Advertisement
Published: December 27th 2009
THIS IS MY PERSONAL BLOG AND COULD NOT POSSIBLY REFLECT THE THOUGHTS OF ANYONE OTHER THAN MYSELF, DUE TO MY UNIQUE MENTAL QUIRKS AND NEUROSES WHICH IN NO WAY WERE CAUSED BY THE THE US PEACE CORPS, THE US GOVERNMENT OR ANY OF ITS AFFILIATES, SUBSIDIARIES, OR AGENCIES, CLANDESTINE OR PUBLIC.
Where are the sleigh bells ringing, Jack Frost, Frosty the Snowman? Melted in the searing African sun is where they are. There is no scent of pine, no hot cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. I have seen a couple artificial trees, maybe a meter high at best, but I haven’t seen any with brightly wrapped packages piled high beneath them. I’ve heard a couple of Christmas carols blaring through the PA system at a grocery store in Gaborone where the cashiers wore Santa hats, but still, it just didn’t seem like Christmas. What made it worse is that the longer I’ve been here the less fond I am of visiting Gabs. Hearing Jingle Bell Rock as I force my way through isles crowded with palettes of stock, stockers, shopping carts, hand trucks, shoppers and stray children did nothing to kick start anything remotely resembling a Christmas spirit.
By
Christmas Eve, the tap water had been gone for several days again and the outside tank was empty. All that remained was is a few buckets stacked on our front step. I missed my family, my friends, my home. Our miniscule kitchen was sweltering, and I had promised to prepare food to take to a neighboring village where we’d spend Christmas day in the home of another Peace Corps volunteer. I was hot, I needed a shower, and my Christmas spirit was nowhere to be found. I was still slightly frazzled from our most recent trip to the capital. Let me explain.
Any day in Gabs was beginning to seem a bit like the movie, Ground Hogs Day. It seemed that every time we went the smallest task took an incredibly long time and involved waiting in line after line. We were making plans for a trip up to the northern part of the country for New Years. Here one just can’t get online, make reservations for lodging and transportation and start packing. Oh no!! First of all the Internet has to be working and running fast enough to allow surfing or just fast enough to send an email.
If that happens, it’s a good day. No. One has to get online, then email, email again, call and finally to confirm our lodge reservation, we have to go into Gabs to one of the bank branches where the lodge has an account. We then must deposit half of the cost of our lodging into that account, in cash. As to transportation north, you just go as early as possible to the main bus rank in Gabs, wait in line, and hope you can get on a bus going the direction you want to go.
The reasons I did not want to go to Gabs were many, but we saw no way out of it and badly wanted to take this mini vacation. We had to make the Gabs journey just two days before Christmas, and every gainfully employed man, woman, and child in Botswana had just got paid. I found myself thinking the worst. My inner voice was rattling on: The buses are always packed anyway and will now probably have standing room only which means that we will probably spend the entire trip each way sandwiched between a couple of very large African women holding toddlers who
are dripping sugar water from Cool Time popsicles into my hair and onto my clothing that I cannot wash due to lack of water at home. Travel and shopping is chaos at the end of each month and this month will be much worse.
We knew that this trip up north would be too much to cover on our stipend and agreed we’d use a bit of money from an account back home. So we get to Gabs and go to the main branch of the FNB where we are to make the deposit. We walk in the front door and lines of people are snaking throughout the bank, and people are sitting, leaning and waiting on every available piece of furniture. We didn’t even know which of the several lines we should use. Fortunately, a young woman from the bank was standing near the door and offered to assist us. After waiting about ten minutes for her to return with my American debit card, she informed us that this particular branch could not withdraw any money from that account in order to secure our reservations at the lodge. She directed us to another branch where we could use
an ATM. It was about a 15 minute walk from where we were. We made the walk, sweating and without benefit of shade or breeze. We were pleasantly surprised to see only a short line at the two ATMs. Soon I stood in front of the machine, entered my card and waited, and waited until a message appeared on the screen as my card popped out of the slot, “We are unable to process your transaction at this time and are sorry for any inconvenience.”
“This whole @#$*&^%$ country is an inconvenience,” I found myself muttering as I went inside to see if anyone could assist me. “Please go over there,” a pleasant young woman told me after making several phone calls to various people at the other branch questioning why they were sending us and a couple other customers with similar needs to their branch. “Oh my! There’s a queue,” she added as if that was something unusual to experience anywhere in Gabs. We waited in one line and then another, my patience with the tellers vanishing like water in this blazing desert, until about two and a half hours after we had arrived at the first bank,
we had our extra cash and had made the deposit to secure our lodging reservation. The bank fee was only ten times higher because we couldn’t use the ATM. Now we just had to go to an Internet café to fax a copy of the deposit ticket to the lodge, a service that the bank could not possible offer us, and then play bumper cars with a grocery cart to pick up the few items needed for our contribution to Christmas dinner. And then, yea, yea!!, the bus ride home.
I remembered that day, and thought of the lack of water and the heat with growing frustration. Just buck up, I told myself as I stood sweating in the closet disguised as a kitchen. I thought of my rural western upbringing and all the ‘life is tough out west’ sayings that I grew up with. I felt myself nearing a boiling point - no pun intended- and feared that I’d take it out on Steve. Now wouldn’t that make for a truly wonderful holiday? So I sat and calmed myself for a bit.
The food was prepared, the kitchen and I were as clean as could be expected with the small ration of water available to us. I sat down with a novel and read for awhile before going to bed. Christmas morning came; we met our friends in Lensweletau and came home to a couple young volunteers who were our house guests for the night. We ate a light meal with them and hit the sack, putting an end to our first Christmas is Botwana.
What made this Christmas beautiful are the many gifts, none of which were purchased, wrapped or stored under a tree. The first was that Steve and I made sure that we remained kind to one another. The second was getting a padded manila envelope from one of our granddaughters. She’d filled it from her own toy box with small toys and art supplies for ‘the kids in Africa.’ We added a couple of bags of marbles and some costume jewelry to it before giving it to the neighbor kids. The third was that a kind young teacher had given us a ride the day we had to go to Gabs and refused the equivalent of bus fare when we tried to give it to him because, “You are friends.” When I look back at the trip to Gabs with a rested mind and body, I realized that we encountered more helpful people, than sour ones. When we left on Christmas morning to go the 30K to Lensweletau, we were unsure when or if the buses would be running. A young man with two passengers in his car stopped. When he found that we were going to the next village, he told us to wait at the intersection. He would drop off his passengers in Kopong, return and drive us to our friend’s home. He did, and he also left us his cell number so we could call him to pick us up when we were ready to come home. He called himself the Christmas taxi. While at our Peace Corps friend’s home, I received several text messages and phone calls from Batswana wishing us well on the holiday. We received an informal invitation to a late dinner at the home of Batswana friends in Kopong. We were too full to eat, but we stopped to say hello when we returned and were given oranges from their tree. We ran into one of our neighbors as we were walking back to our house. She greeted us with a warm smile and told us that one of her favorite memories of Christmas was eating bread with jam and butter. It was the only time throughout the year that people had bread to eat. Those who could afford it would buy several loaves and spend the day going through the village and having bread with friends. This kindness and generosity was called bringing Christmas. I hope that someone brought some Christmas to all of you this year.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.038s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 19; dbt: 0.0177s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Jayne
non-member comment
Now that's the true spirit of Christmas
What a wonderful lesson in the true meaning of Christmas. Patience and finding the kindness in others when your at your most vulnerable boiling point! You found your true center!! That's my sis!! I love the kindness of your grandchildren, if we could all take a lesson from her and just send anything that we don't use or need your way that others would cherish, now that's the true spirit of Christmas. Speaking of which I still haven't got your present sent off yet, gotta get a few more things together and get my butt in gear, been dragging lately. Yep, I've got HD Skype ware so you can see and hear me pretty clear I guess. Hopefully we set it up right. Still waiting to find out. No calls yet. But I can hear your messages, I don't know how to leave a voice message yet. Thought skype was suppose to be easy!! If it is, it's not w/our HD thingy. Course Lopo has to have the best, ya know!!?#@ Then twice as hard to figure out. Gotta go, going to start making stew and red chili for everyone for my B. day party around 3 pm wish you were here!! Love and miss you way way lots.