My
first night in Thaba-Tseka, I was able to see/meet/hang out with 4 volunteers
all at once. Two of them are “townies” –
Evan and Travis. One, Brandy, is in town
temporarily due to an inability to return to her site about an hour outside of
town (more on that later – it’s a very “interesting” reason), and one more,
Katie, who lives about 10 mins. outside of town.
When
I’d told this crew I was coming for a visit, they were very excited as the T-T
folks apparently don’t get so many visits since they are pretty isolated/in the
middle of the country and on the way to nowhere. They asked me to pick up some things to bring
with me from the capital (e.g., avocados, pork shoulder) that is hard for them
to get so that they could cook for me (I DID help sift flour for
tortillas!). We ended up spending well
over two hours to make carnitas tacos (mostly coz the pork had to slow cook, of
course!). But while waiting I got to
chat with them, hear some stories, etc.
Much
talk was about Brandy’s current “in limbo” status. While the rest of the volunteers got to go
back to their homes, host families, sites, etc. after consolidation, Brandy is
staying temporarily slash indefinitely in the Thaba-Tseka camp town because HER host
family is…wait for it….relatives/family of the rogue general Kamoli, who has
yet to be captured, killed, exiled, or turn himself in. I teased her that she had a great National
Enquirer story in the making: blond, white American girl in love nest with
General Coup! J
I can’t remember now if she said she’s actually met him or not, but I
think she said she has and that he is actually very normal, not scary at all,
etc., and that his family is really cool.
So then I teased her about falling prey to a variation of “Stockholm
Syndrome.” To her credit, she was able
to take all the ribbing and was in pretty high spirits, all things
considered—partly coz she was getting to hang with some fellow volunteers in
T-T, and of course partly due to getting to meet/hang out with the cool new PC Director of Management and Operations (C’est moi!). Still, at the end of the day, she is
understandably frustrated with being in limbo and is hoping for a resolution
that will allow her to get back to being a real Peace Corps Volunteer and doing
some work.
As
I mentioned briefly on Facebook, it was awesome fun hanging out with this
group, cooking and eating, swapping stories, yapping about Peace Corps,
etc. Totally took me back to my own
volunteer days. Sigh. At one point, while the pork was marinating,
Evan and Travis took me to a nearby local bar to check out/experience some
Lesotho nightlife. It was a hoot. First of all, Evan looks a bit like Bradley
Cooper, and Travis acts a bit like a young Tom Cruise, circa “Cocktail.” And, as the two white boys in town, they are
semi-celebrities and were treated as such at the bar. The bar that was ALL men. Apparently, it’s just not “seemly” for a
woman to go to a bar in Lesotho unless she is an admittedly/known
alcoholic. They can WORK at one – and in
fact the bartender/pool table mistress/arbiter was a woman – but they just
don’t hang out at the bar. Speaking of
the pool table, for some reason the balls here are smaller (yes, there is some
irony there about small African balls).
Also, they don’t have the full regular set, although they DO have the
right number, so there were, for example, 3 blue solids, and no 8 ball so they
used the yellow 1 ball as the 8. Evan
and Travis (i.e., Bradley & Tom) tagged team against a local and won the
first game and were destroyed the second, which was a good one to leave on, as
there seemed to be mixed feelings about the “status” of playing against, let
alone beating or losing to, the Americans.
Travis is also a minor local celebrity due to the fact that he plays on
the local soccer team, which is supposedly pretty good AND a “a feeder team” to
some pretty important major league soccer team.
I would know/remember more about this if I cared about soccer, but I did
pick up enough to know it is, indeed, a “pretty big deal” all things considered.
The
next day, I headed SE to visit two rural volunteers, about 30 minutes apart. The
road from the town of Thaba-Tseka SE to the sites of a couple of VERY rural
volunteers was—to put it charitably—rough.
Add to the fact I was with our “fast driver” and that said sketchy road
often skirted/barely clung to the sides of mountains, and let’s just say it was
an experience. On the plus side, the
scenery was often breathtaking. I’ve
seen many mountain ranges – including some that stretch significantly higher
than these in Lesotho – but there’s something striking about these. Partly it’s the way they “overlap,” partly
it’s the way they “interact” with the sun & sky. I’m not sure what’s different about it, and
partly it was due, no doubt, to the occasional scattered clouds and the way the
shadows played on the mountains, but it was often very, very striking. It’s
definitely a beautiful country – or at least swaths of it are, so far. J
Kara
is perhaps our most isolated volunteer, and also the youngest. But she is also very mature, very
self-aware. I ended up talking to her
for over 3 hours and was very impressed.
I was actually very impressed with all of them, They’ve all had issues, needless to say,
working in Africa, but they’re all holding up well, making the best of their
challenges, and having some awesome experiences. I would love to be a “serial volunteer” – do a
country for a couple years, then come back home to catch up with folks for
awhile before heading back out, etc.
Sigh.
On
Friday I saw a couple more volunteers that had absolutely incredible “roads” to
get to their villages/houses. Incredible
as in I wouldn’t even consider them roads.
In fact, one volunteer offered up as we were bumping along to take her
home that she usually has the taxi drop her off up the hill because she didn’t
really consider the narrow, rutted, boulder-strewn path to her home a “road.” I have to agree.
Even
the well-paved roads between towns we had to share with random herd boys and
their livestock – mostly sheep, but the occasional cows, many donkeys, and the
occasional ox team and/or horses. At one
point, they were upgrading the road and building a pretty significant bridge to
replace the previous narrow, very low to the river, sketchy bridge. The crew working on this was partly Chinese,
with a couple of Chinese construction trucks/vehicles, so the investment in
Africa continues unabated by those sneaky Chinese! J And of course we were confronted with typical
Chinese “cleverness”/cluelessness/assholery when we were coming back and got
stuck behind a Chinese dump truck (ha, I accidentally first typed DUMB truck –
talk about your Freudian slip!), sitting in the right of way so that we could
not go around, waiting on another, nearby dump truck that was being
filled. Note that the dump truck
sitting/blocking us knew we were behind, trying to get around, AND he very
easily could have moved over to the shoulder behind or in front of the other
dump truck, but he just sat there, an asshole, until the other truck was filled
and took off, and then took his sweet time moving to take his place. Needless to say, despite all their “investment”
the Chinese are NOT making friends here!
