Lesotho, Part 1

I arrived in Lesotho on Sunday afternoon, exhausted from 2 back to back night flights. I skyped our consultant whose trip overlaps with mine, since we were at the same hotel. ‘Made it, but going to take a nap’. Um, I went to sleep at 4pm and woke up the next morning. When I met him for breakfast the next morning and apologized, he just laughed at me and said he knew when I skyped him that it wasn’t going to be a nap. 

 

The lowlands (which still have plateaus)

 Lesotho is beautiful. The capital, Maseru, is in what they call the lowlands, and on Thursday we went farther south into the lowlands so I could see some of the laboratories that my work project supports. I won’t bore you with tons of laboratory pictures, but it’s really neat to see how things work, and meet really dedicated, committed lab workers. 

 One of the labs we visited.

We went all the way south to Mafeteng and Mohale’s Hoek. The trip there and back, with several stops at labs and one for lunch, took a full business day. [Sidenote: There is a really good pizza place in the middle of nowhere Lesotho!] So last week was mostly spent in the Maseru office except for Thursday, catching up on administrative stuff and working with the technical team on data stuff. I also checked out the mall next to my hotel and felt very at home- all of the chain stores are the same as Botswana. 

I found my favorite biscuits (cookies) :D

Once you are outside Maseru, it’s mostly rural. There are shops and scattered restaurants, but few banks or job opportunities (that I could see) outside of agriculture and small roadside businesses. There are several large Chinese garment factories in Maseru, but still not a huge business district that I saw. 

 A garment factory outside of Leribe. 85%+ of the employees are female.

Houses are traditionally round and made of stone. Now there are more square/rectangle cement structures, but all seem pretty substantial and able to weather the elements. Which is important, because it snows in the mountains and apparently hailed in Maseru last week (!). 

 

A village about 30 minutes from the capital.

The language, Sesotho (pronounced ‘Seh-sue-too’) is very similar to Setswana, the language I learned in Botswana. Similar enough that most of the greetings are the same and if I speak Setswana, people understand me. And then tell me how to say that phrase in Sesotho :)

Next post: I climbed a mountain and did some cool stuff on my free day.