Jo'berg & Gaborone

Madeline at the Main Mall - Gaborone

A little about Botswana. It is a landlocked country just north of South Africa and shares borders with Namibia to the west and Zimbabwe to the east and is separated from Zambia to the north by a narrow panhandle extending from Namibia called the Caprivi Strip.

It was formerly Bechuanaland, a British “protectorate.” It received independence in 1966, at a time when South Africa was suffering under apartheid and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was moving toward civil war. Botswana, first under the wise stewardship President Sereste Khama, and then under the leadership of the Presidents that followed him, has steered a moderate, progressive, democratic course. Diamonds are the main export and the main source of revenue for the government. The government has managed this resource well, and has invested the diamond revenues in infrastructure, health, and education.

Botswana has undergone tremendous change since independence as it has modernized and educated its youth. There has been an exodus from the rural areas of the country to the cities, and it has become one of the world’s most urbanized societies with over half of its population living in urban areas.

The problem that ruins what would be an otherwise promising outlook is AIDS. Sub-Saharan Africa contains 11% of the world’s population, but more than 70% of the world’s HIV cases. Botswana has not escaped this epidemic. The current population of the entire country is about one and a half million and it is dropping due to this scourge. The birth rate has dropped from 3.5% to 2.3% in the last ten years. Life expectancy at the time of independence was 49 and moved up to 70 by the mid-1990’s due to the improvements made throughout the country. Had that trend continued, it would now be around 74, the same as the U.S. Instead, it is 33, and is expected to drop to 27 by 2010. The government is fighting this battle with education, promotion of condom use, and free antiretroviral drug therapy to all HIV positive citizens.

Americans are, for the most part, unaware of Botswana. Most exposure to Botswana here has been through the somewhat inaccurate movie, “The Gods Must Be Crazy” and the excellent “Number One Lady’s Detective Agency” series of books by Alexander McCall Smith.

We arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa (referred to locally as Jo’berg) at 7:30 in the morning on this day, then, after a four hour layover, flew for an hour and a half to reach the airport at Gaborone (pronounced “Hob’ o ron eh” in Setwana, but referred to by the locals as “Gabs”) a little after noon.

Like much of Gaborone, the airport is a combination of first and third worlds. Passengers deplane on the edge of the runway and then walk through the tropical heat to the small chaotic terminal. But a gleaming new terminal is under construction next to the old one.

Madeline was not waiting for us, but did arrive in a taxi after we'd been waiting a short time--she had been at a friend's and had lost track of the time. She asked us if she looked different. She looked like the same old Madeline to me--I imagine that she feels like she looks different after all the experiences she's been through the past few months.

We tossed our luggage into the taxi and rode to the Lolwapa “Not the Ritz” Lodge, a small hotel across from the University where Madeline had reserved a room for us. The Lolwapa has a friendly welcoming staff, six rooms in varying states of repair, an empty swimming pool used for drying laundry & a fair number of cockroaches. Our room had interesting cracks in the bathroom tile, half a soap dish in the shower, and dirty shoe prints on the wall & ceiling—somebody using their shoe to kill roaches would be my best explanation for that phenomenon. There was a TV, which was capable of picking up only the channel that the lobby TV was tuned to. There was no shower curtain, but there was a mop so you could mop all the water off the floor when you were done with your shower. All of this for less than 30 bucks a night. I have stayed in worse.

My immediate impression of Gabs was that it is growing and modernizing at a rapid pace. In some ways it is a third-world city—roads in bad repair, unkempt vegetation and litter along some of the main roads, large numbers of people walking along the sides of the road in the middle of the day—perhaps an indicator of high unemployment (estimated to be around 40%), while goats, chickens, and cows wander down the road on the outskirts. On the other hand, there are many good roads, many nice buildings, and an amazing number of buildings under construction. And everybody I saw was clean, and neatly, even fashionably dressed. While the infrastructure for landline phones does not exist on a large scale, it seems that everybody has a cell phone.

After checking into the hotel, we walked to the Main Mall, an outdoor shopping area that is normally filled with outdoor kiosks selling every kind of goods imaginable. Since this was Sunday, however, it was mostly deserted. We did find a small grocery store open where Madeline bought a meat pie, since she hadn’t had lunch. We found a bench on the mall where Madeline could eat.

As we sat there, an eight or nine year old kid came along to beg. He was kneeling before us with his hands extended begging for money. I had forgotten about third world beggars. We were about to get up and move on to get rid of him when a teenager came along and chased him off. He seemed concerned about the impression we foreigners were getting of his country. "Don't give him any money," he told us. "He'll just use it to buy glue for sniffing."

Something I noticed at the Main Mall and elsewhere: Tiny, fast moving ants seemed to be swarming practically everywhere. If you would stop walking and stand still in the midst of one of these swarms of ants, they would immediately crawl onto your shoes, up your legs, and start biting you. When I mentioned this to Madeline, she shrugged and said, “Oh yeah, the ants. They’re everywhere.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon settling into our hotel room, and then at dinnertime took a taxi to Riverwalk, one of the many modern shopping centers in Gabs. We ate at a bizarre restaurant called Apache Spur; I suppose it could be described as a theme restaurant. The theme would be the American West as visualized in the mind’s eye of some African designer who has never been there. All the stereotypical Western and Native American themes are mixed together freely with African design elements. We could consider this payback for the decades of inaccurate and stereotypical American-made African jungle movies and TV shows. The menu was the African version of American fast food. The burger was good. The enchilada was not an enchilada. There was a strange bottle of something called “chip sauce” on our table that shot its contents into the air and all over the table when Kathy opened the cap. As a microbiologist, I was intrigued.

After dinner, we taxied back to the Lolwapa for a long night of jet-lagged slumber.