Dumela / Intro Credits

Um.. Hmm... Well...
These are the first words that come to mind as I stare at the sneering, blinking cursor and think about the avalanche of new experience that has buried me in its sandy snow since arriving in Gaborone, Botswana one week ago. It seems disgustingly cliché to start out this blog with an ambiguous, rhetorical "Where do I start?" but I'll do it anyway.

Where Do I Start?

The Journey:
If one were to look at my travel itinerary of the past two months they might think it was a copy of one of Jules Verne's original drafts for Around The World In Eighty Days. It was ridiculous, amazing, and eye-opening even in the places I have already been to / lived in for five years of my life. It looked a little like this : Philadelphia - Chicago - DC - London - Malaga - London - Singapore - Jakarta - Bali - Surabaya - Kuala Lumpur - Doha - Dubai - Addis Ababa - Johannesburg - Gaborone. The homecoming, the vacations, and even the transit stopovers were all fantastic and I appreciate every frequent flyer mile I hoarded (thanks Papa). The most exciting, frustrating, and dazed of those legs was definitely the Dubai - Addis - Joburg one. As Harris dropped me at the airport in Dubai, I didn't exactly have all my wits together due to some extraneous circumstances. I walk through the metal detector as I have done again and again - BEEP BEEP BEEP - "do you have a belt sir?" - fumble, fumble, unbuckle - "thank you. have a good flight." - "thank you. " And I walk away. It is not until 2 hours later as I sit on the plane and observe the frequency that I am pulling up my plants that I realize that some lucky security man now owns the one belt I once owned. (Thank you Ilana for flowering me with flowery belts for the last few days).

My brief stopover in Djibouti and then the more lengthy one in Addis Ababa were fairly uneventful. I wish I had arrived earlier in Addis as I only had time to check into my hotel, enjoy a beer and conversation with an Ethiopian businessman, and wake up in time for a breakfast and a ride back to the airport. The one observation I was able to pick up from my stay in Ethiopia : everybody runs in Addis Ababa. As I sat in the back of the hotel van on my way to the airport in the wee hours of the morning, every where I looked were herds of joggers, sprinters, and even some that seemed to be neither but were still, of course, running. Can anyone say Abebe Bikila?

I arrived in Johannesburg and I thought twice about going out and getting a coffee when I saw the sign hanging over the Arrivals section that read "ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK" with a highlighted picture of a revolver under the letters. And then the sinker occurred. Have you ever been at Baggage Claim and felt that slow sinking of the heart as the interval between suitcases exiting that merciless portal becomes longer and longer until the conveyor belt shrieks to a halt and your flight number disappears from the display screen. No bags. Connection to Gaborone on a different airline in an hour. Bureaucracy. After being sent to three different places I finally got to a stand where the lovely lady behind the counter calmly said "no, I'm afraid we don't know where your bags are, but here's my number - call me from Gabs." Grin. I spent my two hour delay making lists of all the things I would have to buy in Gabs to replace all my possessions. Finally, I boarded the rickety, two-propellor plane and stared out the window at the barren extraterrestrial landscape below for an hour until we bounced, quite literally, our way down the runway of Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, Gaborone. Pick up was easy - because I had no bags. The next day I would learn that my bags had inadvertantly been sent to Lagos, Nigeria, from Addis Ababa and a day after that I would pick them up at the airport completely intact, untouched, and slightly damp from a rainstorm in Lagos. Or Addis. Or Joburg. Who knows. My bags have seen more of Africa than I have. Maybe I'll ask them a thing or two.

The reunion with Daniel and Ilana was as epic as I had imagined it would be and as our days together went on, things only got better and better. As Ilana and I discussed and allegorized while I may have slipped and tripped down the ladder of fortune a few times in a few different ways in the weeks leading up to my arrival, there was now nothing to do but wipe my brow and begin a steady climb back up. And that we did.

Kamogelo:
The morning after I arrived, Daniel and I joined Abby and Ilana on one of their routine combi (small, packed minibuses with nonsense like COMBI4LIFE and SILENTPREDATOR WordArted to their rear windows) out to the day care center that they have been working at for the past two months. My heart remained intact for about the first five minutes until it immediately melted into a more waxy, water-based substance as crowds of smiling kids began to hang off limbs, give thumbs up, and poke my Adam's apple in amazement. Perhaps it was superficial, as their reaction is probably very similar whenever an unfamiliar face enters the schoolyard, but I felt a connection with some of the kids that went beyond just simple fascination. This reached its pinnacle in a percussive frenzy when Daniel with his harmonica and me with my doumbek began to jam. Some observations from this jam session:

1) Batswana kids can really shake it.
2) Music really is a universal language that can bring people of widely different backgrounds, interests, ages, everythings together.
3) Daniel's tin sandwich skills have improved significantly.

It's really amazing how simple happiness can be. As my fingers rolled over the head of the doumbek and Daniel's shallow breaths transformed themselves into melody, and kids hung off my neck and smiled and screamed and shook, I really was perfectly and purely happy. Depending on our class schedules which are still very much in the air, I hope to be able to go to Kamogelo at least once a week during my five month stint here.

Orientation:
In three y-tailed words? Anxiety, Bureaucracy, Frenzy.
Dead ends and detours, registration woes, paralyzing newness, wacky cool and wackily cool new friends from Botswana, and less expectedly Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Mexico, and the States. All the other international students studying abroad here are all really interesting in their own lovely ways. And the Batswana that I've met only keep reconfirming that they may be the friendliest people in the world.

Orientation has consisted of repetitive but informing lectures, dinner and dancing around a fire at a masterpiece of a house in a small village outside of the city, bus tours of the city, and lots of "what are you studying"s "oh, tell me about your little town in Norway"s and "here, you call me and then I'll have your number"s. I'm used to moving around a lot and as a result I love introducing myself and am not all that opposed to small talk. But something about this time makes it very different. Maybe it's because I'm in Botswana now. Or maybe it's my age. The experience of settling in to a new place is undoubtedly different for a seven year old, a thirteen year old, a seventeen year old, and a nineteen year old. Whatever the reasoning, there's something really exciting about this whole beginning thing.

Music:
After lugging my aluminum doumbek across four continents it has truly proven its worth. On Wednesday night after a Quizzo session at the Bull and Bush, we (Daniel, Ilana, and I) came home to an impromptu German party in Daniel's apartment (did I mention there were a lot of German exchange students?) We mingled, laughed, and then I remembered the existence of one of Daniel's roommates, Pat. Pat is a middle-aged, Texan social worker with long hair, an impressive beard, and a guitar. One thing led to another and Pat and I, with the aid of Daniel and his harmonica "slipping into the pockets" put on an impromptu gig. He is a fantastic songwriter, a great conversationist, and full of ideas and I look forward to exploring the Gaborone music scene with him in the next couple of weeks. It's been a long time since I felt a strong connection, creatively, with another musician (at least since last summer) and it was a very relaxing, almost surreal experience. Every percussion tap, nylon pluck, and exhale of breath just...fit.

The Dam:
We went to the Gaborone Dam on Thursday evening. The bar was closed. But a rock to sit on is all you need when you're looking at this:





I realized the task I had ahead of me, recounting the onslaught of experience when I asked the question, "where do I start?" and now comes the inevitable "where do I end?" There's a lot I haven't elaborated on in sufficient detail and there are things I haven't even mentioned that I have been experiencing a great deal of : the nightlife, for instance, or choosing classes and figuring out what I want from the months ahead But all that will come. There's plenty of time. I've come to realize that so many of the events, influences, and people in our lives are completely transient. Very little, nothing even, is permanent. And as obvious and pessimistic as this may sound, I don't think its either. There is no 'good' or 'bad' in looking at the episodic nature of life. It's important to understand, and I think I am finally understanding it, that no matter how transient, temporary, and slippery the things that enter and leave our lives may be, there is beauty in the permanence of their effect on you. Nothing really lasts. People, places, and things change every day. Whether in slight, unnoticeable ways, or drastic, traumatic, epiphanous ways and every alteration shapes you into one form or another. To me the transiency I see around me isn't a good thing. It isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing.

So as I look ahead of me into the next five months of my life here in Botswana and try to figure out what I'm doing here I take up the permanence of the past and launch into another exercise in beautiful transiency. There's a lot about everything (I'm very good at being vague), that I still need to figure out. But I'm glad this next episode is happening here in this entirely new country of Botswana, in this entirely new region of the world. I was ready for The Entirely New and I'm happy its here.