Arrival in Africa

October 20, 2008

Woke up at the crack of dawn and caught a shuttle from the Holiday Inn Johannesburg back to the airport where we boarded a small prop commuter plane for a one-hour flight to Maseru, Lesotho.

Everyone was pretty excited when we landed and stepped onto the tarmac in our destination country. Very cliche, but it was an emotional moment for everyone! People came for a lot of the same reasons, and though the decision process was lengthy, there we stood, 10,000 miles from home, somewhat prepared to follow through on our plan to work with and at the same time see the Help Lesotho organization in action.

Clearing customs was entertaining. They had a luggage conveyor belt that unfortunately did not work. So two army guys humped our bags through the opening in the wall for the belt, and then 2 other army guys inside spread them out across the floor in the terminal in rows. Then another police officer brought in an old golden lab who sniffed all the bags for drugs.

Between here and Amsterdam three of our group have lost one piece of luggage each! Shelley lost the only bag she checked! (All of our bags did not catch up with us until Thursday).

We picked up the rental car, an 8 passenger VW van. Manual transmission, stick shift, and right hand drive. I did a test lap around the airport parking lot, stalled once and drove in the wrong lane once! Ouch!

From the airport, we made our way into the capital city of Maseru after several failed attempts. From downtown Maseru we got totally lost, finally I tipped some kids to lead us to a parking spot. We got out and found the information centre on one side of the street and a decent restaurant on the other. Hurrah!

From the information centre we got excellent directions to the town of Hlotse in the Leribe district and we were off after lunch.

Found the whole trip to be overwhelming. Population density startled me. I expected population to be much more sparse.

Arrived in Hlotse, asked directions to the convent guest house. Drove there and despite the fact that we had reservations, the nuns were oddly surprised to see us and seemed not to have exactly what we were expecting in accommodations! Dropped bags there and then we went downtown to find my hotel. There we met Donna Bawden of Help Lesotho who asked us how we found the convent guest house. When I said it was fine, but things were not quite as expected and that it was further from the hotel than we had thought it would be, she developed an odd expression on her face! When I described where we had checked in, she said, oh, you checked into the Catholic Guest House? We were booked into the Anglican Convent Guest House - when I got to town I just asked for the convent guest house and got directed to the wrong one. Within another 45 minutes all was straightened out. We got moved and met Peg Herbert, executive director of Help Lesotho and gathered for dinner at the hotel.

Several glasses of wine later, everyone was installed in their assorted locations and we called it a day. And it was a long and confusing one!