GO A FISA! (IT’S BURNING HOT!)
Just our luck. Right after arriving in Goodhope, we start
the biggest heat wave so far. It got up
to 40 degrees (104 degrees F) for several days.
Of course it’s a dry heat, but it is little comfort without a fridge. We coped by using the Pineware (Chinese) fan
we bought at Saaz general dealer, a mere seven-minute walk from our home. Without a fridge, we trekked to Saaz daily to
buy a Coke in the afternoon. It turns
out that some items can survive for days without refrigeration, like eggs and
vegetables. All of our milk is uht
(ultra-heat treated), meaning that it can remain on the shelf for weeks and requires
refrigeration only after opening.
Then, after
five days of unrelieved heat, Stephanie’s Kenya Peace Corps colleague, Brent Schaeffer,
showed up from his Gaborone home with his long time Batswana wife, Mpopo, and,
more important, a mini-fridge. Never
before has a hotel sized bar fridge seemed so wonderful. They lent us their upstairs mini-fridge for
the duration until the Ministry of Education could get its act together to
deliver us our allocated fridge.
With the
mini-fridge, we could store meat and partially eaten dinners. We could keep some drinks cold. It made the heat wave a bit more manageable. Which was helpful, since we tried to make a
good impression during our first week in Goodhope. I have a short five-minute walk to school
from home, but Stephanie has a thirty minute walk, across a sunbaked, treeless
landscape. Luckily, the graduating
classes had finished their exams and exited school, and it was the last week in
school for the undergraduates. The
teachers were correcting the prior week’s exams for these students, and the
students were performing busy work and cleaning up in their classrooms. Stephanie enjoyed a girls’ empowerment rally
for her fourth form girls, complete with speakers and music. I befriended the IT staffer at my school, and
he promised to help me get internet access from my school’s computer classroom
(with the help of Windows XP machines).
Each of us
were introduced to our student bodies at respective assemblies. We had been given traditional Setswana names
by our host family mother back in Kanye, and those names are the ones that our
schools want to use for us. I am Kabo,
which means gift, and Stephanie is Gorata, which means to love. The students giggled with pleasure at
assembly to learn our names (the boys in my school have nicknamed me “KB”
already). But we realize that we need to
be given the appropriate respect and hence we need to be called by our
surnames, and that will be a task for us when the new school year begins in
January.
As the week
progressed, we decided that we needed to explore more of Goodhope. So we ventured over to the post office. Unfortunately, this village is spread out
over several kilometers, and nothing is clustered together. From our house, the post office is a
40-minute walk. As some consolation, the
post office is quite entrepreneurial. It
both sells cell phone airtime (we all have pre-paid cell phones, so we
constantly need to top up our minutes) and it runs an internet café – ten Pula
for an hour of internet access.
As our
first week of work ended, clouds approached in the late afternoon, pouring down
showers on the parched and heated plain.
The rain allowed various bugs to emerge from the ground, including
glossy black millipedes, dung beetles, five-inch long grasshoppers and fuzzy
orange-red ladybug-like creatures.
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