Saturday, April 10, 2004

Around 3am, all us girls were awake and Daniella was talking about her dream involving poodles coming into the tent and biting us. Allison was hungry so she actually got out of bed to get some bread and an apple. I put on some socks because I was freezing. We finally fell asleep again around 4:00.

Allison was awake before 6:00, and then Daniella and I woke up just at 7:00. Allison finally figured out the stove...sort of...and put coffee on while we all sat around in our chairs watching her. After the coffee was ready Allison made some pancakes. They cooked well, and tasted yummy despite the slight bitter after-taste (the result of a bit too much baking soda).

After breakfast, us girls wanted to go explore and find where "the river" was that Daniella had heard mentioned the day before. Daan decided that he would climb to the top of the mountain we were camping in front of. So we went off to explore and maybe 30 minutes later came across “the river" which was actually wetland. But it was a really beautiful wetland with weeping willows overhanging it and in it.



When we realized that we were not going to get to swim in a river, we decided that we would try to explore the valley on the other side. While we were walking along the river trying to look for a place to cross it, we ended up seeing a huge hole in the side of a mountain with people sitting in it, so we changed our course and headed for that. So glad we did. It took us maybe an hour to get up to it...with a bit of rough climbing to do it. But it was well worth it and a really spectacular wonder to experience.





After sitting in the hole and enjoying the shade for a while, we all started to get hungry and so decided to eat out at the restaurant again. So we went to get Daan and then headed to The Saucery. It turns out that they serve breakfast until 2pm, so breakfast it was. We went back to our campsite and laid down in the sun which resulted in a short nap and a pretty bad burn (just on my lower back amazingly enough). But eventually we all woke up and started to play hearts…which lasted for about five hours. It was exactly the kind of afternoon I needed.

Since it was starting to get a little chilly already, we all decided that a campfire would be really nice (we didn't have one the night before) and so Allison and I went to go find the little boys we had seen selling bundles of wood earlier. So we started walking down the road looking for them and when we got to reception, asked where we might find wood and they just so happened to be selling it there, so we bought 50K of wood for 25R and Allison and I had to lug it up the mountainside. It didn't even take a whole five minutes before we had the fire going. We all sat around and stared at it before we decided that we were all starving.


Of course, even though Allison had spent about 400R on camp food, we ate at the restaurant yet again. I had quite possibly the BEST vegetarian lasagne I have EVER had. It was well worth the 20R. Anyway, we went right back to our campsite and started our fire up again. After re-staking our tent in the CORRECT direction, we toasted our hands and feet and ALSO some REAL S'mores at the fire. Us Americans were right, though…they were, in fact, slightly different. But they were yummy. I only wish I could have somehow captured how amazing the sky is. After getting over the initial confusion that results from the fact that the big dipper and all the stars are backwards, the only thing you notice is how incredible it is…and not a single cloud.


We warmed ourselves until about 9:30 and then we were ready for bed. This time, though, we were all so tired and we actually were not on top of each other and we wore tons of layers to bed so we wouldn't get cold. It was a much more pleasant sleep...despite the fact that I couldn't lay on my back because of my sunburn.

  Friday, April 09, 2004

Easter is a HUGE deal here, so everything had shut down by 1:00 on Thursday. Good Friday is a national holiday as is Easter Monday. So being completely deserving of a vacation and having been presented with the perfect opportunity for one, Daniella, Allison, and I headed up to the music festival at Rustler’s Valley in South Africa around 10 this morning (Daan came up later).

We had a pretty fun road trip. About an hour into our trip, we passed this guy who was hitch-hiking who I had seen at Lancer's during my first week in Lesotho. He was a Brazilian guy with a big hiking pack on his back and was very hippy-like and clearly going to the music fest and you could just tell he was harmless, so we picked him up. It turns out that he has been working with a group of youth in Botswana, teaching them how to express themselves and their country through art. Very cool guy. Then we got to the road we needed to be at (after we passed it and went 10K too far). This was a very bumpy dirt road that was 12K to our destination. So it was a bit of a crazy ride (and the best part was that the speed limit was marked at 70K...which is impossible).


We each paid our 200R at the entrance (at which point our Brazilian hitch-hiker friend jumped out and left his bag at reception as collateral while he went off to find his friend) and then we went to our mountainside campsite...just in front of a group that had a massive tie-dyed shade tent set up. Everything was pretty spread out though so everyone had plenty of personal space.



So as soon as we arrived, we set up Allison's tent and put all our things inside. We laid out a tarp and sat our chairs on the tarp and broke out a bottle of wine, which of course we had to drink straight from the bottle since we had all forgotten cups. After relaxing a bit, Allison decided to teach us hearts so we played a few games of that and before we knew it, it was 6:00.


So we went down to check out the music and it turns out that there was not live music...at all. It was all DJs and all techno...all weekend. The Easter Music Festival is actually just a cover-up for what should be called the Easter Hippie/Raver Festival. I have never seen so many dreds in my life!!! After a tiny bit of dancing, we discovered a little restaurant...The Saucery. So we went there and I got “chips” (AKA fries) which were awesome and we were all so excited because we thought we would have to cook in the dark when we got back. And the funniest part about it is that our waiter was our Brazilian hitch-hiker friend who was apparently working for his admission. So we ate and then decided that we were actually tired (about 8:00 by now) and that we should go back to the campsite and find Daan.

So we went back to the campsite...getting lost and having to go through a barbed wire fence (at a safe spot, of course). But eventually, we made it back to our campsite where Daan was all set up. At this point, Allison decided to get her tiny stove to work so we could make S'mores. But she couldn't get it to work and finally gave up when she burnt herself. So we ate some cold S'mores, with pink and white marshmallows, Digestives (a brand of cookie), and Cadbury chocolate. Us Americans agreed that they just weren't the same...Daan insisted that it was just because of the fact that we were eating them cold. I'm not so sure.

Then one of the guys from the group behind us with very impressive skills starting twirling fire. And the group beside us had formed a drum circle so we had some pretty good entertainment. Anyway, we walked down to the bathroom and brushed our teeth and then were ready for bed (by about 9:30). The three of us girls slept in Allison's two-man tent. Of course, we didn't realize that the tent was on a slight slope until we got in and realized that we had staked the tent upside down, but we slept in it anyway with our shoulders at the small end and very much so on top of one another. I fell asleep almost instantly, but woke up maybe 15 minutes into it when the wind started. It was SO intense. The wind was making the tent flap like crazy. Us girls were laughing hysterically at how much our tent was shaking...and then we heard Daan shouting something in Dutch. So Allison calls out, “Are you okay, Daan?” And he says “NO!” And she says, “Do you need help?” And he says, “YES!!!” So Allison and Daniella got out to help him while I manned the tent. Daan hadn't staked his tent earlier, so when the wind started to get bad, he got out of his tent to get the stakes from his car. His tent had its own agenda and decided to blow away about 20 meters. And of course he's in shorts this whole time and the girls had to help stake down the tent. But miraculously it never rained and the wind stopped soon enough. I had a really terrible night's sleep (and I have the bruises on my hips to prove it), but all in all, it’s been a pretty exciting day.

  Thursday, April 08, 2004

Is it April already? So here’s the deal.

The Sunday after I posted, I went to a big HASH braai in Ladybrand.


That was the last time I even had a chance to breath for a long while. That Monday marked the start of eleven consecutive days working between 15 and 18 hours each day. But even if I DID have time to blog, it wouldn’t have mattered much since my modem was struck by lightning and I didn’t have access to internet until yesterday.

My new roomie and partner in crime, Kim, arrived the Wednesday before the workshop (a week ago). While she was lying awake in bed her first night (suffering from major jet lag) she heard me say in my sleep, “I can’t get it all done.” Needless to say, I put her to work right away. I already had her running all over Maseru by Thursday. Besides the fact that she has taken so much of the workload off me, it’s really nice just to have some pleasant company again.

So most of my work involved preparing for the workshop, but I did conduct some interviews for PSI as well. I could tell you all the boring details of the work that occupied my time, but I would much rather just tell you about the oh-so-wonderful product that resulted. The workshop could NOT have been better. We had great facilitators and amazing participants. There were more than 60 participants from 4 educational institutions, 2 hospitals, 6 government ministries, 3 businesses, 4 NGOs, and 3 religious organizations. All these people were mushed together and forced to work in small groups to come up with individual action plans that address some aspect of HIV/AIDS. I couldn’t believe the enthusiasm! The participants were even working through their breaks. One of the groups even decided that they loved the concept so much that they wanted to organize themselves and go into their villages. Of course the important part is the actual implementation of the plans, so I will know its true success when I follow up with the participants in the beginning of May. But as far as workshops go, it was a definite success.

By yesterday (the last day of the three-day workshop), I was BEAT. I went to bed at 9:30 last night and didn’t wake up until 7:30 this morning. But that was just the BEGINNING of my recovery since I leave tomorrow for a mini-vacation!