Lesotho: a bird's-eye view

From the plane, flying over the Free State province of South Africa, you see many large fields of crops with a few isolated houses in between. These are farms and farm houses. Then we cross the Caledon River, as the whites call it, or the Mohokare River, as the Basotho call it. The river is the border between South Africa and Lesotho. Now in Lesotho the fields are small and shaped like puzzle-pieces. There are many more houses than on the other side of the river, and they are in groups. These are villages surrounded by family fields. A bird's eye view of the land indicates a lot about who lives down there, and how they live.   The fields in South Africa were green with crops, and I saw sprinklers watering them. Yet the fields in Lesotho are brown, and I remember why. Basotho don't have irrigation like the farmers in South Africa. Basotho rely on the rain to feed their fields, and the rain comes in the summer, but the summer is over.  The earth gets bumpier in Lesotho. Mountains poke up all over. Some fields are terraced. We fly over the capital city, Maseru, which is a spread of shiny tin roofs. There is little pavement to see, just dirt and brown grasses and small fields and vegetable plots in between shiny tin roofs. Rivers wind through, and they are tree-lined. Maseru is a city of a couple hundred thousand, but it is also like an overgrown village.  We fly low now over the outskirts of Maseru, low toward the airstrip. Collections of dark cows or light sheep are watched by single shepherds in fields. The fields are rashed with brown termite mounds. We touch down.