Home again

I have come back from Lesotho to Wales now, so there won’t be any more blog entries on this site. I’ve had a wonderful time living and teaching in Mokhotlong. I have put up some more photos of the school and town on the Picasa photo site linked to this one, so if you would like to compare life in a Basotho city and rural town (Maseru with Mokhotlong) you can do.

                         

This month I’m visiting schools in Carmarthenshire and Ceredigion with Anna and Katie to give students a Lesotho experience, so maybe we’ll see you there.

Thanks for reading!

Claire

Touching Tiny Lives

This week, students from St James High School went to visit Touching Tiny Lives (TTL), a charity in Mokhtolong. TTL looks after children under 5 who are ill with malnutrition (not having all the nutrients they need from food) or serious diseases, such as HIV. HIV only affects a small number of people in the UK so we don’t know very much about it; but nearly 3 out of every 10 people in Lesotho have HIV or AIDS, so it is a very serious problem here.

HIV is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system. Your immune system is what helps you get better when you are sick. When they get a cold or a sickness bug, people with HIV feel a lot worse, and take a lot longer to get better than healthy people do. Eventually, HIV can turn into AIDS, which is a much worse form, and from which many people die.

The students are all members of the school HIV and AIDS club, that helps to raise awareness of HIV and how to avoid it; so they wanted to see the good work that TTL is doing to help children with the disease.

There is no cure at the moment for HIV, but there are some pills called ARVs that help people with HIV slow down the onset of AIDS. This can keep them healthy and extend their lives by many years. One of the good things that TTL does is to make sure children with HIV can take these pills and keep healthy.

School disco

Anna, one of the other Welsh teachers in Lesotho, is working at St James High school, just outside Mokhotlong. Her students have worked hard this year, so as a reward, she threw them a party this Saturday. Most of the students stay at school in the term time, either in the boarding house on site or the village nearby, so nearly everyone came along. Some enterprising students even came with sandwiches and snacks to sell.

Anna began the party with prizes for competitions she’d run, and showed some photos of the students at work and play in the school. Then it was time to for the DJ to start the music and the dancing.

 

Just like any other school disco, lots of people were a little shy at first, but once the tunes got a bit more lively, they stepped up to the dance floor and joined in the party. Everyone had a good time and said they’d like a school party every quarter!

Lebopo

As well as teaching at St Peter’s Primary School, part of my job in Lesotho is to help build up links between Welsh and Basotho schools, and to help Basotho children learn about Wales. This week, I visited Lebopo Primary school to meet the children there and tell them about the Lesotho-Wales link.

Lebopo is a village about 2 hours walk from Mokhotlong town (a very long way if you want to go shopping!). The school is quite small, and there are between 15 and 24 pupils in each class. Some classes share a classroom, like the 2 classes in this picture.

At the moment Lebopo don’t have a partner school in Wales, so they had lots of questions to ask me about life in our country. There were questions like ‘How long do you have to go to school for?’ ‘Do you use horses for transport?’ ‘Do people keep livestock in Wales?’ ‘Do you have mountains?’ We also looked at an atlas to see just how far apart the countries are and think about the ways we could travel from one to the other.

If you have any questions you would like to ask some children in Lesotho about their country, just post a comment on this blog. I’ll ask some of my students and repost their answers.

Work

I’m sure that lots of you help around the house when you’re not at school: washing up, doing a bit of ironing or washing the car. Here, children help in the home too, but sometimes in different ways. Every day, most children will polish their shoes after school (it’s very dusty here, so they get dirty quickly) and at least once a week, they wash their school uniforms. Children also help to prepare meals in the kitchen, and to grow vegetables in the garden. The St Peter’s student in the picture is doing the family washing on a Saturday morning. The children have a lot of housework to do, but they go out and play with their friends after they’ve finished.

Some of you, or your older brothers or sisters might have a Saturday job. It’s the same here. There aren’t as many shops in Mokhotlong as in Welsh towns, so the jobs can be a little bit different. These two pupils in St. Michael’s Primary are selling cabbage from their mother’s garden. After school and on weekends, they can usually be found in town selling vegetables out of their wheelbarrow.