Just touched down in Londontown....

As the plane landed in London, all of my African melancholy faded away and I was excited to see my old stomping grounds. I made my way through the airport to customs, smiling like an idiot at all the happy yellow signs of Heathrow airport welcoming me back to yet another of the places I consider an adopted home. Seven years both is and isn’t a long time, but I was ready for the reunion with this city (and of course my friend Jo) to begin.

Having just arrived from Botswana, where lines are the norm, and we’ve all come to learn to just stand in them patiently, I wasn’t at all fazed by the line at immigration/arrivals. I approached the unsmiling agent, handed him my pink passport and gave him my biggest dose of friendly African style greeting of “Hello! How are you?” complete with a big smile. I was soon reminded that here in London, that is interpreted as “crazy” and treated as such.

Unsmiling Immigration Official: “What brings you to London, Ma’am?”

Me (bristling only slightly that in the last 7 years I seem to have gone from “Miss” to “Ma’am”):
“Well I missed it! I studied here some years ago and….”

UIO (ignoring my charming story and flipping through my passport, which is a different one than I had at that time and holds no European stamps. This one starts In Africa as it’s my Peace Corps passport-the other one is expired) “Oh really. And where are you coming from?”

Me: “Africa! Or really, as one should be specific about this as it’s a whole continent, I was living in Botswana-I just finished the Peace Corps- and then I flew out of Jo-burg, but this most recent flight? Well it was from Egypt…….”

UIO (cutting me off): “And where are you staying in London?”

Me: “With my friend Jo! In Paddington!” (Which I know I had written on the little form that was right in front of him, but am quite used to answering tons of ridiculous questions asked by people who have the information right there in front of them.)

UIO: “Paddington is surely a big place. Any specific information about where your friend lives?”

Me (still smiling like a golden retriever): “Well I have it somewhere, but it doesn’t matter. She’ll pick me at the train station.”

UIO (sighing): “And how long will you be in London?”

Me (oblivious): Begin rattling off my itinerary to a man who clearly DOES NOT CARE.

UIO: “And what is your employment?”

Me: “Well I’m unemployed. And really homeless too, if you think about it! See I just finished the Peace Corps in Botswana……”

UIO (cutting me off): “Do you have a ticket to leave the UK Ma’am?”

Me (proudly): “Actually I do!” Begin repeating aforementioned itinerary.

UIO (cutting me off again): “May I see it, Ma’am?”

Me (riffling through my overweight carry-on bag that was put through by the ticketing agent in Jo-burg through just this type of friendly subterfuge): “Yeah, I’ll get it for you now. I’m so glad I had my shit together (insert noticeable eye roll from the immigration agent here) and printed them off in Botswana… Do you want to see all of them or just the one from Scotland to the States? They’re marked with the pink sticky tabs and the yellow highlighter.”

The Unsmiling Immigration Official reviews my travel document as I prattle on about my upcoming travel plans.

UIO (satisfied at finally finding confirmation that the idiot in front of him was not trying to stay in his country on any sort of permanent basis, and again cutting me off, whilst almost violently stamping my passport.) :” Thank you Ma’am, this will suffice. It seems as you are indeed leaving within the allotted amount of time I won’t have to ask you to provide proof of income (muttering)-as it seems you have none- and I have to remind you that you are (loudly) not permitted on this entry visa to work in the UK. Enjoy your visit.”

Me (suddenly realizing this man thinks I’m clearly some sort of terrorist): “Uh, thanks.” Repacking all my shit into my bag and heading to the baggage claim.

As I walked through the same duty free lined hallway I passed through to enter this country on another great adventure (with blinders on, as the amount of bright lights and perfume smells and just well, STUFF that lined the shops would have stopped me for at least a few hours if I so much as glanced left or right) I again grinned, happy to be back, and excited to see something familiar from my past. I grinned at all the people who were not waiting for me, and remembered meeting my former boyfriend here, as well as my mom and sister when they arrived.

I walked over to the cash machine and inserted my card, and punched in my code. Denied.

A small part of me was swept back to 7 years ago, when I arrived in this same airport, alone and more that slightly freaked out at the prospect of 5 months in a foreign country where I knew no one (with the exception of the location of some graves that apparently held some long dead ancestors that my great uncle had told me I should go visit). I was trying to call my mom to tell her I was in London with the calling card that she gave me. We had known it was going to be the middle of the American night when I got in, but she wanted me to call to let her know I was safe so I did. The card, which we thought would last at least few phone calls was finished in about 5 minutes (first lesson about foreign pay phones and calling cards learned the hard way) and I was suddenly alone in a very big city (at least until the study abroad babysitters came to collect me, when the flight with everyone else from the East coast arrived) and I was scared.

But the bigger part of me has been dealing with bullshit of this nature in foreign lands for the past two years, and simply knew it was a matter of making a plan.

I quickly cursed myself for impulsively buying the overpriced magnet of the green World Cup 2010 mascot in the gift shop in the airport in Jo-burg, as cashing in those Rand might have been enough to try to get a tube ticket at least to Paddington to meet Jo. The little guy is creepy and weird, but I was feeling nostalgic and wanting something to commemorate my time in South Africa leading up to the world cup. Here’s his picture.



Creepy, huh?

As it seems everywhere in the world besides the Maun airport that has wireless internets locks it down and makes you pay, using my laptop to get on Skype or the internet was quickly eliminated as an option.

My next move was to try to use my card to use the internets at the little kiosks (using one's card-three pound minimum-of course-plus international fees) to see if I could get a hold of my mom (unlikely as it was still early in the States and she's usually not on the internet unless I warn her that I might be) or the bank to sort this out.

My "make a plan" skills kicked in once I realized if I could get someone on Facebook who was in the States to call my mom to alert her to the problem she could probably call the bank and we could sort this out. A second cousin of my fathers was quickly found to attempt this duty and my mom was soon on the internet and calling the bank. (thank you so much Lori!!!!!)

After a few hours, a few international calls on my credit card (the irony of using my credit card to determine why I couldn't use my credit card was not lost on me) to determine why I couldn't use the damn thing to get cash or buy a train ticket and I was feeling an awful lot closer to the girl who was here 7 years ago. I had used the internet to ask Jo to come rescue me (bless my amazing friend's warm and wonderful heart, as well as the crazy technology of everyone having the internets on their phones. I did have my Botswana phone that I tried to get a sim card for but that particular machine was allied with the cash machine and the train ticket machine in rejecting me)and was waiting for her in the train station below the airport.

As I waited for Jo's undoubtedly smiling and distinctively unencumbered with luggage figure to emerge from one of the trains, I put my ipod in my ears and felt sorry for myself. This readjustment thing was going to be harder than I thought.I chided myself for the rookie mistake of forgetting to have my mom call the bank and remind them that I would be in the UK for a month (This lovely mistake was confirmed completely the next day when I tried to get cash from the ATM at Paddington station-thinking there was a perhaps a 24 hour hold or something to do with the British bank holiday-and the machine ate my card. Thanks, Visa. This leaves me with no credit card- it shut itself down from disuse from two years in Botswana without using it and now no cash card. Awesome). My ipod was playing a shuffle playlist apparently designed by the gods to bring me right back to all of the happiest times I ever had in Botswana.

I sat against the wall of the station surrounded by my bags and thought back to the disdain in the Unsmiling Immigration Official's voice as I explained my current (and flippant) life plan. I was homeless (and now looked it in the train station sitting against the wall surrounded by my worldly possessions) and jobless (although I did briefly consider that busking might be a positive career move for the time being, before remembering that I HAVE NO TALENTS past giving my friend's cheeky nicknames)and at this point at least, penniless.

Botswana and Africa seemed so close and yet so far away, and I was swept up in longing for the kindness so commonly and frequently shown by strangers there. In Botswana if someone had seen me sitting alone in a train station they most likely would have stopped and chatted with me. They would likely have inquired as to what I was doing alone in a train station,and when I told them what was happening, they would have shaken their heads, muttered "hey" in disbelief, helped me buy a train ticket to be paid back when we got to Paddington. I quickly realized this was not going to be what happened here in London when I briefly tried to greet someone and ask how the automatic ticket machine worked and they looked at me with complete fear in their eyes that a fellow human being might be speaking to them and needing something from them.

Jo rescued me soon after, and I only made friends with one African (the smiling Nigerian ticket taker on the train) on the way home. The impersonality of the western world is going to be a tough one to get used to, but as with all things, we move forward....

The LOVE Boat.... or: A Pirate's Life for Me

While my village is Seronga, I have spent a fair amount of time in other villages in the delta, be it for groceries, banking, projects, internet, or sanity breaks. The one that has become my more commonly go to for most of the above is Maun. Although it is the farthest geographically of the villages I visit on the regular from Seronga, I can sometimes hitchhike there on empty bush planes. Maun is a big city compared to Seronga, and has so many amenities that some of them are usually working. Until you’ve lived a life of sporadic internet, water, electricity and let’s just really call it convenience, don’t judge.

So being that I have to pass through Maun to get to my village from Gabs or nearly anywhere else, and me being myself, I’ve made quite a social circle there. There are lots of young ex pats and pilots living and working in the place that is the “gateway to the delta”. It’s nice to get away from the constant development talk that seems to envelope all my PC friends when we do get together (even though that means I end up the unfortunate observer to enough pilot shop talk that I’m relatively certain I could fly a damn plane myself.) At the end of the day, with few Peace Corps volunteers near me, and none on my side of the delta, sometimes it’s nice to hear more English. And it’s a fun party town.

It’s with this in mind that I came up with the idea of having all my Peace Corps friends and my ex pat friends together to give Maun a proper farewell. So we rented a boat called “The Sir Rosis of the River” and that’s what we did. As there was limited space on the boat, we decided that it could start on the boat and continue after we docked at the Riverlodge. I was tired of pilots running around in their uniforms 24/7, so I declared that they would be forbidden from being pilots for a night, but rather a Pirate theme was necessary ( I also threw in Peace Corps, princesses and Peter Pan as theme options so as to not disclude anyone.) Few people actually came in dress but at least the pilots were dressed in something other than their uniforms. Throughout the course of the night many of my Maun friends showed up at the Riverlodge, and I got to say my farewells to many of them that I don’t usually see for one reason or another, be it that they are away at their camps or I’m in Seronga (I do spend MOST of my time in my village.)

So as the boat left the dock at the Riverlodge the passengers ended up being all Peace Corps volunteers, along with the Vixen and Clara. I began by trying to play good hostess and make sure everyone else knew Clara and Vixen, as the only non PCV’s, but my Peace Corps friends being who they are, all let me get through rather lengthy introductions of those two before informing me that they all knew Clara and Vixen. Egged on by my emotionally overwrought rambling of how I came to know those two, some of my buddies half heartedly insisted that I introduce everyone on the boat, even though after serving two years in the Peace Corps together, we generally know altogether too much about each other…

So back to the introductions. We all know I never need encouragement to run my mouth, but an interesting thing happened as I went around the circle (interesting for reasons other than the low flying plane that buzzed by shortly after I began—thanks Feeelix, you certainly do know how to make an entrance, although I have a feeling this was payback for me not moving the boat departure time to later). As I began jokingly introducing my friends to my other friends who already knew them, I realized how much I really LIKED everyone on the boat. I mean seriously, each person I looked at was someone I’ve shared something with here, either I’ve traveled with them, roomed with them, cried over the phone to them or they to me or usually both of us together, driven long distances with, shared good times and bad, and basically loved a whole helluva lot. And many of them had traveled insane distances to be here with me, flopping around in the Okavango Delta in the sunset (and Hairspray did it despite her personal policy of never swimming in water that’s not the ocean or a pool.)

We were pirated by some pilots who apparently begged borrowed and stole to get out to our boat and other friends met us in their boats along the river. Logistics had stressed me out as usual, but any effort spent was SOOOO well worth it, as I looked around and saw all my friends basking in what has become my paradise. I felt so grateful, and lucky to have met such an amazing group of people and to have shared the past two years and this experience with them. That boat might be named after a disease of the liver, but the organ that was currently afflicting me was the heart. It was completely full of love.

“Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and the occasions of love among and between peoples.”-June Jordan

Home/Sick

I recently returned from a trip to Maun sick as a dog. What started as a little tiredness and what I’ve come to call sexy bar voice (named as such after I first acquired the infliction, which had to do with spending time in smoky bars and screaming to be heard over loud bands in college. It usually went away on its own) has progressed quickly into a full blown “flu”. Now despite what we’ve all heard about the horrible diseases coming out of Africa, in reality there seem to be only a few. They are HIV, Malaria, TB and flu. “Flu” is the catchall for whatever else might possibly ail you that cannot be detected by one of the diagnostic tests for the other infections.

On the other side of this illness I’m left with only my own feverish recollection of my symptoms, which I’m relatively certain had something to do with sexy bar voice, which progressed into swollen closed throat to the point of waking up choking, which lead to phlegmy cough and feverish body aches. When it was just sexy bar voice I waited, as this one sometimes goes away on its own and generally has causal factors linked to my excitedly screaming too much. As I had been in Maun for my goodbye party, it seemed this one was a likely candidate. When I was still hoarse by Wednesday, I knew things were headed downhill.

When the painful throat began I started pushing fluids and ibuprofen, and I stopped by the clinic to check in on if it might be something serious. They only seemed to want to give me an injection (a move I’m certain has more to do with them getting a chance to stab me in my white ass than it does actually making me feel better because no matter what I’m sick with the clinic always wants to give me an injection.) I raided their ibuprofen stock and grabbed some throat lozenges (which are chalky and don’t work) and headed home. This would be the last time I left my hut in three days.

I laid around and rested, the kettle constantly boiling as I prepared myself some homebrew remedy that I think I inherited from some ex boyfriend’s mother as the gospel, as I can’t recall drinking hot lemon and honey water as a child. This mix was alternated with tea and regular water, with broccoli as the main food of choice, not because I wanted it, but because if I didn’t eat it soon it would go more off than it already was. Picking through that moldy mess alone took about an hour, and I prayed that stomach sick wouldn’t follow. At one point I can actually remember thinking how novel it was to feel like shit, but to have a completely different area of my body than usual be the center of my distress. I think I’ve prepaid on any future morning sickness, puking hangovers, or flu caught from a child who is in school with a bunch of other disease infested germ factories through my time of intestinal distress in Botswana. I’d like to think that my stomach has become iron clad, but I know the minute I reenter the States and all the preservatives and strange foods that I’ve been unwillingly weaned off for the past few years are going to throw me into a mess of stomach sick again.

So lying in my hut dying, I would have given huge amounts of money I don’t have for some chicken soup, but it’s certainly not a part of the typical Batswana diet, and thus not available in Seronga. The co-op (the only store in town) didn’t even have orange juice, although my host sister was kind enough to send the kids on the compound to my door with green unripe oranges plucked from the tree outside my window. I gnawed on them while watching episode after epsiode of Gossip Girl (until staring at the screen made my eyes ache).

During this time I would wake myself up in the night with a dry hacking cough that water alone could not quell several times a night. I would stumble out of my bed looking for water or SOMETHING only to get caught in my mosquito net-trip and fall, and grab around in the dark until I was drinking honey directly from the bottle. It seemed to be the only thing that would coat my throat. This happened several times a night until a stroke of genius hit and I realized that surely the Peace Corps must have given us something in our medical kit for this particular ailment before they sent us out into The Land Without Target (or pharmacies, or minute clinic, ect). So I fumbled around in the dark for that nearly empty toolbox and found that sure enough, there were 2+ year old cough drops. I popped one of those nasty soft bad boys in my mouth and drifted back into a feverish sleep, and woke up in the morning with the remainder in my cheek and pink drool on my pillow.

I spent the days restless and yet tired, and couldn’t leave my hut for fear of running into someone I didn’t have the voice to speak to. I’ve learned that when I’m really exhausted and on the verge of sick I can’t hear well, and my friend’s Afrikaans accent had been giving me some serious trouble when I left Maun. And he was speaking English. I knew I couldn’t manage to try to speak to people if I was going to have to decide which language they were trying to communicate with me in as well as responding in the Voice That Sounds Like She Smoked a Hundred Thousand Cigarettes.

I’ve found that being sick is one of the universal times that makes one miss one’s home and culture. I may be 28 years old, but you can bet your ass that I wanted nothing more than for my mother to rub my back, or for K-Train to make me chicken soup (likely from scratch, she’s domestic that way). Although I couldn’t really talk, I wanted to speak to the States so badly. It seems being ill was bringing on a terrible bout of homesickness.

I held out for most of the day, as I had to wait for it to become a decent hour to call America. I made a few calls, but it seemed that many of you were out enjoying springtime in the US (as winter descends on Botswana). Being “sick” is usually synonymous with “emotional” for me, so when I couldn’t get a hold of anyone I began pouting, which in the absence of any voice of reason to smack some sense into me quickly became a pity party of note.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had the sort of mind bending and soul crushing bouts of homesickness that were a hallmark of my first few (*8? *10?) months in Botswana. That sort of loneliness has to fade away, either on its own or by force, or I wouldn’t have survived here this long. I think knowing that I was going to be away from home for this long has sort of compelled me to push thoughts of home and people there further from my day to day mind, as if I thought about it as much as I used to, the pain would get to be unbearable. So as a coping mechanism, I think I’ve put you all on another planet; you are characters of some movie I remember seeing that used to be my life, but for right now only exists in a slow motion dream world.

Now that the time to reenter that universe is coming near, I’m struggling to remember all the storylines, the new characters that have come on in the episodes I’ve missed, and the details of the one I’ll soon again be playing. And all of this struck me a lot when I was ill.

After the “flu” incident I the cavity I had diagnosed but not filled in Gabs back in March flared up and I had to continue on with antibiotics and pain reliever drugs until I could get to Maun. (See previous entries.) Never in my life have I wanted so badly to be completely drug free within my body.

I survived Africa’s most recent attempt on my life, but the ache for home still remains. As my arrival in the motherland gets closer, it joins the emotional stew swirling wildly and erratically throughout my body. I guess if this whole experience hadn’t been worth it, it wouldn’t hurt so badly to leave, and time remains the only drug that will cure this ailment. And so I take each day as a pill, both bitter and sweet, as time takes me away from this world I will miss so desperately and into the one of my dreams.

This is my life......

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.

Our Public Art in Seronga

The culmination of my Peace Corps Service!

A Measure of Success.....

When I arrived in Seronga, due partially to my inexperience in living alone, and also to my former shortcomings in the field of planning and preparation, there were quite a few items I didn’t have, many of which it didn’t occur to me I might need. Nowhere was this deficiency more evident than in the kitchen.

When I visited my hut in during the weekend in which we viewed and took inventory of our future new homes and villages, (an exercise in which many of my Bots classmates were able to wander around their comparatively spacious accommodations- and really how much is there to explore in a one and half room hut- for somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 days, I myself had about 1 due to the fact that I Seronga is just so damn FAR from…. everywhere. I t took me two days to get there from Moleps and two days to get back) I have to be honest and admit that I spent a majority of that time cowering in the corner (or really rather not—round room-no corners), or later, when I realized the creepy crawlies that resided in the corners, huddled in the middle of my bed (possibly in tears) eating my processed cheese slices and bread which seemed to be the only logical thing that might be properly kept through a journey of that many miles (or really, Kilometers).

In the midst of my quivering period of self doubt, I managed to observe that there were about four plates and a few half sets of cutlery which I assumed should be fine as it seemed unlikely that I would have any houseguests. The few sauce pans and glasses and two coffee mugs that rounded out the happy cupboard seemed to sufficiently cover what would be necessary for me to (learn to) cook.

A few weeks later in the altogether overwhelming experience of shopping in the mall in Gabs for the supplies that were to furnish our homes for the next two years, ( I blew a quarter of my moving in allowance on a down comforter and would do it again in a heartbeat… somewhere in my head was a line from what was undoubtedly an old Martha Stewart ”Living” magazine from my grandmother’s house extolling the virtues of nice bedding… or perhaps that was an advertisement… whichever) I did manage to remember to spend altogether too much money on a non-stick (yeah right) cake pan and cookie sheet. And with that I survived happily enough. I didn’t even have proper pot holders until this past July (which I got from someone who was moving away) but they’re those crazy silicon bird beak looking things, the technology of which must just be beyond me….

I give these examples of my culinary shortcomings as an overly detailed account of how inept I am when it comes to matters of the kitchen. You can see the direction this would be going when I resorted to taking up baking as a hobby.
Busy the hands to quiet the mind? Feed the stomach to empty the brain? I have no idea what pseudo fortune cookie theory I was operating under at that particular time.

But discovering I had no measuring cups was likely one of those charming little mishaps that defined those first few months at site (and likely sent me crying to that overly-expensive-down-comforter-covered-bed. I cried enough in those first few months to certainly last me the next two years…) Depressed, determined and most of all, hungry, the perseverance I’ve found in myself (and has jumped in to save me through much more trying and traumatizing shit than I can name) kicked in and I decided that measuring cups were going to have to be a luxury for the moment (incidentally I now have two sets;-).

So I baked. I eyeballed and felt the weight of the ingredients. I experimented and tried new things. It probably wasn’t always exactly right, but at least sometimes, it worked. Things tasted generally ok. I ate them. I didn’t poison myself or others (that I know of). I can’t even begin to tell you the amount of pride I experienced, and the amount of confidence in myself I developed, and the hope that was fostered that I could indeed do this Peace Corps thing.

Because what does it mean to measure? How can one determine exactly how much of something one has in different situations, under different conditions? How does one measure things, especially abstract things like success? Or behavior change?

I think about this often, even more so when it comes time to fill out our quarterly Peace Corps reports, those nightmarish visions in excel friendly format (allegedly) wherein we’re supposed to compile numbers and write a short synopses to describe what it is we do and how many people we’ve “saved” from the scourge that is HIV in Botswana.

So every three months I find myself in a tailspin of self doubt and feelings of inadequacy and failure when I face the difficult task of quantifying the work I do into an easy-to-read numerical format.

I often find myself envying people serving in other Peace Corps countries, where the goals appear (although I’ve learned nothing here if I haven’t learned that appearances can be deceiving…) to be attached to programs with tangible outcomes.


“What did you do in the Peace Corps?” a Question I anticipate enjoying almost as much as the one about “Why are you joining the Peace Corps?” or “What will you do in the Peace Corps?” To be able to simply answer, “I dug wells.” Or “I grew gardens”. Some of the members of a former cohort often said (only partially in jest) “I saved babies”.

What does it mean to have lived a year and a half of your life in a place and still not completely have a handle on it?

What have I done in the Peace Corps….?


Ummmm…



Crickets chirping….

(I mean really, I’ve been writing this lengthy, overly wordy blog which many people swear they’ve been reading for a year and a half and they still ask me what I do… and I don’t blame them a bit. Personally, I like to think there’s been some growth, and professionally, I’ve got ideas, and some energy still, I’ve got a helluva lot of goals, and things I’d love to see happen… but it’s also really tough to explain in a way that seems meaningful to the average onlooker. When I try to describe what have been some of the more meaningful moments and life changing experiences I've witnessed and had myself here, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it can all start to sound a little kum-bah-ya and lame. I realize that. People say I'm doing good work over here, and I struggle sometimes to believe that is true, but it's the hope that I'm doing something that will incite change that gets me out of bed in the morning.)

As Americans (and especially as Americans with mostly American funders) we want results. We want numbers, we want hard facts, and we want success. We want gorgeous, Excel generated charts and graphs and spreadsheets that we can take back to show other Americans how successful we’ve been. These are our measuring cups. We want everyone to marvel at the cake we’ve baked, and we want to give them the recipe for success with exact and replicable ingredients.

But this is Africa. And more specifically, Botswana. And even more than that it’s Seronga, a tiny village in the heart of the Okavango delta and peoples whom even their own government often overlooks. We don’t eat cake here. And so I’m sorry. Success looks and tastes differently here. The measurements vary.

Because what can these numbers possibly mean? If it’s about numbers I can give you numbers all day, numbers that have been ascribed to me or to my accomplishments. I can give you my weight, my date of birth, my social security number, my high school and college GPAs, the score I got on any number of tests throughout my life, the number of stamps in my passport, any number at all that is supposed to have some meaning that in some way describes me. But do they? Can they tell you if I’m a success?

Ok then, lets talk experiences. If I gave you the name, presenters, brochure, location, duration, program from every class, speech, lecture, workshop, seminar, poetry slam, open mic night or reading I’ve ever attended that was supposed to in some way influence me or change my mind, could you from that calculate my risk behaviors?

Maybe. But probably not.

But it doesn’t exactly predict how I’ll act. And thus whether I’ll act in a way that might lead to me acquiring HIV.

So how can I report, honestly, that the guy over there that attended the workshop I’ve put on has been at all informed, has taken in the information presented to him in a meaningful way, that he relates to himself the benefits and risks of male circumcision and that his decision around this matter for himself might be changed. Can I report this quite honestly when I know for a fact he came for the free lunch?

And what about the woman over there, who just sat through the clinic health talk on multiple concurrent partnerships? Can she conceptualize what this means for her (sure she can repeat what has just been said, and she can tell me all day long what it is I want to hear.)? Does this mean that I can safely assume that she’ll have the sexual negotiation skills and confidence to confront her partner, and the independent financial resources to leave her partner should he refuse to give up his other wives, or even to go to the clinic to test for HIV with her? Is all this a success if it just ends up getting this woman a fresh beating?

You can see where the numbers and reporting are just the first wave of angst.

It’s hard to look at a report designed for the duel purpose of keeping track of what we’re doing (this is indeed the only evidence we submit that we are really doing anything-for those of us this far out it’s not like the Peace corps is just going to randomly wander through our villages-I’ll say it again, it’s a mission to get here) and reporting to funders (one might expect that it’s sort of in everyone’s best interest to produce high numbers of those reached- and thus effectiveness as it’s these funders who keep us in jobs-this has been a moral dilemma to me, as I had always envisioned the Peace Corps as a place in which the goal would be to “work myself out of a job…” And the HIV rate in this country has done nothing but go up since I’ve been here) and not feel a sense of confusion, and I daresay, failure?

Because really in the end, all the paperwork and reporting and questioning leads to one bigger, more personal end.

If the Peace Corps is my life (Which arguably it is, at least for these two years. It’s pretty difficult to separate the personal from the professional when you live in these circumstances, with these sorts of goals) and these are the predetermined measurements of my success, and I feel this much confusion and uncertainty over reporting my “accomplishments” and whether I’ve achieved success, then what am I doing? Am I doing the right thing? Must my goals and feelings of success as a person in an individual be intrinsically tied to the level of success present in this village-ie the increase or decrease in the number of HIV infections? Has this been worth it? Am I successful?

These are questions I ask myself everyday. And the answers have never come to me via the reports I agonize over and resignedly hand in every three months. I’ve had to redefine success. Again and again. And it rarely comes in a numerical form.


Because success has come to look and feel differently to me.


Do I know that making art projects around the village is going to have any impact whatsoever on the prevalence of HIV in my village, or in Botswana? Nope. But I do know that several children have taken a project through from design to completion and can see their efforts on the walls of their hometown. I can see in them a sense of pride in their accomplishment. Some of them have made a connection between the use of alcohol and HIV. Some have been inspired by the notion of recycling objects to make art.

Can I foresee if reading books in English and discussing the themes and watching the movies and journaling about their reactions is going to keep five precious girls from contracting HIV? I wish to God I could. But I can tell you that I have seen their comfort level of reading, comprehending and expressing themselves in English increase, for some of them, dramatically. And I am willing to bet that these skills will help them enormously when they’re in medical school, a plan that half of them have, with their primary goal to be to find a cure for HIV and to help their people.


So how do I measure success? I know it when I feel it.


I consider it a success when I see one of the nurses, after watching me practice reading aloud in English with some school children for 45 minutes while they waited for him to finish with patients so that he can help them complete a questionnaire they’ve been sent to complete, take real time to help them finish their assignment and make certain they understand. Last week a nurse shouted an answer at them from a doorway.

I consider it a success when the woman who sells me airtime texts me after I’ve given her some magazines because she’s expecting a child and wants to know more about healthy eating and how she should prepare health wise for the baby. Prior to my suggestion she had never before taken advantage of the library within 100 meters of the door of her shop.

The children with whom I practice writing their names and multiplication tables in the dirt have steadily decreased the time it takes them to answer my quiz like questions and increased their willingness to look me in the eye. Learning is becoming something that is fun for them. They’ve come to trust me and know I won’t beat them if they get the answer wrong.

And there’s no box on the form for that.

How much credit can I take for any of these things? Probably not much. But for me that’s the definition of Peace Corps. We don’t come here to achieve success in the typically American sense. We have to find it in other ways, to search and dig and redefine it for ourselves. For me that has meant that my feeling of success comes when others achieve something, when I see that they are becoming closer to their best selves, and that they are improving the way in which they interact with and manage their worlds and what they want from it, when they raise their own expectations of themselves and others.

Did I come here to solve HIV? Nope, that one is way bigger than me. Did I come here to personally have an impact on a massive reduction of HIV? Even at my vainest moments I’m not that delusional. Might I have helped someone who could potentially do these things for their own country? That’s the dream. Have I been successful? That’s the one I take to bed with me at night, and hope that in the end, the answer will come out to be a resounding “yes”.

The tale of the (J-)Kat Burglar of Seronga....

The story of how I added “breaking and entering” to my laundry list of Peace Corps Accomplishments….

A few months back, I was walking home through the (hot) village around lunch time distracted in my usual fantasy about what I would be having for lunch. Alas, upon my arrival at the hut, not only was there was no grilled salmon waiting for me, there was another less delightful surprise. I had locked myself out of my hut.

How did you manage that, Lorato? Well it happened that I had left the skeleton key, which was what I used to lock the door from the inside at night, in the lock inside the door in the morning. I have a small padlock that I use to secure the deadbolt latch that Simon had installed for me on the outside of the door after my host family had been stealing from me using said skeleton key to open my door. The key for the small padlock was of course on the same key ring as the key which was still in the lock on the inside of the door. It was, as we say in Southern Africa a bit of a f*ck up.

Now I know myself, and I know that this is the type of shit that I’m generally known to do. As such I had tried to create a safety measure so that this very issue wouldn’t occur. I had attempted to preempt myself by putting a spare key up in the shade netting that creates the shady area on my “porch”. I instinctively reached for this key, smiling to myself in appreciation of my brilliance.

Which I immediately followed with a cursing of my stupidity. My constant use of what appeared to be the foolproof key plan, which entails clipping them to a karabiner so that I can always clip them to my purse, a bag or my person, so that I DON’T MISPLACE OR LOSE THEM, had recently caused just that to happen, in the process of clipping or unclipping the damn thing the keys had fallen off without me noticing. And thus the emergency replacement key had been promoted to the sole key to my hut.

Which was now on the other side of the door.

And the lunch clock was ticking.

So I quickly looked out into the yard at the gate, just to see if some Prince Charming slash Knight sort of fellow might instinctively know that his services were needed (it seems that Disney sponsored Damsel in Distress detector doesn’t quite pick up signal in Seronga. They must be in cahoots with the Orange and Mascom cellular networks.) and possibly pitched up outside my fence on his horse (with his locksmithing kit). No such luck.

Back to the old standby, making a plan.

I briefly stood back and assessed the situation. As I’ve said, I know myself and thus often arrange things in my life so that there is some emergency escape/contingency plan. I soon discovered that if I used my little pink mini leatherman (thank you thank you thank you K-Train-best gift EVER!!!) to unscrew the entirety of the door handle, I could probably shove something long and thin through the lock where the key was currently nestled. It would push the key out of the lock and the hopefully drop it just on the other side of the door. If I then pried a piece of the bottom of the door that was supposed to keep small creatures, like say, mice out (we all know exactly how well that has gone) and found another longer thin object through I could possibly hook the keys and pull them out, and thus unlock the door.

Which is what I did, in thirty minutes or less, just like the Dominoes Pizza guy (shit now I gotta add that one to the list of lunch fantasies). Who needs prince charming anyways?

Phone/Home: a story of community integration

Yesterday I traveled from Seronga to Sepopa (1.25 hours over water, about 45kms as the crow flies from Seronga, but there’s no crows providing public transport, so over the river we go) via the clinic boat ambulance, and was then picked up by the Sepopa Clinic ambulance to travel the rest of the way by road to the district offices at Gumare. This route cuts the travel time on the journey from anywhere in the arena of 3 to 7 hours one way by road down to between 2.5 to 4 hours with the water/road combo. It’s definitely the way to travel, and I was excited to be taking the boat again as our ambulance boat has been in the shop for about 10 months.

Maybe it was my excitement over being on the water again, perhaps it was my rush to call the Sepopa ambulance to collect us, but somewhere in the transfer from the boat to the truck I managed to drop my phone. My very expensive, internet enabled, bright orange Sony Ericsson that had been a gift from a friend. I had just decried the fact that my phone was one of a kind in the delta, and was probably going to get stolen on my blog the day before.

I didn’t realize I had dropped it until I got to Gumare and was going to take the Sepopa clinic ambulance driver’s number so I could call to find out when they would be heading back to Sepopa. I couldn’t find my phone anywhere. I could hardly believe that I’d made the hour long journey without needing to text someone, but that’s apparently what happened. Panicked, I dumped the contents of my bag out onto the white sandy road in Gumare and began freaking out.

The nurse, the driver, and villagers in the back of the ambulance immediately began to look around and offer their phones to help me. A women riding in the front of the ambulance whom I didn’t know was already asking my number, which she then reported was ringing. Someone answered. I dashed to the back of the ambulance to see who had it. None of them. I ran back to the woman, confused. She handed me her phone. I asked the man who had answered how he had gotten my phone, completely bewildered at this point. It was Tom-Tom, a guy from Seronga who works for the Okavango Houseboats. They do transfers for clients who don’t fly into Seronga across the water from Sepopa to their various houseboats and bush camps along the river and into Seronga. He told me he found and recognized it was my phone and would be taking it to the police in Seronga.

It turns out my friend the police sergeant, who I’ve been working with on the Men’s Sector Committee as well as the social worker had by chance called my phone and had spoken to Tom-Tom and told him to bring it to the police station when he returned to Seronga. The police sergeant continued to answer the phone for the rest of the day, because, he explained, he didn’t want someone to call and get my voicemail and be worried, because he knows that Lorato always answers her phone (I think this caused a little confusion/alarm for subsequent people who called my phone only to have it answered by the Seronga Police, but we’ve got all that cleared up).

My phone was missing for less than an hour, and was waiting for me (along with some teasing) at the police station when I returned to Seronga that evening. From the time it got lost until I was reunited with it, no less than 4 people from Seronga area came up to me (in Gumare, Sepopa, at the hoof and mouth gate near Ikgoga) to inform me (in various languages) that my phone was at the police station in Seronga.

When I was reunited with my bright phone (which in the end, despite me trying to be discrete about having such a flash phone, was the reason it was returned to me) I called the managers of the Houseboats and the owner in Maun to compliment them on having such a trustworthy and honest employee, as well as thanking Tom-Tom and giving him a small reward and a note.

I was so touched by my village’s concern for me and amazed that my phone, which is likely worth at least a month’s wages around these parts, was returned to me. Thank you, Seronga. Bottom line? I heart Seronga and Seronga hearts me! (no matter what I say next week... Or tomorrow!)