While my village is Seronga, I have spent a fair amount of time in other villages in the delta, be it for groceries, banking, projects, internet, or sanity breaks. The one that has become my more commonly go to for most of the above is Maun. Although it is the farthest geographically of the villages I visit on the regular from Seronga, I can sometimes hitchhike there on empty bush planes. Maun is a big city compared to Seronga, and has so many amenities that some of them are usually working. Until you’ve lived a life of sporadic internet, water, electricity and let’s just really call it convenience, don’t judge.
So being that I have to pass through Maun to get to my village from Gabs or nearly anywhere else, and me being myself, I’ve made quite a social circle there. There are lots of young ex pats and pilots living and working in the place that is the “gateway to the delta”. It’s nice to get away from the constant development talk that seems to envelope all my PC friends when we do get together (even though that means I end up the unfortunate observer to enough pilot shop talk that I’m relatively certain I could fly a damn plane myself.) At the end of the day, with few Peace Corps volunteers near me, and none on my side of the delta, sometimes it’s nice to hear more English. And it’s a fun party town.
It’s with this in mind that I came up with the idea of having all my Peace Corps friends and my ex pat friends together to give Maun a proper farewell. So we rented a boat called “The Sir Rosis of the River” and that’s what we did. As there was limited space on the boat, we decided that it could start on the boat and continue after we docked at the Riverlodge. I was tired of pilots running around in their uniforms 24/7, so I declared that they would be forbidden from being pilots for a night, but rather a Pirate theme was necessary ( I also threw in Peace Corps, princesses and Peter Pan as theme options so as to not disclude anyone.) Few people actually came in dress but at least the pilots were dressed in something other than their uniforms. Throughout the course of the night many of my Maun friends showed up at the Riverlodge, and I got to say my farewells to many of them that I don’t usually see for one reason or another, be it that they are away at their camps or I’m in Seronga (I do spend MOST of my time in my village.)
So as the boat left the dock at the Riverlodge the passengers ended up being all Peace Corps volunteers, along with the Vixen and Clara. I began by trying to play good hostess and make sure everyone else knew Clara and Vixen, as the only non PCV’s, but my Peace Corps friends being who they are, all let me get through rather lengthy introductions of those two before informing me that they all knew Clara and Vixen. Egged on by my emotionally overwrought rambling of how I came to know those two, some of my buddies half heartedly insisted that I introduce everyone on the boat, even though after serving two years in the Peace Corps together, we generally know altogether too much about each other…
So back to the introductions. We all know I never need encouragement to run my mouth, but an interesting thing happened as I went around the circle (interesting for reasons other than the low flying plane that buzzed by shortly after I began—thanks Feeelix, you certainly do know how to make an entrance, although I have a feeling this was payback for me not moving the boat departure time to later). As I began jokingly introducing my friends to my other friends who already knew them, I realized how much I really LIKED everyone on the boat. I mean seriously, each person I looked at was someone I’ve shared something with here, either I’ve traveled with them, roomed with them, cried over the phone to them or they to me or usually both of us together, driven long distances with, shared good times and bad, and basically loved a whole helluva lot. And many of them had traveled insane distances to be here with me, flopping around in the Okavango Delta in the sunset (and Hairspray did it despite her personal policy of never swimming in water that’s not the ocean or a pool.)
We were pirated by some pilots who apparently begged borrowed and stole to get out to our boat and other friends met us in their boats along the river. Logistics had stressed me out as usual, but any effort spent was SOOOO well worth it, as I looked around and saw all my friends basking in what has become my paradise. I felt so grateful, and lucky to have met such an amazing group of people and to have shared the past two years and this experience with them. That boat might be named after a disease of the liver, but the organ that was currently afflicting me was the heart. It was completely full of love.
“Maybe the purpose of being here, wherever we are, is to increase the durability and the occasions of love among and between peoples.”-June Jordan
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