Lumela, u amohelehile bolokong ba ka! Hello, and welcome to my blog! This is where I will be writing about my experiences in the Peace Corps. I'm serving as a Primary Education Teacher in Lesotho for the next 26 months. Currently, I'm in training, and will swear in to become an official volunteer on December 14!
I arrived in Lesotho along with my 14 co-trainees on September 29. 10 of us are in the Education sector, and 5 are in the Health sector. Since that 24-hour trip through three airports, we have been learning a lot about living in Lesotho and what our role as volunteers will be. For the first 8 days, we stayed in a hotel for a sequestration period. While there, we got to know each other while attending sessions about Peace Corps basics. We also started learning the local language, Sesotho. The hotel was a great introduction to the culture here, we started eating the local food and speaking with the hotel employees to practice Sesotho. Lesotho Independence Day was October 4, while we were there, which was a fun experience to celebrate! We ate traditional food, and the women showed us a traditional dance.
Pictured above is the hotel we stayed in. The rooms were very nice, with running water and electricity, and it's a beautiful area! It's also spring in Lesotho, so the weather has been mild and feels great compared to the full summer of Texas that I left behind.
Pictured on the left is the traditional meal we had on Independence Day. Papa is a staple dish, which is made by mixing ground maize and water in a pot on the stove or over an open fire. There are also two types of bread, one baked and one steamed, spinach, mashed squash, chicken, and chicken intestine. Everything was delicious, although the texture of the intestine was not my favorite. It's rubbery and slimy, so it's the only thing on my plate I didn't finish. We also had ginger beer to drink, which was very good, and I learned it's pretty simple to make at home!
After sequestration in the hotel, we moved in with host families across a few different villages. Immediately upon arriving, our families were at the front of the village to meet us and had a welcome song and dance! They also gave us Sesotho names. Mine is Relebohile, which means 'we are thankful'. Trainees meet most days in the main village for sessions about Peace Corps policy, safety and security, nutrition, education/health, and more. We also learn Sesotho in our different villages every morning with our amazing Language and Culture Facilitators. Our LCF's help us navigate living with our host families and being immersed in this new culture. Each trainee has a separate rondavel, or hut, next to our family's house. There is no running water or electricity in our rondavel, so we use a pit latrine and take bucket baths! When we get home each evening, our families teach us what we'll need to know to eventually live on our own. We help cook so we can learn the different foods and how to cook them, and we've been learning how to do laundry and wash dishes by hand in buckets. It's been an amazing and unique experience so far, and I'm excited to be sharing this journey with you! Kea leboha, sala hantle! Thank you, and goodbye (stay well)!
Pictured left is my rondavel, which is not a traditional one but is rectangular with a tin roof. We were provided with a gas tank and stove, pots and a tea kettle, buckets of water (which we boil before drinking), a water filter, table and chairs, a bed, buckets for bathing and washing laundry/dishes, and a mop and broom.
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