Botswana and Learning to Farm

Hey everybody. Ya, it’s been a while, but I have a good excuse this time. I think I can count the number of nights I’ve spent at home by myself this past month on one hand. There’s been a whole lot of running around so it’ll be really nice once things settle down after next week.

A few weeks ago me and two other volunteers, Laura and John, went to a workshop on HIV/AIDS prevention in Gaborone, Botswana and it was AMAZING!!! First off, the per diem they gave us for the week that we were there was as much as we usually make in a month. They put us up in this pretty nice hotel right next to the really nice conference center the workshop was at. Pool, huge buffet, tv, and warm showers: it was almost a vacation. There were also two Botswana PC volunteers attending the workshop so they were able to show us around the city, which was waaaayyyy nicer than anything Swaziland has. We were able to get Chinese take-out one night and see Avatar in a real theatre the next. All of the fun stuff aside, a lot of information was covered during the five days we were together and it all looks like it’ll all be pretty useful here in one way or another. So the next step now is figuring out how we’re going to share what we learned with all of the other volunteers. John and Laura are working on an article for the next issue of our monthly newsletter and we’ll be putting together some presentations for our Mid-Service Training and the new group’s Pre-Service Training.

After getting back from Botswana, I had a couple of days at home until I had to leave for a gardening training the World Food Program put on for us for five days up at the place where we did our Pre-Service Training. WFP donates food to a lot of schools and Neighborhood Care Points all over the country and they want to start using PCVs to monitor the places in their communities getting food to make sure everything’s working as it’s supposed to. The first part of the training was showing us what to look for and how to report what we find, but the second half was teaching us actual gardening techniques and that was really interesting. We spent a whole day practicing making a compost pile and learning what plants go well together depending on what exactly you’re trying to do with your garden. All of that is meant for us to start on a small scale with a little garden on our homesteads, then hopefully people will see how amazing our garden is doing and then we can share these new techniques with others, and so on. My homestead doesn’t have a ton of space, but I’m planning on starting small by doing a few things in plastic containers and seeing how that goes.

Last Thursday was our big presentation of the Welcome Video to our bosses at the office. We had spent the three previous days in town working on the video, almost non-stop, including not sleeping at all the night before, and they still said we have more work to do. A lot of their comments were about some parts being too long and to try to cut out stuff that isn’t super important. We have to present the final thing next Monday so it can all be sent out April 1st, and we still have some work to do before then. The whole thing has been fun and all, but I’ll be a lot happier once it’s finished. We’re still going to try to put a lot of the video up on YouTube so I’ll let you guys know when that happens.

One of the girls here has a birthday coming up so we’re all going to go to House on Fire, the big concert venue in the country, to see this pretty popular (so I hear) South African band called Freshly Ground. We’ll be staying at the hostel on the game reserve so hopefully we’ll get to spend some time just hanging out in the pool watching the ostriches wander by.

Ya, it’s been a crazy month and I’m exhausted, but I’d much rather have things like this than how they were, with me walking to the store for some bread as the highlight of my day. With that said, it’ll be nice to take a day or two next week to just relax. All right, now back to sweating.

P.S. One of the presenters from the Botswana workshop just put up a bunch of pictures he took. Enjoy!