Walls come down....

In which it ends as it began….

In tears.

On my first nights in Seronga I walked around my hut, hairless and confused, scared of every shadow of everything that moved (huge spiders, lizards and geckos on the walls, my own bald reflection in the mirror) as I tried to rid my hut of what I would come to learn are actually permanent amounts of sand and spider webs and set up the place in a way that would make it feel like a home or at least a place I felt I could be. I hung up photos from home and my favorite pieces of art on post cards, and put inspirational magnets on my non working fridge. As I did this I was usually crying, missing home and family and things that felt normal, desperately fighting the creeping feeling that I had made a colossal mistake which was about to evolve into a pretty epic failure.

And now two years later, as I walk around essentially taking apart the hut that has become my home, again I am crying. While I knew it would be no piece of cake to leave this place, I was unaware of the little slivers of pain I would encounter in preparing to leave that would rub raw the new skin I’ve grown since being here.

It seems it’s time to grow some more.

And while I’m ready, I’m also not.

I strip things off the walls of the hut that is home, some quotes and small passages are copied into my journal, most cards and letters read one last time in an attempt to copy them onto my heart. Photographs are stared at and the faces memorized in a desperate attempt to review what was once the starting line-up of my former pre-peace corps life and now sometimes appear like a police line-up of suspects and faded memories. The more reasonable part of me assures what has always been the larger, more powerful emotional, illogical part that when I get home, everything and everyone will fall right back into their rightful place, but doubts and fears crowd around like the ever present dust and sand of this hut. A lot has changed for all of us in the past two years. And the fact that I often forget Very Important Things that I’ve been told about by my family and friends (which breaks my heart on the regular) freaks me out to no end. There are Very Significant People whom I’ve never met, and am about to, and I feel almost shameful in presenting them with this bush-wacked, mentally and emotionally drained version of myself.

Simultaneously feeling constantly full and empty, whole and broken, I am very confused. Emotionally erratic. And numb at times. Very weird.

I stand out in my yard at the burn pile (sorry those of you worried about the environment but although Batswana may mostly burn their trash, and there’s no official “recycling” centers to be heard of anywhere in this country other than Gabs, they’ve got the reuse and refix thing down like what) burning elements of a life. It feels completely ridiculous to be doing this, but this is what we do with things we can’t use anymore in Africa. It’s hard because what I burn now doesn’t exactly feel like rubbish. Notes about projects and dreams which may or may not have happened. Heartfelt letters and cards from friends. Pictures of people back home (sorry guys, I can’t afford to bring or send them all home, I’ve kept the best of all of you) melt into the sand and I wonder if those people will recognize the bush chick they are presented with upon my plane’s final touchdown. Hopes and dreams and fears and plans all go up in smoke. It covers my skin and coats my hair as it blows up at me, entering my lungs and making my eyes water more than the tears that already drift down my cheeks. I wear the scent of my burned up life like a perfume, wanting some sort of physical essence on me to mark the pain I feel almost constantly these days. The smoke drifts past me and I struggle to let my feelings follow it into the atmosphere.

I have to be ruthless with the things I get rid of. I’m taking 50 bajillion planes between here and Minneapolis, and it seems baggage restrictions have changed quite a bit in two years. When I came here I managed to bring my body weight in luggage and not pay a cent of overage. Although my body weight has become less here, there’s no way I’m getting close to that and I can’t afford to ship much, either. I’ve become an expert at talking my way onto bush planes, but something tells me commercial flights might be a different story. I look ruefully at books that have changed my life, things people sent here as gifts or to make my life easier and I stress about leaving it all behind. I know they are only things, and that things can be replaced and in the end don’t really matter, but once a pack-rat always a pack rat. There are times when I arrive in the hut only to turn around and walk back away from it, unable to make any hard decisions about who to give what to and how. The hut itself is so small that any minor movement of stuff from one pile of indecisiveness to one of decision doesn’t lessen the chaos one bit.

Then there is the matter of whom to give what. Since the minute I arrived in Seronga people have been asking me for anything, everything, especially the clothes off my back. It’s an awkward conversation to have, especially when it’s repeatedly, but it usually ends when I promise them something, “lata”. Well it seems lata has come. And of course I can’t remember seven hundred some conversations of what was agreed upon, so how do I decide? I’d like to give things to those who need them most, but how do I know who needs what most? And would the old toothless woman who asks me daily for a few pula for local brew know what to do with a solar powered water purifier, even if she does need it most?

There are also times when I am feeling inspired, and I take a bag full of things I specifically want to give to this person or that. I can usually find them somewhere in the village and deliver things to them, maps, books, clothes, movies. We talk about what I’m giving them and why, and as we have these conversations I take mental pictures of these people and attach to those pictures feelings of love and joy. I try to not to think about whether they have HIV or AIDS, that they might be dying soon, or that these moments are likely “goodbye-forever.”

In the end I sold a great deal of stuff, an idea that might make some of you balk knowing the conditions that people here live under, but for me felt like the only fair and respectful thing to do. I simply couldn’t stomach the idea of coming here to teach self empowerment and that white people and black people are the same and that no, I am not rich, only to turn around and hand out things like Santa Claus on my departure. I sold clothes and shoes, random stuff, for 2 pula, 5 pula, 10 pula (to give you perspective, a can of coke is 5 pula, which is affordable to most of my village, and for clothes, no matter how worn out, that is cheap even for Africa. All those clothes that you donate to Goodwill, thinking you are surely clothing the whole of Africa? They are sold in markets in the streets, for much more than that).

It felt yucky to favor one group of people who were my friends over another, or to indulge that perceived white privilege or to have spent so much time telling those in the village that we are the same, only to show them exactly how different we are, that I can just give things away, when even they sell things that they make or buy in another village to each other. So after consulting with a few of my closest and most honest friends in the village I took a big suitcase full of stuff to the clinic and then to the tuck shop that I get most of my airtime from. With the young girl who worked there (a tuck shop is like a tiny little shack that sells small convenience type stuff) I showed her how she might display the things and how to actually give a little sales pitch. I also taught her how to figure out percentages, and each day she would write down what she sold, and figured out 25% of the total, which she was then given for her efforts.


village women and my co-workers at the clinic at my what-garage sale? It was really weird for me, but they had fun. I think in some weird way many of them had more fun with and were more excited with opportunity to buy stuff than the stuff that I had given them especially because it meant something to me. IDK...

In the end, I used the most of the money that I made from selling stuff to pay to ship home goodbye gifts that people made or bought for me. I know. I know. I KNOW. It's a sick irony I'm still trying pretty hard to come to terms with and I am relatively certain I will never be able to do it, or explain it, or anything other than that I understand in my soul that it's an irony of Botswana, and one of those things I'll never be able to make sense of in my brain and will have to just trust my heart on this one.

With the gifts I had tried to discourage them from doing this, for many reasons. I knew I would be traveling after and I wanted our memories to be not based in presents or gifts but experiences we had together and things we created together, like the public art and the workshops, but I couldn’t really find a way to respectfully and appropriately do that within this culture. Sometimes it seems American commercialism is our biggest export. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, and this is all very hard to describe in a way that makes sense to the Western mind, so I’ll just leave it at that.

One of the most adorable gift was from my closest friends Mr. Khumalo, who I did most of my men’s sector work with, and was the main organizer of my Seronga farewell party and who pitched up even though he was clearly ill. He and his wife gave me a wooden carved morkoro, the traditional boat used in the delta, with a note that said I should use it so I can find my way back overseas to Seronga someday.



It's funny, it was too big to fit in the box so I am carting this little guy on my UK adventure with me. The paddle (which I think is really a spoon, as in the delta they use a long straight wooden stick to pole rather than paddle through the river, which makes me suspect this may have been made by a Zimbabwean)makes me laugh for not only that reason, but I also like that it's as big as the boat, which would probably come in handy should I need to beat off any dikwenas (crocs) or dikubus (hippos)on my way in my little boat.