… have been greatly exaggerated.
(February 20) : It’s been a long time since I updated anything here. The last month has been a little strange for me – my supervisor and a significant amount of the staff were transferred, and after a long delay Sempe’s replacement arrived this week. The delay in updating was certainly not intentional, I simply have been moving around the country a lot in the last month, and haven’t had much time to stop and write about what has been going on.
I decided to take some time while waiting for the new supervisor to arrive, to travel around Lesotho a bit and see what some other volunteers are doing at their sites. It was a good trip, both to see how things are going for everyone and to see more of this country. I now have at least driven through nine of Lesotho’s ten districts. and spent time in seven. For such a small country on the map, it is surprisingly large when you are traveling in it.
We’ve started to have some members of the new CHED group coming in June joining the Lesotho facebook group. It’s strange to think that we are going to be the old group so soon. On one hand it feels like we just got here, on the other, like I’ve never known a life outside of this one.
(February 23): With little happening at my site and a lot of time on my hands, I’ve had ample opportunity to catch up on my reading. The variety of books I’ve read in the last two weeks is illuminating, both of the variety available and the willingness to read anything that is part of Peace Corps. An incomplete list would include this following:
Reinhold Niebuhr, Prodigal Summer, Sandman vol. 1 and 2, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a Star Trek pulp novel, The Wisdom of Whores: Brothels and the Business of AIDS, and The Red Tent. If anyone can find a theme in that list, you are better at pattern recognition than I.
(February 28): Down in Maseru for the weekend. The recent changes at work have left me a bit in the lurch, trying to figure out where I fit in with the new staff and how I will procede over the next few months. This has led to a lot of thinking, pondering, and, let’s be honest, complaining with other volunteers about our collective problems. It’s been a good weekend though, giving me a chance to talk out the things that have been bothering me, get reassured that I wasn’t going crazy making mountains out of molehills, and recommit to the next year here.
