Host Family Party

With training coming to an end, we were told that we were having a thank you party for the Host Families. We split into committees for the party: Cooking, Ushering, Shopping, and Entertainment. I was on the Entertainment committee and we spent a couple weeks planning what we wanted to do. I really wanted to do an acrostic poem. For those of you who don’t remember, those are the poems where you spell something (like in this case ‘Thank You’) then say ‘T is for ______, H is for _______’ etc. down the line.  Maybe it’s just having been a kindergarten teacher, but I thought it would be nice. I took it upon myself to write the English, and then had help translating it into Setswana. My friend helped me write the letters THANK YOU! on one side of a paper and RE A LEBOGA (we thank you) on the other side. I got people to volunteer to read each letter and the two sentences with it then at the end we flipped the papers and said “Re a leboga” together. The families loved it; I think they were the most happy to hear us speaking Setswana.

We also planned three skits. People seem to love skits. The three skits were: cooking, washing clothes, and pets. We were trying to show Americans in the funniest light possible. The cooking skit was about adding crazy things to food, since some of the things we cook get a strange look. The two volunteers who wrote it also stressed smelling food since here that’s not considered polite. Culturally, smelling food is implying something is rotten and so it is a big no-no. (Of course we learned this the day after I smelled all the spice mixes in the house trying to figure out what they were – go figure.) The pets skit was about how American’s love animals and treat them like pets. Dogs are kept strictly outside the house. There are used mostly for protection and are definitely not coddled. In the skit the two volunteers had the American naming every animal she passed and trying to bring it in the house as a pet. It went well.

The last skit: washing clothes was done be me and my friend Kate. She was the host mother, and I was the American. We joked about me being 25 and not even knowing how to wash clothes, when a Batswana would have learned how to at five. Then I wrestled with a sheet in my attempt to wash it. My favorite part was parodying a Setswana song. Let me preface this by saying: I love Setswana songs. It’s a great way to learn the language and culture, not to mention that the harmonies people sing here are beautiful. My favorite song is sung by a woman working in a field. Translated, the lyrics go: Aunty, please carry my child. I’m in the field plowing and I’m alone. You can see that I’m plowing, and I’m alone. For the skit we changed the words to say: Aunty, please carry my Sunlight (brand of soap). I’m trying, I’m washing, and I’m alone. It was a big hit. Like with the poem, I think they liked the fact that part of it was in Setswana.

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!