Gaborone

While there are a substantial numbers of cars in Gaborone, not everyone owns a car, so there is a fair amount of pedestrian traffic everywhere. It seems like a good thing to me, for several reasons. For one thing, it reduces crime. Crimes are less likely to happen on a busy street than when the potential victim is alone. Also, the more humans, the more humanized the environment becomes. Everywhere you go, small entrepreneurs have set up kiosks, stands, and even tables along the street selling all sorts of goods. People out walking around are potential customers while people zooming by in cars are not.

Can you imagine this in the U.S.? People would get out of their cars, get some healthy exercise, meet their neighbors, and find interesting things at stands along the route to their destination. They wouldn’t get there as fast, which is also OK. Living life at a slower pace would only be a good thing for all of us.

If you don’t own a car and have to travel a long distance in Gabs, there are taxis. There are also combis, which are very reliable, very cheap, and a great place to strike up a conversation. Combis are small white vans that can hold a dozen passengers when they are (very!) full. They run specific routes and you can ride for P2.70 (about 35 cents).

On this day, we met Madeline at a combi stop near the University and then took a combi to Tlokweng, a town outside of Gaborone where she volunteers at the SOS Children’s Village. An Austrian named Hermann Gmeiner founded the SOS Children’s Villages organization in 1949, while he was still in medical school. His original mission was to help alleviate the suffering of the many orphaned and abandoned children in Europe after WWII. From those beginnings, SOS-Kinderdorf International has grown to become an organization that is recognized around the world, and in fact was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

SOS Children’s Village began working in Botswana in 1986. The village in Tlokweng has 15 family houses, and each family has between ten and twelve children whose range in age from babies to 16 year-olds. In addition to orphans, the village also takes social welfare children brought to them by the government social welfare program. Children from the surrounding community also attend the kindergarten at SOS. Kids living at the village go to the nursery school and kindergarten on site until they reach school age when they attend the local schools. At age 16, they children move into a youth house where they stay until they are old enough to be self-sufficient. Also, a vocational training center teaches skills and vocations such as tailoring, welding and carpentry.

In Botswana, of course, many of the children who live at SOS have been orphaned by AIDS. One can hardly begin to imagine the suffering these little kids have gone through to lose both parents, and perhaps siblings to this disease. Some, no doubt, are HIV positive themselves.

Madeline spends her time helping in a class of nine two and three year-olds, as well as supervising general activity on the playground during recess. And when Kathy and I were there, we helped as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed working (playing) with these kids. I don’t know what they made of me—a “teacher” that was helpful, but obviously of limited intelligence & unable to understand anything they said. I was in demand on the playground, however, for lifting, twirling, and pushing swings. I was constantly surrounded by an eager group of kids yelling “Teacha! Teacha!” Trying to get my attention, approval, or assistance.

After recess we washed hands, prayed, and had lunch: On this day, lunch was chicken gravy over rice, “pumpkin” (actually some type of winter squash), and beets (Tswana word for beets: “Debeetirooti”—I love it!) Then we rode the combi back to Gabs & did a quick tour of the University of Botswana campus and Madeline’s dorm.

The University is contained on a large, well-maintained campus filled with modern buildings. The large number of covered walkways and covered courtyards reflect the fact that the summers are hot, and that there is a rainy season. Madeline’s dorm room was a typical dorm room. There were maybe eight double occupancy rooms clustered around a common room on her floor with all of those rooms sharing a bathroom. Her room contained a desk and a bed, and she and her side of the room was separated from her roommate’s by closets.

After the tour, we went for dinner at an Indian restaurant. It didn’t take many days for Kathy and I to discover that local cuisine was essentially not available in the local restaurants. Restaurants serve “international cuisine” but restaurants celebrating Botswanan fare were at best rare and probably nonexistent. Local food, however, can be found in the little stands along the road, and I’m sure in most people’s homes—perhaps even the homes of the people who worked in restaurants serving pad thai, shahi korma, or hamburgers.