My Grandfather told me about how when he was a boy, country folk used to dress up to go into town. His aunts and cousins could be spotted from a block away—country girls in dresses sewn in colors so loud they made a sound as they walked down the street. Going into town was an opportunity to shine and to be noticed; that is what I think of when I am in Lobatse at month end and I see the old ladies wearing dukis and german print dresses and young women wearing new dresses and outfits that can still be spotted on manikins in shop windows. Even I try to avoid my holey jeans at month end and I wear a new crisp top and try not to sweat stains into the armpits. I comb my hair out nicely because as much as I hate the crowds, I enjoy watching the people in them. Everyone with a job is paid at month end and so at the shops there are specials and the specials bring crowds and queues and thick aired koombies. I love it and hate it at the same time. There’s an excitement that month end generates for me. I stand in lines, long, long African style lines where people in front of you say “I’m here,” point out their spot and then go into the grocery store to buy something and stand in another line while you hold their place whether you want to or not. Naughty children abound. Men gawk and say “hey beybee,” as we walk by but I love that women get dressed up to go into town at month end. I run into people I know and we exchange pleasantries. Month end is usually when I get free rides from people I know who see me hiking into town. Although Lobatse is nothing special—its mostly grocery stores, pharmacies, practical places like that—I enjoy watching people flood in at month end, men in their nice clothes, women in dressy dresses, things I would almost never wear outside of Botswana. These are clothes that are beautiful but far out of context in America (think, puffy sleeved dresses and ruffles). I lament that Americans don’t dress up anymore, with the exception of black people and immigrants and we’re all gleefully flamboyant, what most may call tacky. Most Americans don’t even try anymore. My holey jeans wouldn’t elicit a second glance back home. I’m soaking in the last of Lobatse’s pageantry at month end. I think of my grandfather and all the lady relatives who I did not know, all of whom dressed up to go into town to fetch groceries, run errands, exchange pleasantries with other people on the road in flamboyant colored dresses made especially for going to church and going into town.

Storm clouds are backlit by shadowy gray moonlight, moonlight that doesn’t reach the ground. The sky is deserted and throughout Pitsane the electricity is out because of the storm. It is dark tonight. There is no light behind windows except for the dim illumination, an inscrutable glow of weak flames gulping wax and wic. Through the windows to my house my candles burn tall flames because they've nearly been burned to a roach. Occasionally there is a bright flicker when a moth flies into the fire (it seems they really do that) but the night is saturated shades of black and blue; it really is a perfect picture of darkness. Usually I cannot see outside at night because there is a glare from the light emanating from inside my house; my house becomes a fishbowl, lit from within, but tonight a vague silhouette of trees and tin rooftops are visible. Solid things are black. The sky and space between solids is blue. I think back to when there were national brown outs when I lived with my host family during training in Molepolole. At least once a week we sat together as my host sister ambled through the dark for candles. We were never prepared but she knew the house well and always found candles quickly. I'd get my handcrank flashlight and my host nieces would play with it, taking turns cranking the handle, marveling at what a clever contraption it was. We would talk. We would talk about nothing in particular but I find myself sitting in the house alone, not even the cat is around, thinking about the times I sat with my host family in the dark, when we stopped watching the TV. In the dark is when people beginning to see each other; we begin to notice the things we missed in the light. We are searching for the things we cannot see.

The sky looks empty and starless, but then a round yellow hole in a blank sky leaks a shaft of light just as the power flickers back and collapses again. Soon after, my refrigerator groans back to life and the lights illuminate. The windows reflect the glare and show an image of myself against the cold glass windows. I close my curtains so that tsotsis cannot look in and I will resume distracting myself in the glare. A book. A novel. A movie. A couple songs on my Ipod. Once again, I am a cardboard cut out in a backlit box. I'll go to bed thinking to myself what I fool I was—the sky is never empty, for the blanker it looks, the more layers of clouds there are covering what’s cloaked underneath.

Someday I’ll have a house, and that house will be situated on a street lined in lavender jacarandas that rain little purple flowers in the spring. I'm even prepared to plant these trees myself, grow them painstakingly, because that will give me more to brag about over wine and cheese when the Peace Corps is a cocktail story—I’ll get sauced and make up stories about how I single handedly built hospitals or saved little baby kittens; Sensational stories on the cusp of implausibility that an average American will feel too stupid to question because after all, I was in the Peace Corps which makes me honest and good by default.

In my mind's eye my street looks similar to one of the highly stylized Chinese kung fu movies of late. I will have a terrace and a balcony and they'll be swallowed by ancient, thick purple bougainvillea. I will take afternoon walks through the lazy tarred lanes that are feathered with felled purple flowers. My children will take for granted the pink light bleeding through the canopy of blooming trees; the dog's only want will be to pee on yellow hydrants and scratch up grass over where he's urinated but I'll walk in quiet contentment under the smoggy LA sky and think of the beginning of the rains; I'll think of Botswana's "springtime" and all the things I took for granted back then (now), when my moods matched the sky's. Under a purple canopy, memories will become beautiful and tinged with a different colored light. I won't be able to see as clearly, but what I will be able to make out will look be a lovely misty purple, not bachelors’ button blue. I'll remember how I spoke choppy Setswana, and how much all of the children loved me (mostly, they're just unafraid). I'll laugh about the frustrations and remember how I called strangers mother or father as a sign of respect, how I hitch hiked here and there with little worry about my safety. I'll miss those things and I'll think of muted thunder clapping, of waiting for prolonged promises of rain. I'll think of the quiet taps on my tin rooftop, then of the rain like timpani drums and the thunder like cymbals; I'll remember the music of a deaf composer pouring on my rooftop.

When I immediately get home I’m sure the problems that seem so insurmountable today will seem less so because hindsight blurs the edges, the details, the feelings that small details engender. I’ll beat myself up for not breaking the tasks apart into smaller pieces and approaching them bit by bit. Gradually, hindsight’s keen vision will blur into memory and fade into nostalgia and I’ll remember Tebogo and Olebile’s birthday parties, or building a garden with Kamogelo, Aerobics Club practice, and watching soapies at Neo’s house. But today, I am in Pitsane and the pans are dry. Its been overcast for the past week and that brings hope for rain, but sometimes the clouds are plain empty, other times the rain just passes us by. The upside is that dolor hued skies look pretty when lit with jacaranda blossoms and that memory will stick to me harder than the names or faces of people who don't show up to VMSAC meetings, the counterparts, or the ladies who call me fat, and for that I am gratefu

Back home I never noticed the moon much. I don’t pay it much mind here either, not until I looked up that night and against the clear black sky there was a large orange moon; a moon that looked like a sun, bright and full but dim enough to look at. It was a naughty version of itself. Like a lustful moon that wasn’t blushing, but rouged.

The moon bled clear bright light while a shadow of a man watched me through the side window of my house. Yellow light glowed from the single window with sheer domicile curtains. I laid on the couch right under the window oblivious and watching a movie on a laptop. My neighbors all go to sleep before I do but Oh, my latest “counterpart” woke up to go to the toilet. She spotted him through the naked bathroom window of her house and called me. She whispered. I always thought of her as such; a whisperer. One who says things in quiet hushed tones when you’re not around or not listening. But this time she whispered pertinent information—that a man was watching me through my side window. The first time I introduced myself to Oh was the night I went to a party in Good Hope with my then counterpart, KT. KT told me Oh would be the new social worker in Pitsane, so I introduced myself. Oh got up mid conversation and walked away. No goodbye or it was nice to meet you, or I have to go. She just left. That was the first time I put in effort but after all my efforts with KT, my patience was threadbare and so the next time Oh blew me off was my last effort. Though we communicate infrequently and in fake polite bursts, I get the impression that she resents my lack of effort. She’s put even less effort than I have. The office is right behind our houses. She lives next door to me. I’ll go weeks without seeing her but I know its my job to solicit people’s love and approval, its my job to be pleasant. I feel a little guilty for two half hearted attempts for her approval, but I just can’t stand being tolerated on good days, avoided or blown off on bad days and never genuinely liked and so I’ve found my own activities involving people who don’t mind working with me.

The night Oh called, to tell me that a man was watching though the yellow glow of my side window, that was the beginning of a change. After Neo and her boyfriend chased the thief away I felt “integrated.” Like someone cared about me. My neighbors. My community. They liked me. They saved me, right?

Several months later I read The Bluest Eye for the 3rd maybe 4th time and the phone call made much more sense. I love Toni Morrison. Her prose. Her insight. She can put ugly truths so beautifully. This time I recognized where Mos Def and Talib Kweli got the chorus for Thieves in the Night.

“Not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves (in the night) from life.”

Toni Morrison had described me and Oh, and so perfectly. The sandy sentiments all around me storming my head and sliding through my fingers: does she like me, does she hate me, should I have tried harder? Then there was the man looking through my window, Oh watching him through hers; the phone call, the whispering,. What I perceived as integration and genuine concern was just common courtesy. I thought about it. I’d have done the same for her. I’d have even done the same for someone I hated because we’re not compassionate, we’re only polite. We’re not good people, just well behaved.

That’s when my bleeding heart healed. I’ve healed and my heart is lame. Now it’s a machine more than an organ and I don’t spend as much time wondering if colleagues really like me. I sleep better at night with the measured beats of a pacemaker and not the fickle pump of a fleshy heart hungry for approval.

The text message went thus: "I'm over this place. I just did a project which confirmed my frustrations with the people."

It was a simple statement. Something said out of frustration. We've all been frustrated. We've all said and thought fucked up things, we've generalized and buried our hard heads into our soft hands. But the sub-text gave me the emotional equivalent of the moment when you know you'll vomit, when your salivary glands keep producing thin clear spit and you feel sweaty and nauseous. Its the subtleties that sadden me. Not the people at his workplace, not the people who worked on the project, but he referenced the people. Them. His patience has spoiled and curdled and so he'll leave bitter, not angry at any one in particular, just those people; all of them. The world around him has been condensed and abridged into a low quality product for his convenience, like Ri-Coffi or Nescafe. For some, its better to just leave, and never come back.

It makes me think back to the benevolent teachers at WPHS, my high school. Some of the teachers would sit back and read the newspaper and tell you they got paid whether you learned or not. Some were optimistic and white. They were from Culver City or Santa Monica and they came to teach math or English because they wanted to make a difference. They would be like Hilary Swank and Michelle Phieffer in those movies, you know the ones. They hoped to make such a difference and have a profound influence but they inevitably left after a year or two. They left angry; chased away by our obstinate ignorance and our ingrained attitudes and un-motivations. These benevolent teachers tried to help us and we didn't appreciate their efforts, and so they went back to Lockhead Martin or to their advertising jobs and re-diffused into their white privilege. They remember their time at WPHS with spite and don't understand why those people, those terrible, terrible kids wouldn't let themselves be helped by qualified professionals who'd given up so much to teach there.

What they failed to understand was that in general, we had an ingrained hatred of fair weather friends who wanted to help us to make themselves feel benevolent and giving. If they didn't understand that, understand that we didn't appreciate them 'slumming it' to make themselves feel good, then it was better for them to leave and never come back. So when I joined the Peace Corps I kept my high school English teacher in mind, the old white guy who taught at my sketchy high school. He never lowered the bar, never took my bullshit, never gave up on me or any of us even though I half assed everything and consequently failed his AP test because of my laziness. He had the measured patience and understanding of a Peace Corps Volunteer because he had been a Peace Corps Volunteer. He was different from the others, he focused on what we could be, not what we were at the time and not what everyone believed we would be.

Biriyani. Have you ever had it? I did and it was delicious. My god. It was delicious but they fed us three courses. Course after course after course and it was delicious but we didn't pace ourselves. I had biriyani until I wanted to burst and orange colored pastries that tasted like donuts and spindly greasy yellow pastries that tasted like sugared lemon. I left happy because for the first time in my life I'm grateful to be invited to someone's house for dinner. So much of life is lived over a plate and whenever I'm invited to share I always come and I'm always honored to be there.

With Setswana food, its a plate over a plate. Two plates stacked on top of one another to make a flying saucer filled with food.

At homestay I cooked once. My host mom was away campaigning (she's a councillor) and my older host sister was away doing something. I was home alone with the kids and I wouldn't let them eat until everyone got back. I think about it now, and it was appalling but that's an American thing. We think its cruel for old people to be served first. They thought it cruel that I made hungry children wait until the old people got home before they could eat. I saw it as spoiling their appetites. In Botswana, meals don't need to be eaten together. You just need to make sure you dish for everyone.

A year later I eat my phaleche and I enjoy it. I find myself seasoning food with pure MSG and liking it. Generally, I season food with the cornucopia of spices in my kitchen. I live close to Lobatse which has a lot of Indians and so the grocery stores have every spice imaginable and some I've never heard of. I've asked Indian ladies to teach me to cook Indian food and they always oblige. I'm welcomed into their kitchen to learn to make Sambusa, how to fold it like a flag. They teach me to make chapatis, how to rotate it as I roll to make it even and perfectly round. I've been taught how to make curry and the difference between garam masala and mutton masala. I cook everything from Mexican to currys, but from time to time I'll make a Setswana dish, sprinkle it with MSG, and enjoy it.

When my neighbor's maid sends over a bowl of beans, I smile and clean the bowl with my spoon. I wash it and then return the bowl with biscuits or maybe mashed potatoes. I'm not sure you'll ever understand how I feel when she sends one of the children over to give me fatcakes and so when I get home and I meet a foreigner, they're automatically invited over for dinner. I can't imagine the loneliness of being away from home in America---a country where we don't invite people over for dinner, but "entertain." I can't believe that I'll go home to a place where its unheard of to send a child to the grocery store by themselves to pick up milk and eggs or where if someone pulls over to give me a ride, I have to say "no" because its unsafe to talk to strangers.

Don't get me wrong. I like my village and my house but every time I return to my house after a long time away its like I don't know the place. That split second after I open the door and flip the light switch, things are strange. The house has a smell. Not a bad one, but an unfamiliar one. I notice what a strange assortment of furniture I have, how the living room set looks like a Cosby sweater. Although I have more than enough furniture (a sofa, love seat, overstuffed chair, coffee table, desk and chair, book case complete with potted basil plant atop it, a large charcoal sketch on the wall) it feels hollow and I wonder if I need more furniture. I mull over in my mind; do I need a mini-rose bush to put by the desk? Is that what's missing? In a millisecond I am attacked by the Ikea nesting complex.

I dump my bags, coddle my ginger tabby cat, check the fuse box and re-duct tape the main switch up because its surely fallen down during my absence. I check the fridge to see if any food has spoiled during the electricity's hiatus. There's charm in the fact that I have all amenities, (running water, electricity, a water heater) and none of them work unless you know the trick-- how to duct tape it or jiggle it, cajole it into commission. I check my garden. Flowers always bloom in my absence. I greet my neighbors and thank them for watering while I was away and then the house is mine again. I promptly forget the hollowness until something bangs against my reality again, and I hear the empty boom.

A little girl named Lorato (Lorato means "Love" by the way) came to check me as I left the house on the way to the Junior Secondary School. She often stops by and she's always disheveled and soiled any my temper is usually curt and my mood sour. It was hot and the sky was sparse, not many clouds, just clear blue with an unforgiving sun shining down on us. I don't particularly like it when she stops by. She doesn't speak much English and when she comes, she rarely has an objective. I'm never sure why she comes but this day, she looked listless. Sick. I'd blown her off the past several times she came and so I told her to come, have cold water under the shade of the tree in my yard where I keep a plastic table and chair set up.

After she sat and drank generous portions of very cold water from a plastic blue cup, we sat in silence as usual. I asked if she was alright. "yes" she said. Are you sick, "yes" she said.

"Mathata ke eng?"(What is the problem?) I asked

"Ke na le opa mo tlogho" (I have a headache) she said, and so I went in the house to prepare a small plate of food for her. I cut cucumber, carrots, and dill and mixed it with yogurt. She wouldn't eat it. She spit most of it out right in front of me. Batswana aren't shy about their culinary opinions, so I asked my neighbor for bread and I brought her jam. She devoured all of it, a quarter loaf--6 slices of bread, and I made her take half an aspirin. She went in her schoolbag and pulled out her math homework and so I called Katie to ask for help on how to find the area of a square. I called Katie multiple times, and Julie too for help. Lorato didn't need my help with her homework. She gets good marks in math and I always find her helping me with the homework as I call other volunteers to walk me through how to solve for X or find the circumference of a square or some other mathematical enigma.

Eventually Lorato said she could not see. She blinked long slow blinks keeping her eyes closed tightly for 5 seconds at a time. I sent her to go home to rest just as two women passed by. One said she was her mother, and after a lengthy speech in Setswana (she spoke fast and I couldn't understand her, nor did I want to) she asked me for 2 Pula for snuff and then Lorato trailed the two women home weakly. An hour later she was back and with a friend.

"My friend likes TV," Lorato said.

"I don't have one," I told her, and went back in my room to watch a movie on my laptop. Then I was disturbed by the sound of 10 children, all of them terrible little rascals, rummaging through my trash. The bizarre part is that I've never had children rummage through my trash before. Never. After I scolded them (and the boys ran away w/ a rancid carton of tomato cocktail), Lorato wouldn't leave. Meanwhile they boys were in the distance throwing rocks at a donkey. Lorato sat underneath the tree outside of my yard to wait for me to go back into the house so she could play on the swing I built on my tree. I came outside again to tell her to go home, and she wouldn't. Finally, she cried as she silently graffitied my tree with an old crayon. I had to pull it out of her unsympathetically.

"There is no food at home," she said. She looked down, and fidgeted with a dull shard of broken glass.

I was upset. I'd just seen the lady that allegedly was her mother. I'd also seen her pass out an hour before. I initially thought she was faking, and maybe she was. I don't know. I was upset because I never seem to know what to do anymore. In a lot of ways its easier to deal with children back home. They aren't supposed to spend much time unattended. If you tell them not to play with dulled shards of glass or throw stones at donkeys, they listen. I went to the kitchen and cut open a 1kg bag of sugar beans to dump 1 cup of them into a ziplock for myself and the rest I put in an old plastic grocery bag with a 500g bag of pearled wheat, and an unopened 1kg bag of samp (corn with the husk removed) and gave them to Lorato. I'd bought the pearled wheat just to see how it tasted and then I never touched it again. I was never going to eat the samp. I bought it impulsively just to show Craig, when he was visiting, what Setswana food was like. I bought the beans to make for other volunteers the upcoming Saturday...Mexican food isn't complete without sugar (pinto) beans. I was upset because I was giving food away. I've been in Botswana too long. I now give food away like a Motswana. Its kind but it's short term. She'll be hungry tomorrow and there's a chance she's lying (although I doubt it) and just wants to taste American food. There's an even higher chance that she won't get to eat the food, or she'll get a negligible amount because adults are served first. Children are served last, and served the less desirable parts.

The food didn't come completely free. I handed her the bag (heavy, about 4lbs) and told her to come with me. I asked if her mother had talked to the social worker, as I walked her next door to the social worker's house. At 2:30 the office was closed as usual and the social worker was in her house watching TV as she dozed. I asked her to find out if Lorato's family was registered for food baskets. As it turns out, Lorato's a registered orphan with 4 siblings. In their house 10 people are living off of the children's food basket. Of the 10 adults only 3 people in her household are children. The rest are unemployed adults and Lorato lied for her Aunt because if the social worker comes around asking why this child is constantly dirty and disheveled and is hungry, Lorato knows she will be beaten.

I went back home to lay in bed and finish watching my American TV show on the laptop. I finished a bowl of salsa (no chips, no bread. I'm weight watching so it was just salsa made with fresh homegrown cilantro) and fed my cat an old piece of boiled chicken, a leftover from the week before last. I looked around at all of my things. The plush couch, the large charcoal drawing of a loaf of bread on the wall and the bookshelf packed tight with novels, dictionaries, manuals, and other literature. Food and ceramic dishes bustle out of every cabinet in my kitchen so I have plastic shelves to hold the overflow of beans, herbs, spices, and vegetables. In my universe, it rains Mexican food, basmati rice, and tea seasoned with cardamom, cassia, cloves and cinnamon. I bake fresh breads and have an assortment of flours: rye, wheat, white, cake, self rising, and cracked wheat. The bean aisle and spice aisle are my favorite at the grocery store so I have beans and spices that I don't know how to use and piri-piri peppers, masalas, and dry roasted cashews from my holiday in Mozambique. I make gourmet poorman's food in the name of slimming and drink imported coffee made with a machine. My cat eats nutritionally balanced catfood, wears flea and tick collars, he gets vaccines and is neutered and sleeps in my bed at night. I live by myself and buy dried beans and rice in bulk.

I wear perfume, make-up and fashionable sunglasses and I'm hesitant to give out samp and beans to a hungry child because I don't want her asking me for enough samp and beans to feed a family of 10 everyday. I know she and the other two kids in her house may not get any, that the adults may eat it all, that the wheat may be thrown away because they didn't know how to cook it, and suddenly I am ashamed. The government employees pity me because I'm always too broke to drink at the bar and wear clothes that don't have holes in them but I have 2lbs of unopened beans and 2lbs of unopened samp and a bag of pearled wheat just laying around the house and suddenly I am ashamed of my opulence.

I had several fellow PCV's read over the following blogs and I asked them all the same question: does this make me sound bitter? Each person I asked tilted their chins down and looked at me over the tops of their seeing-eye glasses. They begrudgingly said, "yes." I remember reading the first draft of this to Julie. It was a year ago. Everything had just happened and she told me it wasn't a good idea to put a three part tirade on the internet for the world to read; it made me sound angry (true) and bitter (in this instance--also true). It wasn't something people would understand unless they lived in Botswana, she said. She was right, but I also feel like I am supposed to articulate my experience in Botswana, the fun as well as the frustrating.

As usual, consider this prologue my disclaimer. I'll sob when I have to leave Botswana. I'll have to leave one home to return to another but whether I like it or not, my relationship with MD has shaped a large part of my Peace Corps service. I'll never be able to separate my run-ins with him from my time in Botswana. As time passed, and other volunteers have had freakishly similar situations in their offices, I think back on the lessons I've learned and I still can't figure it all out.

Just know that my blog, and these (lengthy) entries in particular, are slanted. Its my perception of things and my perception is far from the truth, whatever "the truth" is. Just as many good things have happened since I've been here, maybe more, but for every high, there's a low and don't let any PCV ever tell you different, because that, that's the truth.

MD would be unavailable and out of the office on the day my Associate Peace Corps Director or APCD (a woman from America) drove out from Gaborone to meet with my office, but that was okay my APCD said, because she had to go to Good Hope anyway to meet with Anna's counterpart (who avoided Anna shamelessly, like she was a tax collector.) It wouldn't be a problem at all.

In the meeting MD tried to intimidate (is that the right word?) Keitumetse and get her to leave.

The new District Officer is in the council chambers. Everyone is there. You should be there too, is what he told her.

But the APCD made it a point to say she came here for a specific meeting with KT, and that KT wouldn't have known the District Officer was around otherwise; it makes no sense for her to leave on account of that.

The plan was for me, KT, the APCD, and the Program Assistant (a Motswana man) to talk about my role as a Peace Corps volunteer and what the Peace Corps was. The meeting wasn't meant as a reprimand and the APCD made that clear. It was just a makeup session since KT, my counterpart, never attended any Peace Corps events. After meeting with my counterpart, the APCD and Program Assistant would meet with everyone who worked in my office: meaning me, KT, and MD. This is why MD said he'd be in the meeting with the Distict Officer until we finished and then he would meet with us all, thank you very much, and then he left. We waited for him for about 20 minutes before I called, and then we waited some more until he deemed himself ready to come meet with us. It was reiterated again, that this was not a reprimand but a simple clarification of my role as a Peace Corps Volunteer. The APCD and Program Assistant explained what the Peace Corps was and the concept of Capacity Building as well as my role in community outreach and MD elaborated that I don't come into the office on time, that he calls at 8am to see if I'm well---what if Gomolemo is sick? Then what do I do if she is my responsibility? And the meeting carried on this way, with MD missing the point and the APCD pulling him back on track. Other volunteers may say what they want about her, but the APCD came through when I needed her. When MD tried to monopolize the meting, the APCD wouldn't let him. When he implied that he was an authority figure, she corrected and explained that he was not a boss, or even my counterpart, but a colleague. After the meeting, the APCD seemed exasperated and I read the look on her face and offered an unwelcome/unprofessional answer: "Yes. He is always like that."

I had told MD before that the computer wasn't supposed to be in Pitsane, it was here as a favor to us but after he showed up at dusk, I put the computer in the back of a government vehicle, just to be an asshole, and watched it ride off in a flurry of dust. The following day I locked myself in the house, kept the curtains closed and confined myself to the cavernous emptiness of my bed. There would be no more computer lessons. No more movies or blogs. This was my life. I had melted from periodic waves of anger; burned to a stump like a candle. The rest of me laid where I had melted below; a flat, wax-blob of my former myself; I was disappointed that this was all I was made of. I confined myself for the entire day before I got a text message in the late afternoon from Julie. Is it true, she asked. She saw MD at the RAC and he said he didn't work in Pitsane anymore, that he now worked in Good Hope; and like that, my day began to look up.

Soon, I found out it wasn't true. Not exactly. After I'd had the APCD speak to MD, he was finished with me and so he conducted all of his affairs out of the offices in Good Hope to avoid further conflict. When pushed to our limits, when we couldn't make an answer, we reverted to our cultural norms. The Peace Corps volunteer strapped on battle armor and took up arms whereas MD, the Motswana, did whatever it took to avoid civil commotion. Keitumetse, I would imagine truly hated me for getting her involved, especially since her attachment to me was involuntary, but now MD was out of her hair too, although he was still on her couch some Friday nights. Eventually, KT was transferred for reasons beyond anyone's control (at least that's what she told me) and the new social worker, is allergic to the office. To work. To me. She'd likely been warned of my inflammatory talents, of my ability to draw tension from all living tissues around me, of how I'd pulled pus and moisture into a raised abscess which burst into a hot sore. I can't help but wonder how much more I've hurt my office than helped it. In his defense, MD was a genuinely helpful social worker and KT was lackluster but she also did her job and did it with limited resources; but now the door to the office is scabbed shut and taped off by a (white-people flesh tone) band-aid.

No Motswana will ever do much of anything directly. There will be a barbed wire fence of propriety, tight toothless smiles, but the next time MD needs transport, it won't appear; when he wants help with assessments, it will fall through. He'll find himself eating lunch alone. Everyone will collectively and silently disappear to eat together or go to a football game which he wasn't told about (read: wasn't invited to). When he speaks, demands, gives ultimatums they'll play along, shake their heads but nothing will happen. MD is a man who is (at best) tolerated among his colleagues, but never liked. It wasn't until months later that I began to better understand this and feel somewhat validated. In a lot of ways, we are the same, MD and I. Maybe that's why we couldn't get along; we both wanted results, to make things happen. But Setswana culture is about fellowship. It is within fellowship that you'll achieve results. With me it seemed that MD tried to push disrespect off as culture but with Batswana he pushes it off as western culture; modernity.

MD was transferred from the main office to an extension office in S&CD (a whole other department) for a reason, but MD and I were two-tone lions, conflicting prides that couldn't be in the same space. He came to Pitsane and was MD, Alpha-male Social Worker. He boomed and roared; but when I roared back he clutched his tail and unofficially transferred himself away to Good Hope, to the comfort and cordial tolerance of Batswana employees. All that's left in Pitsane is my solitary pride. I now sit alone under the office's naked jacaranda tree, my unwanted territory, and my bitterness has dissolved into loneliness and regret.

On a morning when MD called my cell phone around 8am, I damaged my shoe hopping over a fence. He'd began making a habit of calling me at 8-is, to see if I was well and if I was, then I should be in the office by now. Not long before, I'd explained to both KT and MD, my role as a Community Capacity Building volunteer and the whole of my day was not supposed to be spent in an office. When I would leave the office I told KT where I was going. When I never intended on coming in, I text messaged what I was up to. She never cared either way, but should the Peace Corps or any authority figure call, I didn't want her to stand clueless. More importantly, I wanted her to feel some sort of link to me, some sort of responsibility. When MD called at 8, I wanted her to be able to interject and say "Gomolemo is at the clinic today," something that would shut MD up, strip him of (what I thought of as) self granted authority. It never happened. One of the volunteers in Good Hope said I should put up a calendar and pencil in my scheduled activities but I never did. It was mostly because I'm bullheaded. I didn't want MD to feel any sort of tangible link to me. I didn't want him to feel as if he had any authority, as if he deserved to know where I was. I would furnish no reference materials as to my whereabouts. Not for his benefit.

I'd just left the house and was near the train tracks. I was stepping over a mangled wire fence, the one everybody steps over. Its a shortcut, the clearest cut path to the main road without having to trail along the fence for an actual gated door/opening. The fence was rickety. It's made of wire, but not chain links, just threads of wire that run horizontally to block livestock from the train tracks. I was crossing the part where the wires sag from frequent (human) crossings. I usually step on it and just walk right over without having to climb in any awkward position but that's when MD called and told me to to turn around, go back to my house and leave the keys where he could find them. He had documents to type. I when I said I wasn't comfortable with that, MD got upset and abruptly hung. That's when I got my left foot tangled in the wire fence. It snagged the foamy sole of my Reebok (the snag is still there on the inner sole of my left shoe) I had to balance and pull my foot out and I stomped across the train tracks to the main road and hitched a ride to Good Hope, where I was headed for the day.

This wasn't the first time MD urgently needed the computer. The last time he needed it and told me to leave my keys where he could find them (that was his phrasing), was when I had a workshop at the far reaches of my village. I didn't leave him the key but let him use the computer when I got home at the end of the day. The urgent purpose? Revising his 6 page C.V. on a Friday night. He was looking for another job, trying to get out of council, he said because they're unorganized and sloppy.

This particular day, the day I caught my foot in the fence as MD hung up the phone, I was at an event at a Faith Based Organization (FBO) where a famous gospel singer was performing. As part of her backup singing posse, Tebbie (the gospel singer--who wore in a racy red get-up) had a midgit among other tall people. It was by far one of the bizarrest things I've ever seen in Botswana. I sat next to Julie and we've never felt as uncomfortable as when we saw the little man dance. The audience laughed; when they weren't pointing, they would applaud. The two volunteers in Good Hope walked through the crowd taking pictures, passing out fliers, busying themselves by helping implement the event. Me and Julie's only job was to sway and dance to the sounds of Tebbie and her small/medium/ large backup singers, but for us dancing boiled down to swaying like we were blown by a breeze and clapping complicitly. There were less than 50 people in the audience and so there was nowhere to hide, no way out of participating. We looked over our shoulders and glanced at our cell phones for the time and I rotated between the lazy clap-and-sway and sitting down to prepare my brief. I had to talk to MD. Returned Peace Corps Volunteers unanimously told me to keep my distance from "Peace Corps" the institution; it just makes things more complicated, they all said, but I was considering calling my Associate Peace Corps Director (APCD) to help me work things out with MD. Until then, I wrote my case to document it and organize my thoughts. I was preparing to talk it out, trying to write out the previous things that made me uneasy, how I could contribute, how we could move forward; lots of "I" statements and therapy talk, but then my phone rang. The office phone is what popped up on my cell phone screen so I ran behind a building to take the call.

On the end of line was MD. His voice cracked and his words were staccato like a man tap dancing to the shots of a machine gun. His words rammed together; they bumped up against one another like a mouth of over crowded teeth, like a loud echo in an empty auditorium. I didn't shout back at him. All I did was enumerate the facts: My house is being used as a professional space, I said, and that's not the way its supposed to be. God forbid, if anything were stolen (a semi-frequent occurance for Peace Corps Volunteers) by someone I knew or someone coming to my house for help, I wouldn't know where to lay blame. I told him how early in the morning people report to my house for help if the office is closed. Lastly, I didn't feel comfortable with him being there while I wasn't. I didn't tell him, but the truth was that I didn't feel comfortable with MD ever being there. My counterpart was in the office, at her desk watching him on the phone yelling at me in a high pitched hysteria. Listening but silent. Not wanting to be involved. She never said anything to him during his fit or afterwards.

Although its petty, that was the official beginning of my hatred.

I did not approve of that, she said.

She was looking at the ground as she spoke about MD’s behavior that day. She spoke about it because I spoke to her about it and it was the beginning of a muted rage. A silent hatred that I would forget if only she would just like me or even half-heartedly care about anything I did or said. Our relationship had gone bitter like a tea bag left to steep too long. It went from mild, to strong, to a thick brown baste of disgust.

It was when MD came to my house at 5:45pm to use the boxy desktop computer in my sitting room that the hairline fracture broke into a thousand tiny pieces. There was a dead hum of violins so high pitched, so akin to a banshee's song that it sounded silent and the discord could only be felt. MD, Keitumetse and I sang this tune like a cacophonous choir and then we were broken shards of ourselves being swept up like broken beer bottles from the dancefloor at the end of a reckless night.

Work is over at 4:30 and MD lives in Lobatse, not next door to me but he appeared at 5:45 to use the computer. It was dusk and he wore a longish trenchcoat that billowed in the wind. I swear I'm not making this up (this and the little man really happened). All evidence pointed to a standoff. Just 2 hours ago, I was in the office and I talked to him about attending the Peace Corps counterpart workshop at my upcoming In-Service Training with KT. MD had a special way of ignoring me. It was slightly annoying but it still allowed for me to speak my piece. I was through no fault of my own that he didn't listen and so I tolerated it.

This workshop may be a good idea, I said, just to know what the Peace Corps is and to clarify my role as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

He nodded, yes, yes, okay, but he never mentioned needing the computer, only needing lunch for the following day.

You will cook me lunch tomorrow, he said said.

I’ll be busy. Maybe another time, was my reply.

But at dusk, he showed up on my porch to use the computer and I stood in my doorway. I told him he had 30 minutes. I was very clear. I had not invited him in. 30 minutes only, I said. He agreed, yes, yes that's okay; just 30 minutes. He could be finished in 30 minutes but 45 minutes later, he had forgotten the agreement and was appalled when I asked him to wrap it up.

MD argued with me. Told me I was a terrible volunteer, that I should be helping him help the community and that I was kicking him out. He was shouting. Pushing the line to see how far he could get me to go. In America, I'd never stand for this. I'd have called the police, a burly friend, a relative who'd just been released from jail. Such an option doesn't really exist in Botswana. I stayed calm because I couldn't afford to look bad but I could have bitten MD's bald little head off and spit it across the yard. I could have torn MD's skeletor shaped head off his thin neck with my teeth and spit the hollowed remains past my front yard, across the fence, and into the bush of thorns under the tree with sagging bird nests--but I didn't. Before he could even push me that far, a deux-ex-machina swept across the room and we were swallowed by darkness. The power went out for a brief 5 seconds and MD's document evaporated into the blank monitor screen. The power shuts off for a couple seconds and then comes right back on to give you a heads up that there is a scheduled black out and that's when MD said he thought it was time for him to leave. With that, he pushed the chair away from the desk and stood up to walk out of the door, leaving the door open behind him. MD had finally stepped over the line and he did it deliberately.

When Microsoft Word gave me to option to recover his documents, I deliberately deleted them because I am a petty and vindictive person. I've never claimed to be big and I was tired of his power games. That night, when the power went out, I sat in the dark at my counterpart’s house and told her she needed to do something. She shook her head in agreement and that was it. She did absolutely nothing and I knew she wouldn't do anything but I sat in the dark and was satisfied because MD was toppled off his high horse and trampled by the truth. Everyone knows the house always wins and that you can't beat the computer, but all of us in that office were now just shards of broken glass; a mess that needed cleaning up.

MD had previously worked somewhere in Good Hope at the Rural Administration Center (the head office for the sub-district's council and district operations; referred to as RAC). He was transferred to the little yellow and orange S&CD extension office in Pitsane--an office with no cleaning lady, nobody to clear the yard, no electricity, fax, or copier. It has four cement walls, a cement floor, a tin roof and a disproportionate amount of doors, none of them in places that allow air to cross ventilate. The keys to the doors are lost except the front door and despite having several windows, the office is dim. The office's only redeeming features are an old borrowed desktop computer--which can't live in an office with no electricity--and the purple jacaranda tree growing in the corner of the office plot. The tree is the only pretty thing on an otherwise shabby plot; a welcome contrast to an overgrown yard filled with thorn bushes and sun cracked patties of cow shit.

In his great move to the office in Pitsane, MD arrived with a large moving truck. He brought with him a brown wooden couch set complete with matching furry velveteen cushions. The set had a sofa, love seat, a chair and a squat side table. None of it is comfortable to sit on, but it is better than what the office previously had, which was old office chairs. He brought two pictures which he adhered to the wall with putty: one of himself standing on train tracks and another of him and his wife at their wedding. In the first picture he looks chic in a 70's style leisure suit and aviator sun glasses. Has one hand in his pocket with one foot positioned in front of the other giving him a slight lean. The second photo is of him and his wife at their wedding--they're peering in opposite directions, neither of them are looking at the camera. They both look tired. The picture, taken with a 35mm camera, captured a man who was wearied by dullness, as if dullness had drilled a hole in him; he looked bored. It was a huge contrast to MD moving forward on the train tracks in a leisure suit and aviators, and just as big a contrast of himself in real life but many Batswana it seems, display unflattering wedding photos. I cannot say why.

The first day I met him was when I accompanied Keitumetse (KT) to the RAC. I also met with Julie and Anna and together the four of us walked in a flank to a destination that I can't remember. We were distracted by MD who called us all into his office where he kept his heater turned up to full capacity. MD was noticeably short and thin with a face that looked like it was whittled and lightly varnished leaving sharp edges under a glossy finish. He was probably in his mid to late 30's. His face was angular and there were no eyebrows to speak of. Where eyebrows would be was a lump of flesh compensating for its baldness, always furrowed in concentration or raised to show interest. He was not bad looking, just plain. He'd just been transferred and was telling me what great friends we would be. He offered the etymology of his name (it means "writer", he said) and he had vivacious eruptions of energy. He presented himself as a man of order and results. Keitumetse meanwhile looked herself: quiet, a notch past laid-back and leaning heavily toward apathetic but not quite there yet. He promised to take me with him to do assessments, visit kgotlas (traditional courts/meeting places), and attend Village Development Committee meetings.

Together we would do very important work, MD said.

He had a distinctive way of speaking. His sentences were staccato and towards the end, he held the last word like a long note. As he continued speaking (about how he was taking classes in Mafikeng, South Africa to expand his C.V. and get into project coordination/management, etc) Keitumetse just shook her head complicitly, never affirming or denying any action or responsibility. When we left MD's office, I said he seemed like a nice guy--someone with a lot of initiative. Julie said this might be good for my office. Anna said he sure did talk a lot and Keitumetse just left for lunch.

This was all exactly a year ago. I was still new. It was still winter and I would go into the office almost everyday, never at 7:30, but I was always there by 10 because in Pre-Service Training we were warned about being wise about the precedents we set. If you start coming in at 7:30, you'll always be expected to come in at 7:30, we were told, and so around 10-ish Keitumetse and I would sit at the office desks quietly. The desks made an L shape; my desk faced hers and hers faced forward. When I wasn't reading a novel, I was studying Setswana from a blue and white book. I'd break the silence with a question (usually pertaining to Setswana) and Keitumetse would answer concisely. With that, I'd go back to the drawing board, and try to think up more conversation, but then came MD.

It was his first order of business to get the council to arrange for a cleaning lady and for someone to come clear the yard (neither ever came to fruition though). The office was uninviting, he said. It didn't inspire self worth to those who came to use its services and that is why he brought the sofa set, he said. His first day in the office, I can't remember where Keitumetse was, I helped him clean. He asked to borrow the broom from my house and we swept and pulled down cob webs.We attached the broken blinds back to the cement walls. We had worked so hard, he said, and we deserved a tea break, a tea break at my house and so MD and I had tea.

He could magically make transport appear and true to his word, I would go to kgotla meetings in Tlhareseleele and VDC meetings in Dinatshana--villages in the catchment area that I'd never seen because you need transport to get there and it usually either wasn't available or it didn't show up when KT called for it.

MD didn't take the house he was offered in Pitsane. He was offered the house next door to mine. It was was too small. "Unsuitable" is the word he used. Instead, he opted to commute from Lobatse where his wife and children lived (maybe 30k away, 15 minutes in a car, about 20-ish on a koombi) and so he would show up for tea at my house nearly everyday. One day, quite early on, he said we should go dutch on ingredients and cook lunch together on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Mondays and Wednesdays, whichever day worked better for me. For some reason--indistinct and misty; more of an inarticulate vibe than a reason--I didn't want to and so I hesitated with an answer. I hesitated because MD was friendly and self confident, yet to me, his confidence felt hollow, like an over confidence; a hubris that casted a shadow and muted vivids into dimmer shades of themselves. I considered myself bright but MD's shadow was becoming saturating. Around him, I felt like I had to be darker, sterner than with KT who would just let me be. I saw MD far more frequently than I did my next door neighbors, one of whom was KT, a woman I wanted to love me. A woman who I had to reach out to. Who wouldn't come to me. I'd have given my left foot, my first born child, some other cherished appendage for a moment of her attention.

I would have to think about it, I told him.

Afterall, I said, I don't eat Setswana food. MD didn't eat phaleche and those things anyway, he said. He preferred motogo which was healthier than phaleche. I would have to think about it, I said, since I would be going to events and things and not just working out of the office; that would mean that he would miss lunch some days.

And with that, I never brought up the subject of lunch again.

Gradually things changed. There was a tension surrounding the computer that I inherited. The volunteer before me got a laptop for the office. Someone stole it and so he worked out an agreement with the volunteer in Good Hope who gave him the government purchased computer from her house--a desktop. She (the volunteer in Good Hope) already worked at an office with a computer and electricity. Once I secured a laptop for my office, the desktop would go back to Good Hope but until then, it was stationed at Keitumetse's house. When the volunteer before me moved away, KT kept the computer safe. I asked her to move the computer back into my house so that I could help her learn to use the programs on it, and she did.

My house and the office face in opposite directions. Their backs are turned to each other but they're a stones throw away. MD proposed to fix the electricity problem by running a long extension cord out of my kitchen window, and in through the back window of the office so the computer could be moved to where it belonged. According to MD, that is what he would do if he lived in one of the houses behind the office. I declined because afterall, people and cattle cross the walkway between the backs of the two structures all the time plus a computer needs a surge protector, I said. It sounded like a fire hazard to me and so the computer stayed at my house where I would teach Keitumetse to use Microsoft Excel for government toiletry/food ration vouchers and try to help MD draft things he needed.

When MD needed to type something, he invited whoever this was for to come along to my house and sit on the couch to wait for the document that Keitumetse and all the other social workers with computers just hand wrote and stamped because it was quicker. MD deemed it unprofessional to hand write notes and such, but his typing was slow and choppy; he was like Elmer Fudd hunched over the keyboard hunting, using the caps lock key to capitalize a letter and then hitting it again to resume his work in lower case letters. Gradually, others would come with and sit on the sofa awaiting help from the social worker. Soon, he was running the office out of my sitting room, doing consultations as he sat at the desk with his back turned to the computer and his leg crossed.

More than ever, people began reporting to my door at 7:30am to ask for help when the office was unoccupied. MD lived in Lobatse and Keitumetse's house would stand undisturbed since my house was the one where people were usually helped. It became the first point of inquiry when the social workers were away but I was rendered silent and useless when they knocked on my door since I was officially registered with the U.S. Peace Corps as a "novice" Setswana speaker. "Ga ke Mmaboipelego. Ga go na thuso. Sorry." I'd say. (Literal translation: Not me social worker (feminine). There is no help. Sorry.) Ironically, I always thought of myself as a wordsmith, someone who could craft them, twist, contort, and forge them into beauty or blunt force but in my doorway at 7:30, it was like talking to a baby, except not cute.

****

MD thought it was a good idea that someone be in the office at all times and so the next time that he and KT were out, I should sit in. I protested. I was not a social worker, but neither was he until he was transferred to Pitsane, he said. My assignment was to build capacity, I told him. Taking up an office job was unsustainable, but MD thought it was a good idea and so I did it, but only this one time, I said. When they came for help, people were frustrated that I could not speak Setswana. It was like going to the DMV where all of the clerks only spoke Spanish. As I sat at the desk waiting for people to come in, I kicked myself for obliging (I was too eager to contribute, too eager to be liked) and I studied Setswana from a Peace Corps issued list of verbs and nouns. In the book, I ran into the word "MD". It meant "secretary". I was beginning to notice that MD was full of these types of redefinitions. When people came into the office that day, I took down their phone numbers and told them that the social worker would call them once they returned, but they never did.

Soon, MD began to call my cell phone at 8am to see why I wasn't in the office yet and that I must report there now because he has things for me to type, simple inquiries. I refused every time and elaborated on how that doesn't build capacity; when I leave, he'd be no more able to type documents swiftly than when I came, I'd say. When KT needed help typing a document, I'd show her various features in Microsoft Word that would make her job easier. After 30 minutes of her typing a one page document by herself, I would type the rest for her so that she could get back to the office and work on something more important. When I tried to show MD features, he preferred that I wait until he had a specific question. Months later a volunteer would see her at the computer in Good Hope skillfully navigating Microsoft Excel and Word. It was a good feeling to know I'd been useful where as working with MD, became KT and me working for MD. MD, with no credentials and minimal experience, became the boss. Keitumetse, a woman with a degree in Social Work, became his assistant. I, the Peace Corps volunteer, became his personal secretary imported from America. MD demanded respect--respect that he hadn't earned by deed or credential, but then again, I'm American. Unequal/unearned power distributions set me on edge and a tension was building. I could have stayed home to be a secretary (and gotten paid for it too) and so I explained my role as a Peace Corps Volunteer and elucidated what my contribution to the office could/should be.

I found myself wondering. Was this a cultural thing, or a MD thing? No other male social worker was like this. When cultural sensitivity can only be bought at the price of my self-respect, I opt to hold on to my basic American values. I consider myself laid back and flexible. I voice my opinions and think of myself as assertive, but not bossy. This is how I was raised but beyond that, as an individual I don't consider myself someone to be trifled with and I don't think MD had ever worked with an American before. Especially not an American, 10 years his junior who looked like a Motswana.

On Saturday mornings I would come outside to water my flowers only to see MD to my left, walking out of Keitumetse's back door wrapped in a blanket greeting me as I filled a greenish bucket with gray water. Keitumetse hated him too, I know she did, but she didn't know how to set boundaries with MD, who pushed the line slowly and habitually without formally stepping over it. Somehow it was imperative that you allowed him to do this or that for the sake of work, or for the sake of something else and so he'd invite himself over on a Friday night and sleep on her couch. On those Saturdays it would take everything I had not to drop the bucket, not to ask what the fuck he was doing around on a Saturday, my designated day not to see or hear from him. All he did was greet me, but it left me exasperated and angry. Despite how KT or I felt, he hadn't actually stepped over the line by inviting himself to spend the night over KT's house on a Friday. I would fill the green bucket, wave listlessly and then water my plants before I prepared to leave my village and go to Lobatse to get a day off.

At first living alone seemed like bliss. Kinda. I'd just finished training only to discover that my house wasn't ready so I went from a host family to living with another volunteer. I didn't realize it at the time but it was overwhelming. Then I moved into my house. It was winter and I'd only been on malaria meds for 3 months. I was jittery and paranoid. My dreams were like real life and so were my nightmares but on Friday or Saturday nights I used to put on my patent leather pumps, fake eyelashes, and wear red lipstick. I would think about how I should be out wearing an expensive pair of jeans. I would think that I should be wearing a skimpy top with no bra and in my right hand should be a mojito. In America it was summertime. In Botswana it was the dead stone of winter.

After a year, a good night was a hot cup of coffee and walking on my borrowed carpet with Simon (the cat) following behind me twitching his tail back and forth. I'd close the curtains and wear an old LMU sweatshirt with the pajama pants Craig left behind last December and I would watch movies on a laptop. I can now admit to myself that moving pictures on a screen eventually get boring; its then that I'd retreat to a book. Then I watched a movie called Synectochede. I couln't help but appreciate the title since its got a double meaning. In the movie it refers to a city in New York, but in literature the word synechtochede refers to the act of using a part to represent the whole (for example, the phrase lend me your ears, or sit your ass down), At the very beginning a professor of literature reads a poem about the onset of autumn--a melancholy season that signifys the beginning of the end. She reads a poem that goes thus:

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.

Whoever is alone, will stay alone

Will sit, read, write long letters to the evening

And wander the boulevards up and down restlessly while the dry leaves are blowing.

I'd sit alone, read and write long letters to the evening and call them blogs, or I would date them and call the journal entries. Batswana (and Africans in general, I think) wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to be alone. When the shit hits the fan Batswana always have someone who comes through for them--a flock of people: family, friends, neighbors that never particularly liked them b/c their dog killed three of his/her chickens. Everyone. In their darkest hour a Motswana is never alone. If they are its a disgrace and they've been shunned. I can't think of anything they could possibly do that would earn that kind of punishment. I however begged for solitude and alone time until I got wise. Living alone is great for a while but solitude is just a border post. Its the invisible line where Overwhelmed and Lonely meet. Like the literature professor said: whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters to the evening and wander the boulevards of her mind up and down restlessly while the dry leaves of shrivelled oppourtunities and the shrapnel of broken promises to herself are blowing. And so I stopped walking barefoot on the borrowed carpet with my cat (the carpet belongs to my neighbor). In Botswana you don't necessarily have to do anything labor intensive to keep company with people. Not in modern day Botswana at least. I learned that I should spend my weekday nights going to my neighbor Neo's house to watch Soapies. The moving pictures on the screen never get boring and by the sheer art of sitting, my Setswana has improved two fold. By doing nothing together I've learned to stir phaleche like a real Motswana. I can cook madombi. Together Neo, Tebogo, and I sit on the red velveteen couch and watch a South African soap opera called Generations while eating meat and phaleche--we, ourselves are the only vegetables, sitting; watching; being together because no man is an island and Botswana is land locked anyway.

Pitsane (and most of Botswana) is yellow and brown right now. The pans in Pitsane are dry but still pretty in their wide expanse of blond emtiness. Meanwhile the tree in my yard has balded like a chemo patient. Winter is cancerous and it goes in and out of remission with the passing seasons. When the sun sets during the winter, the worst falls down on us. A frost sets in. I see it on the grass on the few early mornings when I leave the house. I see it, an opaque white layer of ice, as I cross the train tracks to hitch hike to Lobatse or Gabs. When the sun is out, the cold is at bay but still salivating, licking its lips at what greenery is left to kill. My flowers stand dry and splotchy. They're pathetic, sad and nearly dead.

In the mornings I see a shadow of breath retarded and then destroyed by the cold air when I exhale from my mouth. This is usually while I drink my morning coffee in the stuffed chair by my bookshelf. The cat lives in my lap and I need him there. Before I make it out of bed though, I usually pick up my cold cell phone and text Julie or Laura (who live nearby) that humans were not made for this. Batswana often tell us that this must be nothing compared to winters in America. We're two Californians and a Texan. We're not accustomed to cold, but even Americans who are have always enjoyed insulated houses and heating. We often wonder whose idea it was to live in the coldest region of Africa but it's when I see pictures of this past summer that I remember. I have a hard time believing this is the same place that was full of birdsong and shimmering curtains of flickering bugs that hummed with energy. Although the pans are still pretty with breathtaking views of pink, blue, and purple cotton candy skies, I'd rather not be out in the chaffing cold. It blows through me and takes something away with it--a chunk of my high spirits. Winter blows its cold dry breath during the bright warm sunshine to let you know its still here and will be back on the hunt when the sun sets. All of Borolong is miserable. We just bundle, and wait with frozen hopes that will thaw when the frost does.

The headmaster at Pitsane Photlokwe Primary School died. She just died. One week she was here, the next she was in the hospital and that Monday I got word that she died. Of what, I don't know. At first I wanted to though. I feared a heart attack because she was quite overweight and so I asked. Someone said lung cancer. Someone else said she had asthma. Another guy said it was such a pity. But at her memorial service they said her cause of death was pneumonia. I don’t doubt it. Her cause of death is like an equation that ends at 2X=2. It’s what left her weak enough to die of pneumonia that makes me stop solving for X. The incomplete answer is false but has a smoky halo of truth.

I remember telling her that in America husbands and wives just about always live together and that I was shocked when I first got to Botswana and saw that here they often didn't. "That is why," I said "HIV/AIDS is such a big problem." I wonder what it made her feel like to hear me spout out my facts and figures like an nerdy statistician locked in an ivory tower. I would imagine that it probably made her feel something similar to what I feel when people spout out facts and figures about inner city youth growing up in dangerous ghettos with single mothers who sigh and hope that no checks bounce this month. It feels like a train flattening your reality into a plain piece of paper offering black and white numbers instead of an holistic picture of reality with its fine strokes of color and texture that reflect the same reality. A statistic. I don't know how it made her feel. The fact remains that she's dead now and I was dumb with shock. I called her cell phone and when no one answered, I texted other teachers to make sure it was true--because I'd just seen her the week before last. Meanwhile, everyone around me carried on. Ashes to ashes, another one bites the dust quietly and life goes on.

However she died the fact still remains that I lost a good colleague and a friend. At her school, the ground is red and tidy: there are trees and flowers; the kids play unselfconsciously and their clothes are old but they're all tidy and smiling; the teachers halfheartedly complain that the children are naughty, but the teachers are amused by it. The children are naughty, but in a way we'd describe in America as "inquisitive." Her school mirrored her countenance and dress. I'd come every Tuesday to read to the kids. After the hour walk to get there, I was always dusty and bedraggled. Mma Nyadza always dressed smartly. Always. I can't say I'd ever seen her wear anything twice. When my group first arrived to Botswana in training we were told that we're judged by how we dressed. As scruffy Americans we all thought it was stupid, shallow, and that there were bigger things to think of. A year later, I realize that one of the big reasons I admired Mma Nyadza was that she ran her school like no other headmaster I've seen AND because she was always impeccably dressed. Its the latter that didn't just make me admire her, but made me want to be like her. But now she's gone, and I'm afraid that its her husband who'll be next.

Anothter something posted against my better judgement...

She doesn’t love me. This sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. She only tolerates me. I’m okay but I’m more work. In the same fashion I always use when I’m emotionally flustered—feeling emotions, confused emotions that I can’t easily pinpoint, I’m just asking myself the same question over and over again. This isn’t a productive approach. Why doesn’t she like me? I can’t quite figure it out. It’s like turning into a complicated heady movie in the middle but you can’t figure out what’s going on. The characters seem strange and foolish. The plot doesn’t make sense to me, although it makes perfect sense. I just hadn’t been paying adequate attention. It all started, rather, I began to notice when I somehow finagled a way to get my counterpart to take me with her on assessments. We would go from house to house of the people who signed up for assistance and see if they qualified for government assistance. We stopped to assess a house and I asked the old lady who lived there with a big dog for a piece of her succulent growing in the garden. She gave it to me. Months later on an average day when Julie came to visit, my counterpart joined us. It was sunset and Julie and I sat on the porch talking while we watched the sun descend. It’s a big red hole in the sky that creeps behind the 5 canisters and then dissolves into clay colored sand. Everything is washed with shades of pink. Keitumetse never joins me when I sit in solitude watching the sun die. Never.

Keitumetse looked at my plant. It was the only thing I’d planted and it was tucked in the right hand corner of the dirt before my porch. She walked into the gate and pointed to the plant.

“Your plant. It is growing.”

It’s a light green succulent with rounded leaves on the bottom and pointed at the end—all of it fat with stored moisture and dusted with a natural white powder of some sort. She was right. It was growing. I’d hardly noticed. Tall stalks sprouted up from the center of each collection of fleshy bloated buds. From each stalk hung muted orange chandelier droplets that weren’t quite flowers but were very pretty. They deliberately drooped. Keitumetse, my counterpart, asked me in an uncharacteristically enthusiastic and friendly tone to tell Julie how far we had to go to get the plant. It was like an old friend cluing in a new one on our past escapades--remember the time when...?

That’s when I noticed it; Keitumetse was capable of being more than polite. With Julie on my porch Keitumetse took it a step further and was genuine. She just chose not to be that way with me although she was always polite. She always asked how my day was, as I stood by corner where our chain link fences meet. I would water my cilantro patch, and she’d stand on her side as I spoke. When I’d ask her how her day was, she’d reply “it was fine” and then head in the house. This is the extent of our social interaction and she was content with that. I'd finish watering my plants and think of schemes to make her like me.

But isn’t this what I wanted. I remember talking to a volunteer about how I didn’t want an “overbearing” counterpart. We were at a lodge in Moleps and my hands were curled around a lukewarm cup of tea. It was during training when I was still new to the Peace Corps and thought reckless debauchery beneath me. “I just want to do my thing” is what I said. And I meant it too, but when I can’t get my counterpart to even take me on assessments, I wonder. I wonder why God listened this time. Why doesn’t she like me? Find me amusing, at least? Is it because I’m black or is it just me? Both are viable options. Both are plausible. Maybe it’s just me. I’m not gregarious or particularly witty. The contrary. I’m socially awkward, especially in Botswana. My awkwardness isn’t charming here. I can’t bath in a bucket. This makes me dumb, not funny. I can’t hand wash clothes. This makes me doubly dirty, not out of my element. I’m borderline social retard and my counterpart holds me out at arms length. It’s probably just me. But she never liked me. She never disliked me. She never displayed any feeling for me—neighborly or professionally. It’s as if she received a numbing shot, an epidural that was delivered before I came and that’s what saves her from the pain of Peace Corps workshops or meetings. Until the Peace Corps came to her, she’d skillfully managed to be too busy reading magazines in the office after the morning rush. She has always displayed the same anbesol indifference; numb and only feeling textures but with Julie, she feels something.

Weeks later, I walked to the office at 8:45 in the dark with my cell phone flashlight, a candlestick and a box of matches to call Ebony and then Lawrence. I can’t remember the catalyst to my late night black people phone calls but I was troubled; troubled that my counterpart only tolerates me. All was well with Ebony, it seemed. I think Lawrence mostly wondered why I was calling at 9:20, and possibly, how he could get me off the phone politely.

The next (and last) time my counterpart took me on assessments it went like this: we left with a team of social workers. There were 3 vehicles. Around time for lunch she asked “Gomolemo, aren’t you hungry?” It was more of a statement than a question.

“I guess. I could eat.”

But in fact, I wasn’t hungry at all. I was thrilled to be out in the field and in the thick of action; sitting in the back of covered government vehicles, bumping across the village to assess people’s living situations and determine whether or not they qualified for government assistance. There was dust in the air and for the first time, I didn’t mind. Ethusang had bought everyone soft drinks as we waited in the office for the 3 vehicles to arrive that morning. They all laughed and joked in fraternity. They ate biltong. Now, it was 30 minutes before lunchtime and Keitumetse signaled the driver to take me home for lunch. She and the other social workers would stay behind.

“You’re trying to get rid of me, aren’t you.” This was a statement, not a question.

“No! I’m not trying to get rid of you.” She translated it into Setswana and then there was an echo of laughter from the other social workers. “Ethusang will go with you. He has to go to the office.”

The driver dropped me off at home and Ethusang at the office. The driver never came back for me but I knew he wouldn’t. The team of social workers would have moved on by the time I walked back across the village and so I didn’t bother. I don’t know where Ethusang went when he finally left the office, but that was when I admitted it to myself: Keitumetse doesn’t like me. The rare times she has taken an interest in me is when she needs or wants something, like aspirin or fresh baked cookies. She never comes in the house, but stands outside the door on the other side of the closed metal burglar bars. I try to invite her in, but she politely declines so the conversation is held while I’m in the house clutching the burglar bars of my front door as I talk to her through the bars. It makes me feel like a curious monkey. The other times she takes an interest in me are when she asks cryptic questions like: can you tell who is destitute by looking at their house? Or, how do you have weddings in America? They never feel natural but like they’re something she’s been thinking about for a while, or like they’re asked out of a cultural self consciousness—can you just look at some poor person’s house and tell they’re poor? Do you find Batswana weddings, primitive? I never get the impression that she wants to know the answer. These are nothing more than impressions on my part, impressions that become more realistic as I answer the question(s) and she stops paying attention or abruptly changes the subject. Impressions that have become bruises and scabbed over sores that I've picked at until they become sore and eventually numb.

Maybe it was that I just wasn’t personable enough. I claimed I didn't drink or party. I was afraid that people would get the wrong idea about me. I wasn’t friendly enough. Not laid back enough. I was the self righteous goodie two-shoes that nobody really likes being around. Someone who's strictly business. That’s a possible option. Yes. That just might be it. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t like me and was never interested in me. Because I was a monkey on her back that she never wanted; a monkey that’s only cute when caged or kept at a distance. When she talks to me, it’s for practical purposes, propriety, or just to ask about Julie. She doesn’t get to see Julie often—once a week generally. She seems to relish those encounters. Julie is without a doubt more upbeat, personable and spunky. She’s also white but I can’t tell if she likes Julie because she’s upbeat and personable or if it’s because she’s upbeat, personable, and white. This is the question. This is the tick that’s latched on and is sucking me dry. Perhaps its that she sees black people every day so there’s a bland indifference to a black American living next door. There’s nothing particularly special about a foreign black person living next door but a white person? Now that. That’s something, especially when it’s a white person who takes an interest in what you do. I understand that intellectually, but emotionally, I don’t. I feel like she seasons me with a little Julie but there’s another part of me that’s afraid I’m using race to excuse the fact that I couldn’t win my counterpart over. Another piece of me wonders when I started caring so much about what others thought but the Peace Corps does something to you. It makes you want people’s approval, more so than that, their respect. There’s a sliver of me that regrets my initial professionalism. Was that the deal breaker; my khakis and loafers? Did that make me unrelatable? It could be the same way that I think of another volunteer named *&%#. She’s nice. She’s studious and focused in an admirable yet unrelatable way, a way that somehow makes fun feel like frivolity, almost like sin. Maybe I was to Keitumetse what *&%# is to me. I find the prospect disgusting and infuriating. Thinking of *&%# and her situation, her far more blatant situation, is what makes me suspicious about Keitumetse’s profound love of Julie. I got a ride with *&%# and her counterpart to Pitsane which is on the way to her village. I remember her counterpart’s faux elation at not one, but 2 black Peace Corps volunteers at the initial counterpart workshop! She embraced us in what felt like a headlock but must have looked otherwise because our APCD stopped and took a picture at the sheer cuteness, our heads nearly in her armpits and buried beneath her bosom. Both *&%# and I got an impression she wanted real Americans. Mind you, *&%# is nice but we don’t have very much in common—still we agreed on this. We couldn’t place why but it was there, and we both had it. Neither of us was going to point it out and use it as a crutch, but somehow it came up, and we knew. Jason later confirmed it was true. *&%#’s counterpart wanted a real American, preferably male and single. I chose to think the best because optimists live longer happier lives and I was only 1 month into my service. *&%#’s counterpart spent the first 6 months avoiding her. Our counterparts are friends, by the way. I don’t particularly enjoy *&%#’s company either but I realized that it wasn’t a black paranoia when Julie and I hitched a ride home with an ambulance. *&%#’s counterpart saw us sitting in the back. We were waiting for a driver. It was then that she pulled Julie out of the back of the car and pulled her aside. “When will you come with me to do assessments?” She asked. *&%# had been trying to get her counterpart take her on assessments for months. I don’t think it’s just that *&%#’s a proverbial stick in the mud.

I realize that Keitumetse probably didn’t like me much because she never wanted another responsibility. I took the computer that she never should have had, and didn’t know how to use. She was chaffed by my tensions with Mokwaledi. I however taught her how to use various computer programs to make her job easier. I turned a blind eye to the things she stole from my house like my previously full propane gas tank and my floor rug. I tried to like her. I tried to find good things about her: she took in her sister when her mom died; she took in our neighbor when his mom was transferred to the Kalahari Desert so he could finish Senior School in Lobatse. She’s done noble things. I never considered her a particularly bad person. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt; I tried to understand why. Maybe I didn’t ask her the right questions. Maybe I asked too many questions, none of them personable. Maybe I was too desperate? Each story has a flip side. Keitumetse could tell her side and I’d realize why she was the way she was and/or how she perceived me, but I could never got her to talk.

When she rolled up in front of my house and told me she was transferred away I stood on my side of the fence with my hands on top of the chain links. For a brief second I was upset although I tried not to show it. She was only transferred to Good Hope, which is the next village over but I didn’t want to get stuck with Mokwaledi. I regretted not being able to win her over. Back home I’ve charmed even the most unlikely audiences and so somewhere within me I was glad to be rid of her because I never got her to like me and that felt like a failure. All these emotions mingled together like the sweet but putrid smell of rot and rejuvenation from my nearby compost pile. When she began lamenting about how her sister is in the middle of her term at the Junior Secondary School in Pitsane and now she’d have to commute, I tuned out, pulled my hands off my chain link fence and tucked them in my pockets. I shook my head up and down mindlessly in an apathetic nod.

“That’s too bad” I said dutifully, and then headed into the house.

Now when I stumble into her at the grocery store or the hardware store in Pitsane, or even in Good Hope, I treat her exactly how she treated me. Not at all hostile but faintly dismissive. Polite, but the bare minimum. She notices. Neither of us cares.

***

That night I went to my other neighbor’s house, Neo. There was a party she was going to. It was for Mma Borolong who was moving to South Africa to be with her family. Keitumetse had been transferred to Mma Borolong’s position in Good Hope. Neo invited me along. Keitumetse also went. I told Julie and she wanted us to pick her up as well. It was no problem for Keitumetse who fawned over her the entire night, holding a beer in one hand, and Julie’s hand in the other. Meanwhile, I sulked and openly told Keitumetse that she doesn’t love me, never loved me. My indictment, strangely enough was not alcohol induced. It was 100% sincere and my face didn’t flinch. Keitumetse however just giggled and kept staring at Julie, her eyes like those of a doe caught in the majestic headlights of Julie’s whiteness. Julie handles it well. She somehow manages to be receptive without falling into an undertow of admiration as I sit dry on a shore of shallow working relationships. Still, she’s uncomfortable with the race card. She notices too and is uneasy, hoping I don’t take my aggression out on her—and I can’t because Julie’s become a great friend, someone who’s friendship I value, a friendship that holds weight. She’s become my rock. But as always, there’s an extra layer of understanding that comes from experience. It’s like a dermis you can’t see but can only feel, like the last and third layer that’s irreparable when burned. At the party, I sat on the porch next to the woman who would be transferred to Pitsane and live next door to me—my new counterpart. She wasn’t impressed by me. She wasn’t the friendliest. I did all the talking before she excused herself and went into the house.

I don’t get it when it comes to Botswana and Batswana culture. I’ve got a pretty good idea, but I still don’t fully get it. I know what books and research have told me. I’ve seen these things and am learning to put them into context, to understand, but there’s a deep rooted emotional level to culture that eludes me. In that sense I’m much like Julie who gets the top two layers regarding race in America but can’t see the invisible emotional sting of history’s 3rd degree burns. Together, we’re both figuring out its implications abroad and discovering the global novelty of being white in Southern Africa. Sometimes it feels like I’m discovering it more than her. Other times it feels like my view is obscured by my veil of blackness. In general, white people rarely have to grapple with their race. In America, it’s relatively rare that white people enter a situation and think “wow, I’m white.” Botswana however, is opposite world. White people are very obviously white. People like you. They’ve gotten to know you. They’ve shared food with you, you’ve drank tea together and talked. They like you because you’re you, right? Or do they like you because you’re you and interesting, and smart, and funny, and white? That’s the silent benefit, just like my anonymity. I don’t have to deal with the same harassment and stares. People aren't initially afraid of me because I'm American. I zip through bus ranks. I’m invisible and sometimes, that’s the silent benefit. Most black people seem to handle these things with equanimity and cool or with an aloof understanding. But not me. It seems that I’m the very definition of sensitive. I feel it. I really feel it and when I feel it, I can’t help but think about it. My body sits still, my mouth is closed but my mind is like a rolling field, like a VanGough painting. I sway back and forth on this like brittle grass before the rains. Maybe Keitumetse just didn’t vibe well with me but did (does) with Julie. That’s possible and very likely. The world after all doesn’t have to like me. All people don’t click. But, I wonder: had our placements been reversed and Keitumetse had been Julie’s counterpart, would she still have been so aloof? Maybe. Maybe Keitumetse would have kept Julie at arm’s length because she was an extra responsibility. Maybe Julie and I would have watched the sun die together that afternoon on the porch in Pitsane as Keitumetse passed by and gave the obligatory “hello” before going inside the house and cooking dinner. Maybe. But something deep inside me, some latent hardwiring tells me to look at the obvious: at person A’s blatant argument and blow up with her CP during a staff meeting—a counterpart who constantly tried to undermine her. I look at *&%#’s CP who ducks and dodges. I look at these things and think that I should be happy that Keitumetse kept it polite and ambiguous.

Mpho did another event in her home village. This one was for youth. It would be an agriculture project. She wanted to give them something to do, something constructive. Yes. They would grow maize and merogo. The department of culture and youth was issuing funds for such programs and projects. She identified a plot of land with a standpipe and gate. She commissioned a youth to go and spread the word, but no one showed. Julie and I sat at the Kgotla with 5 bagolo (old people) and none of the youth showed. They tried to snag a young guy who was passing by, but he was very very busy. He was on his way somewhere and had to go. No Really. He had to get going. Julie and I laughed at this.

Mpho just didn’t understand it. Why wouldn’t they show?

“Because there was no food.”

“That’s dumb!” her face looked sincere. “If they would do the project, they’d have plenty of food.”

“Yeah but that’s not how people work.” It felt strange to talk to an old person like this.

“Ah! These kids. They’re lazy.”

“I don’t think that’s what it is. Why should they do the project? They shouldn’t do it just because you want them to. Whatever young person you told to publicize probably didn’t. You have to realize, you’re mogolo. They couldn’t tell you ‘no’ so they said yes and went home and forgot about it because they didn’t want to do it.”

Mpho’s one attempt at sustainability failed because she had always failed to realize this: You have to motivate people, make them want it. You have to sell it to them, not bribe them but sell it to them. That’s the only way to make a sustainable project work and you know what, that’s not easy.

In my mind, I saw myself dancing, feet lifted high, arms in the air. A shuck and jive dance. Because now she sees it—or maybe she didn’t b/c she’s likely moved on to another fruitless project—but she got a brief glimpse of it. This, this is what I wanted to explain to her when she wept in the DAC office. This is what I wanted her to understand. I reveled in her failure. Sometimes, failure is good. In this case, I think it was better than success.

One day I won’t have to rob Peter to pay Paul, but until then fuck it. I’m going to Cape Town! Yes buddy. Cape Town during peak season and I’m going to enjoy every single minute of it. That’s why my lawn is overgrown into what looks like a field of apathy. You know what it is? It’s a field of dreams. Dreams that I’ll be able to save up enough Pula to go on a vacation proper. I’ve obsessively scrimped and saved on everything but food. I make all my own bread which is cheaper than buying that nasty stale stuff that costs too much because of the global food crisis. I indulge on food, but my curmudgeonly ways have suited me. I wear parsimony well. My jeans are all ripped to shreds with the exception of one pair that I took out of Jessica B’s trunk. They’re the only pair of jeans still intact. I reuse EVERYTHING. I take the cheapest mode of transport. No taxis. I don’t leave my village much. No weekend trips into the capital. Why do I punish myself so? Because I’m going to Cape Town Baby!

I don’t like Johannesburg very much, but only because I’m not from there. From the bus rank in Gaborone, I took a minibus taxi to Johannesburg. It was a 6 hour ride and I held everyone up when we stopped in Zeerust. I got stuck in a long line in the grocery store trying to buy a SIM card during month end when the grocery stores and shops are busy like real African marketplaces but with no haggling and witty branding. I slept most of the way to Johannesburg after that. Jo’burg is a real city with restaurants and coffee shops, streetlights and smoothly paved sidewalks, architecture and landscaping. There are skyscrapers in Johannesburg. Right before Johannesburg, we passed through suburbs made of new track homes in militarily uniform lines and rows. There were big clean malls, chain stores, tidy lawns, and white people in cars and on the sidewalks with black people selling newspapers and hammocks in between cars at stoplights. The suburbs are squat and one story letting the sun shine through to every clean nook and cranny. Sharp and unforgiving African sunlight pierces the corners where old dark European trees weren’t planted for shade. The suburbs were overall nice-looking, but the city was beautifully dark; sunshine was blotted out by skyscrapers and smog. The blue sky was muddled with mauve. There’s modern minimalist architecture set against intricate long-standing structural design in Johannesburg. Old edifices with carved marble veneers stand tall. Others stoop and crack with old age. Elephants stand like gargoyles on the top tiers of old banks but next door, a building may have fallen from grace, its original use long forgotten by its architects and original owners. I guess they packed up and left after colonialism. Maybe they moved to the burbs. I don’t know, but I do know that what was once a beauty is now a dilapidated shrewish building converted into a tenement. Orange balconies and laundry blew in air that smelled sweet from pollution. Some of the balconies were missing. There were buildings made of glass and metal, hip and minimalist. Hippie graffiti done by artists, not gangs decorated the underbelly of the freeway overpass. In Jo’burg there are gangs, crime, and pounding poverty that grinds people into shadows of human beings. There’s historical oppression and high prevalence of car jackings. There were ads for newspaper headlines and colorful advertisements for cable Bollywood movie channels. There are drug problems. Addictions. Recreation that’s good and bad. Jazz clubs. Salsa lessons. Hair salons and antique furniture shops. Soweto isn’t far from the city. Nor are the suburbs that are insulated and full of white people not wanting anything to do with the grime. Understandable, I guess, but I have always loved cities with all of their complexities. When LA spontaneously combusted in 1992, I still loved her deep in my heart.

Johannesburg is the heart of South Africa. A pulsing, beating city that vibrates with the buzz of 11 languages: Zulu, Setswana, Xhosa, Sotho, English, Afrikaans and they all hover in their own little enclaves of Black, Indian, White, and Coloured. They zip by in their cars because Johannesburg is a car city. Everyone is in their vehicle bubbles. White people drive with white people. Black people drive with black people. Indian People drive with Indian people. Coloureds with coloureds. I didn’t see many whites or Indians on Koombis. The same applied on the sidewalks. All this was observed from my minibus taxi window seat, as we drove into the city and dropped people off at destinations before the bus rank. There’s not much mixing in the rainbow nation. That’s understandable because Apartheid was just yesterday. This was America in my grandmother’s lifetime. The tension in the pot is thick; it’s like stirring a pot of phaleche. Just like stirring a pot of Phaleche—second nature to anyone who cooks Phaleche everyday but like stirring cement to me because I’m American and prefer jasmine rice. Americans have given up on the melting pot and settled for a salad bowl—different yet mixed in together and united by a tangy American dressing called the English language. God bless America.

There’s no hood like your own hood and so for me, Johannesburg was a little dangerous. It felt good to be back in the city although Jo’burg has got its parts. The bus rank is the bad part. There are also problems with taxi drivers not letting women out of taxis and sexual harassment is common. I read it in a magazine article. This makes me an expert, right? I wasn’t taking any chances. I was escorted and admired by an Ethiopian Rasta who helped me find a taxi when I wandered away from the bus rank. I was giving bad directions in a thick American accent. Taxi drivers were confused.

“16th street?” they’d ask.

“No. 60th street”

“I don’t know 16th street”

“No. 60th Street. Six, zero. 60”

We resorted to a lot of spelling. My Rasta admirer helped sort out the directions to my hostel and vehemently asked for my number. She was dressed as a man, a convincing man might I add. I suspect she thought I didn’t notice. Truth is, I just didn’t care. Only in the city can you find that broad spectrum of people. Gender is bent. Sex is god given equipment. The wheels of the taxi pressed smooth pavement. My taxi drivers are old men and they speak Zulu. On paper Zulu is flat just like any other language, but when you hear it spoken it’s jolted to life by frequent clicks. It sounds like a linguistic beat box. You’ll know Zulu when you hear it. I tell them I know how to greet in Zulu. I only know this because of a Ludacris music video. One is Venda. I also have a Venda dress. “It’s nice” I say, “I like Venda print the best. I call it my Muvhango dress.” Muhvango is a South African soap opera called a “soapie.” The old men find me amusing. The driver anticipates every light and rolls forward a quarter of a second before they turn green. They drop me at the door which is a large house that has been converted into a hostel. I buzz in.

The hostel is run by a young hip Afrikaaner couple. They expected an…American, although they didn’t explicitly say as much. They were pretty nice. Their dog however, was not. The hostel had a pet dog. A big, black longhaired housedog that frequently stared at me pensively, suspiciously and whispered airy, muffled mini barks. The lady who ran the hostel said he never did this, and he’d never hurt a fly. When she wasn’t looking he snapped violently at flies as they buzzed past his snout. Never in my life has there been a dog that didn’t like me, until him. He didn’t warm up with baby talk. “C’mere puppy. I’ve got a sausage in my pocket” one of the other PCV’s said in baby talk. He kept his eyes fixed on me and looked at her warily. I was meeting some fellow Peace Corps volunteers there that night. They were stopping in Jo’burg on their way to Mozambique so we decided to stay at the same hostel. They also sensed some of the other hostel stayers were assholes. We weren’t particularly crazy about the Australians, but for one. The Brazilian was a nice guy. A travel writer. There was also a British girl--English. Together, everyone drank ciders and ate braaied meat on the patio. This is when the dog began to like me. At the braii where I dropped bones and fat for him to scrounge. I was the only black person there. We were the loud brash Americans. The British girl didn’t like the hip-hop I played on my IPOD which I’d connected to the speaker system. None of us liked the British girl very much. In the background, shadows of black Africans passed by. They were the housekeeping staff and Adryan, Julie and I wandered off to find out what they were doing tonight. As a Peace Corps volunteer, it just felt bizarre to be in Africa yet surrounded wholly by white people but the guy who’s door we knocked on looked taken aback. It’s not every day that two white girls and a coloured (that would be me) knock on his door and ask where all the black people are. He had family in Mafikeng, not far from my village. Without a doubt, he found us amusing.

After we drank the bar dry, Bar Man Willy, as we named him, drove us to a pool hall where we could drink even more gratuitously. Julie and I fizzled and sat on the patio, and as she chain smoked, and I talked about how strange it felt to be back in a real city. There were palm trees lining the streets. Meanwhile, our fellow PCV’s worked the room. In the morning, I would go to the airport and pick up Craig—early—but that night a full moon mounted the city sky and hung low over high buildings. Slinking silver light traced the skyline and my fellow Americans were my validation among white people under an African sky.

I don’t like Johannesburg very much, but only because I’m not from there. From the bus rank in Gaborone, I took a minibus taxi to Johannesburg. It was a 6 hour ride and I held everyone up when we stopped in Zeerust. I got stuck in a long line in the grocery store trying to buy a SIM card during month end when the grocery stores and shops are busy like real African marketplaces but with no haggling and witty branding. I slept most of the way to Johannesburg after that. Jo’burg is a real city with restaurants and coffee shops, streetlights and smoothly paved sidewalks, architecture and landscaping. There are skyscrapers in Johannesburg. Right before Johannesburg, we passed through suburbs made of new track homes in militarily uniform lines and rows. There were big clean malls, chain stores, tidy lawns, and white people in cars and on the sidewalks with black people selling newspapers and hammocks in between cars at stoplights. The suburbs are squat and one story letting the sun shine through to every clean nook and cranny. Sharp and unforgiving African sunlight pierces the corners where old dark European trees weren’t planted for shade. The suburbs were overall nice-looking, but the city was beautifully dark; sunshine was blotted out by skyscrapers and smog. The blue sky was muddled with mauve. There’s modern minimalist architecture set against intricate long-standing structural design in Johannesburg. Old edifices with carved marble veneers stand tall. Others stoop and crack with old age. Elephants stand like gargoyles on the top tiers of old banks but next door, a building may have fallen from grace, its original use long forgotten by its architects and original owners. I guess they packed up and left after colonialism. Maybe they moved to the burbs. I don’t know, but I do know that what was once a beauty is now a dilapidated shrewish building converted into a tenement. Orange balconies and laundry blew in air that smelled sweet from pollution. Some of the balconies were missing. There were buildings made of glass and metal, hip and minimalist. Hippie graffiti done by artists, not gangs decorated the underbelly of the freeway overpass. In Jo’burg there are gangs, crime, and pounding poverty that grinds people into shadows of human beings. There’s historical oppression and high prevalence of car jackings. There were ads for newspaper headlines and colorful advertisements for cable Bollywood movie channels. There are drug problems. Addictions. Recreation that’s good and bad. Jazz clubs. Salsa lessons. Hair salons and antique furniture shops. Soweto isn’t far from the city. Nor are the suburbs that are insulated and full of white people not wanting anything to do with the grime. Understandable, I guess, but I have always loved cities with all of their complexities. When LA spontaneously combusted in 1992, I still loved her deep in my heart.

Johannesburg is the heart of South Africa. A pulsing, beating city that vibrates with the buzz of 11 languages: Zulu, Setswana, Xhosa, Sotho, English, Afrikaans and they all hover in their own little enclaves of Black, Indian, White, and Coloured. They zip by in their cars because Johannesburg is a car city. Everyone is in their vehicle bubbles. White people drive with white people. Black people drive with black people. Indian People drive with Indian people. Coloureds with coloureds. I didn’t see many whites or Indians on Koombis. The same applied on the sidewalks. All this was observed from my minibus taxi window seat, as we drove into the city and dropped people off at destinations before the bus rank. There’s not much mixing in the rainbow nation. That’s understandable because Apartheid was just yesterday. This was America in my grandmother’s lifetime. The tension in the pot is thick; it’s like stirring a pot of phaleche. Just like stirring a pot of Phaleche—second nature to anyone who cooks Phaleche everyday but like stirring cement to me because I’m American and prefer jasmine rice. Americans have given up on the melting pot and settled for a salad bowl—different yet mixed in together and united by a tangy American dressing called the English language. God bless America.

There’s no hood like your own hood and so for me, Johannesburg was a little dangerous. It felt good to be back in the city although Jo’burg has got its parts. The bus rank is the bad part. There are also problems with taxi drivers not letting women out of taxis and sexual harassment is common. I read it in a magazine article. This makes me an expert, right? I wasn’t taking any chances. I was escorted and admired by an Ethiopian Rasta who helped me find a taxi when I wandered away from the bus rank. I was giving bad directions in a thick American accent. Taxi drivers were confused.

“16th street?” they’d ask.

“No. 60th street”

“I don’t know 16th street”

“No. 60th Street. Six, zero. 60”

We resorted to a lot of spelling. My Rasta admirer helped sort out the directions to my hostel and vehemently asked for my number. She was dressed as a man, a convincing man might I add. I suspect she thought I didn’t notice. Truth is, I just didn’t care. Only in the city can you find that broad spectrum of people. Gender is bent. Sex is god given equipment. The wheels of the taxi pressed smooth pavement. My taxi drivers are old men and they speak Zulu. On paper Zulu is flat just like any other language, but when you hear it spoken it’s jolted to life by frequent clicks. It sounds like a linguistic beat box. You’ll know Zulu when you hear it. I tell them I know how to greet in Zulu. I only know this because of a Ludacris music video. One is Venda. I also have a Venda dress. “It’s nice” I say, “I like Venda print the best. I call it my Muvhango dress.” Muhvango is a South African soap opera called a “soapie.” The old men find me amusing. The driver anticipates every light and rolls forward a quarter of a second before they turn green. They drop me at the door which is a large house that has been converted into a hostel. I buzz in.

The hostel is run by a young hip Afrikaaner couple. They expected an…American, although they didn’t explicitly say as much. They were pretty nice. Their dog however, was not. The hostel had a pet dog. A big, black longhaired housedog that frequently stared at me pensively, suspiciously and whispered airy, muffled mini barks. The lady who ran the hostel said he never did this, and he’d never hurt a fly. When she wasn’t looking he snapped violently at flies as they buzzed past his snout. Never in my life has there been a dog that didn’t like me, until him. He didn’t warm up with baby talk. “C’mere puppy. I’ve got a sausage in my pocket” one of the other PCV’s said in baby talk. He kept his eyes fixed on me and looked at her warily. I was meeting some fellow Peace Corps volunteers there that night. They were stopping in Jo’burg on their way to Mozambique so we decided to stay at the same hostel. They also sensed some of the other hostel stayers were assholes. We weren’t particularly crazy about the Australians, but for one. The Brazilian was a nice guy. A travel writer. There was also a British girl--English. Together, everyone drank ciders and ate braaied meat on the patio. This is when the dog began to like me. At the braii where I dropped bones and fat for him to scrounge. I was the only black person there. We were the loud brash Americans. The British girl didn’t like the hip-hop I played on my IPOD which I’d connected to the speaker system. None of us liked the British girl very much. In the background, shadows of black Africans passed by. They were the housekeeping staff and Adryan, Julie and I wandered off to find out what they were doing tonight. As a Peace Corps volunteer, it just felt bizarre to be in Africa yet surrounded wholly by white people but the guy who’s door we knocked on looked taken aback. It’s not every day that two white girls and a coloured (that would be me) knock on his door and ask where all the black people are. He had family in Mafikeng, not far from my village. Without a doubt, he found us amusing.

After we drank the bar dry, Bar Man Willy, as we named him, drove us to a pool hall where we could drink even more gratuitously. Julie and I fizzled and sat on the patio, and as she chain smoked, and I talked about how strange it felt to be back in a real city. There were palm trees lining the streets. Meanwhile, our fellow PCV’s worked the room. In the morning, I would go to the airport and pick up Craig—early—but that night a full moon mounted the city sky and hung low over high buildings. Slinking silver light traced the skyline and my fellow Americans were my validation among white people under an African sky.

Anyone who knows me knows that I hate weddings. I prefer graduations. They’re less personal, more permanent; they’re cheaper. I hate weddings and other starchy polite occasions that involve distant family and other distant relations. Unless I’m in Botswana of course. At home, I think I hate weddings so much because in my adult life I’ve never been to one for someone I cared about. I’m always a guest of a guest, usually the man I’m dating at the time. We get expectant stares. It makes me uncomfortable. All of my family members are either already married or confirmed in their unmarried lives of fornication and other categories of sin. I haven’t been to a wedding for someone I knew and was emotionally connected to since I was the flower girl at my Aunt Janel’s wedding in 1993. In Botswana, I’ve come to enjoy weddings. They’re western enough for my comfort, but still Batswana enough not to be American. Past and present run parallel in Botswana but don’t intersect, and sometimes I feel like I’m in opposite world. I need a letter inviting me to a meeting or workshop, but weddings are free game. Everyone in the village shows to a wedding. Barefoot children show up and eat. Elderly women bring Tupperware. Prepare to be eaten out of house and home in a celebration of love. I’ve been to five weddings since April although I’ve been invited to none. You can just show up and something about it feels so wrong, but its okay, and the food is free. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson don’t have shit on me.

  A brief rundown on Botswana weddings: There’s no ceremony. All the legal work is done beforehand at a government building. The nitty gritty cultural stuff is done before hand in the form of a bride price called Lebola. Its an exchange of cows or the cash equivalent if you don’t have cows, but cows are the preferred method of payment. The number of cows depends on several factors. I claim I cost 100 cows when I get proposals but those have waned. 6 cows is the standard. If you had a child out of wedlock that means the bride costs more. Its called paying “damages.” If there are any Batswana out there reading this, correct me if I’m wrong. I’m still not sure how Lebola works but from there, you pitch a tent and have a party. A well decorated tent looks like the inside of the Genie bottle on “I Dream of Genie” sans pillows. The food is free. There’s loud music and elderly people talking on the microphone—elderly people like to talk on microphones for extended periods of time. Everyone respects their right. I like that. They’ve earned it. The bride and groom shake a bottle of champagne and let it burst forth in a majestic arc of alcohol that looks strangely similar to an ejaculation. Coincidence perhaps. There’s a Best Man and a Best Lady, not to be confused with a Maid of Honor. I’m not sure what their responsibilities and roles are, but above all the bridal party gets to don a Setswana German Print outfit and dance in and out of the wedding tent. The bride throws the bouquet. The groom doesn’t throw the garter. There’s no special dance. The cake is diluted with alcohol and has a shelf life of forever. The happy couple will eat it on their anniversary—which anniversary they eat it on depends on the alcohol content. Of course, there’s always the option of hiring out a cardboard cake that looks strangely authentic. Much to my chagrin, you don’t get to eat cake in either case—real or fake. That’s what makes American weddings bearable. I’ll get a slice of cake. That’s what I repeat to myself as I’m sitting in the pews during the ceremony. That’s what I tell myself when I’m hiding in the bathroom during the bouquet toss. I’ll get a slice of cake, rubber chicken or a vegetarian dinner option, and a free glass of champagne. If I’m lucky, I’ll get multiple free glasses of champagne. Higher end Setswana weddings require an invitation and are likely more “western” but I like the anonymity and warm fuzziness of a Botswana block party under a tent elaborately decorated with cloth. No awkward conversations about how much the Maid of Honor loves Grease 2. No. No, no no no. Sit. Eat. Dance. Drink. Dance. Get another plate. Drink some more. That’s what a wedding should be. God bless Botswana. 

My mother used to say “I’m so mad I could spit.” I could spit. That’s how I felt but worse when the news social worker came to my house at 5:45pm to use my computer. This afternoon I spoke to him about patching things up. I spoke to him about talking with my Associate Peace Corps Director about the Peace Corps and my role as a Community Capacity Building volunteer. Yes. I thought we had a break through after Monday’s one sided shouting match. I was proud of myself for the way I handled the situation. I now know that he only felt powerless and stupid when that wasn’t my intention. Today, he deflected that shit on me and I could have bitten his bald little head off and spit it across the yard. The new social worker, the arrogant little—nevermind—, he has an inferiority complex, but it’s more complex than that. He is small and slight. He has no eyebrows. I don’t know whether he hates me because I stand my ground. I don’t know whether its because I’m a young woman. I don’t know if its because I look Motswana but don’t act Motswana (he’s ga-ga over Julie) but just for the sake of simplicity, this will be my only reference to race because its more complicated than that. I don’t know what I could have done to make the situation better. What I do know, is that I could have torn his skeletor shaped head off his thin neck with my teeth and spit the hollowed remains past my front yard that had been freshly cleared, across the front fence, and into the bush of thorns under the tree with sagging bird nests. I’ve calmed down a lot since I asked him to leave my house. Honestly, the conversation we had is a blur. Tebogo, my 12 year old neighbor saw the whole thing. Ultimately, it came to end. The era of the computer is no more. I called Tiona, the volunteer in Good Hope and arranged for transport. The computer went into the back of the government vehicle and drove off, down the dirt road, across the train tracks, onto the gravel road, down the long tarred road to Good Hope. My counterpart and I have been left computerless. No typing lessons. No helping my counterpart with vouchers. No more teaching her how to use Excel. No movies. No music. No late night blogs and long drawn out emails to people back home. The latter is probably for several people’s benefit. But still. I’m disappointed that a good resource had to be exiled because the new social worker doesn’t know boundaries. 

(also old)The computer. I feel a mounting tension surrounding this computer. Not with my Counterpart, but with the new Social Worker who was transferred to my office. He often wants to use the computer which is fine but he’s been known to call at 8am telling me to leave my house keys where he can find them so he can use the computer for something—the use? Updating and revising his resume. He periodically calls my cell phone to ask my whereabouts since he, and not my Counterpart, wants me in the office in the mornings. Today he called to ask where I was. I told him I was at the kgotla (the chief’s office/village meeting place) and he said he needed me to get into the office. He has some documents that need typing, simple enquiries. I was to type them. I told him that I cannot because it’s against Peace Corps policy—which its not but its against my policy and if all else fails blame it on the Peace Corps. “As a Peace Corps volunteer, I cannot do the work that an employee should be doing.” I continued. “My role is to build capacity but not to be an employee—so I’d be more than happy to teach you how to type, or have you over my house so that you can type the documents, but I cannot do your typing.” He can’t type. Most government employees can’t type. Most people can’t type. I’m the black pill in the matrix, sent from America to do all of their typing, it seems. “So you cannot help with office assignments?” he asked with an arrogant hauteur. He wan’t appalled or surprised but sounded more like he was building a case. I can’t remember if he said it or not, but there was a palpable question of whether or not I should be in the office everyday 7:30-4:30. He insists on having all of his work typed up neatly. Watching him type is suspenseful. He’s like Elmer Fud, fumbling over the keyboard, concentrating, almost sweating—“shhh…I’m hunting”— he hits the caps lock key, dramatically brings his finger down to capitalize a letter and hits the caps lock key again, to subdue the magical power of a typed, upper case letter. It’s a dramatic hunt and peck; entertaining to watch, considering his name. In English his name means secretary, although among Makgoa who don’t know any better, he claims it means author or writer. When a group of volunteers attended a week long workshop at the Vocational Training Center in my village, I had everyone over my house for tea. We made brownies and had real American coffee. I wanted to be nice. I wanted to be all inclusive. Cumbayah. Ujima. Kugichaguiliah. My Counterpart was away but I invited him over to meet the other volunteers. He introduced himself as my “superior” and encouraged them all to get Batswana boyfriends. “Of course I can help with office assignments, but typing and secretarial work is expressly forbidden because it does not build capacity. When I leave in two years, how will the office be more efficient?” I wrapped up my work at the Kgotla and then headed to the office to tell him that he was more than welcome to come and type up his enquiries. “I’m doing consultations” he said. He wouldn’t make eye contact. He has no eyebrows, but where eyebrows would be, is a lump of flesh that’s always furrowed in concentration. He’s intense. He’s proud. This particular day, he was discomforted, embarrassed, emasculated because I challenged him. I refused him. There were two people in the office. I told him that when he was ready, I would be home, and the computer would be waiting. Hours later, he never showed up. Somehow, I’ve sensed that he’s less than crazy about me. I am a woman, I am young, I can type 85+wpm and he’s a grown man, educated in social work— a social worker who hunts and pecks while I refuse to do his office work. Figuratively, I’m dead weight that takes up space by not coming into the office. That makes no sense. I know. But that’s how he feels and emotions rarely make logical sense. The truth is, people don’t understand the role of a Peace Corps volunteer. It doesn’t help that the volunteer before me was a trained Social worker with the counterpart who was legendarily bad at his job. The PCV assumed the role of Social Worker. He didn’t have much of a choice. Being a Peace Corps Volunteer in a place like Botswana is difficult. I have a two bedroom government house. I have running water, electricity. I have an office that I report to. There are trained men and women. The literacy rate is high. Its not what you think of when you think of Peace Corps Africa. No. Botswana is developed. There’s infrastructure but, its different. I see a lot of the same problems I saw growing up in the inner city. In the rush to develop, certain people are left behind. There are small remote villages with government offices and government employees who were transferred there against their will. In walks a sprite (usually young) Peace Corps volunteer, who doesn’t come into the office at 7:30. They can type. They are computer literate. You are their counterpart. They don’t “obey” you. You’re not their employee. They have big ideas. Big resume building ambition which means more work for a government employee who’s already drowning in work and just doing the dead man float. It’s a bad day.

(this is old but I've been slacking on the blog...)This morning I woke up caught in my mosquito net. I hung it yesterday evening and it fell on top of me while I was sleeping. I woke up with a swollen lymph node and a family of mosquito bites speckled on my right butt cheek. On the kombi from Pitsane to Good Hope I gazed out the window, closed of course, and we passed by a cipher of large birds: vultures with expansive wings and large tear shaped bodies. A whole swarm of them were on the ground and they circled around something dead. I don’t boast intelligence and noting the animals’ unlively state is not too clever of me, but there was something dead in the distance. Gross yet fascinating. Real vultures. They’re huge, I’m not sure how they manage to fly when they’re bellies are full of scavenged meat.  Vultures mean something, but what? Botswana’s got birdlife. Just this morning, I saw a bright blue bird—parakeet blue. Not feathers, but plumes. A blue bird flew through a broken sky and mended it together—and then my mood brightened. If I were an animal, I’d be a chameleon. My mood is always changing. I changed from dark blue to bright sky blue azure, to a different shade of blue, but blue nonetheless. Hopeful. Parakeet plumage blue. Brightly pigmented, bling bling blue and the early morning was bad but the vultures picked and fed on the dead attitude that’s disappeared and flown away in their heavy bulging bellies. 

I'm in yet another mad dash on the internet but I wanted to say hello to any Bots 8 socialites and overacheivers who are patrolling Peace Corps Botswana blogs---I know I did.

So, welcome folks. My email is tatumlittle@gmail.com. I check it pretty frequently if anyone wants to say hello or has any questions. I'm going to try and put up a makeshift packing list.

Julie and her counterpart live across the road from one another in a little village with a big name. Seokomelabagwe, is so small in fact that most people in the nearby villages don’t know it exists. When we first moved to our respective villages, I feared I’d never learn the long cumbersome name. I wouldn’t know what to tell a kombi driver when s/he asked my destination. My village almost looks industrial. Her village looks like Africa. On paper, Seokomelabagwe has a population of 300. In reality it has a population of 200, at the most. Julie’s counterpart has a rooster. She loves this bird and refuses to kill him. She said several people have suggested it, but she will not. “I love my cock” she says. “He tells time.” If ever people and their pets look and act alike, this is it. Julie’s counterpart is a swollen and elderly woman with thick wrists and ankles, high blood pressure, an even higher sodium intake, and diabetes. She’s nice albeit maternally bossy and inclined to forget things. Might I add that she’s a prominent woman and nothing short of a local celebrity. Her rooster is also fat and old. I can’t vouch for the cock’s memory or his celebrity but I do know that his legs are bad. He waddles—walking is a chore—and after so many steps, he tilts over and falls. Every time he falls I’m afraid he’s literally dropped dead but then he struggles to get his balance and slowly maneuvers himself up again. Sometimes he just stays seated, roosting on his bad legs. It’s any day now for the bird but Julie’s counterpart seems to genuinely care about her rooster. When she eats lunch on the patio, she deliberately spills rice and beans for him and he pecks at her feet. Its cute. Bizarre, but heartwarming. Since he’s effectively charmed his way out of the pot, I’d classify him as pet except that I hadn’t seen him in a while. I asked Julie how the cock was. She said she hadn’t seen him in a while either. As soon as I thought he’d transcended his original role as livestock, he fell right into the pot.

Listen guys. Don't get the wrong idea about Botswana. Its very developed in some places. Its very rural and undeveloped in others. There are pockets of people who are having a rug pulled from under them. Botswana is developing so quickly. The HIV prevalence rate is high. Some people just don't know what to do, so they're clining to tradition because that's all they feel like they can do.

_____________________

Disclosure for children:

They said there’s a lion. You must take the ARV’s to put the lion to sleep. If you don’t take your medication, he will wake up and attack the soldiers that protect you—he wants to eat you, you see, so one should take their ARV’s every day. Never default lest the lion learn a way to trick you.

“How old are you” I asked in the stupid voice I use to talk to young children.

“I’m 14.”

He mumbled and looked down when he spoke. I wouldn’t think much of this, because lots of children mumble and don’t make eye contact, but this kid didn’t mingle with the others. He sat by himself. His head hung low; his thin skin was thin and lucent like dark brown wax paper. It didn’t do much to drape the gloom underneath.

“No, you’re not. How old are you really?” I asked with that same stupid high pitched voice that Americans use when talking to children.

Julie’s NGO, is a small Community Based Organization that is coordinated by an old woman. It’s named after the old woman’s dead daughter, Clara. She was a prominent HIV/AIDS activist and one of the first people in Botswana to publicly disclose her status. Clara began planning an OVC childcare center for the children in small, rural underserved villages around the area; the villages in the time capsules, like her home village—Seokomelabagwe—a small village with a big name. A pride of lions are roaming in the bush. Perhaps it’s a sick parent, a dying parent, a dead parent, more often than not, it’s both parents, or a sister, brother, aunt, uncle. The lion is there and not only does he eat people, he smacks others just to make his presence felt and known. Children are left without parents. Family members take in the children of dead relatives. Multiple relatives have died. Multiple children have been taken in. Rural areas have been affected the most. Unfortunately, HIV is easier to transmit than passion and efficiency, so both the passion and the virus that sparked it, were buried with Clara when she died of AIDS related illness. Now all that’s left is a sack full of dreams, a Peace Corps volunteer named Julie with a NGO that is run sloppily—that’s not being run at all. It has no building, no office, no direction, nothing but a Peace Corps volunteer whom the elderly and inexperienced board and coordinator don’t listen to.

I was sitting next to him. I smiled.

“How old are you really?”

He didn’t respond and Julie said she thinks he’s really 14. She’d done the same thing before I got there. We both limped away, feet in mouth. We were meeting the children at Julie’s NGO for site visit. Her NGO is a fledgling childcare center. I found out the 14 year old boy who looked 8 or 9 was eaten by the lion when Julie saw his name in my S&CD office two months later. My counterpart told me that he’d been buried that past weekend. He has AIDS and defaulted on his ARV’s because his mother “was drinking too much.” I felt slapped by a big, heavy feline paw because I had no idea and never would have guessed he was HIV positive despite the fact that Clara’s Childcare is an NGO that focuses on Orphans and Vulnerable Children. His mother was there. He wasn’t an orphan. I assumed he was sickly. Lupus perhaps. Malnutrition maybe. HIV would have would have explained why his mother was also sickly and frail looking, it would have explained his disposition. Not only was he physically sick, but he was withdrawn, unhappy in a way that children rarely ever are. Even the poorest of the poor children smile. They play. They interact with others but during the site visit, he didn’t smile. He didn’t interact with other kids. He just sat there, waiting for the lion to pounce. He knew it was coming. There’s a generation of HIV+ children, who were born before ARV’s, right on the cusp of their availability and so they got them just in time, just before they wasted away as toddlers and died of AIDS related illnesses. They weren’t introduced to a lion living inside them. They were just told that they were born with HIV. Three letters come with a lot of meaning that they didn’t create or craft. They could put the lion to sleep before he got to them but healthcare providers hadn’t standardized a disclosure method for children born with HIV.

A mound of ambition, a good idea digested and then shat out into a now festering pile. Trying. Trying so hard, to take it, turn it into manure, and get something to grow while a hungry, very alert lion, still roams.

I'm sporting my Obama For Yo' Mama t-shirt. I can't believe it. I cannot believe it. On the left side of my tee, is the pin with the American and Batswana flags that the Peace Corps gave us the day we swore in. I just can't believe it. I'm tired. I'm wearing a full face of makeup, fake eyelashes and all. I cried most of the morning. I didn't sleep last night. I've been watching the news at my Counterpart's house since 5:30am. I've spent over P100 in airtime calling home, and unfortunately, I wasn't there for history, but I'm floored. I just don't believe it. Part of me is happy to be away from home in Botswana. In Botswana, depending on what region you're in (how rural) there's a big range of knowledge about Black people in America. Its not uncommon for people in more urban areas to call me a nigga and think its a good thing. I get to explain to people that when my grandparents got married, they weren't allowed to vote. It was illegal. But now Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States of America. I just can't believe it. People in my village are constantly asking me about it. Congratulating me, mostly. I still can't believe it.

During our pre service training, a current volunteer spoke to us. Perhaps it was the effects of living by herself for too long, with no other American contact. She was weird. She spoke to a crowd of 54 people and held a red hat over her face the entire time. Her right hand held the brim and the top of the hat, the rounded part that goes over your head, blocked her face. Then she put the hat on and pulled the floppy brim completely over her eyes. She was Peace Corps weird.

As if I wasn’t strange enough back home, I think my weirdness is beginning to metastasize. According to Julie’s computer, which I’ve pilfered, I’ve played Lauryn Hill’s Nothing Even Matters 86 times on my Ipod. It registers as my most frequently played song. Her Unplugged album registers as frequently played as well. That I sit at home by myself listening to Lauryn Hill, pondering about how profound she is (post Miseducation, when she was Unplugged), should be distressing. I’ve always been a Lauryn Hill fan but now I’m truly beginning to believe she’s on to something. Plenty of head doctors would diagnose this as a problem. I know I’m getting stranger because I wish Dave Chapelle were with me in Botswana. This came to me as I sat in the sun at the bus rank in Good Hope after a bad day. I realized that one of the social workers, the caretaker who does all ordering for supplies, doesn’t like me. I’ll never get anything done. She’ll continue giving me the run around. I was brooding; steeped in the fact that I hate protocol and that making friends is harder than work. That’s when it dawned on me. Julie said “Dumela” to some kids. They looked confused. I think it was her facial expression. She looked stern when she said it, but her voice was cheerful and I laughed because in my head I heard “Dumela, bitches.” Instantly, I thought of Dave Chapelle—How I wished he were here with me.

When I get home, I want to be like Dave Chapelle. Thoughtful but not too strange. Funny, unassumingly profound. What would Dave Chapelle do? Dave Chapelle would give voice to the absurdities, the complexities, and the strangeness and hilarity of my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana. Dave should be my wingman. We could be great together. I could give him a tour of Botswana. He could provide me with a way to gracefully explain my experience when I get back home. Dave could give voice to it. He could make it funny, thoughtful, concise. Comedy with an undercurrent of truth. Truth but not so abrupt, not as heavy as Lauryn Hill would make it. Dave wouldn’t let it hit you like a tsunami. The magnitude would be there without him crying at the mic (weird). The impact would be there but it would just be an undercurrent. You’d get swept along, lost in laughter. Laughing at the truth. The hilarity of it all. If only Dave Chapelle were my wingman. I could be his Charley Murphy. As I think all of this (and then subsequently post it on the internet for the world to see) I can’t help but think back to some of the people I rode the bus with back home. Usually around the Santa Monica area was when the eventful things happened. People who were mentally ill would sometimes babble on about pop culture and Jesus. I hope this isn’t the beginning. I really need to make some Batswana friends.

Today my 12 year old neighbor and I hung out as usual. It was a nice day. For me, it was completely lazy and unproductive. Its been overcast lately. Clouds hide a hot truth and its warm, but not too sunny. There were no UV rays to sting me so I sat outside to wait for Tebogo. He should have gotten out of class soon. When he came, we talked, he skipped rope, and then we baked a cake. He slipped away to run home for a while as I put the pound cake in a loaf pan and placed it in the oven. By the time Tebogo came back, he sat at the coffee table in the sitting room and wrote a letter to his mother. He wouldn’t let me read it but he said that he was running away and leaving her. “I can’t stay in this situation any longer” he said. Parenting is hard, I’ve told him. Being 12 is hard. Tebogo is confused on the difference between discipline and abuse. I didn’t take him seriously and continued in the kitchen. Eventually, I sat down on the couch to read a book and chat with Tebogo, who is very obviously middle class and privileged. Once he finished his manifesto, he folded it, handed it to me and said “please give this to Neo.” Neo is his mother and he always calls her Neo. They’re on a first name basis which is strange in the United States. This is just as bizarre in Botswana. Then, Tebogo walked out of the door, went home and gathered his bags (that had already been packed) and started off down the dirt path. I read the letter and it was melodramatic and peppered with misspelled words. In short, the letter said “I hate you, I’m running away, don’t try and find me or I’ll kill myself and you’re no longer my mother.” Oh, and he also said “you abuse me.” Tebogo and I have had the abuse conversation before. He knows his rights although he doesn’t understand his responsibilities. I made a quick phone call to Julie to ask what I should do. Tebogo wouldn’t talk to me as I chased him down the road with everyone in my ward watching attentively. Julie and I deduced that chasing after him was probably a good idea. Tebogo himself was giggling and he wouldn’t tell me where he was going. I have reason to believe that I looked ridiculous but I didn’t know what else to do. Eventually I let him walk off with a huge duffel bag over his shoulder, a plastic bag in his hand, and a scraggly dog named Tiger trailing after him. He walked down the train tracks into a flat sunset all the colors of cotton candy and newborn babies. When I got home I called his mother who is nice but really laid back. She wasn’t too worried. If she was worried she didn’t’ sound worried. She said he was upset (obviously) because she yelled at him for not doing his chores. She told him that if he didn’t do his chores, she would beat him. His school uniform had steeped in a bucket for two days, now marinating in its own dirt. He was supposed to wash it. His other uniform has been on the clothes line for two days. “He’s going over a friend’s house over that side” she said. I halfway expected her to sound concerned, distressed, angry, to say “off with his head,” but she didn’t. So here I am sitting at my desk writing this with a half baked but all the way burned cake in my oven, and a runaway 12 year old on my mind.

Tebogo’s mother came to my house that night. We spent the evening riding around the village in a boxy white four door car that looked strangely similar to a Volkswagen Rabbit, trying to find her son. Maybe it was the mefloquine, but I swear a saw a Cheshire cat materialize, grinning against the black night. The darkness swallows people, cars, cows, donkeys—everything. All matter is absorbed into the blackness, but I saw a wide toothy grin in a thorny acacia tree and that was him laughing at my American notions in Botswana, laughing because the needle on my compass no longer points to the N. The N now stands for normal, not north.

The longer I’m in Botswana the more I feel like I’ve stepped through the looking glass and slid down the rabbit hole because this is opposite world. To say “I’m coming” means I’m leaving. Rather than “I’ll be right back,” or “I’m coming back,” people just show you their backs and say “I’m coming” as they walk out the door. Opposite world. Cars drive on the opposite side of the road. The white rabbit holds a pocket watch, running. Late. Always late, only to get into the office by half 7 and drink tea until tea time. Productivity isn’t judged by how much work you do. It’s based on attendance; on sociability. Ironically, if you don’t participate in the social activities, you can’t get anything done. You’re blacklisted. You have to participate in a never ending tea time. Stuff the pocket watch with butter, jam, and a lump of sugar, so you can get things done efficiently. Wind it up, dip it in tea, and bite into it. I walk into the main office in Good Hope and there is a dormouse, milliner, and hare, sipping tea, chatting, punctual. These are necessary pleasantries.

Mud hut living would be easier. Tradition and modernity wouldn’t cross paths. The point where western culture and Batswana culture intersect is the crossroads that leaves me confused; a Cheshire cat points in opposite directions with that mischievous mouth spread wide in a toothy grin. The Cheshire cat smiles devilishly. He smiles because sometimes I’m larger than life, arms and legs poking out of the white rabbit’s house—the Lekoa knows everything—and other times I’m miniscule, generally in domestic tasks and the social arena. In Botswana, I’m nothing short of a social retard. Situations are trivial yet somehow they’re serious, profoundly serious, like the pre tea time party in the main office. Coming to work late is unacceptable. Punctuality is important, but productivity isn’t. Politeness is paramount. Drink your tea. This is cultural. Traditional Batswana culture in an office setting. This is the way it is. This is the way it works. This works. Deep down the rabbit hole. Like Alice, anytime I ask “Why” (Ka gore eng?) I only end up more confused. Don’t ask. Just observe. Participate. Your gut will tell you why things make sense. I’m just waiting to stumble across the hookah smoking caterpillar lounging on a mushroom to ask “who are you?” because I don’t know. There’s a strange chrysalis going on. I hope I come out pretty but right now I’m gooey at the core, half baked, like my pound cake; wet and mushy in the middle. Unfinished.

I remind myself that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland weren’t just folly. They were philosophy cloaked in absurdity. Philosophical folly. Deep and superficial. Deep down a rabbit hole and the sequel was through a mirror, a completely shallow surface that reflects opposites. In America, I’m black. In Africa, I’m (Lekoa) white. Opposite world. No matter how bizarre things get, they’re always profound and so I’m careful to offer insight. I am careful to offer a solution because I just may end up cuddling the wailing baby that turns out to be a squealing piglet, or chasing the bratty 12 year old down the road and through the black night in a white VW Rabbit. We found Tebogo at close to 10pm that night over his friend Edward’s house. Tebogo told Edward that his mother was out of town and he needed a place to stay for two or three days. 12 year olds are cognitively half baked the world over, they think they’re smarter than they really are. Dumb creatures, turning into adults but not quite there, wrapped in a cocoon and all mushy inside. Likewise, I’m mushy and gooey on the inside, confused as to why this 12 year old has broken the mold, run away, disobeyed his mother, wrote her a fowl letter, put me in an awkward position as the disruptor and bearer of bad news. Is it my influence or just his bad decision? The caterpillar asks me the hard questions, “who are you,” “what are you doing?” “what is the impact of your influence?” The Cheshire cat disappears but those grinning teeth are ever present and I can’t bear to ask “why?”

My plants are growing. They’re really growing. I’ve got some heirloom tomato sprouts; I have five leaves on my burgeoning basil bush and a fledgling basil bush pushing through the pebbly soil towards the sunlight. I’ve got five bushels of cilantro growing in a corner of my yard just waiting for a looming fiesta. Well, I had five bushels of cilantro until an herbivore farm animal (a goat, cow, or possibly a donkey) came into my yard and ate them--probably as a sidedish to the tree that it devoured-- but they’re growing back. I have baby mint. Mint! I can smell the mojitos. I’ve even got some non-edible plants happening. My house is starting to look like a home. I’m settling. I’m nesting. It seems that I’m growing, after a failed gardening attempt and an even more hilarious exercise in trying to clear my own yard, it’s all starting to come together and that’s a relief.

*note: names have been changed

Although I was home and knew I would be home that afternoon, I left the letter we (and I am blatantly using the pronoun we incorrectly, as it should be I, but I is bitter right now) drafted earlier this week in a red folder with a blue post-it that read “MPHO.” Mpho is putting on an HIV/AIDS testing event in Dinatshana and I offered her my help. So excited to finally do something. So eager. Foolish, foolish Gomolemo. The early bird gets the worm but I got the worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle when I spoke too soon.

I left the folder that held the letters outside. I secured it down with a red brick on the window ledge but in my mind, I slid it underneath the door; handed it to her hesitantly and with disgust using pliers to reach out and hold the letter, thereby blocking any proximity or an effluvium of vibes between us when she seized the letter from my cold, distant, pliered grasp. Distance. The subtle but gaping distance that you can’t place until well after you’ve accepted it politely. The distance of letters outside the house bolted down by a brick on the window ledge. That’s what I want to establish. I went for a 20 minute walk at noon, and then took a well deserved nap. Three hours later as I lay in bed reading a book of short stories fresh from a nap, I hoped I had missed Mpho. Distance. I knew I hadn’t but I read anyway and within 20 minutes I heard the creak of the metal door to my front fence and knew it was her knocking. As I laid there reading, I heard the red brick scrape under the force of her sloppy grip and I thought of the bread crumbs that spilled when she came over my house for tea two weeks back. The bread crumbs of the homemade whole wheat bread she ate with tea, as she talked shit about Mma Barolong and Lesego. I thought of how she left large nuggets of bread on my floor (I should have known then), how she scooted the coffee table closer to her on the couch. How she asked if I brought my tea set from home. How later on that day, she said “But I’m hungry too,” when I went to the restaurant and bought a Russian (Think Hebrew Nationals/ Polish sausage) and how I gave her P6—the Russian only cost P4 but she didn’t give me any change. None. She shoved it deep into her pocket past the lint and lining. I should have known. Fuck being polite. Fuck being rude. Distance. The polite, calculated, understated kind. That Batswana passive aggression.

When we went to the District AIDS Coordinators office, she roped me in with puppy dog eyes—those deeply shallow puppy dog eyes—and cried softly and whined pathetically, shamelessly appealing to Cathleen, a Peace Corps Volunteer, for money to host food at her event as if tears would soften her and get her to modify the district budget. “Bread. The people need bread.” When Cathleen left to pick up a fax, I tried to brainstorm ways that she could get bread donated from the bakery so testers in Dinatshana could have this bread that they needed so urgently. Suddenly, it went from bread, to “bread and soup. Soup isn’t very expensive. Soya Mince soup with bread.”

“But I thought you just needed Bread”

And her face changed from that droopy, barefaced pity and rumpled into prideful disgust because, as Mpho went on to say, you can’t give people bread. “Just dry bread? No. Nobody can eat just dry bread. They need soup too.” Her face imploded and crinkled up like a balled up piece of paper, at the suggestion. It was like I tried to offer the villagers of Dinatshana something that was less than; something inadequate like puppies begging at the foot of a table for scraps when these fat government employees had double decker sandwiches with tea during pointless meetings that would be followed by lavish lunches. While they factored that into the budget, I tried to offer the poor starving people in Dinatshana, dry bread?

“Well where are you going to get the funds for the soup?” I asked and her whole story melted like soft white bread in cheap MSG soup mix soup because I wasn’t going to give her shit out of my pocket. If her event was so special, she could either raise the money like Cathleen said, or she could cough up the pula for it. Cathleen suggested more sustainable approaches like encouraging people to test so they’d know their status and bringing a social worker with her so that people who qualified for assistance could get a monthly food basket. With free bread and soup, the problem in Botswana would persist. People will only show up for the food. Another one off event. Another freebie. Another message missed and eclipsed by the free food. The goal isn’t just to get people to test, but to get them talking. They can’t talk with their mouths full. Mpho refused to understand this. Her name was on the line. The villagers need bread. They also need soya mince soup and one time testing events and other villagers who are more motivated to do all the work for them. What they really need, is jobs and mobility. They need income generating projects. They need a reason to be motivated. Food is temporary. Motivation shouldn’t be the side dish but the main course. How are people’s lives better once the event is over? Their bellies are fuller, but they’ll be hungry tomorrow.

When I left the DAC office, I was emotionally spent because Mpho didn’t want to brainstorm ways to get bread, and soup, she wanted a handout from the government District AIDS Coordinator. Mpho is from Botswana. She’s from Dinatshana. She understands her village but I’m not Motswana, I don’t speak (fluent) Setswana. I don’t understand her village, but I do understand people’s emptiness, and the emptiness goes beyond their bellies. I see it at home in the inner city where its filled with 40oz of Colt 45 and metric measurements of illegal substances. In Botswana its filled with a carton of Chibuku. I see people who look lazy, but are perfectly capable. They’re not lazy. They’re unmotivated because they’ve been let down so many times. They’ve been disempowered. They’ve been served a little too much and in all the wrong ways. Handouts. A food basket here. A foodstamp there. They don’t know it, but they pay for it with their pride in a government office, interacting with a government employee smothered by work. Dragging themselves into the office to a Sisyphean ball of paperwork. No fieldwork, just paperwork. Handouts don’t give people a reason to get up in the morning—neither social workers nor needy villagers.

I wanted to get as far away from Mpho as possible, and stay away because she’s bad business but another part of me wants to show her what I see. Let her in on the secret without blaring it in her ear so loud that she becomes deaf. And so, the letters for her special HIV/AIDS testing event in Dinatshana are outside, on my window ledge, waiting for this to all blow over. Waiting for the next opportunity for improvement. Waiting to show her, not tell her, what I see.

My enthusiasm for Setswana has waned. I don’t seem to study like I used to. People are content—and convinced of my fluency—with my immaculate greetings. I started training as one of the few people who studied. I hit the ground running, but by the end of training, I was run into the ground. 7:30-4:30: 4 hours of language, followed by a lunch consisting of peanut butter straight from the jar, then technical training— a lesson in tedious frustration. When my day was over, what used to be dedicated to Setswana was shifted towards a required portfolio and novels. Novels for my sanity. The portfolio, to demonstrate my Peace Corps competencies with a colorful backdrop of construction paper and bright, fruit scented markers. Cutting up pretty pieces of paper was mindless, cathartic, my host nieces loved it, and I let it wholly replace my Setswana studies.

Since I’ve been at site, I’ve only made it to page 23 of my self study language manual and I’m downright ashamed. Ashamed that I haven’t made it past the pleasantries, beyond an “Intermediate Mid” score on my LPI language test when I should have broken Intermediate High, at least. So here I sit, thinking of all the immigrants back home that don’t speak English and the frustration of being mute in a big country far from home. The longer I can’t speak Setswana, the longer the shame of mostly interacting with English speakers hangs over me. English speakers aren’t the people who need services the most. During training, current volunteers spoke to us, and we inevitably asked them how their Setswana was. They curled back and said they got frustrated and gave up, and wished they didn’t. Perhaps they’ve got a newfound empathy for immigrants far from home who move to America, live there for a decade or more, and never learned much English, aside from the absolute bare minimum. The necessary. The “I don’t speak English” phrases that are memorized. Lots of Peace Corps volunteers in Botswana don’t speak much Setswana. They can’t make it beyond hello and other small pleasantries. They depend on others to speak English. My group was one of the first groups to take the language seriously, and the Peace Corps has been putting the smack down on Setswana. Rightfully so. Setswana and English are the two languages here, but English is not called English, its called Sekoga, which sounds strangely similar to Lakoa which is essentially an English speaking white person. English is my first language as I’m from an English speaking country. Somehow, I qualify as a Lakoa, which isn’t a bad thing. It exempts me from certain protocol. I sit with my head hung in shame. Its hung over page 23 of my self study Setswana book. My neck has a crick and it will stay there until I reach a certain level of language proficiency and can hold my head high—I’m aiming for Advanced High in eight months when I take my next LPI language assessment. To move to a country and be mute beyond hello doesn’t suit my long winded, shit talking personality. Similarly, when Batswna speak to me their English is proficient. I would describe most people’s English as proficient only. Not fluent but proficient enough for me to avoid Setswana. My heart flutters when I find someone who is fluent—who speaks English as well as they speak Setswana. But their Setswana, among themselves is animated and it vibrates with meaning that’s under the surface. Life is lived in Setswana and Sekgoa (English) is a necessary evil.

Loneliness lives my belly and so I’m always hungry. Ravenous. Starving. Overeating. I now eat things that I otherwise would scoff at, like eggs. I eat them fried, hard boiled, and sunny side up with the yolk runny, but it tastes creamy and like America. I eat a jar of peanut butter a week, straight from the jar a nickel plated spoon in my mouth. When it comes to Peanut butter I have a problem and should consider a support group because going through a 410 gram jar of partial hydrodgenation is just unhealthy—I go through it in a couple of days really, but I refuse to buy another jar until the following week. I eat avocados and think of Baja Buds burritos, the basement, lunchtime. I think of my mother’s perpetual struggle with her weight and I file it away in my mental rolodex as I begin to bake brownies. I’ve made regular brownies but those are too sweet and have way too much oil—my tastebuds tell me this, not my conscience—so I cut the amount of sugar in half and use real butter, the expensive kind that I have to go to Lobatse for because butter tastes better. Its not as greasy so I butter up my conscience and add coconut and make chocolate macaroons. And then I think of my coffee shop in Culver City and Mexican mochas along with overpriced but tasty macaroons. My macaroons aren’t so tasty but fuck it, I’ll take what I can get, like the freeze dried Nescafe that has no chicory added. Ooh, and by the way. Pasteurization is a French word that means “take all the flavor out.” Unpasteurized full cream milk is delicious. It’s the equivalent to drinking coffee creamer. Half and Half. Damn good, high caloric goodness to fill the expanding void I call my belly.

Fat. Its not an insult, its just an adjective. People pick up the photo of my mother and brother and they state the obvious. “Your mother. She is fat” Back home, these are fighting words. In Botswana, they’re descriptors; neither bad nor good like “big” or “small.” Like “long” or “short,” fat is a relative adjective. Last week I was fat because I stood next to someone thinner than I. More often than not, I’m too skinny. I should eat more. It’s all relative. A qualifier. Without the same connotation we think of, like “stupid” or “ugly.” Fat. Either you are or you aren’t. There’s no malice behind it.

I work in a tiny Social & Community Development office in a wee village by the train tracks. The village of Pitsane, mistakes me for a real social worker which I am not, but my Counterpart is. She’s a short but her patience is long and although she’s pretty young (couldn’t be older than 30), she has the quiet reserve of an old woman. None of Botswana’s civil servants are from the villages where they work. Government housing is provided near their offices and thus I live next door to my counterpart in a row of four sudden government houses, so few they’re not numbered. Depending on which side you approach, my house is tertiary and the last house is vacant—second if you come from the opposite side, and in that case, the first house is unoccupied. Either way, one side is empty. The government transfers employees throughout the country similar to the way we think of the military. They serve their country in the broadest sense of the phrase “civil servant,” so like myself, my neighbors are far from home. The office is always bustling. I don’t speak enough Setswana to conduct business affairs which is why I’m literally a worthless lump in the corner from 7:30-4:30, but my Counterpart is nice and she drags me along for the ride, or lets me sit in the corner while she helps. Besides one other government employee who works across the village, in Finance, we have no neighbors to speak of. Although our houses are near others, the four houses somehow form their own silent community and stand in a four family squad when everyone else’s environs bends into a round sweep. In most of Africa, neighborhoods are situated in round formats, not gridlines with intersecting streets. From our front doors, we face a tree and the backside of an abandoned looking house on a horizon of neglected blond grasses that stand high. Farther behind it is the backside of the family home to the owners of Mustapha’s hardware. In the periphery is the posterior of the kgotla. Behind us, the outskirts of the village curls around us in an open field and lovely as it is, there’s a numbed sensation of isolation, invisible but there like a line drawn in pencil and then erased with only a faint indentation remaining. It’s only the train tracks and the grainery that also runs across in a straight line. The grainery is where the five titan containers stand rigid with maize and all of this is capped by Botswana sky that dips so low to the earth that you can reach up and touch it, dive in, or sail in its undertow. An infinite ocean of blue covers the desert--and clear, (my god its clear) even when nothing feels clear anymore amid imperceptible layers of sky, earth, and the diamonds hidden beneath it. Its culture that hides between the invisible layers and pops out at you when you least expect it. Blurry lines, fuzzy borders, where does the west end and Botswana begin? For all of its blue sky there’s just as much gray in Pitsane, just 10 miles from the South African border. Heaven rests on Pitsane and our houses are naked. No hedges. No “stop nonsense”. No buffer. Civil servants on call in yellow houses with orange trim to match the office right outside our kitchen windows. Villagers knock on my door when my counterpart isn’t in the office, thinking I can help. Mmaboipeloego—mother who listens to all problems. That’s the literal translation for social worker. They’re confused when in Setswana, I tell them I can’t speak Setswana. Botswana has a very solid national identity and anyone from Botswana is Batswana first, tribe second. That I’m black makes this confusing because in Botswana all Batswana speak Setswana, except I’m not Motswana, nor am I Coulored. I’m a black American under a blue Botswana sky who is living in the yellow government house with orange trim right by the South African border, otherwise known as the Rainbow Nation. Darkening under the African sun, suddenly I’m invisible. I appear to be like everyone else, but I’m so so different because culture hides and startles us but then it intrigues. Alone in my blackness, I’ve got a complicated nonlinear story to tell and so right now I’m in a kaleidoscope of confusion.

We have a grocery store, a petrol station, a hardware store, two take-away places, two ATM’s, three bars, numerous tuck shops, and a couple of chibines (moonshine houses). We’re more developed than most villages in the area. Although Good Hope boasts street lights and bumpily paved sidewalks, we have a nightclub—a stark white building with windows painted white, no door to speak of, and blockish black letters that read “TONY’S NIGHTCLUB.” It’s off the main road and literally next to nothing on the fringe of the village. Multiple people have invited me and I’ve politely declined. “I’m a Christian,” I say. In Botswsana if all else fails, blame Christ or the Peace Corps and because Batswana are respectful of protocol all things pious, that answer is enough. Case closed. Pitsane’s development is due to the fact that we’re right on the main A1 highway to South Africa, just 10 miles away, and lie near a town called Lobatse. Just by looking at Pitsane, you’d never know there were needy people. The houses here are beautiful. In my ward, they’re huge. One house looks like a two story fairy tale chalet with a thatched roof. The house behind me has an intimidating and immaculate garden complete with hedges, a dramatic walkway entrance, orange groves, and a large dog with no name. Across the road and to the right is a modern house in the shape of a traditional roundaval with a shingled roof overhead and marble tiled floor down below. The owner is very nice and just finished his Ph.D. in Cleveland. In comparison, I live humbly in my row of yellow and orange government houses with unswept yards. Since none of the civil servants are from Pitsane, and will likely be transferred somewhere else, they take as much pride in the outside appearance of their houses as, well, people in government housing. My house is by far the worst. Field mice and other vermin live in my matted lawn but I’ll sculpt it soon. Very soon because I don’t know the next time I’ll ever be able to happily live by myself in a two bedroom house with a yard. Soon my yard will be speckled with flowers and neatly swept shining with the same pride as the small houses farther out—the houses with neat yards and attractive xeriscape gardens. Houses that are well kept, despite their bare bone basic setup. I used to walk around Pitsane wondering where the destitutes lived. Last week, we did assessments. My counterpart and I went around the village inspecting houses of people who applied for assistance. Looking at the houses I’d think they didn’t need assistance—look at the pink peach tree blossoms—but once you step inside, the same rough cement brick that’s outside is also inside and light shines through the tin room above the crumbling homemade concrete floor; the roof stays on because of the weighted rocks that hold it at the corners. No electricity, no water, no standpipe in their yard, a pit latrine. Graceful landscaping. Thoughtful xeriscapes. How was I to know about the gizzards beneath the surface? It’s the pride in the well swept yards with attractive gardens that I saw. Faulty homes placed on a surfeit of neat, tidy beauty and widows who sign their name with a wobbly “X” because they remember a time before schools when Botswana was the Beauchanaland Protectorate. With only 42 years of independence, Botswana has built itself on the diamonds that slept underground in Orapa. Diamonds for development. Some people in Pitsane may not have much, but they’ve got pride and that pride outshines the situations themselves. There are no hills in Pitsane. The less fortunate live next to the decadent and the sky sits on top of it all welded together at the horizon’s waistline.

I’d like to say that I disappear into the gray mornings at 7:30 on my way to the little concrete office behind my house but I don’t. I don’t materialize until 8:30 or so, 9 maybe. Our office has no electricity nor does it have any particular rhyme or reason to its setup and architecture. The previous social worker insisted on a flushing toilet outside the office right behind his government house, and a tall fence with wire on top. These things took precedence over electricity it seems, and so the council obliged. The toilets outside no longer work and all is well because the keys are lost. My counterpart is still relatively new. Keitumetsi (my Counterpart) has only been in Pitsane for 7 months and it seems that I know more about the village than she does. I’m nosey, and not bogged down by the office she inherited so I wander around and ask questions that only a foreigner with Peace Corps PACA tools could conjure up, like “Could you draw me a map?”. The office covers Pitsane, as well as four other villages. Transport is an issue and it’s a two wo/man job so another Social Worker was transferred to lighten the load. When Mokwaledi, the new Social Worker, came he brought furniture to make the office more inviting. The yard is overgrown and littered with trash. Mokwaledi and I cleaned, (yes--even in Botswana), we drafted letters petitioning the council for a piece worker to sweep the yard, we dusted. He’s an assertive one. Slightly overbearing but kind; and enthusiastic about his job in a profession that burns people out much like Social Work in America. The office has been neglected by the previous Social Worker, by the council, by the last PCV who assumed the job of Rraboipelego and ran the S&CD office by himself and out of his house. The office is not, however, neglected by needy villagers. My Counterpart, like so many other Social Workers in Botswana is overworked but unlike several she still walks through the gray mornings to the office outside our kitchen windows, and smiles a reticent mona lisa smile.

A tubby 12 year old boy named Tebo is my only friend so far. He lives two doors down, the last house in the row of four unnumbered government houses. Everyday after school he comes over and asks me questions—about South Africa, because he’s convinced that I’m coloured and not from America. He’s a good kid, with a good head on his shoulders but this story isn’t about the 12 year old boy who teaches me Setswana and helps keep the boredom at bay. This 12 year old has a puppy, the pup of the former volunteer’s dog. The story is about his young dog named Tiger. I am good friends with this kid’s dog. Tiger, with a crick in his tail and floppy ears. Back home he’d be your all American ragamuffin mutt. He chases cars and has fleas and ticks. He also kills chickens, thus making him a liability. Tiger lives on the edge. He’s a dumb dog, but he is charismatic and loyally waits by the door when I let him in my yard. He waits because he knows that I will feed him. Tebo doesn’t. He claims that there is no food for him. One day I spilled too much salt into my batch of cornbread and the brackish taste left me feeling dehydrated. I decided to give this bad batch of cornbread to the emaciated dog. Tebo saw and inquired what I was feeding the dog. “Cornbread” I said. Batswana don’t eat cornbread and so it’s a huge hit. In Botswana, corn meal (or maize meal as the rest of the world calls it) is called phaleche, and phaleche is used to make a starchy stiff side dish similar to day old grits. Its not bad. Fascinated by this “phaleche bread,” as most Batswana are, my 12 year old neighbor proceeded to eat over half of the salty batch and would have left the dog nothing had I not grabbed the bag of bread from his sticky hands and fed the starving dog. I feed Tiger often. Today I bought a bag of Alpo and decided that I would feed him everyday. After feeding and petting him, I decided that I would teach him how to play Frisbee. People stared as I talked baby talk to a dim, car chasing dog. “Go get it!” I yelled out in the highest pitched baby talk voice. Tiger tucked his tail between his legs and hid behind the trashcan. I chased him and put the Frisbee in his mouth. Tiger accepted it gently, like it was a powdery white elephant that would trample him if he didn’t handle it with care. He walked away with it, and then sat next to it, looking at me. What was he to do with a Frisbee? Fat happy, confidently sharp dogs are created, as are timid, meek ones like Tiger. It reminded me of my last day at my homestay. I spoiled my host family’s dog and was going to miss her. She was old and fat, like an American dog. Her table scraps doubled when I got to Botswana and I’m sure her body mass increased two fold due to my presence. Setswana food is not bad, but I just couldn’t eat mounds of it. The serving sizes are overwhelming so the dog ate well for those two months. I tried to take a picture of her before I left, but she wouldn’t let me. The same dog who, everyday was so excited when I got home from training ran with her tail between her legs at the sight of a camera pointed at her.

There don’t seem to be distinctive seasons in Pitsane, just desert extremes. When I’m up, I’m up. When I’m down, I’m down and it’s all made psychedelic and pretty by mefloqine dreams, sing song mosquitoes, and bright birds. Its winter and then summer. Right now there’s a confusing shift, a hazy warm winter period. Winter is cold, and as described by more than one person from Pitsane, summer is sweltering. I get rude stares, but a genuine kindness you can’t even find in the smallest town in America. The stares feel rude, but they’re mostly curious as to why this American is living away from her family for two years, and just as important, why she talks to dogs and chases farm animals (baby goats are quite adorable and I’m inclined to follow them around saying “come here baby goat” with a piece of edible foliage in my hand). The seasons are changing gradually and imperceptibly. Suddenly mosquitoes whisper threats in my ears at night and people know my name.

Itchy feet brought me to Botswana where I see children sing songs in perfect harmony as they walk home from school in dusty leather shoes that shined brightly just that morning. Shiny patent leather shoes on dusty dirt paths—Perhaps not patent, but shined so lovely they’ve turned that way. That is Botswana, akin to the silent pride of old southerners (the lost pride my Grandparents brood about) old black southerners who didn’t have much more than their pride—old clothes but never dirty, worn shoes immaculately shined—always dressed nice and neat. I’m often outdressed. Personal presentation means something here and I’m something of the new school frumpy American my grandparents shake their heads at. Even the dirt poor are neatly dressed and tidy for school in their government issued school uniforms. Shoe polish comes with their government assistance food baskets—the Botswana equivalent to welfare. Song. Dust. Shoes that retain a faint blink, just beneath the thin layer of a day’s dust. As they sing, they toss candy wrappers on the ground to keep the empty beer cans and hollowed chibuku containers company. I’ve neither got shiny shoes nor the cajones to walk on footpaths because a snake may be waiting there, waiting for dingy American feet. I’ve developed a somewhat irrational fear of a snake (or tick) biting my feet. I don’t want my itch to end that way.

There was an insect on my living room floor. In LA, I’d call it a cricket, in China I’d call it good luck, but here I call it disturbing. I’m far from squeamish when it comes to bugs, but I couldn’t crush this mini being. If this is what Buddhist monks on the countryside of austere monasteries are faced with I see why they refuse to trounce them. They might trounce back. This animal kept running from the quarter that I put beside him for scale so I cut and paste it closer. Still, this picture doesn’t do him justice. It qualifies as a rodent by sheer size and I was afraid it would bleed if I smushed it. Death by Doom didn’t work so I swept him outside with a broom. This beats the time I fell asleep beside my mosquito net, not under it. I swatted a mosquito on my cheek that turned out to be a roach.

The population in Botswana is about 1.8 million although the land mass is about the size of Texas. I can go to almost any part of the country, drop my Setswana surname and ask if they know of my family—and there’s a good chance that they do or could find out if they wanted. Since Botswana is so small people think America is too. It’s a safe assumption, I suppose. Several people are under the impression that I personally know stars, and if I don’t know them, I’ve surely seen them, right? I once claimed to be the lost member of Destiny’s Child, “Remember the chick in the “Girl” music video where they all sang together at brunch? That was me!” I slid into a frustrated fit of sarcasm and I’m not sure they bought it. Celebrity inquiries include: Brian McKnicght, Kanye West, Celine Dione, Beyonce, 50 Cent, Jay-Z, and since, I’m from LA, I surely know who shot Tupac.

It’s been a month and my yard is a hot mess. Flames rolled across the dead grass and gray plumes of smoke wafted into the sky washing into a thin shade of white. When the Zimbabwean woman who was clearing my yard asked for matches, I assumed she smoked. Shocked, I asked myself why I hadn’t acted on the impulse to make a bonfire of the backyard by myself. I nearly killed myself digging up the front of my yard but Alice burned it where it stood and had a much easier task in front of her sans foliage, thorns, and ticks. Yes. That is what I thought. The roots were exposed and stubbornly gripping the dirt like lost boys found.

I’d planned for Alice to come the Sunday before, but she never showed. I had insisted on Alice because I know she doesn’t drink her pay at the chibines. It was a holiday weekend. For lack of a better allusion, Zimbabweans are to Botswana what illegal Mexicans are to California and Texas. Her employer unexpectedly revoked her days off since she needed help that particular Sunday. I stood at the kombi rank for an hour and a half, waiting in vain. I can generally tell a Zimbabwean, not by physical features, but by language proficiency. They tend to speak perfect English. Zimbabwe has (or had) a 90% literacy rate and so Alice is uncommon since she spoke about as much English as I speak Spanish. The following Sunday we sat in my living room and had tea before she got to work on the yard.

“I run away” she said “Foreva. Neva comes back. Neva!” Forever was said with an emotive hand gesticulation. “She neva gives day off and leaves no food me eat. I tell her I go to Gaborone (mispronounced) and put days in papers but I run away foreva.” Alice planned on adding more days to her visa in the capital until she could get back to her 5 year old son in Zimbabwe at the end of August. “Two rooms you live here?”

“No. I live by myself. Alone” I said.

She nodded and sipped her tea. “All this room is only for you?”

After tea, I showed her my yard.We agreed on P80. To clear my entire yard, was P100 but I offered her P80 for half. For a month’s work her employer paid P300. I spend about P250 a week as an unemployed volunteer. I offered her P80 for a job worth P50 but 30 minutes later, she asked for “20 more.” Alice and I mostly communicated in broken English and hand signals but its clear she believed I was rich. “No. I do not have more money,” I told her. “Alice, do a portion of it” I drew a line across the back of the yard. “Pull the grass from the roots so it does not grow back.” When she got to work on my yard, she burned it and what was left was singed but still stubborn, proud, and firmly rooted in the ground. “I finished” she said, palm turned upward for payment. I took her opened hand, “Come Alice. I’ll show you what I want.” I walked her to a well manicured yard. “I see” she said. She would have to come back to finish. This was to be a two day piece job. Thursday Alice returned. On account of this jagged piece of work she delayed her escape but she never finished the job. Instead, she moved the numerous rocks in my yard, stones that hid under the once tall grasses. Hand out for payment, she told me she had to get to “Gaborone for put more time in my papers.” I tried to reason with her. “Alice, I do not want to cheat you, but you didn’t clear the yard.” I tried to explain what she obviously knew and understood.

“It too much,” she said. “Stones under grass. Hurt arms. Stones heavy.”

Stones hadn’t crawled into the yard since she burned the tall grasses, exposing dirt, roots, and rocks and I finally understood that she’d never intended on finishing. Feeling sorry and stupid at the same time, I gave her P20 short of what I promised, hot lunch, and cold water. From my house she ran away to Gaborone looking for more piece work and fair pay. I wasn’t angry as she left, but felt an invisible yet palpable mound of pity akin to the smoldered patties of cow shit in my backyard. Burned, I walked next door and knocked on my Counterpart’s door to ask her to help me find someone to clear my yard.

As much as I love coffee what I really enjoy is tea time. Yes tea time in Botswana is 10am and afternoon tea is 3pm. This, my friends, is what I call civilization. The only less than genteel aspect of Batswana culture is a freeze dried substance called Ricoffee. Ricoffee is an instant coffee, or so it leads you to believe. By naming itself Ri-coffee it is masquerading as coffee, but Tatum knows the truth of the matter—it is in fact, 60% chicory thus making it instant chicory. By sheer ratio of coffee to chicory, it should be categorized as instant chicory, not coffee. Nestle, which owns Ricoffee, can’t pull the wool over my eyes. In Botwana, you can only find coffee in the capital and the tourist regions and it costs a fortune. The same applies for cheese, but that’s another blog. More often than not, tea time involves comely china tea cups and saucers with roses or some other European flora painted on them. The most popular types of tea are Five Roses and Reiboos. Five Roses however, is my tea of choice. As far as I’m concerned the only tea worth drinking is the heavily caffeinated tea and Reiboos is decaffeinated. Reiboos is affectionately referred to as “bush tea,” and I still haven’t quite figured out if “bush tea” is a reference to the tea leaves that are perhaps gathered from a bush, or if it’s an allusion “the bush---as in the outback, or the wilderness. I’ll keep investigating. What I do know for certain is that Five Roses has sponsored every church in Botswana. Most churches have a sign out front that reads “Five Roses” in the right margin and is decorated with the Five Roses logo; the church name and denomination are usually printed in bold letters on the remaining portion of the sign.

I add two Five Roses tea bags to my delicate china cup and smother them in full cream milk. Meanwhile I dream of coffee during tea time. I’m a star crossed lover, caught between two worlds. I imagine myself like Mariah Carey in her “We Belong Together” music video, running out on her prim, well established fiancé (in this case, a thinly veiled symbol for my relationship with tea time…so thinly veiled in fact, that I’m explaining it in a long parenthetical interjection) and my true love, coffee, who gives me a proper caffeine fix every time and leaves me satisfied. Although I can have a proper tea in Southern Africa, what I really want is a disposable paper cup complete with a wasteful plastic top to gush out a wellspring of sweet black gold, Texas tea, bonafide coffee, sweet nectar of the Ethiopian Sidamo, Columbian, or French Roast Gods. As much as I enjoy tea time, what I really love, is coffee.

The moral of this vignette?

Please send coffee to the following address. I’m desperate:

Tatum Little/Gomolemo PCV

Private Bag 005

Good Hope, Botswana

Enable my caffeine addiction and I’ll love you forever. Thank you.

The water in Pitsane is treated and I suppose I could drink it straight from the tap although it’s cloudy at first. If I chose to drink straight from the tap, I’d wait for the calcium to settle and form a murky sediment at the bottom of the glass. I’m still grateful for the option though. Tatum is all about choices but Pitsane is the true meaning of hard water. My skin has white fissures running across it like cracked and barren dessert soil. These ash lines form perfect little borders making diamonds of shiny tight skin, like the back of a snake. My skin is like a Louis Vuilliton bag. Its rather disgusting, but I find it fascinating. For skin, Batswana are fond of camphor cream and pure glycerin. I now see why. I feel the insatiable need to wade in a pool of Vaseline. Of late, I’ve started slathering hair grease on my legs instead of lotion. My skin needs hair grease like people in hell want ice water and the sta-sof-fro has been doing the trick. It penetrates the skin like lotion but it leaves a much needed greasy film that will hold me over for the rest of the day. The problem is, grease and Africa mix a little too well—opposites attract. When the wind blows Botswana is a dust bowl. As stated before, Batswana dig up all the grass, exposing none other than dirt. When the westerly wind blows, every morsel of dirt, sand and dust stick to me like flypaper. It’s a vicious cycle. I slather hair grease over my hide and dirt sticks. My hands feel like sandpaper and look as if I’ve been kneading flour. My hygienic tendency to wash my hands at any given chance (with soap), during winter doesn’t help the ashiness.

A train runs through here a couple times a day. Its on its way to South Africa. Train tracks were laid from Cape Town to Cairo, by none other than the infamous Cecil Rhodes decades ago. Yes. I live by those train tracks and travelers ride on opulent looking passenger trains and wave to me. I'll have to ride it someday.

My yard is a matted brown tangle of dead weeds and coarse grass. Thistles choke your ankles as you try to walk from the front gate to the door. It’s embarrassing. A cow femur lays in the front yard among other unidentifiable bones. The previous volunteer had a dog and this dog dragged bits of a cow corpse into the yard to gnaw on (dogs are pretty hungry out here). All things considered, I decided it would be sensible if I bought a shovel and cleared my yard. “Clearing” my yard means digging up every single strand of grass with a shovel. Batswana usually pay people to do this kind of grunt work, but I’m a self-masochist; “cheap” is my safe word. As I locked my door to head to Mustapha’s Hardware Store, a man stopped at my yard and asked for piece work

“Let me clear your yard. P100,” he said.

“I don’t have any money,” I reasoned.

So I headed to Mustapha’s hardware store and purchased an expensive flat edged shovel. P80 it cost me but that was the cheapest one they had. Along with the other items, I purchased-a box of laundry soap (self-masochism at its finest; this is a cruel game I play with myself), and some other item I ‘needed’- my total came to P103; three pula more than having someone else clear the weed carpeted yard for me. I reasoned with myself saying that a P80 shovel will save me from having to pay someone to clear my yard in the future. It’s an investment, I told myself. Its 10 days later, and only the very front of my yard is cleared. Impish thistles don’t affront the ankles of visitors anymore but there’s much more to be done. I gradually chip at the yard day by day, and inevitably, a passer by will shout out that you’re supposed to pay someone else to do that, but I get a deep sense of satisfaction knowing that I’m being productive with my day. This is what I tell myself. Everyday I gaze on my barren dust bowl yard with pride although last weekend my neighbor’s teenaged brother took pity on me and cleared part of the yard for me, free of charge.

Lately I’ve been baking bread. Margaret Atwood wrote a short story about bread. There was another story by an author, I can’t remember about bread…a child was hit by a car and a lonely baker called about a birthday cake. I never was a very good student, which is why I can’t tell you the name nor the author, but I digress. Bread and meat were always the two things I was afraid of cooking. Bread involved too much chemistry. You have to wait for it to rise, deal with yeast, living bacteria, so on and so forth, but now I find baking bread cathartic. Kneading it is like rubbing out my frustrations. I put on my ipod and close my eyes as I knead dough. The past two loaves have started out as sticky. I’ve had to caress them from globs into orbs of dough. I don’t mind the work and the manipulation. Baking bread gives me something constructive to do with my time. I seem to have a lot of time on my hands, so I fill them with bread dough. I’ve baked herb bread. Last week I made a rounded loaf of rosemary bread. Rosemary is non existent in Botswana so I pilfered some Rosemary off of a responsible volunteer who brought some from home. I remember rosemary bread from the farmer’s market in Culver City. I used to buy round and overpriced loaf of rosemary bread and it was delicious. My version is good too, although not as good as the baker’s at the farmers market’s. My oven isn’t very good, so my bread is always half crispy on one side and chewy on the other, but all around tasty. Rosemary bread tastes like perfume and when I cut it, it the crispy side cracks open with a wisp of wet steam. If anything, I find it amazing that I can do so many things with plain flour. I’ve never bought more that one bag of flour a year. A couple years ago when I started making zucchini bread, which is more of a cake, I began buying whole wheat flour and bran, but other than that, I only used flour for that one recipe. I gradually expanded to molasses bread which is still cake like although not as sweet. Lately, I’ve used flour as the foundation upon which most of my meals are based. I’ve made pasta from scratch. I make multiple loaves of bread a week. Three at the least. I divide the recipe by three to make smaller batches, and I always have fresh bread on hand. I’ve made cream based soups that call for tablespoon of flour. Before I knew it, my one kg bag of white flour was gone. I bough at larger one this time. Warm spongy bread. Today I bought a bag of cream of tartar. I plan on trying my hand at biscuits once I devour this final loaf of rosemary bread.

The point:

I forgot my point, but hey it was fun reading right? You all know I'm long winded.