Food, Food, Food!

Hello! Since my life has settled down here and I don't have as many things to update on, I'm going to start doing some more topical blog posts on questions I get asked about a lot. This one is on Basotho food and what I've been eating here. But first a little mini update on the last few weeks!

front porch, after school English lesson

Update time:

• Teaching has been going well! The kids have gotten used to my accent and way I teach and my coteacher and I continue to develop a nice little rhythm in the classroom.

• I've started painting my school. My principal has a bunch of different ideas for murals and things she wants painted on the outside walls of the school. One of the projects I wanted to do while I was here was using my love for creativity and art and creating murals with the kids for their classrooms. So this has worked beautifully and I've gotten to start dreaming about this project. Fridays have turned into painting days instead of teaching for me, and I'm currently painting numbers 1-100 and phonics on the side of the lower grades building. Materials are limited so I've had to get creative but I've had a blast and invited a few kids to come pick a number to paint with me each day which they have been super excited about.

• My host sister told the kids that come visit me after school that they could only come over if they brought their notebooks and were speaking English. So I've had a little group of neighbors coming over to learn English after school each day. I've learned that the kids memorize random English concepts, phrases, or words for the classroom, but can't actually speak conversational English and don't understand what they are saying. These lessons I'm giving after school are so random and made up on the fly. But the kids have had fun and I've given them stickers if they speak English with me and we will play guitar or football after. Hard to say if they are just coming for the stickers…

• I am a track coach now. They kids have been racing each other and running after school in preparation for Moshoeshoe Day (a holiday this Monday where the schools race eachother) and for running competitions that are a national endeavor and begin next Friday. This has been so fun. The kids all change into their running clothes (many in jeans or dresses or whatever clothes they own besides their school uniform and all of them barefoot or in socks) for the last hour of the school day. Barefoot running is no foreign concept here and many of the kids are wicked fast. Hoping we get first place next week. Stay tuned.

• The end of our first quarter is this week so we are reviewing material and giving assessments. Then this weekend I head to Maseru for a 10 day Peace Corps training with the rest of my cohort. A group of friends and I are leaving straight from this training to go to Durban for Easter weekend which I CAN NOT WAIT to be a normal person and not a PCV for a few days. Durban has Indian food. Coffee shops. The beach. Restaurants. I have been dreaming about this vacation and am excited, to say the least.

Lesotho and Food :)

Now for my topic of the month. I have grown so much respect and appreciation for the quality of food I was accustomed to in the US. Even on a college student budget and spending 30 bucks a week on groceries, I took such advantage of grocery stores, access to fruits and veggies and all ingredients, and going home to my parents house to my mom and dad's 5 star cooking. If you know my parents you know they can make boujie meals and I miss them - the meals and my parents ;).

Traditional food here consists of papa (a white, stiff, porridge-adjacent food made with maize meal), potatoes, beans or peas for protein, meat when available (although usually you can't really tell what kind or part of animal you are eating), moroho (usually Swiss chard, cabbage, or any green leafy veggies cut and cooked). There are other traditional foods like lesheleshele (a breakfast porridge) and joala (homemade sorghum beer) that you see often as well. It is currently peach season, which means clotheslines are hung with peeled and rolled peaches to make mangangangjana (just sun dried peaches). Most people live directly off of what they grow or can trade or buy from their neighbors. The market stands in the village supplement what people can't grow or produce themselves, but aren't regularly frequented. 

making dried peaches with my neighbor and host sister!

While I do like most of the traditional food, I usually make oatmeal and instant coffee for breakfast (real coffee is nonexistent here) and have school lunch (papa and peas or papa and sopa). Sopa is a brown mush with bits of meat in it and I honestly am not totally sure what it is. But it's surprisingly not bad. Dinner lately has either been fried rice, a potato and egg scramble, curry, or beans, rice, and whatever veggies I can find. Not having a refrigerator or oven keeps things interesting.

Y'all when I go into town I love it just because I can get lunch somewhere. There is a KFC in Butha Buthe which just reopened and a guest house that has some pretty good food options (a burger that tastes kinda like meatloaf but is still good, fries, chicken tenders, and milkshakes). I also found a Basotho man who sells Chinese food out of a tin shack in a random alley. 10/10 stir fry. We are friends now. In town I have a store for everything. I go to one woman for spices, one for veggies, and one store for oreos and chickpeas (when I discovered this store I almost cried. They have chocolate and rolos too). It's been fun to remember the shop owners' names and talk with them when I'm in town. My district is called Butha Buthe but the volunteers have coined the name Boujie Buthe for it because you really can find most things you want or need in town if you look hard enough.

All in all, I eat well and don't have complaints food wise. Although, I do miss restaurants and espresso and drinks with ice in them. And cheese. And meat. I get my random food cravings and all that for sure. But when you are around kids that their only meal is school lunch or families that can only afford to eat what they produce, some of those things seem to matter a little less. Food and my attitude toward it and appreciation surrounding it is one of the many ways that my perspective has been changing during my time here. Ever so thankful for the life I have led and the privileges I've been given that I simply don't deserve.

Until next blog post! Love you all dearly and thanks for reading :)

And the usual disclaimer: all thoughts and opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't reflect those of the Peace Corps or US Government.