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.