We made it!! It was a veeeeeeeery loooooooong trip, but we're here now and happy of it!
South African airlines is a lovely airline.
They have great food (as you can see in the picture) and the seats were adequately sized. We had an empty seat beside us, so we switched off having the seat next to the empty so that we could spread out a little more. We did do lots of walking and stretching, but apparently not enough since my (Sarah) ankles were HUGE when I arrived in Jo-burg. We watched a few movies on the plane including Endgame (about the end of apartheid in S. Af.) and Date Night (hilarious! We were afraid we were waking people up because we were laughing so much!). All-in-all a great flight except that it was 15 and a half hours long.Arrival in Jo-burg was pretty uneventful. We had shrink wrapped our luggage and zip tied the zippers for protection (see picture),
but we don't think that we really needed to. Most of the other bags were not protected as such. Dwight, the director, was right at the other side to meet us and swept us off to the parking lot where some "helpful" S. Africans put our bags in the car (quite illegally, but we figured that three of us could take them if we had to and the bags were shrink wrapped anyway...).From Jo-burg we headed south to Maseru. We stopped a few times to get out and walk around. The ride was terrifying at points (driving at break-neck speeds on the "wrong" side of the road!), but also fascinating. It actually looked a lot like Eastern Montana prairie land. If you have been there, you can definitely see what I mean from the picture below. However, at several points we went through towns where there was an African shanty-town on one side of the road and beautiful houses where white Africans lived on the other side of the road. I've included a picture of one a shanty-town below. It's not the best picture, since I was unprepared to take a photo in the first shanty-town we passed through, which was much closer. This was the best I could do. The white houses off to the right of this on a hill. It was a painful reminder of how deeply apartheid affected this area. It has definitely not yet recovered in full. Will it ever? We keep hope.
Customs in Lesotho was a little different than that in Jo-burg. They made us get out of the car to go into a building to have a person stamp our passports on two different occasions. I was unclear why we had to do that twice, but I guess that's how it always goes. Meanwhile we had 6 suitcases and all kids of carry-ons, but they didn't seem to care about checking. Dwight just said "We have nothing today. Just personal affects!" and we were good.
The border crossing is right at Maseru, and we came to the school direct from the crossing so that Dwight could grab us an extra blanket from the stash in his office. The school is beautiful! I've included some pictures here and there will be more in the weeks to come.
This first picture is our "house" where we both have our classrooms. The rooms are big. We'll send pictures once they're set up.
Here's Dwight (the director) with the new sign in front of the main office.
And to your right you will find a picture of the campus from the front porch of our "house". They have thatched picnic umbrellas over some tables in the commons. It's very beautiful!
After a brief stop at school, we headed to our houses, which are in the Thetsane neighborhood below the Pope stand (I'm sure you're all very clear on where that is!).
The picture to the left shows the view of the Pope stand from our house. It's where the Pope came to speak when he came to Lesotho (when was that? I don't know...).The house is in great condition and we have a lot of space. We went grocery shopping yesterday (600 rands = about 84 dollars, but we had some relatively expensive essentials to buy (ziplock bags, spices, oil), so it probably won't be that much every time) and going on Saturday to Bloomfontain to furnish it more thoroughly. They're building a guard stand in front of the house. There are many more construction workers than there probably need to be and there's always an overseer there who doesn't do much. We were shocked to learn that they plan to be done on Saturday. We doubt that will happen...
The kitchen has a nice sink, the all-important electric kettle (good for tea, oatmeal, and purifying water!), a good sized fridge and an "interesting" (read: very crooked burners that may or may not function) stove. There are no drawers and the "lazy susan" doesn't really turn, but we'll definitely be able to make it work. In fact, last night we made stir fry with rice, and it was delicious.
Thank you to Maureen and Brian (our neighbors and fellow teachers from South Carolina) who gave us a heads up to bring curtains and to my mom for pushing us to buy them. We have 24 hour security and a lot of windows, so we really needed those! The living room and dining area are looking pretty good. Now we'll just add some pictures and maybe a little area rug. We also get to redesign the area around the coal stove in the living room so that it looks a little nicer. You can't really see it here, but it's basically a stove on a sheet of metal nailed to the floor.Interestingly, the toilet and the bathroom are two separate areas in our house. The toilet is
currently running quite a bit, so we have a request in to get that fixed (the s
logan here, however, is "when in Maseru, be patient!), and the bathroom needs some work to get a shower set up that doesn't require sitting in the tub. However, both are functional for now. We'll also have to purchase some mats for those rooms, because the floors are FREEZING in the morning (it's Spring here in mountainous Lesotho).Beds in Lesotho are made with a bottom sheet and a covered duvet. Our duvet cover has African women on it, and is very cool. We did end up having to use that extra
blanket that Dwight brought from the school, since it gets chilly here at night (in the 30ish degrees Fahrenheit), everything is made of cement, and there is no heating to speak of. We do have an electric heater in our room, but we've opted not to use it yet (we're told that May is particularly chilly, so we'll hold out). We are going to the mountains on a retreat this weekend with the staff, so we're going to bring our winter jackets and hats for that, since we can only imagine how chilly it will be at night up there!Alright, that's all I have time for today. Next time I'll give you an overview of Maseru living and probably de-brief the retreat that we're headed on. Look for an update next week on Wednesday.
Till then! ~S&J
