Home at last

Well, I’ve finally arrived in Gaborone for good and am slowly starting to get settled in here. I’m staying in the “guest flat” for now, which is a small one-bed apartment with a tiny kitchen and living room. I’m enjoying having my own place for now, but I think when the next short-termers arrive I will be happy to have them move in with me and give me some company. There are three students from Germany who will be arriving at the beginning of September to stay for a year, and we will move into the short-termer house that is right next to my current flat. I’ve been here for two full days now, and it’s been pretty laid-back so far. The first day was a free day so that we could get unpacked and settle in a little, and Erin and Nicole and I spent some time in town shopping for some essentials. Yesterday, then, we had our first day of “orientation,” during which we were just sent out together with the assignment of traveling the town on the combis and doing a few other random things like sending a postcard and eating a traditional meal from a stand in the mall. Since we’ve been in Botswana for 4 weeks or so already, the only really new thing of the day for us was the combi system, the use of which is quite an experience. The combis are a bunch of old, dilapidated vans that circulate through the city on certain routes and try to pick up any pedestrian they pass by honking the horn and yelling at them. Since the system seems to be a conglomeration of random people who own vans, there is no central organization and therefore no published map of routes or anything convenient like that. The only way to get somewhere if you don’t know the system (that would be us) is to go to a place where combis stop (which is sometimes only apparent from the crowds of people standing by the road) and ask someone which combi to take to get to a particular place. To complicate matters more, most Batswana (people from Botswana) seem to have an intense aversion to maps, probably because they never use them, so showing someone where you want to go on a map will get you nowhere. Needless to say, we felt pretty silly standing at the combi stops pulling out our map of Gaborone and looking generally confused and clueless. Of course, it doesn’t help that the already-small population of whites in Gaborone pretty much all have cars, so a white person riding a combi is a very rare sight indeed. But we had a lot of fun figuring out which combi to get on, how to tell the driver we wanted to get off, what to do with rowdy drunks who tried to talk to us, etc. Perhaps the highlight of the day was getting picked up by a policeman. At the end of our combi-riding, we decided to walk the few kilometers back to where we had started the day. As we were ambling along the side of the large 4-lane highway, a big police truck pulled over into one of the pull-offs and called us over to him. After asking where we were going, he invited us to pile into the cab and he took us just down the road to where we wanted to go. He was a really nice guy, and it was fun to have somebody help us out without expecting anything in return. So with that, the first day of orientation came to a close.