Site Visit

Monday through Wednesday I went on a site visit to get a better idea of what my day to day will be like as a volunteer. Ellen, Ro and I were traveling to Thaba Tseka with Rebecca and Victoria, two volunteers who live there. Thaba Tseka is the camp town (district capitol) within the district of the same name. We got to the bus ranks about an hour before the bus was slated to leave, and were repeatedly solicited to buy anything from newspapers, prepared food, knick-knacks to bread. Rebecca got some delicious flat bread that was passed around.

Leaving the bus ranks took about 20 minutes, moving a few feet at a time while people walked about in front of the bus and we squeezed through very narrow canals of the market streets. Finally we were freed and the sprawling city of concrete block homes, street side vendors and honking taxies and the landscape quickly changed to the plowed fields of the lowlands and foothills. Uniformed students were walking along the road on their way to exams. The transition to the mountains came quickly, then progressed slowed as the bus crawled up the ridge. Once on the top of the first pass the scenery opened up to reveal the expanses of mountain ridges that ran like dulled, serrated knife edges. The mountains looked tired, beaten down by erosion and time. There wasn’t the jaggedness or Goliaths of the Cascades, but instead a greener, but similarly bald, amplified version of the Santa Monica Mountains, stacked on ridge behind the other as far as you could see.

When the terrain allowed and water existed, a small village would pop up with its terraced fields and herd boys, in the traditional goulashes, diaper like garment, and wool blanket pinned around his shoulders, standing watch near small flocks of sheep or herds of cows. Eventually we made it to the Katse dam, which was just visible from the road and finally to the one and only pit stop about 3 hours into the trip. The bus pulled up next to some women selling various fare, including one old woman who had a large Tupperware bowl full of various goat parts. She would intermittently pull back the plastic bag that covered the bowl, pick up a fork and prod the goat’s decapitated head a bit, then covered the bowl again. The next hour of the trip was on the portion of the road that was unpaved, but wasn’t so bad because the bus was one of the new ones and had a fairly plush ride.

Finally we made it to Thaba Tseka, which sits on a mountainside above a river gorge. Trees are scarce and the wind can really whip across the bald landscape. We made our way down to Victoria’s rondeval. All of her stuff was strewn around the yard. Her family had apparently cleaned and bug bombed her rondeval because she had had bugs. We helped move stuff back in the left her and Ro to finish putting stuff away while Ellen, Rebecca and I went up to Rebecca’s rondeval to drop our stuff off. We took a small tour of the town, then went and talked to another PCV, Sam, who works in Thaba Tseka also.

That night everybody convened back at Rebecca’s to make burritos. Sam made tortillas while Rebecca sauted some veggies, made some rice and grated cheese that had been brought with us from Maseru. The burritos were delicious, and we were later treated to a light show. Stars were laid out like a tapestry above us and along the far ridge it looked like an Olympic Shock and Awe campaign was being waged. The clouds above the ridge lit up as lightening struck incessantly for a few hours. It was amazing.

Tuesday Ellen and I went with Rebecca to visit her school, a 45 minute walk away, through some fields and across a grass runway that appeared to end on a cliff. We got there about 10 minutes before she expected to have to invigilate (proctor) a test, to find out that the test time had been moved up an hour and nobody had told her. Apparently she is rarely informed of schedule changes like this. She went to invigilate and Ellen and I did our best to solve the maths test that she was going to have to mark later. We scored about an 85 on it I think. Uh oh, I’m going to have to go do some review on high school maths.

We went to meet some of Rebeccas students outside, only to find out that some of them were collecting rocks. When asked why, they said because somebody told them to. Others were digging holes in preparation for planting trees. Well, there was only one shovel, so one student was digging holes while the others watched.

We walked back over to Rebeccas and I wasn’t feeling well so I took a nap, while Ro, Ellen and Victoria went on an adventure hike to the next town over in order to get a signature for something or the other. When I woke up I helped mark Rebeccas exams, on which the average score was optimistically somewhere in the 40’s.

The trip back was uneventful, but long due to the old, tired bus we had. The training center was very exciting as everybody trickled in from their various site visits and the story telling began. I wasn’t feeling too hot, so I went to bed early. Thursday I had a temperature of 102, which subsided slowly as the day wore on. Unfortunately I was stuck at the training center while everybody else went to the Ambassador’s house to enjoy a Thanksgiving meal. I’m feeling better, and will hopefully be back to 100% before Saturday, as we are heading out to do our Community Based Training, which means we will be living in a village doing practice teaching and continuing our training. I won’t have internet access during that time, but will hopefully get to send emails and such on the weekends.

I will be getting a cell phone after Christmas and will send out more details when that’s available. I hope everybody is well at home.