Being Gluten-Free in Africa

For those of you who don’t know, I have Celiac’s disease. Celiac’s disease is a condition where a person’s body is unable to digest gluten. Gluten is found in grains such as wheat, flour, barley, rye, and oats.

Being gluten-free in the States can be challenging. Whenever I go out to eat, I have to call ahead and check the menu to make sure they have gluten-free options. Unfortunately, not all restaurants have gluten-free options. Luckily, most of my friends in the States know my allergy and are always very considerate about my food restrictions. In addition, Celiac’s disease is becoming more common and more information about it is being spread. Grocery stores have gluten-free aisles and companies are now including gluten allergen information on their products. This is making it easier for people who have gluten allergies to eat out safely.

However, no one knows about Celiac’s Disease or gluten allergies in Africa. When I first arrived in Serowe for Pre-Service Training, I had to explain about my allergy to my host family. My host mother did not understand. I had to explain to her many times, and in many different ways what I could and couldn’t eat. I had to explain that pasta has gluten in it. I had to explain that I can’t eat oil that has touched gluten before. And I had to explain that the spoon they use to cook food with can’t be set down on the counter, because the counter has wheat on it, and I will get sick from cross-contamination. The first week or so in Serowe, I got sick often. However, after most of the gluten had been purged from the house, and once my host mother understood what my allergy was, I didn’t get sick anymore.

Being gluten-free in Africa, however, is a bit harder than it is in the States. In the States, if I went on a road trip, I could pack a lunch with a gluten-free sandwich. Here, there are no gluten-free substitutes.

Luckily, because of globalization, being gluten-free isn’t impossible in Africa. Food, such as chips and spices are labeled with their allergen information, including whether or not the product contains gluten, or if it was manufactured in a facility with gluten in it. In addition, my friends and I were able to find gluten-free flour and brownie mix at an upscale “Super-Spar” (a grocery store in Botswana) in Orapa. Orapa is a diamond-mining town that we were able to visit during PST. However, Orapa is a walled-off city and you need a passport and special invitation to get into it, so the likelihood that I will ever find these gluten-free products again is slim.

My apologies if this post is a little long, but it was important to me to share the experience of having Celiac’s. Especially, since when I was first applying to the Peace Corps, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be accepted because of my gluten allergy.  In fact, I almost didn’t apply. However, I did apply. And I was accepted. I share this allergy with millions of other Americans, and maybe there are others who are also afraid it might impact their application for the Peace Corps. They shouldn’t. As a Celiac’s, I might not have been considered for certain countries because of my dietary restrictions, but I was, in fact, accepted into the Peace Corps.

There are four other people in Bots ’14 (the group the Peace Corps Volunteers that came over with me) that cannot eat gluten as well. And I am so grateful they were here with me.  Together, we were able to manage the struggles of being gluten-free together. We were given special gluten-free food baskets to accommodate our dietary restrictions (we didn’t receive any special gluten-free goods, but instead of being given bread or cereal in our food baskets, we were given an extra carton of eggs and another bag of fruit). When there were catered events, we were able to explain together to the caterers our allergy, and figure out what we could and couldn’t eat.

My daily diet usually consists of eating fruits and vegetables, so eating gluten-free in Botswana isn’t that hard for me. However, sometimes it is nice to have something different. And, during PST, my fellow gluten-free friends and I were able to come up with some excellent recipes using ingredients we could find in Botswana, for foods we were able to make in the States.  

Below, I have listed some of the recipes we have cooked and created while here. Please note that because we had no measuring cups in Serowe, a cup of sorghum is literally a cup (technically we used a mug) of sorghum, and a tablespoon of oil is literally a spoon of oil. So if your recipe comes out a little odd, don’t be afraid to experiment. That’s how we learned to make these! Please try to re-create, and enjoy!

Sorghum Pancakes:

2 cups sorghum powder

2 eggs

3 tablespoons of oil

2 tablespoons of sugar

1 teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon baking soda

1.5 cups of milk

Mix all ingredients together and cook like normal pancakes. Eat with peanut butter and sliced bananas (or another fruit) on top. This works well as a very filling breakfast or a nice snack.  If you add vanilla extract, the pancakes don’t stick together very well, and they come out more as a pancake scramble (it resembles granola) and you can eat it like cereal with milk. It is delicious.

Add nutmeg and cinnamon and raisins, and it becomes more like a granola bar. In addition, if you add crushed pineapple and shredded carrots to the nutmeg, cinnamon, and raisins, it makes carrot cake (sort of)! It doesn’t hold together as well, so another egg might be needed, but if you put frosting or jam on top, it is similar!

Banana Pancakes:

1 Banana

2 Eggs

Optional:

1/8 cup of sorghum (this is to thicken the egg and banana mixture); if you don’t have sorghum, add any other type of flour (almond, rice) to thicken the batter

A Dash of Baking Soda (this makes the pancakes fluffy)

Mix all ingredients together and cook like normal pancakes. Eat with peanut butter if maple syrup is not available (which in Botswana, it’s hard to find, and very expensive).

Quiche:

Potatoes (sliced thinly, about ¼ an inch thick)

Red and Green Pepper

1 Onion

Zucchini

Mushrooms

Eggs

Milk

Shredded Cheddar Cheese

Coat the bottom and sides of baking pan with oil, then line with the thinly sliced potatoes. Try to cover all holes with potato slices. Then put the pan in the oven and bake for about 20 minutes (or until the potatoes are baked and not hard anymore). This creates the crust.

Stir-fry the onion first, then add the peppers, next the zucchini, and last the mushrooms. You can add as many vegetables, and as many different types of vegetables as you want. The vegetables listed were just the ones available to us.

Mix the eggs and milk together. The ratio of this should vary depending on how big the pan you are using is. But for an 8x12 pan we used 5 eggs and 2-3 cups of milk.

Take the pan with the potatoes out of the oven. Cover the bottom with the shredded cheese. Add the vegetables. Add the egg and milk mixture. It should fill up to the top of the potato slices on the side. Top off the mixture with more shredded cheese.

Bake for about half an hour (or until the egg/milk mixture is quiche-like). And allow for time to cool. Finally, eat!

Summers in Botswana Are Not To Be Messed With

A fellow PCV told me that Botswana summers are not to be messed with. She was not wrong.

As I am writing this post, it is a balmy 104 degrees in my room.  And the sad part is, it is so hot outside, that when I walked into my room, I thought, “Oh, it’s cool in here.”

It has been 100 degrees plus all for about two weeks, and it doesn’t cool down much at night. Last night, it was 99 degrees when I went to bed. I keep cool at night by sleeping with frozen water bottles and a fan. In addition, when I climb into bed, it is actually so hot out, that my sheets are warm, and feel like I just took them out of the dryer.

One of the challenges of living in rural Botswana is that the electricity and water go out several times a week. When the electricity goes off, I can’t use my fan to keep cool. And, because there is no power, the water bottles in my fridge start to melt.

I can’t even take a cold bucket bath, because the weather is so hot that it is heating the water pipes, so my bucket baths are warm. To compound matters, my roof is tin, and I have no ceiling in my house. Therefore, my roof attracts heat.

Currently, it is the rainy season. And, while it hasn’t rained much, when it does rain, it cools down a lot, which I am grateful for. A few days ago, it was 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Thankfully, we experienced a massive thunderstorm and it cooled my room down to 86 degrees.

This blog post may sound like I am complaining. Let me be clear: I am not. I agreed to extreme weather and unpredictable water and electricity conditions when I signed up for the Peace Corps. These are just a few of the daily challenges that I have experienced since coming to site.

A few days ago, the water and electricity both went out. It was 100 out, and I was lying on the floor trying not to melt (side note: I finally understand how the Wicked Witch of the West felt in the Wizard of Oz, if only someone would throw water on me). However, it was the first time that I felt like a true Peace Corps Volunteer. Because I knew, that all around Botswana, there were hundreds of other Peace Corps Volunteers, sitting on the floors of their houses, possibly without water or electricity, trying not to melt into a puddle. Just like me.

And I love it.

Creepy Crawly Things

Because Sefhare is in an area of Botswana that tends to get more rain than the rest of Botswana, the bugs here are particularly fearsome. I will break down the creepy crawlies I have encountered since coming here for you:

Spiders: Generally harmless. I tend to leave them alone because they kill the mosquitos in my house. 

Centipedes: I saw a centipede that was as long as my forearm and as thick as my big toe crawling on my porch the other morning. I chased it away with a broom.

Beetles: Beetles are attracted to any light. They are thick and black. They tend to fall from my bedroom ceiling and make a loud crack sound when they hit the floor. However, they are harmless, and I sleep with a mosquito net, so any Beetles that would fall on me while sleeping are caught in the net.

Cockroaches: The first night in Sefhare, I battled a cockroach that was coming up from the pipes in my tub. It was gross and I finally managed to kill it by spraying it with about half a can of this wonderful bug insecticide called DOOM. However, I couldn’t push it back into the pipes because it was so big. I pushed as much of it back into the pipes as I could, however its antennae were still peeping up from the pipes. So I plucked its antennae from it’s head and hoped it would eventually disintegrate. I was squealing a lot during this encounter.

Thankfully, the only other bad encounter with a cockroach was when one the size of my pointer finger climbed down my wall (I was doing crunches, and when I leaned back I saw the little bugger climbing down from my wall). I immediately sprayed it with DOOM and (because of where it climbed out of) it fell in my bed frame. This caused me to spend several painful minutes searching carefully in my bed frame to see where it fell. As soon as I found it, I killed it with a shoe. Luckily, it was pretty disoriented from the DOOM and so it didn’t put up much of a struggle.

Scorpions: My. Worst. Nightmare. They are EVERYWHERE. They are huge, usually about the size of the palm of my hand. I have never hated bugs before, and was not scared when killing them in the States, but these scorpions are terrifying. They are also bright orange and hairy, which is gross.

The other night, I woke up in the middle of the night because I heard a squeaking/scratching sound coming from somewhere in my room. I turned on my very handy headlamp (thanks, Dad!) and saw a scorpion the size of my hand eating something it had just killed on my floor. I decided not to try and kill it, and instead tucked my mosquito net closer into my bed, and tried to go back to sleep. The next morning, I found the remains of its kill on my floor, along with something else that had also been eaten on my floor.

This is a picture of a scorpion I killed in my bathtub my first morning in Sefhare (and yes, that is my footprint you see around it):

I’ve seen scorpions run out of my laundry and be nestled in clothing I am about to wear. I check everything before I put it on now.  Just to be safe.

Yesterday the water went out. Luckily, I was able to store some water in a big pot to use later for brushing my teeth and drinking. I then left the pot on the counter of my sink. I came back half an hour later and a scorpion had fallen in and drowned to death in my drinking water.

Luckily, I don’t believe they are poisonous. The general rule of thumb that a PCV told me is this: If the pincers are bigger than the tail, it means that the primary way it catches its prey is by it pincers, and not stinging it with its tail. The pincers on the scorpions I have killed here are bigger than the tail, so… win?

Lizards: I have a family of lizards that live in my house. There is an adult and a few baby lizards. I have found them in almost every room in my house, but I tend to leave them alone because they eat the bugs.

In summation: DOOM is great. And I hate bugs in Botswana.

Beginning in Sefhare

Thank you all for your patience with the delayed blog posts. This week I will update my blog several times, so please stay tuned for more! Well, I am finally at my site in Sefhare! It has been quite an adventure.

We officially graduated from Peace Corps Trainees to Peace Corps Volunteers on October 15, 2013. Graduation was exciting and emotional. I was sad to leave Serowe and my friends, but equally excited to go to my new site.

I was picked up in Serowe by two members of the Red Cross (RC) chapter in Sefhare: Pascoline (the Rehabilitation Officer) and KB (RC Combi Driver). Pascoline and KB spent the day with me in a town called Palapye and helped me shop for supplies and food before heading to Sefhare.

Once in Sefhare, we stopped by the Red Cross Office to meet the other members of the Red Cross: Cecilia (the Admin Officer), Karabo (the Field Officer), Thobo (the Chef), Elsie (the Cleaner), Marea (Pre-School Teacher), Mpho (Teaching Assistant), Otiliah (Teaching Assistant) and Mma Seema (the School Head/Principal). They were all wonderful and incredibly welcoming. My furniture had not arrived (and still hasn’t!) so they loaned me a bed to sleep on and an electric stovetop burner to cook on.

We then headed to my house! My house in Sefhare has four rooms: A sitting room (currently empty because of lack of furniture), my bedroom, a bathroom and a kitchen. As you can see in the pictures below, my house is unique. For example, when I need to go to the bathroom I have to walk outside to get to the bathroom. This isn’t a problem, except for in the morning when people walking in my neighborhood see me in my pajamas. This type of housing is typical of a lot of houses in Botswana. In addition, my landlady is wonderful. She makes me feel safe and welcome. 

Because I live in rural Botswana, there is no grocery store in my town. I can get some basics in my town, for example peanut butter, potatoes, beetroot and beans, but for more substantial food, I have to travel an hour to my shopping village: Mahalapye. At first, I didn’t think traveling an hour to get food was a big deal. I have since changed my mind.

The bus goes out of my village only four times a day. The bus is old, very hot, and packed with Batswana. If there are no seats, people just stand in the aisles. And, the bus almost never takes just an hour. The bus is prone to breaking down. And, since there are only four buses out of Sefhare, if the bus does break down, you have to wait on the side of the road for the next one. Thankfully, this hasn’t happened to me yet.

When I go to shop, I shop for two weeks at a time. I have to carefully plan out what I am going to eat for the next two weeks. And, if I forget something, I have no way of getting it. On the weekends, the food shops are packed with people. It is incredibly overwhelming, and, while I am not claustrophobic, I think I might have become claustrophobic while shopping during my first weekend in Mahalapye. I take my camping backpack with me to put food in. Because of the lack of buses and difficult shopping conditions, shopping is a whole day ordeal, and it is very exhausting, especially with a heavy pack. I shop twice a month, so when I shop, it is food for two weeks.

An additional challenge to having my village so far away is food storage. I have a refrigerator in my kitchen, however electricity goes out often. And, the weather is so hot here that I have lost a lot of food as a result.

Thankfully, my shopping village is only an hour away. I have a friend whose shopping village is three hours away, and there is only one bus out of her village per day. So she has to spend the night in her shopping village.

I have been in Sefhare for about a month now, and, so far, I love it. I have developed a daily routine that helps me feel grounded, and the community in Sefhare has made me feel very welcome. I have met a lot of new people, and everywhere I walk people call out “Mpho!” (my Setswana name, which means “gift” in Setswana) and are eager to strike up a conversation with me.

Please check back this week and next week for more posts about my job at the Red Cross, the progress I have made on my Community Assessment, weather, bugs, and almost everything in-between!

Saying Goodbye to Serowe

Time passes strangely in Botswana. The first few weeks in Botswana seemed like months. Even though only a few weeks had passed, such a massive change had occurred in my life, that it seemed like it had been a long time since I had been home.

Now, time is passing quickly. We only have a few days until we swear in as official Peace Corps Volunteers. We learned about our site placement last week, and we met our supervisors soon a few days later. Each volunteer is assigned a supervisor and counterpart at their site who is tasked in helping them learn about the organization they will be working at, assisting them in developing projects, showing them around the village, and introducing them to important members in the community.

At first, I was very excited to learn about my new site. I am working with Red Cross Botswana in Sefhare. Sefhare is a small village in eastern Botswana that hosts around 6,000 people. When I learned about my site, I kept on imagining the people I would meet, the projects I would work on, and the new places I would see. However, as our swearing-in date has gotten closer, I have realized that living at my site, means that I will be living away from the friends that I have made these past few weeks.

PST has been so many things. It has been challenging, stressful, exciting, boring, informative, and wonderful. And, as I find myself saying goodbye to the friends I have made here, I am nostalgic. Entering into the Peace Corps has been a unique experience. Because of this, I have bonded closely with  many other Trainees. We have become close because of the intense changes we have gone through together. And, once I leave, I know I will miss my new family of volunteers very much.

Site placement!

I finally have my site placement! I am working at Botswana Red Cross in Sefhare (a small town near the South African border). I will be working with Orphan and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in schools. I met my counterpart at the Red Cross this week. His name is Karabo, and he seems very involved in the Red Cross, the town, and improving the lives of OVCs. I will post more on the specifics of my job once I get there, which is only 2.5 weeks away! 

Challenges

I have experienced many challenges since coming here. Here are just a few:  

·      I cannot roll my r’s! In the Setswana language, you roll the r’s.

·  The water and electricity went off last night. Taking a bucket bath, with no electricity, is challenging. However, having a headlamp has proved very useful when going to the pit latrine in the dark (which, in general, is not recommended, as cockroaches and rats tend to frequent the pit latrines at night!).

·      Dogs, chickens and roosters and donkeys are very active and loud at night. Sometimes, with all the noise, it is incredibly hard to sleep.

·      The weather is getting quite hot. No matter what I wear, I can’t get cool enough! This is going to become a problem when the weather starts to get hotter, as it is starting to transition into the summer months. During the summer (the hottest months occur from October-February), the temperature can get up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (or so I've heard).

·      Communicating with friends and family in America is hard without regular Internet access.

·      Red dirt: It is everywhere, and gets on everything!

As I continue throughout my service, I will add to this list. And, hopefully, I will be able to take some off this list as well!

Shadowing Week

Shadowing is an integral part of Pre-Service Training (PST). Shadowing occurs halfway through the two-month PST, and is when a trainee “shadows” a current volunteer at his or her site, giving trainees an opportunity to experience what a volunteer does at his or her post.

I shadowed a Bots ’11 volunteer named Rachel Ecklund, a Life Skills volunteer in Morwamosu. Morwamosu is about four hours west of Gabarone, in southern Botswana. Morwamosu is in the “bush,” and is a tiny village. Rachel lives in a traditional, round, one-room house.  She has electricity, but no running water. Rachel gets her water from a tap in her yard. The tap doesn’t always have running water, so she has to store water in large bins in her house in case she doesn’t have water for several days.  She uses a pit latrine in her yard to go to the bathroom. Not having running water can be challenging. Washing dishes certainly takes a lot longer, and bathing involves a very large bucket!

In the Peace Corps, each volunteer is given an assignment area designation that they will work in for their two years of service. There are four designations: Life Skills, NGO, Local Government Capacity Building (LGCB), and Clinical Health Team (CHT). Life Skills volunteers work with primary, junior and senior secondary schools. Life Skills volunteers work with students to help promote healthy lifestyles, with an emphasis on life skills such as creating self esteem and a positive identity, goal setting, and decision making. One such tool for promoting these types of goals is through a program called PACT. While I was shadowing with Rachel, I had the privilege in sitting in on a PACT meeting she held for the children at her school. PACT stands for Peer Approach to Counseling Teens. During the meeting they discussed ways they could be positive role models and allies for their peers when faced with pressures to participate in unhealthy activities (such as drinking alcohol or having unprotected sex), which can increase the likelihood of contracting Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), or HIV/AIDs.

Rachel is leaving in early October, so her service is almost over. Her last project before she leaves her site is creating a world map on one of the walls of her school, Morwamosu Primary School. The map will be incredibly beneficial to the children of the school, because they can use it as a reference point for their studies. The few days that I spent with Rachel, we spent at the school, painting the countries with the school children. The children paid incredible attention to detail when they were painting and were proud of the work they did coloring in the countries. 

The wall with dots painted on the countries for the children to color in.

Peace Corps Volunteers helping the children paint in the countries.

A semi-finished world map!

I loved shadowing week. A major highlight was the food! Rachel is great cook, and I learned how to make green curry, peanut thai curry and gluten free taco shells from scratch! Peace Corps provide volunteers with a cookbook while they are at site, and we used a lot of recipes from it. In addition to eating some great food, shadowing gave me a chance to talk to Rachel and ask her all of the questions I had about the successes and challenges of her service, staying connected with family and friends back in America, and traveling around southern Africa. Shadowing was a perfect vacation from the daily stresses of PST, and it left me feeling refreshed and excited about the rest of PST and my service.

Site announcements are next week, so I will keep you all posted of where I will be stationed, and the organization I will be working with. Thank you for all the positive feedback regarding my blog posts, and I hope you keep on reading and following along in this journey with me! 

Food in Botswana

The food in Botswana is very different from the food in the United States. I am going to break down what Batswana (Batswana are people from Botswana, Motswana is a single person from Botswana) eat based on the different food groups.

Starches:

Batswana eat a lot of starch. The main types of starch that are eaten with meals are:

o   Setampa: grounded corn.

o   Dikgobe: setampa mixed with beans.

o  Phaleche: stiff, white millet porridge eaten for dinner; eaten with your fingers (you should only use one hand!) and used to scoop up the food on your plate.

o   Bogobe: stiff, brown sorghum porridge eaten for dinner; also eaten with your fingers

o   Motogo wa mabele: soft sorghum porridge, eaten for breakfast, typically mixed with milk and sugar; Batswana like to eat phaleche with sour milk.

o   Motogo wa phaleche: soft millet porridge, eaten for breakfast, typically mixed with milk and sugar.

o   Rice

o   Ma fresh: Homemade French fries!

o   Pumpkin: this is usually served cubed and boiled in water.

                                                        Setampa

While I love to eat carbohydrates, I am having trouble with the amount of starch eaten here. Meals typically consist of at least half of a plate full of starch, served with a small piece of meat and some vegetables. Setampa, phaleche and bogobe are very heavy starches. And, after eating meals here I feel very full for about an hour, and then I am hungry again.

Vegetables:

·      Cabbage: Batswana typically eat cabbage boiled, and with a little oil on it.

·      Beetroot

·     Salad: Salads in Botswana are what Americans would think of as coleslaw. Their “salads” are shredded cabbage or carrots in mayonnaise.  Batswana love mayonnaise and I have even had potatoes in mayonnaise. Batswana use spicy mayonnaise in their salads, as opposed to the plain Hellmann’s mayonnaise I am used to in America.

·      Carrots

·      Rape: A leafy green that resembles shredded spinach.

·  Other vegetables such as mushrooms, zucchini, avocado, and eggplant available in supermarkets, but are more expensive depending on the season. 

Meat:

·    Seswa: it is meat (goat, cow or chicken) that has been pounded – bones and all! – into a consistency, that when it is finished, looks like pulled pork. It is delicious. However, you do have to be careful when eating seswa because biting into bone is not fun.

·      Batswana typically eat goat or cow meat. Chicken is available, although it is more expensive, and therefore less common at meals.

                                           Seswa and bogobe

My host mother, when cooking meat, tends to boil it in a pot. She then adds a little bit of oil, and fresh vegetables (onions, carrots and cabbage most often) to create a “stew” to flavor the meat with.  Meat always comes on the bone, and is typically very tough. For weddings, it is traditional for the husband’s family to pay a “bride price”. This is typically paid in the form of several cattle, which are slaughtered for the ceremony, and made into seswa. Fresh seswa is delicious. It is dripping with delicious meat fat, and is so tender it falls off of the bone.

Overall, food in Botswana is different from food in America. And while there are many foods here that I love to eat (motogo for breakfast, fresh seswa, beetroot), I am eager to get to my site and make food that I am familiar with, and go a little easy on the starches!

Greetings from Botswana, Africa!

Dumelang borra le bomma! Greetings!

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Stephanie Pillion. I graduated from Smith College in 2012, with a B.A. in Government, and a concentration in International Relations. I spent the past year living in New York City, working at a law firm called Hughes Hubbard and Reed, LLP, as a Litigation Paralegal. I am passionate about the reading and writing fiction, learning about different cultures and languages, and traveling. Currently, I have been serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer for the past two weeks in Botswana, Africa.

My process to become a Peace Corps Volunteer began over a year ago. The Peace Corps is an organization founded in 1961, by President John F. Kennedy, with the mission to promote peace and friendship around the world through cross cultural exchange and service. The Peace Corps application process is an intensive one. After filling out the application in June of last year, I was contacted in August of 2012 for my first interview. I was interviewed by a former Peace Corps volunteer, and after the interview I was nominated for the Peace Corps as a Community Services: Health (HIV/AIDS Capacity Building) volunteer. The next step in the application process was medical and legal clearance. The lovely members of the Hollis Police Department helped take my fingerprints, and I sent them off to the Peace Corps around November. Around March, I was given another round of essay questions to answer. Questions ranged from expectations I had for my service to the top challenges I expected to face while in the Peace Corps. Finally, I was nominated in April of 2013, as an NGO/CBO Capacity Builder with the Botswana, Africa, HIV/AIDS Capacity Building Project.

And now, a little more than one year later, here I am in Serowe, Botswana! The first part of my journey to Botswana started in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I met my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers (PCV) for the Staging process. Staging is a one-day orientation program that all volunteers go through before heading off for 27 months of service. Meeting my fellow volunteers was both overwhelming and exciting.

The next morning, at 2 AM, all 60 of us volunteers left for a bus to JFK. We then spent 15 uncomfortable hours on a plane to Johannesburg, South Africa. When we landed in Johannesburg we took a one-hour plane to Gabarone (pronounced “Hab-a-rone-ay”), Botswana. We spent a few days in Gabarone, going through more orientation sessions and medical interviews (I am on Malaria medication now). We then traveled north to a town called Serowe, where we met our host families.

I am living with a family called the Matlhodi’s. I live with my host Mother (whom I call Mma, for mother) and her grandson, Tsala (which means “friend” in Setswana). My house has power and electricity, both of which I am grateful for. I still have to heat up water on the stove for my bucket bath, but my living conditions could be worse.

Everyday I walk about 45 minutes with some fellow PCVs who live in my ward (a ward is like a neighborhood in the States) to school, the Teacher's College of Serowe. Class starts at 8AM, and ends around 5PM. We get a tea break around 10:30AM.

During class we have Setswana language lessons (the language they speak here), medical and safety training sessions, and discussions about the roles of a Peace Corps Volunteer in development (the Peace Corps development philosophy is based around capacity building within a community to ensure sustainability after a PCV leaves his/her post). 

So far, I have loved learning about Botswana culture, speaking Setswana, and and making new friends. So far, every volunteer I have met has said that we received the "Peace Corps Jackpot" when we were chosen for service in Botswana. So far, I have to agree with them. Still, there have been many challenges along the way, but I will delve into those in a later blog post.

I am going to try and update my blog as frequently as possible. I am going to make it a combination of videos, pictures and posts. Hopefully, you can all follow along with me in my journey for the next 27 months! 

Go siame! Goodbye!