The yellow house near the railroad tracks (aka Casa Moseki):
Sunrise over Otse:
Otse from the mountaintop:
The other night I taught Babae how to play Freecell. With real cards. Not on the computer. Definitely more tedious, but at least I know I won't accidentally get distracted from my work for several hours at a time. It's really good that I didn't bring a SET deck. I also enjoyed trying to explain Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
Life here is covered in a fine layer of red dust. Literally. And I thought it was just a tan. I do not envy those who have to meet me at the airport in three months. Maybe I'll learn how to do laundry by then. Or find a laundromat.
We went back to Mokolodi for a day. We were split into groups and given a 10x10 m area to study. We had to determine which animals and plants and insects live there. I know nothing about plants. There was a thorn bush and a thorn tree and another thorn bush that was somehow different from the first. Thorns + flowy skirt = AAARRRRRGH!
And then we tried to identify animal poop. (That's from a zebra, that's ostrich, eland, warthog. That's too small for eland, too big for springbok, maybe kudu.) It's like a logic puzzle. I could do this for a living. Me and zebra poop:
Two of my classmates, Leah and Ahni, identifying a thornbush:
Another classmate, Wes, identifying yet another species of thornbush. Or maybe a bug.
There were also footprints (spoors) to identify, but it took us too long to realize we should check spoors first, before walking all over the plot.
Cheers to Botswana's ecology. Nothing personal, Rhode Island, but this is way cooler.
Then I pet a cheetah. His name is Numa. He and one other were rescued as orphaned infants and became too accustomed to people to be released. So they were trained to get pet on the head by tourists. Not such a horrible life; the fences with barbed wire aren't so bad...
Whoa...cheetah:
that's tame:
I want one:
That'd be me, petting a cheetah:
If anyone wants a postcard, email your home address to me. Unless your last name is Zelman or Resnik, in which case it's in the mail.
"Pula! Pula! Pula!"is a cry that can be heard throughout Botswana. All speeches that I've heard have ended with this call for rain. It is also the name of Botswana's currency; I have often heard young boys begging for pula.
Otse itself practically begged for water, as every step kicked up a cloud of dry rust-colored sand that coated the surfaces of the village, roofs and dresses and cows and mucous membranes.
One night it almost rained. Clouds appeared late-afternoon and clustered by a nearby mountain. The clouds darkened as the sky did and turned the sunset a brilliant purple:
Streaks of lightning brightened the sky and thunder followed too many seconds after for the storm to reach Otse. Rain could be heard in the distance and the air was humid for the first time since I'd been there. I anxiously awaited the melody of rain falling on the tin roof, but it never came. The next morning was as hot and dry as the one before.
So continued the drought.
Then one day it finally rained. From the first light, the sky was a menacing grey. The Botswana name for this month means "sick clouds":
It was cold and windy. (Well, probably not colder than about 23 degrees C, but still not the 40 degrees it was the week before.) It was dark and gloomy. The cows and chickens and donkeys were hiding. But the earth was happy. The electricity in the air showed that. The dust was counting down to the moment the sky opened.
By lunchtime, thunder. Not long after, raindrops started pounding the ground. The rain only lasted a half hour, but the sky didn't look done yet. And all the disadvantages of a tin roof (i.e. the HEAT) are all forgotten with the heavenly tap-tap of the rain.
Then at night the thunder started again. I fell asleep to the rain. Flash. Tap-tap-tap. Boom. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Sleep. [I suddenly have the urge to tap dance. Hey, I wonder if it's possibly to tap dance on the tin roof...maybe that's not such a good idea.]
When is the Kalahari Desert not a desert? When I'm there, of course. I bring rain with me wherever I go, from Providence to the Gunks to Phoenix to Otse. Botswana's covered by, officially, the Kalahari semi-arid ecosystem, because it gets 25 cm of rain a year. I don't know what the cutoff for desert is, but this place is pretty damn dry.
It's amazing what things make me feel like I'm home: as it was raining the hardest, the electricity went out. Ah, the familiar.
Once the rain stopped, all of Otse was outside, drinking and partying. What a way to begin a weekend of festivities for Botswana Day. (A weekend that lasts through Tuesday, according to the government.)
A muddy, poopy river ran through town, and damp cows drank happily from it. Donkeys still looked sad, but all the goats were out being chased by their goatlets.
And then it rained again.
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