This month, we are at an orphanage in Maseru, Lesotho. It’s the small capital city of this mountain nation. Lesotho is known as “the kingdom in the sky” and I couldn’t think of any name more true. At a mile high, we are in the country’s low point surrounded by tan stone mountains where the clouds feel like they can be reached with a jump. It feels like a floating kingdom in the sky.
So far, I’ve spent all my time being a jungle gym for the kids to climb on, playing futbol for hours and hours, doing back flips, climbing trees, making ALL the animal noises, and reverting back to my 10 year old days. It’s been a dream come true.
Yesterday as we were finishing up our games and getting ready for dinner, one of the boys, about 13 years old, told me to come with him.
“Okay, where are we going?” I asked.
“We have to go get the sheep. Get your shoes.”
“I don’t need shoes.”
“Yes you do.”
I took his advice, grabbed my shoes, and followed him through a hole in a fence to the neighboring property. For being a capital city, Maseru has an abundance of open countryside. After a while, we caught up to the group of boys tasked with the mission of finding the sheep. I affectionately call this group the wild boys because they remind me a lot of my childhood self. Too much energy and imagination to know what to do with.
Soon we were running, jumping over bushes and creeks, balancing on water pipeline across small valleys, and getting all kind of scrapes and cuts (everything in Africa has thorns). We stopped and ate some berries off of bushes, broke our shepherding sticks off of trees, and wandered around the giant wilderness of the neighbors. To me it felt like we were just kids playing around in nature. We made it to the far corner of the property, and still no sheep. I began to understand that this would not be as simple as I first thought.
A few shouts in their Sesotho language, and we hustled through a ravine to a small forrest. We eventually made it to a iron barred fence with a gap in it that led to a rocky dirt road. As people walked by and gave us (mostly me) funny looks, the boys asked if the people had seen sheep. I don’t think the answers were helpful, but we pressed on up the hill path. The boys continued to ask, and the answers continued to be of no help. We were running down steep hillsides, jumping off rocks and boulders, and asking every person we saw.
At this point, we had traveled a couple kilometers, and I wasn’t feeling great about our luck. We finally made it out of the wild to another rocky dirt road. And finally, someone had seen sheep. The pointed a direction, and we ran. Just a group of wild boys running with our sticks searching for some lost sheep.
We finally made it to a small village at the foot of a large mountain. We found the sheep! But the challenge was far from over. We had to make the whole journey back as shepherds. With shouts and whistles and stick waving and tapping, we kept the sheep in line. One boy led them from the front, one boy kept them in from the left, and I kept them in from the high ground on the right while the others pushed them in from behind.
Every local that passed us by was amused by this overgrown American child running with children with sticks trying to control just 3 sheep. One of the sheep was particularly ornery, and I had to chase her back to the group many times. I wasn’t really sure what I was doing at the start, but shepherding came naturally. I loved every second of it. It will definitely go down as one of the coolest experiences in my life.
After the long journey home, we all cheered for each other with high fives and encouragement. The director of the orphanage was so worried the sheep would not be found. We felt so accomplished.
We were just 10 wild boys blazing a trail through the Lesotho hillsides to bring the lost sheep home.
