Lesotho

I had a great weekend in Lesotho with Brooke, Jed, and Marc. Lesotho is a mountainous country within South Africa. The landscape was stunning and the culture of the Besotho people was fascinating.



We had a Cultural Tour and even embarked on a three hour pony trek through the mountains. Our ponies each had interesting personalities and so acquired names. Mine was named Cliff and I swore if he continued being a big jerk I would turn his name into his fate. Marc named his Mare Quimby. Clever. And Jed named Brooke's Zigzag McGee because her horse was so ridiculous with it's zig-zagging. Even when the ground was nearly level. It was totally unnecessary and very funny.



The people are very isolated high in the mountains. The villages are very small, but there are many scattered throughout the mountains.



The land is full of sheep and goats grazing and men shepherding them. We crossed paths with one man sitting on his horse, holding a lamb.



The shepherds walk long distances on foot with a stick or sit on a horse wearing a bellaclava-like hat and a blanket wrapped around them. I love the blankets they where and thinking about them trekking all around those mountains wrapped in blankets.



But the life is hard, and having a "guided tour" of the village we were in was really hard to handle as it glossed over the hardships very well, portraying the culture as cute. Being in a community everyday and understanding the issues within these sort of communities makes going on a touristy tour very tough. I didn't really know how to react to the blanketing of the issues.


(The family we stayed a night with)

Each family has their own field and eats only what they grow. Subsistence farming is their way of life. And if it's a bad season (like this year) they will have no food and so begin rationing the food they do have very early on. What really got me was the water situation. I asked the tour guide where they fetch water (because I noticed the river to be very dirty, especially with so many animals around) and she said from fresh little streams from the top of the mountain. The sad thing is that even on a three hour pony trek around and up and down I saw no such streams. And even if there were, the mountains are so steep I can't imagine what type of task it would be to fetch water or how far one would have to climb in order to get water the animals haven't gotten to yet.



The cleanliness of the children was, I believe, reflected in this. They were so dirty. And it's not like I think a dirty child is bad. They play and they get dirty, but African people are quite clean and the children are bathed daily. These kids were not, so the acquisition of water is obviously an issue. And this especially becomes an issue when the children are bottomless (like most of these ones were). The boys seriously did not wear pants. I don't understand why. You would think one would choose pants over a shirt if he had to decide, but the kids were topped and not bottomed.
Life is definitely tough.



An interesting custom is that the home belongs to the woman and if men want to enter (and I mean the husbands) they have to knock and get permissoin. If the woman doesn't allow him to enter, he does not enter. This is because the home is a nurturing environment; the place where mother bonds with child and the man isn't allowed to interfere with that. When a child is born, the husband is not allowed to go into the house for the first three months of the child's life. This is because the mother is connecting with the baby. The husband sleeps elsewhere. What's even more interesting is that the baby is not considered a human being until after three months. This must tell you about the infant mortality rate in the past. Really sad.


And this place had the highest HIV rate in the world, a staggering 37%. Now it's down to 21% which is still REALLY high. The culture of the Swati people in Masoyi and the culture of the Besotho people in Lesotho and the culture of many other African communities are so unique but there's that one word that is a common thread linking them all, telling and retelling that same story of brokenness and despair.



Now on a more uplifting note, all four of us drank too much brown water and now are best friends with our toilet, making it's water, in turn, brown.

But the trip was worth it.