Coal fires, snow, manual shift, and my future

It looks like another cold front is moving through Lesotho and I will have to get the coal fire started up again (the coal fire in my place is worse than a temperamental boyfriend!). This brought to mind a story that I wanted to relate to my readers about the dangers of being caught out in these mountains during a snowstorm. A woman and her child came into the hospital three days ago with severe frostbite on their legs. They were caught out in the Maluti Mountains, along with the grandmother, after the huge snowstorm that hit Lesotho early last week. It seems they were all off to visit a sick relative on the other side of the mountain when they were stranded in the middle of the storm. They managed to find some shelter in a dilapidated shepard’s hut and were stuck in the hut without food for a week. Finally they saw a man on a surefooted Basotho pony trudging through the waist deep snow and they were able to attract his attention. The irony is that the mother and child ended up with severe frostbite injuries because they were put on top of the pony and rode the rest of the way to safety, thus exposing themselves to the bitterly cold elements and decreasing their own circulation by not moving much. Meanwhile the hearty 66 year old grandmother (those ol’ bo 'me’ can be tough buggers!) trudged behind the horse and came away from the whole incident without a scratch. Unfortunately, the young mother developed wet gangrene in one foot and it had to be amputated while luckily her child only had some patchy bits of dry gangrene that were removed leaving both feet intact.

In other less exciting and more ego-centric news I 'm learning to drive manual shift and have so far avoided hitting any living objects. It only took 14 years after I got my original drivers license!! I’m a lazy American and I miss my easy automatic truck! I am off to Cape Town next week to get some dissertation writing done and use the library at the University of Cape Town and meet a couple of professors (and maybe go to some wineries!!). I have a job interview today and tomorrow with ICAP-Lesotho (International Center for HIV/AIDS treatment and care Programs run through Columbia University). The first one is with the country director (a Ghanaian!) and the second is with the New York office. I sense that they had a small batch of candidates since this is not the easiest country in the world to work in and there aren’t too many folks afoot on the ground with some HIV/AIDS monitoring and evaluation experience in Lesotho.