The cows did not drive us into another house. We had been looking forward to this possibility for the past 5 months, and it has finally come to pass. Our "new" house has finally been vacated, and we are in the process of moving. As with everything else in Botswana, there is a complicated process that no matter how hard you try, you cannot circumvent.
We wanted to have the house painted on the inside and decided that the quickest way was to do it ourselves. Nnooooo. First off, we forgot how hard it was to get the materials cross town without a car. Within an hour and with the assistance of two taxis, we were able to return to the house to begin clean up, spackling and wall prep. Five hours later, we had prepped all the walls but only got three walls of one room completed before we needed to leave for language training and decided to pay a painter to come in and do the work.
What we didn't count on is that our partial painting job kept the inspector from inspecting the house and passing it for occupancy. Therefore we have to wait until the painting is completed to get the inspection done, in order that we can then get some "casual labor" to move our furniture and eventually move in.
We got the name of a reliable Zimbabwean painter from our friend Susan, and he started Wednesday. Within 48 hours, the weather made a marked shift from 95° to a high of 62 with drenching rain. This delayed the painter from finishing the job, which prevented the cascade of necessary maneuvers from happening this week.
Nonetheless, we are delighted that soon will we will be able to move into our new place, shown below. It has two bedrooms, a larger living room, a slightly larger kitchen, a separate bathtub room and toilet as well as a front porch, a roof top solar powered hot water heater and a private yard, which is mostly surrounded by hedges. It is just four houses down the row from our current house, but all of the traffic goes in the other direction, so it is a much quieter location. We are thrilled.
The New House
On to the Orient
My boss, the District AIDS Coordinator received a wonderful invitation to travel for two weeks to China and give a presentation at an HIV conference in Sichuan province. I was delighted for her since she has only once before been out of Botswana to South Africa. In typical African fashion, they invited her less than two and as half weeks before she was to depart. She ran around frenetically trying to obtain the various medical checkups, paperwork, visas, and other necessary items, while simultaneously reveling in her good fortune. Also in African tradition, three days before she was supposed to leave, she got a phone call saying she was not going, because the Chinese sponsoring agency had lowered the age of conference participants from 55 to 50. Since she is 52, she was now not going and was crestfallen (Don't try to read any logic into this decision, I don't think there was any).
After several hours of frustrating negotiations with the Ministry of Local Government and the Chinese Embassy, she finally did get the go-ahead to depart today. We are so excited for her and pleased that the bureaucracy did not get in the way. She asked me to create a presentation for her in PowerPoint that she could give it at the conference, which I finished off yesterday. In addition to a description of our HIV treatment and prevention program here, I included multiple pictures of Botswana, its scenery and animal life.
Language Lessons.
Kopo and I traveled up Mochudi, two hours from here over last weekend to meet with six other Peace Corps volunteers for an intensive language week in Setswana. Since both of us had important meetings back here in Ramotswa, we could only stay for several days, not the whole week. It was nice to get a brush up on the language and spend some time with our fellow volunteers. I continue to be impressed with what a great group of people they are.
The down side, as far as I'm concerned, is that this confirmed that neither Kopo nor I are going to be fluent in Setswana. It could be done, but it takes continual practice and usage. We are both just too tired at the end of the day to spend time with a tutor or studying language books. In both Kopo’s school and my office, our colleagues are so competent in English, that there is no incentive to speak Setswana and with all the important things going on at both sites, it would actually slow down the whole work day to try to use it. I have to say that I am somewhat disappointed in myself for not reaching one of the goals I had set before arriving, but you can't do everything.
Death by Electricity
If I end up deceased in Africa (which I don't think is too likely), it will not be from something exotic like snakebite or a rhino-ramming. It is going to be death by electricity, and not in the usual way. I think the likelihood of dropping a radio into the bathtub is fairly remote and the electricity is inconsistent enough to make electrocution almost impossible. Since I have sworn of buggery with any African critters, getting “the chair” is also unlikely. What it will say on my death certificate is that I am the first person in Botswana to die of “acute and chronic electrical frustration.”
Electricity in Botswana is a frail, paradoxical, intricately complicated version of electricity in the United States. Don't think that we are not happy to have it, because we have talked with volunteers who don't have it and their lives are much different. Reading by candlelight is just not my cup of tea.
There are three different plugs in common usage here in Botswana -- the big fat round three pronged ones, the flat triangular three pronged ones, and a small two-pronged type. I have had the audacity to introduce a fourth type -- the old flat United States two-pronged type (Don't even get me started on the further complexity brought on by trying to use the United States three prong grounded version).
There is no rhyme or reason as to why any given appliance will have a particular plug. Needless to say none of these four types fit into one another without a big bulky adapter. Since each plug type has a male end (for plugging in) and a female end (to be plugged into), the number of needed adapters is almost infinite. The useful life of an adapter before it dies is approximately 5.2 days.
Rooms in a house have at most one outlet, which is positioned as far as possible from the place where you are likely to use an electrical appliance. Therefore, extension cords are a hot commodity, but they only come in two sizes -- 18 inches and the length of the Nile.
Buying and using an electrical appliance like a fan or a coffee pot, and actually getting it to work is somewhat complicated.
1. You buy the appliance, take it home and unpack the parts from the box—appliances never seem to come assembled.
2. You try to read the directions printed on a piece of paper the size of a cigarette pack, written in Chinese with a diagram requiring a magnifying glass.
3. You rapidly discover that not all the parts/screws/nuts/clips are appropriately included.
4. You go back to the store to get another replacement appliance and find that they no longer stock this appliance and that you bought the only one in the entire store.
5. You go to the hardware store to buy said screws/nuts/clips and find they do not have any of the correct sizes.
6. You go home and resign yourself to only partially assembling the appliance using a large dose of creativity and lots of duct tape
7. After applying the plug-in process described below, you use the item 1 to 8 times until it breaks
8. You hunt for a place to discard the now-useless appliance carcass. If the item is large (a refrigerator or a stove), you leave the useless carcass exactly where it is in the room, buy another similar appliance and place it next to the old one.
9. If the broken item is portable, you remove the carcass to the yard and deposit it in a semi-inconspicuous spot alongside your neighbor’s non-running vehicle, which now has no tires and is propped up on cement blocks
10. If you do buy a new appliance, you repeat steps 1 to 6 with new, but similarly unintelligible directions, and/or consider the possibility of doing without this particular appliance altogether.
The plug-in procedure:
Just "plugging in" and turning on an appliance is in itself a multistage operation requiring skill and patience:
First, you find out if the plug type matches the wall outlet (Odds are 3 to 1 that it will not).
When it doesn’t, you search for the appropriate adapter. If you are fortunate enough to have the appropriate adapter in the house, it will mean disconnecting the electrical set up that you carefully made yesterday for a second appliance, thereby rendering the second appliance temporarily nonfunctional.
If you do not have an adapter, you walk to the store and try to buy one. You are told that they ran out of that adapter, but they might be getting more "next week"-- which means that you might obtain said adapter in February (see a previous blog post on "Botswana time.").
Once an adapter is obtained and an extension cord is connected, you turn on the appliance to discover that the weight of the adapter plus the cord causes the cord/adapter assembly to fall out of the socket. Therefore as shown below, you prop up the adapter with bricks, rocks, books, or previously broken, appliances that you mistakenly thought were totally useless.
You discover that even when pushed in, plugs rarely make continuous electrical contact. Jiggling, jockeying, pushing, and pulling is necessary to get a connection, which immediately stops the instant you take your hand away. Despite your best efforts and Herculean patience to get electricity flowing, you find that walking, talking, sneezing or breathing within 8 feet of the outlet causes the plug to move slightly and the electricity to stop.
American appliances run on 110 V. African electricity is 220 V. The two do not mix without a voltage converter. I discovered this when I plugged an American clock into an African outlet, instantly saw a plume of smoke, and now use the clock as a paperweight which permanently says that it is 6:13 PM. The need for a converter requires that if you want to use an American appliance, you need an American plug adapter plugged into a voltage converter, which is plugged into the appropriate African plug adapter, which is plugged into the wall socket.
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Wires from these various jerry-rigged connections create a new menace. The odds are very high that you will trip over the wires, causing one of three things to happen:
-- You pull the appliance off the table, causing it to fall and break.
-- You break the cord, the adapter, and/or the plug
-- You fall flat on your face.
Trying to have more than one appliance plugged into one wall socket (an absolute necessity in an African house) results in a rat’s nest of cords (see below).
No matter how carefully you try to separate the cords, overnight they become tied in knots. I think they are breeding.
Just when you have solved all of these problems, actually have the appliances working, have avoided tripping over the wires and sit down to admire your handiwork, the electricity goes out in your entire block and you try to remember where you left the candles.
The Land Line Telephone
Telephones are a special brand of electrical agony. Voice quality is good and the ability to phone anywhere in the country is a bonus, as long as you don't have to call a cell phone. I learned rapidly that there are certain land lines that can only call other land lines. Despite the fact that virtually everybody in Botswana has a cell phone, it takes a special land line to call a cell phone. In our office this then creates a series of little signs attached to the various phones --"will call a cell phone," will call a land line only", “will call extension phones in the Ramotswa government offices only, but will not make outside calls."
This is only a minor inconvenience, however, and the real problem is what happens between the wall phone jack and the phone itself. In a small office, the phone lines invariably cross where you walk. At least twice a day you trip over the phone line pulling the phone off the desk or more likely snapping the little plastic spring connector that keeps the phone line attached to the back of the phone. Thus we have multiple phones where the plastic connector only works if you use one hand to keep the connector pushed into the back of the phone. Simultaneously holding the handset, dialing and pushing the little plastic Doohickey into the back of the phone works well if you have three arms. Otherwise, it results in the plastic doohickey pulling out of the back of the phone at a crucial time in the call. The ensuing disconnection necessitates either you or the other person to call back. Taking a phone message for someone is interesting, although I have solved the problem by learning to grasp a pencil between my toes and writing with my feet.
I have speculated that the connection wires from the wall phone jack to the phone itself are actually alive, since they seem to have the ability to wind themselves around furniture legs and chair pedestals during the night. This process occurs every night without your knowledge or consent. Most Africans do not go to the trouble of trying to unwind the cords since they will only creep, crawl and twist again by morning. Rather than unwinding the cord, some natives have decided to leave their phone on the floor. This would not be a half bad solution, were it not that the African style curled cord from the phone base to the handset appears to have been made from an industrial strength steel spring, which convolutedly coils into a small ball. This occurs to a point that you cannot pick up the handset without leaning your head down to within 6 inches of the phone base. Combined, these two factors require that when the phone in this picture rings, you have to get down on your hands and knees and put your head under the chair to speak into the handset.
It makes no difference though, because I usually can't understand the Setswana over the phone anyway.
I didn't intend to get so detailed about this, but I did want to cover the eventuality that if I am ever found unconscious on the floor having tripped over an electrical cord and having died from asphyxia caused by the curly phone cord, I wanted to make sure that Kopo was not a suspect.
R.I.P.
Kgosi
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