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!