Of All the Places in the Entire Freakin’ Continent …

…. I end up living in the coldest spot. I’m not kidding. See the blue spot that indicates temps between -10 and 0 degrees Celsius in the map below? Yeah, that’s where I live. The only dot on the entire CONTINENT of Africa where there are subzero temperatures, morning frost on the ground, and no central heating.

The cold temperatures are definitely amplified by the lack of insulation in houses, central heating, and good firewood. I lit the first fire in my fireplace last night and while I was proud to have eventually gotten a good blaze going, the wood here just doesn’t burn very well. It kind of instantly turns into smoldering embers rather than flame up nicely.

I saw the snow up close and personal too — a couple of weeks ago, I took the scariest flight of my life on a small prop plane out to the mountainous region of Qacha’s Nek. Or, rather, I attempted to take a plane there. We stopped halfway to drop people off at the Semonkong region and decided it was too windy to attempt the second half of the flight. Our very able pilot from Mission Aviation Fellowship did his best to give us a smooth flight but the high winds battered our little plane up in the air – I’ve never had so many non-rollercoaster-related stomach-dropping moments. At one point, we had to get above the clouds and the pilot banked HARD to the right and then shot straight up through a break in the clouds. omg omg omg. It was exhilarating but entirely terrifying. But the views! I couldn’t resist snapping a few shots while holding on for dear life … the snow-covered mountains were dazzlingly gorgeous!

The Mountain Kingdom

That's the airstrip we landed on

The beautiful Semonkong waterfall, which I've only seen from the sky

More pics here. Despite the beauty of the snow, I find myself yearning for the sunny and warm beaches of Mozambique, just a hop, skip and 8-hour drive away … hmmm …

 

Taking My Inner Dork to the Bank

**Disclaimer: The following information reflects the analysis and research of The Lady V, who fully and completely acknowledges the dork inside her.**

You learn a lot when you live outside your home country of the United States. For example, you learn that Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is not nearly as ubiquitous as KFC. You learn to drive on the left side of the road. You learn how to differentiate between a power outage and when you’ve run out of pre-paid electricity. But most importantly, you learn to pay attention to currency exchange rates.

Unfortunately for me, the U.S. dollar has been dropping in value against the South African rand (which is what the Lesotho maluti is pegged to) and I am paid in U.S. dollars. This means that my salary gets deposited into my U.S. bank account in U.S. dollars and, in order to spend my money in Lesotho, I have to withdraw in rand. Every time the dollar depreciates against the rand, I essentially get a pay cut. For example, when I first arrived, I could withdraw R4000 and would see $403 deducted from my account. Today, I see $510 deducted from my account.

So, in light of the diminishing value of my salary in Lesotho, I’ve been searching for ways to minimize this pain. Some organizations pay their expats a sort of monthly allowance to offset this risk, but of course, mine does not. And, sadly, I have neither the means nor knowledge to participate in arbitrage or true foreign exchange hedging (my MBA international finance professors would be ashamed, I know). In my search for alternative solutions, I began by looking at exchange rate patterns to determine which day of the week would yield the best rate. The chart below shows the ZAR to USD interbank conversion rate over the past three months and the pink boxes indicate weekends – Friday through Monday. Turns out, the best days to exchange or withdraw money are Tuesdays and Wednesdays. You can tell from the chart that the rate tends to go against the dollar Fridays-Mondays.

Here’s what that means in real-life terms. The maximum per transaction amount that I’m allowed here is R4000. Let’s say I withdrew R4000 every Sunday for the past three months. According to the exchange rate on those days, I would have seen $6,223 deducted from my account. But if I had taken the R4000 out on Wednesdays instead, I would only have seen $6,082 removed. And this in a country whose currency is relatively stable! Now, I should add that I tried this analysis for the first six months of the year, but the exchange rate has dropped so much since January, that it didn’t seem to be reflective of my current needs. Then again, maybe this theory doesn’t bear out in the long run and it all just evens out in the end. But I like the idea of my theory — so I’ll be keeping an eye on this trend in the coming months.

I gladly welcome any other ideas of how I might hedge my FX risk — anyone??

 

A Lesson in Inappropriateness

Today’s new headline from The Lesotho Times:

Man Killed After Raping Dog

Naturally, this led to a hearty and inappropriate discussion with my co-worker as to whether or not it could be considered rape if the dog consented and whether PEP kits are effective in canines … but then we got back to the office and read the full story, which is actually quite sad. Oof.

And if you think only Lesotho has bizarre headlines, I saw this one on CNN.com this morning: Man Dies After Falling Into Vat of Hot Chocolate.

 

Is Waxman-Markey Worth It? | Mother Jones

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones posits an interesting take on why the new climate change bill, sponsored by Waxman and Markey, should be passed.

Take a look. And let me know what you think.

Is Waxman-Markey Worth It? | Mother Jones

 

Questions

I’m wrapping up my fifth month in Lesotho and am just now feeling like I understand the work I’m supposed to be doing and am becoming effective at it. This past week has been a hectic one, as I’ve been charting out my Q3 and Q4 workplan, but finally, finally, I feel like I’m getting somewhere. It’s frustrating that it’s taken five months to get to this point and I wish I had done this kind of planning three months ago … but at the same time, I don’t think I knew nearly enough back then to do it. Still not sure I do. To give you an idea of what’s slowed me down, here are a few questions that have been posed to me or that shed some light on what it’s like to work in HIV/AIDS in a resource-constrained environment that still bears a stigma towards this plague:

• What do you say to an HIV-positive woman who says her husband will beat her if she tells him of her status?
• Is it even possible to combat HIV/AIDS when the local radio stations run advertisements for herbal drug that cure AIDS?
• How do you handle a situation when the only generic drug manufacturer of a certain children’s drug decides to stop producing and it means that a 3 yr old child now has to take 5 tablets at a time, twice a day?
• When an infant’s HIV/AIDS test result can take up to four months to be returned, at which point that baby has probably died, where do you start?
• How can you provide life-prolonging ARV drugs to children when they can’t even afford the transportation to their nearest health clinic? Or when they have to walk 4 hours to the clinic? Or when the river floods and can’t be crossed for a month?
• What value do you put on life when the majority of your weekends are spent at funerals and in cemeteries that stretch for a mile along the road?

I know I don’t have all the answers and I probably never will. But five months on, I know there are solutions, imperfect though they may be.

 

You Rocked My World

There comes a time when we hear a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
and it’s time to lend a hand to life
The greatest gift of all

We can’t go on pretending day by day
That someone, somewhere will soon make a change
We are all a part of God’s great big family
And the truth, you know,
Love is all we need

We are the world, we are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So let’s start giving
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me

Send them your heart so they’ll know that someone cares
And their lives will be stronger and free
As God has shown us by turning stones to bread
So we all must lend a helping hand

When you’re down and out, there seems no hope at all
But if you just believe there’s no way we can fall
Let us realize that a change can only come
When we stand together as one

Thanks, MJ.

 

USA! USA!

Went to see the U.S. national team play the Spanish national team in the 2009 Confederation Cup semi-finals last night in Bloemfontein. There are four reasons that going to the game was the best decision ever:

1. McDonalds in South Africa still serve apple pies that are FRIED not baked. I almost had two.
2. The stadium in Bloemfontein sells Budweiser!! You can’t get that in any bar or liquor store in South Africa or Lesotho. Mmmm…bad beer on a freezing cold night never tasted so good.
3. Spain lost.
4. America won!!!!

And, yes, my group of Americans (that’s us to the right) came with a gigantic U.S. flag that was frequently and jubilantly waved throughout the 92 minutes of the game. USA! USA! (Said one of my friends: “It’s a good thing Obama won; otherwise I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be doing this.”)

It was my very first live football/soccer match in Africa and it certainly did not disappoint. All kinds of people were there, blowing on these stupid plastic trumpet things, chanting their painted faces out, and waving flags.

Tonight will tell whether the US faces South Africa or Brazil in the final match on Sunday night in Johannesburg. I am really really really tempted to go to the game, despite the $200 ticket price. But it would require driving the 4.5 hours from Jozi at 4am and going straight to work. Those days are over for me.

 

E.R.M.’s – Eye Rolling Moments

Part of living in the developing world means learning to deal with a life of minor inconveniences and what I’ve dubbed ERM’s, or eye-rolling moments. Here are recent examples:

1. I came home from Istanbul to find my house without water and spent two nights pouring water down the toilet to flush. Turns out, I just didn’t recharge the water meter properly – you’re supposed to take this little gadget to the gas station, where you pay them for water and they load the credit into the gadget. You then touch the gadget to the water meter and it automatically recharges. Evidently, that was too complicated for me.

2. On Saturday, I was on my way to Bloemfontein with two friends. They stopped to get their passports stamped and I turned off the car while waiting. When they returned, my car wouldn’t start. It wasn’t a battery or a fuel problem. We spent 20 minutes trying to push-start my car around the parking lot at the border post with the help of two random, drunk men. Finally a friend of a friend showed up and got it done. Then, collectively, we made the very very bad decision to drive the 75 kilometers to Bloem anyway. Of course, the car wouldn’t start when we finished our shopping. After 45 minutes of pushing the car around the Waterfront Mall parking lot in the dark with about 8 mall security guards, it started to rain. At which point, you kinda just want to laugh and kinda just want to lie down and cry. Again, a stranger showed up and, on his first try, got the car started. I drove us back home, terrified of stalling out on the N8.

3. With my broken down car sitting in my driveway, I received a phone call from the mechanic that had just replaced my alternator two weeks earlier. She informed me that when putting my car back together, they had accidentally put someone else’s car battery in my car and my battery in his car. But he was out of the country so they couldn’t switch them back until he returned.

4. On Monday, our furniture was supposed to arrive from Bloemfontein – we’ve been living with nothing but beds in our house since May, so imagine our excitement at finally having sofas, a coffee table and a dining table! The driver called 2pm to say he had picked everything up. At 5pm, we called the driver who said he was only just leaving Bloem and would be at our house in two hours. At 9pm, we called again and the company’s owner told us that our stuff was at the office because he didn’t want to disturb us at night and sent the driver home. My roommate yelled at him for not even informing us that he had made that decision, threatened to call the police and then promptly hung up. Our furniture arrived at 7:15am the next morning.

5. A few nights later, I took a taxi to the new Italian restaurant in town. Only to discover that they had completely run out of pasta.

And there you have it. Classic ERMs from Lesotho.

***

And a bonus for you today! My newest addition to the blog is sharing the Friday headline from The Lesotho Times, one of our local newspapers. It comes out on Fridays and, just like in Newsies, they put up posters around town, loudly proclaiming the leading story in all caps. Usually, the headlines are super entertaining.

This Friday’s Lesotho Times headline:

BEAUTY QUEEN WINS CAR

 

Asian Poses

I can’t believe someone made a website about this…

http://asianposes.com

Make sure you have at least 10 minutes of free time before you click on the link. It maddeningly sucks you in, as reluctant though you may be. My favorite part is how the blogger breaks down and explains each pose. For example:

Pose #23: Heart Shape. There are a few variations of this pose, but the most is to take both hands and place your thumbs together with your other fingers in an arch shape. The top of your fingers are joined together to form the top of the heart, while your thumbs form the bottom of the heart.

Wow.

 

Aude Sapere: 25% of Men in South Africa Admit Rape

Yes, the results of this study are horrifying to many of us Westerners — and even the most adamant culturally relativist would probably raise her eyebrows at the fact that 25% of men in South Africa admit to raping a woman, that nearly half of those men have raped repeatedly, and that three-quarters of the men first attacked while in their teenage years.

But, my question is, how do you change this behavior? If, as one of the researchers suggests, that violence culturally defines what it is to be a man or to be masculine, then is this situation fixable? How do you instill a different value set for what demonstrates masculinity and, if you can accomplish that, whose value set do you use?

Read more at The Guardian: Quarter of men in South Africa admit rape, survey finds