14. Still Living

Hello? Is... is this thing working? It's been so long since I've been on the internet that I'm not even sure how to use it anymore.

I've been in Lesotho for a week now with my teammates Marion, Liza, and Jillian. We have encountered our fair share of obstacles in our brief time here so far. For example, we did not have running water for our first two days here in Mokhotlong, we have had no contact with the outside world since we arrived, and every day we must defend ourselves from the flocks of children on the streets asking us for sweets.

On the bright side, the people here are very friendly. Perhaps too friendly. On our first walk through the town, a man named Francis approached Liza and told her, "I would like to be in love with one of you. How do I do that?" He followed this up by appearing on our doorstep later that night with his friend and trying to convince Jillian that polygamy was an acceptable practice here in Lesotho.

One thing I did not expect to find in Lesotho was that every grocery store is in fact owned by a Chinese family. What are the Chinese doing in Lesotho? I have no idea. And when I asked them, they didn't seem to know either. One of the men referred to Mokhotlong as a place where "birds don't even sh*t," a Chinese phrase meaning "in the middle of nowhere." What a charming picture.

So far, I have really enjoyed our stay in Lesotho. The people we work with at GROW are entirely too nice, and although I'm sure that we are doing our part to promote the loud American stereotype everywhere we go, they seem to put up with it very well. Tomorrow is the king's birthday, so we will be celebrating with our new friends, although I am not sure what this will actually entail. On Saturday, we plan on purchasing and slaughtering a sheep for our braai.

I suspect that one day I will look back on this and wonder what the heck I was doing in Lesotho, but for now, I am just enjoying being where birds don't even sh*t. Oh, the except for the one that went our doorstep. It turns out that birds do sh*it in Lesotho.