Personal Body Guards

It's the end of another crazy, hilarious, perfect week here and I still cannot believe how fast this time is flying. This week was good, I spent a few days in the classroom, which I am loving more and more each time I'm there. I'm loving getting to know my kids more and more, and also talking to my teacher during the downtime (which there is a ton of in my classroom!). There are a few kids in the class that are total spitfires, and a few really really great students, so it really reminds me of home in those ways! In the classroom, I usually teach the math and science lessons, and grade their work and then help grade and assign English work for the day. Tiny, the spunkiest one of them all, is always telling me that I should teach Setswana to them, and I think she just wants me to look really dumb in front of the class! I am definitely getting some big ol' arm muscles from all of the writing on the board that I'm doing! They only have about one or two textbooks for each class, and so most of what their notes are I have to write up on the board so that they can have it to study for or learn from later. I've taken a few pictures of my classroom, and Les took some of her's, but every time I get my camera out it's a pretty big distraction so I'm trying to limit that to a minimum!

My time at The Tlamelo Project has really been great this week too. More time in the kitchen, but even more so I am starting to really enjoy the kids and their emerging personalities that we are getting to know so well. They are starting to know and recognize us and get all of our names, and it's so cool to show up and have them all yell hello to you. I have a few that I am really enjoying getting to know, one of them is Bareng, she is a 12-year-old who is so incredibly smart and is such a sweet, quiet spirited, caring girl...I've told everyone already that I'm bringing her home. She told me yesterday that now I can be her mother...so I think that a mother needs to bring her daughter home, right? : ) I just love talking to these girls and listening to them talk about their lives, their schools and their families, I would love to visit them at their homes some time. Bareng really wants to come visit me at the University here because she hopes to attend here when she is older, and so I am going to try to figure out how to work that out, because I would love to do something like that for her. In addition to that, my group has been talking about how cool it would be to figure out something or some day trip sort of thing to get some of these kids from Tlamelo out doing something fun and exciting. They don't really do field trips because there isn't much funding, and we thought it would be so cool if we could take them out to Mokolodi (the game reserve we visited a few weeks ago) for a safari...I'm not sure if it'd work out, but stay posted for that!

Today we all attended a football (soccer) game that the boys from our school (Naledi Education Centre) were playing in, and although I had to leave before the game actually started, it was a great experience. These kids don't have a coach, and I'm not sure from where they got their uniforms, but they just were having such a great time playing and having a team of their own. It's boys aged 13-19 or so, and it's so neat to watch them all together. I guess after Leslie and I left they repeatedly asked Jack to be their coach, and we all think he should take on the job for the remainder of the summer! : )
As Leslie and I were leaving to go to the train station to inquire about tickets, the boys were practicing before their game started and they stopped us before we got off the field. They were SO concerned with Leslie and I walking out with just the two of us. They checked Leslie's bag and said she may be okay because there were no valuables in her bag, but then they looked in mine and saw my camera and money and decided amongst themselves that we would not be safe walking to the Combi stop on our own. It was so incredibly sweet, these guys were so concerned, and Les and I saw no problem because the stop was pretty close but apparently, as they kept telling us, "there are many thiefs around here, you two girls cannot walk by yourself!" They told us they would get some other boys who weren't warming up to walk us to the Combi stop, and ran off. Les and I are trying not to crack up at this point because we think it is so so sweet and cute, but sure enough, they come back with three boys in tow (one only about 8, another about 14, and another 13 or 14 year old) and they take their job SO seriously, grabbing both Leslie and I's hands and leading us to the Combi stop. The whole walk, they keep talking about how they need to be our police and protect us, and Les and I are grinning ear to ear. Once we get to the Combi stop, they hail the Combi for us, and then hold our hands until we step on there, watch us to our seats, and tell the driver we need to go to the station. We are rolling in laughter and flattery as we get on, and everyone already on the Combi is laughing and smiling too. It was a perfect, hilarious, wonderfully typical Botswana scene.

We've gotten all of our travel plans figured out, and we all are SO excited for what is coming up. Next week we head to the Okavango Delta, which is an overnight train ride and a bus ride away from Gaborone, and we couldn't be more excited for being there. We're staying at Audi Camp (click here) and have a Mokoro (hollowed out canoe things...) trip planned and a horseback day trip also to see all of the wildlife in the area. I'll post more about those plans and the trips later- I always try to keep these blogs kind of brief and they always end up being about fifty thousand pages long so again I apologize...

I'd Definitely Say It's a Mountain...

At the start of another week, I cannot believe that we are into our FOURTH week here, it doesn't seem right at all! Please don't make me leave?!

I know I'm halfway across the world, but I cannot help but mention the crazy weather and sad news from back home and our campus from last week. Thursday morning we all got word of a crazy tornado hitting Manhattan and our K-State campus pretty hard...and it's been hard for us to hear of that and not be able to do anything to help right now. A neighborhood in Manhattan lost 30 homes that were literally leveled to the ground with only the foundations remaining, and the area around campus and several buildings on campus had severe damage ($20 million just at KSU alone!!)- it seems so surreal that it actually hit Manhattan. Sitting with Danielle on Thursday evening, we were just talking about how when it sunk in that the tornado actually hit our school, it really made us sad...that's our home and we love it so much and we can't do anything to help right now. I think we all realize though that there will still be plenty of clean-up work to do when we get back, and we are all just extremely thankful that no one was hurt in the huge storm. Our thoughts are definitely with anyone there who is cleaning up and rebuilding. (For pictures of the storm and the damage, click here.)

Other than the tornado news, last week ended really well. I spent Thursday and Friday just at Tlamelo, not at the school, and worked in the kitchen more, cutting meat and veggies, and learning the Rachael Ray way to cut onions! : ) Leslie made me start running with her last Thursday after we got back here to UB and we've been keeping it up most every day. It's nice to have that bit of routine from home, and I think it's helping me back into a normal rhythm of stress/thought release, which if you know me, I need to let a few of the five billion thoughts in my head out once in a while!! I never really run with anyone back home, just my iPod, and it's been great to have Leslie with me pushing me and not letting me stop. The weather has been incredible too, around 4pm when we run it's about 70 degrees and the sun isn't too hot, and of course the humidity here is nothing, so it's not reminding me of home at all!! We have a nice little route though and she talks of expanding it, but that's for next week maybe...

Anyway, Saturday some of us decided to try to find the village of Thalmaga which is well-known for the handcrafted pottery and markets. We set off for the bus rank, which like the Combi station, is just six or so streets full of buses that aren't in any particular order and have no real schedule for arrival or departure. We are DEFINITELY learning to be flexible through public transportation systems alone!! We got to the bus rank and waited for about an hour where we thought we should be. When our bus never showed up, we decided to head for BotswanaCraft, a local shop that sells a TON of Botswana-made arts and pottery and jewelry and about a billion other things. It was an awesome store, and I am definitely planning to return towards the end of the trip to find some great souvenirs and gifts. After that trip, we came back and napped for a while, which has gotten to be quite the trend around here. : ) Saturday night a few of us went out to dinner at an Italian (they have about every kind of food here except Mexican and local food) restaurant that was really fun and had a really cool environment.

Sunday we attempted again to get to church, but as we still don't have directions and are a little wary of getting lost for the billionth time, we vowed to try harder next week to find directions and get there! I'm really excited to go because most of the kids from Tlamelo attend this church, and I think it'll be really neat to see them in a different environment.

Sunday afternoon Luke, the guy from Canada who works at Tlamelo one day a week, and his friend Graham took our entire group on a "hike." This hike turned out to MUCH more, more like a climb for sure. It was so much fun though, and such a great experience for our group. The "hill" we climbed up was QUITE a bit taller and steeper than it looked, and I really think it was a mountain, but that's just me. ; ) Such a work out though, and so much fun with those two guys and our whole group. And the view from the top...amazing. (It's called Kgale Hill and it's pretty much in the city still, and things have just built around it. ) Half of the view was the city of Gaborone, and the other half of the view was of the game reserves and the Gaborone Dam and the lake around it, so it was incredible. I did my first "photo stitch" for an attempt at a panoramic view of the sights, and it's not great, but it was cool to be able to capture so much of the view. We were so far up and in these huge boulders that were stacked at the top of the hill...it was incredible when we made it to the top. The heights convinced Leslie further that she's definitely bungee jumping at Victoria Falls and convinced me further that I am for sure NOT going to take that plunge...

Today started another week at the school, and I am not quite loving the extremely early and chilly mornings, but starting to enjoy my students more and more and hope that I can get to know them further as the summer goes on. I am really starting to feel a routine here and enjoying that feeling. I know very soon it will be thrown off by our travelling, but as for now, it's very nice and relaxing. I'm on my fourth book of the trip now, and looking desperately for a cheap American book store to buy some more. I am SO enjoying that aspect of the evening downtime!! Things are still great here, and I am attempting to slow our time down as much as possible...can't believe we only have FIFTY days left in Africa...

Partly Cloudy

The last few days have been interesting. Definitely the feeling has changed for quite a few of us I think, and it is still an incredible thing to be here, but the outlook and perspectives have been altered. Talking with the girls last night though, I think we kind of knew this would come at some point, that there would be a time in this journey that all of the sudden it wouldn't be so "sunshine and butterflies" all the time...but now that it's hit, we're feeling it, and adjusting to the other side of being here.

I've been teaching in the Standard 6 classroom for the past few days, and it has been an incredible and insightful experience. The teachers, the students...the more I am in the classroom, the more I feel like I am let into their lives and their realities. And all of the sudden it's not such a high anymore. Still perfect, still nothing I would ever change in being here, but just maybe not such the emotional high anymore.

95% of the people in the village we are working in are HIV/AIDS positive. 95%. And the more we hear their stories, that statistic almost seems the least of their problems.

Playing with the kids every day like we have been for the past week or so has been great, but talking with the other girls last night, I think it is really easy for us to walk into Tlamelo each day, spend 5 hours cooking and playing with the kids and seeing them smile, and feel good about the kids without actually knowing their realities.

On top of getting more stories from the kids in my classroom, today after lunch and clean-up Champ, the director of the Tlamelo Project, took us on a walk around the village. He explained to us that he and the other leaders of Tlamelo (5 or 6 young guys, in their mid 20s) make these home visits every few days and pray with and support the citizens of the village, and the families and parents of the kids they serve each day. (So, so cool.) We met with one lady in particular who has been going through some incredible hardships, nothing any of us can imagine going through, and yet she sat and talked with us with a peace and a hope that seemed unexplainable. Champ translated a little bit to us, but mostly we sat and listened to her speak in Setswana, getting understanding from her expressions and the manner in which she talked. Jack and Meeka and Marinda offered some words of encouragement to this woman and Champ translated, and that was so awesome of them to be able to give something in that way. At the end, one of the Tlamelo leaders prayed for her and it was so incredibly powerful... Walking out of there we were all pretty somber but as we continued our walk I was thinking about how Champ just kept talking about how to her, there is a light at the end of this road, and he was telling us about the hope that she has, when this woman should logically have little reason to hope. And...if she is having all of these devastating things happening to her and her family and yet she still has a hope and a peace beyond understanding... ah. Just completely put so, so many things into perspective. Amazing. I am so thankful we had the opportunity to visit these people and walk around the village.

So. Things have been getting a lot more real here. My Grandpa Gordon told me the week before I left that this summer would be wonderful and horrible, and not that any of what we have gone through has been horrible, but I think I am starting to see that side of things here. But seeing that and being in those experiences is not making me want to leave and or making for a horrible trip, it's just a different side of the experience, a necessary one I think. The feeling I feel is a little bit raw, like we've seen the life of these people and now it's time to actually feel a little of what their every day is like, and not just see smiles for a couple hours.

We've been here for two full weeks now, and I am still having the time of my life...and wouldn't trade this time and place and service for anything ever. I am grateful that things are changing, and the reality of this world and this city is setting in, and that is perfect. Only makes us want to get out there more... for me today it started feeling like helping just one person, or doing just one thing isn't going to change these lives that are so down, and yet, that is a pretty defeated outlook! This place and these people are beyond words amazing, and I won't leave feeling down. We're here to serve in whatever way we are needed and however we can best be put to work, that's where we'll be. Be here, and live here, and serve here. I love this life...still.

And...I'm still staying forever. ; )