Mannyelanong - Where Vultures Poop

So I climbed a hill this last weekend. Me, my 51 year old boss, Richard, his 9 or 10 year old son and 3 teen aged girls, who have befriended me in my neighborhood.  We were picked up at 7 a.m. and drove 15 minutes to the base of the hill and headed straight up the side of it. Richard is no nonsense and I had been forewarned by the previous volunteers that he is the best one to take me up there, but that he goes like a bat out of hell. If hellbats were to actually climb things instead of presumably flying to the top.  Come to think of it, maybe we did fly up there, it went so fast. 

I had my day pack full of food for the kids and water on my back.  It and my knit cap conveniently got caught on every low hanging branch and bush we scrambled under, but at least it wasn’t an eye.  There were no well-worn human type pathways, only goat and monkey droppings to show us who was who in the hill climbing hierarchy.  Yeah, that’s what we were climbing. We saw a bunch of monkeys up ahead of us on the hill early on. Far enough away that we could never catch up to them, of course, even if we could have, which of course was never to be.  The climbing was fun, but a bit hard on the old ticker.  We would stop and rest once or twice in the whole hour, mostly so we could take off garments, and pack them away. Or yes, to make sure my heart hadn’t jumped out of my throat and been left on the rocks somewhere, to be forgotten but then sorely missed later.

I didn’t have time to take pictures on the way up, not wanting to be left behind in the seemingly mad dash up the hill. What was our hurry??  Oh, Richard had to be back in town by 10.  When we got to the top, it was well worth it and the view was spectacular even if you had to be sure not to forget you were standing on a very small space and could easily fall 100 feet before hitting anything remotely soft like a thorn bush. Assuming the bouncing off the rocks didn’t already make your landing surface a moot point.  We sat at the top and I served the kids bread, apples and hard boiled eggs for what was most assuredly their break-fast.  Then, after about 15 minutes, we were off again, headed down hill.

The real reason I will never climb Mt. Everest, or Kilimanjaro or any other oversized hill is because of the trip down. They never talk about that aspect. It’s always about the summit. But climbing downhill, especially with bad knees and now overtaxed quadriceps ain’t a cake walk. It could be a long downhill role/bounce.  Richard went easy on us so we didn’t have to try to maneuver down the same rock faces we climbed up. Instead we followed gulleys, sans water, with lots of loose rocks and boulders and tree branches to grab hold of for balance and to stop freefalls.  Jeez, this was actually fun. Once we were done I looked back up the hill. It is called Manneylelang which loosely translated means the “hill where vulture’s poop.” Nice. Didn’t see them or their poop, but how cool is that to say you climbed a hill where vultures poop.  Okay. Maybe not, but its true. All of it.

Pudi, Lobatse and my newest weight control plan

So, my cats think that every time I go into the kitchen or open the refrigerator or cabinet to get something to eat that they should also eat.  This wouldn’t be so disturbing except for it calls attention to how often I go into the kitchen to get something to eat.  I guess they are just trying to help me. It’s the kindest form of tough cat love, I suppose. Them both sitting there staring at me, sometimes meowing like they are in excruciating pain directly caused by my desire to feed my face, but not theirs.  I wish their efforts were helping.

Right now I am sitting on the bed and they are each sitting on one of my legs. Like their tiny little bodies could keep me from the kitchen if I really wanted to go there. 

Pudi went to the vet Friday for her spaying. I apologise to Ameila, who named her Tsatsi, but she will always be more of a pudi (goat) to  me.  I got a ride well enough, directly to the vet. And discovered the “nice fellow” who took me to the vet with Sisi awhile back overcharged me. Okay, so left her there at 8 and had a couple of hours to roam Lobatse until she would be ready – hopefully a drugged cat that I could easily slip onto the bus with and pass unnoticed.  Nah, she was wide awake when I picked her up and screaming mad.  They don’t seem to overly drug animals for surgery like we prefer to see at home.

So I got a taxi to the bus rang, got on the bus and hoped for the best.  She only screamed when the bus moved. Or stopped. Or started up again.  It was probably good not to understand what people were saying. I could tell by body language and voice tones that some were surprised and amused, and some were surprised and annoyed. It’s not like she was loose and running about or anything. I have seen people carry live chickens on buses and combis, but perhaps that counts as fresh groceries.  Anyway, I was going to tell anyone who complained that she was more of a goat than a cat. Not that I have seen any goats on buses, just want to be clear here.  Just that a goat maybe would fit into the frame of reference as a potentially useful item to try to transport somewhere, whereas cats…not so much.

So it is now Tuesday night and in theory I should take out her stiches. Yeah, snip, snip, snip.  But I have just two hands and she has 4 clawed appendages, plus a mother who is looking on very attentively. Mom was fighting with Pudi earlier, maybe I should have handed her the scissors and asked her to do it.  Well, here it goes.  Dang she isn’t cooperating, but I got one. And her mom is still very calmly just sitting here watching. No help.  Pudi has stalked off now. So that’s all for tonight and we will try again tomorrow.

I really like Lobatse. It has a friendly, Beaver Cleaver-esque small town feel to it.  When I got there, stores were slowly opening, people were walking the sidewalks – they have sidewalks- saying hello and being all friendly like. They also seem to have more shoe stores than the number of feet living in the town would warrant, but I love shoes so this was pretty cool.  Sadly, I can’t even look at the women’s shoes – well I can, but I can’t try any on or buy any because they stop at 10 here and I am a dainty 11. So I look at dainty men’s shoes, when I can find any.  I haven’t figured out how anyone can wear some of those pointy, high heeled things anywhere, let alone here on the uneven dirt and gravel that makes up most of where we get to walk.  After the shoe stores, it was on to count the clothing stores, and then the “china shops” which sell all kinds of things you need or don’t need for your home.  One shop had bicycles which I will eventually buy to shorten my time in the sun during the summer months.  Whenever I get my 540 Pula refunded from buying gas and electricity when I moved in, it will almost be the right amount for a basic cheap mountain bike. Hopefully with tires that won’t pop when I ride over my first thorn. Not here on Lobatse’s nice friendly concrete sidewalks, but back in Otse.

Well little Pudi is back sitting on my leg, holding me out of the kitchen.  Silly rabbit, uh, goat,  you have another stitch I need to remove….yuck. I think I am leaving that one alone for another day. Maybe the vet said wait 7 days? I am sure he said 5…

Flo's Clothes

I am working with 4 disability support groups who are trying to improve the lives of their loved ones and themselves who have disabilities here in Botswana. There is still a lot of discrimination, stigma and mistreatment directed towards these folks and these groups are forming to address their needs for food security, education and jobs.

One group is run by a woman named Florence in a small town just off the main road to Gaborone. They have sent in their paperwork to become a registered non-governmental organization and are learning about financial management, board development and how to run a nonprofit.  The first time I met her she said I needed to come live with her for a week and I would be speaking Setswana after 7 days.  I saw her again a week or so ago at a training and she said I needed to spend a weekend with her soon. Not sure if the reduction in the timespan meant she realized a house guest like fish start to stink after 3 days or if my language knowledge had seemingly so improved that she could now get me to fluent in a shorter time frame. Not likely.

She is a go-getter though, and told me she needed clothes for her support group members.  Knowing where I come from, and figuring I have massive resources and money, may as well tell me what she wants. Since she is going to make me fluent in Setswana in 3 days the least I can do it get some clothing for the people here who are very often not adequately dressed for the cold winter nights, or don’t have proper shoes to walk around on these roads.

 I am thinking of all the clothes I donated at home before I came here, and all the clothes my friends have in their closets that they never are going to wear. While it isn’t cheap to mail things to Botswana, if everyone reading this blog would just pack one mid-sized box (something a person can easily carry 2 miles on foot, okay?) of clothing and/or shoes, it would make such a huge difference to these groups.  Not everyone is poor in Botswana. Many people have jobs and can buy what they need, but people with disabilities have it a lot tougher.  They are less likely to be hired to work, are often subject to abuse or neglect, and often can’t physically access services that will keep them healthy, like HIV testing, or the clinic to get their ARVs if they do test HIV positive.  While clothing will not solve all their problems, it will provide them with warmth and some dignity, and they will know that someone cares about them. 

Think about it, when you are cleaning your closets, or your kids closets to get ready for shopping for school clothes this fall.  If you consider it a rag there, it is will be a rag here too, so don’t send those, but most of what you have that you aren’t wearing anymore is probably not a rag.  All sizes, kids and adults, are needed.  Please, help me earn my Setswana learning weekend fair and square!

American Pie, Bye Bye

I am sure I mentioned that my (non-Ipod) MP3 player died just before I left for site placement back in June?  Yep. I had used it here on a very long and tormenting bus ride up to the northern part of the country, where it saved me from having to listen to a terrible “lion-roars-a lot-while-white-family-in-jeep-screams-a lot” movie on the bus ride home. This nerve-racking movie was followed by three young men dressed as old men being really fun in Setswana, which sadly wasn’t that funny to me.  So I listened to my music and survived, then put the thing back in my suitcase until I pulled it out again on June 8^th and discovered the music files were empty but I now had a lot of animated videos of bugs. They sing, they dance, they fall in love, get married, have baby bugs for all I know, but they aren’t singing my music. So siree Bob. Not sure where they came from, since the mp3 had never been anywhere w/o me and certainly was never stuck into any place too dark to see, like a virusy computer.

So now a month into this, I am surviving better than I imagined. After all, most evenings I can get decent music to bathe by on the radio and on weekends there is a lot of Motown, R&B, and Rap (which I can avoid if needed). There is too much Chris Brown and Rhianna, but then lots of decent stuff from the 60’s to now.  (That small solar, battery operated, crank radio has come in quite handy, except for there is only one place in my house that it gets any reception - from the top of the fridge.) The real problem is the a.m. radio, when I am getting ready for work and need music because I can’t sit and watch Matt Lauer while having breakfast.  Morning Talk Radio is a serious problem here too, it seems. I know they blame most of the road accidents on drinking and driving, along with the free range cattle, donkeys, sheep and goats, who do in fact, range quite freely on the roadways at really inappropriate times.  But I think an underestimated  cause of car accidents has got to be people calling in to am talk shows, or perhaps screaming at the commentators, while driving along these roads with their free range traps, sober or not.  No Rush Limbaugh here, but people still sound so animated at times during those calls…I just can see them on the roads in the middle of nowhere, yelling their heads off at that tiny box in the dash.  Right before saying hello to the California Dairy Cows’ very distant cousin in the windshield, or missing a critical turn and landing in a culvert full of goats.  Not a morning well spent.

Peace Corps drills into us during our pre-service training that we are not to travel at night.  Many of the volunteers felt that this was just PC trying to be too parental and not allowing us our birthright to freedom of movement (wait, is that in the constitution??) But I have to say, after bad timing got me home later than I had planned:  it is VERY DARK HERE when it gets dark and before it gets light again.  There aren’t street lights in many places, and walking down my hillside, on the gravel (big chunks, mind you, not those quaint pea gravel things, but chunks you can twist you ankle, knee and hip joint on, if you really hit it at a decent pace) is quite an undertaking.  One early morning (which darkness wise, is the same as late night) I had to get to Gaborone for a work related conference and had my headlamp on as I staggered down the gravel road. Around the corner, suddenly and without warning, appear two women, seemingly just dumped in front of me out of the dark. I said hello, they said “oh, a miner!” laughed and went on to be swallowed up again in the darkness behind me. One of them said, “eish, I need one of those things.”  Those were the last words I heard and I never saw them again, but I hope they made it home. 

The bus ride was even more frightening than this walkabout, because I was traveling through the same pitch darkness without benefit of my lamp, in the complete control of the driver and quite a bit faster than I normally travel on my own two feet.  Imagine you are traveling along, left in the driver’s seemingly maniacal control, seeing nothing, nothing, but the 2 lane road in front of you. You can’t see anything off to the side of the road –all the cows waiting to commit suicide are lined up there – you just know it, but they are going to hide until the very last possible moment.  On the other side you see nothing, until a car comes along from the opposite direction. And then you see nothing again, because after the complete and total darkness their headlights blind you silly until they pass. If your driver is still driving, you and hopefully he, have the opportunity to recalibrate the rods and cones in your eyes and get ready for the next vehicle to assault them again. And on, and on until you get where you are going, or meet a cow, or a drunk driver who is also doing the whole going blind thing on the other side of the street, but may not be nearly as worried about it.

Is it any wonder, with the loss of my music and the driving and road habits of beast and man here that I have the lyrics “drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry…..” bouncing around in my head?  They should have played that song at our training as a cautionary tale – it might have at least caused me to back up my music.  Oh, I forgot. I do have some music. Bollywood.  That’s a whole different story and yes, I AM liking it and I am every so grateful to my dear, dear friend who gave it to me. But it ain’t enough.

Remedial Setswana 101

You have to love (and hate) a language where the same word can mean “to become perplexed” or “to become neat and tidy.” Or when used in a slightly different verb form, can be the same word as that for “camel” which is, of course, a noun!  It wasn’t even the word I was looking for, but it is easy to get distracted in this Setswana-English dictionary.

Also, shouldn’t a dictionary, when it gives you the Setswana translation from the English word also have the same word in the Setswana side just to be able to double check the meaning? I wouldn’t normally demand this of this kind of book, but the few times I have cross checked words, I have found that what I thought meant what I thought it meant, well, it meant something slightly or sometimes significantly, different. 

In my random wanderings in this book, I have found a word for ogre or giant.  That is sure to come in handy. But I couldn’t find the words for destiny or values.  If I ever manage to speak this language, it will be oddly selective if this is my go-to book.

Here is a fun example of how words work in Setswana. All I know is that I am very lucky that people speak English here. I was going to tell you that word in Setswana, which I thought was lesego, which means luck, but saying I am lucky is: (again, pick one and look it up on the other side) ke sego, ke tlamu, ke tshego, ke selwa ke naga or ke senogelwa ke dilo. Damn it).  And yes, I should be doing something more productive than this with this language learning process, but I am taking a break, okay?!

Let’s look at the word perplex, shall we, since it really does explain my state of mind most of the time when it comes to Setswana.

Perplex (it has a few choices) – akabatsa; kama; tseakanya; tseanya. Okay. Now, used in a sentence:

“These things perplex me” = dilo tse di a nkama. Yep, you get to put an “n” in front of kama.  Haven’t learned why yet, but cool.

“I am perplexed by the multitude” (isn’t clear if this means “multitude” of people, beans, or confusing words) = ke akabaditswe ke bontsintsi.  Yep more endings added to that darned verb. Way cool.

So let’s flip now to see what these words for perplex say on the Setswana side of things.  Hmmmm..I’ll start with kama because it’s the shortest and easiest to remember and say….Yep, here it is. Kama means “to comb.” Well, that certainly is perplexing but it makes much more sense for kama to mean comb than perplexed, right? Wait, though, there is more to kama than meets the eye.

It is also a noun: “a conical piece of clay toy with hollowed ends which, when skillfully thrown into water, makes a smooth, noiseless dip, hence “lo ntse jaaka kama” which means “you have hit the mark, or spoken truly.” So if I ever want to say, “lo ntse jaaka kama” I am saying that, not “jeez dude, you seem perplexed.”

The following entries occur before we return to discussing the tenses in which we can be perplexed: kamaganyo; kamakama (I like the sound of that – have one’s arms full or to hug); kamakamile (has carried lots and lots of things in the arms), kamalala (to be stiff of body, stubborn, or speak frankly); kamaletse (is stiff in the body), kamano (to touch with, but this is a noun??!!), kamatlela and kamatletse (these two are both different tenses for embrace) and then, finally, kamega, which means to become perplexed, become combed AND, to become neat and tidy, followed by kamegile, which is so obviously the past perfect for kamega that I don’t even need to explain that to you, do I?

These words are then followed by kamela, which is singular for camel and then kamela, which means…comb for; be neat and tidy for; perplex; put at a loss and show off.  YOU get to choose. I know which definition will almost always apply to me. And like I said, I wasn’t even looking for this gold mine when I found it!

And you all wonder what a person can do without 24/7 television?

Random Moments-Cats, Sisters, Shopping and Baboons

Good news. Even though I accidentally locked Sisi in my closet for…ehem, well more than 12 hours, she didn’t pee, poop or otherwise ruin anything, and was quite okay. Bad news is that Tsatsi, her daughter appears to have spent most of that time clawing at the front door. I’ve just become the reason landlords don’t rent to pet owners. And I have renamed her Pudi, which is “goat” in Setswana. Tsatsi and Sisi are too close in sound and I want Pudi to know when I am distinctly yelling at her and not her mother.

I almost gave up carrying the overly large, 24 lb. box my sister sent, full of my own stuff, at about the 1 mile point.  The only thing that kept me going was the promise of M&Ms and well, my nicer clothes, inside the box. An older woman kindly offered to carry the box the last ½ mile, and up the hill, on her head, as it is properly done around here. Forget Setswana. I need to learn how to safely do THAT!

I love it when I walk out of a store in Gaborone, make the mad dash across decidedly un-pedestrian friendly streets - carrying quite a bit of shopped for items and a load of books from the Peace Corps office -and find myself at the bus stop just as my bus shows up. AND there is a front seat open so I can clearly indicate to the conductress when I need to get off. How cool is that? 30 minutes later and the bus would have been full and might not have even stopped!

Oh, and I almost came face to butt (hmmm) with my first baboon yesterday, in Gaborone, of all places!  I was walking up to the Peace Corps office when this big black dog came running toward me.  I was still trying to figure out what kind of dog it might be, given that most of the dogs here are much smaller and brownish tan, when it lumbered by me and I said, "Holly sh--" and stepped back two steps and waited until it was off to the trash bins. I heard a fellow chuckle behind me and then he came and explained to me about this troop that lives just in the hills on the other side of the office complex. They come down every morning and this guy (the baboon,  not the fellow talking to me) and his little baboon gal friend come to the dumpster because he has been neatly butt kicked by the dominate male and is on the low end of the food pecking order.  The fellow (not the baboon) further explained that the baboons tend to attack female (humans) more than men because women tend to feed the baboons and giving food to other baboons is a sign of weakness. Also, carrying handbags can be a sign of weekness because to baboons it looks like we are carrying food to give to them. My backpack was firmly on my back and I had left my apple for baboonn panhandlers at home, so I was in good shape.  I thanked the fellow for the information and made my way.

Lekoga

Lekoga

That is the word for white person here in Botswana. I have been told that it isn’t derogatory when someone calls you that. And I have also been told it isn’t polite. Sekoga is the word for English. Makoga is the word for more than one of us white folk. Usually its little kids who say it (repeatedly) and it is more a form of a greeting or calling out for my attention than anything I have felt is offensive. Then again, maybe these kids are trying to offend me.

So no one said it this morning, but I sure felt like one, when I walked up to the Kgotla this morning at 8 a.m. for a meeting. The kgotla is where the chief (kgosi) of the village runs customary meetings and presides over issues of customary (vs. civil) law that are brought to his attention in the village.  It serves as a meeting location for lots of reasons, but what I stumbled upon was the actual weekly meeting held by the chief to address whatever community issues needed to be addressed.  The Otse Kgotla includes the actual kgotla building which has a thatched roof held up by wooden beams, a cement floor, and low white walls, but is otherwise open to the elements.  A really cool stone wall about 5 feet high in some places surrounds the kgotlal building and an amphitheater type area, also covered but otherwise open to the elements, where villagers can sit. There is a huge old tree in the courtyard area between the amphitheater and the kgotla building and the setting provides a great view down the hillside toward the “hill/mountain” where the vulture sanctuary is. It is simply a pretty spot to sit.

 The chief, his assistant chief, the assistant and the police department have actual offices in a building a bit further away.  I have met the chief, and some of the police, and a number of the people standing around, but there were at least 100 people there, mostly adults, and no, they had not yet all seen me. Tada!  Here I am. And look, I am leaving.

I had actually been coming for a VMSAC (Village Multi-sectorial AIDS Committee) meeting, because I got a text that the meeting was today and since she never said what time, I took my chances and headed there first thing in the a.m.  Women have to wear conservative dresses inside the kgotla area and the chief’s office, so I was suitably garbed, with my long underwear and sensible black shoes completing the uh “look.” I actually fit right in in that regard, assuming I was old. Which I guess I am here and more and more, anywhere. My grey hair definitely makes me look older. That was the plan but now I’m not as down with it.

But this wasn’t my meeting.  I could have stayed, standing around another hour until it finally started and then not understanding anything anyway. I will save that for another Thursday morning because I had all that conference follow-up work to get started on, then had to come back later for the VMSAC meeting which I was finally informed started at 2 p.m.

Later, arriving promptly at 2, I asked where the meeting was to be held.  A nice fellow found out for me and told me where, but that it was at 2.  Then he looked at his phone and said, “oh, well, it is after 2. Hmm….” This was the first time I have seen a person here notice and comment that a meeting wasn’t starting on time.  Finally, there were six of us waiting for the meeting to start and it was 2:30. I asked one woman who was in charge of the meeting and she said she was. We waited some more. Finally, the guy from the DAC (District AIDS Committee) office arrived. I know him, since he is a fellow PCVer’s counterpart in Ramotswa, and we greeted all around and started the meeting. One of the women there, who works at Camphill and happens to have my same American name kept telling them to translate for me, and with that and the “code switching” (that’s when they speak in both Setswana and English, alternating words or sentences), I got the basic drift.  Apparently there is some kind of district wide competition that will take place on August 10^th and the vice chair is pleased I will be helping to organize it.  Maggie came over when it seemed like the meeting was done and people just kind of wandered off (it was tea time, after all), and told me about the theater group at Camphill that she is working on for a competition in Gaborone on August 10^th.  And of course I am going to help them with that as well. Whooa!  What just happened?

Last one in the room or whoever isn’t present gets volunteered for things at home.  But wait! I WAS in the kgotla for crying out loud and wasn’t even the last one there, and I don’t have a clue what you want me to do. Besides, I am at a Peace Corps training August 10^th.  Which really begs the much more important question: who is going to watch my cats for the two weeks I am supposed to be in training?

Eish. Only a dumb lekoga would have indoor cats who need watching anyway.

Why Batswana Love Conferences

My First Botswana Conference

I had heard or read or dreamed before I came here that the Batswana love conferences and it turns out to be true.

It so reminds me of home. I remember when I used to go to a lot of conferences and would stand in whatever hotel lobby the conference happened to be in and read all the signage for the various and sundry groups that were meeting at the same time.

The day I saw the “International Association of Concrete Mixers Annual Conference” or maybe it was the “North American Affiliation of Bio-engineered Seed Distributor’s Board of Director’s Annual Meeting” next to whatever conference I was attending, I realized that America had gotten too complicated, too affiliated, too separatist. To have day long (or longer) conferences on almost any possible topic, just seemed so ridiculous to me. Especially knowing that most people attended as an opportunity to stay in a nice hotel, have tons of information spoon fed to them, have someone else make the meals (ah, conference chicken!), hang out in the bar and drink too much (or of course not), most likely on someone else’s dime, and then went home and probably implemented very little of what they heard/learned at the conference. I always came home from these things energized (and sometimes a bit hung over…) with a whole list of things to do, only to be hit with reality of my workload back at the ranch and if I could do one or two of those great things, I was a happy girl. To me, this conference business was quintessentially American.

So I was simply thrilled to find out I was going to get to spend two days at a conference. This conference was sponsored by a contracting authority for one of my nonprofits big grants – 494,000 BWP (Botswana Pula) which if you divide by 6.5 or so, tells you what we are talking about. This contracting authority happens to be the European Union and the Country of Botswana. Nothing to joke about.

I had to be on a bus at 6 or 6:30 a.m. to head to Gaborone for the conference.  Mind you, I had to come back each night on a 5:00 p.m. bus in order to get home by dark at about 6 p.m.  It is also dark here at 6:30 a.m., and cold as ____(fill in blank with the coldest thing you detest). But at 5 p.m. it is very warm and instead of being a cold and crowded bus like in the morning, is a hot and crowded bus.  On my return trip the last day of the conference it had heated up quite nicely. I kindly gave up my front row seat to a woman with a baby and found a seat midway back where I scared my first young child on this bus ride.  She was walking down the aisle with her mom, probably no older than 3 years old. She saw me, sitting in my seat with my sunglasses on and took two steps backward. The look on her face made me feel so bad to have been probably her first viewing of a white person.  Ah, if only I had been my younger, cuter version, it would have softened the blow, I am sure. I hope she isn’t scarred for life.

The bus was full, so people stood in the aisle next to me. The curtains were closed against the sun, the guy next to me was using more than his small allotted space and I was butt-dangling into the aisle. My genetic predisposition to claustrophobia started to kick in and I was provided an opportunity to practice a meditative moment to avoid screaming at the guy in the aisle who I was sure was purposely invading my space.

The purpose of the conferences was to walk all of us through our interim narrative and financial reports, which happen to be officially due July 1^st, since the 1^st 6 months of the 12 month contract ends on June 30^th. Woooahhh! How can you close a reporting period on one day and then file the report on the next?  Even in America we don’t do such things. But I guess in the EU they do. Apparently we were supposed to bring all our records - financial and otherwise - to the meeting where these very patient representatives of the EU would train us how to do the reports and then actually allow us to use the majority of the conference to do the reports with them there to help us. How cool is that?  A conference where you actually get some work done?

This is called capacity building, because many of the people at the conference run very small nonprofit organizations and this may be their first big grant. They have never used an excel spread sheet or organized their records according to how most granting agencies like to see things (i.e. cumbersome and bureaucratic). If we had simply been told to do it and sent home, we would have had troubles, but being able to sit there with our computers and go through the forms was a good way to teach everyone.

But Victor, my counterpart, our new fund development person Ralph, and I were mostly there for the heating and the food.  None of us were around when the initial training in January happened, so we had no idea what the meeting was going to be like and ahem…we didn’t bring all our financial files.  But we sat right under the output for the heating system and it was bliss. I actually took my down coat off. And my scarf and most certainly my hat and gloves.  Our office at Camphill has no heating or AC so we were happy just to be there.

Tea breaks are also serious business at conferences and meetings of any sort, so we enjoyed those, one at 10 and another at 3.  Literally and figuratively sandwiched between these breaks was a full blown buffet lunch.  Two salads, two starches, yummy veggies and three types of meat (chicken, beef, and uh, probably goat). And dessert.  I must confess, I was a glutton, but I wasn’t alone. Nobody here eats like this on a daily basis, and we all tried to act really nonchalant about it, but we was happy folk.

So we defrosted, ate, learned, ate some more, and worked for two days. I still came back with a list of great ideas, but these WILL be implemented in the next week, because we have an appointment at the Gaborone office to turn in our report and records and 494,000 BWP says so.

Once this report is in, I am going to look for some more conferences. The winter is just beginning and if they are anything like this last one, I will be warm, fed and productive.   I am also willing to accept any two of those three. I can’t wait to see who is meeting in the room next door.