Tales from Summer Camp

(written today!)




So, this is a pretty sweet part of training, in that I’m doing virtually nothing. Between my return from visiting my new site and January 5, we have occasional training sessions surrounded by huge amounts of free time. We spend it wandering around Maseru a bit, but mostly at the training center. We play cards, volleyball, and wiffleball, watch movies, enjoy some local beverages, dance around, and generally come up with random crap to do. One guy made a fire pit and a makeshift hookah. We sleep 6 people to a room. Long story short, my regret of having never gone to summer camp as a kid feels largely redeemed. It’s pretty hard to find a difference between this and Wet Hot American Summer (just watched that by the way, great movie). Except that we’re in the Kingdom In The Sky, I suppose.

And now, a couple other stories I forgot about from earlier.

On one of our last days at CBT, we had a potluck with everyone staying in Maqhaka. Adam and Shanthi and I decided to make a homemade gnocchi with cheese sauce, following a recommendation from some other volunteers that it's extremely easy to make. This turned out to be a big lie, and we ended up very, very late to the potluck. Carrying a huge pot of pasta, we decided to run down the mountain (normally a 20 minute walk) to reach the place a little faster. We figured, we're usually dripping sweat after arriving anywhere as is, so why not. But, the air is very thin here, and pretty quickly we found ourselves gasping, so we periodically stopped to walk. One of th etimes we stopped, we happened to pass by two of the girls we knew from around the village, probably 10 years old. They saw me panting, and a girl named Morongwe, carrying a sack over her shoulder, yelled out to me "Abuti Mpho, u khathetse joalo ka fariki!" (Eric, you are tired like a pig!) I turned around a bit in disbelief. I figured I heard her wrong, and I asked her "Fariki? Hobaneng fariki?" (Why pig?) A huge grin broke over both of their faces, and they started slapping the sack on Morongwe's back. The giggled as the sack started convulsing and squealing. Evidently, Morongwe was carrying a piglet in a sack down the mountain. We laughed, caught our breaths for another moment, and kept on running and laughing about the poor pig in a sack.

My host family from CBT gave me a few gifts before I left. It was really sweet, I got a shirt, a hand-painted crafts thing with scenes from traditional Basotho culture, and a nice little analog alarm clock. The clock is hilarious – you set the alarm for when the HOUR hand reaches the spot you want, and the alarm sounds when it gets somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-15 minutes of the time you set. To me, this is so Lesotho. Maybe it’s all of Africa, I’m not sure. But the concept of time is just so different here. Punctuality and deadlines are extremely loose, and an alarm clock that rings +/- 15 minutes from when you are supposed to hear it is so representative of the entire culture.

That guy Pule I wrote about before turns out to be a creep. Apparently he doesn’t work for the school at all, but he does like to tell people he does. He then follows this up by telling people the principal has sent him to request money for various fake reasons. My Vice Principal tipped me off about this, so, I’ll keep an eye out. As long as I know, I mean, I guess he’s still a nice guy.

In other news, my family in my new home has decided to give me a new Sesotho name, so I think I’m no longer Mpho. I’m now Refiloe, same as my little sister from CBT.