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.