First Congregational UCC - Platteville

Dear Friends and Family,

I wrote the following mass email awhile ago. I haven’t had email access because I just spent the longest stretch in Kole since I got here. I feel a little overwhelmed to be in the big city of Ghanzi. :) I came for a Regional Peace Corps meeting. Several PCV’s were here and celebrated my birthday with me over the weekend. Thank you for all your birthday messages. It is bittersweet to feel so far and so loved . . .

I should add to the GLOW news below that I had my first meeting with 20 girls and it was as successful as I could have hoped. We meet again next Saturday (the 15th). I’m a happy volunteer!

March 1st

I keep thinking I have seen the most beautiful sky there is to see (the first “beautiful moment” that I told you about, for one). But then, there was the time when one of the Charleshill drivers was taking me home to Kole with long awaited gas cylinders for the stove and refrigerator. I thought his name was “kopa” as in “Ke kopa,” I am asking for. But it’s not, it’s Copper pronounced in Southern African English. Have I told you about the names? People have one Setswana, and one often very odd English? Magazine, Tigerfish, Good, G-string . . . I kid you not. Anyway, Copper was driving me home and the colors of the sunset were absolutely brilliant. Yesterday, the sky surpassed all previous attempts at awesome beauty. Lately, it has been blazingly hot, but without fail, a small storm blows in around 5 o’clock, dumps some rain, and leaves a sticky humid dusk in its wake. That’s sort of what happened, but there was more than one storm, from more than one direction, with clear patches in between, and it all hovered for the sunset. The result was a patchwork of swirling clouds and small rainstorms (none of which were actually above Kole) which had sheets of pink rain silhouetted against the sunrise. Directly above where the sun was setting, there were layers of purple, orange, and pink, and spaces of blue in between. Just when you thought, “This is as awesome as it gets,” there would be streaks of lightning amidst all the blazing color. It was truly indescribable, I swear to you I am not exaggerating and I am not doing it justice. I ran backwards, watching, dazed, then stopped and walked, then sat down, then ran a little more with tears on my cheeks because it was just too beautiful.

I know I should broaden the topics of my emails and pictures to include people and Earthly events. I will do my best. I just wish you could all see it, though. I was looking at that heavenly phenomenon and thinking, “There. That is heaven on Earth, right there. Between those clouds, right by that lightning. Yes, that is where one communes with a Higher Power.”

I am beginning to see that “work” moves in cycles. These past few weeks I have felt rather unproductive, going to the health post to help hap-hazardly with weighing patients, counting out pills to put in the little plastic bags in which they are dispensed, walking to the kgotla to see the chief about a VMSAC event at the kgotla, collapsing at 2pm and letting the heat of the day induce a coma-like siesta, jogging with my nurse or one of the teachers, and maybe playing football with the a few motivated, impressive ladies who wrote their own letter to the school asking for the use of the grounds and the soccer ball when the kids finish (around 6pm). I say maybe because the rain has made the field too muddy this week and sometimes the “ladies” are off in Ghanzi or Charleshill. So, there is this sort of daily routine but it doesn’t feel like I am accomplishing much. No project, no presentation, no class, no art project, no tangible, check-it-off-the-list kind of thing is happening at the moment. I print off a letter here and there to explain a proposal for some such project. There is a Community Health Talk where the VMSAC committee is going to supposedly teach the community what they learned at their workshop. Still, I have had a restless, okay, I need to find something useful to do on a regular basis to fill this time of just sort of hangin’ out, feeling.

Hopefully GLOW will provide the somewhat constant time commitment which I crave. We are supposed to have our first meeting tomorrow (Saturday) morning at my house. Ten girls are invited, including two of the ones who went to Gaborone for Camp GGLOW. (The third is at junior secondary school in Ghanzi). I have juice, hard candies, a pen for each of them, and a blank notebook for anonymous questions that they can write during the meetings to be discussed afterwards as a group and a loose agenda for planning, “What do we want to do as a GLOW club?” That may make me sound unprepared, but I am sooo ready for them. It will be hard not to put ideas into their little heads (I have a curriculum all worked out for anatomy lessons, confidence building activities, practice public speaking, etc.) but I want them to own the club with gentle guidance only. When Monica had her first GLOW meeting and passed the anonymous question notebook the girls wrote things like, “Can you get pregnant if you have sex in water? What do you do if you like a boy? How do you know what to study if you want to go on to college?” Etc, etc.

The reason it has taken so long to organize a first meeting is a packed schedule at school. With only four teachers and seven classes, it was hard not to feel like an intruder if I went during school hours to ask about something unrelated to the two subjects everyone was trying to teach at once. And if I asked any teacher individually, the answer was inevitably that the teachers would all have to discuss it together. Two more teachers came (still one short) so things calmed down and the schedule became more normal. But this quarter is the time for sports competitions. So, the kids are kept at the field after school until it’s time to go home. The only other free time in the schedule is taken up by choir practice for the Environmental Health Choir Competition (Environmental Health is the fancy term for garbage collection). The district apparently hosts a proudly musical group of garbage collectors, which I think is fantastic, but also (I can’t help it) amusing. The competition is in July and considering how last minute things usually are, these kids are going to be well prepared. So, that left me with Saturday, and to avoid the hoo ha of asking to use the school on a Saturday (I can hear it now, “But, Thapelo, what if someone is eaten by a lion during your GLOW club meeting at the school, we would be held responsible?!” . . . I am only exaggerating the slightest bit. The reason they didn’t want me to take the girls to GLOW originally was, “What if you hit a kudu (specifically a kudu, a certain kind of antelope) on the road and someone is hurt, who will be responsible?) Uh, there is free health care in this country. And the parents of Kole are quite unaware of the term “liability,” I assure you. Anyway, the meeting will be at my house. That will be a problem as soon as the head teacher gets wind of it because she will want GLOW to be under the supervision of the school with the “help” of the guidance and counseling committee. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I don’t mean to sound cynical. It no longer is trying to go to school and listen to what once seemed an exceedingly long discussion over a trivial matter. For example, the chairs for the VMSAC workshop. There is a building for “Non-formal Education” which was exactly what we were doing. Perfect. There are no chairs, though, so we needed to borrow some from someone/where in the village. The school has chairs in a storeroom that were brought over the holidays. Brand spankin’ new. I assumed that since they were new, we shouldn’t bother to ask to use them because they would want them to stay siame (nice, ok). But then a committee member informed me that she talked to Mma Marambe (school head) who told her to tell me to write a letter to the school asking for the chairs. I did so. The day before the workshop I went to the school to “receive feedback,” as it is officially called. I knocked (ko’ko), entered a meeting with the teachers, and helped them review one of the tests they had recently written. Twenty or thirty minutes later they asked if they could help. I asked for feedback. They discussed. It was reiterated that the chairs were new and it was their understanding that they weren’t to be given out for outside events. Fine, that’s what I thought. No problem, I will look for chairs elsewhere. Mr. Sephiri, one of the guards at the health post, took me with his own vehicle and petrol to collect chairs from the kgotla the next morning. People are wonderful. Later, I was told that Mma Marambe was upset with the teachers for making my life difficult but they told her I didn’t seem to mind, and I didn’t.

In search of a light topic that won’t tempt me to sarcasm or snide remarks, I should entertain you a bit with the description of my culinary artistry while in Kole which is, sometimes, decidedly odd.

The first time it occurred to me to tell you about this was the time when I had absolutely no groceries in my fridge except for plain yogurt. I had to scrounge through the non-perishables on my shelves. Thankfully, I had some tid bits from care packages. Katie (Bartels) sent me M&M’s at some point. Mom and Dad often send hot chocolate packets in their letters. I didn’t particularly want dessert, but makeshift chocolate pudding was literally the only thing available at the moment. Unfortunately, plain yogurt does not make a good base for pudding. It was more like yucky, sour chocolate pudding with little bites of heavenly M&M in between. I think that was one of the nights I went to Katlego’s house at dinner time, which is the equivalent of asking for food. You will be dished a plate. If they only cooked for 4, then everyone will get a fraction less in order to make the 5th plate. Communal societies have some amazing qualities.

Before the CKGR trip, I had quite a few vegetables in the fridge. This was a novelty and I couldn’t let them go bad. So, I sautéed onions, green peppers and mushrooms and froze them. I didn’t bring any food back from Ghanzi after the trip so I was down to scrounging the shelves and cleaning out the freezer a few days ago. I had beans, the veggies (in their sad, soggy, thawed state), rice, and . . . ah, yes, good ‘ol plain yogurt. I burned the beans, thawed the veggies, threw it all in with rice and used the yogurt like sour cream. It was a weird fajita salad thing that was actually better cold the next day (maybe because I fished out the burned beans before I put it in the fridge).

I had two potatoes that were about to go bad. I wanted a way to eat them in something cold, so I made potato salad. Except I got impatient and mixed the dressing and boiled eggs in with the potatoes while they were still hot. I had boiled them too long, so the result was deviled egg mashed potatoes. Yummy. J

Mostly, I have fun cooking and I eat ridiculously well, considering that I live in a semi-arid desert climate. One of my favorite snacks is an apple, finely cut, with plain yogurt (I sound obsessed . . . I guess it’s good for you, and one of the only dairy products that is easily transported because it can be kept for a little while in the sun and still be ok), with a sprinkle of sugar and cinnamon. When the mangoes were in season, nutmeg instead. If I have fresh vegetables, I usually try to eat them raw. I have made interesting salads: shredded carrot, chopped green pepper, onion, tomato with a dressing of oil, vinegar, and (this is what makes it delicious) ginger! Lettuce doesn’t travel well and there seems to be only iceberg lettuce available in all of Botswana except for the expensive Woolworths grocery store in Gabs, so most of my salads are what a friend calls, “village salads.

Just sort of “hangin’ out,” as I said before, can be a good thing. Two nights ago I was at Katlego’s house, playing with her kids, waiting for her to come back from correcting tests so I could help undo her hair. She had a style that I really liked, long thin braids, but I liked it less when I realized how painstaking it was to undo it all. It took us three days of about 2 hours work each day. So, I was waiting to help her finish and having a ball with her two boys, Oratile (7) and Montate (3). We watched a bad TV movie while I took out the braids. We didn’t finish until almost midnight so she asked me to sleep over, partly to avoid the mandatory “walking me halfway” so late, in the dark, and partly for my company. Oratile wanted to sleep in bed with us, too, but she made him a bed on the floor next to us. He prayed for us before we slept. Katlego held my hand while we fell asleep.

Things can be very intimate here. I have been in the same room as someone who is bathing several times now (always women). This morning, I went to my friend Tshimoyame’s house to collect chairs she had borrowed because I want to use them for the GLOW meeting tomorrow. I heard the tell tale splashing from outside her door and said, “Dumela, Mma. Ke Thapelo. A o a tlhapa?” (Morning, it’s Thapelo, are you bathing? . . . there’s a thing in Setswana about stating the obvious. Unwritten language rule: if you see someone doing something, ask them if they are really doing that thing. Just to be sure, I guess). “Emma, tsena.” Yes, I am. Come in. She opened the door for me. I went in and we chatted while she bathed in about 5 litres of water out of a bucket. I handed her her towel when she was done. It’s not that there is a lack of modesty. Someone who she didn’t know came to the door later but she wasn’t fully dressed, she looked around quickly for a sarong to wrap around herself before she opened the door to greet them. It is intimacy between friends.

That is quite long enough for now. Thank you for reading.

Love and miss you dearly,

Leah