Grandma Smiling as Southern African Cousins Unite

In a continent in which ancestors matter a lot, two grandchildren of a woman from New York whose own grandmother immigrated from Donegal on the northwest coast of Ireland 130 years ago met up at a music festival in Swaziland. It might seem like a coincidence that Walter Bayer, shown here looking very happy in a funny hat, and our own Dia Marie are both Peace Corps volunteers in southern Africa. Then again coincidences are not always what they seem. Walter is the son of my sister Kathleen Bayer. Both Walter and Dia grew up as part of a tight group of cousins fiercely loyal to one another, their grandmother, and Don McLean's American Pie.

Both are motivated by a desire to serve. Both are adventurous and generous in spirit. And they both like music, enough to travel for hours and hours over bumpy roads to attend the BushFire festival. After the music died, Dia and Walter traveled together to Lesotho, where he teaches at a school in Butha-Buthe, a village at least three and a half hours from the capital, Maseru. Dia helped him teach a Life Skills class, then made for the mountains (they don't call Lesotho the mountain kingdom for nothing) and after a 9,000 foot climb in the Sani Pass, last we heard she is on the road back to Sefphofe.

Walter keeps a pretty cool blog on his life there, which you can find https://wbayer21.wordpress.com/ . Cool kids doing cool things. And in just 44 days we'll be there, flies on the wall, peeking in on how a new generation takes on the challenge of building a new world. My Uncle Bob told me long before I was a parent that if you're smart and patient you'll learn a lot from your kids. How right he was.