The Community

For this entry I will try to convey, with photos, a sense of the community we are part of here in Lesotho.

Downtown Maseru - a very unimposing capital city.

Coming to Lesotho and knowing it was a poor country, I expected most folks to live in similar circumstances. How near sighted of me. Like every country and society, Lesotho has those who have more and those with less. As one young man I met in a poorer part of town ruefully noted as we looked up the hill to where the nicer home were, “The rich get richer and the poor poorer.” Where ever one goes, it seems that economic disparity exists as surely as death and taxes.

This picture is from near where the young man made his observation. The poorer folks build with grey cinder block (forground). The wealthier add coloured brick, or else cinder block which has been “stuccoed” and then painted. You can see the colour in the distance.

Many of the brightly coloured homes are very large also.

Cinder block homes. What appears to be vacant land the children are heading down in the picture below is actually the street.


And more often than not, if you live in a cinder block home, water is something you carry home.

There is a part of Maseru (I did not take pictures) that is very poor. The homes there make the cinder block homes look good.

The "row house" below is made of rocks, and is a step up from the poorest part of town, but a step down from the cinder block homes. Each window likely represents someone's one room home.
On Sunday we went for a drive out into the surrounding country. There we saw very few coloured houses.

Two scenes from a rural village. The homes, here
as in Maseru are spread out, not crammed together
like the shantytowns of Cape Town.

In the country we saw a number of traditional rondavels.









And then, I continue to be intrigued by the herders, out in the weather, wrapped in their blankets.

~ Benno~