The season has come for the electricity to begin cutting out. Luckily just when I get home is about the time it shuts down to store up water at the dam for the next day. So my life has completely changed from just a few weeks ago.
Now I cook with a camp light on and read with candles while listening to the Ipod. What once was bright and illuminated is now dark by 5 pm and light again by 7 am. It's amazing how much I don't really care, at least not yet! I remember those first five weeks in CBT (community based training).
I lived in this one room shack smaller than the bedroom I have now. The place was voted the worst of all the houses in our village. Rightly so, a block building with no insulation, it had a half functioning door, two small windows, and a tin roof separating me from the outside. By five the sun was going down and the place was cold. I've never tried to go to bed so early in my life!
Cooking was a great time waster. Trying to figure out gas cooking coupled with an inability to cook and not much to cook made for some interesting meals. After dinner I would sit as close to the gas heater as I possibly could with a regular rotation like a well done rotisserie keeping all sides more or less not frozen.
Of course, cooking at night as it got colder caused the steam and that heated moisture rose to the top where it collected on my tin roof. In the morning that condensation had collected on the tin roof and everything else in the place leaving a winter wonderland look that wasn't as enjoyable as special as it sounds. My clothes were always so cold. They felt frozen because of the dampness. Once 10 am came around, though, that condensation would start raining down everywhere.
Huddled in my warm sleeping bag under the covers on my bed just as I got up in the morning was the best. There were a few times, just when you get up and you aren't sure where you are, that I sent myself back to a few mornings waking up in the Smoky Mountains. The air was clean and so cold. The crispness of everything is so joyfully startling.
Cold is a completely different beast when there is no haven from it's unrelenting torture. The constant invasion of a blast from the wind or the deep settling dampness that inches ever closer to the core down to your bones is worrisome. There was no central heating then, like now, or a car to give a blast of heat on high. All day is the same battle for warmth. That's when we all started to go native and huddle on the sunny side of buildings wearing dark colors to absorb as much heat as possible.
I'm not sure if I am remembering these things fondly or not but they are rushing back to me as I sit in the dark with a jacket. Those thoughts remind me that winter does come to Lesotho. Thankfully, I live in the second coldest place in Lesotho. I guess the memories of CBT will be thought much warmer compared to the highland chills of Semonkong.