Greetings,

I am so touched by the number and responses of readers to my first letter. Thank you for following along and for caring so much.

Back in Canada, I reflect on my intense but productive trip. I had over 40 meetings, visited programs, hugged each staff, admired our new library and our two centres and ‘felt the Mosotho’ in me again after such a long hiatus. Knowing I will return for February and March 2023 made it all that much easier to leave so soon.

‘M’e Mamoletsane, Kathleen and I met with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, UNAIDS and UNFPA to discuss our CHANGE4ce Program to help build capacity in other organizations to provide better psychosocial support in building resilience and mental health. We are hopeful to move this initiative forward. We know that our training and experience in mental health would help so many organizations deepen the impact of their work.

I previously mentioned the new group of correctional service and national security officers in our Computer and Life Skills Program. They had heard about our program and made a proposal to their management to be allowed the time to attend the course. The first week, they were mostly speechless about the opportunity before them. Week two, their questions were meaningful with minds and hearts open. Each one will impact hundreds of wounded lives in their careers. Realizing that prisoners are not evil people but broken and struggling was a profound revelation. One said this was “like the family he never had where people get real love and care”.

One of our COVID initiatives was to mobilize our alumni to both keep them occupied with purpose and to provide support to children during the school closures. We developed and they distributed over 5,000 age-appropriate workbooks filled with COVID information, coping strategies, math and literacy activities, motivational pages and games. The alumni volunteers were trained and each supported a troop of children in their village – to listen, learn and comfort. It has been a great success. The guardians of the children have approached the alumni to learn how to better support the children under their care. Although thankfully the schools remained open for the 2022 school year, we continued the project with the volunteers supporting children after school and on weekends. COVID set so many children so far back both educationally and emotionally. The impact over the last year blew our expectations away. As you can see from the table below, a total of 108 volunteers reached 4,635 vulnerable children. On average, each of these children participated in 7 life-changing sessions.

“I have really improve on my self confidence because I can stand in front of many people and speak which was something that I wasn’t able to do before I start my outreach.” – Mafusi, volunteer

 

“Children are now seeing the light even those who are struggling they are trying.” – Chaka, volunteer

We are so proud of these young people that we are asking you for help to support a whole new cohort of volunteers. We are excited to launch a new project in which we will, with your help, recruit 100 new volunteers who will reach at least 4,300 children with tutoring and mental health check-ins. These young ones are desperate to get some help and to learn. This is the focus of our fall fundraising and we hope you will join us to make it happen. Please click here to learn more and stay tuned for additional information in the coming weeks.

Another project we are conducting is in its third year in the south of Lesotho on early and unintended pregnancy. UNFPA begged us to help in an area in which over 50% of the high school girls had fallen pregnant. That is not a typo or over exaggeration – literally more than half of the girls in high school in this region became pregnant. My heart aches for these girls and their dear babies. We are working with the chiefs, local council and community members to hold them responsible for protecting these girls. We are working with potential enablers and perpetrators, including the landlords of the tiny rented rooms rural children must live in to attend high school, taxi drivers (part of the essential transportation sector), bar owners, herd boys and teachers. We are proud to say that there has been significant progress. The taxi drivers are determined to protect their student passengers, educate new drivers, and to work with the schools to ensure students can only access taxi rides if they have a pass to leave school. Similarly, the landlords have stepped up to monitor their premises against perpetrators and ensure only those who should be in the rooms are. The main high school has reported a remarkable decline in pregnancy and has made a commitment to work with other schools to reduce truancy so that the girls are not enticed away from their education by the promises of food, jobs and ‘treats’.

Kathleen visited a school and spent a day each with the young mothers and a couple of grannies.

Going to their village, Kathleen visited a granny who had prospered under our program and who was able to grow enough food to feed her family and understand positive parenting.

The other was a different story. Our program officer had rescued two children whose mother had abandoned them. Their grandmother agreed to raise them. When Kathleen arrived, the grandmother was totally bedridden. At 84, she was giving the little food she had to the children and literally starving herself to death – so weak that she could not get out of bed. The children now care for her. This visit still haunts Kathleen. Our staff will follow up.

I had charged our psychosocial professional interns with reading Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning” and had a great chat with them on it, followed by a serious and quite wonderful discussion with all the male staff on a module on ‘Supporting Boys and Men’.

On Friday, Lesotho’s new Prime Minister was inaugurated. He paid for his own inauguration and put himself out on a real limb by making 20 promises of accountability in the first 100 days. The population is hopeful.

I write in hope that one or more readers would like to fund or to contribute to a new truck. The photo represents the one we need to purchase. As you know, we work up in the mountains on extremely rough roads (even using the term ‘road’ is a stretch!). The wear on a vehicle is enormous. We need to replace a 2012 Hilux Toyota double cab truck that has 309,000 KM. After three years of hunting and pecking, our very first truck was purchased by a corporate CEO who emphatically asked me “Well, what do you need?”. Within days the Toyota dealership in Maseru informed me that our new truck was ready to be picked up. I know this is a big ticket item, but I also have faith that someone out there can help this time around.

This partnership between you and our amazing staff has brought about more change and reached more people than we could ever have imagined – close to 260,000 people. The need is enormous but so is our capacity and our determination. We are on it!

P.S.: Our 2023 Help Lesotho Calendars are now for sale. Filled with beautiful and inspiring images, grab one before the start of the new year!

P.P.S.: We have some fun video footage from our trip that I would like to share with you. Below you can watch videos of grannies singing and dancing (taken by Kathleen) as well as our staff singing to welcome Kathleen and me to Lesotho. We’re also including a delightful compilation of resilience fun-day activities with children at our Hlotse Centre. Enjoy!

Read 2022 Letter #6 from Lesotho
Read all previous 2022 Letters from Lesotho

On October 12, 2022, waiting hours to board for our 15-hour flight from New York to Johannesburg, I had such vivid flashbacks to my reverse journey 31 months ago – leaving Hlotse in the dark hours before dawn to get through the border before it closed, to the circuitous days and countries to return home, wary of the hordes of international travelers who might be carrying this nameless plague that had so suddenly descended upon the world.

Now – returning to Lesotho, still masked and COVID wary, the world is both altered and oddly the same. The pandemic brought our staff new capacities with devices and platforms allowing more effective and meaningful distance communication – upon which we have relied all these months. Compounded by climate change effects and debilitating inflation, so much progress has been erased during these months. Gender-based violence, human trafficking, poverty, food insecurity have all risen alarmingly.

Our Board chair, Kathleen Lauder, a long-time supporter, friend and an international development specialist, is with me. Kathleen was in Lesotho twice in the very early days of the organization – no staff, no office, little structure. We reminisced about the sometimes harrowing adventures and struggles in those years building credibility, programs, partnerships and progress. It is exciting for her to see Help Lesotho now – robust, highly trained staff, incredibly well respected and impactful.

As you can imagine, I longed to see each one of our staff – to see for myself and hear know how they are. I love and admire them. After the beneficiaries, they are my daily concern. Zoom and Google Meet just aren’t the same. Our driver, dear Ntate Motsamai, greeted us warmly at the airport and, after a two-hour drive to our Hlotse Centre, the staff and children welcomed us with songs, signs and hugs. Home again!

I write after our first week – predictably crammed with 25 meetings as we try to make the most of this trip (my shortest visit in my 18 years). I will return for February and most of March for my usual time and donor trip, but these precious days are designated for our staff after such a long absence. There are still a couple spots open on the March 2023 trip. I would love to welcome you to the mountain kingdom. Please take a moment to watch this short video of the incredible people and places our guests visit (be sure to hit the ‘play’ button in the bottom left corner!).

Just since we arrived, there has been rain – finally – to drench the arid soil and prod the spring seeds and seedlings to grow after a drought of many months. As prices escalate, these homegrown vegetables are more essential than ever. At the centre, we only lost water for two days this week.

We had a great visit with our Pearl Girls and Guys4Good. These adorable grade seven children are learning how to navigate the perilous world of high school, peer pressure and adolescent confusion. They were bursting to tell us of their growth, new-found insights and how they are sharing what they learn in this program with their peers.

By-weekly, our staff congregate from various locations at the Hlotse Centre – to support each other, share their successes and challenges, and learn. This provided us with the chance to see everyone and celebrate our time together.

This year, all staff completed a challenging 12-Session Psychosocial Support Course on our online platform, followed by a Facilitator Course for those who facilitate our modules – a refresher course for some and new training for others. Our impact depends on the professionalism and insight of our facilitators. The certification requires successful completion a 7-session online course and practicum of facilitation evaluation on various topics. I was thrilled to present the program staff with their CHANGE4ce Facilitator Certification Certificates.

How they love to learn – always asking for more training. I recently finished mini-courses on suicide (Lesotho has the highest suicide rate in Africa – you can learn more here) and most recently on supporting boys and men – delving into the social-cultural issues more deeply than ever before. Following our group discussion with the male staff, they will then lead the discussion with the female staff to process the material. I love those discussions as do they, as we constantly work together to increase our effectiveness, in this case to reach one of our strategic goals to train more boys and men and hopefully, this will help.

Our staff are dedicated and care so deeply, yet each one is exposed to stories and pleas of unspeakable suffering all day long. They too face the same challenges at home. Providing useful training and support is paramount. Toward this end, I have engaged a dozen of our talented donors who have specialties to act as monthly phone/Zoom coaches for particular staff. The pairing of them has been a joy – knowing what a wonderful growth experience this will be for both. The mentees and I are thankful for donors who give so freely of their time and expertise to help our staff grow and get the attention they dearly deserve.

On this subject, one of our staff has an autistic son, another an autistic nephew. With no resources in Lesotho, I am reaching out to see if there is someone reading this letter who knows of a parent of an autistic child who might be willing to listen and support these two.  We have many deaf children at the centre and our staff have learned sign language. All of them would benefit from and appreciate learning about exceptionalities. If you can help – please reach out.

Lesotho held a national election last week and I was keen to hear the opinions on the results. We made enormous efforts to get the young people out to vote. We sent text messages to 141,000 people across Lesotho – in both English and Sesotho, distributed 3,000 handouts on why voting is so important, and reached thousands with multiple posts on social media. Of the 163K people we potentially reached, we hoped that at least 30% actually read the material – perhaps 50K. Shortly before election day, there was no electricity. Our staff were so committed to get voters out that they went out one-by-one on foot all over town encouraging people to vote. Yet, after all this work, disappointingly, Lesotho had the lowest voter turnout in the country’s recorded history at 38% – a clear indicator of how discouraged the population is with poor governance. We can only hope that those who voted did so wisely. Election monitors from many countries pronounced the election peaceful and fair. The populous has accepted the results without backlash – unlike most previous elections. The new Prime Minister, Sam Matekane, will hopefully bring the positive change this country so badly needs. He brings extensive business experience as the wealthiest person in Lesotho and seems determined to cut corruption, entitlement and restructure. We live in hope.

I met with a new class of Computer and Life Skills (CLS) participants, this time all correctional officers. Another strategic goal over the next five years is to train as many police and correctional officers as possible. We have trained many police officers and correctional guards in the past. They love it. Along with nurses and teachers, these are the frontline workers who can either help or retraumatize vulnerable girls, women and boys. Building their self-esteem and psychosocial awareness has proven to help them address their clientele with greater compassion and less judgement. I will re-visit them this week. Ironically, when I finished chatting with a youth group yesterday, there was a female police officer and former CLS graduate waiting for me. Hearing I was in town, she patiently waited for a couple of hours to tell me what a huge difference the program had made in her life. She looked to be in mid-forties and was completing her Master’s degree in social work on secondment from the police force. We had an interesting chat, while she pleaded for Help Lesotho to give this training to all the police officers and management so that they too could change.

Kathleen spent this weekend at our precious Pitseng Centre, participating in the programs, exploring the village and the stunningly beautiful valley. I was thrilled to see the new library – nearly finished, the space is well made, bright and spacious. We regaled ourselves with imaginings of the depressed youth, struggling students, correspondence students and aspiring literacy learners having this wonderful place to concentrate and hold discussion groups. Our most sincere appreciation to those who donated to this library. Please know that the impact of your generosity will last for decades and help hundreds of villagers.

Whether meeting with staff, professional interns, or program participants, the message is the same. Their compounded trauma peppers every conversation and meeting. The staggering need, intense fear and anxiety, and overwhelming gratitude are ever present. Our time together is filled with various combinations of tears, hugs, confessions, pleas for more training, stories of personal bravery and change, prayers of gratitude, and hope. I am constantly and deeply touched by the expressions of how important and meaningful our programs are and how loving and talented our staff.

The needs are tremendous but we are not helpless. We are focused and reaching people every minute. Last year, we helped 22,000 people. No dollar, day, conversation or effort is wasted.

I will write only one more letter this trip. So much to pack in! Kathleen and ‘M’e Mamoletsane and I are meeting in the coming week with three of the UN agencies who currently fund us to see if they will support some new work. Wish us luck!

I look out on the mountains as I write, feeling hopeful and appreciative. We have serious work to do and you are the ones that make this possible. I wish you could know what a difference it is making!

Until the next letter,

Best wishes

Read Peg’s next ‘Letter from Lesotho’ #142
Read the previous 2022 Letters from Lesotho