The Scharmers Come to Visit

I’m going to tell this story a little bit different. I am going to tell a little story about each picture in succession from the beginning of our trip to the end. This trip was by far one of our favourites. The Scharmers got to experience fully what Botswana has to offer.

I drove down to Johannesburg South Africa to pick up the Scharmers from their 16 hour flight over the big blue pond. We spent the night at a backpackers before we drove north the following day. It was a quiet evening with good food and better conversation. I was so excited to see them I lost my cell phone and left a calling card in the pay phone. I lost my head in a sense. In the morning we drove into Botswana and picked up Katie in our rental car at the bus station. Our first true cultural stop was at the Bahurutse Cultural Village. This is a place where people can go and stay in traditional Setswana houses, eat traditional Setswana food and watch traditional dancing and culture.

Doris and Scott are looking onto a basket full of sorghum, which is one of the staple foods in Botswana. The old woman is wearing traditional cloths and jewellery and in the background you can see the Kgosi (chief) of the village.

Doris looks in on the morder and pestle stomping process of how they turn sorghum into a flower like meal. She soon after joined in on the stomping process.

After we were shown our room and the festivities had ended, we were shown to the dining area for our first truly traditional meal. From the far end where Doris is there was an English muffin like bread, followed by a maze meal mashed potato like dish, then a sorghum pourage followed by the vegetable of cooked bean leaves that Katie is dishing. The last on the table is a dish of cooked caterpillars. Yum! We washed it all down with a swig of traditional sorghum beer.

We slept in the traditional roundival hut and experienced a few leaks during a ravishing thunderstorm. No harm done and a good breakfast and a tour of the grounds gave us a nice start to a great day.

On our way to Salajwe we ran into a little road water but the rental car pushed on through with out once having to be pushed.

The Scharmers came bearing gifts and a lot of them at that. We couldn’t have been happier! Thank you thank you to all those involved in getting us Oreos, Cheez-its, cereal, beef jerky and much more!

Katie and I took the Scott and Doris on a tour of Salajwe. We stopped at the Primary school where the school head gave a tour and some children sang for my parents.

From the Primary school we went to the clinic where Katie showed what she does as a Peace Corps volunteer. We even got to see a 4 hour old new born baby. Very exciting. Here is Scott checking out all the medications in the back room of the clinic. After the clinic, we toured the Junior Secondary school, the day care and saw some of what the rest of Salajwe village looks like.

Here the Scharmers are with the Chief of Salajwe and his wife, who is Katie’s best friend at the clinic where she works as a cleaning lady. Dad with some kids in front of a cooking house. That night in Salajwe we had some other volunteers over, John and Sadie, to share a meal of pizza.

The next morning, we went on our first game drive through Khutse Game Reserve and the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. It is a unique desert landscape of low trees and open grasslands.

One of my favorite parts of our trip was when we took a ride in a donkey cart. I think I pushed for it more than anyone but when else will we have the reason to ride around Salajwe village with a troop of 25 kids following us? Never, it was perfect.

Following a lovely visit to Salajwe, our home away from home, we drove further north to the Khama Rhino Sanctuary. It’s a game park where we stayed overnight and went on a game drive. We toured the town nearby and went to their markets to see how an African Market is.

The first game we spotted were a group of Giraffe that were grazing the tree tops. But the Rhinos where what were so fantastic for me. An amazing endangered beast that we got to see with our bear eyes.

After another night at the Rhino Sanctuary, we drove further north to the border town of Kasane. This is the road that is long, rough, but occasionally full of wildlife.

We spent 3 nights at Chobe Safari Lodge. It is built right on the banks of the Chobe River and designed to impress ambassadors and national delegates from around the world. Our first night we ate at the buffet. Just to name the meat I ate, not to mention the sides and desserts I had; Kudu, Guinea Fowl, Impala, Crocodile, and warthog. Scrum-dilly-umptious! It was late so we settled into our fully equipped, permanent standing camp tents.

The following day had a trip to Victoria Falls, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, scheduled for the morning. We meet with our guide, Lucky, who took us to the Botswana border and then through the Zimbabwe border. All without interruptions or incidents.

Once inside the park we got to see the huge volumes of water pouring over the 200 meter falls. It was beautiful. At one spot, danger point, on the trail the mist is so bad that it is constantly raining. We were a bit damp but the hot Zimbabwe weather quickly dried our happy selves.

Lucky took us to a 2,500 year old Baobab tree. The oldest in the area with a huge trunk, short branches and long thick sausage like seed pods. Everywhere we stopped, vendors would pop out of the bushes with crafts for us to buy. Everyone’s trying to make a buck, who can blame them.

Katie, mom and Lucky pose for a picture at Mama Africa, a restaurant that served traditional Zimbabwe food. I got dried beef in peanut butter sauce with peanut butter rice. Everything has peanut butter in it it seams. When everyone had eaten their fill, we went to the big craft market. 30 some stalls with handmade crafts. Each stall contained a sales man that could sell a box of sand to Bill Gates. With our arms full of crafts and gifts we took our van back to Chobe Safari Lodge. Our night was spent river side with cocktails, cards and a heavenly sunset.

Our last day in Kasane was spent leisurely. We had coffee overlooking the river, walked the shops around town, saw the local markets, visited a hollowed out tree that was used for an old jail, swam in the lodge pool, played cards, watched baboons steal food from the buffet, and waited for Lucky to arrive for the evening boat cruise.

Again we were blessed with another wonderful game viewing experience. The boat cruise unique in the fact that you can get so close to the animals in their natural habitat because they are habitualized to seeing boats day in and day out. It’s like you’re not even there because you are not seen as a treat.

That was the culmination of our trip. From Kasane, the following day, we drove 10 hours south to the capitol Gaborone. We slept deeply and continued our journey south the following day to Johannesburg South Africa. It was a sad time seeing them walk through to their gate to go back to America but Katie and I both knew that we would be seeing them soon. What a great trip!!

World Map Project

In her first year as a Peace Corps volunteer (1988-1990), Barbara Jo White recalls a fellow volunteer requesting wall maps from National Geographic to post in classrooms for her students. White replied, “The only way you’re going to get a map to stay on a wall is to paint it there.”

Applying the grid method to make her first world map, White says she utilized the Mercator projection method that makes countries further from the equator appear larger. Later she traced National Geographic’s new projection map and World Map Project was born. Pretty soon letters poured in from Peace Corps volunteers around the world asking for gridded map pages.

Enthusiasm for the project continues today due to the project’s simplicity and durability. White explains, “Because few rural schools have maps and many students leave school in their teens, some children never see a world map or have a concept of the world. The only way many schools can get and keep a map is to have it painted on a wall.”

Today World Map Projects can be seen on five of the world’s seven continents. “It’s such a good way to get integrated into the community. So many volunteers work with children and youth and this is a great way to literally draw the connection between you as a foreigner, and the community for the young people,” says Inter-America and Pacific Country Desk Officer Ella Ewart (RPCV/Peru, 2006-2008). She adds,”It was really rewarding to me, as a volunteer, to have a map—something tangible that I could point to and that I created hand in hand with the kids.”

Inspired by this method of mobilizing a community through painting project, Lucas commissioned his PACT Club to create a World Map Project on a wall on the Lempu CJSS campus. Graciously the art teacher at Lempu, Mr. Mosele, supported the project by donating paint brushes and offering to help pay for some of the paint. Along with some of our own contributions and donations from a local hardware store, we managed to collect all materials for almost no cost at all

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Following White’s instructions on how to trace, label, and grid a world map, we had to be extremely particular when drawing the grid lines, which on a curved wall is not easy. Once the lines were drawn, PACT Club students painted the foundation of the map ocean blue. Lucas had every student practice on separate sheets of paper recreating a gridded square by copying it onto a larger square. Then they began drawing out all the countries of the world. Although the project is supposed to be more about a community coming together for a common goal, many geography lessons were learned by students and staff. Several times people asked which of Botswana’s neighboring countries is America. Then we got to show them just how far our home country really is from Africa. Even many staff could not say where South Africa is (just south of Botswana). Many students assumed Russia was America because it was the largest.

After all countries were painted and labeled, we completed the project by painting Botswana flag and Peace Corps emblem in the corners. Lucas is making up lesson plans to share with teachers on best practices for utilizing the World Map. After all the ups and downs of our service having to address a topic as sensitive as HIV, this project was a breath of fresh air. And we will have managed to leave a physical mark in Salajwe.

Thank you Brandt, Michelle, and Adam.

We got your box and were blown away by all the goodies you included. The beef jerky didn’t last long because we love it and the stuff they have here does not compare. Try hanging a thin slab of meat out in the sun to dry, throw some pepper on in and eat it. That is Botswana beef jerky ‘Biltong’. My favourites were the A-shirts, drink mixes, citronella candles, and the roasted peanuts. Katie loved the candy, the sweat bands, the wet wipes and the fruit shacks. You guys are awesome and we can’t thank you enough for all that you send. Brandt and Michelle, we got your wedding picture up on our fridge. You two look great. Thanks Adam for catching us up on what you have been doing for a past few years.

HIV/AIDS Awareness Dance

One of the best ways to get Lempu Senior Secondary School excited about being at a boarding school is to provide some type of entertainment. It gets old just sitting around on the weekend with nothing to do and no place to go. This in when Katie and I had a great idea.

The month of youth against AIDS (MYAA) was coming up in March and we though an American style school dance would be an ideal event. We wanted to make it an HIV/AIDS awareness dance to go along with the MYAA part of it. So we made up posters for the dace to be on Friday the 11^th, right at the end of the term after all the testing was done as a way for the students to cut loose a little. We can never tell how out events are received until the night of because no one talks about it. On the day of the dance we cleaned up the hall and set up 3 tables that would represent the ABC’s of HIV awareness. A: being Abstinence, B: for Be Faithful and C: means Condomise. Each table had pamphlets and posters that represented the different ABC’s. We also made 200 small red ribbons that had safety pins on them so they could be attached to each person who entered.

We were set up and ready by 7 with all things in order except for kids. The students do something a little different than I’m used to in terms of privacy when setting up the hall. They turned it into an exclusive club by covering each window with either a bench tipped on end or a random poster made in some other class. We had volcano posters and the layers of the human skin posters and much more covering all the windows so that if you were on the outside you couldn’t watch the dancing. It was a fund raising event for both the guidance and counselling committee and the HIV/AIDS club. We charged 1 pula which equates to .12 USD. So when all was set up and music was playing inside by our self proclaimed teacher DJ, a line formed out the door and wrapped around the building. At that price, almost every student could be part of this dance. I think the fact that it was an American “Free style” dance that made it so appealing for the students. Every Batswana kid knows how to dance to some degree so it was perfect.

Kids started pouring in through our assembly line. 1 pula at the door, a stamp on the wrist, and a AIDS ribbon on the shirt was the complete package. When the line ended we had made some 450 pula and the school isn’t much over 500 kids. It got hot in there but the kids were loving just being themselves and dancing. Many were just in their own little worlds, feeling the beating and letting it move their bodies. The teachers kept asking Katie and I what was next on the agenda, as if every event had to be so finely planned that they were surprised and a little worried when I told them there is no schedule...”This is how an American dance is, kid’s just dance and they love it.” This might have been too unstructured for the staff so we did have 3 groups of presenters on the ABC’s, who all did wonderful. During the Condomise piece, I opened a box of condoms on the condomise table but it was quickly taken up by the guidance teacher under the assumption that we were encouraging sex. There was also a planned debate. I was sceptical of a debate at a dance but the 2 teams of debaters had everyone sit down and they debated the topic of weather Anti-retro virus (ARV’s) medications should be free provided by the government. This is currently how Botswana is doing things. It was great and very informative to me and the student body.

I had to wrap it up and do some more dancing before the night came to an end. So I had the DJ form an old school dance circle from middle school dances we all know so well. Some students had practiced for this and gave their dance, followed by Katie and I who showed off our now rusty swing dancing skills, and then individuals jumped in and broke it down until time was up. It was a great success and I could see smiling faces on all the kids who participated. Dances are so much fun when few people hold back or are too cool to just let go and dance.