#9 January/February/March

Dumelang batsadi!

Howdy. I don’t have any big news, so what follows is mostly a collection of funny and interesting stories. Enjoy the random exploits of your friendly neighborhood peace corps volunteer Kopano.

At work, I am continuing to trend away from what I am technically supposed to be doing, and just doing what I want to or what is possible, so that I don’t sit around all day.

Hold up! I wrote this about a week ago, and we just had a Peace Corps update on what we are allowed to do. Long story short, we can do supply chain management (helping to work in the pharmacy, real thrilling stuff) and that is about it. So whoop-DI-doo, they are telling us to sit in a chair all day working on supply chain management. Yea. I mean seriously, how dull can it get? I start to fall asleep towards the end of the name! Nobody tell Elon, but I am just going ahead with all the work I have.

Anywho, the big project that I am working on with my coworkers is an elementary school field day type event, where my clinic sponsors a day of fun activities that we intersperse with health talks, screening for various things (HIV, STIs, breast cancer, etc), and donations of toiletries. So far the preparation has consisted of writing numerous Official Letters to invite, inform, and update all of the people we are asking to help. Events like this are usually supported by all the government offices in the village, including the police, Kgotla (town hall), social workers, Village Development Committee, etc. The community assessment that I completed in the Fall is already bearing fruit, as I know most of the departments and officers personally, so asking for their help is easy. But writing and delivering letters can only take up so much time, especially when we started the planning four months in advance. Some days I help out in the pharmacy, which is inside the outpatient care building at the clinic. Anything from helping enter in new deliveries of drugs, to counting pills into little baggies and writing labels (oh god we’re back to supply chain management again. Please Nick, move on already!)

I have two other regular commitments around the village now, both that are not health related but of the get-off-your-ass variety. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons I go to the primary school to help with the remedial math class for the 5th graders. The teaching style involves a lot of games, is super interactive, and really helps the students. My other commitment is to the Design and Technology class at the junior secondary school (think middle school). I am friends with the teachers now, so I ask them if they need any help and then go over in the afternoon. Last weekend we made a new shelf in the classroom for one of the tools, and this week we made several wood joints displaying different joinery techniques for the students to learn from. I am absolutely in heaven there.

Helping to teach the math class today at the primary school, I realized how out of practice I was with interacting with kids. I’ve had a lot of different jobs working with kids and teens, but I had forgotten how much of a difference it was from working at the clinic; I spent the morning helping to organize medicine and then sitting with my coworkers as we waited for patients to come in, so going to school was incredibly different. As always with kids, in my experience, the answer is just to lean into everything. After a great hour almost solo teaching (!) these tykes how to recognize their hundreds, tens, and ones, I ended up walking all the way home with about 15 little kids who wanted to see where I lived. I have almost entirely broken the “lekgoa” barrier, meaning I rarely get called “lekgoa” anymore (which translates to “white person”). The one exception is with kids, especially at school when they have strength in numbers. It was really nice to walk home with a bunch of them so that they could see I was a normal person, not a scary “lekgoa.” When babies come in for their monthly checkup at the clinic and see me they just start weeping and wailing, so this was a nice change.

Because both of the schools are on the other side of town, I take the opportunity to go to the boat station more often now. It is really nice at sunset, as I discovered when I hosted a friend of a friend fora few nights and he flew his drone over the delta during the sunset. I will post the pictures and video in the pictures tab. Something about sitting on the dock and watching the sunset reminds me of being back in MN. It is amazing how something as simple as the tactile feeling of sitting on some planks of wood over the water can make me happy.

Doing my part to actively fight against Elon Musk and the Department of Chainsaws, a few weeks ago I took a trip down to the capital to get...a shot. Whoop. It was a long, rainy, pretty boring trip, but on the way down I got to see two of my friends and my host family back in the training village. All in all, it was about a six day trip to get one HepB shot that they had overlooked when I was getting medically cleared back in Maine. The first half was great, because I got to see Jasmine and John. The second half, wandering around Gaborone, and then sitting on the bus for 12 hours two consecutive days stunk.

The big story recently has been the War Against Bats (WAB). Because we are so close to the river, this is apparently a great environment for bats. Furthermore, most houses are not completely weather-sealed like they are back home, as the weather never gets to an extreme where that is necessary. Put these two things together and you get bats living above the ceiling in a lot of houses, including my house. After coexisting peacefully for several months, the straw finally broke when dead bats started falling onto my veranda. My host family sent some guys over to take out all the droppings, kill the bats, and stop up the holes they used to get in. I won’t go into extreme detail, but three major things happened that day: one, they took down the whole ceiling in several rooms, two, I discovered I was scared of bats, and three, they killed almost two dozen bats and birds that were living up there. All over right? WRONG they didn’t kill all of them so the ones that were still up there now had no place to escape but down into the house. I spent the rest of the week living in terror, waking up to bats clinging to the INSIDE of my mosquito net (1:30am), to the outside of my mosquito net (11:30pm), hearing the *thump* as they dropped down to the floor, and personally killing a bunch more. For a few days I was so jumpy that I almost had a heart attack when the wind blew my hair onto my ear. Picture me in my boxers with all the lights on dragging around furniture at 1:30am, swinging a broom like it is Excalibur, trying to smite a tiny little scrabbling bony terrified bat. Pretty sure this is my batman origin story.

In very exciting news, I finally finished Les Miserables. It will go down as the hardest book I have read cover to cover, and even then I skipped so much exposition that I probably only read about 85%. Even though it kicked my ass, I still loved the story, the imperfect characters, and the writing. Both the Bishop and Jean Valjean left a great impact on me for their excessive charity and meagre living. Combined with everything that comes with living here in Botswana, I find myself struggling to comprehend how extremely wealthy people live with themselves, and how they can accrue so much wealth while the rest of the world struggles. When I see or hear news from home, I often find myself thinking it ridiculous because that money (sports contracts, political donations, etc.) could buy so many things for those in need. It is not just here in Botswana, although it may be easier to see the poverty living in a small village, but people all over the world are struggling. Some things simply baffle me: homelessness? Starvation? How on earth can any of us buy a second house, live in a mansion, donate millions to political campaigns, when $100USD could buy food enough for several people in my village? When $1000USD could buy tons of school supplies for elementary school students anywhere in the world?

I know I am not exactly the Bishop myself (he lives on bread and milk and gives the rest to the poor and hospitals), but I am not advocating for that. My problem isn’t with any of you, but more with the ultra rich. The mega yacht, ski house, first class ticket rich. Sit in the back of the plane for a few hours with the rest of the world and send some money to the local soup kitchen or Habitat for Humanity. I foresee myself spending my life fighting these inequalities, finding a way to levy money from the crazies down to simple things like food, housing, and medical care.That’s about all I have from here. I’m too fucking fed up with our two co-presidents to even comment on the whole thing, so refer to the above paragraph and you guess how I would feel about the whole thing. Not including my thoughts on Peace Corps, but simply out of spite, I’m going to make them drag me outta here kicking and screaming if it comes to it.

You thought I was done. I thought I was done. We’re all wrong! Bonus story: I found a small craft shop here in the village that collects crafts from villages all over the Okavango delta and then sells them to the safari camps and overseas. Most of the crafts they source from others, but some they make in house, which I have now started to help with. Yesterday I spent 3.5 hours sanding spoons and was so happy afterward. Intricately woven baskets are the main specialty around here, and they are beautiful. I have some in my house from my host mother, and am thinking about getting some more from this shop. I’m going to spend a few afternoons a week there, helping with the actual construction of items and also helping to organize some different things for kids in the village. Hopefully we will be able to have a showcase of artwork that kids have done at the primary and secondary school.

Ok, that is truly it. I will be posting some pictures soon. Love you all! Wish me a bat free night :)