Happy Holidays

For the first two months of living in Lesotho, I was training to be a Peace Corps Volunteer – learning the culture, language, policies, procedures, etc. The other trainees and I lived in 3 neighboring villages with host families. My training village, HaMabekenyane, was the smallest with 7 trainees. We basically spent the entire 2 months together , especially trainees in our respective villages.

December 18th, the trainees in our Education (Ed 14) group swore in as volunteers. The 19th, we all moved to our respective sites in villages all over the country. After spending the last couple of months together, all day, every day, it was emotional to leave, especially since this Christmas was my first Christmas away from home. I miss everyone at home, but luckily the holidays have been much busier than expected.

For Christmas, the people living on the north side of the country went to Liphofung in Butha Buthe. (Unfortunately, we could not see people in the south side of the country, including some of my favorite volunteers, because of travel/safety measures.) Liphofung is a national historical site so it has all of the amenities that were nice to have again – running water, shower, toilets, and electricity. We stayed in 2 separate “chalets” with about 15 people each. One from volunteers from my Ed 14 group and one for the other volunteers in country.

Liphofung: Chalets we stayed in are in the bottom left

The area was absolutely beautiful. The historical are caves with ancient cave drawings that you can walk to and see. I’m not exactly sure how old they are or the history of any of them or if they’re even really historical, but it was neat and fun to explore.

Katie, Sarah, Paula, Chris and Brandy walking through the caves.

Katie, Brandy, Sarah, Me and Paula

Observing Cave drawings

We stayed there for 3 nights. It rained and we had a lot of time to relax and hang out. We cooked and ate really good food – everyone was assigned a group and a meal to prepare. We watched movies (including Love Actually – I had to!). We played bananagrams – way too much, but since for once my brother, Scott, was not there, I actually won a game. And we had a dance party!

Sarah and I in our ugly Christmas sweaters!

For New Years, a couple people that lived near me decided that we had to do something….so on New years eve, we went to the capitol, Maseru. We went out to eat a couple times, went shopping, and watched Hunger Games Catching Fire in the movie theater. That night we stayed at a volunteer, Paula’s house. On New Year’s day we were just relaxing when Paula’s host dad came in and offered us the South African version of monopoly (basically the same but different names of places). So we played monopoly, then set, then poker (with monopoly money). We all headed home in the afternoon to make sure to get back before dark.

Then last weekend, I planned a trip with all of the other volunteers who trained with me in HaMabekenyane. 4 of the 7 of us have birthdays in January, so we decided that we needed to celebrate all together. School starts this week so we had to meet up the first weekend of January. We decided to go to Mofeteng and stay with Kristy since she is the most centrally located. We all got to hear about eache other’s sites and Christmases and since half of them live in the south, I haven’t seen them since we left our training village. We ate way too much food and had birthday cake that fell apart but was still devoured by the time we left. The weekend felt so short, but we all had to head home on Sunday.

Happy Birthday to Matt, Katie, Michelle and Kristy!

Monday, I had a staff meeting all day.

The past week has been my first entire week spent in my village. It’s been nice to relax after all of the traveling and being able to mentally prepare before school officially starts.