September 2007 Archives

I enjoy the little Weather Bug on my iGoogle homepage to keep me updated on the weather. It's not exactly accurate (often in the last few weeks it has said the predicted high temp. would be "90 degrees" but the actual high temp. in the middle of the day reads "97 degrees.") but when I set the readings to Celsius I don't know enough to tell how wrong it is.

So when I saw little rain drops on the picture for today, I scoffed. The prediction earlier today read something like "light morning showers" but that didn't exactly come to pass. Then, just less than an hour ago there was exactly two rumbles of thunder and about 10 minutes after those less than 5 minutes of rain fell. After the rain had passed I logged-on again to my Google homepage and the weather prediction now reads as you see it above "Tons of rain." Ha. It's still windy and cool outside, but the sun is coming out. If you want tons of rain, visit Seattle.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen as many donkeys in my life as I have in Botswana. Somebody once told Brian and me that, in order to encourage people to grow crops, the Government of Botswana once gave its citizens donkeys for free to help with the plowing. The policy has ended, but it was enough for donkeys to become absolutely ubiquitous and at this point I’m not entirely convinced that all the donkeys in the country have rightful owners. You see them roaming the streets in even the most remote parts of the country. They don't mind standing in the middle of the road, and could bring the main road in Molepolole to a stand still. There are some people who still use donkeys to pull carts out to the lands (appropriately called “donkey carts”.) There was even a butchery along the road between Gaborone and Molepolole that sold donkey meat. (According to a Daily News article I read the owner originally thought the meat could be used to feed dogs, etc., but it became wildly popular among everyone. The butchery could buy a donkey for something like P200 and make 100 percent profit!) I could have made a photo collage of all my donkey pictures (I like the small, fuzzy donkeys best.) but will just share this one of Brian from early after settling into Molepolole.

Botswana President Festus Mogae praised Peace Corps volunteers during his current visit to the United States. He said that Botswana PCVs "have played an invaluable role in our struggle against the virus."

Supposedly, RPCV Becca (from our group, Bots3) met with Mogae and his wife Barbara in Washington, D.C. Though I am yet to find a copy of it myself, I'm told a picture of the meeting appeared on the front page of the Botswana Daily News. I also heared that an interview with Becca ran on BTV news late last week. Just giving a shout out to Becca if she is reading this.

But about Mogae, it's always nice to feel appreciated. In Peace Corps you give and sacrifice a lot for your home country and the country serve in. Rarely, if ever, are you thanked by anyone for what you do. Mogae's comments definitely made my day.

I'm in Palapye this week for a workshop/annual review meeting for the Pathfinder project I work with at BOTUSA. Thus, why I'm a behind on posting this. We watched "An Inconvenient Truth" this weekend, and I have to say that I've never been so riled-up, inspired by a movie. Ever. I want Al Gore to run for president. If you haven't seen it, you must. I don't know how anybody could watch it and not be inspired to do something for the environment. These are the three things I've decided that I can do here in Bots:

• Recycle: Ironically there's an environmental organization down the street from our house and they recycle everything. Cans, paper, plastic, glass. Going to push myself to separate my garbage more and take what I can there.
• Use reuseable shopping bags. In Gabs they've instituted a policy of having to pay for any plastic bag at grocery stores. I think it's a great policy except that the bags are so cheap and I keep forgetting to bring my own bag so I don't think much about it. I'm going to try to be better at using bags over again.
• Start a compost pile. We had one in Molepolole that went to the chickens, but gave it up when we moved here. I think our garden-fanatic landlord would be a fan, and it would be a good use for all our green/vegetable leftovers.

I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took me to come up with a second C. Hellooo, we only played Canasta like every Thursday for a year and a half. I have no excuse for my brain lapse, only to blame my stress from applying to grad school.

So, Canasta. Canasta (Spanish for “basket”) is the card game that your grandmother plays when she gets together with friends. Seriously, it’s an old ladies game. The tradition in Molepolole apparently started with our friends Jes, Kelone, Ralph and Peter who would get together to speak German together once a week (Jes is German, Ralph is German/South African and the others were all just fluent.) This changed after others who weren’t fluent in German joined the group.

Canasta is a good social game meaning that it doesn’t take so much concentration that you can’t have conversations not revolving around the game at hand. Also, unlike poker, it doesn’t take betting to make it enjoyable. It’s also fun to play because the more hands you win the more you’re at a disadvantage for taking it all. The second place team almost always wins the whole game so no matter how far ahead the first place team is in, you have to finish it out to 5,000 points. The only downside to Canasta is that you need 5,000 points to win the whole game; that can take a very, very long time to finish. The time aspect is why we almost always played on Thursday, because you can show up to work totally under slept on Friday and make it up over the weekend.

Since Ralph moved away we’ve discovered that he “adjusted” some of the rules. Rules that would make the game significantly shorter to play. (This means that we usually finished at 10-10:30 instead of almost midnight.) For example, when we played with six players Ralph’s rule was you had to have two Canastas to finish. Or, when your team had more than 4,000 points you have to open with a Canasta out of the hand. Ralph owned what we fondly referred to as the “Canasta Bible” – a book of rules for all kinds of card games – so we believed him. When Peter bought Canasta Caliente cards on a trip to the U.S. we were able to read the rules ourselves and figure out what had been going on all along.

Ironically, now that we’ve moved from Moleps nearly the entire original group is gone - Ralph moved in late 2005, Kelone is in the U.K. finishing her Ph.D. and Jes is there helping her, Peter is taking 3rd term off of work to visit the U.S. for five months and Gareth just moved back to England. So there’s nobody in Moleps carrying on the canasta tradition.

For more information on Canasta check out the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canasta or this was the website that came up when I Googled “canasta” and “I’m feeling lucky.” (I must add that if only we had the card holder pictured on the Wikipedia website I would have spent a lot less time organizing the discard pile. What a cool invention! (Not sure that I should admit to that.))

I found it! The worst website ever! I was looking up information on the Zebras next game. The senior team is playing in the COSAFA Custle Cup semi-finals against South Africa on the 29th of September. Exciting stuff. The match will be played in Germiston, South Africa. I'm interested in going, but where is Germiston? A google search revealed that it is near Rustenburg. And that it has the worst website on the internet.

Seriously, this thing looks like it hasn't changed since 1995: http://www.germiston.co.za/germiston.html

On September 11, 2001 Brian and I were living in Silver Spring, MD and had only lived in the D.C. area for 3-months at that point. I was working at the American Bankruptcy Institute in Alexandria, VA whose offices are on the waterfront of the Potomac River, literally downstream from National Airport.

If I remember correctly it was a Tuesday, like today. I had been sick the day before so it was my first day back at work for the week. I was in my office when our receptionist called my phone and told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Or, no, maybe she said there was an explosion at the World Trade Center. Now I can’t remember which. I had never been to New York at that point and have to admit that I don’t think I knew what building she was talking about. Regardless, we all quickly gathered in our boss’s office (where there was a television) and tuned into The Today Show on NBC. The second plane crashed just before we turned on the television and the first images we saw of everything was replays the second plane.

My memory is a little fuzzy after this. I remember continuing to watch the events in New York while planes were flying directly overhead in the landing pattern for National Airport. They always flew directly overhead of our building, but on that day it made us all feel uncomfortable. I remember learning that there was a missing plane, potentially headed for D.C. The reports of an explosion at the Pentagon and the small-scale panic among those of us gathered in the office. I remember that it was unclear whether I’d be able to take the Metro home because the line I took had a stop at the Pentagon. I remember making contingency plans to stay with a co-worker who lived in Virginia so I wouldn’t have to cross the river on Metro, but also just really wanting to be at home with Brian. (Eventually the Metro opened and I was able to get home safely, but the trains were eerily empty.) I remember finally getting home and watching television late into the night. That the news stayed on all day and that Brian and I kept waiting for the first commercial break, figuring that it would be a sign that there was finally no new news.

Finally, for me, I remember the most haunting image of the day - the people who jumped from the towers before tey fell. There were pictures in the Washington Post the next day and an article that I clipped and have saved somewhere. I still cannot fathom the nightmare it must have been inside for the people who jumped to think it was a better alternative.

It all feels very, very distant now. I don’t know if that’s because of time or geography. The news has very little mention of it, mostly because of the Petraeus hearings I suppose. And now that we're over the big five year anniversary I'm sure the news coverage will increasingly go down.

This is a bit late, but I wanted to at least share the Mmegi article that ran in response to the Washington Post article on infant feeding in July. There's a lot I could say about this, but won't because the whole issue is very politically sensitive. Just wanted to make sure to share both sides of the story.

Click on the "continue reading" link to see the full-text of the article.

Brian and I are just starting to get our application for admissions to graduate school in public health underway. The one word that comes to mind when thinking about the whole process is overwhelming. Applying is basically made up of a lot hoops you have to jump through so the admission committee can make a life altering decision. One missed hoop and you’re doomed. How could it be anything but overwhelming?

Since yesterday was a U.S. holiday, but not one in Botswana, I had the day off from work and used the time to start writing the first draft of my personal statement. Now I consider myself to be a relatively decent writer – I used to write testimony for congressional hearings for crying out loud – but believe me that a personal statement is much, much more difficult. Why? Because you are given so little direction to go on and so much depends on your statement. It’s really the only chance the admission committee gets to know who you are because the rest of the application is very standardized – undergrad transcripts, GRE scores, generic application forms, etc. The personal statement lets the committee know who you are and why you’d be an important asset to their program.

The title of this post comes from the first draft of my statement. Right now the first sentence right now literally reads, “Introductory sentence or two.” Let’s admit it, that’s all you have to catch the reader’s attention – a sentence or two. Then you jump right into all the obligatory stuff on why you want to attend that particular school, study a particular program and how that all relates to your past and future work goals. For me the first sentence (or two) has to capture why I’m interested in public health in the first place. Why public health and not public policy or some other graduate program?

I feel like I have a relatively good chance of being accepted to most of the programs I’m considering. I meet all the generic requirements (minimum GPA, GRE scores and work experience) so all I have to do is write an outstanding personal statement and I can let myself off the hook. I will have done everything I could. That’s not too much to ask is it? Wish me luck.