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.