Maun

We had our first real "vacation" away from the work site this week. The two national holidays along with one day of "leave time" from the Peace Corps made for a five-day trip up to Maun. Maun is the principal city in the northwest part of Botswana, and is also one of the two principal jumping off points for safaris, river trips, and game watches in the Okavango Delta. As such, it is busy, relatively westernized and much more populated by Europeans of all nationalities and a large group of Afrikaner’s (Dutch/German descendants who are sometimes referred to as Boers or farmers).

For the price of 160 pula ($22) we got the joy of a purported 10 hour bus ride. By leaving Ramotswa at 4:45 AM for a ride to the Gaborone bus station, we got there early enough to get a seat. The aisles were packed to the gills with standing room passengers, many of whom were standing at least 4 to 5 hours before they could sit down. A couple of rest stops and nine hot sweaty hours later we thought we had the end in sight---- but not so fast Bozo
We pulled off the main road into a small village and emptied out all the passengers. The following picture tells some of the story:




I never did find out exactly what was going on, as the only word I could make out from the bus driver was "compressor." Regardless of the cause, when this occurs nine hours into a 10 hour bus ride and 80 km from your destination, it is not a good sign. As can be seen, there were many consultants trying to help the bus driver who was under the bus. After canvassing the local townsfolk, the bus driver borrowed a screwdriver and one of the passengers fashioned a crude 3 inch diameter disk out of Shake-Shake carton which he had fished out of a trash can. (Shake-Shake is the local beer and derives its name from the fact that it has sediment in the bottom and needs to be shaken up to drink. It comes in a waxed carton like an American milk carton. ) A gasket like flange was screwed back on and the problem was deemed fixed. Don't ask me how it is possible that a problem that could bring down a whole bus is repaired by a discarded Shake-Shake box, but it was and we rolled into Maun 1 1/2 hours late--sweaty and tired but delighted to have arrived.

A number of other Peace Corps volunteers had made the trek to Maun from various towns in Botswana as well. Some were camping at the "Backpackers Lodge," an outpost on the river including Jeff Auser, Glenn Smallwood, Richard Walker, Cherry Washington, Laura Nissley, and Lena Muldavin. Others like us were staying at the house of another Peace Corps volunteer Roberta Troxell. Roberta is a nurse midwife from Illinois and proved to be an excellent hostess for the five of us who were staying with her, which included Karen Auble, Alison White and Heidi Jansen.
The first night, we let the Lodge staff do the cooking and they put out something resembling a very passable cheeseburger. We met several of the other Europeans were staying at the lodge including Gordon MacDougall, an 18-year-old from Glasgow Scotland, who was doing his "gap year" as a volunteer with out of school youth. We also met two Germans who sported full beards and who were in the midst of doing a Che Guevara-- type motorcycle trip beginning in Namibia and heading all the way to Germany.
The next night with Roberta at the helm and the rest of us as sous chefs, we put out a real spread of vegetarian lasagna, mixed salad with homegrown lettuce, garlic bread, and topped off by some vanilla ice cream with rhubarb sauce -- a veritable feast.
Over the course of two days we played several Scrabble games, took a sunset boat ride down the river and walked for two hours in a public game Sanctuary. Neither of these latter two activities resulted in much big game viewing except for a few zebra, several baboons, an Impala and a few comely warthogs as shown below.













As is often the case when Peace Corps volunteers get together, the best part of the experience is getting to know each other better and sharing great conversation, complaints, stories and rumors. It is hard to conceive of finding 60 people of all ages and backgrounds who had never known each other prior to April of this year, but who are so interesting, smart, talented and resourceful.
We had hoped for an overland 4x4 safari on Friday, but were foiled by the Botswana bureaucracy. The federal office where we had to buying the park entrance ticket was closed for the holiday, so we postponed until Saturday. The ultimate outcome was foretold in a tremendous thunder and lightning show Friday evening which led to a steady downpour beginning in the middle of the night and continuing well into the morning. After some hasty consultation at 4:30 in the morning, Kopo and I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and we abandoned the safari in favor of a 6 AM bus back to Gaborone. We figured that a 12 hour ride around the bush while being soggy, cold and wet was the best we could expect, even if we saw some good animals. This would also allow us to get home with a day to regroup before the work week started. We will have time for several other game watches over the next several months as part of some business trips that we will need to make, one to Khutse in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in early November and a second one to Kasane for World AIDS Day in early December. And these will be in addition to our previous great viewing at Kruger Park when in South Africa several years ago.

I will have my first crack at running the office alone this week as both my District AIDS Coordinator and Monitoring and Evaluation officer are attending a World Bank workshop all week. I’m looking forward to getting several projects started in their absence. I might even get the printing presses cranked up and get out another issue of the Kalahari Khronicle for next week's post.
I'll close this post with a picture of one of the beautiful African sunsets which we took from our boat ride.

Kgosi