Of Cats, Goats, private body parts and Rotarians

Well, I stood firm from April 1^st when I left California, to May 14 at 11:26 a.m. Botswana time when I was texted this nice statement, “Hi Maggie, I am Amy. I stay at Camphill with my husband Colin. I heard u will be volunteering at Camphill.  Congrats! Do you want a kitty?”

So during my site visit to Camphill, part of my orientation process was to find out where my closest bank branch was, where I should shop for food, etc.  Turns out both the bank and a nice grocery store are right across the street from the only veterinarian for a million miles. Give or take. And since Ms. Sisi was clearly headed during my visit right into another “heat” and has already had two litters in her two years of life, it seemed like a no brainer that the only way I would take her would be if they had her fixed. And, the only way they could have her fixed, given their work schedules, before this next round of howling, screaming, sneak-out-at-night-and-here-we-go-again moment was for me to take her to the bank with me and er, well, just casually drop her off on my way, um, at the vet. And since I am a volunteer with no car, this meant taking her in a box of some sort on the bus the 15 km up the road to Lobatse and then grabbing a taxi from the bus stop to the vet. We had the box, the tape and were getting ready to practice loading her into the box when we decided to borrow a cat carrier from the vet the day before the big event. A very smart move.

The next morning, at 7 a.m., I proceeded to put Sisi into the carrier and steel myself for carrying a screaming cat for 20 minutes on a crowded bus, with at least 50% of the people either unfriendly towards cats or not understanding the reason for spending money to have one spayed. So, there she goes into the carrier. And then out she pops, having slammed the carrier door open with surprising force for such a petite lil thing. But remember, she is heating up. Sure glad that happened at home and not on the road or I would have killed a perfectly good cat. After learning how to properly close the latch, I walked 10 minutes to the bus stop – carrying her past all the early morning workers here at the center who enjoyed a nice laugh at the white woman carrying a perfectly healthy cat around in a cat carrier.

Wind and cat howling, I stood with others gathering at the stop who were either trying to hitch or wait for the bus.  I had resigned myself to the mortifying bus ride when a car pulled up and people rushed to it to get a hitch.  Exiting from the vehicle was my unexpected knight in shining armor, Victor, my counterpart here at Camphill who I will be working closely with until December, just arriving from his commute from Gabs. In my memory, he appeared to be brandishing his messenger bag like a sword, fending off the hitchers, calling me over as he did so and flashing me that big hero smile.  Suddenly, I am in the car, breaking numerous Peace Corps rules, and getting a ride from a pet owning, Motswana who took me directly to the vets office.

I walk in and realize, I am not in Oz anymore.  Staff are all locals, but the room where the animals are being taken for their morning fixings is full with white South African women living in Botswana with their felines in tow (okay, two women and one 8 year old daughter, but the room was small and they each had brought in 3 really large cats). The one with the daughter was planning to stay for the duration, because her daughter wants to be a vet so gets to actually watch the vet do the fixings. The vet, Mark, also a non-American white person from somewhere else, gave me the poor volunteer rate and threw in a rabies shot and the various other feline vaccines for nothing.  Apparently I am the soon to be proud owner of the only cat in Otse who has had her shots and been fixed. I hope she isn’t shunned for this by the devil-may-care cats in the area.

So I left her in good hands, ran my official errands and headed back to Otse on the bus. The return trip was legit, as my agency’s project coordinator was going into town with his wife (who is also my landlord) and took me along so we could chat about the agency. No lie. I waited with my spayed/drugged kitty at the vet while they did their banking and got to learn all about the 4 leopards that live in and around my town and kill and eat the vet’s calves but he refuses to try to kill the leopards, because, well, duh, there are only 4 of them and as he said “if we are going to leave our calves laying around in the bush…”.  He talked about the sick vultures at the vulture sanctuary/nesting area here in Otse who are too sick to get to the top of the hill where they are supposed to sanctuate/nest and thus sit on telephone poles until they get too weak and fall off and are picked up by the vet’s staff at his ranch who bring them in to him to treat. He tells me about the people who stole a bunch of his goats and then sold them to locals in smaller herds, including a bunch of castrated ones he had rescued from the SPCA. Apparently whoever stole them eventually got caught and the un-eaten goats were taken to the local chief’s office for the vet to identify and reclaim.  As he stood with the chief, who in this town happens to be a woman – a rarity – the delighted goats approached them and quite happily made it known to her that they did indeed belong to the vet. I guess they were almost petting zoo variety and must have somehow convinced the people who misappropriated them that they were too cute for goat stew. As I guess not many castrated goats are.

As I was waiting for my boss/landlord/ride the vet takes a call from a fellow on the other side of Botswana who is working with some cattle farmers. Seems one pregnant cow lost her vagina (I kid you not) or rather it had dropped outside of her, as apparently can happen to pregnant cows. Gives new meaning to the words “difficult pregnancy.”  Well, the cattle farmer didn’t deal with this right away, so the poor girl has been in this state for a couple of weeks!  I now know a lot more about how to fix this particular problem in cows than I ever thought I would. If I had too, I could probably do all but the stitchery part of it. Knowing that sugar is better to use than salt was also helpful.  The vet also was a wealth of information about who’s who in Otse as far as businesess and Rotarians, as the nearest Rotary club is in Lobatse and I hope to be able to attend some of their meetings. The guy who owns the diamond cutting business here in Otse is apparently a Rotarian, but I don’t think the dutch cheesemaker is, although he does own the most pretentious house in town, sitting on the side of the hill a bit above mine with big huge round windows staring back at the town folk like empty eyes.

Leaving Sisi safely at home to sleep it off, I got back to the office by 2 where I experienced a very slow internet experience so instead went for a walk across town to see if I could find a shorter route to my soon to be home. Walking back from there I picked up Jim, another PC volunteer, at his work site and we ran into the village chief who walked us part of the way home.  He is 46 years old, which is pretty young for a kgosi.

Sisi had been in heat and recovered well from her surgery. Her silly 3 month old kitten (Colin and Amy call her T-bone, I call her Pudi, which is “goat” in Setswana and sounds like how tweedy bird says “pussy” in the cartoon. Another PC volunteer, Ameila will have to straighten all this out when she finally gets that kitten for herself) was very upset with her upon her return. T-bone/Pudi, threw a total hissy fit at her mother (heh, now I know where that comes from!) for a couple of hours for god only knows what reason. The next day, when mom was feeling more herself, she hauled off and smacked the Goat and I applauded her parental acumen.

Its nice to have a cat with a name pronounced the same as Ceci my trainer at Praxis back home. Perhaps seeing Sisi laying around on the couch sleeping will be the motivation I will need to do a few push ups and crunches from time to time. Eish.

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.

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.

My Host Family

I haven’t been able to post as much as I would like. When we do have a chance to get on line at school I don’t always have the time to compose anything or the blog page is down for some dumbass reason.  So I have been remiss in telling you about my great host family. I want to say I have been lucky because some of the volunteers in my group have had hard times for one reason or another with their families. Mine is pretty cool, and I am not struggling all that much with living with a bunch of other people. Thank you to Jamie and her kids and Gail for getting me ready for this!

So my “mother” is Lenah Tutuwe, a widow of about 6 or 7 years who is 52 years old and works as a housekeeper at the town’s hospital. I am pretty sure she looks much older than I do at 49. She has had a harder life, to be sure and is also diabetic.  Lenah named me Katlego, which means “achievement"in Setswana. No pressure.  It has been an achievement just to say it correctly, but at least she didn’t give me a name with any “r”s in it because they roll their “r”s here like you wouldn’t believe. She is very kind and the first few weeks when I was on my way out to school she would stop me and say a 5 minute prayer for my safety. So far, so good. She has five children, the oldest is her son Phemelo (“Protection”) Joseph who is about 35 or 37 or something. He lives here but travels to Gabs every morning (about an hour or so on the bus) where he works as a driver.  Lots of government and other groups have drivers to take employees to various meetings and such, because everyone doesn’t have a car here like in the US. His girlfriend, Lorato, who is 22, lives here at the house with us and their two kids. Lawrence Tao who is almost 15 months old and Alicia who is almost 2 ½ years old.   When I figure out how to put photos on my blog, you will see. These beautiful babies are so much fun, though I can’t understand them at all. When I have had a stressful day at training or just adapting to life here, a few minutes playing and laughing with them is all it takes.  One of my first lasting memories at my host family is dancing with Alicia on the porch and trying to keep Tao from crawling off the edge and dropping the 3 feet to the ground (no porch railings at this homestead).  Fun times which later expanded to them bouncing on my bed and me trying to keep Alicia from bouncing right onto Tao’s head or him off the bed.  They slobber on everything, have snotty noses when they are sick, and pee on the floor with startling regularity, but I love them and little Ali said to me the other day “ke rata mma Kattie”  which means I love mama Kattie (my Setswana name is Katlego which is Kattie to the kids).  Their mom, Lorato has the most beautiful laugh and a singing voice to match. As the main person doing the cooking, she took me “under her wing” to teach me how to cook correctly.  I have humored her since they do things differently here and only had to tell her once when she told me how to chop the carrots for the “soup” which is more like a stew sauce they use at every meal to go with the bread or phaleche (more on that later), that I have been chopping carrots longer than she has been alive.  Now she tells me when to chop carrots, but no longer how to do it.  Progress.  I know she gets bored being at home with the kids and waiting for Phemelo to come home each night around 8 or 9 p.m.  She said today she wished she could work to help him with money. 

Lenah also has four daughters, three living and working in the capitol – Gaborone – we say Gabs, and one living in the opposite direction in Jwaneng, basically a town built for mining purposes only and full of male workers and prostitutes. Well, and government workers like my sister.  The oldest sister, Madgeline Malebogo (“Gratitude”)works as a secretary and is the mother to Lucia, a 13 year old who lives here at our house full time.  She has been my language teacher, speaking the best English of any of the permanent residents here. She is very funny, loves to speak English, watch English movies and shows on tv, and is your typical scatterbrained teenager.  She helps take care of the kids when not at school and is supposed to help with laundry and cooking and cleaning, but gets so distracted sometimes, it takes her forever. I have been teaching her card games, including solitaire, which she is enjoying. I showed her my book of 150 ways to play solitaire, but took it from her when I saw her eyes rolling into the back of her head. That isn’t for beginners.

Next comes Boikanyo (“Faith or Trust” I am not quite sure which) Amelia, who is a hair stylist, also living in Gabs, then Tshegofatso (“Blessing”) Sophia, who works at a government job in Jwaneng and is the first of my sisters I ever met, lastly the baby Khumo “Wealth” Sinah, who is a police woman in Gabs.  I remember the day I met the first one. She came home for a weekend and greeted me with such friendliness and sisterliness. She told me, “when I come home I take care of momma, and you are my big sister so I will take care of you!”  I almost burst into tears because I was expecting to have to chop carrots, onions, green peppers, cabbage and potatoes just so for yet another soup and just wanted to crawl into bed! I loved her from that moment on and forever. 

All the sisters came home for Easter and it was a hoot. Nothing special happened for Easter. I was blessed to be with a family that doesn’t spend the entire Easter weekend at church, as do others here. Then two came again for mother’s day, although so briefly I was in school most of Saturday and barely saw them on mother’s day before they had to leave.  I am so happy that I will be living near them and Kanye so I can see them and know I have a place in country to come “home” to if I need to get away without being able to truly get away.

Lastly, there is my uncle, my deceased father’s older brother, who comes into town once or twice a week from the cattle post.  Here in Botswana, cattle ownership is very important. The more cattle you have, the wealthier you are. When you marry, the groom pays lebola “bride price” to the bride’s family and the number of cows varies from community to community. Here in Kanye area it is set at 8 cows.  Up north, there is an area where it will cost you 12 cows for your bride.  Weddings are a topic of another post.  At any rate, uncle blows in, blows out.  He speaks very little English but seems kind enough. When he is here, I can often hear him and mom late into the night talking and maybe playing some kind of dice game. I just hear the sound of what sounds like domino pieces and their low voices. 

This brings me to tell you about our house.  First, it is pretty decent by comparison to some of the other places volunteers are staying, but not the best of the bunch.  We have a compound, with three older buildings on it besides the current house. It appears each of the older buildings were previous houses –  each having two rooms attached but with their own entries, metal roofing and no running water.  Our current house is a three bedroom, with a large living room, smaller kitchen with no built-ins or cabinets except a double sink.  The bathroom situation is a toilet and sink in one room, a huge deep bath tub with small sink in another, and a shower room. The shower doesn’t work and has no door, the tub has no real water pressure so we still have to haul hot water from the kitchen sink. For the first week I was here the tub room’s door wasn’t attached and I had to move it over to block the opening.  The first time I used the toilet, I ended up locking myself in because there was no door handle on the inside.  Phemelo came home that weekend and fixed these two things for me!  The house has a great tile roof that looks well built. I know this because I can see it, along with all the cross beams, when I lay on my bed because we have no ceilings.  Which is why I can hear mom and uncle whispering away.  Last week Phemelo was gone in Gabs all week so Lorato and her kids and Lucia and mom all slept in the room next to mine.  They sounded like girlfriends at a slumber party, laughing and giggling.  It was nice.