Site Assignment Excitment!

Lumela Friends and Family!

We're spending our second weekend in Maseru, enjoying the shopping and KFC (which is the only recognizable/American food chain that has globalized to Lesotho, as far as I can tell)! The training portion of my Pre-Service Training is officially finished (yay for no more sitting under a steaming tin roof for 10 hours a day), and we'll start our "Practice Teaching" rotations just after Thanksgiving weekend! Yay! I have loved the short time I've spent teaching so far, and can't wait to establish my own classroom culture and routines!

But in the meantime, we'll be spending next week on our first visits to our new sites (ie. home and workplace/schools for the next two years!) Thursday was a GREAT day for all us trainees as we FINALLY received our site assignments!!! It was much anticipated around the Peace Corps family, and in the few days leading up to the announcements even my 'Me' constantly asked "U tla lula kae selemo se tlang, ausi Limpho? U tla lula kae?!" (You will live where next year, daughter? You will live where?!) I could do nothing more than laugh and say, "Ha ke tsebe, 'Me'" (I don't know.) The anticipation was killing us.

AND so the long awaited news... I will be moving to Botha Bothe, one of the northern most provinces in Lesotho, on December 12th! YAY! Botha Bothe is located in the foothills of Lesoth (not quite mountains, but definitely not lowlands-And apparently with gorgeous views of the neighboring mountains). I will visit my site and know more next week, but what I do know is... I will be a Science and Math teacher at Linokong (pronounced din-o-kong) High School, near the village of Linekeng. The school has about 400 students ranging from Form A - Form E (the equivalent of 8th grade - 12th grade). I will most likely teach a combination of math and general sciences (biology, chemistry, and physics) to Form B (9th Grade), and upper level Physics and/or Biology to Form D (11th grade). I am SO excited! I am actually one of two in my training class that is replacing a current volunteer, which definitely has it's perks. A PCV, Andrea, has spent 3 years at Linokong HS and will live 3 days before I move there- So my host family and village are clearly big fans of Peace Corps and it's a well-established site.

My house is a thatch roofed rondaval! YAY! Although, not so "YAY!" for the inevitable spiders that also apparently enjoy living under and in a thatch roof. :) But I've become fast friends with the massive tree spider, Leonard, (literally- massive is an understatement in describing Leonard's general size and hairiness) that shares my latrine in Makola. We've amicably divided custody hours of the latrine- I get it during the day, and he gets it at night (and I get my lovely pee-bucket). And so far it works... So I have high hopes that all my future living buddies will take as kindly to my "separate but equal" living spaces arrangement. :)

Despite my request to be placed in a remote location in the mountains, I will actually be a short 15 minutes from one of the largest camptowns in northern Lesotho (complete with another KFC!). It's definitely not a perk I'm complaining about, as it means cell service and access to modern amenities will be much easier for me than some other volunteers... But I think the my favorite characteristic (and the reason I was placed there, that overrode all my other preferences) is the presence (PC Staff have told me, but we'll see next week) of a brand new Millenium Challenge Clinic in/near my village!!! Early on I had a conversation with the CD (country director) about my desire to do my Secondary Project in Maternal Healthcare... So THANK YOU Peace Corps! I'm incredibly excited! Fingers crossed I find some wonderful opportunities to help the local women and children in my village/area. :)

So other than that, things are going fantastic! As always, I'm still in love with Lesotho and having the time of my life... My upcoming move will be exciting and at the same time sad... My 'Me' can only be pacified with promises that I will visit often (and bring my mom to visit, too when she comes to Lesotho- She is SO excited to meet "Me oa hau America" (my American mother)). I will miss Makola and my family a lot when I leave, but I know that training is just the very beginning of the adventure!

I know I have received consistent requests for pictures... And I JUST set up my blackberry 30 minutes ago, so hopefully now I will be able to oblige via Facebook. Pictures of my family, Makola, and my now wonderfully shaved head to come! :)

Have a VERY Happy Thanksgiving! I will be spending mine with the Peace Corps Trainees and Staff at the U.S. Ambassador to Lesotho's house! And she even has a pool- talk about heaven! FUN!

Hugs to all! Khotso! Mary Elizabeth

While Shopping in TY!

Lumela, Friends and Family!

Today finds me sitting in an internet cafe in Teyateyaneng! Peace Corps has graciously granted us trainees a much needed day of shopping, relaxation, and civilization! YAY for chicken fingers and chips for lunch! I'm happy to report that things are as wonderful as ever in LEsotho- I must still be in the inevitable honey-moon period because I truly love it here. My Sesotho skills are blossoming, and I can hold full conversations about my family, my work, and what I love about Lesotho in Sesotho... THANK YOU to my 'M'e for endlessly talking to me and putting up with my confused looks as I try to figure out what in the world is going on. The woman has the patience of Job. :)

Next week we finally find out our sites- So everyone here is sitting on pins and needles until next Thursday! I can't wait to find out where I'll be living and working for the next few years. Prays that they'll send me to the mountains are appreciated... I just fell in love with the mountains when I was out visiting Mokhotlong a few weeks ago. SO gorgeous! It makes living in the middle of nowhere seem absolutely worth it!

And at the end of next week (starting next Sunday) we'll be visiting our new sites- So next week I'll be out of contact, but finally getting to meet my new family and colleagues! I can't wait!

I'll keep this short, because a Coca-Cola and hot chips (fries) are calling to me from the hotel down the road (ie. the secret hot spot for "as close to American food as it gets in Lesotho").

Sending everyone lots of love! Hopefully I'll be able to post pictures in a few weeks!

Khotso! (Peace!) -Mary Beth

Safe and Sound in Lesotho!

Lumela Friends and Family!

We're in Maseru today taking a short tour of the city, and visiting the Peace Corps Office... So I finally get the chance to write a little! Everything is going great! Our Pre-Service Training is absolutely exhausting, and they keep our days full to the brim with classes, lesctures, activities, and language lessons. Needless to say, a combination of 4 hours of language training a day and living with a family that speaks NO English, has had a very positive effect on my Sesotho. I'm already able to comfortably introduce myself to people, go through all the formal greetings, talk about myself, and compose basic statements. It's been really amazing to see how quickly immersion can improve language skills!
My family is wonderful... My host mother's (called 'M'e here, meaning mother) is 'M'e Malehlohonolo Mothobi, and she's absolutely wonderful. She takes amazing care of me, and loves telling everyone about her new daughter. :) It took me all of about an hour the first night, to realize that when they kept repeating "Limpho Mothobi" they were referring to me! So after a little confusion and botched translations, I finally discovered that my family had given me a Basotho name, Limpho (pronounced Dim-Poe)... In Sesotho, Limpho means "gift"... And 'M'e quite literally treats me as a gift to the family. I also have three younger siblings.... Toka is my abuti (brother) and is about 12 years old, Tsoanelo is my ausi (sister) and is about 5, and Thato our ngoana (baby) is 3 months old. They are lots of fun, and endlessly enjoy coloring with the colored pencils I brought. Every day Tsoanelo escorts me to me language lessons at 'M'e Makabelo's house (one of our language and cultrual trainers that is living in the village with us during training), and she meets me every day after class. :) I'm so glad for the company of the kids... They follow us everywhere.
We are quite the celebrities in our little village in the district of Berea (located about 30 km outside of Maseru, it's a relatively rural village). There are 16 PCVs ((Peace Corps Volunteers) of the 30 in my class living with me (with other host families in the village). It's nice to have the company, and having friends I see everyday who speak English and understand the challenges of "cultural immersion" is incredibly comforting. It's a nice transition to what I have coming when I finally move to my site in 7 weeks. We still don't know where our sites will be... I think we find out in week 5 of training (we're just at the end of week 1), but I'll be spending next week on my "Host Volunteer Visit". Essentially that's our first exposure to what life will really be like in country for us. I'm going to be traveling to one of the northern most (and highest altitude regions) of the country, named Mohoklotong (sp?). It's about 9 hours by public bus. I'll be staying with a volunteer named, Caitlin for 4 days, and going with her to work (she is a Secondary Science teacher, as I will be), and around her village. I'm excited and aaprehensive about my thrust in traveling cross-country with limited Sesotho, but I'm sure I'll have no option but to get the hang of it quickly.
I feel incredibly safe here. I now TOTALLY understand the emphasis Peace Corps places on integrating into your community. The Basotho are an incredibly friendly and welcoming people, and they know that we are here to help and absolutely want us here. It's a great source of pride for a Basotho family (like my own) to host a PCV... And they proudly display their new daughter/son to the community. We really are family- and it's a feeling of safety that can onyl come from fully engaging with the community. Everywhere we go we greet EVERYONE. You say hello, you ask how their family is, how they slept, how their life is, where they are going... It's VERY good practice to improve our fledgling language skills, but at the smae time it can get tedious when going the half mile to school take 45 minutes. But it's an important component of the safety in country. I absolutely love our Country Director and our other Trainers/Peace Corps Staff. I know I'm in good hands.

So everything is going great! 'M'e is never satisfied with how much I eat, and I've been in great health. We went hiking (in our one short 2 hours off) this past week, and the mountains are absolutely gorgeous. I feel incredibly blessed to get to wake up to such a beautiful mountain sunrise every morning. For anyone wondering, you can be assured that I honestly don't miss electricity or water. I rise with the sun at 5am every morning, boil my own water for a bath, bathe in a bucket just large enough to stand in, use an outdoor latrine, read at night by kerosene light, and am normally asleep my 7:30 or 8:00pm. :) It's a very simple, but good life and I'm happy with it! I've given up all my technology (to lock them in the PC safe at HQ during training), so I just went ahead and went cold-turkey on electronics... And I've honestly been so exhausted/busy I haven't noticed.

Anyway... I'll post more once I have internet more frequently. Hopefully I'll have a phone with internet access in a few weeks. Until then, lots of love!!!

Khotso! (Peace!) - Mary Elizabeth

Let the Journey Begin!

It’s hard to believe I’m finally here… Just a few days away from making my dream of returning to Africa (more-permanently) a reality. It feels oddly familiar to be surrounded by suitcases, and half-packed boxes yet again (I calculated a few days ago that this will be my 12th move!) I love the sensation of having a great adventure ahead… So much learning and exploring to come.

On October 10th, I will start the next chapter in my life… I’m moving to Lesotho (a small country in southern Africa) to work as a Secondary Science Teacher with the Peace Corps for the next 27 months. At this point, I feel that I have more questions than answers- I can’t be certain where I will be posted in the country, or where I will teach, or how I will manage to learn Sesotho in 2+ months, or under what conditions I will be living for the next two years of my life. Yet, I am oddly content. Nervous, to be certain, but confidant that I will face each challenge as it comes… And hopeful that I will be a stronger person at the end of it all.

 Lesotho, “The Mountain Kingdom” 

And without a doubt, I am excited. I am so incredibly blessed to get the opportunity to embrace this next adventure… Lucky to have a family that is supportive, friends that are willing to visit and write often, and an education that will hopefully allow me to contribute something to my new Basotho community. I guess it’s also rather convenient that I’m young (ie. stupid and crazy) enough to give up everything I know to go live in relative poverty for two years. :)

I know the transition will be difficult, but it is my hope that I will take each challenge as a lesson and opportunity for growth. I pray that in silence, I will learn to listen to my own voice/heart more clearly. I pray that in darkness, I will find comfort in the light and company of people. I pray that when I am in physical discomfort, I will become attuned to the rhythms of my own body. I pray that when I am alone, I will learn to savor my own thoughts and feelings. I pray that when I am overcome by the strangeness of the foreign, I will see more clearly the similarities in all humans. I pray that when I am homesick, I will learn to be thankful for the blessings of a safe home and loving family. I pray for strength, patience, peace, and compassion, so that I may give freely of myself and my talents.

Thank you in advance to everyone that has and will support me in this adventure over the next several years! I look forward to sharing the wonderful stories of my time abroad with you all here, and when I return safely in two years!

With Love from Virginia… <3 Mary Elizabeth

The Hinkles are in Italy… Again.

I’ll go ahead and put a warning out there… We have always lovingly referred to our own family as the “Hinkles”… Yes, that’s right. We were the peopled that watched “The Beverly Hillbillies” and said, “Wait a second! We’ve driven across country with a wooden rocking chair strapped to the trailer… What’s wrong with that??!” So needless to say, family vacations can sometime have a flair of the unexpected, and even trashy at times… As my sister would say, “that’s just how we roll”… :)

Carolyn found a little bunny friend in the trailer park! :) 

Lago di Garda (Garda Lake)… With the Italian Alps in the background!

So when my Aunt Laura suggested that we stay in a motor home instead of a hotel during our two nights in northern Italy, we all just had to laugh… It was just too typical. :) Little did we know that we’d go ALL the way with the “trailer park” jokes… And I mean all the way, as in my mom fired up Spam for breakfast. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like it hasn’t happened before… In fact my brother was thoroughly excited to wake up to the smell wafting through the motor home… It’s just ironic, because oh-so-many people around Stuttgart would just never believe the Commander’s family were capable of such behaviour… :)

But we quite enjoyed ourselves! When we got back from Verona, we packed our cooler full of beer (in plastic bottles none the less) and headed to the beach of Lago di Garda (Lake Garda)… We had a great afternoon baking in the sun (something that hasn’t been possible in Germany so far this summer because it’s been so darn cold!), swimming in the lake, and watching the rather scantily clad men strut around! :) And later that evening we retired for a true all-American dinner of beans n’ franks… (I told you we were the Hinkles… Haha)

Sisters on the beach! 

Gorgeous sunset on Lago di Garda!

 

Carolyn was quite surprised by some of the tiny swimsuits walking around… Haha

And of course there were lots of other shenanigans along the way as we attempted to live up to our red-neck roots… :)

My mom and I are too cool… Haha

With Love from “a trailer park in northern Italy”… :) Mary Elizabeth

The Delights of Verona, Italy…

Lovely, fair Verona… <3

Verona, Italy… Home of the star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliette. Unfortunately there was to be no whirlwind romance for me in Verona, but there were lots of beautiful back-alley streets to wander, delicious pizza, and lots of icy gelato! So, no surprise, I was content… :)

We started our wandering through the city with the touristy city centre… I had been excited to make a stop by Casa di Giulietta, because really, what else does Verona really have that’s much more notable than Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette?  Unfortunately, we were completely let down by her house/balcony courtyard… Here I was imagining: how sweet and romantic… A quiet courtyard that is a pilgrimage site for thousands of giddy little teenage girls every year, just praying for love. I even thought, “Sure. I’ll touch the right breast of Juliette’s statue (not my idea, someone else started that ridiculous tradition) if it’ll give me some good luck in love. Not like I’ve got anything to loose at the age of 22, right?” Haha :) Wrong.

What I didn’t expect was to have to fight my way through the courtyard, past middle-aged Asian men… Haha :) Definitely not the cute little, meditation spot I was imagining it would be… Instead of quaint little love notes tucked in the wall, all we found were graffiti and bubble gum stuck to everything… Although I will admit that the graphitized love notes were a little cool… :) I even left one of my own: I visited fair Verona on August 11th which coincidentally was the 23rd Birthday of my best friend and “heterosexual life partner”, Jetta… So somewhere in Verona, if Jet should ever visit, she’ll find a heart with our names in it. <3 

 

Juliette’s Balcony…  

Love note graffiti… <3

 

 

Anyway, so after our disappointing “tourist-trap” moment, we headed to the back alley streets for a little less of the crowds and a little more “authentic Verona”… We found our way to the river and eventually to this amazing little cafe for lunch… We sat outside for most of the afternoon just chatting it up and eating pizza… And on our way home, of course, made a stop for gelato! :)

  LOTS of pizza

Oh fair Verona… How pretty you are… :) 

 Crazy cousins!  GELATO!

The party was just getting started though… Because after we left Verona, we headed for some beach time! :)

With Love from Verona, Italy… <3 Mary Elizabeth

Over, Under, and Through the Swiss Alps

On our second and last day in Switzerland we awoke to gorgeous blue skies! :) So we hopped out of bed, made a quick stop at the bakery, and headed towards the train station! We took a train up to the village of Wengen, and then a cable car up the mountain and began hiking! We took a trail that went just along the mountain ridge-line, and gave an amazing view of the “three peaks”… The tallest being the Jungfrau…

The hike took us a good portion of the morning and afternoon, but only because we stopped so often to take in the view… Or drag my mother away from talking to the cows! :) The weather was perfect, and we found a great little place looking out over the three peaks to stop for a picnic lunch of fresh brot, Swiss cheese, and Swiss chocolate… Yum!

 Snack Break, anybody?? :)

My mom likes cows… And apparently I do too! :)

  Planking atop the Swiss Alps. Basically wins.

 

It was truly amazing to realize how much of the Alps you can’t take in from the valley… As in we literally could not see them! From the our guesthouse in Lauterbrunnen it seemed as if they stretched on forever, and we marveled at watching the clouds move, revealing a new peak… They just kept appearing from thin air… But we really had no perception of how massive they truly were from the valley… On the train and cable car up, they just kept unraveling before our eyes… And just when we thought we’d reached the highest peak another would appear… So it was truly amazing to stand atop the ridgeline and realize the Lauterbrunnen was so far below that we could hardly spot it! :) It was definitely an amazing experience, and one we nearly all voted as our “favorite” since moving to Europe over a year ago! 

Gorgeous views the whole way… 

Picniking along the way… :) Fresh brot, Swiss cheese, meat, and Swiss chocolate… It doesn’t get any better! 

We left Lauterbrunnen later that afternoon, tired but rejuvenated from an amazing day atop the Alps… But little did we know that our Swiss adventure wasn’t quite over yet!

We hadn’t headed down the road more than 20 minutes before two things became very obvious: 1) we were driving to Italy on the curviest, steepest, tightest mountain road we’d seen yet and 2) we were frighteningly low on gas! We finally reached the top of a never-ending uphill chain of mountains, and just when we could go no higher our “gas light” turned bright red in warning… Despite looking for a gas stop for the last half hour, there was not a single town or even house in sight… If we broke down up here there would be no help until we had hiked to an SOS phone (that we passed every few miles)…

Roadside pull-off at the top of the never-ending mountain road… Where we stopped to desperately search the map for the nearest town before the gas completely ran out! Haha

 

Part of the ridiculous winding Swiss roads…

 

Gas on empty, gas-light on, and car in neutral!  

Luckily we had reached the top, so we put the van in neutral and coasted all the way down the mountain riding the brakes! We must have coasted for 30km before we rolled right into a little town and the only gas station for miles… And just in time!

After that, the rest of the trip seemed relatively mundane… Although we did spend a considerable amount of time driving under mountains and through tunnels… In fact, between Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland and Lago di Garda, Italy we went through 47 tunnels! One of which, at 17km long, was the longest tunnel in the world! Pretty impressive Swiss engineering!

So in retrospect, I guess you could say that we spent the day going over, under, and through the Swiss Alps! :)

With Love from a windy road in the Swiss Alps… <3 Mary Elizabeth