House guests and potential roommates

Living in the bush, I get a fair amount of creatures in my house. By far the most common are ants, spiders resembling daddy long legs, and house flies. The latter is the most annoying by far. I've also killed 2 scorpions and a few bigger spiders, without stopping to photograph them ;)

But some of the larger things that have tried to move in with me include: 

Curious baby goats

Setotojanes, or corn crickets

various lizards, possibly living in my suitcase

a preying mantis

a bat

a non poisonous whip snake, which involved calling my neighbors to help me find it and get rid of it

a mouse

and a bird that got lost in bathroom, with lots of resultant flapping.

All creatures made it out alive except the snake and the mouse. People here kill all snakes, and the mouse had already died because I sprayed too much doom trying to get rid of some ants. Most things I was happy to live and let live, just you know, not in my house. 

How to plan a GLOW camp

January: Think that you should plan a GLOW camp for the next school break. 

Realize that is in May or August. 

Start scratching out a grant proposal.

January and February: Meet with other PCVs a few times to knock out details.

February: Attempt to apply for grant. Have website issues. Repeat approximately 18 times in 2 months. Spend so much time at your friend's office using her computer that you are sort of her roommate for a month, between the grant and the flooded road to your village.

March: Keep meeting with PCVs. 

Give up on grant website and just email documents to PC staff members.

April: Hold counterpart training for teachers that will be coming to camp. 

Go on vacation. Be informed that you HAVE to submit through the broken website. Curse. 

Return from vacation. Finally get grant submitted. Woo! Get feedback, resubmit.

May, week 1: Find out you are approved but you won't get the money in time for your planned camp date. Bump camp back 2 weeks. Call ALL of the people to make sure this still works.

May, week 2: Wait for funds to magically appear in your account. Double check ALL the logistics.

May, week 3: Buy food for 80 people for 5 days. 

Avert small panic attack in grocery store in the process of your shopping spree. 

Cram all of this food into 2 small hondas for transport.

Have several PCVs carry the remaining supplies on combis. Read: 10 loaves of bread and various other things, EACH.

Have the people that promised you transport try to back out. Spend the weekend trying to figure out alternatives of transporting 60 people from 10 village in a 6 hour period.

Week 4: Bully your way into getting the original transportation.

Have a GLOW camp!

If we can barely pick this up, carrying it to the bus stop will be fun.

Raquel's like, DANG that's a lot of bread.

Butternut squash or cookies anyone?

Oh, and each girl got a hygiene kit, so we had to make and move those too.

Finishing the pre-camp logistics!

Hygiene kit: A bar of soap, 5 pads, comb, Vaseline, toothbrush, toothpaste, washcloth, bar of laundry soap, and deodorant, in a reusable bag.

Aileen's Wedding

Aileen, the PCV in the village next to me and my good friend, got married to her American non-PCV finance Adam last week in Letlhakeng.

We hung out at the Rural Administration Commission (RAC) for the officiant.

The actual ceremony was very Batswana in a room at the RAC, but they are MARRIED!

The happy couple and the officiants. 

They got serenaded  by everyone in the offices on their way out.

They had a nice reception at a little restaurant in Letlhakeng.

The bridal party. 

Speechifying in true Botswana style.

The only bummer was the bridal party hit a donkey on the way back from the wedding, which dented the rental car and caused a few hours of insurance and police report stress.

But we celebrated  more back at Aileen's place, including Jess making us all multiple smoothies. Congrats to the happy couple, who had to jump through a LOT of bureacratic mess to get married. PULA!

The real Africa

I’m spending my last night in my 20s reading a good mystery by candlelight. It’s not the bash most people probably plan for celebrating their last night being 29, but I’m okay with it. I’m probably going to spend tomorrow cleaning and doing laundry, because my house is still currently only half put together after the move (see below). I’m okay with that too (cleaning on my birthday, not my house in shambles), because I get to really celebrate my birthday later in the week. I’m seeing friends on Wednesday and Thursday, and on my Friday, my mom and Carol come!!! And I am super excited for that. And I want my house ready for that, so laundry is an okay thing for tomorrow.

I managed to move across the village last Friday (as in 2 days ago). For those that I hadn't told, a bar opened near my house, and so I asked Peace Corps if I could move. And they said yes, and 2 months later, viola. For the record, I didn’t have any security incidents related to the bar… but I didn’t really want to wait around to see if it would be an issue. PC policy is that volunteers aren’t allowed to live near bars/shabeens/depots, so I acted on that. And, I didn’t feel super safe in the other house simply because the doors were flimsy. And the locks sucked. Rose broke into my living room once when the lock on the door broke, and I had to get someone else to break in for me once a few weeks ago for the same reason. Annnnnnd it was pretty easy to do. So, move I did.

Of course, dealing with the ministry of education and Peace Corps took time. PC asked me to look for a house, since I’m already in the village. I gladly took them up on the offer, because it gave me more say in where I would live. A teacher at my school recommended my new place, and then I got the paperwork turtle moving.  PC and MOE looked at it, negotiated rent, told them to fix a few minor things, and signed papers.  I kept pushing to be able to move by the end of June, so I wouldn’t have multiple leases, and so I could be moved before my family came and stuff. Low and behold, it actually happened!

I was stressed out the day of the move, simply because I didn’t know how it was going to go. There’s always the risk, being the lekoa in the community, that I’d get surrounded by people wanting to touch and have my things. So I recruited Aileen and her friend Parker who is visiting, and they helped me move and guard my stuff. My old landlord said he would help me move, but then passed it off to a guy I didn’t know, who looked at my furniture and went and recruited a 2^nd random dude to help. 4 pick-up loads puttering 5 minutes across the village later, and I was moved. We only had to push the truck through the deep sand twice.  The actual moving took less than 2 hours. And that was simply some furniture maneuvering logistics. I did some cleaning on Friday, hooked up my stove and gas tank, hung some curtains, and collapsed in exhaustion. Yesterday I put my living room together; tomorrow I’ll tackle my bedroom.  But it’s so nice to have functional doors and locks, I can’t even tell you. And a gate for my porch, so kids can play in my yard and not swarm my porch/house.

Today, I attempted to buy electricity, locks, sponges, bleach and airtime in Letlhakeng. I was able to get the airtime and locks. For some reason, no stores carried bleach or sponges, which I find odd.  And whatever network is necessary to buy electricity was down, so I couldn’t do that either. Hence the current reading by candlelight. When I made it back to my village, I discovered I could buy electricity here. But the network was still down. At least I can try again tomorrow without trucking out to L again!

While I was in L, stalking the small general dealer/grocery store to see if I could buy electricity, I ran into a guy that knew Aileen’s friend Parker. Small world much? It was a little weird for a white guy to already know my name. And let’s be honest, I now stare at the white tourists just as much as the Batswana. But we talked for a few minutes and discovered we were both on our way to lunch, so he and his wife gave me a ride and we had lunch together at a little Botswana restaurant. They were thrilled to get to try real Botswana food, and I could at least explain what most of the choices were.  At the end they even paid for my meal, so all in all it was great! It was kind of funny to be with people that were like, wow, we’re in the real Africa!! This isn’t like Gabs! And I do understand where they are coming from, because if all you’ve known is the capital of a country, any country really, going into the rest of it, especially rural areas, will be quite different.  But itwas weird to hang out with them because all of my friends in Botswana are either Batswana, or pcvs, and the excitement of ‘we’re in Africa!’ has either worn off or was never there to begin with. This couple also went against advice and tried to take a small 4-door sedan on the dirt road past my village up to Khutse game reserve, and literally had to dig their car out of the sand a few times. Real Africa? Check.

So I’m hanging out in my new house, looking forward to next weekend, thankful for locking doors, good friends, and glad to be in ‘the real Africa’ J

Life's never boring here...

Sometimes it's a little dull, like when school lets out or everyone leaves for the holidays.  But never boring.

After my last post that was slightly woebegone, I talked with 2 teachers at school for about a half hour and that helped my feelings of isolation a lot.  Then I came home and talked with one of my neighbors for over an hour!  She's the closest I have to a friend, and it gives me hope that she's in the community, and I am also connecting with teachers.  So, friend prayers are potentially being answered :)

Also I think the woman in my kitchen yesterday was the village crazy, and I think she stole my kitchen knife. I've been told she's not dangerous, but its not really comforting to know that a crazy lady wanders the village, and now possibly I've armed her :P

Like I said, never boring...

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. 

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!

Mangos and roaches and cows, oh my!

I saw my very first HUGE roach a few minutes ago.  Diana said that when they fumigate the house, it clouds everywhere and roaches will come out to die.  Hopefully most of them will do that out of my eyesight :P

I'm still trying to get my body on Ghana time, but it really wants to wake up at noon and go to bed at 4am (there's a 4 hour time difference here).  This is sort of problematic as people go to bed around 11pm-12am and get up around 7am.  And the roosters get up way earlier.  At least I have these few days of downtime to sort out what time it is :)

Diana and her family live in a large single level house that is walled in, and there are lots of fruit trees in the compound.  I had fresh mango yesterday, and there are also coconut, cinnamon, and orange trees.  The neighbors have bananas, plantains, and tangerines.  It's like living in an orchard :)

Today after Diana's parents came back from Mass, we went to the PramPram beach about an hour from here. We picnicked and played in the sand and let 4-year old Kate splash in the water.  I learned a new card game that seems to be a combination of hearts and something else, playing with Diana's father and her brother Andy.  Also Diana, Andy and I played the spelling game on the way home where you start with a letter and the next person adds a letter, except we could only spell countries.  This might be a new way to get my uncles arguing over geography at Thanksgiving :)

And my first TIA- This is Africa- moment: Driving back from the beach today with the whole family (Diana, Andy, sister Nat, her mom and Dad, neice Kate, and me).  We stopped at a toll at dusk, went under a bridge on a major highway, and Diana goes, COW!  cow cow cow!!! and we swerve to miss several large cows meandering across the road, and then look behind us hoping no one else hit them either.  And everyone in the car starts going, they should NOT be crossing the road there...

Dude, where's my car?!

If only this were a comedy story.  In hindsight, it's very entertaining, but believe me, at the time it was looking like a tragedy.
So several times I have driven to a shopping center, parked, and caught the bus onto campus.  Now... having seen other people do this, and having done it many times myself with no problems, I thought it was an okay thing to do.  Worse case scenario, I thought I might get a parking ticket. Ha.
So yesterday I come back from class, get off the bus... and my car is not there. !@$@!!! Frantically look around the parking lot, scan my brain- did I drive and park here this morning? I know I drove and parked... it couldn't have been on campus, I don't have a school parking permit... Okay.  I must have been towed.  Trot over to the sign that says such-and-such company will tow if you have been in the lot for more than 24 hours (which I would never do).  It also says private property, will tow if you aren't a customer, etc, etc.  I've seen those signs everywhere and never seen anyone towed. Til now I guess.  So I call the company.  Um, we haven't towed anyone today ma'am.  You should call the police.
....... omg my car is stolen. At this point, I politely hung up and tried not to freak out in the parking lot. Did I lock it? I always lock it, and my car automatically locks anyway.  What else is in my car. @#%! My passport is also in my car from a recent errand.  Who do I call? Roommate to pick me up.
So I call my roommate and ask her if my car is parked outside our place.  She was like no, is your car missing? Yes, I think it was stolen... and proceed to explain. She is also flabbergasted, and agrees to pick me up in a few minutes.  And gives me the police non-emergency number.  So I call and they tell me a different number, which I call and report what happened.  Since I can't recite my license plate number off of the top of my head, they said they will have an officer call me back in a bit and I can give them whatever information they need when I'm home.
So roommate picks me up and drives me home.  Where I proceed to call my insurance company and start the claim process.  I decide not to call my mother until I sort some things out, because I know I'll probably have a break down when I talk to her and need to be professional on the phone to others.  As I'm finishing up with the insurance company, alternating between trying not to freak out and mentally planning how I'm going to live without a car for a while, my roommate comes flying in from her room.  Unbeknown to me, she had been on the phone with the shops where my car was parked trying to see if any of them had a security camera.  About 4-5 calls in, one of them was like, I can't believe there was a theft in broad daylight right in front of our store (this is a very busy intersection).  That's never happened before; are you sure it wasn't towed? Roommate: well, she called the number on the sign and they said they hadn't towed anybody today.  Store: I'm pretty sure I saw a wrecker out there earlier, so someone was towed.  Here's the number we have for a towing agency.

Which is different than the one posted on the sign in the lot.
So my roommate calls the number, describes my car, and low and behold, it sounds like its there.  When she ran in and told me this, I explained it to my insurance agency and said I may have found my car.  They were super nice and were like, that's great!  Call us back and we can either cancel the claim if you have your car, or set you up with a rental tomorrow if it's still missing (presumed stolen).  Geico is awesome, for all of their annoying commericials.
So my roommate takes me into Atlanta into the epitomy of sketch where the car lot is and... it's there!  YAY.
I pay $125 to get my car back, glad to just have my car.  On the way the police calls me back and I explain and they said that's fine, call us back if its not your car, otherwise you are fine, you aren't in the system yet.  This morning I called and canceled my insurance claim.  Still glad to have my car!

So there are a few times that it is not better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.  And I've never been so happy to hear that my car was towed!