Peggi Tabor Letter #2 - More About Peace Corps Training
Dear Friends and Family,
I’m writing this letter from the home of a fellow PCV in the beautiful town of Leribe. Our group is scattered throughout the country just now spending a couple of days with current, more tenured volunteers. It has been wonderful –
there is life after our “boot camp” is over. I sit here, in a house with both electricity and a computer, sipping a glass of wine as I write this. Life is indeed very good.
But, what I really want to tell you about in this email is what life is like where I am now living in the small mountain village of Bokone. Sundays in the Village are especially nice. It is the only day when we have no classes or scheduled “cultural experiences”. Living with these kind, hospitable villagers presents both a simple and complex view of life in rural Africa. The simplicity comes from the lack of “westernized” influences; the sense of communal oneness and the subsistence farming and herding that support the family with whom I live.
My room, in which I sleep, study, cook, do laundry and bathe is perhaps 8×10. It is an addition to the main house and is made of cinderblock with a corrugated tin roof. I can see the sky between the top of the blocks and the roof and when I wake in the morning frost covers my metal ceiling and any water left out has a thin layer of ice on it. I can’t tell you how comfortable and happy I am living in this tiny room. It makes no sense–but it is true. I sit studying at my little table with the door wide open to a breathtaking view of house garden, maize fields and beyond the majestic Maluti Mountains. Animals are all “free range” here. Huge African oxen pull carts loaded with the maize harvest down the lane that fronts this property. Chickens wander around pecking for stray kernels, many followed by their chicks. My family owns both sheep and cattle and the older sons take them daily from their stone kraals to the fields to graze. It is very African, very peaceful and very lovely.
The complexity of this village life is, unfortunately, primarily tragic. It is focused on the realities of both poverty and the HIV/AIDS pandemic that haunt this peaceful place. The HIV/AIDS issue here is huge beyond imagining. It impacts every family, every day. Here are a few sobering statistics:
- A Basotho who turned 15 in 2000 has a 74% chance of becoming HIV positive by his or her 50th birthday.
- Africa houses 70% of global HIV/AIDS cases. The southern Sahara region, this region, has the five most highly infected countries – Lesotho, with a 32% to 41% infection rate is #4 and by far the poorest country challenged to fight this terrible plague.
- In Lesotho today there are a minimum of 330,000 adults living with the HIV virus. In this tiny country of less than 2 million people, 70 die every day of the virus. Those 25,550 annual deaths join an already high death rate acerbated by poverty, famine and lack of medical care.
HIV/AIDS affects absolutely everything. In my work, as a Community Economic Development advisor, I must face the reality that there is no institutional memory. In a country where written, defined processes are not the norm the knowledge of how to run businesses, ministries and other cultural organizations dies with the leaders of these institutions. Make no mistake; the people dying are good people. They are dedicated individuals intent on helping their country and their communities and they are dying —in droves. It is heartbreaking.
As hopeless and frustrating as this is, there are good things happening here and the Peace Corps is one of them. One of the biggest challenges we face is convincing people that solutions are possible. We focus on the positive. For instance, over half the people in this country are negative – and, people care. The government is directing a large percentage of its scarce resources towards HIV/AIDS education. This is, after all, a preventable, stoppable disease. I now know more about safe sex and condoms than I care to mention.
The current campaign, which we Peace Corps volunteers (PCV’s) are taking to every village is the ABC’s of AIDS prevention – i.e. ABSTAIN, BE FAITHFUL, USE CONDOMS. I’m most comfortable discussing A&B and am working on a rather impassioned plea (in Sesotho, of course) on these issues. Demonstrating effective condom application, using either carrots or cucumbers, is just not something I am comfortable doing. We have, however, lots of PCV’s who are great at it! God bless them!
Speaking of God, I’ve been going to church every Sunday (don’t faint, siblings). I totally enjoy it. The singing is outstanding – Lesotho is known within Africa as the country of song – everybody can sing, and harmonically! Also, Sunday services, outside of funerals are the social event of the week and a great opportunity to meet and talk to all the villagers. In Bokone, I attend a tiny Catholic church. It is a satellite church to the main Mission, which is a two-hour trek across the mountains from the village. For the past two weeks hardly anyone was in this tiny church. Last Sunday, the chief priest from the mission, Father Gabriel, conducted a full Mass and the church was packed. I was the only white person in the congregation. During his sermon he came to me, introduced me (I understood very little of this), pulled me to my feet and invited me to speak. I said every darn thing I know how to say in Sesotho – it was pathetic and inane including such remarks as “your children are beautiful” and “you ride your horses well” but it received a huge, if undeserved, ovation.
So many things that happen here warm my heart. One cannot help but love these kind and welcoming people. So I’ve decided that since 95% of Basotho are Catholic, I will be totally participative while here. As a pragmatic and hopeful agnostic with strong Buddhist leanings, I figure if there is a God, she will surely approve and if there isn’t it is still a culturally appropriate way to integrate into the community. Interesting events since my last email include:
Corn shucking: The all-important maize harvest is being brought in.
Families spend the days in the fields hand pulling the ears off the stalks. Wagonloads of corn are brought by ox-drawn carts and dumped on the large stone patios which front most houses in the villages. Here the older women sit in circles around huge piles of cobs. They hold a cob on a flat stone and strike it with another flat stone. Kernels fly and by the end of the day there is a big pile of kernels that are carried in baskets on their heads to a central area where they are loaded on other carts to go to the mill to be ground into meal that is the basic of the dietary staple – papa.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been helping the women shuck after school. It’s a very companionable way to spend the early evenings and I am making some friends – I’m getting quite good at it except for the basket on the head part – my attempts at which cause gales of laughter among my fellow shuckers.
My first big boo-boo: We all cross train in one another’s specialities. Last week we were learning how to conduct HIV/AIDS workshops for youth. This included learning a bunch of games. One of them was a “tag” sort of game. While trying not to get “tagged” I tripped and fell into a nasty barbed wire fence. It became an ad-hoc first aid session. One PCV ran to her nearby house to get the big medical kit we are all issued and another PCV, a RN, demonstrated how to clean, treat and bandage wounds without touching blood. Blood is a very big bug-a-boo here. None of us want to get near it. She, Susan, did a great job and we all got a good lesson in first aid. I received the additional insight to avoid running backwards, over rough terrain in a long skirt.
Royal watching: You may have heard that Price Harry was here for a few months. He spent much of his time working and visiting PC sites. I had the chance to stay at one, an orphanage, a couple of weeks ago. The Mantase Orphanage is run by a really outstanding PCV. Her name is Miranda Lopez. In two years she has turned this place around. It is now a model site with solar power, great organic gardens used to feed the orphans and beautiful traditional Basotho architecture of round, stone, thatched-roofed rondavels that are
reminiscent of the Hobbits Village in “Lord of the Rings”. Anyway, Prince Harry worked there for a couple of weeks and Miranda reports that he is really a nice guy. He fit in with all the PCV’s with whom he hung out throughout his stay in Lesotho. He is an artistic sort of guy and is not all that happy with his dad’s royal command to attend a military school. He would rather follow his mother’s example of good public works. While he was here the BBC filmed a documentary about his visit. It is supposed to air in the US. If anyone sees it and can, would you please copy it? Everybody here is dying to see it.
These emails are really long, aren’t they? There is still so much more I would like to tell but it can wait until next time. If you have time, please reply to this and tell me what is going on in your life. As interesting as this place is, I still feel very, very far away and yearn for news from home. May you each stay very well and completely happy.
Khotso, Pula, Nala (Peace, Rain, Prosperity)
Peggi
