15 May 2008: Eleven Months in Lesotho

Wake up around 7am. Breakfast of granola with yogurt (one upside of winter is the ability to keep dairy products fresh simply by leaving them on my floor) and coffee from my sacred, cracked french press. Reluctantly trade my pajama pants for a skirt, brush teeth and maybe my hair, and on to the clinic because it's Thursday. Thursday is baby day (or "Under 5 Day" officially) and mother's bring in their kids for immunizations, weighing and info from the nurses on nutrition, breast feeding, HIV, etc. And when they talk, you listen. The nurses have a confidence and commanding presence that not only am I aware of despite the language barrier, but bo-ntate in the room cannot ignore. Anyway, I register the kids in our clinic log and note their weights and necessary shots in their bukanas, a small book that serves as a medical record of sorts. Some kids fall in the range of healthy growth on their charts - some don't. Others are losing weight. Thursday mornings aren't the most encouraging times.

Done around 11 or 12. Time to eat again! Salad or tuna sandwich or PB&J or steamed veggies or leftovers... some days if I'm lazy it's popcorn or soup mixes that require only hot water. Since Tricia has just sent a care package comprised entirely of chocolate, it's a king size snickers bar. Good thing I'm here to teach nutrition.

Putz around the garden, do laundry and hang it to dry, wash dishes. Then make a visit to the preschool to ask Masekhampu to translate for me at a meeting the following day. I love bilingual people. Note to self: work on becoming one some day.

Read for an hour or two and enjoy a visit from a couple toddlers who stop by to use scrap paper and crayons to draw. Then head up the road to check my messages. Lots of people are in the fields harvesting maize and sourgum and I know they've been there all day (it's 430pm) and will be there tomorrow and every day until the crop is finished. Road construction (which is temporarily making transport slower but greatly improving the rutted, washed out dirt road) means lots of dump trucks passing me, and I'm passing lots of construction workers. A full truck goes by in the opposite direction and a large boulder rolls out, breaks into smaller chunks upon hitting the ground and one catches my shin in front of an audience of men. My sad attempt to dodge it slightly resemble players attempting to grab a fumbled football - only in that the direction of the objects are equally unpredictable do to their awkward shape. I'm not nearly coordinated enough to achieve avoiding the basketball -size rock. The driver jumped out and apologized 37 times and everyone shouted "Sorry! Sorry, 'Me!" in the typical Basotho manner. Even though they had no blame - I could have jumped into the side of the truck head first and they would have responded the same way.

Swollen leg, small gash and a nicely evolving bruise by dinner time (and no messages on the phone). Pasta with olive oil and italian seasoning for dinner. And an excessive quantity of york peppermint patties. At least for the next week when someone calls me fat I can assume it's the chunky leg and not the bag of M&M's I had for breakfast.

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Rapolang and Phillipe brightening my day with their 'writing'; either I don't know the word for "drawing" or "coloring" in Sesotho or it simply doesn't exist. But they don't know it either, so when they see me in the village they come running at me saying, "Ausi Mosa, we want to write!"