Pictures of my house

I finally have fast internet to post some pictures, woo!

My house from the outside.

My porch and clothesline.  This is standing in the doorway of my bedroom, looking at the open door to my living room.  To the right out of the picture is my bathroom, and then to the right IN the picture is the kitchen. And I was doing laundry when I took this :)

Clothesline.

My bathroom.  Not finished, but hey, plumbing is plumbing.

My bedroom.  

Still waiting on a bed, although I have made prettier curtains since I took this picture.

My closet and new curtains. 

My living room.  The huge board will be shelves as soon as I can get some cinder blocks.  The rest of the couch cushions are currently part of my bed.  

The rest of my living room.  

The table is currently my desk and storage for half of my worldly goods in Botswana :P

My kitchen.

The rest of my kitchen.  Currently using the hotplate until I get a gas tank.

The view from my yard with a double rainbow.  

The buildings are some of the primary school.

Sunsets here are spectacular.

"Wild" life in my yard.

 A few things that wander in and out of my yard.

I've named this donkey and her baby Kanga and Roo.

Roo:  Stop taking my picture!!  Do not want!

Let me tell you, cows on your porch at 3am can scare the @^#$@!! out of you.

Roo.

I'm in your yard eating your grass. 

Sometimes even the donkeys just lay down when its hot.

Oh hai.

I'd categorize some small children as wildlife.  

These kids saw me taking a picture of a goat and HAD to have their picture taken.  

They were trying to look gangster :)

Goat in yard: What can you see?!

Goat on porch: I think I see food!

Goats apparently like watermelon.  

(I gave them some sketchy watermelon I wasn't going to eat.)

Not sure what these guys are, but they are EVERYWHERE.

 Harmless, and they don't move much, but pretty big at 2 inches long.

Second week, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit...

better, actually!

It was another busy week, but things are running more smoothly at school.  We apparently have food and firewood, because meals seemed to happen and no one was sent home early.

I got to sit in on several guidance and counseling classes, and then taught 4 of them at the end of the week!  The regular teacher left for 2 days to take care of a sick family member so I covered the remaining classes.  It was kinda fun, a little scary… but since they were mostly form 3s, they seemed to at least understand me for the most part.  The coolest thing was I had them submit questions on anything at the end of class, and I got some really really good questions.  They were very honest, and some of the questions almost made me cry.  Questions about sex, abuse, alcohol, where to get help, suicide, stress, why they don’t have enough teachers.   I have 6 pages of questions to answer and that was only 3 of 18 classes J

I was also able to have PACT club this week, yay!  10 kids showed up, and several had been in PACT before.  This was good because I let them take charge since the teacher helping me was a no-show.  They told me topics they were interested in and planned to talk at the next morning assembly.  Awesome to see kids taking the initiative!

I also interviewed the village chief, police, and social worker during the week.  And made 3 trips to the primary school to meet with their guidance and counseling teacher to plan PACT club for that school.  And finished typing up my community assessment for Peace Corps, which is now the length of a term paper :P

Tomorrow I leave for 2 weeks of Peace Corps training in the capital.  Looking forward to a BED, and a SHOWER, and not cooking for 2 weeks, wooo!  And probably useless training and more language classes J  It’s rained the past 4 days straight, so I was very glad the sun came out for a couple of hours this afternoon to dry my laundry.  It’ll be interesting to see what my dirt road is like tomorrow, and whether I can get out of my village…

First week at school!

The first week of school!

After arriving just as last term ended and then nothing was going on over the holidays, I’ve been looking forward to school starting for a long time.  Here’s the good, the bad, the confusing and the potential.

The good:

- School has started!

- We finally have some firewood

- My counterpart and a few other teachers seem willing to do stuff with me

- I can sit in on classes and start getting to know students

- They already have an active SGA that I might be able to work with

- I got to introduce myself to all of the new form 1 students

The bad:

- There’s still a big lack of furniture and books (and teachers and food and firewood and…)

- They ran out of food and firewood Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and had to send the day students home.  The boarders went hungry until they found food and firewood, which usually happened around 5pm.  This is after not feeding the kids at all Monday, the day they arrived, because the term technically doesn’t start until Tuesday.

The confusing/frustrating:

- All of the directions in the new student orientation were given in Setswana.  The teachers know that these kids don’t understand and speak English (About 30-40 probably do out of 700 something).  But then they still exhort them to study hard and get good marks, in classes that are taught and tested in English.  I don’t get how people either don’t understand that the kids won’t get anything out of lessons in English, or ignore it and pretend like the students just don’t care about school.

- The hungry kids (see above)

- This chaos of the first week, including classes left unattended and lack of food and firewood, apparently happens every year.

The potential:

- We now have at least some firewood, so hopefully we can keep the students for the full day and have PACT club

- There are several clubs/students organizations I might be able to work with

- The teachers and school staff are happy to have me and introduce me to everyone as ‘our Peace Corps Volunteer’

- Some teachers are interested in having me teach a class or help them teach creatively

- We had a guidance and counseling meeting where I got the go ahead for PACT club and we put a few activities on the school calendar

- School has started so I can finally DO something!

- The end of my Peace Corps ‘Community Assessment Phase’, affectionately called Lock Down, is almost over as well.  This means I can start doing projects instead of just observing, and I can leave my village more. 

Botswana 101: The Schools

Some more Bots 101 so you understand what I'm doing, or at least referring to, at my school.

Primary School is Standards 1-7.  (Like our grades 1-7 in the US.) 

Junior Secondary School is Form 1-3. (Like our grades 8-10 in the US.)

Senior Secondary School is Form 4-5. (Like our grades 11-12 in the US.)

Required Subjects at J.S S. are Math, Science, English, Setswana, Agriculture, Social Studies, and Guidance and Counseling.  Students pick 2 other subjects from Design and Technology, Home Economics, Religious and Moral Education, Art, and Physical Education.

There are also a lot of sports teams and a few clubs for students after school.  One of the clubs I’ll be working with a lot is PACT club, Peer Approach to Counseling Teens, which is an extension of guidance and counseling: encouraging good decision making, peer mediation, healthy living, HIV awareness, etc.

Botswana has a good school infrastructure, but it also has a lot of challenges. 

In Standard 1, subjects are taught in Setswana, the native tongue of 85% of the country.  English is one of the main subjects, and then after the first standard or two, all subjects are taught in English. (Except Setswana, which is taught through form 5.)  The reason for the switch to and push towards English is that it’s the national language and Botswana wants to be internationally competitive.

This is fine if the kids actually learn English, and I think in most places they do.  Just not where I am.  In the Kalahari there are a lot of smaller tribes, some of which were relocated out of game reserves into settlement villages (like my village.  Think Native American reservations.).  These people are the poorest in Botswana and usually don’t speak Setswana as their native tongue.  In my area they speak Sekalagadi; other places speak Kalanga, and I have no idea the languages of the San in the west.  So these kids start learning Setswana in school and then immediately start learning English too, FROM Setswana.  And honestly, most of them don’t learn much English, and therefore much else, in school. 

It would be like if in America, you learn English in your family as a child, go to school and start learning Spanish, and then FROM Spanish you start learning Mandarin Chinese… and then all of the rest of your subjects are in Mandarin.  Good luck with that, right?

But Mary, you ask, how do these kids pass a grade level if they don’t know English?  The answer is, they don’t.  But kids are automatically passed on from standard to standard, form to form, even if they fail every subject, through form 3.  To get into Senior Secondary school they have to pass exams (in English).  But before that, passing isn’t required.

Also, passing here is 50%.  I haven’t figured out the grade scale yet, but looking at term results (posted with names, outside for all to see at school) from May, 17 kids in Form 3 passed classes like we would count in the States, which here was a B.  Another 40-50 got Cs, somewhere in the 50-65% range.

Schools often suffer from shortages of books and other materials, and sometimes food.  It seems there are never enough teachers, and when there is a teacher missing, that class just has no teacher.  Sometimes for months.  There is no substitute system here.  Currently my school is missing about 8-10 teachers.

Some of this sounds pretty depressing, and sometimes it seems that way, especially at my school.  I think I have the Botswana equivalent of like, inner city Philly as far as challenges at my school.  But Botswana has a high percentage of kids in school, and is pretty good about having social workers provide kids with uniforms and school fees if they don’t have the funds.  And having put together this school system from nothing in about 40 years, it’s got a lot going for it.  Hopefully they keep making positive changes in the future.

I’m sure I’ll post again about schools after I’ve worked at one for a while J

Botswana 101: The Country

So, this probably should have been the first post in my Peace Corps journey… oops.

I feel like a little info about the country itself would be helpful to whoever is reading this as you follow along my 2-year journey.  If you are like me, you don’t know much about Botswana (at least I didn’t until I came here.  All I knew is that it was in southern Africa).

So, here’s a few facts and figures about Bots, Wikipedia style:

Location:  Just above South Africa.  Namibia to the left, Zimbabwe to the right, Zambia to the north.

Climate: Mostly desert- the Kalahari Desert.  More temperate in the south and east (if you look at a map, that’s where the greatest population of people live.  Not a coincidence.)  Okavanga Delta in the north.

Population: About 2 million.  And half of them are under the age of 30.

Languages:  Setswana and English.  Although English is the ‘National’ language, most people prefer to speak Setswana, which is a Bantu language.  Various other languages are also spoken by various tribes/villages throughout the country.

Economy: Diamonds.  And cattle.  There are 3 million cattle in this country, so more cows than people.   Diamonds fuel the economy since the government owns 50% of the mines.  Cows fuel peoples’ day to day lives and are the sign of wealth.  Cows > bank accounts.

Biggest strengths:  Peaceful, uncorrupt government.  Amazing use of diamond mines to build infrastructure of country.  Good healthcare system.   Lots of animals and tourist possibilities in the north.  More than 25% of the country is game reserves to give animals spaces (animals = lions, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, gemsbok, hippos, rhinos, hyenas, wild dogs, cheetahs, jaguars, elephants.  Coming for a safari yet?)

Biggest challenges:  2^nd highest HIV rate in the world, I’ll expand on that below.  Not much private economy.  The diamond mines are slated to run out in 10-20 years, which means the country needs to switch its economy to other things.  Very high unemployment.  25% employed outside of their own cattle herds and farming lands.  Lack of accountability in government and in jobs in general. Alcohol abuse.

HIV:  The epidemic is driven by many things, including alcohol, multiple concurrent partnerships, low condom use, low circumcision rates, intergenerational sex, transactional sex, etc.  In some places 50% of women of childbearing age are HIV positive.  Currently the government provides free anti-retrovirals to all patients that need it.  Peace Corps is in the country through American PEPFAR, the presidents emergency plan for AIDS relief, which funds other Bots HIV programs as well.

History:

Botswana is known as the success story of Africa.  It was never an official colony, but rather a British protectorate.  This has good and bad results: it’s avoided some of the worst results of colonization and post-colonial rule (see: race in South Africa, violence in D.R.C, ethnic clashes in Nigeria, anarchy in Somalia, genocide in Rwanda, etc.).  But it also didn’t get the infrastructure build-up that say, Kenya and South Africa did.  So when it became a country in the 60s, there wasn’t much to start with.  Then they found diamonds.  Lots of them.  And unlike almost everywhere else in Africa, this resource did not curse them, but was put to good use by a functional government.  And the government built roads, schools, and hospitals.  It wired the country for electricity and cell phones, and set up piping so that water is drinkable straight from the tap in most places (you need to travel the developing world to realize how freaking rare drinkable tap water is outside of the US and Europe). It got more than 90% of its kids in school and provided free healthcare.  It provided food for a lot of the country that had no way to provide for itself.  It did really cool things with that diamond money.  It got upgraded to middle income country status.

                The aftermath of that is mixed.  Botswana has some of the best infrastructure in Africa.  It also has a population that is used to relying on the government for almost everything, and therefore private industry is rather stalled.  The biggest challenge facing Botswana now, in my opinion, is getting its population to work in private industry.  The infrastructure is there, it just needs businesses and manufacturing, so it’s not importing most goods from South Africa and can employ its people.  Personally, I think this is an even bigger challenge that the HIV epidemic, which many see as the greatest challenge.  It’s not a competition though, I feel like a country can work on two problems at once.   I’ll go into development issues more in another post.

                Botswana did well enough in development that the Peace Corps, which had been in the country since 6 months after independence, left.  There was a mutual agreement that PC wasn’t really needed anymore, and volunteers could be better used in other places.   They left in 1997, and returned at the request of the Bots president in 2003 to address HIV/AIDS.  So currently all 135 of us in Bots are doing HIV related activities/programming.    Some of us feel like economic volunteers would be more useful, or at least as useful as HIV volunteers, but that’s another post as well.

                So that’s Botswana in a nutshell.  Come visit me!

Things I've learned recently

Things I’ve learned as I’ve sat around my village for a month with nothing to do: (In no particular order)

-          I can be a pretty creative cook

-          It’s hard to motivate people to work hard when they think the same thing will happen whether or not they work hard.  I’m convinced this is why people do things halfway, don’t show up on time, and expect handouts.  It’s a messed up legacy of colonialism and post colonial time when the government had to provide everything for everybody.

-          It’s really easy to adopt the above mindset myself!  Lots of times I have to make myself be social to try and meet people, even though I often think it doesn’t matter if I leave my house or not

-          It’s pretty easy to become a hermit in Peace Corps

-          The kids in my village must think I own a candy shop, the way they ask for sweets.  This is also left over from colonialism, when white people tossed coins and candy to kids.

-          People here are FULLY capable of working hard and getting things done.  The way the clinic handles ARV day is pretty impressive, and the local post office can hand out payday checks to 60+ people in under an hour.

-          It’s pretty impressive to see 8-year olds riding bareback on a horse at a canter while rounding up cattle

-          There is apparently enough water in Botswana to drown a goat, because I got to help in the rescue of a baby goat from a watering hole a few weeks ago.

-          Goats are really cute.  And heavy.

-          You’d almost not know this was the desert, it’s so green from the rain.

-          Thunderstorms are amazing here.

-          Rain messes up our dirt road so much, I wonder why they don’t pave it to save themselves the effort of fixing it every time it rains hard

-          I have a homicidal streak when there are flies in my room.          

-          I really like sleeping under my mosquito net.  I may require a canopied bed when I return to the states.

-          Apparently my name is Lakoa (white person).  Arg.

-          My Setswana has not improved since I moved to my site, but my English has declined a LOT, because people speak to me in broken English and I speak back to them in broken English :P

-          Soccer (football) is everything here- there was a weeklong tournament starting 2 days before Christmas and ending just before New years

-          My school is lacking a lot of things, including furniture for the student dorms

-          In said dorms, the boys are way more destructive than the girls

-          There seems to be no accountability in this country.  I’m not sure it’s possible to get fired from a job unless you legit broke a law.

-          Unemployment seems to be just as big of a problem, if not more so, than HIV here

-          I love hanging out with motivated students, like the daughter of my landlord

-          I missed my South African Soap Opera for 3 weeks and had NO clue what was going on when I watched it at my landlords house

-          My fan might be my single best purchase since coming to Botswana

-          I need to figure out a good way to turn down marriage proposals and propositions.  Saying I have a bf in the states (which I don’t) doesn’t work.

-          It’s really annoying when people demand that I give them my stuff, it’s not even asking.

-          I sewed curtains for one room and I really liked it.  Potential new hobby upon returning to the states.

-          I actually kinda like riding in the back of pickup trucks

-          It doesn’t actually matter how often I sweep, there will still be sand everywhere

-          Putting canned fruit in the freezer is amazing on a hot day

-          Some of the bugs here look like a 2^nd grader designed them, they are so colorful and weird looking

-          Batswana like to party.  Craziest New Years Eve party I’ve ever been to was in my yard a few days ago