Botswana, Africa

Botswana, Africa
DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed on this blog are our personal views and are not representative of the Peace Corps or the U.S. government in anyway.

Friday, June 25, 2010

History of Mmadinare






























I found an interesting article online today that gives some details about the history and development of our village here in Botswana, Mmadinare. Here is the link to the article if any of you are interested in reading it.

http://www.mmegi.bw/index.php?sid=6&aid=1815&dir=2010/April/Thursday22

I also found this article that talks about the upcoming tourist development of the Lestibogo dam that is located only a few miles away from Mmadinare. It is really a beautiful place and I'll post some pics of it here too. They are talking about developing this area as more of a tourist destination and I can see why because it is really a very pretty place surrounded by hills and it shows the authentic traditional village life here in Botswana as well which is something you really wouldn't see if you only came here for a safari. Here is the link to that article too.

http://www.sundaystandard.info/article.php?NewsID=5995&GroupID=3

Thursday, June 24, 2010

A typical day....


I remember before joining the Peace Corps being really curious about what a typical day as a PCV would be like. So here it goes:
7:15am- start walking to work (but now I have a bike)
7:30am- get to work at the S and CD office (social and community development). There are three other social workers and a student intern.
7:30-12:00ish- hang out at the office. Since I don't understand Setswana very well I don't catch much of what is going on with the clients until I can ask someone later. I know that they provide food rations for children who have been orphaned and for people who are unable to work called 'destitutes'.
12:00-1:00pm- Lunch
1:00-4:00ish- Mark and I walk around and introduce ourselves to people in the community. Everyone has been really friendly to us and wants to know us. Later on, when we identify projects, we will both have things going on in the community in the afternoon's. For example I might see if I can help teach a life skills class at a middle school about health and HIV/AIDS issues.
5:00ish-Make dinner. This has has been funny lately. We don't have a stove, fridge, or any furniture yet so Mark had the genius idea to cook on our space heater! It actually worked! I think we fried some veggies or something. Now, thankfully, we have a rice cooker and an electric frying pan that my supervisor loaned to us so we can cook normally (and safely!).
Evening time- We usually get on the Internet now that we have it for a while, listen to music and radio shows, read (a lot), and talk with our neighbors. We have movies on our computer that we watch too. Lately we have been addicted to True Blood and are onto season 2 now!
9:30pm- Bed time! I know....we are seriously old ladies now! We stayed up until about 11pm last weekend and I could have sworn that it was 3am because I was so tired! I guess this is a good thing because there is not much else to do when it gets dark here. It gets really, really dark and the stars are amazing too. We should get an astrology book or something!

So that's it....every now and them something funny happens, usually to do with a farm animal since they are everywhere. It's funny how 'normal' everything is when before we came I thought it would all be so exciting and strange!
*Here's a picture of Mark cooking dinner on the space heater.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Just another Wednesday

We are now at our site in Mmadinare and have internet at our very own house so these posts may start coming more frequent.

Today I was at school when some goats found their way onto the school grounds. This is a big deal because they have been eating our garden! So I walked out toward them to scare them off and as I passed by Mma Makoba's office she let out a yell.... "Lasie!!" All of a sudden without another word being spoken a 4 year boy comes bolting out of class to run and chase off the goats. So that's it. I found myself wondering how often this happens and whether or not the boy is actually called Lasie.