A few life updates

I haven’t been keeping up with this blog enough! My apologies to anyone who might be reading this. A lot of has happened in the last couple of months and sometimes it has been too much to put into words. I’m currently on vacation with my parents and have a bit of down time to process and write a few blog posts.

The projects that I have managed to get started are going well, as for the others, they’re still works in progress. I am still working on my organizational system for my clinic’s pharmacy and dispensary. Since it’s the end of the fiscal year, we ran out of printer ink about a month ago and won’t be getting any more for another few weeks. Nonetheless, the parts of the system I have implemented so far seem to work. I have mostly been working on making the dispensary match the pharmacy. I want to eventually gather enough data on how much we dispense every week so that we can just refill the dispensary once a week, instead of daily, and that would make the process of keeping stock counts much simpler. It doesn’t sound like the most exciting work, but when I think about the issues we have with stock outs or wasted drugs due to expiry, I think it’s some of the most important work I do.

Furthermore, I finally managed to install Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on one of the clinic computers!! I started going through the lessons with our Health Education Assistant (Mma Lenyatso) and it has been so much fun. Mma Lenyatso started out not knowing how to use a mouse or type her name. Now she has progressed to using half the letter keys on the keyboard and has managed to double her typing speed! I’m hoping that her success and progress will inspire others to want to take lessons as well. In fact, I think this program is so useful that I hope to install it on the computers at the primary school so that the students can have a chance to learn as well. I figure, the younger you start with typing, the easier it is.

The other day I had my first morning health talk at the clinic. The subject was malaria since world malaria day is coming up. I managed to get some pamphlets to hand out and clinic staff helped me put together a poster in Setswana about the symptoms and prevention methods for malaria. I think the talk went really well! Fortunately, Mma Lenyatso and one of our ambulance drivers were there to lead the discussion, since it was all in Setswana. Our clinic actually received several hundred mosquito nets from UNICEF and in the month leading up to world malaria day, we handed them out to pregnant women, women with children under 5, and the elderly. I am considering doing a project to monitor the usage of the nets and possibly map out my village to pinpoint areas that malaria cases occur. (Big dreams, we’ll see how that goes).

Mosquito nets

At the primary school, I have started a World Map Project! I really love geography, and I thought that the best way to start getting involved at the school would be this project. We are drawing a 1.68 meters by 3.36 meters world map on the side of one of the buildings at the school. Once the project is done, we’ll be able to play geography games with the kids and I have already started quizzing them on the different countries of the world. I also just like the idea of adding something colorful and beautiful to the school. We plan to write ‘Welcome to Gobojango Primary School’ over the map and it will be the first thing people see when they enter school grounds. But I won’t lie, it’s also a lot of fun and deeply satisfying to be able to look at a physical accomplishment at the end of the day. As an added bonus, some of the teachers have gotten very involved with the project and it has been great getting to know them.

A work in progress!

Sadly, I am still working on getting a GrassRoot Soccer team going, but that was in part due to the school break and my traveling around for trainings and holidays. I plan to step up my efforts when I get home.

I also feel that I should mention a sad occurrence. A few weeks ago, a woman I worked with at the clinic passed away. Her name was Lentho and she was a lovely person. She became too sick to work by November, so I didn’t get a chance to get to know her well, but I know that she was funny and she was kind. She was the first person to invite me to a party when I arrived in Gobojango. She was also the first person to try to find me a pet cat when she found out how much I wanted one. She loved to garden and dance. She was very close to many of my friends and neighbors, so I would accompany them sometimes and visit Lentho at home. Her passing was very difficult and impacted almost everyone I know in Gobojango. She is really missed.

That’s all for now, I promise to post again soon.

Buses, ghosts, and combi sprints

A few weeks ago I went to the lovely town of Kanye (yes, I was incredibly excited about the name) with my neighbor Lorato as my counterpart so that the two of us could attend a GrassRoot Soccer training. What is GrassRoot Soccer? It’s an NGO that uses the popularity of soccer to teach young people about HIV. That sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but the program actually works really well. There are 12 different lessons and you use different games to teach anything from the risks of having multiple concurrent partners, to the fact that you cannot tell whether or not a person has HIV just by looking at them. I loved this training because our Batswana counterparts were just as invested and enthusiastic as the volunteers. Anyway, I had been struggling to find a way to broach these uncomfortable and very serious topics with young people in my village and I feel like this method is a good place to start.

The journey home was quite the saga. I ended up taking 4 buses and traveling for 10 hours total to get back. I love that I can hop on a bus in Botswana and go anywhere for a reasonable price, but those long rides can get old fast. Whenever I get too grumpy and feel like complaining, I try to remind myself how much harder it would be if I was six foot four like my brother Steve. On one of these buses, a woman across the isle from me was sharing a two-seater with her young daughter. The bus was pretty packed at this point. Then, a mosadi mogolo (a respectful term that literally means old woman) clambered into the bus with a toddler and a baby. Suddenly, that two-seater was now struggling to accommodate for five people. I felt so bad for them that I offered to let the toddler sit on my lap and the old woman gratefully handed the child over to me. The second she was in my hands, I knew I had made a stupid mistake. The little girl suddenly started bawling, screaming, and scrambling with all her might to get away from me. I keep forgetting that with children under five there is pretty good chance they will be terrified of me. We hastily traded children and I was now holding a slightly squirmy, but calm baby girl. She spent a few minutes staring at my hands before tentatively petting them and playing with my fingers. I get pet surprisingly frequently by children (and sometimes adults), I guess the novelty of the color of my skin never quite wears off. I always find it interesting to watch little kids prod my arms and pet my hands as if to make sure I’m real and not some kind of ghost. And my hair, of course, is just too much fun to pass up. If I sit for too long in front of little girls in my village I’ll end up with a dozen braids in a few minutes.

Anyway, when I finally, finally, FINALLY got to my shopping village to wait for my fourth and last bus of the day, I got to participate in one of my least favorite rituals. If by some misfortune I happen to be in my shopping village on a busy Friday or a holiday weekend or the end of the month when everyone gets paid, I get to take part in what I like to internally call ‘combi sprints’. A combi is like a van that is used as a small bus when traveling short distances. Since there’s a fair amount of travel to and from my village, our combis tend to be a bit bigger than the norm, but are still rarely large enough to accommodate all the passengers. Since I arrived in my village almost six months ago, I have tried to figure out when the buses come and go, but I get a different answer from every person I ask. So, when I finish my shopping or traveling and am ready to go home, I sit and I wait.  While I’m waiting, I do my best to position myself and my bags so I have a good shot at getting a seat on the combi. It never seems like it will be much of a problem, since there are only a few people standing around, but it must be some kind of optical illusion I haven’t gotten the hang of yet. I’ll be standing there wondering if I should put my backpack down because my shoulders are aching, when someone at the other end of the parking lot will whistle. Suddenly, everyone jumps into action and dozens of people run over to get in line as fast as possible. There’s a lot of jostling and angling for a better spot, but eventually people settle and we wait for the combi to arrive. However, once the combi does arrive and opens its doors, any pretense of order falls apart. There’s a mad rush towards the door as everyone tries to squeeze in as fast as possible. Some of the people at the back of the line will give up and rush to the open windows to drop a plastic bag of groceries on one of the seats. (In Botswana, all you have to do to mark a seat as yours is to leave something on it.) If by some stroke of good luck I manage to get onto the bus in time, I try to find a seat and begin awkwardly trying to decide where to put my gigantic backpacking bag. Eventually we all cram in and, when no one else can fit, the combi starts easing out of lot with the door gradually sliding shut. I sit there and greet the people around me and then reassure myself that this last ride of the day will only be 30 minutes long. When I get to my stop, I launch my bag out of the combi and clamber out after it. I’m sweaty, exhausted, and relieved to be back in my quiet home. I greet my neighbors as I walk to my house and am overjoyed to find my kitten waiting for me inside. I put my things down and congratulate myself for successfully making it through the combi sprints again.