My Botswana Workout and Diet Plan

So, since we aren’t leaving to visit our sites this week due to the teacher's strike, I thought it was time to revisit and share with you my workout and diet plan while here in Botswana.

Weekdays

Up at 6 or so, stretching if I have time before leaving at 7 a.m. for 1 hour walk to training site, rain or shine, with day pack full of books, lunch, water bottle and laptop. Walk can take more or less time depending on how many people I need to stop and great, or how many kids I need to teach high five to. Sometimes I walk down to the main road to try to catch a cab, which may or may not come and decide to take me where I want to go. This means either a vastly shorter or a vastly longer walk.

8 to 4:30 - Sit on butt in training, interspersed with random stretching opportunities to keep from going stark raving mad. It’s not that everything is awful, it’s just that we are anxious to get going, there is some duplication, and well, it just isn’t part of my workout plan, let’s just say that.

Once every week or two we get a 1 ½ hour “healthy outlets” session, where we go to a local school and use their volleyball court, pathetic weight room, or tennis court to play 5 on 5 soccer. Last time, I was the only woman lifting the weights with our male Batswana teachers and drivers. One of them is totally buffed, but the rest, not so much.  I had to politely leave to avoid hysterics as one of them used the “butt shaker” machine. You know, that thing from the 60’s that women stood on with a wide band around their hips that vibrated their butts hoping to shake off the fat. This one was minus the band. Jeez, if a person could shake off the fat then riding in one of our vans over some of our local ward’s dirt roads would have shaken me into a stick by now. And another universal cultural truth: men here don’t like women telling them their body mechanics while lifting weights suck either.  So, then out to the soccer court.  After 10 years of soccer retirement due to an ankle injury, I can proudly say that I was a tenacious defender of our goal against all but one or two very lucky (J) shots. One of our teacher’s (“Z-Man”)apparently talked about it with the guys all the way home (I wasn’t there but wouldn’t have understood it anyway) and the next day told me he would pay me to let him score next time we played.  Later, he realized it would make more sense to simply draft me to his team. Drat. I need the money.  At any rate, these periodic “healthy outlets” only serve to cause us all to be incredibly sore or injured the next day, but since the next day is Saturday and we only have half days of school, it means most go to medicate at the local lodge. Enough said. Sadly, my old soccer injury is acting up, so Z-man will have to play without me next time. The best part of healthy outlets is they drive us home afterwards.

4:30 on non-healthy outlet days - 1 hour walk home, again, longer or shorter depending on activities required along the way. Sometimes there is a diversion to a drinking hole.

6 to 8, food preparation and clean up, sweeping and/or mopping, playing with kids, etc. (see below)

8 ish – bath – hauling 3 or 4 buckets of water from kitchen to a very nice bathtub that doesn’t have enough water pressure to run an actual bath. When water heater decides not to work, I must first heat the water in an electric tea pot, or boil on stove when the tea pot breaks or electricity is out.  I have yet to perfect the exact proportions, so baths are either scalding or luke warm. Another component of any bath at my home is the “bathtub slow motion vault” which I use to get myself safely out of the tub with my feet going directly into my slippers, rather than on the cement floor, which is really hard to keep clean. The tub is so high, that simply stepping out and down can be tricky, so I use both my arms to lift myself up and lower one leg at a time into my shoes. Those pushups are paying off here, to be sure. It is also trickier at night, because the window in the bathroom is broken, which means that anyone walking by and looking in the general direct could be scared silly by the “lekoga” (white person) performing this slo-mo vault, so I have to wrap myself in my towel before executing the move. 

After this work out, I generally study until 10 or 10:30 and go to bed, after generously spraying my clean body with bug repellant and making sure now large insects are lurking nearby. If I feel the need, a bit more stretching before lights out.

Weekends

Saturday looks a lot like the week, but we get out of training by 2 or 3 (well, or 4).

Sunday

Wake up late (8 ish), stretching before anyone knows I am actually awake and starts to wonder what I am up to.

Sweep out bedroom, hallway and bathroom areas with a short hand held whisk type broom that requires a person to be bent over (20-30 minutes cardio workout if done properly, which also entails breathing in some nice dust)

Usually also laundry day: Filling huge tub outside with cold water and detergent. Washing clothes: scrub, scrub, swish, scrub scrub swish. Then, wringing them out and putting them in rinse basin, followed again by serious wringing, then to another bucket of just plain water for final rinse and more wringing. Then hang on clothes line.  Then haul dirty water away in buckets and dump in yard. Dump remaining water in large basin. If laundry isn’t started early enough in day to dry, it is then taken down and rehung in an inside room on lines so high up that even I have to stand on a sketchy stool or bench and wonder how many spiders I might be disturbing in the process.  This process and accompanying worry definitely burns extra calories.

Other workout activities: 

Daily - Picking up 15 month old and 2+ year old kids and doing overhead presses, bicep curls and other various lifts and throws to provide them with fun times and me with a workout.  They are growing quickly, so I either need to do this more often or find smaller children.

Randomly – pulling weeds and hauling them to “compost/garbage” pile, using a funky wheelbarrow in semi-deep clay sand.

Also randomly, and hopefully even more seldom – killing huge cockroaches and spiders. I have killed one while visiting another volunteer and screamed for my host mom to kill another, which sadly, was in my bedroom at home.  I think this uses up a huge amount of calories due to the stressful nature of the activity, using the proper technique and maintaining proper body mechanics. It appears so far that they do not travel in large packs. Or is it a gaggle of cockroaches? 

Cooking and cleaning: besides my room, sweeping the house and the dishes, I have managed to get out of mopping the floors when I did it one morning and slipped and fell, landing hard on my ass before wacking my head (also hard) on the ceramic tile floor.  My ass hurt for the day, but the whiplash I received hurt for the next week. Now my kind family won’t let me near a mop. Where were they when I grabbed it the first time?  Sigh. I wonder if there is a safe way to get out of the cooking and dishwashing that doesn’t involve self-injury. When I get to my final site, I won’t be cleaning, cooking or doing laundry for anyone but myself, so I may find time for more varied workout activities and will seek out new children for a portion of my weight lifting workout.

Diet – I have cut out alcohol except for maybe one or two drinks on Saturday. Uh, or when we find out we aren’t going to our site visits and want to “de-tress”like yesterday, and maybe again today. I was hoping walking more and drinking less would make a weight loss plan effective, but so far same-o, same-o.  I don’t eat a lot of the meat which is a workout in itself because they like the meat tough (no hormones, free range chicken and cattle mean less fat), and I have avoided the one time we had tripe. Sadly, the carbs come fast and furious, since that is something cheap and easy for families here to fill up on. Potatoes, rice, pasta, corn, and something called phaleche, which is made out of corn meal and which when you first see a pile of it tricks you into thinking it is mashed potatoes. It is not. It isn’t bad, it just has no taste and probably little nutritional value. We get plenty of apples, oranges, carrots, green bell peppers, onions and cabbage, eggs, bread (oh yea, another fun starch, and let me say, when I get home I will probably avoid peanut butter for about 100 years.) I buy bananas occasionally, broccoli, yogurt and cheese but we are given about 25 pula a day ($4.50) to spend on taxis and whatever else, so buying food to supplement what peace corps gives our family and what the family buys on its own isn’t always feasible.  The good news is that 21 Pula today bought me: 1 banana, 1 chicken pot pie, 1 kit kat candy bar (an occasional treat), and a bag of ginger snaps I am saving for a special occasion. 

Sadly, it appears another universal cultural truism is that the men are losing weight due to the diet and the women are either staying the same or gaining.  When we get on our own we will be able to control our diets better and many of us plan to start veggie gardens as projects.

At site I plan to supplement my workouts with painting, gardening, and working hard trying to figure out what the heck I am doing and what the (more) heck they are all saying to me.