Botswana Baby Shower!

A few weeks after I got to site I was on one of the runs I take through the village that end up hurting my knees and confounding those around me. The sand is deep and awkward to run in, and with the heat blasting you from above, and from the aforementioned sand below, there just seems to be no logical reason to be running ANYWHERE. People in the village laugh at me, ask me what am I doing, if I’m training, what for, where I’m going, if I’m thirsty, if I’ll die from this craziness?
I generally make it sort of near the police station which is at the other end of town, and stop in there to say hi to them and to see what’s happening. As this is Seronga, the answer is generally nothing. On this day however, the two female officers I have come to know were wrapping up baby items in cloth diapers. I had heard there was a baby shower in the village this weekend, but I had thus far failed to procure an invite (although to be honest, I hadn’t tried very hard). I managed to get one by asking them what they were wrapping. D explained that there was a baby shower on the teacher’s housing tonight, and would I accompany her?
We arranged to meet at the bottle store (a nice central location) in town after I had gone home to shower and get ready. On my way to the bottle store I text all my PC friends in Bots, proclaiming a victory of integration for myself.
I met D and we arrived at the house which the party was being held. I walked in to the usual situation of when I walk into any room here, which is people staring and whispering about the Lekgowa who has crashed their party. A few girls embraced me and welcomed me in English. I tried to offer my improvised gift of some lavender soap and chapstick, but they didn’t understand what the magazine paper wrapped object was, so I just added it to the pile of diapers, muttering something about gift for the mother.
There were men on the porch, and they soon joined us in the house. This surprised me as in Botswana gender roles are pretty well defined, and male involvement in parenting is not very common. As a matter of fact, the men rarely stay in the same house as the women, and the man is not allowed to sleep in the same room as the woman and baby for the first three months of a baby’s life. Marriage isn’t super common in Botswana due to a number of cultural factors. One is the custom of LaBolla (dowry) which is often many cows, (a lot of money for someone from a communal culture wherein people are obligated to take care of their entire and often extended families, and who don’t often have lots of outside sources of income and jobs) regardless of if a woman wants to participate in the tradition, she doesn’t have a lot of say, as her father and uncles are the ones who do the negotiating. There are additional “damages” that must be paid by the father per child out of wedlock, or even to marry a woman who has children by another man. The Batswana who do have a certain level of education and have gotten trained positions with the government (nurses, teachers, police, ect) are placed wherever the government assigns them without any respect to their spouse. The scarcity of jobs causes those ambitious enough to go after them to make sacrifices, namely having their family raised together with both parents. There are many nurses who may have met their partner during their education and who now live very far away from their spouse. Many of these cultural details of which have also incidentally led to Botswana having the highest rate of HIV in the world…
But back to the shower. I was offered a drink (there was tons of alcohol present) and tried to find a corner on the floor to sit in. I looked around at all the women’s bellies, trying to determine which one was the mother to be. None of them looked far enough along to be holding a baby shower for, and so I asked the woman next to me, whom I had met in the village and knew to be one of the police officers wife. She said that the mother was “shy” and was hiding until all the guests arrived. I should note that the shower was scheduled to begin at 2:00 and it was now 5:30. People continued to show up throughout the night, thus is the concept of time in Botswana.
Finally a woman came out of the closed hallway door in a pink terrycloth bathrobe with a white powdery substance on her face and a necklace of condoms (the joke being that she didn’t know what they were and thus fell pregnant) around her neck. All the women began to hoot and holler and more men who had been drinking outside on the porch came in. I had heard stories of the mother to be being bare breasted during these events but apparently that’s not how it works among the social elite, or showers where men are also present. It’s completely normal for any woman to breast feed publicly here, but those in the government worker categories are often from the cosmopolitan cities of Gaborone or Francistown are often behaviorally and sometimes appearance wise extremely western.
So now the mother was present and the games would begin. In Setswana. The first game was one in which everyone was given a piece of yarn (each of varying lengths) and had to wrap it around their finger as they told introduction details about themselves. They had to keep talking for as long as the string was or else they were “punished”, or at least this is what I could pick up with the limited amount of Setswana I can understand. The “punishments” were either to have baby powder smeared all over your face (punishable offenses also included coming late, talking out of turn, or really anything that pissed the host woman off, as far as I could tell.) or to have to put out one’s hand and have a blob of what I think was some sort of baby food put in to eat. When it came to my turn I blurted out all the details about myself I knew how to convey in Setswana, which was a definite crowd pleaser.
The next game was words written on small slips of paper that one had to describe what it was used for to the new mother. I think the object of this game that was funny was the men trying to explain with much authority what things like “gripe water” are (which was all in the type of Setswana that leads to me still have no idea what gripe water is for, but I think it’s a traditional healing method for colic.) My word was “shawl,” which I took to mean what you strap the baby to yourself with, and I had to talk about in English because that was way beyond the scope of the introduction Sets we had learned in training. I’m still not sure if that’s right because at he end of the day I’m white and people here rarely tell me I’m wrong despite my constant insistence that the only way I’ll learn things is if people correct me when I’m wrong. Then came a lengthy session on advice from the elder women of the group on how to raise a child, and a discussion in which the mother and father to be had to disclose what time they through the baby had been conceived. This appeared to be hilarious to all present. Gift opening was much as it is in America, with the exception that they had to guess who the gifts wrapped all in identical nappies were from. Mine of course being wrapped in a magazine page stuck out and just confused them, but I think they appreciated it.
After all this there was a dance party in the living room and a Brei (barbeque of goat and cow meat) and fire in the front yard. I got a ride home at 10:30 and the baby shower was still going strong (although I was happy to notice that the mother to be did not have a drink in her hand- it’s not uncommon for pregnant women to drink alcohol here). I was tired from listening to so many hours of exclusively Setswana, but I had had a good time.