Home Sweet Home....eventually

Today is Memorial Day, and while I have visions of barbeques, flip flops, and the air show at Jones Beach, I am currently sitting on my bed wearing a long sleeve shirt, a hoodie, leggings, pajama pants, and socks, covered in a heavy fleece leopard print blanket, and I can see my breath. Winter has arrived in Botswana, folks! There are a number of ways to tell it's winter here, but my favorite is when you're explaining something very important to your APCD, and she stops you to let you know that your teeth are chattering while you talk (in case you didn't notice). To be fair, it does usually warm up during the day to the point where short sleeves are acceptable, so I thought leaving the fleece at home would be ok- unfortunately it was overcast most of the day, so it didn't warm up much. Maybe I'll be investing in a small space heater when I move into my new house?
With the mention of the new house, I feel like I should move into a description of my new village and my new work site and my new house, which is really the purpose of this entry, but I don't know how to approach the subject. I guess I'll start with the housing situation, since although it's a bit of a mess, it's the easiest to explain. I was supposed to move into a house that had been used by a Peace Corps volunteer that just left last week, but certain factors that I won't discuss here have closed that option to me. My counterpart found a different house pretty quickly with equivalent amenities, but we are still waiting for Peace Corps staff to visit and approve it. The house is on a family compound behind the senior secondary school, about a 15 minute walk to my clinic. It has a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom with bathtub, two bedrooms, and by the time I move in, it will have working electricity and hot running water in the kitchen and bathroom. It has no furniture yet, since I was supposed to get the previous volunteer's furniture, but my counterpart is working on that situation. The décor is interesting, to say the least. The living room and the bedrooms are all painted a bright peachy orange, which I think is supposed to look cheerful and tropical and they are equipped with brand new white tile floors with an orange floral design. The kitchen and bathroom are painted an intense, bright, crayon-like shade of blue. It's all a little much for my tastes, but it's very clean, and I can work with the colors to tone them down even if I can't repaint. The house is bigger than my house in New Paltz, and there's a good chance that the furniture could end up being nicer, too- what a strange Peace Corps experience!
Onto the clinic. My counterpart is really my supervisor, since she is the head nurse at the clinic, but I think I'll be working pretty closely with all the staff. Because I had no housing yet, I spent my site visit at my counterpart's house, which could have been very awkward, but wasn't because she's amazing. She's very down to earth and funny, and we understand each other really well. She also had her daughter in law and son staying the week with her, and they're around my age, so I ended up having a really good experience with them, but I'll go more into that later. The clinic is youth friendly, as I mentioned before, but it works with all ages and types of people. We got into Mahalapye pretty late in the evening on Wednesday, so I didn't get to see the clinic until Thursday, when I was given the grand tour and introduced to the staff. On Friday I spent the entire morning at the clinic, and was put straight to work giving out vitamin A supplements to kids ages 6 months to 5 years old. To give you an idea of how busy the clinic can get, imagine an average pediatric practice. I worked for a solo practitioner (one doctor), and we saw a max of 30 kids a day. This Friday at the clinic, we saw 90 kids in 3 hours, and there was no doctor. Every kid was weighed and given a vitamin supplement, every mom was questioned about the health of their child, and every record was checked to be sure it was up to date, but it was very much an assembly line with no privacy and no extensive counseling. Then again, it is a clinic and not a private practice, and privacy and time are given to patients who come in because they are sick. The clinic has a lay counselor who does HIV testing and counseling, and everyone works with the PMTCT program, but patients are referred out for ARV distribution. The clinic also works in the community, especially with the senior secondary school, which I also visited. The school head (principal) had some issues already in mind that he'd like me to work on, so I have a feeling I'll be spending a lot of time there. The community has a lot of resources I'd like to check out and work with, especially the drama group that works on health issues, the prisons, the hospital, and a few community and youth development centers. I guess that's the good thing about living in a really big village- lots of things to do!
I know I touched on my feelings about the size of my village in my last entry, but after seeing it and spending a few days there, I feel it's worth talking about again. I've gotten a few different population estimates, but the number that comes up most often is about 50,000. It's very big, and very spread out, and a little intimidating, especially for someone who wanted a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. During my stay, crime was also mentioned a lot (don't be too worried, I've already had a chat with our security officer about my concerns and I feel that he's taking me very seriously and working with me), and at points during the visit, I was feeling very negative about the whole experience. I kept thinking that this was not what I signed up for, and that this was not how I pictured my Peace Corps experience going, and that two years of my life was a lot to give up for an experience I wasn't completely thrilled about. It's very easy to go down that road and stew in negative thoughts, because no matter what, your Peace Corps experience is never going to match up with the expectations and mental images you had before you left. I expected it to be difficult and prepared myself for homesickness and loneliness, dealing with lack of amenities and comforts, and culture shock. I never thought that as a Peace Corps volunteer in sub-Saharan Africa, I would be in a big house with electricity and hot water, in a big town with malls and supermarkets and crime, or that I would have 3 other volunteers in the same town as me. It sounds like I was a little ignorant before coming here, but really I wasn't. I knew that there were large towns and cities with nice amenities and shopping areas- I just didn't imagine that Peace Corps would place volunteers in such places!
With all these thoughts swimming in my head, I had a pretty rough night on Friday with a lot of doubts. Thankfully, my counterpart must have realized that I was a little burnt out, and she gave me Saturday off while she went to work. I ended up waking up at 4am to go with her kids to spend the day at their cattle post. The cattle post is a huge part of the culture here, and most people seem to have one in their family. Generally, most families will have a house in the village the family is historically from, as well as 'lands' (farmland) in the area surrounding that village, and a cattle post, which is is even further away and deeper into the bush than the lands. They may also have property in Gaborone (the capital), where many people go to school or are able to find decent jobs. For example, my host mother lives in Molepolole on her family's compound, but her mother and children live with her brother in Gaborone, where the kids go to school. The lands and cattle post are taken care of by uncles and cousins. My counterpart's situation is very similar. The separation of family members and the remoteness of the lands and the cattle posts and the way many people live in places they don't consider home adds a whole new facet to the HIV epidemic in Botswana, which is something I really want to find out more about and possibly work with while I'm here.
Ok, cultural lesson and rant over. We got to the cattle post at about 5:30am, before the sun, so we woke the uncles up and started a fire for tea (and warmth- it is winter, after all). As soon as it was light enough to see my surroundings, I fell in love with life at the cattle post. Shelters are just that- shelter. There was a small one room house made of stone and cement, and a couple other houses that looked a lot less sturdy. Electricity and running water are laughable ideas there. The goats and chickens were kept near the houses, and the cattle kraal was a short walk away. While we let the water heat up, we went to watch the uncles milk the cows. We took the fresh milk, and poured some of it in with the hot water, and dropped in a few teabags, stirred it a few times, and the tea was done. I don't usually take my tea with milk, but I would have felt rude refusing the milk they had just worked so hard for, and I was well rewarded- fresh milk makes creamy, delicious tea. We spent a while warming up by the fire with our tea, but soon it was time for work. Some uncles went to work giving the animals medication and preventative treatments, while others went to gather firewood. We went with one of the men to the river to fill up the water tank so the animals (and people) would have something to drink. This is the dry season, so the river was completely dry when we got there. However, water still flows under the ground even during the dry season, so we used a generator and some tubing to suction the water from the water hole into the tank. A few of the cows joined us for the trip, and I was told that when the river is full, baboons and other animals come over for a drink, too. Once we had the water, we gathered some goat dung to use as fertilizer, packed the back of the truck, and headed back to town. Although I must have heard the word 'lekgoa' (white person) at least 37 times, it was so much like the Peace Corps experience I had envisioned that I just wanted to stay. Of course I couldn't stay, so I made arrangements to stay that night at Mike and Geri's house so I could start to process the whole experience with other volunteers. It ended up being a great decision. Mike and Geri had not gotten all the warnings about crime that I had gotten, which leads me to think that people really just wanted to be the single young white girl living alone would be extra careful and not take stupid risks- good advice for a girl living alone anywhere. They had also gone into more of the shops and spent more time wandering around town than I had, and they already had a good grasp of where the basic facilities and shops are, which made me feel a lot better. The good dinner, hot bath, and adult beverages provided may have also helped my mood a little...maybe.
We left for the bus rank at 8:30 Sunday morning, and after a nice long, damp walk, we got there almost an hour later. The bus ride was uneventful (or at least as uneventful as a ride on a bus in Botswana can be), and it provided some good thinking time. I started thinking about potential projects and found myself getting really excited about them. I realized that all this time I'd been thinking things like “this isn't what I joined Peace Corps for”, and really thought for the first time about what I did join Peace Corps for. Of course there were dreams of exotic places and small villages and roughing it, but I can get all those things on vacations here- and there will be plenty of them. I joined Peace Corps to gain professional and life experience and to help people. Period. In signing up and getting on the plane, I agreed that I would go where ever they sent me, knowing that there would be risks and difficulties, because I trusted that I would be sent to a place that needed my skills and that the risks would be reasonable risks. I think I can safely say that almost anywhere in Botswana is a heck of a lot safer than most American cities, or even suburbs. After this site visit, no matter how I feel about my village or my house, I know that there's a lot of work I can do at my site. And my Peace Corps job is flexible enough that as long as there is a community need, I can work with projects that interest me personally and professionally. Along with clinical work, I could also work with the prisons, with the churches, with the drama group, with a school youth group, or maybe find an agricultural project to get involved in. If there is a felt need, I could potentially even do health outreach work to smaller surrounding villages or to people living on the lands and cattle posts. As soon as I got home, I started working on a list of potential projects and a schedule for the next couple months at site, when I'll be doing community needs assessments and getting to know my way around. If you know me, you know that once I start making lists and schedules and planning, I'm in a good place. Not only because I love list-making (and I do), but because it means that I'm starting to dream and to visualize myself living in a place and finding a niche there. Now all that remains to be seen is whether I can turn these more realistic dreams into a reality in the next 2 years.