Traveling Around

Exploring the city of Gaborone in my first weeks made me forget sometimes I had left North America for Africa, which provided a very easy transition for the other Americans on my program and me. I began to think that maybe our American culture had just been transplanted to this foreign land without any of us knowing. But as I traveled around the country more, I started to see past my first impressions and began to realize what kind of country Botswana really is.

Since I am only in the country for a semester, I am trying to see as much of it as possible. The social life on the University campus is not that exciting, so I and the other students on the program have been going on a lot of weekend trips.

The first one we took was to a place called Serowe. Technically it is still a village, but it is the largest village in Southern Africa. I don’t know what makes a village a village, but this place was definitely not a city. There were goats all over the place, and we almost hit a few. The cars didn’t slow down and stop for them; they just honked loudly and hoped they’d get out of the way. There was a central area with a shopping center, but it was mostly traditional houses sprawled out all over the place. After arriving, walking through the bus rank to find a ride to where we were staying was really the first time I was complete aware of my different skin color. I know they had seen white people before, but after eight got off the bus, looking lost and confused, everyone swarmed around, trying to offer us a ride. One vendor woman just straight up asked us: “Where’s my money?”

In Serowe, we stayed in a place called Khama Rhino Sanctuary, home to thirty white rhinos and two black rhinos, as well as thousands of other animals. When I say we stayed in it, I mean we actually slept inside the park. We had to be driven around by a guide whenever we wanted to go somewhere, because it is very easy to come across a rhino or a leopard. We went on a game run while there, and it was probably the most amazing thing I have done so far, and probably one of the most amazing things I have ever done. For lack of a better simile, it was like living in The Lion King. We saw rhinos, zebras, ostriches, antelopes and a whole bunch of other animals I had never heard of.

That night, I broke the rules and walked a little ways away from the designated “camp” with some friends to an old wooden look-out post we had found earlier. It was rotting and shaky, but I was able to climb to the top to watch the sun set over the savannah. I hope I never forget what that looked like.

Last weekend, we went on another trip to a place called Molepolole. This is closer to Gaborone, and we only spent a day there, but it was still quite an adventure. We visited a cave that was believed to hold evil spirits, until David Livingstone spent a night in it and proved the local chief wrong. It smelled like bat poop and we met a Rasta-man on the way up smoking a joint out of a twenty Pula (the local currency) note who told us he was going “to kill the dragon.” After that we tried to find the ruins of the old London Missionary Society (which no one, except Lonely Planet, had ever heard of) and then the aloe forest (which no one had heard of until we described it as “the forest that scared the Boers away,” a local legend about the Boers invasion.) Once we arrived in the aloe forest, we met either a drunk or crazy—or both—woman who made us try the aloe plant, calling it the “number one medicine.” I almost threw up.

I know when I first came to Botswana, I was surprised at the level of development and influence of American culture in this country—and I still am. (In Molepolole, we got a ride from a combi that had two television screens in it, playing Shania Twain and Celine Dion music videos.) But I have also realized that this is still a Third World country. A lot of the development, it seems to me, is really just on the surface. There is not much infrastructure. For example, Botswana has not been developing its own power sector, because it could always import cheaper electricity from South Africa. Now, South Africa is facing a power crisis and has cut off Botswana. The power now frequently shuts off without warning, along with the hot water, something even the locals get mad about.

Another good example, which I’ve been thinking of as a microcosm of the whole nation, is the pool they have on campus. It is Olympic-sized, and during orientation they made a point of mentioning it as a source of pride for the campus. I was excited to start swimming in it, as it gets unbearably hot here in the afternoon, but so far I’ve swam in it only once, the first week of school. Although I’ve gone almost every day since I’ve been here, it has always been “dirty.” I don’t know why it’s dirty, but they always tell me it will be clean in a week. Now I’ve stopped asking and I just go right to the smaller, cleaner pool. One other American remarked; “Why would they build an Olympic-sized swimming pool if they couldn’t maintain it?” I think it is a good question, a little presumptuous, but an interesting thought.

It seems like a lot of the things they do here is simply because they can do them. They build malls all over the place because they have the money to and because people want to shop, even though they are still one of the most unequal nations in the world, with huge levels of unemployment. Maybe, as Americans who are used to having things like working pools and large malls, we can have the freedom to critique. Botswana is still a young country, trying to figure out its explosive growth. So far, I think they’re doing a pretty good job, and I have been having a lot of fun, even if I don’t really understand all the time what’s going on around me.