More Spring/Winter Happenings

Continuing from my previous post on Spring/Winter Happenings, here are some more Spring/Winter Happenings:

Meeting President Bush

I had the honor of meeting George W. Bush and his wife when they came to Gabs a few weeks ago.  I was part of a small group that had a private informal meet and greet with him that lasted about 30 minutes.  I will write a separate blog post about that soon.

Planning Upcoming Vacations

Of course we recently had a very nice trip to Tuli-Block.  This was a mini-vacation.  We are looking forward to David and Betsy’s trip here in September and October. We are going to have the vacation of a lifetime with David and Maria, and then a week after they leave we will be having another fantastic vacation with Betsy and Mike.

In the past we usually took a nice vacation every year and a super-dooper (expensive) one ever two years.  Our vacations in France, Italy, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, etc, fall into this category.  This year we are doing two super-dooper vacations in the same month.  Why not!  We will probably never get back to Africa, and we haven’t seen our kids in 15 months.  The trips are mostly planned out and they will go something like this:

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Spring/Winter Happenings – Part 1

Regarding the title, I am posting this on July 2nd which is not usually considered Winter, but down here below the equator it most definitely is.

Frankly I am kind of running out of ideas to post about, so allow me to catch you up on a few things that have been going on this Spring/Winter…

Mid Service Training (MST)

MST represents the midpoint of our service, and also the last training session the Peace Corps gives us.

We will meet two more times before we leave the Peace Corps.  Once at our regional meetings next February where we will compare notes on what we are doing and catch up with each other; and also at our Close of Service (COS) conference where we will learn what we have to do to leave Botswana and the Peace Corps.  (I have heard that one weird thing we will be required to do at COS is produce stool samples for them three days in a row – so they can check for parasites, worms and whatever)

MST was held at the Oasis Motel in Gaborone.  It was fantastic.  Nice modern rooms with heat in the rooms and a fantastic shower that had great water pressure and very hot water.  When I finally emerged from the shower we went out to discover a very nice restaurant and an outdoor bar by a swimming pool.  It was too cool to swim, but we bought an alcoholic beverage (or two) and soon were seated with about ten other volunteers talking and having a good time.

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Our Trip to Tuli-Block

A few weeks ago Tish and I made a trip with friends to the Tuli-Block.  This huge area (almost 2 million acres) in North East Botswana is home to several game preserves.  We were headed to the Nokolodi Tent Camp near Tuli Safari Lodge in the Tuli-Block.  The trip was an opportunity to spend time with a few of our Bots-10 friends (Susan and Charlie), and to say goodbye to Chuck and Mary McGee who are in Bots-9 and were completing their service and returning to America soon.

Going to Tuli-Block was our second opportunity to see African wildlife.   We had been to the Khama  Rhino sanctuary and saw some wildlife, but no elephants and no cats.  I hoped to see those things at Tuli-Block.

Our trip began, as always, with a bus ride to Gabs.  At the bus rank in Gabs we found the bus to Selebi Phikwe, boarded and began the four hour trip to the village where Mary and Chuck live.  Halfway there we passed through the village of Mahalapye, where we stopped to drop off and pick up passengers.  I was glancing out the window watching the chaos that is a bus rank.  I watched people queuing to get on busses, vendors getting on and off busses carrying their wares, vendors holding their wares up trying to entice people on the busses to buy through their windows, and people selling things from tables.  In the midst of all this, in the crowd I spotted a white lady, and then another.  Funny thing is when we see white people in Mochudi or some other small village we are just as curious and interested as the Batswana are, because they are rare.  I turned to Tish and said, “Hey there is a white lady coming this way”.  Then I saw who it was, it was our friends Susan and Charlie, who climbed on the bus and sat near us for the rest of the trip.

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Learning Setswana

Before we joined, we did a lot of research on the Peace Corps.  One of the things we learned was that the Peace Corps has one of the finest language training programs around.  Over the last 50 years, the Peace Corps has trained over 250,000 volunteers.  They know what they are doing.

Learning any language is difficult for me.  When I thought about joining the Peace Corps that was one of the things I stressed about the most.  In high school I studied Latin which is not a spoken language.  I struggled with Latin, but when I tried to learn Spanish I really had trouble.  I could learn the words, read them and write them, but understanding them when spoken was an entirely different matter.

Learning the language worried me, but I did like the idea of knowing a second language.  I hoped that we would learn a language that we could use for the rest of our lives.  There was a chance we would be sent to South America or Western Africa — where Spanish and French are spoken.  We could use those languages, especially Spanish, back in the USA.  Then we found out we were going to Botswana where the language to learn is Setswana — unfortunately, no one speaks Setswana outside of Botswana except for a handful of people in neighboring countries.  At least I thought it would be fun to be able to talk to Tish in another language from time to time, it could be our “secret” language.

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United Ladies

Much of my Peace Corps service here in Botswana has been focused on IT education and service.

One thing I do here is to help organizations manage their computers.  Soon I will be helping Stepping Stones International (where Tish works) with the 20 computers that were donated to them.  They need to be networked together and set up, people must be trained, and acceptable use policies must be put in place.  Another organization, BOFWA, soon will receive some new computers that I will help with.  Whatever I do for any organization must be sustainable, so I must find a counterpart in the organization to train so they can continue to manage the computers when I am gone.

Teaching people to use computers is also part of my service, and my favorite part.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays at the local library I teach the staff from 8-9 am.  Then at 9 am, when the library opens to the public I teach for a few hours more.  People young and old just drop in to learn about computers.  Sometimes the same person will come back several times, but often the person I am teaching is someone I have never seen before.

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Join the Peace Corps and Fall in Love

Botswana is not a particularly romantic place.  Paris it is not.  The place is mostly desert — rocky and sandy.  There are no beautiful parks in which to walk hand in hand.  Instead of lush flowers, there is an abundance of thorny bushes and trees that will draw blood if you aren’t watching where you are going.  Outside of the capital, there are no fancy restaurants or movie theaters to take your date to.  Usually volunteers are in different villages and it takes hours on a crowded bus to even see each other.  When you do see each other, the lack of air conditioning and heating usually means you are either bundled up in layers and shivering, or sweating profusely — neither is a good look for attracting the opposite sex.  Maybe it is true, maybe Love is blind.

During this past year there have been a lot of Peace Corps volunteers falling in love in Botswana.  When I joined the Peace Corps, that was something I was not expecting to see.  I assumed that the volunteers would come here, be sent to their isolated villages, and do good deeds for two years and then go home.   I expected many lasting friendships would be made, but never this much romance.  But then what do I know, I also thought we would be living in a mud hut and hauling our water in from a creek — and here I sit typing this post on my laptop preparing to upload it to my blog via the internet.

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Mind Games at the Halfway Mark

Marion and I reached the one year mark in Botswana on April 3rd and will reach the one year mark as Peace Corps Volunteers in Mochudi on June 8th.

Though pleased with this accomplishment,  I will be the first to admit that I have struggled at times.  My struggles have mainly been emotional ones, as I try to cope with the wide variety of feelings that race through my mind daily.  The list below will give you some insight into my emotional roller coaster.

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Halfway There

We arrived in Botswana in April 2011.  The first two months were spent in pre-service training, after which we came to Mochudi where we will serve for 24 months.  When it is all over, we will have been in Botswana for 26 months.  Our blog has a small “widget” on the column to the right that indicates how many days we have left before we return and what percentage of our service we have completed.  This past week it crept over the 50% mark.  We are halfway done.  We have been here for 13 months and will return home in 13 months, in June 2013.

The first nine months or so the widget was configured to display how long we had been in Africa, but then I changed it to display how much time left we had to serve.  The change wasn’t because of some fundamental shift in the way I think of my service, I am not anxious and concentrating on coming home, I am still very much concentrating on the here and now.

The switch to “time left” is more because I view the time we spend here and the things we experience and do here in Botswana as an accomplishment to be proud of.  When I said to Tish, “hey we have completed 50% of our service”, I am not saying, “Hooray 50% done we will be home soon.”  Rather, I am saying, “Can you believe it we have accomplished 50%.  Maybe the difference seems unimportant to you, but to me it is worth explaining.

So at the halfway mark I look back and this is what I see…

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