the place where cacti come to die

Update on what I'm working on; problems of livelihoods. Not very well-structured.

Since my last post on “what I do, what I don't do” (emphasis on the don't), my job has become slightly more defined. At least, what I perceive as my job has become more defined, growing from blurred silhouette into practical reality – what the rest of the office thinks, I'm not sure. Certainly my program supervisor, N, doesn't seem to realize I'm now under the auspices of his department – he takes off without warning, to undetermined locations, without word of when he'll be back. But such minor pitfalls aside, I'm becoming more and more involved in the plans for the Huiku Trust, the community-based-organization which manages the GH1 wildlife management area.

Let me unpack that for you. The government of Botswana designates wildlife management areas which have certain restrictions in terms of development, and are public land still belonging to the government. Sometimes these areas remain under the management of the wildlife department, but sometimes they lease the areas, with certain requirements, to other groups. The GH1 wildlife management area is currently leased to the Huiku Community Trust, which is a great thing for the community: they are in charge of a huge area of land; it cannot be taken over by ranchers, and they can use it for their own benefit. Komku helped establish the Huiku Trust for community members in Qabo and Grootlaagte, and hired some consultants in Maun to assist in drawing up the management plan. The plan was submitted to the government to convince them that Huiku should be granted the lease. I haven't actually seen the lease yet, but I think it basically says that Huiku has control of the land so long as they stick to their original management plan, and they can make sub-leases as long as the sub-letters follow the same guidelines.

The original management plan was great – it was built around the establishment of a game reserve, which would be properly fenced and maintained to encourage a healthy, high-density game population. Attached to the game reserve would be a cultural village, camp site and lodge, and some craft activities. The whole complex would be cleverly marketed and the tourists would flock to it like eager little lambs. There were some other, smaller enterprises in the management plan, but they were either attached to the game reserve directly, or dependent on income that would ideally be coming into the communities from the tourists. (If nobody has any income, then the proposed small shops will have no customers... the initial influx of capital has to come from somewhere, after all. At the moment people live on government food rations, and most spare money goes – sadly – to alcohol consumption.)

Unfortunately, a game reserve requires a large amount of starting capital. The first step is to fence it, and that fencing costs a lot of money. For the GH1 game reserve we're talking about basic game fencing – cattle fencing is low, about 120cm, because cattle don't do a whole lot of fence-leaping. Basic game fencing is tall enough to contain the more agile antelope, maybe 2m. Serious game fencing is electrified to keep in things like hippos, rhinos, elephants – animals that can take down a basic game fence without breaking a sweat. I recently heard a story about a newly-introduced hippo on a local game reserve that decided to check out his new territory, and casually strolled right through four fences before his owner caught up with him. He was resting in a mud puddle in D'Kar. His owner had to chase the hippo back along the road, all the way back to his property. Apparently the hippo never tried to get loose again – he just wanted to know what was out there, so he went walking, but quickly realized that it was the Kalahari and not the Okavango. Aside from his artifically maintained pond on his game reserve, there was no desirable hippo territory - just desert. So he went back, and has since been quite content to stay home.

Back to the point, fencing is expensive. Drilling boreholes and equipping them with pipes and pumps is expensive. The whole venture is expensive, and money is not something that Huiku nor Komku have a lot of. For that and other reasons (time, expertise, etc.), the game reserve idea has been shelved under “too ambitious.” Unfortunately, it left a gaping vacuum in its place, which nothing has since filled.

At this point, I step in, my “Princeton in Africa” cape flying in the scorching Kalahari wind, and declare, “BUT WAIT! FEAR NOT, INNOCENT CITIZENS! I SHALL SAVE YOU ALL! THE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ENDOWMENT IS HERE TO DELIVER YOU FROM HARDSHIP!”

Just kidding. (But don't we all wish? Especially that bit about the endowment?)

More realistically, at this point I step in, cobble together some meetings with a variety of people in the area, exchange emails with a collection of people around the world (several of whom I've never met), play diplomat between all of these parties (always a bad idea, trying to be diplomatic – somehow I never learn), and attempt to divine a hopeful path for the Huiku Trust.

It is slow and frustrating, and I don't really know what I'm doing, but it's work that I'm very interested in. I have experience in ecology and conservation, of course, but the primary concern is the people, and helping them make a (sustainable) living off of this land. Livelihoods and income generation in this area are a constant conundrum for me. When you have an indigenous people who have recently emerged from a pure hunter-gatherer lifestyle, are struggling to live on government handouts in ill-equipped little settlements (they live on the “Remote Area Development Program,” which is a nice euphemism for “stuck in the middle of nowhere with no jobs, no electricity, no transport, no phone line or cell phone reception, and no reliable social services because nobody wants to stay and work in your 'remote area developments.'”), and have recently been granted a huge amount of land to manage, several things come to mind. The first is, “live off the land!”

Problems with this: hunting is prohibited. There is still some poaching, of course, but you can get chucked in jail for it, and there isn't enough game to sustain the 1000-odd people living in the two GH1 communities, anyhow. Gathering is possible, but again, not enough plants for everyone, and gathering was previously accompanied by a nomadic lifestyle in small groups that could move easily from place to place to seek new vegetable resources. No longer possible.

Farming seems like a great idea, a gentle transition from hunting/gathering to the “modern world,” but permit me to remind you that this is the Kalahari. The clinics try to have small vegetable gardens to encourage healthy eating among their patients, but even a small garden requires a dedicated water source, a lot of fertilizer (sand = not so arable), and shade netting to start the seeds. Young plants are fried to death by the Kalahari sun, no matter how much you water them. Larger-scale agriculture would be expensive and extremely difficult, and people simply don't have much interest in doing it. This isn't land meant for agriculture of any kind – even crops of cactus need to be watered when it gets too dry. That's right, too dry for cactus. An interesting project involving prickly pear cacti and cochineal insects* failed because the cactus crops kept failing. Part of that was neglect on the part of their caretakers, but still, it's pretty damn hard to kill a cactus.

Tourism is seen as a great possibility, and a drive down the Trans-Kalahari highway will tell you as much – there are a dozen hopeful little signs advertising camp sites, safaris, and cultural villages. Doubtless, many of them are supported by outside funding. Doubtful, whether many of them can make it. Western Botswana and the deep Kalahari are simply not a tourist hot-spot. The Okavango Delta is hugely popular and with good reason – it's a beautiful and unique wetland teeming with wildlife. The Kahalari, as you may have gathered from the rest of this post, is dry. There isn't a lot of water, vegetation, or game. It is beautiful – stark, ascetic, elegant, with the most dramatic and incredible skies you can imagine, whether it's day or night. But it is dry, and flat, and relatively empty. There's a small element of cultural tourism, and some people are interested enough in Bushman culture to come just for that – but most of the tourists coming through this region have pre-booked, either through Okavango package deals, or as people coming on private hunting safaris. There aren't a lot of people just wandering through, ready to try out the little camp site they see advertised on the side of the highway.

This makes me nervous. Yes, eco-tourism is a great idea. It's good for the environment, it lets the Bushmen share their culture with the world, etc., etc. But is it possible for it to succeed? Even with the best management, with a very generous donor who will pay for the start-up expenses – even with those things, which we don't yet have – are there enough people coming through to make it a viable income source for two entire villages? Because that's the goal, or should be. Sustainable livelihoods for all of those people. Is it possible? It will be difficult, and it definitely requires a different approach to marketing – the current management plan and ideas being tossed around are basically variants on the 'sign on the highway' strategy. But everything I've seen here points to the fact that the only way to generate enough business in this region is to book them yourself, bring in new customers that would not be coming into the region already. In a place like the Okavango, you can just start something up – there are thousands of people that want to come to the delta already. Here, you have to convince people that they want to come, and then provide your services.

More thoughts on this later. I find myself desperately wishing I'd taken a course in microeconomics while I was at school. Bother.

Also - not sure if I said this already, but HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING: “Africa, a biography of the continent,” by John Reader. It's literally a biography of the continent from it's earliest geologic beginnings, to the present day. I've never been so interested in a history book in my life.

* Cochineals are a little insect that feed on prickly pear cacti – to repel predators, they produce carminic acid, from which the carmine dye is produced. Some enterprising person at Komku decided that it would be a good project for the communities, and it hung on for 5 or 6 years before – apparently – the cactus crop failed and the project went under. This story makes me fear for the future of the hoodia project – there's a huge ready-made market (hoodia is an appetite supressant – google it and you'll find a million pages about it, hurrah for the American obsession with weight loss!) but will the hoodia crops FAIL?! Hopefully not. The prickly pear is a South American cactus, whereas hoodia is native to the Kalahari, so it should be a bit hardier. I never thought the day would come when I was debating with myself whether a cactus was sufficiently hardy enough. Good grief.

Pula (the Setswana word for rain, as well as the name of the currency)

I have been trying to do my laundry but I'm being assaulted by sunny thundershowers – the huge drops falling like diamonds into the bright tropical sunshine.

The rainy season is marvellous. It's an epic drama played out on a stage so huge and level that I can't see my own ant-like spot in it... Thunder and lightning rip across the Kalahari, and climbing the water tower behind my neighbours' house allows me to see an incredible distance across the plain to the crackling storms on the horizon. Rain falls in fits and starts, the wind whipping my windows closed and blowing my hapless laundry off the line. And the landscape greens. I saw this happen in Kenya, but we moved on soon after the rainy season commenced, and I wasn't able to observe it the way I am now – seeing the colour bleed back into the land.

When I arrived, the drive from D'Kar to Gantsi was a parched otherworldly expanse of silvery acacias, dry yellow grasses, the white rubble of exposed rock, and red lateritic soil – but even the red was flattened to beige, leached of its colour by the harsh desert sun. Now, driving the same road is just as extreme, but in an utterly different way. The scene is picture-perfect, like an extra-saturated image of idyllic pastoralism, the dream of the American West, perhaps – endless straight road, no other cars, and on either side, a bright new green that somehow speaks to you of growth, renewal, sustenance, possibility. There are vivid accents of red soil and yellow grasses; and the sky is everywhere, the clouds a virginal white but shadowed with dramatic grey blues and pregnant with rain. If you look to the horizon, you can see how the muted prussian blues blend into a thin band of falling rain, the drifting blur of water sieved from the heavens and settling onto the land. As evening falls, if you have a bit of elevation, you might see the snap and fire of lightning tearing through the clouds – you might see the shadows of birds as they ride the rising wind and shelter in the bushes.

Everything is growing. One of the trees in my backyard has burst out its plumage of tiny green leaves, and in its new shade the patchy grass has begun to emerge. There are flowers – the brilliant magenta cactus flowers and the most delicate, alien white blossoms that grow on single stems straight from the ground, like oddly-folded lilies. The tiny yellow flowers of one of the acacia species. I've gotten into the habit of running some mornings – I run down the gravel road, turn into the bush and run along a dirt track until I am tired, and then walk the rest of the way back, weaving my way in between bushes that were not green two weeks ago, watching the clear morning sun cast its shadows on the bone-coloured stones, the unevenly-greening bush. There is one acacia that seems to have some kind of relationship with a large, fleshy epiphyte*, and the separation of the plants is bizarrely obvious now; the epiphyte has greened up quickly and the acacia remains barren. The skeletal thorn trees harbour their verdant companions like strange hats, half-hidden by the frizz of thorny twigs.

The days are cooler. The wind and the clouds and the rain – ah. It's beautiful. Not that the sun, the extreme dryness and the perfect clearness of the sky weren't beautiful (I miss the unrelenting clarity of the stars), but this is easier to love.

I'm making progress on plans for my work next year – but I won't write about it until things are more hammered-out.


*I'm sure I'm missing something here – I don't think it can be a true epiphyte, or how could it green up so quickly, when its host tree is not? So maybe the 'epiphyte' has some roots in the soil? I'll have to examine it more closely. Anyhow, it looks like a cluster of fleshy green vines that sits in the upper branches of particular acacias.

Trivial Thoughts: The Perfect International Gift?

Before I arrived in Botswana, I read Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's excellent book, “The Old Way.” The book describes her experiences as a young woman living with the Bushmen – the Ju/Hoansi people of Namibia, to be precise. (Pronunciation: “Ju” with a soft J, and then a click connected to a slightly nasal “oh-ah-si” - the click is the same noise as “tsk,” or the noise you would use to encourage a horse. So, altogether - “ju-tsk-oansi.” It has a very pleasant sound, if you can spit it out.) Her father took her entire family to the Kalahari to find the Bushmen, back in the 50s when there were still some people living in “the old way,” the unchanged hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our earliest progenitors. (I won't gomuch further into the book, but I would highly recommend it – it was recommended to me by the Princeton alum who helped set up this post, and I'd like to second his endorsement. It's not very long, so go read it!

At one point in the book, Thomas describes how her family was returning to the Bushmen after a period of absence. They wanted to bring something as a gift, to make appropriate contributions to the reciprocal gift-giving system by which Bushman society is knit together. They decided to bring cowrie shells, having observed that cowrie shells were well-received and valued as ornaments in whatever culture they were introduced to. Cowrie shells hadn't yet arrived in the Bushman world, so they thought it would make an ideal gift. The shells were a great success, and were soon gifted, re-gifted, and spread far and wide among the different groups of Ju/Hoansi. (One of my friends in D'Kar has cowrie shells woven into his dreadlocks, and I wonder where he got them from, because they are still not very common around here, being as Botswana is a landlocked country... he is half Herero and half Bushman, but probably not Ju/Hoansi. Nevertheless, I wonder.)

Were I to come up with such a gift – something that has been universally popular in whatever culture it is introduced to – I would have to suggest bubble wrap.

I have not yet visited a place where the fascination and joy of popping bubble wrap does not exist. I popped through many a sheet myself, when I was younger – though I think I'd still enjoy it today, adults don't usually spend time popping bubble wrap in North America.

Not so in India. One of my favourite memories from my time in Kodaikanal was a moment near the end of the year, when a small army of ayahs, all dressed in their navy-blue saris, were moving desks from one end of the campus to the other, to accommodate the students taking their exams in the main hall. One of the my favourite ayahs, the one who cleaned the art studio, was gleefully sneaking up behind her co-workers and popping a particularly strong, vigorous sheet of bubble wrap right next to their ears. As they jumped in surprise, then grumbled and swatted her away, she just snickered and crept over to her next victim.

In Botswana, I have so far witnessed two bubble-wrap indulgences: First, at Dqae Qare, a huge woman holding her little toddler on her lap, smiling and popping some bubble wrap as her son shrieked with laughter and snatched at the wrinkled plastic bubbles, his tiny fingers too weak to pop them himself. His mother patted his chubby little legs and popped a few more.

Second, in one of the settlements, a tired and gaunt old lady sitting all alone, on a chair in the shade of her decrepit house, staring into space. Her face was still, a frozen collapse of wrinkles, but her hands moved with a slow rhythm as she meditatively popped a dusty and beleaguered scrap of bubble wrap, waiting patiently for the midday heat to pass.

.... You have to admit, it's satisfying.

Obama in Botswana

I found out yesterday morning. I'd just gotten back to my house from my morning run, and K had just gotten back from his morning walk. As I turned the key and was about to step into my house, he said it: "Obama won." It took me a moment to process - wait - really? - can it be?! And then I was incoherently happy, shouting and saying the same things over and over again.

The office was abuzz with it - everyone had been calling and texting each other since seven in the morning when it was made official, the Botswanan television stations were covering it nonstop (sadly, I do not have a television - and let me tell you, it's not often that I bemoan my lack of television!), and the radio was broadcasting the speeches.

Botswana is excited. Africa is excited. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the world is excited, and when Obama said in his speech, "And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand," I felt proud to be a part of this moment in history, even though I'm not in America to witness it. I've never wanted to be on American soil so badly as I do right now - I've never loved the American people so much as I do right now. I'd forgotten the reasons I love the US. I'd forgotten that I do, actually, believe in the American Dream, the American spirit and all the rest - it's been buried for the last 8 years, but here it is again, bursting forth in this courageous, hopeful, defiant election. I'm excited for the coming years.

Last night, C, A, R and I had an impromptu election party - we sat in C's kitchen, made macaroni and cheese (very American!), and read Obama and McCain's speeches out loud to each other. R had downloaded them to her laptop earlier in the day, and we gleefully acted out the crowd's reactions (USA! USA!) as one of us read the speech. We drank wine and talked about our elation and our pride, our hopes and dreams for America, the stories of friends and family members who had been involved in the election back at home.

I told them how I'd sat in the dorm room of a friend in 2004, back at Princeton, watching with horror as the votes were tallied and Bush took office for a second term - and a very close friend of mine from Illinois looked past that and cheered for the election of Senator Barack Obama. "We're hoping he might be the next president," she said. "We're very proud of him in Illinois. I think he really has a chance." I remember looking at the young, smiling face of 2004's Senator Obama and thinking that the next election was an eon, a world, an endless stretch of potentially disastrous time away - and this man was young, and black - but there was something in my friend's voice when she talked about him that made me remember what she'd said. It seemed like such a pipe dream at that time, on that depressing night. But here we are, in such a different November.

I'm proud to be an American right now. And I hope that we are truly entering a new stage in American history, and that the hard work that brought us to this milestone election can bring us past it into a brighter future. Yes, I realize I'm getting a bit melodramatic - and my eyes are even tearing up as I write this - but there's never been a better time to get excited, to overflow with hope, to let idealism run free. Even more than I'm happy about Obama, I'm happy that America voted for him. The spirit of the country rose up to shout that they still believe in hope, equality, democracy, liberty, the possibilty of a future that is better for everyone, and not just a few. To shout that their voices are important, and they will be heard. No matter who we have in office, the fact that the people have made that statement is the most wonderful thing I can imagine.

Okay, done. I promise that's my last overflow of political idealism. And I know I haven't been eloquent. But... I'm just so excited!

Re Batla Botshelo! (We Want Life!)

A brief note: When I sit down to write about something like the Health Trip, the most challenging thing to do is to narrow down my topics. I could spend pages just telling you about the elders, the dessicated little San ladies with their sharp, critical eyes and their myriad wrinkles. Wrinkles I never knew could exist, wrinkles going every-which-way... Or the children, who at 5 years old dance better than most white guys can ever hope to, and why they generally stop going to school at about 13 or 14 years of age... Or the shebeens, where everyone gulps down cardboard cartons of a horrible thick sorghum liquor called khadi, and dances the night away. But I have to narrow it down.

THIS ENTRY: Description of HIV/AIDS in Botswana, linkages to TB. The challenges of getting people to be tested and have safe sex, efforts of the workshops. This first part is a bit boring, a lot of background information; the second part covers how the people reacted to the workshops, and their desire to take charge of their own health and their own lives. Description of workshop atmosphere.

CREDIT: Information taken from Wikipedia's HIV article.

When I was in Victoria for the summer of 2005, I made two new friends; both were about 45 or 50 years of age, and both had lost several very close friends to AIDS. Their friends had died in the early 90s, back when HIV/AIDS was still a new disease and the anti-retroviral drugs we use today didn't exist. Back then, HIV slapped you with the terrifying, irrevocable sentence of an early death. People were just becoming aware of it, and there was nothing you could do about it. I remember listening with horror as my friends described the helplessness, the pain of watching their friends' immune systems crumble, their bodies ravaged by opportunistic infections. “It wasn't like cancer,” one of them told me. “I've seen people fight cancer – if you have a strong will, if you have treatment, you can fight it, there's something you can do – but not with this. No matter who you are, how you fight, it will kill you. You never have a chance."

Of course, HIV has not yet been cured. Nonetheless, the face of the disease in modern-day Botswana is quite different from Canada in the 1990s. In some ways it is much more hopeful, and in some ways much more dire. The HIV infection rate is terrifyingly high – in Gantsi district, the estimate is between 25% and 30%. But the Botswanan government provides antiretroviral treatment, free, to anyone who tests HIV positive. Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment, or HAART, was first made available in 1996 – essentially, it's a cocktail of drugs that inhibits the virus's ability to replicate itself, thus dramatically slowing the progression from HIV to AIDS. According to the best estimates, HAART triples the average length of time that a person lives from the time of infection, giving them about 30 years instead of 10. (There are a plethora of factors affecting how long someone will live after infection, of course – it can be much shorter – but as a rough average, it is 10 years without treatment, and 30 years with HAART treatment, as long as the treatment regimen is adhered to.)

This is an incredible luxury for the developing world, made possible by wealth of the Botswanan government – most countries cannot afford to provide treatment to even a small fraction of their citizens, because of how expensive it is. But here in Botswana, everyone can have treatment – everyone has the chance at a vastly increased lifespan. The problem, then, is overcoming the stigma attached to the disease, and educating people about prevention, testing, and what to do if you know you are positive. When you think about the actual chances of being infected with HIV, it becomes obvious that despite the best efforts of enthusiastic condom campaigns, and the millions poured into education, that the vast majority of people are not doing anything to prevent HIV infection. Most cases of HIV in Africa are the result of heterosexual intercourse, and the chance of infection (with penile-vaginal intercourse) is 0.1% for women, 0.05% for men. Contrary to what many people think, HIV is not that easy to catch. (To clarify – I'm not advocating we all rush off to have a lot of unprotected sex, I'm just trying to make a point about how much we need further education about HIV transmission.)

The main aims of the health workshops are (1) To educate about transmission and prevention of HIV/AIDS, including some hilarious condom demonstrations for both female and male condoms, featuring audience volunteers (2) To encourage people to get tested, both so that they can stop spreading the disease to their partners, and so that they can get treatment to increase their lifespan, (3) To educate about healthy living in general, personal hygiene and nutrition, etc, and (4) To educate on all topics covered for HIV/AIDS, but with respect to TB.

.....TB. Tuberculosis. A disease I remember reading about a lot in Lucy Maud Montgomery books – consumption, a disease that Anne of Green Gables might have been worried about, but I certainly wasn't. Think again. TB is one of the biggest killers of people in this area, and all throughout sub-Saharan Africa – it is one of the most troublesome opportunistic infections for people infected with HIV/AIDS. Many people carry the Myobacterium tuberculosis, but only in a latent state; a healthy adult's immune system can fight it off. However, for someone whose immune system has been compromised by HIV/AIDS, TB poses a serious risk, and because it is highly infectious and people here live in such close quarters, with little understanding of disease transmission and the importance of personal hygiene, it is often transferred to babies and young children and even other healthy adults.

TB, unlike HIV/AIDS, is completely curable – the treatment course is long and unpleasant, but if adhered to, it eradicates the disease. The problem is, again, getting people to (1) get tested, (2) get treatment, (3) STICK TO THE TREATMENT. With both TB and HIV/AIDS, there is a stigma attached to the disease, and many people would rather languish in their homes rather than get tested and have people know for sure that they are infected. The understanding of treatment is shaky at best – so many people begin the treatment, but stop as soon as they start to feel better, leaving their settlement and their clinic to go work on the farms and ranches where treatment is not available, but employment is. They believe they are cured, but without following through with the full treatment course, they will stay infected. Worse, they develop drug-resistant TB. If they begin treatment again, they must take the second line of TB drugs. Some people default on treatment a second time, and then they develop MDR-TB (Multiple Drug Resistant TB), which makes treatment very difficult indeed, and also means that if they infect anyone else, they pass on the MDR-TB instead of ordinary TB. Often alcoholism contributes to patients defaulting on their treatment. In the health office, a lot of people consider TB to be a more pressing threat than HIV – it kills much faster, and it is much more contagious.

Needless to say, I've heard a lot of sad stories over the past few days.

But equally, I have heard stories of hope, and I have witnessed the communities' determination to learn about these diseases and improve their condition. For every person hiding in their home, coughing up blood but too afraid to go in for testing, there is another person who trudges down the dirt road to the clinic to attend the workshop, sit through hours of presentations in a language (Setswana) that they don't entirely understand, so that they can learn about these diseases and learn how to help themselves. The workshops were lively, even raucous at times, full of laughter and eager contributions from the audience. I tried many times to imagine the same workshop taking place in Canada – it would be so much more sterile, quieter, hands raised politely, everyone a little bit worried about how their questions would sound.

In one of the condom demonstrations, M chose two ancient old ladies to show the audience how to properly put on a male condom. Decked out in a strange assortment of vibrantly patterned dresses, shawls and shirts, these two old crones creaked to their feet and stood up in front of the audience. They had so many wrinkles their eyes were barely visible, and their leathery, deeply-creased hands seemed too stiff to do such a delicate thing as roll on a condom. The audience was hooting and shouting, laughing till tears came to their eyes. But, bickering with each other about the best method, they did it. The taller of the two ladies held the penis model and barked instructions at the shorter one as she tore open the packet, carefully pinched the nipple at the top of the condom, and slowly rolled the latex down the resin shaft of the penis replica. She squinted at her handiwork and stood back, looking impassively at the ready-for-sex penis. The crowd went wild.

There was a delightful sense of family congeniality about the whole thing – women brought their babies, because who has daycare in the middle of rural Botswana? Without the slightest inhibition, they popped out their breasts and fed their children, eyes still fixed on the presenter. One young boy kept peeing on the floor – no problem, someone just grabbed a mop and wiped it up without interrupting the presentation. (Let us ignore for the moment the sanitary concerns of having someone urinate on the cement floor right outside the clinic... There was slightly more of a hullabaloo when the same child started to relieve himself of solid waste.) People shouted their encouragement to people answering questions, and openly shared their opinions and concerns. There was a tremendous bravery about it. We don't want to look away from the problem. We admit it's there. We want to know how we can help each other, how we can help ourselves.

On the day I returned to D'Kar, dusty and exhausted, I was walking down the road with the leader of the Komku health team, and we stopped to talk to a woman who was on her way to the bus stop. She had been a participant in a very special beauty contest that took place in Ghanzi a few weeks ago – the “Miss HIV-Positive” beauty contest. “I am on my way to Ghanzi to celebrate fourteen years of being HIV-positive,” she told me proudly, holding a small suitcase, eyebrows dramatically pencilled in, lipstick bright on her lips. She had the unassailable confidence of someone who knows the facts, has looked death in the face and decided to wring the absolute best out of the rest of their life.

There is hope.