Our first week in Botswana will be spent in Sefhophe, the village where Dia is working.
The second week we'll be riding off road and camping among the wildlife, in areas of the country with far more animals than people. I'll get to be the driver of a 4x4 Toyota truck exploring the edges of the Okavango Delta and the remote salt flats (called "Pans") in the Kalahari. By then I should be accustomed to driving on the left side of the road, though on many days there won't be much of a road.
The term wildlife does not begin to describe the variety of creatures found in Botswana. The country has in recent decades made preserving the native species of lions, elephants, zebras, giraffes, hippos and rhinos a high priority. There are many national parks, a no nonsense "shoot to kill" policy against poachers, and a budding infrastructure for ecotourists like us who will get to camp on the ground up close to lions and other fierce creatures.
Dia has told us that she and her Peace Corps friends have gone out to reserves and heard hippos so close to their camp they could hear them breathing. She also says that most Batswana would never think of doing anything so daring, which seems to me a sensible way to carry oneself in the presence of such massive carnivores.
As we plan our trip, I find it amusing to watch Ellen demonstrating such enthusiasm for sleeping out on the Pans with lions just yards away, when it has proved difficult to get her to consider camping in the Adirondacks where a noisy raccoon is the most likely predator we might encounter.
She has been assured by others who have done this and blogged about it that the lions will not bother our tent. Apparently lions perceive tents as large stones and do not bother them. Presumably the lions are aware of this. The other possibility is that those who slept in tents not mistaken for stones did not live to blog about it. We'll see.

The West Wing

This post is about a time warp, about the incredible pace of change in communications technology, and about the love between a mother and her daughter.

So why does it contain an image of Martin Sheen?

It's a slow Sunday in Sefphofe, and Dia is looking for something to do with her down time. She's fed the puppy that she takes care of. So she sent her Mom a message on What'sApp suggesting that they watch an episode of the West Wing together. This happens every once in a while, when we think she might be getting a little bored or homesick.

Dia has downloaded the entire series on her laptop, which, among other things, makes me hope that NBC does not have copyright lawyers in Botswana or who are paid to scour obscure blogs written by Peace Corps parents.

Mostly it makes me amazed that Dia and Ellen are watching the same TV show simultaneously and texting one another about it as they do. Almost as if they were sitting next to one another on the couch.

Decades ago, the first time I moved overseas, I spoke to my family on Christmas. The phone call took days to arrange and cost more than two hundred dollars. It was the only phone call, the only communication we had besides letters. It's a new world. I'll get used to it eventually.

Diamonds - Whose Best Friend are They?

Last fall you might remember a story about an extremely large diamond - the size of a tennis ball, being found in southern Africa. Turns out it came from a mine in Botswana run by the Canadian mining company Lucara. It was quickly shipped from Botswana to Canada where dealers expected it to sell for something like 60 million dollars.

Botswana produces more diamonds by value than any other country in the world - 3.63 billion dollars in 2013. It's one of the reasons that Botswana is among the wealthiest countries in Africa.

Lucky for the people of Botswana, no one knew they had any diamonds before they gained their independence in 1965. Had the British known what riches lay beneath the dry soil, they just might have found reason to hang around a bit longer.

We hear a lot about Blood Diamonds, and you might even have seen a Leonardo DiCaprio film on the subject. Botswana has no blood diamonds. Four foreign diamond companies mine the shiny rocks, and the trade appears to be above board for the most part. Diamonds are the country's biggest source of wealth right now, but they are thinking it's time to diversify - the mines might last another decade, two at the most. Tourism seems to be the most likely candidate to replace the gem trade as the cornerstone of the economy.

While government policy has intended to spread the diamond wealth around, a recent World Bank report describes Botswana as the country with the third highest rate of income inequality in the world. (Bernie Sanders take heed.)

Move Over, Wallis Simpson - Meet Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams

You probably have heard the story of how King Edward VII abdicated the British throne in 1936 to marry the woman he loved, a Philadelphia women named Wallis Simpson. But you've probably never heard the story of Seretse Khama, Botswana's founding President, and the British woman who became his wife, Ruth Williams. Until Dia announced that she was heading off to Botswana I had never heard of Sir Seretse Khama either, but here's what I've learned about him since.

Seretse Khama, like Nelson Mandela, was born royal, the son of a tribal chieftain in what was then Bechuanaland. His father died and he became chief of the Bamangwato people in 1925. He spent most of his younger years studying in South Africa and later London, where he met Ruth. When the two married, tribal leaders joined with South Africa and British leaders to have Khama stripped of his leadership role and sent into exile. South Africa's apartheid leaders couldn't live with the example of an interracial couple occupying the seat of government just to the north, and the Brits - well they needed the South Africans as allies, so they joined in the racist effort.

The people of Botswana didn't take well to this, and the Khama couple came home in the mid 50's. Seretse waited five years before he founded the political movement that eventually led to Botswana's independence in 1965, when he became the new nation's first President.

It seems like one of those moments when the right person showed up at the right historical moment. And then they found the diamonds. Seretse Khama and the discovery of diamonds account for much of modern Botswana's history. More on that next time.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3421963/New-film-tell-explosive-tale-late-Botswanan-president.html

Soon there will be a feature length film about the great love story that dramatically impacted how Botswana developed as an independent country. And it's a story most of us have never heard.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is an amazing invention.

Dia and her Mom text almost every day using this little app on their phones.

We can't really speak with her by phone or Skype when she is in Sefphofe, where the signal is very limited.

But when she goes to the capital, Gabarone, the connection is pretty solid. Last week she was there for a training and we had a three hour conversation via Skype. (She looked great and was very happy to be in a place with running water for hot showers). She now joins the locals in referring to the capital city by its nickname - "Gabs".

Interesting fact about Botswana is that it was one of the rare countries, in fact the only one that I know of, to have the seat of its government located outside the country. Until 1965, the country we now call Botswana was the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, with its capital in Mahikeng, in the North West province of South Africa. This may come in handy one day when watching Jeopardy.

Upon independence, Botswana, a new country needing a capital of its own, chose to build one pretty much from scratch. They settled upon the place that was to become Gabarone, in part because there was a source of fresh water and in part because that area was not strongly identified with any particular tribal or ethnic group.

Most of the city's major streets and buildings were constructed within three years.Today it is a city of nearly a quarter million people, and is growing fast.

It's got malls, universities, night clubs, banks, a stock exchange. It is a modern city by any standard, or so we hear. On July 19 we will arrive on a flight from Johannesburg, landing at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, named for the first President of independent Botswana. More on him later - he seems like an interesting and in some ways visionary leader.

Relentless Sunshine

It's almost always sunny in Botswana

And it just got a little sunnier.

This is not a digression from our discussion of Dia's work, but a further explanation of what we do not know.

Botswana is a warm place, where it only rains a bit, and mostly in the few months of southern Africa's winter. (The word for rain - pula - is the same as the word for money).

Click here for the forecast - no rain in sight.
Before Dia went to Botswana, I gave her a nickname. Technically it is not a nickname, since it is many times longer than her name, but sometimes you have an extraordinary circumstance which requires bending the rules, which for me is not easy when it comes to words. I call Dia the "relentless sunshine".

We all know people who we consider optimists. Dia is one of those people, but that term does not begin to touch it. I would say that Dia is constitutionally incapable of seeing the negative in a situation. It's a powerful and striking form of blindness. In the most difficult of situations, she will be the one to point out the up side. It's not like she's afraid to take on the hard stuff; she just doesn't want to talk about it. Doesn't want to give it any space in her brain.

Two concrete results from this sunny disposition. One, that huge smile you see in most of her pictures. Two, she is not eager to tell us much about her work at the clinic in Sefphofe. It's hard stuff, we assume.

When we talk or text with her, we hear about the people she works with. We hear about weddings and other celebrations. We hear about the donkeys in the road as she walks to work and the puppies in her yard when she comes home. But what happens in the clinic, at least as far as we know, stays at the clinic.

That's why we'll have to go see for ourselves.

Botswana's Stunning Achievement Against AIDS

If you look at the poster behind her, you'll see the main reason that Dia is in Botswana. She studied Public Health Education at SUNY Brockport and her area of interest has always been women's reproductive health. 

Botswana's is a large country with a tiny population - barely 2.2 million people. The major threat to public health is HIV.

Between 20 and 25% of the adult population are HIV positive.

There are 67,000 orphans due to AIDS, and more than 5,000 people die from the disease every year.

Botswana has the means to educate and treat the people, and has taken many steps to manage this epidemic. In 2002 Botswana became the first country in Africa to make anti-retroviral drugs available to those already infected. Their maternal-child transmission rate has dropped from 40% to 4%. Click on the link above to listen to an NPR story about what they've been able to do.

At the request of Botswana's government, all 162 Peace Corps volunteers in the country are working on HIV - related issues. Dia works at a small clinic in Sefphofe. What does she do there?

Very good question.

And away she goes...

First question everyone wants to know about Botswana.  Where is it?

North of South Africa.

East of Namibia

South of Zambia

West of Zimbabwe

For our purposes, all we need to know is that it is a short flight from Johannesburg, South Africa. We fly direct from New York to Johannesburg on July 18, then take a short flight to Gabarone, Botswana's capital. That still leaves us four hours by road (in our case, in a rented white four-wheel drive Toyota truck) from Sefphofe, where Dia lives.

Masego

Last October we learned that our daughter, Dia Marie, had been given a new name by the people of Sefhophe, the village in Botswana where she has been serving now for six months as a Peace Corps volunteer.

The name? Masego.

The meaning?  Gift.

Realizing that on the other side of the planet there was a village that had the vision to see what a gift our child really is, we decided that the only thing to do was to go to Botswana and meet these prescient people.

So that's what Ellen and I will be doing in July. July 18 to be precise - 100 days from today.

If you'd like to share in this journey, to learn about Botswana, Dia's work there in southern Africa, come back and see this blog from time to time. We'll be there before you know it.