Bits and Pieces of Shorobe

I'm pleased to announce that I am accompanied on this trip by the once top SET player for her age group in all of Michigan. We all have our skills; I'm pretty sure I made a few enemies during our last game of Speed Scrabble.

If Mapquest covered Shorobe, directions to my house would look like this:
Directions from Bus Rank (Shorobe) to Ntlo ya Monthusi (Monthuse's house)

1. Head South on The Road
2. Pass the Blue Store on your left. <.1 km
3. Pass the kgotla on your left. .2 km
4. Pass the Shorobe Primary School on your right. <.1 km
5. Pass the big pink house with the satellite dish on your left. .3 km
6. After the cement bricks on the side of the road stop (.1 km), continue another .2 km.
7. At the big white patch of dirt, turn right. <.1 km
8. Follow the tire tracks perpendicular to the road. .1 km
9. Enter the gate. House first building on left, with bright blue door. <.1 km.

Total Distance = 1.5 km Est. Time (walking) = 15 min.

The worst part of living in a village is seeing all the half-starved dogs; counting ribs is not idea of a good time. Fortunately, they had already removed the ribs from the cow-insides hanging on the wall by the fire in one of the huts.

I'm getting good exercise walking on loose sand all the time. Also by carrying buckets full of water. I get well-washed by doing both at the same time.

When we were in Otse, a few girls had skirts made for them by their host-mothers. One girl now has a skirt with images of Nelson Mandela on it. Being the wonderfully covetous girl that I am, I was thrilled to arrive at my Shorobe homestay and see my host-grandmother sewing clothes. I began plotting. My efforts paid off when, Wednesday night, I complimented my host-grandmother on her dress, and she announced she was going to make me one. Sweet.

That night I couldn't find the smaller washbasin for bathing. I asked where it was, and Monthusi reached into the half-built mud house on our property and pulled it out. It was muddy. I asked why it was there. The answer: Mokogi. Of course. Four-year-old boys are the same everywhere.

Thursday we had a lecture on snake handling. We learned some horribly inaccurate snake treatment techniques: suck the venom out, use a tourniquet and then remove it after a short time, etc. I found the discussion on cytotoxins fascinating. Snakes are so lazy, they make their prey digest themselves.

I'm having a difficult time finding an ISP advisor who will let me work with them in a national park. Telling me it's impossible only makes me try harder. Anyone looking for a research assistant in the Okavango Delta region?
Possible topics:
Using the age composition of blue wildebeest herds in the Moremi Game Reserve to predict the future success of the population.
Assessing the effects on biodiversity of different types of tourism in the Okavango Delta.

This morning I "dumela-mma"-ed a "rra". How embarrasing.

Aha! I've discovered that irons were invented before electricity; my host-grandmother had an iron-shaped metal box with a hinged top and was filling it with hot embers from the fire. Ohhhhhhhhhh.

Pula on the tin roof at night, and the heat is forgotten.

Now the children run to greet me when I come home from school. All it took was an afternoon blowing bubbles. Now they follow me around shouting tyhe only Setswana word they know I know: Tau! (Lion!) Tau! Tau!

I've borrowed my friend's copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'm about 80 pages into it, so I'll think I'll take a moment to philosophize.

Being in a whole new place, in Africa, is making me look at the world all over again, like a fresh start. The differences; the lack of electricity, the hand-washed clothes, the tin roofs; seem so mall. When I look back on this experience, that's not what I will remember.

I'll remember to stand upwind of the fire when cooking, how to dump the used bathwater on the ground and not on me, how to wash my clothes; but most of all I'll remember the things that are the same.

I can only really understand things in terms of dichotomy: same or different, America or Africa, modern or old, old or you. The important samenesses are not the things that are modern, rich, or America; they're the things that are human. The shouts of four-year-old children, the villagers playing soccer, the self-consciousness of my 16-year-old sister in Otse, looking at the stars, the feeling of family.

Okay, I'm done now.

No, wait...one more thing. Cow's liver is pretty much the grossest thing in the world. And this is coming from someone who can sit at the dinner table and play "Look at the Cool Pictures in my EMT Textbook!"