Boipuso

Happy Botswana Independence Day! This is THE holiday here – or just a great excuse to take several days off work. Independence day is technically today, paid holiday Monday, unpaid holiday on Tuesday, and last Friday was kinda a half day/extremely unproductive day. Lots of people travel and there’s also a big party in town with free food today. Apparently fights break out every year over the food so I’m just hanging out at the house that I’m house-sitting at for the evening!

    So there’s not much new stuff going on in my life, but it’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged so need to let everyone know I’m alive! It’s also an important milestone of my year: 4 months! WOW. One-third of the way through my year here. It has gone by so fast, which I’ve been thankful for but it is still amazing as every month passes I say how is it next month already?!?!? The other day I was looking at the calendar and thought, ‘ I can’t wait for October weather!’. Then I came to two realizations: 1) October was next week and 2) I will not be getting any autumn weather here…. Slightly disappointing considering that October is the dreaded, hot month.  We got rain last week though! I walked out of my door on Wednesday to go in to town for bible study and I thought, wow it smells like rain (yes, it is quite a strong smell here, especially when it hasn’t rained in so long!) then I look up in the sky and sure enough, there is a storm rolling in! It was really exciting, but when it rains here, it pours. And it’s usually accompanied by a thunderstorm (yay!). It was an unusually early rain, usually it starts towards the end of October. It was amazing how cool it got afterwards, such a relief from the increasingly hot days we are getting (in the upper 90s - 100s every afternoon). But when it is such a dry heat it doesn’t feel nearly as bad. The sun is extremely hot, hotter than at home. You can be outside for 20 minutes and come back in a shade darker (and feeling 20 degrees warmer).

      But anyways, enough about the weather and back to the four months. I’ve heard that the third and fourth month are the hardest, but I am finding that as I get more and more settled in, I am enjoying it more and more. I am just beginning to build relationships with people and feel like I belong here. It sometimes varies day to day, but overall I’m really happy with life here! Homesickness hasn’t really hit me much yet, but sometimes I will have moments where I miss certain things. The other day I was petting the horses near my house and realized how much I would loveee to get on the back of a horse again! And today I looked at a picture I have of my piano and got the urge to play piano so badly! I think I will have to break down and just play the keyboard at church sometime this week. Hopefully I’m not losing all of my piano skills.

      Last weekend was a pang of missing Corey’s wedding. Amazingly enough, my dad was able to get me skyped in to the wedding so I could catch some of the video and sound. It was awesome, but made me 1) miss Corey and Chelsea sooo badly and 2) make me feel so guilty for not being there!!! For financial and timing reasons, it wasn’t feasible to make the trip back, but it was an absolutely beautiful wedding, and they are going to re-enact it for me when I get back :-P (okay at least the vows and the kiss)

    Well, I am losing my focus so I think I’ll wrap this post up, but Happy Boipuso everyone! Until next time…

Food

Sooo I’ve been slacking on posting about food that I’ve been cooking, but I kind of assume most people aren’t exactly on the edge of their seat waiting for Ellen’s newest crazy creation of a meal. So here’s a few highlights I have happened to take pictures over the past few weeks:

First, the quaint crispy toast, cheese, avocado, and apple slices for lunch:

Pumpkin Banana bread – delicious!!! Pumpkin is extremely cheap here for some reason, so I just keep buying it and freezing it – figure it will come in handy for thanksgiving dinner! Unfortunately I dropped this bread on the floor taking it out of the oven, but was able to shove the insides back in and let it cool together to make it edible. Very good bread though, would highly recommend it.

Baked tomato with mozzarella. One word: yum

Lemon chicken dinner with fresh green beans and rice. Nice meal!

This is making me hungry! Dinner time : )

My Kids!

'Education Coordinator'

    I have neglected to write anything so far about my teaching duties since school started back up in mid-August. My main ‘education’ job here is planning lessons for the Conservation Club, which happens once a week at two schools in Kasane and Kazungula. I am working on coming up with a curriculum that they can use in the future for the club. So far, the clubs have been going great! The first week Lipa and I did an introduction to ourselves, CARACAL, and the Chobe Ecosystem. Throughout  the rest of the year we will be learning about the different parts of the ecosystem, so we started with wildlife and talked about mammals the second week, birds the next week, reptiles and amphibians last week, and ‘real-world encounters’ this week, with a guest speaker Cisko, the CARACAL tracker.  I really enjoyed this lesson because it is so applicable to the kid’s lives. When I asked them who had seen an elephant out in the bush, almost all of them raised their hands, but not many of them know what to do when they actually find themselves in that situation. It was great to have Cisko explain the correct way to handle an encounter with elephant, buffalo, hippo, baboons, then demonstrate some of his tracking skills. (And just in case you were wondering, slowly back away from an elephant, never run away unless they are already chasing you.)

The Kazungula club with their bird feeders made from recycled water bottles!

    On Saturday, the clubs will have a field trip to the Biodiversity Center! The only trouble with planning this has been transportation. With a big group of kids being 10 kms away, it is sometimes difficult to line up transportation. After going through some trouble requesting a bus from the Chobe District Council (basically the local government), I finally learned the correct process, so thank goodness we won’t have to be cramming kids into recruited friend’s vehicles! I have also been working on planning a Game Drive into Chobe National Park for the clubs at the end of the year. This requires writing letters to safari companies and hoping that they will be generous enough to donate time and a vehicle to take the kids into the park.

   Interesting thing here is that you have to write letters for everything. It is rather old fashioned, but it documents any communication you have had with someone. So it’s been kind of fun giving myself the title ‘education coordinator’, sound pretty official right?

     A few new things I have also been working on as the ‘education coordinator’ are communicating with the Principal Education Administrator (basically like the Board of Ed) to arrange visits to all ten schools in the Chobe District. We are only reaching two of the schools with our Conservation Clubs, so it would be a great opportunity to be able to travel to the more distant schools to teach them about the environment. Unfortunately, conservation is such a poorly covered subject in the schools that the children know very little about it in general and even just the Chobe region. We hope to get those visits started this year, but it’s slow goings so far, so we’ll see…..

    Also, I contacted a local Catholic Mission called Bana ba Ditlou that provides a preschool-type program for youngins and an after-school program for older children in the community. They have a conservation component to the program but the woman who runs it doesn’t know much about conservation, so she is happy for me to help. We are still working out details of what this will look like, but currently they are coming to the library on Thursdays for the ‘Library Club’, which I just started back up today after realizing that kids were still actually coming even though there are supposedly mandatory afternoon study sessions at school.

     So, there’s quite a bit going on, and it’s great! This week I have really started to get to know some of the kids and phew! What a relief to finally be getting some of the names down. Between Katlego, Kato, Kagisano, Kagiso, Katsano, Kutlo, oish! It’s been tough. I have asked the majority of these kids their names about ten times, but in the end, I think it will mean more to them if I can actually call them by their names!  Most are starting to open up to me and become more comfortable (which I’m sure will not be fun later…) but it feels so great. After a great afternoon surrounded by kids I often find myself not being able to hold back a smile, and I am so reassured that they are the reason I’m here!

Busylessness

    I have determined that this year, I am learning a lesson in time management. Not the kind of time management required when you have so much to do and not enough time to do it all, though. The kind when you have too much time that you don’t know what to do with it. It’s a pretty pathetic problem, but it’s so completely new to me that I’m finding it really difficult. For the past four years I have been so busy I often didn’t have time to think, but now I have so much time I think I’m thinking too much!

    For the most part I find things to fill my time, but usually I resort to eating, exercising, reading, or sleeping, not necessarily in that order. Sounds great, right?? Ugh. Well I suppose to any normal person it’s the life, and most of the time I don’t really mind, but for someone who thrives on having something  to do or somewhere to be every minute of the day, it can get pretty frustrating. It’s not really too vacation-y, because I’m still doing work at work, but it’s just outside of work that there’s not much to do! Not having transportation certainly doesn’t help the situation because I can't stay anywhere past 6 without having to pay a bunch for a taxi or bum a ride off someone.

     So, it is something that is taking getting used to, and is getting more and more difficult as time goes on and I get more and more stir-crazy! Below is an example of the result of a lazy hazy Sunday afternoon…. Painted toes and nails! Decided to go hokie spirit on the toenails (thanks Carrie for the artwork) in honor of our successful football season so far! And the fingernails just ended up horribly tacky…. Oh well, it was fun to experiment!

Tourist for a Day

      On Thursday I had the opportunity to be a model for a promotion they are filming for seven lodges in Chobe and the Okavango Delta. Rob is friends with James, the marketing coordinator for Chobe Game Lodge and Savanna Lodge, five star lodges in the Chobe that are a part of Delta and Desert Safaris. He hooked me up to be a model at Chobe Savanna Lodge, so on Thursday morning I was picked up in a boat from immigration, got stamped out of the country, then took a boat ride to get checked into Namibian immigration (consisting of one grumpy man that sits a shack and you hope is actually there when you pull up).  Afterward we headed to the lodge, where we got filmed coming into the dock, grabbed some muffins for breakfast really quick, then headed back out on the boat to make a village visit. We went to Kasenu (sp?) a village just down the river where they will often take tourists to learn about local village life. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I guess it was part of the job…. Unfortunately I wasn’t wearing the right clothes, I wish I was wearing a skirt or something longer. It was just a bit weird being a tourist in the village, when I’ve been living here. I started to put on my ‘Africa’ accent, then realized I guess that wasn’t very tourist-y. So we got the ‘tour’ of the village, then pulled out some footballs (soccer balls) and James played with them while I drew with some of the ladies and kids with pens and paper we took. They seemed appreciative but at the same time I hate fulfilling the role of the white American tourist that throws stuff or money at people and thinks of it as helping to fix all their problems. But either way, I think they will enjoy the footballs! It’s a very small village right on the river, and they rely mostly on fishing for their food. Unfortunately overfishing is a big problem in this area because it is their food source and livelihood, but it doesn’t give the fish a chance to recover.

Me with the kids from the village

       After our village visit, we headed back to the lodge and did a few shots of room orientation, then had a little break and had lunch by the pool. Oh, I forgot to mention that we had the entire lodge to ourselves, there were no other guests, and it only hosts a maximum of 24 guests. It is probably the most secluded lodge you will find in Chobe, and is situated just across the river from the park, and is west facing. So in the evening there is a 270 degree view of the river, sunset, and park. Best view from these parts, I promise you. I had my own little chalet room for the night, and it was absolutely beautiful. So after lunch we headed out onto the boat for some river/wildlife shots. There were heaps of giraffe down at the river getting water, then we found some elephants that were just about to cross the river. We drifted in soo close to them on the bank of the river, it was just amazing. Then we backed off and waited for them to start their journey across.

     They stood on the bank making sure they had everyone, then they start to go into the water in a line, making sure to keep the little guys sandwiched among the bigger ones. WOW. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the largest land mammal swim. I was truly amazed that they could even stay afloat, but they kind of bobbed, using their trunks as a sort of snorkel when they went down. I took some video I will try to post on facebook. We were sitting in our boat on the bank right next to where they climbed out and began to start grazing again. It is just such a humbling experience to stand next to these ginormous elephants. In the words of Walter, the marketing director for Delta & Desert, how can you live in a place without elephants?

    After our boat journey we went back to the lodge and I got changed for sunset cocktails shots in front of the beautiful sunset. The herd of elephants crossed right in front of the lodge at sunset, making it even more breathtaking! After some drinks, we sat down for a delicious dinner of bruschetta appetizer, a chicken dish and yogurt mousse for dessert. Yum. Did I also mention that this was all free…. Phew. Anyways, we hung around for a bit and looked at the footage of the day then I retired to my room to get some sleep. I decided to take a shower just cause the shower was cool.

Relaxing on the bottom level of the lodge

     I woke up the next morning, had a cup of coffee and read my book, then packed up and headed up to the lodge for breakfast while the guys finished up some filming. Then we all had breakfast (yogurt/fruit, croissants, omelet) and headed back to Botswana! They dropped me off at work on their way to the airport to catch a plane to head to the next lodge they are filming. It was a bit tough to get back into work mode after all that relaxation so removed from the ‘real world’, but back to reality and teaching in the afternoon!

    The promotion is just going to be used online, so when they finish and post it up I will definitely share the link!