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.
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