We’re almost a week into the trip at this point, but since this is my first post, I think I’ll start at the beginning. On May 23rd, we left as a group of eight (six Lesotho BTB interns along with two on their way to Swaziland and Malawi) from Houston Intercontinental Airport to start a tiring two-day plane trip. I almost went with “difficult” or “grueling” as the adjective in the last sentence, but those just wouldn’t have been fitting since we actually got to  stop in London for a beautiful afternoon-length stay. As far as I know, none of us had ever been, so we used a handy airport brochure (that had almost as much advertising as map space) to make our way through a whirlwind tour of all the city’s well-known attractions.

This past Tuesday, we finally moved into our Happy Villa in Maseru, Lesotho, and made sure we hit the ground running as far as our project was concerned. Our first stop was at Masianokeng High School, where Grace and I will be teaching a microenterprise course covering many small business fundamentals. We worked hard to develop the course during this past semester, so I was somewhat apprehensive going into a meeting with some teachers and Principal Chimombe; I really hoped that our design would work within the framework of the school. However, everyone we met seemed very friendly and enthusiastic, and we left the meeting feeling great, with a solid plan in place. On Friday, Grace and I are going to help teach a Business Education lesson and meet the students that will be taking our course. In the near future, we also will survey the hospitals that received infant incubators from last year’s program with the help of a Masianokeng teacher, to help decide how to go about implementing updated incubator designs this year.

The second half of yesterday and this morning were spent at the Lesotho Family Art and Literacy Centre, a group that hopes to write, illustrate, and publish children’s books in the Sesotho language, books that relate to Basotho stories and traditions. The grand opening of the Centre is in a few weeks. It’s a big project with a lot of potential, and I’m glad we’ll be a part of it for the next few months. Our work this morning involved yard work on the grounds of the Centre. We collected grass and brush for burning and piled trash in a wheelbarrow to bring down to the donga, which is apparently the British word for ditch. Peering over the edge, we could see that the community used this donga as their landfill, piling in all sorts of personal trash, most of which was recyclable. Obviously, a U.S.-style central landfill for their trash would be preferable, but some constraint (cost, distance, lack of knowledge, etc.) apparently prevents the community from consistently using such a resource. Working at the Centre in this community has already brought to a head the difficulties that many Basotho people face, providing a stark contrast to the model city of London that we visited not four days ago.

It’s a tough problem. In talking to Thabo, a part-time artist at the centre, we heard that some people in the community aren’t even that interested in development. As much as the many expats working for NGOs in Lesotho might feel that Western-style development efforts are the best thing for the country, how can they expect to be successful if there’s less than overwhelming enthusiasm for those efforts on the part of the target population? Moreover, if development doesn’t interest Basotho, is it even right to press forward with modernization efforts? The people Thabo referred to form a small sample of a country with 2 million people, so perhaps these questions are completely overblown. Actually, they probably are. But I think it’s still something worth thinking about, if only to help in adhering to the idea that we are here to help effect changes that the Basotho people we’re working with need and want, as opposed to projecting changes on the population that might be unecessary or unwelcome. The groundwork for our two main projects has been laid; I can’t wait to get started.