Roof of Africa

So this weekend I helped marshal the Roof of Africa, one of the craziest and most technically demanding motorcycle races in the world. My friend Matt and I spent three days hanging out in various scenic spots in Lesotho waiting for the bikes to arrive, helping service crews organize themselves for the arrival of the riders and checking in the bikes when they arrived. It was a long three days, but well worth it. We moved progressively further from town each day into more remote mountain areas. Around 300 riders started on Thursday in the time trial, about 260 started Friday's section and about 120 on Saturday. Some withdrew because of injuries, some because of mechanical failures and others because they had to be able to hit a certain time for the course and couldn't do it. All-in-all, I don't know how many finished, but I can't imagine it was more than about 70. It was a brutally tough race over rocks, mountain passes and through some pretty difficult terrain. These pictures only capture the race around the checkpoints (the easiest and most accessible parts), but believe me, the riders reported some crazy obstacles. Of course it rained for part of Thursday and Friday taking a difficult trail and making it harder. I must say that all the guys are crazy, but at the same time, this is their ultramarathon and I respect them for having the guts to try it and to make it as little or as far as they did. We all have our vices and passions in life and these guys have a particularly wild one!
The winner was a guy from New Zealand who made the rest of the field look like amateurs (which they certainly were not). The best description I came up for his riding was that he rode his motorcycle down the hills like he was skiing, slaloming back and forth as if the bike were a part of his feet rather than a couple hundred pounds of metal. He gapped the field by a wide margin. The pictures on the left show some of the fueling stops with the support crews and a couple of riders I managed to snap photos of as they went by. The one of the rider headed straight down a mountain pass was on the last day of the race as the riders headed into the most difficult section of the trail. It was a mountain pass at 2200 meters (7,200 feet or so) that they crested, checked in and headed back down, only to climb up the pass on the other side of the mountain again! They had completed about 1/3 of the route at that point and still had a long, challenging day ahead of them. Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.

Working at Parliament/Running

So this last week was an intense one spent mainly in the Parliamentary Library. The National Archives sent me over there the other week when they didn't have the records I was looking for. It didn't seem like they get a lot of outside researchers there; in fact, it seemed like it was mainly used by Members of Parliament to do research on previous sessions and to stay current on the Lesotho and South African newspapers. But they were happy to have me sit in there and dig through stacks of Government-published newspapers from 1965 and 66 (the year of independence here). I have probably one day left there of work, but it was an interesting place to sit and work as it is right across a big driveway from the House of Parliament so I got to watch all the comings and goings of top government ministers and MPs while doing my work!

In other news, I traveled yesterday (leaving at 5AM) up to Ficksburg, a small town in South African about 80km (50 miles) from Maseru for their annual Cherry Festival Race. The town is in the middle of the cherry, asparagus and peach growing region of South Africa and the race was brutal! It was 23km (14.5 miles...or almost a mile and a half longer than a half marathon). It started out in town, but about 2.5 miles into the race, turned off onto a dirt/rock/gravel/mud trail that wound its way up and over the mountain that sits right behind town. Someone with a GPS watch told me we climbed over 250 meters in the course of the 5km (3 mile) climb. Then we ran on top of the mountain (more of a plateau really) in a series of ups and downs before dropping the entire 250 meters in about 3km (2 miles), in a part of the race that was especially hard on the legs. Then it was just 6km more (@ 4 miles) back into town. Ficksburg sits at an elevation of about a mile to begin with so this was quite the race. I managed to place 8th overall out of about 700 with an average right around 6 minutes a mile, which seemed pretty good considering. I am a bit sore today, but hopefully that will work itself out pretty soon! It was a good time and I even got to hang out at the Cherry Festival afterwards (think American midwestern county fair-type atmosphere with all things cherry for sale). Good times!

Lesotho's waterfalls

In case you were worried that all I do here is work, fear not. Last Saturday I went with some friends up to the mountains (about a 45 minute or an hour drive from Maseru) to hike to the waterfalls that you see pictured here. They are called Qiloane Falls (the Q is the click sound in Sesotho...try it). They are stunning, especially after a week where it rained a few times. The pool at the bottom is excellent for swimming, if a bit cold. However, this being Lesotho, you can just hike right down and jump in as many times as you want (one in my case). The hike to get there, which you see in the third picture was spectacular through the treeless high mountains. It was a quite managable hike (+/- 2 hours) through some spectacular country and a good excuse to get out of the city for a while on a nice early summer day here.

In case some of you are worried because I have not updated on my running in some time, I am still going at it pretty hard. I am planning to run a 23 kilometer race (about a mile a quarter more than a half marathon) this coming weekend in the South African town of Ficksburg, which is on the border with Lesotho about an hour north and east of Maseru. It is a partially off-road, up, around and down a mountain that, like everything else around here is at altitude of at least 5000 feet! I will let you know how it goes. Take care.

Degrees of separation

Happy weekend to you (even if it is mostly over). I was reminded last week how small and interconnected this country is when I went out for an interview. I had been given the name of a man from one of the other guys I had interviewed who he said would be interesting to contact. So on Thursday I set out for the place where he had told me to go (he said, just go to St. David's mission near the town of Mamathe's and ask for him). Sure enough, I rolled up and knocked on a door and found a secondary teacher who knew exactly where he lived. We walked together down to his house and he sat with me as I interviewed a very nice and informative gentleman who had been active in the Boy Scouts and had taught at various schools in Lesotho for 58 years (58!). At the end of the interview, I mentioned that I had a former teaching colleague who had lived just near here as well and asked if he had known her (she has passed away, this is 'Me Libe for those reading this who know her) and, of course, not only did this man know her, but he had taught with her and her husband at various times in his career. So here I was sitting in a man's house who I had met less than an hour earlier who was 55 years older than me and we had taught with some of the same people. It was a neat situation, a great way to end the interview talking about former friends and a good reminder about how small a country of 1.8 million people (according to the census) really can be.

Lest you think I spend all my time running around the countryside, on Friday I was asked to take part in a round-table discussion at the university on the US presidential elections, the crisis in Zimbabwe and the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As the collection of topics seemed rather scattered I was a bit nervous about sitting on a panel like that, but it turned out very well (thanks to the skill of the moderator) and was quite interesting with a free-wheeling discussion about African politics, the role of western foreign policy and what should be done to move forward in these situations (not the US, but the others). The university has an interesting staff that gets many professors from around the southern African sub-continent so there was a lively discussion with professors and students (mostly local Basotho) that left me feeling more hopeful that someday there might be enough pressure from 'civil society' to force the hands of regional governments to bring about some constructive change in truly bad situations. Stay well!

St. Rodrigue in the news

Hello everyone, I was just informed that the BBC is doing a feature on the area around where I used to teach here in Lesotho, St. Rodrigue. The link is below, but it is a long-term project of theirs to chart how HIV/AIDS is affecting people in the rural communities. It could be a very interesting project, so please check it out at least once. I don't know how often they will be updating it, but you might want to check back in a month or two as well (I will try to keep up with it as well).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7697831.stm

Take care!

ps for those who know St. Rodrigue, I don't know exactly what they have shown on the Google Map at the bottom of the article, but it is not the main mission. It might be one of the clinic outstations (Ha Shoaepane, perhaps?)

Obama reaction in southern Africa

As I am sure some of you are curious as to how Obama is playing here in southern Africa, I copied an editorial from the "Sowetan", a South African newspaper that is, as its name suggests, based in Soweto, the former township outside of Johannesburg that was home to Mandela, Bishop Tutu and many other famous South Africans, and is widely available in the region as an English-language newspaper. If you want to check it out for yourself, their site is... http://www.sowetan.co.za

Anyway, here is the editorial. I think they captured the mood around here as I have seen it since Wednesday's announcement (6 AM local time on Wednesday), especially the first line. It is a kind of public euphoria, the likes of which I have never experienced, not really a 'he-needs-to-do-something-for-me-now', but just a 'right-now-nothing-seems-too-impossible-to-imagine' kind of euphoria. Enjoy.

Sowetan Says: Now all can dream of a fairer world.” Sowetan (newspaper), Thursday November 6, 2008. Staff Editorial

The US votes in a black president and now nothing seems impossible in the world. Barack Obama swept into the White House by offering voters hope for a fresh start after eight years of turmoil, despair and economic gloom. The victory of a man whose father was born in Kenya also gives hope to hundreds of millions of Africans throughout the world. He won fair and square by exciting the mass of Americans to the possibilities of a more just and equal order. Not since John Kennedy in the 60s have we witnessed such a spontaneous outpouring of affection and hope for the realisation of the American Dream, which cynics in the US and abroad have long dismissed as a Utopian fantasy. Now comes the hard work. Obama has raised expectations so high that any failures in restoring the US's broken economy while developing a more egalitarian society and a just foreign policy will bring out critics around the world with a vengeance. Revolutions are staged by those with thwarted expectations, not the no-hopers. Obama won his overwhelming victory by stressing multiculturalism and not once playing the race card. Maybe everybody in the US can dream of being treated equally regardless of race. But the realisation of Martin Luther King's grand dream has been spotty at best. Every nation's foreign policy will reflect its interests, yet the world lives in hope of a sensitivity to local needs and values, and an end to the crass venality of the Bush era. We expect the US to continue consuming far more of the world's resources than any other nation, but we hope it will no longer trash our globe in the process. Obama must ride the wave of optimism he has engendered to take the hard decisions that will often clash with the immediate interests of his constituents. But as many world leaders have learnt, these are difficult times that demand a new vision and a determination to do what is right by us all. And a son of Africa is the man of the moment who might just pull off that dream.

Quick update--elephant pushing

Hey, this will be very short. Learning new languages and about different cultures often lets me appreciate more the nuances of language. The Royalist party that I was discussing in my last blog is/was known as the Marematlou Freedom Party where Marematlou is a Sesotho idiom for the 'people who get together to push the elephant.' At the time it was formed, there was a Regent for the young King and the people who started it were concerned that the Regent would never make way for the young king, so they got together to try to 'push the elephant.' To ruin the suspense, they succeeded and the new king took over! Still, I think it is one of the best names for a political party that I have ever heard.
Also, people here in Lesotho (Basotho and expats from all over) are very excited about our new president. I have had many people come up to me or text me telling me how excited they were. Let's hope some of the expectations can be met.

A different kind of politics

Well, happy American election day to all of you. I cast my absentee ballot a couple of weeks ago and hope it arrived in time. Life continues to go well here despite a touch of sickness today for me. I still plan to get up early (3 or 4 AM) to watch some election returns with some American friends. Should be a good time.
The cricket match was a good time: imagine a baseball game that goes a lot longer and has nice grassy banks on which to sit and relax and watch the game. South Africa beat Kenya by a lot and a good time was had by all.
I had an interesting interview the other day with a man who was in the words of my friend who pointed me towards him: "a right proper gentlemen of a type they don't make anymore" and sure enough it was true. He was a very thoughtful, soft-spoken man of about 70 who had spent much of his life as a close adviser to the King of Lesotho during some of the more turbulent days politically here in Lesotho. So, yes, this man was a committed royalist (my friends who study British history and read this blog just did back-handsprings to find that people of this political persuasion still exist). He said he has had many opportunities in his time since then to join some of the political parties here (of which there are around 19 registered, depending on the day and who is splitting off from another party), but that this was not for him. Needless to say, he had a very interesting take on events in Lesotho in the 1950s and 60s (and even into the 70s but I didn't press him on that although if I had had more time perhaps I would have). So yea, research is still going well here and I am finding that I really enjoy finding people and sitting down to a chat with them about the past.
Viva le roi!