All Hail the Dragonslayer!!

Sunday (Feb 3)
Today was long and boring! I woke up at 5:45am to go running with my roommate Alyssa, which was surprisingly nice because the temperature was very cool, and the sun wasn't burning down on us! I am starting to feel like a runner again, and that is very exciting! Progress is slow, but I think if I keep it up, I will come home in better shape than I've been in a few years! Other than that, most of my day has been consumed with studying for the first test in Globalization in Southern Africa. The study guide is pretty extensive, and I'm not too confident with the material, so fingers crossed! I am heading to bed really early tonight in the hopes that I will be able to rouse myself at 5:45 again tomorrow morning for another workout session! Hope everyone has a lovely Sunday!

Monday - Today was the big test, and although I still felt like I was not fully prepared, there were no surprises, which I suppose is a good thing! After the test, Alyssa and I sped-walked to Riverwalk to go shopping for groceries, and just made it back in time to grab a quick snack before our independent study class at 11. Nothing in particular happened other than the fact that we found out that we will be going to tour the diamond mines some time in late March/early April. We are also going to Johannesburg for sure which will be great, and of course the Okavango Deltas for a whole week! So although my pictures at this point are few and far between, there will be plenty from those trips to show for my time here! Setswana, a quick nap, and aerobics consumed the rest of my day, and for dinner Alyssa and I cooked up a veggie burger and went to my room to have a little picnic with a blanket on the floor because our roommates had friends over and they were occupying the kitchen table.
Unfortunately, we are finding that there are a lot of clashes in living styles between the Botswana girls and Alyssa and I, and it's leading to a lot of undue tension. For example, they requested that Alyssa and I go out and spend P70 (around $14) each to buy cleaning supplies and air fresheners for the bathroom, which we were supposed to use after each use of the bathroom and shower in order to keep the bugs at bay. We agreed to this, but found it hard to believe that cleaning the bathroom and shower (which get cleaned by the maids every weekday) every time we use it will keep away bugs when the kitchen stove is constantly overflowing with pots full of food. Our roommates cook a lot, and even though it smells wonderful, it is quite frustrating for us when they insist that we keep other areas spotless while they will leave food lying around on the stove for up to twelve hours at a time. I'm glad we found a pot this weekend so that we don't have to rely on scrounging up a clean one to cook with every day. A lot of the issues I think arise out of the age differences since they are all close to their thirties and therefore have a different sense of household than we do, particularly since we view this place as just another college dorm that we will vacate in three months.

Tuesday 2/5
We had Setswana for two hours today, and although most of the people in my class have a sincere desire to learn the language, our professor is not providing for the kind of environment in which learning is promoted. I suspect that learning Setswana from a non-native speaker would be much easier than from a native speaker, because there are so many rules and inconsistencies that are not being communicated effectively, and it's leading to a lot of frustration within the class.

Wednesday 2/6
The days are definitely starting to move a lot faster lately. I can't believe Valentine's Day is only a week away! Globalization this morning, then no class the rest of the day! Alyssa and I ran at 6 again, so our workout was done (except for aerobics at 5!), so I sat down and hammered out my African Traditional Religions paper and caught up on the reading for Globs. After aerobics, Alyssa and I cooked up burgers with pickles and cheese, and for our side, we made our own cucumber salad. For those of you that know my dad's cucumber salad, it was not like that, but it was still pretty tasty! We defrosted a frozen medley of corn, peas, beans, and carrots and added slices of cucumber and juice from our pickle jar as well as some herbs and garlic salt. The result was actually quite satisfying and I think we will do it again soon!

Thursday 2/7
Another hectic day spent exercising, sitting through class and reading the article about the globalization of Botswana's livestock industry (cattle mostly) for tomorrow's lecture. African Traditional Religions is actually turning out to be very interesting, and despite his way too numerous sexual references and crude jokes, the professor is really challenging the class to think about religion from a scholarly perspective, and to see African Traditional Religions not as primitive superstition, but as legitimate and valid as any other institutionalized religion. In fact, the professor (Dr. Leslie Nthoi) is a devout Christian, so many of his comparative examples incorporate Christian stories and principles, and I am finding that if I didn't have as much of an open mind about my faith as I do, I would be quite offended at some of the things he says. For example, today he was lecturing about the use of "myths" in portraying religious ideas about the world, but he spoke of myths not in terms of "wrong assumptions and false truths" about reality, but in terms of a different kind of knowledge that is true in some contexts and not in others. In other words, there is a construction of reality that pits knowledge against knowledge(specifically, scientific knowledge vs. religious knowledge), in which each is equally valid within its own context. Therefore, it can be equally true that God created the world in seven days, in a religious context while the idea of evolution and whatever spontaneous creation process you identify with can also be true within the context of science. He then went on to talk about the "truths" found in the Bible vs. the "truths" found in science, and asserted that history itself is based on knowledge as can be obtained scientifically, whereas the Bible is based on faith, which is something that cannot be empirically determined. In this way, it suddenly becomes possible for science and religion to exist together, in their own planes of truth, an idea I have long toyed with, and really like as a way of defining my world. It is interesting watching the reactions of the "strong Christians" in the class because they react very strongly when Dr. Nthoi makes these bold statements, but by the end of his explanation, they are nodding in agreement.

Friday 2/8
I accomplished very little today, other than eating a lot of food and starting my paper for Globalization. Alyssa and I decided to eat traditional food from the stands just outside campus, since we hadn't had that food in a while, and our meal consisted of dumplings, rice, a special sauce they call "soup", pumpkin, shredded beets, and fried chicken. I spent the afternoon writing my paper and doing Taebo, before Alyssa, Whitney and I went off to Riverwalk for our weekly ladies night out. We ate at a place called Spur, and gorged ourselves on hamburgers, fries, and cheesecake! Oh it was delicious, but oh did I pay for it later! Dinner was raucously fun due to the lovely company and great atmosphere at the restaurant. Apparently, birthdays are a big deal at Spur, and although we couldn't really understand the words, their birthday song sounded really awesome! Afterwards, we hobbled back through the mall casually window shopping, and then stopped at a stand at one end of the mall where a Kenyan was selling his Pan-African wares. We met this guy the previous Friday in the same spot, and he is a very interesting person in that he will not (at least with us) go into price negotiations until he has told us the history and origin of the item we are interested in. Most of the things are outrageously priced, but he swears by their authenticity, and he certainly gives you an education to go with the gift! I was able to bargain with him to buy a very cool tapestry for P80, which was significantly reduced from the original price (P250). In exchange, I gave him one of my email addresses so he could send me the full story of the boy featured on the tapestry.

Saturday 2/9
Today was a mixture of fun experiences, and horrible illness. I seem to have developed an acute sensitivity to the food in the stands and/or the combination of that with a large greasy meal later that day. Whatever it was, I was very sick all day, and it definitely diminished my ability to enjoy the day trip we took to the city of Molepolole which is located about 30 (?) km outside of Gaberone. The city itself is very African, in that much of what you might expect to find is here such as old, decaying buildings, tons of street vendors, colorful rooftops, mud houses, people, and dirt. Our first activity upon disembarking the bus from Gabs was to rent out a combie to take the nine of us (8 American ACM students and a University of Indiana student here doing research for her masters in Public Health) to the "haunted caves of Molepolole. This combie was completely different from any other that we had ridden in, in that it was decked out with twin movie screens showing music videos by Celine Dion and Shania Twain! So each time we road in the combie, we were treated to cherished relics like "I Feel Like a Woman" and "My Heart Will Go On". At the site of the cave we literally had to hike up the side of the hill through all kinds of brush in order to reach the cave near the top, but it was definitely worth it. Supposedly, David Livingstone spent a night in this cave in order to prove to locals that it was not haunted (and as one of my friends sarcastically stated, destroyed thousands of years of tradition in the process!!). There was a middle-aged man there who followed us up to the top who was smoking weed through a P20 bill and quoting scripture to us. After taking some pictures, my friends and I were preparing to leave the cave and the man reappeared after having disappeared for several minutes announcing that he was a dragon-slayer and must therefore go on alone into the cave to fight the dragons. In all, it was a very funny encounter, and when we walked past the hill/mountain where the cave was some twenty minutes later, we could still hear him chanting away up in the cave!
After that encounter, we wondered up and down the roads for a couple of hours trying to find the famed "Aloe Forest" which turned out to be a large grove of huge Aloe trees that simply replaced the desert scrub in that area. It was very interesting to see how big the trees could get, as many were well over our heads, and I was wishing I had brought a knife to cut a branch off for use on our sunburns!
The trip back to Gabs was rather uneventful save for my extreme discomfort which had intensified enough that it was painful even to speak, and I spent the rest of the night recovering and trying to rehydrate myself.

*I don't know if you guys like this format better or not than the other format. I normally intend to post twice a week so there are so many days to cover, but my schedule made that difficult this week. I will try doing the daily reporting for a while, and see if it just becomes too mundane at which point I will revert to reporting only on the interesting events that occur over the course of several days. Thanks for reading! TTFN!