never no flashlight

10:00 p.m..

Walking home at night, alone, from L's house.

It's about a kilometre to my house. This walk used to terrify me. There are, of course no lights – and using a flashlight just makes it worse, because you get a tiny island of light and the rest of the dark is even darker. I haven’t used a flashlight on this walk for about a year. If you have ever walked a country road, not a single electric light visible in any direction, you probably know what this is like.

It’s dark, of course. So dark. But it's never true dark. There's no such thing as a completely black night sky – the stars give more light than you’d imagine, and when the moon is out it’s like daylight. When the sky is cloudy, it's dark, but if it gets too cloudy then there's lightning, and either way the stars shine through somehow. If the cloud is thick enough to block out the stars entirely, then it’s also stormy enough that the wind shreds the cloud here and there and you can see the sky. If the cloud covers the entire sky, then it’s not thick enough to completely obscure the moon and stars.

I walk home in this dark. On a cloudy night, I cannot see my hand in front of my face. I can see only the barest distinction between earth and sky - bushes converging as a lumpy horizon, a line between pure shadow and the slightly lighter sky on the horizon. It gets darker up in the dome of the sky, where the cloud is thicker. I walk towards that convergence, the V of lines of perspective showing me where the road is. It is a straight road, gravel, lined with acacias. Occasionally I can see a dim cooking fire in the bush, or hear the murmur of voices, but at 10 p.m. almost everyone is sleeping.

On a night this dark, there is sure to be lightning, and when the lightning strikes it lights the world IN COLOUR. At night, you don't expect colour, even if you never thought of it that way. Your cones are off. Your rods are on. Your brain adjusts to the greyscale night, and when the lightning flashes it shocks – it's not just the light, although it makes you feel the craziest kind of high, your pupils dilated 110% for the dark and suddenly stunned by the sheet lightning blowing up the world – it's not just that, it’s the COLOUR. Colour when there should never be any colour, no, not at midnight, and somehow your brain knows this, interprets the sudden appearance of the spectrum as severely strange, an anomaly, an unreality.

It is so dark I literally cannot see my hand in front of my face, unless I hold it against the sky to get the dim silhouette against that slim band of light on the horizon. There are always goats asleep on the road at this time of night, and I smell them before I hear or see them – the pungent odour of goat fur and hooves and dung, and the smell of the leaves and grass they have eaten, half-digested and flavouring their exhalations. As I get closer, the goats scuffle to their feet and I can catch glimpses of the white ones as I walk among them, feeling the air stirred by their passing, the movements of the pebbles kicked up by their hooves. The darker goats are invisible.

I know the route well, of course. It’s impossible for me to measure a kilometre when I walk in the dark, and it always seems to take longer than the 10 minutes it actually does, so I have to judge my progress by landmarks. I steer by the big square water tower, which can usually be discerned as a fuzzy silhouette against the inky sky. After that it’s not so far to my house, and I look for the shape of the particular bush that marks the turnoff. Usually someone’s left a light on in the office, and if I peer through the bush at the right spot, I can see it and it will guide me home. If the office light isn’t on, I wait for flashes of lightning to show me the special bush that heralds home.

I've been here so long now that I know the bushes. I never miss my house, never walk too far, never turn too early. I love this walk, my solitary journey home in the dark.

I don’t even bother bringing a flashlight to L’s anymore.

The Gat

"The Gat" is the premier local oasis. It used to be a quarry, and has since been transformed into a cool haven in the dusty, burning-hot expanse of Ghanzi. If I remain in D'Kar for the weekend, the Gat is my favourite excursion - I'm sure you can see why!

Terraces of beautifully maintained green grass lead down to the water, and a large thatched pavillion provides shade. The quarry is about 100m across, and 6m deep, clean and clear. The owner stocked it with fish, which occasionally nibble your toes. Less charming are the water beetles lurking at the edges, which will give a sharp bite to whatever part of your body they happen to encounter. I try to get in and out very quickly.

There are flowers all over Ghanzi right now - foamy spray of white on some of the bushes, tiny powdery yellow flowers, bright yellow daisies growing in any shade available, cactus flowers, acacia flowers, and so many more.

And there are always the desert plants, hardy little herbs popping up in the sand.

There's never a day without a new weird bug. This little guy is actually facing downwards - the long light-green things are the antennae, not the brown ones.

Reflection.

And of course... what trip to the Gat would be complete without a braai?

Wasp Attack!

On Wednesday morning, I went for a run with R. We ran the village loop, and when I got back to my house I decided to do something I hadn't done in a little while: climb the water tower behind my house. This is a metal tower about 10 meters high, on top of which is the big green water tank. Standing up there, you get a lovely view of the village in the morning, and I used to climb it about once a week. Wednesday morning, I climbed up with my camera and got a few nice shots, then started back down.

However, one critical thing had changed since the last time I climbed the tower: some very large red-orange wasps had made a nest at the top. I disturbed this nest as I placed my hands on the top rungs, and had just enough time to hear the angry buzzing, see the incoming wasps, and think SHIT! before bracing myself for the stings and starting to scramble down the ladder as fast as humanly possible, taking the rungs two at a time. The wasps came at me and stung me three times: once on my forehead, and twice on my left arm. I swatted away the last wasp, hit the ground, and dashed away while swearing my head off.

The stings hurt, but I considered myself lucky to have gotten away with only three, and after about ten minutes the pain subsided. There were tiny puncture marks but no swelling, and only mild itching. The stings got a bit worse throughout the morning, but never became more severe than a bad mosquito bite. I had a trip to Grootlaagte and Qabo scheduled for the afternoon, so we packed up the Land Rover and drove out to Grootlaagte around two. That night we camped out on the floor of a VDC house, laying out sleeping bags and mattress pads on the linoleum floor. I had trouble sleeping due to the heat and the itchiness of my arm; but again, no worse than a bad mosquito bite. Okay, maybe a really bad mosquito bite. Still, I thought nothing of it.

When I woke up on Thursday morning I thought my eye felt a bit funny, like it was clogged with sleepers or swollen the way your eyes will be after crying. No problem, I thought. Wash it out with water, blink rapidly. Solved.

Then I looked in the mirror. The whole left side of my face was swollen, an ugly line dividing my forehead into the level, normal plane above my right brow, and the Frankenstein-esque bulge above the left. I could barely open my left eye. My left arm was swollen and angry red above the elbow, and itching with a fiendish intensity.


What to do? I was torn between dismissal – it's just a wasp sting, you'll get over it! - and concern – this has never happened to me before, what if it gets worse? Also, I have a party to go to this weekend and I cannot show up like this....

After a brief conference with my companions, we decided to go and see the clinic in Grootlaagte and ask them for help. Unfortunately, the nurse had gone on a mobile clinic trip to provide services to the people working on nearby cattle farms, and without her the clinic was closed. “I'll be fine!” I said, optimistically. “We can try the clinic in Qabo when we get there later today.”

The rest of the day proceeded in an extremely embarrassing fashion. The purpose of the trip had been to introduce the new manager for the Huiku Trust to the relevant village authorities, and of course we carried on as planned. This meant that I met such important village figures as the kgosi (chief), the Huiku board members, the councillor, and the chairman of the village development committee while sporting a giant lump on the left side of my face. “Dumela!” I said to each of them, holding out my hand and ignoring the curious looks. “This is our new manager!”

We drove to Qabo in the afternoon. By this time, my left arm felt like it was permanently encased in one of the inflatable arm bands doctors use to test your blood pressure: the swelling from the stings was pressing in on the rest of my arm. When we drove over bumps I could feel my fluid-filled, Popeye-sized biceps jiggling. My eye was a little bit more open, but the swelling was moving down, and – more worryingly – over to the other side of my face. “We are going to the clinic as soon as we get to Qabo,” I said, firmly.

Unfortunately, the Qabo nurse was in Ghanzi. We decided that it was time to take matters into our own hands and chanced a visit to the traditional doctor, while waiting for the nurse to come back.

The traditional doctor was a plump, jolly old woman in a blue dress with a lot of plastic beaded necklaces around her neck. She sat back from her laundry bucket and listened as P explained the situation in Naro, and then gave me her advice, which consisted of three main points:
1.People that complain about wasp stings are huge wimps.
2.She didn't know much about plants/herbs to help stings; that was the specialty of the other traditional doctor, who was very conveniently out of town.
3.However, in a pinch, she suggested that I rub the swellings, vigorously, with soil. She demonstrated, picking up handfuls of soil and rubbing them roughly into her arm.
This was not what I had hoped for – I had envisioned a steaming hot poultice of some kind of bitter-smelling, mashed-up roots and leaves. The poultice would burn at first, then soothe and immediately relieve the itching, draw out the poison, and visibly reduce the swelling before I even left the doctor. Alas, it was not to be.

We trekked back to our camp site and I began dutifully rubbing soil on my arm, though I couldn't bring myself to rub it on my face. It didn't seem to have much of an effect, but it did feel wonderful to itch the whole area.

After that I had a short nap, and a brief board meeting.

Following the board meeting, at about 6:30, we decided to go and see if the nurse had returned from Ghanzi. She had, but was not at the clinic, so we ran around the village searching for her – eventually, we found her, and she agreed to come back to the clinic and help me out. Nurse K, a cheerful 28-year-old woman, spent about 15 minutes telling me about her dreams to move to Canada to become a nurse there (and could I get her a visa?), and then searched the clinic for some appropriate medicine. “I want to give you an injection!!” she said, with more gusto than I felt comfortable with. “I want to give you ____, but I'm not sure if we have any left. Otherwise I'll give you hydro-cortisone.”

Soon enough she returned with a needle and a little bottle of hydro-cortisone, set up a white folding screen, and without further ceremony asked me to lift up my skirt. I did, and she stuck the needle into my butt, injected, swabbed, and it was all over. She filled out a patient record card for me, gave me some Panadol for any pain that might result from the shot, and then showed me out.

I know that there must be at least one person reading this who is thinking something along the lines of, “Dear god! INJECTIONS? In AFRICA?! At a clinic in the village, where they don't even have electricity?!?! Is she TRYING to get HIV?” To this I respond, calm down. There are problems with health care in Botswana, but the nurses are well-trained, the clinics clean and well-supplied (in fact, some people make a living stealing anti-retroviral drugs from clinics in Botswana and then reselling them over the border in South Africa), and a dirty needle is not even a possibility.

And it worked! My arm is back to its normal size, my eye is open, and I was not disgraced at my party over the weekend. I guess we'll never really know, though, if it was the soil or the hydro-cortisone that did it...

chameleon & goats

A few weeks ago, I found this baby chameleon sitting in my flame tree sapling. Obviously I had to photograph it. A lot of people here are terrified of chameleons - I suppose because they have the creepy ability to change their skin. The office was horrified that I would be crazy enough to touch one.

What a bizarre creature!

When I walk home at night, the goats are usually sleeping in the middle of the road. This is the herd anxiously running away from me.

"The State of Africa"

There is no shame in not knowing, the shame lies in not finding out. (Russian proverb.)

I've just finished reading Martin Meredith's "The State of Africa" (2005) which, as its tagline suggests, is "a history of 50 years of independence." It received stellar reviews as a general overview of the history of the continent over the last half-century, and I have to agree; Meredith's book covers the entire continent, giving satisfying summaries of the stories of a multitude of different countries. He illustrates the immense differences between the countries and regions of Africa, while at the same time showing that their problems have been, at heart, the same. His writing style is concise and readable, with enough colourful language to keep his readers engaged, but not enough to distract from the subject. He includes enough statistics to drive home the outrageousness of corruption and the tragedy of poverty, but never so many numbers that it becomes dry or tedious reading. Brutal massacres are presented with compassion but without sensationalism.

For me, "The State of Africa" will hopefully prove a springboard to easier reading. I find history in general difficult to read, although I love to learn about it; I suspect that the reason I find it so difficult is that I start from such a weak base. When I read through a chapter in which every name and every event described is more or less completely new, it takes an awful lot of backtracking, re-reading, referencing the index (and occasionally Wikipedia), and furious underlining before the story becomes clear. The chapter about Angola went slowly; the chapter about Rwanda went at least twice as fast. The more I learn, the easier and more exciting it becomes to learn more. I suppose that's the way all learning works. At any rate, after this thorough introduction to the subject, I hope some of the other books on my bookshelf will go faster.

Meredith offers very little editorializing throughout his book; in fact, I found the last chapter disappointingly free of opinion. I suppose any historian invokes their opinion to some degree, simply in how they choose to present their material and interpret the chain of cause and effect. There are a few main choices for "cause" (or perhaps we should say "blame") when people write about Africa: (1) The Evils of Colonialism! (2) The Evils of Tribalism! (3) The Evils of Corrupt Dictators! and (4) The Evils of Western Economic Imperialism! Meredith weaves carefully between these three, with the majority of blame landing on (3) The Evils of Corrupt Dictators!, which I tend to agree with. (Hold your horses, I know that colonialism set the stage for terrible leaders, but do you really want to make excuses for Charles Taylor?)

Many books about Africa end with a summary of hopes (or least predictions) for the future, but Meredith offers nothing more the sum of his 700 pages - which is that anything can happen, and even the most promising new leaders can quickly go bad. The common people of Africa have been screwed every which way by pretty much any power that has become involved in their continent,and there has been extraordinarily little positive leadership to reverse the trend. But as Meredith writes in his author's note, "What has always impressed me over the years is the resilience and humour with which ordinary Africans confront their many adversities. This book is intended as a testimony to their fortitude."

Amen, Martin Meredith!

a few photos

Baobab flowers, Namibia

The actual Lion-Killer Stone, Huiku Trust land, Botswana

Another view of the Lion-Killer Stone. Doesn't it look like a nose?

Nothing much to report. It's been hot. Two weeks ago we had pounding, pouring, incessant rain for over a week- the sides of the main road filled with water and then the road itself was half-submerged. Ghanzi looked like the Okavango. Houses flooded. The gravel road to Grootlaagte was filled with treacherous ponds over two feet deep, threatening to drown my vehicle. Jojos (water tanks) overflowed. The lot outside of the Komku office was covered in water. My drainpipes gushed water and the garden exploded. The nights were cool enough that I wore light pajama pants and cuddled under my blanket. Then, abruptly, the rain stopped... and now it is hot as hell again. I sleep in a tank top on top of the sheets and wake up with my neck uncomfortably clammy with sweat. My cats sprawl flat on the floor in an effort to make as much of their bodies as possible touch the cool linoleum. When C and I go running, it's twice as painful. But in theory the rainy season should last at least another month, possibly two... So I'm hoping for the rains to return.