Signing off

Hi everyone. This will likely be my last blog post because my time here is running very short--I leave on Tuesday. Just wanted to thank you all for your support over the past 10 months. It has been, as always, a good stay in Lesotho. I have made good research progress, have been able to keep up with many old friends and make others. It is always sort of bittersweet to leave. On one hand, it is always good to come home. On the other, I really like Lesotho and a part of me always finds it hard to leave. The best summation I can come up with is a Sesotho expression that lLiterally translated means "I have remembered." The phrase, however, implies that you have good memories tinged with nostalgia, so Lesotho: Ke hopotse. I will be back at some point, but for now it is fond farewell. Stay well.

Going out with 90km of bang

So this week on Sunday I will be down in the South African province of Kwa-Zulu Natal for that country's premier running event, the Comrades Marathon. I have mentioned on here before that I was going to do it, but now that I am but 3.5 days away from the event it is starting to sink in. I have been writing a series of articles on the race itself, its history, the most famous competitors and now my training. They have been going up on the web at: http://www.RunningTimes.com

This is no normal 'marathon' but rather two marathons plus an extra 5 km (3.1 miles). It will be quite the event with over 12,000 people entered. You can find more information about the race here: http://www.comrades.com

I am looking forward to it all. You can find results there and even live television from a number of points on the course (not that it will help those of you in North America as it starts at 5.30 AM South African time and I hope to be done by noon local time). Still, feel free to check it out.

Back in Lesotho, I am starting to say my goodbyes and have wrapped up most of my research except for a few interviews with friends that I still might try to squeeze in. Also, big congrats go out to my sister Katie and her husband Joel on the birth of their first child, a boy (I have not yet heard the name...even with the internet, sometimes news takes time to get down here)! Stay well.

Winding down

Hi everyone, I know it has been a while since I posted on here. I am coming into the home stretch of my time in Lesotho. I will be leaving here on the 2nd of June so I have just over three weeks left. I have been doing a bit of travel, trying to wrap up my research and see all the friends here that I need to touch base with before I head for home. I don't feel close enough to the end yet to do a summation post...that can wait for later. My last few weeks will be busy as well trying to tie up loose ends and make sure that I am taking a lot at last minute research materials and getting in last-minute interviews. I am also running the Comrades Marathon (a 56 mile race) in two weeks and have been writing a series of articles on the race for Running Times magazine (http://www.runningtimes.com).
The photo here was taken on a beautiful Easter day a couple of weeks back now. I went up to see an old friend in the northern part of Lesotho and the light was just stunning for the drive back home.
This week I managed to interview two of the sisters who run St. Rodrigue (where I used to teach high school). It was great to see both of them (one is still the principal of the school) and to hear their stories. They were very easy interviews to set up and do because I have known both of them since 2002--another example of my research being greatly aided by my prior experience here--and they both had some very interesting insights on independence and what young people were thinking about it.
So, life is good. Fall is well advanced here with trees dumping leaves and the nights quite chilly. My morning runs have been crisp, to say the least, these past few weeks. It will be interesting to dump myself straight from early winter into a St. Louis summer in a few weeks, but I think I will be able to handle the transition! Stay well.

Also for those who have not been following the BBC article on HIV/AIDS in Lesotho that has focused on St. Rodrigue's clinic for the last six months, the last series of articles is up and they are excellent. Here is the one for the local chief, you can access the other people on the right side of the page after you get to his article. It is sobering, yet uplifting reading.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8026975.stm

Training in the mountains

As some of you know, I am training to run the Comrades Marathon (a 56 mile race in South Africa) in addition to my research. I have been putting in a lot of runs since I arrived back in August--the race is in May. This weekend I decided to run the last long run of my training and I decided that Maseru was far too tame a venue for this event. I had already done a 50km (31 mile) training run here back in March but decided that a few more hills and another thousand feet of altitude were in order. What was I thinking? Not really sure, but I went for it anyway.
On Friday after a day of research at the university instead of heading for Maseru, I made the drive down to one of the best tourist lodges in Lesotho (and possibly the world, if you are ever here, check it out)...Malealea. I arrived in time for dinner and spent a relaxing evening here. Saturday morning I got up bright and early to (attempt to) conquer the hills. Malealea is at about 6000 feet and I was going up a road toward St. Rodrigue, where I used to teach) that would get up to 6200, drop to 5600 and climb back up to 6200, at which point I would turn around and do it all in reverse. The only hitch in this plan was that I had to carry all my water and I had a touch of the flu last week.
The scenery was amazing for the run, high mountain peaks, the Makhaleng River valley down below (Lesotho's 3rd or 4th biggest river) and a host of scenic villages to pass through (ie an opportunity for 5 or 6 kids to run with me for a couple hundred meters). It was a good run, a beautiful run even until I got to about 35 km (the low-point river crossing on the way home). I was running out of water and my body was telling me that I should have turned around at 21km (making the run a marathon) instead of dragging it out to 25 km, but at that point, what is one to do?
In this case, it meant walking most of the way up the large hill (600 feet of climbing in just over a mile) and then taking turns jogging and walking until I got to just over a full marathon (43km), asking a local high school student who was sitting by the road where the village water tap is, refilling my bottles and taking the shortcut back to the lodge. Sadly the shortcut only cut about 3-4km off the trip and involved going down and up from two different small rivers. So I made it back to the lodge chastened to listen better to my body, especially when I have been sick, but also confident that if I can undergo epic journies like this at altitude then I should be able to get through it when I am down at sea level for race day.
I also managed to talk my way out of a traffic fine (that was largely bogus to begin with) by telling the cops the names of the villages I had run through as I was driving back to Maseru later that afternoon. They thought if anyone was crazy enough to try that and knew the places, they had better let me go, I guess! Stay well.

Research ups and downs (why I will never be a reporter)

Autumn is in full swing here. As I sit at the desk in my apartment I watch the leaves on the tree outside turn yellow and fall off. It also means my time here is drawing down as I come back to the US in June. The other day I drove south from Maseru to possibly try to interview a woman that a friend told me would be an interesting person to talk to and to go to the Protestant Church archives. I went back and forth on the 30 minute drive over whether I wanted to stop and try to talk to this woman. I knew where she lived as my friend had pointed out her house, but I had never met this woman before and had no phone number for her so I couldn't call in advance--it was going to be a cold call or nothing. After mentally debating for about 25 minutes the turnoff was rapidly approaching and I finally decided to just go for it. I bounced over the dirt road to her house, stopped and went to knock on the door of her house. Turns out I tried the wrong door. There were voices inside but the door on the other side of the house was the one that they used so I cautiously went around.
Standing there in the doorway was a very small almost 80 year old woman. I greeted her and introduced myself in Sesotho (including my connection with the friend who had met this woman earlier) and, as has happened so many times here, she welcomed me warmly into the house and we sat down in the living room. We ended up having a great, wide-ranging 45 minute interview as this woman had been a primary teacher and an organizer for the school's Junior Red Cross and Girl Guide groups. She was a very spunky woman who loved to laugh as she told stories so transcribing the tape is more fun than usual as she had a good laugh at a few of my questions!
This interview has gone like so many other ones that I have had here and makes me thankful that I ended up in such a friendly place. Imagine this scenario playing out in the US: a random guy speaking only a bit of your first language shows up at the door claiming that so-and-so gave your name to him and he wants to ask you some questions about history. Would you welcome him into your house and answer his questions? Here the answer has been yes almost 100% of the time and for that I am grateful. Still, I dread the cold-calls and don't think I will ever make a career of something like journalism or sales where cold-calls are a big part of the job! Stay well.

Fortuitous timing

I know I just posted the other day, but I have a good story. So I made it out for a run this morning even though I was not very motivated to get out of bed. As a concession I ran a shorter, flatter 7-mile loop rather than the hilly 8-miler I had planned. I still wasn't feeling very good about 2.5 miles into the run but then I saw a guy coming the other way down the road also running. I gave him a friendly wave and he turned to come with me, which happens on a fairly regular basis here as there aren't that many people running. Company is always nice. So we start chatting and he figures out pretty quickly that I am American. Not too tough to do, but he starts telling me how he used to know a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers. Again, nothing too unusual as the Peace Corps has been here since 1967 or so and tends to keep between 80 and 100 volunteers in a rather small country. Many people here have been taught by or lived in the same village as a Peace Corps volunteer and they do some good work.
Where the story turns is when he told me where they were from: New Jersey, Grinnell, Iowa, (someplace I didn't hear because my ears were burning). I interrupted him and asked if he knew Ntate George and 'Me Sue and he said YES! I couldn't believe it (for those who don't know, 'Ntate George' is George Drake, my undergraduate advisor who was here with his wife in the Peace Corps 1991-93 at St. Rodrigue and he was the instrumental is setting up the teaching program there that I did in 2002). Turns out he was in school at St. Rodrigue primary when George and Sue were there and he used to come visit them. His family would also lend one of their horses to Sue so she could get to some of the mountain primary schools so she could run workshops for the teachers. They also helped him through high school by putting him in touch with a group called Friends of Lesotho (http://www.friendsoflesotho.org) that helps students in Lesotho with school fees.
So we ran together for 4 or 5 miles chatting away and having a great time. The timing of it all and the close connections really turned around the run and made my day a great one. It really is the personal connections that make living away from home and doing mostly solitary work worth it. Stay well.

Autumn

Hi everyone. The equinox came and went last week on Friday--a day of amazingly comfortable temperatures and cobalt blue sky. In other words, vintage autumn around here. Like the American Midwest where I grew up, autumn might be the best season around here. The weather is usually good with little rain and clear days where you feel like you can see every detail on the mountains no matter how far away they are. The photos here were taken on my trip down to the southern-most district of Lesotho, Qacha's Nek. I took the buses down there and stayed with a friend who is a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching in a small village on the bluffs overlooking the Orange (Senqu in Sesotho) River. It was a fabulous couple of days and I got some good interviews in while I was there, including one with an amazing women whose husband was frequently gone either in jail or in exile because he was a Communist Party organizer in Lesotho. While he was gone, not only did this woman raise her family, but she was also the point person that political refugees would come to when they were fleeing apartheid South Africa. They knew to slip across the border and find her at this tiny village and she would help them get to Maseru and other points in Lesotho where there were more support networks to assist them. A 20th century Underground Railroad...that mainly used the small airplane connections that Qacha's Nek had at that time with Maseru (they only finished paving the road that goes between the capital and the district in 2005 or 2006). Yet another fascinating story that I had the honor and privilege of listening to in my research here.
If it doesn't come through in these posts, I just want to say that I am eternally grateful for the number of people here in Lesotho who are willing to humor a stranger showing up at their door asking them questions about the past. When I look back on my time here the majority of the mind-blowing moments I will have had came about because of the generosity and openness of people who were complete strangers to me a matter of minutes before. Kea leboha haholo, batho ba Lesotho (Thank you very much, people of Lesotho)!
Stay well.

Moshoeshoe's Day

Today (March 11th) is Mosehoeshoe's Day--the anniversary of the death of the first Morena e Moholo (literally translated, the High Chief...or as it has come to be known, the King although Moshoeshoe would not have recognized the title) in 1870. The day is a public holiday and an opportunity for the country to reconnect with its heritage as Moshoeshoe is the Morena a Moholo who brought a disparate group of people together to form what is today the Basohto nation and fought a series of wars against other African groups, the British and the Afrikaners to defend the land that is today Lesotho (although people here are to this day wishing for the return of some of their lands which now fall in South Africa).
So I went downtown in the morning to check out the festivities. The current King Letsie III was there as was the Prime Minister and the entire diplomatic corps stationed in Lesotho. It was an interesting time. I ran into a Kenyan friend who I run with so we hung out and watched the proceedings. The man in the blue blanket in these pictures is Letsie III. He is very well respected and received the loudest cheers when his horsemen and motorcade made a dramatic entrance. You will see his horsemen in front of the army honor guard and band in the first photo. They were quite the site trotting in formation and carrying long spears with Lesotho flags on the ends.
The seocond photo shows (barely) the King about four people in front of me accepting a torch from two runners who brought it from Thaba Bosiu (the mountain stronghold and home of Moshoeshoe) that morning. They would then light the torch. I was about 10 feet from all of this. Again, very cool.
Then the King, the Prime Minister and other high ranking officials and army officers made their way to the top of the hill to pay their respects to Moshoeshoe at a large statue on the top of the hill that was unveiled the day before independence in 1966. As a historian it was an interesting event and as someone who really enjoys Lesotho and the Sesotho culture, it was quite the day. I didn't stay for the speeches as the acoustics were bad, but I can read about them in the papers later this week. It is hard to say which day means more to people here--the actual independence day on October 4th or Moshoeshoe's Day on March 11th.
Stay well.

Surrender Hill Marathon

Hi everyone. Hope you are well. I was over in South Africa on Friday and Saturday doing an interview with a former colonial agricultural officer in Lesotho (or, more correctly in Basutoland most of the time he was there) and also running a marathon. As some of you know I am planning on running the Comrade's Marathon this year, a 56 mile (89 km) footrace from Pietermaritzburg to Durban (two cities down in the southern African province of Kwa-Zulu Natal). in order to do that you have to have run at least one marathon length race or longer in the previous year. So I figured I had better get on that!
I chose the Surrender Hill Marathon in Clarens, Free State mostly because it was close--less than a two-hour drive from Maseru. While it is beautiful country as you can see, it is also tremendously hilly and at an even higher altitude than Maseru. The race started at 6000 feet (about 2000 meters) and featured over 1700 feet of climbing (and 1700 feet of descending) over the course of the 26.2 miles (42.something km). It was pretty brutal, but also spectacular. I needed to finish under 3 hours to start where I wanted to at Comrade's so that was my only goal. I managed to stumble home in 2:51, which was good enough for 4th place--a distant 4th as the top three were all professional runners from Lesotho who took home the prize money. It was a good time and I got a good interview the day before so we will call it a successful weekend.
The two photographs were taken on the course on the way home. The first two were both taken at the top of the actul Surrender Hill (the hill was a place where a bunch of Afrikaner soldiers surrender to the British army during the South African War, 1899-1902). One is looking down it to the turn around point, which was cruelly located at the bottom near the grove of green trees, so we came down it and had to turn around and go straight back up! The other one just shows the magnificent views from the top of Surrender Hill. The third photo shows me with Bruce Fordyce, probably South Africa's greatest long-distance runner. He won the 89km Comrade's Marathon an unreal nine times in the 1980s and 90s and at one point had the world record for the fastest time over 50km and 50 miles. His mother lives in Clarens so he comes down to jog a half marathon and hand out awards. Pretty neat guy.
Stay well.

Reminders

Lest you think that every day of doing historical research is highly entertaining and interesting, today serves as a good example of the mundane stuff that takes up a lot of my time. I am alternating between straining my ears to try to transcribe an interview I did the other day with a very soft-spoken man who wanted to keep watching a soccer match while we talked. It was a bit distracting at the time of the interview, but nothing compared to trying to decipher what exactly he was saying at various points as I feel like I can hear the soccer commentators better than I can him at many points! When I can't take that anymore I start going through the files of notes and scanned newspaper articles that I picked up the last time I was down at the archives at Morija (the main archives of the largest Protestant Church here in Lesotho). I read through the articles and notes and tag them in an organizing program so that when I go to write my dissertation and want to find all the sources I have that talk about 'opposition parties', the 'Boy Scouts' or 'Agricultural training projects' I just search for those phrases and up pops a list of all the documents I have that mention the topic. Quite tedious work, really, but all part of the job.

However, just when I was forgetting where I was today as I bunker down in front of the computer with my American music playing for company, my ears pick up what sounds like a large group of people chanting or singing in unison. While this is far from unusual for Lesotho, it is not coming from the school just down the hill from my place (I can hear all the children there happily playing after school) and I am not sure where it is coming from. Finally, I figure it might be people coming down the road where I live so I poke my head out the door. Sure enough, about two minutes later as the singing gets louder I see the entire cadet cohort of the Police Training College dressed in identical white t-shirts and royal blue pants with a gold stripe down the leg come jogging slowly by in formation singing. It is quite an impressive sight, especially as their trainers flank them to block traffic on the more major roads. To do this, they carry very long branches that they broke off birch-like trees to warn motorists, if they couldn't see, that there is a large formation of recruits coming down the road, boats striking in unison and singing at the top of their voices.
Stay well.

Taking stock

Hello again. About a week ago I passed the 6-month mark of this trip. Summer is starting to fade out a bit here, although the unseasonable rains have made this one of the most comfortable summers I have ever experienced with daytime highs in the 70s and nighttime lows around 50. Good for running, good for work, good for living and the farmers! About the only thing suffering from all the rain is the topsoil which is eroding even faster this year and heading downstream to South Africa and the Atlantic Ocean.
So after another six months living in Lesotho, where do I stand? My work seems to be progressing well. I am gathering together a nice collection of very interesting interviews, most averaging an hour and a half of sitting and chatting. Having invested in a scanner my computer is also filling up with scans of newspapers from the 1950s and 60s along with photographs, election posters, anti-communist literature and other random documents that I happen to come across when I have the scanner and access to electricity. So work, while it does drag at times like when I am trying to get in touch with people who are not easy to track down or when I think about spending another day by myself in the archives digging through dusty boxes of yellowed, musty newspapers, would have to be called a success so far.
Socially, it has been a lot easier to find things to do then I expected coming here to live in a new city where, outside of a few teaching friends who have their own families, I really didn't know anyone. Through a series of fortuitous coincidences and random encounters I have managed to make some pretty good friends here and now keep as busy as I would like. I have also been running a lot, some on my own and some with two different groups--one a group of South African bank employees who are serious marathoners and ultra-marathoners, and the other a group of younger Basotho who are trying to make the jump from decent school runners into the ranks of those who could conceivably compete for cash prizes at some of the road races in Lesotho and South Africa. Both push me in different ways and both are a lot of fun to hit the roads, hills and trails of Maseru with. I will be running a marathon next weekend in South Africa to qualify for the Comrade's Marathon, which is a 56-mile (89 km) race between the cities of Pietermaritzburg and Durban. Needless to say, it is a big undertaking. It will go down in May, a little over a week before I leave to come back to the US.
Of course I still maintain contact with St. Rodrigue (the high school where I used to teach) and some of my oldest friends here in the country come from that connection. So on the whole, while I won't say that the time has flown by all the time, it sure surprised me to realise that I had hit the 6-month mark. I dare say the final three months will go faster as work gets more pressing and my departure date gets closer. Stay well.

Rain and theories

For much of the spring (September-November), many people in Lesotho were fervently hoping and praying for rain (some of the sisters at the school where I used to teach had gone for a pilgrimage to another mission to pray for rain when I went up there to visit back in August). People need it to loosen up the rock-hard ground after the cold winters here in order to plow and plant. They also need it to water the grass that the ubiquitous cows and sheep feed on. Lesotho is also just a much more pleasant place to live when the hills and mountains are green rather than the dull, dusty brown that comes with winter.
After much delay the rains finally came in mid to late November, about two months late but just barely in time for most people to still get in a decent crop for the year. We had wonderful summer weather for a few months, but in late January, it turned again. Since then we have had a period of fairly intense rain that is somewhat unusual for the region. Full days of rain. For two or three days at a time separated by a day or two of warm sunshine. This part of the world is known for its impressive summer thunderstorms, but not its full days of rain and low gray clouds.
It has made the summer not very hot. Many days here of late we are only getting up to 20 or 22 degrees C (around 70 F). Almost everyone I talk to has said that the rain is unusual and I agree heartily with them. No one can agree on causes, but many people have pet theories ranging from global climate change to the effect of putting two very large new lakes in the high mountains of Lesotho. No matter why it is coming, it has certainly breathed life into the fields of Lesotho and made the rivers, which can run to a trickle or even nothing in the winter, into raging torrents that flow over the low bridges built on the gravel and dirt back roads of Lesotho and take enormous quantities of brown muddy water and the topsoil of this country down into South Africa and eventually the Atlantic Ocean.
Stay well.

Around Lesotho

It has been a while since I have posted, but my parents were here for a visit. I don't really have anything profound to write. We had a great visit and it was a lot of fun to show them around Lesotho (it was their first time visiting the country). It rained a lot but that just made the back-country dirt/gravel roads more interesting! Fortunately we were not in my little car, but in something a little more powerful with four-wheel drive. The pictures here are just a few that I took. The stone house is the house of the first King, Moshoeshoe I. It was built in 1839 and is still standing on his mountain fortress, Thaba Bosiu--Mountain of the Night. The rest of scenery pictures. The waterfall is up at Semonkong, the 200 meter tall Maletsunyane Falls and the photo of the three of us shows St. Rodrigue, the school where I taught and which the BBC is currently documenting, in the background. Enjoy the photos and I will try to find something more deep and profound to say in future posts! Stay well.

Month end

For those who have never lived in places where virtually every person is paid at the end of the month (or at the best, twice a month), there is very little to compare the phenomenon that is month end, especially here in January where many people are short on money because they spent a lot on the holidays. Plus the new school year just started two weeks ago so people need cash to pay school fees (all high schools in the country have tuition fees, books, uniforms, etc that parents ad guardians have to fund).
What does this mean for daily life here in Lesotho? It means that last weekend was a very quiet one in town with precious few taxis full of people speeding towards town. This week was the complete opposite. Everyone from the suburbs around Maseru and even many rural areas have to come into town to use the banks and ATMs to access their cash. So from about Thursday there were enormous lines at all the banks. And by enormous I mean sometimes they stretch for two blocks and people will wait over an hour to use an ATM. Today as I was running through the center of town at 7.30 AM, there were already long queues at all the banks even though they would not open for at least another hour. I guess it pays to get their early and get out. This means that the stores and the shopping areas of town, like the bus station, were also totally packed as people make their necessary purchases.
It is also a time to kick back and relax with friends, so when I ran past a public bar at 6.30 this morning there was already a loud-speaker set up blasting out the local famo music (which is accordion and guitar based with guys singing over the top of a bass riff...I find I don't really mind it unless I am sitting in a taxi with the volume turned up to 11 and the speaker right next to my ear) and people already hanging out. There are always more parties and get-togethers at month end as people can afford to spend a bit more on food and drink.
I can't say that I really like month-end. Going back to my teaching days, riding the bus at month-end was always a unique experience as it was the most crowded (and hot) time as the conductors continued to cram people in long after it was over-full. Now living in Maseru, month-end means there are more people on the roads who might have had a few too many drinks and it is harder to take care of errands as all the stores and offices are more crowded. However, to really experience and understand life here you need to be aware and sensitive to the ebbs and flows of the cash cycle. Sorry I don't have any photos for you this time, but my camera needs batteries and I wasn't going to get in the crush today just to get those!
Stay well.

Human nature and diverse experiences

So yesterday I had three very different experiences that sort of sums up the different circles I run in around here. During the day I spent my time in a small village out near the mountain where the first King of Lesotho gathered together a disparate group of individuals and made them into the Basotho people of today offering them shelter and security in a time of great unrest in exchange for loyalty and fighting for him in battle when it was needed. The old men I was interviewing (with the help of a Mosotho friend as my Sesotho language skills wasn't quite good enough for full-length interviews) were both prophets in an African independent church that was formed in the 1920s and takes its name from the founder of the nation, Moshoeshoe. Both of them emphasized during the interview that they are not the ones controlling their message and that Moshoeshoe himself must have had a deeper understanding of religion (ie sent from a higher power) because while he invited missionaries of different denominations into his country (in the 19th century, a time when denominational differences between various Christian groups mattered a lot more than they seem to today in the West), he himself never joined any of the churches. He saw them as useful to his mission and for his people but stayed above them in order to try to preserve peace in his country.
Then in the late afternoon I found myself sweating on the hot streets of Maseru running hill repeats with a disparate group of Basotho ranging in age from late teens to well over 50 who all meet in the afternoons to do some training. It is mostly a junior development running group for aspiring national-class runners, but there are some serious trainers who happen to be older and slower as well. A fun group to train with and the hill repeats certainly burn the lungs and legs at 5500 feet! I try to meet up with them at least once a week to get in a good quality workout and a couple of them might even make it to the St. Louis marathon this year to race in the US.
Finally, I made it with two minutes to spare to a get-together in the backyard of some friends' who were hosting an inaugural-watching party for a group of 30-40, of whom probably 2/3rds were American. We watched the pageantry on the Mall unfold, the excited coming together for the peaceful transition of power and heard a speech that echoed some of the great figures and speeches from the American past.
Doing all these things on the same day may sound like a disparate day of acts not connected, but in all of them, the theme ran through that we are all human and need to treat each other as such and life not only can and will go on, but can improve for all people. All the people I came across were working not only to better themselves but had also come together with others to make life better for a wider circle of people. While I did not understand much of what the prophets of the independent church were saying (even when they were translated into English), some of what my running colleagues were saying in Sesotho or what all the people watching the speech in Washington, Maseru or anywhere else in the world were thinking, it made me reflect that the most powerful acts come from people coming together to understand each other and work for good.
While the news reports of conflicts and death in many places (and ignores others, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but that should be another post), only listening to/watching or reading the news can cause us to lose the human perspective--that everyday throughout the world, people are coming together to better understand each other and work for good. It isn't reported in the news, but it is what makes the world go on and gets me out of bed in the morning.
Stay well.

More Lesotho on the BBC

For those of you who don't have the BBC Africa page bookmarked (and I am in that category as well), they have updated some of their stories from St. Rodrigue, Lesotho--which is the community where I taught high school in 2002. It is a story about how people in rural Lesotho are coping with the HIV/AIDS crisis. It is extremely well written, dare I say beautiful. The link below takes you to the story of a primary school teacher. The other links are on the right side of the page. Only the first four have been updated since the first time I posted this link, but if you haven't checked them all out, please do so.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7806217.stm

Stay well.

Not so 'funny' money

On a more serious note, on my travels I was right on the Zimbabwean border at Livingstone, Zambia. There the street vendors were selling what you see in the photo as tourist curios. I gave a guy all the Namibian change I had left in my pocket (less than $1) to get this note from him. It is what passes for Zimbabwean currency these days, although if you look closely, you will note that it has already 'expired'. How money can expire is beyond my comprehension, but then so too is money that is worth 50 billion anything. And I didn't have enough change for him to give me the 100 billion note.
It really is a sad commentary on a country that is destructing right now. The Robert Mugabe-led regime in Zimbabwe is currently making a mockery of that country and while I don't know what the solution is, more awareness of the problems the country faces can't hurt. People there are starving and dying of a disease that is easily treatable in a country with working health systems--cholera. International condemnation by 'the west' (aka Britain and the US) has so far backfired in that Mugabe just twists whatever is said to present himself as the victim. I would like to think it couldn't get worse, but it really could. Right now Mugabe can't really govern because he slipped up and let the opposition win Parliamentary elections last March--he most likely lost the presidency as well but delayed the results long enough to rig them. It could get worse if he declares a state of emergency and is able to govern without the small level of checks he (and the heads of the police and army, who currently hold the real power) has now. So, while I don't have an easy solution to the problem, the least I can do is help raise awareness and showing the joke that passes for 'money' right now there is a powerful image.
I don't know if writing Congresspeople, Senators, President-elects, Members of Parliament or whoever your local representatives might be will help, but the least you can do is to not skip another newspaper article about Zim that is buried on page 8 of the local paper and to add your voice to those calling for peaceful and meaningful change there.
Stay well.

Happy New Year

Hi everyone. Just wanted to wish you a happy new year and give a sampling of photos from my travels. I managed to see quite a bit of southern Africa in a few weeks of travel. I spent time in and around Cape Town with Lauren (my fiancee for those who don't know her)--the shot of us on Table Mountain comes from that part of the trip. We hiked up and down and the clouds even cooperated to give us good views and cool breezes. The second part of the trip (once she went home) was a road trip up through Namibia into Zambia and home via Botswana and South Africa with some friends from Lesotho. You can see Victoria Falls here (from the Zambian side), along with the spectacular Fish River Canyon of southern Namibia and a photo taken in northern Namibia of a lion crossing the road and running into the bush. That was quite the stroke of luck as there was a very short window for our paths to cross and they did. Seeing lions in the real wild was incredible and left my friend Matt and I both buzzing for a while (it was a National Park but one with no fences so the animals wander back and forth between Angola, Namibia and Botswana--it was in the Caprivi Strip for those familiar with geography). Anyway, much like most of you I am now back to work and will post more boring work stories as they arise! Take care and have a safe and happy new year.