Hello from Lesotho! The roof of Africa is sunny but biting cold this past week We've had strong winds to add to the discomfort. Our nighttime lows have been only about 20 to 25 F but with the winds it's more like 10 to 15 F. This is a hard time of year for many Basotho. There's little wood in the country so villages away from the main roads often rely on animal dung for warmth and cooking (smoky!) Mostly people bundle up in their kobos (famous Lesotho wool blankets with African designs) and huddle on the north side of buildings to catch the winter sun. We are blessed with a tank of propane and a gas heater from the Peace Corps. We're quite comfortable heating one room in our small house, reading and listening to SAFM and the BBC. We watch for moments when the wind dies down and we can work in our daily walk or run (critical for morale). Lynn has been cooking up wonderful stir fries and pasta dishes (a basic Knorr soup mix to which she adds all available fresh vegetables; cabbage, carrots, broccoli swiss chard, cauliflower, etc. from our school winter garden) and once thickened, pours over rotini. Every hot mouthful is heaven! We can't complain; the days are getting a little longer already.

Here's a winter observation. We have numerous iris and now daffodils blooming throughout fall and winter here. Are these northern hemisphere bulbs that haven't reset their clocks? We marvel and wonder. Other plants are also blooming, enough so that Lynn can still take her daily vase of fresh flowers to our farm office. Our cold frame in our yard continues to produce lots of red leaf and romaine lettuce. Our farm woodshop is producing cold frames to go home with each of our gardening/landscaping graduates in the spring (October). They'll be used to start seedlings for their commercial gardens.

The world does look a little different from our African Peace Corps perch. Listening to the BBC this morning, I learned that the G-7 industrialized nations at their Okinawa meeting had agreed to "help reduce the digital divide" that is leaving poor nations increasingly behind. Well-l-l. Maybe we should consider a few things ahead of the Hewlet~Packards (I love and miss mine back in the US!) Stuff like electricity, phones, paved roads, drinking water, health care, and for all the world's millions of newly literate, something, anything to read. Then, maybe, we can deal with Napster et. al. Increasingly, I'm having to recognize that my own beloved country has only the sketchiest idea of what's going on in the lives of a majority of the world's citizens... that said I'm writing this letter on an old stodgy computer and am urgently seeking a new one to open the eyes of our wonderful students to the world of information technology.

A couple of weeks back, Lynn and I finally got to foIlow up a travel tip from the Friends of Lesotho webmaster Bill Dunn, in Anchorage. We bailed out of winter and went down to Port St. John's on the Indian Ocean, just four hours and a 6500 ft drop from Qacha's Nek. Wow. Finally, a great backpacker's town that tourism hasn't ruined. There are miles of beautiful beaches. It's uncrowded There's a nice mingling of blacks and whites, good little restaurants and lodgings and it's inexpensive. Great swaths of virgin rain forest fill the little valleys and canyons around the town. One day we hiked for miles down the unspoiled coast, following the trail along tide pools and through wild banana groves and, finally, climbing steeply up a path through the forest to the grasslands on the headland tops. We passed a small herd of shiny black wildebeest We sat down at the top drank from our water bottles and watched village women in the distance hand cutting thatch grass for their rondevals. Below the Indian Ocean pounded this dramatic edge of a continent and cooled us with a perfect sub Tropical breeze. Thanks Bill Dunn. We'll go back again to the same place when the southern right whales are migrating just off-shore!

A very sad note ends this month's letter Judy Pasmore, a fellow trainee and Peace Corps Volunteer died at her Lesotho site recently. I've included a Portland Oregonian article that movingly tells her story. Her husband Paul has returned to their Morija home to finish the work they started.