The moment we've all been waiting for. I'm in Lesotho! My Skype name is becky.shor if you want to contact me. The iChat thing doesn't seem to want to work here.
The nitty-gritty: Flight to Amsterdam was only a quarter full, so I got my own row to stretch out in. I watched The Wedding Singer and slept for an hour or two. In Amsterdam for a couple of hours, then got on the super jumbo, two story jet to Johannesburg, which was full. I tried not to sleep, so I would get on this schedule, but that failed miserably. Needless to say, when I got to JoBurg, I couldn't sleep, so I called Caleb, read 150 pages of book, and watched a really stupid movie on my computer. I slept from 5 am - 6:30 am. Then we caught our plane to Maseru.
It's 90 degrees here, everything is green, peaches are in season and our luggage made it with no problems. We went directly to our house, dumped our bags, met Suzanna (another sort of intern who lives with us), then headed to the office. We met Senate (pronounced Seh-NAH-tay) our Lesotho-based boss and Lisebo (pronounced di-SAY-bo), the admin assistant. Then we went to lunch at Mediterranean. I had about five bites of a salad, but my system is so off that, I really couldn't eat much more. (And yes, you can eat the raw veggies here in Maseru, but not out in the districts.)
We made a brief stop at the Shoprite for some subsistence groceries (I got eggs, yogurt, bread and peanut butter), then drove out to Roma for a meeting at the National University of Lesotho (NUL). LeBoHA (the organization that I'm working for) is trying to for a partnership with NUL
to build health systems research capacity at the university. So we met with the Vice Chancellor and the Dean of Health Sciences and hashed out some ideas and verbiage for a pre-grant proposal. Sarah and I also learned quickly about office politics here.
I was practically dreaming while I was awake on the car ride home, that's how tired I was. But now that I'm in bed writing this, I'll be honest and say that a bit of homesickness has leaked in, and I no longer feel tired. I hope it goes away soon because, honestly, I'm not sure I can survive three full days of sleep deprivation. So there...I'm really not as tough as everyone thought.
I had two piece of bread and peanut butter for dinner.
3 comments:
Hi Becky, Glad to see that you've arrived in good shape. I hope that you get some sleep and adjust to your new time soon.
Jackie
Hi Becky! Glad to hear that both you and your luggage (especially the shoes) arrived in Maseru. I am really excited to read about all your new adventures. We miss you here in Maine already!
Kristen and Denny
Hi Becky - Thanks for posting the update! Sounds like you are already in the full swing of work. I hope your sleep schedule adjusts easily - we miss you here!
Amy
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