I never expected to go abroad. I had thought about it before, but never with much seriousness, and somewhere in the back of my mind I think I knew it would never happen. But the COD for this spring looked dismal and my thoughts grew more nagging. I realized I was vocalizing my distress when one of my friends said, "Whining won't get you out of the country - go do something about it."
And now, as you are sitting in Wilson waiting for Sabato to start teaching, I'm sitting in a yellow house in Maun, Botswana with one table, five mismatched chairs and a leaky bathtub. The traffic on the main road outside rumbles as my friend Becca Goldman shuffles cards. If I weren't playing "Brown Eyed Girl" so loudly out of these tiny laptop speakers, I could probably hear the rats in the ceiling. It's a typical lazy Sunday.
Becca and I, along with Lauren Baker and Rachel Prunier, have been here studying the ecology of the Okavango Delta since January. The decision to miss a semester of classes and go tromping off to Africa was difficult. Plane tickets, passports and shots can be a hassle, not to mention finding subletters, getting enough credits to graduate and explaining to Mom that you want to spend four months in the country with the highest HIV rate in the world. But in the end, most things work themselves out and you find your former fears were bred out of ignorance.
Maun is a great town with grocery stores, banks, a post office and even an Internet cafe. Public transportation is reliable, the people are amazingly friendly and the weather is great (if you don't mind a little heat).
We live with a Dutch student named Flora, and in a few hours we are all going to the German students' house -"The Ostrich Farm" - where we are going to have a birthday braai (local term for barbecue) for Roland, a Swiss anthropologist. In addition to the Europeans, we work closely with students and researchers from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Canada and, of course, Botswana. It's always interesting when three continents of culture collide. Thankfully, everyone speaks English, though with varying degrees of proficiency. The real trouble arises when you run into cultural differences, because as one person explained to us: directly saying "no" to an African is like saying "get away to hell."
On two occasions, we arranged to meet with Maun natives who were going to show us the villages and take us to church, and twice we were stood up. For them, it would have been too rude to tell us they were busy and couldn't take us. The graceful exit was simply not to show up.
Indeed, we've gotten very used to waiting. Life in Botswana moves more slowly than in the West, and the people joke that if the world were suddenly to end, Botswana would probably last another day because it's always a step behind. Sometimes we think it would be nice to have an extra day, especially when it comes to doing field work in the delta. Inevitably, tires go flat, food goes bad, equipment stops working and data gets lost. Most of the work Lauren and I do in the field is digging holes and collecting soil samples. Mud and clay are the worst, peat is okay, but our favorite is slightly damp sand. The auger cuts through it like butter and it spills through the sieve like water.
Ha! You know you've been in the field too long when you start to wax poetic about dirt.
One of the more exciting field trips we took was to Shakawe, where I got a stomach bug. Normally when you're camping there, you don't leave your tent in the middle of the night because there are large nocturnal animals that you don't want to eat you. But alas, I was sick and had to risk it. Becca and I crept out at 5 a.m., hoping for the best, and we got about 30 meters from camp when ... Crash! Snort! Becca jumped into the truck and shone her light out the window to scare an animal away while I stood quietly behind a tree with my light off. The animal disappeared and in the morning we found hippo tracks. That was a most exciting start to a day that I spent mostly vomiting, sleeping and playing cards.
Yes, there are scary animals here. Yes, some days I curse tropical latitudes and blazing suns. Yes, I miss my cat. But in the end, all those trite comments that people share about living in another place for a while are true: you learn about the world, you learn about yourself and you learn about life. You learn things you won't forget. I finally found that out when I stopped whining and got out of the country.
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