4 Botswana Cultural Practices I Admire and Embrace

1.) Greet people ALWAYS- Greetings are huge in Botswana. They mean the world to people and are a significant part of any relationship. I also like how it is expected to greet people before you ask for help or ask them to do something for you. This does not always happen but it is considered impolite to not first recognize the individual as a person (and not a means to an end). On days when I am not super busy at work, I love to go and “check” all my coworkers and friends in the community just to let them know I care about them and recognize their importance in my life. Every time I travel to the capitol city where such extended greetings are not common, I always experience a bit of culture shock.

2.) Sing or dance whenever you want and wherever you want- Tswana culture is full of the celebration of life with its continual expression and rhythm. People are not afraid to randomly break into song or dance and love it when you do, too! Songs are used to open school assemblies, work meetings, casual community meetings and about everything else in between. And when you ask people what they enjoy doing they will often say dancing and singing. They will then proceed to break into song and dance for you.

3.)  Share your food- Food is also a huge part of building relationships with people. At first I found it difficult to openly share my food especially with the limited volunteer allowance we are given and the expense of food in our village of Tsabong where a bag of apples costs 29 pula and only costs 9 pula in villages closer to the capitol. However, once you see how it brings people together your heart is opened and it is a nice experience. There are times where you are offered food you don’t really want like gemsbok liver or cow intestine and there are times where it’s a delightful experience like honey sucked straight out of a freshly gathered honey comb. Recently on the bus home from the capitol, I witnessed my seatmate (a 25 year old woman) share her bag of chips with a snotty-nosed little girl standing next to us in the aisle. The girl was obviously starving and very sick with some sort of bad chest cold. The little girl couldn’t have been more than 4 and was traveling with her mother and two younger siblings. I can’t imagine trying to take three small children on a crowded 7 hour bus ride but the mother was helped by the women around her who took turns holding them.

4.) Hold or Clap someone’s hand when you talk-  Even grown men will be seen walking down the road holding hands and chatting it up. When I first arrived here, I found it awkward and weird but now I even do it to others and find it to be quite pleasant. When you are really excited to see people, you usually give them a hug and then hold their hand for a few seconds while you chat. It’s also very common for people to do what I would equate to a fist bump in the states during the middle of a conversation. You do it after you or they say something funny or after something you agree on. The hand slap is just a clap of the hands with a little thumb touch at the end. It’s hard to put into words but it’s like doing a secret handshake with your best friend growing up except you regularly do it in mid-conversation with everyone from your closest friends to complete strangers.

Marital Rape Still Legal in Botswana

One of the hardest things for me to face as a woman working on gender issues here in Botswana is the issue of marital rape. It is technically still legal for men to rape their spouses. Thanks to the Domestic Violence Act of 2008, women can now prosecute the husband’s rape as a civil lawsuit. However, the rape cannot be tried as a criminal lawsuit and is not recognized as a criminal offense.

Recently, I gave a sexual abuse training to doctors, nurses and administration at the primary hospital where I work. Afterwards, one of the doctors asked how one of his patients who is married and a mother of four with her husband can claim to have been “raped” by him. The doctor was dead serious when he asked, too. As politely as I could…I explained that women can be raped no matter what their relationship status and that it’s not his job to decide whether she was raped or not. I told him that based on my presentation, he now knows what he should do in this case which would be to examine the woman for signs of rape, do a rape kit, treat her, note her chart and then take her to social work for counseling. I further explained that it’s up to him to take those first steps and then it’s out of his hands. It is not his place to decide whether she was actually raped or not. That is for the social workers and police to decide after extensive counseling and investigation.  His response was simply shaking his head as if doing what he is required by law to do is too burdensome in this case. The Chief Medical Officer did have my back, though, and encouraged the other doctors to always follow through with a rape case even if it’s a married woman reporting rape.

I am not sure what else to say except that I hope this demonstrates what we are up against here with challenging such viewpoints on women’s rights when even doctors do not acknowledge or take the time to report cases of rape for married women. I hope to write another blog soon addressing marriage dynamics and why women are likely to experience marital rape.

Photo Gallery Update

We have been posting pictures of our time here in Botswana on our Facebook pages.

In case you have missed the new photos that we have posted, or are interested in checking out the older ones, we have posted links to all of our Facebook photo galleries in the sidebar on the right side of the screen our blog (michaelandhayley.blogspot.com). You are not required to have a Facebook account in order to view them, they are open to anyone to view.

August 2012 Update!

Here is a much delayed update!
The one-year mark of our service is coming up. There is a trend among
Peace Corps volunteers where around the one-year mark, your service
work really starts to pick up speed. This trend has proven to be true
with us as well. It really has taken about a year to integrate
ourselves into Botswana's culture and systems of business. Over the
last year our service has been comprised mostly of building
relationships and learning the do's and don't's of life here. But now
that we have reached this point, a lot of our initiatives and projects
are coming to fruition much quicker than we anticipated. This is
probably because the people that we work with have gotten to know us
to a degree that they are more comfortable trying new projects with us
and allow us to support them in leading their our projects as well.
When I first arrived at the school, most teachers were not quite sure
what I was there to do. When I sat in on classes to observe the
standard approach to teaching most teachers were initially defensive
because they assumed I was there to audit them and file reports about
their weaknesses to the Ministry of Education. But After building
deeper relationships with my fellow teachers, they started to see that
my primary focus was on setting up programs and initiatives for the
students' benefit. And after a year of small projects, teachers are
now starting to buy into my work here and show an interest in
bettering the school themselves. This is a really important step
because my school has a very very poor pass-rate (meaning barely 50%
of the students received passing grades at the end of the school last
Novemebr). The Ministry of Education has been putting a lot of
pressure on the schools of Botswana that had such low pass-rates, and
have especially been placing a lot of blame on the teachers for doing
a poor job of engaging their students. The teachers subsequently focus
the blame on the students who "don't want to learn". It is a difficult
issues to overcome, but I do believe the handful of teachers at my
school that are showing a real interest in helping the students
perform better will pave the way to higher scores this November
(although, change happens slowly and I don't expect a large
improvement this time around..maybe next year!).
Aside from work in our villages, Hayley and I have been traveling
between our home village and Gaborone (the Botswana capitol) to work
on various projects and committees. Hayley is part of a very active
Gender Committee for the Peace Corps which works on researching gender
issues in Botswana and providing information and training to Peace
Corps Volunteers in the hope that we will all be more educated and
qualified in ways to help address the gender issues here. Some of our
older volunteers liken Botswana current social structure to the US
life and culture of the 60's. Women's rights were still (and still
are) needing improvement, and the society was patriarchal in that most
positions of power were filled by men and minority opinions lacked
strong representation.
Hayley will also be traveling to Gaborone in order to help lead some
sessions at the Bots12 In-Service Training which is a training given
to recently arrived volunteers after they have spent 2-months at their
sites. And, the newest batch of volunteers (Bots13) will be arriving
next month so she and the rest of the gender committee will likely be
preparing some sessions for their arrival training as well.
As for me, my latest project outside of the village has been helping
to create a set of introductory Setswana language training videos. Two
other volunteers and I collaborated with the Peace Corps Botswana
administration to put together a series of language videos that could
better prepare incoming volunteers for learning the Setswana language.
Because Setswana is a Bantu language it is complete foreign to more
English speakers due to the fact that we come from a heritage of
Romantic languages that are derived from their Latin/Roman language
heritage. Along with the challenge of learning a Bantu based language
like Setswana, the English language is widely spoken in Botswana which
makes learning Setswana even harder because you are never forced to
learn it. It is very easy to speak English with people at school,
work, and even the grocery store. So, many volunteers, such as myself,
don't progress very far beyond basic sentences and greetings. These
reasons help to explain why Peace Corps Botswana has such low scores
when it comes to language uptake by its volunteers. Our language
trainings pale in comparison to the language trainings of other
countries in which learning the local language is ESSENTIAL for
survival and success. But, it is the hope of the Peace Corps Botswana
administration that these language videos will give incoming
volunteers a leg up on Setswana before moving here so that further
language learning will be much easier for them in the future! You can
check out our finished product at this address:
www.learningsetswana.wordpress.com
I am currently working with a group of dedicated students on a
twice-daily study group. We meet every morning before school and every
afternoon after school in order to study various subjects in
preparation for their exit exams this November. Students graduate from
Junior Secondary Schools like mine, and move on to Senior Secondary
Schools before going on to college. Basically, my school is the
equivalent of 8th-10th grade and in order to go on to 11th and 12th
grade students must receive a passing grade when all of their final
exam scores have been averaged together. Keep in mind that the
Botswana grade scale is shifted about 10 points down from the standard
scale used in American schools. So, 80-100 is an A. 70-80 is a B. etc.
Unfortunately, for students in the Kgalgadi region of Botswana there
is only one Senior Secondary School in the region for them to go to
and this school is usually described as more of a refugee camp than an
actual school! The living and learning conditions at the school are
very poor and the Peace Corps Volunteers that work at the school and
in its surrounding village are planning some monumental camps and
projects that just might be able to help students and teachers at the
school improve things a little bit. Most of the volunteers in our
region are planning to go to the school early next year for a GLOW
camp (Girls Leading Our World) in which we will provide a number of
girls with further education about their rights, health, and education
in the hope that they will acquire the tools and confidence necessary
to help Botswana move towards a less patriarchal society and into a
more egalitarian one.
I am also working on starting a school newsletter. My hope is to have
the letter at least be a monthly production at the school written and
edited by teachers and students. It will mostly likely only be a one
page, two-sided publication but I think that it will be a great way to
increase people's awareness of the goings-on at the school. Currently,
I hope to have each newsletter include: A message from the School
Head, an article by a student, an article by a teacher or other
professional, and also some bits of life skills/health tips, and
lastly a section that promotes any events at the school or community
that would have a positive influence on the students and teachers at
the school. This project is currently in the 'buy-in' phrase in which
I am working with the head of the school's language department to get
one English teacher interested in the project so that I can work with
her/him to put together a team of students to create the newsletter.
Over all, we are loving our experience here in Botswana. The
relationships that we are building with co-workers, community members,
and students make it very easy to move through frustrating
circumstances and remain inspired to help our new friends. Even with
frustrating systems of protocol that impede our efforts to change
things, we are able to see that we are having a positive influence on
the lives of the people we befriend and work with here in Botswana.
But more importantly, we are seeing myriad ways in which the people we
befriend and work with have a positive influence on us as well.

Long Awaited Videos

Hi All,

There has not been much to report on about our lives in Botswana
lately, so I am posting a link to another volunteers blog post which
contains a few videos from our Pre-Service Training (PST).
These videos were made to catalog out training experience, so they
date back to September - November 2011.

http://iambeckyroar.weebly.com/1/post/2012/07/pst-video.html


- Michael

it's time for Botswana updates!

Greetings All!

It's been a long while since our last blog update, and in the absence
most of our adventures have been pretty standard for our life here. We
under went about a week without running water which we made it through
by using the slew of 2-liter bottles that we had filled with spare
water. And, to make it less intense there were a few nights when the
water would come on as a trickle sometimes in the middle of the night
so we were able to replenish our bottles.

Hayley has been doing some travel back and forth between our home
village and the capitol for various committees that she is serving on.
She will also be traveling to a "language week " event in the near
future. A "language week" is an event in which a volunteer invites
five other volunteers over to their home for a week. Once the five
volunteers all confirm their plans to attend, the Peace Corps arranges
to have a language teacher sent over to their house for the week where
the teacher will give lessons for a few hours each day and then they
are all able to hang out and have fun in the afternoons and evenings.
So, its five days of practicing the language with an experienced
teacher and hanging out with some of your fellow volunteer friends. It
will also be another bit of proof that Hayley is both more capable and
also dedicated to learning the Setswana language than I am. Life in
Botswana does require some use of Setswana, but fluency is very very
hard to come by because the Peace Corps lack of focus on teaching it
to volunteers during training. The Wide use of English in Botswana
also makes it very easy to carry on life in a safe and effective way
without much knowledge of Setswana.

Another upcoming event that we are working on is an event hosting the
US Ambassador to Botswana, Michelle Gavin. The Ambassador is coming to
our village next month in order to meet us and see our region of the
country. She is interested in learning more about the needs of youth
in the Kgalagadi district (the Kgalagadi is known as the Kalahari in
US-English). During her visit, she has asked the volunteers from
around our district to host an event with the youth of the Kgalagadi
in order to have some fun with them teaching them about HIV&AIDS and
also learning more about their needs so that the US is better able to
do what it can to help.

I have become good friends with the IT guy at the school I am assigned
to, and we have plans to install a long-range wireless router in the
coming weeks. This router will help to allow computers in the
buildings and offices that are on the far edges of the school grounds.
Most of the computers are consolidated to the administration building
and computer lab, but a few other departments could be improved by
giving them network access as well because it would make it easier for
teachers to have more open access to the internet which might go on to
improve their work as teachers through the integration of wireless
internet access.

An interesting phenomenon regarding the internet in Africa is that
regular access to the internet has only become a more common part of
life for most African countries in the last decade. And, this means
that most African countries have made the jump from highly limited
internet exposure to wireless/cellular internet access. Many countries
have skipped the time consuming and expensive process of setting up
wired cable connections across their countries (Botswana is included
in this), and instead most citizens of African countries either access
the internet through their cell phones or through computers that have
some sort of satellite based connection. The increased use of cellular
based internet has led to a boom in mobile apps and internet browsing.
There is a lot of speculation about what this means for the Internet
in Africa in general, but overall there is an expectation that many
people in countries like Botswana will do most of their internet using
through cell phone apps and will never be forced to learn the ins and
outs of computers and typing. What's most exciting about all of this
is that the potential for connecting the developing countries of
Africa to the global internet-based exchange of information is already
becoming a reality with relatively little extra effort on the part of
big telecommunication companies.

If it sounds weird to think that many people in Botswana will never
have to work with computers to use the internet, just look at the
common practices of today's teenagers in the US. Many have grown up in
a world of iPhone apps and Android phones that are just as powerful as
the standard home computer and they are allowed a much more private
and personalized experience of the internet and its riches. I am
excited to see what new developments will have come around in the US
after we complete our Peace Corps service and return home. The
potential for new technologies that might further help the world
provide aid the developing countries is great, and I can't wait to see
what's next!

All of these thoughts are based off of a blog article titled: How
Africa is embracing "the cloud" on its own terms

That's enough technology ranting for now. Our cat Nola is keeping up a
regular schedule of napping most of the day and having freak out
sessions in the evenings. She has some trouble getting much traction
on the linoleum tiles of our house but she is very skilled at showing
off her parkour skills by running around our living room area without
touching the ground in her own version of the beloved childhood game
"The Floor is Lava"!

The schools are on a tri-mester system which means they have three
terms a year with varied amount of break time in between. Term two
ends at the end of this week and the schools will be closed down for a
little more than a month. I plan to spend a good bit of that time
trying to keep in contact with responsible local students that will be
in the area and can help me make sure we have some students that
remember to come to the Ambassador event we are putting on next month.
I will also do what I can to continue helping a local organization
called the Center for Excellence whose local leader needs help
learning about how to use a computer. The Center for Excellence is an
organization that offers support to people both infected and/or
influenced by HIV. They work to provide chickens and other goods to
people that come to them for help.
That's it for now. We hope to share more in the near future!

- Michael

Overview of our Experiences Thus Far

I was recently asked by a friend to write a little about our work
here, so I thought I would share the short overview of our work and
experience with the Peace Corps in Botswana.

In Botswana, everything that the Peace Corps is involved in is
centered around addressing the HIV epidemic that has hit the country
so hard.

(there are many theories about why the southern africa has been the
worst hit by far, and currently the best explanation centers around
the cultural practice of having multiple concurrent sexual partners.
HIV is most communicable during the first few months of infection. In
Botswana and other regions of Southern Africa it is a common practice
for people to have multiple sexual partners at the same time and
because this means the disease has a "super-highway" for transmission
because as soon as someone is infected they unknowingly pass the
infection on to all of their other partners. To make matters worse,
the disease is often not detectable during the first few months of
infection. Thus, during its most communicable time period the disease
is also difficult to test for and with people sleeping with multiple
partners it has spread fast, or so the theory goes).

Even though the prevalence of HIV is extremely high in the country, it
is still a very taboo subject and although students have rote
memorization of all of the basic information regarding the disease,
people are still reluctant to ever acknowledge actual infections and
deaths that are related to HIV. Botswana has the 2nd highest
prevalence of HIV infection in the world. There are three categories
of volunteers: NGO, Health, and Education. I fall under the education
category and have been assigned to work at Tsabong Junior Secondary
School (students are the equivalent of 7th-9th grade aged) where my
primary assignment is to work with the guidance and counseling staff
to improve the students education in life skills which covers just
about everything that falls under "good to know in order to live a
happier healthier life". I teach a few classes each week with
different classes of students where I try to incorporate games and
activities while teaching them about nutrition, relationships,
contraceptives, personal finance, etc.

The country is on its way to falling under the "first-world"
classification and so people here have access to running water, paved
roads in most towns, satellite television, and internet which has
helped them begin to connect with the global community more and more.
The students are all very interested in American media (movies, TV,
music) and we have had a lot of fun talking about things from back
home. A secondary project that I am doing at the school is to improve
the students' computer awareness. The school I am at is lucky enough
to have a sort-of-up-to-date computer lab with limited access to the
internet. So the computers work well for teaching computer basics but
are not very functional when it comes to teaching the students to do
more than send emails and setup facebook pages (which most already
have figured out anyways). I focus on teaching typing skills and using
the Microsoft office programs.

Those are some basics regarding my work here. Hayley's job is involved
in using her Masters of Public Health degree experience to work with
the district health management team to plan and coordinate initiatives
and events. She is currently attempting to compose a questionnaire
that will yield statistically valid data for further analysis and
planning with regards to community health needs.

Our daily life consists of walking to most places that we need to go
around our village which is home to 7000 residents and is about 5
square miles in size. Most volunteers live in villages that do not
have grocery stores so they take weekly or bi-weekly trips to the
nearest large village to do their shopping. Our village, however, does
have its own store and we walk about 30min to get there and then 30min
back with our groceries. It has been an adjustment to be car-less but
we have found that life in Lawrence, KS had helped prepare us for some
of the walking because we used to walk to campus and Mass St a lot. We
had considered getting bikes, but have scrapped the idea for now
because there is no law enforcement of the speed limits on the roads
here and the legal blood alcohol level for driving is 3x that of the
US standard and it is common for drivers to be drinking and or clearly
drunk while operating their vehicle, especially during the after work
hours and at night. But Botswana has a basic public transportation
system that is well regulated and allows us to travel around the
country when we need to.

Our free time is mostly spent relaxing at home, especially in the
summers when it is around 90 degrees both day and night and we just
want to stay out of the sun. But now that winter is starting it is in
the 40's and 50's in the mornings and at nights while the days are
usually in the 70's. We hear that it will eventually be 40 degrees all
the time, and without any airconditioning/heating in the houses here
we are prepared to spend most of our time in a sub-zero rated Marmot
sleeping bags!

We watch a lot of movies and TV's shows on our computer and also read
books on our Kindles. While we have only made it through 6 or so books
each, we can proudly claim to have watched over 100 movies and every
more TV show episodes! I think that clearly indicates where our
priorities lie... :)

I hope that this information has helped to answer a few of your
curiosities about our lives and work here. I am happy to answer other
questions anytime!