May 8, 2003 - University of Minnesota: When I last saw y'all, we had just escaped from the bloodthirsty Islamic rebels in Cote d'Ivoire. That's not entirely true of course, but I've found that it's more interesting than describing the 9 days with Baptist missionaries, playing bocci ball and watching Lord of the Rings on DVD.

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Ivory Coast: Peace Corps Ivory Coast : The Peace Corps in the Ivory Coast: May 8, 2003 - University of Minnesota: When I last saw y'all, we had just escaped from the bloodthirsty Islamic rebels in Cote d'Ivoire. That's not entirely true of course, but I've found that it's more interesting than describing the 9 days with Baptist missionaries, playing bocci ball and watching Lord of the Rings on DVD.

By Admin1 (admin) on Saturday, July 19, 2003 - 10:55 am: Edit Post

When I last saw y'all, we had just escaped from the bloodthirsty Islamic rebels in Cote d'Ivoire. That's not entirely true of course, but I've found that it's more interesting than describing the 9 days with Baptist missionaries, playing bocci ball and watching Lord of the Rings on DVD.



When I last saw y'all, we had just escaped from the bloodthirsty Islamic rebels in Cote d'Ivoire. That's not entirely true of course, but I've found that it's more interesting than describing the 9 days with Baptist missionaries, playing bocci ball and watching Lord of the Rings on DVD.

Letter from Chris S .

Date: 8May03 9:11am

Hey y'all. At the risk of disturbing the group email silence we seem to have, I thought I'd send an update of what I'm doing, following the brave efforts of Toby and Melissa.

I'm writing this from Durban, on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa. When I last saw y'all, we had just escaped from the bloodthirsty Islamic rebels in Cote d'Ivoire. That's not entirely true of course, but I've found that it's more interesting than describing the 9 days with Baptist missionaries, playing bocci ball and watching Lord of the Rings on DVD. (Anne, no one seems to appreciate the humour of making cornbread with 3 cups of powdered milk; it will have to be our private joke... :))

I spent much of the next 5 months working as the manager of a backpacker hostel in the Drakensberg mountains of South Africa, a place I discovered when traveling around after leaving Zimbabwe. My best time there was spent learning how to cook, struggling to throw a cricket ball with a straight right arm, and of course, hiking. The Drakensberg form the spectacular eastern border of Lesotho and in my time I managed to hike almost the entire range -- foiled at the end only by the treachery of my Chaco sandal. In retrospect, "work" may be too strong a word for my time there -- I prefer the term "sabatical" (yes, I know, sabatical from what?)...

However, having drifted dangerously close to work, I decided to move on into what I term the "professional house guest" phase, attempting to visit all my Peace Corps friends in Africa.

I started with 4 weeks in Lesotho, the "mountain kingdom" inside South Africa, visiting my friend Adam who lives in a town called Qacha's Nek (the "Qa" is pronounced with a click). Qacha is a remote frontier town -- a place where it is not out of place to see horses hitched outside a bar like something in a John Wayne movie -- and is a Siberia-like exile for Basotho civil servants and Peace Corps volunteers alike. But things are looking up for Qacha as cheese has been sighted in the food shops and one of the bars got a coin pool table and even has a stereo provided there's enough juice in the car battery to run it. (As a sidenote, I believe that I have introduced "shit-talking" into rural Basotho culture, the only "sustainable development" I've been involved with in Africa.)

Life is pretty slow there, living without electricity or running water (giving me little sympathy for the "humanitarian crisis" in Iraq) and it's difficult to describe what life is like -- it is definitely not always in agreement with my non-PC friends idea of "how much fun I must be having". The people are poor, but what development there is, is of the bad kind. There's a lot of cultural erosion and a bad dependence on the aid community. Incidentally, I think that "African time" may have been invented in Lesotho...

Probably the best example of how things work is to talk about a bus ride, not nearly an organized affair like we enjoyed in RCI (or any country where rational thought is found). After leaving Adam's I went to visit my friend Susanne in a town called Mafeteng, a hole of a town notable for the fact that a volunteer just got removed because people were trying to kill him for his body parts which can be used in witchcraft... Hopefully a description will give some of you a nostalgia for Africa and an idea of what I'm doing with my time:

The bus ride was 8 hours, all of which was done standing in the aisle. Now, there is a charming idea in Africa that you can always put one more person into a vehicle, but this was the first ride that I've seen that idea come up against the fundamental incompressibility of the human body. To ride this bus was to understand how people get crushed to death at soccer games. And on each mountain pass, you would feel the m*g*sin(theta) [engineering term] of 30 other people in the aisle and holding on to the roof bar became like a 10 minute chin-up. Being Africa, no one opened a window (or is allowed to by cultural tradition) and the whole ride, deafening music is blared out of loudspeakers -- Basotho pop music being currently engaged in a search to unify the dissonant sounds of an accordian, a man shouting in a microphone, and a whistle. When someone needs to get off the bus, they may have to spend 10 and 15 minutes, depending on how much arguing is done, since navigating the aisle is like trying to pass an electron through plastic [engineering simile]. The 8 hours is spent mentally trying to control your bladder and trying to free up space for your paralyzed limbs by stepping on someone's foot, or hinting that you might be coming down with tuberculosis...

That's life in Lesotho, you can just extrapolate out from that description for insights into the rest of things there. Does this sound like fun? I'm not sure anymore. Regardless, there's a whole continent left to cover, and I'm off to Madagascar in 2 weeks to spend a month, hopefully finding out what a lemur is at some point.

After that it's to Malawi and Kenya before heading back to West Africa and visiting in Gabon, Togo and Ghana.

I hope all is well with everyone, and I'll write when I can. Miss y'all. Chris.



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Story Source: University of Minnesota

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Ivory Coast; COS - South Africa; COS - Lesotho; Safety and Security of Volunteers

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