A grab bag

In terms of my daily activities, I can assure you that research in the field is not something for those who like routine. Sure I can have a few days in a row where I do the same thing, like Monday-Wednesday of this week when I spent most of my time at the National Archives digging through boxes of old letters and various correspondence between government officials and people in London, South Africa and Lesotho. Yes, I know how to have fun, especially as most days I was the only person there and definitely spent more time there than the archivist did.
However, today was completely different. As I am here on a Fulbright Fellowship I was asked by people at the US Embassy to sit on a panel that was to interview Basotho candidates for a Fulbright position in the United States. There were two US embassy employees (one Mostho, one American), a retired Lesotho ambassador to Denmark and a retired professor of Economics/former Fulbrighter from the National University. We interviewed five candidates who all wanted to pursue higher degrees (mostly PhD) at American universities and ultimately selected one. Then the embassy was kind enough to take the panelists to lunch and I now have, in addition to a nice free luch,two very interesting people to interview about what they were doing during the 1950s and 60s. You just never know where you will find sources for my project!
Tomorrow I will head up to the university for their Friday history seminar where members of the department give papers on their research. Then I will probably spend some time in the archive up there going through educational records. A heck of a week! Like I said I am hoping to start interviewing people next week to start the oral component of my project. It is kind of fun to have to figure out what my plan of attack is every day. There are always more places to check for documents and more people to contact. Spring is on the way here. We are just waiting for the first rains to make it green and allow people to start plowing and planting, but the temperatures have been (mostly) nice. Take care!