My Heroes: Three Inspiring Basotho Women

Throughout my Peace Corps service, I have constantly been amazed and impressed by the strength, passion, and commitment to community I have seen in Basotho women. Whether the women of my former host organization, my host mother, colleagues, or friends, I have been awed and learned so much from these women over the past four years.

Today, it is my pleasure to introduce you to three incredible, strong, inspirational women that I have had the luxury to work with and befriend over the last few years. 

PONTSO

Some of the GLOW 2015 Leadership Team:
Sarah, me, Pontso, and Megan at the end of camp.

I first met Pontso in 2014 at Camp GLOW [Girls Leading Our World]. I was immediately drawn to her enthusiasm when addressing the campers during a career panel. She passionately spoke about getting her Masters in Sociology and the challenges she had overcome in her life to get to that point.

Over the next year, we worked together regularly on the planning team for the 2015 Camp GLOW. She was invaluable in ensuring the most vulnerable girls were included in camp and that we created the most dynamic and applicable topics. During camp, she again blew me away with her readiness to help out in every way imaginable, on top of taking care of her own responsibilities.

Since then, we have transitioned from work partners to friends. It has been fascinating to follow her journey. She is a manager with the Ministry of Social Development. She has applied and been accepted to multiple international programs including participating in the World Festival of Youth and Students in Russia last year, was a 2017 Young Global Changer chosen as part of The Think Summit in Germany, the African Union’s Youth Volunteer Corps (like Peace Corps but for countries in the African Union), and most recently the US’s Mandela Washington Fellowship which is the top opportunity through the US State Department’s Young African Leaders Initiative started under the Obama Administration. She was also honored as one of Africa's Brightest Young Minds in 2017! 

A recent newspaper article about Pontso's volunteer development work. 

In addition to these great opportunities, she continues to volunteer her time to improve the lives of Basotho people. When she was living in Masuoe, an area on the outskirts of Maseru, she became passionate about the impacts of climate change on the local environment. Even though she has moved from that community, she is working with community members, empowering them to work to improve the impact of soil erosion and safety on their community. 

LERATO

Lerato and I goof off together
after teen club in 2016. 

Lerato works at Baylor College’s Pediatric HIV Clinic, where she provided support to patients and coordinates the Teen Club Support Group for HIV positive youth. She is a firecracker of a young woman. At teen club, her bond with the members of the club was constantly evident. She challenged them in positive ways to embrace their situation and take responsibility for their own health.

In addition to being great at her paid job, Lerato is also an outspoken HIV+ advocate. She regularly gives talks around the country sharing her own story and challenging stigmatization of HIV. She was first diagnosed with HIV in 2007 as a teenager. When she shares this story, it’s hard. She does not shy away from her mother’s negative reaction and the loneliness and isolation she felt when she first found out she has HIV.

Voting via SMS for the Finite Awards will finish before the
Ceremony and Gala in August of 2018. 

Thankfully, her story does not end in 2007, with heartbreak. Lerato is a strong and healthy woman. She adheres to her Antiretroviral Therapy. She and her mother repaired their relationship. She has twin daughters who are now seven and HIV negative as a result of successful Prevention of Mother-To Child-Transmission. She uses her experiences and challenges through motivational talks and to help the teens she counsels and supports. 

Last year she helped organize a large and unique HIV testing event. It involved a fun walk, motivational and educational speakers helping to de-stigmatize HIV, HIV testing, and lunch. Almost four hundred people participated in the event with 154 being tested for HIV. 

This year, she is a finalist for the Survival Heroes category of the annual Finite Women Appreciation Awards, which is an award offered by Finite Magazine in Lesotho to women. I, for one, definitely think this is a well-deserved nomination and wish I was still going to be here to attend the Gala with her in August!

LINEO

Lineo and I strike a pose in traditional and modern
cultural dress at the Cultural Day she organized.

I met first met Lineo because she was a counterpart for my fellow volunteer, Nick. She is a faculty member at Leribe Agricultural Skills Training Center. In addition to this, she is incredibly active in the community. She planned and coordinated a huge Cultural Day for the school and local community in 2015.

Last year she qualified for and participated in a regional YALI [Young African Leaders Initiative] Summit in Civic Leadership. She has made the final rounds for the Mandela Washington Summit twice in recent years. Currently, in addition to working to improve agricultural efforts and food security if rural areas of Lesotho; she also spearheaded a project called Barali (daughters in Sesotho).

Barali is a project to decrease school dropouts due to early pregnancy. Working with local Child and Gender Protection officers, she visits area schools to teach young women about their sexual and reproductive rights ad HIV. As she gets to know the young women at specific schools, she works with local leadership to combat the challenges these young women face such as early marriage, gender based violence, etc.

Through Barali, she is fostering dialogue, working with many local partner organizations, and empowering adolescent girls to have the confidence to make their own decisions. She held an event in May to encourage girls to be bold enough to buy their own condoms; something most young women in Lesotho are hesitant to do. Over five hundred local youth participated in the event.

I cherish the moments we steal to reconnect
now that we live further apart. It is always
inspiring to hear what Lineo is working on. 

Currently Barali is hosting a campaign called “Hear My Story” which is sharing stories about women who have had abortions. Abortion is illegal in Lesotho, so women and girls who feel they must have one typically do not have them done by medical professionals. They are often dangerous and lead to medical complications. Seeking medical care after an illegal abortion can also lead to prosecution. The effort of this campaign is to highlight the challenges, stigma, and desperation that women and girls encounter as a result of becoming pregnant.

Even Lineo’s facebook page has become a tool for discussion. She often starts conversation about the impact of perceptions on our sexual health. It’s truly amazing to see the way she fosters important dialogue about culturally sensitive topics on social media.

Two Years and Sixteen Volunteers

Fresh off the plane: June 5, 2014

Last week I highlighted the accomplishments of my Peace Corps training group in light of our work as defined by and reported to Peace Corps. Numbers of people reached in specific topics, however, only shares a small portion of our story.

One of my favorite things about the Healthy Youth program in Lesotho, is that each volunteer’s job responsibilities and activities are unique to their site. As a result, we worked in a number of areas, some overlapping and some unique to only one or two of us. Here is a sampling of the work that filled our days:

Health

• Worked in a clinic to increase ARV adherence and infant wellness checks 
• Weighed infants and worked with Village Health Workers in an outreach clinic
• Started a growth monitoring and intervention program at an orphanage
• Worked with three HIV+ Teen Clubs

Youth Development

• Directed 6 overnight camps serving more than 425 girls and boys in six of Lesotho’s ten districts
• Completed more than 20 Grassroot Soccer Interventions to educate on HIV prevention
• Tutored herdboys in computer skills
• Started and led Youth Clubs in Athletics, Gender Empowerment, Drawing, Games, English, and English Reading

PCV Stephanie and colleagues show off the produce at
the orphanage she worked with.
Photo provided by Stephanie Sales.

Income Generation to Support Families and OVCs

• Two community-based sewing businesses
• A farm including water accessibility for an orphanage
• Started three chicken projects
• An achaar project
• Fenced a farm and orchard to protect product from cattle
• Advised five agricultural co-operatives
• Helped a women’s and girl’s weaving group with marketing and market development

Community Engagement

• Planned  and led four World AIDS Day events including talent shows, voluntary HIV testing, 
• Built a multi-purpose athletic court for one of Lesotho’s largest towns
• Planned and led a Spread the Love, Not the Disease Valentine’s Day event with over 100 youth participants enjoying face painting, nutrition and fitness info, yoga, HIV testing, and Planned Parenthood
• Hosted a large HIV awareness, testing, and education day for youth
• Built a Community Building with a children’s library
• Worked with Caregiver and OVC Support groups in four communities; building the capacity of caregivers 
• Led a father’s support group through the Red Cross
• Built small greenhouses with families and provided nutrition and gardening lessons to build food security

Education

PCV Eloise's students at the Khotsong Skills Training
Center, a tertiary school.
Photo provided by Eloise Williams

• Started computer labs at 2 tertiary schools
• Worked with a school to help it get internet access for students and teachers
• Taught primary school classes in Life Skills, English & Creative Writing, and Dance
• Taught Life Skills in secondary schools
• Taught at 3 tertiary institutions

Lesotho 82 Peace Corps Volunteers and their counterparts at a workshop.

The Teen Scene

Teenagers in Lesotho are like teenagers everywhere. Different cultures and different styles of living apparently make little impact on the wants, needs, and desires of adolescents. Living in a rural village without electricity or fancy toys does impact the way Lesotho teenagers spend their free time as hours of television, video gaming, Facebook, and texting are not an option.

Here are the top 5 positive ways that youth spend their free time in my village:

# 5: “Going Up and Down”

Going up and down is classic wandering mixed with a bit of loitering. Teens usually participate in this activity with a partner or as part of a trio. They stroll the village with no particular destination in mind, stopping to talk with friends as they go.

#4: Staying Late at School

Schools are a huge gathering area. Students travel up to an hour or two to attend school. As a result, their school friends may live far away and school is their only opportunity to interact. Many students will stay late to participate in clubs covering activities and topics like GLOW, Chess, English, various sports, Choir, and more. Also, especially before exam time, students will stay late to “read” with their classmates. As much of the learning is done through taking notes, students in Lesotho call studying “reading”.

#3: Playing Music at Max Volume

This one requires someone with a solar powered radio. Teens will gather for hours around the radio, often including impromptu dance parties. Since the radio is solar powered, this gathering is strictly outside and becomes larger the longer it lasts.

The girls playing "primitive" with local children

#2: Playing with Children

Children flock to the teens when they are hanging out in the village. Eventually, the teens, especially younger women, will start leading a game, a song and dance, or playing house with the younger children. Last weekend, I passed a few teens who were entertaining children as they played “primitive.” They had gotten some food from their parents and were cooking in old tin cans on an open fire.  Everyone was having a blast.

#1: FOOTBALL!

Football (soccer for the Americans) is far and away everyone’s favorite pastime.   Boys play constantly, as football is still predominantly a male sport here.  When the boys are just playing for fun, the more daring girls will join in. Others sit and watch the fun.

A weekend football match in my village.

The village has two teams comprised of teens and young adults. These teams practice daily and play almost every Sunday, occasionally even on Saturday. When there is a home match, pretty much every weekend with two teams, almost every idle teen makes an appearance, whether to see the match or be seen by their peers. At the matches, they stand in tight groups with their friends; socializing and occasionally singing cheers at the players.  But, it is not just matches or pick up play that brings the teens. They will often go and hang out around the field during the daily practices as well. 

Kathy's Lesotho Reflections

Hiking Lesotho's mountains.

As my last two blogs have highlighted, my amazing sister visited Southern Africa for most of August. It was wonderful sharing my life and work with her. I asked her to write as a guest blogger about her experiences in Lesotho. As she told me, "This trip has engraved itself my heart and it seems to funny to me that outwardly I'm the same when I feel so different inside." 

Here is the experience, in her own words:

In August, Beth and I went on one of our Amazing Adventures.  We started in Kruger National Park with Tracy, hunting for glimpses of elusive animals, celebrating 2 birthdays, freezing our fingers on game drives, and laughing all over the park.  There we checked the Big Five off our lists as well as many different bird species.

After parting ways with Tracy, Beth and I were off to Cape Town to be penultimate tourists.  We checked off Table Mountain, the Castle of Good Hope, The Best Nachos Ever, and local draft beer (Beth even got to have a porter!)  Robben Island was a highlight (see Beth's previous post) although also a difficult stop.  After 4 nights in luxury (gotta love rewards points!), we wine tasted in Stellenbosch and continued on to Lesotho.

From the second we reached the border, I knew that this Adventure was different.  This Adventure involved litter all over the ground.  This Adventure had us checking out of South Africa and walking over No Man's Land before checking into Lesotho.  This Adventure had the custom's agent welcoming us to the country with a big smile on her face and telling us that we were beautiful.  This Adventure had me blindly following my sister deeper into the city and through a few alleys to avoid the taxi drivers and pick up a Venture taxi instead.  This Adventure had me cuddled with the trunk door of an SUV sitting on a jump seat with my luggage piled on my lap next to a man who cracked open a beer while trying to change his SIM card.  This Adventure had me overwhelmed.  For the first time in all of my travels throughout Europe and North America, I was in a place were most people didn't speak English (or French!) and I couldn't even guess what they were saying.

And so my Adventure was living Beth's life for a week.  We went

Kathy doing laundry.

on errands around the village and the camp town, hand washed our clothes in the spring before carrying them back up the hill, taught life skills to Standard 4-7, weighed babies at a monthly clinic, and talked to a teacher about the upcoming GLOW camp that Beth is running.  All of these activities were surrounded by much needed Sister Time.  And in the background was always someone checking in, wanting to make sure Beth was okay since they haven't seen her in a while.  

With one of the four classes Beth teaches weekly.

And that is what made this Adventure so different - people.  People who yes, couldn't understand me just like I couldn't understand them.  But this Adventure had people who welcomed me in and accepted me just for coming to visit their country (it helped that I'm Thato's sister!).  They spoke to me in the language of love and smiles. They payed me compliments through Beth - usually expressing surprise that we look so much alike and then saying how beautiful we are.  This Adventure had brothers who teased me, played football with me, let me join movie night, and called me "a-ussi Kavy" (Sister Kathy).  This Adventure had Me' Masekila who made me Ma-toe-hoe and then tried to explain to me what it was in Sesotho before just saying "porridge" in English (I must have looked awfully confused!).  This Adventure had a community of people who welcomed me to their home and shared as much about it as they could in ten short days.  This Adventure had the Chief saying, "Welcome home" when he met me and even though it was only day 3, I felt it.  

Sharing Kathy's favorite American
foods with the host family.

So while the first day or so was tough and there really is a ton of litter on the ground, by the end of the trip, I didn't notice it.  Instead I saw the people - welcoming, kind, and amazing.  

PCV Profile: Mackenzie

Mackenzie and me at Bushfire

One of the life skills classes

My dear friend Mackenzie and I sat together on our fifteen hour flight from America to Africa last year. Prior to Peace Corps, she worked in Lesotho. Peace Corps had always been a goal for her and she is certainly maximizing her experience now that she is here.

I really admire her openness, positive attitude, and creative soul. She is one of the most unique women I have encountered and every time we talk, I leave our conversations feeling both happy and inspired.

Mackenzie lives not far from the capital of Lesotho, Maseru. She works with Blue Cross, a drug abuse prevention and treatment organization working throughout the country. Her work as a Peace Corps Volunteer with such a well established organization is far different than my own loosely structured organization, job, and site. She is an incredibly busy woman!

Both women's soccer teams that Mackenzie coaches.

She teaches life skills classes with the people in the inpatient drug and alcohol abuse rehabilitation program. Additionally, she is out in the community constantly. She teaches life skills at two primary schools and two high schools in the surrounding area every week. She meets with two HIV+ Support Groups through Red Cross; one for men and one for women. She has a women's walking group that meets weekly and an after school youth running club that runs three times weekly. She even uses her weekends for work, coaching two women's soccer teams. She has helped put together women's soccer tournaments through Blue Cross.

The "I Aspire to Be" Chalkboard

Somehow in the midst of all of those activities, she also has found time to do some really neat projects in the community. Her creative spirit has been put to great use and can be seen throughout her community. Outside a local shop is now an "I Aspire to Be..." chalkboard where people can declare and share their dreams. She and men from the community have been painting red ribbons throughout area villages to increase HIV awareness.

Although it is still in the early stages, she is working with her community to start a piggery as an income-generating activity for the community members.

The empowered women of Camp Glow

Additionally, Mackenzie co-planned and co-directed a GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) camp in her area last month. The camp was a 3-day camp with 60 young women from seven Maseru District schools attending. It was a huge success with exclusively local funding. The campers participated in sessions on leadership, self empowerment, HIV Prevention, gender equality, drug and alcohol abuse, and how to start a GLOW club at their own school. After it received local television attention, people starting contacting Blue Cross so she is already contemplating doing a second camp before we finish our service!

Life skills graduates at Blue Cross

Mackenzie and a counterpart working on the chalkboard

All photos provided by Mackenzie.

Just an Average Month

While I was at PST over the last few months, the trainees regularly asked what my weeks in Peace Corps generally looked like. The reality is that my job is so varied and loosely structured that no two weeks look the same. There are a few things that happen every week or every month and then a wide range of additional things thrown in that currently have me feeling incredibly busy.

The consistent weekly activities I have are limited to Tuesdays and Thursdays. On both days my afternoons are spent studying Sesotho with my tutor. Thursday mornings I teach Life Skills to 167 children at the local school.

Village Clinic Day Education Talk

The second Saturday of every month I spend at an HIV+ Teen Support Group. We typically have over 80 teens monthly. Then, the third Friday of the month I spend at the Village Outreach Clinic for Mothers and Children.

On a weekly and monthly basis, those are the only things that occur at regular intervals, however, somehow I seem to be constantly busy. Some of the other activities that keep me moving are:

• 

  Camp GLOW 2014

  Connecting with MCCC-multi-day trainings, workshops to move forward on our Egg-Laying Chicken Project, and other meetings
• Work and meetings with the local Ministry of Agriculture to plan and schedule trainings for MCCC
• Planning meetings with my counterpart and supervisor
• Meetings with any and all of the committee planning the large-scale, four district Camp GLOW [Girls Leading Our World] with me. The camp is not until late September, but we are working extensively on the budget now so we can do the grant application through Peace Corps.
• Community Events-a huge part of being a PCV is participating in community events. These include the obvious weddings and funerals, but also pitsos (community meetings called by the chief) like the one held for me last year when I visited, parties and celebrations like the one for our Agricultural Block Scheme, and similar activities.

• 

  Helping with English homework

  Kid Time-a casual but integral part of my job as a Healthy Youth PCV is to work with youth as a mentor and role model, encouraging them to develop positive life skills. While some of this is done formally through my weekly Life Skills classes or the Grassroot Soccer Camp I did in January, more of it is done through casual interactions like stopping to play or chat when walking between places, playing cards or soccer at my house, and helping with homework (especially English) assignments, and the like.
• Peace Corps Meetings and Work-this includes activities like helping with Pre-Service Training, participating in In-Service Trainings, serving as the Co-Chair for the GEL [Gender Equality Lesotho] Peace Corps Committee, completing required volunteer surveys and reports, and the like. Usually these activities take me out of the village, even the paperwork as it is done digitally and we do not have electricity.
• General Life Activities-regular rural life in Lesotho takes much more time than back home in the US. Simple life maintenance is time consuming. Fetching 10-20L of water takes more than half an hour. Making that water drinkable requires boiling and cooling before filtering. Doing laundry in the winter months involves packing up clothes, basins, and detergent, walking for 10-15 minutes, then sitting at the spring actually washing the cloths for up to 2.5 hours before packing it all up and hiking back uphill to the house with the heavy wet cloths. Winter is dusty and windy, so clothes require more time and more water to get clean. This must be done early enough in the day to give everything time to dry on the line before sunset. Buying food requires hours. If I head to town, it is at least an hour to get there and usually twice that to return. If I go to one of the village shops, it is only twenty minutes of walking each way but the requisite and enjoyable social conversations with the shopkeeper and other villagers at the shop adds at least an hour to the tally.