Basotho Fashion 101

Now, Maseru and the other big towns will have more of an “American” type of dress available- jeans, sweaters, Toms, Converse, big purses, etc.  However, in the rural villages, there are a few staple traditional garments.

Men

1.       Blanket- Men wear it around the shoulders like a cape, fastened with a giant safety pin.  It’s usually clasped over a shoulder so that one hand is free to work or hold a malamu.

2.       Malamu- large stick used for walking or beating herd animals

3.       Gum boots- rain boots that are extremely useful during the rainy and snowy seasons.

4.       Herd Boy Hat- so named by us volunteers, but it’s basically a ski mask.  You see some dude walking by wearing one and a blanket and you’d be surprised how scary it looks.

Women

1.       Blanket- younger girls and bo-‘m’e (women) wear them pinned like a skirt around the waist (to increase fertility by warming your womb) but grandmothers also wear them around the shoulders.

2.       Headscarf- Never leave home without it or a sun hat.  Basotho are real big on head coverings.  And the women always seem to find the most awesome ways of tying them.

3.       Seshoeshoe- Traditional style and print of formal/celebratory dress.  I’m wearing one in my profile picture on facebook, but the style is not traditional.  They tend to have HUGE puffy sleeves.

Children

They mostly wear what the adults of their respective genders wear, although many of them wear clothing I would expect to see kids in America wear as well.  All children who attend school are required to buy and wear uniforms.

Agriculture?

Since it is now spring time in Lesotho, the entire village has been working plowing fields for maize, planting home gardens, and generally being very busy.  On our compound, we now have two seed beds, a keyhole garden, a flower patch, and there will soon be a trench garden.  With any luck, around December or January we’ll have tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, squash, spinach, radishes, carrots, beets, and lettuce!  It was definitely not east building all of these though; we had to bring wheelbarrows of soil, manure, mulch and stone to the compound from around the village.  And by we I mean that we cooked food for a bunch of kids and fed them in exchange for their manual labor… I did, however, by myself, haul 60 liters of water from the tap in one day to get the compost heap in the keyhole started.

The Ministry of Agriculture also gave a week long workshop about potato production which would have probably been informative for me personally if it’d been in English.  However, I spent most of the time helping one of the women cook food for those at the workshop.  This also meant that I got to eat chicken for four days in a row which was awesome!

Speaking of eating meat,  I was present at a sheep slaughtering a few weekends ago.  Another Thaba Tseka volunteer, Mike Kerr, had his mother visiting from the States and his host family threw a party for her which of course included a slaughter!  Mike actually did the deed himself and with the help of a few other guys, skinned and butchered it as well.  In short, it has been a very good month for me as far as meat consumption goes :)

One of the local ECCD (early childhood care and development) schools is literally right next to my compound.  The kids come over and hang out with me in my house maybe once a week or so.  We play with Jenga blocks because we’re really cool like that…