Orientation Week

The hospitality that has been shown us by the Flying Mission staff here so far has been amazing. Since arriving on Monday, we (Nicole, Erin, and I) have only really eaten two evening meals on our own and have spent the other three evenings in various Flying Mission houses eating wonderful meals and enjoying the company. We just returned from an evening at Mark and Debbie Spicer’s house, which we enjoyed immensely. Mark is the Aviation Manager, so he will be one of the guys that I will answer to at the hangar. It has been a lot of fun to get to know the people that I will be working with, and I think they will really make my time here a good one. On Thursday of this week, we spent some time doing orientation with Tina Cort and in the evening went with her to the Gaborone Game Park, which was a lot of fun. We didn’t see any animals that we hadn’t seen before, but we were able to see them at a bit closer range. Sometimes a little bit too close. One zebra, who apparently is used to being fed by park visitors, came up to our car and let us pet him while he nibbled at our hands looking for sugar cubes or something of the like. As he was leaving, he decided to scratch his rear on the side of the car, pushing in the side mirror in the process and sticking his tail in the open window and into Nicole’s face. For a few seconds, it looked like he was going to let loose some fragrant zebra dung on Nicole, and we all busted up laughing as she tried to get as far from the offending zebra rump as possible. It was pretty strange to see a zebra that tame, as most of the zebra in the wild seemed to be pretty skittish and shy. Anyway, today was spent running some errands and then going with Tina to a preschool in the nearby village of Kumekwane, where we spent an hour or so playing football and jumping rope with the children there, who were excited to interact with us. It was a lot of fun to talk to the children and try to understand some of the Setswana words that I asked them to teach me. A few of them got a kick out of telling us the word for “buttocks” when we asked what “hands” were in Setswana, and they of course thought it was hilarious when we innocently repeated the word everytime they asked us what “hands” were. But despite that and the fact that every setting on my watch got changed by one curious little boy, we had a blast with the kids. Then we came back and headed to dinner with the Spicers. And now it’s my bedtime. More later.