Enter Botswana

Monday. 7:00 AM.

I hear a shower running and an occasional footsteps. I suspect that Mr. Watermelon has decided to get his day going (it was at this time he decided to eat half of his melon). The comfort of a bed with incredible for my first real chance to get sleep since the States. Thing was I kept waking up every couple hours since I was too hot.

I can remember waking up at 9, 11, 1 and 3. At nine, I discovered that I had passed out incredibly fast. The light was still on and my door wide open but I didn't care. I think I was awakened by Dr. Lacks delivering much needed toilet paper and bottled water from the store. I guess we didn't have TP. Not a problem for me...yet. The 3 Americans from the previous night said the water is okay here on the campus, but our doctors and two professors recommended that we use bottled water for brushing teeth. I get a little flustered from waking up, but quickly go back to sleep, without changing, closing my door or turning off the light. By the 11 o'clock one, I had decided to sleep normally. Light, door, clothes taken care of. But the heat. Ending up throwing off my blankets off, which I've now found at the foot of my bed.

I fall back asleep and woke up 10 minutes later. I find my friend Andrew already up, showered and clothed, along with Mr. Watermelon. After bidding them good morning, I make my way to the shower room which is a separate room from the john. It's a small closet of a room, but it still yields warm water. I shower and dress, and head out the door with Andrew and Jun. We make our way to the dining hall again. It's really, really bright out. We have a meal, it wasn't too entirely appetizing but it's sustenance. Around 8:30 we leave to head to class despite Prof. Lacks not knowing exactly where the classroom was. Luckily someone knew for some reason or another and we headed off for the main quad. On our way, we stopped at what was a traditional hut and fence built for display in front of a main campus building. It wasn't much maybe 4 meters in diameter with walls about 20 cm thick, made of hardened clay and mud. We talked about some of the thermodynamic properties that make them so cost effective. After about 10 minutes we proceeded into what was a very modern building filled with classrooms. Once we had settled in, we were introduced to the head of the Faculty of Engineering. He tells us his last name which was hard enough to pronounce before I had forgotten it. But then he told us that the "C." in his name and on the PowerPoint stood for "Clever." We didn't believe him at first, just thought he was being funny with us. A "Clever" professor. Such a great little irony, but we were informed by DJ Lacks, as he is now called affectionately, that his name is really Clever, once Lacks had taken over for the day. We did our homework and finished before noon, and proceeded to take lunch.

After lunch, we had this orientation to attend to. So at 2 o'clock, we went back to the classroom and sat down with the department head of student affairs, who basically talked to us about security and all that. Next up was the woman who is our liaison to UB and is in charge of international cooperation and such. She asked us to take out our passports and make sure on the stamp we received at immigration had V30D signed on it. "Void after 30 days." She had to just make sure that we had enough time on these visas to do the trip. Lo and behold, I had "V03D." Definitely made me worry. Yeah, turns out that lady at immigration who asked me more questions than someone responding to a Jeopardy category (if you don't get the joke, then it's probably not worth telling you now) didn't really like me or misunderstood me. So I tell her, and she informs me that we're gonna have to go down to immigration tomorrow and get more time on my visa. Yeah. Not too fun. So after that little stumble, Kevin, the Motswana (singular denomyn) youth who I first met at the airport has been assigned to help us get wireless access. After travelling down to IT, and waiting around for like a half hour for Kevin to emerge from the office, we still didn't have wireless access. Oh well, this little bit was just set up for this encounter: while waiting I ended up walking off to this little courtyard. A group of women were coming up and I graciously moved over to the side and continued to walk past. I had almost past a third of them when they all said 'hello' to me. I, off guard and startled, managed to get out an 'hello' with a surprised expression on my face that sent all of them into a giggle. Guess I still have that affect on all women, no matter the continent.

It's late afternoon by the time our adventure with Kevin around campus was over and the traveler's diarrhea had begun to afflict me. Not a too fun. But I toughed the rest of the day out. Our afternoon plans consisted of heading down to the "mall," which in this sense was this open air, paved thoroughfare close to the heart of Gaborone. It took about 20 minutes to walk there and on our way we passed this seemingly huge gathering of people located in this huge open field. Not thinking too much of it we continued walking. We definitely got a first hand account of how the city was. The sidewalks would occasionally yield to the overgrowth of flora nearby, great thorned bushes sprawled out across out paths. With thorns easily 2 inches long, we had to take caution. An occasional termite mound would crop up in someone's backyard, anywhere from 1-2 meters tall. Taxi's here are not the stereotypical yellow sedans of NYC. They consist of these small vans that have almost the same profile of a Volkswagen bus. They kept honking, we thought at us, but they honk right before they pull into these trapezoidal asphalt alcoves off the left side of the road (Drive on the left, remember.) where they pick up passengers. And boy these things are usually packed to the brim. The drivers mush make a killing in Pula (the currency). I wonder wonder how much gas is here? That's one thing that's different for sure, they don't display the price of gas on the signs for you to see on the road. I distinctly remember passing 4 children just walking along with us. Two didn't have shoes, made me reflect that their standard of living, though higher than a lot of African countries, is still pretty low. They ended up peeling off and we made it to the City Centre. It was incredible. Tons of people had set up tables and were selling their goods and services, ranging from legumes, fruits and vegetables to shoes and mobile phone repair. The cell phone fella's booth had tons of torn open mobile phones, and their little circuit boards and keypads all awry. Guess it was a testament to his ability. There were also businesses in the building surrounding the walkway. Most of our group were looking for Ethernet cables for our laptops, and we struck gold at the third place we looked, a store called "Japanese Electronics," run by you guessed it, a little Japanese woman. Oh, did we stick out in the crowd, as Americans we definitely attracted a lot of attention. We found our way into a grocery store and found some familiar and local brands. We are such tourists, we took pictures of some of the products that amused us. We found "Milk Chocolate Oreos." I didn't know Oreos came in any other flavors besides the usual and the"Uh-Oh" variety. After taking that picture, a worker, who I guess they have patrolling the aisles to prevent shoplifting, told us to stop taking pictures, unless you got the manager's permission. No biggie we stopped. After stocking up on some basic goods like water and 330 ml cans of soft drinks, we decided to head back to base. We met up with some kids who went to the Orange Mobile store for air time and SIM cards for their phones. I'm fine with not having service down here, but I guess others aren't. Then we took to the road that was almost a straight path back to UB. We passed the field with the huge crowds again. We could hear someone speaking in Setswana (the other official language besides English) to the crowd over loud speakers almost like he was mustering them for something. A young man, presumably a student at UB since he was walking with a binder and a textbook, was up ahead and we caught up to him and I asked him what was going on here. He replied that it was a strike and that the public servants gathered here want a pay raise. This strike turns out is really big news here, saw front page stories about it in the subsequent days. We get back to campus safely, along with the strike informant who was indeed a student. It was dark when we got back to the dorms and I turned in for the night soon after dinner. Rice and sausage again. It was this night that I took a picture of the moon. It appears "upside down" in the Southern Hemisphere. It's really something else.