Ice, Ice, Baby.. In honor of ice, rain, and end of the hottest days of my life.

October is the hottest month in Botswana. It is also known as suicide month. Although I haven’t been updating my blog recently, I have not yet succumbed to that particular fate. Being from Minnesota, land of the ice and snow, I am definitely not accustomed to the kind of heat Southern Africa has to offer.

It kind of sneaks up on you through the month of September. The heat becomes more intense earlier in the day and you realize you need a stronger SPF than the 15 that is build into your facial moisturizer (which is sliding off your face at an alarming rate anyway). Suddenly you are sweating by 7:00 in the morning and find yourself sitting through entire meetings (which are difficult to decipher in the best of times) without realizing anything that has happened. And not caring much. Toward the end of the month no one even bothers any more. People wander around like zombies, and have entire conversations that neither party remembers. I broke down and bought a pink “Minnie Mouse” umbrella to shade my white self from the sun’s crazy hot rays. The duct tape that holds up most of the interior design of my home was melting off the walls and ceiling, and I spent long hours in the slightly cooler than room temperature water of my bathtub, the standard brown floaties worse than usual as the boor hole that feeds the village got closer to dry (I can’t even bear to recount how often I feared for my life as the water was out for many days at a time quite consistently. This was of course not very rational, but then my brain was melting). The candles I used for light in my bathroom and the rest of my house when the electric was out would be sad little puddles around their wine bottle holders when I forgot to put them in the freezer during the day. I was sweating in strange places like behind my knees and the back of my neck, under my eyes and on my wrists. It was as if my armpits had given up the effort it took to properly sweat altogether, or the sweat evaporated before it caused a scene.

During the course of my criminology degree we learned that there is a significant increase in crime during the hot summer months. I have found this is not the case in Seronga as we are all too hot and tired to try to kill each other, and furthermore we don’t want to get that near each other. Panting became an acceptable form of greeting. "Go Mogote" and "Ke Letsatsi" (too hot) quickly joined the meager number of setswana phrases I know.

I found myself spending great heaping periods of time dazed and confused, as that type of heat with no relief certainly must begin to destroy brain cells. I have never been more grateful for the invention of freezers and being in possession of ice in my life. I would freeze two 1.5 liter bottles and carry them frozen in my bag (they only stayed cold for maybe two hours before they were hotter than piss warm again) to work at the clinic. I was constantly fighting people in the village (including little children) away from my precious boiled, filtered and kind of cold water. I was constantly dehydrated and dizzy and a bit ill (this was off course followed by a month of combivir, accompanied by many of the same symptoms-lucky me). I would often sleep curled around another frozen bottle. I tried soaking my sheets, my bedding, my pj's, then I tried sleeping in the altogether, nothing really helped. Although many of my peace corps compatriots also complained of the heat and sleeping many more hours per night (and those lucky bastards had fans..) I found I lay under my mosquito net in a state of near sleep, full sweat. I was becoming certain I wasn’t sleeping at all and thus the resulting blogs I sometimes attempted to write were definitely unfit for public consumption. My ranting became completely off the wall. Simon and I had entire conversations in which we were both speaking, at each other, about completely different topics and not even noticing, or caring.


At one point my saint of a mother sent me a tent, after which I slept in my front “yard” on the dirt. I later modified this arrangement to sleeping on the mat from my papasaun chair on the floor with my door wide open with an attempt at a mosquito net duct taped around the door frame, an unfortunate remedy as it had to be torn down every morning when I had to leave my house and painstakingly replaced every evening. There was little breeze to come through but then at least the oven that is my concrete house had a vent feature. October will not remain as a terribly productive month in my memory of Peace Corps Service, but then I stand by my excuse that my brain was boiling.


Then on November 4, a miracle happened in Seronga (and not the same as the one that happened in the states, although now instead of “Lorato,” or “Lekgowa,” the people occasionally yell “Obama” when I go down the road in town. They are so happy. I am too). After a month of occasionally dark skies and scalding breezes that flirted with the idea, it rained. It had sprinkled teasingly a few times prior, but this was a proper rain, with thunder, lightning and puddles. Had I not discovered a new, gel heavy method of holding my increasingly fro-ing hair into a somewhat suitable form I would have danced and sang in the rain with pleasure. As it was I was grinning to the point my face hurt, and yelling “pula” (Setswana for rain and the denomination of the money in Botswana- go figure) at anyone who looked my way (or really was in the vicinity). I sent off a flurry of excited (and often international) text messages.

The rain had the effect of both clearing the dust out of the atmosphere (thus making the sun’s rays impressively even stronger) and also cutting the heat of the day more often. It’s become more bearable to sleep and I’ve even begun to see women carrying their babies in their heavy winter gear again. The clouds that fill the sky make the sunsets even more beautiful (which I would have never thought possible). I’ve taken to rain worship as a hobby, and find myself singing any song I can think of with rain or ice- my two saving graces- in the lyrics embarrassingly often. I’ve survived my first suicide month in Seronga, and that makes for celebration indeed.


So... How's the weather back home?