That quote in the title is an old Botswana saying. I think it is fitting to our cross-cultural goals here as Peace Corps volunteers.

I am leaving tomorrow morning for training in the capital, Gaborone. This training is going to consist of a lot of similar material that we covered at pre-service training (PST) however now that we have all been at our sites for a few months we are able to now take a lot of the skills that we have learned and apply them to real life situations. All of the volunteers in our group (Bots9) have one of four job descriptions: Life Skills (mostly in-school teaching and development), NGO (work with a specific non-governmental organization), DAC/DCL (District Aids Coordinator/District Community Liaison work in the district office coordinating HIV/AIDS focused activities) and CCB (community capacity builders work with clinics or social work offices to help build sustainable programs). The IST (in-service training) combines two groups at a time NGO-Life Skills and CCB-DAC and has them train at different times. Amanda left a few weeks ago. We overlap for a few days then she will return here to Gumare and I will stay and continue my training. This is a bummer because over a month time we will only see each other for a few days. She will even miss my birthday! Over the past few months we have been working on a large report for Peace Corps called the Community Analysis. This report is supposed to detail all the elements of the community and surrounding area that are relevant to our positions here. If you want to know more about the area we live in you should take a look at this report because it profiles the community on both a social and institutional level.

Link to Community Analysis - Gumare

I also wanted to post an update on the work I have been doing on the garden fence. I tried hard to complete this fence before I left so that, as a surprise, it would be complete by the time Amanda came home. Alas, I should have worn gloves because I got quite a few blisters and cuts on my hands and was forced into early retirement.

Here is a photo of Lady and Buster in their dog nest simply because they make me happy.

On Thursday I attended a youth forum where local children from schools all over the district came to learn communication skills and life skills (a common term here for coming of age skills focused around relationships and sex education). I helped Ngwao Boswa setup their baskets to show and demonstrate basket weaving for the children. Another volunteer, Mary Hill, was attending and presenting at the forum. Mary is from the Bots8 group, which is a year ahead of our group. It was great to see another volunteer. Mary even brought me groceries and dog food! Which were very much appreciated because it is quite a journey for us to grocery shop.

Also, on Sunday I was able to meet up with Angel and take some photos of her giving some supplies to some local orphans. In the photos you can see Xwii/XiXae, the young boy I talked about in the last post (I apparently spelled his name wrong before, but that is expected because his language is not even a written language). He is the one wearing red. We found out that his blindness was caused by a surgery when he was younger. The other children are from Tubu, a small village just east of Gumare.

Lastly, here is a photo of our house again. I know I have already posted photos of the outside of the house but I was talking to someone from back home the other day and I was trying to explain how different my house is from my neighbors. This photo somewhat shows that across the street all the people live in much more traditional houses. These rondavels are traditionally made of mud, dung or thatched walls with a thatched roof of reeds collected from the delta. More modern renditions of these rondavels are made of cinderblocks or even have a core made of soda cans that get exposed as the mud wears off.

The reed fence project for our garden continues. It sure takes a very long time to cut the reeds, unsheathe it of the outer layer to make it look better and then weave it to the fence. Once it is done it will look wonderful and will protect our garden. This brings me to my next point. Our garden plants seem to be mysteriously dying. I will be the first to admit I have very little experience gardening but things were going so well until we put the seedlings in the actual garden bed. A few times, we have noticed that some dogs (not ours) have gotten into the garden to lie where it was cool. I also think the neighborhood chickens have gotten in for a snack. Either way, once the fence is complete the garden will be secure and we can replant a few things.

Furniture! We finally have furniture in our house! This was a very exciting day. We now have a nice small dining table, a soft futon and a great bed to sleep on, all brand new. We will upload some pictures or a video of the inside of our house soon.

I have been working with a local drama group for the past few weeks. We are working on focusing the group's performances on community social issues. They already have a skit addressing gender-based violence and now we are collaborating on getting other issues such as HIV/AIDS, TB, condom usage and multiple concurrent partnerships, which are all huge issues here in Gumare as well as Botswana as a whole. This country is obsessed with soap operas. Everyone watches them. In Molepolole at training both our 13 year old host brother and our 80 something year old mother loved to watch "soapies" any time of the day. This drama group hopes to capture this fascination by creating dramas that we will record on video that address these targeted social issues. Tune-in in the coming months for these videos. We have a tentative plan to start shooting in September.

One of the first people we met when we came to Gumare was a local restaurant owner by the name of Angel. Angel has kids of her own but also looks after many orphans in the community by serving them food, giving them clothes and sometimes a place to stay. Angel approached Amanda and I to help her with starting a new NGO. She wants to establish an orphanage here in Gumare that can serve the children in a more sustainable way than she is currently able to do. One night she brought a friend of hers to our house. Xini (I cannot really spell it or accurately describe how to pronounce it, let's just say it involves a lot of clicking) is a young boy who doesn't know his age. My guess is that he is around 12. Xini is completely blind. He lives here in Gumare with his aunt and uncle at the VDC (village development committee) houses, which are basically welfare houses. The problem is that his aunt and uncle are alcoholics who spend all their time at traditional bars called shabenes. So, Xini sits at home in fear that people will once again break in or that his aunt and uncle will come home to take the food the government gives him so that they can sell it for more alcohol money. Angel's dream is to help the seemingly countless cases like this in our district. We look forward to helping Angel through the initial stages and into the future of her new adventure.

The Peace Corps philosophy on sustainable projects starts with assessing the community needs and then helping to initiate projects that the community actually wants to do. This is what nearly all of my projects have been so far. However, I have to admit that I secretly and selfishly want to start a project that no one has yet asked for. I want to raise bees. Apiculture has long been a Peace Corps focus around the world but there are currently no Peace Corps beekeeping projects here in Botswana. In fact, even outside of Peace Corps, beekeeping is not often practiced in Botswana. The main reasons being that it is hard to keep African bees in a desert and that it really is not a tradition of any of the people here. The government has had multiple incentives and educational pushes to get people interested in beekeeping but with little interest. I have put out a few feelers and have found a few men interested in the project. The next step is logistics and planning. Wish me luck.

This past week Amanda has been gone for training in the capital. I will go at the beginning of next week and then she will come home. It will be great to see all of my friends/fellow volunteers and also to brush up on my language training, both Setswana and English. That was only partially a joke. I am sure most people who have lived in an area where your primary language was not the most spoken language would agree with me in saying that your primary language somewhat degrades. Therefore, it will be good to get to learn more Setswana and to speak normal American English with my friends.