travels and work...

Well, a lot has happened since I last wrote, mainly because of laziness, over work and lack of internet, I have let this blog fall short of my initial expectations, but I’ve moved into a new place with fantastic internet so I hope to be a bit better in the future.

Anyway, here we go.

Work has gone from me trying to figure out what I’m doing, feeling under-prepared and actually slightly bored because nothing was working out. And then at the beginning of this last week, I felt completely overwhelmed and still not certain what I’m doing. My boss Kathy came back last week and rescued me from what seemed like piles of work so I can focus in my attention. Right now I’m organizing a Children’s HIV testing event in Butha Buthe, which is the northernmost district of Lesotho. I’m planning a family day with prizes and games and entertainment. Again, not sure how to do that but we’ll see in a month. In addition to that we’re in the middle of choosing campers for Camp ‘Mamohato, and setting up a gardening project for patients on WFP aid. For your information, basically the UNWFP gives out food packages to people who don’t even have enough to feed themselves. People become dependant and the cycle is vicious in that no one ever graduates off the program, so I guess teaching gardening will help that. The goal is self sufficiency, but we’ll see if it works out.

Weekends have been mostly full of relaxing here in Maseru and tasting the local expat life. Things in Maseru are strange. There are only five restaurants and really not that much to do on weekends. However, every NGO known to man-kind is here, and with that a slue of American or British aid workers to hang out with and get to know. Everyone from EGPAF, PIH, ICAP, BIPAI, K4L, MAF, m2m… I’m just listing these because you’ll walk into a room and here hundreds of acronyms being tossed around. The parties are quite fun and everyone is actually really interesting (it does take a certain type of person to fly off to Africa for several years), so I’m not complaining, although essentially 1am rolls around and it starts to look like the basement of TI. Every weekend there is a Braii (barbeque), a brunch (which are always phenomenal, with everyone making their own brand of brownie) or one of the Baylor doctors is leaving back for the United States and is throwing some sort of farewell party. So you can get kind of stuck just hanging around white people and staying in Maseru. These parties can get quite elaborate though.

Two weeks ago one of the PAC doctors was heading back to Hawaii to start up a new medical practice, after spending a year in Botswana and one in Lesotho. For her send off, they had arranged a fireworks show. These fireworks had been bought illegally from some “Chinese store in South Africa” and these things were definitely illegal looking. They were so big that I think you probably needed a permit to light the things off and at least some sort of expertise in pyrotechnics (one of the things sailed from the downstairs garden past the deck, just feet away from our faces). Anyway, it was fun and no one got hurt. Yay!

Okay, back to what I’ve been up to. After this farewell party, I made a trip out of the country (the first time I left Lesotho since I got here) to Bloemfontein and it was a nice change of scenery. The drive was interesting, mostly looking like something out of Alberta or Iowa, and not all that African looking. Although, as I would come to see, I was not entering a real African town anyway. Bloemfontein, is described as the last Afrikaner stronghold in South Africa and is the judicial capital of South Africa. It’s about 120km away, and at 140km/h I was there in no time. South African highways are amazing, and like the infrastructure of the country itself, they are far far more advanced compared to its northern neighbours. Bloem is a nice town, but with not much to do expect to go to the two local malls. They had all the amenities of an American mall, and hey! White people too! Although I do admit it was nice to feel less like a minority for a change. It kind of sucked that I drove all that way to see Bloemfontein and the only thing we did was go to a mall, but that seems like that’s pretty much all to do. I had some ice cream (a true rarity in Lesotho), watched a movie (Lesotho has no movie theatre) and had some pesto pizza (again, can’t find pesto (pre-made or basil leaves, pine nuts or parmesan cheese, none of these three delicious treats, in my new adoptive country). After a gourmet South African day, we headed back to a gorgeous African sunset (they really are awesome in Africa). Anyway, this brings me to another point. The border system is quite strange in Lesotho. You’d think because Lesotho is an island nation inside of South Africa that things would be a bit easier to go in and out, however it’s still complicated and irritating and always busy. I waited in an hour long line up to have my passport stamped. They had one person working the border on a Saturday evening with 200+ people waiting. The boarder patrol also decided to take a break right as I was about to hand in my passport. After getting through the South African part, you have to go to the Lesotho one, which requires another line up. They also allow peddlers in, who at every step want to help you fill out forms for a tip. One Mosotho man grabbed my passport, and again, I was feeling sassy so he received no tip and a harsh look for grabbing the precious document.

So back to work, I’m organizing this testing event in Butha Buthe (boo-ta boo-tay). Its about a two hour drive north of Maseru, and the drive is absolutely beautiful. Again, Lesotho is a bit hard describe in what it looks like, the first leg looked like something from the prairies, and then it had tall birch trees like something from France, and then I’d take a corner and find a huge table top mountain. Kids spotted the highway every turn, and of course were eager for a ride, but if you stop, all of a sudden you become a taxi service for about a dozen people, so I had to keep driving. I wasn’t entirely sure how to go about arranging my testing event, so the district invited me to an HIV “stakeholders” meeting, where essentially every NGO and hospital involved with HIV in the area was invited. I pulled in, slightly sweaty from the hot two hour drive, and got up as the first speaker to explain what I wanted to do. I’m pretty sure half of the people there didn’t understand what I said, but I’m sure things will work out next week when I ask them to start helping out.

I met with the doctor out there, who toted me around the district in her four wheel drive. The road up to the district was great, but basically unconquerable in my small Toyota. “This is a rental”, she described, so we kind of just let loose and plowed down rocky terrain to get to the local HIV clinics. I just about fell out of my seat but we got there in record time and I was able to meet all the doctors and nurses in the area so I can get their help. I had scheduled a meeting back in Maseru later that day, but in attempt to whisk off quickly, I got a flat tire. I managed to roll into the gas station, where in a true prissy West Van/Princeton form I paid the people there to fix it so I didn’t have to worry about it. Unfortunately, the flat tire made me late to arrive in the capital and along the way back I learned about the many wind storms that hit the country… so I was almost thrown off the road, but it was neat, as blankets of beige and red sand storms engulfed the highway. So I’m learning all the ins and outs of the Lesotho roads, seeing the country and getting work done at the same time.

So aside from work and visitng the few restaurants in town, I was able to make it out to South Africa again this past weekend. I went to Clarens, which is another Afrikaans town about two hours outside of Lesotho. Clarens is best described as a nice gourmet jaunt from Lesotho: wine stores, a small brewery, and lots of art places. Kind of a neat town, described as the Santa Fe of South Africa and it was quite beautiful, a small valley cradled by table top mountains. The Baylor crew had a nice lunch there and just hung around for the day. Its really hard to describe what the food selection is like in Lesotho, because its fine, but its missing some of those things that you just start to miss. So we all had a plate of asparagus and mussels and were quite satisfied.

Next weekend I’m going to try and take a trip to Kruger National Park, but it’s quite the drive… eight hours, just east of Mozambique. But there are lions, cheetahs and giraffes. Hell yah.

The last couple of weeks I have been lulled into a sense of security and self-containment in the expat life. A couple of weeks ago I was driving back to my place when I pulled up to the neighbour’s place… the kid in the front yard was playing with a gun. I’m not sure if it was a real one or not, but he was showing all of his friends and I stepped on it and furiously sped away from the place. This week, the same neighbour had a dog that died, and instead of burying it or something, they just left it on a pile of trash in the front yard and it stunk up the neighbourhood for a week. On my back from work and from hanging out with the other doctors, I pass by the local prostitutes almost everynight. A couple of nights ago one of the jumped after my car and grabbed the handle and chased after me. Of course I sped off again, but these couple of incidences remind me that despite my attempt to escape the realities of Africa, that despite how very American things appear here, there are other parts of the country that are just plain different. Even at the clinic, I run the fun things and some of the testing, but I don’t get to see the real problems with the HIV patients. Last week Raj, one of the doctors at Baylor was working at the local hospital and had two patients die on him. I’ve heard that the numbers get even worse, with one of the docs with 20 deaths in two weeks! Things like this just don’t happen in Canada and the US. I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that things in Africa can be self contained and that you can turn a blind eye to the bad things, but they are definitely there. There are so many wonderful things about the country, but ignoring all the bad things will not help to change its problems.

Until the next time,

Stu