This past weekend Jon and I went to Kasane for the weekend. We left Thursday night at 9 pm on the overnight train to Francistown and then took a kombi to Kasane (about 7 hours, yuck). We stayed at a really cute lodge called Water Lilly. Saturday a guide brought us into Zimbabwe to Victoria Falls, and Sunday we did a morning game drive in Chobe National Park, and then in the evening went up the Chobe river through the national park. The park itself is huge, about 11,000 square kilometers, and has about 60,000 wild elephants! I can't begin to explain so look at the pictures!

Victoria Falls:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2034202&id=15002854&l=5bc997bc79

Chobe National Park:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2034203&id=15002854&l=7f9d07f2ca

Last Week

So nothing new has really happened recently. It’s been overcast and slightly rainy all week, which has been awesome! Haha it’s nice to have a few days off from the hot hot sun! We received back our first Setswana exams (94!).. the whole class did really well. I was proud of us.

We’ve started counting the days a little bit more now that its getting closer to April. But really trying hard not to! This weekend we are distracting ourselves a little with an excursion to Victoria Falls. We’ll be leaving Thursday night on an overnight train to Francistown, and from there taking a bus to Kasane in the north of Botswana. Unfortunately backpackers lodges are not allowed in the country, because the government prefers low impact-high cost tourism.. good for the environment, bad for us. So we’ll be staying in a hotel in Kasane, and traveling to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe for the day on Saturday with a guide. It’s important for us to have a guide, as Zimbabwe isn’t doing so fabulously right now, but we also don’t plan on traveling too much into the country. It’ll be interesting to drive through though. A good friend of ours recently went traveling through Zim and was saying how it looks really modern for the 1970’s or so, but since then has stagnated, and the shelves of the grocery store are bare. They don’t accept Zimbabwean currency anymore, so we have to trade our Pula in for U.S. dollars. It will be weird to use them again! Hopefully I won’t need to many, just for a visa, and possibly to bribe police haha. Unfortunately most of the money from the visa’s etc. goes directly into Robert Mugabe’s pocket. With the recent “accident” involving the prime minister and his wife, there is a lot of unrest there. If you use American Dollars to pay for something, you may get your change in Pula, Euros, anything. Fortunately though I won’t be spending much, as the markets in Zim welcome American clothing to barter for their goods, and I can very easily trade some of my t-shirts for a lot of souvenirs!


In other news getting Zinzi (who we now believe to be male…) home has been a huge hassle. The issue is that NO businesses answer their phones, and when I finally got through to a person, they had no idea what the airlines policy on animals was. Very frustrating to say the least, as I watched my cell phone minutes vanish quickly with all these calls. My sister, and Jon’s mom have been helping organize things on the United States side, which is proving to have much better telephone service. So hopefully things get sorted out quickly! The kitten has really come into his own and had such a personality now. After his eye drops we have discovered he has huge eyes, and is completely adorable. He spends most of his time playing with toys Jon and I have created for him, and as a African kitten he’s very resourceful. He uses a balled up receipt as a ball and toilet paper rolls keep him occupied. We have several cardboard boxes, one which he uses for scratching, and it has a small rug in it he also sharpens his claws on occasionally. Which is unnecessary cause his claws are very very sharp, and everyone that meets him has scratches to prove it. He’s still just getting used to himself though, so hopefully he realizes claws are unnecessary most of the time. I’ll put up new pictures soon!

SOS Childrens Village

So a few days during the week I go with another internation student to tutor at the SOS Childrens Village just outside of Gabarone. This is an orphanage, or which there are 3 in Botswana. The children there range in age from babies to about 20, and after an effort is made to find family members the children remain at the orphanage for their entire childhood, the children aren't adopted.

The children in the kindegarten have a really nice facility on the compound where they attend school, but the other children all commute to local schools. The girls I tutor go to a local high school... so they have a lot of physics, chemistry, calculus.. but it helps me get ready for my GRE's. The girls are really funny, and it's nice to help out and talk with girls that are close to my age group, but from such different backgrounds. We walk through the playground to get to their housing and the little kids always run up yelling "teacher! teacher!".

What I've found interesting are the girls stories of school. In public schools in Botswana it is still customary to hit, pinch, and whip the children. It's awful and really traumatizes the kids. We've seen this at UB where almost no one will volunteer an answer in class because they have been trained for their entire academic lives that if they get it wrong, they will get beaten. It's a really different situation than anything I've encountered before.

Lobola

So here in Botswana there is still currently a lobola, or bride price to be paid whenever there is a marriage. In a lot of cultures the female has to pay the males family a dowry, but here its the grooms family that has to pay. The payment is almost always cattle, and it ranges from 6-12 cattle normally, always in twos. This custom is still very alive and well. My professor today told me that as a white American girl, I'd probably be worth about 16 cattle!

Don't tell my dad though, I bet he'd be all for that arrangement!

So I just wanted to comment on a phenomenon here in Gabs. Students here have an incredibly huge tolerance for alcohol. Every weekend like the entire campus gets crazy drunk. They are super loud, and blast hip-hop, as well as smash their glass bottles everywhere when empty. This leads to minimal sleep on the weekends.

So last night night I went to bed around 2 am, and people were loud and drinking and whatever, but I can't usually stay awake past 2 am anyways, and later on people being loud outside and smashing bottle woke me up. Not unusual, except this time when I woke up it was light out and 7 am. I left my room a little before 10 am, and STILL people were out drinking from the night before. That's like 16 hours straight... I don't know how they do it and stay on their feet.

Zinzi!

So Jon and I were walking outside of his dorm and we saw this teeny tiny kitten. We gave it a little water and were walking away, but I just couldn’t leave it, so I scooped her up and brought her to Jon’s room. Upstairs we inspected her, and she has a little bit of a goopy eye, and was absolutely covered in green paint. Other than that she seemed ok. She is tiny tiny and has nothing to her. If you rub your finger down her side you can feel every one of the tiny ribs. We have since decided to keep her and named her Zinzi! It’s the same name as Nelson Mandela’s daughter. Anyways Zinzi now has quite a comfortable home as Jon’s roommate went back home, so the whole half of the room is covered in pillows, blankets, and boxes for her to sleep in and play on. We were able to find cat food, and litter at the grocery store and she took to both really quickly.
We decided we want to take Zinzi home with us. It seems pretty easy (knock on wood) to do so. Since we decided that we just can’t give her up, today we took her to the local vet for a check-up and to get some medicine for her goopy eyes. She had two shots, which she did not like one bit, and we also got some eye drops, and some de-worming pills just in case she has kitten worms. Otherwise she’s perfect! She’s no more than three weeks old, and just about two pounds, little bundle of gray and green fur. We’re still working on getting the paint off, the vet said we may just have to wait for the fur to grow out and cut it off as best we can.. so I’ve slowly been working on removing it.
When we first found Zinzi she was really quiet and shy, and I think very hungry. Now that she’s been inside for a while she’s getting used to us and her domain. She’s become very playful, and likes to sleep with Jon, or pounce on you if you aren’t paying attention. Jon will put up pictures of her soon!

Nothing too much has happened recently! I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing? Next week I have tests in three classes, and a presentation and a paper due in another! It’s going to be a hectic week! Unfortunately I’m also involved in a very large group project that is taking up much more time than necessary. Oh well! Funny thing is my special education lecturer is going on maternity leave after next Monday. A substitute lecturer is scheduled to take over our class, in April. This leaves the majority of March without a lecturer for my class. It’ll be interesting how this plays out!

The other night the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night, and absolutely no one left their rooms or even peeked out to see what was going on. After about fifteen minutes a security officer with his hands in his pockets ambled over and turned it off. Well he actually struggled and turned it on and off a few times over the next fifteen minutes, but eventually managed to turn it off. This same thing happened in the business building last night, and no one got up to leave, one student went and shut the door to the room we were in to block out the noise.

Another student who also lives in Vegas who always hangs by the door to Jon’s dorm (I spend most of my free time in Jon’s room with Zinzi) was arrested very early the other morning for smoking pot. Most of the security out here is a hired company called Miami Security and they wear green uniforms. They are most likely to be found smoking pot also. Unfortunately somehow this guy got caught by the more official blue uniformed security and was carted away to jail at 6 am. He was in jail two days and when he came back we asked did you have to pay a fine? And he actually didn’t have to go to court, or pay a fine. What happened was he went to jail, and they whipped him, and let him go. They actually whipped him! It’s really crazy that that was his punishment, but interesting to know… do not smoke pot in Botswana.

Today we were able to get fridges to help assuage the hunger that comes with eating white rice twice a day every day. It’s fabulous to be able to keep water and other things in the room! When we were asking for a taxi to take us back to UB, the taxi driver told me it would be 50 pula, which is ridiculous… waaayy too much. I proceeded to get into a fight with this cab driver who was extremely rude. He assumed cause I’m white I’d just pay, or that I wouldn’t know, and when you call them on charging too much (it’s a standard rate here) they get all huffy puffy. Later on in the day though Jon and I were walking back from Riverwalk and a gentleman riding in a taxi had the taxi pull over and pick us up and he paid for our ride to UB. He was really nice, and him and the taxi driver were hilarious together. So that made up for the earlier grumpy taxi-man.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever mentioned Riverwalk before, but here there are a few main commercial areas nearby. The two closest we can walk to, Riverwalk, and Main Mall. There is also African Mall near Main Mall, but we don’t go very often. Mainly we stick to Riverwalk, as it’s about 1..5 miles away, and has some shops, a bookstore, restaurants, and a movie theatre. This is the only real thing to do around here…. And everything there closes at 7 weekdays, or like 4:30 on the weekend. It’s a pain if you want to do something at night. Main Mall is mostly outdoors, and they have a lot of stalls selling things for both tourists and locals, so it’s cool to see. There is also Game City, which holds the other movie theatre, which switches movies back and forth with Riverwalk, and they have more stores. There are some restaurants as well, but I prefer the ones at Riverwalk. One perk of Game City is the store Game. It’s something like a Wal-Mart, it has everything and it’s not expensive. Unfortunately Game City is the only one we can’t walk to, but we still go every so often and check it out.

As I’m typing Zinzi is perched on my shoulder like a little parrot watching me type. Her eye drops have worked wonders and I got almost all of the paint off of her. The last few days she has really started showing some personality and become a real kitten… she’s VERY playful, and bats around the toys we’ve made her (they don’t really sell any animal toys here). The only drawback is she’ll pounce on you in the middle of the night, which can be a startling way to wake up.



P.S. .... it seems the most common question people ask when talking with me is "have you met many celebrities?" .... they always get disappointed when I tell them not too many celebrities hang out in New Hampshire.