHED MY COS (close of service) CONFERENCE!

MOçAMBIQUE, M'Lady

2009-08-10T11:47:00.007+02:00

finally! some mystery illnesses and now the known illness of shingles is causing my blog-related apathy. actually it's causing a more general malaise, which is reaching its apathetic little fingers into all corners of my life.

hopefully my immune system is more robust than victoria's grandmother's, who had shingles for 10 YEARS. ugh that sounds awful.

anyways, where did i leave off?

Moçimboa de Praia

1. They speak portugues in moçambique. it's weird, and also a lot of fun to say "hola!" in africa and people respond!

2. luckily my spanish came back to me surprisingly quickly, and i picked up the differences between spanish and portugues pretty quickly, so i was able to understand people! and to speak to them! in whole conversations (kind of)!

3. i can't remember if i included this in the last post, because technically it's a Tanzania event, when people found out we were american, they would get this really concerned look on their face, put their hand on our arm, and intone "i'm SO sorry for your loss". we were really confused, and asked "what loss?" "michael jackson, of course!"

so for the rest of my life, when someone asks where i was when michael jackson died, i can say Dar Es Salaam

4. The bus pulled up to our guesthouse-thang at 3:30am and the conductor was shouting PEMBAPEMBA PEMBA like it was an air-raid or something, we flipped out and ran to the bus thinking we'd miss it, and then ended up circling the town for another 2 hours, we passed our guesthouse like 5 more times. stupid.

5. On this very same bus, after we had been on the road for a couple hours (on the bus for about 4 hours), this awful smell permeated the bus, so i covered my nose with my scarf, and then finally it reached up to the driver, who pulled over to the side of the road, and everyone rushed off the bus. we were so confused as to what was happening. a baby at the back had exploded! vomit and diarrhea were shooting out of all orifices of this baby, it was so gross! so we all stood around on the side of the road while a couple people wiped up the bus, and one woman walked around holding the baby by one arm while it spewed its innards.

Later that trip, we were really hungry and had no money, so were trying to barter half a jar of peanut butter for a couple bread rolls through the window of the bus. The small child selling bread was not agreeing to our suggestion but we kept haggling until the bus driver took our peanut butter away and just bought us two rolls. for that we were infinitely grateful. Thank you, busdriver!

Pemba

1. This little beach town had many an unfriendly expat. not much tourism, but the hostel where we stayed had a big screen tv with MTV music videos playing nonstop! we were completely entranced. also there were girly magazines from 2006, so we watched tv and read old fashion tips for the whole day. other looked at us like "ew, stupid americans travel around africa and only want to watch mtv" but we bore their judgements well. we did not care.

2. There was some ngo called "elephant human relations aid", and we kept seeing them on our trip, first in mtwara/mikindani, then again in pemba! the logo on their car was like the sistine chapel with adam and god almost touching, except it was a person's hand, and an elephant's trunk. we mocked them a lot, mostly because we were bitter that they kept seeing us and not offering us a ride.

3. savannah is a delicious cider sold around africa, and here they put lime in it!! the difference is life changing! it's like corona vs. corona w/ lime (in terms of taste difference)

4. There was a traditional dance show for the tourists, and we neglected to go over to watch it. as an excuse, madeline said "my life is an african dance."

which is absolutely true. our lives are an african dance.

Ilha de Moçambique

1. Our taxi never showed up to bring us to the bus, so we hitched from pemba to the ilha. Thusly a 5 hour trip became 10 hours, and we spend probably 2 1/2 times as much money. curses! but we did not die, and still have all our limbs; both of which are things to be happy about.

The ilha de moçambique is the former capital of moçambique, from when it was controlled by the portuguese. Now it's been mostly abandoned, and is a surreal ghost town neverland sort of place full of big beautiful whitewashed spanish style buildings with all these plazas and statues and gazebos and wide treelined cobbled walkways, except they're mostly abandoned and crumbling apart, with figs (banyans) growing in and through the walls, and the whole island is overrun with street children.

3. when we arrived at the ilha, a bunch of small boys (7-10 years old) surrounded us and were saying "my name is (breakfast, juck chuck, go, etc) i will be your wife i make good kissing, don't go to your hotel, come stay at my house, i don't work i will just pleasure you all day" etc etc. Street kids harassing us is not new, but a child prostitution ring is unusual, to say the least. The kids were following us around and becoming really annoying, so vic says, "where's freddy mercury?!", whips out the painting she bought in its cardboard tube and starts whacking the kids with it. They dispersed quickly after that.

4. The hospital is (was) this huge grandiose 3 building structure that takes up a whole block, the walls and ceilings are crumbled through, with trees growing in the buildings. It's still in use, and the patients were waiting beneath the boughs of the trees to be called into the doctor.

Also there's a crazy woman living in the maternity ward, she just sits in the corner smoking cigarettes backwards. The hospital workers chase her out periodically, but she just comes back in.
below is a pic of the front of the hospital buildings

5. Cher is EVERYWHERE. almost every place i've been to in africa has played cher at least once. also while at the bar where we heard cher, a toddler ran past our table carrying a butcher knife almost as tall as she was.

6. Seafood sellers wander around the town with their catch of brightly colored fish on a line in one hand, and a scale and knife in the other. people will stop them, they'll hack off a section of fish and weigh it right in front of you.

7. We were trying to buy bread, and the woman at the market was out, so we followed a small child through the streets, into a doorway, through a tunnel lined with other small children, and out into a secret courtyard, with other doorways leading to other tunnels and courtyards, and stairways leading up to the "second stories", which, due to the lack of ceilings, were like rooftop balconies. There was no bread back there either, but this whole other city, apart from the streets and building fronts, was incredible.

8. The one atm on the ille was not functioning, and we were out of money. we managed to spend very little while we were there, and the mistress of our guesthouse was the most awesome woman i've ever met, and was driving out to the nearest big city (Nampula, 4ish hours away) so she both gave us a ride, and dropped us at an atm to get money out and pay her!

Nampula-Beira= NOTHING

Vilankulous
1. Finally, we arrived in a place with other tourists! (this shouldn't be exciting, but it was. we wanted to meet some other fun people)

the other tourists we met were very awesome, two of which we ended up travelling with for the rest of our trip.

2. i got to snorkel and it was a lot of fun. there were lots of fish, but they weren't very exciting. boo.

3. we sailed on a dhow, which was SUPER COOL. see a couple posts ago for a photo of a dhow.

4. other miscellania: a) goldfish is a very good south african band, and b) beaver canoe is a questionably named chain of restaurants in zimbabwe.

Tofo

1. awesome waves to bodysurf

2. a continuance of the awesome beaches

3. fun beach parties with all sorts of other people we met. being peace corps is like a fun club, whenever we meet other volunteers we hang out.

4. we drank a lot of local rum called "tipo tinto" and talked like pirates

5. we spent a lot of money to go on a whale shark tour, and there were NO WHALE SHARKS. stupid jerks.

here's our new band photo:Then to maputo (moz's capital), then to johannesberg, then bloemfontein, then maseru, then finally homehomehome to thaba-tseka.

Thank You Madeline's Camera

2009-07-23T17:24:00.008+02:00

These pictures go in reverse order, just to keep you on your toes

The man in red with the pole is the one who ROBBED US. he even looks devious....

truckin' on the chobe river

mikindani

Hey, i'm MIckey, and i'm Danni! welcome to our hostel

goodbye zanzibar

i love america

thinking about life

good morning, nungwe!

Things white people like: henna and elaborately woven palm frond accessories!

The dorian fruit: the bane of my existence.

why yes, i will quaff from your coconut, pepe le peau

and next we will see boy climb coconut tree, then sample some fruits, then the tour will be finished

This flower by my finger grows into a nut larger than my head, which then creates CHOCOLATE

This man is the spice nazi, vic's face shows our general reactions to him yelling at us.

we are eating something tasty. i think cinnamon bark

One Step At A Time

2009-07-15T13:19:00.005+02:00

I made a list of vacation highlights, but have been informed that my lists are rather nonsensical, and highly uniformative. So for this past vacation i will compromise by making an annotated list. also, my camera was stolen, so this blag will be visually impaired for the rest of its tenure. unless i borrow pics from someone else, which is moderately likely.

HIGHLIGHTS

Zanzibar: Nungwe
(this was a beach town on the northern tip of the island)
1. turqoise waters (they were perfect! better than a computer desktop picture! and the water was so warm and clear and perfect. the ocean began approx. 10 ft past the door to our room)
2. we walked past this group of about 20 women on the beach one morning, wrapped from head to toe in beautiful colored fabric, all with cooking-pots no their heads like johnny appleseed, and they were smashing these octupi repeately into these rocks, to tenderize them i guess.
3. the air was like syrup there, it was so thick and humid and oxygenated! i'm used to the rarified air of lesotho. i had to spend some time gasping, like i couldn't fit this substance into my lungs
4. there were all these dhows (a style of wooden fishing boat) in the water, and one of them was called the For-Tuna and mad and i thought the pun involved in that name for a fishing boat was pretty much the best ever. then the fortuna sank while we watched, the proprietor was desperately trying to bail it out, to no avail. not very fortunate.
5. We went on a tour of a spice farm, and saw how a ton of different spices are grown, and ate many an odd fruit, our tour guide-type guy was a little intimidating, he was like the soup nazi but for spices. he'd hand us something and ask us what it was, and if we got it wrong he'd yell and say we were banished or soemthing. we'd get really nervous and just shout out like 5 spices and never commit to one answer out of fear. we got to see a boy climb a 50 ft tall coconut tree like nobody's business, and rambotrons are my new favourite fruit!

6. there was a bar on the beach, and at one point i dropped our room key in the sand (at night) and so mad and i were trying to find it without accidentally burying it, and this one girl next to us was like, oh hey i have a light, and then OSAMA BIN LADEN's face is staring at me from the sand! i found the keys quickly, and turned to find the origin of this miracle, and it was a lighter, with a little flashlight on the other end with osama's face projected out! so i traded my normal lighter for hers, and now i am the proud owner of osamaaaa. apparently these lighters are 'everywhere'. i looked and found some saddam hussein ones at a market, and i've heard tell of some obama and beyonce ones as well. i love capitalism, as long as it gives rise to things like this.

Zanzibar: Stone Town
1. A little known fact about Freddy Mercury, of the rock and roll band 'Queen'. he was born and spent the first 5 years of his life in zanzibar! we saw his house. and bought some mercury-themed souveneirs. and victoria bought an amazing canvas of a painting of freddy, that says 'we will rockyou stone town zanzibar' off the wall of some shop. we also had a lot of fodder for 'mercury-poisoning' themed puns.

2. there are mosquitos EVERYWHERE. and they all eat me. i was vic and mad's de facto mosquito net because they would all just bite me, and no one else. the mosquito nets on the beds are fun though, i felt like i was sleeping in a gauzy bubble.

3. i love chapattis

4. i love kangas (the traditional fabric) women wrapped in these are so so beautiful. i did not buy them. why? because i'm a idiot and need things to regret, i suppose.

5. seeing a small monkey drinking out of a straw out of a coconut while sitting in a rich woman's lap at a fancy restaurant. i guess they are like teh chihuahuas of zanzibar...

6. Top Chef Beachside: there's this nighttime seafood market in stone town, with all these stands with fresh fish on kebabs and chapattis and fried morsels of unknown wonder, and all the people are dressed in chef hats and jackets. delicious.

7. getting to watch indian boy band music videos on the ferry from zanzibar to dar es salaam

Dar Es Salaam
1. we managed to try to get our visas for moz on mozambiquan independence day, when all embassies were closed, poo! then the next day we went back and they had run out of the little stickers to put in the passport. they said we'd have to wait a couple weeks til they get in, so vic took our passports back to zanzibar, and used the full extent of her persuasive powers to get visas put in for each of us, all in one day! the mug shots we took for this are priceless, and hopefully will eventually make it onto this blag.

2. dar is a dirty yucky city. not enjoyable. but we did find a subway! it was creepily exactly like subway in america...

3. men selling water on the streets inexplicably make this incredible obnoxious kissy noise to advertise their wares

4. Dar and Zanzibar are both predominantly muslim places, so there was what seemed like a constant call to prayer being issued from the mosque loudspeakers, it's beautiful.

5. we stayed at the YMCA in dar, and got locked in, and so had to make a great escape by climbing over a wall and down a fence at like 3:30 in the morning

6. We rode this death trap bus with no shocks to speak of for 12 hours from dar all the way to mtwara, near the moz border, going like 120 km/hr over speed bumps and along incredibly bumpy dirt roads with everyone screaming and flying out of their seats, with the horn playing this fun arabian jig-tune all the while

Mikindani
1. So, they speak Swahili in Tanzania, and we were getting by ok with our stock phrases, and we thought we heard this one guy say something like "cashew" to us in greeting (kay-sho (or something) means tomorrow, but that also didn't make sense in the context) so we decided to adopt it. The next person to pass us on the path was an old man on a bicycle and we cheerily called out to him, habari! cashew! to which he shook his fist at us and exclaimed while riding off "YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE SWAHILI LAANNGUAAGE!"

2. I love baobabs

3. When baobabs are fruiting they look like christmas ornaments

4. i ate a baobab fruit. it was not very good.

5. We were supposed to get picked up by a rickshaw at 4 am to catch our bus in the next town over which left at 5 am, and it never showed up. at 4.30 we got a call from the driver saying "there is something wrong with my bah jah jee" i thought it sounded like a personal problem, but evidently this is what he called his rickshaw. So the man called his friend to come get us, and at 5.15 this little motorized rickshaw zooms past us, skids to a halt while making a 180 degree turn, and the guy shouts for us to get in.
So we hustled in, with our packs and squished into the little seat, and the man was off! He was crazy! and evidently really wanted to get us to our bus on time, it was like mr. toads wild ride, but waay scarier because it was real. we zoomed over this pitted dirt road through palm trees at breakneck speed flying out of our seats holding on for dear life, laughing because what else can you do if you're about to die? and then we got there and the bus was gone, but we found an old man with a pickup truck from 1796 that looked like it had been totalled and brought back to life at least 5 times, and he was driving to the border. the passenger door was not on hinges, and had no handle, it had to be removed entirely from the car for us to get in, and then wedged back into place after us. This man also had a need for speed, and the road to the moz border was also very crazy, 4 or so hours later, we're all dumped off at the shore of this river.
We agreed on a price for the crossing (2000 Tanzanian shillings, or 50 Metacais), and were hustled into a very leaky canoe with 6 other men, plus 2 polers, and one guy whose job was to continually bail out water during our passage. it was so beautiful! we basked in our surroundings, happy that things were going our way. the river is very wide and fraught with sand bars, so we meandered around and through them, and about halfway across the river the bail-out guy asked us for the money, so we gave him the amount we had agreed upon, and he said no no no that's not enough, and that the price was 50,000 shillings. we laughed at him and said that 2 was all he'd get, whereupon the man started to get angry, and demanded 50,000 Tsh from each of us, and we patiently explained that we do not have that much money, and even if we did we would not be giving it to him. He had stopped bailing out water during this whole exchange, and the water was up to my ankles, and all the other men in the boat were ganging up on us also, and we were all yelling and they wouldn't take us back to tanzania, or onward to mozambique without getting all our money. in non-hidden cash we had 60,000 Tsh total, and so they took all that, and finally poled us on to the other side of the river, where we were tossed onto the back of this truck with 20 other people and a crapton of luggage, and we miserably rode on for another 4 hours or so to Mocimboa de Praia, and the truck driver again tried to overcharge us and wouldn't accept what we gave him, and finally we had to just walk away from the man, we were so exhausted and sad and beaten down. we had no more money, and were so so tired of being cheated and harassed. This trip wore down my spirit considerably. The baobabs, however, made everything ok. I couldn't help but smile every time i saw one

Stay Tuned for The Rest Of Mozambique!

I'm Not Going To Cook It But I'll Order It From ZANZIBAR!

2009-06-18T10:03:00.003+02:00

So, not only is Zanzibar a restaurant from a Tenacious D song, it is also an island of near-mythical beauty and wonder off the coast of Tanzania! I will be flying there (after much grief with my credit/debit cards. curse you and your fickleness, wells fargo!) on saturday, and 2 friends and I will spend some time relaxing on snow-white beaches, basking in turquoise waters, and wandering amidst the 17th century muslim sultanate "stone town"!

After that we will be making our way south along the coast of mozambique, frolicking through the jungle, playing catch with my new pet hippo, traversing rivers in dugout canoes, buying 1,000 kangas (awesome fabric swaths), consuming half the marine life from the coastal waters, dancing where appropriate, etc. etc.

I am SO EXCITED.

also, for you enjoyment, some photos from my life, recently:

The dog, is, after much speculation, PREGNANT! look, i'm poking a puppy fetus!

I did kind of want to sleep, but instead had to spend the day curing the hiv, one dirty dish at a time (there was a free testing day, and we helped with the catering) (that's my mom standing next to me!)

Lastly, a rare glimpse of the elusive headless-skinless tree sheep, captured right outside my hut!

A Duality to Defy Diana

2009-06-09T17:35:00.004+02:00

HAPPINESS

cheese
tea
the professor
victoria (s) [both of them make my life sweet]
the tasty things vic bakes for me
cookie dough
my students
both of my families
thinking of grad school
i got a man!
altering/decorating my old shirts/dresses so that they ROCK
the new neko case album
lotses is sending me his old ipod! (<3)
dreaming of mozambique
pumpkin fries
pumpkin bread
moonshine
haruki murakami
my new coat
i may only have 4 more months in this country!
not teaching classes during my winter break

SADNESS

Parkinsons has been gone for 2 months, i keep expecting to see someone wearing her (people here have an affinity for making daniel-boone style hats out of house cats)
i didn't get to teach for a full mon-fri week ONCE this quarter because of classes being cancelled for various stupid reasons
silence
'radio lesotho' -- the only radio station i get here is mostly fuzzy call in shows and the horrific native music called famu
doing laundry in subzero water
looking like the little brother in "a christmas story" when i go to bed each night because it's SO COLD
being a pariah
i may have 6 more months to get through
i have no good books to read
tuna went from 12 maluti per can to 20 maluti per can (from luxury item to unaffordable)
people in USA don't seem to be receiving any of the mail i'm sending
the professor isn't pregnant, she's just a slut.
my students are completely incapable of problem solving.

FUNDRAISING!

2009-05-05T13:39:00.003+02:00

SO, on a different note.

Victoria and I are trying to get an assembly hall-lunch room-library-study area building put up at my high school. My school is only 4 years old, but we're fast becoming one of the best in the nation, the teachers and students are all so dedicated, and they work so hard, i really think a lot of these students will go on to do something great with their lives.

Because my school is so new, they have very little in terms of resources. The entire school consists of 9 classrooms, some outdoor latrines, a lab (with almost no actual lab materials), and a building with a staff room and principal's/secretary's offices. They have to have daily assembly outside, which is really unfortunate in summer because it's always raining, and in winter because it's freezing cold and very windy. They have nowhere to sit and eat lunch, and I'm organizing a library, so about 1000 books will arrive next may, with nowhere to be stored or read. Also fofr the standardized tests they have every year, there is nowhere for the students to take the exams. This building will be great for all of these things (Assembly hall, library, study space, exam hall, lunchroom, etc). An estimate and a sketch are going to be made up soon, which i will post.

The idea was put to me by my host family, my "mom" is chairman of the school board, and her oldest daughter owns a contracting company, and they are very motivated to organize everything, we are getting windows and doors donated, and we will hold fundraisers in town, BUT, this building will cost about $20,000 US, which is waaay more than these villagers that live on 2,400 USD a year can raise. So soon i will begin fundraising in earnest, but for a heads up, anyone who was interested in sponsoring a child (which is still an option) may want to divert their funds to the Hall! A website is being set up that you will be able to donate directly to.

I realize America/ the world is in some sort of "recession" and whatnot, but as poor as you guys feel, you are still incredibly unimaginably rich compared to my students, friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc. And this hall will last a long time, and make such a HUGE difference to these kids.

Please tap into your sense of compassion, forego eating out or candy or something superfluous for a little while, and instead give the money to these wonderful kids who have all the odds in the world stacked up against them.

Wah- waah (sad face)

2009-05-05T13:02:00.003+02:00

So.... my ipod spontaneously combusted. literally (kind of). i was listening to it in my speakers no prob, and it paused for no reason, so i turned it off, but it was frozen, which happens plenty so i did the magic reset thing. and when it reset it insisted i plug into itunes before it can be normal again. so i plug into itunes, and itunes sez i must "restore" it. which means EVERYTHING will be deleted.

So i get scared, and take it to the IT specialist in the office in the capital. and he uses his linux system to look at it, and it says there are only 1.16 GB of corrupted music. There should have been 60 GB music, 4 GB pictures, and like 10GB of movies....

So i get real sad, have 2 whole beers with lunch, and decide i will restore it. But my ipod decided to get all sassy and won't let any computer restore or reformat or anything! It won't let me move on! So IT specialist has it again for the day. i think he is intrigued by this.

I am just real sad. I'd think, a lot of times while on the bus or travelling around, what if my stuff was stolen, what would i miss the most? it's my ipod. ok. but, i am putting it in a box. i will not dwell.

Other than that, i'm too lazy to tell you the story of the 3 week old cous cous. it's a good one though. In general, i feel like everything is just same old same old, and so i just can't get inspired to write an actual blog post. hence all the photos and lists.

People who are writing me letters are getting good stories in return though. well, good stories is interpretable, they're getting random stories from day to day life. Maybe if you write me a letter (even writing an email, then printing and mailing it to me works well), i will tell you fun stories!

love you all

The Mystery of the 3 Week Old CousCous

2009-05-03T15:52:00.000+02:00

Easter, Shmeister. Put it in Your Keister!

2009-05-03T15:14:00.005+02:00

Goals for Easter Vacay 2009

1. Climb to the highest point in an area
2. bathe in a waterfall
3. build a badass sandcastle
4. hammock joust
5. find monkeys
A. befriend a monkey
a. trade headband for very powerful ring with said monkey
a.1. convince said monkey to wear said headband
6. Madeline needs to buy jellies and a floppy hat
* Please note: Rebecca would also like a floppy hat

10 Things to Quicken My Heart [Easter]

10. Backflips in the waves
9. midnight full moon shark infested waters of the indian ocean skinny dipping
8. building drip sandcastles
7. drinking with friends
6. sangria
5. foliage
4. cuddling
3. making fires and sitting by them
2. hammocks
1. Brett the helper -- with headband

Highlights [Easter]

1. See previous list
2. food poisoning twice in two weeks (doh!)
3. meeting a former employee of Jaime Oliver
4. burning myself 3 1/2 times on various hot substances/objects
5. Dreaming of a chuck-e-cheese shipwreck
6. Sitting on a couch with jack/brett/mad watching the foliage for 5 hours
7. Creepy assholes harassing/molesting me in my sleep (3 times) (triple doh!)
8. My hair= a fro the whole week
9. Wearing dresses that end above my knees
10. Minimal sunburnage
11. Buying purple tights
12. Road trip with best playlist evar
13. Harassing the attractive bartender into having a dance party, then being unable to attend
14. Not getting eaten by sharks
15. 3 giant friendly dogs adopted us for the day! (we named them jellybean, fetch, and lamp)
16. pineapples (with rum, sometimes)
17. monkeys of indeterminate species
18. untended cows that go for a jaunt to the beach to sunbathe and wade in the shallows

I Can't Imagine Anything Higher Than This

2009-04-14T18:52:00.001+02:00

Beaches + Monkeys + Hammocks = Happy Rebecca

and also these cows that like to go on outings to the beach

The Questionable Inner Workings of Youth Today

2009-03-27T13:19:00.003+02:00

Questions I've Received Lately
1. What did you eat for breakfast
2. Can i see a person with HIV and AIDS
3. Who is the new president
4. If i have sex with 5 boys in one day, will i get sick or pregnant
5. If i have sex with 5 boys unprepared, will i get sick or pregnant
6. If i have one baby that is 12 months, can i make another
7. Are there people on other planets
8. What do these words mean: admire, fortune, conflict, fakalakabusted
9. When is maths club
10. How old are you/ How many are you in your family
11. Is Eminem your father
12. Is Rihanna your cousin
13. Where are China, Japan, and Brazil
14. What is osmosis
15. If my period is only 3 days do i have a problem
16. By the time you want to be married you should tell me
17. What can i do to make the labia grow longer what is the function of the labia what happens if they are too long
18. What if Mugabe can say he wants to marry you will you agree
19. Are there poor people in America
20. Do you have cows in America
21. If i want to marry the American, what can i do
22. Madam at Ha Matala (a village) at Maseru (district) there was a man who rape the pig why do that man do that to the pig when there are many prostitutes
23. If there are pimples on my genitals do i have a problem
24. If i make unprotected sex with my boyfriend and he tells me a week later that he is HIV positive, will i have HIV
25. How do i factorise
26. Am i at high risk if i make abortion/ will it be wrong if i can make abortion
27. Is oral sex nice? What is it?
28. Madam my brother says he will marry you he is very handsome so what if you can say o.k.

Things I Wonder About
1. Why bees always hang around the pit of my latrine so i'm scared to sit down because they'll sting my butt
2. If kitty AIDS is as prevalent as human AIDS and will parker get it because she's a cat-slut
3. If the real GRE is as easy as the practice problems in my "Cracking the GRE" book
4. If Michelle Obama is dead. A student today asked if she was because they heard she was in a fatal car accident. [Note: it was Zimbabwe's PM's wife who died]
5. If my class discussions about sex, pregnancy, HIV/AIDS are actually helping/educating my students at all
6. Have I become a glorified condom machine?
7. If my new haircut makes me look butch (almost nobody at school noticed, because here everyone's hair is fake and changes dramatically every month or so, so they don't realize it's a big deal for a whitey to lose that much hair)
8. A student gave me a cob of corn in class today. Is this the Lesotho equivalent of giving the teacher an apple?

Madam, You Look So Sharp!

2009-03-27T12:15:00.004+02:00

My skool won a debate (topic: should HIV testing be compulsory in Lesotho) and so the next week friday we had no classes and there was a DJ and we made a crap ton of samp (corn based porridgy dish that's SO tasty) and the teachers had to dress in the student uniform, and the students got to dress in private clothes, it was so cute, these kids dressed to the nines. anyway, on with the photos:

The "hip hop boys"

all the ladiez in the kitchen

woo hoo first day of skool!

The Great Shearing

2009-03-01T17:47:00.006+02:00

Before:

The first cut

notice the cow in the background trying to eat my head

Almost there.... Taking a break to menace said cowDone!

Thanks, Westlife, For The Best Decade Of My Life!

2009-02-27T15:46:00.008+02:00

i rode a stallion up a mountain!

Then went to a staff party

Here are some photos of the area taken by ms. Pam who has a much better camera than I:

Prayer Flags

Lastly, I love it when random men with accordions show up by the riverside to play pied-piper with the children

She Has Freckles On Her, But She Is Nice

2009-02-15T20:36:00.002+02:00

12 Feb
I had the best time evar last night. It started out kind of lame, though. It was raining like crazy and my house flooded again, so i was hiding in bed reading a book with my headlamp. Then i got up to go brush my teeth and was dancing across my hut when i noticed how slippery the floor was when i realized that i was EXACTLY REPRODUCING the end scene from the fine feature film: Step It Up 2: The Streets! HOLY CRAP! so I got all into it, dancing and swishing the water around, and did the banana-peel fall onto my butt a few times. THen i started doing risky-business type slides back and forth across my hut, when i crashed into my little table thingy that has all these tupperwares of flour, papa, sugar, oatmeal, etc. on them, and of course the only thing to fall was a bowl of eggs, which cracked all over the floor. I swept the mess into a dustpan and then as i was pouring water and soap over the area to clean it, i had an epiphony: soapy water is waay slipperyer than regular water! So i squirted dishsoap all over my floor where it mixed in the puddles and my whole house turned into a slip n slide! I danced and slid around for almost half the night. Today my butt and hands are so sore, but my heart and mind are oh so content.

Smushy Faced Children Follow Me

2009-02-07T14:30:00.004+02:00

25 Jan
The bus was inexplicably 40 minutes early today, so i missed it and what is normally a 2 hour trip became a 10 hour long day of triumph!
Tally for the Day:

strangers proposing: 6
strangers proposing to me in front of their wives: 2
pages read: 192
failed hitch attempts: 3
kidnapping attempts (where i'm the "kid"): 1
mls of water for the day: 500
food: none
cute babies played with: 2
Items demanded of me: my jacket, my shoes, my earrings (3 times), food, candy, toilet paper, money for beer and cigarettes

Taxi Tally: Occupants of the 14 person max. vehicle:
21 adults, 4 babies/toddlers, 4 giant duffel bags, a 9kg propane tank, 3 buckets full of godknowswhat, a chicken, 2 animal hide drums (of the musical variety), and about 157 flies.

29 Jan
I spend at least an hour every day circling my hut, swatting flies. One time i clocked in at 2 hours 10 mins. This is indicative of:
a) The number of flies in my hut
b) My dislike for flies
c) The range of activities available to me in my free time
d) All of the above

30 Jan

Things I Do When I'm Bored
1. make lists
2. swat flies
3. curse the existence of flies
4. do crosswords
5. teach myself to play vic's mandolin
6. read books
7. play with professor phonics
8. create/ convince myself i still have a life and future in America
9. draw pictures
10. shadow dance
11. Lift "weights" a.k.a. buckets of varying quantities of water
12. lay on my bed and stare at the ceiling
13. read more books.

2 Feb
My house gets secretly flooded during heavy rains. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. So my floor is concrete covered with mismatched pieces of plastic sheeting, and during heavy/prolonged rains water seeps in through the seam where the wall and floor meet, and collects beneath the plastic sheeting. I kept getting my socks/slippers soaked while walking around my house, but couldn't see any puddles. Finally i realized that if i step near a hole, water will geyser up. When i discovered these hidden geysers i tried to mop up the water, but more just kept coming. Then i realized the ENTIRE FLOOR was like a waterbed with too many holes, and it was still raining, so i retreated to high ground (my bed) and watched the progress. As the rains continued a lake started forming over near my door ( the lowest point of the floor), and two streams formed along seams in the sheeting, and the water trickled down to the lake. As a result of my bloodlust, there are quite a few discarded fly carcasses on the floor, who were then caught up in the deluge and also made their way down to the lake. I was waiting for my furniture to start floating away, too.
I suppose there was a good reason why the successful little pig made his house of brick, and not mud and cow dung.

I Will Bathe Myself Sometime This Year

2009-02-07T14:28:00.000+02:00

10 Jan

AMERICA
America is a land of dreams, one that already feels like a dream. I spent 3 weeks in a haze of remembered things, people, places, etc. I think the thing i liked best was belonging. People took me as i was, as just another human rather than "the whitey" or "the foreigner". Nobody shouted, jeered, mocked, whistled, stared, or asked me for shit as i passed them on the street. Nobody paid any attention whatsoever! Anonymity is amazing.
I (un)fortunately both reaffirmed old connections and relationships and made new ones. It's good (great) in theory because these are amazing people but it sucks because i was just getting used to going without, and now i'm back to being without.
SUMMARY OF AMERICA:
10. freedom
9. pavement
8. strip malls
7. beer
6. all the food groups
5. sushi
4. friends
3. boys
2. feeling like home
1. instant gratification

20 Jan

USA officially gets a new president today! I'm excited to watch the inaugeration (streaming live all over africa!). It's a bit weird though because I've gone throught this whole election process from the outside. I YouTubed Obama's acceptance speech when i was home for christmas and it was the first time i've ever heard him speak before. His voice is much deeper and more resonant that i had imagined from the photos.
Today is also the second day of school! I'm only teaching 3 classes this year (2 science 1 math) so I'll have time for other projects. Also I'm the one that made teh school's timetable this year, so i personally have an awesome class sched! No classes early morn, after lunch, or on fridays! woo 3 day weekend! So anyways, what will i do with all this free time? I have many plans:
1) Trees! This is a hanously barren country, and the most offensive part is that my school campus doesn't have a single tree, nothing even near! So I'm applying for a small grant to buy shovels/water cans (which will then be used in the agriculture program) and i'm getting 200 seedlings from the ministry of forestry.
2) Scholarships- I'm trying to get scholarships for school fees for a handful of incredible students who can't afford to come to school anymore. [it's US$65 per year to attend school. If ANYONE reading this wants to sponsor one of my kids, I'll send you letters, background, photos, progress reports, whatever you need. It would make such a huge impact, and not in the amorphous "where's my money going" sally-struthers sort of way. If you're interested, email me for more info: rereilly at gmail dot com]
3) Math Club! I'm going to train some of my best students to become tutors, then I'm going to have a one day a week after school math time, where kids can work on their assignments, get help, and play maths games. (I introduced "multiplication bingo" and they're completely obsessed with it! they want to play everyday, and they want to come after school to play! every time i see them they yell "BINGO!" now. they think it's the greatest thing ever)
4) Thaba-Tseka district is holding a Diversity Camp, where 25 students from around the district come in for a day and a half and do life skillz sessions, HIV/AIDS awareness stuff, career workshops, etc. and i'm excited to help out with it.
5) A tome entitled "Survival for the Teacher Who Isn't" (1984) [type-writered, spiral bound] was unearthed from the peace corps technical library, and it's a great, fairly comprehensive resource for pcvs that teach during their service. The maths and science teachers in my group have taken it upon ourselves to overhaul/revamp/bathe in sparkles this book. I'm super excited about this project because it involves one of my favorite activities: writing about teaching + science! Right now madeline and I are in charge of the "methodology/motivation" chapter. Also I'm doing the visual aids portion, and contributing to the classroom games/science labs and demos/ math teaching techniques sections.

Donations to the Poor Mountain Girl Living in a Hut

2009-01-11T18:01:00.003+02:00

So, this list is mostly for my mom. But if others want to use the following information in a way that is beneficial to me, i will not complain.

Package Wonders
goldfish crackers/ cheeze-its
pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, pistachios, almonds (tamari roasted!), cashews
dried fruit (mango, apricot, and cranberries are faves but all are good. except prunes, not so into those)
candy (dark chocolate, nerds, skittles, starburst, cookies n cream bars, andes mints, reeses, chewy spree, sour straws, sour patch kids, etc etc etc)
that cheesy soup mix stuff from bear creek or whatever
crystal light or other drink mix (all flavors except orange, all brands except Tang. i can actually get that here.)
salmon/tuna steaks from t. joes
salsa con queso dip
mini whiskey bottles
fun food mixes (just add water type stuff: scone mixes, soup mixes, etc)
other fun trader joesy type foods, or snack type foods
cholula
magazines (make magazine, scientific american, wired, intouch, us weekly)
glitter (fine grain, a range of colors (unmixed))
pencils, pens, erasers, rulers, etc. to give away to my students for being good
new music! data cds are ok because i have access to computers
tv shows (30 rock, coupling, how i met your mother, the office)
new anime (dan i think that one's up to you, unless other readers also enjoy anime....)
movies (any and all, pretty much)
love letters
photos

Slap that Baby, Make him Dance

2009-01-07T15:13:00.002+02:00

So, i'm back in country! I'm in the capital now until mid-month, there's a slew of conferences and things i have to attend here before i go back to my hut. Which is good, i'm getting a slow step-down from America. First i went to Durban, in South Africa for 4 days or so. we stayed at an amazing hostel right on the beach about 45mins outside of the city, which was nice. it was just slow and relaxed and i sat on the beach all day. I got off the plane from san diego in johannesberg (about 30 hours of travel time), then hopped on a 7 hour bus to durban, then met some friends at a restaurant there where i changed in the restaurant bathroom, passed off my bags to some friends that were going back to the hostel, and went straight out to a club to go dance, and was up til oh-dark-thirty in the morning. The next day (new years eve) my immune system, after a month of near constant abuse, decided to say fuck you, and shut down.
new years eve i spent on a stool in some club trying to get the energy to dance to like half a song, then going to sit back down, and new years day i woke up with no voice, swollen lungs, and mucus everywhere. i was a wreck. so i stayed as horizontal as possible the next few days, on the beach or in bed in our closet-like room in the hostel. I'm still kind of gross and mucusy but am slowly getting better. unfortunately STUPID M_F-ING METH HEADS have ruined my life here as well. South Africa just made sudafed no longer over-the-counter, so i can't get any decongestant.

Oh! and we had a twilight-zone sort of moment in Durban, we were on a taxi, trying to get to the taxi rank where the long distance taxis are, so we could get back to lesotho and the driver and the conductor of our taxi had never heard of lesotho before! I understand americans not knowing, but them not knowing was like a californian having never heard of nevada. it's totally crazy. So we pulled out a map and showed them the country of lesotho, you know, that country that is encased within their home country of south africa. So they went to the police station to ask them if they'd heard of Lesotho, and how to get there. We were so exasperated. finally we got dropped off where we started, with a refund, and had to try again with a new taxi.

I'm gearing up for a week of different conferences here in the capital. One starts tomorrow, the "all volunteer conference" where all 80-90 volunteers in Lesotho come together to do god knows what (i haven't attended one of these before, so i have no idea what it entails). and I've been asked to emcee! woo! i guess i'm entertaining... unfortunately i'm only funny when in small groups/not on the spot, so i don't know if i'll accept the gig or not. my public speaking skillz are not that great.

So I'm going to start some sort of soccer program with my neighborhood when i go back. I received a very generous donation of three soccerballs from a friend in America, and I'm excited to go back and play! I think I'll keep one at my house, one at Vic's house (her place borders the soccer field) and one at school. oh! and Jason, if you are reading this 1. thanks! and 2. i lost the address for your music server, can you email it to me? rereilly at gmail

It's now time for... quote of the week! this gem comes from Ms. Britney Spears
"Love me, hate me, think what you will about me, but all of the boys and all of the girls are begging to if you seek Amy."
once you puzzle that one through, you will be on step closer to nirvana, and one-ness with the divine essence of the mulitverse.

There Are So Many White People Here

2008-12-12T19:49:00.002+02:00

I've been informed that i should be keeping my potential readers abreast of my current activities.

I"M IN AMERICA!!!!!!!!
my tummy hurts and i want to purchase everything i see.

my cell for while i'm here is 760 908 9976, i realize i'm not supposed to just post my phone number online, because that paves the way for stalkers and telemarketers, but since i'm in a crazy mood i'm just doin it.

At any rate, give me a call!

Public Transport, How I Love Thee

2008-11-28T12:09:00.001+02:00

i almost missed the bus because i was dilly dallying around my hut, i had a premonition that i wasn't meant to ride that claptrap bus. I had a potential ride later in the day, but victoria convinced me to take the bus to make sure i get to the capital for thanksgiving, and not spend it alone in my hut.
So anyways I had to run up a mountain with my huge backpack to flag the bus down on the street, luckily i got one of the last seats, next to an obese but friendly and nice smelling 'me. Then the bus went and sat around outside someone's house for like an hour while the driver did god knows what. Then we finally got on the road, and were hauling ass when i hear a big thumpy squelchy noise. I figure it was nothing because we kept going, but then the driver stopped and reversed back to the scene of the squelch, and apparently we had run over a donkey! it was all in a pile on the road with it's donkey friend sniffing it. The driver then had a shouting match out the door with the donkey owner, they were going too fast for me to follow what they were saying, and then we vroomed off.

Then we picked up a bunch more passengers and i ended up with a smelly blanket man standing in the aisle next to me, leaning over my seat with his icky blanket all up in my face. ugh. so i took a sleepy pill and passed out for an hour or so, and woke up to a different man sitting next to me in the aisle vomiting into his bucket hat, and swaying his head so it kept almost bumping my thigh. I tried to shrink away but the lady on my other side was taking up both her seat and part of mine, so i curled around and kind of side-spooned this random lady trying to keep vomit man away from me. Luckily Basotho are used to excessive physical contact with strangers so she didn't seem to mind me cuddling with her. Someone gave vomit man a plastic bag to put his vomit hat in, which he then left UNDER MY SEAT, and exited the bus. I was wearing flip flops and couldn't put my feet down on the floor for the next 3 hours because vomit juice was leaking out of the bag all over the floor beneath me. At least people opened the windows for once, so it didn't smell too bad. Or maybe i'm just so used to bad smells in general this didn't bother me too much.

Then I got to town, went to Colleens, showered for a year, and had some amazing thanksgiving feastiness! And then went swimming in a pool! I drank too much beer though.

The End.

Chairman Mao has been haunting my dreams

2008-11-19T18:40:00.001+02:00

4 Nov

So we have to fill out these trimester report forms every few months, which consists of a sheaf of papers asking us to quantify exactly how many people we've helped and in what way. the numbers all get compiled and sent to washington d.c. where peace corps can be like "ok, exactly 4,000 15-24 year olds were told to use condoms. We need that number to be 6,000 by 2011" or something. At any rate for my 1st trimester report i had all sorts of stuff to write down with teaching, science kit workshops, childrens' health day, debates, etc. and felt good about my service here. For the one i just filled out, i had NOTHING to write, other than teaching. It was pathetic! ugh, I apparently lost all vigor after winter break. Then i remembered: oh, yeah! I'm at school for an ungodly number of hours every day with double shifting. Also, all sports, clubs and debates were cancelled for the forseeable future because there's no actual after/before school time in which to do these. There's only 2 weeks of classes left, then exams, then home! Then i'll be back all refreshed and excited to get shit done next year. Also new ED volunteers arrive 14 nov and i'm helping with training! I get to do a session on the use of visual aids, nutrition, and something else i think. also i get to mooch free lunch!

I was walking home with my coworker yesterday and after spending 20 minutes telling her i will not get her a job in USA, nor will i just pass her CV around, but she's welcome to visit me and do that herself anytime. Then she told me if/when she visits america she doesn't want to go where a lot of black people are because they're crooks. I then gently pointed out that she was black. THen i thought about it, and the only example Basotho have seen of blacks and whites coexisting (if they've seen any) is South Africa. So high density black areas are mostly all in teh townships wehre people are dirt poor and so of course there's crime. She's convinced white people don't mug/carjack/hold up people. I tried to tell her, "yeah we (as in whiteys) do that too" but like most things i try to tell anybody here, she didn't listen/ doesn't believe me. It's just all so uphill trying to tell anybody something they don't already know/suspect. It's also ridiculously difficult to convince people that Lesotho and S. Africa are not the only countries with HIV/AIDS epidemics and that (gasp) we even have it in America, the land of sunshine and lollipops!

In other news, I almost got mauled by a dog the size of a large wheelbarrow yesterday. I've been walking past that motherfudger at least twice a day for almost a year now and yesterday it decides to attack me! I had to sprint for a large pile of rocks to grab one and threaten to crush in the hellbeast's skull with and it shied away at the last moment but kept barking and growling just out of reach and i had to walk slowly and calmly away. Then when i got home my knees almost collapsed i was so freaked out. The dogs here do not mess around when attacking. Stupid dog, now i'm afraid to use that shortcut to school anymore. I'm considering getting a molamu (herdboy stick) to carry with me so i can smack it if it tries to consume me again.

Speaking of near death experiences, weekend before last I was in the capital and some friends and i decided to find a park to hang out in for the afternoon. We heard about one over by the taxi rink (a hellhole of disgust with really good deals on jewelry/pirated dvds etc.) so we go, and the entrance is kind of down a hill off the road, through a gate guarded by children (our first tip-off) then we entered this parallel universe of rolling hills and bit trees and slides and swings that was completely run by children. It was like Lord of the Flies. As soon as we entered (not only the only whiteys but also the only people over 15 years old) I noticed all the kids cock their heads toward us, like they were sniffing the air, sizing us up. We decided to be brave and continue and chose a corner at the back of the park to sit. As soon as we sat down we noticed all the kids sloowwly migrating over to the slides closest to us. Then finally their leader approached, a scrappy little boy, probably around 13 years old, and asked us for beer or sweets. As soon as he came up 20 other kids rushed over, then 30 more, so we were COMPLETELY surrounded and I kept thinking of this Joyce Carol Oates short story i read where this woman goes on a hike in a nature preserve and 15 small children attack and maul/rob/de-clothe her. So Vicki and I grab sticks and threatened to beat them (a normal occurrance here, i threaten small children almost daily) and we tried to tell them that we have no sweets and they're too young for beer and blah blah. They all stood just out of stick range and stared at us (people here, children and adults, have an amazing ability to/interest in staring at us while we go through normal daily routines, I've gotten used to being a monkey in their zoo) So finally two basotho friends who were meeting up with us arrived and helped extricate us from the mob. The children then followed us across the park, insisting that we wouldn't be able to get rid of them, and they were going to follow us around forever. Luckily they stopped at the gate and just stared after us like hungry souls (who also enjoy yelling obscenities)

So I had a dream the other night that I named my dog "Hooked on Phonics" and that I called her "Phonics" for short. Since I always follow my dreams, I've officially renamed Spots/Spads/Professor Picklesworth. I now dub her phonics.

12 Nov
So the "bell system" at my school consists fo a form B student with a watch and a hand bell. This means we're all at the mercy of a student to decide when classes change. I like to get in fights (jokingly) with the bell boy, telling him he's late, or early. He always responds with something like "the times are not similar, madam" and i say, "yeah because you're WRONG" but he's a pretty stand up kid, though. always stands strong and doesn't let me phase him . He does lengthen periods if he's into what we're learning/isn't done done with the classwork, and he shortens boring periods. Today he's m-f-ing 20 minutes late though! The classes are only 40 minutes long to begin with. Argh. Luckily I'm done with the syllabus and am only doing review games so it's ok to miss a class.

I'm a Cardboard Cutout!

2008-10-30T15:33:00.000+02:00

the other maths teacher, N. Moalosi
'Me Tebello, geography prof

I am the braai master (with a school shirt!)

quick! where's waldo?

N. Moshoeshoe (named after the first king! I'm not sure if he's a decendant or not...)

Me with Ntate Letsatsi (lit. trans. Mr Sunshine)

Me with Ntate Chelete (lit: Mr. Money)

My students. They're being "badass niggers", and yes, they learn these words from American rap songs.

My school!

Into the Wilds

2008-10-26T12:32:00.000+02:00

hiking trip photos:

the chief of Ha Jobo, (he's sitting outside his kitchen hut, where we slept) (m-fing kitchen huts smell like smoky bullshit and now my sleeping bag is forever tainted because the basotho never developed chimney technology)After getting minorly lost and hiking for about 10 - 10 1/2 hours, we were left on the precipice at the very very top of the mountain in the background, by that V where the two mountains come together, and had to hike to where this pic is taken. i thought i might die with jelly legs of doom

I am full of spunk and verve, not at all list-less

2008-10-24T14:53:00.000+02:00

Things I'm Into, Lately

bananas
handkerchiefs (both for wearing and nose blowing, though not simultaneously)
thunderstorms
sobriety
spinning around in circles
random text message capitalizations
how felicity is a badly dressed obsessive freak, ben is an egotist, noel is alright but makes me nervous just watching him, and julie has questionable taste in hair clips
throwing things at my students, especially if they're sleeping/not paying attention. or if kids outside are loud i'll throw things out the window.
Metric, and Arrah and the Ferns
Racetrack from the major motion picture "Newsies"
cheese
the grocery store had green beans, potatoes, AND eggs on monday!
reading my kids penpal letters. my favorite quote: "in my country witches ride on dwarves it looks like a small baby but it kills people at night".
Hearing that people (besides my parents) are still reading this silly blag
FAILblog (or at least i'm into this when i have internet)
banana-coconut-mixed dried berry-snocap-cinnamon pancakes
homemade samosas
thinking about visiting Japan
making "mix tapes" on my ipod

Things I've Received Recently

A free school tshirt
commendations on my braai (bbq) skillz after i grilled steaks for 4 hours at a school picnic
a tummy ache from eating steak for 4 hours straight at said school picnic
multiple compliments on how fat (and therefore happy) i am
Protection from bo-ntate (men) given by my faithful pint sized runt, The Professor
Extreme soreness in my feet areas from hiking for 11 hours in one day
the satisfaction of knowing i hiked through 3 districts in 2 days
~20 bedbug bites (luckily not from my bed)
enhancements on my wicked farmer tan
a 'scotch whiskey and habanero chili' dark chocolate bar from Munich
major welts on my legs from walking home in a horrific hail storm, i still have the bruises!

Things I Have Not Received Recently

mail
marriage proposals
inspiration
will power
peaches (it snowed on the blossoms so the whole peach season is f*ed!)
the satisfaction of a completed NY times crossword puzzle
giardia from drinking semi-stagnant river water
a lightning bolt of language comprehension
a literal lightning bolt to the dome from these crazy storms

Things I'm NOT Into, Lately

wind
random creepy bored TTI guys that follow me home
I have to pay M50 for that stupid non-free school shirt
my clothes smell like beef and charcoal
i seem to be unable to get a balloon or a plastic bag to stick to the wall to demo electrostatic force
the tp being blown out of/down my latrine
sexual frustration
freaking typhoons that cause me to be stuck at school til 5:30 pm, and then drowning me when i make a run for it.

Accomplishments

Shaved my legs for the first time in almost a year, it's INCREDIBLE! I feel so streamlined, like a porpoise, but with a lower body mass index
teaching my kids more 90s slang, telling them this is how we talk in America. (examples: radical, tubular, eat my shorts, don't have a cow) So I now have a hoard of retarded bart simpson/bill and ted types running around
I've turned myself into a one-woman photo-op. I told the kids i'd get pictures printed in Maseru for them so everyone and their mother now wants pictures, a lot of them with me.
I moved my nightstand from the right side of my bed to the left. (it's like i have a whole new hut!)

FINAL HOME DATES

2008-10-03T17:35:00.000+02:00

AMERRIICAAAAAA, oh i can't wait to eat your food.

I arrive in san diego 5 december, and leave san diego 30 december

i'll be in the Berkeley/San Fran area 13 Dec-21 Dec

PLEASE hang out with me!

Found Poetry

2008-09-27T14:28:00.000+02:00

God almighty saved our little sally because god heard their prayer it can work miracles sally grew up to be a nanny

Oh! what ails me?

what?
listen: i will raise my hands up. I will kneel down until i feel pain

always life seems easier to people who concentrate on education sometimes life seems tough and sky becomes duck to people who are vexatious

1. grocery

2. clothing
3. BELIEFS NEEDS
4. INSURANCE
5. AGRICULTURE
6. MAINTENANCE
7.

cold blood means the animal that live in water and freeze to death every time

SLackers

2008-09-15T10:16:00.000+02:00

Hey! Back again! My school is mildly killing my soul so i keep escaping. This next week is just exams anyway and the more i avoid invigilation duties, the better. especially since i suck at it, because you see the kids looking at each other's papers, and the other teachers just whack 'em with a big stick, but i still can't bring myself to get medievil on their asses. and also i really don't want to take their tests and give them zeros because the exam is their only grade, we're not allowed to include assignments or class participation or anything into the grade, and these poor kids' families are going hungry to pay their school fees, and then to f-them over by giving them a zero? i can't! ugh so i'm just ineffective to the extreme. and also this is all me rationalizing the fact that i'm missing a week of school in order to bum around the capital and go to all these random parties happening.

A lot of volunteers hate coming to Maseru because it's all big (by our standards- there are about 500,000 people here) and busy and smelly and kind of overwhelming but once you get past all of that it becomes the land of electric lights, avoiding work, couches, vegetables, cheese, the internet, and movies! I love doing nothing and seeing other volunteers and hanging out and staying up after dark and trying to remember what on earth i used to do online all day long, and eating pizza and all sorts of wondrous activities.

When here i exist almost solely on vegetables, cheese, and whiskey. it's beautiful (but expensive) I'll be here until this coming weekend so i'll be able to respond promptly to emails, etc. My official reason for staying is that i need to compile/edit the rogue newsletter i've become the editor of. This issue i'm trying to make electronic so i can save on photocopy/stampage fees but i need to locate a scanner... if it does become electronic i may be able to upload it to the 'net so it's possible you all can see, and marvel at the fact that you don't understand a word of it becasue it's all so lesotho-centric! hoo-rah!

The Windy City

2008-09-15T09:58:00.000+02:00

31 August

There have been gale-force winds, day and night for a few weeks now but they haven't managed to blow in any clouds. we need rain so badly, but every day it's all frickin cloudless and sunny. i miss the rain so much! ahh ptown. anyway the wind makes going outside miserable, since it's so dry these huge dust clouds come up and roam the town, making it hard to see (i'm considering investing in goggles) and blowing dirt into my eyes ears nose mouth clothes house EVERYTHING. it's all full of a layer of grit. I can't wait for winter to be over! the peach trees have started to blossom, and it's so perty.

1 Sept

While i love my mud hut for its insulative properties, problems arise when things like modern windows and doors are installed. The dry mud crumbles away from the metal frame so i have HUGE gaps around my window and door, and mud chunks are always falling off onto my floor. This is all fine and breezy in the summer, but in winter, especially with these tornadic winds about it becomes very lame. Last night i duct taped my window closed and around the cracks, and along all the edges and f-ing snow was still somehow blowing into my house. grr. my bed's right next to the window too so i had to make a little cave in my mounds of blankets to keep from freezing to death.

Victoria's Pictures

2008-09-06T15:44:00.000+02:00

since you all love me and want to see my face, here are some pics from vic's camera that i'm actually in! (i realize i'm not really in any of my own pics)

from the desert to the ocean, quadbike style

where i belong
tai chi at dune 45

i likes me some sand
action! that's me landing on my head

rolling is hard work

cave dwelling, with strong ankles
i wanna poke it

Pup tents

2008-09-06T13:18:00.001+02:00

small children in blankets! at the cultural festival
these toy cars the little boys make out of wire and old tin cans. they're super cool
ahh the professor
dinosaur bone ceiling. and yes that is a light bulb, it is there to mock me
town

20 August

we got a new puppy! My abuti named this one Spots after our previous puppy, Spots, who was stoned to death in january (Neither dog has/had spots, btw). I had previously named this puppy Professor Picklesworth, so i guess we'll just have to let the dog decide which name it prefers. It's super cute and amazing and i have reaffirmed that dogs are WAAY better than cats, especially whiny cats named parkinsons who may or may not have given me fleas.

the professor and I

school is going well, it's really tiring, but good, and i love my students incredibly (in a completely appropriate platonic sort of way) and we have 6 new teachers this semester who are all really nice. 4 are student teachers so they're all young and hip and stuff. and my two favorite teachers are Ntate Chelete (transl: Mr. Money) and Ntate Letsatsi (Mr. Sunshine). The Basotho have great names, sometimes.

It's almost springtime so i can plant my garden soon (Thanks, uncle jim!) and then i will have more than onions, carrots, and cabbage, vegetable-wise.

I missed all of last week of school because i am a derelict (I know, inappropriate word usage, but i like the way it sounds). I went down to the capital for a meeting with staff (I represent my district in the volunteer union, of sorts) then stayed for a workshop put on by an organization called "Men as Partners" which, though it sounds gay-rights centered, is really gender-equality centered. it's a movement to try to get men involved in womens' empowerment in southern africa, to get them to understand why women should be empowered and support their mothers/sisters/wives/girlfriends/etc. It was a great workshop, but very adult specific, so i'm trying to come up with a way to adapt the activities for primary/high school aged people. I think instituting the mindset of "women are just as good as men and should have the same rights" will be a lot more successful with the younger crowd, who're less set in their ways.

Also, i'm no longer in the newest group of volunteers! (groups come every 6 months, with education (Ed) vols arriving in nov. and community health and economic development (CHED) vols coming in june) so it's kind of like high school with a 4-group hierarchy and the new CHEDS were sworn in, which makes me like a sophmore! woo! i really want to help out with the training of the new ED volunteers when they come in Nov, but i won't get a choice in the matter, my boss said he just chooses the vols he thinks are "responsible, professional, etc" and while i am responsible, i'm not the most professional gal around, i still need to work on the whole think-before-i-speak thing, and to filter out inappropriate comments. So really I don't know if he'll let me help. I'll just have to wait and see.

So there have been multiple taxi strikes since i've been here because the cost of a taxi-bus license was raised from M200 to M1000. This is the government trying to raise money to buy busses to help regulate/expand the transportation system here. and we just got TWO BRAND NEW BUSSES! in the Thaba-Tseka-Maseru line! So now if i want i can ride in a bus that's not from 1970 that breaks down/explodes every other trip! Hoorah progress! Also the paving of the road is going well so my trip is about an hour shorter and 5000 times safer than it used to be. TT is entering the 21st century, slowly but surely. Next thing you know we might have INTERNET! probably not during my tenure here, though.

24 August

So when deciding to enter the peace corps, i readied myself (ish) for being away from home for 2 years. It's part of the whole deal, and i did/have still accepted that, except my dear mom and dad love me! and so they have offered to fly me home for christmas! holy crap! i told them that i'd think about it because my initial reaction is, No! I'm here for 2 years stick it out YOU CAN DO IT. also the culture shock of going home then leaving it again seems like it might be a bit too much. But i can't stop thinking about it, and i'm already super super excited! So i'm going to look for plane tickets, and hopefully i can find some that aren't too expensive. anyone that'll be in the san diego area in december, GET READY! it'll be super awesome! woo! i'll probably have to lie to my coworkers about it though because they'll ask me to buy them all sorts of things. they still think i'm rich.

Sometimes i make my teeth shine with List-erine

2008-09-06T11:26:00.000+02:00

and my sneakers gave me an unfortunate b-list-er on my heel. lame.

Things I do When I'm Bored
1. Make lists
2. Do crosswords
3. Make crosswords for friends
4. Sit by the coal stove in the staff room with my coworkers
5. Draw pictures
6. Make comics
7. Play "if you had one day in USA, what would you..." [eat, drink, do, etc.]
8. Think about dating celebrities (Shia LeBeouf and the singer of Snow Patrol are some odd recurring ones)
9. Make up scenarios for where i'll live/what i'll do/ awesome guys i'll meet upon my return to the states
10. Try not to flirt with my coworkers
11. Not study sesotho
12. Read old science textbooks (the ones donated by christian schools are weeirrd)
13. Read other random books (right now i'm trying to battle my way through Clavell's Shogun)
14. Play with spots II/Professor Picklesworth
15. Harass Parkinsons (and no the alliteration in pet names was not intended)
16. Shadow dance with myself (candle light makes for good shadows)
17. Think of interesting food combinations
18. Clean my hut
19. Try not to bake tasty things
20. Attempt to do the splits
21. Call Victoria on the walkie-talkie
22. Dance like a Mosotho man (involves a lot of pelvic thrusts)
23. Practice juggling (if i have enough similar sized fruit)
24. Memorize the words to cheesy pop songs
25. Stare at my dinosaur bone ceiling
26. Think deep mature thoughts and reflect on my life and grow as a person
27. Draw "cave paintings" on my latrine walls with a brown crayon
28. Lie as still as possible for as long as possible and see if i lose substance

Things That Increase My Heart Rate
1. Almost getting impaled by a mad cow
2. Cheese
3. Madeline Cozad
4. Thoughts of the weekend
5. Blasting Avril, Britney, or happy hardcore in the morning to get myself out of bed
6. Doing sit ups in the neverending Battle Against the Fetus
7. Completely finishing a crossword with no cheating
8. Hugs
9. Hiking to/from school (especially if i need to pee and am rushing)
10. Jumping Jacks
11. Thinking about kisses
12. The phone ringing
13. My students saying "Yes, we understand" and meaning it
14. Thinking about GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS!!

Things That Make Me Sad and/or Annoyed
1. Today is friday. I last bathed on monday
2. Fleas
3. Hearing an anonymous student call me "'Me Lekhooa" and not knowing what to do about it
4. Not everyone is as excited by the periodic table as I am
5. Apparently the teachers at my school are going to have to wear uniforms, too. I'm confused as to how this will work
6. Random smelly herdboys coming to my house and asking me to give and/or buy them a sheep
7. Gross smelly obnoxious herdboys on the bus who dance over me with their yucky old blankets draping so I can't lean back in my seat for the ENTIRE 6 hour bus ride. (and also having everyone else on the bus laugh at me, like haha white girl getting harassed by herdboys. jerks.)
8. Realizing i need to pee half hour into a 6 hour bus ride
9. My fetus is unchanged by the 100-150 situps i'm doing each day
10. Wondering if my sister is sick all the time because she has aids, or if her immune system just sucks.
11. wind
12. wind in a dusty country

Things I Know Now But Didn't Before
1. Springbok is the tastiest meat evar
2. The difference between rabbits and hares
3. The 5 characteristics of minerals
4. Inappropriate and funny are not always the same thing
5. Chocolate oatmeal rocks my socks off
6. L.A., Cleveland, and Queens are all right near each other
7. Shredding carrots can sometimes be dangerous
8. RIP Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes
9. The movie "Friday" is a lot funnier if you pretend it was filmed in Lesotho
10. Including words like "speculum" and "catheter" in my cursing/insults is fun
11. The sesotho word "noka" can, depending on vocal inflection/context mean "river", "to salt something", or "thigh", and this is potentially confusing
12. Britney, you go girl. I fully support and eagerly anticipate your grand comeback

Pict-ing

2008-08-12T10:41:00.000+02:00

birthday papa! (my 'Me made me wheat papa.... mmmmmm)
the etosha pan is this miles-wide area of crazy jello-like mud that's too deep to walk in vic did a mudmask, i did warpaint, then we realized our faces were burning. i think that was the feeling of clean pores.

more ice cream! and balloons!
it's a reality. VIGILANCE!
a meteorite actually did fall, then we basked upon it
giraffes are not eaten because they are animals that are tall enough to talk to the gods, and to let you know if it'll rain soon. (ahh the age-old joke of "how's the weather up there?!")

zebras, as a species, are bad tempered because they have chronic bad gas (their stomachs can't fully digest their main food source) i ate them. they were not tasty. they can, however, have body temperatures of up to 45 degrees but their brains won't fry because of a network of veins across the skull, cooling the blood/their heads.
the hunnybadgers are hunngry
demons of the speed persuasion

'ell if rhi know!
wildebeest, and springbok i think
no caption necessary

becoming a part of the landscape

plummeting to their deaths
trench warfare
photo-ops in the one-horse town of Solitaire
african sunrise....

to sunset

trials and tribulations in the tumultuous dunes
quick, look like you're inside computer desktop picture yeah, we went there.

ice cream and alcohol! go indulgence!

social weaverbird nest, they get HUGE! until the tree falls down, a lot of the time. they also do this to powerline poles, which is funny looking.

I'm Missing the Olympics, and I'm not Sure if That Makes Me Sad or Not

2008-08-10T16:51:00.000+02:00

apparently we lost in badmitton though. curses!

7 August

ugh, i'm failing at thinking of things to write about. I feel like i'm just talking to myself/the void on this blog, and i can't think of anything to say to the residents of a place that only marginally exists for me anymore, and i've given up on writing letters to people who never write back. If you want a letter, you have to write me. so there. I'm sick and tired of this place, but don't want to give up and go home either.

Well, update: school's started gain, school's started again, and this whole "double-shifting" thing (half the students come 7am-noon, other half noon-5pm, same teachers throughout) is not the doomsday event that everyone (including myself) made it out to be. I'm actually teaching less than before because all of teh students' classes have been cut back, and there's a new student teacher taking up the slack in the science dept. I've just gotten so lazy/stopped caring so it's hard to get the motivation to go to class. My students are sweethearts, though and it's really nice to see them again. I've lost a lot of my favorite kids though with the classes all getting switched around. i guess i can look at it as an opportunity for new favorites. and my classes are so so tiny now! it feels all empty in the classroom with only 35-40 kids in a class now instead of 55-60. maybe i'll actually learn everyone's names now.

Oh yeah! I'm a year older now than the last post. woo 24! My neighbor made a vat of sorghum moonshine and we sat around in the sun drinking, doing crosswords, and playing with puppies all day, then my 'Me made a big dinner. it was really nice.

So, Lesotho is maybe 95% Basotho, and 5% chinese. Europeans never came here because Lesotho has the virtue of having nothing to exploit, so the only white people here are from various NGOs/ Int'l aid programs. Anyway, there's REALLY bad racism/discrimination towards the chinese, they get shoved, insulted, spit on, etc. They can't enroll their kids in regular schools becasue they'll get harassed so badly. Some small children, having never seen white people i suppose, assume because i'm not black i must be chinese, so i get inappropriate racist slurs yelled at me by toddlers/kindergarten aged children. A couple times they've thrown rocks at me, but luckily since they are small they have no arm so i'm never close to being hit. stupid inept little kids. At least i'm not asian-american though, thouse volunteers get untold-of amounts of shit during their stay here. I haven't met a single mosotho who thinks it's wrong to hate, or at least dissapprove of, chinese people. I miss the diversity of the States. i've tried to tell people about how the races are all mixed up there, but they don't really believe me. I have a pictures of my grandma Betty, uncle Jim, cousin Paul, and Paul's son Isaac to show them how it's all the same family, but the offspring get progressively more asian looking with each generation. The people i show this to still look kind of dubious, like they doubt those people are really related. During a sex-ed session, amidst the questions about inter-species sex i had a few about inter-racial sex, like "if a mosotho cannot get a sheep pregnant, can he get a chinese or white person pregnant?". A lot of questions you never really foresee occuring in your life have been inquired of me here.

I have an exchange program going on in the staff room, where i teach my co-workers spanish and they help me with my sesotho. They think it's great, though they seem to only be using it as a means to flirt with each other. i've been asked to translate such useful phrases as "the teachers here are beautiful" "i love you" "do you love me" "come sit by the fire" "these men are strong" etc. I like it cuz it helps me remember my spanish. It's all mixed up with sesotho though in my head. i keep confusing myself.

well, i ended up saying a lot for not having anything to say.

When I was back in Nam...

2008-08-10T16:03:00.000+02:00

Ok, sorry no pics just yet, for some reason this computer won't recognize my camera. stupid technology.

19 July

We just got to Etosha National Park, this campsite is incredible! There are 3 outdoor showers and toilets just for our site. they're a little voyeuristic with just thick mesh for walls. There are Hyrax (rock ferrets) running around outside, and on the way in there were all these giraffes just chillin by the side of the road!

Before this we stayed at this campsite with HUGE rocks and we all went bouldering for a few hours, it was so much fun. Man, i really miss bouldering. My jolly jolly thighs have seized up though and refuse to work today, which makes getting in and out of the truck difficult. i have to sort of fall out.

This morning we saw 600,000 year old cave paintings! they're soo cool! they're done with a mix of blood and yolk from ostrich eggs. Then victoria and i stood on a rock and shadow danced/fought for like an hour. we would've been there all day probably if our slave driver tour guide didn't make us leave. Man, we are funny funny people. We created what will be the next hit on youtube, if i'm ever able to upload it.

Before that i discovered my new obsession: QUAD BIKING. Holy crap! It has awakened my need for speed. we went for 1 hour in the afternoon on piddly 125cc automatic bikes, and it was waay too slow/short for me, so i cancelled my sandboarding excursion the next day and booked 90 minutes (all i could afford) and got a 250cc semi automatic (you have to weigh at least 80 kg to get teh 350 cc manual bikes, and though i have gained a lot of weight, i'm not that big). it still wasn't enough. i wanted to go all day. we "rollercoastered" on the dunes where you rocket up one side of a dune, do a sharp turn at teh top and plummet down again, i just gunned it the whole time, going higher and faster. (sidenote: the kalahari desert is BEAUTIFUL, it goes right to the ocean and the dunes are amazing) I impressed the guide with my skillz and daring.

Then before that we were in the huge red dunes of the Namib desert, we kept climbing up and rolling down them, the sand is so soft. I'd just sort of dive headfirst from the top of a dune and go into uncontrolled summersaults, until i fell sideways into uncontrolled log rolling. I permanently have sand in every orifice, i think some new ones were even created, and i severely messed up my neck from landing on my head so many times, but it was definitely worth it. We're enforcing the stereotype of Americans being loud obscene nutcases, but that's ok because we're having more fun than them. We really pretty much never stop laughing.

It's weird tho, because we're on an organized safari, everywhere we go we're just surrounded by tourists, it's like waiting in line at the parthenon, except i'm in friggin africa in this ginormous desert and everyone's concentrated in a few places. After Mongolia, Namibia is the least densely populated country in the world (1.8 million people, same as lesotho) so we've seen almost no actual namibians except in the big cities. i'm used to lesotho where there are villages scattered pretty evenly across the entire country, and no tourism to speak of. The back roads in teh middle of nowhere in this country are 100x nicer than the main f-ing road to the middle of lesotho where i live, and even the smaller backwater towns here are way nicer than Maseru (the capital). When i tell people i live in lesotho, it's a good way to garner pity/ lower prices while bartering. Lesotho is seen kind of as the armpit of Southern Africa. Whatever, at least we have pretty mountains, and nice people.

We (the tour group) are all on mefliquone, an antimalarial and it's giving everyone crazy dreams. Others are dreaming of being killed, shot, shooting others, general distress (or if you're madeline each dream ends in a party). I keep getting my heart broken, almost every dream it happens somehow. Everything's so vivid though, it's almost worth it.

27 July

Home again! I knew i was getting close when the sidewalks disappear, streets started being lined with trash and men start jeering at me. Good 'ol Lesotho. I can't wait to get back to my hut and sleep in my own bed and see Malehluoa and my 'Me again. I feel like i've been on vacation forever. day before yesterday (afternoon) we boarded the bus at Windhoek, then got to Bloemfontein 20 hours later, then an hour wait, then a 2 hour taxi to Maseru, where i spent the night last night, now it's 8:30 am and i'm waiting for the bus to leave here to get to thaba tseka, which will take about 6 hours. I've gotten really good at long car rides while living here.

Icing, anyone?

2008-07-11T13:58:00.000+02:00

And now, Mosilisi, Lesotho's PM has come out in support of Mugabe, saying that his win in a one-man election is legitimate. wtf

5th time's a charm

2008-07-08T14:34:00.000+02:00

I hate the internet. here we will try once again:

So, due to the requests for me to get to the point and put my thousands of words into photos, here they are!

drying out meroho (leafy greens) and maize to get us through the winter

my sis sewing a dress

the two facial expressions i most often inspire in the children of lesotho:

small furry creatures that like to plague me. parkinsons on the left, tsotse (theif/criminal) on right

two bo-ausi making snowflakes with me in my roundavel

water balloons Lesotho Style (don't worry they weren't used)

huddled around the coal stove in the staff room. N. Chelete is rockin out to my headphones, i think i'm introducing him to Blackalicious as a counterargument to Lil Bow Wow being legit music.

more Rockin Out. please do not notice the chubbsy faced whitey on the right.
I found an appropriate whiskey for my profession

ok, this is SO F-ING SLOW. so i'm giving you words while i wait for pictures. damn you internet, and damn you all websites that have imbedded flash or a million jpegs causing me to be unable to access you unless i wait the 20 minutes for everything to download. The makers of websites have totally forgotten that dial up internet does indeed still exist, and is used by a large part of the world. or a large part of my world, at least.

30 June:

So I didn't get to hang out with the old lady because she was in the hospital. While waiting for her to show i was able to watch some awesome music videos from some botswanan music group, a movie called Matilda about some mischevious little girl that's so smart and has read so many books that she can move shit with her mind and so defeats the evil headmistress, and also a dvd containing every britney spears music video ever made (there are like 20!). i forgot how awesome britney used to be.

Then yesterday i hiked to the river (1.5-2hrs down/up a mtn) with a bunch of kids and Ben, an american with grand multimedia plans for the future of lesotho. We went to fish, but with nothing to bait the hooks with we didn't catch much. Instead we roasted corn, took a bunch of pictures with a film-less camera, swung on swings woven from still attached branches, threw rocks, played with "water balloons" (condoms we found by the river), got really wet trying to ford the river, and really singed trying to dry off over a fire. All in all, a super awesome day. Of course my camera ran out of batteries after 4 pictures. i have chronic power struggles with that battery inhaler. (did you spot the pun?! yes....)

Right now i'm in the staff room at school, i stopped by to say hi to the teachers doing winter classes, deliver mail, and discuss the merits of 'Lil Bow Wow'. (I'm not sure who that is, but my position is anti, based on the name alone)

+Warning+: This is me ranting without a lot of factual support/well thought through arguments, so you might want to skip it in favor of more pretty pictures.

2 July:

It's a perversion, an indecency, what i'm doing here. It's just so blatantly selfish. The basotho, many of them, see it too and have us volunteers for it. What fucking retard would give up a good life for this sort of poverty? That we can be so blasé, so unconcerned about what we have that we'd give it up to come "help" here, it's an affront. It's like rubbing their noses in it. We can leave, go home whenever we want. Even the most educated and motivated mosotho is hard pressed to find a job/higher education in South Africa, and Lesotho itself is just dead ends. This whole place is dead ends for people used to dead ends. They see, and know what it is to be born here and not there are are so stubbornly proud. I love the Basotho for their national pride. In this nation of zero resources, one of the recipients of the highest amt foreign aid per capita, this place where imports at least triple the exports, they still stand so tall. We fucking americans, who denounce our country, who put Canadian flags on our luggage when abroad, who are we? We let ourselves be defined by such fads, such limited factors. Sure the administration sucks, but i've never met a mosotho who defined themself or their country by the actions of their corrupt ill equipped government. It never even occurred to them to act like the actions of the Prime Minister reflect the national consciousness, or their own dignity at all. (I realize these are horrifically sweeping statements and that neither of these are ideal positions with many finer points, but this isn't going to be that in depth. i'm just ranting.)

The Basotho are smart enough to be proud of what they have: their independence, their traditions, their own people, music genre, and the 'best' way of preparing papa (maize meal). I'm so sick of Americans lamenting so much with such vehemence. We ran out of actual complaints and have lost our sense of what we have accomplished at the same time. I don't want to feel guilty about what i have, what i grew up with, and i don't. I do feel like an ass for taking it all for granted. Roads, hospitals, youth centers, movie theaters, diversity, grocery stores, a largely progressive populace, all of it.

Oh, it's romantic in a way, living in a mud hut, reading by candle light, lending my "vast knowledge and experience" at the high school. Nothing I do, nothing peace corps ever does, is sustainable though. This really is a "get paid to see the world" gig for recent college grads. I knew that upon entering, in face it's one main reason i applied. Being here, though, it makes me feel like an idiot, flaunting what i had to go on a jaunt to the third world for a couple years. At the end of this I'll just be abandoning the students I've spent 2 years convincing to trust me, listen to me, learn from me. They'll really just learn that i left them. I've gotten innumerable stories about "that lekhooa" that used to live here and promised this and that, then left and forgot about everyone here and what they promised. I'm just another in the parade of halfway-caring better offs to come and leave.

p.s. sorry for all the run on sentences. and negativity. i know there are lots of positives, and this isnt all and everything. i'm entitled to be negative sometimes, alright?

Not so Fowl Times

2008-07-04T10:21:00.000+02:00

26June:

Potential B-day Happiness
letters/pictures
aforementioned desirable package items
seasons 1-3 of coupling
Season 3 greys anat.
How I met your mother (any, all)
good books and music
airline whiskey bottles
cajun spice and sweet hungarian paprika from limbo in ptown
hugs
kisses
etc.

Last night i had my 1st taste of "white flag" joala. There are 2 main schools of moonshine in Lesotho: yellow flag and white flag. When you brew, you hoist plastic bags of the appropriate color on a pole outside so people can come partake. Yellow flag is sweet, winey mooonshine that has been described to me as tasting of "fermented bleu cheese dressing". White flag is sorghum based, is really thick and chunky, and tastes kind of like sour cream of wheat. Victoria's family came out to visit so her lesotho family threw a feast. it was really nice, and we all drank joala and danced and had fun. Vic's mom thought this one little girl, lintle (2-3 yrs old) was super cute barging around the room knocking into peoples' legs, but i don't think she realized the little one was drunk on too much moonshine. There's no concept here of "too young to drink".

eee, some ducks are approaching dangerously near me as i write. Luckily i'm ok with ducks, so i will not flinch. There are roosters here too, and along with being majorly obnoxious and crowing at 4 am, they freak me out. I have to arc my walking patterns significantly to avoid them.

Now I'm sitting around outside my neighbor's house watching a little barefoot boy attempt to play the banjo whilst reclining in a wheelbarrow. It's super cute, and i really wish i had a camera. I'm doing an awful job chronicling my stay here in pictures. We're drinking more joala from last night, and the little one is drunk again. Eventually today i'm going with them to visit 'me julia's "grandmother". THe reason that's in quotes is because i'm skeptical she has an alive grandmother because she's way old and a grandmother herself. It's fun to try to communicate with crotchedy old ladies sometimes. It's better if they're drunk becaue then they speak slower and i can understand them easier.

I'm mildly regretting the hectic winter break i have. It'd be nice to have more time to sit around. A la today. stupid me and my commitment making.

Dribble

2008-06-21T09:54:00.000+02:00

Hey,

i'm all out of it, i feel like i've been repeating myself a lot, and so i can't remember what i've already written in this here blaggy and what i've just been telling people. that's partially why i'm into condensing my life into lists. i've been in the capital for a week, eating haenous amounts of food and drinking whiskey and red wine, so my body is freaking out a bit. all these forgotten food groups such as meat, dairy, and fresh fruit. i have major food baby issues. but, i have been showering every single day almost since i've been here, and i feel almost too clean. my hair is all floofy and shit. AND i stole lindseys clothes so i'm all pretty, too! (she has lots of pretty clothes). so all in all life is good. i leave tom morn for home for a week where i will relax, sleep all day, and read lots of mediocre books. then i'll be back for more rich food and alcohol and friends and internets and dresses and cleanliness and things.

my camera was mia since last month when i was in town, so no new pics. maybe i'll take some this intervening week so i can post some eye candy next time i'm in town.

ok. i'm too out of it to post. goodbye forever!

Formal Invitation

2008-06-18T11:37:00.000+02:00

So, first off, i realize you're all broke, but in the case of fiscal responsibility/sudden bouts of inheritance, i would like to formally invite anyone desiring happiness/adventure in life to visit me.

Just think: sometime later on you'll see this amazing (wo)man, and have the desire to attract them. if you follow my advice, you'll be able to start speaking loudly about "when i was in africa...". Said hottie will be irresistibly drawn to you, and you will then regale them with tales of wonder. we can even feed some babies or something while you're here, if you're into that. You'll be a chick/dude magnet! The logic for visiting me is undeniable.

To excite you about your impending visit, i've put together 3 suggeseted vacation packages. these by no means need to be followed. off the beaten track is a-ok with me.

1. The Kingdom in the Sky $
The most affordable package involves chillaxin with me in Lesotho. See what my life is like!
possible adventurez: pony trekking, hiking, using a pit latrine, donkey pub crawls

2. Summer Lovin' (Winter for you N. Hemisphere fools) $$
While the rest of the continent is boiling, we can frolic round South Africa! Durban, Cape Town, the Wild Coast, Kruger Nat'l park all await!
possible adventurez: swimming in both the indian and atlantic oceans, being eaten by lions, going on wine tours, etc.

3. Go North $$$
good for winter, also fun any other time. these adventurez are more expensive because they're farther away (= more transportation, more time away, etc.)
Mozambique: beaches, seafood, dancing, djs. possible adventurez: aquiring a harem, introducing new dance moves
Botswana: elephants, okavango delta, victoria falls. possible adventurez: falling out of a canoe and getting eaten by hippos, "swimming" in the mist of Vic Falls
Namibia: namib desert, large animals, skeleton coast. possible adventurez: dune boarding, leopard feeding
Swaziland: like Lesotho but with infrastructure and better crafts! possible adventurez: seeing the "virgin parade" where a bunch of jailbait parade around naked, so men can decide which one they want.

Hello Out There, is Anybody List-ening?

2008-06-17T11:05:00.000+02:00

Things I Fantasize About
1. Double ply toilet paper
2. Cheese (duh)
3. Mexican food/ Thai food
4. Hot showers
5. Fishies (a.k.a. goldfish crackers)
6. Nerds
7. Meeting a nice boy that likes me for me, and doesn't see me as either a freak show or a free ticket to America
8. Electricity

Things That Make Me Happy
1. Waking up next to Victoria, singing the good morning song, and relaying our dreams
2. Kittens (sometimes)
3. Lunch bar dreams
4. Cheese (duh)
5. Mail
6. Scottish Leader Whiskey
7. The prospect of Namibia
8. Having a conversation with a stranger that doesn't end in a request of some sort
9. Hot water bottles
10. Dance parties
11. Glitter (especially when in conjunction with 10.)
12. How excited my student sometimes get when I enter the classroom
13. Nanotechnology (So Cool)
14. Crossword puzzles
15. Jam (esp. strawberry and raspberry, lately)
16. Snuggling with Vic's pregnancy pillow (somewhat unfortunately named Bryan Adams)

Things That Make Me Sad
1. My dropout rate is up to 7
2. Accidentally looking down into my pit latrine
3. Rats that eat my underwear
4. Running out of batteries
5. incomprehension
6. The number of bestiality-related questions I got during an impromptu sex ed class session
7. The number of ribs I'm able to count on all the domestic animals
8. That many Basotho believe that if you wear gum boots (galoshes) during sex, you won't get HIV
9. You know what would make this better? cheese.
10. How relative bathing has become (relative to what? i'm not sure)
11. Rats that sneak under my door, confound my cats and eat my tomatoes

Trends I May or May Not Have Inspired
1. Holding your hands as if you were wearing mittens while dancing
2. Beanies with brims
3. the internet
4. a love of veronica mars (of the show, not for her because she herself is a selfish paranoid bitch who uses people)
5. lists
6. pie
7.using old airline whiskey bottles for salt/pepper shakers
8. spelunking
9. speaking spanish
10. burning man SOUTH AFRICA!!! woo!!

p.s. comments are always appreciated

I've got a Visual!

2008-05-19T13:47:00.001+02:00

Dancing babies! trad dress doing the traditional shoulder poppy dance
even blind sheperds deserve to learn!

i think it's really made of skittles

i found these pieces of wood that fit on my fingers, so i made finger puppets. victoria thought i should make an angry face for the camera, so she insulted me. my apparent response was bafflement...

CRISIS!! NOOOOO... south africa is falling apart, no potatoes...

I pass this on my way to school, this building was going to be a hotel built by some german guy, but before it ever opened the german was killed and the structure burnt down... ho, hum.

the death of swine

2008-05-18T14:04:00.000+02:00

16 may

i thought when they cut its neck, the blood would gush, like in the movies. instead, even though its head was half off, it came out in a single arced stream, like a drinking fountain, actually. the pig kept squealing and grunting even when there was nothing left to grunt from/with. when its head was off, laying in the grass, the body kept moving. it reminded me of a cat luxuriating in the sun, stretching its limbs out, reaching, or like a drugged mental patient fighting off its handlers in slow motion. or like the death throes of a pig with its head cut off. whatever. it kept moving for a whole nother minute or two with no head. it felt like 10 minutes though. i could see the trachea still opening and closing in the neck stump. i decided it was telling me its last words, which were that i should eat more mangoes so i can feed the delicious pits/skins to its children. i tried to tell it that there are no more mangoes because it's winter time, but the pig wouldn't listen to reason. headless pigs can be like that.
then they cut out its balls. there something about it they burst/get cut while the pig is being butchered than the whole animal isn't good to eat anymore. then they put its body in a big tub and dumped boiling water on it, then pulled out its hair/scraped it off with rocks. the pig's head was just lying there in the grass, looking like a halloween mask. my gut instinct to poke things with sticks kicked in, and i really wanted to prod the head. the men were all busy around there though and i didn't want to get in the way, so i refrained. ok so writing that made me regret my lack of action, so i just went back and nudged it with my toe. the nose is all squishy, adn its cheek feels like when i found my puppy and petted it, thinking it was asleep but it was really dead. a pig's neck is incredibly thick, almost thicker than its stomach. and its brains were kind of spilling out the back of its skull. i looked for the spine amidst all the bloody flesh, but i couldn't see it.
After scraping off most the hair with rocks, they busted out a package of lady bics. it was funny to see four old men meticulously shaving a giant headless pig with little pink and purple plastic razors.
The vegans/vegetarians are probably grossed out by me right now, and some meat eaters, too, but i had to watch. turning away doesn't make the thing not happen, it just means i'll know less about what actually went on. if i was an imaginative person i'd be fine with that, because i could fill in the gaps myself, but i'm not all that imaginative, really. i need facts and memories to fill in the blank spaces. and how can i learn new things,anyway, without poking them with sticks/my toe? i think meat eaters that won't participate, even passively, in killing an animal are trying to avoid responsibility for what goes on before the meat reaches their plate. i'm not really the type to flinch, anyway. i remember when i was in elementary school i wanted to be either a horse trainer, a teacher, or a neuroscientist, and my 5th grade teacher told me she could see me as a brain surgeon, and i was like, hey thanks! and then she continued "...yeah, i bet you could cut open someone's head without even flinching". i was sort of taken aback, i remember, because adults aren't usually that blunt with kids. (Also, for the record, that teacher was a petty bitch who didn't like me because i critisized her teaching methods). But hey, maybe she's right.
The hairless pig (did you know boy pigs have nipples, just like boy humans? i didn't, though it makes sense) is now going to ride with me to Maseru, where it'll be butchered. i'm kind of sad they aren't doing it here, because then i could learn how an animal is gutted. The pig's eventual destination is Johannesburg, where it, along with a sheep, some chickens, and a few buckets of joala (sorghum based moonshine) will cater the party for my m'e's youngest daughter's college graduation. (her youngest child (out of 8 total) is two years younger than the oldest grandchild, btw)
p.s. i'm eating pumpkin seeds right now and they're SO GOOD. mom i love you.

Minutae, Mostly

2008-05-18T11:58:00.000+02:00

Mid-May

It seems like i've entered a new trend. When i injure myself i'll injure the corresponding body part on my other side within a few days. At first i cut up my thumb while chopping vegetables, then the next day my right thumb split open, entirely unreasonably. i didnt cut it or anything! ugh. so since band aids suck i had to wrap both thumbs first in band aids then in scotch tape. with the lack of opposable digits i was forced back an evolutionary step, and looked like a retard for a week or so. then a few days ago i fell and scraped the crap out of my knee, and ripped my tights, and today on teh way to work i fell again and scraped my other knee. at least i'm not a catholic, or i'd have a hard time praying in this state.

in other news, i'm now the proud owner of 7 pairs of crotchless panties. a pervert has entered my household and i can't seem to get rid of it. I have a mouse (or rat) the size of a small warthog with very refined tastes in which pieces/parts of my clothing it likes to eat. I've relocated both Vroomba (momma cat) and Parkinsons (or parker, the kitten) into my house at night, and the dumb things don't even wake up when the warthog stomps through the room, knocking stuff over and chewing into my tupperware. totally useless. and i leave for 5 days on friday, and i'm afraid it'll consolidate its ownership of my home even more while i'm gone.

Oh! and i suppose i can tell you all how i'm actually helping around here, sometimes. A week or so ago there was a "children's health day" a couple hours away from wher i live, put on by the unfortunately named ngo of notre dame alums: Touching Tiny Lives. 8 peace corps volunteers were there to help out. it was a bit of a nightmare, but ended up ok. there was a huge turn out, and the nurses from the hospital were 3 hours late, so the bo-me (women) were about to riot. the plan was to screen teh 0-5 yr olds for malnutrition while their mothers were being counseled/tested for HIV. what ended up happening was 3 of us went outside to do the screening there because HIVness was taking forever. so vic, klein, and i were little bubbles with our scales and MUAC strips inside of a crazy mob of pushing yelling, non english speaking women and babies. It looked worse than it was. I just let the bo-me fight it out and took whatever medical record book was closest, and then found the corresponding child. I was the lucky one with the lbs scale, so i had to convert each weight into kg in my head. my measurements were a bit general... 3 other pcvs were on crowd control and i'm really glad i wasn't them. i'll take a screaming baby over masses of incomprehending impatient old ladies any day. About 300 m'e and kids came and i think i screened between 70-100 yound ones, and only had to refer 15-20 of them to ttl for malnutrition. that's a pretty good ratio. i have no idea what teh HIV+ stats were because they went to get tested after they saw me. i'm kind of glad i don't know because i have a feeling it's a depressing statistic. anyone under 5 years old with HIV is incredibly sad. it just seems so doomed.

as requested, here are my plans for the near future:
2 more weeks of school, then 1 1/2 of exams, (i've gotten depressingly little done this quarter) then i'm migrating down to maseru for the winter around 13th June. I'll have regular internet from mid june to mid july, and also will be unable to receive mail sent to my thaba tseka address. the 3rd week of june and 1st of july i will be teaching science workshops for teh teachers college. the week between those i will be gallavanting somewhere. then the 2nd/3rd weeks of july will be NAMIBIA! woo! then i'll be back in the mountains around my birthday (30th july for those of you interested in sending me presents), and school starts up again around 6 august.

ways in which i've Made a Difference this week:
1. i taught one class the word 'farting' (it was necessary, they were calling it 'quinching' which is totally lame) and another class the verb 'to suck' (in the "man that sucks" context, rather than "science doesn't suck" or "i taunted the children by sucking on a lollipop and not sharing")

2. i finally convinced my students (at least to just agree with me) that ALL snakes have backbones, even though you can wrap them around your finger.

Back Log

2008-05-18T11:54:00.000+02:00

End April- Beginning of May:

It’s just so tiring, wondering constantly what I’m dong here and if I’ll make it through, I want so badly to go ‘home’. I don’t want to spend two years pining for something else. I’m so used to getting what I want, when I want it though, so I suppose this is strengthening. Besides, I chose to do this. That’s what’s really keeping me here. If I was in this position not by choice, I’d be doing al sorts of work to get out of it. Hm, this sounds worse than I mean it to. I’m not miserable here or anything, I just miss home so so so so so much. I need to get my head on straight and stop thinking about Portland as home. Integration, that’s the word, right? I need to actually make an effort to learn this damn language, rather than wait for comprehension diffusion to occur and one day I’ll wake up and understand what’s going on around me. It’s really lonely being excluded from conversation all day every day. It’s depressing to have children shout “lekhooa” (derogatory term for white person) at me when I walk around town, and it’s depressing to see how little I’m getting through to my students. I’m just shouting at a wall so much of the time. It’s depressing how many of my students are failing their classes, and how difficult it is for them to succeed in this outdated colonial-era styled school system. It’s depressing that my students, co-workers, and friends are attending funerals for loved ones almost every weekend, and it’s depressing to watch my neighbor die of aids; I feel like I can count more of her bones every time I see her. Two of my students have already dropped out of school because they’re too sick and need the money for medication rather than school fees. What can I do in the face of all this? I know I am helping, and am useful here, and yes I know the answer to my question: just keep going, do my best I can, etc. Saying that is a whole lot easier than doing it. There’s just this heaviness, a sadness that’s settled into my chest, and I’m dragging myself around. It’ll pass, I know, it’s just be nice it if passed sooner rather than later. On a more positive note, my dear Madeline’s school fell apart and went defunct around her (that’s not the positive part) so she had to move her site, so now instead of a 2 day journey away, she’s only 2 hours! Woot! And in july we’re going to Namibia and Botswana, and then it’s my birthday, and then I’m sure something else exciting will happen, such as the appearance of cheese in my life, or maybe a letter.
OK, It’s time for another edition of…

Things I Know Now, But Didn’t Before
1. According to an unnerving number of my students, an exoskeleton is “the bone of every person that died before”
2. Unrefrigerated salami will cause me to vomit more than 12 times in a 10-hour period
3. When the ambassador’s entourage is exclaiming over/taking pictures of an elusive sprinkbok, it will ruin the moment to mention that you see them on menus in South Africa all the time.
4. While cats are fun when they belong to someone else, I am not a fan of having one live with me, even if it is a cute fuzzy kitten
5. Feeding a cute fuzzy kitten pasta will give it smelly gas and bad diarrhea, thusly nullifying its positive qualities
6. Raspberry Jam + Feta + Spinach + Sweet Pickles + Honey Mustard + Pringles = Best Sammich EVAR (We went on a shopping spree at the Spar in S. Africa, and just put everything we bought on bread. Ahhh heaven)
7. Indian Summer is a horrible movie and Bill Paxton is not capable of pulling off a mullet
8. Trying to get friends to sleep over at your house all the time because they make the best space heaters can be construed as ‘a little creepy’
9. Ninja baths are >17 times more fulfilling than regularly sanctioned baths
10. Loose wrap skirts are neither appropriate nor professional to wear to work on a windy day
11. Thinking I can curse as much as I want around students/ neighbors/ coworkers/ random passers by because they won’t understand American curses is misinformed, because they tend to comprehend at very inopportune moments
12. Similar to when working with an open flame or printing presses, it is inadvisable to wear trailing scarves/ dangly earrings when attempting to weigh/screen for malnutrition 70-100 babies and small children, because they will latch on and strangle you/ forcible remove your earrings
13. One should not go against instinct and try to weigh demon children, because they will pee on you
14. Sticking mystery fireworks in a fire pit after they fail to light can be fun, as long as one is nimble (a la the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins) and is able to jump out of the way of shooting jets of colored flame. [If you’re wondering: yes, I am both nimble and quick]

Nenny Corn Where Are You?

2008-04-28T08:42:00.000+02:00

jen none of the emails i have for you work. send me an email with how you're doing! mine is rereilly at gmail

I missed the bus, and that is something i will nevah evah evah evah do again

2008-04-27T16:26:00.000+02:00

two of my co teachers outside school. notice the ravine of death behind them. yes my school is on a precipice. these teachers both have amazing names, as well, the man is ntate lebesele (milkand) chelete (money) and the woman is puseletso (just sound that one out).
some of my students at katse dam, being too cool
yes, it snowed already. mothergherkins. Thaba Tseka: SO COLD. and it's only autumn.

Today was amazing! we decided to be bad irresponsible teachers and not go back to tt today, and instead go tomorrow. we even woke up 2 hours earlier than we needed to to catch the bus home, but were having entirely too much fun laying around giggling, and i was the warmest girl evar with 4 blankets, so we stayed.

we went to this little border town in south africa that was like a dream. it's only 30 minutes away, and is so different from lesotho! there are real grocery stores there, too. and all sorts of cute restaurants, and funny looking boers. we ate brunch (yes, brunch! it even exists in africa!) and it was this cute place with a windy garden and there was this family there with a fat naked baby they kept putting in this fountain to take creepy anne geddesesque pictures of it. Then we went to a real grocery store where there was a "POTATO CHIP CRISIS!!" a huge sign informed us that due to a shortage of something or other, they might not be able to stock all our favourite brands/flavors of potato chip.
it's been a wonderful wonderful weekend with victoria and madeline, i'm not sure if we're capable of not laughing. giggle triplets? who knows. oh! and readers of mine, check out victoria's blog: nosoapplicable.blogspot.com. she's going through all the stuff i am, and she is much more in touch with her brain than i am, so she actually talks about all the myriad emotional crises we're going through whereas i prefer to ramble about specific instances and things. i love victoria because she balances me out, and helps to force me to talk about what's going on in my head. and my dear mad, i never see because she's on the other side of the country, but she's one of the wittiest people i've ever met, and i love how down to earth she is. so there's my synopsis of my cronies. and i love them.

this coming weekend i'm going out to another volunteer's site about 2 hrs from me, they're holding a children's health day i'm going to aid (possibly by way of face painting?!), where we're trying to get all the 0-5 year olds in teh area screened for malnutrition and HIV, and also dole out free measles vaccines, and talk about eating healthy and other various practices that lead to a successfully alive child. hopefully we'll do a children's health day in tt also someday. then after that i'm coming back to teh capital for a meeting, so i'll be able to internet some more. all around fun times

ok, love you all. and i continue to think you ALL SUCK MY GOSHDARN UNMENTIONABLES for failing utterly at keeping in contact with me. PLEASE send me communications. if you're going to refuse to send me letters, i'll also love emails. i miss you, tell me how you are, suckers.

Sci-WOW-ence!

2008-04-26T12:28:00.000+02:00

spelunking on st. pattys day with airline whiskey bottles.

This weekend I’m teaching a workshop for teachers from 5 primary schools in the area. They (the teachers) get these maths and science supply/teaching aid kits from the ministry of education, but never use them because they’re afraid of them or something. SO, in my continued role as expander of horizons, enlightener of minds, and general bringer of the light, I am going to show them how to use these kits. Problem is, I have yet to see what exactly is in them. Ho hum. Also, I’m expanding this workshop; in june and july I’ll be leading an enhanced version of ‘love you maths/science kits like they love you’ in Maseru for the Lesotho College of Education. Eventually I’d like to create a short manual/sample curricula to give to all the peace corps resource volunteers so they can do these workshops in their own districts. Then the WHOLE COUNTRY will be able to successfully teach maths and science, and the students will be empowered, and the country will be elevated as a whole. Lookie me and my big aspirations. AND my momma is sending me my book! Yes, if you weren’t aware, I’m a published author of a book with the most cumbersome non-acronym friendly name in the history of evar: No Hassle Messy Science With a Wow: Chemistry in the K-8 Classroom. And I got some shitty credits on it, too. My name was listed last, so I look like a hanger on or something, but I know in my heart I wrote a large chunk of the book. So there.

Other projects in the works: Creating a library at my school (I may, sometime in the future request book donations from you all back home), starting an HIV/AIDS peer teaching group at my school (where I train some enthusiastic/intelligent/natural leaders of my students on all manner of HIV/AIDS information, and then they go out and teach their peers about it. So it isn’t just another talking head at the front of the classroom railing on them about the dangers of it all, like they don’t know already.), and also I want to bring in HIV AIDS testers/counselors/awareness spreaders to the winter sports tournament in June. Also in September we’re going to organize a sports camp event, where we use some sport (probably soccer) as a hook to get ~200 kids from the region to come for a weekend, then we’ll have free HIV testing, and also counseling/education/etc. And we want to do a career faire/day thing too sometime to show the kids that jobs do exist, and they matter, and stuff. Also I’m the Volunteer Advisory Committee representative for my district, I have yet to discover exactly what that entails, but I do get to come to maseru may 9-12 for a meeting and I’ll find out then. So much stuff happening! And school is hectic as well. I don’t get home till 5ish, and it’s dark by 6, so I have a very small window in which to get shit done. Which is going to get worse, because my school has been chosen to pilot this “double shifting” program to combat overcrowding of classrooms. How this works is half the students will come to school from 7am-noon, and then the other half will come from noon-5pm. Issues: 1) the same set of teachers is used for the whole day. Ergo, I will now be at school for 10 hours a day. 2)my school is really far away from everything, on a precipice. It takes all the students 1-2 hours to walk there, and in winter it’s pitch dark at 7 am and 5 pm, and it’s really dangerous to go out at night here. 3) all extra-curricular activities and sports are fucked because, when will they occur? And 4) I’m a whiny bitch and don’t want to work that hard. They’re paying the teachers extra for the long hours as compensation, so I guess that means I will just get to have an extra warm feeling in my heart since I work for free. Ugh.

And it’s cold as balls at night! I have a gas heater which works pretty well, but releases an unknown and possible worrisome amount of carbon monoxide, and I have no detector, so I’m afraid to keep it on for more than an hour or so. I have 4 comforters though (1 down!) so I sleep pretty well, it’s just so hard to get out of bed in the morning, I snooze for 20-30 minutes. AND IT SNOWED! Already! This does not bode well for actual winter time.

Anyway, so July, in Sesotho, is “phuphu” which is pronounced “poopoo”. How fitting is that! I’m born in the month of poop! Though I’m a bit jealous of june birthdays because june is “phuptjane” pronounced “poop-johnny”.

On another note, I asked my students to write me anonymous notes telling me how I’m doing as a teacher. Here are some gems:
“To be fair and honest I am indeed enjoyable in most times when you visit our calss for teaching Madam; you teach us with solidarity and I am free with that!!!”
“you are teaching very nice but you have to decrease the notes hey! You are giving us so much notes To be fair you are teaching very nice KEEP IT UP!”
“you teach us nicely madam because you make us to laugh when it is time for science” “You tought us good, but a thing is that you are giving us a lot of notes but I tsoarela (forgive) you because you are not Mosotho and you cannot pronous words good.” “MADAM REBECCA As a maths teacher my announcement to you is that everything you do also what you have done. My under on you is good and my feelinfs about you are fabulous. I understand your teaching much better than the last maths teacher,”
“Infact I understand your subject and you tolerate other people. You don’t know how to tease people. You are always well dressed and you are pity.”
--from a whiny student I kicked out of class for fighting with a girl “you are not teaching well and you like to expel others in your class. You should not do that.”
“you do very well that every student understand. You are able to pass the knowledge that you have to us and you are the best of my maths teachers that have taught me. Keep it up please.”
“there is nothing further to worry about because she has got the ability to express herself in speaking then, she taught us well from the beginning up to end, until now. So congradulation for her!!!”
and, one of my favorites, i think the student mixed up "how" and "what": "you are walking but too slowly, going up and down. You are removing the bottle from its lid then take it from it for the last time"

Bus-iness a Usual

2008-04-26T10:43:00.000+02:00

So... last time i left maseru, Lindsey and i ended up on this jankey bus from the 1960s/70s, but at least we got seats and didn't have to stand in teh aisles. TO ease or 6-8 hour ride we each took a "valium" (a weak neighbor of valium that's sold over the counter here for the equivalent of 20 cents US each). Anyway the main issue here with the bus ride home is that they don't stop for pee breaks at all, so you're fudged if you need to pee. A few hours into the ride linds and i need to pee like a couple of seabiscuits (or secretariats, if you prefer), it was a pretty unfortunate circumstance. Then, at a point where to road both inclined and turned sharply, the overloaded bus went up on two wheels, smacked back down, and the engine cut out. The bus then proceeded to roll backwards down the mountain and the driver turned the wheel so the bus ran perpendicular to the road and ran back into a ditch/someone's fence/shop. Linds and i were like, FUDGE YEAH! perfect timing! SO everyone had to get out so they could remove teh bus from teh ditch and we were able to run and pee behind a building.

They got the bus out of teh ditch in like 30 mins, but then had to wait 3 hours for a mechanic to come, so we had a nice mountainside picnic of an apple and 2.5 biscuits each (which, incidentally, is not enough food for an entire day). and we napped and read our books. i didn't get back to T squared until dark though, and had to walk 20 mins up the fucking mountain home in the pouring rain with 200lbs of groceries. I thought i would collapse. so sadd. Then when i finally reached my doorstep, my lock was jammed and i couldn't get in. Two bo-ntate (men), 2 bo-abuti (boys) and 45 minutes later they broke in using a nail, a rock, and a butterknife, and completely mangled my lock in the process. They were all super nice to help me out. Then i was home! hoo-rah!

It's been hard readjusting to mountain life. I got pretty used to hot showers and cheese. I'm no longuer under "lockdown" though so ui can, in theory, go to maseru/S. Africa whenever i please. I'll probably take 'pamper me' trips regularly, but i wonder if that'll make things worse because it will continually remind me of what i don't have. WHen i was here (thaba tseka) for 2 1/2 months straight, i got used to it, and though i will always yearn for cheese, it was a dull ignorable ache rather than a stabbing in my lactose-loving heart.

Fast Times at Training Camp High

2008-03-31T18:52:00.000+02:00

so i've been back at "camp africa" (a.k.a. the training site in Maseru) for a week and change now, and it's alright. it's nice to see my far flung friends again, but the schedule is KILLINGME. we have sessions from 8am to 8pm and i've been drinking a lot to deal with this weird stress of seeing buildings and people etc. again, so i'm also hungover a lot. only a couple more days, though.

yesterday we got to hang out poolside at the amby's house again, and it was awesome! there were snacks! i felt like a real person kind of! AND they let me be dj and choose all of the music. so that was nice.

ugh, i've gained 10 pounds though. which would be fine if i gained weight like a normal person, but because i'm me, it goes only to teh fetus and second chin. so i now have a perma-potbelly, and a chubby chin. my pants are having a hard time fitting.

and i got vaccine number 10 or so today, the HPV one, and a flu shot. my arms are hardcore.

so because we're dirty and unwashed and ostrasized so much, a fun activity of PCVs is to get dressed up pretty and or wacky, with pretty make up and lots of glitter, so here are some fun times pictures. you can find more on facebook

photo montage

2008-03-26T22:10:00.000+02:00

sorry no pics from cape town, i don't have my camera cord (curses!)

here's my roundavel

rainbows!

me marking assignments at my desk in the staffroom

form A2, there are 5 rows of 3 desks that wouldn't fit in the picture. that's tsepo in the front, he's awesome.

exam day + inkless xerox machine = free day! = taking out your teachers weave

l to r: reithumetse, malehluoa, pule: my family! we're hanging out in teh kitchen. i just gave pule and reithumetse these valentine socks with light up hearts. they went NUTS

reithumetse in front of the kitchen house

me and 'me mamasebetse, another teacher

pie in africa!

The day i rejoined 21st century society

2008-03-25T13:58:00.000+02:00

Back from easter vacay! In action! FULL EFFECT. We went to Cape Town and it was incredible! Man, holy shit, they have grocery stores there that are huge! And they have a whole entire aisle for cheese! I just stood and gawked for a while, my friend had to prod me along or else I would have been there all day. I think they have that stuff in the states too, huh. Whatever, lesotho grocery stores have two aisles of food, period. I got lost in the grocery store, there were like 20 kinds of pasta. All I bought were some pickles though. I think my logic function shut down.
Anyway, 5 of us rented a car and drove 11 hours on the wrong side of the car/road to cape town. I was one of two drivers, and the only victims were the front left hubcap, and a v. small speeding ticket (equiv. of going 72 in a 65 zone sort of thing, yeah I know, LAME) anyway, I’m proud of myself. We went on a wine tour in Stellenbosch wine country, and I met a cute Australian at the hostel and kissed a boy for the first time in 5 months, so that was fun. Then we went to cape town and danced the night away and I got to see the beach. And I ate at a restaurant almost every day. I ate so much food, I got kinda sick. So rich. AND< id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5181648533283152418" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YW2qUQNImqs/R-jp4zFEIiI/AAAAAAAAAFg/6Gav6oTIr7g/s320/P1110115.JPG" border="0">

previously on....

2008-03-19T16:40:00.000+02:00

February
Hey! LTNS! I happen to live in the the only region completely without internet. Yes, I am at the end of the long, windy unpaved road high up and far away. Life is good, I’m pretty settled in here at the glimmering mountains of thaba tseka. My host family is sort of a rotating cast of characters, people stay for a bit, then disappear. I’m not sure how everyone’s related, Basotho are incredibly vague when it comes to differentiating extended family. They’re all just family, without qualifiers. Anyway, the head of my family is my ‘Me, an incredible, indomitable lady, she just turned 66, she’s technically retired (she started a primary school from scratch and ran it for 20 years) but she’s still on all these committees and charities and things. The only wrinkles she has are crows feet at her eyes from smiling. She has 8 grown children and some number of grandchildren ranging in age from newborn to 28. Of this family, two grandsons (pictures will follow), a girl that lives with them and helps out with cooking/laundry/etc. and also attends high school, and two really old men, whom I have no idea how/if they’re related. The girl that lives with the fam, Malehluoa, is 24 and we hang out a lot.
Thaba-Tseka town, where I live, is the capital or camptown of Thaba-Tseka district. As such it’s a “big town”, which doesn’t mean much by American standards, but most villages consist of 20-40 homes and maybe a tiny shop/bar. Here I get to enjoy such luxuries as canned tuna, peanut butter, and sometimes bananas! I feel pretty cosmopolitan, anyway. Also we have a bank and post office, which is SUPER nice. Especially when I get a package! Like from mom and dad! It’s pretty much the happiest thing evar when I have mail.
Also, I’m getting used to having people ask me for money/candy and I can just shrug it off. Basotho men can really get on my nerves sometimes, though. Here the only glimpses of America/ns is through music videos, and some random reality shows that are played here (e.g. cheaters). So, unsurprisingly, then men here have come to the conclusion that American women are all sluts and will marry and/or have promiscuous sex with anyone who bothers to inquire. And they inquire. Either that or all Americans have a “get in free” pass and will choose a lucky winner to bring back to America with us. I had to explain to one guy last week that no, Americans do not have a boyfriend for everyday of the week, and no, he cannot reserve Wednesdays. You can’t really blame them, I suppose. I mean, a potentially better life is standing there right in front of them and they just need to ask. Who wouldn’t try?
My school is super cool. My coworkers are all really nice, though I’m categorically left out of all conversation in the staff room because they only speak Sesotho. It’s way too fast and complicated for me to follow. I walk 45mins-1hr each way to school, up/down hills and through some pretty treacherous muddy swampy areas, so I always show up to school breathing heavy, with my face all red and my hair sticking out, and mud splattered/smeared all up to my knees. I’m not quite sure what my coworkers think of me, they’re always so clean and composed. And really, I have no idea how I get so much mud on myself. I think if clumps on my shoes and gets flung off my heel onto my calves. And since I like mud I’m always really tempted to squish in it but since I’m a responsible professional grown-up, I exert my endless willpower and instead I mince daintily through it with my skirts held out of the way.
I’m in charge of the scientific enlightenment of two of the form A classes (~8th grade, though they range in age from 13-24) and the mathematic abilities of one of the form B classes. There are 50-60 kids in each class, which is average. The kids here are all so docile and obedient. I think it’s because they get the crap beaten out of them with sticks by all the other teachers whenever they’re out of line, or get their assignments wrong, or make noise, or etc. etc. They’re SO much easier to handle than the hyperactive, spoiled 8 year olds that I’m used to. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the 8 year olds, American kids are just a whole lot more entitled than the kids here. Here they actually do respect/obey their elders.
So anyway, to deal with the much reduced social stimuli/stuff to do, Victoria, Sam, and I have created theme days, and we attempt to speak/text in said theme as much as possible on those days. Saturday= Limericks, Sunday= Haiku, Monday= punday, Tuesday= double entendres Wednesday= misused/incorrect clichés/idioms, and Thursday and Friday always change, sometimes sexual harassment day, arrested development quotation day, famous last words day, etc. It keeps us busy. I really like making limericks. Also we’re making a rival to the countrywide PCV newsletter. I made a comic strip for it featuring rowdy-o the donkey and lerato (love) the honey badger. And I totally freaked out Victoria by killing them off in the first strip. But, really, she needs to have more faith in their resourcefulness and adventurous spirit.
Some Selected Limericks/Haiku from the PCVs of Lesotho:
Me:
There once was a girl named Victoria
She had a brother in praetoria
Though he hardly knew her
He rolled over to her
And now they have a daughter named Gloria

There once was a boy named Klein
Who’d ask each passing damsel, “will you be mine?”
Then a seductive lady, though a bit shifty
Said she’d be his for a buck fifty
So kleiny said, “now it’s my time to shine!”

Victoria:
There once was an aussie name Heath
Who brought us more joy than a wreath
He OD’ed on drugs
While wearing sassy uggs
To him all my tearz I bequeath

Me:
‘morrow I enter
Valley of shadow of death
Students, please behave

Hundreds of flies swarm
Berserker attack swat down
They just rise again

James:
I cry out skyward
My pantry left bare, no more
The fish of tuna

Freshly washed clothes hung
I sigh, as dark clouds approach
This will end poorly

Oh, and I remember I made a list of 10 things to quicken the heart, like my 2nd post or something. Here’s an updated list:

10. eating bread fresh from the dutch oven with lots of butter
9. the feeling right after bathing/hair washing, before dust/sweat envelops me again
8. cheese (or the possibility of cheese)
7. finding green peppers/bananas/mangoes in the store
6. seeing the dung beetles rolling their load across the road
5. hot showers/ clothes dried in a drier (or dreaming of them)
4. day dreaming (my main occupation)
3. being irresponsible and squishing in the mud
2. when I walk to school through the fields, all these grasshoppers jump in and out of my path and I feel kind of like they’re heralding my way, like rose petals, but not
1. GETTING MAIL!

March

Two weeks until I post this! The past few months have been good, mostly. The first month or so at site went SO SLOW. Then I got into the groove of things and the rest of my time here has gone by really fast. Also I took on another class at school, so I teach 3 classes of science instead of 2 so I’m super busy with school. Anyone I wrote to saying I have a lot of free time, that was a dirty lie. I get up at 6:46ish, eat my oatmeal and drink my tea while rockin to the likes of Luna-C, Shy FX/T Power, or Britney Spears, then I head to school. I’m there 8:07ish-4:01ish every day, expanding young horizons, winning the hearts and minds of students and teachers alike, saving starving babies, curing both AIDS and the clap, and generally changing the world. I get home 4:53ish, and being the evening culinary masterpiece (and every other day I bucket bathe, if the pump hasn’t gone dry AGAIN.) by the time I finish dishes it’s 7:02ish. I have a rigorous regimen of excersizing once in a blue moon, and also my ausi Malehluoa comes over for maths help and we sit around and chat after (she doesn’t go to the school I teach at). I’m usually in bed by 8:34ish and asleep by 9-9:31. Teaching is tiring! I mean, I knew that already I suppose, but it hasn’t changed I guess. Also my reputation as maths tutor seems to be spreading (my ausi was failing and now she’s the top of her class and helps out the other kids!) so I get kids from the other high school stopping by my door a lot for help. Also I have abuti (brother/young boy) time where the two current abutis staying with us (ages ~4 and ~8) come over and we sit on the floor and make high art with our colored pencils and crayons. (THANKS molly and jen’s mom!) I’m teaching more classes than the normal PCV load, and I like feeling busy and like I’m needed. It helps keep my from thinking about all of you quite so much. I’m going to now give you all (except the Van Meels, Mom/Dad, Cecilia Hartman, and MOLLY!/Mark) a guilt trip for the lack of letters. This is mostly directed at you, my friends. I know emails are easier/more convenient, but maybe you could print them and mail them to me? I really want to hear from you! Just one little letter….
Ok enough of that. Tomorrow is Moshoeshoe’s day! King Moshoeshoe I is the hero who delivered the Basotho people from the clutches of the Boer Farmers in hmlphrgmphh year. Nowadays that means no school! And there are celecrations with traditional music, and dancing and singing and games. I’m SUPEr excited. Sam (another PCV, and recovering vegetarian) is supposed to help slaughter a bull. I’m not jealous. I am excited for the potential of meat, though. I’m protein-starved here. Well, meat starved at least. Speaking of the culinary wonders of Lesotho, I now eat tomatoes and onions! (cooked, not raw). Beggars can’t eat gift horses everyday, I suppose (Today is Wednesday, incidentally, and also misused idioms day). The only produce regularty available are apples and carrots, so I jump at any variety. My digestive system has fared pretty well, I get random vomit/diarrhea attacks, but not too bad. MAN, PCVs love talking about their bowel movements. I’m trying not to do it too much (OH! MOLLY! The “everybody poops” book was incredible, I laughed so hard, I love you.) Anyway I keep a can of glade spray in my latrine, it’s “fresh linen” scent, though, so now my brain has made the dubious association between clean clothing and going poop. I’m hoping the association doesn’t spread to muscle memory, because then I would have a real problem. I have yet to start a garden. My ‘Me has one she lets me pilfer from, but I want to start a plot with slightly more exotic flora such as broccoli and zucchini. I’ll have to wait until Sept. or so, though, because now is winter veggies planting time! (It’s towards the end of summer here, now.) (It’s like I’m Endless Summer 3, except I don’t have Bruce whatshisface making snarky commentary about my adventures.) (Man, that would be major awesome if I did, though.)
I’m still reading a lot of books, which is fun. I went through this cheesy time travel historical fiction fantasy romance phase, which I’m out of, thankfully. I want to read some good fantasy if anyone (Dan) has any suggestions… now I’m on an old school sci-fi kick: HG Wells, Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card. I’m loving it. I want to try reading all the great/classic authors I never got around to in the states.
Finally, a list of items always welcome in Lesotho: Fishes and candy (my two great loves) (all candy that exists is good, some favorites include: starbuts, nerds, sour patch kids, peachios, skittles, runts, butterfinger, cookies/cream bars, reeses cups, any dark chocolate, tootsie roll pops, etc) cheez its, teriyaki beef jerky, dried fruit (any, mango, and cranberries are faves) cashews, sunflower seeds, pumkin seeds, photos of you, letters/artwork/poetry/political manifestos/ news clippings/cool sciency stuff/trashy celeb mags/ etc. (Adam! I have you news clipping up on my wall) I also now have access to a computer (though it’s without internet, printer, sound, cd burning ability, or dvd drive) I can add music to my ipod! So if you are in possession of some rockin tunes, feel free to send em my way!
- MISS YOU SO MUCH!!

ha-HAH! I continue to surprise with more posts

2008-01-10T15:50:00.001+02:00

some photos!! the first two are from the front door of my roundavel. rocken, huh? in the first one you can see the mission.

the children, they love me. they love the camera more though. they made me take pictures of them for like an hour.

this pic is from today, at the swearing in ceremony. these are our "new volunteer" faces. Madeline is in the middle, and victoria is on the right.

These are the bo-me, our language trainers in traditional dress (they're called seshoeshoes (pronounced seh-shway-shways)).

So i think i might forego my previous career aspirations and just become a zombie. I'm already functioning as little as one, and i feel like i'm just stumbling around in a haze of sleepiness. Maybe some brains would fortify me. A couple friends have taken to napping during the day and then staying up late and keeping me company, or rather, they just feel like reading a book until 2 in the morning and it's nice because they're with me, and i can pass out on the couch easier.

oh! though. i'm a real live volunteer now! we had swearing in today, and leave in the morning to start our lives as pcvs. i will miss people, but i'm glad to be done with training finally, no more in-betweenness. i can start teaching and living in one place and be awesome. and then maybe i'll sleep. today i met nancy, the ambassador's wife, and it was cool. The ambassador was wearing a super-awesome straw fedora type hat today, and it was baller. and i got to wear a pretty dress that i complemented with band-aids all on my knees cuz i scraped them up. and then i ate a lot of food, and everyone made fun of my food baby because i looked 3 months pregnant. the pattern on my dress actually did a pretty good job of concealing it. and then i bought gummy worms. the end.

i uploaded a bunch of photos to facebook, i'm not sure how to share them on here, but if you have facebook, check em out

new address!

2008-01-09T09:40:00.000+02:00

My new address will be:

P.O. BOx 120
Thaba-Tseka 550
Lesotho, Southern Africa

you can still send stuff to the old one though

also, has anyone received my mailings yet? let me know

also for the people who might phone me, i think there's a 9 or 10 hour difference, but i'm not sure. you should look it up (p.s. remember to alter for the fact that i'm not on daylight savings time)

News, olds, mes, and yous

2008-01-08T13:54:00.000+02:00

Hey, this will be the last post for god knows how long, I leave on thurs or Friday to my site in thaba tseka, where it’s costs my left breast to use the internet for half an hour. I will still write snail mail, so if I don’t already have your address, email it to me and I’ll draw you semi-retarded cartoon depictions of my life.

I successfully spent my first few nights alone in a roundavel, we had a 4 day site visit. My family there is amazing, my new ‘me is totally cool and badass, and I really like all my ausis and abutis, too. My roundavel is beautiful and I have a big double bed, and electricity!! And my school is brand new, and none of the windows are broken, and it has nice desks, and I’m excited. Going there made me feel a lot better about staying here. Although, I didn’t really sleep at all there, I was so scared. I kept telling myself there are burglar bars on the door and window, and it’s ok, and nobody’s out there. There were haenous(sp?) storms every night, incredible thunder and pounding rain, and I just kept thinking that no one would hear me scream this time. But it’s ok, I’m fighting to become a rational human being again and not need to have a flashlight on next to me all night. My crank radio has a flashlight, which is nice so I don’t have to worry about batteries. Eventually I will be able to sleep I hope.

I feel like my brain is full of cotton balls, my ability to do anything is lessening with each successive night of no sleep. I think maybe I’ll reach some sort of breaking point, and hit bottom, then start to come back and sleep more and more. Who knows, though. I just keep having nightmares of hands coming out to pin me down and strangle me, or of scary men popping out of random places to beat me. My heart is always going a million miles an hour in my sleep, or at least it always is when I wake up.

I think about how it would be easy and wonderful to go back to Portland, but back in Portland it’s all the same stuff, it’s easy and convenient and rote. And I really don’t want that. Well that’s a lie. I TOTALLY want that eventually. Like in two years or so. But now I don’t want to miss out on the rest of the world. Sure Lesotho is uncomfortable and stinky and obnoxious and foreign and etc. but there are so many new things every day, so much to see. And really that’s what I want. I’ll deal with flies all over and bedbugs and 25 people in a tiny taxi that smells like “a giant man made of papa” to quote Victoria. But it will be good I think. Hopefully when I settle down at my new amazing home in my awesome town high high on the top of all the mountains (like 7400 ft. up), it will be better. (p.s. I have a view to school all views from my front step. You’re all jealous.) and soon school will start and I hope hope I will be a good teacher that cares, and will help these kids/adults who want a life that’s better than what they have.

I love you all so so much for emailing me. It means more than I could ever say in responses. And most of the time I know I haven’t been responding, but don’t stop writing because of it. I like all the little updates about your lives, so I can live vicarously through you a bit.

Things I know now, but did not before:
1. walking around a mountain village is hard and makes me feel like an old man with a broken hip and small lungs
2. in England, “fannie” means vagina, not butt
3. I wonder how many bad british porns are named after the fannie farmer cook book
4. my “rash” is not a barrier to men wanting to use me as a passport back to America.
5. The ambassador is my bro. And swimming in his pool makes me a happy happy lady
6. I continue to be unable to go a month (or a week even) without hurting myself in a stupid way. I gashed the shoot out of my thumb new years eve, it looks ucky
7. boxed wine from south Africa is really tasty.
8. it’s not very appropriate to steamroller people while wearing a shortish dress, because then there will be pictures of your underwear on the refrigerator. (for a definition of “steamroller” see the movie Strange Brew (one of the best movies ever made))
9. if you pass all of your classes but get a 49% in English, you fail that grade and have to repeat it. (Fucking lame!) (sorry but that injustice and stupidity deserves cursing)
10. Cecilia Hartman, you’re a wonderful lady. I’ve been smearing the glitter from your Christmas card on my cheeks each morning, and it makes me happy.
11. Jen’s grandma, I forgot your name, but you also rock, thanks for the Christmas card.
12. Grandma Betty, you also rock. Thank you too.
13. Glitter is like a tattoo of shining wonder.
14. I was asked to draw the design for the program for swearing in and for t-shirts for our group, I’m the artist type of the group apparently. It turned out really good, and everyone likes it.
15. This list is way off topic.
16. i have a new address, but forgot it. maybe i'll try to post it tomorrow. you can still send me stuff at teh old address and it will realize its destiny of belonging to me and will find me anywhere.
17. life is much less fulfilling without temporary tattoos and starburst.
18. The basotho don't understand high fives really, so when i get excited about something i do this sideways-raise-the-roof sort of motion of shoving my palm in their face waiting for high fives that don't come. i decided to tell them that this is what americans do when excited, and that they too should shove their palms into peoples' faces when excited.
19. My new abuti (like 9 yrs old) is a liar. he said when he saw monkeys at the zoo, his dad threw his cigarette in the cage and the monkey smoked it. maybe the monkeys here are just smarter.
20. my new friend (24 years old), who lives with my family and does the cooking laundrey etc. has AIDS, and so does the old lady next door, and my nephew-ish abuti who's like 11 years old. it's really sad, and is a good reality check for what's happening to me.
21. the cowboy version of raggedy andy lives near me. he's missing his two front teeth, has this incredibly awesome handmade patchwork cowboy outfit, dreds, a painted cowboy hat, and a mesh tank top. he's my new hero, even though i'm a little too freaked out by him to talk to him. instead i admire from afar.
22. my family has a puppy that's teething, and hurts like a mother fudging bootie when she uses my extremities as chew toys.
23. my new favorite book is titled: Pronoia: the antidote to paranoia: how the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings. it's this crazy guy from marin county who's on lots of drugs, but has a very definite vision of a new world and his religion is the beauty and truth laboratory. he's totally nuts, but very emphatic (and unintentionally hilarious) about his beliefs. Rob Brezny. look it up.

fins from the muff, and maybe bagels with cream cheese (toasted) love!

ha-ha-ha-ha stayyinnnn aliiiveeeee wooooo hooooo

2007-12-31T10:47:00.000+02:00

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)

Scorpions, Christmas, and Rapists... Oh My!

2007-12-28T13:16:00.000+02:00

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'm the most grown up mature well worded lady you've ever done met

2007-12-22T13:41:00.000+02:00

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!

I am attempting to use less offensive potty mouthage in this post

2007-12-14T14:40:00.000+02:00

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 apologize for bad language featured in this blog and other emails.

2007-12-01T10:02:00.000+02:00

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!!

darn! i wish i was your wooman!

2007-11-24T10:48:00.000+02:00

We leave today for homestay! So this may be my last post for a month or so, I’m not sure about internet access in the villages. I’m so excited to go out and live in the actual Lesotho instead of this compoundy thing we’ve been confined to. I’m also really nervous, though. I hope my sesotho skillz will be enough.

So, true to form, I managed to totally and completely embarrass myself in front of the ambassador at thanksgiving. I may have made some off-color (vulgar?) remarks without realizing he was directly on the other side of this semi-tall lamp. Hopefully he will just forget that anything was ever said… other than that, thanksgiving rocked. There were 6 turkeys and tons of other food and before dinner we played red rover and freeze tag (because we’re all mentally 6 years old) then ate bunches and I forgot my bathing suit because I suck balls so I didn’t get to swim. Everyone there was really nice, and there were a handful of the cutest kids I’ve ever seen. Then after we got back to the compound we had a dance party, and played invisible double dutch, and acted like retards.

Oh! And I forgot to mention, during my volunteer visit, when we went to see the high school, the kids were asking my volunteer about my “rash” (freckles). And then they kept asking me to put my jacket on because they didn’t want to look at my rash. Motherfuckers. I hope that all my students don’t freak out about it. One of the girls had some freckles on her nose though, and I was like, no these spots are from the sun, they’re just like yours! And she covers her face real fast and is like gasp-NO!.

SO, Christmas is kind of coming up, and it takes 4-6 weeks to get a box here, and if I was someone who loved me, I would use what is called the “international flat rate box” it can be as heavy as you want, I think the regular size is 37$ or something. That’s mostly directed towards my momma for future package dealings.

Anyway, for Christmas I want my mommy to put $65 in my checking so I can buy a cell phone. Other than that I only want little things that may or may not fit in a flat envelope such as: an SD memory card for my camera (apparently mine wandered away, I have no memory card, I must’ve taken in out a long time ago for unknown reasons), fishies, starburst, peach-green tea, powdered ranch sauce mix, nerds, something else exciting… MOSTLY though I really really really really really want pictures, drawings, poems, short stories, letters, comics, notes of love and missage, from you guys. If you send me a Christmas letter I will love you forevers. Once I get my roundavel (round- hovel!) I will need to decorate it. I

In sesotho, “rata” means to like, “ruta” means to teach, and “rota” means to pee. I am having trouble with saying I pee whiskey! Or I’m going to pee science! Or I teach candy! And so on.
p.s. Diana I love your stories. I almost peed my pants in the middle of the internet café. Whoah, the computer automatically put an accent on the e in café. Nice.

Stuff things in a turkey's butt.

2007-11-22T16:37:00.000+02:00

Happy Thanksgiving!

I miss all of you soooo much. I hope you all don’t miss me tooo much and cry into your turkey. I finally went to the dentist this morning. I have been having a lot of trouble eating and drinking because my tooth was so painful. Apparently the crown I got right before leaving Cali was too big in one spot, and was putting a lot of pressure on the tooth above it, making it hurty. So the dentist drilled off a bunch of my crown, and my tooth feels all rough and rounded off and weird. He said it will take a few days for my ouchy tooth to relax and stop hurting, and gave me a prescription for “brufen” which apparently is ibuprofen. Woopie. Hopefully I will be able to eat lots of food for thanksgiving though! I’ll load up on brufen before I go.

So I got to go visit a current PCV at her site for a few days, and it was awesome! She is in Quthing in the South of the country up in the mountains. They were these rolling green mountains with farm plots cut out of the sides of the mountains. Terracing I think it’s called. I got to experience Lesotho transport. This consists of busses (like school busses) which I did not take, Sprinters (22 passenger mini buses), Combis (15 passenger vans) and 4 plus 1s (sedan taxis). So on one of my sprinters, there were 36 people we counted. This is normal apparently, I had a fat lady from across the aisle leaning on me, I don’t know where that half of her ass was, and another guy’s butt in my face, and he kept dancing to the music (which I’ll tell you about later) and shaking his butt in my face. And in Lesotho they think that open windows on cars are the way you get tb and common colds, so they keep them closed. Ick. Then we had a combi (15 passenger) with 21 people on it at one point. It was barely moving, I thought the engine would die. We got around ok though.

Anyway the site, so amazing! And her little roundavel was very cute. She had no electricity or running water, but that wasn’t a big deal at all. We cooked dinner on the propane stove, read books, talked, and she had a nice double bed so I didn’t have to sleep on the floor, which was very clean anyway so I wouldn’t have minded. I think I want to be placed in the mountains. We went on a hike, straight up a mountain and it was beautiful, but the air up here is so thin, my lungs felt like they were dying.

Oh! Revelation! Very few people in Lesotho die each year as a result of AIDS. However, thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people die from things like a broken heart, a headache, the common cold, a broken finger, etc. it’s way taboo to die of aids.

So it’s been asked, where I am living. It’s this compound walled with a few rooms with 3 sets of bunk beds each, a living room with a couple couches, and another building with our classroom and eating hall area. There are 23 trainees and ‘me mamothe, who is our main lady that are living there, and others who come each day. It feels like what camp would be like, we are all in bunks and have no personal space AT ALL and spend every second of every day together. Luckily I love all my co-trainees and don’t mind too much being with them. In the evenings we play campy games like charades and question games and other stuff. It’s fun, but is a bit much sometimes, so I retreat into my noise-cancelling headphones and my book.
Oh, and to everyone writing me emails, I know I haven’t been responding, I only have time to read and then blog, and so let everyone know what’s up.. one day I’ll put aside more time to send you personal notes because I’ve been thinking about all of you a lot, and wondering how life’s going without me and stuff. So, no I am not ignoring you.

And my co-trainees I guess are reading this blog, too. Why? I don’t know. Maybe if they forget what they did today? To see if I gossip about them? Or I am just so magnetic, and my story writing style is irresistible they must live through me.
The school system here is pretty much atrocious. All of the principals are corrupt and steal money, the teachers are beat down and don’t come to class a lot, and the students are left with exams written for british students, subject matter that doesn’t pertain to them, an outdated colonial school system set up that is centered around English, rather than sesotho. One school i went to had 15 computers donated, but the school doesn't have electricity, so is unable to use the computers. and they won't give them up because people here are very possesive of free stuff/supplies etc. the principal had just embezzled 35,000 rand, the classrooms all had broken windows, students were pulled out of the middle of their end of year exams to have their heads shaved and so didn't have enough time to finish, ugh. (all students here must keep their heads shaved. if not they get beaten or expelled) oh yeah, and students are all afraid to ask or answer questions because they get beaten if they're wrong, or ask sometihng the teacher doesnt know. they get beaten for everything pretty much, and are only taught to memorize and regurgitate. lame.

i'm going to the ambassadors' for t-day, i'm really really really happy to hopefully get an americanish meal. with turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy. and cheese.

oh crap out of time

eat stuff for me!

Best Blog in the HIstory of EVAR

2007-11-17T14:12:00.000+02:00

Guess who’s faaamous?!!!....... (me). We went to lunch at the US ambassador’s house, and his daughter informed me that her mother follows my blog!! So, officially I would like to make a shout-out to ambassador’s wife! Hey! I’m going to use your pool on thanksgiving! I’m really excited to go swimming.

Tomorrow I get to venture out into the great land of Lesotho. We are going in pairs to visit different current peace corps volunteers. I’ll be excited to practice my sesotho! And also to see what it’s like actually being out and about in this country!

The other day we visited some schools, (one secondary, one primary and one preschool) and we got to talk to all the kids. The high schoolers all wanted my jewelry, and the primary were awesome to talk to. I got to practice my halting sesotho with them, and have them giggle at me whether or not what I was saying was making sense. Then, coolest thing evar, all the preschoolers lined up and sang for us and it was total muffin. The people here sing all the time, they just bust out into these incredible harmonies and stuff all the time. We get to sing both ours and lesotho’s national anthem every morning before class (just like elementary school!), and then for breaks we sing while dancing in circles around the classroom. I like the dancing. (surprise!) and it’s great learning all these songs, even though as you guys know, I have the most off key voice. I try to sing quietly.

I have all sorts of internet while I’m in the capital, and all of the camptowns (capitals of the districts, comparable to states in the US) have internet except 3. so I have a 70% chance of having regular access to internet at my site. Eventually I will get a phone, so I can text friends in-country, and also receive calls from you guys. The phones are 450 rand (divide that by 6.5 to get US dollars) and I have like 100 rand. So I can’t get a phone for a while.

In the evenings I study sesotho (a little) and hang out with co-trainees. We play games and stuff. It’s great being with them, because before I left nobody really understood why I wanted to do this. It went from outright telling me I’m crazy, to being supporting but still not really understanding why. But now all these amazing people, they went through the same thing, and they (obviously) wanted to do this too. So it’s a nice support group sort of thing. Also, apparently one of my favorite trainees (victoriaaa) sent this link to her mom. So hello victoria’s mom!

it's funny, i'm getting used to being stared at, but now whenever i see another white person, i totally stare. they're funny looking! they totally stand out! I'm such a dork. i should just stare at myself or something.

today our main trainer lady was gone because she was going to a funeral. also my language trainer, and one other have their head shaved, and she told me it's because her mom died last month. The women shave their heads to mourn family member deaths. One in four people here has aids. when i'm walking through town, i just count off, and think about how every fourth person will die relatively soon. Much sooner than they should, and much sooner than they would if they had access to healthcare and knowledge about how to manage the disease. It's really depressing.

anyway, on that note... i'm running out of internet time./

ok i can cheer you guys up. if you're wondering where i get my humor, my mother emailed me saying "becky eats poop"

love you all, thank you so much for the emails, keep em coming!

i miss you and want to know how you are

2007-11-15T16:21:00.000+02:00

send me emails, you assholes! let me know how you're doing and stuff! if you have my blog address, i want to know how you are. this isn't a one way thing, you know.

also real letters would be much appreciated. i want mail to open! send me stuff! i finally bought some stamps, but i don't have envelopes, so some of you may get some mail in a month or so.

i have nothing new, except to say that i think it's awesome how much beyonce is on the radio here. and also i like how a few of my co-trainees join me in song whenever i burst out with a cheesy pop number.

sala hantle bo-ntate le bo-me! (stay well, guys and girls) (literally fathers and mothers)

ausi rebecca

mountains, and poop

2007-11-13T17:47:00.000+02:00

Hey!

Still alive! And causing trouble, apparently. Luckily they like people who laugh a lot and are gregarious here. I’m not used to being in class all day, so I get all antsy and act like a hyper distracted second grader sometimes. The bo’me all know my name though, and correct my sesotho, which is good. I’m in the advanced speed language group, and we go really fast. It’s crazy, there is so much to learn, and no time to study because they keep us busy from 7am to 8 or 9 pm. Anyway I have 30 minutes to rush-blag. So here is an update:

Anyway, the language here, I told some people before that it’s not a click language, but it is! There are a few clicks. One, the “tl” is a lateral lisp side of the cheeks exhale sort of click, and that’s in a lot of words. Also the ‘q” is a tongue on the roof of the mouth behind your front teeth sort of click. This sound is associated with water, because it’s the noise a stone makes when dropped in water. How cool is that!?! Quthing, one of the districts has a lot of rivers and is “click-uting” I want to live there so I can click.

Also, the people here dress to the nines, everyday. They are so swanky!! I am wearing all my nice semi-business casual wear, and I am way underdressed everyday. People all have these great outfits, and perfect hair and everything. It’s very important to look clean and professional here, even in the very rural areas. Apparently we get to learn how to iron our clothes without electricity… woo.

It was great, the other day during cultural training or whatever, ‘me (which means mother, which here is used for any woman that is married or over 25) ‘me mamothe, our director was talking, then she grabbed her boobs and announced “these mountains… they are nothing!!” and then was shaking them around and saying, we can keep our money in here, take them out, bring them around, basotho men do not care! Well about 10% care so keep a shirt on, but mostly they are nothing!! Then she grabs her thighs and is like “but these.. oooohhhhh!!!! Oooo yeah! They are sexy! That’s why you do not wear tight pants or short skirt, you are just showing men your goods, inviting them to have sex with you”. Then she went on for a while about it. It was great. also she was telling men not to wear short shorts because they don't want their animals to fall out.

Then today Dr. J (our medical main man) was talking about knowing if you have dysentery vs. regualar diarrhea, and he said, “you all know the smell of your own poop. So if you have diarrhea, smell your poop. If it is different, you can say ‘this shit is baad!’” so, in the future I may inform you all that my shit has gone bad, and then you can all feel sorry for me and hope that it’s giardia and not amoebic dysentery.

I am also apparently wowing my co-trainees with my random science knowledge. Thank you, OMSI!

time up!!

byeeeeeeee

first africa blog dedicated to victoria!

2007-11-10T16:24:00.000+02:00

i'm alive!

i'm in maseru, the capital. we got in yesterday, it's sooo beautiful here! and today i learned a little sesotho. it's all hot and sunny and i turned into a lobster because i'm dumb and don't use sunscreen... my co-peace corps people are all really awesome. the bo-me (women) that are our language teachers are totally great, too. it's disconcerting being a spectacle every time i leave the training center, though. it's like i got two heads or i pooed myself or something, everybody stares and yells random things i don't understand. i'm in training until january 10, and i won't know where my site will be until week 6 or 7 of training. I think i'll do really well here, though. it'll require a lot of patience and flexibility and whatnot, but i usually get excited by most anything, and there is so much here to be excited about... I love all the new experiences and sights and smells and such. the food isn't too new, but it's alright. kinda bland. i'm making friends with victoria, the cooking lady. today we talked about TLC (the r&b group, not the treatment). the internet is SO SLOW we have all sorts of plans. sunday is dance party, thursday is talent show day, oh crap gotta gooooo

love you all forever!

p.s. VICTORI-UH.

So Long! Farewell!

2007-11-04T07:19:00.000+02:00

[Children:]
There's a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall
And the bells in the steeple too
And up in the nursery an absurd little bird
Is popping out to say "cuckoo"
[Marta, Gretl, Brigitta:]
Cuckoo, cuckoo

[Children: Marta, Gretl, Brigitta: ]
Regretfully they tell us Cuckoo, cuckoo
But firmly they compel us Cuckoo, cuckoo
To say goodbye . . .
[Marta, Gretl, Brigitta:]
Cuckoo!
[Children:]
. . . to you

[Children:]
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night
[Marta:]
I hate to go and leave this pretty sight

[Children:]
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu
[Friedrich:]
Adieu, adieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu

[Children:]
So long, farewell, au revoir, auf wiedersehen
[Liesl:]
I'd like to stay and taste my first champagne

[Children:]
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye
[Kurt:]
I leave and heave a sigh and say goodbye -- Goodbye!
[Brigitta:]
I'm glad to go, I cannot tell a lie
[Louisa:]
I flit, I float, I fleetly flee, I fly
[Gretl:]
The sun has gone to bed and so must I

[Children:]
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, goodbye
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

[Guests:]
Goodbye!

10 things that quicken the heart

2007-10-27T06:02:00.000+02:00

i found this blog: http://snoreandguzzle.com/?page_id=11 This person is compiling a list of 1,000 things that quicken the heart, made up of small lists sent in. What are these lists? you ask. here's what the site sez:
"A common japanese tradition...As a form of meditation, or therapy, it is common to prepare a “list of 10 things that quicken the heart.” The list is supposed to describe the small things in life that make one happy, and which makes existence slightly more tolerable." i loved reading it, and have made my own list (yes, of 11 things. so what)...

11. glitter

10. going out to breakfast with friends, slightly hungover, and ordering eggs benedict and rc cola

9. walking through mud barefoot and having it squish between my toes, (alternately: making flubber or oobleck at work and letting it squish between my fingers)

8. falling over in the shallows at the beach

7. a nice glass of whiskey, with ice

6. a nice pint of microbrew, on tap

5. joking around with 2nd graders

4. dancing to cheesy pop music

3. anime

2. kisses on the cheek

1.long hugs, where i can nuzzle the base of their neck

at least that's what i have now. i keep thinking of other things, oh well. if anyone does read this blog, you should make a list, and send it to me so i can anally compare it to mine

A Hairy Adventure (Hah!)

2007-10-18T07:17:00.000+02:00

no, i am not yet in Lesotho. I have completed the first and most difficult step though, which is leaving portland. now i am just mostly bored and waiting to leave already!

i'm posting because i have a funny story and nobody to tell it to... today i got a crappy haircut. (whoo! hah! man, that is funny. but wait, there's more!) it definitely is not bad compared to past do's i've endured. I somehow attract the crazy incompetent hairstylists. once in high school my hair was cut about 3 inches shorter than i asked because the lady "didn't do short hair" and kept messing up and trying to fix it. how a hair cutter can manage to charge $50 and not know how to cut short hair, i'm not sure. Another time i had this nutcase whose version of "chunky layers a la meg ryan" meant "leave 9 small random chunks of hair 1 inch longer than the rest while cackling and proclaiming 'meg ryan eat your heart out!' ".

anyway, today i may have accidentally encouraged it. So i got 3 fillings in 3 separate quadrants of my mouth, which meant 3 novacaine shots. my face was a total retard. Rather than slur, i decided to over-enunciate, and i ended up sounding just like jimmy from south park (the guy with crutch-braces, timmy's nemesis). I got a total kick out of this, and laughed muchly at myself, drooling with each laugh as i drove away.

So anyway, i went straight to "Athleticuts" after the dentist. I don't know how i could have expected a decent haircut from a place with astroturf, stadium style seating, and a one-hole put put golf course in the waiting area, and jr. high-style lockers between each cutting station, with the stylists wearing jerseys. Man, it was cheese and half; i couldn't resist! maybe i have self-destructive urges sometimes... As i explained to the lady what i wanted, i realized i was still speaking retard. both the stylist and the receptionist were so understanding and overly helpful and pitying that i didn't have the heart to tell them i wasn't actually verbally (and therefore mentally?) challenged. And this hairstylist admits right off how nervous she was because i wanted a "real" haircut, not just a trim. since i have sort of learned from my past, i sort of walked her through my hairdo, in a silly voice. (and yes, i may have emphasized my speech a little more than necessary, but i was having fun).

About halfway through the cut, my speech was clearing up, and then i got another round of funny looks, these more suspicious than "awww poor you"... so i admitted the fillings in my recent past. i was sad to end the game. this lady was pretty funny, though. when she got really nervous about a particular cutting action, she would switch into a horrible british accent, and call me things like "me love". it was so hard not to giggle and mess her up even more! and after i admitted my full mental capacity, the receptionist kept trying to convince me to shave my head and that no, really, it will look good! hah hah, sneaky receptionist, i will not fall for your revenge schemes, for i am too smart and in complete control of my faculties (if not the left side of my tongue and lower lip) for you to fool me!

anyway, here i am with a marginal do. maybe i'll try cleaning it up once the mirror returns to my bathroom (it has gone on a sudden adventure to places unknown and now i have this stained, gluey wall to look at).

the end. (!)

Freak OUT

2007-09-23T19:47:00.000+02:00

So, I'm freakin out.
I leave portland in a week and a half. This is my home! I can't leave! stupid. I'm going through this thing where I keep getting all frustrated when friends are too tired, or forget, or busy to hang out... i know i can't expect them to drop everything and hang out with me, but I know after drive away Oct. 3, I'll never see 90% of them again, which is really sad, because the friends i have up here have become my family. They're the people i live with, and have thanksgiving and new year's with... but the difference is friends are a lot easier to lose track of than family. This whole life i have will be gone when i come back, if i do come back to portland. It's really scary, and depressing.
and people keep calling me noble and brave shit like that, which makes me uncomfortable, because i'm not. If i really wanted to help people or save the world or whatever, i wouldn't do it by joining the peace corps. I mean, i do want to help people, but i have no illusions about being successful. I don't know how i'll even be able to teach, because not only will i have to teach in another language, i have to teach science in another language. Science already has so much specific vocab as to shut a lot of people out, and make it scary to learn, and i know that vocab. I won't even know what i'm talking about over there. and as for the brave thing.... I don't feel brave, i feel more like crazy and i don't know. something else. stupid?

Blagga Whut?!

2007-09-13T09:05:00.000+02:00

In honor of the awesomeness of xkcd.com, i am henceforth calling this my blag.

T- 7 weeks and counting until i travel to somewhere for a couple days, and then to lesotho, africa... yeah, i had to wikipedia it, too. One site called it "the switzerland of africa", which i find awesomely silly. I'm going to live in a place where it snows! and yes, i of all people manage to do this by going to africa. that will be crazy though... snow. and i will get my very own hovel! i really want to get a chicken. i will be afraid of it, because birds freak me out, but i really like chickens, in a stand back no-touchy sort of way. so this chicken will help me get over my fear of birds plucking out my eyeballs and it will also give me fresh eggs! maybe i will name it "destiny" or "mutual understanding" or something.

fun fact #1: lesotho has both one of the highest aids rates, and one of the highest literacy rates out of any country in africa. although it is roughly the size of vermont, so maybe that is influencing these statistics...

fun fact#2: lesotho is like a little island in the middle of south africa, it's completely surrounded. it's like they seceded from the union and shit. in fact, they did.

fun fact #3: lesotho has the "highest low point" out of any country in the world. the lowest point is like 4500ft above sea level. There don't seem to be many trees there, judging from pictures, which is weird.