August 25th 2003

Hi Everyone,

How is it going? I am doing fine here. I hope everyone is fine. I recently had a chance to take a nice hot shower. It is refreshing to do so. I waited all day till about four o_clock. It had been a clear sun shining day and the temperature had reached about 80 degrees. I get hot water fed to the shower from a solar panel on top of the house. There is no hot water tank, no back up source for heating water except manually so when it is cold or cloudy there is a definite lack of hot water here. That shower sure was nice though.

Soon after the eighty degree weather came a cold spell. My clothes on the clothes froze solid and that night the neighbor that shares the duplex with me had his water pipes freeze and bust. I left my house that morning to see that water was just pouring out of his front door. I then turned the water and electricity off for both our houses. Water kept coming into his house from the ceiling well into that night. The plumber came the next day. Took a part of the roof off and fixed the broken pipe. He fixed it with a plastic pipe. I could not help but ponder the logic behind if a metal pipe can break when it freezes wouldn’t a plastic pipe break that much easier. I also noticed though that I did not even have a plastic pipe. Apparently from the stains on my ceiling mine had broke some time back. Instead of fixing mine with a metal or plastic pipe it has been rigged with the basic water hose. I am amazed mine did not break but the continual stream of water that leaks from the sinks in my house I am sure had something to do with it.

Right now it is windy. It is dusty and windy and it is nasty. The wind gust are forty to fifty miles per hour. The dust is filling the air and even though above me there are no clouds there is a so much dust the sun has been browned out. I went to a meeting today and by the time I got there my eyes felt bad and there was dirt in my mouth. When I was my hair next it is going to turn the water tea colored from all the dirt in my hair. This dry and windy weather is going to last off and on for about a month people say. It should not always be as dusty and windy as today though and I would rather have it than the winter weather we were having.

Winter was cold. It lasts about two months here and I know compared to an Oklahoma winter it is mild but they do not often have heaters here. The heater I do have is good for heating a bedroom and I kept it going a lot during winter but when I was outside the bedroom I was pretty much on my own. The colder it gets here the more clothes people put on here. The common thing to do is to wrap up with many blankets and walk around like that. Because of the fact I am not going from a heated house to a heated office to a heated car to a heated grocery store back to the heated house here the cold weather kind of sinks deep down into a person or they get chilled to the bone. It is a kind of coldness that does not seem to go away. I sure am glad though I had Carhart overalls to wear and a quality sleeping bag to keep me warm.

The rainy season is supposed to be coming in about a month and I sure would like for Lesotho to get a lot of rain. Part of it has been in a drought but not the city I stay in. I was in the village the other day and saw some kids with the swollen bellies so I know they had not been eating to well. I am enclosing a picture of a schoolgirl I took in that village. She is standing in front of an aloe plant which as you can see can get quite large in Lesotho. Love ya’ll. Jeff