It’s 11:30 at night. I’m huddled on the bench seat of a boat as it speeds through the darkness. The ebony sky meets the inky black water of the delta, with the stars overhead providing little in the way of light. The misty churning water from the outboard motor sprays up behind us like an angry apparition. The papyrus waves us by as we pass, concealing from view the night creatures whose hunt we may be disturbing. I shiver in the cool night air, as it whips by me I tuck my legs up under my skirt. I glance through the shadows at the Botswana Defense Force soldiers who wear lifejackets and are armed with semi-automatic weapons.
And I ask myself, an altogether not uncommon question in my life these days.….. How the hell did I get HERE?
My day had actually started quite well. My cooking/fridge gas had gone out the night before and after many previous knock down drag out episodes with the clinic I actually had an extra cylinder on hand. I changed it over and arrived at the clinic in the morning ready to begin what I imagined would be an extensive, headache inducing, tearful battle to replace the empty in anticipation of the next Peace Corps volunteer coming (I have no idea if I’ll be replaced or not, but it’ll be easier for me to wrangle the right people into replacing it than it will be for them.)
To my surprise Cliff, our principle registered nurse relented without a struggle and began to make arrangements to get the full cylinder to my hut and take the empty one back to the clinic. I was so surprised by this unexpected turn of events that I did something a little a bit out of character and asked if there was anything I could do to help him.
It’s not that I’m a cruel useless person who doesn’t help here. (After all, that’s sort of the point of Peace Corps isn’t it?) It’s that I don’t often ask if people at the clinic need my help because they then tend to put me to work doing the mindless pill counting type tasks that they are completely capable of doing and furthermore are being paid to do. I’m not here to take jobs from Batswana, and furthermore I don’t want to encourage the low productivity that is an epidemic in this country. I’m not going to do a task so that someone else can spend more time staring into space. I did plenty of this type of stuff when I first arrived in Seronga before I found my community projects, but since then I really don’t spend that much time at the clinic as I sort of just get in the way. My time in the community in meetings and creating projects has been much more rewarding and well spent in my eyes, so that’s what I generally do.
But on this fateful morning, exhausted, on call Nurse Clifford regarded me wearily and said that yes I could help him. He wanted me to go make copies. In Shakawe, 100k’s up the flooded out bumpy road and across a river.
Now I had had some plans of things I was hoping to get done this day, but I was so happy to know that I wasn’t going to have to beg and plead and cry to get my gas replaced that I agreed to his request. Having my gas replaced so painlessly already made the day feel like a success. I figured I would build the driver’s capacity by teaching him to use the photocopy machine at Shakawe. This time of year I seldom leave the village unless it’s absolutely necessary, as the road is often washed out from heavy rains and the current on the river at the ferry is strong and slows down the rate at which it can carry vehicles and people back and forth. Epic long waits for the ferry are normal this time of year, and the ferry docking point has no toilets, shops or even shade. It’s not something one does for fun. I wasn’t completely thrilled to be going back up the terrible bumpy road that I had just come down the day before, but I had a book to read and figured it would be fine.
I should have taken heed of the type of day this was really going to be when I arrived at Shakawe to find the photocopy machine there was out of toner. This would be a simple fix many other places on Earth, but in a place with no Office Max for about a bajillion miles this was not a problem that would probably get solved in my time left in Botswana. With a small sigh I realized that in order to get these copies I would have to go to Gumare.
So another hour and a half down a paved road, book finished and half an Oprah magazine retired to the dustbin of my memory, it was now midway through the day and I was getting slightly tired. When I arrived at the RAC in Gumare I took a deep breath and walked into the office I was supposed to make copies at only to find it broken. After consulting every person with access to a copy machine in the entire office block, and begging, pleading and finally probably stealing in the end, I had about half as many copies as had been requested of me, but it was going to have to be good enough.
Now I could get into a huge and extensive complaining session of all the things that were poorly planned or thought through about this task and this day, but so many of them are typical top daily life in Seronga that I will gloss over them. The main things that set my head twitching slightly with frustration were that Cliff hadn’t called ahead to ensure that a copy machine somewhere within a 500 kilometer radius was actually working before sending me on this goose chase. I also would have appreciated if once he did send me out he might have done it with enough diesel in the truck to get back. None of the government departments had diesel, and the truck was now down to less than a quarter of a tank. When we arrived at the petrol station, there was no diesel (also not rare), not that we could have bought any if we had had money because all the government purchases must be made with no less than five quotations, and then it must be done with a government purchase order. It will not be a disease or a wild animal that kills me should I not make it out of Botswana; it will inevitably be the bureaucracy. I won’t even go into the fact that the district sends us out reams of blank copy papers only to return back 500 k’s to fight with people about making copies on them.
And none of this incredibly frustrating situation would have even been worth mentioning had it not ended with me in a small boat in a hippo infested delta in the middle of the night in a flood. So back to that.
When we reached the petrol station at the junction of the main road, I saw that there were other people from the clinic there, loaded into a clinic ambulance from one of the villages on this side of the delta. It appeared that in addition to my crazy copy run there had been a boat dispatched from Seronga to Sepopa with patients who needed to go to the hospital. I looked at them and only half wondered why they hadn’t been sent with the copy task, but really at this point it didn’t matter. I realized I now had a choice to make.
Option one was to try to go back to Seronga with the truck I had come with, which at present did not have enough diesel to make it with few options for getting enough to make it all the way home. In my mind this truck was also running a relatively good chance of getting into trouble in the dark on the horrible bumpy road. I also took into consideration that it was already after four and the last ferry crossed at around 6, meaning we might well get caught in Shakawe for the night. The animals are moving at this type of year, and elephants are killing people on the regular in Gumare. It’s a good policy to avoid the roads at night.
Option two was to jump in to the other ambulance with the people going across from Sepopa to Seronga by boat. The boat driver who would be going was quite notorious for making many many unnecessary stops along the way to the boat station, but then the truck driver might do that as well, he had his whole family with us in the back of the ambulance. My currently frazzled nerves didn’t have a lot left on the old fuse. Taking the boat would potentially save me an hour and a night in the bush on the road with elephants. I wanted very badly to be done with this day and to get into my own, warm bed.
So of these two options the present flood made both of these less than optimal choices, but two years of scraping by in the bush have done nothing for me if not made me a fond fan of Russian roulette. Would I prefer to die by hippo or elephant? Would I like to suffer on land or on water?
Looking to take the easy way out, I jumped into the car that was heading for the boat. We of course stopped in several villages along the way, and then when we actually got to the boat launch (which the next day would be completely flooded out to the point that it was unusable) the boat driver got into the boat and zoomed away to try to find a place we could launch from for next time the boat came across (again why he didn’t stay with the boat and work on this during the day while everyone was at the hospital, I have no idea) after 20 minutes of him driving off somewhere in the river I began calling his cell, it was getting dark and we needed to move if we were going to make it home before it got too dark.
He eventually pitched up, and the auxillry nurse who had been escorting the patients, the remaining patient and his young child and I loaded onto the boat. I got out my ipod, opened my magazine, and prepared to relax through the hour and a half trip.
Not so, Lorato! About ten minutes in, something in the steering column snapped, the driver lost control of the boat and we drifted at a pretty good speed into the papyrus. The driver reversed and tried to straighten us, only to have us smack back into the reeds. The whiplash inducing jarring startled me and I looked up wearily from my magazine and asked the nurse what the problem was. It appeared the boat would now only make right hand turns. We couldn’t even really keep going straight ahead for any distance between the current and the curve of the floating papyrus islands. This was not a good thing driving on a winding delta river that carries on like a snake heading through the bush. This was a fuck up.
Now I will be the first to admit that I possess very little knowledge or understanding of most things mechanical. Prior to Peace Corps the only thing I used tools for was to indulge my hobby of putting together pre-fab furniture purchased at Target. However, living alone in the bush has caused me to develop a habit that I previously thought was a strictly male tendency related directly to their Y chromosome. “Cute shoes” Barbie appears to have somehow evolved into “Bushchick” Barbie in the past few years. This means that whenever something breaks (or appears to break) an overwhelming urge takes a hold of me. I find myself needing to hold tools in my hands and furrow my brow, hovering over the ailing thing trying to diagnose the nature of the problem despite never having witnessed the working parts in action before.
Despite the fact that I myself don’t have a car, several of my female friends here do, and it seems we find ourselves getting into crazy situations on the regular. My time in Botswana has thoroughly destroyed my former idealism that Prince Charming is indeed on the way on a white stallion to rescue me from these crazy situations, so I’ve had to pinch hit with enough broken things to become quite good at being a bush mechanic.
Africa seems to hate both electronics and mechanical themed items, and when a foreign produced thing that makes life more enjoyable or efficient shows up here Africa immediately goes to attack and destroy it. This includes vehicles, their engines, office machines (see above re copier machines) ipods, cameras, cell phones, printers, computers, pumps, generators and the list goes on. There is never enough spare, replacement or correctly fitting parts for anything, and most cars (and often bush planes) are held together with any number of curiously rigged temporary fixes. I have observed this, learned it, and try to live being always prepared to address any problem that may arise from these conditions.
It is with this in mind that I get out my red leatherman, turn the flashlight on my phone which I hold between my teeth, and climb under what I think is the steering column. I feel around for loose or broken things first off, and then follow that with a short bout of random banging the tool on things. I took a few things apart and put them back together with no success in diagnosing the problem. During this episode the boat driver and the nurse are sitting around as casually as if they’ve just gone on tea break chatting in a hybrid of Se’yai and Sembugushu. I mentioned to the boat driver that he might go to the back and see if he can find a way to detach the outboard motor from the broken steering parts and drive the boat from the back. He looks at me as though I’ve just grown a second head (English does that. But I really don’t have the Setswana for “drive shaft”. And I furthermore don’t know if boats have them.)
By this time it was getting increasingly dark. I looked over at the nurse, who is showing very few signs of attention much less concern. I’m tired, I’m extremely irritated, and I’m stuck on a boat in the middle of the Okavango Delta. Greeeeeeat.
I decide to use the other main tool for fixing and making plans that I have on me at all times. My phone. I go to call Cliff, the nurse who sent me on this hell voyage. No signal. Of course not. So I resign myself to drifting through the delta on a broken boat.
And I feel no real sense of urgency about this until I hear the hippos grunting from the papyrus near the boat. While I have a healthy fear of the animals that populate the area I live, they don’t generally cause me great fear or panic. I’ve got lots of animal researcher friends, and it seems that around cooking fires we spend a lot of time trading my crazy “development, Peace Corps, HIV/health policy and why-this-country/culture/people are bizarre or challenging” stories for their “this-is-why-these-big-crazy-African-animals-do-what-they-do-and-aren’t-people-so-totally-misinformed” fascinating facts. I’ve had enough run-ins with animals to have a good idea of what they will do in many situations and when there is really reason to be scared or not. I can look at a riverbank and have a pretty good idea of whether it’s a nice spot for hippos or crocs or elephants to hang out. It seems that in addition to the great resume building skill of “Bush Mechanic” I can add “African Animal Behavior Specialist” to my illustrious CV.
So while I know that tourists pay thousands of US dollars to come hang out in my neck of the bush and drive around in planes, boats and safari vehicles to see these animals, I’ve become accustomed to trying to stay out of their way. The animals that live in the protected parks and places where there are lots of humans are often quite used to people and if you don’t bother them, they won’t often bother you. But they’re still wild animals and this particular area is not a park. It’s the bush, specifically the river (which equals water and drinking and feeding and all sorts of guaranteed animal necessities) and I’m told that more people are killed in boating accidents with hippos than any other African animal. Being vegetarian, hippos generally kill you because you irritate them (say by driving around the delta in a boat that only makes right hand turns and keeps crashing into the papyrus where they are feeding, probably with their young, at night) they don’t bother with you after that. They leave you for the crocs, who will take your body and bury it, and finish you off once you’ve properly rotted. Several people in my village have died from hippo attacks while they were washing laundry or fetching water in the river already this year.
If for no other reason than to deny my mother the fulfillment of her ironclad foreboding that I’m going to die out in the bush, I decided it was time to make a plan.
I asked the nurse what his plans were. After staring at me blankly for a few seconds he looked down at his phone, which is on the other network and has signal. And no airtime. So he can’t call anyone. I looked at the boat driver, same thing. Helpful. They seemed to sense my impending panic, and began speaking to each other in their rapid fire African linguistic gumbo. I heard mention of trying to get to one of the camps in the area and asking for help. By my estimate, we had traveled about 15 minutes at proper speed which left us with anywhere from an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and a half to get back to Seronga. We couldn’t turn around and go back to Sepopa as the launch was flooded and we couldn’t get out to the main road or the village without a vehicle, the one we had arrived in had simply dropped us and gone back to the clinic at Sepopa, which would be empty at this time of evening. Although the current was presently working with us, heading around another churning curve could change that quickly. With our present course of action being the “right-turn-slam-into-the-reeds, reverse-backwards-into-the-current-and-float-out-into-the-middle-and-repeat” technique we weren’t making much headway and were wasting a lot of fuel.
Finally we got into cell range and I started making calls. The head nurse back at the clinic said he would contact the police and BDF (Botswana Defense Force-the military) to come and rescue us. I called the houseboats company that operates out of Seronga, but it seems they had had their opening of tourist season party that day and all their boat drivers were too drunk to be given the keys to the boats. We heard back from the BDF and they were refusing to come as they rotate camps every three months and none of them were familiar enough with the area to navigate it in the dark. The police boat was broken as well.
I began to consider that we might just spend the night on the river with these hippos. To distract myself I began reviewing what I might do should various horrible possibilities occur, alternating these visions with farfetched dramatic rescue fantasies. I half heartedly looked around for helicopter landing sites and began packing necessary survival tools in my bra for if we should be upturned by an angry hippo. I hadn’t planned on being on the boat that day and was wearing a skirt as it was laundry day, which irritated me thoroughly as I pictured swimming against the current with the damn thing dragging off me. My flip flops were in their last days, and wouldn’t be a huge loss but I would want them if I then had to walk a great distance. And how would I describe to people where I ended up should we shipwreck this stupid boat? Should we stop with this stupid ramming and just wait to see if someone could come tomorrow? By the time morning comes if we keep this up we will waste all the fuel and won’t be able to get home even if we can figure out how to fix the boat in the light. The delta channels are made up of lots of papyrus islands, which aren’t actually solid ground but floating bog like things. Papyrus is better than sandy banks in terms of croc habitat, but can be worse for hippos. What was the houseboats schedule of boats through to Sepopa? Where is the nearest landing strip, solid riverbank, and road? The lights on the boat are attracting mosquitoes; did I take my malaria meds today?
These factual/practical and fantastic/crazy thoughts swirled together slowly through my head like the river surrounding us, both disturbingly getting equal seriousness and consideration. (In hindsight it seems dramatic, but as I sit here recounting the night with Clara whom I was texting prior to the rescue, she confirms that indeed it was dramatic. This is my life…) I was exhausted, worried, hungry and really tired of situations like this not being extremely regular but at most times possible in my life. And it was really, really dark. The cell service had gone out again, and with nothing productive left to do to remedy this comedy of errors which began in search of photocopies, I lay down on the bench of the boat and went to sleep, the revving of the engine and the crashing of the papyrus lulling me into a strange dream world.
After a brief and fitful sleep I woke up and another hour or so had passed. We’d been on the river for about four hours. I was informed that after most of the district being called in search of help the clinic had gotten in touch with TD, the old man who recently retired from his job at the clinic and calls me his daughter. He knows the river well enough from a lifetime in Seronga and was willing to come out into the channels in the dark to lead the BDF boat to rescue us. It would take them an hour to get to us and another hour for us to get back home, but I would see my bed tonight.
So the boat driver finally agreed to abandon his ramming and reversing and pushed the boat into the reeds to park it. We sat in silence and I contemplated today’s course of events and how much of it was unnecessary and caused by a lack of preparedness. I’ve been in Botswana long enough to know that everything always seems to work itself out, but in the heat of the moment this one is usually a challenge. My patience has grown by leaps and bounds in the time I’ve been here, and I have remained calm in some pretty random and potentially frightening situations. In the current one, after raising my voice slightly a few times to remind the people technically in charge of this boat that they might take a bit of action to get us out of here, I hadn’t been freaking out too terribly. (As I write this a few weeks later I can’t even remember if I mentioned this whole scene to my mom) When there was signal I sent some text messages to my closest friends describing the utter ridiculousness of my life, but I was generally more certain than not I was going to survive this particular incident. And while this weirdness makes for great blog entries (at this point I begin naming and composing them in my head before I’m sure I know how it will turn out) it’s sort of a tiring way to live. Although there’s a certain beautiful simplicity of bush life that comes from the fact that there are just not too many options and thus decisions to make, this always trying to be ready for any crazy situation that might happen (and really, who could predict this one?) gets tiring. I know that America is going to be complicated in all the options and the fast pace and overwhelming presence of basic amenities, but my God in some ways it’s going to at least be EASIER.
It’s common for me to hear from Americans that they really admire what I’m doing (even thought I think we’ve all got a tenuous grasp of what that might be) but it’s been pretty hard for me to describe what exactly about this life is challenging. It’s hard to live in so much uncertainty, and not being able to control situations like this is really tough. As far as I can tell there is something in Batswana culture that makes them so calm and low key, they take situations as they come and rarely stress in situations like this. In times where my eye threatens to twitch out of my skull because I’m so frustrated when something has gone wrong that could have easily been avoided (regular basic maintenance on the boat, more tools kept in the locked compartment created for that purpose, a plan of action for emergency situations, the boat driver possessing a little more knowledge about how to properly drive and fix the boat) they are as cool as cucumbers, patiently waiting for the proper bureaucratic process to fall into place that may or may not remedy the situation.
I spend my life here trying to avoid any more discomfort than is already inherently present in my life, to eliminate possibilities for long periods of time spent hungry, thirsty, and uncomfortable or in some form of suffering or discomfort. The Batswana just accept this as their lot, and as they wait for the answers to magically reveal themselves as to how to get out of situations like this, there is no consideration on how to avoid it for the next time. There is a tremendous lack of planning or sense of urgency about anything here, despite my favorite phrase being that I’ll “make a plan” and my highest compliment to someone has become to call them “useful” or “prepared”.
I survived my late night boat trip, settling into my bed at 12:30 in the morning. Below is a photo of me and TD, my rescuer.
