A new home away from home.

The past few days we have been visiting our new home in Mmadinare. It is a nice hilltop village town just north of the town of Phikwe. Phikwe is a major town with many stores and restaurants... they even have sidewalks in town! This is a huge thing for Botswana. I am working with Mmadinare Childrens Corner Trust, which is a preschool that deals with kids who have been affected by HIV, especially those orphaned and vulnerable children. It is not exactly what I wanted but it will make my days much easier to deal with since I will be playing with kids all day. Lindsey actually has a pretty good office which seems to be pretty well organized. I think all in all we will have the opportunity to make a big impact on the community. The town is completely surrounded by hills in every way so I think we will have the opportunity to get out in the wilderness quite often. There is a large reservoir in town, actually the largest in all of Botswana so this makes me happy since I have seen very little water since arriving in the country. That's it for me here's Lindsey- so my placement is with the S and CD office in Mmadinare. That stands for social and community development and it is basically a social work office similar to what we have at home. There are many differences I am sure, but overall I felt very comfortable with the position because my past experience has been similar. My supervisor seemed like a really nice person and she took me on a home visit (or should I say 'hut' visit) on the first day and told me about an interesting case she is working on right now. I think I will also do some work with Mark's NGO since I like to work with young kids and I am interested in the support groups that they run for the orphaned kids. As you can see from the picture we got to finally see our house. It is pretty small, but we will make it work. We have electricity and hot running water with an indoor bathroom. Some other volunteers don't even have that so we should be really happy about that! There are a few volunteers that have huge houses that seem like mansions to us now! It is all just luck what you get in the end. Our village is also about 1 hour away from one of the major cities in Botswana called Francistown. There is an international airport there that visitors can fly into easily so keep it in mind! That's all for now...soon we will have internet connection in our house with a portable modem so we will look forward to keeping in touch with everyone.