Festive Greetings!

Festive Greetings 2009 from Botswana!
First, my apologies for not getting out proper Christmas cards before I left the country. While I usually try to “do it all” something had to give between grading, packing, and planning for the spring Africa Study Away program. It is one thing to pack for a couple of weeks vacation and quite another to pack for a 3 ½ month hiatus which involves coordinated travel for 20 students for two of those months. In any case, I hope this holiday greeting finds you happy and healthy!

2009 was a travel fill year as Paul and I rang in the New Year on a three week overland trip to Tanzania. We drove from Botswana through Zambia where the pot holes were the size of kiddy pools up to Tanzania where busses drove at death defying speeds. We visited some of the best known sights of East Africa including Mount Kilimanjaro, Serengeti National Park, Ngorogoro Crater and the island of Zanzibar. The trip was culturally rich, especially when we stayed with a Masi warrior and his family, and amazingly beautiful as we ate dinner with our toes in the sand on the beaches of Zanzibar. Our drive back traversed through Malawi which was lovely and undeveloped and is definitely on our list of places to go back to and explore further. This is especially true given that a bout of malaria while driving through meant I don’t remember much of it!

In late January I joined my study away group of twenty students in Namibia for ten weeks of travel around Southern Africa. As the Director of the program, I was with them the whole time while the other three faculty members involved from the departments History, English and Religion rotated in for two weeks at a time. My course on Global Health Inequalities examined HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB as well as the many organizations in Namibia, South Africa and Botswana focused on trying to deal with these health issues.

Returning in April, I finished off the term, did four presentations (someone remind me not to do THAT again!) and prepared for a cross-country trip with Paul, his son Nikolaj and daughter-in-law Trine out to Colorado to see his sister Connie. We rented an RV and visited some very cool places in the south western region of the US including: Santa Fe, Taos, 4-corners, Mesa Verde, Carlsbad Caverns, Monument Valley, etc. We also rented Harley’s for a couple of days and cruised through the Rockies stopping for a brief snowball fight…in May. Paul is convinced he wants to buy an RV and trailer for the motorcycle and head west!

The summer brought me back to Botswana for two and a half months and, for the first time, I finally felt like I was actually “living” here, instead of just visiting. Paul offered many star shows in Nxai Pan, where we bring his 10” telescope out to one of the very flat areas of Botswana for the most stunning views of the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. We also did a trans-Kalahari safari with a group of Spaniards that culminated with a lion in camp. Very scary but very cool!

By mid-August I was back to the states for the Fall semester. I had the opportunity to teach my First Year Seminar on Global Health for a second time and I had a nice group of twelve students who were also part of an “Engaged Living” program where they lived in the same dorm and we did several out of class activities together (e.g. a poverty tour of Greenville, an evening lecture and demonstration by a Japanese massage therapist accompanied by Chinese take-out, a popcorn and movie night in their dorm, etc.). It was fun but all the grading of their papers (it was a writing seminar) kept me very busy. When Paul visited from mid-October to mid-November he affectionately called me “the grader.”

I also taught my Medical Sociology class for the first time in the semester system. We used to teach it in the winter term when students only took two courses. Now in the semester system our ten credit hour program that combines medical sociology with medical ethics and incorporates ten weeks of field observations at a local hospital takes up most of the Tuesday/Thursdays for the 20 handpicked students (they have to apply for the program). Sadly, we often saw the firsthand realities of what it means to be uninsured in America and had some very timely discussions of the proposed health care reform currently being debated.

We’re finishing off the year with me back in Botswana. On Christmas Eve day we’ll take a day trip to Moremi and on Christmas day we’ll head down to Meno a Kwena (tooth of the crocodile) where we’ll camp for the night. In January we plan to take a trip over to Mozambique for a couple of weeks before my study away students arrive in early February.

We hope you and yours have a joyous festive season.
Peace,
Kristy and Paul

getting my bearings

Within minutes of driving out of the parking lot of the Johannesburg airport we are waved over to the side of the road by a neon-vested police officer. “What is it?” I ask Paul. “Who knows,” he replies. The interchange that follows leaves me baffled. The officer asks Paul what he can give him for Christmas? Continues by inquiring how much he (Paul) will bring Santa for not wearing his seat belt. I wish I wrote down exactly what he said because it made no sense. The pronouns were confused, Santa was involved, and in the end…it was really about a 200 Rand bribe for the police officer. Paul unfazed says he’ll pull over so the officer can write him a citation and the guy waves him off. You see, you can’t really write a citation for an illegal bribe. Welcome to Africa!

The drive back to Botswana is long and hot. About seventeen hours of driving and the temps are comparable to what we were having in Greenville when I left – about 40 degrees except there it was in Fahrenheit and here it is Celsius (or about 104 degrees). I’m pretty tired from the cumulative effect of the end of the term, packing to leave for 3 ½ months and traveling. At one point I’m dozing when Paul slows to avoid something in the road. I open my eyes assuming it is a donkey, cow, goat or horse and catch a fleeting glance of a rather large male ostrich making his way across a very hot tarmac (paved) road. It pays to have hooves in this climate.

On day two of driving we are stopped at a police check point. Guessing that it is a spontaneous veterinary control stop (checking for uncooked red meat to avoid the spread of hoof and mouth disease between districts), I’m surprised when they ask Paul to step out of the car and go into the tent to receive some driver safety information. The sign outside the tent reads “Kill These and Save Lives.” It takes me a while to even make sense of the sign. Kill what? Paul returns with a handful of pamphlets some of them only in Setswana (very helpful to the English speaking driver). I learn that the “these” refers to “over speeding,” “negligence” and “cell phones.” I guess if we “kill” these, driving will be safer…

Botswana has a notoriously high motor vehicle accident rate. In 2007, for example, there were 66.3 accidents/1,000 vehicles (compared to 43.1 accidents/1,000 in the US) and 28.3 fatalities/100,000 population (compared to 13.6 fatalities/100,000 population – don’t you love what you can find on line from the US Census Bureau?). I learned from one of the brochures that Botswana has a Motor Vehicle Accident (MVA) Fund to provide compensation for people in motor vehicle accidents. The fund, started in 1986 provides automatic third party coverage through the payment of a fuel tax. It pays for things like loss of income, loss of support to dependents, payment for medical and rehabilitative expenses, etc. All sounds good right? It seems there was some new change to the fund as of this August but what I found most interesting was that you would only get 50% of the benefits if you were found to be drunk or negligent in the accident. That’s right…even if your drunk driving caused a motor vehicle accident, you’d get some sort of compensation from the government for the accident. You’ve got to love Botswana. Of course, the larger issue contributing to motor vehicle accidents is the animals in the road but there doesn’t seem to be any move to solve that problem. Donkey dodging can be hazardous to your health.

PS: There is the most beautiful bird outside my window today at the office. It’s one I’ve not seen before, a paradise fly catcher. It has a chestnut colored body and blackish blue head kind of spiked into a Mohawk of feathers. What is most fascinating is that it has two long tail streamers that are probably double the length of his body and his beak is almost turquoise blue in color as is the ring around his eye. I’ll try to bring my camera in and get a picture of him if I can.