Dear Family and Friends;
I’ve been thinking a lot about the incredible luxury of central heating lately. Autumn is here and the days are filled with warm sunshine, temperatures climbing to the pleasant 60’s & 70’s. The fields are a sepia palette of rust and gold as sorghum and maize continue to ripen and dry for harvesting. But the nights bring on icy winds. On many mornings light frost is everywhere.
I think I told you about my heating arrangements. I have propane gas tanks; two of them. They’re huge. They look like the bombs that E. Pickens rode down to global destruction in “Dr. Strangelove”. During training I made about every mistake one can make with these potential bombs including leaving both the tank valve open and a hotplate burner on – unlit – while I visited the latrine. Upon returning, not only was my room filled with gas but also the entire house to which it was attached was primed to ignite. The mother of the family with whom I was living ran out, advised me of the peril we were all in and proceeded to turn off my tank and fumigate the place. She saved the day and a lesson was learned.
I now have an almost anal procedure that I follow to light both my cooking burner and the heater – and to turn them off. So far, so good. My current issue with my heating and cooking system is refilling the darn gas tanks. The tanks, even empty, weigh a ton. They can only be refilled in town – way down the mountain. Here’s the current procedure. A herd boy and I hitch up the oxen and load the empty tank into a cart. We take this to a point where it can be off loaded to a pickup truck. I have arrangements with several pickup owners in the valley. In town we exchange the empty tank for a full one and return to a prearranged ox-cart pickup. It’s a hassle to say the least. As a result I’ve become very frugal about heat. I find myself hanging around cooking fires outside at night listening to long stories told in a language I understand only minimally then scurrying into my hut, jumping into my sleeping bag resplendent in my mittens and stocking cap.
Can this, I ask myself, really be Africa? This Mountain Kingdom has a ski resort that I definitely plan to visit this winter and will report upon to you. I’ll just bet their rental gear is circa long ago – we’ll see.
In many ways living here is what life must have been like in rural America in the early 1900’s – without the propane tanks. To the villagers, my hut is very luxurious. Clean, gas heat is considered hugely extravagant. On cold days I always turn on the heat for visitors and they love it. They sit huddled around my gas heater, munching PB&J’s, sipping tea and trying to think of reasons to stay all day. Most huts are heated with wood and dung fires - inside. It’s terrible. The roofs theoretically absorb the smoke but they don’t really. People sit inside breathing in dense smoke. In bad weather women cook over these indoor fires with babes wrapped to their backs – their tiny lungs filling with particulate matter. Lung and breathing problems are very common here.
In rereading this letter, I think I’m a little depressed. It’s been a lousy week. The food shipments that were supposed to come from the UN Food for Work Program didn’t arrive. The local distribution official, after a month of assurances that she would put our village on her areas’ distribution list, decided that we really belonged to another district. I wanted to strangle her. It means starting all over again with proposals, justifications - mountains of paperwork. In the meantime we continue to bury heartbreakingly bone thin corpses.
On the bright side, the cooperative is doing well and I’m working with another PCV to initiate HIV/AIDS training for 54 home health care workers, 9 sangomas and 7 community leaders. HIV/AIDS and poverty go so hand in hand here. If we can in any way initiate the behavioral interventions necessary to stop the spread of this disease we will be taking a positive step. I’m excited about the training program and will spend most of next week in Maseru lining up speakers, resources and funding. I also just spent a most enjoyable day writing a constitution with the executive committee from the newly formed Menkhoaneng Community Development Association. This will be the umbrella group that directs the Co-operative, the construction group that builds the toilets for the school and the workers who are being trained in traditional building methods for the Cultural Village project. We will register this new constitution (which is very much like a business plan) with the central government and become an official CBO (Community Based Organization). Hopefully, this will allow this association to run effectively for many years after I leave. The meeting, which took place in my hut today for nine hours, was a joy. We had both of my laptops going full blast, the constitution being written in both English (by me with much serious input by community leaders) then translated into Sesotho (by a brilliant local teacher). I was able to serve wonderful food – Bear Creek Farms minestrone soup, steamed bread, chocolate bars and cans of soft drinks – it gave us all a feeling of affluence. The group left just as the sun was setting into a colorful sky graced with a bright full moon.
I just read an excerpt from Jeffery Sachs book, “The End of Poverty” and was hugely inspired. My sister sent it to me from the March 14th issue of Time. Sachs runs the UN Millennium Fund and has stunningly brilliant ideas on how to end world poverty. It would just take 0.7% of the GNP of donor countries to halve poverty by 2015 – sure sounds good to me.
Tomorrow is going to be really fun. I’m going to the Cultural Village Project to take photos of all the volunteer workers. They’ve been primed to show up spiffy. We’re going to make official badges for everybody. They’ll say, “Moshoeshoe I Cultural Village Volunteer”. We’re hoping they will be worn as a badge of honor.
With love from the currently quite chilly heart of Africa,
Peggi
