Emelela ko Charleshill

Embracing the bitter cold at 3:16AM, I begrudgingly got out of a bed. Speaking to my host family the night before, they knew I would be gone for the next five days and that I had to be up very early the next day. Per usual, they made me a lunch. I also hard-boiled some eggs, and packed some other snack food for the long bus ride.

As I was gathering my things makuku thata that day, I discovered the doors to the house were locked. Since my bedroom is in a separate corner, I couldn’t get in. I tried to think of creative ways to break into the house, but I couldn’t find any. Every window is covered with burglar bars and the doors have strong deadbolts. This certainly made me feel even safer in my housing situation, but it wasn’t helpful for the matter at hand. I walked around the house and noticed that Bami’s light was still on, even though his loud snores told me he was asleep. I opted to wake him up.

“Bami…”

“…Bami…” I whispered

After waiting for a response, I then yelled, “BAMI!” after which I heard some rustling and some incomprehensible noises of post-slumber pains.

“It’s Kabo. Dijo tsame in the kitsi.”

He let me in the kitchen so I could get my food. Promptly after that, the khombi arrived to pick me up, and one by one, we collected 8 other PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) with the early crowd.

After we gathered everyone, it took about an hour to get to Gaborone, just in time to wait for the 6AM bus to Ghanzi. Getting on the bus wasn’t as much of a battle as we anticipated. We were prepared to push people out of the way as the concept of a “queue” in Botswana doesn’t exist in most contexts.

Getting on was no problem. I was actually surprised and impressed by the minor luxuries that occurred over the next several hours. It was a coach bus that was nicer than any Greyhound I’ve ever been on. There were also venders walking up and down the aisles selling stuff: sweets, newspapers, milk and even cell phone minutes.

(Sidenote: in Botswana, one doesn’t pay per month of cell phone usage. You pay for exactly what you use. Therefore, people buy “cards” with a certain amount of money on them: airtime. The cards come with a code that is typed into the phone for use. Also, you pay for every call you make, but it costs nothing to receive calls. Hence, it’s common for people to always answer their phones, even when in meetings or speaking to a group of people. It hasn’t been too annoying… yet.)

Once we got moving, in our dreary states of being, we began to see a different landscape of desert, bushes, sand and succulents. This would get old after 30 minutes though, as the scene repeated for 10 hours. This also isn’t a route where one sees much wildlife. So we weren’t seeing the giraffes, lions and zebras of quintessential Africa. They’re mostly in the Kalahari Desert and Okavango Delta, north of us. Nonetheless, it was nice to see a different part of Botswana.

Since the bus was crowded, all seats filled, and many folks standing in the aisles, the main discomfort were the number of people squeezing through, up and down the aisle. Unlike most American forms of transport, where one pays before you board, we paid our bus fare en route to our destination. A bus attendant went seat by seat collecting our fares, and also keeping track of those standing in the aisles since the bus was packed full. It cost P77 each way, approximately $16. We also had a few stops along the way. On our first stop, there were several women selling fried chicken, fries, water, and other unhealthy nourishments. It still wasn’t the type of convenience I was expecting, and they certainly weren’t hassling us either.

Windows are apparently a big issue to battle over on the bus. Batswana thinks they’ll get the flu from the wind coming in the window, so it was frequent that someone else would ask us to shut our windows, even when it was hot. There are a series of irrational thoughts like this that lead me to believe they’re severely lacking some basic biology and chemistry education.
1) There is little understanding of how any illness is spread.
2) There are misconceptions on how HIV is transmitted even after they’re taught.
3) Soap is rarely used when washing their hands.

On our last stop, I was waiting in line for the pit latrine when I heard Pedro calling for me from inside the stall. “The door won’t open. I’m stuck in here.” I noticed that there were no handles or doorknobs on this old piece of orange-painted wood. It wouldn’t unlatch, and we were trying to figure out how to get him out. I then saw the large rock on the ground which is probably used to keep the door closed without fully closing and latching it. There was a hole where a handle would be, and we tried everything from knives, pens and keys to try to turn it and unlatch it but nothing would work. In the end, I hoisted myself up on the wall behind me and kicked the door down as Pedro guarded himself on the back wall.

After 10 hours on the bus, we reached Ghanzi in the western part of the country a little after 2PM. We met up with three PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteer) and split up into 3 groups to continue the next leg of our journeys. Antonia, Kate and I met up with Monica, the person I would shadow for the next few days. Monica was able to get one of the ambulance drivers from her clinic to drive her up to Ghanzi and take us to our sites. Otherwise, she would have had to hitchhike, and we would have had to do the same. There’s no other option for public transport. You either ride with someone you know or hope someone driving in your direction will give you a lift.

Monica lives in the town of Charleshill, which is 2 hours west of Ghanzi, a major village. Since she doesn’t have a grocery store where she lives, and it’s rare for her to have reliable transport, we went to Spar and stocked up on a lot of food. Monica once ran her own catering business, so I was already looking forward to all of the great food we would cook in her home.

As we left the grocery store, we saw several children begging for money. They would hold up one finger, rub their bellies and ask for money, one pula. The strategy was consistent, and I remembered all of the children we saw when we got off the bus. “Ga ke na madi” we would tell them. If we even gave them just a few Thebe children would swarm us asking for more money. It would also serve as an incentive for those who are school-age not to go to school. The other ridiculous and sickening part is the Botswana government provides a large number of welfare and socialist programs: food baskets and financial assistance for poor families, universal health care, and an extensive infrastructure of orphan programs. Botswana is one of the countries that doesn’t deal with issue of malnutrition, because, for the most part, its people are well-fed. Parts of the problem are that many people don’t know the programs exist or how to access them. In the saddening rationalizations of picking and choosing your battles, these weren’t kids that we could help.

We met up with another PCV, Leah, and the 5 of us went back to the khombi. Since the ambulance driver was taking us, and it’s a government vehicle, we had to go to the government office to wait for a paper to be signed, approving the use of the vehicle. We waited for well over an hour, chatting in the parking lot, until someone was able to sign our form so we could go on our way. This was only the beginning of formulating my understanding of how difficult transportation can be and how flexible one has to be in order for it to work out. By this time, it was 5:30PM, we had been up for 14 hours, the sun was starting to set, and we had a few more hours to go.

We drove an hour and half west to Karakudis to drop off Antionia with Natalie. From there, we went on for another hour to Charleshill. Outside the windows of the khombi, the same repetitive landscape whizzed by, but clouds were starting to form. Suddenly, an illustrious thunderstorm was lighting up the sky in the distance, probably one of the last rains before the dry season. Kate and Leah stayed with us for the night, and then went on to their final destination of Kule in the morning.

Charleshill is a small town with a population of about 1500 people. Despite its size, it’s the hub of the southern sub-district, consisting of 10 villages, and part of the greater district of Ghanzi. It’s only 8km from the Namibian border, and it’s the only official border crossing between the two countries. There are three non-Batswana tribes who live in the area, and many of them don’t speak the national language of Setswana. Although Setswana is still useful, and most folks speak it, there are also the dialects of Sasarwa, Saherero and Sakgalagadi.

Monica is part of the CCB (Community Capacity Building) program, one of four Peace Corps programs here, the others being Life Skills, DAC (District AIDS Coordinator), and my program: NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) Development. All four programs focus on HIV/AIDS in some way. Most folks in CCB are partnered with a clinic and work with the PMTCT (Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission) Program.

All people in Botswana who are diagnosed with AIDS, HIV+ pregnant mothers, children and many other categories of HIV+ people receive free ARV (Anti-RetroVirals) medication through the government. It’s revolutionary in the since countries such as the U.S. don’t even provide such a program, leaving folks in the U.S. who are HIV+ with huge medical bills.

In addition to the ARV program, PMTCT provides education and other resources to help mothers who are positive not transfer the virus to their child. The highest rate of transmission is during childbirth. After that, there is a 5%-10% chance that a child can get the virus through breast-feeding. PMTCT offers positive mothers free formula as an alternative to breastfeeding. However, there is a 5%-10% chance of infant mortality through this method since some mothers do not prepare the formula properly, do not have access to enough formula, etc, and many children pass from diarrhea or other form of malnourishment. With the infant mortality rate equal to the HIV transmission rate, one can easily see where controversy arises.

One challenge of the program in this area is the non-Batswana tribes such as the Baherero who don’t believe in western medicine. It’s just one of several reasons that people don’t take advantage of this or other HIV programs.

I spent the next few days getting to see some of Monica’s work, but mostly, I had a lot of time to finally relax a bit. Morning staff meeting at the clinic consisted of a short song, a brief prayer, and a 1-minute information-less exchange. I was lucky, apparently, since the morning meetings are usually very long, tedious, and entirely in Setswana.

I got to see Monica teach two different classes, one sex education class at a primary school and a computer class at the middle school. Trying to solidify the school schedule and find out when the computer class was proved to be a bit of a challenge. Monica teaches on Day 2. The Botswana school system operates on a 6-day schedule that sometimes include Saturdays, sometimes not, does not include Sundays and skips on holidays. Mondays, for example, could be any of these days, depending on the week. This was the third day in a row that she thought it was Day 2. The students who were outside showed us their schedules to affirm for us that today was indeed Day 2. We were quite confused, however, when we walked into the computer room and there was a teachers meeting taking place.

After we left and talked to one of her teacher friends, we confirmed that it was Day 2, they know there is a computer class, but there’s also a meeting. One would think that a meeting can happen anywhere, but a computer class has to happen in a room full of computers, but they wouldn’t move the meeting. Instead we taught off of broken typewriters and pictures of keyboards. Flexibility and patience continue to be important virtues in Botswana.

With both classes, I was impressed with how smart the kids were, how friendly they are, and how attentive they seemed to learning. I was also touched that a couple of kids in the computer class, asked me to come over and help them several times. It was heartwarming.

The most important part of my journey, sincerely, was food. We baked up a storm, cooking pita bread from scratch, making pastas, veggie curries, baking chicken and blending random yogurt, fruit and oat concoctions for breakfast. I was dying for delicious food. I also didn’t realize just how much the food situation was affecting my mood until I had so many options in Monica’s kitchen, and time/space to cook. It was more than just my mood, but my ability to think clearly, process and brainstorm ideas. It was a genuine moment of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs playing out in my life.

The journey back to Molepolole was uneventful. I was sad to leave Charleshill, but not as sad as I was to have to return back to training.

Prior to my journey to Charleshill, witnessing a sample of life as an actual PCV, I was having the ubiquitous doubts of the decision I made for my life. Why am I here? Why am I in Peace Corps? Why am I in Botswana? Why didn’t I take one of my job offers in the States? Did I make the right choice? Am I going to make the most of the next 2 years? Are the next two years going to help me personally and/or professionally? What in the world am I doing in Africa?

Having time away from my host family and training gave me the time and space to reflect that I’ve been needing. I felt more confident in my decision to be here, remind of the multiple directions I could see my life taking in the future and how my time here furthers all of my options. I know I’ve wanted to do this for years. This is exactly what I asked for, and it hasn’t even started yet.

Overall, it was helpful to see that there is life after training and living with a host family. They both come with a huge number of positives, but they also come with a bit of restraint on personal freedoms. I’m so eager to get to Site, find out where I’ll be working, what I’ll be doing, and officially begin this working experience.