Mollo

Well, the best part of winter, so far as I can tell right now, is that we have a working fireplace in our house, and we used it for the first time last night. It's so cozy to just sit down here in the living room, watching the coals burn, reading Dickens, and seeing the rain come up from behind the hills. (And it's much cheaper to heat the room than with the electric heaters...which don't work when the power goes out!)

I had a bit of a party last night, and met some very cool people. One of them is a lawyer in J'burg and a very active member of the ANC. I had some great discussions with him about politics in South Africa, and learned so much. He's a Masotho, but he's been living in South Africa for about 15 years and had some really interesting insights about politics that I haven't heard too much about here in Lesotho. That may be more because I haven't really been interacting with anyone involved in the political movements here, more than a factor of people being apathetic.

The more people I meet here, though, the more my time in Lesotho seems so abbreviated. Not just in terms of getting my work done (which I never will, let's be realistic), but also in terms of making connections. That's one of the hardest parts of being abroad, or living anywhere, so briefly....so much potential friendship not realized. But I guess email definitely helps that now.

Oh, and the best part of this party, is that almost everyone here in Lesotho is used to having a maid, so Me Zinnia had a girl come over and clean up everything. Naturally, I felt totally uncomfortable with this, bu then I just have to remind myself that it's income for someone. So when I woke up this morning, all the dishes were already done, and the house completely back in order. We need to adopt this in the States, for sure!

So, I was supposed to pick up Sarah and Josh from the airport this morning, but due to the coming rain, their flight has been delayed..."indefinitely". I'm not really sure what that means, but this has been a fairly common occurrence lately for flights to/from J'burg. It really is a bummer for them to have to sit in the international terminal all day, but they at least caught me before I headed our to the airport. Instead, I'm sitting by the fire again, putting some finishing touches on a QA Plan that we started at one of the hospitals last week.