“Koko,” I thought I heard coming from outside. Huh? I looked at the clock. 6:42 am. Seriously?
Everything in the house has been sold, and the small voice outside was coming round to pick the last of it. The concrete walls echoed as I stumbled out of bed – not that I’d been asleep for some time, but lying in bed was an act of optimism seeking a few more minutes of rest.
I folded up my sleeping bag and she collected my bed, extracting it from piles of luggage and a few things yet to be wrapped and shipped. The truck left, and I finished pulling things together. I showered by draining a bottle over my head, as our water was out yet again. Appropriate for my last morning, somehow.
I don’t much care for the house I’ve lived in these past 14 months, but this morning it was hard to leave. I felt pulled back, longing for something that’s already gone. It’s the end of an era, my housemate said a few days ago. I suppose he’s right.
So in a few hours I get on a plane, flying to Zimbabwe for my sister’s wedding. It’s a perfect ending for my time here. But flying straight on to a new life in Boston next Wednesday is still a little daunting.
Finally moving towards the car, I stopped in the dust and called to the remaining cat. Crazy, we call him. Crazy was here before us and will be here for some time after we’re gone. Crazy doesn’t really get along well with other living creatures, but I called out anyway. Lying in the sun, he squinted at me. Meowed. I called again. And he turned his head away.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Friday, August 03, 2007
seronga
The ferry closed at six, we thought. So roaring along the narrow waves of aging asphalt was the logical solution for our already-a-day-behind departure. Unfortunately, a few of Botswana’s finest were also out…on the side of the road…in chairs with clipboards and a radar gun. I suppose I should have just kept driving; after all, a cop flailing his arms to make cars stop seems a bit embarrassing for all of us. But my Midwestern follow-the-rules upbringing reared its reliable head, and I pulled over.
107 in a 60kph zone! Though I honestly can’t recall seeing a sign, and the village in which we were stopped had apparently receded from the road. I was traveling with a colleague, who did his level best to weasel me out of the fine. I’ve never given a bribe in Botswana, he said later, and neither have I. But the process of paying up was painful too; multiple forms attested to my admission of guilt, I signed over THE ACCUSED, had to wait for a receipt. In the meantime, other trucks flashed by at 110, 120k’s. “Ah!” shouted the receipt-writing cop to his younger, grave-faced partner. “You didn’t even tell me that one was coming!” as he missed shooting another one with the radar gun. Nice, I thought. I feel kind of like I’m doing a public service, keeping them occupied while everyone else hurls towards their destinations. Maybe they’ll take up a collection for me in appreciation.
We climbed back up into the Land Rover, my colleague taking the keys away from me as we discussed whether to haul ass or give up on getting to Shakawe before the river crossing was closed for the night. I think we can make it, I said, though of course I had never been up this way and had no idea. Predictably, perhaps, we pulled up at the dock as the ferry slid out onto the river. But the sign – this time, there was one – said closing time was 6:30. So we lucked out, and shortly, watched the sun set over the water, and drove onto gravel on the other side. Now, I’m unwound, I thought, as the first breaths of relaxation swirled from my lungs through my fingers and toes.
We arrived in the village several hours later, driving through thick dark and low hum of the occasional generator. There’s no electricity on this side of the river, and winter evenings set early and cold. Fishtailing through the sand tracks from the heart of the village – anchored by a bar and a bakery – we arrived at the house of the local councilor and his wife.
At this point, it seems wise to say that there is no way I’m going to be able to do justice to this trip here. Between the characters I met, moments that I savored, and things that made me want to scream, there was a lot of, well, drama. And as I sort through everything that has happened this past year while getting ready to leave, I find myself less resilient than usual, much more likely to be happily buzzed or completely dragging with little in between. So Seronga inflamed this tendency, being out in the middle of nowhere, getting to know the local conservationist scene, exploring the landscape, trying to talk with expats, villagers, government officers, missionaries. In the end, there is nothing like walking on so much Kalahari sand to keep you off balance.
107 in a 60kph zone! Though I honestly can’t recall seeing a sign, and the village in which we were stopped had apparently receded from the road. I was traveling with a colleague, who did his level best to weasel me out of the fine. I’ve never given a bribe in Botswana, he said later, and neither have I. But the process of paying up was painful too; multiple forms attested to my admission of guilt, I signed over THE ACCUSED, had to wait for a receipt. In the meantime, other trucks flashed by at 110, 120k’s. “Ah!” shouted the receipt-writing cop to his younger, grave-faced partner. “You didn’t even tell me that one was coming!” as he missed shooting another one with the radar gun. Nice, I thought. I feel kind of like I’m doing a public service, keeping them occupied while everyone else hurls towards their destinations. Maybe they’ll take up a collection for me in appreciation.
We climbed back up into the Land Rover, my colleague taking the keys away from me as we discussed whether to haul ass or give up on getting to Shakawe before the river crossing was closed for the night. I think we can make it, I said, though of course I had never been up this way and had no idea. Predictably, perhaps, we pulled up at the dock as the ferry slid out onto the river. But the sign – this time, there was one – said closing time was 6:30. So we lucked out, and shortly, watched the sun set over the water, and drove onto gravel on the other side. Now, I’m unwound, I thought, as the first breaths of relaxation swirled from my lungs through my fingers and toes.
We arrived in the village several hours later, driving through thick dark and low hum of the occasional generator. There’s no electricity on this side of the river, and winter evenings set early and cold. Fishtailing through the sand tracks from the heart of the village – anchored by a bar and a bakery – we arrived at the house of the local councilor and his wife.
At this point, it seems wise to say that there is no way I’m going to be able to do justice to this trip here. Between the characters I met, moments that I savored, and things that made me want to scream, there was a lot of, well, drama. And as I sort through everything that has happened this past year while getting ready to leave, I find myself less resilient than usual, much more likely to be happily buzzed or completely dragging with little in between. So Seronga inflamed this tendency, being out in the middle of nowhere, getting to know the local conservationist scene, exploring the landscape, trying to talk with expats, villagers, government officers, missionaries. In the end, there is nothing like walking on so much Kalahari sand to keep you off balance.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
ready, not ready...
After another hectic month on the road, I arrived in Maun this past weekend. I hesitate to say that I got home, because, well, I am perpetually confused about where home is, and besides, that last time I called Maun home, my Zimbabwean sister yelled at me because my home is supposed to be where hers is.
Anyway, I stood in my room, staring into my closet, looking at the clothes hanging there, and I thought, I’m not ready to go. As crazy as I feel here a lot of the time, I love it. I love that I am never bored and that there is something to learn every day. I love being stretched and challenged and reminded that my view of the world is not the only one. I love the simplicity, the way in which a less complicated day to day existence helps clarify why I do the things I do. And I love the fact that looking in the mirror here becomes an act of honesty rather than an examination of which mask I’m wearing today.
But at the same time, I am definitely ready to go back. I have a fantastic job waiting for me, a brand new loft almost ready to be lived in, family and friends that I miss. And some of the things upon which I have to spend energy here are, well, a present stream of frustration that ebbs and flows depending on how much I need from university bureaucracy. Right now the flow is pretty high, and so my patience has been worn low. So I do look forward to some of the simplicities of modern life as well.
But I know that when I arrive, I’m going feel displaced. Chosen or not, wanted or not, I will be unsure of where my feet are planted. In Afrikaans, the word for this is soutpiel. It literally means, well, salty penis. But metaphorically, it refers to a man with one foot in the West (especially Europe) and the other in Africa – so something is left dangling in the ocean. It’s an insult, an indictment of a lack of commitment to one or the other. Apart from lacking the requisite anatomy to fit the description precisely, I think I understand how this feels. I haven’t been able to make the commitment to stay here, or in the US. I know that going back will be eased by the idea that I will be in and out of Africa for a long time, which seems like the best of both worlds. But I often think I should have decided to stay here, difficult or not, the other side of the world or not. I feel a bit like, as Peter Godwin says, I am leaving my post.
The problem is, as I’ve said before, I want to be a full participant. If I am really to be here, I want both feet on the ground. I want to be a member of the community in which I live, and not just the white expat community (eesh). But this is hard, if not impossible. There will always be barriers, things I don’t understand, cultural discourses which I may come to understand but never just sink into. And as a white foreigner, there is a lingering feeling that at any time, someone could pull the carpet out from under me.
I imagine I might say some of these same things about the US, but for slightly different reasons. There, I think I do get it – I just don’t agree with most of it. I feel marginal in a different way. Maybe the difference is making the choice for myself about where and in what ways I feel I can do the most good…and be healthy and happy while doing it. But as always, I reserve the right to change my mind. And there are few things more American than that.
Anyway, I stood in my room, staring into my closet, looking at the clothes hanging there, and I thought, I’m not ready to go. As crazy as I feel here a lot of the time, I love it. I love that I am never bored and that there is something to learn every day. I love being stretched and challenged and reminded that my view of the world is not the only one. I love the simplicity, the way in which a less complicated day to day existence helps clarify why I do the things I do. And I love the fact that looking in the mirror here becomes an act of honesty rather than an examination of which mask I’m wearing today.
But at the same time, I am definitely ready to go back. I have a fantastic job waiting for me, a brand new loft almost ready to be lived in, family and friends that I miss. And some of the things upon which I have to spend energy here are, well, a present stream of frustration that ebbs and flows depending on how much I need from university bureaucracy. Right now the flow is pretty high, and so my patience has been worn low. So I do look forward to some of the simplicities of modern life as well.
But I know that when I arrive, I’m going feel displaced. Chosen or not, wanted or not, I will be unsure of where my feet are planted. In Afrikaans, the word for this is soutpiel. It literally means, well, salty penis. But metaphorically, it refers to a man with one foot in the West (especially Europe) and the other in Africa – so something is left dangling in the ocean. It’s an insult, an indictment of a lack of commitment to one or the other. Apart from lacking the requisite anatomy to fit the description precisely, I think I understand how this feels. I haven’t been able to make the commitment to stay here, or in the US. I know that going back will be eased by the idea that I will be in and out of Africa for a long time, which seems like the best of both worlds. But I often think I should have decided to stay here, difficult or not, the other side of the world or not. I feel a bit like, as Peter Godwin says, I am leaving my post.
The problem is, as I’ve said before, I want to be a full participant. If I am really to be here, I want both feet on the ground. I want to be a member of the community in which I live, and not just the white expat community (eesh). But this is hard, if not impossible. There will always be barriers, things I don’t understand, cultural discourses which I may come to understand but never just sink into. And as a white foreigner, there is a lingering feeling that at any time, someone could pull the carpet out from under me.
I imagine I might say some of these same things about the US, but for slightly different reasons. There, I think I do get it – I just don’t agree with most of it. I feel marginal in a different way. Maybe the difference is making the choice for myself about where and in what ways I feel I can do the most good…and be healthy and happy while doing it. But as always, I reserve the right to change my mind. And there are few things more American than that.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
breaking and entering
I got my first SMS with the word ‘burglars’ in it the other day. Unfortunately, it was used in reference to some folks who stopped by my house on Sunday night. Fortunately, no one was home at the time but the cat (and I think she’s still a little freaked out). One of the two wooden doors through which you can get into our place was hacked apart with a panga (not to be overly dramatic, but it’s a large machete-type knife) and an undetermined number of ‘burglars’ crawled in thru what was left of the door and started going through our stuff. They didn’t find much. This is of course because we don’t have much. They riffled through everything in the cabinet under the TV, and went thru my housemate’s closet, and made a mess. But it doesn’t appear that they managed to take a whole lot of anything. They left a laptop, for example, but took a pair of tennis shoes. I think what happened was that a friend of mine, who was staying in the house while my housemate and I were away, drove up not too long after they got in and the sight of her headlights scared them off.
The reason they got in, though, was because my friend didn’t lock the metal gate over the outside of the wooden door. This is both disturbing and reassuring – the latter because it indicates that the place is otherwise hard to get into, but the former because it makes it feel like someone was watching for an opportunity, and/or hanging around a lot. The house was broken into several times last year before I arrived, but not since. The weirdest part of this one was that my room was completely untouched. There was a camera on the shelf in my closet, jewelry in the drawer next to the bed, shoes, clothes, a few CDs. But it appears they never even went into my room. It looks like someone ripped a small hold in the cardboard that covers up the broken glass in one of my windows and pulled out a small blue nylon bag with a few CDs in it, but even that they left in my housemate’s room down the hall.
On finding the door hacked open, my friend called the local 911. This is where the story gets strange. The Maun police are not known for being terribly responsive or competent. So the local expat community – read, whites – have established their own little group of enforcers. To ‘subscribe’, you just get a walkie-talkie. To get help, you use it to say someone’s in your house. Et voila, the cavalry arrives. In this case, my friend says, within a minute or two three men showed up at our place, one screaming “YOU BASTARDS!!!!” and going through the house with a handgun tucked into the front of his pants and wielding a shotgun with a flashlight taped to it. This image makes me almost as uncomfortable as the idea of someone breaking in in the first place.
Maun used to be a village. Now it’s teeming with tourists, who have enabled walls to be built between the wealth they bring and the people who resided in the area ‘before.’ This breeds resentment. It feeds anger and frustration. White foreigners come in and set up businesses for other white foreigners, constructing turquoise pools under razor wire walls and driving air-conditioned Land Cruisers past mud-and thatch huts while hobbled donkeys limp and graze in the center of town. And yet, we are the ones who feel affronted. We are the ones who arm ourselves and express our rage that THEY would try to take something from us. The first time my housemate was robbed – before I arrived – the thief took milk from the pantry. Someone broke into the house and stole MILK. Not the laptop that was sitting on the sofa, but MILK.
Even though she left the gate unlocked, my friend says she doesn’t think it’s her fault that ‘they’ broke in. By this I think she means that she shouldn’t have to lock the door. Fair enough. In an ideal world, no one would ever have to lock anything. But I can’t sort out the logic that inflates the bubble of the white community in Maun. People come here, a friend of mine says, because they can do whatever they want. Hearing stories about pilots ramming around in the Delta and overturning boats in the middle of the night, I suspect there is a great deal of truth in his observation. But I want to go one step further. I think it’s because we think we have a RIGHT to do whatever we want, and with no responsibility to anyone but ourselves.
In the end, having someone break into your house is scary – regardless of whether you are there or not, and regardless of the larger political context in which it takes place. Stuff is just stuff. My friend can go out and buy a new pair of shoes. But I can’t just go out and pick up a new sense of security. The 911 subscribers say that crime has really been escalating of late, and I guess they would know. As for me, I think Maun is built on inequalities which have real consequences for everyone – whether they admit it or not. Maybe taking so freely isn’t free in the end, and maybe privilege can’t help you sleep at night. I guess I’ll be testing that one out in the days ahead.
The reason they got in, though, was because my friend didn’t lock the metal gate over the outside of the wooden door. This is both disturbing and reassuring – the latter because it indicates that the place is otherwise hard to get into, but the former because it makes it feel like someone was watching for an opportunity, and/or hanging around a lot. The house was broken into several times last year before I arrived, but not since. The weirdest part of this one was that my room was completely untouched. There was a camera on the shelf in my closet, jewelry in the drawer next to the bed, shoes, clothes, a few CDs. But it appears they never even went into my room. It looks like someone ripped a small hold in the cardboard that covers up the broken glass in one of my windows and pulled out a small blue nylon bag with a few CDs in it, but even that they left in my housemate’s room down the hall.
On finding the door hacked open, my friend called the local 911. This is where the story gets strange. The Maun police are not known for being terribly responsive or competent. So the local expat community – read, whites – have established their own little group of enforcers. To ‘subscribe’, you just get a walkie-talkie. To get help, you use it to say someone’s in your house. Et voila, the cavalry arrives. In this case, my friend says, within a minute or two three men showed up at our place, one screaming “YOU BASTARDS!!!!” and going through the house with a handgun tucked into the front of his pants and wielding a shotgun with a flashlight taped to it. This image makes me almost as uncomfortable as the idea of someone breaking in in the first place.
Maun used to be a village. Now it’s teeming with tourists, who have enabled walls to be built between the wealth they bring and the people who resided in the area ‘before.’ This breeds resentment. It feeds anger and frustration. White foreigners come in and set up businesses for other white foreigners, constructing turquoise pools under razor wire walls and driving air-conditioned Land Cruisers past mud-and thatch huts while hobbled donkeys limp and graze in the center of town. And yet, we are the ones who feel affronted. We are the ones who arm ourselves and express our rage that THEY would try to take something from us. The first time my housemate was robbed – before I arrived – the thief took milk from the pantry. Someone broke into the house and stole MILK. Not the laptop that was sitting on the sofa, but MILK.
Even though she left the gate unlocked, my friend says she doesn’t think it’s her fault that ‘they’ broke in. By this I think she means that she shouldn’t have to lock the door. Fair enough. In an ideal world, no one would ever have to lock anything. But I can’t sort out the logic that inflates the bubble of the white community in Maun. People come here, a friend of mine says, because they can do whatever they want. Hearing stories about pilots ramming around in the Delta and overturning boats in the middle of the night, I suspect there is a great deal of truth in his observation. But I want to go one step further. I think it’s because we think we have a RIGHT to do whatever we want, and with no responsibility to anyone but ourselves.
In the end, having someone break into your house is scary – regardless of whether you are there or not, and regardless of the larger political context in which it takes place. Stuff is just stuff. My friend can go out and buy a new pair of shoes. But I can’t just go out and pick up a new sense of security. The 911 subscribers say that crime has really been escalating of late, and I guess they would know. As for me, I think Maun is built on inequalities which have real consequences for everyone – whether they admit it or not. Maybe taking so freely isn’t free in the end, and maybe privilege can’t help you sleep at night. I guess I’ll be testing that one out in the days ahead.
bush school
I spent the last three weeks up in the Botswana-Namibia border area working with students, faculty, and locally-based conservation practitioners from Africa and the US. I’ve been working with other faculty members on setting up this programme for some time, so it was really nice to finally get everyone here and go out and do something. We’re trying to find ways to make sure that research done here is actually useful, rather than an abstract inquiry into what someone from across the ocean thinks is interesting. And we’re also trying to benefit people who live here with training and opportunities that are sometimes hard to come by. By conducting interdisciplinary research with a team of people ranging from conservation outreach workers to students and professors, we’re also hoping to socialize students from abroad in a way that will make it natural for them to go about their work in locally meaningful, respectful, participatory ways.
So, I had some teaching to do. I talked a lot about being sensitive to local culture and expectations about appropriate behavior. I told our female students they needed to wear skirts when they go to the village. I got really tired of the term ‘instrument’ being applied to research strategies, as if a questionnaire was going be used to slice a person open like a scalpel. And given the prevalence of HIV in the area where we were working, I told a group of students that I didn’t see any conceivable way for them to walk into the home of someone they didn’t know and ask, “Has anyone in your household died in the past year?” Stigmatization being what is it, I said, they will assume you mean AIDS. But that’s not what WE mean, one student argued. Doesn’t matter, I said. You won’t be the one interpreting your questions. You only get to ask them.
But I also did a lot of learning. I thought about how different my graduate education must have been in comparison to the one at the University of Florida from which most of the students were coming. I wondered where along the line the idea that living in another country and being, as my advisor told me, ‘interested in everything’, got lost in a sea of GPS measurements and survey forms. I was reminded that practicing what I preach about taking your time and getting to know another way of life is not something that’s ever easy, or finished. And while I thought that playing a soccer game with one of the nearby (all male) teams was a great community-building idea, I didn’t realize it could also stretch local ideas about who is an athlete. Several of our best players, you see, were women – and when the game was over, women from the village crowded around them with congratulations and excitement (even though we got waxed).
By the way, Michael (and other Badgers :-), if you’re out there reading this, one of the grad students made a comment the other day that I thought would make you laugh hysterically. We were arranging meeting times to talk about specifics of conducting fieldwork, and one of the students piped up, “If ‘Rachel’ is synonymous with ‘methods’, then we really need some more time with her before she goes.” Me, a methods expert. Imagine.
So, I had some teaching to do. I talked a lot about being sensitive to local culture and expectations about appropriate behavior. I told our female students they needed to wear skirts when they go to the village. I got really tired of the term ‘instrument’ being applied to research strategies, as if a questionnaire was going be used to slice a person open like a scalpel. And given the prevalence of HIV in the area where we were working, I told a group of students that I didn’t see any conceivable way for them to walk into the home of someone they didn’t know and ask, “Has anyone in your household died in the past year?” Stigmatization being what is it, I said, they will assume you mean AIDS. But that’s not what WE mean, one student argued. Doesn’t matter, I said. You won’t be the one interpreting your questions. You only get to ask them.
But I also did a lot of learning. I thought about how different my graduate education must have been in comparison to the one at the University of Florida from which most of the students were coming. I wondered where along the line the idea that living in another country and being, as my advisor told me, ‘interested in everything’, got lost in a sea of GPS measurements and survey forms. I was reminded that practicing what I preach about taking your time and getting to know another way of life is not something that’s ever easy, or finished. And while I thought that playing a soccer game with one of the nearby (all male) teams was a great community-building idea, I didn’t realize it could also stretch local ideas about who is an athlete. Several of our best players, you see, were women – and when the game was over, women from the village crowded around them with congratulations and excitement (even though we got waxed).
By the way, Michael (and other Badgers :-), if you’re out there reading this, one of the grad students made a comment the other day that I thought would make you laugh hysterically. We were arranging meeting times to talk about specifics of conducting fieldwork, and one of the students piped up, “If ‘Rachel’ is synonymous with ‘methods’, then we really need some more time with her before she goes.” Me, a methods expert. Imagine.
Friday, May 11, 2007
ants got my pizza
Here I sit, in my office, in Maun. I find myself wanting to post an update, but lacking the energy with which to write something intelligent. Perhaps I can instead just share some funny-ish-type thingys that have happened lately. Hopefully I am not so soaked in being here as to be the ONLY one who thinks they are (mostly) funny:
I have worn the same pants four out of five days this week.
I ordered something different at our usual restaurant the other night and the owner came over to confirm that I was serious.
I had a faculty meeting that lasted for a day and a half.
Someone in the US asked me if she could call my university here to help expedite receiving some documents.
My boss reviewed a paper for a journal in which he said the author was ignorant and arrogant, and that the analysis rested essentially on innuendo.
I was really excited to need a blanket at night.
Our booze fridge died. Ok, this is sad too, but the fact that we HAVE a booze fridge…
I had a moment in which I thought I understood what the cat said.
I watched a small cobra slide away from the door of the library and was unconcerned.
I bought baskets with goats on them.
Today, the ants in my office ate my leftover pizza before I could have it for lunch.
This list surely doesn’t say much about being here. But I did recently read an article that disparages the way people – read, white people – write about Africa. It was in itself a list of things to say and not say. Like, make SURE you talk about starving children and large mammals and vast landscapes. Be SURE to talk about the continent as a whole rather than its different countries and peoples and ecosystems. Sins of these kinds are many. Am I free of them? Of course not. Even white folks who grew up here tend to do these things. But I wonder, is it me – is this really the way I think about being here, or is it that I don’t give my audience enough credit for being able to engage with the subtleties that would do more justice to what I want to express?
I have worn the same pants four out of five days this week.
I ordered something different at our usual restaurant the other night and the owner came over to confirm that I was serious.
I had a faculty meeting that lasted for a day and a half.
Someone in the US asked me if she could call my university here to help expedite receiving some documents.
My boss reviewed a paper for a journal in which he said the author was ignorant and arrogant, and that the analysis rested essentially on innuendo.
I was really excited to need a blanket at night.
Our booze fridge died. Ok, this is sad too, but the fact that we HAVE a booze fridge…
I had a moment in which I thought I understood what the cat said.
I watched a small cobra slide away from the door of the library and was unconcerned.
I bought baskets with goats on them.
Today, the ants in my office ate my leftover pizza before I could have it for lunch.
This list surely doesn’t say much about being here. But I did recently read an article that disparages the way people – read, white people – write about Africa. It was in itself a list of things to say and not say. Like, make SURE you talk about starving children and large mammals and vast landscapes. Be SURE to talk about the continent as a whole rather than its different countries and peoples and ecosystems. Sins of these kinds are many. Am I free of them? Of course not. Even white folks who grew up here tend to do these things. But I wonder, is it me – is this really the way I think about being here, or is it that I don’t give my audience enough credit for being able to engage with the subtleties that would do more justice to what I want to express?
Monday, April 16, 2007
tsitsi
A small knock rattled the door. Another visitor, I thought. Great. I hadn’t had a moment’s peace since arriving. I’m still something of a curiosity in my sister’s husband’s village in rural Zimbabwe, and I was staying in the newly built rondavel (round, hut-like house) across the dirt road from his family’s main complex. So I was a curiosity and fair game, especially for the teenage girls living in the area.
Sighing, I opened the door. I’d seen her before but we had not actually spoken. She was slight, sinewy, and radiated bashfulness. But there was something else, something hard about her, that made me realize she might not bend if pushed.
She greeted me. I greeted her. Then we waited. The wind blew cool under the graying, cloud-thick sky.
“Is there something you want?” I asked, playing, but also tired.
“Yes,” she stated. “Sweets.”
This was how I met Tsitsi. Tsitsi, whose mother died when she was just a baby. Whose father (my sis’ uncle-in-law) passed away a few months ago. Whose aunt found her in a nearby village, going from house to house looking for food, a place to sleep, a glint of affection or even just interest. Whose time was spent herding cattle – something girls generally don’t do – but wishing she was in school. And whose quiet, unassuming ways still allowed glimpses of the flint behind her eyes.
I didn’t know a thing about her when she first stood at my door. But over the next few days, I learned. And my sis told me that Tsitsi was in danger of not going to school, because those relatives who were looking out for her already had school fees to pay for others and little money with which to do it. Her uncle’s pension, for example, is 10,000 Zim dollars a month – but the bus fare to town to collect it is 40,000. One US dollar, by the way, gets about 15,000 Zim dollars on the black market. School fees are 600,000 a term, but they spiral all the time as money becomes more and more worthless.
So the night before we left, we called Tsitsi back to my little rondavel. My sis told her that from now on, she didn’t have to worry about school fees, because I was going to take care of her. She wouldn’t have to borrow old uniforms from schoolmates, because I would buy one for her. As long as she was in school and trying to do better, I would help her. The child sat between us on the bed, and when she spoke she seemed only able to look at her feet. “I’m confused. I don’t know if what I’m hearing is true. I don’t really know who Rachel is, where she comes from. But I just want to thank the God who made her.”
The next morning we took Tsitsi to town with us, and drove her to my sis’ brother’s house so that his wife could help her shop. Tsitsi’s small bag was in the back of our car; my sis had just given it to her the night before. But all it contained was a wet dress. It was the only other dress she had, so she had washed it the night before to bring it along. I had been trying all week not to be overly emotional about where I was and what I was seeing – the funerals, the living conditions, the cobra at the side of the footpath that nearly struck me, the hard labor of just getting by – because for me it was all tempered with the affection and welcome of people who didn’t know me at all. But the wet dress did me in. I went back out to the car, got my wallet, and took out the rest of the rands (South African currency) in it so they could also be exchanged and so that Tsitsi could also get some other clothes, a decent pair of shoes. My sis explained to her sister-in-law, who would take Tsitsi shopping after the holiday weekend, what she needed. “And if there is extra money, just…”
I cut her off. “No extra money,” I said. “Spend it all. If you get what she needs and there is still more, just let her choose some things. I don’t care what. I just don’t want it back.” I swallowed what felt like a swelling tumor in my throat. Tsitsi shyly hugged me in the driveway and my sis made her promise to study hard.
When the family was told that I would be taking responsibility for Tsitsi, they had all thanked me again and again. “It will be announced at school!” one of them declared.
“I don’t care about that,” I said, “Please don’t do anything that will embarrass her.”
“It will be called the Dr. Rachel DeMotts Scholarship for…” he continued.
“Really, please,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
He pushed. So I said, “If you must call it something, then name it for my grandmother, Mavis Johnson.”
So the money for Tsitsi because the Mavis Johnson Bursary. My grandmother passed away 20 years ago. We still call her the little hornet. I suppose I thought of her so quickly because there was something familiar in Tsitsi – a pinch of stubborn, but a sure and loyal warmth.
But when I came back and talked to a friend about Tsitsi, she told me I had better not get my hopes up for the girl, that she’d probably be pregnant within a year or two. Her pessimism (and the lurking views of Africans underneath it) was a bitter earful and I felt like she was warning me not to care, like I’d been foolish somehow, that I had better not really get invested or I’d be disappointed. But from my point of view, what I’d done wasn’t about me or my hopes or getting credit. I just thought that if I could make it possible for a 14-year-old girl to stop worrying about whether she would be able to go to school, then I should. It was simple. Like a wet dress, and having a dry one.
Sighing, I opened the door. I’d seen her before but we had not actually spoken. She was slight, sinewy, and radiated bashfulness. But there was something else, something hard about her, that made me realize she might not bend if pushed.
She greeted me. I greeted her. Then we waited. The wind blew cool under the graying, cloud-thick sky.
“Is there something you want?” I asked, playing, but also tired.
“Yes,” she stated. “Sweets.”
This was how I met Tsitsi. Tsitsi, whose mother died when she was just a baby. Whose father (my sis’ uncle-in-law) passed away a few months ago. Whose aunt found her in a nearby village, going from house to house looking for food, a place to sleep, a glint of affection or even just interest. Whose time was spent herding cattle – something girls generally don’t do – but wishing she was in school. And whose quiet, unassuming ways still allowed glimpses of the flint behind her eyes.
I didn’t know a thing about her when she first stood at my door. But over the next few days, I learned. And my sis told me that Tsitsi was in danger of not going to school, because those relatives who were looking out for her already had school fees to pay for others and little money with which to do it. Her uncle’s pension, for example, is 10,000 Zim dollars a month – but the bus fare to town to collect it is 40,000. One US dollar, by the way, gets about 15,000 Zim dollars on the black market. School fees are 600,000 a term, but they spiral all the time as money becomes more and more worthless.
So the night before we left, we called Tsitsi back to my little rondavel. My sis told her that from now on, she didn’t have to worry about school fees, because I was going to take care of her. She wouldn’t have to borrow old uniforms from schoolmates, because I would buy one for her. As long as she was in school and trying to do better, I would help her. The child sat between us on the bed, and when she spoke she seemed only able to look at her feet. “I’m confused. I don’t know if what I’m hearing is true. I don’t really know who Rachel is, where she comes from. But I just want to thank the God who made her.”
The next morning we took Tsitsi to town with us, and drove her to my sis’ brother’s house so that his wife could help her shop. Tsitsi’s small bag was in the back of our car; my sis had just given it to her the night before. But all it contained was a wet dress. It was the only other dress she had, so she had washed it the night before to bring it along. I had been trying all week not to be overly emotional about where I was and what I was seeing – the funerals, the living conditions, the cobra at the side of the footpath that nearly struck me, the hard labor of just getting by – because for me it was all tempered with the affection and welcome of people who didn’t know me at all. But the wet dress did me in. I went back out to the car, got my wallet, and took out the rest of the rands (South African currency) in it so they could also be exchanged and so that Tsitsi could also get some other clothes, a decent pair of shoes. My sis explained to her sister-in-law, who would take Tsitsi shopping after the holiday weekend, what she needed. “And if there is extra money, just…”
I cut her off. “No extra money,” I said. “Spend it all. If you get what she needs and there is still more, just let her choose some things. I don’t care what. I just don’t want it back.” I swallowed what felt like a swelling tumor in my throat. Tsitsi shyly hugged me in the driveway and my sis made her promise to study hard.
When the family was told that I would be taking responsibility for Tsitsi, they had all thanked me again and again. “It will be announced at school!” one of them declared.
“I don’t care about that,” I said, “Please don’t do anything that will embarrass her.”
“It will be called the Dr. Rachel DeMotts Scholarship for…” he continued.
“Really, please,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
He pushed. So I said, “If you must call it something, then name it for my grandmother, Mavis Johnson.”
So the money for Tsitsi because the Mavis Johnson Bursary. My grandmother passed away 20 years ago. We still call her the little hornet. I suppose I thought of her so quickly because there was something familiar in Tsitsi – a pinch of stubborn, but a sure and loyal warmth.
But when I came back and talked to a friend about Tsitsi, she told me I had better not get my hopes up for the girl, that she’d probably be pregnant within a year or two. Her pessimism (and the lurking views of Africans underneath it) was a bitter earful and I felt like she was warning me not to care, like I’d been foolish somehow, that I had better not really get invested or I’d be disappointed. But from my point of view, what I’d done wasn’t about me or my hopes or getting credit. I just thought that if I could make it possible for a 14-year-old girl to stop worrying about whether she would be able to go to school, then I should. It was simple. Like a wet dress, and having a dry one.
spatial politics
When ordering my business cards a while back (and I do mean a while), I found out that I was hired under a line for spatial policy under the governance unit. I didn’t really want ‘spatial policy’ on my business cards, so I changed it to simply ‘governance.’ But last week in Zimbabwe, I got an unexpected lesson about spatial politics anyway.
I went with my honorary older sister to visit her family. So I spent the better part of a week a couple of hours’ drive from anything that should really be considered a road. My sis’ family lives in a village with no electricity and only a few boreholes for water. I hadn’t really asked for details when she said we’d go visit for Easter. But somehow, even considering the places I’ve been, I wasn’t quite prepared.
See, besides the fact that I wanted to spend time with her mom especially, who has made gifts for me even though we’ve never met, I wanted insights. I wanted to understand how it is that Mugabe is still in power, how he can beat and arrest and release and abuse and arrest and release the leader of the MDC (the opposition party) time and again without people refusing to take it any more. It was bad when I was in Zim five years ago. Now, inflation is up to 1600% and food shortages are looming again. The back of every road sign we passed for hundred of kilometers had "MDC" spray-painted on it in shaky white letters. But what I really wanted to know was, how are people surviving in country that prints money with an expiration date on it?
I got several kinds of answers that apply to the space beyond the cities. One, Zimbabwe is fertile; if you have land, you have a decent shot at making something grow on it – even if it’s only enough to scrape by. So people out in the villages have multiple crops and hopefully some livestock or chickens to keep things going. But the second was more insidious. Sitting on the steps of the house at night in the quiet, there was no radio buzzing in the background. No blue glow of the TV. No version of last week’s newspaper on the table. Though to be fair, the only papers left in Zimbabwe are government propaganda anyway. But it was clear to me that apart from word of mouth, information was not available. And then we talked about elections.
Elections in Zimbabwe are a joke. Intimidation is rampant; people are told that there are cameras watching them and if they don’t vote ZANU-PF (Mugabe’s good squad) “we will KNOW…” But people are hungry. And just before the polls open, ZANU-PF tends to show up in villages with food. They hand it out, a gift from your government. But the thing is, the food comes from abroad – from USAID, from the UN’s World Food Programme – and it was meant to be delivered without political strings. So in the end, those ‘helping’ acts of donations are actually supporting the continued brutality of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, he of the goob-of-a-mustache and raging paranoid storm of an ego.
My sis’ husband’s father thinks the end is near. “You look over there and see death. Over there too, it’s death. So the end is coming.” I hope so. But I hope it’s a different kind of end.
I went with my honorary older sister to visit her family. So I spent the better part of a week a couple of hours’ drive from anything that should really be considered a road. My sis’ family lives in a village with no electricity and only a few boreholes for water. I hadn’t really asked for details when she said we’d go visit for Easter. But somehow, even considering the places I’ve been, I wasn’t quite prepared.
See, besides the fact that I wanted to spend time with her mom especially, who has made gifts for me even though we’ve never met, I wanted insights. I wanted to understand how it is that Mugabe is still in power, how he can beat and arrest and release and abuse and arrest and release the leader of the MDC (the opposition party) time and again without people refusing to take it any more. It was bad when I was in Zim five years ago. Now, inflation is up to 1600% and food shortages are looming again. The back of every road sign we passed for hundred of kilometers had "MDC" spray-painted on it in shaky white letters. But what I really wanted to know was, how are people surviving in country that prints money with an expiration date on it?
I got several kinds of answers that apply to the space beyond the cities. One, Zimbabwe is fertile; if you have land, you have a decent shot at making something grow on it – even if it’s only enough to scrape by. So people out in the villages have multiple crops and hopefully some livestock or chickens to keep things going. But the second was more insidious. Sitting on the steps of the house at night in the quiet, there was no radio buzzing in the background. No blue glow of the TV. No version of last week’s newspaper on the table. Though to be fair, the only papers left in Zimbabwe are government propaganda anyway. But it was clear to me that apart from word of mouth, information was not available. And then we talked about elections.
Elections in Zimbabwe are a joke. Intimidation is rampant; people are told that there are cameras watching them and if they don’t vote ZANU-PF (Mugabe’s good squad) “we will KNOW…” But people are hungry. And just before the polls open, ZANU-PF tends to show up in villages with food. They hand it out, a gift from your government. But the thing is, the food comes from abroad – from USAID, from the UN’s World Food Programme – and it was meant to be delivered without political strings. So in the end, those ‘helping’ acts of donations are actually supporting the continued brutality of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, he of the goob-of-a-mustache and raging paranoid storm of an ego.
My sis’ husband’s father thinks the end is near. “You look over there and see death. Over there too, it’s death. So the end is coming.” I hope so. But I hope it’s a different kind of end.
Friday, March 16, 2007
it's for me
My office phone rang. This is almost notable in itself for several reasons: mostly because it doesn’t happen very often, but also because it’s been changed three times in the last month or so. Apparently we are ‘upgrading’ our ‘system’ here in the hopes it will be closer to possible to make phone calls like normal people. I picked up.
Me: Hello.
Her: Helloooo [crackling sound]
Me: Hello?
Her: Yes, hellooo [more crackling]
This is going to be good, I thought. I have no idea who this is so let’s commence with the niceties expected when answering the phone here. See, you don’t just identify yourself. You greet each other first and carry on a bit. It’s rude to just announce who it is without showing your interest in the other person’s wellbeing.
Me: How are you?
Her: Ah, I’m just fine, mma, how are you?
Me: I’m also fine, mma, thank you.
Her: This is Mma [garbled someone-or-other I couldn’t hear] calling from Main Campus.
Oh, crap. Maybe this isn’t going to be good. Someone actually initiating contact from Gabs is a bad sign. Bad. Now I’m nervous.
Her: And is this Dr. DeMotts?
Me: [oh well] Yes, mma, it is.
Her: Oh, good! How are you?
Me: I’m still fine, mma, thank you.
Her: Oh, good! And this is your extension, number 7239?
Me: Uhhh…yes, mma, it is. [you DID call ME, after all]
Her: Oh, good! Mma, I’m calling all the extensions in the book and checking to be sure they are right. See, we can call you from main campus now!
You have GOT to be kidding me. I choked back a powerful desire to laugh.
Me: Well, mma, yes, that’s pretty great. And good luck with all those phone calls.
Her: Yes, thank you! Thanks, mma.
And she hung up.
Me: Hello.
Her: Helloooo [crackling sound]
Me: Hello?
Her: Yes, hellooo [more crackling]
This is going to be good, I thought. I have no idea who this is so let’s commence with the niceties expected when answering the phone here. See, you don’t just identify yourself. You greet each other first and carry on a bit. It’s rude to just announce who it is without showing your interest in the other person’s wellbeing.
Me: How are you?
Her: Ah, I’m just fine, mma, how are you?
Me: I’m also fine, mma, thank you.
Her: This is Mma [garbled someone-or-other I couldn’t hear] calling from Main Campus.
Oh, crap. Maybe this isn’t going to be good. Someone actually initiating contact from Gabs is a bad sign. Bad. Now I’m nervous.
Her: And is this Dr. DeMotts?
Me: [oh well] Yes, mma, it is.
Her: Oh, good! How are you?
Me: I’m still fine, mma, thank you.
Her: Oh, good! And this is your extension, number 7239?
Me: Uhhh…yes, mma, it is. [you DID call ME, after all]
Her: Oh, good! Mma, I’m calling all the extensions in the book and checking to be sure they are right. See, we can call you from main campus now!
You have GOT to be kidding me. I choked back a powerful desire to laugh.
Me: Well, mma, yes, that’s pretty great. And good luck with all those phone calls.
Her: Yes, thank you! Thanks, mma.
And she hung up.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
maun desperate housewives association
About a month ago I snuck into a very exclusive gathering here in Maun – the book club. My friend Monica, our librarian at the centre, had worked her way in and was hosting, so she invited me. Stupidly, I assumed that reading was involved. “What book are you all reading?” I queried. She laughed. “Oh, Rachel, it’s not really about that…”
It is about white expat women getting together, having a few drinks, and trading copies of books they’ve read. There is no discussion of anything that’s been read. It’s more like a traveling library with booze and snacks. And the library is mostly “chick lit” - books by ‘writers’ like Danielle Steele with flaming pink covers and drawings of skinny women in spiky heels who are always after a man. Or men.
I admit, I went out of a sense of something like arrogant curiosity. What do these mostly South African wives of safari guys talk about? They insulate themselves from life here in their big houses with razor wire, snarling Rhodesian ridgebacks (dogs bred to fight lions), and security systems, coming out to take the kids somewhere or shop at the Safari Spar. I couldn’t imagine.
I went early to help Monica cook and set out the books, which travel from hostess to hostess in a set of lopsided cardboard boxes. The more trashy paperbacks I pulled out, the more I wondered what I would have to say in conversation. Then again, if I were to play the voyeur, it didn’t really matter if I were at a loss for words.
It was a small gathering; apparently word had not made it all the way around to the usual suspects. But about half a dozen women pitched up, dressed in sparkly sandals, cropped pants, topped with carefully styled hair. One woman had brought her kids. But she left them in the car to sleep, with the whole vehicle draped in a mosquito net.
We served carrot salad, spicy chickpeas, basmati rice, pakoras, yogurt dip, and sliced cucumbers. It was more food than usually accompanied the evening’s non-bookish banter. As we settled in, talk revolved around three things.
Food. A lot of this was about weight loss. “It just makes sense not to eat carbs and protein together!” “I lost ten kilos on that diet!” “The gluten in wheat is just not good for you!” And on and on. I had another pakora. And another. They’re made with chickpea flour, after all.
Illness. Here I thought I could relate to the tales of malaria. But I couldn’t get a word in. Not that I tried very hard, mind you. But I felt a bit like I was looked through rather than at. I became quieter. Every time I got up my chair edged back from the circle a bit more, and a bit more. Then, we got onto the subject of HIV. The human resources director of a major local safari company – apparently they were not ALL desperate housewives – held court on the costs of caring for all their employees who are positive. “We have to fly them down here to get their medications, and pay for treatment, and we’re overstaffed by 25% to make up for when people are away or sick, it’s just a huge burden and it’s so expensive! It costs money to fly them down here, and you know they’re only making 700 pula a month anyway [about $115], so we have to pay for them to stay here, and the flights…” There were so many things I wanted to say, simmering quietly in my growing anger. ‘THEY’ are human beings, I thought. And what does it say about your profits if you can overstaff by 25% and still make a shitload of money doing it?
Travel. A truck-driving short-haired woman in boy’s sandals and cargo shorts talked about her upcoming trip to the family farm in South Africa. And a deeply tanned woman in a white miniskirt had just returned from three weeks in Argentina, after having spent the holidays in the Cape before that. Her flights were late getting in, so apparently she did the unthinkable. “I just got my bags and I WALKED OUT of the airport! I mean, you don’t DO that!” She and her husband stayed at a lodge set up mostly for people who wanted to come and hunt birds. They were surrounded by fields of sunflowers – planted, well, to attract birds. I wish she’d stuck to the birds, because her discourse on race relations in the former Spanish colony was even more sickening than the notion of growing gorgeous flowers so birds could be shot. “It’s so much more harmonious than here. I mean, they all speak the same language, it’s one culture, everyone’s white. Or at least not really black.” Silently choking, I pushed back even further. How does someone actually think like that, and then decide it’s ok to let it come out of her mouth? The obliteration and subjugation of indigenous cultures in Latin (case in point) America was no less brutal than it was here. And the idea that speaking Spanish was just naturally what everyone did, well, the parallels with Afrikaans must have utterly escaped her.
But the shopping in Buenos Aires is brilliant, apparently, and oh, it was delightful to hear about how much red meat and wine she consumed. I guess we were back to food after all.
It is about white expat women getting together, having a few drinks, and trading copies of books they’ve read. There is no discussion of anything that’s been read. It’s more like a traveling library with booze and snacks. And the library is mostly “chick lit” - books by ‘writers’ like Danielle Steele with flaming pink covers and drawings of skinny women in spiky heels who are always after a man. Or men.
I admit, I went out of a sense of something like arrogant curiosity. What do these mostly South African wives of safari guys talk about? They insulate themselves from life here in their big houses with razor wire, snarling Rhodesian ridgebacks (dogs bred to fight lions), and security systems, coming out to take the kids somewhere or shop at the Safari Spar. I couldn’t imagine.
I went early to help Monica cook and set out the books, which travel from hostess to hostess in a set of lopsided cardboard boxes. The more trashy paperbacks I pulled out, the more I wondered what I would have to say in conversation. Then again, if I were to play the voyeur, it didn’t really matter if I were at a loss for words.
It was a small gathering; apparently word had not made it all the way around to the usual suspects. But about half a dozen women pitched up, dressed in sparkly sandals, cropped pants, topped with carefully styled hair. One woman had brought her kids. But she left them in the car to sleep, with the whole vehicle draped in a mosquito net.
We served carrot salad, spicy chickpeas, basmati rice, pakoras, yogurt dip, and sliced cucumbers. It was more food than usually accompanied the evening’s non-bookish banter. As we settled in, talk revolved around three things.
Food. A lot of this was about weight loss. “It just makes sense not to eat carbs and protein together!” “I lost ten kilos on that diet!” “The gluten in wheat is just not good for you!” And on and on. I had another pakora. And another. They’re made with chickpea flour, after all.
Illness. Here I thought I could relate to the tales of malaria. But I couldn’t get a word in. Not that I tried very hard, mind you. But I felt a bit like I was looked through rather than at. I became quieter. Every time I got up my chair edged back from the circle a bit more, and a bit more. Then, we got onto the subject of HIV. The human resources director of a major local safari company – apparently they were not ALL desperate housewives – held court on the costs of caring for all their employees who are positive. “We have to fly them down here to get their medications, and pay for treatment, and we’re overstaffed by 25% to make up for when people are away or sick, it’s just a huge burden and it’s so expensive! It costs money to fly them down here, and you know they’re only making 700 pula a month anyway [about $115], so we have to pay for them to stay here, and the flights…” There were so many things I wanted to say, simmering quietly in my growing anger. ‘THEY’ are human beings, I thought. And what does it say about your profits if you can overstaff by 25% and still make a shitload of money doing it?
Travel. A truck-driving short-haired woman in boy’s sandals and cargo shorts talked about her upcoming trip to the family farm in South Africa. And a deeply tanned woman in a white miniskirt had just returned from three weeks in Argentina, after having spent the holidays in the Cape before that. Her flights were late getting in, so apparently she did the unthinkable. “I just got my bags and I WALKED OUT of the airport! I mean, you don’t DO that!” She and her husband stayed at a lodge set up mostly for people who wanted to come and hunt birds. They were surrounded by fields of sunflowers – planted, well, to attract birds. I wish she’d stuck to the birds, because her discourse on race relations in the former Spanish colony was even more sickening than the notion of growing gorgeous flowers so birds could be shot. “It’s so much more harmonious than here. I mean, they all speak the same language, it’s one culture, everyone’s white. Or at least not really black.” Silently choking, I pushed back even further. How does someone actually think like that, and then decide it’s ok to let it come out of her mouth? The obliteration and subjugation of indigenous cultures in Latin (case in point) America was no less brutal than it was here. And the idea that speaking Spanish was just naturally what everyone did, well, the parallels with Afrikaans must have utterly escaped her.
But the shopping in Buenos Aires is brilliant, apparently, and oh, it was delightful to hear about how much red meat and wine she consumed. I guess we were back to food after all.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
march in the delta (clinic)
I absolutely thought it was malaria again – the fever, the aching muscles pulling on aching bones, my increasingly lack of ability to comprehend what was going on around me. Even as I sat on it, I felt like the couch got further and further away. The 104 degree thermometer in my armpit confirmed it. So I called a friend and she took me to the clinic. Malaria, I said, she said. A nurse called the doctor and the next thing I knew I had a handful of little bags – quinine for the malaria, paracetamol for pain and fever, some antibiotic for my guts that was not the loperamide the doctor wanted me to have (“we don’t seem to have any…”). After refusing to be admitted I went home to my friend’s guest room to sweat and hallucinate and shake with wrenching chills while ghostly paperwork flew around the room and my head…manila file folders, pink sheets of paper, envelopes, stacks of things I had done and not done over the previous week haunted me. I must be a nerd if the only things bubbling up when I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep are office supplies.
Anyway, the next day was worse. I threw up the water I was trying to drink, which meant the meds would not stay in my stomach. So back to the hospital we went, and I stayed – even though there was no IV quinine on which to put me, which was the whole point of going in. But then, it’s gastroenteritis, the doctor said, when for a second time they didn’t see malaria in my blood. I was infected with a raging unknown parasite, but he added: “It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as the fever’s coming down.” I was in no shape to argue. Having started the treatment for malaria, I had to finish it or risk developing resistance to it in the future. Quinine, by the way, makes your ears screech while the bitter yellow pills turn your stomach against you. It also wreaks more havoc with your liver than a month of nights at the Maun Sports Bar.
I SMS’d my brother and his wife. “So are you gonna die or what?” he yelled into his cell phone, standing in their kitchen in Italy. The nurses were lovely people but they did not really inspire confidence. Pushing burning antibiotics into my veins every four hours, they seemed to only enter the room when I was in just enough of a stupor to think I might be sleeping. Once I rolled over and my IV tube, hooked into a small bottle of liquid pharmaceutical fire, fell onto the floor. Medicine poured onto the floor. I grabbed for the bottle, twisting it upright while my other arm flailed at the nurse call button. After she stuck the tube back in, I pointed out that at least a third of the bottle was not coursing through me but pooled under the edge of the bed. “Oh, well, that’s too bad, because it’s the last one!” Next, a syringe full of one of the other kinds of antibiotics I was shot full of didn’t want to pour into the IV. So she leaned on the plunger. Hard. The back of my hand swelled with a germinating golf ball of penicillin, my distended vein making my eyes go wide with pain. “Let’s just take this out,” another nurse said softly, later, pulling out the IV needle. And shoving a new one into my inner wrist, so that I could not move my left hand without feeling the drag of the newly embedded needle against tendons and flesh.
I bled into the IV. My guts got me up every hour to go the bathroom. My bed and I slowly took on the smell of my gym bag. My head throbbed and my hips ached with the strain of trying to be absolutely still. I didn’t leave the little room with the indigo-swirled comforter (“It makes me think of water and bugs swimming in it,” said my friend) and pepto-pink door for three nights. I swung at mosquitoes with my dirty flipflop, figuring if I didn’t have malaria when I went in I might well have it by the time I got out.
The fever shrank, but the infection in my guts was unrelenting. Two days in, the doctor commented on my loperamide dosage while doing his morning rounds. “I’m not getting loperamide, you didn’t have any,” I said weakly. “How am I supposed to be taking it?”
“You take a double dose to start, then one more after every time you go to the bathroom,” he said. For the first time I felt despairing tears well up. “They gave me something once yesterday but that was it,” I said. I wasn’t taking the drugs I was supposed to have. No wonder. I have a friend in med school who thinks he wants to be a doctor in Africa. At some point, I remember thinking, maybe I should ask him if he really wants to work under these kinds of conditions. That is, what medication? You mean we should have quinine in stock during prime malaria season? And that there should be a close relationship between what gets written down on a chart and what happens to the patient?
The next day, after nine kinds of medications, half a dozen rotating nurses, three different doctors, the payment equivalent of about forty bucks, and my signature on 34 separate invoices, they let me go home from the Delta Clinic. Mostly I was tired – of more chemicals circulating inside me than blood, of the deafening ring in my ears, of not being able to sleep, of being poked at for what seemed like no reason. But I was also ok. Folks from work had come to visit, called, asked about me. Even the cleaning ladies gushed with relief to see me back in the office, eight days later. And I reminded myself, at least I wasn’t out in the bush. At least I didn’t have a major trip planned. At least my friends were around to look after me. At least I could afford to GO to the hospital. At least, at least. “What the hell were you doin’ in the hospital?” my boss cried over the phone from Gabs when he found out.
Maybe I should have said, I just needed a few days of air conditioning.
Anyway, the next day was worse. I threw up the water I was trying to drink, which meant the meds would not stay in my stomach. So back to the hospital we went, and I stayed – even though there was no IV quinine on which to put me, which was the whole point of going in. But then, it’s gastroenteritis, the doctor said, when for a second time they didn’t see malaria in my blood. I was infected with a raging unknown parasite, but he added: “It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as the fever’s coming down.” I was in no shape to argue. Having started the treatment for malaria, I had to finish it or risk developing resistance to it in the future. Quinine, by the way, makes your ears screech while the bitter yellow pills turn your stomach against you. It also wreaks more havoc with your liver than a month of nights at the Maun Sports Bar.
I SMS’d my brother and his wife. “So are you gonna die or what?” he yelled into his cell phone, standing in their kitchen in Italy. The nurses were lovely people but they did not really inspire confidence. Pushing burning antibiotics into my veins every four hours, they seemed to only enter the room when I was in just enough of a stupor to think I might be sleeping. Once I rolled over and my IV tube, hooked into a small bottle of liquid pharmaceutical fire, fell onto the floor. Medicine poured onto the floor. I grabbed for the bottle, twisting it upright while my other arm flailed at the nurse call button. After she stuck the tube back in, I pointed out that at least a third of the bottle was not coursing through me but pooled under the edge of the bed. “Oh, well, that’s too bad, because it’s the last one!” Next, a syringe full of one of the other kinds of antibiotics I was shot full of didn’t want to pour into the IV. So she leaned on the plunger. Hard. The back of my hand swelled with a germinating golf ball of penicillin, my distended vein making my eyes go wide with pain. “Let’s just take this out,” another nurse said softly, later, pulling out the IV needle. And shoving a new one into my inner wrist, so that I could not move my left hand without feeling the drag of the newly embedded needle against tendons and flesh.
I bled into the IV. My guts got me up every hour to go the bathroom. My bed and I slowly took on the smell of my gym bag. My head throbbed and my hips ached with the strain of trying to be absolutely still. I didn’t leave the little room with the indigo-swirled comforter (“It makes me think of water and bugs swimming in it,” said my friend) and pepto-pink door for three nights. I swung at mosquitoes with my dirty flipflop, figuring if I didn’t have malaria when I went in I might well have it by the time I got out.
The fever shrank, but the infection in my guts was unrelenting. Two days in, the doctor commented on my loperamide dosage while doing his morning rounds. “I’m not getting loperamide, you didn’t have any,” I said weakly. “How am I supposed to be taking it?”
“You take a double dose to start, then one more after every time you go to the bathroom,” he said. For the first time I felt despairing tears well up. “They gave me something once yesterday but that was it,” I said. I wasn’t taking the drugs I was supposed to have. No wonder. I have a friend in med school who thinks he wants to be a doctor in Africa. At some point, I remember thinking, maybe I should ask him if he really wants to work under these kinds of conditions. That is, what medication? You mean we should have quinine in stock during prime malaria season? And that there should be a close relationship between what gets written down on a chart and what happens to the patient?
The next day, after nine kinds of medications, half a dozen rotating nurses, three different doctors, the payment equivalent of about forty bucks, and my signature on 34 separate invoices, they let me go home from the Delta Clinic. Mostly I was tired – of more chemicals circulating inside me than blood, of the deafening ring in my ears, of not being able to sleep, of being poked at for what seemed like no reason. But I was also ok. Folks from work had come to visit, called, asked about me. Even the cleaning ladies gushed with relief to see me back in the office, eight days later. And I reminded myself, at least I wasn’t out in the bush. At least I didn’t have a major trip planned. At least my friends were around to look after me. At least I could afford to GO to the hospital. At least, at least. “What the hell were you doin’ in the hospital?” my boss cried over the phone from Gabs when he found out.
Maybe I should have said, I just needed a few days of air conditioning.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
happy birthday, jackass
I know, I know. But the idea that Bob here gets to eat cake while there is literally no bread in the shops, inflation is at a world record 1600%, and life expectancy has dropped to 36 (the lowest on the planet), well, it really pisses me off. That's his wife Grace on the left, and the martini glasses hold an 8 and a 3. Which is already more than double what most Zimbabweans are getting these days. Mugabe has been P-resident since 1980 and recently parliament voted to move the dates of the next election from 2008 to 2010, so that prez and parl can be chosen at the same time. I haven't been to Zimbabwe since 2002 but i'm going there for Easter, and in some ways I am really not looking forward to it at all.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
go well, ryszard
He certainly never knew it, but I am quite sure that Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist and interpreter of Africa extraordinaire, helped me to get my first job out of grad school. In the guest lecture I gave in a comparative politics class as part of my job interview, I read aloud from one of his books. Yes, I know, it sounds odd. But in talking about the development of the state in Africa, I read Kapuscinski’s description of Idi Amin. “Everywhere he went, it was as if Amin moved the state with him,” he wrote, I read, separating the weight of each word carefully, placing them gently into the ears of the students staring at me. The dean himself also sat in the front row, rapt, and told me later that to him my reading was more like dramatic performance. But it was Kapuscinski’s words that animated the room that day.
For a journalist, Kapuscinski was a freak. He was eloquent, modest, and lived in slums and got robbed with sides of TB and malaria. He was so far off the journalist’s path that, when I first read one of his books, I refused to believe he actually WAS a journalist. He covered the entire continent, loved it, breathed it in, and wasn’t big on talking to government officials. Real people were what mattered. Real people in villages sprinkling the countryside, people without food or reliable income or access to power. A traveling companion of Kapuscinski’s once remarked, “Because people from Europe spend their time here only in the cities and drive along the major roads, they cannot even imagine what our Africa looks like.”
Kapuscinski, however, makes imagining possible:
“More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold wind, darkness. But here, from the morning’s earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight.
In time past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the each passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde Islands.
Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat. If we’ve come from Europe in the wintertime, we discard overcoats, peel off sweaters. It’s the first gesture of initiation we, the people of the North, perform upon arrival in Africa.”
-Ryszard Kapuscinski
First three paragraphs of “The Shadow of the Sun”
For a journalist, Kapuscinski was a freak. He was eloquent, modest, and lived in slums and got robbed with sides of TB and malaria. He was so far off the journalist’s path that, when I first read one of his books, I refused to believe he actually WAS a journalist. He covered the entire continent, loved it, breathed it in, and wasn’t big on talking to government officials. Real people were what mattered. Real people in villages sprinkling the countryside, people without food or reliable income or access to power. A traveling companion of Kapuscinski’s once remarked, “Because people from Europe spend their time here only in the cities and drive along the major roads, they cannot even imagine what our Africa looks like.”
Kapuscinski, however, makes imagining possible:
“More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold wind, darkness. But here, from the morning’s earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight.
In time past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the each passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde Islands.
Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat. If we’ve come from Europe in the wintertime, we discard overcoats, peel off sweaters. It’s the first gesture of initiation we, the people of the North, perform upon arrival in Africa.”
-Ryszard Kapuscinski
First three paragraphs of “The Shadow of the Sun”
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
mmmm, sparkly
[just in time for Valentine’s Day…ah, I’m laughing now…]
Last week while in South Africa, I saw the movie “Blood Diamond.” This decision was, in some ways, against what remains of my better judgment, because I know it would make me angry. But I couldn’t quite NOT see it either, so, there I was. The movie is about how alluvial diamonds in Sierra Leone fueled a rebellion that turned kidnapped children into drug-addicted murderers who chopped off the hands of the less cooperative, and made a few gun runners and smugglers wealthy. It is also yet another movie about Africa through the eyes of white people – a South African smuggler and an American journalist. And imagine! They somehow find love and screw in a landscape swarming with mostly crazed, heavily armed Africans killing each other, but for one good black man (who just happened to find a big fat rock) trying to save his family. A surprising approach, no. But still infuriating, definitely.
A bit of background. Last year in my African Politics class, I gave a lecture on diamonds. I started with the whole idea of a wedding ring – a prehistoric reminder of ownership and property. Some historians say that it comes from women being bound hand and foot when married off. Once she learned to behave and promised not to run away, her feet were untied. Eventually her hands would also be released, with the exception of a single strand left around her finger as a reminder. Romantic, no?
Then, there are stories about gemstones and royalty in Europe going back hundreds of years. Eventually we work our way up to DeBeers, the largest diamond company on the planet. DeBeers is South African and controls the vast majority of the world diamond market by hoarding diamonds and heavily restricting sales to artificially inflate their value. DeBeers built prisons for the apartheid government in exchange for the labor of black prisoners who had done unconscionable things like walk through a white neighborhood on the way home without a government-issued pass. DeBeers is largely responsible for a marketing campaign in the 1930s and 40s that created the idea of the engagement ring and the two-month salary rule. They actually sent sales reps from jeweler to jeweler to talk about their stones, weddings, and how much men should be advised to spend. So much for cultural tradition (for another iteration, see the more recent ‘right-hand ring’ campaign – though you have to go to this site to connect DeBeers with ‘a diamond is forever’…).
As I am sure most of you know I could rant on about this for a while. I must have had my angry juice this morning. But let’s get back to the movie. Nothing about its setup surprised me in any way. It’s simple, it sells. And Leo DiCaprio has come a long way since The Blue Lagoon, baby. We are, however, talking about a cadre of actors and filmmakers who did not even go on a ‘fact-finding’ trip about diamonds in Africa until after the film was already in the can. AFTER. And did I mention that the trip they did take was organized by none other than DeBeers?
But here’s the kicker. Jennifer Connelly’s character, the well-meaning journalist, says tearfully towards the end (as Leo’s mocking her for thinking writing makes any difference…wait…), “But if those girls KNEW someone died for that stone, they wouldn’t BUY them!!” Or something like that.
Now that, as my brother would say, is one metric shit ton of crap. Stories about blood diamonds have been in the American media for years. Granted, they are not exactly first on the evening news, but they are out there. This is not new information. Even here we have a few models who cried when they found out that the Botswanan government moved the San out of an area in which they wanted to sell mining concessions. And at the same time, DeBeers was recently allowed to begin opening stores in New York and Beverly Hills. Sounds like their market is really shrinking. And I am foolish, but not so foolish as to think that the sorority girl in the back row of my African Politics class is going to forego that diamond engagement ring she’s been taught to fantasize about since she was in a frilly pink dress because of her crazy professor’s stories.
What exactly would it take, do you think?
Last week while in South Africa, I saw the movie “Blood Diamond.” This decision was, in some ways, against what remains of my better judgment, because I know it would make me angry. But I couldn’t quite NOT see it either, so, there I was. The movie is about how alluvial diamonds in Sierra Leone fueled a rebellion that turned kidnapped children into drug-addicted murderers who chopped off the hands of the less cooperative, and made a few gun runners and smugglers wealthy. It is also yet another movie about Africa through the eyes of white people – a South African smuggler and an American journalist. And imagine! They somehow find love and screw in a landscape swarming with mostly crazed, heavily armed Africans killing each other, but for one good black man (who just happened to find a big fat rock) trying to save his family. A surprising approach, no. But still infuriating, definitely.
A bit of background. Last year in my African Politics class, I gave a lecture on diamonds. I started with the whole idea of a wedding ring – a prehistoric reminder of ownership and property. Some historians say that it comes from women being bound hand and foot when married off. Once she learned to behave and promised not to run away, her feet were untied. Eventually her hands would also be released, with the exception of a single strand left around her finger as a reminder. Romantic, no?
Then, there are stories about gemstones and royalty in Europe going back hundreds of years. Eventually we work our way up to DeBeers, the largest diamond company on the planet. DeBeers is South African and controls the vast majority of the world diamond market by hoarding diamonds and heavily restricting sales to artificially inflate their value. DeBeers built prisons for the apartheid government in exchange for the labor of black prisoners who had done unconscionable things like walk through a white neighborhood on the way home without a government-issued pass. DeBeers is largely responsible for a marketing campaign in the 1930s and 40s that created the idea of the engagement ring and the two-month salary rule. They actually sent sales reps from jeweler to jeweler to talk about their stones, weddings, and how much men should be advised to spend. So much for cultural tradition (for another iteration, see the more recent ‘right-hand ring’ campaign – though you have to go to this site to connect DeBeers with ‘a diamond is forever’…).
As I am sure most of you know I could rant on about this for a while. I must have had my angry juice this morning. But let’s get back to the movie. Nothing about its setup surprised me in any way. It’s simple, it sells. And Leo DiCaprio has come a long way since The Blue Lagoon, baby. We are, however, talking about a cadre of actors and filmmakers who did not even go on a ‘fact-finding’ trip about diamonds in Africa until after the film was already in the can. AFTER. And did I mention that the trip they did take was organized by none other than DeBeers?
But here’s the kicker. Jennifer Connelly’s character, the well-meaning journalist, says tearfully towards the end (as Leo’s mocking her for thinking writing makes any difference…wait…), “But if those girls KNEW someone died for that stone, they wouldn’t BUY them!!” Or something like that.
Now that, as my brother would say, is one metric shit ton of crap. Stories about blood diamonds have been in the American media for years. Granted, they are not exactly first on the evening news, but they are out there. This is not new information. Even here we have a few models who cried when they found out that the Botswanan government moved the San out of an area in which they wanted to sell mining concessions. And at the same time, DeBeers was recently allowed to begin opening stores in New York and Beverly Hills. Sounds like their market is really shrinking. And I am foolish, but not so foolish as to think that the sorority girl in the back row of my African Politics class is going to forego that diamond engagement ring she’s been taught to fantasize about since she was in a frilly pink dress because of her crazy professor’s stories.
What exactly would it take, do you think?
"i care"
A friend of mine suggested to me a few days ago that in fact, most people don’t care about poor people. “I’ve literally been sitting in meetings where someone will say, ‘I don’t have time for the poor!’” he insisted.
I argued. I felt I had to. I also felt he wasn’t quite right. But it wasn’t because of some burgeoning faith in humanity’s fundamental goodness. It was because I wanted to spin his comment differently.
“I think they care in the abstract,” I said. “Like, oh, wow, that’s really too bad that she’s living in a dumpster and he has no access to medicine. It really shouldn’t be that way! Let me put on a ribbon to show everyone else that I care, that I think it’s BAD! And then I can go back to sipping my cappuccino and planning my trip to Hawaii and feeling good about myself. Whew!”
He laughed with a sharp bitterness that is increasingly familiar to me.
“It’s like looking at a puppy,” I continued. “You go, awwwww, isn’t that adorable, I really FEEL something warm and fuzzy here…for about ten seconds…then I go on with my life. Don’t KICK the dog. Just give it a pat. And then walk away.”
I wasn’t being terribly articulate, I admit. But I was trying to get at something I’ve been trying to, well, get at for a long time. It’s the gap between what we know and how we act. Maybe it’s more a matter of what we are willing to know, and the extent to which we are willing to align our behavior with that knowledge. I’m not sure. But I do know it’s easy not to pay attention – to poverty, to HIV, to developing world debt, to the war, whatever. And it’s easy because it doesn’t really affect the lives of most people in the West. Not really. I know that when I go back to the States, I have a good job. I can go to the grocery store and buy onions any time I feel like it (Botswana decided to ban onion importation because we should be able to grow our own…but instead, we have no onions). I can call my parents, go on vacation, sleep on flannel sheets in the winter and crisp cotton in the summer with no malarial mosquitoes lurking in the curtain folds. And I can make my own cappuccino.
Now before I piss anyone off, let me say as well that I clearly am as guilty of not being affected as anyone else. I can’t figure out how to align my actions more closely with what’s going on in my head (ok, maybe that would be a disaster anyway). I’m swimming in a soupy sort of cognitive dissonance these days – somewhere between how I am, and the way I think I should be. I suppose that’s not so unusual, given that I work in a building where they lock the bathroom door when there’s no toilet paper and live in a house that has fleas (maybe – we’re still not sure).
I imagine that we all want our lives to ‘add up’ somehow – to amount to something, to have weight and shape and a pleasant taste when we take time to savor them. Here, I have a Zimbabwean sister – but I also have white friends who have lived in Africa for 15 years and can’t count a single black friend. I just spent three weeks in Europe, where among other things I bought a cobalt vase of Venetian glass and ate risotto with black truffles. But next week, I could go down with malaria and, well, possibly die. Last week I participated in a conservation workshop where one moment, I was being called “Dr. DeMotts” with a shovelful of thick disdain smeared on my title, and in the next I was asked to give a presentation to people who’ve been working the region for twenty years. Back, and forth, and back again. It’s just increasingly difficult to have my feet on the ground when I’m not sure whose ground it is, or what I’m doing on it. I asked my boss how he manages all the bouncing around between continents and cultures, and he said, “I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”
But that didn’t really answer my question.
I argued. I felt I had to. I also felt he wasn’t quite right. But it wasn’t because of some burgeoning faith in humanity’s fundamental goodness. It was because I wanted to spin his comment differently.
“I think they care in the abstract,” I said. “Like, oh, wow, that’s really too bad that she’s living in a dumpster and he has no access to medicine. It really shouldn’t be that way! Let me put on a ribbon to show everyone else that I care, that I think it’s BAD! And then I can go back to sipping my cappuccino and planning my trip to Hawaii and feeling good about myself. Whew!”
He laughed with a sharp bitterness that is increasingly familiar to me.
“It’s like looking at a puppy,” I continued. “You go, awwwww, isn’t that adorable, I really FEEL something warm and fuzzy here…for about ten seconds…then I go on with my life. Don’t KICK the dog. Just give it a pat. And then walk away.”
I wasn’t being terribly articulate, I admit. But I was trying to get at something I’ve been trying to, well, get at for a long time. It’s the gap between what we know and how we act. Maybe it’s more a matter of what we are willing to know, and the extent to which we are willing to align our behavior with that knowledge. I’m not sure. But I do know it’s easy not to pay attention – to poverty, to HIV, to developing world debt, to the war, whatever. And it’s easy because it doesn’t really affect the lives of most people in the West. Not really. I know that when I go back to the States, I have a good job. I can go to the grocery store and buy onions any time I feel like it (Botswana decided to ban onion importation because we should be able to grow our own…but instead, we have no onions). I can call my parents, go on vacation, sleep on flannel sheets in the winter and crisp cotton in the summer with no malarial mosquitoes lurking in the curtain folds. And I can make my own cappuccino.
Now before I piss anyone off, let me say as well that I clearly am as guilty of not being affected as anyone else. I can’t figure out how to align my actions more closely with what’s going on in my head (ok, maybe that would be a disaster anyway). I’m swimming in a soupy sort of cognitive dissonance these days – somewhere between how I am, and the way I think I should be. I suppose that’s not so unusual, given that I work in a building where they lock the bathroom door when there’s no toilet paper and live in a house that has fleas (maybe – we’re still not sure).
I imagine that we all want our lives to ‘add up’ somehow – to amount to something, to have weight and shape and a pleasant taste when we take time to savor them. Here, I have a Zimbabwean sister – but I also have white friends who have lived in Africa for 15 years and can’t count a single black friend. I just spent three weeks in Europe, where among other things I bought a cobalt vase of Venetian glass and ate risotto with black truffles. But next week, I could go down with malaria and, well, possibly die. Last week I participated in a conservation workshop where one moment, I was being called “Dr. DeMotts” with a shovelful of thick disdain smeared on my title, and in the next I was asked to give a presentation to people who’ve been working the region for twenty years. Back, and forth, and back again. It’s just increasingly difficult to have my feet on the ground when I’m not sure whose ground it is, or what I’m doing on it. I asked my boss how he manages all the bouncing around between continents and cultures, and he said, “I’ve been doing it for twenty years.”
But that didn’t really answer my question.
Friday, January 12, 2007
cape to chobe
I personally drove about 4500k’s (on a 6000ish-k trip)in the past two weeks. This was all in the name of a nice holiday, which was in fact, nice. But driving is not really my favorite thing to do. I should have picked up on the warning signs when it took us nearly four hours to leave Maun, because:
1. I didn’t have the ownership papers for my boss’ car.
2. I didn’t have police clearance for the border.
3. I didn’t have a letter from the bank giving me permission to take their car (which is in fact paid off) across the border.
4. I didn’t have a letter from my boss allowing me to take the car anywhere.
Now, if I had known I needed any of these things, I’d happily have started collecting them prior to 6:45am on the day of an 8:00 departure. But, I didn’t. My bad. So after finding the registration, I went to the office and forged a letter from my boss on university letterhead giving me permission to use the car. We then went to the police station, where we were sent upstairs. There, we were told, no clearance without bank permission. Now, again, it’s not my car – so being me, I went to the bank anyway – on a Saturday morning – and demanded a letter for someone else’s car based on a fake permission letter from the owner (who was in Canada). Which I got. Returning to the cops, I was told, “Oh, the guy with the keys to the office where the stamp is that goes on the letter has knocked off.” The woman who was ‘helping’ me said I was out of luck. But then there was a small tinkling sound against the tile as she rifled through a stack of papers…a spare key hit the floor. Et voila, we were off. And across the borders of three countries over the next two weeks, no one ever asked to see so much as a shred of all my paperwork.
Cows, donkeys, goats, minibuses, potholes, dirt hills, twisting mountain roads, and twenty-six hours later we arrived in Cape Town on Christmas Eve. I hung some plastic Santas on the aloe plant and went to bed. But Christmas Day we spent by the sea with some friends, eating curry and drinking Jack Daniels in the sun. Not bad. Not bad at all.
A full travelogue would require more space and energy than I’ve got right now, but let me share a few things I picked up along the way:
Zimbabwean and American definitions of a ‘good road’ are even more markedly different than I previously thought.
Karaoke is apparently a universal language of its own – even in Korean, on the side of a mountain in Africa.
There are, in fact, baboons in Cape Point.
Breaking and entering is sometimes easier than you think.
Even at the end of the world on New Years Day, you might see someone you know.
Some wine has enough legs to run a marathon.
Slapping yourself actually does keep you awake in the middle of the night.
Every safari has it asshole. And sometimes, she’s Canadian.
When you need it most, there is no tonic water in Botswana. Or fish.
Rain drives all wildlife into deep hiding. Really. I saw it once.
When a bar in Africa floods, you really don’t want to be there to see what floats out.
And, elephants apparently may prefer the side of road to the park:
happy new year, everybody...
1. I didn’t have the ownership papers for my boss’ car.
2. I didn’t have police clearance for the border.
3. I didn’t have a letter from the bank giving me permission to take their car (which is in fact paid off) across the border.
4. I didn’t have a letter from my boss allowing me to take the car anywhere.
Now, if I had known I needed any of these things, I’d happily have started collecting them prior to 6:45am on the day of an 8:00 departure. But, I didn’t. My bad. So after finding the registration, I went to the office and forged a letter from my boss on university letterhead giving me permission to use the car. We then went to the police station, where we were sent upstairs. There, we were told, no clearance without bank permission. Now, again, it’s not my car – so being me, I went to the bank anyway – on a Saturday morning – and demanded a letter for someone else’s car based on a fake permission letter from the owner (who was in Canada). Which I got. Returning to the cops, I was told, “Oh, the guy with the keys to the office where the stamp is that goes on the letter has knocked off.” The woman who was ‘helping’ me said I was out of luck. But then there was a small tinkling sound against the tile as she rifled through a stack of papers…a spare key hit the floor. Et voila, we were off. And across the borders of three countries over the next two weeks, no one ever asked to see so much as a shred of all my paperwork.
Cows, donkeys, goats, minibuses, potholes, dirt hills, twisting mountain roads, and twenty-six hours later we arrived in Cape Town on Christmas Eve. I hung some plastic Santas on the aloe plant and went to bed. But Christmas Day we spent by the sea with some friends, eating curry and drinking Jack Daniels in the sun. Not bad. Not bad at all.
A full travelogue would require more space and energy than I’ve got right now, but let me share a few things I picked up along the way:
Zimbabwean and American definitions of a ‘good road’ are even more markedly different than I previously thought.
Karaoke is apparently a universal language of its own – even in Korean, on the side of a mountain in Africa.
There are, in fact, baboons in Cape Point.
Breaking and entering is sometimes easier than you think.
Even at the end of the world on New Years Day, you might see someone you know.
Some wine has enough legs to run a marathon.
Slapping yourself actually does keep you awake in the middle of the night.
Every safari has it asshole. And sometimes, she’s Canadian.
When you need it most, there is no tonic water in Botswana. Or fish.
Rain drives all wildlife into deep hiding. Really. I saw it once.
When a bar in Africa floods, you really don’t want to be there to see what floats out.
And, elephants apparently may prefer the side of road to the park:
happy new year, everybody...
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