PCV Profile: Torle

Torle in her kobo and seshoeshoe on our swearing in day.

Torle is another PCV who arrived in Lesotho with me back in June of 2014. She is a vibrant and energetic young woman who calls Utah home but has traveled and lived all over including elsewhere in Africa and Alaska. She has an incredible singing and beat boxing talent and definitely qualifies as the coolest basketball player in Peace Corps Lesotho.

Given her affinity and experience with team sports, it is not surprising that Peace Corps placed her with the Leseli Youth Sports Organization in Teyateyaneng or TY. Leseli Youth Sports works  on youth development by encouraging youth to engage in healthy, active lifestyles. Youth participate through football (soccer for the American readers), basketball, and volleyball teams; although predominantly football. When she arrived at site, she found she had a jam packed schedule from the beginning. Torle found herself coaching multiple youth teams and visiting the many local schools in and around TY.

Torle's counterpart teaching life skills in GRS

After we attended the Grassroot Soccer training last November, she augmented those school visits to include the GRS PC Skillz curriculum, teaching teens life skills and HIV Prevention messages using football drills. Currently, she is in secondary schools three days a week. She also coaches basketball, volleyball, and netball. Netball is a women's sport somewhere similar to basketball but with different rules about passing and traveling, there is no recognizable dribbling that basketball players would identify. She also works with the LBA or Lesotho Basketball Association and teaches a Zumba class for women in her village.

Torle has been working incredibly hard with her counterparts to help them complete an impressively large project for their community. After doing Needs Assessments with the many youth in her organization, they decided to build a multipurpose sports court for youth in the Teyateyaneng area. As Teyateyaneng is one of the larger towns in Lesotho, this court has the possibility to be used by thousands of youth.

Preparation for the new sports court begin.

In the interest of capacity building and empowering the youth she is working with, Torle and her counterpart created a really strong Youth Committee. They visited the seven secondary or high schools in TY and requested the school nominate the three most outstanding students with an interest in sports. These twenty-one youth were then interviewed in English before the group was narrowed down to five girls and five boys. The Youth Committee meets every Friday. They have been working on every detail of the project from the beginning.

The Committee co-wrote the project proposal and donation request letters. The teens then visited area business owners to ask for their involvement. They did a phenomenal job, as they have five large construction and building supply owners donating many materials, the labor, and all equipment for construction of their Multi-purpose Sports Court. This left them to continue fundraising only for four materials and meals for their laborers. They are planning and implementing a number of community events to raise funds to feed their volunteer laborers on workdays. And, with Torle, they have written and been approved for a Peace Corps Partnership Program or PCPP grant. Their PCPP grant is currently active with Peace Corps if you are interested in taking a closer look.

Girls doing a drama as part of GRS.

Torle recently also became the Grassroot Soccer Coordinator for Lesotho. As the coordinator, she helps and supports the PCVs in Lesotho who have been through the GRS training and are doing GRS Interventions. She also serves as the conduit between the GRS staff in Cape Town, the Peace Corps staff in Maseru, and the PCVs in country. It a lot to add onto an already busy woman's shoulders, however, with her passion for youth sports and programming.

 

A crew clearing the area where the sports court will be.

Torle's many well trained and incredibly motivated GRS Co-Coaches.

Workshop Woe

My journal entry from Monday:

Today this week was incredibly challenging, in all likelihood the toughest day I have had in Lesotho yet. It was the day of our mini-PDM workshop. It was going to be long and difficult no matter what.

Then I learned this morning that Ausi Mareisi, my counterpart, had to work...but, 'M'e Mamphatsoe saud someone was calling her supervisor to get her the time off to join me in co-leading the workshop as planned. Despite this reassurance, I could not help but be anxious.

This was my nightmare. The very idea of doing the workshop effectively with people who speak no English, using only my decent but inadequate Sesotho skills has literally been my worst case scenario for the last month. It was a concept so awful I tried not to consider it a possibility at all.

It turns out that Ausi Mareisi could not leave her other job as her supervisor had disappeared. My worst case scenario was now my reality. Rescheduling was not possible as we had chairs, supplies, and meals provided by WorldVision. I wanted to laugh or to cry.

I wanted to cry. I wanted a magical ability to speak and hear Sesotho fluently for a day. I wanted to have been assigned an organization full of English speakers, like more of my PCV peers. Part of me even wanted to quit or at least to hide in my house and ignore this reality.

By I did not join Peace Corps to quit or hide in my house, I joined for challenges and new experiences; to fully immerse myself in another country. And, the reality is, nothing I have done thus far in Peace Corps would be new or challenging without the language difference.

So, I took a deep breath, or five. I apologized to the nearly twenty people present for speaking Sesotho poorly, and I started the workshop.

We worked within my language abilities until my supervisor and another leader in the organization arrived. I let them know that Ausi Mareisi would not make it and they promptly suggested I walk across the street to ask my friend to close his shop so he could help with translations when needed.

Lucky for me, Abuti Sama is in fact a good friend and he was willing to do just that. Unlike Ausi Mareisi, he had never seen the material we were covering let alone attended an entire training on it, so I really challenged him with my translation requests. Often times, while he tried to figure out a way to say the complex things I threw at him, I came up with easier explanations that I could manage in Sesotho. Then, I would use him to confirm what I said made sense.

In the seven-hour workshop, we did not get nearly as much completed as we had ambitiously planned, but we reached a unanimous conclusion to pursue an income generating project of egg-laying chickens and to hopefully reinvigorate the previously successful Vaseline project. Both of these meet with the outcome of the Needs Assessment Ausi Mareisi and I previously completed. The egg project has the benefit of also increasing food security in our communities, a second need brought forth in the Needs Assessment.

Despite wanting to both laugh and cry many times throughout the day, I cannot call it anything but a success. I managed to go far beyond the language abilities I recognize within myself, expressing hard topics in ways that everyone understood. We shared an incredibly camaraderie throughout the day, being playful with the language in ways I would not have understood or joined a few months ago. Bo-'M'e all agreed upon a project, which was completely unexpected. And, I had the excellent reminder that people want to see my work here succeed and are willing to stop everything to help.

It is pretty great to not only meet a challenge, but also be forced to recognize how many people are there to support me when I think I am going to have to deal with something on my own.

MCCC’s Egg Laying Chicken Project has been in development since March 2015. After many delays, MCCC and I were able to write a successful grant proposal for a VAST grant through Peace Corps. VAST grants are funded by PEPFAR to help with HIV-related work and OVC (Orphan and Vulnerable Children) care. It is due to MCCC’s work with OCVs that qualified us for the VAST grant. Otherwise, we would have applied for a PCPP [Peace Corps Partnership Program] grant and would have been asking for assistance in funding this grant proposal. I encourage you to consider supporting other PCPP projects.

Posts about this project include:

Workshop Woe, Busiest of Birthdays, Checking Out Chickens, A Day with Bo-’M’e, Chicken Coop Construction Day One, Day Two, Day, Three, Day Four, Day Five 

Needs Assessment

This week Ausi Mareisi (my counterpart) and I took a big step we had been anticipating since PDM. We held a pitso or community meeting to undertake a Community Needs Assessment.

This is a critical first step before working with our organization to design and implement the primary large project of my service. With more the fifty years in development, Peace Corps knows that without community support even the best projects will not succeed after the volunteer leaves. Therefore, before we undertake our projects, we are expected to do a Needs Assessment to garner that support.

My supervisor and I had met with our chief a week earlier to schedule the pitso. Since CCC (Community Care Coalition) works in five villages, we requested a multi-village pitso instead of conducting five different pitsos. While attendance from the other villages may have been higher had we visited each village, it was far less stressful to hold only one larger pitso. This also prevented people from misunderstanding and thinking I would work with CCC to complete a project for each village.

After living in my village for seven months and spending a lot of time talking to people about needs, it is easy to believe that I have gotten to know the community well enough to understand what they need. At the same time, it is important to ensure that I am meeting their actual needs, not simply perceived needs.

As always, the pitso began with a prayer. Then, with surprisingly little introduction, the meeting was turned over to Ausi Mareisi and me. I started with a five minute speech in Sesotho that my tutor and I had fine tuned over the previous week. I explained that it was time to start a project with CCC, but we needed to ensure we are meeting a community need and have community support. I continued to explain some of the limitations of Peace Corps projects including limited funding and goals from the Lesotho government and Peace Corps that my work must meet. To conclude, I explained how we would complete the Needs Assessment. This was by far my longest speech in Sesotho thus far. While it was not memorized, I delivered it well and only struggled through one tough word.

After my speech, Ausi Mareisi spoke and then we completed the Needs Assessment. First we asked for people to suggest things the communities need. We had a variety of answers including:

• electricity
• water
• a better road
• a speed hump on the district's main road where the school children cross
• a “sawmill” (what the Basotho call a sawmill is actually a grist mill to grind maize and sorghum into powder for cooking)
• income to help provide for orphans, vulnerable children, and the sick—this one took on a variety of answers...
  • money to buy chairs to rent out with the community building to generate income
  • reinvigorating the CCC vaseline project
  • getting milk cows
  • getting egg laying chickens
  • making soap to sell
  • training to make and sell shoe polish
• increased food security
• job creation
• more toilets
• better clinic access

We then allowed people to vote for only two items, however, every single person immediately voted for the first item: electricity. Thus, we adapted and allowed them three votes. This narrowed our list down to five needs: electricity, speed hump, job creation, food security, and income to help OVCs.

From there we completed what is called pairwise ranking, comparing each item against each other item. Despite everyone voting for electricity in our first vote, when compared with money to help OVCs and food security, it took second billing. When compared with jobs, it only tied.

It was challenging to convince people to choose one out of two things they see as strong needs. The meeting nearly fell apart when we asked them to choose whether increased food security or money to help OVCs was more important. It took a lot of energy to get things back under control and moving again.

In the end, the community strongly placed income to help OVCs and the sick above everything else although increased food security and job creation were also important.

The planned outcome of this pitso is to use the information when we meet with CCC to plan our project. 

The unplanned outcome has been the conversations this has sparked with villagers in the last three days. Those that did not attend the pitso have started many chats about the pitso and community needs. Just like the people at the pitso, each person has immediately said that we need electricity, water, and a better road. I agree with them but then try to explain in Sesotho how the community reached the decision that money to help OVCs was more important than electricity.

Another outcome has been the affirmation that I do in fact know my community. The types of projects I have been considering and even the one that Ausi Mareisi and I designed for practice during PDM match with two of the three things that villagers ultimately said were most important.