Initial Impressions

Dumelang! This is how you greet a group of people in Setswana, the native language of Botswana. There are various ways that you can greet, but it all depends on if the reference is singular vs. plural and feminine vs. masculine. Anyway, enough with the brief vocab lesson because as of now this is about all I know. Next week we have an hour of Setswana lessons, which I'm super excited about! I was surprised when my classmates and I flew from Johannesburg to Gaborone, Botswana how often the native language is used. While the official language of Botswana is English, most Batswana people that we've encountered tend to stick to their native tongue unless speaking to us foreigners.
Batswana men and women are beautiful! The common features that people seem to share is very smooth, darker skin, full lips, and radiant smiles. The people are very friendly, although we seem to get stared at a lot, which is not surprising. After all, we are a minority, which is very humbling. It seems to make my group of classmates bond together all that much more.
There are 12 of us on the trip, and we're a pretty diverse group. While all of us but one attend Ohio University, there are many ethnic representations including Japan, Korea, St. Vincent, Kenya, and of course U.S. citizens. We've all pretty much been non-stop together since we departed Columbus on Sunday.
After a 30-hour journey from home to our new and temporary home in Gaborone we settled into our rooms. I felt badly because we're staying in graduate housing, but the three of us guys ended up moving in with a guy who is a native Batswana without any fair warning. Luckily for us, Ressaho is very friendly and even participated in some drinking games with all of us Yanks. We snuck into the staff lounge late last night and had a few beers. It seems as though it's hard to get anything but sweeter beers here, although I'm not complaining because for the most part things are very inexpensive coming from America.
The currency here is called Pula (bills) and Thebe pronounced teh-bay (coins). Six Pula is equivalent to one American dollar, give or take with the exchange rate. Needless to say it's weird when you go to the grocery store in search of toilet paper and it says 36 Pula for 10 rolls of toilet paper, when in reality it's only six dollars (approximately).
Today we made our first field trip to one of the 10 NGO affiliations we have here in Gaborone, and incidentally it is the organization I have been looking forward to learning about the most. It is a children's orphanage called SOS, and there is another branch of SOS in Botswana's second largest city, Francistown. SOS houses 190 orphans, ranging from ages 0-23 of whom only 19 allegedly are HIV+ and/or have full blown AIDS. To be honest, given the content of this experience, I was surprsied at how few children have HIV/AIDS, although it somehow made visiting a little less sad. The other component to that and the reason I said allegedly have HIV/AIDS is the fact that the children are not tested for HIV/AIDS until they exhibit certain symptoms. It's unfortunate given that some people do not show symptoms of HIV/AIDS for years. In turn, this is also a sticky subject considering many of the orphans spend their entire childhoods at SOS, and what of the adolescents who become sexually frustrated and do not use protection? There are so many questions I have, and this is one of the main reasons that we are here: to critcally evaluate the NGO's and how we might provide some feedback for a research project that OU's communication and development department is putting together.
The children are absolutely incredible; bright-eyed and full of laughter and sharing. I took lots of pictures and I'll share them as soon as I can. There were actually a few American volunteers from California that were at the orphanage. It seemed as though the Americans were the most excited to be there. There is an English Medium school that the children attend, although the teachers are very unpaid and it seems like their only motivation is the fact that they can't find other work. In addition to teachers, there is a group of women that live at the orphanage called the "mothers." These are the caregivers and surrogate mothers for children. The man that runs the orphanage is referred to as the "father," which provoked a lot of controversy among my Ohio U. cohorts. In general Botswana remains a rather patriarchal society, so the notion that there is a group of women all devoted to caring for the children and one man who oversees the entire operation with his own wife and children present echoed traces of "The King and I."
After the orphanage we traveled to a small village about 45km outside of Gaborone called Thamaga. We got tons of traditional Batswana pottery for super cheap! It's beautiful stuff!
The food has been interesting. Every morning we have eggs, juice, bread, tea, a traditional Batswana soup, and some type of meat. Yesterday it was beef livers and today it was minced meat. We also have peas, carrots, and corn for lunch in addition to chicken every lunch and dinner. I'll admit that it's getting old already eating the same thing virtually every meal, although I won't get on a soapbox because we are being treated very well.
More later...
:) Mark