Finally some pictures!

It takes sooo long to upload pictures at school, but I was finally able to get a few up today.  Here are some snippets from my Botswana life :)

 Cows at my host family's cattle post.

 Dancing at the cultural site!

 They made us dance too!

 Botswana chess.  I'll let you know when I figure out how it works.

 Yummy food.  Clockwise from the white stuff on top: Paleche, grilled chicken, cabbage, seshwa (pounded beef, in the middle), and a roll.

 Maudu, the adorable 1-year old in my house at her birthday party :D

 My host family: Me, Tswanama holding Maudu, and my mom.  My brother Thato wasn't there.

This was during a crazy thunderstorm we had a few days ago (actually the same night hurricane Sandy came ashore in the US).  This was at night, lit up by lightning.

Also, We're all going crazy

I want to be as real as possible on here.  I can’t say everything, because this is a public blog, and therefore I’m not going to write specifics, especially anything negative, that would be traced back to my host family, or people in my village, etc.   But 26 months in the Peace Corps won’t be all roses either, and I don’t think keeping this blog annoyingly cheerful when I’m in a bad mood would help me or my readers.

That being said, we’re all going crazy.  And by we I mean Bots 13 in training. 9 weeks of sitting in training, at least 2/3 of which is review, some of which changes, makes for a reallllly long 2 months.  And it’s a necessary beast, because we ARE getting lots of good information.  Really good language training, really helpful cultural information, necessary other information.  But we are at the point of climbing the walls and really wanting to be at our sites.

Part of the problem is that PC is filled with bureaucracy and requirements from PC Washington that we can’t escape.  Part of the problem is that Botswana is also really good at bureaucracy.  And part of the problem is that we have a group of people highly educated in different areas that all need to be put on the same page, so most sessions are new information for some people and review for many more.  Also some of the sessions seem completely pointless, like when we get outdated health information that we know is wrong, or when we get a 3 hour session on information that could have been given to us in 30 minutes if we didn't have to do group work and make a flip chart.

We’re currently trying to gather information about our sites and getting anxious when we hear that not all of the housing is set up yet, or that it seems most schools didn't know they had to pick us up and take us to site.   I’m sure most of this will be resolved, and my situation seems pretty good, but it does raise anxiety levels.  That with our boredom = crazy.

On the plus side, we met our supervisors and/or counterparts (teachers we will be working with) yesterday and most of them seem very nice and eager to have us.  My counterpart seems super nice and helped me make a game plan of things I can do at my site, like running after school clubs and teacher trainings.  So there is a use for our training J

So… slowly going crazy.  Only 3 weeks of training left!

Language, and my Setswana-Spanglish

Learning a language is a really interesting process.  Especially the second time (or maybe 3^rd, depending on how you look at it) around with competent teachers.

I’m a native English speaker (hopefully that’s not a newsflash) that didn’t learn any other language until I was 13, when I started Spanish.  It was rough.  Long story short, I had a horrible few years in the public school system with bad teachers and classmates and really learned nothing, except a hatred of foreign languages.  By the time I got a good teacher (4^th try’s the charm) it was too late: I hated Spanish and I dropped it.

Fast forward to college, where I needed 3 years of high school foreign language to be able fulfill the language requirement.  I had 2.5 years.  Rats.  So I started over again with Spanish, learned way more than I did in the previous 2.5 years, but still decided that I sucked at foreign languages.  I can carry on simple conversations in Spanish; order food, tell you a little about myself, get a few directions, etc., but that’s about it.

Now I’m in the Peace Corps learning Setswana, a Bantu language spoken in Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia.  At first, it took my 2 whole days to just remember my Setswana name.  But after a week or two the sounds became more familiar and it got a bit easier.  And besides the actual Setswana, I’ve learned a few things.

1) I actually don’t suck at languages like I thought I did.  Granted I’m not amazing or anything, but it’s coming faster than I thought it would.

2) I’m beginning to see the link between music, math, and language.  People always told me that if you are good at math you are good at language, and I was always like, you’ve never met me apparently.  I’m pretty darn good at math- my college major got me close to a math minor, but I thought I was language inept.  Now I’m realizing that pattern recognition, something my math brain is pretty good at, is really helpful for languages.  I’m not sure I have ‘the ear’ that people talk about, but maybe at least I won’t require Setswana for dummies.

3)  Spanish is waaaaaaaaaaay easier than Setswana.  This has renewed my motivation to pick up my Spanish again once I get back to the US, because shoo.  If I can learn Setswana, I can definitely learn Spanish.

4)  I know more Spanish that I give myself credit for.  This is because every time I want to say something in Setswana and I don’t know the word for it, the Spanish word pops into my head.  Not helpful brain, not helpful.

5) I might actually like languages. Who knew?  I’ve hated and then found I didn’t actually hate enough things that I’ve learned to never say never, but this revelation is pretty amazing.  I still maintain you can put me in a mental hospital if I ever claim to like physics though.

6) If I like languages and don’t completely suck at them… this opens some pretty cool doors.  There are some places in Africa that I’d like to work in the future that are francophone, and I could go from there.  My one current worry is that I’m not sure my brain knows how to sort out multiple languages, as evidenced by my substituting Spanish for Setswana.  I’m afraid that Setswana is dislodging my Spanish, and that French would dislodge my Setswana.  Maybe someone who is trilingual can comment on this.  Maybe I just need to cement them both better in my brain.

So, language is obviously going okay. Ke ithuta Setswana!  (I am learning Setswana!)

My site is Salajwe!

So I've gotten my site announcement, and it's Salajwe!  From what I know, it's a village of around 1700 just south of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.  There is a primary school, junior secondary school and clinic, as well as 1-2 shops.  My shopping village is Molepolole, which is 2-3 hours away depending finding a hitch.   Luckily I think I can get non-perishables in my village, so I can stock up on vegetables when I go to Moleps.
I'll be working with the junior secondary school, which is ages 13-15ish, heavy on the ish.  Of the 750 kids at the school, 600 of them board there.
I don't know anything about my living situation yet, but there is another volunteer in my village who works at the clinic, so she is trying to scope that out for me.  Salajwe is not on a tarred (paved road), so I think I take a khombi (minibus that seats about 14) and then hitch hike the rest of the way.  Hitching is pretty safe here and very common, so don't worry too much about my safety.  Also we don't travel at night, due to drunk drivers and cows (and not always in that order).  If you are going to worry about my safety when traveling, it should be from accidents, not sketchy people picking up hitch-hikers :P
So!  I have a site!  And I get to go there in less than a month.  I'll update with a new address when I procure one.  :D

What I can do

As I write this, I'm sitting outside the library in Kanye, enjoying the shade, coolish weather, and free wi-fi.  Four girls that were sitting in the grass near me for a while finally came up to me and starting asking me for money, not an uncommon occurrence.  On a whim I decided to use the reverse psychology I’ve heard friends here discuss.  Give me 2 pula.  You give ME 2 pula.  What?  It completely baffles them that I’m asking THEM for money.  They were persistent though, and part of me wanted to tell them to bug off, I’m not going to give you money.  But then they asked me where I was from, and I managed to steer the conversation towards them: What form (grade) are you in?  What is your favorite subject?  What do you want to be when you grow up?  We had a laugh when I gently correctly one girl’s pronunciation of pilot, because I swear she first said pirate. (Which is doubly funny because there is no coast here; Botswana is a landlocked country.  I told her she’d be stealing boats in the Okavanga Delta.)  They are at junior secondary school, which is like middle school in the States, and what I’ll be working in at my site in less than a month.  They said I should come to their school, they have bad teachers that don’t teach them and beat them when they don’t know their lessons.  I asked if they had books that they could study on their own, and they said they weren’t good, etc.  There is corporeal punishment in schools here, but I have no idea if they are studying or not, who is actually getting beaten, etc.  So I told them that in a few years, they get to run things.  They get to make the decisions about teacher training, and corporal punishment, etc.  And if they don’t like the way things are, they should change them.  Because they would be in a better place to do that than me as a volunteer, because people will just assume I’m a crazy lacoa (white person).  That made them laugh, and although I’m not sure if they believe me, I think I at least gave them something to think about.

During our conversation they kept saying I want to go to America, everyone’s rich in America.  (So as I’m talking with them, I now have the song ‘America’ from West Side Story playing in my brain.  If you’ve seen the movie you know what I mean.)  And I’m trying to explain a few things like: America is big, more than 150x the population of your country.  So no, I have not met Beyonce or Obama.  Also, not everyone is rich in America.  Yes they might have more money than people here, but things cost more there.  Also, there are poor people in America.  And bad teachers.  And people that can’t find jobs. Etc.  And I said, you guys want to be pilots, nurses, and teachers.  Why don’t you make Botswana so great that people want to come and move here? And they were like, huh?   The conversation sort of dwindled after this and they started asking me for money again.  So I told them I was glad to talk with them, but if they kept asking me for money I was going to leave.  That sort of startled them, and they left a few minutes later, saying they would see me again.

This might not sound like a great conversation, but it actually was.  Because I made them think.  And I think they were surprised I would take an interest in them, asking them about school and their goals and such.  And it really solidified for me something I can do here as a PCV.  I can engage with students, as much as possible, and rock their world a little bit.  Care about them, help them dream, show them a point of view they’ve never thought about. 

There’s a lot that I’d like to do in my two years here, and much more that I can’t change.  Hopefully at my site I can build long term relationships with them, and help them problem solve, and tutor each other, and start some clubs and other programs.  But even if I just hang out with students for two years, I think that will be the biggest difference I can make, teaching/mentoring/after school programs aside.

Hey y’all.  Apologies for the delay in update, I was under the weather the middle of the week and wasn’t thinking much about posting.  Am much better now so here you go…

Last week our training group was shadowing, where we live with a current volunteer for a few days and see what they do, what their life is like, etc.

I stayed in Ghanzi with a volunteer named Maureen, who works with NGOs.  Maureen is a lot of fun, and because of her location (the biggest town in the entire district) she has people in and out of her house ALL the time.  Like there’s literally only been a few days at her site when someone hasn’t been staying with her.  So the first night it was just me, the 2^nd night it was me, a couch surfer from Spain named Marta, and a grad student from GB named Jenny.  The 3^rd night it was me, Marta, and some PCVs, and the last night there was a pile of us because we had a barbecue.  Because of Marta and the fact that Maureen speaks Spanish pretty fluently, I think I spoke more Spanish this past week than Setswana, although Marta also spoke English.

I arrived Tuesday around 1:30pm, after getting picked up by PC at 4:30am to go to Gabs to catch a bus.  Although it was almost an 8 hour bus ride, the ride itself wasn’t too bad.  There were 6 of us on the bus, and me and another trainee were going all the way to Ghanzi so we had people to chat with. Our drive through the Kalahari was beautiful, although it mostly looks the same.  Lots of small trees/bushes that are brown, although with the rains coming they will soon bloom.  Not a desert like the Sahara.  Also, ostriches!! And man, they are HUGE!  I wasn't expecting that, so they were really fun to see.

On Wednesday Maureen took me to a smaller village where we helped another volunteer write a grant for her NGO, which provides facilities and materials for San people to make and sell arts and crafts.  Then we went back to Ghanzi and visited the Ghanzi celebration for international mental health day at the bus rink, complete with lots of speeches and dancing.  Then we briefly met with someone at an NGO for people living with HIV.  That night we went to dinner at a restaurant with some PCVs and the people staying with Maureen.  Thursday we were supposed to do some field work but the person taking us was sick.  That afternoon we went to the local elementary school and did a reading group with the kids we could find.  Normally Maureen has a regular group, but some of the kids were having exams, other weren’t there, and the room was locked, so we made due with what we had, PC style J 

Friday we prepared for the brie (pronounced bry), the Botswana way of barbecuing.  At the brie there were a bunch of us and we chilled all evening, going dancing later at the local bar.  Saturday I caught the 10am bus home.  It was an awesome week and is making me want to be at my site!

Saturday we went to a village about 45 minutes from Kanye that I guess is sort of a tourist attraction?  They danced for us, had us dance with them, and told us a lot about traditional cultures and practices.  At the end we had lunch there, so I know that PC must have paid them for our visit.
The dancing and singing was really fun to watch, and I hope I can get some people to teach me when I get to my site.  I don't have high hopes for my dancing abilities, but I'd really love to learn some of the songs I've heard in church and when people are working.  Some remind me of the spirituals that are sang in the American south from the time of slavery.  (I know that sounds like a duh since I'm in Africa, but most slaves that were taken from Africa that wound up in America were taken from central and west africa, not southern africa.)
Anyway, the dancers made different people in our group dance with them at different times, including the 'grandfathers', 'grandmothers', and Luis, the only guy in our group under 30.  Then the guys in the dancing group picked girls to dance with, and then we mock married Katy, one of our group, to the chiefs son.  This was complete with her getting to dance with the women a few songs (including one called 'I have a headache'), getting an additional skirt and shawl to wear over her clothes, and having a 'honeymoon' in a traditional hut.  The last thing was hilarious because after they were led into the hut, the older women in our group were invited to peak in the window to 'make sure everything was going ok'.  Apparently this really used to happen, the grandmas spied on the honeymoon to make sure things were happening. :P  The whole thing was funny and slightly awkward and Katy was a really good sport.
We also got a chance to grind some sorghum to make a porridge that's a breakfast food, and buy some jewelry made in the village.  I got a neat necklace with beads that are the colors of the Botswana flag.
After we got back from the cultural visit we had free time, so about half of our group hung out in a cafe in Kanye that we've found called Kohai.

Tomorrow I leave for Ghanzi for a few days, so hopefully I can update in a week about those adventures :)

I’ve found internet that’s easier to access, so hopefully I can post more often.  At least for the duration of training.  I realize that I should probably back up a bit and explain a little bit of how Peace Corps works, since I know most people aren’t familiar with the process.

When you apply to Peace Corps, you tell them all of your skills and background and they roughly try to place you somewhere where you can use those skills and experience (very roughly.  More on that in another post).  The application process is a completely separate beast that I’m not going to go into here :P  Once they tell you where you are going, you have the opportunity to accept your invitation or decide not to go.  I got my invite in May after I graduated.  Then there’s a whole bunch more paperwork that goes back and forth between you and PC, until the day arrives that you leave.

When you leave home you go to some city in the US for staging, to meet the rest of the people going to your country at the same time.  A lot of people might not know this, but PC sends people to countries in batches.  So my staging was in Philadelphia with 34 other people going to Botswana to be Life Skills volunteers (more on the life skills stuff later).   We meet each other and more paperwork ensues.  After getting talked at a bunch we basically didn’t sleep and began the process of getting here, via a bus to New York, flying to South Africa, then Gaborone (affectionately known as Gabs for short), then taking a bus to Kanye.

Kanye is our training site.  Each of the 34 of us (one person has gone home already) live with a host family to learn Setswana and local culture and customs (unless you are married then you are placed together).  M-F and some parts of Saturday, the 34 of us have training at a local education center.  This is what I mentioned last time, where we get sessions on health, safety, language, local culture, HIV/AIDS, and eventually what we are doing in schools.  At this point, we are actually not Peace Corps volunteers yet.  We are Peace Corps trainees, in the Bots13 class (you’ll hear me mention that a LOT).  Once we finish training we swear in as Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) on November 15^th, at which point we then go to our sites.

So I’m currently a Bots13 PC trainee in the middle of pre-service training (PST).  Have you picked up that PC really likes acronyms? J   There are currently 3 other bots groups here as current volunteers.  Bots 12 came in April, Bots 11 came a year ago in September, and Bots 10 came April 2011, so they only have about 6 months left.  Bots 9 left this past June.  Keep in mind that people think of Peace Corps as a 2 year commitment, but it’s actually 26-27 months, because your training (that I’m currently in) doesn’t count towards your 2 years of service.  I’m sure I’ll go into lots of other PC stuff in future posts.

Next week we have a break from M-F training and we get to shadow current volunteers for a few days.  I leave at 4:30am for Ghanzi (pronounced hanzi, most Gs are silent in Setswana) for 4 days, and I’m super excited.  I’m excited to actually be with a volunteer, and to see more of the country; Ghanzi is pretty far west- look near the Namibia border if you are trying to find it on a map.  I also know that our training class Bots13 will have sites within several hours of Gabs and not be as far as where I’m going next week, so yay for getting to go farther for a few days!  The 8-hour bus ride is not on my list of favorite things, but at least its just one bus I think.  I’ll give a full report in a week or 2.

Once again, leave a comment if you have questions!