Self Portrait

Oh, my goodness! What a hot day that was. I still remember it over a year later. I was going out from the clinic and it was so opressive out that I had to stop at the bar to buy a coke. By the time I made it half way to the friend I was visiting I had to stop again. I'm sitting on the wooden railing that makes up the cheif's 'official' kraal (where the cows go... like the infamous OK). In African tradition it is the most sacred of places- you depend on your kraals to protect your animals. Traditional african life hangs in the balance arround healthy animals. Setswana customs dictate that the chief be buried in the kraal so that his spirit may linger and watch over the cattle. This rarely happens in modern Botswana. Our village kraal is (by the great mystery of cel phone technology) the only place you might pick up a cel signal. At this time of the day you can usually find half a dozen people sitting on the fence searching for a signal. Mabye those old bones down there in the dirt brought in a signal for us. But the heat today kept everyone away (well, at least at the bar seeking refreshment). I think that with everyone gone I noticed my long shadow for the first time and took this shot.

Home

Yes, that yellow brick building with the tin roof was my home for two years. I had no electricity in the house or running water. I did have have a tap in the yard, so water was at least fairly close at hand. I kept large buckets of water in the kitchen so that when the tap went dry I could still cook and drink.

My yard was dirt (I called it my little sand box) but you still had to sweep the dirt and make it look nice. The best women could sweep the dirt with different strokes and create a patterend masterpiece. I was lucky if I could get all of the little plant pods and stuff out of the yard in one go.



A tin roof in summer = hot.
A tin roof in the rain = loud.
I will say no more on that subject.

On candles
Candels cease to be romantic lighting when you have nothing else to use. If you have no candles you can find a small neighbor or boy roaming arrond the village and send them to go buy some. They always bring back back exact change. I think that in the summer candles put out more heat than light. One part candle wax mixed with one part paraffin (thats kerosene for you crazy Westerners) slowly heated makes a good floor polish. In the classroom a candle makes a good phallus for demonstrating proper condom use.

The Perfect African Sport

Every evening, like clockwork, the village kids would come out to the the field in front of my house and play football. You don't need anything to play football. A ball can be made from threading together plastic bags untill you have enough to wrap around into a hard ball. Martha would be proud. The kids play untill dark then go home and attend to household duties like bringing in the goats, washing and pressing school clothes for the next day, or cuting firewood.

Out in the Bush

Out in the middle of the Kalahari Desert along a strech of land that looks like the middle of nowhere is one of the coolest places in Southern Africa. Planet Baobob. On the Francistown-Maun road in Botswana is a little camp off the main road in what looks like nothing but Kgalhadi scrub brush. But upon closer inspection this little camp is situated right in a virtual forest of Baobob trees. The sunest picture on this page (down at the bottom) has one of these trees in the foreground. Pictured here is the reception desk/bar for the site. It is aslo the base camp for adventures out onto the salt pan (see the picture of nothing but perfectly flat ground and a jeep). A wonderful treasure that I cant wait to get back to.

Getting the message out

As a Peace Corps Volunteer working in HIV you are always asking your self: "How can we better present this message and get it out there?" One of the things that we did was to create a district HIV/AIDS newsletter. We had a print run of 3,000 copies that went out to all of the clinics, schools, and hospitals. In it we ran indepth articles about HIV, stories about people with HIV, and information about support groups. It became quite popular and the copies got passed arround quite a bit. To the left is a small selection from one of the issues. you can click on it and make it bigger to see it.

The ambulance

This, ladies and gentle men was our clinic ambulance. A pickup truck with a flashy light and a big "A". We didnt really cary any medications in the ambulance with us. It didnt have any special devices in there. Not even O2 or IVs. But it did have superb 4 wheel drive and could get to the hospital no matter what the conditions on the dirt roads might be. Any medical supplies we needed would be in the clinic and we would take only what was needed by that specific patient. The African sun would bake any drugs left in the ambulace and render them useless.

on delivering babies

In this room I have delivered more babies than I can count. Spartan by western standards, the room seems to trouble health professionals in the US. But, the truth is that infant mortatility in Botswana is one of the lowest in Africa. And, this is a vast leap forward from what little the country had 25 years ago. This is a standard delivery room at a rural clinic. We can handle uncomplicated pregnancies here. All of the hospitals have much more at their disposals and are equipped surgical level delivery rooms for c-sections and have units for critical care neonates. If at the clinic any abnormalities are discovered during prenatal care, we send them to the hospital to deliver. If there is trouble at the clinic during delivery we have an ambulance and driver on stand by to transport the patient to the hospital. More often than not clinic level deliveries go according to plan. Actually, what is keeping the infant mortatility rate elevated in Botswana is not the level of health care but the prevalence of HIV and AIDS.

Our clinic staff

The Ramokgonami Clinic Staff

(its winter, thus the sweaters)

(yes, winter can be cold in Africa)

(its a desert where I live, deserts get cold)

(very cold when you dont have a heater at night)

on very rural health care

Location:
Moshopa Health Post
Mahalapye Sub District
Republic of Botswana

What you are seeing is the pharmacy for a public healh post in a village that has no more than 1,000 residents. The clinic that I worked at oversaw this and several other health posts in the area. Think of it as a minor emergency clinic. Here you can acess (for free) wound care, basic drugs- antibiotics, anelgesics, antihypertensives, vaccines, pre and post natal care, for non emergenccy cases you can schedule an appointment with the doctor when he comes (about one every three weeks), for more serious cases we have an ambulance with a nurse and driver on call. For ease of distribution the drugs are prepackeged in plastic bags and set in the trays on the top shelf (we do this when nobody is at the clinic so that when patients come we can get them in and out faster). The middle shelf has containers of basic oral drugs- pills for adults and liquids for the kids.

on the weather

Of all the different kinds of weather I face in Botswana the dust storm tends to be my least favorite. Now, its not the kind of dust storm that can sweep across northern Africa but, a Kalahari dust storm or a phefo e e matsubutsubu in setswana - a storm of winds is not a fun event. Generally, they strike up when I leave my windows open at home and have walked to a remote end of the village. It then involves a several kilometer run to my house at top speeds while I silently shout oh god, the windows! SHIT! the pot of lentels will be sandy (who shouts about their lentels?) Dammit, my bed is going to be a fucking beach. Even when you get the windows closed the dust still gets in. After the storm abides I have to spend the rest of the day geting sand out of everything. Yes, dinner was ruined. So, now that I'm tired I will have a sandwich. And beer, beer is good.

Me, Myself, and I

On vacation along the lower Okavongo river. Namibia is on the far side of the river, I'm standing on the Botswana side. What a truely lovely day that was. The weather was perfect. The country was beautiful. And above all I was in the best company one could hope for. 

Its never what you think

This is the Riverwalk mall in the capital of Botswana. Not everything in that small African country you never heard of before is cows, dirt, and mud huts. Many of the places that were called third world in the past are now a mixture of first and third world. The restaurant below is fabulous.

on the setting of the sun

Location:
20° 11' 51" S
25° 18' 15" E

Why is it that a common event such as the setting or rising of the sun can strike us with such emotional force? I took this picture while on vacation with a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer over the 2005 independence holidays in Botswana. The sunrises and sunsets in Africa always grab me. On my first flight to Africa I was told by an old Afrikaaner that the zonsondergang (sunsets) out in the bush would stay with me forever. He was right, but not in the way I thought. It is not an image that stays with you but rather a rhythm. The passing of light, the comming of stars, the rise of the moon. It is a daily cycle that transformes over the course of the year. In the west, we hardly notice these things in our daily life. When do notice them they tend to be singular events- an extra special sunset on vacation, perhaps. In rural Africa you can't help but notice. Over there you always know when the sun sets, when the moon rises, and in what phase. If the sun is down and the moon is not up its much harder to find your way.

on facing isolation

Location:
Ntwetwe Pan-

Makgadikgadi Salt Pans

Kalahari Desert

In the Middle of the Kalahri Desert there is a vast nothingness the size of Switzerland. Yea, big. Geologically, its a salt bed that remainis from an ancient superlake that covered over 30,000 sq. miles. Personally, it is the most profoundly desolate place I have ever been. No roads, no plants, no animals, no, people, not even any insects. It is a place where you come face to face with true isolation. 360 degrees of featurelessness, yet one of the most fascinating places I have ever been. The first time I went out on the pans we spent the night in sleeping bags 100 yards out from the vechicles. It is a rare luxury to experience the dance of the night sky from such a vantage. It is a place where you feel small, but where being small is not a bad thing.

I learn the art of painting posters

A drama group came to our district to perform plays about how mothers can avoid transmitting the HIV virus to their unborn children. Sounds dreadful but the group made a great play out of it. I got the task of making the posters to go up and advertise the events. Its a lot harder than one might think.

on evenings

I took this photo during one of those splendid electric sunsets we had in Botswana. The man pictured is Godfrey Sekgabo, teacher of Math and Computer studies and coach of the chess team at Ramokgnami CJSS. We were in his garden in the school compound that evening (as we so often were). We had no water for the garden so we were sparingly using the last bit of water from the watertank in the yard. After the work in the garden we would harvest what we wanted for dinner and SK (thats what we called Sekgabo) would usually make dinner. That is unless he was in the mood for one of my American concoctions. Then I would cook. We would then usually watch the news in setswana and play a game of chess. If it was time for the newspapers to come out we would go buy all of them from the general store and then sit and read them. Lively and heated discussions followed about the articles... the government of botswana, the removal of the bushmen from the CKGR, the banning of a University of Botswana for criticizing the government (he was kicked out of the country), the Thokolosi (gosts haunting someone or other), elections, Zimbabwe and its president Uncle Bob...

In a country of only 2 million there is always something to talk about. The whole country is like a small town- everybody knows everybodies business.

Outside the West

In the rest of the world this is actually a common scene. This could be Africa as easily as it could be South America. Domesticated animals clogging up the road is one of the universal themes in developing countries. I like the contrast with the high voltage powerlines in the background.

on the nature of African dirt roads

Where does this road go?












The funny thing is that this road is in the capital of Botswana (just just next to downtown). Looking at it you might think that you are in the middle of the Kalahari. But, just down the road a bit you will find this restruant. The great Sanitas. A gem of the capital city. Its a plant/outdoor stuff/herb store and restruant. Fabulous. Everything here is fresh. And inexpensive. You never know where that little dirt road goes!

The Ramokgonami Table Tennis Team

On vacation

Sterilization

I took this picture with my mom when she came to visit me in Botswana. She was positively overcome by the sight of our autoclaves. "Michael, take a picture, oh, they will never believe this back in the US!" I had never given them a second look. But then I have never worked in a western hospital. To me, they did their job and that was that. To my mom, well, just look!