Heading to the Village

One component of the CIEE-Botswana program that aims to immerse us in Setswana culture and language is a home stay in a nearby village of Gaborone. We learned a while ago that our home stay would be in the village of Mochudi, which is approximately 35 kilometers north of Gaborone. Now while we have already been to Mochudi, our visit was limited to the Phuthadikobo Museum, which has an extensive web site. As I've noted in an earlier blog, Mochudi is well known for its strong ties to traditional ways, including a kgotla (the village meeting place where communal decisions are made) and brightly painted houses.

We leave this Saturday for Mochudi on an 8 am shuttle, and will remain there all of next week until the following Sunday. This translates numerically to the 14th until the 22nd. On the weekdays we will still have to come to classes at UB, which should be very fun considering every day my classes start at 8 in the morning. Considering it's over an hour each way, I will be waking up with the sun and roosters to catch the combi in to town.

This small detail doesn't bother me all that much, as almost all the CIEE students have class that early, so we can commiserate in our Politics and Poverty of Southern Africa class. Today, I found out who my host family is, and somehow in a country with a fertility rate hovering around three children per mother, I was placed with a mother and her 12-year old son. Do not take this the wrong way; I am ecstatic about the set up. As an only male child, I am sure that I will be able to get along with/understand my new host brother much better. Moreover, my host mom is a local teacher in Mochudi. I'm hoping her teaching skills extend to Setswana over family dinners; I am in sore need of practice!

I think many of us are dealing with mixed expectations vis-à-vis the homestay but now with our family's demographics in hand I think we can now construct a realistic expectation of the week-long experience. Plus, didn't I mention the view from the hill is amazing?
In other news, we had an unexpected and sad visit from Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in Gaborone. Here is a link to the tragic story about Tsvangirai's car accident which resulted in his hospitalization here in Botswana and his wife's death. Batsi, our CIEE director and Zimbabwean, returned from a trip home with both news and a surprise. Of the incident, he said the national mood is one of mourning and this event may have advanced the cause of the new unity government in ways unforeseen just days earlier.

The surprise was both welcome and, literally, completely worthless: a 50-billion Zimbabwe Dollar note for each of us. One could hardly buy a few text messages here with that.

Borrowing from Garrison Keillor, whose impression of Lake Wobegon is not too dissimilar to mine of Botswana: And that's the news from Gaborone, "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve . . . where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."