wednesday and thursday

We spent Wednesday at home doing some research – we looked at companies who we thought might be willing to sponsor AAP and drafted letters to them (not going to send them until the website is up tho…). We found four companies, so hopefully at least one will agree to donate something. I’ve also found this website justgiving.com, which looks like it could be really good but it’s quite an extensive application process, so I don’t know whether it will work out.
On Thursday we went into the office and FINALLY FINISHED ALL THE NAMES!  It was a total of 588 names, finally done. Among them were such wonders as the kids called ‘one’ and ‘two,’ ‘lala,’ ‘doctor,’ ‘stompie,’ ‘pinky,’ ‘kebabo,’ ‘logic’ and many, many more. Masimanyana seems to be the equivalent of ‘smith’ or something. Anyway, it is done and dusted, hopefully now it’s in a spreadsheet they will be able to do stuff with it.
At about three Auntie June took us to the Trade Fair (the real one this time). She had planned to spend the afternoon with us but had to go to a meeting with Auntie Martha to ask a Chinese construction company to sponsor AAP (that thing they say about the Chinese investing heavily in Africa, they aren’t half right…). So first we went to pick up Auntie June’s nephew and niece, then she dropped us off. Her plan had been that the little twins could just wonder around the fair by themselves (they’re eight), but they seemed to want to hang out with us, which was cool. We went on that ride where the chairs on chains spin round and round, and bought a couple of cool things from the stalls, there was lots of really nice stuff, as well as lots of plastic tack. The kids went home earlier than us with June, and we spent aaaages waiting for a combi to get back home. So many people were waiting for the same number, you had to run when one stopped and fight to get in (literally pushing and shoving was the only way). The one we ended up in had a load of teenage boys in, who were all speaking in English with American accents the whole way, calling each other N***** the whole time like American rappers, trying to be well hard talking about prison (“you got nothing there but a bed and a bucket to shit in and if you’re bad they take away the bucket and you have to shit in the corner” – I assume and hope that’s not actually the case here, especially as things such as being homosexual and having oral sex are illegal). It was really weird. I felt like I’d suddenly been transported to a Snoop Dog video, until you looked and realised they were about 16. Kate got somewhat confused because she heard them talk about someone being ‘fisted’, but what they were actually talking about was how they’d seen an old woman get pushed accidently on the bum when she was trying to get onto another combi. Not being fisted. Thank god! We drove past the best private school and the sign outside it said “where ‘just passing’ is never good enough”. Christ. Sounds like hell.

Mmanoko

On the walk to the office I brought my amazing bubblesword and played with it with the tyre kids for a while. Even though the bubbles don’t really last they loved it, screaming every time and jumping up to try and pop them. It was really fun.
As Martha couldn’t find any other transport, Kabalano drove us all to Mmanoko (it’s much nearer than the other villages). Once again we were based around the clinic, which seemed to be better equipped than the last one (it even had condoms!). The nurse brought together all the older children/young adults (there were about 60-70 in all I’d say), many of whom had babies and toddlers, and we did our talk again. I think it went pretty well, at the end an old man who’d been listening in said that he approved of our talk but not where we cautioned about drinking too much alcohol (we just say be careful and look out for your mates so they don’t do anything stupid). After we helped line up the kids and tried to film/take pictures of them while they were being fed. I think there were around 200 people there, mostly children but also some mothers. One lady tried to get Kate to bring her baby back to England with her.
After all the food had gone we tried to do some interviews to film for the Australian people, but it was pretty difficult – firstly with the lack of English and secondly because it’s such a sensitive subject – are you HIV positive? How many children do you look after? Are they yours or are they orphans? How many of them have HIV? It feels really weird just blurting out questions like that to women you’ve never met before with a camera in their face.
One girl called Catherine came up and gave Martha a big hug. She looked about 10 but was 13. She thanked Martha for giving her the dress she was wearing. Martha talked to us and Catherine (who spoke surprisingly good English) did as well. Her dad is dead, and her, her mother, her brother, and two orphaned relatives all live in the same house, and all have HIV. Catherine has very serious asthma and has had to go to hospital a lot because she also has liver failure (“they told me my liver had expired”). Her little brother has similar problems. She was wearing one pair of plastic-like trainers, with one without any laces, which were her only shoes. She was very sweet and clever to speak such good English. But again, after having a conversation like that with a child, it’s difficult to say “right, can you just repeat all of that while we film you so we can show other strangers how terrible your situation is so they might give money?”

monday

We got up early and took a combi to the Main Mall to go to an opticians. Annoyingly when he looked in my eye the contact had gone (it had definitely still been there the night before as I could feel it and see it, maybe it fell out in the shower in the morning). The optician sternly warned me never to fall asleep with it in again, and we bought some eyedrops from the pharmacy. After having lunch we went to the office, and spent the afternoon typing in names, checking our emails (we’d left the computer at Martha’s so hadn’t had it over the weekend), and writing another letter to the land board about the proposed orphanage. The higher land board says we must get the sketch from the local land board of what they want to build on the site instead of the orphanage. Unfortunately such a sketch does not exist as of yet (despite them being certain three months ago that an orphanage could not be built there), and their designer cannot do one for a while. So we wrote a letter explaining what was going on. Some lovely Australian ladies are also trying to raise money for AAP and have requested that some videos be filmed of the children. So tomorrow (fingers crossed) we are going to Mmanoko and will be doing some filming, etc, as well as giving our talk and handing out food. Here’s hoping we can find vehicles!

weekend

We spent Saturday at home doing work and boring stuff like laundry etc. I found it really difficult to take one of my contact lenses out at night and stupidly thought that it would be ok to sleep in it and get it out in the morning. Woke up with a sore eye, made sorer by my many, many attempts to get the fucker out (it had dried out overnight and was stuck to my eye). We had to leave at around 11 because we were visiting someone so had to leave it in (all the opticians were shut as it was a Sunday).
So anyway, we took a combi to the bus station and then another to Odi, a village about half and hour’s drive away from Gaborone. We then had lunch with an old friend of my Mum’s and his wife. They are both absolutely lovely people and we had a nice afternoon chatting about political and cultural issues, far too many for me to go into much depth here. We got a lift back home during which their son went on about how boring Botswana was and wanted to talk about England (he’s 16 or 17). I asked him what he liked about England and he went on about the expensive cars he’d seen when he was there. Surely there’s more to the UK than that? He was also very surprised when I mentioned homeless people in England (“really, you get them there?”), and asked whether there were a lot of rappers there. I suppose it’s the same as the Australian and after an immensely frustrating and painful evening trying to get my lens out, went to sleep with a red bloody eye 

Djs

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We had quite a productive day at the office – finally finishing the writing of the website and sending it to our friend to start designing. I also found a Christian shopping site that donates part of whatever people buy to their charity of choice, so once the website is up we will register AAP with them. Kabalano came in the afternoon and we had fun chatting and showing him the music we like but which you don’t get over here.

When the working day was finished we went with Kabalano and Martha to shop for food, as we had been invited over to Martha’s for dinner. After some Jessicatime at their house, Kabi took us out to see his studio while dinner was being prepared. It was just in the back of one of his friend’s houses, but was very shiny and hi-tech, with proper soundproofing, CDJs and several monitors. There were four other guys there who DJ for the same company (they do R&B, HipHop and House, but it’s not really the same as House in the UK). Kabalano whether we could record some just random chat so that he could chop soundbites of our voiced to mix in his songs. Which is how we found ourselves in a little white room next to a massive microphone thingie having to say random things over and over again while trying not to fall off the chairs laughing. They assure us that once they’re done our voices will be unrecognisable and you won’t be able to understand what we’re saying (to be honest that was probably the case for a lot of it from the beginning). Who knows, it might become a massive hit ;)

Dinner was delicious, and after we watched a really good film with Kabi – In the Loop. Very funny, about British and American politics based on the Iraq war. Watch it. No-one thought to tell us that lee was waiting for us to finish so Kabi could drop us all off home though so we came out at midnight to find her tiredly waiting for us! Ooops (but then how could we have known?).

breakdown

After a day spent at home doing bits and bobs of work and doing Karaoke with Wethu in the evening, we went into the office on Thursday, expecting to go to Mmanoko. Unfortunately, the combi (which Lee and Peter had left in earlier) broke down when it was about 10km from Mmanoko (we hadn’t left yet because Martha was still searching for a vehicle). Therefore actually going to the village was abandoned as an idea as it was getting too late and there was no way of getting the food to the village, and poor Martha instead had to find a vehicle with which to tow the others back. It goes to show how much they need a new combi - this one is from 1986 and despite a nice mechanic fixing it for free, it just isn’t up to doing the work it needs to do. We went home early and decided to call it a day and chill with some films instead of stressing about it all.

Mmantshwebisi

We actually managed to get to the office slightly before 9am today. We found only Thebe there, and got to work printing out our talk, and drawing three sets of one hundred stick men. This was to demonstrate how many people were statistically likely to get AIDS if a) they just had unprotected sex (24 out of 100), b) they were circumcised (12 out of 100), and c) they abstained/used condoms properly (0 out of 100). Obviously it doesn’t work quite like that, but it’s a visual way of getting a message across, especially since (according to the internet) a lot of Christian charities have sent out the message that condoms are only 80% effective. That finished, we messed around on the internet until Martha arrived at 10am (as the charity’s combi is not up to driving the distances and especially the end bits of dirt roads, she is borrowing a friend’s vehicle, and had to wait for him to get to work and then go pick it up). So we set off with Martha and Doris.

After a much more agressive attempt by Doris to convert us (she didn’t seem to believe that someone could believe in God but not that Jesus was the son of God), we were off. After about two hours, (punctuated by a stop to buy juice and a stop to pee in the bush), we arrived (the village is called Mmantshwebisi, and is about half an hour on dirt roads further along than Serinane). It was less overwhelming than last time, as people were not already waiting for us. As we drove up Martha explained that a lot of the people in this village were people who had been resettled from the bush. This means that the government (still to this day apparently) sometimes finds San people living as close to their traditional way as is still possible in the bush, and forcibly makes them settle in the village. When I said that I didn’t see why this was necessary, the justifications were first that this way of life was primitive (again, ahhhhhhhhh), and secondly that the world had changed and that they needed access to schools and hospitals. Whether or not Martha is aware of it (and I’m sure she is not), the Bushmen were resettled in three big waves after the discovery of diamonds in their reserve. There were schools and clinics serving them when they were in the reserve, and since resettlement AIDS and alcoholism have become rife (before there was practically no HIV in the community because they were so remote). Although they won a court case in 2006 to go back to their ancestral land, the government has done all it can to prevent this by banning them from using the water supplies (as Botswana’s population and agriculture has increased the water table has gone down and the traditional methods of getting water are no longer reliable), banning them from hunting without a permit and not granting one single permit (despite the High Court ruling this illegal), and banning them from bringing their small herds of goats into the reserve. Well done, Gem Diamonds. For more information please go to http://www.survival-international.org/tribes/bushmen or http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/01/exiles-kalahari - there’s a petition on the first website.

We stopped next to the clinic, which this village is lucky enough to have. After greeting the other volunteers (who has come up in another bucky with food), we were introduced to Tom, a child with some kind of mental problem. He was wearing a grubby white suit jacket and pants and had a big smile. They asked us how old we thought he was and, mindful of the fact that kids here often look younger than they are due to malnutrition, I said 11. In fact he is 15. He stayed around the whole day, he was really cool.

We were introduced to the Nurse at the clinic, a lovely lady, obviously San herself. The clinic provides infant formula (important when mother’s have HIV), and various medicines for a nominal charge (about 20p, I assume they would give it to those who really had no money). There was a free condom dispenser on the outside wall which, unfortunately, was empty, due to ‘lack of supplies’. Useful. Really useful.

Martha came over and said we were going to see ‘two destitutes’, while the food was being cooked. The Nurse showed us the way. First we came to one homestead with a very small, very battered rondavel in it. I have stayed in traditional huts made from cow dung and mud with thatched roves before, and they can be perfectly pleasant, clean places with smooth painted walls and floors. This one had cracked, unpainted walls and a battered door held shut with a piece of string. A man was lying on the ground outside, dozing in the sun. Auntie Martha spoke to him for quite a long while, which obviously I couldn’t understand at all. His leg had a massive burn on it, and he was wearing a white wristband that said ‘zebras4life’ on it (later found out this is a football team sponsored by Orange). It reminded me of the Live8 wristbands. The day before a snake had come into his compound and he showed us how he had pinned it down and killed it. His girlfriend came up with three puppies, and Martha asked in English why he wasn’t married to her. He showed us inside his house. The floor was covered in drifts of sand. There was a few blankets spread on the floor, a stopped clock leaning against the wall, a pile of clothes next to the bed, and a candle stub. That’s all that was in the house.

As we walked away we asked Martha what she’d been talking about. He was epileptic and HIV positive. Once he had had a fit while he was cooking over a fire and fell into the fire. As he was alone he was unable to get out of the fire until his fitting stopped, hence the horrible burn on his leg. His girlfriend was also HIV positive, and he was not married to her because she was already married, with seven children. Her husband had abandoned her without telling her where he was going for a long time, and during this period she had started going out with this man. When her husband came back he was very angry and brought the case to the village Chief. She just said that, although she was happy to cook and care for her husband, she could not now abandon this man who had looked after her while her husband had gone away. So now she lives with her husband, but still cooks sometimes and sleeps with the boyfriend as well. Auntie Martha once again was dismayed by this primitive life and thought they should read the Bible. I can understand.

We went to another house, this one in better nick, although there was apparently no gate (the fence being made from sticks in the ground with three wires stretched across them at different heights which we squeezed through). There was an old couple sitting by the ashes of a fire. We sat down in chairs where the seat was made from wire and orange string woven around the metal frame. They had chickens and a cute kitten. Again I didn’t really understand what was being said, but he showed us his house again. This one was bigger and painted, made from bricks and cement. Inside there was a low bed, and a bench of sorts with clothes on. When he was shutting the door it either came off its hinges or it had no hinges to start with. Either way he had great difficulty in getting in to shut properly, I tried to help but wasn’t much use.

Martha says that none (by which I assume she means basically none) of the people in the village have jobs. To be honest, what jobs would there be? It’s a 40 min drive to the nearest tarred road for godsake, and a lot longer than that to the nearest town. There are a couple of very small tuck shops in the village and that’s it. Some people have a few animals, but it’s not like the land is fertile enough to grow your own vegetables without lots of water and effort. Basically the whole village relies on government handout of food, which the first man whose house we visited said was enough to feed him for two weeks out of four. No wonder people have lots of sex, and drink what they can get. It must be the most depressing existence imaginable.

When we got back it was time to give our talk. The teenagers between 13-16 were rounded up and we went a little way away from the clinic to a tree. We stood because there were plants, thorns and cowshit all over the floor. I’d guess there were about 30-40 of them, boys and girls. Quite a few girls had babies on their backs/hips, we’d been told many people had children very young here. We spoke about HIV, condoms, circumcision, etc. They laughed when we showed them our pictures. Once again we were translated but as a couple of them came and spoke to us afterwards, I’m pretty sure most of their English would have been good enough to understand what we were saying as well as what was translated. I’m sure they’d heard it all before but maybe we said it in a different way, or maybe repetition is the key. I felt useful anyway. At the end one girl asked us to elaborate more on the three different strains of HIV that we’d mentioned in the talk, so that was good, perhaps she’d been unaware of that before (basically there are three different types, some are more receptive to drugs than others, and different drugs work best with them. Therefore even if you and your partner already have HIV you should still use condoms because you could reinfect each other with different strains and make the situation even worse than it already is). It did feel a bit silly going on about condoms when there were none available at the clinic though. Still, we also talked about staying faithful to each other, not being pressured into sex and getting tested, so at least if they have the information they can make their own decisions.

Talk over, a couple of very crisp looking boys came up and asked what London was like. They hope to get a job in Gaborone when they finish school, and maybe go to England one day. One of them had earphones in. Seeing as there’s no electricity in the village, I can only assume they must be a fashion accessory rather than something that actually plays music.

When we got back the food was ready and people were queuing up (there were probably about 120 kids and about 70 adults). At first I was serving out soup (volunteers would go and collect three bowls off people and get them filled up then return them), after a while I did the running back and forth job. Me and Kate got quite annoyed with Peter and Lee because every time they saw a bowl for the second time, they went on and on about how people were cheating and getting more than one helping. Whereas we thought that maybe some were doing this, but many were also eating, washing the bowl, and giving it to someone else who didn’t have a bowl. Plus when you see poverty like that it’s hard to begrudge people a second bowl of rice, samp, soup and beef. Slightly stressed by the busyness and annoyed, we were probably a little too sharp within the context of the local tradition of respect for ones elders. Oh well, I think we were forgiven. Martha and Doris had to go back early because the guy needed his car back, but we said we were happy to stay to help and then go back in the back of the bucky.

Driving back in the back was actually quite fun, if windy. Martha and Doris had been kind enough to leave us their jackets so we wouldn’t get cold. On the long straight roads you can look back and it looks as if the road goes on forever.

officeday

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One of Kate’s friends has been amazing enough to offer to do us a website for adopt a person (and pay for it – he is amazing!), so we spent quite a lot of time researching stuff on the web trying to sort out writing the content for it. Also finalised a couple of letters (with various dramas involved therein). They are appealing to the land board because a Chief had granted them permission to use a piece of land to build and orphanage on (they don’t have the funding yet but getting the land is the first step), and the local land board refused it because ‘it’s earmarked for village expansion’. Surely an orphanage counts as this? Anyway, that refusal letter was dated in April, was received by AAP in May, specifies in the letter that any appeals must be made within four months, and has only now been actually written (possibly hasn’t been sent off yet but I’m not sure). Martha also had quite a blow because she had reapplied to First National Bank for funding (they previously donated a lot but then withdrew this at the start of the year), and had really been hoping that they would reconsider, but they still refused. This means that AAP cannot afford to send out volunteers to bring food to the villages (leaving dried food to last some people during the week) on a weekly basis as they used to. Now they can only bring food to the villages once a month (they still feed people in Gaborone every day though). We also designed and wrote up a talk for older teenagers about AIDS, talking more about condoms, how circumcision does not fully protect, etc. Tomorrow we are going to another village, further away than the last one we went to, and will give a talk to some 14-16 year olds there. Luckily they have a clinic at this village so we will be able to say go there to get free condoms, HIV tests and learn how to put a condom on properly (which saves us trying to show how to with a banana which might I think end up with me, Kate and the teenagers falling over from laughing too much).