Site Announcement

On October 19th we had a special day half day of training. Everyone was only half paying attention because we were all focused on the afternoon and site announcement. That was when we would find out where in Botswana we would be spending the next two years. It was actually really nice and they made the site announcement all official. They cleared us out of the training classroom, and wouldn’t let us in until it started.

While they were setting up, we went down stairs with the LCFs (Setswana teachers) and they taught us some traditional games kids like to play. My favorite was dodge ball-esc. Two people stand about 25 feet apart and have a ball. Between them there is a shallow box, crushed cans, and a team of four or so people. Using their feet, the people in the middle have to pinch the cans and toss them into the box. In the meantime, the two on the outside are trying to peg them with the ball. When the person in the middle gets hit they’re out. Speaking as one who was in the middle – it’s a lot to keep track of, especially when you’re the last one. I’m sure it’s also funny to watch as the middle person frantically flips cans in between dodging the ball. It was a lot of fun.

That was the morning, then the long awaited site announcement! When we got to the classroom the chairs were in a big U facing the front where there was a map of Botswana with 34 pins in it for our sites. It was easy to immediately see that we were all mostly together except for a few on the fringes. Since my group is all Life Skills volunteers, we’re all in the southern half of the country. The room was decorated with balloons and streamers. After we had all taken our seats they told us to reach under our chair and find the paper there. Each paper had a number on it, and that was the order in which we were called to find our sites; I was number thirteen. I took it as a good sign since we are Bots 13 (the 13th group in Botswana since the program re-opened) and we arrived on September 13th. They called our name, we went up to get our site, announced it to the group, pinned our name on the map, and then we got to take a drink and a giant cookie with our number on it.

My site is…. *drum roll*… Kgope! My school is Kgope Primary School. Primary school here is Standards (Grades) 1-7. Some people are at Junior Secondary Schools: Form 1-3 (Grades 8-10) and two people are at Senior Secondary Schools: Form 4-5 (Grades 11-12). If what I just wrote doesn’t make sense, what I’m trying to show is that instead of saying “Grades” they use the terms “Standards” and “Forms”. Back to Kgope! Kgope is a small village of around 500 people in Kweneng District. It’s fairly close to the capitol Gaborone and another large town Molepolole. I’m the first PCV in the village which is what I was hoping for. There will be no groundwork in place, but it also means no expectations. It sounded like a perfect placement for me. On a funny note, if you google ‘Kgope’ the only thing the Wikipedia page says is the District and that there’s a Primary School; that’s me!