Day 2

6:45am: took a quick shower, made some oatmeal, ate a pear, and made the thirty second walk over to the clinic with Lena (Lorine headed in early.).

8am: Morning prayer began. It consisted of a Sesotho song/chant and a spoken prayer. Announcements followed whereupon Dr. Mohapi introduced us to the doctors, nurses, volunteers, and all the patients in the waiting room. They all clapped and cheered for us; I’ve never felt so welcome.

9am: After a quick tour of the clinic I shadowed Dr. Paul who was amazingly nice and willing to share all his knowledge with me! We saw one patient and then he took me to the pharmacy, showed me all their medications and explained their functions. As he introduced me to the staff I suddenly felt really dizzy and sat down. My vision got weirdly blotchy and everyone’s voices sounded muffled as if there was cotton in my ears. I told Paul and he walked me over to the cottage, told me to rest, and that he would send someone to check up on me in half an hour. After my mini faint attack, I laid in bed for about thirty minutes, stared at the ceiling, and felt like the pathetic weak girl who couldn’t even last one hour walking around the clinic. A doctor I’d met earlier named Amy came to check up on me and told me not to worry since she’d had a similar thing happen to her before. She made sure I was okay and then left. Ten minutes later Lena came in to check on me too. (It’s only been one day and I already feel like I have so many friends!) I pointed to my empty water bottle and probar wrapper and told her that I was already feeling better.

11am: Finally able to walk without feeling dizzy, I walked over to the clinic with Lena and we headed downtown with a clinic driver who needed to drop blood samples off at the public hospital. Lena purchased a cell phone to keep in contact with the other Rice students in Lesotho. Walking in a place where I can’t understand what people are saying and where I don’t recognize many shop signs is a bit surreal.

Pictures from driving around downtown:

one of the many fruit stands (i have yet to purchase something, but i keep having this vision of me waking up every morning and walking down to purchase a fresh piece of fruit for breakfast!)

livestock on the side of the road, nbd

kids who've just gotten out of school, it's really cool because each school has a different brightly colored uniform so it's easy to see which kids are from different schools

this is pretty much what the landscape and city are like

picture taken from the road that wraps around one of the larger hills

so this may just seem like a typical picture of an autoshop, but please pan your eyes over to the right...

2:30pm: Made lunch (peanut butter sandwich and a sweet potato), read some of my book, and fell asleep on the couch.

4:30pm: I woke up when Lorine came back from the clinic and continue reading. (Having time to actually read something besides textbooks and English books is amazing!)

6pm: It’s already pitch black outside.

6:30pm: Lorine and Lena bundled up and trekked over to the clinic to get a wifi connection.

7:52pm: I’m bundled up in long underwear, fuzzy socks, wool shirt, sweatshirt, and hiking books and am about to head over to get a wifi signal and submit this post!

p.s. if you couldn't figure out what made that last picture interesting, it's the donkey just chilling on the side of the road