Moshoeshoe Day

Today is Moshoeshoe Day in Lesotho; a national holiday commemorating King Moshoeshoe, the country’s founder. If I have my history straight, King Moshoeshoe held strong at the mountain of Thaba Bosiu and eventually defeated the boers to solidify Lesotho’s borders.

For me it meant no school. Classes were cancelled and our school held its first field day. Mphaki Primary and Mopeli Secondary School (our closest neighboring high school) both came to watch and compete. Mphaki High School (my school) is pretty big, so we divided into teams (red, black, white, blue and grey) and the students competed in “athletics” (track and field) events. The sports master, who had organized the day, also threw in a sack race for the boys, a bottle race for the girls, where they had to race across the field with a bottle of water on their heads, and a 100 m dash for the faculty (not only did I participate, but I came in fourth!).

The students loved the events. I got some good video and pictures from the day. To cheer on the runners, the different teams would sing songs and dance in a circle chanting. I mentioned it before, the Basotho love to sing and they are really good at it. The cheering songs and circle dancing seems to be a cultural thing, not just for athletics, but for scouts, which is a club at school, and any other reason or excuse they can find. It’s great to see the enthusiam!

I had my first visitor this week to my ronduvel (besides people from the village). Another volunteer in my district who works with ECCD—pre-school and primary schools—needed to visit a few schools in my area so she came up the night before and visited the schools the next day. It was a great excuse, or reason, to clean my house a bit, and a random, middle-of-the-week visit is like getting a snow day when they were calling for rain—too good to be true!

She stopped in at my high school in her way out. I was in class at the time and my students were literally climbing on top of their desks to get a better look when they saw her walking up the road. Then, she came to my room and I stepped out for a minute to say hi (the students were, supposedly, working on an exercise). I came back in to excited faces, so I explained that she was my friend and that she worked with the ECCD and was in the area for the day, etc. and they literally started clapped and cheered for me when I mentioned the word, “friend”. It was both extremely amusing and very endearing. They were so happy for me, to learn that I had a friend. It was really quite sweet.

(Note: this was written on 11-Mar-09)