Peace Corps Training or Vacation Opportunity?

Sorry for the lack of pictures in this rant.  Lightning makes everything better though.

I’ve had a busy week.  I was selected to be assistant to the district security representative (DSR), which means I don’t really have any responsibility until the primary DSR goes on vacation.  The DSR gets a message from the main office every week with potential security issues, such as elections, protests, and what not.  The DSR then relays this message and everyone in the district must check in by responding to the text.  The bottom line is that I had to go way south to Mafeteng for a day of training.

They allowed us to arrive the day before training and leave the day after, in order to ensure everyone could arrive on time.  I decided to leave a day early and visit the Ried’s in Morija.  Their place consists of a three bedroom house with a full bathroom, kitchen (with oven), living room, refrigerator, and garage.  “America appreciates your vacat… I mean sacrifice Ryan and Lisa Ried”.  Anyways they are amazing people and love having visitors over so they welcomed me to stop by.  Well apparently my watch didn’t switch over on New Years properly so for two weeks I thought the date was one day ahead, an easy mistake in Africa with a cracked cell phone screen.  So I showed up two days early.  We played cards, drank wine, and Ryan made some amazing tacos.  Two days later, we grabbed a taxi and headed to the hotel in Mafeteng.

Mafeteng is a dumpy desert wasteland so I will spare you pictures.  Just imagine hot garbage and sad people everywhere.  

Never been to a flossing party before.  From left to right we have Susan, Alicia (who is an HY volunteer), and Lirra.  Alicia works on photography projects and has the same camera and lens as I do.  For those of you that care this photo was taken at ISO 10,000.  Not bad eh?

After the training I headed south to Quthing to see Melinda.

Peace,

- Joel