The Windy City

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.