We Need Your Help!

As we near the end of our service, there is one project that (due to long internet outages, and the size of our village) threatens to remain a loose end, so we are again humbly soliciting your help!

Please help us finish mapping Ramotswa to improve health care for everyone.

1. Click here and log on to Open Street Map.

2. Create an account, login, and search for Ramotswa, Botswana.

3. Click "Edit". An image of our village will appear. Zoom in so you can see individual buildings.

4. Click "Area". Trace around each building by clicking on the corners. Double click when you finish. Save your work. It will look like this…

To learn more about the project or how to map, watch our video here.

We have a team of Ramotswans building on your work by identifying major landmarks. With your help, we can get this thing up and running! Please share, get your 4-H club or class of 3rd graders into it. Every little bit helps!

Things I Have Learned from Long Water Outages

Monday, Thursday, and Saturday have been water rationing days for our entire two years in Botswana (I recently learned that in California this means no watering the lawn. Here, its more straightforward. It just means the water is turned off on these days). However, as the weather turns cold and dusty, and the dam has now reached 0% capacity, water is scarcer, more unpredictable and the empty pipes have taught us a few things. These are a bit hard to describe daintily. You have been warned.

1. If you don’t have a pit latrine you are wasting your time. You know those time management calculations of the total years of your life that you spent doing x? Well, I don’t want to know the percentage of my life I’ve spent attempting to flush a modern toilet without running water.

2. Math. 6 liters will flush a toilet once...or it will provide 2 baths, teeth brushings, face washes, pajama laundry, 3 cups of tea, and cook an entire pot of beans. Choose wisely.

3. More math. Storage and gray water sufficient for 20 flushes will last you one week if you conserve. It will last you one afternoon if somebody has a bad tummy. While your first instinct may be to curl up at home if you are tied to the toilet, in this case, your best option is also the most dangerous. Dress up and go to the capital. Try to reach a public toilet before its too late.  Then hang out there while people stare at you until you feel better.

4. Wet wipes make a very nice shower.

5. Living on the edge of town is a gift. Pooping in the lands is highly preferable to going on the sidewalk near the “don’t urinate or defecate here” signs.

6. Living on the edge of town is a curse. If you have to go while at work you have three options: go in the yard, keep a “special bowl” behind your desk, or start walking. If you are on the bus, and you arrive at the bus stop in the center of town, 40 minutes is a long ways to walk.

7. 27,000 people require infrastructure. Infrastructure can be built and it can fall apart. Pit latrines contaminate ground water and get banned. Indoor plumbing is not sustainable in a desert in drought, but you have to have one or the other. This is why the ancient Mesopotamians, Great Zimbabwe, the Romans, and the Aztecs engineered sewer systems for their highly populated areas. They were also located near water. It is hard for 27,000 people to live without water.

8. Access to water is highly political.

9. Popcorn makes a great, waterless dinner. Don’t wash that pot!

10. This one is from a friend in the southern Kalahari Desert: If you need to stay somewhere all day, plan ahead and don’t drink water in advance. This is also very dangerous. If you start to lose feeling in your head, scrap this plan immediately. Drink water with oral rehydration salts :)

11.Love is finding that someone has hauled and lifted to prepare the bathroom for you with the toilet tank full when the water is off.

12. Love is waking up at 3am to the sound of ominous gurgling (a sign of water returning to the pipes), cleaning, and refilling while your loved one sleeps until morning.

Re (kind of) Mmogo

Everybody wants to be a VIP. Every special event has them. They get the shade, the chairs, the snacks, the blue and white tulle-draped tables, and they give the long speeches. It is the fear of offending them that necessitates endless protocol. I’m not a fan of this tradition- hence, our all-VIP parties. Nobody needs shoes or a primary school certificate to enjoy the perks.

That said, we met a few VIPs this week that were kind of impressive, and showed very un-VIP humility by showing up at a Peace Corps party. The party celebrated the end of our one and only All-volunteer Conference. Without this short get-together, volunteers from our intake group (Bots 14) who haven’t been facilitating sessions at Bots 15 trainings have no opportunity to meet the newest set of Americans to hit the ground in Botswana. Its a nice chance to meet another American who might be stationed only a long walk through the bush away from you, but who is only reachable by bus in the opposite direction, through the capital. Due to a booking error, Owen and I were shuttled to a different hotel that didn’t have a working shower. Ironic, since the theme of the conference was “Re mmogo” (we are together), and we were about 20 km away from togetherness.  Dawn and Botho, who could have hoarded their much-coveted shower, shared their room key with us, and we still basked in the luxury of hotel amenities. We were thankful to have showered and spiffed up for a banquet with His Excellency Festus Mogae, former president of Botswana.

Mogae was one of the “founding fathers”, working alongside Sir Seretse Khama (the first president of Botswana) and others to establish the hybrid of tribal law and democracy that earned Botswana its independence from England in 1966. They requested Peace Corps volunteers to help set up the fledgling country. Mogae describes a situation in which only 40-some nationals held University degrees, so Peace Corps volunteers stepped in to help draft the constitution and the national budget. These volunteers were also some of the first teachers, so many older government officials remember them from the classroom. Fast forward to 2002, during Mogae’s presidency, when Peace Corps had long since left the country due to its rapid development and middle-income status. That year, HIV/AIDS broke out in a big way all over Southern Africa. Mogae was one of the first to admit to the UN, “we have a problem.” He sought out the ear of President George W. Bush, and asked for the Peace Corps to return to Botswana. “When you think about your future presidency” (as one does) he said, “you don’t expect that it will be all about fighting this disease”. But, for him, it was. He worked hard to provide health care and put his people as his top priority.

National heroes are more complex than they seem. Mogae’s presidency was not free from corruption. I thought I would dislike this man, but instead, found him smart, witty, and very down to earth- even while discussing an impressive career and life doing a lot of good for a lot of people. Owen highly recommends Diamonds, Dispossession, and Democracy by Kenneth Good for an overview of some of the ways in which he helped to build the facade of democracy, which hid centralized power, the personal gain of top officials, and controlled the flow of information. Hopefully, the banned book that forced a professor to flee the country won’t get our blog shut down. This is when small readership is nice :)

The Bus Rank

The Gaborone bus rank is often a migraine-inducing experience with its competing screechy house music, the diesel/bathrooms-have-been-closed-for-too-long stench, piercing whistles, and pushy "Kooltime le metsi" salesmen. It is also a central part of any trip to the big city, and it is home to a few of my favorite things. Here, it was quite pleasant and empty on a Tuesday morning.

Book Club Party

The children in our library's literacy program have successfully finished their first goal of 2015: completing a paper chain stretching from floor to ceiling, representing all the books they have read as a group. One of those books was the Jungle Book. To celebrate their accomplishment, we reserved the library conference room, where community stakeholders, VIPs, and government officials hold their workshops (a space that is off limits to children). We filled it with beanbags, popped popcorn, and made our own movie theatre.

The Kgotla

There is a kgotla is at the heart of every people group, the villages within each group, and the wards within each village. It is a public gathering space and the site of the traditional court of justice, which settles many civil cases, and certain criminal cases when the defendant chooses it. It is presided over by the paramount chief (Kgosikgolo) at the people group level, the chief (kgosi) at the village level, and a headman at the ward level. Because of these levels, we have several dikgotla in Ramotswa, but it is also home to the main kgotla of the Bamelete people. This past week, our main kgotla hosted an event for the disabled community, benefiting SESAD (the Southeast Sports Association for the Disabled), the School for the Deaf, and a rehabilitation centre. Here are a few photos.

The tallest people in all of the land stood in the back.

Ellen (our DHMT head and adoptive mother) gave the opening remarks.

The Dikgosi (chiefs) of Ramotswa, Otse, Taung, and Mogobane.

Students from the School of the Deaf.

Kgosikgolo (paramount chief) rocking the blue.

Rehabilitation Centre arts and crafts for sale.

 

SESAD farm

Botswana Rises

Oops! I just realized that its almost the end of February, and we haven't posted all month. One of the more notable events this month coincided with Valentine's Day, and involved the One Billion Rising Campaign- a worldwide social media campaign against Gender-based violence. Despite the unusually high rate of GBV in Botswana, and its close ties to HIV, this is actually the first year Botswana has been involved, with a big event held in Kasane #ChobeRises. 

Here in Ramotswa, we decided to join in. You can find the photos of over 40 participants at the Ramotswa Public Library Facebook page, at Chobe Rises, or at https://choberises.wordpress.com. You can learn more about the worldwide campaign at onebillionrising.org

The idea behind the campaign addresses the fact that 1 in 3 women worldwide (or about one billion people) experience gender-based violence (about twice that rate in Botswana). One first step is to get people to think about why they might not support such a thing, and what they can do to rise up against it. So, youth in Ramotswa finished this sentence: "I am rising because…" and connected with others with the same message around the world. We were disheartened by the number of people who were not supportive of this message: people who said "but, it is the fault of women- they need to be disciplined" or "but, women are the ones who start it- we men are keeping them in line".We were encouraged, however, by the messages of those who spoke out, including our chief of police and our Kgosikgolo Mosadi Seboko.

Seboko is the first female Kgosi in Botswana. A kgosikgolo is a paramount chief, presiding, not just over a village, but the entire tribe (in this case, the Bamalete people). Although she is very busy in the tribal judicial system, presiding over our local kgotla, and as a member of the government legislative branch in the House of Chiefs, she advocates well for her people, and even occasionally makes time for her two local Peace Corps (that's us!) While she's not a fan of the internet, and will only see these photos in person, you can find her on Wikipedia. We were honored by her involvement.

I am rising because..."All people need to be loved and respected. Let us consider women as mothers. Let us care for all.  Women are the [blankets tied around the torso to carry a baby on the back] for the country (a Setswana proverb meaning that women are those who carry, protect, sacrifice, and care for us)."

*Please feel free to correct my translation