Hello All,

As of Wednesday, I am at my official site that I will be at for the next 2 years. I am working at the Ntlafatso Skills Training Center. As far as I understand, my job will be teaching business skills. Ntlafatso is a vocational school where adults come to master a trade like sewing, catering, auto mechanics, brick laying, panel beating, etc. The goal of the school is for these students to become employed upon completing school, preferably self-employed. So I will be teaching these students how to create a business plan in order for them to create their own businesses. My supervisor tells me that they have a thick curriculum book, however because the terms are only 3 months long, it is my job to go through this book and pull out what is most important, basically create a new curriculum. I’m super excited about this. When I first heard my job was teaching business skills I was a little worried that the job would consist of me teaching these students skills that they may never use. So I was so happy to learn that they will be learning with a real world context.

So, I live on the school compound, which is a 20 min walk to the center of the camptown. There are 7 staff houses, in which one of them I reside. Let me just say that this house is much more than I ever expected my Peace Corps experience to be like. I have a living room with couches, coffee table, and a large table with 6 chairs; kitchen with a 4 burner stove, oven, and double sink; one large bedroom where I have my single bed and built in closets as well as an extra bedroom sans furniture; and a toilet and bathtub with hot running water. Not to mention, electricity! It is so nice to be able to flip a switch and have light. Not to mention being able to use my laptop whenever I want to watch movies, listen to music, and get on the internet with my 3G modem. The only downside to having this big house is that it is impossible to heat. So I just use my gas heater at night before I go to bed and whenever I bath. So all day is it cold in my house, but it’s worth it.

I have a supervisor, Ntate Chaka, and a counterpart, ‘M’e Mapitso. Their houses are right next to mine. They are so wonderful. They seem very motivated in their jobs and also with me and my job. I am excited to work with them.

I am so happy to be done with training. It was so hard to sit in a classroom all day and listen to lectures. We were all becoming restless. It is nice to finally settle in to my house and stop living out of a suitcase. It will be hard to adjusting to not being around Americans all day everyday. But there are a few volunteers near me. One girl works with World Food Program and her office is right next to Ntlafatso. There’s an education volunteer in the camptown, and then there is Kelly who is about a 30 minute drive outside the camptown. I get the feeling that I will have volunteers stopping by my house all the time, which I’m pumped about.

All of us new volunteers are ‘on lockdown.’ Basically for the first 3 months at our site we can’t leave our districts. We are supposed to get to know our communities and figure out our jobs. Then at the end of the 3 months we will all go back to the Training Center in Maseru for 10 days to have a few workshops. Peace Corps calls this Phase III. They break it down as such: Phase I is the 10 weeks of training, Phase II is ‘lockdown’ for 3 months at site, Phase III is the workshops and more training.

That’s enough Peace Corps lingo for now. I will try to upload some pictures of Lesotho and of my house to you can see what I’m talking about. Post some comments if you have any questions!