I’m sitting here at Paul’s office watching the stock of stray cats at the office building behind his office block, which has multiple in my four month absence. Two tiny kittens just emerged from a long abandoned pipe lying on the ground joining the half dozen (or more!) adult strays that are out there. They’re running around like squirrels on Furman’s campus. Oh the oddities of Maun…how I’ve missed you so.
I’m freezing because Paul has left the air conditioner on high when he went to climb up a pole to fix someone’s broken internet. A job that was supposed to take an hour has now taken 4 and a quick call to him revealed that he doesn’t know when he’ll be back - so much for being a silent partner in ngami.net! After the first year of the internet company climbing poles to do installations, he only has to do it now in a pinch. His colleague hurt his foot over the weekend and can’t make the climb himself. So Paul is…up a pole. I couldn’t bear to watch. It makes my hands sweat thinking about the lack of medical care here should someone fall on their head. It is too much for me to take. I could turn the AC down but it would mean climbing up on the desk (the unit is high up on the wall and I am too short to reach it). I guess one shouldn’t complain about AC during that hot African summer. Better not jinx it…there could be a power outage!
So I’m busily writing thank you’s to the dozen or so people I met in Gaborone on Thursday/Friday planning for my proposed May X in Botswana (if we get enough students who can afford to pay for the two week trip). There is an amazing amount of HIV/AIDS programs in the capital. I wonder how much of it actually filters out to the rest of the country.
Botswana is about the size of Texas and a large percentage of the 2 million people that live here, live on the eastern side of the country near the capital. We live in the north western corner and the long drive back gives you some sense of how quickly you go from city to remote. In fact, I think if you’ve only lived in Gaborone (the capital) you haven’t actually lived in Botswana. They are completely different worlds. To truly live in Botswana I think you need to get off the paved roads. I think you need to get into the dirt.
It is summer here and the rainy season so there are large puddles to navigate (not from floods as in the dry season but from rain) on the drive to and from the ostrich farm. Giant black millipedes motor along the sand, legs moving like a wave (I mean giant – probably 8-10 inches long!). We’ve already chased two red wasps out of the house (these are the evil sons of Satan whose stings hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before. When I say “we” I mean “Paul” – I run in fear whenever I see one. Sometimes I run from mud wasps which are relatively harmless but who has time to distinguish between black and red in a moment of panic).
Nine soggy ostriches greeted us as we did our morning exercises at 7 AM today (before it gets too hot). Hissing and kicking at each other over the bit of corn we feed them. Poor things were not only skinny but wet after yesterday’s rain.
I ran out of slippery water while doing the dishes last night (our water has some sort of something it in that makes it really slippery and leaves you feeling like you’ve never quite gotten the soap out of your hair when showering). We called Twanda (one of the Zimbabweans who runs the farm) to come fill up our tank from the bore hole (he has to divert water from other places on the farm to our tank). After several hours it didn’t overflow (which is unusual) so we turned it off to go to bed and turned it back on in the morning only to see a "fountain of youth" shoot 10 feet in the air from farther down the piping. Someone will have to fix that.
Our DSTV satellite TV only had one channel coming in last night. Several others were pixelating (like Picasso’s Cubismo era had taken over) and some were just black. We’re not sure if new leaf growth on the trees are blocking our satellite signal or what. That will have to be fixed.
The headline news from last week’s paper were about crocodiles preventing the recovery of a dead body out of a river. It seems some drunks wandered into the river and one didn’t come out. When the rescuers came to get the body, three larger crocodiles were visible near where they thought the body was. The Wildlife Department was brought in to shoot the crocodiles but they failed. Two days later the body floated and they were able to get it out of the river.
As my study away students say “TIA” meaning “This is Africa.” I am constantly reminded that I am a long way from home.
Kristy
PS: I’ve got a few half finished blogs from the summer I want to polish up and post soon. Better late than never, right?
