And the Flood Came.... 2009

From sometime around March/April 2009

It was a record setting year for floods, not only in my home state of Minnesota (or did North Dakota get credit for the flooding this year?) but also in the Okavango delta. It seems that this year the waters this side reached the second highest since the 1960’s. Whereas in Minnesota there may have been huge efforts at sandbagging and people’s houses may have flooded, the Eastern side of the delta saw people being relocated to tent communities and roads rendered impassable. And by roads I guess I mean road, as in the nameless dirt path that we travel back and forth on as our only escape from Seronga. Or I guess there’s always planes…. If there’s tourists…

The floodwaters seemed to peak in tandem with my foul period of discontent. As the extremely quickly flowing currents breached the banks of the river, flooded out the roads and made the ferry a somewhat dangerous option, it essentially stranded us on what sort of began to feel like an island in Seronga. As I’ve said, in Seronga we certainly didn’t have it as bad here as they did in other places, in Xakao many people had to be relocated from their homes into government or UNICEF or UN tents, and in Gudikwa people couldn’t get through the water to the clinic.

Months later the flood is still effecting us as the clinic has had to call in help in the form of helicopters and boats from the BDF and the government to administer to patients that are out of reach as we try to give every child that is under five a dose of vitamin A as part of a nation wide Vitamin A Campaign. The combination of the force of the current on the two outboard engines which run each of the two ferries at Mohembo that we must use to cross the river from this side (about 100kms up the road to the north only to turn around and head back south to get anywhere of note other than Namibia) as well as the increased traffic due to the electric company’s attempt to wire this side of the delta (think big heavy reels of cables, huge poles, many tools and huge trucks) have basically decommissioned three of the four engines. I’ve witnessed the ferry floating away down the river as one of the engines failed and the strong current caused it to drift past the waiting crowd as many people standing there yelled to the people that were drifting down the river on it (and I laughed and filmed). After about thirty minutes the BDF (Botswana Defense Force) boats came rushing out to rescue the people and an hour after that the boat managed to slowly make it’s way back up the river which made for a memorable (although not personal recording breaking) wait of just under four hours to cross the river on the ferry. (My personal record is 5 hours, and I’ve heard of people waiting 6. A friend from Maun recently drove the 350k journey from Maun to Shakawe only to find neither ferry working, with no one able to give her any information as to when one would be working again. She turned around and headed back down to Maun. With my groceries. That ended up being a long week….) For some reason someone cut down the last remaining trees that were on the East side of the delta at the ferry, which can make for some long, hot days of waiting next to cool deep water that you can’t swim in for the current and the monster crocs that are rumored to live near there as well as the hippos that can usually be seen on the far banks.

Our own clinic boats have been in the shop for 7 months for what has been called service and the boat driver at the clinic angrily tells me is routine maintenance that would take him two days at the most to complete, but it is the government’s policy that the service be done by those who get the tender (which from my understanding has to do with who will say that they will give the lowest price for something regardless of quality of service or timelines. This seems to be the case with whomever from Maun has won the tender to deliver gas cylinders as well. That guy has been promising to deliver the gas that I use to power my fridge and stove to cook for nearly three weeks. Luckily I’ve got friends in low places and have been able to beg a spare off someone in the interim, but that is astoundingly poor service.

The water was pervasive and encroaching, and it added to my foul mood by making me feel claustrophobic and desperate. Although I couldn’t see the difference unless I drove over the road to Shakawe, where the ferry may or may not have been able to cross, I felt the waters were drowning me. But then it could have just been my mood.

I had been in this country nearly a year and what precisely did I have to show for it? One men’s sector event, a painting, a mosaic project that will likely never start and a bunch of kids who know how to scream my name whenever they see me pass on the road. What seems like a ton of half started projects that I was really excited about but never went anywhere because when people had come to me saying “Lorato, we want to work with you on a project,” they meant, “Lorato, we want you to bring us some money from America, and no we have no plan or really any desire to actually put forth effort to get organized to make this project work, but once the money is here we can do all that hard work, not before to actually get the money. Can’t you wave your magic American wand? And no we really don’t want to listen to your suggestions because although you are American and white which means that you surely must have access to this money, or can’t you just ask some other rich Americans for the money, you are still a young girl and should not expect to tell your elders what to do, or god forbid to suggest what they are doing wrong.”

I still lose my patience (often). I haven’t been miraculously transformed into some sort of Mother Theresa figure of calm understanding amongst the village I live in. Although I love them I sometimes hate them. I am regularly frustrated with an alarming number of things that people around me just seem to accept as “normal”. At least once a month I need to get out of the bush to stay sane, which I think I initially considered to be weakness or a lack of toughness but am very slowly beginning to accept as just a smart policy. Add to that I miss my family and friends and it will be at least a year until I see many of them again and I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life type constant rumination and throw in a seemingly sent by God to push me over the edge style flood (or perhaps I’m just a bit histrionic) and you have a perfect storm of a mid service crisis. It seems that through all this I’ve stuck to my mantra, go hard or go home, even in my emotional breakdowns.

I have to admit that however much I was strongly disliking the flood (read: hating) it was completely amazing to see all that water. (Which I find myself saying, as we do in MN wahd-deR, which confuses the shit out of the local people, and I’ve taken to try to pronounce it as they do, wah-tah, which they laugh at. Oh well.) From the sky I flew from Seronga to Shakawe and could finally see that all the clumps of trees Simon called islands during the dry season truly were. All the places that just months before we had taken Simon’s truck joy riding across were now covered in a sparkling blue gown. Up until a large cow was killed by a croc this side the children would dart across the road in Mohembo and dance and play naked in the water that had previously covered the road but had now begun to recede. They splashed around and were happy. It was enough to make even my foul mood abate, at least for a while.

As the flood reached Seronga and passed, it took with it the tension and rage that seemed to be boiling to some terrible peak inside my soul. Things were still frustrating, and I was still feeling lonely and isolated, but it was less so now. The waters came, they asserted their force and their strength and then they slowly left. They washed away all the dirt and emotional shittiness that had built up within me like a slow release pressure valve. And as is its tendency, the flood will come again next year, but for now the water is fine.