Sometimes memories come, so vividly and sharply it pains me. They are like sparks that start a fire that I find myself stoking; sometimes casually and halfheartedly, bemused and only slightly interested. Sometimes the memory presents itself and I dive headfirst down the rabbit hole to follow it. I cling to it, searching the Kalahari Desert of my mind for kindling, blowing on the hazy smoke filled trenches of my brain with the intensity of the bellows of hell to keep it burning. I pour gasoline on the thing and inevitably, the intensity builds to a point where this fire has become out of control. I find myself lost in a bushfire of uncontrollable nostalgia.
I try to stop the thing, to escape the heat, to extinguish the flames but it’s too late. I’ve done it again and now I have to categorically burn each and every recollection I can find, occasionally throwing in plastic and all sorts of stuff that’s not real to fuel this mess. I must keep the fire going until it burns itself out, the toxic smoke of the untruths I’m attributing to you choking me and yet necessary. I burn a wide swath around the places that burn hottest, hoping that if I indulge this one, just this once, it’ll go away forever, or at least long enough to let me heal from these latest burns a bit.
On occasion the fire gets too hot and I sweat and I panic, I go a bit mad, I scramble to desperately try to create new memories. I try to make and have and do so much that whatever is left behind from before pales in comparison. In some ways it works, I succeed. Between here and there is no comparison. I am here and I wouldn’t change that. But to long for you, all of you, and home and what I left, to miss such silly things as to be hard to describe to those who live them every day, it’s difficult. To honestly describe yearning for pavement and streetlights and salads and bubble baths just becomes really strange. It’s difficult for me to believe I’m not crazy.
Sometimes I try to deny the reality of it all completely. I try to recreate the memories, or replace them with new ones, to make it all seem uglier so it’s not so painful. I try to make you into someone that would have been easy to leave, to forget, to let go of. Someone who’s not who you are. I try to create new memories; or to mold them out of clay or carve them out of wood or shape them out of metal, but they look garish and ridiculous next to the crystal clear recollections that hold the emotional bouquet of who I remember you to be. All of these new pieces melt away in the heat, and the flowers, which should wither and die in the flames, remain as fresh and when they first bloomed. There are times when I’m strong and can withstand the flames. There are times when I cannot. It comes down to a choice, because I can’t keep all these memories of you and still continue to become me. If I keep living this way, with memories of you starting these massive fires in my mind I will be left with nothing, having burned everything in my path, the charred remains of who I could have become all that remains. And I won’t do it.
I walk these coals, they have become familiar. They burn into the scars deep within me, searing not just my flesh but my bones, which feel as bleached and brittle and white as the bones of the elephant we found last week, dead for many years, and just as unable to hold up the person who must walk this Earth each day. And yet I do, and I can and I learn. I’ve danced before these particular flames before. I do it, I know it hurts, and yet I burn, I burn. I begin to relish the pain a bit, scratching at the blisters, watching them ooze and hoping this is the last case of arson, and knowing it’s not. The fire burns hotter and hotter, threatening to engulf me, and yet I know it never will. Not completely.
So I try, again and again, to put out the candle.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Let You Go....
It could be any one of you, those I have known; some of you parade through my mind with the kind of demanding insistence uncharacteristic of you in real life while others of you visit with alarming irregularity, leaving my grasping and clinging for any morsel of our bond I can recall. I find myself audibly gasping in surprise as some wayward memory bursts into the forefront of my mind, much the way the word one might have been racking ones mind for a few weeks back will present itself too pointlessly and gracelessly late to be of any use, but is so winsome and shiny and appealing that one wants to shout it out from rooftops.
This memory has hijacked my attention, I’m suddenly miles away from whatever was happening at present, leaving the person I’m probably trying to have a conversation with (likely at least partly in another language which is another part of the brain that is constantly muddled entirely) irritated or confused. I look around me for someone to share it with, someone to laugh at the inside joke but there’s no one inside this joke with me, which leaves even me outside in the cold.
The bright shiny memory is followed by a hallow feeling of sadness that pushes the joy of the reminiscence back into the depths from whence it came, leaving me feeling alone and confused and filled with a longing for something unnamable and suddenly vague. It comes and goes so suddenly that I begin to doubt that the memories are even real, maybe it never even happened. Perhaps I never knew you and we never did that and that place doesn’t exist. There’s very little in the differences between this world I now inhabit and the one I thought I knew to effectively confirm or deny. My former life takes on a dream like quality.
The sad memories, of those with whom I’ve lost touch since I’ve been here, or whom I might not see again (for whichever reason) or places which no longer exist hold a particular poignancy. They rub up against the sharp corners of my mind where my will has stepped in to protect me from their innocent poison, for truly indulging them, for reliving them starts off a chain reaction which can only lead to dark places. These bittersweet memories are like soft velvety cushions, and I find myself falling into their soft luxury where the initial promise of comfort fades away and leaves me in pain on a bed of nails.
So I let you go, one by one, after the other, some of you slip away during the night, some of you must be pushed out the door, but I can’t do it any more. I can’t spend my time wondering what it is with you, and for you, I must just settle for the idea that maybe someday we’ll meet again. It’s too difficult to continue on being stretched across these oceans and continents. I must try to be just where I am, and not spend so much time where you are, at least in my head.
But I assure you it pains me physically; I can feel you stripped away as flesh from my bones, each one being torn away categorically and seemingly without reason. My logical mind tells me that you can stay, and rest comfortably in my soul while the irrational, emotional part pushes you out the door. It’s hard to give in this metaphorical grey spot, the place with and without you. There can be no more “I wonder what she’s doing,” or “I wish he could see this”. I have to hold you each in your place in my heart, and hug and kiss the image of you that lives in my soul and put you back on the deep dark shelf in the depths of my mind. And I have to forget about you for now.
I have to let you go.
This memory has hijacked my attention, I’m suddenly miles away from whatever was happening at present, leaving the person I’m probably trying to have a conversation with (likely at least partly in another language which is another part of the brain that is constantly muddled entirely) irritated or confused. I look around me for someone to share it with, someone to laugh at the inside joke but there’s no one inside this joke with me, which leaves even me outside in the cold.
The bright shiny memory is followed by a hallow feeling of sadness that pushes the joy of the reminiscence back into the depths from whence it came, leaving me feeling alone and confused and filled with a longing for something unnamable and suddenly vague. It comes and goes so suddenly that I begin to doubt that the memories are even real, maybe it never even happened. Perhaps I never knew you and we never did that and that place doesn’t exist. There’s very little in the differences between this world I now inhabit and the one I thought I knew to effectively confirm or deny. My former life takes on a dream like quality.
The sad memories, of those with whom I’ve lost touch since I’ve been here, or whom I might not see again (for whichever reason) or places which no longer exist hold a particular poignancy. They rub up against the sharp corners of my mind where my will has stepped in to protect me from their innocent poison, for truly indulging them, for reliving them starts off a chain reaction which can only lead to dark places. These bittersweet memories are like soft velvety cushions, and I find myself falling into their soft luxury where the initial promise of comfort fades away and leaves me in pain on a bed of nails.
So I let you go, one by one, after the other, some of you slip away during the night, some of you must be pushed out the door, but I can’t do it any more. I can’t spend my time wondering what it is with you, and for you, I must just settle for the idea that maybe someday we’ll meet again. It’s too difficult to continue on being stretched across these oceans and continents. I must try to be just where I am, and not spend so much time where you are, at least in my head.
But I assure you it pains me physically; I can feel you stripped away as flesh from my bones, each one being torn away categorically and seemingly without reason. My logical mind tells me that you can stay, and rest comfortably in my soul while the irrational, emotional part pushes you out the door. It’s hard to give in this metaphorical grey spot, the place with and without you. There can be no more “I wonder what she’s doing,” or “I wish he could see this”. I have to hold you each in your place in my heart, and hug and kiss the image of you that lives in my soul and put you back on the deep dark shelf in the depths of my mind. And I have to forget about you for now.
I have to let you go.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Water is Life...
Back about a year ago, when I was living with my host family in what I now think of as the large and bustling village of Molepolole, I was describing my life and bucket bathing to my sister back home in the states. When I got to the part in the bucket bathing description in which I mentioned having to lift the basin I’d just squat bathed over and dump it back into the bucket in which I’d hauled the water into the house back outside to dump it back into the yard, I remember exclaiming, “I would so rather have indoor plumbing than electricity.” Although my arms came to be amazing during that period of my life, the statement still stands.
My sister sounded a bit incredulous about this, (“How will you watch movies on your laptop without electricity?”) and I can’t wait until she gets to experience life in Seronga (My mom, Karly and Paul are coming in October!!!!). I have been lucky enough in my placement in Seronga to have indeed gotten water and even a little electricity. I have a solar panel that I can use to charge everything in my house during the day and then selectively watch a movie or have music at night. I have water coming into my house for a sink, a toilet, and a bathtub with a pseudo solar shower.
I have all this luxury… When there is sun. Luckily Botswana gets something like 300+ days of sun in the year. It’s those few overcast ones that begin to make life difficult.
Strangely enough, if it is overcast or worse yet raining in the village I won’t have water. How can having rain, which seems like free water from the heavens mean you won’t have water, you ask.
I realize it doesn’t seem to make sense. As with most things here it’s a bit of a convoluted story.
In Seronga, all of our water comes from a pump house, located between 15-20 kilometers outside Seronga near the settlement of Teekae. The water is pumped into great big holding tanks high above the villages. There are standpipes and taps throughout the village through which to access the water. The holding tanks are rarely cleaned, which leads to an interesting smell or crazy spider webby sort of slime or sediment in the water depending on the season and temperature. You get used to it.
I’ve realized, much to my recent houseguest’s (who had been a PCV in Kenya) dismay, that I when there is water I will leave it running a while after I need to just to hear that it is there. When the water is out I will leave the tap open just so I can hear the occasional hissing that means the water might be on its way. I keep buckets and jugs full of water at all times. I rejoice in the sound of my toilet running. To say I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with water is an understatement.
So in Seronga, there is one man whose job it is to make sure the pump has oil and fuel (which he apparently sometimes spills down the pump hole, causing my water to have a beautiful oily shimmer) in order to make sure the holding tanks are full. This man does not have a vehicle. So he relies on calling all the government offices in the village to find out when someone is going out that way, or who has enough petrol to take him to Teekae. With his cell phone.
Now what can cell phones possibly have to do with sunshine and water? Or the price of rice in China?
Wait for it.
In Seronga we have two cell phone companies that we can use. The older of the two, and the one most people in Seronga use, is Mascom. It’s been here longer and is slightly cheaper than its more newly introduced competitor, Orange. (I have noticed lately that more people have begun to get Orange Sim cards as well, which they switch out on an unpredictably based schedule with their Mascom sim card, using the same phone. So you never know which number people will have in their phone and have to waste money trying to text or call both numbers in order to get a hold of someone. Charming.) Orange (which I have because it can text the states, and is more reliable in Seronga) is set up to operate their cell tower off the police generator, which is nearly always working. Mascom came to Seronga a while back, and put up their tower powered by a solar panel and battery, which is getting a bit old. This means that people using Mascom can expect that they won’t have service after about 10 at night or before 10 in the morning, the times during which the solar battery is dead.
When is the other time a solar battery might be dead- you wonder. Yup that’s right, when it’s overcast. So anywhere between a few hours and a day of when it becomes overcast I can generally expect we’ll lose water. It seems a bit difficult for the pump guy to actually have to walk between the government agencies (and in his defense they are a bit sprawled out from end to end-not a lot in Seronga is centrally located). Or if it’s the end of the month (payday) and the pump guy is too busy partying to remember to get out to fuel the pump.
Seronga is not unique in this water problem by any means. In other villages in Botswana the water comes from centralized treatment plants or pump stations. In the delta, in villages “that side” (the western shore of the delta) also have their water coming to them from centralized treatment plants, or sometimes piped directly from the river. The villages to the south western end tend to be a quite a ways from the actual river, or even the floodplain. They would not have the luxury of being able to walk to the delta to fetch water. Places like the Etshas and Gumare have problems when the flood comes because it can flood out the pumping stations. They have problems when the flood recedes because elephants, the brilliant creatures that they are, can somehow find where the water pipes are under the ground and smash them in order to get the water out without having to travel any further into the delta. As the river always seems to be flooding or receding, (thus the nature of the word “delta” or the nickname of the place as “the swamps”) these villages are nearly constantly in a problem with water.
The village of Seronga is lucky because most of the inhabitants live within a somewhat reasonable distance of the floodplain or even the river, which has water all year round. They can fetch water and carry it on a bucket on their head for everything they need in a day.
(Pause to let you think about fetching a hauling all the water you’d need for a day-drinking, bathing, cleaning, cooking- a kilometer or so uphill from the river to your house, on your head. Now add your children and spouse into that picture. Then remember that you must be boiling the water that you and everyone in the family plan to drink over an open fire to sanitize- as many people and cattle bathe in, wash clothes in, and use the delta as a toilet. You have to find and haul the firewood as well. Add HIV to the mix, attacking your body and ARV’s making you occasionally nauseous, sick or weak. Do you have livestock or a garden that needs to be watered to provide food at the very least and a bit of side income- or sometimes the only income into your household? Ladies and gentlemen this is the burden of an African woman, and it’s how some of them live their lives every day. I’ve got it bloody easy.)
For those of us that are even luckier, there’s a thing called a Jo-Jo. In reality, despite these crazy water conditions I usually still do have water; I just have to haul it from across the yard. It’s a pain in the ass. (I still thank my lucky stars for this as I know many PCV’s even in this country who don’t have indoor plumbing, a Jo-Jo or both) A Jo-Jo is a big green water tank with holes in the top to be filled with either rain water from gutters (which can get gross because of all the leaves that also fall into gutters, as well as bugs and spiders that get into the tanks) or a hose when the water is working. When there’s no water coming through the standpipes, this option becomes a helluva lot more appealing. As I boil and filter all of my drinking water anyways, this isn’t the end of the world. Many of the government houses in most of the villages have Jo-Jos, and quite frankly, the villagers have lived with this problem their entire lives, and have taught me tricks too numerous to count of how to deal with not having water.
I admit that this situation is light years ahead of many of the water situations in African nations, and again, that I’ve got it easy by many village standards. As I write this, the water is out again, the sun is bright as ever (which is lucky because my solar battery is powering my laptop in my hut as I write) for reasons mysterious to me. I guess it’s part of the magic and mystery of Africa that try as I might, I will never fully understand it. Which can be a beautiful thing. And if I had a glass of water, I’d drink to that;-)
Post Script: by the time I'm posting this entry it's been several days straight without water. I've heard that the pump itself is broken and that the repairmen went back to Gumare. I don't even know what that means. I find my mood is so dependent on water. Have a tall cold clean glass from your tap for me, no matter how gross you think that is and thank your lucky stars for it.
My sister sounded a bit incredulous about this, (“How will you watch movies on your laptop without electricity?”) and I can’t wait until she gets to experience life in Seronga (My mom, Karly and Paul are coming in October!!!!). I have been lucky enough in my placement in Seronga to have indeed gotten water and even a little electricity. I have a solar panel that I can use to charge everything in my house during the day and then selectively watch a movie or have music at night. I have water coming into my house for a sink, a toilet, and a bathtub with a pseudo solar shower.
I have all this luxury… When there is sun. Luckily Botswana gets something like 300+ days of sun in the year. It’s those few overcast ones that begin to make life difficult.
Strangely enough, if it is overcast or worse yet raining in the village I won’t have water. How can having rain, which seems like free water from the heavens mean you won’t have water, you ask.
I realize it doesn’t seem to make sense. As with most things here it’s a bit of a convoluted story.
In Seronga, all of our water comes from a pump house, located between 15-20 kilometers outside Seronga near the settlement of Teekae. The water is pumped into great big holding tanks high above the villages. There are standpipes and taps throughout the village through which to access the water. The holding tanks are rarely cleaned, which leads to an interesting smell or crazy spider webby sort of slime or sediment in the water depending on the season and temperature. You get used to it.
I’ve realized, much to my recent houseguest’s (who had been a PCV in Kenya) dismay, that I when there is water I will leave it running a while after I need to just to hear that it is there. When the water is out I will leave the tap open just so I can hear the occasional hissing that means the water might be on its way. I keep buckets and jugs full of water at all times. I rejoice in the sound of my toilet running. To say I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with water is an understatement.
So in Seronga, there is one man whose job it is to make sure the pump has oil and fuel (which he apparently sometimes spills down the pump hole, causing my water to have a beautiful oily shimmer) in order to make sure the holding tanks are full. This man does not have a vehicle. So he relies on calling all the government offices in the village to find out when someone is going out that way, or who has enough petrol to take him to Teekae. With his cell phone.
Now what can cell phones possibly have to do with sunshine and water? Or the price of rice in China?
Wait for it.
In Seronga we have two cell phone companies that we can use. The older of the two, and the one most people in Seronga use, is Mascom. It’s been here longer and is slightly cheaper than its more newly introduced competitor, Orange. (I have noticed lately that more people have begun to get Orange Sim cards as well, which they switch out on an unpredictably based schedule with their Mascom sim card, using the same phone. So you never know which number people will have in their phone and have to waste money trying to text or call both numbers in order to get a hold of someone. Charming.) Orange (which I have because it can text the states, and is more reliable in Seronga) is set up to operate their cell tower off the police generator, which is nearly always working. Mascom came to Seronga a while back, and put up their tower powered by a solar panel and battery, which is getting a bit old. This means that people using Mascom can expect that they won’t have service after about 10 at night or before 10 in the morning, the times during which the solar battery is dead.
When is the other time a solar battery might be dead- you wonder. Yup that’s right, when it’s overcast. So anywhere between a few hours and a day of when it becomes overcast I can generally expect we’ll lose water. It seems a bit difficult for the pump guy to actually have to walk between the government agencies (and in his defense they are a bit sprawled out from end to end-not a lot in Seronga is centrally located). Or if it’s the end of the month (payday) and the pump guy is too busy partying to remember to get out to fuel the pump.
Seronga is not unique in this water problem by any means. In other villages in Botswana the water comes from centralized treatment plants or pump stations. In the delta, in villages “that side” (the western shore of the delta) also have their water coming to them from centralized treatment plants, or sometimes piped directly from the river. The villages to the south western end tend to be a quite a ways from the actual river, or even the floodplain. They would not have the luxury of being able to walk to the delta to fetch water. Places like the Etshas and Gumare have problems when the flood comes because it can flood out the pumping stations. They have problems when the flood recedes because elephants, the brilliant creatures that they are, can somehow find where the water pipes are under the ground and smash them in order to get the water out without having to travel any further into the delta. As the river always seems to be flooding or receding, (thus the nature of the word “delta” or the nickname of the place as “the swamps”) these villages are nearly constantly in a problem with water.
The village of Seronga is lucky because most of the inhabitants live within a somewhat reasonable distance of the floodplain or even the river, which has water all year round. They can fetch water and carry it on a bucket on their head for everything they need in a day.
(Pause to let you think about fetching a hauling all the water you’d need for a day-drinking, bathing, cleaning, cooking- a kilometer or so uphill from the river to your house, on your head. Now add your children and spouse into that picture. Then remember that you must be boiling the water that you and everyone in the family plan to drink over an open fire to sanitize- as many people and cattle bathe in, wash clothes in, and use the delta as a toilet. You have to find and haul the firewood as well. Add HIV to the mix, attacking your body and ARV’s making you occasionally nauseous, sick or weak. Do you have livestock or a garden that needs to be watered to provide food at the very least and a bit of side income- or sometimes the only income into your household? Ladies and gentlemen this is the burden of an African woman, and it’s how some of them live their lives every day. I’ve got it bloody easy.)
For those of us that are even luckier, there’s a thing called a Jo-Jo. In reality, despite these crazy water conditions I usually still do have water; I just have to haul it from across the yard. It’s a pain in the ass. (I still thank my lucky stars for this as I know many PCV’s even in this country who don’t have indoor plumbing, a Jo-Jo or both) A Jo-Jo is a big green water tank with holes in the top to be filled with either rain water from gutters (which can get gross because of all the leaves that also fall into gutters, as well as bugs and spiders that get into the tanks) or a hose when the water is working. When there’s no water coming through the standpipes, this option becomes a helluva lot more appealing. As I boil and filter all of my drinking water anyways, this isn’t the end of the world. Many of the government houses in most of the villages have Jo-Jos, and quite frankly, the villagers have lived with this problem their entire lives, and have taught me tricks too numerous to count of how to deal with not having water.
I admit that this situation is light years ahead of many of the water situations in African nations, and again, that I’ve got it easy by many village standards. As I write this, the water is out again, the sun is bright as ever (which is lucky because my solar battery is powering my laptop in my hut as I write) for reasons mysterious to me. I guess it’s part of the magic and mystery of Africa that try as I might, I will never fully understand it. Which can be a beautiful thing. And if I had a glass of water, I’d drink to that;-)
Post Script: by the time I'm posting this entry it's been several days straight without water. I've heard that the pump itself is broken and that the repairmen went back to Gumare. I don't even know what that means. I find my mood is so dependent on water. Have a tall cold clean glass from your tap for me, no matter how gross you think that is and thank your lucky stars for it.
Mice are not Nice....
A new and interesting twist on the same old murder.....
Like so many starlets at the academy awards who tearfully promise themselves they wouldn’t cry, I swore I wouldn’t write about killing mice again. I thought I had covered the whole genre, from trapping to poison to blunt object traumas to the head. I was certain that there was nothing left to say. And generally there wasn’t. Until of course last night.
I was sitting on my bed in a benedryl induced haze, waiting for the drugs to completely put me to sleep. I had been sick with some terrific stomach bug that had left me weak and tired, but as I had laid around for several hours already that day I was finding it tough to sleep despite being tired, so had taken the benedryl to knock me out. I was writing letters home which will inevitably arrive after the event I’m meaning to write about when I heard some soft tapping coming from near my door. I thought perhaps it was the little boy who lived on my compound coming to greet me. I had heard that he had come home earlier, and despite us not speaking any common language, we’ve become buddies.
I shouted a greeting at the door three times to no response. Finally I hauled myself off my bed and opened the door. What greeted me on the other side was not a smiling little boy but a mouse crawling up the inside of the netting I’d wrapped through my burglar door to prevent mosquitoes in the warmer seasons. I pushed open the door and he was dangling like Tom Cruise in one of the “Mission Impossible” films. I grabbed the dustpan from the floor and flicked him off the door into the night. Little did I know that would set the tone for the night…
Around eleven thirty I woke up in from a deep sleep in a big confusion. I heard splashing around in my bathtub. At first I thought perhaps the cork had come out of the piping I’ve been using to shower and the sound I was hearing was the water rushing out into the pipe into the bathtub. Upon closer inspection I saw a dark something in the corner of the tub. I had left a small amount of water in the bottom to rinse some of the laundry I had soaking in the morning as the water has been out. I didn’t remember leaving anything in the tub and as soon as I turned around to grab my headlamp the splashing began again and I had a strong suspicion as to the nature of the intruder.
When I shone the light in the tub it was indeed a mouse, attempting to climb out of my bathtub. A quick survey of the situation determined that he had probably come in through the slightly open window climbing in through a hole in the netting that surrounded the piping. Strangely enough this was not the first mouse I’d seen in a bathtub, the other one was in Maun at Anna’s house. She being a vegetarian and an animal lover that mouse was trapped and released. As I am not a vegetarian or an extreme animal lover, this mouse would not be experiencing the same fate.
I thought that the fact that I had not taken any drastic measures to disturb whichever animals were living in my ceiling making noise and waking me up all the time had been an appropriate enough attempt at hospitality. When I mentioned the intruders to my landlady she suggested that perhaps it was the mice that fly (bats) that had gotten up there and she would look for the hole which they were using to get in and block it. As there are holes all over I very much doubted the success that this mission would bring. She then asked if I had any poison to kill the mice in her house. I told her that I had something better and lent her one of my traps, secretly smug in my current lack of a mouse problem, due to what I considered good management techniques: read two traps and a shitload of poison.
KARMA. (sing-songy voice)
Once I got the headlamp out I was able to catch the little bastard between a shallow wash basin and a deep bowl, using his inability to properly swim to my advantage. I took my improvised trap out in the yard to make a plan. Every time I heard him scramble I yelped a little bit as well. I knew at that moment that bashing him wasn’t going to be an option, as last time that had ended badly. I had been nauseous and generally sick a majority of the week and wasn’t in the mood to lose what little might have remained in my stomach over yet another gory murder in my front yard.
Suddenly the bit of water in the bottom of the basin gave me an idea. Drowning! I’m not certain it was the recent studying I’ve been doing for the GRE about angles and geometry or if it was a drug induced hallucination of some sort. But I quickly decided drowning would be the most effective form of capital punishment. I grabbed a brick to place on top of the upturned bowl and ran for a bucket and the outside standpipe.
I opened the tap only to hear an unsatisfying hiss. No water. Well this would make drowning a more difficult option, but yet not impossible. There was also a bucket full of water in the bathroom, waiting for morning that I would usually use to wash my face. I was going to have to wander around with a dirty face in the morning but it seems knowing this mouse would be dead was worth it. I grabbed the water and went back to where my captive was held.
I carefully poured the water into the basin. Nothing. The water couldn’t get up in the bowl because of the air inside. I still cannot imagine what inspired me to attempt to defy the laws of physics or gravity or whatever scientific truth means that I had effectively created a little submarine bubble for this little bastard but that is exactly what happened. I tried a few times to tip the whole production to get the water up inside the bowl but my hands weren’t big enough to grasp the basin and hold down the bowl. The mouse would escape and swim around desperately, and I would squeal, and it was generally bad. So now I had a trapped mouse, a basin full of mouse shit water, and a brick on top. Prior experience told me crying wasn’t a helpful option in this scenario.
My benedryl addled mind could do no more. I was worried about leaving the whole production either too close to the house as he would inevitably try his little breaking and entering scheme again, or too far into the yard as I have a highly curious four year old little boy who is currently staying on the compound and had visions up him upending the thing and the mouse escaping in the morning. In my drug induced stupor of a brain the idiot mouse clearly had rabies as it was crazy enough to repeatedly try to enter my house (somewhere in my mind the exact diagnosis and suggested rehabilitative treatment was crawling it’s way out from the depths of my criminology and psychology degrees as I’m cross referencing my time at a law firm for the statues on capital punishment that I’d already sentenced this monster to.) and was going to attack the child before I got up and how would I live with that? It seems these bloody things are bent on making me lose sleep whether they’re dead or alive!
So I did something slightly crazy.
I went into my house and grabbed a pen and a post it.
I wrote on the note:
“Please kill the mouse”
And drew a sort of stick figure mouse drawing on it.
I have absolutely no idea whom I was appealing to, as the little boy likely cannot read Setswana much less English. I began to laugh hysterically and exhaustedly in my yard in the moonlight. Perhaps some Tokaloshi or an bilingual African spirit would take care of the job.
I woke the next day and looked at the whole set up in my yard and knew I couldn’t deal with that just then. When I came home from work the girl on my compound upended the whole mess and the mouse was indeed expired.
It just struck me that perhaps it was hypothermia. Eish.
Like so many starlets at the academy awards who tearfully promise themselves they wouldn’t cry, I swore I wouldn’t write about killing mice again. I thought I had covered the whole genre, from trapping to poison to blunt object traumas to the head. I was certain that there was nothing left to say. And generally there wasn’t. Until of course last night.
I was sitting on my bed in a benedryl induced haze, waiting for the drugs to completely put me to sleep. I had been sick with some terrific stomach bug that had left me weak and tired, but as I had laid around for several hours already that day I was finding it tough to sleep despite being tired, so had taken the benedryl to knock me out. I was writing letters home which will inevitably arrive after the event I’m meaning to write about when I heard some soft tapping coming from near my door. I thought perhaps it was the little boy who lived on my compound coming to greet me. I had heard that he had come home earlier, and despite us not speaking any common language, we’ve become buddies.
I shouted a greeting at the door three times to no response. Finally I hauled myself off my bed and opened the door. What greeted me on the other side was not a smiling little boy but a mouse crawling up the inside of the netting I’d wrapped through my burglar door to prevent mosquitoes in the warmer seasons. I pushed open the door and he was dangling like Tom Cruise in one of the “Mission Impossible” films. I grabbed the dustpan from the floor and flicked him off the door into the night. Little did I know that would set the tone for the night…
Around eleven thirty I woke up in from a deep sleep in a big confusion. I heard splashing around in my bathtub. At first I thought perhaps the cork had come out of the piping I’ve been using to shower and the sound I was hearing was the water rushing out into the pipe into the bathtub. Upon closer inspection I saw a dark something in the corner of the tub. I had left a small amount of water in the bottom to rinse some of the laundry I had soaking in the morning as the water has been out. I didn’t remember leaving anything in the tub and as soon as I turned around to grab my headlamp the splashing began again and I had a strong suspicion as to the nature of the intruder.
When I shone the light in the tub it was indeed a mouse, attempting to climb out of my bathtub. A quick survey of the situation determined that he had probably come in through the slightly open window climbing in through a hole in the netting that surrounded the piping. Strangely enough this was not the first mouse I’d seen in a bathtub, the other one was in Maun at Anna’s house. She being a vegetarian and an animal lover that mouse was trapped and released. As I am not a vegetarian or an extreme animal lover, this mouse would not be experiencing the same fate.
I thought that the fact that I had not taken any drastic measures to disturb whichever animals were living in my ceiling making noise and waking me up all the time had been an appropriate enough attempt at hospitality. When I mentioned the intruders to my landlady she suggested that perhaps it was the mice that fly (bats) that had gotten up there and she would look for the hole which they were using to get in and block it. As there are holes all over I very much doubted the success that this mission would bring. She then asked if I had any poison to kill the mice in her house. I told her that I had something better and lent her one of my traps, secretly smug in my current lack of a mouse problem, due to what I considered good management techniques: read two traps and a shitload of poison.
KARMA. (sing-songy voice)
Once I got the headlamp out I was able to catch the little bastard between a shallow wash basin and a deep bowl, using his inability to properly swim to my advantage. I took my improvised trap out in the yard to make a plan. Every time I heard him scramble I yelped a little bit as well. I knew at that moment that bashing him wasn’t going to be an option, as last time that had ended badly. I had been nauseous and generally sick a majority of the week and wasn’t in the mood to lose what little might have remained in my stomach over yet another gory murder in my front yard.
Suddenly the bit of water in the bottom of the basin gave me an idea. Drowning! I’m not certain it was the recent studying I’ve been doing for the GRE about angles and geometry or if it was a drug induced hallucination of some sort. But I quickly decided drowning would be the most effective form of capital punishment. I grabbed a brick to place on top of the upturned bowl and ran for a bucket and the outside standpipe.
I opened the tap only to hear an unsatisfying hiss. No water. Well this would make drowning a more difficult option, but yet not impossible. There was also a bucket full of water in the bathroom, waiting for morning that I would usually use to wash my face. I was going to have to wander around with a dirty face in the morning but it seems knowing this mouse would be dead was worth it. I grabbed the water and went back to where my captive was held.
I carefully poured the water into the basin. Nothing. The water couldn’t get up in the bowl because of the air inside. I still cannot imagine what inspired me to attempt to defy the laws of physics or gravity or whatever scientific truth means that I had effectively created a little submarine bubble for this little bastard but that is exactly what happened. I tried a few times to tip the whole production to get the water up inside the bowl but my hands weren’t big enough to grasp the basin and hold down the bowl. The mouse would escape and swim around desperately, and I would squeal, and it was generally bad. So now I had a trapped mouse, a basin full of mouse shit water, and a brick on top. Prior experience told me crying wasn’t a helpful option in this scenario.
My benedryl addled mind could do no more. I was worried about leaving the whole production either too close to the house as he would inevitably try his little breaking and entering scheme again, or too far into the yard as I have a highly curious four year old little boy who is currently staying on the compound and had visions up him upending the thing and the mouse escaping in the morning. In my drug induced stupor of a brain the idiot mouse clearly had rabies as it was crazy enough to repeatedly try to enter my house (somewhere in my mind the exact diagnosis and suggested rehabilitative treatment was crawling it’s way out from the depths of my criminology and psychology degrees as I’m cross referencing my time at a law firm for the statues on capital punishment that I’d already sentenced this monster to.) and was going to attack the child before I got up and how would I live with that? It seems these bloody things are bent on making me lose sleep whether they’re dead or alive!
So I did something slightly crazy.
I went into my house and grabbed a pen and a post it.
I wrote on the note:
“Please kill the mouse”
And drew a sort of stick figure mouse drawing on it.
I have absolutely no idea whom I was appealing to, as the little boy likely cannot read Setswana much less English. I began to laugh hysterically and exhaustedly in my yard in the moonlight. Perhaps some Tokaloshi or an bilingual African spirit would take care of the job.
I woke the next day and looked at the whole set up in my yard and knew I couldn’t deal with that just then. When I came home from work the girl on my compound upended the whole mess and the mouse was indeed expired.
It just struck me that perhaps it was hypothermia. Eish.
Push.....
Frustration, education, motivation, creation….
It had been an “I hate Botswana” type of morning. As I’ve said, I’m no Susie Sunshine pants, and these times occur. It’s my reality on occasion. I had been at the clinic, and had sat through a meeting in which the doctor (call me simple, call me crazy, call me whatever, everyone else does… but I tend to hold someone who is a doctor up to slightly higher standards, for better of for worse) had complained that there was no “motivation” (read money, t-shirts, food, ect) involved with participation in the upcoming vitamin A campaign.
As soon as the words left his lips the other local staff also began to complain. Perhaps it was the fact that it was Friday morning and it had been a long week, or perhaps I had just reached the end of some rope. Whatever my personal “motivation”, I found myself wondering quite loudly, “I’m confused as to why people want more money for completing tasks that are in their job description, during hours they are already being paid to work?” Wrong statement, as all the staff chimed in with variations of the phrase “Lorato… You’re trying to kill us with too much work.” In reality all the vitamin A campaign meant was that the staff would have less time in the afternoon to sit around in the waiting room and shoot the breeze. For one or maybe two weeks. When I tried to talk to one nurse privately about it later, he actually said very seriously “Lorato, that time in the afternoon is for us to rest.”
Granted, when there are patients the nurses are generally working very hard. There is no concept of appointments for the most part in African medical clinics. Everyone just shows up in the morning and waits until it is their turn. The afternoons are generally quiet, which makes sense in the heat of the day, especially in summertime, unless there is a woman in labor or an emergency. On Mondays the nurses have incredibly long days and get up at the crack of dawn to collect blood, and when patients have to go to the other side the auxiliary staff can spend a great deal of time on the road (for which they are paid overtime). I can see and understand all this.
Most days, however, I stop by there in the afternoon and the staff is just sitting around. I can do this about one day a week, and enjoy it sometimes as it can be a good opportunity to chat with the staff and learn more about the different cultures that I live amongst. More than about one or two days in a week, however, and then I begin to lose my mind, so I’ve begun to spend a lot less time at the clinic. I go in the morning and usually leave for the police or school or mortuary. I’ve found that since I’ve changed my schedule to include being out in the village more it has made me more visible and accepted in the community. More people approach me and bounce ideas off me, and many more go out of their way to greet me even in other villages, which continues to astound my fellow PC friends.
But there’s a little tiny American piece of me that seems to be unwilling to die that believes in order to have something better you must work hard for it and earn it. This sometimes involves sacrifice. It can be tough to work amongst people whom are generally making a few times what I am making monthly and listen to them complain about what they feel entitled to. Especially knowing how much better off they generally are than most of the patients in the village they serve.
I have learned in Seronga that there are some times when I just need to walk away. On this particular day I packed a few thousand pills into individual dosage envelopes and informed the staff I would be going to the school. I had planned to meet with one of the teachers who had proposed marriage to me last week at the ferry (which I denied but suggested we could work on a project together if he could be a professional about it as a consolation… this is how I meet many of the people I collaborate with, unfortunately) to plan how to undertake creating a world map mural on the wall of the primary school.
The teachers at the primary had long been complaining that I only work with the junior secondary school, which they decided was because there is generated electricity there. In reality it is because the older children tend to speak a bit more English, but I agreed, it probably was unfair. So I began to try to think of possible projects to do at the primary school. I’ve learned that if I ask people here what they want to do, they tend to respond “whatever you want to do, Lorato.” I realized I have to be the one that comes up with some suggestions and then let them pick. When I was at the hardware store with a map one day and discovered that some of the women working there didn’t know how to find Botswana on the map that there might be a big, raging need for a map of the world to be displayed somewhere prominently in order to educate the whole village. It’s another pipe dream that this will actually make an impact, but I’ve found in the Peace Corps you gotta live on pipe dreams or you’ll starve. Or go crazy. Whichever.
So I went to the primary school to check my friend France. Despite attempting to slip in unnoticed and not disturb the class in session, my arrival was heralded as though the president himself had made a surprise visit. France, the teacher, who had been sitting at his desk playing with his phone, jumped up and greeted me, introducing me to the students and nearly bowing to me in his excitement. The children appeared to be discussing the day’s topic amongst themselves, and many who recognized me from the village began to whisper to each other more excitedly. I quickly gave up any thought I had had of observing quietly and decided to check how the students were doing with the days lesson.
The topic appeared to be multiplying decimals. As I wandered around the room checking the students work I noticed many, many hash marks on papers and numerous children counting their fingers under their breath. These children were standard fives, which is somewhere between an American 3rd and 5th grader, but many of them were older than typical 5th graders, as it seems that children often start school later in the villages. When a child begins school often depends on if they have any older siblings or family they can stay with in the village as their parents will likely spend a great deal of time away from the village during the year at the cattle post, or lands where they keep their animals and crops. It also depends on if and when the parents can get the money together to pay for school fees. I think sometimes children just eventually reach an age where they can stay in the village and manage to get themselves to and from school ok by themselves. As I checked their work it seemed very few of them knew their multiplication tables. I was horrified, but unfortunately not surprised.
The emphasis on education is increasing on this side of the delta, but there are many barriers to education being effective. School is supposed to be taught in English, which is many of the children’s 2nd, 3rd or even 4th language. Most of the educational materials are in English or Setswana, the country’s two national languages. In a village where many of the parents have a form three (between 8th and 10th grade) or even standard 7 (elementary school) education and their mother tongue may be Sheyai, Simbugushu, or one of the Sesarwa languages, which they may or may not know how to read or write, it’s difficult to expect them to emphasize the importance of education. If the parents haven’t passed away from HIV.
Beating is also common in schools, mostly at the older level, but I believe it also happens at the primary school. I have engaged in many long, exhaustive and completely useless conversations with the staff of the junior secondary school about whether beating is an effective form of discipline. I’ve beseeched them to be more creative in their discipline regimen, and given the teachers suggestions, to no avail. I’d like to be able to say that I had some effect on this practice and somehow knew how to stop it completely or even reduce it but I can’t.
I am ashamed to say that there are days when hearing the sound of the freshly stripped stick whizzing through the air towards some child’s rear end has been more than I can handle and I have to walk away. I’ve had to leave meetings because I can’t stand to hear the children’s cries (“Lorato-they are pretending. They are not hurting. They will be laughing in a minute. You don’t understand our culture. You think we are abusing them but they are very naughty”). I haven’t yet decided if it’s worse to hear the children being beaten or to bear to see the look in their eyes as they come from the room where it happened only to see me walking away. Children are beaten with a switch for coming late, for sniffing glue, for not speaking English amongst other offences. I find it hard to say unequivocally that for as much as I enjoy school and learning that I would want to attend school in Seronga.
These are just some of the things that have become a part of my life here that are hard to effectively describe when people ask questions about life here, or make statements like, “Well it’s Peace Corps, didn’t you expect it to be difficult?” Yeah, I did, but not in these ways.
So back at the primary school, I learned on my visit on this particular day that there are over 700 children at the Seronga primary school. From standard 1-7, there are about 100 children each level. And there is sometimes only 1 or 2 teachers for an entire grade level. Seronga, being far from everything, has proven in every government sector (police, clinic, schools, ect) to be a very difficult place to assign people. And the people that are assigned here are generally pissed off about being here (“Lorato- it’s boring here. How can you stand it here? There are no shops and nothing to do. And it’s far from everything, there’s no electricity and these people are backwards. Eish this place is terrible.”) which doesn’t lend to creating a particularly effective work environment.
So without enough teachers the head teacher told me that they have resorted to splitting the classes in two or three groups and then the teacher will rotate amongst the rooms. The children sit by themselves in between waiting for a teacher. This means that some children have gone entire terms without a teacher and are thus missing many basic skills. Someone somewhere in government has decided to introduce teaching schemes (which from what I can understand about what the teacher tells me sounds like some nightmarish developing world version of “no child left behind.” Except that in this version nearly every child is left behind.) The teacher is given the set of topics for the semester and must cover all of them on a certain schedule. Whether the children have the background knowledge and skills to understand the topics or not.
I briefly spoke to France about this, and his complaint was that the children themselves are just slow, or stupid, or inherently ignorant. He claimed to not have had this experience when he taught children “that side” (which is essentially anywhere that’s not here).
Which is where the lightning struck for me.
Anyone can talk shit about their village, or any other village and God knows I often do. It’s one of the most difficult challenges I’ve found with living in Seronga. To go from one situation that’s irritating or frustrating for one reason and stumble across another that’s alarming for another reason altogether can start to feel impossible. It seems an endless cycle of shittiness. Sometimes it seems as though there are altogether too many tragedies, injustices, and unfortunate conditions happening in one small village to know which one to throw my energy at to try to fix. I’ve called Seronga “the place that God forgot” only partly jokingly. It’s a place that’s very, very easy to lose hope in and I have lost my hope, my faith and myself in several times.
And yet I still find myself here.
Because even though God may have forgotten Seronga, it doesn’t mean that I have.
Somehow in all the craziness and heartache and joy and tragedy of this place it became my place. Seronga challenged me and tested me and pissed me off and somewhere along the way made me fall in love with it. All the things that make me want to run screaming from it are the things that make me know I have to keep fighting for it.
The point of the descriptions above is not just to complain about my life here. It’s an attempt to describe the conditions here not just for myself but to give the situation and the setting of the story for all of those who live it. It’s easy to think of this place in a very surface level “why the hell can’t they get their shit together and deal with this HIV thing” sort of way. I know I’m guilty of it. The picture I’m trying to paint for you is a circular portrait of how I’ve come to understand and deal with my own frustrations about the deeper issues in Seronga.
When I get pissed off and frustrated, I generally find someone who is more pissed off and frustrated than I am, and then try to talk them out of it a bit. It’s a bit ridiculous, but I’ve found it works.
I think any Peace Corps volunteer in any country at some point has to come up with certain strategies to deal with things that at the end of the day are just so very different from home. Like many places in Botswana, Seronga has characteristics that make it frustrating, not just for me as an American, or as an outsider, (but those are personal factors of me that add to my own frustration of the place) but also to those who have ever known anything different, or “better” and this includes other professional Batswana who work here who aren’t from here. Where I am lucky is that I have discovered I am not alone in my frustration. There are actually people living here who are even more pissed off and frustrated than I myself am.
Whether it’s my own uncanny sense of timing or some crazy instance of serendipity, it seems I find these people just when I need to.
Speaking with France something sprung in me when he told me those children were stupid. The fire within me was relit from the embers of disappointment and the faint glow of disillusion with a spark of indignation.
For as often as I might, in a moment of weakness, speculate the same thing about the villagers in my own head, for someone else to say it was blasphemy. These children were from my village, which in African tradition makes them mine. I know for a fact there are many bright children in that room, whether they be book smart or village smart or what. And I know even more that I believe in them.
As France is a man who claimed to want to marry me I decided that I had a quite a bit of leeway in terms of what I could get away with saying to him so I laid into him a bit. I argued that if he indeed were to go back and teach the students at the level they are at instead of trying to go along with the syllabus and teaching them things that were ahead of math concepts they had ever reached, he might find more success. If the children were failing perhaps it was his inability as a teacher and not the children’s inabilities as students that was falling short of the mark. If he tried some new things, or different methods, or went off the beaten government mandated path of teaching he might have better results.
Now generally the tone of the culture here tends to be quite docile and accepting, with a focus on keeping the peace at all costs. Arguments or heated discussions are an exception, they’re very rare, and have a few possible outcomes. It generally either freaks a person out or they’re intrigued by it. Women in particular tend to be relatively subservient here as well, at least in public. (In reality they’re running many aspects of the home, the community and the government… Just under the radar.) My behavior right now was throwing my colleague (or former potential suitor-although in my defense, I tend to give men an extensive list of reasons why they would never want me for a wife almost before they finish the last breath of their proposal of marriage) for a bit of a loop, but luckily my buddy France tended to be in the former group and was open to my somewhat forceful suggestion.
We briefly discussed how we could approach the day’s lesson differently, and he agreed to follow my lead, and we would reteach the day’s lesson in tandem, with him taking over once we got started. With the children I modeled a more gentle approach, working around the room rather than sitting at the desk and getting down near each child’s level. I showed them a different way of multiplying by grouping the numbers without the hash marks, and gave them more time to think through the answer, no matter how long it may take. I watched as not only the children’s confidence but France’s enthusiasm increased. By the end there were still a few children counting on their fingers and using hash marks, but the classroom overall expressed a ton more enthusiasm about the idea of memorizing the multiplication tables by next week. I agreed to come and help him for the rest of the term on selected days if he agreed to try new things (and to not beat the children). I’ve taken to quizzing the children that I recognize when I see them in the village on any number of random multiplication tables, and they have also begun to quiz me, although I think they think I’m some sort of magician when I can answer them immediately without thinking (God bless the American education system.)
In the end in Seronga, we’re all in this together. Sometimes the only way of pulling myself out of a shitty mood and reigniting my own hope is to try to do it for someone else. It was by pushing France to be a better teacher, to expect more from himself and believe more in his students that I managed to pull myself out of my frustration. I’m not going to change everything here, and maybe nothing will change, but perhaps if I keep wearing at the things that bother me instead of letting them wear on me, something good will come. I guess I must just focus on trying to create a moment or two of joy and hope amongst the misery and irritation and will be enough. Perhaps all it can take is a little push.
It had been an “I hate Botswana” type of morning. As I’ve said, I’m no Susie Sunshine pants, and these times occur. It’s my reality on occasion. I had been at the clinic, and had sat through a meeting in which the doctor (call me simple, call me crazy, call me whatever, everyone else does… but I tend to hold someone who is a doctor up to slightly higher standards, for better of for worse) had complained that there was no “motivation” (read money, t-shirts, food, ect) involved with participation in the upcoming vitamin A campaign.
As soon as the words left his lips the other local staff also began to complain. Perhaps it was the fact that it was Friday morning and it had been a long week, or perhaps I had just reached the end of some rope. Whatever my personal “motivation”, I found myself wondering quite loudly, “I’m confused as to why people want more money for completing tasks that are in their job description, during hours they are already being paid to work?” Wrong statement, as all the staff chimed in with variations of the phrase “Lorato… You’re trying to kill us with too much work.” In reality all the vitamin A campaign meant was that the staff would have less time in the afternoon to sit around in the waiting room and shoot the breeze. For one or maybe two weeks. When I tried to talk to one nurse privately about it later, he actually said very seriously “Lorato, that time in the afternoon is for us to rest.”
Granted, when there are patients the nurses are generally working very hard. There is no concept of appointments for the most part in African medical clinics. Everyone just shows up in the morning and waits until it is their turn. The afternoons are generally quiet, which makes sense in the heat of the day, especially in summertime, unless there is a woman in labor or an emergency. On Mondays the nurses have incredibly long days and get up at the crack of dawn to collect blood, and when patients have to go to the other side the auxiliary staff can spend a great deal of time on the road (for which they are paid overtime). I can see and understand all this.
Most days, however, I stop by there in the afternoon and the staff is just sitting around. I can do this about one day a week, and enjoy it sometimes as it can be a good opportunity to chat with the staff and learn more about the different cultures that I live amongst. More than about one or two days in a week, however, and then I begin to lose my mind, so I’ve begun to spend a lot less time at the clinic. I go in the morning and usually leave for the police or school or mortuary. I’ve found that since I’ve changed my schedule to include being out in the village more it has made me more visible and accepted in the community. More people approach me and bounce ideas off me, and many more go out of their way to greet me even in other villages, which continues to astound my fellow PC friends.
But there’s a little tiny American piece of me that seems to be unwilling to die that believes in order to have something better you must work hard for it and earn it. This sometimes involves sacrifice. It can be tough to work amongst people whom are generally making a few times what I am making monthly and listen to them complain about what they feel entitled to. Especially knowing how much better off they generally are than most of the patients in the village they serve.
I have learned in Seronga that there are some times when I just need to walk away. On this particular day I packed a few thousand pills into individual dosage envelopes and informed the staff I would be going to the school. I had planned to meet with one of the teachers who had proposed marriage to me last week at the ferry (which I denied but suggested we could work on a project together if he could be a professional about it as a consolation… this is how I meet many of the people I collaborate with, unfortunately) to plan how to undertake creating a world map mural on the wall of the primary school.
The teachers at the primary had long been complaining that I only work with the junior secondary school, which they decided was because there is generated electricity there. In reality it is because the older children tend to speak a bit more English, but I agreed, it probably was unfair. So I began to try to think of possible projects to do at the primary school. I’ve learned that if I ask people here what they want to do, they tend to respond “whatever you want to do, Lorato.” I realized I have to be the one that comes up with some suggestions and then let them pick. When I was at the hardware store with a map one day and discovered that some of the women working there didn’t know how to find Botswana on the map that there might be a big, raging need for a map of the world to be displayed somewhere prominently in order to educate the whole village. It’s another pipe dream that this will actually make an impact, but I’ve found in the Peace Corps you gotta live on pipe dreams or you’ll starve. Or go crazy. Whichever.
So I went to the primary school to check my friend France. Despite attempting to slip in unnoticed and not disturb the class in session, my arrival was heralded as though the president himself had made a surprise visit. France, the teacher, who had been sitting at his desk playing with his phone, jumped up and greeted me, introducing me to the students and nearly bowing to me in his excitement. The children appeared to be discussing the day’s topic amongst themselves, and many who recognized me from the village began to whisper to each other more excitedly. I quickly gave up any thought I had had of observing quietly and decided to check how the students were doing with the days lesson.
The topic appeared to be multiplying decimals. As I wandered around the room checking the students work I noticed many, many hash marks on papers and numerous children counting their fingers under their breath. These children were standard fives, which is somewhere between an American 3rd and 5th grader, but many of them were older than typical 5th graders, as it seems that children often start school later in the villages. When a child begins school often depends on if they have any older siblings or family they can stay with in the village as their parents will likely spend a great deal of time away from the village during the year at the cattle post, or lands where they keep their animals and crops. It also depends on if and when the parents can get the money together to pay for school fees. I think sometimes children just eventually reach an age where they can stay in the village and manage to get themselves to and from school ok by themselves. As I checked their work it seemed very few of them knew their multiplication tables. I was horrified, but unfortunately not surprised.
The emphasis on education is increasing on this side of the delta, but there are many barriers to education being effective. School is supposed to be taught in English, which is many of the children’s 2nd, 3rd or even 4th language. Most of the educational materials are in English or Setswana, the country’s two national languages. In a village where many of the parents have a form three (between 8th and 10th grade) or even standard 7 (elementary school) education and their mother tongue may be Sheyai, Simbugushu, or one of the Sesarwa languages, which they may or may not know how to read or write, it’s difficult to expect them to emphasize the importance of education. If the parents haven’t passed away from HIV.
Beating is also common in schools, mostly at the older level, but I believe it also happens at the primary school. I have engaged in many long, exhaustive and completely useless conversations with the staff of the junior secondary school about whether beating is an effective form of discipline. I’ve beseeched them to be more creative in their discipline regimen, and given the teachers suggestions, to no avail. I’d like to be able to say that I had some effect on this practice and somehow knew how to stop it completely or even reduce it but I can’t.
I am ashamed to say that there are days when hearing the sound of the freshly stripped stick whizzing through the air towards some child’s rear end has been more than I can handle and I have to walk away. I’ve had to leave meetings because I can’t stand to hear the children’s cries (“Lorato-they are pretending. They are not hurting. They will be laughing in a minute. You don’t understand our culture. You think we are abusing them but they are very naughty”). I haven’t yet decided if it’s worse to hear the children being beaten or to bear to see the look in their eyes as they come from the room where it happened only to see me walking away. Children are beaten with a switch for coming late, for sniffing glue, for not speaking English amongst other offences. I find it hard to say unequivocally that for as much as I enjoy school and learning that I would want to attend school in Seronga.
These are just some of the things that have become a part of my life here that are hard to effectively describe when people ask questions about life here, or make statements like, “Well it’s Peace Corps, didn’t you expect it to be difficult?” Yeah, I did, but not in these ways.
So back at the primary school, I learned on my visit on this particular day that there are over 700 children at the Seronga primary school. From standard 1-7, there are about 100 children each level. And there is sometimes only 1 or 2 teachers for an entire grade level. Seronga, being far from everything, has proven in every government sector (police, clinic, schools, ect) to be a very difficult place to assign people. And the people that are assigned here are generally pissed off about being here (“Lorato- it’s boring here. How can you stand it here? There are no shops and nothing to do. And it’s far from everything, there’s no electricity and these people are backwards. Eish this place is terrible.”) which doesn’t lend to creating a particularly effective work environment.
So without enough teachers the head teacher told me that they have resorted to splitting the classes in two or three groups and then the teacher will rotate amongst the rooms. The children sit by themselves in between waiting for a teacher. This means that some children have gone entire terms without a teacher and are thus missing many basic skills. Someone somewhere in government has decided to introduce teaching schemes (which from what I can understand about what the teacher tells me sounds like some nightmarish developing world version of “no child left behind.” Except that in this version nearly every child is left behind.) The teacher is given the set of topics for the semester and must cover all of them on a certain schedule. Whether the children have the background knowledge and skills to understand the topics or not.
I briefly spoke to France about this, and his complaint was that the children themselves are just slow, or stupid, or inherently ignorant. He claimed to not have had this experience when he taught children “that side” (which is essentially anywhere that’s not here).
Which is where the lightning struck for me.
Anyone can talk shit about their village, or any other village and God knows I often do. It’s one of the most difficult challenges I’ve found with living in Seronga. To go from one situation that’s irritating or frustrating for one reason and stumble across another that’s alarming for another reason altogether can start to feel impossible. It seems an endless cycle of shittiness. Sometimes it seems as though there are altogether too many tragedies, injustices, and unfortunate conditions happening in one small village to know which one to throw my energy at to try to fix. I’ve called Seronga “the place that God forgot” only partly jokingly. It’s a place that’s very, very easy to lose hope in and I have lost my hope, my faith and myself in several times.
And yet I still find myself here.
Because even though God may have forgotten Seronga, it doesn’t mean that I have.
Somehow in all the craziness and heartache and joy and tragedy of this place it became my place. Seronga challenged me and tested me and pissed me off and somewhere along the way made me fall in love with it. All the things that make me want to run screaming from it are the things that make me know I have to keep fighting for it.
The point of the descriptions above is not just to complain about my life here. It’s an attempt to describe the conditions here not just for myself but to give the situation and the setting of the story for all of those who live it. It’s easy to think of this place in a very surface level “why the hell can’t they get their shit together and deal with this HIV thing” sort of way. I know I’m guilty of it. The picture I’m trying to paint for you is a circular portrait of how I’ve come to understand and deal with my own frustrations about the deeper issues in Seronga.
When I get pissed off and frustrated, I generally find someone who is more pissed off and frustrated than I am, and then try to talk them out of it a bit. It’s a bit ridiculous, but I’ve found it works.
I think any Peace Corps volunteer in any country at some point has to come up with certain strategies to deal with things that at the end of the day are just so very different from home. Like many places in Botswana, Seronga has characteristics that make it frustrating, not just for me as an American, or as an outsider, (but those are personal factors of me that add to my own frustration of the place) but also to those who have ever known anything different, or “better” and this includes other professional Batswana who work here who aren’t from here. Where I am lucky is that I have discovered I am not alone in my frustration. There are actually people living here who are even more pissed off and frustrated than I myself am.
Whether it’s my own uncanny sense of timing or some crazy instance of serendipity, it seems I find these people just when I need to.
Speaking with France something sprung in me when he told me those children were stupid. The fire within me was relit from the embers of disappointment and the faint glow of disillusion with a spark of indignation.
For as often as I might, in a moment of weakness, speculate the same thing about the villagers in my own head, for someone else to say it was blasphemy. These children were from my village, which in African tradition makes them mine. I know for a fact there are many bright children in that room, whether they be book smart or village smart or what. And I know even more that I believe in them.
As France is a man who claimed to want to marry me I decided that I had a quite a bit of leeway in terms of what I could get away with saying to him so I laid into him a bit. I argued that if he indeed were to go back and teach the students at the level they are at instead of trying to go along with the syllabus and teaching them things that were ahead of math concepts they had ever reached, he might find more success. If the children were failing perhaps it was his inability as a teacher and not the children’s inabilities as students that was falling short of the mark. If he tried some new things, or different methods, or went off the beaten government mandated path of teaching he might have better results.
Now generally the tone of the culture here tends to be quite docile and accepting, with a focus on keeping the peace at all costs. Arguments or heated discussions are an exception, they’re very rare, and have a few possible outcomes. It generally either freaks a person out or they’re intrigued by it. Women in particular tend to be relatively subservient here as well, at least in public. (In reality they’re running many aspects of the home, the community and the government… Just under the radar.) My behavior right now was throwing my colleague (or former potential suitor-although in my defense, I tend to give men an extensive list of reasons why they would never want me for a wife almost before they finish the last breath of their proposal of marriage) for a bit of a loop, but luckily my buddy France tended to be in the former group and was open to my somewhat forceful suggestion.
We briefly discussed how we could approach the day’s lesson differently, and he agreed to follow my lead, and we would reteach the day’s lesson in tandem, with him taking over once we got started. With the children I modeled a more gentle approach, working around the room rather than sitting at the desk and getting down near each child’s level. I showed them a different way of multiplying by grouping the numbers without the hash marks, and gave them more time to think through the answer, no matter how long it may take. I watched as not only the children’s confidence but France’s enthusiasm increased. By the end there were still a few children counting on their fingers and using hash marks, but the classroom overall expressed a ton more enthusiasm about the idea of memorizing the multiplication tables by next week. I agreed to come and help him for the rest of the term on selected days if he agreed to try new things (and to not beat the children). I’ve taken to quizzing the children that I recognize when I see them in the village on any number of random multiplication tables, and they have also begun to quiz me, although I think they think I’m some sort of magician when I can answer them immediately without thinking (God bless the American education system.)
In the end in Seronga, we’re all in this together. Sometimes the only way of pulling myself out of a shitty mood and reigniting my own hope is to try to do it for someone else. It was by pushing France to be a better teacher, to expect more from himself and believe more in his students that I managed to pull myself out of my frustration. I’m not going to change everything here, and maybe nothing will change, but perhaps if I keep wearing at the things that bother me instead of letting them wear on me, something good will come. I guess I must just focus on trying to create a moment or two of joy and hope amongst the misery and irritation and will be enough. Perhaps all it can take is a little push.
Hostess with the Mostess?
In which my time as Seronga’s social chair and bed and breakfast continues…
Over the course of my time in Seronga I’ve come to host more than a few strangers in my yard or house. They come to me in very strange ways, through a friend of an acquaintance, a friend of a stranger, through the blog, whatever. On one occasion some Americans were hitching down in the BDF (Botswana Defense Force) tank and it stopped as they saw me out on my run and figured that as “a white” I would probably know what to do with some “other whites”. So the fact that these two Aussies and one American had been given my name and phone number by not one but two people in the course of their travels didn’t surprise me in the least.
I learned they were coming when my friend Drew from Bana Ba Metsi called out of the blue one Wednesday evening. I was in the middle of my girls book club, but as is policy in Botswana, left the girls reading as I went to take the call. After we had spent a precious few (expensive) phone call minutes going through not only the requisite Batswana pleasantries but also Drew’s mandatory British greeting exchange, we got to the point of his call. He mentioned that he was giving some backpackers a lift on the other side of the river and they were headed my way, and rather than allow him to waste more of his cell phone minutes beating around his British bush I interjected, “Sure they can stay here.” It certainly wasn’t the first time I had invited complete strangers to camp out at my house. I have come to see it as part of my karmic duty to help my fellow seekers in any way that I can. It always breaks up the monotony for me, and I usually get at the very least interesting company and conversation out of the deal. In the past I’ve also had a guest that sewed my mosquito netting onto my burglar door so that I can sleep with the door opened (and locked!).
I went about completing my book group meeting and went for my run not having any idea if (or when) they might end up showing up at my place in the evening. I was splashing around in my (mostly cold) bucket bath when one of the villagers called asking where they should drop the makgowa (white people-plural) that wanted to see me. I threw on some clothes and met them at the main road, as although I now have the new landmark of electricity poles (the rumor is that Seronga will be electrified by generators at least as of July, and we might be on the actual grid before Christmas. I’ll believe it when I see the light-yup that’s a lame joke. I need these visitors to keep me sane probably much more than they need a place to crash.) and can say that I live exactly 15 poles from the second, smaller, brown “welcome to Seronga village” sign across the road down the right, this new information does nobody any good in the dark.
So two Australians and an American walk into my yard (yeah this would make the start of a great joke had there been a bar in Seronga-it’s closed- that they could’ve walked into, the story might have been funnier, but it’s pretty good as it is.). They pitched their tents in the dark and I introduced them to the various amenities available to them at the casa de Lorato, including a stove on which to cook (yeah I usually burn out on cooking for more people than just myself-and really when it’s just me I eat a shocking variety of things cold out of the fridge- what would you do without a microwave- after about one meal. Hey I know I’m not a great cook and so if someone else likes doing it more power to em!) and my luxurious mostly cold water splash bathing situation. The three of them were very cool, and by the end of the night I was inviting them to stay as long as they wanted and Liam was giving me some music and movies. I warned them that the next morning I had to head to Gumare super early and left them with one of my famous hand-drawn maps of Seronga. They were going to check out the Poler’s Trust to maybe try to take a Mokoro trip (the dugout canoe looking boats which are poled like gondolas in Venice through the reeded canals of the delta by a local guy). They hadn’t decided if they were going to stay at my place the next night.
There were still two tents in my yard when I got home from a hellish and brief trip to Gumare late the next evening. My new houseguests (yard guests?) hadn’t gone on a Mokoro trip when they discovered the price to be nearly double what it said in the lonely planet and had been enjoying staying in an actual village. Looked like they were here for a while. Game on.
Throughout the next few days the boys built me a solar shower that works great when used in the middle of the day (but also helps store a decent amount of water in a pipe to use when the water goes out). Les and I enjoyed being able to hang out with another American chick who loves travel, and we did pedicures and discussed the elements of making a place feel like home. She also taught me the finer points of packing light (She is incredible and incredibly ruthless when it comes to packing. She rips pages out of books to make them lighter and managed to find a United States Military Government issue Vietnam era can opener. It’s a tiny wonder. The girl carries about 14 kgs and has done amazing things with her passport, and will easily meet her goal of traveling to 50 countries before she reaches 30. She’s a new personal hero.) Liam taught me about photography, introduced me to new music and “Flight of the Conchords” and gave me a copy of the movie (how fitting) Australia! Gavin… Well Gavin, along with being really instrumental in the creation of the solar shower, taught me the value of emergency vodka, and relaxing as an essential way of life and the benefits of early retirement (although 25 might be a touch young for that…)
They were in Seronga for a few days, and I did manage to at least get them a boat ride on the delta for free (I consider it my personal duty to serve as the American Ambassador to Seronga. Sure I’m self appointed and there’s no other American to oppose me but whatever-some privileges come with isolation…. What is that quote about absolute power….?;-) it corrupts absolutely… right. Well. So even though I failed to get them a flight over the delta- which in some ways wasn’t my fault as the plane that was in that day had had many of it’s seats taken out as it had brought a coffin in for a funeral. Bloody legality of needing a seat and seatbelt to fly in a plane!) as well as an evening and several hours in Simon’s sparkling company.
By their last night in Seronga I had also found some Israelis in the village who were making a fatal error of trying to hitch out of Seronga at around 4PM. Knowing they wouldn’t make it to the ferry even if they did manage to find a lift, I offered them to camp in my yard. They politely declined but sure enough an hour later one of the villagers lead them up to my gate. I figured the more the merrier. 6 people ended up being a bit of a squeeze on the limitations on one room in terms of cooking and bathing, but luckily these people were backpackers and we could all handle it. I learned to say the essential phrase (“improve my hut”) that I think has become a condition of people visiting me in Seronga in Hebrew which is good.
By this time the Aussies and American had begun to feel like family, and I squeezed them all into the hut for the night so they wouldn’t have to re-pitch their tents in the sand and could get an early start in the morning. I’m happy to report Gavin adhered to the bed conditions which were “you can sleep in my bed if you keep your hands to yourself.” We were close, but not THAT close. Liam and Les reported being very comfortable on my paupasan mat on the floor.
I was sad to see them go the next morning. I waited out by the roadside with them for Simon and they said if I wanted to skip out on the whole Peace Corps bit I was welcome to join them traveling, they had discussed it and decided I’d make a good fourth, which was an honor. I realized that although I enjoy traveling, I’m probably not that hardcore, and do better with a homebase in an area from which to travel for short periods like weekends, rather than say years (as they were doing. As I’ve said, hard core). As they say, there’s no place like home, which somewhere between here and there I’ve realized Seronga has begun to be.
We said our goodbyes and Simon picked them up to take them up to Shakawe. He also got them a lift for free to the Namibian border, and even stopped to let them grab their beloved rubix cube, which they had accidentally left with Drew from Bana Ba Metsi (cue the Aussies are thieves jokes that really didn’t work as Drew is the British one… but whatever.) who had then buried it in the sand in a plastic baggie for them (and that, my friends, is what you call making a plan!). My hut felt empty with only me there, but I knew that these weren’t the first, and certainly wouldn’t be the last houseguests. I’ll just have to figure out what the next home improvement I can challenge the next ones with will be. ;-0
And Liam, thanks for posting those amazing photos on facebook! I've gotten lots of compliments!!! I hope you guys are still having fun and that your travels are going well, and safely!
Over the course of my time in Seronga I’ve come to host more than a few strangers in my yard or house. They come to me in very strange ways, through a friend of an acquaintance, a friend of a stranger, through the blog, whatever. On one occasion some Americans were hitching down in the BDF (Botswana Defense Force) tank and it stopped as they saw me out on my run and figured that as “a white” I would probably know what to do with some “other whites”. So the fact that these two Aussies and one American had been given my name and phone number by not one but two people in the course of their travels didn’t surprise me in the least.
I learned they were coming when my friend Drew from Bana Ba Metsi called out of the blue one Wednesday evening. I was in the middle of my girls book club, but as is policy in Botswana, left the girls reading as I went to take the call. After we had spent a precious few (expensive) phone call minutes going through not only the requisite Batswana pleasantries but also Drew’s mandatory British greeting exchange, we got to the point of his call. He mentioned that he was giving some backpackers a lift on the other side of the river and they were headed my way, and rather than allow him to waste more of his cell phone minutes beating around his British bush I interjected, “Sure they can stay here.” It certainly wasn’t the first time I had invited complete strangers to camp out at my house. I have come to see it as part of my karmic duty to help my fellow seekers in any way that I can. It always breaks up the monotony for me, and I usually get at the very least interesting company and conversation out of the deal. In the past I’ve also had a guest that sewed my mosquito netting onto my burglar door so that I can sleep with the door opened (and locked!).
I went about completing my book group meeting and went for my run not having any idea if (or when) they might end up showing up at my place in the evening. I was splashing around in my (mostly cold) bucket bath when one of the villagers called asking where they should drop the makgowa (white people-plural) that wanted to see me. I threw on some clothes and met them at the main road, as although I now have the new landmark of electricity poles (the rumor is that Seronga will be electrified by generators at least as of July, and we might be on the actual grid before Christmas. I’ll believe it when I see the light-yup that’s a lame joke. I need these visitors to keep me sane probably much more than they need a place to crash.) and can say that I live exactly 15 poles from the second, smaller, brown “welcome to Seronga village” sign across the road down the right, this new information does nobody any good in the dark.
So two Australians and an American walk into my yard (yeah this would make the start of a great joke had there been a bar in Seronga-it’s closed- that they could’ve walked into, the story might have been funnier, but it’s pretty good as it is.). They pitched their tents in the dark and I introduced them to the various amenities available to them at the casa de Lorato, including a stove on which to cook (yeah I usually burn out on cooking for more people than just myself-and really when it’s just me I eat a shocking variety of things cold out of the fridge- what would you do without a microwave- after about one meal. Hey I know I’m not a great cook and so if someone else likes doing it more power to em!) and my luxurious mostly cold water splash bathing situation. The three of them were very cool, and by the end of the night I was inviting them to stay as long as they wanted and Liam was giving me some music and movies. I warned them that the next morning I had to head to Gumare super early and left them with one of my famous hand-drawn maps of Seronga. They were going to check out the Poler’s Trust to maybe try to take a Mokoro trip (the dugout canoe looking boats which are poled like gondolas in Venice through the reeded canals of the delta by a local guy). They hadn’t decided if they were going to stay at my place the next night.
There were still two tents in my yard when I got home from a hellish and brief trip to Gumare late the next evening. My new houseguests (yard guests?) hadn’t gone on a Mokoro trip when they discovered the price to be nearly double what it said in the lonely planet and had been enjoying staying in an actual village. Looked like they were here for a while. Game on.
Throughout the next few days the boys built me a solar shower that works great when used in the middle of the day (but also helps store a decent amount of water in a pipe to use when the water goes out). Les and I enjoyed being able to hang out with another American chick who loves travel, and we did pedicures and discussed the elements of making a place feel like home. She also taught me the finer points of packing light (She is incredible and incredibly ruthless when it comes to packing. She rips pages out of books to make them lighter and managed to find a United States Military Government issue Vietnam era can opener. It’s a tiny wonder. The girl carries about 14 kgs and has done amazing things with her passport, and will easily meet her goal of traveling to 50 countries before she reaches 30. She’s a new personal hero.) Liam taught me about photography, introduced me to new music and “Flight of the Conchords” and gave me a copy of the movie (how fitting) Australia! Gavin… Well Gavin, along with being really instrumental in the creation of the solar shower, taught me the value of emergency vodka, and relaxing as an essential way of life and the benefits of early retirement (although 25 might be a touch young for that…)
They were in Seronga for a few days, and I did manage to at least get them a boat ride on the delta for free (I consider it my personal duty to serve as the American Ambassador to Seronga. Sure I’m self appointed and there’s no other American to oppose me but whatever-some privileges come with isolation…. What is that quote about absolute power….?;-) it corrupts absolutely… right. Well. So even though I failed to get them a flight over the delta- which in some ways wasn’t my fault as the plane that was in that day had had many of it’s seats taken out as it had brought a coffin in for a funeral. Bloody legality of needing a seat and seatbelt to fly in a plane!) as well as an evening and several hours in Simon’s sparkling company.
By their last night in Seronga I had also found some Israelis in the village who were making a fatal error of trying to hitch out of Seronga at around 4PM. Knowing they wouldn’t make it to the ferry even if they did manage to find a lift, I offered them to camp in my yard. They politely declined but sure enough an hour later one of the villagers lead them up to my gate. I figured the more the merrier. 6 people ended up being a bit of a squeeze on the limitations on one room in terms of cooking and bathing, but luckily these people were backpackers and we could all handle it. I learned to say the essential phrase (“improve my hut”) that I think has become a condition of people visiting me in Seronga in Hebrew which is good.
By this time the Aussies and American had begun to feel like family, and I squeezed them all into the hut for the night so they wouldn’t have to re-pitch their tents in the sand and could get an early start in the morning. I’m happy to report Gavin adhered to the bed conditions which were “you can sleep in my bed if you keep your hands to yourself.” We were close, but not THAT close. Liam and Les reported being very comfortable on my paupasan mat on the floor.
I was sad to see them go the next morning. I waited out by the roadside with them for Simon and they said if I wanted to skip out on the whole Peace Corps bit I was welcome to join them traveling, they had discussed it and decided I’d make a good fourth, which was an honor. I realized that although I enjoy traveling, I’m probably not that hardcore, and do better with a homebase in an area from which to travel for short periods like weekends, rather than say years (as they were doing. As I’ve said, hard core). As they say, there’s no place like home, which somewhere between here and there I’ve realized Seronga has begun to be.
We said our goodbyes and Simon picked them up to take them up to Shakawe. He also got them a lift for free to the Namibian border, and even stopped to let them grab their beloved rubix cube, which they had accidentally left with Drew from Bana Ba Metsi (cue the Aussies are thieves jokes that really didn’t work as Drew is the British one… but whatever.) who had then buried it in the sand in a plastic baggie for them (and that, my friends, is what you call making a plan!). My hut felt empty with only me there, but I knew that these weren’t the first, and certainly wouldn’t be the last houseguests. I’ll just have to figure out what the next home improvement I can challenge the next ones with will be. ;-0
And Liam, thanks for posting those amazing photos on facebook! I've gotten lots of compliments!!! I hope you guys are still having fun and that your travels are going well, and safely!
Upgrade: A mostly warn shower!
Over the time I’ve lived in Seronga I’ve gotten used to some things. One of them is my bathing situation. I’m getting to be an expert bucket bather, and I only usually find myself in tears over my desire for a hot shower or bath or really any amount of hot water to be touching my whole body simultaneously after about a month in Seronga. I’m used to it. But it could, admittedly be better.
Enter the Aussies.
(Sorry guys. I’m usually better at coming up with genius nicknames but I’m failing here. You’re left for the eternity of the blog as the Aussies. Hope you don’t mind.)
Although my new house guests were incredibly flexible and undemanding and seemed to fit comfortably right in (perhaps the outback is another terms for bush ;-) in my luxury accommodations they decided at some point in the first day that there was room for capacity to be built in Seronga, namely in my hut. On the second evening we were chatting and I realized the time, temperature and amount of water I would have to heat on the stove and excused myself for my evening splash bath.
And genius suddenly struck my houseguests.
Liam mentioned that he and Gavin had decided they thought they would be building me a solar shower. In their wanderings around the village that day they had come upon the hardware store in their attempts to locate the bottle shop (they’re in the same complex of buildings).They had been at the hardware store and discovered that the humble offerings in Seronga appeared to just about have the supplies to create such a thing. I remained cautiously optimistic.
So the next day we go to the hardware store. I soon found myself haggling with the staff because from the time we were quoted prices for piping in the morning until the time we showed up ready to buy in the afternoon the prices had mysteriously doubled. I was ready to give up. It’s continuously disheartening to me when I find that people I interact with every day can so effortlessly attempt to screw me over with no shame or apology. There was some story about them misquoting the price to me in the am, despite me taking someone outside to show them the exact piping I wanted, as well as confirming the price several times. It was time to call in the big dogs. Or rather big dog.
As with most things in Seronga, this project could definitely come off without Simon, but was made both simpler and more complicated, as well as infinitely more entertaining by his presence.
So in the middle of these near to tears negotiations with the women I check in on nearly daily, Simon shows up. He’s flustered and muttering about a plane coming this side and transport. It seems as more white people move to this side of the delta the responsibilities of the white people already living here are increased based on the fact that life in Seronga is in fact, as Simon himself says, “simpler, but not easier.” Meaning that yes, the village life is lovely in its generally calm and quiet serenity, but this is a direct trade off for the increased difficulty of getting simple (and yet occasionally essential to one’s little piece of sanity on this island) provisions, such as cheese, affordable cement, petrol to run generators, fresh fruit, ect, ect. It seems Simon has become the director of transport, import/export and general movements in Seronga, a title he enjoys marginally, and bitches about constantly.
So Simon’s in a bit of a state. As he takes in my state, he shakes his head at the ladies, declares the whole thing highway robbery and decides we’re going to see what we can do to find the supplies we need in Seronga’s other supplier of general goods, Simon’s own yard. The guys and I load into the back of the pickup and we’re off.
Within about 30 seconds the four of us are tramping through the bushiest, likely most snake and creature filled area of Simon’s yard in search of piping. When we find it, near his sewage tank, it’s filled with a foul smelling liquid that once may have been water, but isn’t currently very promising in terms of something I want to stand my body under in an attempt to get clean. But at this point it’s free, it’s there, and beggars can’t be choosers. We attempt to rinse it out and begin the search for fittings. It’s altogether a more difficult, involved scenario than I had imagined, which reminded me why although Simon had growled something about the simplicity of completing this very task a few months back, I had yet to attempt to undertake it. In this instance, with all this testosterone flowing and all those present needing to prove themselves and complete the task, I decided to just sit back and watch. And wait for the fireworks.
I’ve recently noticed that Simon can get a little funny when I bring friends around. I noticed this is especially true when they’re guys. It’s like everyone, regardless of the circumstances, might be a potential suitor, and thus everyone is put up to some crazy Simon test. Very few past muster upon the later analysis. Thank God no one that comes to the bush is trying to actually date me or we might have a problem on our hands.
So through the process of these two guys attempting to make my life a bit more pleasant Simon sort of put them a bit through the wringer. Whenever one of them had a suggestion or idea Simon was ready to inform them why it wouldn’t work. When one of them starting using a tool to do something it was either the wrong technique, or too slow or he just looked on shaking his head. Like the lone male in the elephant herd he was waiting for one of the guys to earn his respect by showing him up, and when it didn’t happen they were both dismissed, in Simon’s mind at least, as a threat. It was the scene I’d always watched on TV when the guy picks the girl up for the prom and the father stands threateningly and broodingly in the corner. To me it was slightly hilarious, and I tried to explain the concept of the prom scenario to the guys, but being Aussies, they didn’t quite get it. There’s some crazy animal stuff going on in the bush.
So eventually we got all the necessary pieces in order to put together the shower. Les and I started on our pedicures as I figured my role would be mainly a consultative one as necessary. It ended up that I have a huge loop of black piping running in and out of my window and up onto the roof of the building next door.
Within another hour I had damn hot water running in through a pipe positioned in my window. It was actually too hot to properly stand under but gave me a good three or four warm weekend baths before it got to cold for the winter. A subsequent houseguest has managed to rig it from the ceiling and my short self can mange to stand right under it and actually proper shower. I mean there’s conditions, I have to shower while there is still plenty of sunlight to keep the water warm. The water has to be working in Seronga in order for it to work. There are a few pressure issues. Now that its winter it’s too cold to use it unless it’s the middle of the day and it seems I’ve found myself incredibly busy during the day these days. But generally it’s a big improvement. Upgrade!
Enter the Aussies.
(Sorry guys. I’m usually better at coming up with genius nicknames but I’m failing here. You’re left for the eternity of the blog as the Aussies. Hope you don’t mind.)
Although my new house guests were incredibly flexible and undemanding and seemed to fit comfortably right in (perhaps the outback is another terms for bush ;-) in my luxury accommodations they decided at some point in the first day that there was room for capacity to be built in Seronga, namely in my hut. On the second evening we were chatting and I realized the time, temperature and amount of water I would have to heat on the stove and excused myself for my evening splash bath.
And genius suddenly struck my houseguests.
Liam mentioned that he and Gavin had decided they thought they would be building me a solar shower. In their wanderings around the village that day they had come upon the hardware store in their attempts to locate the bottle shop (they’re in the same complex of buildings).They had been at the hardware store and discovered that the humble offerings in Seronga appeared to just about have the supplies to create such a thing. I remained cautiously optimistic.
So the next day we go to the hardware store. I soon found myself haggling with the staff because from the time we were quoted prices for piping in the morning until the time we showed up ready to buy in the afternoon the prices had mysteriously doubled. I was ready to give up. It’s continuously disheartening to me when I find that people I interact with every day can so effortlessly attempt to screw me over with no shame or apology. There was some story about them misquoting the price to me in the am, despite me taking someone outside to show them the exact piping I wanted, as well as confirming the price several times. It was time to call in the big dogs. Or rather big dog.
As with most things in Seronga, this project could definitely come off without Simon, but was made both simpler and more complicated, as well as infinitely more entertaining by his presence.
So in the middle of these near to tears negotiations with the women I check in on nearly daily, Simon shows up. He’s flustered and muttering about a plane coming this side and transport. It seems as more white people move to this side of the delta the responsibilities of the white people already living here are increased based on the fact that life in Seronga is in fact, as Simon himself says, “simpler, but not easier.” Meaning that yes, the village life is lovely in its generally calm and quiet serenity, but this is a direct trade off for the increased difficulty of getting simple (and yet occasionally essential to one’s little piece of sanity on this island) provisions, such as cheese, affordable cement, petrol to run generators, fresh fruit, ect, ect. It seems Simon has become the director of transport, import/export and general movements in Seronga, a title he enjoys marginally, and bitches about constantly.
So Simon’s in a bit of a state. As he takes in my state, he shakes his head at the ladies, declares the whole thing highway robbery and decides we’re going to see what we can do to find the supplies we need in Seronga’s other supplier of general goods, Simon’s own yard. The guys and I load into the back of the pickup and we’re off.
Within about 30 seconds the four of us are tramping through the bushiest, likely most snake and creature filled area of Simon’s yard in search of piping. When we find it, near his sewage tank, it’s filled with a foul smelling liquid that once may have been water, but isn’t currently very promising in terms of something I want to stand my body under in an attempt to get clean. But at this point it’s free, it’s there, and beggars can’t be choosers. We attempt to rinse it out and begin the search for fittings. It’s altogether a more difficult, involved scenario than I had imagined, which reminded me why although Simon had growled something about the simplicity of completing this very task a few months back, I had yet to attempt to undertake it. In this instance, with all this testosterone flowing and all those present needing to prove themselves and complete the task, I decided to just sit back and watch. And wait for the fireworks.
I’ve recently noticed that Simon can get a little funny when I bring friends around. I noticed this is especially true when they’re guys. It’s like everyone, regardless of the circumstances, might be a potential suitor, and thus everyone is put up to some crazy Simon test. Very few past muster upon the later analysis. Thank God no one that comes to the bush is trying to actually date me or we might have a problem on our hands.
So through the process of these two guys attempting to make my life a bit more pleasant Simon sort of put them a bit through the wringer. Whenever one of them had a suggestion or idea Simon was ready to inform them why it wouldn’t work. When one of them starting using a tool to do something it was either the wrong technique, or too slow or he just looked on shaking his head. Like the lone male in the elephant herd he was waiting for one of the guys to earn his respect by showing him up, and when it didn’t happen they were both dismissed, in Simon’s mind at least, as a threat. It was the scene I’d always watched on TV when the guy picks the girl up for the prom and the father stands threateningly and broodingly in the corner. To me it was slightly hilarious, and I tried to explain the concept of the prom scenario to the guys, but being Aussies, they didn’t quite get it. There’s some crazy animal stuff going on in the bush.
So eventually we got all the necessary pieces in order to put together the shower. Les and I started on our pedicures as I figured my role would be mainly a consultative one as necessary. It ended up that I have a huge loop of black piping running in and out of my window and up onto the roof of the building next door.
Within another hour I had damn hot water running in through a pipe positioned in my window. It was actually too hot to properly stand under but gave me a good three or four warm weekend baths before it got to cold for the winter. A subsequent houseguest has managed to rig it from the ceiling and my short self can mange to stand right under it and actually proper shower. I mean there’s conditions, I have to shower while there is still plenty of sunlight to keep the water warm. The water has to be working in Seronga in order for it to work. There are a few pressure issues. Now that its winter it’s too cold to use it unless it’s the middle of the day and it seems I’ve found myself incredibly busy during the day these days. But generally it’s a big improvement. Upgrade!
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