As Promised

Finally, the Rockin' Robin video!

Rockin' Robin-Style, and more

Last semester was so chock-full of adventures that I felt sure Brown couldn't compare--just kidding! This week has been full of fun and ridiculous things. And frigid temperatures, but that's beside the point.

1) Fun and ridiculous things... like tap dancing. You know you're addicted when you're playing pool on Saturday night, dressed cute in a fuzzy scarf and oh-so-tappable high heels, and you start getting weird looks because--you're tap dancing. Unconsciously. Given that I was at a bar, maybe I should've tried dancing on the pool table rather than next to it. Oops!

The cause of my addiction is What's on Tap performing at Brown's annual Fall Dance Concert. We had 2 auditions, 3 tech rehearsals, 1 dress rehearsal, and 4 shows, so no wonder my feet wouldn't stop moving! (I tried to post the video. Didn't work. Will try again later.)

2) Haircutting. It's a fascinating idea, and ever since I was a little kid wielding a mighty pair of scissors near Barbie's head, I've wondered what it would be like to cut someone's hair. Like, snip, there it goes! This week, I had a willing victim. Of course, the satisfaction of cutting hair is somewhat mitigated when you're only snipping off an eighth of an inch, but it was a powerful feeling nonetheless. Unfortunately, I'm not cut out to be a barber. I didn't royally screw up, but I mostly just had fun chopping off random sections to make it shorter. (That's the point, right? Jon only said he wanted it shorter.)(He later cut it himself.)

3) Ivy League Co-Champions!!! Go Bruno! The last time (and only time) Brown won the exclusive title of Ivy League Football Champion was my freshmen year in 2005. I went to about an hour of one football game then because it was so frigidly cold, I couldn't sit on the metal bleachers for any longer than that. This year, Brown had a chance at the title again. So, again, for the second time in my life, I sat through an hour of a football game in sub-freezing temperatures. Yay for us, Brown won. Too bad that Harvard won, too, so we have to share the title.

The game was so cold, though, that I wore:

• a tank top under a t-shirt under a long sleeve shirt under a track jacket under a sweatshirt under a winter coat;


• three pairs of socks;


• leggings under jeans;


• a scarf;


• a hat under a sweatshirt hood under a winter coat hood; and


• gloves under mittens

I was still freezing! I came home, turned the heat on full-blast and curled up in bed under the covers for half an hour. I bet the football team would get a lot more fans if it didn't take such superhuman body heat to stay warm at the games.

4) WWE World Wrestling Entertainment. Uhhhh. What?! It was a fairly dull Monday night with nothing to do, so I had a decision to make. I had free movie tickets but the only movie playing looked terrible. Jon had free WWE tickets, which of course sounded terrible. Yet at the same time, I've seen plenty of bad movies in my lifetime. When would I ever get the chance to take in a wresting match? I certainly wouldn't pay for it.

We went. The Providence Dunkin' Donuts Center was filled with spectators. Thousands of spectators. Little kids not more than three years old. Wheelchair-ridden old men. College-age kids who looked like they might be Brown students. And they were all waving posters and signs proclaiming their undying love for that big, bulky hulk wearing a speedo and throwing a table on top of his opponent. The event was broadcast live, and of course, Jon's free tickets were about as close to front and center as you can get without being part of the match. We hid behind our neighbors so that lest anyone we know be watching WWE on television, they wouldn't see us there.

Actually, though, it turned out to be fun. In a ridiculous way, of course. The wrestling was a highly choreographed half-magic show, half-dance of sorts. Run, 2-3-4, jump, 2-3-4, lift chair on 5, swing on 6, and flip backwards as opponent lands beautiful high kick to your gut on 7-8. Then lie on ground for 2 measures while he pulls your leg into an almost-graceful swan position. How did they do that?? How did he crush the trash can over that other guy's head and both of them are barely breaking an unchoreographed sweat? If you recognize that the whole thing is a performance, it's pretty fun to admire the sheer hulky-manly-steroid-assisted talent.

Hope that makes up for months of no adventure!

History

I don't care what your political leanings are, right now we can all be proud to be American. In fact, I've never been prouder.

Sometimes I worry about the fate of the country and of the world. There are so many doomsday predictions of overpopulation, climate change, cancer, genetically-modified organisms, unemployment, poverty, genocide, materialism, achievement gaps, failing school districts, discrimination, corruption, pork-barrel spending, uninsured children, war, terrorism, energy crises and--the list goes on. I can't list all the potential threats to the survival of the human species. Sometimes it's hard to imagine that we're really at the top of the evolutionary food chain when we've gotten ourselves into a bigger mess than any other species on Earth.

And yet--look at what we can accomplish when we try. One hundred and fifty years ago, white men still held blacks as slaves. Less than a century ago, this country practiced legal segregation. White children and black children weren't worried about health insurance coverage; they were worried about equal schooling. Jim Crow laws ravaged our America the Beautiful and divided the nation into a white-versus-black civil war of sorts. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped forward to inspire change, his dream was a world away. He only wanted his children to play in the streets with white children: he never said a word about his children having sleepovers in the White House with white children.

That is how far we have come. On Tuesday, we proved to everyone who thought it wasn't possible that, yes, any child in America can grow up to be whatever they want. Once again, America is a global leader. How many countries have elected a minority leader? How many countries can say that a biracial man born to a foreign father has held the reins of national leadership? Today I am proud to be an American. I am proud of my country; I am proud of the progress we have made, and I am proud to see what happens next.

I am thankful that I'm young enough not to know a different world.

The challenges are still there, of course. Discrimination and poverty and achievement gaps and climate change and all that stuff still exists. But if America can recognize its wrongs and move beyond slavery and segregation to proudly set an African-American in the White House within the course of 150 years, think what we can accomplish in the next century. When my kids are old and wrinkled with the years of a life well-lived, what kind of world will they be part of?

Keeping Up

Thank goodness for technology.

A few days ago, as I was swamped with midterms and papers and feeling crabby from lack of sleep, I thought back on my life in Botswana. How far away it seemed! Those days of waking up to roosters at 6am and devoting more time to family than to studies seemed a world away. Sometimes I still wonder whether Americans are "doing it right" or not. There's definitely something to be said for competition and ambition, but there's also something to be said for sanity and satisfaction. Sometimes I feel like a machine: productive, efficient, quick, pragmatic, tireless. Am I the Energizer Bunny? No. No one is, American or Motswana or any other nationality in this world.

I grew homesick for Botswana. I missed the stunning vistas and the closeknit communities and the lack of materialistic consumerism (okay, so why do I need a $250 suit for interviews and a $50 pair of shoes to wear with the suit and a $2000 laptop to replace my dying 3-year-old computer...). I missed the total strangers who had welcomed me into their homes and loved me as another daughter.

Two of my families don't have electricity, so I can only send them letters and hope that they remember me. I don't expect to ever hear from them again, knowing that international airmail postage is too expensive for them to afford. I content myself with imagining Vanessa growing big enough to wear my sundress and Neo learning to write with the colored pencils I left for her. I imagine Namune going to high school and hope that she passes her courses and doesn't drop out to have a child at 18, like most of her peers will. I bet that Mpena is walking on his own now, maybe even beginning to talk. Will they show him the photos I took of him and explain how for a time, he had an American older sister?

My third family, my Gabs family, is connected, though. My 21-year-old sister Mpelo is doing pre-med studies in Grenada and, typical of our generation, sends email and has a Facebook profile. (Well, she used to; she deactivated it in April but promises that when she reactivates it in December, she'll re-friend me.) Much to my amazement, when I woke up the morning after feeling so Botswana-sick, there in my inbox was an email from Mpelo!

She wrote: "I spoke to my mum the other day, she says she misses havin you and me at the house. I think she is lonely coz it's just her and Stella now."

After I asked about her plans for Christmas, she replied that Botswana was too far away to travel for such a short time; she was going to stay with her older sister in Canada instead. A southern African girl living in the Caribbean--I told her she'd be cold. Mpelo agreed; "I dont have any winter clothes; I'm going to freeze my butt off." True that, Mpelo. It's only October and I'm already freezing my butt off in Providence, and I've lived here for the last 3 years!

Thank goodness for technology. While I will never know what Vanessa, Neo, Namune, and Dimakatso are up to, I will always have a way to find Mpelo. One day, we'll run into each other again. Maybe we'll have little kids in tow and will be all distinguished, her with an M.D. and me with a J.D. or Ph. D. or pH.D. as I like to think of an environmental science degree. Maybe I'll take my kids back to Bots to meet Grannywe and Auntie Stella, although maybe by then Stella will be back in Zim with her family, with a stable government and a currency that actually buys a loaf of bread. One thing that last semester taught me is that this is an incredibly small world. People and faraway places are more connected than we think, and I love the idea that my African sister is only a keyboard and a broadband link away.

Dear Leukocytes:

As your loving and respectful host, I come before you with a concern. I have evidence that in recent months, your productivity has rapidly decreased. Past medical history shows I am a hale and hardy girl; the common cold/flu/sniffles/other ailments rarely bring me down. Over the course of the last six weeks, however, I have been felled by two--not one but TWO--colds. I find this hard to believe. Do I not eat healthier now than in the past, when skipped lunches and dinner at 10pm were common occurances? I have bribed you with oranges, oatmeal, juice, tea, and soup. I have fallen into bed at 10:30pm, which is downright unheard of in the college world. I rarely wake before 9 am, which gives me a good eight hours at least of sleep most nights. Really--what more do you want?

I understand that you may be feeling overwhelmed after working diligently for 21 years. This past year in particular has been quite challenging. I praise you, killer T cells, for warding off malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, and Lyme disease. Thank you for that. But I beseech you: do not give up now. Do not go on strike.

I look forward to working closely with you to resolve this issue. With the current state of our economy, I would hate to have to let you go. This is a bad time to be out of work.

Respectfully yours,
Claire

Walking on Sunshine

I've always loved sunsets and sunrises (and photography), so due to lack of anything exciting in
my life to write about, I'm sharing some of my favorite photos (from New Year's cruise in the Caribbean, spring break in San Diego, South Africa, Botswana, and my summer in Bristol and Newport, RI):

Cognitive Inertia

My semester in Botswana seems like such a long time ago, and yet every now and then, little things happen that remind me that I've spent a bit of time outside mainstream America. For example, just now as I was researching the CITES (international endangered species treaty) trade restrictions on African elephants, I noted the date that Botswana's export quota was last updated: 13.05.08. For a full ten seconds, I was confused. 13.05.08??? There's no thirteenth month; that's for sure. My first instinct was that they were using "military time." Maybe they meant January 5. But wait--in what world are dates recorded in military time? Realizing that that was nonsensical, I sat for another couple seconds, confused. And then I remembered that our cousins across the pond write the day before the month.

It was only a month or so ago that I was still dating my notebooks and journal entries that way.

To complicate things further, I'm studying Swahili this semester. It's similar to Setswana grammatically but not vocabularily. As my teacher, Lugano, an exchange student from Tanzania, explained common greetings to a tongue-twisted class of students, he asked, "Are we together?"

In Setswana, that question translates to "A re mmogo?" and it means, "Do you understand?" In my mixed-up, culturally-confused brain, I heard Lugano ask the question and I immediately translated it to Setswana, answering, "Ee." Yes, I understood.

The problem here, of course, was that Lugano had asked in ENGLISH, I had thought it in SETSWANA, and answered (in my head, thankfully) in SETSWANA, all while sitting in SWAHILI class. Yesterday when Lugano taught us to count and do arithmetic, I could only remember the French words for numbers. My brain seems incapable of distinguishing between languages. If my linguistic skills continue at this rate of degradation, I'll soon be speaking a hodge-podge of gobbledygook gibberish!

I chalk it up to cognitive inertia--my brain readjusts much slower than the rest of me. Let's hope I finish writing this CITES paper before I start communicating in Latin.

Back in the Swing (or Tap) of Things

Whew, school is so busy! I've forgotten what it's like to take REAL classes, have REAL homework, and do more than gaze in awe at giraffes and elephants for credit. Real life is pretty fun, though, and somehow I've found myself taking SIX classes this semester. Most people take four. We'll see how long I stick with all six.

The downside of being back in school is that I don't go gallivanting around on exciting adventures to write about. Generally, the most exciting part of my day is when I either 1) have time to take a nap, 2) get invited to cook dinner with friends off meal plan, or 3) go to tap practice.

WHAT'S ON TAP??? We are!

Last night was alumni weekend at Brown, and they pay the top 10-15 student performance groups to put on a show for the alums. What's On Tap was selected to do two 8-minute shows. We did 3 pieces: one a cappella warm-up routine, one showy piece to Aladdin's "Friend Like Me," and one hard core piece to Daft Punk's "Harder Better Faster Stronger." After being away for a semester and not tapping in 9 months, I was surprised how quickly I remembered the HBFS dance! (I was never in Aladdin--they learned that one while I was eating mopane worms and carrying water on my head.) Here's the clip of our HBFS debut last year in the Fall Dance Concert. I'm second from the right at the beginning; sorry that people's heads block half of our group.

In other news, Providence is cold and rainy (thanks, Hurricanes Hanna and Kyle), I have an exciting thesis topic, there is an illicit kitten living down the hall from me, and I weight train by lugging around a 2.5 inch-wide, 6 pound environmental law textbook.

GREek!

What, I ask, is vile enough
to crush the confident, weaken the tough?
What simple name connotes the power
to render pedants and pundits
ineffably dour?

Oh, my friends, beware the knell
resounding from that of which I tell:
the insuperable exam
the truculent test
the GRE, an erudite hell.

May I expatiate how the horrors abound?
The machinations, the lexicon found
in Shakespeare's plays or ancient Rome,
nowhere else but such a tome.
Were I to speak that grandiloquence--
it'd be silly, y'all, I'd make no sense.
And when if ever must I know
that if Dylan and Sam both want to go
from Oklahoma to Idaho
and Sam drives fast and Dylan walks slow,
then the ratio of speeds is-
Dear me, no!

This test, I tell you, will drive you mad;
it will challenge the knowledge you thought you had.
Every computational error, every solecism
(please, ETS, forgive me malapropism!)
counts quickly backward from perfect 800
until you're left with--
Not much.
Not enough.

Dreams of Stanford, Harvard, or Brown
fly far away, smash to the ground.
So thanks, ETS, for the GRE;
for vocab and formulas impressed onto me;
for creating a test that will train me to be
as cunning and careful as any I see,
to think sharp, to think fast
and insidiously.

The Lighter Side of Life

Enough of these anxiety-inducing decisions. I thought I'd share some of the best (worst?) jokes from my 7 weeks at BELL. We try to keep the humor clean, but with thirty fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds, that's pretty close to impossible. (May their parents never hear about their sex-themed Scrabble game.)

* If two silk worms entered a race, how would it end?
- In a tie!

* Where do you find a dog with no legs?
- Right where you left it.

* Sarah to a fellow student: Keerthana, you spilled chocolate on your shirt.
Keerthana: Oh, fudge!

For fellow math nerds:
* What's the integral of one over cabin?
- Log cabin.

To pick up fellow math nerds:
* If I were a function, you'd be my asymptote. I always tend toward you.

Not so nice:
* How is a hurricane in Louisiana like a divorce in (insert any notoriously country area) ?
- Either way, someone loses a trailer.

This one ended up with me snorting soymilk up my nose in laughter:
* If I'm holding a bee, what's in my eye?
- Beauty. (It's always in the eye of the bee-holder.)

Your 2 Cents Worth

Everyone likes giving advice, so I'm polling the crowd about what I should do in the short-term future. And no, Grandaddy, mortician school is not an option!!

1. Next year: I'm fairly set on taking at least one year off, so grad school is off my mind for this instant. In the interim, I've thought about working internationally but that might be more of an adjustment than I'd like. Four months in Botswana might have been adventure enough. I would also rather not be an intern/flunky/gopher at some prestigious resume-padding company. Unfortunately those jobs usually pay rent pretty well.

2. Grad school: After a year or two, I imagine myself going back to school in one of three potential fields-- sustainable design/urban planning, global sustainable development, or ecological economics. My newest idea is to skip straight to the whole PhD thing (which, indicative of my science background, I often mistakenly write pHD). The problem with grad school is that I've unfortunately picked an unpopular concentration and there aren't too many programs to choose from. Field science isn't my thing. I don't want to research how climate change affects eutrophication in estuarine habitats; I want to do something interdisciplinary that looks at how people can and do impact the environment. Doing my own research sounds like it could be kind of cool!

3. Which leads me to the very-short term: senior thesis. Eek! I've totally neglected that this summer and now it's crunch time. Here's my favorite idea: investigate how economic incentives affect consumption and conservation of resources. Theoretically, pre-paid electricity systems encourage more conservation that post-paid billing cycles. Same with pay-as-you-go trash disposal. But does it really?? The United States has so far pretty much ignored these options, but maybe I could look at case studies and evaluate the effectiveness of different payment schemes. I mean, if it turns out that people do conserve more when forced to pay ahead of time, think how we could use that conserve oil, water, energy, everything down to cell phone minutes if we so desired. Economics is pretty powerful stuff.

Ideas, anyone??? The worst part about getting older is that suddenly, the decisions you're dealing with have become so much bigger, so much more important. Is there a carrying capacity to the scale of decision-making? Like, when I'm fifty or seventy-five or whatever, will the difficulty of life decisions finally start leveling off?

And So It Goes

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end...
- Semisonic, "Closing Time"

Life is full of new beginnings. That is sometimes a very reassuring thing; I appreciate adventure and newness and the chance to start over and try again. But beginning again always means saying goodbye to an important part of your life, like BELL. I didn't realize how much BELL was my home until I was uprooted. It's been eight months since I spent more than a few days in a house in a city. It's been eight months of stargazing and sunsets and fieldwork and fun. Why would I want to leave?

When I left this afternoon, I left behind an empty shell of what used to be. Haffenreffer was deserted: no kids, no tents, no hammocks, only footprints in the marsh as a reminder of the last inhabitants. The lodge was cleared of tables and carpets and posters and fridges and couches. Our bookshelves were gone. The snacks were gone. The tents had been taken down, beds disassembled, mattresses stacked and stored, and computers given back to their rightful owners--my laptop is finally only mine again. But you know what? It feels weird having a computer to myself. It feels extravagant.

When I left Brown in December, I knew I would have a long road of transitions ahead of me. I had to adjust to life in Africa, and those four months were pretty much constant culture shock. Then I had to readjust to life in America. Then I had to adjust to BELL. And now I adjust to life without BELL. I have to readjust to life at university.

My adventures over the last few days have included:

• a staff-only hands-free watermelon eating contest. Kevin and Fraser won, but we all ended up with watermelon in our noses. Kevin had watermelon in his hair, too.
• dinner (no chicken breasts or kidney beans, finally!!) at a Portugese restaurant
• making smores in the fireplace at Haffenreffer while discussing "True Love" by Thich Naht Han
• a picnic at sunset on the beach in Newport
• getting Natalie stuck in a collapsed tent (I was laughing too hard to pull her out)
• stargazing with Rod at Haffenreffer: did you know that Saggitarius could also be looked at as a teapot? do you know how to tell time using Polaris?
• watching Fall River's giant V-J Day firework show
• watching the sunrise at 5:15 a.m. over Mount Hope Bay

Why can't life always be this much fun?! And why do all these new beginnings require such homesickening transitions? I miss my family of BELL staff. I miss my 98 BELL students. I miss Haffenreffer. I'm tired of readjusting, and I just want to be home, wherever that may be.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Just so you know, I would be posting pictures of my summer adventures but I seem to have left my camera cord back in St. Louis.

Anyway, the battle between man and nature continues. Last Wednesday, a HUGE storm struck the area. I was in Warren, RI, at the time, doing some field ecology planning with Lexi. The kids were out kayaking. Less than one hour after they came back to camp, a tornado was spotted in Warren (where Lexi and I were hiding out in a pizzeria "borrowing" wi-fi from the next door coffee shop) and a torrential downpour began.

Torrential! Deluge! Flooding! Cute little Mount Hope Bay looked like the ocean and we couldn't even see across to Fall River, MA. A huge, healthy tree branch crashed down next to our cook's tiny tent. Our solar ovens blew into the bay. And the wind and weight of the water snapped the tent poles of both staff tents.

*insert dramatic picture of our tents crumpled to the ground in puddles of water*

We discovered this at bedtime, just when we wanted to crawl into a warm, dry bed after a long day of cold, wet rain. Instead, we stood outside in the dark staring open-mouthed at the flooded, broken tents. (Remember when I wrote about how my tent survived the torrential rain in Botswana? Nice work, REI. I remain impressed.) There was nothing we could do. Both tents were broken, our beds were soaked, and all four staff members were temporarily homeless.

The next day, it kept pouring. We lost electricity for almost 7 hours and had to move our closing campfire inside to the fireplace. Everyone went a little stir-crazy, regressing to childhood games like building forts out of cardboard boxes, pillow fights, and throwing markers into a bucket across the room. Eek! I used up every game I know trying to keep the group from dissolving into mass chaos.

Needless to say, our bedding didn't have time to dry. The mattresses were still saturated and we hadn't had time to take our sheets to the laundromat--another night sleeping on the couches in the lodge.

Saturday looked a little brighter and sunnier. We moved the mattresses outside to air out and washed our linens. We unzipped the tents to dry out and switched tent poles to make one completely functional tent. A new tent was delivered that afternoon, and everything was looking up, until it started raining AGAIN. The mattresses and pillows airing out got soaked AGAIN. The unzipped tents got flooded AGAIN. We had to sleep on the couches AGAIN.

The rain continued until bedtime last night. Deciding that it would be a little awkward for the new group of students to find their instructors sleeping on couches when they wandered into the lodge in the morning, we improvised with tarps and blankets over wet bedframes to make the tents habitable.

Well, finally the sun has come out. Today is gorgeous. Our mattresses are drying out again and we've found a couple spares in case the old ones are too molded or mildewed to sleep on. My pillow may still be usable after a few more hours in the sun... the only problem is,

it's supposed to rain again this evening.

Man versus Nature

In the epic battle of man versus nature, I'd say nature has a good 3 or 4 points up on man, judging from my past few weeks.

1) What's the grossest thing you've ever slept with? In the case of Annie our intern, that would be... wait, you've got to hear this story.

One night during training week (luckily before the students arrived), Annie went to her tent to sleep. She pulled back her sleeping bag and found some strange, small, pink gumball-like things. Not sure what to think, she didn't look too hard and came running to find the staff. We opened her sleeping bag and there were 6 little pink gumballs. Except they weren't gumballs. They were woodchuck fetuses.

Yes, woodchuck fetuses! Somehow a pregnant woodchuck had climbed up two steps onto the tent platform, pushed through the screen door flap, climbed onto Annie's bed, into the sleeping bag, and given birth.

(All the fetuses were dead. We stored them in a Tupperware container for disposal.)

The best part, though (or worst part if you're Annie), is that she had woken up that morning with blood on her pants. Thinking it was from a cut on her foot, she didn't worry about it. Well, turns out that she had been sleeping with the fetuses the whole night and had squished one. She threw away both the pants and the sleeping bag after this whole ordeal.

2) Wanna share my lunch? A couple days ago, the students went on a field trip to Save the Bay and the Portsmouth Abbey wind turbine, and I stayed behind to take some time off. In my free time, I decided to walk down to Crystal Cave Beach, about fifteen minutes from camp. I had a lovely time walking, watching, and singing to myself in the middle of the woods, pondering things like my non-allergy to the abundant poison ivy (aha! Man: 1, Nature: 0) and my utter inability to identify New England trees. (I do a much better job with southern African trees.)

Anyway, I soon arrived at the beach. This particular beach lies just below an open, grassy field lined with some type of tree or other, and as I got excited about the beach, I started hurrying across the field. I was just about to walk past the line of trees to the shore when-- plop! Fish parts started raining from the sky.

A giant hawk flew out of the tree closest to me and in the process nearly dropped his lunch on my head. I stood there, awed by my proximity to this huge bird and disgusted by the half-eaten pieces lining my path to the beach. Gingerly, I picked my way through skeleton, bloody fillets, and fins. I never did find the head, though. Must be a delicacy in the hawk world.

3) When you gotta go... Speaking of birds, they're apparently also out to get Lexi. Twice this summer, she's been splattered with bird poop. Today was a particularly interesting example:

BELL staff meetings are typically pretty exciting, or at least entertaining. This one was no exception. We made some plans (chicken baseball! giants, wizards, and elves! e-waste!) and then, before we could discuss anything of real interest, a rogue bird decided to relieve himself. With a shower. Ugh, it was so gross! The whole porch was spattered, including Lexi and her chair. We had never seen such range with bird excrement; it was rather impressive, in an absolutely disgusting way. We also didn't wash the chair, so it now holds a place of infamy with all of BELL.

4) You weren't going to eat that, were you? Did you know seagulls like hamburgers?? Neither did I, until tonight.

Lexi and I went to a seafood grill in Bristol to plan the BELL Field Ecology curriculum and watch sunset over the harbor. We chose an outdoor table right by the water. The place was pretty busy for a Tuesday night and we both watched our waitress bustling about, bringing out trays and trays of food. The family next to us had ordered burgers, and when they were ready, the waitress picked up two plates from the tray and went to hand them out. She left the other plates on the tray on an empty table nearby, thinking they'd be fine until she had two free hands again.

Guess again, lady. Seagulls have no shame.

This big ole gull walked right over to that tray, plucked up a burger bigger than his head, and walked off proudly with it in his mouth. The whole restaurant turned to stare at him, mouths hanging open. What the ---? This giant bird stood in the parking lot and inhaled the whole thing, leaving not a single crumb, in less than 30 seconds. Lexi stood up to watch and two of the kids from the family eating burgers walked over to see the spectacle, too. The waitress couldn't stop laughing, just like the rest of us. What was she to do? She threw her hands up in the air and ordered another burger from the cook. When she finally brought our food, she placed it carefully on our table and said, as if daring the bird to try again, "He'd better not still be hungry!"

21

In 5 days, I will be more than two decades old, and that's a scary thought if I've ever had one. Twenty-one years is a crazy long time to have been around!

I remember feeling big and important when I turned ten. Double digits, yeah!! I was in the highest grade at elementary school and certainly those kindergarteners thought we were pretty cool. We'd "hang out" instead of playing at recess and gossip and start clubs devoted to our utter awesomeness. Then we moved on to sixth and then seventh grade, and suddenly we were the babies of the middle school. When I finally got to high school, I really thought I was about as old and grown up as I could get. I'd waited for years to play on a varsity sports team! Then I went to college and that was a "whoa there" moment. Hold on a sec--college students are OLD. College students are, like, part of the real world or something. College students have their life together.

Yeah right.

Here I am, a rising college senior and almost 21 years old and I still haven't a clue what I'm doing. I'd hoped that a semester in Botswana would give me some eye-opening guidance on what I wanted from life, but all it did was confuse me more. What do I want? Do I want to go to grad school? When? To study what? Do I want to spend a year or two working internationally? Where? Doing what? Do I enjoy teaching or working with people or do I want to travel like Mpelo or settle down and devote myself to family like Dimakatso? Do I want to live somewhere with stars and trees and open space to explore, or do I like the convenience and excitement of the city? Do I take the GREs? What do I write my senior thesis on?

I loved the slow-paced, family-focused life in Botswana, but it's becoming ever more clear that that way of life is not applicable in America. I find myself rebelling against the idea of school and competition and working to get ahead, but that labels me as "unmotivated." Am I unmotivated? Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Sometimes, too, I feel like a giant hypocrite. I keep wishing that someone out there had the answers and would just tell me: "Claire. Write your thesis about underwater basketweaving. Apply to these grad schools then take a year off and work here. Then, you know, six years down the road, get married, have three darling children, adopt a dog and a cat, and spend your time writing and baking chocolate chip cookies."

Gosh that would be nice, but here I am teaching high school kids that the way to live is to explore and ask questions yourself. I'm teaching them that the process, not the answer, is important. And I genuinely believe that. It's just that it's so much easier if you have the answers.

I remember four years ago when I was applying to college. Dad told me, "I can't wait to see where you end up!" I agreed with him at the time: "Yep, me too. Won't that be nice when I know." Well, here I am, four years later, wondering the same thing. Where will I be four years from now?

Wouldn't it be nice to know.

Our Distant Cousins

How much do you love monkeys? Enough to grant them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

This is so interesting from both an environmental and political standpoint. If humans aren't placed at the top of the food chain by some omniscient, omnipotent Higher Being (which, after invoking the wrath of hippos, rhinos, and lions in Africa, I don't believe we necessarily were), then where do we draw the line for ethical treatment? Which species deserve rights? Which rights? Why are bonobos more deserving than badgers or bumblebees?

My experiences with monkeys/apes include: They stole Peter's headlamp in Botswana. They plotted how to get takeout containers from a trash can in South Africa. They stole candles and smashed mosquito coils in the Okavango to avoid the awful smell. And just look at the photo at the top of this article--if you put some khakis and a Red Sox t-shirt on him, he might as well be one of my friends chillaxin at Brown.

Reflections on Experiential Learning

Yesterday at our closing circle at BELL, we all shared a few thoughts on the past 2 weeks. At least half the group said, "this was the best experience of my life." One girl said she almost didn't come and "that would have been the biggest mistake I ever made." One girl said plainly, "At first I thought it was so great that we were from all over the globe, but now I'm sad we live so far apart." Another commented that, "BELL made me realize the person I want to be for the rest of my life, but how do I hold onto that when I go back home where nothing is like it is here?"

Good question. I wonder that myself.

Why isn't "real life" more like BELL? At BELL, we explore. We actively crush stereotypes and assumptions and create a safe space where people are comfortable being themselves. As I sat talking in one of the student tents on the last night, someone commented that, "BELL is an escape from the real world." Why is it that we need to escape the real world? Can't we make the real world more like BELL?

BELL is: curiosity. exploration. challenge. I love throwing questions at the students, daring them to figure out for themselves. BELL blurs the line between teacher and student because when I ask, "How many trees are on the 356 acres owned by Brown?" I have no idea either. The only difference is, I have a good idea how to calculate that without counting every tree. When I throw a pile of cardboard, aluminum foil, and duct tape down and say, "Build something that will bake cookies," I know what the finished solar oven could look like. But I don't know what it will look like.

I'm afraid that school stifles this curiosity. What do I accomplish in a typical week at university? I write a couple papers, learn how to apply some new equations, eat approximately 18-20ish meals, read several hundred pages, ... What did I accomplish in two weeks at BELL? I learned about quahogging and how it's just about the only profession still 100% male-dominated and about sewage overflow management in the Narragansett Bay and I discovered how the civil rights movement directly parallels the environmental movement and is all expressed in music from disco to soul to hip hop and I picked berries at a mostly organic farm (why not fully organic? I learned that too) and I stood underneath a wind turbine and watched as the power meter spun forward and I helped build a solar water heater and ate a fried egg sandwich from a handmade solar oven and I discovered that a shirt that was made in China actually has crossed the globe almost as many times as I've crossed the Mississippi and I learned how to lead a group of 29 and how to cool down strong personalities and how to encourage the listeners to talk and to push myself out of my comfort zone when it comes to dealing with people and to be confident even when I don't have a clue what I'm supposed to say.

That's experiential learning for you. How much of these lessons will the kids remember? Probably more than they'll remember their trigonometry formulas and the SAT vocabulary many of them studied while they were here. Now if the "real world" had everyone out exploring and asking questions themselves, I bet we'd all be a whole lot smarter. Or at least a lot better prepared for Life.

When Will It End?

Why is power so corruptive? Why do such intelligent people become so cruel? Why so many threats, attacks, terrorism, wars, manipulation, bribery, ... ?

Give it up, Mugabe, please.

True leadership is knowing when to step up and when to step back. As we tell the kids at BELL , diversify your leadership styles. Sometimes it is much more powerful to listen and observe, to ask questions, and to let the group teach itself. You can't be a leader without any followers.



[In case you didn't catch it, the title of my last post was a link to the related article in the Sunday Standard.]

Botswana Prepares for War?

Someone has to stand up to Mugabe, and I am so glad that Botswana has the courage to do so. I only pray that the situation doesn't resort to war. Botswana has never been to war in the history of the country and they've been so fortunate with their successes. In a country of only 1.7 million people, too, they can't afford the casualties war would bring. Thirty-four percent of the population is under the age of 14. Those are the ones who would be fighting. Imagine the horrors of a population already ravaged by AIDS, then ravaged by war.

If only more countries would step up and admit that Robert Mugabe is not a legitimate president. Mugabe is a tyrant, and at this point, he clearly cannot be defeated by a simple vote.

But let's be careful not to get ourselves too involved. Americans tend to think they know how to run the world, and I'm not sure that's true. Look at our country: economy tanking, never-ending war, half-baked health care, outrageously expensive education, and underperforming schools. I haven't a clue how to fix any of that, but at least I get my vote counted.

I think the Minister of Foreign Affairs laid out Botswana's position best (in another article from the Sunday Standard): “We will never, as a government, help campaign for any of the candidates. If the Zimbabweans follow a process agreed amongst themselves and choose Mugabe we will say Hallelujah Amen. We are not telling them who to choose because we are not Zimbabweans.”

Like Mom's shirt says, "If you think you can run the earth, start with a small garden."

Mr. Mugabe, your garden looks more like a briar patch.

By the Way, Where Am I?

This is where I live:

I'm living on Haffenreffer Estate, at the base of a little teeny mosquito-bite of a "mountain" (200-something foot Mount Hope) on the western shore of Mount Hope Bay in Bristol, Rhode Island. If you remember your U.S. history lessons, I'm living on the site of King Phillip's (Metacom's) War, the last Native American stronghold in the northeast to fall to the white settlers. I'm also living on the outskirts of quaint Bristol, whose claim to fame is the oldest Fourth of July parade in the country. Their Independence Day parties began around the 4th of June and the center line of Main Street is colored red, white, and blue. No USDoT yellow for these guys.

Not-Quite Lyme Disease

Apparently, Rhode Island is the worst place in the world for catching Lyme disease. Deer ticks are all over the place and 25 percent of them are infected. That doesn't necessarily mean that you will be infected, but you know, chances are pretty high.

Thus, BELL has become fanatical about tick checks. The parents were super anxious about releasing their kids into the deep, tick-ridden forests of the Northeast so we've implemented a "buddy system" tick hunt. Before meals, everyone finds a buddy and checks the back of the neck, back of legs and arms, and on top of clothes for ticks.

Every single meal, we've found a tick.

Not all were latched on and most aren't engorged, but some are. In that case, you have a safety period of 24 hours. Between 24 and 72 hours after the tick finds your body, you can take doxycycline as a prophylaxis. After 72 hours, you wait for the flu-like symptoms of Lyme disease to appear.

I've been out here for 10 days and so far I've found 3 ticks crawling and/or living on me. Mostly I pick them off, say hello, and slice them with a fingernail or credit card (this protocol has been upgraded to killing them in alcohol now). One little sucker, though, decided that I taste particularly sweet and tried to make a couple meals out of me. Who knows how long he'd been living behind my knee, but when Lexi pulled that guy out, he looked pretty fat and juicy.

Warning: Lyme disease threat!

Better safe than sorry, right? I've got 6.5 more weeks out here and I'm exhausted enough at the end of every day; if I had to be bright and chipper and teaching lessons with flu-like symptoms, I might just give up. Time for doxycycline.

Did you know: doxycycline is also taken as acne medication and an anti-malarial drug?

I'm planning on keeping a tick count for the summer. I've never seen this many out at BELL! (We've also never checked this thoroughly before.) I kind of wonder, though, how many are camping out behind my ears and in my hair. And wouldn't it be silly if I survived four months in Africa without catching malaria or tuberculosis or getting eaten by a lion, only to get sick from a blood-sucking freckle?

Meditation on an Orange

I am continually impressed by the students I'm teaching! So often, adults don't take kids seriously. School is about authority figures (teachers) handing down the right answers and students accepting those answers as truth. Who cares about their ideas, right?

This philosophy is the Anti-BELL. As a science course, we emphasize discovery and finding the answers for yourself. As an instructor, I guide the lessons and facilitate discussion and ask questions. I try not to give any answers because who knows if my answers are right?

So anyway, this afternoon was Lexi's lesson on "Orange Meditation." With almost no introduction, we each took a cold, fresh orange and found a comfy spot to sit. For fifteen minutes, 29 high school students sat silently with an orange in their hands. Pondering, wondering, imagining. They took their time to peel and eat the orange. As I sat there with my own orange in my hands, thinking alternately about how strange-in-a-great-way this was and how amazing that high school kids were actually into it, I was impressed. When I was in high school, would I have willingly meditated on an orange? There's so much pressure to be "cool" in high school, and sitting still eating an orange for fifteen minutes is pretty far from "cool."

After we all finished our oranges, we talked about everything that had gone into the fruit: sun, rain, wind, farmers, pickers, trucks, oil for trucks, dinosaurs for oil for trucks, bees, refrigerators, money, and on and on. And over and over again, these kids said: "I'm worried about the world. I want to help."

And that's the "cool" thing about experiential learning--they will help because we're all in this together and we're in it until we discover the answers.

Martians Must Be Vegetarians

Good news for asparagus lovers: your favorite veggie may be able to grow on Mars.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/science/space/27MARS.html

Now I'm all for sustainability and reducing your eco-footprint, and planting asparagus on Mars would do nothing for either of those. Imagine the transportation costs to import vegetables from outer space! Imagine how not-fresh they would be when they arrived almost a year later. Imagine all the preservatives--yuck. Even worse than the taste of asparagus itself. Would you be willing to fork over (no pun intended) millions of dollars for Martian asparagus?


Maybe it's a good thing there's no water on Mars to complement the perfect soil. We can't give up on Earth yet, which is also good seeing as my job security is based on the assumption that Earth is essential. That would certainly make BELL difficult if we suddenly had to teach about outsourcing asparagus agriculture and other Martian endeavours.

Speaking of which, thirty kids come tomorrow. High school seems a little foreign (or shall I say, in keeping with our theme, alien?) but I'm incredibly excited. Who wouldn't get excited about two weeks of wiffle ball, tag, hammocks on the beach, hiking, and no homework?!

Take me to your leader, kids. Oh wait. That's me.

Lyme disease? Poison ivy? Bring it.

It's almost a relief to be moving back out to the "wilderness" and away from the city. I still find myself homesick for the stars and sand of Botswana. I still (by necessity--I have no laundry detergent) wash my clothes in the sink with a bar of soap. I can't get used to all this going out to restaurants, to shops, to ice cream, bowling, ball games, etc. Seeing my closest friends spend money freely and easily on food, clothes, technology, and other random bits of soon-to-be-clutter is a bit unsettling. I find myself still in Frugal Mode, where my Botswana mindset reigns: if I buy this treat, will I be able to eat dinner tomorrow?

Interesting note: I can't get used to the credit-based economy here. That's pretty funny because the focus on cash in Botswana frustrated me to no end while I was there. "Come on!" I'd think. "No one carries more than $20 in cash. Just let me use a credit card... please..." I seem to have absorbed that lifestyle more than I realized because now I always reach for cash and forget that yes, everywhere here does accept credit.

I am also struggling with adjusting to the busy American/city/college way of life. People are running all over the place, always with a million things to do. Even my friends. They describe their summer jobs with a disheartened sigh: "I HATE sitting in the lab for seven hours a day. I'm trying to hold down four jobs and I have no time to sleep. Oops, I forgot to eat lunch today. It's okay; I'll just grab an apple and run, I'm late for a meeting."

Really, guys?? Is that what you want? Is this what Americans want to raise their children to be? It disgusts me that I used to think that was normal, even desired, because it meant you were being productive and efficient.

So yeah, I can't wait to be back under the stars in a tent. After battling malaria-ridden mosquitoes, wandering hippos, and the fearsome wait-a-bit tree, poison ivy and lyme disease seem pretty tame. I figure I can handle 35 American high schoolers about as well as I handled 13 Batswana cousins, and maybe after seven weeks on the Narragansett, I'll be ready to try the city again.

Re-Entry and Re-Adjustment

I love that they call coming back to the States "re-entry." As if I've been in outer space and am flying down through the burning, gaseous atmosphere to once again set my feet firmly on the ground.

I guess that could be pretty accurate. Botswana was in some ways an entirely different world. One of the most interesting readings I did over the semester was an essay entitled "The Values Americans Live By." It was a "how-to" guide for foreigners immigrating to the US. How to survive. How to deal with these crazy Americans. How to understand their culture. American culture is pretty strange, if you stop to think about it. All this super-competitiveness, focus on money and productivity, and independence.

I know, I know, you're thinking: "But those are good things!" And that's the American way to think. In most other countries in the world, time isn't money and asking for help is an important part of building community. In Botswana, the best thing you can do is foster good relationships. "African time" evolves out of this belief: why rush away from lunch with a friend to go meet with a colleague and then scurry from there to dinner with the kids and then back to the office to meet with your boss? None of those relationships will gain anything at all. Instead, spend an extra fifteen minutes finishing lunch with your friend and then if you meet a woman on the street, help her carry her groceries and talk to her. In the meantime, the colleague you're supposed to meet with may be playing an impromptu game of tag with the neighborhood children or discussing politics with fellow office staff.

Batswana think we're crazy for always being so rushed and overscheduled.

And it's true: one of the most striking things I noticed upon "re-entry" was that everyone here goes about life in their own little bubble. You walk down the street and no one says hello as they pass you. You sit next to someone on the Metro and barely greet them with a smile. People are so determined to be independent that it seems like they forget the other 300 million people living here with them.

Also, life here is so cluttered!! No, Mom, I am not talking about your tidy house. But there is so much unnecessary stuff here. I remember talking about how exciting it would be to come home to a full closet after 4 months in the same 5 outfits, but I've more or less been wearing the same 5 or 6 things since I've been back. Do you really need more than that? And the stores! The mere thought of spending a Botswana week's living allowance on a pair of flip flops sent me into an emotional breakdown in the middle of the shoe store.

But overall, it's nice to be back. It's nice to walk down the street without seven marriage proposals a day, and it's nice to know that if I skip a shower one day, no one is going to care (or notice). Also nice: a full refrigerator, washing machines, green grass, free internet (because goodness knows uploading all these photos in an internet cafe would have depleted my entire bank account).

Ahh, yes, the photographs. It's taken me I-don't-know-how-many hours to sort them and upload them and I apologize if they still aren't very well organized or captioned. I did narrow down my 1800 photos to 497 of the good ones. I was planning on also uploading a smaller album for those of you who just really don't care about seeing more than one zebra, but I'm tired of sitting at my computer waiting for photos to upload. I may or may not get to that later. I'm moving on African time, you know.

If you are interested, though, here's the link to my photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/claire.santoro/KeNeKeNnaKoBotswana

59 Hours Later

After a surprisingly epic journey (more on that in a minute), I am home. Err, home number 4--or probably I should say, home number 1. Make Otse, Gabs, and Shorobe homes 2 through 4. My time at home is strikingly similar to a homestay: 2 weeks with a family, helping cook and clean, sharing photos and stories of your other "home," trying to (re-)learn a lifestyle that is not what you're used to.



Like forks. People here eat with forks rather than spoons?? Little tiny things like rice and peas with a FORK? Umm, sure, okay, I can do that, silly as it may seem.



And what happened to tea with every meal?



I kind of miss Setswana, too. I tried talking to Maizie (ntsa ya me) in Setswana because she doesn't understand my words anyway, no matter which language I'm speaking.



But, as promised, the details of my epic journey:



I left "home" in Gabs at noon on Friday, which would have been 5 am central US time. No problems there. My mom dropped me off, waited until I had checked in, and then I hugged her goodbye. My plane was about 30 minutes late coming in (African time, you know) but I watched a bit of my last African soap opera and looked around me at all these makgoa heading to Jo'burg with me. The plane finally came and I got on, pressing my nose to the window to take in all my last glimpses of the country I've grown to love. I wanted to remember EVERYTHING. I looked back at the airport, remembering the night four months ago when I had first stepped off the international flight. I remembered standing right on this same tarmac, smiling for a photo of me and the airplane that brought me here and taking a photo for another girl who I had barely talked to yet but would later become one of my best friends. I remembered going through immigration and offering my Botswana address as that of one unknown Stewart Chirova. I remembered our group's lost luggage. Goodness knows, I remembered a lot as I sat on that airplane preparing to leave.



When the plane started to move, it hit me that I was really going. Maybe forever. Who knows when/if I'll ever be back, if I'll ever see my families again, if I'll ever stroll through the vendors at Main Mall and eat a mango with a swiss army knife again. If I do ever return, it will be as a tourist. I'll never LIVE in Botswana again. At that point, 7/8 of myself wanted to jump off the plane and stay in Botswana, but all 8/8 of me were held firmly in place by my seatbelt and 1/8 of me knew that back in America, I had yet another wonderful family wanting to see their daughter. A family that I was actually pretty excited to see as well.

I got to Jo'burg on time (it's a short flight; easy to make up delays) and found my way to the international transfers area. A quick scan around the room, though, told me that the Delta counter where I needed to check in didn't exist. Hmmm. I went to look at several signs, trying to locate the mysteriously missing Delta, and noticed a white man looking confused.

"Aha!" I thought. "He must also be looking for Delta."

"Sorry, sir. Are you also trying to find Delta?" I asked him. I couldn't decide how to address him, since clearly he was not a Rra and after 4 months, I couldn't remember how Americans greet strangers. Turns out, he was indeed looking for Delta but instead of being helpful in finding the airline, he just kept looking confused and walking around searching for the counter that was obviously not there. I sighed and decided that someone-- me-- had to take the initiative so I went up to a not-so-busy woman at another counter and asked her where to go. The poor clueless man followed behind me. "Oh, what did she say? We're supposed to go over there?"

I know Americans like to do things for themselves much more than Batswana, who are inclined to immediately ask for what they want instead of wandering aimlessly until they find it. On the other hand, I also know that men are notoriously bad at asking for directions. Was this guy being a typical male or was he being a typical American?

Anyway, I had 3 hours to kill in the Jo'burg airport so I bought my last mango smoothie and sat down to people watch. Finally I got on the plane to Atlanta, along with about 250 other people. These people included: one man working for an environmental consulting firm in the States who is a great advocate of nuclear energy and spent about 15 minutes discussing my solar energy research project as we waited in line; one guy born in Durban in South Africa who lives in the States 6 months of every year and was excitedly telling me about his plans for Carnivale; a group of seemingly 1 million 17-19 year olds coming back from a mission trip in Swaziland; and a woman coordinating a youth development project in Malawi.


The flight went on forever but was uneventful. We got to Dakar, Senegal, about 3:30 am Botswana time and then took off from Africa for good. I slept a little and then--halfway across the Atlantic Ocean-- a horrible realization hit me.

I was not flying out of Atlanta until Sunday, June 1st.

Somehow, as I had been changing my international flight and trying to make a connecting flight to St. Louis, I had gotten dates confused. I suppose that's what happens when you're rushed at an internet cafe and you don't have an airline ticket with an arrival date on it, only the emailed confirmation of a flight number and departure time. I had skipped May 31! When I arrived in Atlanta at 8 am on Saturday, 30 May, I would have 30 hours to wait until my plane took off. And in this country, I'm not even old enough to rent a car or a hotel room yet.

Well, four months in Botswana did teach me a thing or two, and one of those things is that public transportation is never simple and schedules never go as planned. So I didn't panic. I cringed, embarrassed at my mistake (I swear, guys, I actually am intelligent, nevermind the soup story and my skipping May 31), and then tried to go back to sleep. Things would work out, I was sure. They always do, whether your bus hits a cow or your combi never comes or you're stuck in an airport for 30 hours.

Ahh but I didn't actually stay in the airport. My smart American mother realized the mistake about the time I did probably, but unlike me, she had access to a telephone. She called up a good friend in Atlanta and made arrangements for me to stay at her house. My first night in America was not in my own bed, but I did get to shower before coming home. Lucky for my mom; after 27 hours of being in transit from Gabs to ATL, I was dirty and disheveled and ridiculously tired.

And that is why it took me 59 hours to get to St. Louis from Gaborone. But I am here now, and although I am less dirty and disheveled, I am just as ridiculously tired. As I write this, it is 3:30 am in Botswana.

It is nice to be home, though. I haven't showered with a towel in 2 months, I haven't turned on my computer since January, and going through my closet here is like Christmas! So many clothes! I hardly know what to wear.

Wait... TOMORROW??!

Somehow my brain has been moving on African time, and I forgot that I am leaving TOMORROW. I thought I was here until Saturday!! Oops. Maybe this is me subconciously wanting to stay in Botswana? Because I really would have not gone to the airport until Saturday and then I would have lots of problems: 1) no flight home, 2) a very worried American mother, and 3) an expired Botswana visa. And only about 250 pula to get me out of that fix.

Whew. Good thing I noticed that today is the 29th!

*deep breath*
*pounding heart*

Okay, so what I was really going to write about was not anything related to missing flights. Quite the contrary. I was going to call this post, "The Final Countdown" and write about my five favorite experiences of these past four months.

1) Vic Falls: I feel sort of bad including this because it wasn't even in Botswana, but this was without a doubt, my number one favorite place! There is something so amazingly refreshing, rejuvenating, and humbling about being drenched to the core by the spray from a waterfall. It's nature at its purest, harshest, most beautiful. Standing on the bridge across the gorge, arms raised and shouting into the roar of the falls was... amazing. If you go to one place in Africa, go to Vic Falls.

2) Nxai Pan: Nxai Pan is also humbling but in a drastically different way. Nxai Pan is desolate--a snow-white salt pan as far as the eye can see. Your eyes think they see palm trees off in the distance but there are no trees, grass, ANYTHING to be found for kilometers. Standing in the middle of the pan, you can imagine yourself lost in the desert and about to be sun-dried. It's a great experience. There is nothing between you and nature to mitigate the harshness.

3) The Hokey Pokey: I'm not sure I ever wrote about this, but when I went to visit Liz at Khama Rhino Sanctuary, we ended up becoming "camp counselors" for fifty AIDS orphans ages 8-14. We hung out with them, ate dinner with them, and played games with them for three nights, until the final night of their program when the real counselor asked us to teach them an American game. Ummm... quick! what's something simple and fun and doesn't require much knowledge of the English language? The Hokey Pokey, of course. So Liz/Lorato and I/Malebogo sang the Hokey Pokey to teach them. The "put your whole self in" part was the best. In hindsight, we should have included the "put your rear end in" part (that's always fun with pre-teens), but we tried to keep the song short.

4) Easter Sunday: I still can't get over the fact that church was cancelled because the preacher went to the bar. Unfortunately, that's sometimes representative of the level of alcoholism in rural Botswana. Nevertheless, the church service I did end up going to was equally memorable. As the leader told me, "Batswana know every song" (she wanted me to pick one to sing; I couldn't because I honestly didn't remember anything at the time). If you qualify that by saying every Setswana song, that's true. They sang for fifty minutes and could've kept going forever. People here like to sing. I've been involved in so many sing-alongs, whether or not I knew the words!

5) Tsodilo Hills: First of all, the Hills were naturally beautiful. I'd really like to take a course in geology... Second, they have the world's greatest concentration of rock art, most of it from 3000 years ago, so how could that not be impressive? Third, here's a story I didn't share the first time around but, despite the embarrassment factor, is worth it:
Lunch on our first full day. We've got Stevie's camp stove and pot and two packets of instant soup. Just add water, right? Easy. We put the pot on the stove and wait for the water to boil. And wait and wait and wait because it's just a little camp stove. Our stomachs are growling because we've just climbed a mountain and been hiking for 2 hours, but finally the water boils. Yay! We pour in the soup powder and look on eagerly. Except... ewww. It clumps and looks absolutely disgusting and no matter how much Katie mashes the clumps with a spoon, they won't dissolve.
What in the world happened?? It was instant soup! How did we mess up instant soup?!
Turns out, even if it's "instant," you still have to read the directions. The instant chicken noodle could be added to boiling water, but the instant vegetable had to be added to cold water then boiled. Huh.
So yes, somehow four 20- and 21-year-old American students screwed up instant soup. I'm happy to say that one of the many things I learned this semester is that when cooking ANYTHING, always read the directions.

Yet I still cook without a recipe, mostly by necessity. There simply aren't recipes available for seswaa (shredded mince-flavored beef) and makwinya (fat cakes) and paleche (maize meal patty-sort of thing), which are three of my most favorite Setswana foods.

Salang sentle, botho. Ke tlaa lo bona kgantele (kamoso)!
Stay well, guys. I'll see you soon (tomorrow)!

A Mountain A Day Keeps the Doctor Away

So... South Africa! It was a busy week, and we could have easily spent a month trying to cover what we did in 8 days. Here was our itinerary:

Saturday- Gabs to Port Elizabeth, by plane
Sunday- Port Elizabeth to Storms River, by bus
Monday- Storms River to Nature's Valley, by bus
Tuesday- Nature's Valley to Plettenberg Bay, by bus
Wednesday- Plettenberg Bay to Swellendam, by bus
Thursday- Swellendam to Cape Town, by bus
Friday- Table Mountain and the waterfront, by foot
Saturday- Simonstown, Cape Point, and Lion's Head Mountain, by car and foot
Sunday- Cape Town to Gabs, by plane

Yep, you read that right. Nick and I rented a car and drove along the Cape Peninsula, on the left side of the road! Eek. No problem though; it was remarkably easy (perhaps because I haven't driven on either side of the road in 4 months?) and quite fun. We just had to coach ourselves along sometimes, saying, "Okay, turn right here. That means you're crossing traffic. Left lane, left lane!"

Anyway, here are a few of the notable parts of our trip:
- I saw dolphins! Actually, I sea kayaked right next to them.
- I saw penguins! They're called Jackass Penguins because these cute little tiny birds make a noise just like a donkey.
- As the title says, I climbed a mountain a day. Or at least a big hill. In Swellendam was the highest peak we climbed, 1426 meters high. I was feeling very ashamed and out of shape, thinking that was 1426 FEET high, until Nick smartly pointed out that here in Africa, things are measured with the metric system. That means it was actually over 4000 feet. Then we climbed Table Mountain in Cape Town, which is just over 1000 meters tall. We took the cable car back down, though, through the clouds called the "Tablecloth." And finally, on Saturday, we climbed Lion's Head, which is a piddly little peak at maybe only 600 meters, but it has a gorgeous view. We timed it exactly right by getting to the summit to watch sunset over the sea. All this mountain climbing, though, gave me majorly sore calf muscles after 2 months walking around the Delta and the Kalahari--probably two of the world's flatest places.

Overall, South Africa was beautiful. I loved the week I spent there, even though the country is almost entirely westernized (particularly Cape Town). It felt almost like being at home. Not at all like Africa.

Here's how I know that's true: when I got to the airport, I spent some time browsing in an African crafts shop. The store was packed with tourists! Most of them, I suppose, have never been into "real" Africa where they actually make these crafts and you can buy them for 25% of what the airport sells them for. Nick and I had a good laugh over the carved wooden spoons selling for 75 Rand when I bought a pair in Kasane for 15 pula (Rand and pula are roughly equivalent).

Also, it was an interesting time to be in South Africa, politics-wise. I'll probably post more about that later, but if you haven't read up on the xenophobia, I'd recommend it. And read about Zimbabwe, too. As my mom here commented wryly last night, "Maybe your Bush will come to Zim and do like he did with Saddam." Mugabe is wreaking havoc on his country, and now he's starting to blame America and Britain for his problems. America can't ignore the issues of southern Africa much longer.

D-tops and Claire Go To South Africa

D-tops, by the way, is short for Ditapole ("potatoes" in Setswana), a nickname bestowed upon Nick during the second week of our program by Alexa. There's no good explanation for the name.

Anyway, we made it to South Africa quite easily! And it is a totally different world here. For one, when we stepped off the plane in Port Elizabeth, I knew immediately we were at the beach by the warm salty breeze. And the humidity. Botswana is dry dry DRY and South Africa, at least along the Cape, is definitely not.

Also, people here don't speak Setswana. I find myself at a loss for how to greet them since I can't say "dumela." Saying "hello" just seems unnatural after nearly four months. I find myself strangely silent, offering waves and smiles but no verbal greeting as I pass strangers on the road.

A few highlights of our day-and-a-half here so far:

• My first experience with the Indian Ocean was when I fell in. We were hiking a very rocky trail and I lost my balance. Plop! At least only one shoe got wet.
• Ginormous waves. Like 30 feet high. Seriously.
• We found the African jungle! Storms River, where I am now, is home to the Tsitsikamma National Park, aka practically rainforest.
• My ISP on solar energy in Botswana claimed that Bots has the highest solar radiation of almost anywhere in the world. In the 4 months I was there, we had maybe 2 cloudy days. First day in South Africa and it's overcast... or maybe it was the ocean mist?? At least my ISP stands correct.

I may or may not have internet access the rest of the trip, but I'll share all my stories when I get back!

And Then There Were... None

Our numbers are dwindling!! :(

The program officially ends in twelve hours or so, but Adam left yesterday afternoon to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with his dad, and Peter left this morning to work in the national parks in Alaska. Nick and I are the next two to leave, tomorrow morning at 11 am for Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

The others all depart soon after: Jenn is heading to Cape Town, Allie's meeting her parents in Jo'burg, Stevie's waiting for her dad to come to Gabs, Candice has to get back to graduate from PLU in four days, Maya's hoping to work for an orphanage somewhere in Botswana, Aaron is traveling somewhere yet to be determined, Alexa's going to be chopping down trees in the mountains of New England, and... well, everyone is splitting off in a million different directions, either to go home, to travel, or to get to work.

So yeah, I'll be in South Africa until May 25th. That means I'll be totally out of contact because obviously, neither my American nor Botswana cell phone will work there. Probably I won't be internetting either because I'll be spending all my time gazing at gorgeous mountains and beaches and national forests.

And then my plans for the next week? I have to finish my ISP write-up. That's right; I'm not done yet. Simba's computer decided to corrupt my file two days ago and I had to start over COMPLETELY. For an approximately 40-50 page paper, that's no small deal. Luckily I am coming back to Gabs after Cape Town, so I can turn it in any time before I leave for the US.

I also plan on visiting my Otse family during my 5 days back in Gabs. We went today after ISP presentations, but my mom had gone into town and wasn't home. I had brought some of my clothes and stuff to donate and gave them instead to my aunt, Liz's mom. She was so pleased! One of the things I donated was my adorable brown and pink dress--the one that, according to Liz and Dana, was "my identity" for these past 4 months. I did love that dress and thought about keeping it, but when Liz's mom pulled it out of the bag, she smiled in recognition (did I really wear it that much??) and said, "Oh, this is for Vanessa." And that thought makes me so happy. I love imagining my little 8-year-old sister wearing the sundress, which will still be a little too big for her. She's the best person to wear it. Vanessa's such a little diva and I love her for it!

3 Days

Three more days of SIT Botswana. I can't believe it. Our whole group met back in Gabs last night at Lolwapa Lodge, and it is so great to see everyone again after a month apart! We stayed up half the night sharing stories. It's hard to imagine that three days from now, we'll be spread all over the world, maybe never seeing each other again. Some of us will be traveling in South Africa or Tanzania or Botswana or Vic Falls or back to the U.S., to Alaska and New Hampshire and California and Washington and basically all over the place.

I'm gonna miss these guys and this country, too.

To answer all your questions about my travel plans: I'll be going with Nick to South Africa for a week. We're flying into Port Elizabeth then taking the backpackers' Baz Bus to Cape Town, stopping several places to hike around. We'll end up in Cape Town for about 3 days before flying back to Jo'burg on the 25th. Nick flies out to Europe then but I'll head back to Gabs to stay with my family, visit my Otse family, and maybe take a few day trips to villages outside Gabs. Who knows? Maybe I'll just spend those last 5 days chillin' at home, watching more TV than I ever will in America and filling up on Stella's delicious pap and seswaa.

Updates on Everything

So much has happened since I last posted; I don't even know where to start. Won't it be strange when I come back to the States and every day isn't a huge adventure??

Chapter 1: Tsodilo Hills
First, I did end up going to Tsodilo Hills with Stevie, Liz, and Katie. The frustratingly unavailable people from RIIC finally contacted me on Tuesday just before I was planning on leaving for Tsodilo. Luckily, though, our ride was moving on African time, so I fit in a good phone interview.

Our ride, by the way, was the director of the museum at Tsodilo, a man named Fane. His name is pronounced like "funny," and when Stevie called him to ask about getting a ride, he kept saying, "You're talking too funny." She kept apologizing, thinking he was referring to her incomprehensible American accent. Turns out, he was only trying to introduce himself: "You're talking to Fane." Oops!

Anyway, Fane had to come to Maun to pick up a girl, Elisa, who was going to be working at Tsodilo for 3 months. He piled us into the back of his Land Rover on an old mattress with all our luggage and Elisa's luggage and a couple shopping bags of groceries and a carpet we picked up along the way. With all these errands to run, we didn't end up leaving Maun until 6 pm, which meant we got to Tsodilo about 11 pm. Fane didn't make us set up camp that late, though, so we spent the night on the floor of his living room.

So on Wednesday we got up and hiked a couple of the trails. Both were really cool and the 3000 year old rock paintings were impressive! We opted not to go with a guide so we could spend time climbing the mountains, sitting and just looking, and debating whether or not that painting was a fish or a turtle. (Consensus: fish.)

Our plan for Thursday was to wake up, hike one more trail in the morning and catch a ride into Nxamaseri, the closest village, after lunch with Fane in order to get the 3:30ish bus. Well, plans just don't work in Africa. Fane's meeting dragged on and on and on, so we finally approached a man in a van labeled "Nxamaseri Island Lodge" to ask when he would be heading back into town and could we get a ride? He said he'd be going at 4 when his clients had to catch a flight from the airstrip. Hmmmm. When 3:30 came and went with no sign of Fane, we took the man up on a ride. There's another bus at 8:00 in the morning, so if we could get into Nxamaseri, we could hop on that one in the morning, ride for 5 hours, and still be back in time to renew our visas before the office closed at 4:30 on Friday.

Except... there's nowhere to stay in Nxamaseri. The village kind of doesn't exist. Hitchhiking is also impossible, according to Mark, the guy from Nxamaseri Lodge.

"But," he said, "if you want to stay at my lodge, I'll let you for 100 pula each. Just for one night and I'll take you to the bus in the morning."

One hundred pula is just a bit outside of our budgets, so we looked at each other and sighed. Mark did tell us that there was a campsite a ways away from Nxamaseri called Drotsky's Cabins and he would drive us there if we wanted. However, we didn't know how we would get to the bus in the morning if we went to Drotsky's, which because it's right smack in the middle of the Delta, was probably also outside of our budget. And if we stayed at Tsodilo another night, we might never catch a ride to the bus. We decided to take Mark up on his offer.

Chapter 2: It's a Small World
After 3.5 months in Botswana, you begin to realize how very small this country is. Mark's clients turned out to be two Americans from San Francisco who had led a Habitat for Humanity trip, stopping at Khama Rhino Sanctuary, where Liz was doing her ISP. Sure enough, they recognized each other. Then, the pilot that came to pick them up at the airstrip where we dropped them off turned out to be our friend Gary from Maun. Unfortunately his plane wasn't big enough to squeeze us in as well (not to mention, flights would be wayyyyy out of my budget).

Speaking of small worlds, I've run into Leon, the guy I stayed with in Ghanzi, twice since then. Once in Francistown and once in Gabs.

Anyway, Mark drove us most of the way in his van, and as we were driving, told us that the one condition of staying at the lodge was that we could NOT say we were from America. If we did, he would have to charge us international rates (which we would later find out are US$ 350 per person per night). We were simply his friends.

Okay, sure. This sort of thing happens all the time in Botswana, where you need help, meet someone, and they take you under their wing. We jokingly asked what our story should be and he said, "Can you remember the name Fronette? That's my girlfriend from Jo'burg. You're friends with her."

The next leg of our journey took us into the back of a pickup truck, driving through the bush on sand roads for several kilometers. No wonder hitchhiking is impossible here. We never saw another vehicle.

And then the last leg of our journey took us into a boat! We realized that the lodge we were going to be staying at was a high-end, fly-in lodge and we were riding through the Okavango Delta in a motorboat to get there. Wow.

Chapter 3: What I Am Not Proud Of
When we arrived, the owner of the lodge came to meet us. She was a cute little blond girl, probably no older than 27. She was so nice and cheerful. She showed us our rooms- amazing, right on the water- and kept apologizing that they were eating leftovers for dinner. Not a problem, we thought. Anything beats beans and noodles cooked over a fire. But of course, we didn't say that since we weren't supposed to be students camping in Maun.

Kat, the owner, was awfully curious, though. "What are you doing in Maun? Where are you staying?" she asked.

Uhhhh.

We couldn't say at a campsite, which was the truth, so Stevie came up with some story about visiting her boyfriend who works at the Sankuyo Management Trust.

But it turns out Kat lived in Maun for 4 years and knows everyone! "Jimmy who? What's he look like? How old is he?" Stevie managed to come up with some details but when Kat left us alone finally, we all looked at each other and were like, oh @!#*. We were the only guests there that night and would be sitting down to dinner with only Kat and Mark, so we decided we couldn't keep up the lie. We'd tell her the truth and hand over our credit cards.

We talked to Mark first, though, and he was adamant: you are NOT going to tell her. He told us how much it cost to stay there, and suddenly, the decision wasn't so easy anymore. Everyone didn't have enough money in their accounts to cover the lodge fees, and no one had enough to cover all 4 lodge fees. And if we told, we'd be getting Mark in trouble. But if we didn't tell, we had to keep living this lie.

In the end, we didn't tell Kat. We didn't have to say much more about ourselves until the morning, when we accidentally let slip that we needed to renew our visas that day. We had to cover that up with saying we were all in between jobs, looking to work for village trusts in Botswana. But then Kat wanted to know where we went to school. "University of Cape Town," we told her, since that was the only university we knew for sure in South Africa. Well. Kat went to UCT for a couple years. And, she wanted to know, were we really from South Africa? We don't have the accents. Again, Stevie came to the rescue with her quick thinking. "I grew up in the States but my dad's job with the World Bank moved him to Jo'burg about ten years ago." I'm not sure Kat believed that, but luckily she let it go and Mark FINALLY appeared to take us to the bus.

We paid him more than he had told us to, but it wasn't enough to cover up a guilty conscience. The hard part, though, is that we couldn't come up with anything we'd have done differently given the information we had. At each point along the way, we made what we thought was the best decision. It wasn't until we were too far in to back out that we realized we had been sort of misled into lying. And then we had to make an even tougher decison: get Mark in trouble for helping us out when we were stuck, or deceive Kat, possibly the nicest girl on the planet?

Chapter 4: Home Sweet Home
When we finally got back to Maun, we ran in circles for hours trying to renew our visas. It's amazing how many hoops you have to jump through to do anything involving the government. But around 5:30 that night, we were finally legal in the country again.

The next morning, I woke up and made the 11 hour bus ride back to Gabs. My family was out when I got there but they had left a spare key for me, so I let myself in, made dinner, and got settled. Ahhhhhh. Mma and Auntie Stella came back a few hours later, and Mpelo came home from visiting her sister in Jo'burg on Sunday afternoon. My 3 little cousins appeared on Sunday night. So anyway, I got to spend Mother's Day with my Mom #3.

One of the first things I did when I got home was laundry. It occured to me that between excursions and backpacking from Ghanzi to Francistown to Serowe to Tsodilo, some of my clothes hadn't had a proper washing since Shorobe, which was about 6 weeks ago. Oops!

Life Happens When You're Making Plans

First of all, African time is not American time. Things don't work by schedules and calendars and clocks here, and they think we are all INSANE for putting so much emphasis on productivity and efficiency. The whole philosophy behind African time is that if you use your time to foster personal relationships, then it's okay if you don't get to your appointment exactly at nine o'clock on the dot.

So when I told you guys that I planned on going to Tsodilo Hills, I didn't really *expect* it to happen. No expectations. As Simba says, they're the worst thing that can happen to you (I question his logic there but it's a good point nonetheless). I rather hoped I would get there.

Not so much.

May 1st and 2nd are holidays here and then it's the weekend, so we couldn't get in touch with the people who need to give us a ride from Shakawe, where the bus would drop us, to the Hills. Then we also have the issue of our visas expiring tomorrow and needing to be back to renew them on Monday. How long could we push it, traveling around the country past immigration checkpoints on expired visas? Sadly, in a lot of places, you could push it quite a long time if you're white and/or willing to part with some pula. THEN I also have to be back in Gabs before the 9th to exchange my airline ticket. I could do it in Maun except that my ticket is currently locked up in the SIT office in Gabs. And finally, there's the issue of my mysterious stomach disease. I'm about 500% better than I was three days ago but that's only about 92% of normal. I would probably be fine but I'm not sure I want to test out a 5 hour bus/car ride when my only available toilet is the woods.

But before you start feeling sorry for me, look at the paradise where I've been staying:

Okay, Sedia's not really that perfect, I just managed to capture it at its best. And so when it gets too hot to nap in my tent (about 7:45 am), I take my iPod and my water bottle and maybe my research if I'm feeling studious up to the pool and I drag a lounge chair into the shade and--ahhhhhh....

Alas, though, the time has come to head back down south. I'll be sticking around here to renew my visa on Monday and then I'll probably go to Gabs on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending whether these frustratingly unavailable people from RIIC in Kanye ever email me back. I talked to my Gabs family so I'll be living with them for the week until I meet up with my group on the 12th.

By then, I will have finished and printed all 3 copies of my ISP, eaten my last can of baked beans for a looooooooooooong time hopefully, and will have less than a week left of "school." Speaking of which, I now have less than one month left in Africa. I'll officially be home in a brick house with a grass lawn instead of a mud-and-beer-can hut with a thatch roof and a sand yard on June 1st, 2008-- exactly four months after having left it, buried under nine inches of snow and ice.

I guess there are daffodils now? I miss the daffodils!

At Least It's Not Malaria

Monday night I came down with some horrible illness involving a fever of 102, a splitting headache, and explosive diarrhea. *sigh* My stomach held out for so long without getting sick! (Except for one day of food poisoning from some cheese I ate and two days of a bad cold...) Anyway, my friend Liz got sick, too, so I'm guessing I caught whatever this is when I visited her at Khama Rhino Sanctuary. She went to the hospital today and was told, it's either: 1) bad water or 2) a stomach virus. We're both on antibiotics now (yay Cipro).

On the bright side, not being able to keep any food down may help me lose some of this mutogo belly I've gained over the past three months, and it's also keeping me way under budget. I'm not paying for food I can't eat.

Words, Words, Words

In a rare deviation from my African adventures, this post is instead a book recommendation. If you haven't read it already, go check out Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" from the library or borrow it from a friend. If you happen to be in a foreign country when you read it, even better. Botswana was the perfect setting for me to read it.

Anyway, in chapter 33, Liz wonders which word best describes her home, her family, herself. It's an interesting question much discussed by my friends as we passed the book from person to person. Here are the conclusions I came to:

My family's word growing up was STRENGTH, as in mental fortitude, independence, perseverance. Keep your wits about you. Take initiative. Don't wait to be led. Maybe this is Mom's word, too?

Brown's word is definitely PASSION. Brown students have strong opinions and want to share them. What are you passionate about? Do you protest sweatshops or Darfur? Do you devote your life to recycling? Do you think that computer programming will save the world, or does researching fruit flies make your heart sing? Find your passion and go with it.

So what's my word? STRENGTH might work for me, too, but at least at this point in my life, I think the more appropriate choice is SEARCHING. As in, what am I doing with my life? Where am I going and what do I want? And what brought me to Botswana?

SEARCHING could probably describe almost any 20-year-old American student. Yet, I've realized, it does not describe most 20-year-old Batswana women. In some ways, I feel so immature and inadequate compared to them: I can barely cook a pot of mutogo, much less go to work every morning or raise a child. This also makes me realize how lucky I am. I have the opportunity to be a university student, a family that doesn't depend on me for their survival, and I'm not expected to have kids for another 10 or 15 years, or ever if I don't want them. And that, I'd like to believe, is America's word: FREEDOM.

What's your word?