10/7/14

My visit to glamorous Thaba-Tseka!

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!

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