Living in the Mountains

I have experienced much in the little mountain town of Mokhotlong. To get there it’s a 5 hour drive through the mountains going up and down and around and around. Beautiful drive. I left around 4:30 a.m. at the end of January. I was squished in a truck with a woman and man I didn’t know. Our neighbor, Kal, owns a hardware store in Mokhotlong and the guy driving me was his driver that he has who delivers stuff to the hardware store. In Mokhotlong, I met up with Avril and Joni; Avril is almost 69 and British and Joni is 64 and from California. So they are Bahai women (Bahai is a religion in case you don’t know) as is Kal. Apart from owning the hardware store, Kal also owns a farmhouse and is having other housing put up with the intent to start some schooling. He also wants it to be a sort of Bahai center and is having Bahai people, like Joni and Avril, come in to help out for a certain period of time. Avril and Joni are there because they are working with about 10 high school graduates and are having them teach kids in the schools there about things like love, trust, respect, etc…
So while there, I stayed in the little farmhouse with them. It was about a 1 ½ miles out of town down a kind of steep hill that I walked everyday to the hardware store where Avril and Joni had their office and where I ended up working with kids. At the farmhouse, there was no electricity, just oil lamps. There was really only hot water in the mornings, at night a fire was started in the wood and coal burning stove, and that would heat the water. To take a bath, you had to fill a basin up with water and either sit in the tub and pour it over yourself or else give yourself a sponge bath.
As you could probably assume, it wasn’t very exciting down at the farm. Not that I didn’t enjoy it though. The area was beautiful; we were surrounded by mountains and had a river running by close to the house. Just right next door lived a 12-year-old boy named Mohavi (I’m going to spell most things as they sound) and he and I would play football together with a ball he made out of plastic bags. I showed him my camera and he fell in love with it. He would bring two or three friends over and they’d spend hours taking pictures of each other and making videos of them playing football.
But other than that…there wasn’t much at the farm. I just read a lot and went to bed around 9 pm and got up around 6:30. Yeah, I’m really living it up in Africa!
In Mokhotlong I was able to meet a few people, some were friendly, most wanted to marry me… At the hardware store, there was a guy named Paul who worked there. He was 27. I never really talked to him or anything, he just came up to me one day, asked me my age and told me that he was going to marry me. All the time after that, he’d talk to me about how much he liked me and blah blah. When I left he gave me a half hug and was blowing kisses at me. He was actually a really nice guy and the whole thing was entertaining. Then there was another boy, 20, who worked at the hardware store who I think liked me. His name was Matciti and he came down to the farm to visit me one day. He was really nice and said that he wanted to take me out on the weekend. But unfortunately, I had to leave before the weekend came. AND then…there was Tbtaan. He was a 22-year-old worker down at the farm. A couple days after my arrival, he asked me to walk with him a bit on his way home; he was asking me how old I was and he parted saying, “I’m going to dream about you.”
Cheesy.
He ended up becoming a friend of mine. We’d hang out for a couple hours in the evening when he finished working at the farm and one time I went walking around the town with him while he and a friend ran some errands. It was interesting talking to someone who had grown up in Africa and finding out what his views and such were. He had no interest in going to college. He just wanted to move to South Africa and work. Yeah, he’s not my type.
So about being in town…it was very interesting walking around. Being so white and young, I was constantly stared at. People would literally stop in the streets and stare at me as I walked by. But I would just say hello in their language and they’d smile and greet me back, for the most part. When I went walking with Tbtaan, the staring was sooooo bad! I guess it was weird to see a local man walking with such a white girl. Kids were a bit better; they would usually wave right away. To the children there, I was quite the spectacle. I visited a school a couple times and the kids there would run up to me and shake my hand and say “hello.” One day I was at Tbtaan’s house because his sister was braiding Joni’s hair and so I was sitting out on their front steps with her little girl and boy and a few other neighbor kids. They’d all crowd around me and smile at me. One little girl kept touching my skin and would play with my hair. A couple times she tried to look down my shirt and try to lift my shirt up.

So while there, we started up a playgroup in a building by the hardware store for 3-6-year-olds. It was a place for young children to go for a couple hours. In Mokhotlong, children just tend to run free while parents are at work. It was actually quite a hit, after only a day, we had to turn people away because we had as many kids as we could handle. Sometimes some of the kids would start touching my skin and playing with my hair. There was one little girl there of 3 years who just seemed to love me. She’d always grab my hand and lead me around and would lie against me.
While in Mokhotlong, I had a nice case of fleas; Joni was given a puppy during my stay and even though she was the one who slept with the dog, it was only Avril and I that got bit. My legs look nasty from all the scratching.


Last Sunday, Greg and I went for a pony trek with one of his friends. They’re not really ponies, though they are called Basotho ponies. Some of them are the sizes of horses (like the one I rode) while some of them are a little bit smaller. The pony trek was great! We went for the four hour ride which took us out to this waterfall. I have to admit, I was nervous at first about riding. We went riding through the mountains, which was so gorgeous! But we were having to go up and down these narrow trails on the side of the mountains that were strewn about with rocks. In going down, the horses were constantly slipping for it had just rain the night before. After awhile, I just got used to the missteps and such and felt very comfortable. Along the way, we’d pass little villages of about 10 huts, or a place where only one or two huts were, and these places were just out in the middle of nowhere. These were people that lived off the land. From time to time we’d come across cattle or goats and some herdsmen with some donkeys. The waterfall was great. Greg and his friend went swimming in their skivvies while I waded around. The water was cold and I was wearing jeans and didn’t bring anything to change into, but I still dove in and swam for a bit. It felt really good to ride again, I haven’t been riding for around 5 or more years. We would get the horses trotting when we could and at times got them into a nice canter. It felt so good to be on an almost galloping horse out in the mountains of Africa.


The other day, I headed to a political rally with Greg’s friend David. I think I told you about how there are elections taking place while I am here and the reason why we’re going to Cape Town this week is because the elections are being held this weekend. Last time, the elections went peacefully, but the prior elections there were riots and people were killed. This is what I have learned thus far: there are two separate parties that are the main ones being voted for. One is ABC and the other is LCP. LCP is in power right now and from what I’ve heard, it sounds like they are a bit corrupt or something and so there is a lot of support for the ABC party. The thing to be worried about is if ABC doesn’t win. They have so much support that if LCP wins, then people might assume that it had been rigged and riots will start. When we were driving out for the pony trek, buses and trucks full of people that were going to rallies were flashing the ABC hand signs at us. Think of when you do the exploding fist, it kind of looks like that; fingers held together and then you open them up. While doing this, people say duala (not spelled correctly, but that’s what it sounds like) and it means sunshine. One guy at the rally I attended said it was like a blanket wrapping around everyone. So David and I went to this rally and everyone was staring at us. The whole time there, I never saw another white person. David was doing the ABC sign to people and everyone would cheer. If I did it too, then we got even more cheers. We stopped and talked to a group of women about why they were voting for ABC and they said it was because they wanted the poverty to end and for jobs to be made. So I guess while walking around, a lot of people were yelling la hoi at us (again, spelled like it sounds). I didn’t know the word, until David told me of it. It means white person, but it’s more derogatory. Lovely.