Well, I haven’t even been in Lesotho for a week and already there have been so many surprises. Some of the surprises have been because things are different to the UK, but most of them have been because of unexpected similarities! A lot of the obvious similarities can be found in shops – I really didn’t need to worry about my packing because you can buy pretty much everything you might find at home here! If you go to a supermarket, you can buy Cadbury’s chocolate, Pantene shampoo and Scottish shortbread as well as local breads, meats and sauces. Whilst it’s comforting to see so many familiar things, it also seems like a shame that you can travel thousands of miles only to find the same products.
Do you think that it’s good or bad that the same foods, produced by the same companies, can be found all over the world? Why? – or why not?
Talking of food, so far, we’ve eaten...
Veggie burgers – for breakfast!
Fried fish and chicken
Peas, carrots and squash
Papa (it looks like mashed potatoes but tastes like heavy rice and is the staple food here)
Yogurt
Fried eggs
Corn bread (steamed bread that is quite heavy, a bit like a bagel)
Ice cream
Peaches, watermelon, apples, grapes and guava
Chakalaka (beans in a tomato-y, fruity sauce)
Rooibos tea
Madeira cake
Chicken take-away (a packed lunch that drove with us to Mohale Dam, 3000m above sea level, up in the mountains!)
I’ve been based in the capital of Lesotho, Maseru, but yesterday we were able to go up into the mountains, to the Mohale Dam. The dam supplies water to South Africa and hydro-electricity to Lesotho. The area is very beautiful but not everyone thinks that the dam was a good thing. Many local people who had been used to farming the land had to be moved so the dam could be built and the landscape was changed dramatically. However, good roads also had to be built and this means that it’s easier for people who live in the mountains to travel, and for tourists to visit. The government really wants to develop the tourist industry in the area now. Why do you think this might be a good thing? Why do you think this might be a bad thing?
We have also been learning Sesotho, so I thought I’d share some expressions with you.
Du me la! – Hello! (You say it ‘Doo may la’)
U phela joang? – How are you? (‘Oo pay-la jwang?’)
Ke phela hantle – I’m well (‘Kay pay-la hank-lay’)
My favourite phrase so far is NAKO KE MANG? This means ‘what time is it?’, but if you translate it exactly, it means ‘the time is who?’. There’s a story behind this... Many, many years ago, the Basotho people didn’t use clocks to tell the time. They didn’t need to. They looked at the size of shadows cast by the sun or they listened to the call of the cockerel. They even used the donkey to tell the time, because during the night, it eey-ored every two hours. When the first white people came, they were missionaries from Europe. The Europeans were much more anxious about the time. They needed to know the exact hour, minute and second so that they wouldn’t be late and so that everything would happen when it should. The missionaries, then, came with clocks and watches. They strapped the time to their arms. The Basotho people found this strange and thought that the missionaries must have trapped time in these tiny machines; they believed there were people living in clocks and watches. They weren’t ‘stupid’ or ‘backwards’, they just hadn’t needed to capture time like the Europeans. And so that’s why they still ask ‘the time is who?’. The story has survived in the language.
We’re about to go shopping now – after being interviewed by the local tv station! I hope that it doesn’t rain today. Even though it’s very hot and we have to cover ourselves with sun cream, there are also tremendous thunderstorms. We had five before we’d even been here for 24 hours! Luckily, they haven’t been that frequent since.
I’ll try to post some photographs soon! Salang hantle. (Goodbye!)
