Finally a Weekend Away

A weekend away was very much needed. Kimberley is not a bad place, but it certainly is not the most exciting place I have ever been. Friday was Heritage Day in South Africa so Albert and I rented a car and stole away to Lesotho for the weekend. There are two GRS interns and two GRS fellows working in Maseru for the year, which as it happens is only about 3 hours from Kimberley. The perfect weekend getaway. The interns and the fellows actually work for Kick 4 Life, an affiliate organization based in the U.K. so they do some work that is similar to what we do and some that is very different. It seemed to me that they get to have a much more hands on approach in their jobs, as they are developing specific curriculums for Lesotho and running additional projects to the basic interventions and VCTs. The organization is also a little newer, so I think there is more work to be done. Be it a good thing more than a bad thing, Kimberley is reaching a point where it might be able to function without intern support very soon. It was a cool experience to see how their office functions and the work that they do for some comparison purposes. I really think that it would be beneficial for interns to move around a little and get an opportunity to see different sites, their systems, and see how the organization works in all the different locations. By the way, I was super jealous of their office as well, it was spacious, energetic, though probably distracting at times, and seemed like the place to be.

Lesotho (pronounced Le-soo-too) is a small African country that is entirely surrounded by South Africa. It is actually a country within a country. After a little bit of research I have found that Lesotho has had a very interesting history that moved from leader to leader, government to government until they finally gained independence from Britain 1966. It then continued to change hands quite often. The more I read about these countries the more I am just utterly confused by their histories and it makes me wonder if their own people can even keep track of it. I can’t even keep track of U.S. history and that is fairly straightforward by comparison; there weren’t coups or times where one king ruled, then another and back again. I just don’t get it. You can tell immediately when you cross the border into Lesotho that you are entering a different country and one that definitely fits into the developing countries category, if not the lesser developing countries.

Thanks to Semester at Sea I have become very good at checking CIA World Factbook for comparison purposes and I found some interesting information on Lesotho. As always I did the research following the visit. This allows for me to go into places open-minded and slightly uninformed, therefore skipping the judgments phase and I like to do the research after to see what surprises me. As I said before Lesotho is not quite as privileged as a lot of countries and at times felt like a whole other world. It absolutely blew me out of the water when I read that the average life expectancy at birth is 40 years old. Could you imagine? They are number two in the world for their death rate and the death rate is almost exactly that of the birth rate. I guess that is one way to keep a population at a steady number. We had been talking in the car on the drive about the absurd amounts of funeral homes/businesses there are between Lesotho and South Africa; now it sort of makes more sense. Additionally a week ago at an intervention graduation in Kimberley we had a situation where one of the student’s had passed away before receiving her certificate and it barely seemed like a big deal at all (keep in mind we work with 12-13 year olds). We merely bowed our heads in silence for a few seconds and then moved on, laughed, and had a good time. Strange. The HIV/AIDS prevalence rate in Lesotho is 1 in every three people. One in every three people. Mom, Dad, Pope and one of you has it. Really crazy things to think about. I don’t even know how to respond to these statistics. I knew there was a good amount of poverty there, I knew there were plenty of diseases and other problems affecting this country, but I had no idea about this death rate and the prevalence rate of HIV/AIDS. Just to help put this into perspective in case one in three doesn’t sound crazy enough, in South Africa the prevalence rate is one in six. I do not have any intention of just painting a morbid, terrible picture of a wonderful little country, but I wanted people to get an idea of what is really out there. On the other side of the spectrum, the literacy rate in Lesotho is at 84.4%, which I think is remarkably high considering all things.

Yes this country has its difficulties, but it truly is spectacular. The country is unbelievably beautiful, with unspoiled mountains, rivers, and villages and warm and welcoming people. The thing about Lesotho is that despite all of the modernization and globalization/Americanization of the world today, it has managed to hold on to its rich culture and traditions. The people are also very proud of their heritage and want to show you and teach you what it means to be Basotho (yes, I purposely put a “B” not an “L”). In the world today we are slowly watching entire languages disappear, traditional music and dances, and customs that have been passed on for centuries, poof…gone, because more and more people are speaking English and listening to American and European music and letting go of their own heritage. I’m sorry to say, but you can just see America seeping into these countries on so many levels. MacDonald’s, the O.C., the latest Eminem song; it is everywhere. What would we do if in a century’s time we were all basically the same without different cultures and traditions? It really makes me wonder if it possible for a country to move forward in the necessary ways (i.e. abilities to fulfill the basic human needs) without losing the wealth of customs and traditions that exist and have existed forever.

We started out our visit with an evening at the Lesotho Sun (nicest hotel probably in Maseru), where were dined and wined and dined some more on an all-inclusive buffet dinner for R60 ($8). We then burned off some of those calories in a little nightclub with the locals, especially Kwan and Poco, our Korean and Spanish friends (I’m just kidding, they were Basotho, but those were the names they gave us). Kwan wanted us to join his krump dance class (dirty style of hip-hop dance) though we all declined because we figured that was probably not something we were gifted to be doing (it also helps that I am not actually from Maseru, so that might be rather difficult). Also we somehow managed to skip through the R40 entry fee and sneak right through the gate and passed the guards with a bunch of other white people that actually paid…oh well!

The following morning I consumed by first bagel since I have been in Southern Africa. Everywhere we go they have cream cheese, all different kinds, even Philadelphia cream cheese, but nowhere have we been able to find to bagels to go with the cream cheese, no one has even heard the word bagel, until we got to Maseru. Sure enough they sell them in the Pick N’ Pay there. I made the mistake of comparing them to a grocery store at home, specifically Whole Foods, and thought that maybe if we made the request in our Pick N’ Pay in Kimberley, they could get some. Umm hello Kristin, where are you living again? Uh, probably not. I think it was maybe worth the thought, but then again maybe it was just a waste of brain space. After the bagel we headed out to the market in town where mainly we just wandered around trying not to get hit by taxi vans and inquiring about the price of chickens for sale. Only R55 ($7) for a chicken in case you were wondering.

Later that afternoon we grabbed some ice creams and hit the road for Malealea, the sleepy, mountain town where we would spend the next two days relaxing. We got there around 2:30 p.m. after winding our way up and through villages and around mountains. We decided to do a quick hike down to the waterfall there without a guide; no worries we got this (I’ll tell you now it is probably quite helpful to have a guide as we learned later). That lasted us all of about a 3-minute walk down to the trail, where we ran into our newest friend, Milo. Milo is a 14 year-old boy who works as a tourist guide because he cannot afford school fees to continue high school. He spoke solid English and obviously Sesotho (again I meant to use the “S”), plus a few words of Spanish and basic French; pretty good for someone who was 14 and not in school any longer. I found out that he had an 18-year-old sister and a 21-year-old brother and they all lived with their mother (no father). He loves hip-hop music, especially Chris Brown (don’t ask me how our music made it into this town in the mountains…cell phones…crazy) and wants to continue to be a tourist guide when he grows up. I can imagine that it would be difficult to dream bigger dreams when you don’t really even know what the possibilities are that exist out there. We have the opposite problem of endless possibilities; we can do whatever we want, be whoever we want to be, which makes our lives difficult because we never want to choose. These boys and girls living in these mountains and in hard-to-reach towns/villages can only imagine the life that revolves around the Malealea Lodge or the local bar. I wonder sometimes which one is better: too many options or none at all.

Traveling is such a brilliant experience and an awesome opportunity to meet people from around the world and learn more and more about all different places in the world, not just the one you are currently in. I met a guy who was from France, but was living in Reunion, a small island next to Mauritius (you all should know where that is if you were following me on Semester at Sea). He was some sort of biophysicist that was in South Africa for a conference and was now backpacking around Lesotho. I saw him buying some intense maps for his 3-day hike through the Lesotho mountains from Malealea to Semonkong. Awesome, but crazy intense. We also had dinner with a woman named Susana from Germany. She currently works in Jo-burg, but will be shipping back off to Germany in a few weeks because her yearlong contract will be ending. She then hopes to land herself in London, not a bad place. She also just finished her MBA from University of Chicago and has spent ample amounts of time at the Chicago and Singapore campuses. She told us that in the last 4 weeks she had found herself on four different continents. Pretty cool if I may say so myself.

In the Malealea Lodge we stayed in these small simple huts that perfectly provided for a great night sleep, but they had huts that ranged from basic to fairly luxurious in case you were interested. I woke up Sunday morning in just sheer awe of the beauty surrounding me. I was so inspired I just wanted to sit there and read and write for the entire day. With a cup of tea it would have been perfect. Unfortunately this was not possible because we needed to get back to Maseru by midday for Doug’s soccer game. I did get a few hours that morning to enjoy a nice muffin and a pot of tea while recording some of my thoughts in my journal. There’s the intellectual side of me again, haha! We made our descent back down to Maseru, enjoyed a lovely lunch, watched some soccer, and then said our goodbyes to the Lesotho interns and company. We spent about an hour and half chilling at the border trying to get back into South Africa. Before we knew it we were back in Kimberley and I was unpacked and repacked for my week in Bloemfontein. A little bit of there and back and back again.