I'm still alive!

My recovery is nearly complete, and not a moment too soon. For a few days I was sick enough that my coworkers and I were genuinely concerned that it just might be malaria, the localized extinction of the Anopheles notwithstanding. Pleasantly, ‘twas not so… merely one of the more mundane yet still super-charged local bugs. Thanks to all who sent get-well-soon emails – you’ll get the best presents on my return. Everyone else will have to content themselves with a baby elephant. In the meantime, I’ll bring you up to date on my surprisingly ordinary life over here.

First of all, Christmas is in the air. The carols are booming through the shops, and the nearby Riverwalk Mall is adorned by the creepiest electronic Santa I’ve ever seen outside Japan. “X Shopping Days Til…” signs are everywhere, and the proud consumerist frenzy is fully underway.

Only it’s thirty-five degrees outside. That ain’t right.

The expat’s life in Gaborone is one of near-constant migration, it seems. I’ve been fortunate enough to arrange places to live throughout my stay, an uncommon occurrence for which I’m supremely thankful.
At the moment, I’m sharing a 3-bedroom apartment near the University of Botswana in central Gaborone with two other expats, Natasha and Natalie. Natasha is a Torontonian interning with the local YWCA, and Natalie is a Fulbright Scholar from Irvine, California researching HIV/AIDS. Both are fine people who know the neighborhood well and have helped show me around.
Two weeks from now I’ll move to my (hopefully) permanent digs, a house with 2 Americans (Steve and Aziz) and a Canuck (another Natalie). That place has a swimming pool. And a DVD player. And a satellite dish. All of which are welcome, since I’m rapidly running out of things to do in the terminal quietude of Gaborone. Most importantly, they have air conditioning!!! Joy! Joy of joys!!!

I’m gradually adjusting to the peculiarities of Botswanan business culture, by which I mean I’m tearing my hair out with slowly decreasing frequency. The Botswanan attitude towards time and work is by turns more relaxed and yet more bureaucratic, a maddening exercise in contradiction. I’ll go into this in more detail in a separate post, but the upshot is that on alternating days I feel tolerably productive and helpful at Somarelang Tikologo, and on others I’m certain that sanity is being torn from my grasp by the infuriating formalities of innumerable committees. This organization literally has fewer staff members than it has committees telling the staffers what to do. AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGGHHH!!!

Rather more exhilaratingly, I’m attempting to plan my Christmas vacation. My friend Rafael from South Africa will be in Peru over Christmas, so I may instead bus over to Mozambique with the Canadian Natalie and Taylor (another American). Mozambique, I’m told, is a captivatingly beautiful place dotted with glorious beaches (meh), sites of startling historical interest (a step in the right direction), and animals galore (now we’re talking!). If Mozambique doesn’t pan out, I may hitch a ride with some friends down to lovely Cape Town, bypassing the crime-saturated abscess that is Johannesburg and instead enjoying what is supposedly the most beautiful city in Africa. If even that doesn’t happen, I get the supreme consolation prize of catching a bus deep into the Kalahari desert and enjoying Botswana’s own natural glories solo, camera in hand. While I’d prefer to do that in April, when the weather is apparently more conducive to huge clusterings of animals, I’m sure that somehow I’ll make do.

So many choices, so little time to blog about it all…