Heather's Adventures in Lesotho

Outside view of my flat

There have been a number of inquiries about my housing situation here so I thought that I would share. As part of my contract the Foundation is putting me up in shared housing for up to four months. That means right now I’m staying in a 3-bedroom flat outside the downtown area. There’s a living room and kitchen downstairs, then the three bedrooms and a shared bathroom upstairs. I have two roommates, both of whom are working for the Foundation as clinical mentors specifically focused on PMTCT. One is Dutch and the other Mosotho, they started the same day that I did.

Because it’s the middle of winter, and because of the altitude, it is quite cold right now. The flat does not retain any heat whatsoever and in the middle of the day it will be colder inside than out! Over the weekend my roommate and I spent the middle of the day on the back porch basking in the sun because it was too cold to be inside. The cold gets even worse after dark. The small heaters that came in the place are not enough to keep the shared living areas warm, so it is difficult to stay up past 8 pm. Fortunately my bed – with two heavy blankets and an electric heating pad – is the one place where I can be warm. I even bought a small fan heater that, with the door shut, can bring my small bedroom to a temperature just above freezing.

Finally, a funny story that’s kind of related to housing. There is a fireplace in the living room of the flat and we heard that Basotho use coal in the fireplace to keep their houses warm. So this weekend my Dutch roommate and I picked up a bag of charcoal at the grocery story to use in the fireplace. It only gave off a little heat so we were wondering what went wrong. When our Mosotho roommate returned on Sunday afternoon, then, she and her husband got a big laugh that we were using charcoal for braiing and apparently NOT the kind of coal that’s used for heating houses. Oops.