Days 3 through 5 (part 1): Orienting ourselves at UB

(Author’s note: This first week has been so jam-packed it has been difficult to keep up with this blog, but once we start working next week and I’ll be back by 3:30 PM consistently it should be a little bit easier. Sorry to all of you who follow this thing religiously.)

Dumelang! (Hello! pl.)

We had a packed first few days in Botswana getting oriented with the place and the culture as best as we could before we our sent out to work with various NGO’s. We’re staying at the University of Botswana (henceforth UB), which, after given a tour on Tuesday, I realized was a very respectable University and had elements of it (including its brand new business building) that reminded me a lot of Athens or were even better than Athens. Again, I’m not sure whether it was my western ignorance or what, but for some reason I didn’t think that what was considered a third world country would have such state-of-the-art facilities, but in retrospect it would makes sense for a government to spend on universities because it in turn is creating an educated workforce that can drive the economy forward. Talking to Karabo and Thato are guides, both of them don’t actually pay anything to go to the university, the government provides scholarships for 70% of the kids who go to college, which is an incredibly impressive feat for a government that is struggling economically.

I haven't talked about the food a whole lot because up until this point it hasn't been too drastically different, but breakfast was the first shocking meal I had. It consisted of what looked like hamburger helper, a gelatinous porridge thing (which we later found out was the staple food of Botswana and they eat it everyday) and then eggs (both hardboiled and fried). Most of it was delicious, but I felt pretty strange eating hamburger, however I will not complain about it if it keeps happening. Meat is a staple food as cattle is one of the main industries in Botswana so every meal has meat in it, which I’m finally starting to feel the effects of. I also am still made uneasy about how accommodating the people have been for us, they clean up after us after we eat and are willing to cook more food that we are used to and I feel like we are here to have a Batswana cultural experience and learn just as much as we are here to work, and the rest of the group feels the same way so, as a result, at some point soon I will be eating worms.

Speaking of culture, I've begun noting some cultural differences and so far I've noticed that instead of saying "eight-thirty" to denote 8:30 they say "half-eight." We have been learning a lot of interesting cultural nuances that I’ve been making a point of noting and I’ll be including throughout this blog. One interesting one is how differently our notion of drought is with theirs. Botswana is landlocked on all sides by Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa and drought to them means 2 to three years without rain, which becomes a very dangerous situation for the people and causes a number of deaths. We also learned that Batswana are very friendly, have different (closer) notions of personal space and are very aware of those around them and would be able to tell if someone was missing in a large group setting.

After breakfast everyday we have Setswana lessons and I’m actually learning a whole lot. I think taking Arabic has provided me with a little bit of an advantage because it has a lot of sounds that aren’t present in English and therefore the muscles in our mouth aren’t trained to say them, and Setswana is very similar in that it has difficult pronunciations. The only one I still struggle with (which actually people from the north part of the country struggle with two and simply disregard, which makes me feel better) is the pronunciation of the letter “tlh” (which I don’t think I can even begin to spell out phonetically). I will try to incorporate a little Setswana into my future posts so you all can get a taste of the language, as you’ll notice I’ve already done.

On Tuesday we all reflected on why we were here and I really liked hearing how even though we all go to the same school, we have such a wide variety of majors and interests and most importantly reasons why we're here. I'm here because this trip combines my two passions, traveling somewhere unique and foreign to me, and volunteering. At tea time (another cultural difference, which we will have every day at 10 AM) I talked to Jenny, a first-year masters student in our group who's really interested in international development also, but using sport for social development to create an environment that can teach not only about life issues but about other important issues like HIV and provide a safe environment for kids to ask questions about delicate issues. I've never really thought of sport being used that way and found it really inspiring and interesting.

I’ll give you the second half of this blog post really soon.

I miss you all!

Ke a go rata thata. (I love you very much).