September 21, 2008

Greetings from Maun, affectionately called the "donkey capital of the world" by locals here. As you can see from the pictures above, the donkeys freely do what ever they please along with the other free roaming livestock here, and you thought you had trouble with loose dogs getting into the trash. It has been just over a month since our last blog entry, and we have been busy! The day we uploaded the last blog entry, we decided to get out of Maun for a night as things were at a stand still with housing and flying. There is a wildlife reserve about 70 miles north of Maun called Moremi, so we grabbed a few things to make a simple camp outfit and drove off into the bush. We had a pleasant drive up viewing lots of wildlife, and reached our destination at sunset. Our camp was at a place called North Bridge because of a large bridge made out of tree branches, and we were shocked to see the size of some of the trucks crossing over it. The road continues up to Chobi National Park even further North.

As the sun slowly went down, we built a fire to cook on and adjusted all the seats in our Pajero so we could sleep in the car that night. At one point, a baboon tried to see what it could steal from the open car, but we chased it away. The camp was on the bank of a slow moving river, and we could hear the hippos calling and grunting to each other as darkness settled in around us. We kept shining a flash light out in the water, half expecting to see a hippo coming into the camp (we found out later that it happened to a friend of ours at the same camp spot). All the hippo and creature sounds were suddenly covered by a large elephant trumpeting down the road. It was enough to call it a night and climb into the car to sleep.

Colin says, "What Julie didn't tell you was that as brazen and aggressive as those thieving baboons are Julie is a little more aggressive and gave them a run they won't forget, after which they left us alone. Also, about the elephant trumpet...ever see a cartoon where the noise is so loud the characters hair is blown back? Julie was already set on a hair trigger with the hippos so close in the dark and became but a blur headed from camp chair to truck with no consideration that I was still in my camp chair while she was safely (she thought) locked in the truck". Though it was a bit warm during the night, we slept relatively well while hearing hippo, elephant and hyena calls. We rose early to travel through a small portion of the reserve. There was a large variety of wildlife to be seen, and we were able to test our four wheel drive out in the deep rutted sand tracks considered roads. Somewhere in our bumpy travels, we lost our front license plate though.

At one place in the road there was a small pond left from the rainy season that was blocking the main road, so we tried to drive through the brush to get around it, but the brush was too thick. We did find a track going through the end of the pond and decided to drive through it. It turned out to be fairly deep, as we realized when a large brown wave of water came rushing over the front of the car and covered the wind shield. Colin gunned the engine and we were able to get through to the other side. Shortly after that, as we were plowing through thick sand and feeling the car bottom out in the ruts, we came around a bend and almost hit an elephant. At that point we realized we were in the middle of a small heard. A large old cow gave a few bluffing charges before we were on our way again.

Colin says, " Whoops, my bad. We had eased into the water hole blocking the road and it did seem a little deep so I backed out. While looking for a way around it, I noticed a safari truck had just gone through. It must have a hard bottom I thought. Julie reminded me that the safari trucks have bigger wheels, right, I must listen to her more often. Anyway, we made a dash for the hole. My big mistake was keeping my hand on the center console shifter. The first recognition of doom was the sudden steep nose down into the hole, the next was a brown tidal wave coming over the hood that was surely going to top the roof. The sudden deceleration caused by hitting the water forced us forward in our seats and my hand pushed the shifter into neutral in the deepest spot. Coming to a near stop, I shifted into drive again and gunned it. As we slowly moved up and out the other side, water was lapping at my open window. Amazing how many thoughts can cross your mind in an instant. Thoughts like why didn't I listen to Julie, why did I have my hand on the shifter, why hadn't I shifted into second before charging in, would I be able to hold my breath long enough to put the chain on the front bumper hooks so the next safari truck could pull us out of the hole, can this truck hold its breath and run under water, and how long can I hold my breath.

About the elephants... Having not seen any all morning we had about given up on them. In second gear ( I learned) and engine racing through the soft sandy stretch of road we came around the corner and nearly ran over an elephant (probably wouldn't have happened like that) . Not wanting to stop and be stuck in the soft sand in the middle of elephants, angry with my driving skills, I continued to zig and zag. Fortunately the elephant zigged when I zagged. Amazing how many thoughts can cross your mind in an instant. We wanted elephant pictures, but for some reason as they kicked sand at us and threateningly trumpeted at us, Julie kept saying "Enough, Enough! Let's Go!"

In the end, we had an enjoyable break and were able to get a taste of this wild land. Also, we felt that we were able to see just what the Pajero could do in more rugged terrain.Our journey was approximately 220 miles and we did it on 10 gallons of gas.

When we returned, Colin continued to fly with Travis to learn the area and radio procedures. On one trip, Colin even got to overnight at one of the safari camps in the Makgadikgadi Pans Game Reserve. The reserve consists of vast salt flats interspersed with islands of Palm, mopane and other trees and is alive with many strange and beautiful birds and mammals including little meerkats. Colin says, " While flying in the area west of Maun in the lush, watery delta I see herds of cape buffalo, elephant and antelope like kudu and impala. When heading east toward Jack's Camp in the more desert environment, we see lots of zebra and gemsbok. Seeing elephant from the air is much like I had imagined it would have been like to see the wooly mammoths walking around Alaska 15,000 years ago.

While Colin was flying, Julie continued to clean and paint the house were we will be renting. It took two weeks to get ready, with Colin helping when available. Our first night was on September 3, three days after Julie started working at the Okavango International School. The place is a small, two bedroom house, with one big bathroom with a rather strange open shower. It is on an established lot with a landscaped yard full of all kinds of birds, and there is a constant chatter around us from their presence. There are also resident bats hanging in the trees and pooping on our car at night...If you look closely at the last picture in this set, you will see one hanging in a tree. The river is just out our back gate, and we have been able to enjoy a few relaxing evening walks since we have moved in.


Moving into our own place has led to more new relationships. Living on the same fenced property, are two young Christian men in small flats, duplexed next door. Adrian is from Botswana, and Munya is from Zimbabwe. Munya has two dogs that guard the property and his nephew was here while we were fixing up the place. His young nephew will return from Zimbabwe to go to school here in January. In addition to our new friends next door, the house came with a maid who works here two days a week. She is a single mother, raising two of her sister's children as her sister died of a stroke three years ago. Her name is Mmatshimo, pronounced"Matseemo". We are paying her the average days wage of P50 (50 pula, pula means rain), which works out to be about $8 a day. She has one other maid job three days a week. So on the equivalent of $120.00 a month and some health aid from Botswana, she manages to support herself and kids with dignity. If polishing every nook and cranny in our house wasn't enough, she is also teaching Colin Setswana, introducing us to other locals, and is acting as a cultural adviser. It is somewhat expected that if you have a paying job you should not be selfish, but also provide a job so another can earn an income. Though we had not planned on this, she has come into our lives and now we enjoy learning more about her and the culture here. We have also taken lunch breaks together, and after praying together she has begun to ask us questions like what church we go to. Her English is weak, so sometimes we have to make a few attempts to share with her so that she understands us. Because Setswana is her first language, as it is with most of the Botswana people, she even went with Colin to help him buy wood from people who gather it and then sell it along the road side. On the 30th of September, it is a holiday to celebrate Botswana's independence, and Mmatshimo has invited us to her village to watch traditional dancing. We are looking forward to it.

Julie is in her third week of work now, and enjoying the active class of 24 students, mostly boys. The school is beautiful and fairly new, and has challenges similar to rural Alaska. Many of the teachers only stay a year or two, and because it is a private school dependent on tuition to function, materials can be limited. Fortunately, the previous classroom teacher(who is finishing off the term in grade 2), had a well stocked class of her own materials. The biggest challenge the first week was learning Setswana names such as: Ontafetse, Nonofo, Boitumelo, Keakantse, Kgakololo, Lakgosi to name a few...and the eight orphans in the class are so hungry for love and attention. In addition to working with the little ones, Julie has been asked to teach seven students from grades 4 and 5 an English enrichment class. It has been interesting, and Julie has enjoyed meeting more people both staff and parents. The school is run by a Christian ministry, but does not teach Christianity in the classroom. There is a weekly assembly on Friday mornings though with praise music, childrens gospel message, and prayer. Even though she loves to teach, Julie has decided to only work to the end of the term in November. If she teaches full time the next term, it will not leave much room to do other ministry and she feels that there are things she wants to do here to support the mission we are involved with.

Colin says, "To start work, Julie needed some paper work officially stamped at the police station for her work permit. Being patient is culturally important here. Any hurrying of officials is not good and has a tendency to slow or halt progress until another day. Since Julie can sometimes be a bit direct when wanting to get things done, I decided to wait outside the station while she went in with her many pages of documents. If you remember the last couple of blogs you'd know that I'd really been spending way to much time at the station. After what seemed like way to long a wait, I ventured inside expecting to post bail for her. To my surprise she was sitting at a big desk with three officers managing an assembly line of efficient paper shuffling, stamping and laughing. When you have Julie's energizer bunny like energy, determination, organizing skills and genuine love for the people you can accomplish anything anywhere! Actually, all the police officials we have had contact with have been very pleasant, professional and helpful."

Colin has fished twice in the Thamalaklane river (tam-a-la-klan-ee) without luck. While fishing he asked three local guys why he wasn't catching fish. When he showed his fancy lure all three just smiled and said, "Ohhhh". Colin is now saving to buy a shovel to dig for worms! We also drove to the crocodile farm south of Maun one afternoon with Travis, when Julie was finished at school. The owners raise the crocodiles until they are 5 years old to use for the skin and food. Some of the breeding stock was as old as 85 years.

After a relatively short amount of flight hours flying with Travis, Colin is feeling more comfortable with the flying procedures and the mission has brought a C210 down from Zambia for him to fly. Unfortunately, there has been some problems with the motor in the landing gear and after he flew it down to Gaborone to be checked, it will need a new one. So, it has been somewhat of a lesson in waiting on God's timing to begin a regular work schedule for him. The wait has allowed us to get settled into a life here, and establish a variety of relationships among a diverse population. We are beginning to see possibilities for additional ministry among the people here and continue to feel confirmed in a purpose for our move to Botswana. Our blessings to you all, and thank you so much for all your prayers, emails, and support. We will continue to try to keep you posted at least once a month.

August 18, 2008

Maun at last! We have been here in Maun, 340 air miles north of Gaborone, for two weeks now and have stumbled and fumbled along and seem to amuse people as we try to assimilate here. It’s hard to describe how valuable the Flying Mission cultural training course was for us as it is now paying huge dividends. As we eat out, shop and navigate there is no panic as the “Gaborone experience” relates easily to here.

Our drive up from Gaborone on Saturday August 2^nd was pleasant and mostly uneventful. We took our time and stretched the drive into two 9 hour days passing over the Tropic of Capricorn on the first day. When we pulled into Francistown after about eight hours of travel, it was lunch time on a Saturday. Needing lunch ourselves, we turned into a very busy mall and found the Hungry Lion restaurant. Every time we ordered something the man said “we are out of that”. After six or seven choices, we finally asked, “What do you have?” The clerk pointed to the one item, which we then ordered. All they had was chicken, which seems to be a pretty standard dish here. We drove a short way out of town and ate delicious chicken under a road side tree.

Saturday night we spent at the Woodlands Stopover Lodge about ten kilometers north of Francistown and seven kilometers off the paved road into the bush. It was easy to find with signs pointing the way. We stayed in a chalet with indoor plumbing. It was a very clean and peaceful place with many beautiful kinds of wild birds. While there, we met a German couple “driving through Africa” in a large home made camper. They started in Germany and have been traveling for thirteen months. Over the past few days we have bumped into them twice in small shops here in Maun.

The next day we stopped for lunch at Nata Lodge just south of Nata. During lunch, we were impressed by the two foot long snake that slithered up the window while we ate there. Just a harmless bush snake and not the glass breaking cobra we initially thought it was. At Nata, the scenery changed to tropical with lots of Palm trees and sand, in addition to monster termite mounds. In the afternoon, we stopped to check out a camp in the Makgadikgadi Pans Game Reserve called Planet Baobab, and they claim to be the Baobab capital of the world. With so many of the huge, ancient trees everywhere in a sand setting it almost felt like we were on another planet.

Over the two day drive, we enjoyed seeing the way people live in simple brick or mud houses, and we saw many people using donkey carts as transportation. In addition, we saw lots of free roaming cattle, goats, and donkeys in the road, and three Ostriches courting on the road side. Our Pajero, ran like clock work all the way up and we averaged twenty one miles to the gallon on the highway.

When we arrived in Maun, a young short term missionary from Germany and the other FMS pilot, Travis, put on two “welcome to Maun” dinners for us. The second day here, as we were checking on a possible house to rent, Julie was offered a job teaching at the Okavango International School through a ministry called Love Botswana. The students go year round to school and start the year in January with three, one month breaks. They are on break for the month of August, so she will be starting in the last term on September 8. She will have 20 children ages 3 to 5 years old. We felt the position was an answer to our prayer for additional provision, as moving and cost of living expenses have been more than we had expected. There is a link to the school through the lovebotswana.org web site if any of you want more information.

We are currently staying at the FMS house with Travis until September 1 when the house we will rent is available. The current house we are in is a large two bedroom concrete and tile house, with the typical high ceilings you find here. Maun has been built along the Thamalakane River (pronounced tam-a-la-clann-ee) with a transient population of non-Africans mixed with local Motswana. People live in anything from nice large houses with walled landscaped yards, to small brick houses and simple round thatched roof, mud huts. The area we are in has the same mix of houses, and every evening we hear the cow bells of our neighbors small heard as they return home. We are just a short walk from the river and have been enjoying the village feel with people and animals walking by. There is a main paved road in and out of town and in town the roads a paved, but everywhere else there are sand track roads that seem to weave around through the brush to additional shops and homes. Of course, there are lots of roaming cattle, goats, and donkey’s everywhere and you really have to be careful driving especially at night.

After three days together, Travis had to fly the plane to South Africa for maintenance and was gone for a week. Colin went to the airport with him in the small FMS car so we could park it at the house while he was away. As they pulled into the airport, a policeman noticed that the registration was past due and stopped Colin, as he was the one driving, and impounded the car. He tried to explain that it was not his vehicle and had only been driving it for thirty seconds, to no avail. Colin had to pay the fine at the police station, and then wait for the registration to come from Gaborone before getting the car back. The word here for being stopped is arrested. When the police man told Colin he was being arrested, he thought he was about to see a jail cell! The policeman didn’t have a pen to write out the citation so Colin loaned him his, which he never got back. We have continued to keep a sense of humor through our new adventures here.

Each day we have poked our noses into all the little shops to see what they have, as we will be starting all over in furnishing a home for ourselves here. We are finding that you have to search for necessary things here, and choices are limited. With Travis gone, we were left on our own to adjust to our new surroundings, and process all the new things we have been learning. We are starting to accumulate a few things and have enjoyed stopping along the road out of town to look over the local crafts and workmen trying to make a living any way they can. Travis also returned with an abandoned little kitten that has kept us entertained when at the house.

Colin has his formal Botswana pilot’s license in hand and is learning the flying routes by flying along with Travis until his final check ride with the operations director of FMS in a few weeks. The biggest challenge is understanding people in the tower with the rich accent the people have here. In our evening hours, we have been able to spend more time with Christoph, the young German missionary, and had an enjoyable evening with the Baptist missionaries that have been here for 10 years. They will be moving to Zambia in December.

Cool things we have seen or experienced:

·The New Life Butcher Shop (we continue to be amazed at the choice of names for things here)

·Even with the wide spread use of computers people use three pieces of carbon paper to hand write receipts in triplicate.

·The smallest purchases receive a hand written and officially rubber stamped receipt.

·Most government offices have file draws bursting with files overflowing onto tables and floors. Like my desk, everything can be located anyway.

·Cell phone use is prohibited or strongly discouraged in government offices, banks and in any public place other than outdoors, this is a very good thing.

·Use of a cell phone while driving risks fines and possible cell phone confiscation. The deterrent works and is a good thing.

·While shaking hands or giving/receiving something your left hand holds your right arm near the elbow. When holding your right arm it is hard to strike the other person with your left and thus shows peaceful intent.

·Tea time is 10 am. A biscuit and cup of tea is in order. This is a really cool thing!

·Opposite the U.S., tea is every where, coffee most places, this is a nice experience for this tea drinker that once felt like a second rate citizen.

·Some young women curtsy while being introduced, remember America until the 1950’s?

·There are very few car/police chases. If you are breaking the law the policeman standing by the road expects you to stop when he waves you down, ninety nine percent of the people do stop!

Not so cool things we have experience:

·Julie’s overnight painful (not cool) food poisoning brought on after drinking Pure Joy Orange Juice that was bad.

·Difficulty accessing internet. We can go to an internet café and pay a lot for a very slow dial-up connection, or poke around town to get wireless by using our laptop in front of a business with an unsecured line….

·Sharp thorns that get stuck in our shoe soles.

Just a short note on some of the pictures.

• The young boy shown with the fish was on his way home with dinner when I stopped him to take a picture. No sport here, just all day fishing for something to eat for supper. He couldn’t understand my interest but did understand the Pula ( 15 cents) that I gave him (which put a smile on his face) for teaching me the secret to his success. The secret? “worms”.
• The two men posing with the chairs are road side furniture makers. Using trees found along the road or recycled lumber they do a credible job of building and finishing most any furniture you want. We bought two bed side tables for 100 Pula, the equivalent of $15.00. We asked them to pose with some of their wares which they happily did as long as we let them pose with their most cherished tool, the skill saw. You see, they start from raw wood to finished product using only hand tools until the most recent purchase of the electric saw.
• For perspective, a starting policeman earns 55 Pula a day, about $8.46.

We thank all of you for your prayers and email responses to our blog spot. It really encourages us as we navigate this new season of our lives. Please continue to pray for our health and safety and that the Lord will show us where
He can best use us here.