What a busy month it’s been, and probably the most memorable Bonfire Night I’ll have for a long while. What happens when you mix overly enthusiastic British people, explosives and pyromaniacs together? One angry neighbour and a visit from the police apparently! Basically… we’d spent a hilarious day trying to explain to the kids what Bonfire Night was all about to which they responded, “so you make a person and celebrate burning it because someone tried to kill the king hundreds of years ago?” Did really put it in perspective, but we continued nonetheless. After raiding the recycling bins for materials we convened later in a large garden where it felt appropriate to pretend it was actually cold and eat the traditional fare of burgers/hotdogs etc. Sadly the South African weather felt it appropriate to rain on our parade so to speak and made it necessary to douse our firewood with petrol and use countless matches before we had a fire. What some of us didn’t know when we put our Guy Fawkes on the fire was that a few felt it would liven things up by putting bangers and firecrackers in partitions of the costume. Gave us quite the shock! Next came the ‘fireworks’ (if they can be called that) which consisted primarily of very loud bangers. Soon after came the highly disgruntled neighbour telling us to ‘please desist immediately’, and then shortly after that the police showing a generalised type of concern after they heard the bangs from the other side of the town! Ironically we had in our party the person responsible for local security. 

Something new I’ve learnt this month about the culture is the naming ceremony of new wives. When a woman gets married, it is traditional for the husband’s grandparents or parents to decide on a new name for her. What makes it such an important ceremony is that the name decides the name of the first child. For example if someone was called Matshidiso, the ‘ma’ stands for ‘mother of’, and then the child’s name would be Tshidiso. The name is often influenced by events or characteristics that occur around the time of the marriage or pregnancy. Say, if it was during the rainy season the wife might be called Mapula (pula means rain). I thought this was a rather risky business as surely you couldn’t count on the sex of the first child so how do you decide on the name, but I’ve been told a lot of the names are genderless. While I’m on the subject of names and their meanings a group of us had a very interesting conversation about what peoples’ names were in English, and what English names would be in Sesotho. We had a ‘baggage’, someone’s first and last name meant road and cat etc. and I found out my name would be Palesa, meaning flower.

Despite my approbations about the food, I also tried a koeksister after one was offered to me. A sickly sweet sugar soaked donut that’s fairly greasy still. It was as unpleasant as it sounds but I can at least say I tried! To add to my list of new foods that I’ve tried I can add dipabi (a powder you eat that’s made of ground mielie, sugar and salt) it wasn’t completely unpleasant, but trying to eat a powder without any water was a little awkward to say the least. Another traditional Basotho dish I had was mahleu, which is a sweetened porridge made with sorghum. Definitely won’t be having that again- it was like having a wheat/oaty-ish tasting thick smoothie. Definitely pushed the boat out and also had jwala jwala, a traditional beer made from fermented sorghum that is given as a ‘you are welcome here’ kind of thing. I’m not a beer drinker at the best of times, but because I was offered it by the chief of the nearby Basotho cultural village you can’t really decline without being extremely rude. Again, it had a thick texture and tasted like yeast (not the enticing freshly baked bread smell, but just yeast) mixed with yoghurt. At least I can say I tried! Maybe try an ‘easier’ new food next, like ostrich.

One more week to go now until the school breaks up for the Christmas/summer holidays, which will be great; 6 weeks of lie-ins, creativity and long walks or cycling. Does also mean many of my friends are returning to England for a month which is a shame, but a good number of families are around for the majority and I’m going to try and get to Cape Town for a bit so I can waddle with the penguins, drink cheap wine, see the sights and swim in the sea, hurrah!