Exciting News

First, I figured out how to use Google Talk to call home for free, so whenever I am here at the training site I can call home using the internet. Bad news is it is 9 hours later here than in California and I am at the school from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and really can only call before 8, after 4:30 and during our lunch break from 12:30 to 1:30, so do the math and if your phone rings at a very odd time, it might be me. I tried it Friday at about 6 a.m. Pacific Time and I am pretty sure my brother-in-law hung up on me. Then I called my niece and got her voice mail. So when she woke up she had a message awaiting her.  Once I get to my site and if I can have internet there then this should all become a lot less complicated.  Which brings me to the really exciting news…

I received my site placement.  I am going to a town just south of the capitol called Otse  to work with a nonprofit organization (called NGO or CBO – community based organization) that serves people with disabilities.  The announcement ceremony was pretty interesting.  Most of us seemed to be happy with our sites, although in reality none of us know what it will be like where we are going, we only know what we think we know.  Over time I have discovered, and continue to discover that what I think I know doesn’t mean squat.  So the organization I am going to is called Motse Wa Badiri Camphill and directly translated it may mean Village of Workers Camphill. It is part of the Camphill Movement which works to create communities in which children, youth and adults with disabilities can live, learn and work in healthy social relationships based on mutual care and respect. Google that for the background.  Camphill Botswana, through the Camphill Community Trust Botswana, runs three community based projects in Otse, the one which I will be at is a community where adults with disabilities learn life and vocational skills.  They also run a school for children with disabilities and a community for teenagers with disabilities. The two volunteers in my group who got to go visit it said it is an unbelievable site – lush landscaping, a pottery program and a place they grow plants, probably both as revenue generating activities. They also do some interesting movement therapies with the folks, so I am very excited to see what is up.  My immediate task will be to work with a consultant they hired to develop grassroots disability support groups to build their capacity in the district I will be in.  This will include working with the consultant to  engage members of disability support organizations in planning and strategic development, advocacy and support services for the disabled, and developing networks among these organizations to increase information sharing.  There is a recognition that people with disabilities are not fully included in access to services generally, and to those related to HIV/AIDS specifically, which is our focus.  My role will also be to help these grassroots disability support organizations (GDSO) work together to develop action plans, set priories, create new policy and systems, coordinate resources and share best practices related to serving this population. Sounds interesting. We shall see what it looks like on the ground.  I am excited to visit there next week and then get there for good on June 8^th to start learning about Otse and the people and needs there.  Apparently, it is a nice village and includes the highest point in Botswana (don’t ask me what that is, but it isn’t too high, I am sure). I will be glad for the hill. When I traveled up north a few weeks ago to visit a current volunteer there I was reminded of the flatness of the California valley – not my favorite landscape.

There is currently a Bots 8 volunteer in Otse  who is ending his service as mine begins.  (I am Bots 10, by the way.) He and his wife, who worked at a different organization, had a fancy schmanzy house on the Camphill property, but I will be getting a different living arrangement more suitable for a solo volunteer. I really don’t want anything too big because housecleaning is pretty important here when you think about wanting to keep bugs and sand/dirt out of your house. Cleaning a large house, coupled with handwashing and hang drying all my laundry will cut into my free time.  Then again, not having a television to waste time in front of will probably free up a lot of free time to fill up again. That and not being able to go to the movies, hang out at Lost Coast Brewery, go out to dinner with friends, hang with my family and Stan should mean I have A LOT of free time. One volunteer is repainting the inside of her house – I see that in my future as well.

At any rate, I visit the site next week and will see my house and figure out what it has and doesn’t have (running water, electricity, latrine or indoor toilet, curtains, furniture, etc. etc.) and then go from there. The Bots 8’ers Colin and Amy have an entire household of various items and I am hoping they are eager to offload some of it for a decent price. There will be another volunteer from our group placed in Otse, Jim who is 84 – our eldest – and I can hardly fight him for the stuff.  None of my colleagues at HSRC would approve, but hopefully there will be something for both of us.  Colin and Amy also have a mother cat and one remaining kitten….I was holding firm that I would not get a cat. After the trauma of leaving my babies at home and all. But various currently serving volunteers, even those without pets, are pretty encouraging of the idea and there seems to always be another volunteer coming into country willing to adopt pets that volunteers who are leaving have to leave behind.  If I get the mama, she will be getting spayed with my first paycheck. Or I will take the kitten and get to figure out a name for it.  There is a stray kitten hanging out at our training site – named Magwinya, which means fat cake in Setswana. I love fat cakes. Picture a ball of dough deep fried and warm and yummy.  They eat them here just like that, but we have put a dessert spin on them – filling the dough with fruit or jelly or chocolate or ?? before deep frying, then rolling in sugar and cinnamon and I think with a scoop of ice cream would be cool. 

We have been learning all kinds of ways to cook flour into bread. We just ate huge dumplings tonight (madombe) and there are things call diphaphathas which with a fried egg and cheese inside are better than any breakfast sandwich at any fast food joint on the planet.  I plan to NOT make any of these things on a regular basis or my new name will be Magwinya as well.