November 26, 2006 (written by Janeen)

Today feels a little more like the Christmas season. I put up the few decorations we have and we are listening to Christmas music. It’s fun!

Here is the anticipated list that I promised in my last blog. I know the suspense is high!!!

As the anniversary of being in Lesotho has come and gone, I thought I’d create a list of things that I have learned and how I’ve changed.

Things I’ve Learned and How I’ve Changed

I can now bridge cards when shuffling

I am willing to try new foods and have found that I do like onions. I’ve even gone so far as eaten some raw, though I still don’t want to put them on my hamburgers.

Sadly, I have become more cynical and jaded. Many people want to help poor people in developing countries and their way of helping is often sending money. I know that a lot of money is being sent to Lesotho in general. It doesn’t seem to be helping the people that need it most, but the ministers get to drive around in Mercedes Benz cars. Does that sound right?!?!

I have a new love for cats. Don’t worry I have not become a cat lady, but I no longer fear them and even would go as far as saying that I love the little guy that we’ve got! AND I wouldn’t be opposed to having a cat when I get home.

We’ve changed the way we shop for food. This is mainly out of necessity, but we make a list of the meals we want to eat for the week and only buy the things we need. This has also changed how we eat. If we didn’t buy snack food, we don’t eat snack food. Of course its not like home where you can jump in your car when you have a craving. We have to walk to the road, wait for a taxi, & ride to town. It is a pretty big deal! Needless to say we’ve both lost weight. I gained some back after the vacation with Jason’s family, but we both look and feel healthy. We hope that we can keep that trend going when we get home!

I am now afraid of dogs. At least I am here in Lesotho. Even the ones that look cute can run at you out of the blue. They are trained to be mean and they are. Jason has been rushed at and almost attacked at least 3 times. I wouldn’t hesitate to throw a rock at a dog if I felt I was in danger, and that wasn’t the case when I first arrived.

I’ve learned that making fresh bread is not only delicious but rewarding, especially if you tried something new. Today I just made ginger bread and it was pretty good for a first attempt.

I’ve learned that you can make some pretty neat toys with what you may normally just throw away.

I’ve realized that we make A LOT of trash. We’ve tried to cut down by utilizing every last resource and making a compost pile, but we still have a large footprint on the earth. I’ll keep this in mind when I get home and hopefully keep the same ideals of making the smallest footprint possible. In fact I have told Jason that when we shop for a house, finding a community that recycles is important to me.

I’ve learned that you can bake almost anything in a Dutch oven.

I’ve learned to appreciate all the resources we have at home. You don’t realize what you’ve got until its gone!

I’ve learned how to bathe with a small amount of water. Albeit, I still enjoy some nice long hot showers.

I’ve learned to appreciate the rain. At home I looked at is as a nuisance that made my hair frizzy and made all the California drivers forget how to drive. Here, I see it as a necessity and it is especially for those who depend on their fields to support them. In fact, I get excited when it rains here. I even jumped up and down with joy when the first rains of the season came.

I have learned to be more patient. The emphasis here is on the more as I have not perfected this trait and don’t think I ever will. There is a part of me that screams inside every time we have a staff meeting that takes three hours when it could have been done in one.

I have found that it is pretty cool to be able to go outside to your garden
and pick fresh vegetables for a meal. Of course all I have done to help with the garden is provide student workers (weeding is a good punishment) and I occasionally water the garden. I give Jason all the credit for the success. We have corn, green beans, peas, sunflowers, tomatoes, cucumber, rape, swiss chard, onions, basil, cilantro, green squash, and carrots. Its SWEET!

I’ve been reassured that God provides for us. We get paid quarterly which makes it difficult to budget for 3 months on an already small salary. We usually are penny pinching towards the end of the pay period, but we always seem to make it. This last time we got a generous gift from a couple of Irish people who were visiting Lesotho and that helped get us through without stress to the next pay check.

I’ve learned that there will always be challenges and you have to give it all you got and just accept that everything is not going to be perfect.

That is about all I can think of for now. I’ll update my list as I think of more. Hope you enjoyed reading it!

November 26th, 2007

Hey to all my friends and family around the globe. It has been a few weeks since I have written anything other than my Thanksgiving wishes. I hope that you are all enjoying the holiday season (Hanukkah starts on Dec. 4th) and are enjoying all those sweet foods and wonderful parties. We are not alone (lots of friends) here and that makes being away from you a little bit easier.

Despite some sad news last week (my favorite teacher’s husband died) we are doing really pretty well. As you have read in Janeen’s blog we are learning a lot about ourselves and our world. The fun part is that we get to impart some of this knowledge onto our fellow volunteers. Last week Janeen and I did 3 days of technical training with the new group. They are 23 bright and eager people from a variety of different backgrounds and places around the U.S. It is really nice being around their optimism and exuberant energy. It refreshes the body and soul.

On top of being around those positive new people, we were also invited to go to the American Ambassadors house for Thanksgiving dinner. We wouldn’t really have been normally invited but he had invited all of the trainees to dinner and since we were in town we got a chance to go with them. Let me tell you, it was awesome. We arrived about an hour before dinner after a long day of thundershowers. It was cool but not cold and he had a heated pool for us to swim in. Now I have not swam in a heated pool for maybe a year and a half and after living in Lesotho for so long it really did feel like a giant chlorinated bath. It was pretty outstanding.

After swimming and playing the mandatory pool games (marco polo, colors, etc.) we sat down to a huge feast. I have eaten well here at funerals or other parties but we Americans know how to party. There were approximately 40 people there and we had 4 turkeys with like 12 sides. This does not include all the chips and fresh veggie platters before dinner. These were all washed down with beer, wine and soda provided by the Ambassador. After dinner we enjoyed all 6 desserts. That’s right 6 desserts. We definitely pigged out. I had to sit down multiple times after dinner and just breathe so that I would not go into food shock. It was pretty great!

All in all though I would say the best part of being at the ambassadors was the way that he made us feel. Our previous ambassador did not exactly reach out to Peace Corps as part of the mission in Lesotho. In contrast the current ambassador expressed his feeling of gratitude to us as members of the greater mission of the United States government and welcomed us as informal ambassadors to the country of Lesotho. He really made us feel like we are part of something larger than ourselves and even though we don’t get all the perks and respect of the state department people, we are still important to what is going on here. It was a really nice thing to hear especially at this point in our service.

I concluded the evening running around and playing with kids for about an hour (doesn’t sound like me at all right? Could have been rubbing shoulders with the ambassador instead I was the clown for the kids. Man where are my priorities?). It was a blast. I don’t really get to do it all that often at school because if you play with 1 child in 2 minutes you will have 100 around you. This can be seriously overwhelming. So I enjoyed not having more than 5 at one time that I would get mobbed by. It was really fun. I was a tickle monster.

So now we are back home. It rained really well today. We are happy about that to be sure. We hope that the weather wherever you are is good and that you are happy and safe.

All the best, Jason

November 24, 2007(written by Janeen)

Well it has been quite some time since I have last written a blog. The last month or so I have been busy with school, but I am happy to say that on November 21st I finished my last obligation for the school year. I am done grading, done with meetings, done with everything for 2 months! School starts again January 21st. Of course I still have projects to work on, but I can take a very relaxed pace. AND even better is that we have family coming in less than a month! YIPPEE! Mom, Dad, Grandma & Grandpa Lansford, Andy, Mari, & Lynette all arrive December 23rd. We’ll definitely be having a Merry Christmas here!

Jason and I just finished two days helping train the new group of education volunteers. Today they are going to the village. I can remember the strange overwhelming feeling of going to the village and having NO IDEA what they were saying to me. I just told some of them the story about how our mother wanted us to iron the clothes we were wearing. The situation went something like this: When she mentioned something about ironing, I brought different clothes for her to iron. Then I took the ironing board into our bedroom thinking she wanted me to iron there. Finally after at least 20 minutes or so, we changed clothes so that she could iron the clothes we were wearing. My skirt was a peasant style skirt that is supposed to be wrinkled, so she struggled to iron that and I didn’t have the heart (or the words) to tell her not to iron it. So I had creased ironed in wrinkles on my skirt that day!!

Since we have now passed the year mark, (Yes we have been gone a year now!) I’ve been thinking about making a list talking about how I’ve changed and what I’ve learned. Now that I’ll have more time at home I’ll be sure to get on that and get it posted. Some things will be funny, some will be sad, and some neutral. Here’s one example: I have learned how to bridge when shuffling cards. Some of you may not be impressed, but it is something I’ve always wanted to be able to do and just thought that I was completely incompetent, BUT I have learned that I am not! You should all be proud!

Well I need to sign off now so I can make it to the post office before it closes. We’ve had some difficulties with packages here. Lesotho started charging outrageous taxes to pick up boxes. It has been fixed and we recently got 3 packages (1 from Gma & Gpa D & 2 from Aunt Sharon & Uncle Bob—Thanks!) without the taxes, but we have 5 waiting for us that we could not afford to pick up. For some reason the Maseru post office can’t relay the message of canceling the fees to our post office. So, I have to run to the post office today and get some proof that the taxes should be removed in order to pick up the 5 packages waiting for us! Whew! Now after explaining all that I really have to go!

We send our love to all of you and are certainly thinking of all our friends and family as the Christmas holiday approaches.

We hope you have a wonderful season.

November 22, 2007 (written by Jason and Janeen)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!! We love and miss you all and we hope that you have a happy and healthy holiday!! All our Love

November 10, 2007 (written by Jason)

Hey all the peoples in the world. It is Jason yet again. I know you are all thinking, 'why hasn't Janeen written a blog in a while'? The short answer is, is that she is marking like a mad woman. You see our jobs are inherenetly different. She has a lot of marking at the end of the quarters while I have very little work all the time. So I have time to do things like read, blog, ponder the deep questions of life and other such endevours. Thus many of you can spend you days (or nights) being bored to death by my irrelevant comments about life and the nature of things.

Life is getting back to somewhat semblance of normallcy. I am in Maseru for a meeting and because of this I will be missing the funeral of Motlatsi. I am pretty good about this though as I am slowly coming to terms with his death and what that means at large. I am feeling really weird about being so self-absorbed about this. I mean, he was 16 years old. His family seems to be taking it in stride but I am having a really hard time moving past it. It affected my whole last week and I was a rather large pain in the butt to live with (sorry Janeen).

I will work this out but it is just really stupid. I don't want to feel bad about feeling bad, but what can you do?
Otherwise, we still don't know anything about the packages. We will keep you up to date as we love getting packages here. It really makes us happy when we open them and see all the love poured out on us. Please keep sending letters and cards. We love those just as much.

My best friend comes in just 17 days and I am PUMPED!! Can't wait to see him.

All the best
Jason

November 5, 2007 (written by Jason)

So last week I wrote a really emotional e-mail. I really appreciate all the words of encouragement. It has been a long and really weird week. It was emotional going to school today talking to the teachers about the funeral and working out how it is going to work. It looks like due to a prior commitment that I won’t be going to the boy’s funeral. I think that this is probably better for me anyway. I am going to go to the families house on Thursday and pay my respects then.

The crazy part is that we have been gone now for exactly 1 year. We had our going away party on the 3rd of last year. We then left for Washington on the 4th really early in the morning. I can’t believe that this year has already flown by. It is totally nuts. We have had our ups and downs here but I still feel that we are happy to have come.

One thing that is frustrating is that the postal service here has decided that it is going to start charging sales tax (on what exactly we still don’t know) that is about 20 to 30 US dollars per package. Needless to say because our salaries are around 250 dollars they are sitting in storage until we get paid or they revoke the sales tax. My favorite part about all this is that the post office never notified us that this change would take place. We just went in one day and the charge had increased by 500%. It is so the way things sometimes work here. Cracks me up!
Well I hope that you are all doing good. We love and miss you all. Drop us a line if you get a chance!
Peace Corps Out!
Jason

November 1, 2007 (written by Jason)

Hello to all the readers around the globe. I hope that as you are reading this that you are happy and healthy. Life here is an up and down journey as I know that many of your lives are as well. Last time I posted a rather extensive blog (one person even called it a novel). I am really sorry about that but I am trying to get you to understand the depth and gravitas of what we are experiencing here.

Along that line, almost immediately after I posted the blog I wrote last week, a teacher from one of my schools called me to notify me that one of our students had passed away. His name was Motlatsi and he was in standard 6 (Sixth Grade). He was a young and beautiful person. He was one of the few students that took it upon themselves to really engage me as an adult and as a person. He was tall and handsome and his singing voice rang exquisitely above all the rest as he sang in the school choir.

I think what is most difficult about this is that he probably died of something that if he were in a country where his health was monitored and the right medicines were administered, he may have gone on to be a productive and integral part of figuring things out in this country. The death of one so young with so much promise makes my heart heavy with the tears I can not shed. I feel nothing but regret and sadness but my heart won’t let me weep. I think this is part of the self-preservation that takes place here.

We are ensconced in so much death. Basotho family members, colleagues, neighbors and students die every week. With the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in our country we see funeral tents up all around the country side on Friday and Saturday (the traditional days to bury someone here). We become callused to these events.

Yet when someone young or close dies, it rips the callus of our hearts and exposes the raw flesh underneath. We have little to buffer us from the blow that this brings to us. It is so real and so raw, it is difficult to know what to do with this. We sit and we try and understand why but we are often found wanting.

All the best
Jason