8/25/09

so, google just spazzed and lost a post i'd just written. that sucks. will write another later

8/9/09

so a couple frustrating/baffling occurences last week:
i saw a primary school kid (not one of mine) drop kick what looked to be an 8 week old puppy. seriously, he picked the terrified little puppy up, dropped it, and kicked it. i yelled at him and he ran off laughing. i will say that one of my girls actually went over, picked the puppy up, and tried to comfort him. this girl, mamello, really likes my puppies, and plays with them when she can. so maybe learning to play with them has helped her to be more sympathetic to dogs. maybe my having the dogs is a good learning experience for the kids, and a lesson on how to treat animals.
also, one of my girls here, who is around 12, got into a fight with another one of my girls, probably about the same age, and bit her in the back. why? i don't know. they are a little old to be doing that kind of thing, though.
i've started my after school study program, so now from 3 until 6 i help kids who have homework with their homework. i eventually want this to be something where all the kids come on time to study or read, even if they don't have homework, but we're taking baby steps. it has been interesting to see who comes, and to see some of the kids brighten up and make an extra effort as soon as someone shows an interest in them. i helped one little boy a couple days in a row and he came up to me on the third day at the beginning of study and gave me a huge hug. it was really sweet.

1/9/09

yesterday a couple of my older girls stayed home from school claiming to have swine flu. i can't believe the house mothers actually let them skip school. these girls were up and walking around like any other kid. i started talking with the house mothers and they explained that they have to be very careful with the children because they have all been through trama. i thought this was interesting, and explained a lot about why the children at the home are so undisciplined. yes, the kids here are all traumatized: they are orphans, many have been rejected by their families, some of our girls were abused before coming here. that doesn't mean that they don't need structure. so i talked with the house mothers about setting up after school study programmes. these don't exist here now. basically the children come home from school whenever they like, play around, and then suddenly realize at about 9 pm that they need to start doing homework. so they go to bed late and are tired the next day. and goodness knows what they do between the end of school and dinner. so now they have to come home after school and study. i'm trying to get at least the primary school students finished with homework before evening devotions and dinner (this is at 6 pm). we'll see how well this works. many ideas here are operative for a few days, and then the authority figures get lazy about enforcing the rules and everything reverts back to how it was. i'm hoping the house mothers will keep working with me on this. i can't watch all 54 kids study at once. i need their help
other than that i'm continuing with my library, with teaching kids to read, and i've been to a couple meetings. and i've met an amazing child. we have a little eleven year old girl here who was living with her aunt and uncle until the authorities found out that she was being molested and took her here. the uncle was taken to jail, which is not always done. many times the man will just get away with these things. anyways, this little girl actually went to court last week, stood up in front of everyone there, and told her story. she's an amazing child. i'm not sure how okay she is. she acts like a normal child, plays, interacts with the other kids here really well, so i hope she's ok emotionally. she's really smart, too. she's comes to me for extra maths work, and sometimes just sits on her own to read. most children here don't. anyways, it came out at court that the aunt knew what was happening to her and didn't do anything, so now this little girl has got to go back to court in a couple weeks to tell everything again. i hope she'll be ok.
oh, and we had an austrian guy here for a couple weeks. he was great with the kids and really handy. i hardly ever saw him because he was always off either playing with the kids or fixing something. he really bonded with our 12 year old here who can neither walk nor talk. the austrian guy actually made the kid a stationary bike to help strengthen his legs (we are trying to get him walking now). it's really sweet.

fun police stories

i've heard a couple great police stories in the past few days that warrant sharing. both are about the mohale's hoek police:

the first happened a while ago, before i came to lesotho. the police had made a big drug bust and had bags full of marajuana to use as evidence at the trial. after the trial though, they had to do something with all of the weed and decided that they should just destroy all the evidence. they piles all of the bags together just outside the police compound and proceeded to burn all of it. bill, my supervisor's husband, was telling me this. he said that the wind was blowing just right that day, so that most of the camptown could smell it and ended up just a wee bit happier and more relaxed that normal. way to go, police.

then yesterday, a police car was driving through the camptown with its siren blaring. unfortunately there are a lot of potholes in the camptown roads. everytime a pot hole was hit, the car would come to a screeching halt, the siren would go off, the driver would go through the pot hole, and then the siren would go back on. just imagine a siren blaring for two seconds, then a pot hole being hit, siren goes off, three seconds or so to get over the pot hole, siren back on. repeat down an entire road. absolutely ridiculous.

12/8/09 a thief in the night

so we have thieves at mants'ase. some of the villagers are coming in the night. and what are they stealing, you ask? clothes? no. food? no. chicken poo. we have villagers coming into the orphanage at night to steal chicken poo. and what are they doing with their chicken poo? fertilizer? no. they are feeding it to the cows. there is a small amount of grain in the chicken poo. there are also worms in the chicken poo. no wonder all the cows end up diseased!
hmm. what else is going on in my life? my dogs are growing. some of the kids are becoming less afraid of them. i had a major breakthrough with one of the 6 year olds, moeketsi. he not only comes near the dogs willingly now, he will pet them with a big grin on his face. other than that, i've started tutoring one kid in maths. and i'm doing some intensive english reading practice. i had a 15 year old reading a book made for a 1st grade reading level here. it took a few hours to get through sentences like "some sharks are big", but she did it, and i think she felt a sense of accomplishment. i'm realizing that the kids are never taught the sounds of letters, so many of them will look at a word like "big" and say "table" or something, just as a guess. so i'm going to start going back to the basics with most of the kids, to teach them the sounds of letters and letter combinations.

2/8/2009 i really am going to be better about this. promise

i will start writing in my blog again. i will, gosh darn it!
so, i got back in to lesotho on thursday. the flight was pretty good, other than a screaming baby sitting near me. the people sitting to my right and left were normal-sized, the food was palatable (for the most part), etc.
i spent friday in maseru, hung out with some of the new volunteers (at least one is a total nerd - hooray!), played on the interwebbies. for with whom i've discussed pride and prejudice and zombies, i watched the trailer for the sequel book sense and sensibility and sea monsters. you know, i'm a little skeptical, and it's written by a different author than p&p&z, but we'll see...
i left for mohale's hoek on saturday. popped by the airport to see off an american girl named dominique. she came to visit mants'ase and liked it so much that she's going back to the states for a month and then returning to work at the orphanage for a year. i think this will be part of her university program. so, there will be another american there, and she seems to have some cool ideas. i'm excited to be working with her.
got back to mohale's hoek. stayed in town at barbara and bill's. they decided, saturday afternoon, that we should take a drive around the maphutseng valley because it's right behind mohale's hoek camp town, it's really pretty, and we can see the last of the snow. unfortunately, the last of the snow makes the mud road slippery. we hit a pretty sketchy patch going down hill. the car slid most of the way down sideways. this is probably not a safe way to drive. but after that, everthing was cool.
my dogs have grown an enormous amount. one of them (my former ewok) is no longer recognizable as his former self. i think he will actually end up being a pretty dog. it looks like maybe he has some spaniel or golden retriever in his history somewhere. the other is starting to form a ridge down his neck. hints of a rodesian ridgeback, perhaps?
i made it back out to the orphanage today, and hit the ground running. i had to catch up with all the kids, then i read the wizard of oz to some children while others were bathing. then i had to unpack, after which i had to sit down and have a chat with a kid who'd stabbed another kid in the butt last night. apparently they'd just been playing. so i got to talk about the dangers of playing with knives to a 15-year old boy.
oh, and we got a new girl at the orphanage, making our numbers now 54, or 4 over capacity. she's 11, and an abuse victim. so i met her, too.
and now i'm about to refresh my physics skills so i can help one of the girls here actually pass science this year. wish me luck.

I’m still a slacker: 20/12/08

So, I’m getting really bad with this blog thing. I think it’s been about a month and a half since I last wrote. In that time we’ve elected a new president (hooray), had Thanksgiving (we had stuffing – someone’s mother sent it from the states), and I’ve been to my second Cherryfest, among other things. Cherryfest was, once again, a bunch of boers with mullets, women with crazy make-up, and other such classiness. Seriously, a woman standing in line in front of me to get into the festival had bright purple eyeshadow all the way up to her eyebrows. Does that ever look good? But there was a lot of free samples of alcohol, and I got my hazelnut liqueur and some cherry liqueur, which is exciting. And I found tapenade, which I haven’t had in FOREVER. It was really exciting. Food generally excites me. Well, good food at least. While up north for cherryfest, I stayed at a volunteer’s house, which was cool because I really like her and don’t get to see her too much. Traveling north is a pain, and expensive. Taxi drivers are really annoying. On the way back down I had two taxi conductors fighting over who got to take me in their taxis. My arms were literally being pulled in different directions. But I made it home, so that’s good.
I’ve also been working at mant’sase Children’s home in qhalasi for the past couple months, trying to get their library functional. Mant’sase is an orphanage run by an ngo, and so it actually does get funding for things, and they have a new director who seems really cool, so I’ve got a lot of hope for the library. I have a lot of ideas of what I want to do with it, and I might actually be able to get them done. And there will definitely be someone there to run the library. I might also help with the eccd there. The new director was a teacher at a Montessori school, so she’s really focused on getting the school working well.
Things at my actual site aren’t so successful. People in my village are kinda lazy, and I honestly have no idea why they wanted a volunteer other than as a status symbol, unless they were hoping to get money out of me. This is actually a big problem with volunteers. Organizations apply for volunteers in the hope that 1. they will fix all problems without asking the locals to actually do any work 2. give a bunch of money or 3. will be status symbols to make them look good. It’s kinda reverse racism, and it makes me feel really awkward, “look at us, we have a white person here.” In short, I’m not sure how much work I’m going to be doing in the future with my village. I’m having a meeting with my support group about this hopefully tomorrow, and I’ve talked with peace corps and they might be coming out after the holidays to talk with my village. Basically this all started because I have been trying to hold meetings to get the library in my village functional, to find someone to run the library, and no one is coming to the meetings. On top of that, my support group said they wanted an organization called new start to come out for an hiv education and testing day. So I met with the organization, spent a couple weeks getting things organized, talking with my support group, getting them to make announcements in the village, etc. and after all that no one, not even my support group members who originally said they wanted new start to come, showed up. And I’m getting tired of working when no one else wants to put in the effort. The one exception was the kids in the village. I wanted to put on a play about hiv and aids for the education day, and so my ‘m’e helped me to translate an applicable story into Sesotho and I had my kids act out the play. They got really excited about it, memorized their lines, came to rehearsals, got costumes, and even began to write their own play. And that’s great. So I might try to organize another hiv education day in January (with the help of the ministry of health) for them if nothing else, because they should be able to show off their work.
I spent a few days this past week at a friend’s site helping to paint a map of the world on the wall of a school. I actually got to draw northern Russia onto the wall because no one else would both draw and get up on the slightly sketchy ladder. I’ll just say that Russia now looks a little unique. But, as most kids here can’t even find Lesotho on a map I guess it doesn’t matter too much.
And I had to buy a dress for a wedding I’m going to on the 27th. My host sister invited me to her friend’s wedding. I’m a little nervous about going because apparently the friend is really excited about me coming and keeps asking if I’m really going to show up. I’m worried I’m going to be put on show as the honorary white girl. Hopefully not. And I loathe shopping. To anyone who knows me, that shouldn’t come as a surprise, but shopping for a dress was a wretched experience. I found one that was ok, and only r110 (about $11) but was strapless, and I was really going for something kinda conservative, as I figure I’m going to attract enough attention anyways. And I have a hilarious tan line. So then I had to find a wrap of some sort, and one that would match my slippers, which are silver (and my favorite part of the outfit). I’m sure there will be pictures of this monstrosity. So yeah, I’m going to the wedding for Christmas. It’s actually in south Africa, in qwaqwa (sp?) just north of Lesotho. Wish me luck

ann