Seronga Village: Joy Division

The fierce Seronga militia, ready to defend the humble hamlet in any battle....

(The title for this blog entry comes from the movie “Control” which I watched after a visiting Australian (Thanks Liam) put it on the hard drive of my computer. I found it a bit weird, but couldn’t get the band’s name that the movie was about out of my mind… and so here we are)

As the time approached for my family to arrive (back in late September.. yeah this is a bit of an old story, but it’s still cute to me) I began to look around my hut and realize some… “home improvements” might be in order. I was hoping to convince my mother that indeed I wasn’t living in the sort of squalor she imagined. The plan for when they came to visit was for all of us to spend at a night in the place so the family could really get the feel of bush life and what I had been describing about a night in a hut. As I thought about three members of my inevitably over packed American family arriving in Seronga I began to panic, and decided I needed to do a major and thorough cleaning (which ended up being really good-as despite risking heat exhaustion cleaning that oven all day I got rid of lots of shit-and the place probably needed it.)

Although I thought moving to Botswana would cure me of my pack rat habit, indeed in some ways it made it worse. I hate to shock you with this unsettling information, but there is no Target store anywhere on the continent. The dry goods store and hardware dealer in the village are only open until 5 on weekdays, and I’ve run into enough weirdly timed emergencies wherein I need strange things that I have come to save nearly everything.

Couple this with the fact that I have learned in this village how many uses there can be for what I previously would have considered garbage. As it seems the recycling center in Seronga is yet to be constructed (perhaps after the water treatment facility, road, bridge, electricity and Target store arrive… although I’ve heard a rumor that there is one in Gaborone) I also have guilty feelings about the bottles remaining from the products I’ve received from America. I’ve really begun to lose it when I see the plastic burning in the trash pile out on the compound. So thus I’ve become really creative.

Being that Febreeze has become a necessary substance in my time in Seronga (Thank you thank you thank you Keith for the influx of the stuff you brought when you came in November!) I had many empty bottles just hanging around behind my bathroom door, where I also have several million bottles of disturbingly colored water in case of emergency. There was also other spray or pump bottles that I had cleaned and saved, and the time had come to get rid of them. Remembering the Supersoaker water gun or hose fights we used to have around the neighborhood growing up, I decided to create little village militias and see what happened.

I put all the cleaned bottles in some plastic bags and set out to arm the neighborhood children with the next best thing I could think of to squirt guns. Anything that could pump out water. I walked to the first standpipe I saw near my compound and a gang of children came running at me top speed as expected. I had filled one of the bottles and sprayed the front line. They were a bit shocked and certainly confused.



Many of my little soldiers didn't have the fine motor skills or manual dexterity to operate any of the weapons that I gave them. But they sorted it out eventually..

Although not really on each other... but we had fun. Or at least I did.