Why I count on the P.O.

If you want to send me snail mail, I'd love to receive it, although post those letters now. My Canadian friend's boyfriend in Argentina sent her a birthday letter in November and she has yet to receive it. A post card sent in January just arrived.

Send it to me at Desert & Delta Safaris, Private Bag 310, Maun, Botswana

Waiting by the acacia tree and the termite mound for your post... Maria

A "bush" room of her own

Monday in Maun

I’m at Bon Arrive` the café across from the Maun Airport, where I’m waiting to meet Kim. She and her husband, Stuart, own a mobile safari company and live in a thatched, storybook house by the Boro River (although not within view of the water but a quick walk). I’m preparing to hand her many pula to rent the cottage on the property – a modern, beautiful place, a one-bedroom studio-type space with a deck from which to watch an array of bird life. Dare I say I might do yoga out there, albeit without a mat?

A Canadian volunteer who works with an NGO, Living With Elephants, is finishing her 5-month stint today. She said this was the best place she found in all of Maun, and now I’ll be taking her place. Hooray and Huzzah, Huzzah!! It’s great news because the cottage is in the bush, definitely scenic, and yet in a fenced compound that should provide a safer setting than some neighborhoods. Kim is fun, too, so I’ll have a new friend to hang out with....They are here....

…They have just left my table. It’s a done deal. I officially am their renter. I met Stuart, the husband, and their son, Kyeren, who has agreed to work with me on a new children’s story when I move to their place. I think he’s 9. He is quite excited by the prospect that we will work on a story together. I said all I need to know is that he is an adventurer, and he assured me he is.

This is a load off my mind to have a home to know will be mine come July. The next challenge – a huge one – will be finding transportation. The thing about the cottage in the bush is, it’s in the bush. So I won’t be able to walk around and find a combi or a taxi, but I figure if the best cottage in the village landed in my universe when I met Andrea on my first day in Maun, on Feb. 26, then the rest will sort itself out in due time. So now I’m having a nip of red wine to celebrate and checking out the pilots at the next table – you know, I would really love to learn how to fly planes here – but they look hardly older than the little boy Kyeren. Neither instructors nor dates who are pilots appear on the horizon, only a top-notch rental property. That’ll do.

Sorry I don’t have a photo to show you. You’ll have to remain in suspense until later.

Meanwhile, I stopped in to see my stand-in Maun parents, Joe and Cathy Wanzala of the “Are we ever happy we have an Obama bumper sticker!” fame.(See the bottom of the first page, blog photo) Cathy was pleased to hear about the Boro River cottage and assured me that they will still be keeping up with me, including being on the lookout for a bakkie (i.e. a truck) or a Land Rover. Tomorrow, I fly by bush plane to the Savute Camp at the Chobe Naional Park to sleep again under the Southern Cross and listen for the sound of lions.

Let’s roll!
(p.s. This will be my last entry for a while. Know that your emails have been uplifting and your support is felt miles away, across the globe. Thank you. And the story of my night out on the town --and village at the Jazzbrew -- with Sechele will have to wait.)

Wanja Njuguna

Friday

I wanted you to see Wanja Njuguna, the media studies lecturer I helped during March. A formidable Kenyan who is an Obama fan and a single, divorced mother of a seven-year-old, Wanja is tireless, but even she was feeling the burden of teaching four classes and advising the UB Horizon student newspaper this semester while trying to make sure her son had proper attention. She looked as if she had received a Christmas gift when I showed up on March 2 and said, "Tell me what I can do to take a load off your shoulders." She happily unloaded a lot of tasks and teaching. I'll describe more later about the UB experience. But for now suffice to say that Wanja and I were struck by how we had similar paths: She wrote about domestic violence and won "the African Pulitzer" (CNN's African Journalist of the Year); she was a hospice volunteer; she got a major U.S. journalism fellowship (the Knight at Stanford in 2002-03) and was an intern at Time magazine, as I was in 1992.
We said goodbye yesterday, but I feel sure we'll be in touch or have our paths cross again before too long.

More from Moshupa

Friday

Since this is a dandy Internet connection, I'll post some more photos. You can't imagine how difficult it's been in some of the cafes to get photos uploaded. I usually give up in frustration, so now Stuart Leavenworth will know why I fail at times not only to take the photo of the Giant Insects from Outer Space but to even consider posting it. It would take too long. But not here in the lap of luxury, where at this moment next to me a white American woman is having a serious minister discussion with black Africans about Robert Mugabe and the election tomorrow in Zimbabwe. If she has her way, God will move Mugabe right out of power. At least that's what my eavesdropping tells me.

But I digress. Back to the photos: So now you can see the hymn-singing time at Spankie's going-away party, the place where we tied on the feedbag of goat meat and the huge pots and pans that the teenage girls had to wash and allow to dry in the sun. Just remember, the sounds of Africa were "Waterloo, finally facing my waterloo" by ABBA. Why, we heard all the hits of ABBA for hours.

The Feng Shui of Rondevals

Friday

I wanted to see how this Internet connection will work here at the Gaborone Sun, where I am going to have drinks soon with Blessing from the media studies department. Here are the traditional houses of Botswana. One is at the national museum. One is at Puni's aunt's house in Moshupa. People keep them on the grounds as "a museum" to how they first lived, Puni said. At least that's the case with her aunt, who now has a larger peach colored rectangular house complete with a big TV and stereo We stopped in last Saturday to say hello. It's very much the tradition here to pay respects to the elders. The shocking thing is Puni called herself an elder the other day, and she's 46! aieyeh!

TB patients on the lam

I see that the New York Times is reporting today on TB patients being locked up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The patients have a drug-resistant strain and have been put in hospitals surrounded by razor wire, but the patients have been breaking out of what they consider a prison to go visit their families.
This is not news I'm seeing in the Botswana press. But it does explain a lengthy television ad about tuberculosis that aired yesterday on the SABC television station we get in Gabs. It went on about how people should be tested and they could be cured if they have the disease.
What caught my attention was the odd announcement at the end, which said that the only thing that spreads faster than TB is "a positive attitude." Quite a juxtaposition.

ABBA out of time, out of context

Tuesday

The party on Saturday at what might be termed Casa de Spankies turned out, not surprisingly, to be a treat.

Puni took me to her home village, southwest of here, called Moshupa. It's about an hour's drive, which had us meandering past rolling hills that sometimes look like those of the Texas hill country and other times resemble Arizona's rocky mesas. With all of the rain, the shrubs and trees appear lush, the grasses high. And, of course, we had more rain that day, confirming once and for all that I am indeed worthy of my Sechele-given nickname, Mma Pula, Ms. Rain. (If it rains on someone's wedding day, it's a big blessing here. Think what my nickname means and what responsibility I carry. I paid close attention at the Botswana National Museum to the “traditional medicine remedy” for making rain: It involves a hairball from a cow’s stomach. Need I say more?)

The party honored Spankie, Puni’s childhood friend and a 41-year-old woman whose birth name I’ve yet to determine. Spankie is what everyone calls her. Her little sister is Spanklet. The regal matriarch, mother of Spankie, Spanklet and various sons who have no “Spank” in their names, is Mma Spankie.

I can’t begin to describe how honored I felt to be among this family and the people from the village who had gathered to wish Spankie and her daughter well. The two will be traveling on Saturday to Tunisia, where Spankie will be working on a 3-year contract for the African Development Bank as an accountant. This was a going-away party and my turn to witness the kind of event that I so cherished in the U.S. before I left to come to Botswana. It started outside on a porch. The family’s minister gave a talk, which was translated into Setswana by another man. The minister assured Spankie that she would have God’s protection and the love of her family and village to support her. He told her that it would be difficult going into an unknown land, as her “sister from the United States (me)” could well understand. There were Bible verses read and a chorus of teen-aged girls who sang, “Lord, I won’t forget what you’ve done for me.” Spankie made a speech. I even raised my hand and asked to say something. Not in Setswana, I assure you. Not yet anyway.

“May the people of Tunisia show Spankie the kindness and generosity that the people of Botswana have shown me; that is my wish for her,” I said. Everyone smiled and nodded once it was translated.

Spankie and I bonded right off. She liked what I had done, setting off for the unknown with my savings and a simple, overwhelming yearning to be in Botswana. She’d been wanting to travel out of Botswana for 10 years. The job interview and the job offer this time came easy, and consequently she felt she was destined to go to Tunisia. She felt confident, and I encouraged her to maintain that outlook.

After the spiritual portion of the party ended, it was time for lunch. I’m well on my way to becoming an African foodie. Several of you have asked me about the cuisine. This occasion provided another round of distinctly traditional fare. The table was piled high: barbecued goat’s meat, a chicken stew, morogo greens, palichay (sp??), mashed potatoes, butternut squash, tossed salad, beet root salad and a porridge. The men, in charge of the barbecuing, which is called a braai, sat under an awning near the fire. The women elders sat inside. The teen-age girls were the servers and dishwashers. They hung around outside in the back courtyard. Spankie, Puni and I sat with the men. They taught me how to eat dessert: a form of sugar cane. With my feeble attempts at Setswana and my nigh-on dangerous attempts at stripping the outer casing from the sugar cane – “Watch out; you’ll cut yourself!!” I heard that many times – I was as good as the party clown. Not the party mime. The party clown.

The other entertainment? Tunes coming from the opened trunk of a car. First it was something pleasantly funky called “township jazz,” but the group soon tired of that and asked for something different. Comfort, a dentist from Swaziland married to Spanklet, obliged. Next thing I knew, “Mama Mia” was playing. ABBA was singing full blast, and I couldn’t help but think of my Austin friend, Sandy Garcia, who would be jumping up and down and groovin’ if she were at the party. There is no ABBA fan more devoted than she.

Under the blue and white striped awning, stripping sugar cane with my back teeth, sitting among relaxed elderly men and younger ones reading the sports pages, I found myself once again awed by my good fortune to be among people so welcoming and hospitable. A Batswana party, a heartfelt farewell to a fellow adventurer, an Easter gathering in a country village. These are the days to remember.

When 7 words become 70,000 and counting

Saturday

Easter is a markedly holy time and an occasion for a four-day weekend in Botswana. Government, the schools, the banks, they all shutter their doors. Even the Pick n Pay supermarket closed on Good Friday.

I admit to being confused over specifics and the paradox. While Puni was preparing to go to a Maundy Thursday service at her Methodist Church Thursday night, I was standing in what can only be called a stampede at the Liquorama. I was there to buy Windhoek Lager for the Secheles. Puni likes a “shindi” now and then, which involves mixing a couple of dollops of Sprite with the lager. Sechele prefers his Windhoek straight up, preferably from a glass bottle because the cans “give it a tinny taste.” If Liquorama were a bank, you’d think there had been a run on the market. The tiniest, well-dressed women with bright red lipstick were hauling mountains of beer, wine and liquor out the door. I tapped my foot, waiting, waiting, inching along for about 30 minutes to check out. I’d never seen anything like the amount of alcohol purchased in such a short time, except maybe at the TOG at Wake Forest the night after winter break.

I’m in the midst of the holiday weekend, so no doubt I will better understand how the Easter tradition all unfolds by Tuesday. But I can give you the highlights: It’s party time. And yet it’s not. They take their Christianity seriously around here, just as they do their partying.

Puni wasn’t kidding when she said she might be late from the Thursday service. She left at 9 p.m., and Sechele picked her up at 1 a.m. Sometimes the service goes all night. I wasn’t invited to that one, which is understandable since I am comatose by 9:30. (Oh, how far has fallen the girl who once went out 31 nights in a row in college and didn’t start drying her hair until 10:30 p.m. before going dancing.)

I did, however, accept the invitation to attend the “Seven Words of the Cross” service at Puni’s church – the Methodist Church of Southern Africa: Gaborone Circuit -- on Friday morning. Sechele was heading to his cattle post, so it would be Puni, the housekeeper Maria and I who were off to the worship service. Puni came to my room wearing a black skirt, colored pantyhose, a red long-sleeved polyester shirt with a large, pointy, white, sailor-like collar and a knit white cap that resembled what newborn babies wear at the hospital. This outfit designated the prayer group. When I got to the church I saw dozens of women dressed like Puni. At 8:45 a.m. they were already in the pews waving their arms and singing. This was going to be amazing. And I was right. By the time we had squeezed every person into every pew, had white plastic lawn chairs set up in the aisle and in the breezeway, we must have been in the wedged company of 600 people. Fans whirred overhead, except, of course, the one over my head. It was broken. Once in a while a breeze would blow through, and we needed it because we were packed tighter than my suitcases.

Puni brought 3 hymnals, one in Setswana, one in !Xhosa and one in Sothu. The service alternated among several languages and dialects, as far as I could tell. I followed along as a minister read the story of the Crucifixion from the New Testament in English. Then the drama began, unlike anything I’ve seen at any Methodist church in America.

A male minister and a female minister told the crucifixion story in their own words, with their own flourishes and a creative take on history. One would speak English for a while as the other spoke Setswana and vice versa. So it was at once a duet and a two-person play. With their loud descriptions, you could envision every bead of sweat on Jesus’ brow, every bit of agony. The woman described the size and make of the executioner’s whip and snapped her arm; she cried out how the whip exposed the muscles and how it exposed the organs as it struck blow after blow on Jesus’ back. We heard a lot about blood. Jesus was “a man on mission,” the woman minister said. He “did not throw in the towel.” The executioner carried a bag made of skin! The ministers shouted, repeating for dramatic effect: “A bag of skin!” In response a choir member lifted a black pocketbook overhead and waved it around a bit, to nice effect. The parishioners, including me, were spellbound throughout this dramatic storytelling.
“Mission accomplished!” the ministers said in ending the crucifixion scene. You could see the ministers’ exhaustion. I think we all felt it. Then there was some more singing.

“This was like that movie about Jesus,” Puni whispered to me, referring to the Mel Gibson movie.
“I could see it. Beautiful,” she said. Puni stretches out the “beautiful” into “beee-u-tiful,” and she says if often about all kinds of things that make her happy, especially her Amway presentations.
“They took me there,” she said. I had to agree.

Then came the Seven Words of the Cross, which were portions of the service in which lay people were supposed to speak for a maximum of 10 minutes (Puni let me in on this rule; it wasn’t in the program) about different aspects of Good Friday. Mrs. C. Mosupi, for example, started off with “Father forgive them” from Luke 23:43. Mrs. T. Kolobe, using John 19:26-27, was charged with the Word titled on the program “Behold thy mother.” There were “seven words” to be covered. By 12:22 p.m., we had reached only the end of Word 6. There was the seventh to go, plus a summary of the whole event that could turn out to be a new sermon entirely.

It must be the case that in any culture you can give some people unaccustomed to speaking in front of groups a microphone, and in no time they swoon at the sound of their own voices. They won’t stop unless somebody gets the hook. (Remember Bill Clinton at the Democratic national convention in 1988? And he was USED to speaking in front of groups.) Nobody rang a bell to signal the end of 10 minutes. Nobody had a hook. The speakers kept on going and going and going. Even the one charged with Word 6, labeled in the program as “It is finished,” ironically -- I can’t stop myself from adding the adverb – was far from finished. I lost count of how many times she shouted, "It is finished," and it was not.

Even Puni, a truly devout church-goer and Golden Rule follower, reached her limit. She leaned over to me: “I am hungry. I am hot. As soon as they stand and the singing starts, let’s run!”

That was fine with me. For about the last hour I had been humming in my head the Lyle Lovett song about black Southern country-church services: “To the Lord, let the praises be/ Time for dinner/ Now, let’s go eat!” Since the “Words” part of the service had been mostly in Setswana, I had been cast at sea. I’d done my own form of meditation in the meantime. First I meditated on Easter and its meaning to me. Then I secretly practiced my Setswana vocabulary. I thought of the student papers I needed to grade and wondered what awaited me on that score. I congratulated myself on bringing a bottle of water and dried peaches in my purse, foresight that both Puni and Maria the housekeeper appreciated as well. I perked up only when the congregation started singing and stomping and waving their arms. That, I could follow. But I certainly didn’t stomp or sway or dance. Too uptight a parishioner for that.

And so we slipped out, after nearly 4 hours. Puni said in the car that sometimes she can immerse herself in such a lengthy service, but on this day she was too hot. I laughed and said in my country we’d be itching to get out in 45 minutes, watching the clock tick away to that magic strike of the clock at noon. Then she started imitating white Anglican parishioners, singing a hymn in their clipped, high voices, recounting how they get “up and down, up and down” in their pews and stick to their formal schedules. We both laughed about that because, from my experience, she was spot on.
“We Africans don’t put a time schedule on praising our God,” she said.
I would have to agree.
And by the way, there are services today and Sunday. But even Puni is skipping those. We’re headed to a party.

A continent's majesty

(w/photo of Lilac-breasted roller)
Wednesday

Many blog posts ago I promised to share the quote that caused Kathleen Krueger to dissolve into tears when I handed it to her with a thank-you gift for her and husband. They lived in Africa for much of the ‘90s. Here is the quote that sums it up for me:

“I believe the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like an old fever, latent always in their blood; or like an old wound throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.”

--Doris Lessing

Way off the hustings

Wednesday

My friend and Nieman Fellow classmate at Harvard, Barney Mthombothi, can't fathom how I could be away from the U.S. during such an exciting presidential election year. Barney used to show up Americans on our fellowship with his vast store of facts about U.S. history and its presidents. He didn't outshine us on purpose or with any hint of arrogance; he is just that smart and a tireless reader of history. He stays up until the wee hours in Johannesburg, he tells me, to follow political news from the States.

Today is one of those days I do feel the absence from the scene and an appetite for hours of TV/newspaper/political scientists' commentary. I tried valiantly to watch the video of Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia online, but it's not happening with these Internet connections in Gaborone. What could I do? I called up the transcript and read the speech on the NYT Web site, and it's one of the most remarkable, refreshing political speeches I have ever read in my years of following politics and politicians in the United States. It is monumental in the way it lays out our country's racial history from its earliest days through today. I can't say enough about its clarity, its incisiveness, its bluntness and its call to our highest aspirations as a country. I wish I had a carload of Obama bumper stickers. I'm finding in Botswana that they are treasured gifts for locals and expats alike. Obama's speech in Philadelphia, snippets of which can be found on African television, will make those stickers even more of a hot commodity.

Tiaras across the planet

Tuesday

During my “office hours” at the University of Botswana yesterday, a writer for the student newspaper came looking for my help. She came to the right place.

She plans a story for the next edition about Miss Intervarsity, the winner of a beauty contest that coincided with a recent whiz-bang intervarsity competition among college athletes from Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. How would she write this profile? What questions should she ask? I shot answers at her rapid-fire. This topic I knew, having been a game but gullible reporter in the pageant oeuvre from Hot Springs to Atlantic City.

Seeing how history repeats itself, I must note that the beauty pageant theme comes round and round for me. My first out-of-town assignment as a college intern was to travel from Little Rock to Hot Springs, Arkansas, one hour away, to cover the Miss Arkansas pageant. I had an expense account to supplement my Arkansas Democrat newspaper wages of about $3.35 an hour and checked into a fancy hotel. I was frantic about not screwing up. This was a big deal, what with the rampant pageant mania in the South, where tots start wearing plastic tiaras at shopping mall pageants at around the age of 2 or 3 and grow up to be surrounded by an entourage of dressmakers, posture perfecters and makeup deliverers known in the biz as “pageant people.” Mine was sure to be a front-page story. I was so nervous I ended up with a case of heartburn that landed me in a doctor’s office.

Wide-eyed throughout the whole event, I went about my duties with all the seriousness of a war correspondent, preparing my dispatch to enlighten our readers with the remarkable tales of these girls, uh, women. I filed my copy. Nothing terrible went wrong that I know of. But I do remember some years later being deflated when I saw that the winner who had told me with great sincerity – and whom I had quoted with sincere admiration --that she intended to become a corporate lawyer had instead wound up in the tabloids as one of Bill Clinton’s paramours and was living in Paris, as if in gilded exile. She hadn’t become a corporate lawyer. She was an actress of little note and, as Clintonian fate would have it, a historical footnote.
First lesson for a cub reporter: Not all beauty pageant contestants really want world peace even though they say so.

Jump!

Tuesday

Here’s a quote I like befitting a leap year:

“As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.” –Native American saying

A couple to remember

Monday
(with photos of Lally; the wet children on the patio; the older children studying their English and learning about compassion toward people and animals...)


Have you ever met people whose eyes shine with what can only be called goodness?
Gerald and Lally Warren fit the bill.
In my overnight visit to Lobatse, I couldn’t keep track of all they had going on in the service of other people. Three young boys showed up ostensibly for an enrichment reading class that Gerald and Lally host in their house on many days. But the young boys, who must have been about 6 or 7, understood that this particular class on this morning was for older children. Nonetheless, they had trudged over, dripping wet and hopeful. What they really wanted was a safe, dry spot and some food.

Lally soon had sandwiches for them – crusts cut off -- and drinks on the front patio. Gerald, a retired primary schoolteacher who had worked for the mining company’s school in Jwaneng, was a mobile headmaster of sorts, driving around in the Land Rover to pick up and drop off children on this rainy Saturday. He retired last year and he and Lally moved to Lobatse to live in Lally’s old house and launch an HIV/AIDS program with their own money: Letsema la Itlotlo, a project for “cultural & spiritual paths to behavioural change.” Plenty of AIDS programs have been operating throughout the country, and the Warrens say that even the most impoverished residents show remarkable knowledge about “the soldiers” in one’s bloodstream fighting off infections and how the AIDS virus can defeat the soldiers. From the time they are in primary school, the Batswana know what to do to prevent AIDS.
Primary kids know more about sex than I do, Gerald told me.
But the problem is that despite the vast investment in public education about AIDS, young people are not changing their behavior. About a quarter of the country’s population is infected. Grandmothers all over the country are raising their dead children’s children.

The Warrens believe existing programs have failed to change underlying societal attitudes, and that’s where they say their program will come in: using school workshops and drama to stress self-respect, abstinence before marriage and fidelity inside marriage as a positive lifestyle. They are drawing from the spiritual and moral teachings of the world’s religious traditions and relying on Setswana cultural values such as ‘botho,’ which means respect and good manners, to form the foundation of their program.

They themselves are Baha’i and have traveled to international conferences around the globe to support the teachings and members of their faith. Major tenets are unity of all people, gender equality, recognition of religious master teachers from many traditions such as Christianity and prayer. I know little about Baha’i but was very interested to hear the Warrens speak about their journey; I could tell in no time that their faith is in action round the clock.

Lally grew up in Mafikeng, an important trading center and what historians say was the headquarters of traders, lawyers, labor recruiters and newsmongers. The first independent Setswana newspaper was launched there. This was also beside the settlement of the Barolong people, Lally’s tribe. If I’ve got this right, Lally is the granddaughter of Silas Thelesho Molema, royalty among the Barolong people, an early nationalist politician and the one who ran the first black-owned Setswana newspaper. His son, Lally’s maternal uncle, Dr. M.S. Molema was a medical doctor who studied in Glasgow and pioneered black Southern Africa historiography, according to the “Historical Dictionary of Botswana.” White or black, anyone in those days in Mafikeng in the early 20th century wanted Dr. Molema to treat them, Gerald said.

As a child Lally equated white people only with unkindness, the most disturbing example occurring when her brother was arrested and jailed with his friend. The reason? The two boys had been sharing a chocolate bar, and a white man who saw them said no black boy could afford that candy. He called a police officer and had them arrested for stealing. Lally’s view that all white people were horrible persisted until a white Canadian couple moved to Mafikeng. The man and woman were Baha’i and believed that all people were equal and equally loved by God. They befriended Lally’s family. Eventually Lally’s parents and then Lally herself embraced the religion. In those days blacks and whites couldn’t fraternize, so if Lally’s parents were at the Canadian couple’s house to worship and white visitors arrived unexpectedly the black Africans in the house would rush from the sitting room and start washing dishes or cleaning so the friendship would remain hidden. The Canadians would drive to Lally’s house and flash their lights. Lally’s father would wave a lantern if the coast was clear, signaling it was safe for the Canadians to come inside.

Lally would never have believed when she was a child that one day she would fall in love with a white British man who dressed “flamboyantly, like a hippie” and came to Botswana to teach. They married nearly 26 years ago. They have three children. One daughter lives in Beijing, married to an ethno-musicologist with a specialty in Mongolian music who was recruited by McKinsey & Co.. Two children are at the University of Cape Town. Another child whom Lally’s mother had cared for became their foster child. She’s grown now and living in London, where she works as a chef.

I won’t ever forget meeting the Warrens or seeing their house filled with books about Africa and the Setswana language (Lally is co-writing with a professor a comprehensive Setswana-English dictionary), books of Baha’i prayers and photographs, and, in the living room, the historical charcoal drawings of Lally’s royal grandfather, her grandmother for whom she is named and her father. It was here at the Warrens’ I first tasted sorghum with honey for breakfast even as Gerald and Lally watched me eat alone. They were in their 19 days of fasting, eating only before sunrise and after sunset in keeping with the Baha’i tradition before the new year begins on March 21. It was here I watched the movie, “A Marriage of Inconvenience” about Botswana’s first president, the man intended to be king, Sir Seretse Khama, and his marriage in 1948 to a white London typist, Ruth Williams. The British government, the Anglican church and South African leaders tried to stop the interracial marriage and then tried to undermine it in the name of national security. It’s the Khamas’ first-born son who will become president in two weeks. I’m learning so much that some days my head feels as if it will explode. And I haven’t even mentioned how I’ve had two private lessons in Setswana and have more scheduled for this week. Nor have I mentioned that Lally is the second cousin of the wife of Botswana’s second president, Quett Masire. Lally, who trained as a nurse and midwife, accompanied the Masires on a peace mission to Rome to try to work out the crisis in Mozambique and then on a diplomatic visit to the U.S. in 1992, serving as a lady-in-waiting to Botswana’s first lady. It’s all overwhelming and thrillingly exhausting.

Robale sentle. Don’t hold me to the spelling. But sleep well, I say. I know I will.

Freeze them for easy cookin'

Monday
(photo is of Gerald and Lally Warren and Dineyo (sp?) who has found a home with them for now)

On Friday I made an excursion to Lobatse to visit Gerald and Lally Warren for an overnight trip to the countryside, to a slightly hilly town 10-minutes drive from the border with South Africa.

I’ll tell you more about Gerald and Lally in the next dispatch. But, keeping with the bugs theme, I can’t resist this tidbit, which is sure to please the three little boys who live in the Whittemore house in Florida and find all manner of wild critters fascinating. And if my memories from childhood still hold, the motto for little boys should be the ickier the better, the grosser the better. (Hey, come to think of it, that’s still the case for my supposedly grown-up boss, Holwerk.)

Everyone here is astonished by the amount of rain that is falling. Sechele says it is considered an auspicious sign before the new president, Ian Khama, takes over on April 1. Prosperity for the country and its people is at hand. He also said one might note that a lot of the rain has come since my arrival and that I could begin to be called Mma Pula, aka Ms. Rain. Which is a good thing in a semi-arid country. Really. (And another hint: I didn’t know how to pronounce Mma and Rra. It’s Ma and Ra, like Ma and Pa Kettle or “Rah, rah, sis, boom, bah.” If you can do it – and I can’t – roll the r. The words are the equivalent of Mrs. or Ms. and Mr. You should always say “Hello, Madame or Hello, Sir.” In Setswana, it’s “Dumela, Mma! Dumela, Rra.!)

But back to the bugs.

Gerald Warren in Lobatse brought up the fact that I had said I eat pretty much anything. If that was the case, he said, I’d be interested in knowing how all of this rain had stirred up the flying ants. I probably had noticed some of the wings on the bathroom and kitchen floors in the morning.
No, I’d missed them.
Well, he said, the flying ants are considered delicious. Snap off the head and the body that remains is a powerhouse of protein. Just fry them up and you’ll find that they have a distinctly nutty flavor.
Mmmm. I made a scrunched-up face. Seriously?
He was indeed. Some people bend over the ant hills and catch the ants as they fly out of the ground. And with a tip you wouldn’t find on the Food Network, he said the trick is to put them in the freezer first. That way the wings freeze and fall off, and it’s easier to prepare the ants.

Since I got that bit of news, I’ve bought a jar of Black Cat peanut butter as a treasured stash in my suitcase, just in case. I’m hoping it doesn’t come to my frying up ants for dinner. I’m not as brave as I thought, certainly not in the league with the Grand Gourmand of the Iron Gut, Carol Hanner in Colorado, who didn’t think twice before popping a lemon ant of the Amazon jungle into her mouth to try it, because the guide suggested we see for ourselves. And, yes, Carol said it tasted like lemon. I gagged and said, “No, thanks.”
My mind wanders back to the wine country, to that fig and proscuitto sandwich topped with Pt. Reyes blue cheese….

Of bugs and princes

Thursday

Yesterday brought no major or minor injuries and only one freak-out scene.
At my favorite wireless hangout, the Equatorial Café, I saw a manager pushing something with his foot the way you would push a soccer ball. It was the size of a toddler’s pull toy, and it was A BUG!! Right out of the horror flicks. Honestly, I’ve never seen a bug so big, even in the Amazon. Thank goodness the manager didn’t squish it. He just coaxed it along to the sidewalk.
Be free, you primordial creature, and don’t come flying near me or my food! All I can say is that when Stuart Leavenworth told me I needed to get a book on insects because bugs would be my big challenge in Africa, he was on the money.

**
Also at the café, a waitress kept checking on me and whether I needed anything else. Then she said, “I feel like I’m bothering you. But I like you. I just like you.” (Don’t read more into this than courtesy. This is a country where, for the most part, kindness reigns.)

And then she said, “Do you have something to do with Amway?”

Well…
I said in fact I do. I’m staying at a house where the wife is big into Amway. (I’ve learned from Puni in the last 48 hours that Amway has pasta, olive oil and instant coffee, so I should have bypassed the Pick and Pay supermarket brand for products of superior quality. Next time, Puni.) I asked the waitress if she was an Amway rep on the side or whether she had been at the meeting at the Gab Sun last week and perhaps saw me there. No, she had not.
“I just feel it deep inside that you had something to do with Amway,” she said.
(Music from “The Twilight Zone” should be inserted here.)
Huh.
Could it be that the “brilliant sheen” on my hair from the Amway product is the giveaway, or could it be that my faux B.O. belies the truth? Do I carry myself with the air of a “home executive?” A lovable one at that.


**
I appreciate the e-mail heads-up from my high school friend Ann Baldwin Harris that Prince Harry is in the house – or rather, on a houseboat in the Okavango Delta, to be exact. That’s a 10-hour drive, and without a car I cannot throw myself into the role of exasperating paparazzi hound in search of a tabloid tidbit or a glittery crumb to throw your way. But feel free to start rumors about my hobnobbing with HRH. I could be at this moment swimming clandestinely through channels lined with papyrus and reeds up to his houseboat, a la Mr. Mean, to offer some generous tips about leech removal. Use your imagination, and take it from there.

A gift for Mavis

Tuesday morning I visited BOTUSA, where Sechele Sechele works as communications director. The organization is a joint operation between Botswana's Ministry of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It helps conduct research and provides prevention/treatment programs for HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis patients in Botswana. Throughout the halls you can see evidence of Sechele's work translating studies and programs into readable and concise posters that explain the mission. He graciously took me on a tour and helped me find Mavis, the former housekeeper to the former U.S. ambassador Robert Krueger and his wife, Kathleen.
The Kruegers hosted me in their home last month at a dinner I'll never forget for the way the Kruegers shared their memories of Africa. They asked me to carry a card to Gaborone for Mavis. It featured a family portrait on the front. I cannot express how much happiness one can feel when delivering a precious gift to someone. Suffice to say, the humble task made my day.

Mavis is a housekeeper at BOTUSA now. She and I had talked by phone on Saturday, and here I was meeting her. I pulled the card from my bag, and she moved a few steps away to hold it up to the sunlight at a window. Her eyes, squinting hard to inspect every detail, filled with tears. She was silent for what seemed like a long time.
"My baby!" she said of the son, now a preteen and a hoops enthusiast. "I can't believe how grown up these ladies are! They're big and beautiful. " The older daughter is at Duke; the younger will follow next year. Mavis cared for them 10 years ago. The Kruegers will never forget her.
Mavis said she will put the photo in a frame beside her bed. "They're the reason I'm here. I'm here because of them," she said, her eyes still welling with tears. "I love them very much." She nodded to me, as if to confide in me.
"I can still feel their love."
She promised to write "a piece of paper" that would detail all that has happened in her life and in her children's lives. She will give it to me to deliver to Texas. But at that moment she needed to go back to work.
Later I stepped down the stairs outside the BOTUSA main building into the brilliant midday sun, and Sechele pointed to a building on the right, the TB building. A shiny brass plaque was visible even from this distance; it commemorated the building's important dedication day and the honorable U.S. official who presided: Robert Krueger.
The world felt suddenly intimate and intricately connected, wonderfully so.

This and that

Here is my favorite sign so far at Malapo Crossing:
Elegance R Us
To get it precisely right, turn the R backwards. If I could I would type it in its full glory.

****

Sechele Sechele loved hearing the moth story. But he did a verbal double-take when I told him how I had found it in a book in South Africa, its identity finally revealed. It was a blue pansy moth, I told him, indigenous only to southern Africa.
He practically shrieked.
"Blue Panty Moth?!" he asked.
Not exactly.

****

Tuesday I was supposed to drop in on the environmental and business reporting class to talk about the profiles the students wrote about me and discuss areas they had deemed problematic: writing leads, structuring stories, choosing quotes, finding a focus. Wanja Njugana, head of the print journalism side of the media studies department, is teaching four classes this semester, advising the one-year-old student newspaper, the UB Horizon, and trying to handle life as a single mom. Her hands are full. She is stressed. I shouldn't be surprised then that she dropped in and out of the class and left me to wing it on Tuesday.
But the start was inauspicious. Remember how I mentioned "wobbly student desks?"
I walked into the classroom and put my backpack on one of those desks near the front of the room and the whole desk collapsed. The wooden part became like a flying kitchen chopping board and then fell in a direct karate chop onto the toes of my right foot. For Pete's sake, do I have to do the pain dance every day in this country? I taught most of the class sitting down and I wondered whether the toes had broken.
Apparently not. At least I'm going to guess not. I hobbled home, acting like the geezer I called myself just the other day.
But the lesson is whenever you see a well-equipped university or classroom, be thankful. UB has some serious challenges, the furniture among them. The worst? The media studies department had only $2,000 this year for books. Next year's budget offers exactly $0.

The $1 billion infusion from foreign nationals into Zim

Tuesday

Zimbabwe made the news again yesterday as a headline rolled across the TV noting that President Mugabe for the first time said there was famine in his country. When I told 16-year-old Pfummy the news, he laughed. Of course, there is. Why, after all, are people like Pfummy needing to get out?

The Mail & Guardian newspaper in South Africa has a feature this week about how Zimbabweans who have left the country are using any means possible to get money and goods back to their family and friends. “For basic necessities, there are buses that leave at 3 p.m. each week day from a bustling depot at Park Station in Johannesburg’s CBD, carrying “Big Five” bags stuffed with groceries, toiletries and money – rands, not Zim dollars,” Zahira Kharsany reports. The road trip can take up to 18 hours, and one Zimbabwean who sends his family supplies for “a variety of food groups” every month said the bus drivers do not steal: “They are honest drivers. I trust them.”

For the Internet savvy who can afford to pay in British pounds, Internet sites provide a means to send goods home. “At YesZim.com, online shoppers can pay in advance for their friends back home to have a meal at a restaurant in Harare,” Kharsany writes.

The article includes an info graphic that shows what hyperinflation has done to Zimbabwe. The annual inflation rate is more than 100,000 percent. (You read that right.)
In Harare, a roll of toilet paper costs 8 million Zim dollars, a can of sardines 30 million and a banana one million. An asterisk in the info box says, “Had three zeroes not been taken off the Zimbabwe dollar in 2006 a banana would cost Z$1-billion.”

In 1980, when the Zim dollar was introduced, it was worth a third more than the U.S. dollar.

Elections in Zimbabwe are less than 3 weeks away, but around here people are not optimistic about seeing any change.

Let there be pula!

Tuesday

Living in Sacramento for nearly four years, I had more than my share of days of rain, fog and gray skies in the winter months. Everyone who knows me knows how I whine about it, especially in January. It’s not rain that I dislike – it’s the endless stretch of drizzly days that make me want to put my head under a down comforter and refuse to come out until April. I miss the thunderstorms of the South. Brief. Dramatic. Hair-raising shakeups. They put some punctuation on the day.

At first light in Gaborone we are having a delicious one, surpassing even the spectacular sky shows of Texas. Pula! Good pula! The cracks of thunder shake the windows, then roll out in angry echoes rumbling into the distance. Lightning flashes. The chickens somewhere in the neighborhood are perturbed.
Not I.
The rain, steady now, falls onto a tin shed behind my bedroom in a constant beat. The air smells crisp-clean as the water mixes with the parched dust on our subdivision’s dirt roads. For a country the British once called the thirst land, pula is good medicine.

Though it is the rainy season in Botswana, the sun will come calling soon.

Chronicle of a Dream Foretold

Monday

Some of you know about the mysterious, inexplicable dream I had about Africa. Others don’t, so I will share it.

In June 2006 I woke up in my flat in Sacramento in the middle of the night in one of those sweaty, frightened states.

Thank goodness; it had been but a dream: A giant moth – 12 feet tall – pinned me to a wall. It was flapping its wings and wouldn’t let me get away. I was paralyzed with fear. I squeezed my eyes tight so I wouldn’t have to see it, flapping, flapping. And then I woke up, my heart ready to beat right out of my chest, such was my panic.

A dear friend who knows a lot about dreams, spirit and life talked to me about it. (I’ve been keeping a journal for several years now that records my dreams and some bad poetry that I probably will not subject you to. I wrote about the moth dream in my journal at the time, of course.)

My friend asked me first off, “Did you think the moth was going to kill you?”
I paused to think about her question for what seemed like a minute or two.
“No…. No, I don’t think so. I think it scared me because I don’t like bugs flying at me. And it just kept flapping its wings, and I couldn’t get away.”
“Could you paint a picture of it and look for it?” my friend asked.
It was a distinctive moth – black, with a bit of white around the edges of its wings and with a solitary, iridescent, royal blue dot – one on each wing. I said I could paint it. I got out the watercolors and painted it from memory, then looked on the Internet at all manner of bug sites (ick) for the moth. I saw a lot of butterflies and run-of-the-mill brown spotted moths, but not my royal-blue-dotted moth.

In an off-handed way, I had a flash of insight and shared it with my friend, “Oh, I just thought of something. Maybe the moth had no choice but to pin me to the wall because I was the light, I was the flame, just as every person is. Just a thought.” I laughed it off immediately. “Just a thought.” My friend shook her head no. Her eyes welled with tears.

A year passed. I continued to browse around for the moth’s i.d. but had no luck. And then came the trip to Africa, in July 2007. I was with my intrepid, jovial traveling companion Carol Hanner, the one I mentioned who told her husband when she married him in 2000, “I’ll marry you, but I’m still going on vacations with Maria.” We travel in sync, and our trips all over this planet are our way of exploring cultures and landscapes, as well as catching up with each other’s lives, from the jungles of the Amazon to the snows of the Himalayas. We have a blast, and I am eternally grateful that she is my friend and such an ally on life’s journey. So it was appropriate that Carol was with me that morning in July on a terrace at Notten’s Bush Camp at Sabi Sands Reserve outside Krueger National Park in South Africa.

We were waiting at dawn for our game drive to begin, so we were standing around having coffee. I went over to a table beside a sofa to thumb through some books. There sat the flashy ones I would typically pick up – one about arts/crafts of Africa and one about interior design called “Safari Chic.” But for some reason I opted for the tattered paperback about plants and animals. I flipped it open, turned the page and there it was: my moth! I got chicken skin, as one of my friends calls it. I looked and inspected it again to be sure, but it was obvious. The moth is distinctive, as my painting shows. The book identified it as the blue pansy moth, indigenous only to southern Africa. I read that line over and over again. How could that be? I had never been to this part of Africa. How could I dream of such a moth? I called Carol over. She had heard about the dream long ago. She got goose bumps, too.

And so I was left with a lot of questions that perhaps only Carl Jung could answer if he were alive. Or Laurens van der Post, the late white African scholar, Renaissance man, military officer, chronicler of the Kalahari Bushmen and godfather to Prince Charles. I learned after my trip to Africa that he wrote a book about a similar situation in the 1960s involving a dream that a New York psychotherapist had about a praying mantis. The woman was Manhattan born and bred; she had no idea what a praying mantis was, but by her pleading with van der Post to come to America and talk to her about the repetitive dream, he sailed over to investigate the situation. It led him, inconceivably, to uncover how a Kalahari Bushman had lived and died in New York City in mid-century, a Bushman who loved and danced and laughed despite his having been kidnapped and brought to a foreign land. Van der Post was able then to write the Bushman’s story in a book in the 1970s called, “A Mantis Carol.” The amazing thing is the praying mantis is considered the sacred god of the Kalahari Bushmen, and van der Post felt in some way the dream was planted to make sure the story got told. Nonfiction no less. It’s in Sacramento’s public library. I checked it out after I returned from Africa and heard about it, in astonishment.

Fast forward to March 9, 2008. My main man, Ernest the cab driver, takes Sundays off “to chill,” so without wheels I set off on foot yesterday to buy yet more groceries. (Pfummy is one hungry teenager.) It would be my first walk to the Malapo Crossing shopping center – a long walk in the hot sun, but I needed it. I had been going only 10 minutes or so when something flew toward me, then glided into a thorn tree. I blinked hard in the sunlight.

Could it be?

It zipped out and onto a nearby blade of grass. It was, indeed. The blue pansy moth. Delicate. Elegant. Small, thank heaven. Its blue dot shimmered in a neon glow. I had found it, or it had found me. If it was the dream of the blue pansy moth that had called me to Africa, I had listened. I had arrived.

I smiled the rest of the way to the shopping center as white butterflies and yellow ones danced around me in the air. The blue pansy moth was out of sight but not out of mind.

That's just cricket(s)

Sunday

This morning around midnight I awoke to what sounded like a 1955 speed typing class beside my head. These were old-school, clackety-clack typewriters. Or you could say it sounded like someone snatched every ball from a pool table, put them in a giant cocktail shaker and shook them beside a microphone. Their crickets in Africa must be on crack.

At least that’s what I think it was that made that racket. After a while, said crack cricket must have crawled under my door and down the hall, because I think I heard Pfummy chasing after it. Someone must have got the critter. Things quieted down except for the neighbors.

In case you’re worried that the monster cricket might have crawled in my ear, have no fear.

Here is the way I live:
I have a yellowish-beige bedroom that is very sunny. It has two wide windows, one on the wall in front of me when I’m lying on my bed and one to the left, which you can throw open as if you were in Italy. White security bars criss cross the windows. Sky blue curtains hang from rods, their design featuring white bare trees and birds that look like pelicans. The floor is linoleum. There is a closet where Puni keeps her clothes and I’ve hung a few things. I sleep on a single wooden bed, part of a bunk bed. Pfummy has the other piece of the bunk in his room. When I get ready for bed, I prop my handy-dandy REI domed mosquito net (a must for long-term travelers in Africa!) on my bed, put on my headlamp for reading and crawl under the net and into my REI cotton sleep sack.

Now the mosquitoes and monster crickets can’t get me. Heh. Heh. It’s hot, so obviously we leave the windows open, and the wide world of insects moves on through. The room would be bare otherwise. No table, desk or lamp. My huge bags are strewn about – I can only surmise what spiders have made them their new home. In one corner I have created an altar of sorts on my sleeping bag roll. Atop it sits a single ceramic tile Puni gave me that has a candle on it to deter mosquitoes. On the tile I have a little ceramic bear that represents spirit and the West that Julie I. gave me; a tortoise of gem stone from Robin since I keep writing about turtles in children’s stories and turtles play a prominent role in the world’s ancient epics; a miniature sculpture of St. John, patron saint of travelers and writers, from Kelly; and a paper-cut-out screen that a stage designer I know made. Its arch features dolphins, and it creates the semi-enclosed space for my entourage. Surrounding the tile, on the floor and propped against the sleeping bag roll, there’s a photo of my parents and one of my nieces. You’ll also find a photo birthday card of a snow-covered Mt. Shasta that Dee Dee gave me, a cherry-blossom card from Julie A., an artistic b/w photo of the N.C. coastline just before a storm and the precious handmade and hand-tied book of inspirational sayings and photos that Mell, Stacey and Maya crafted for me in Austin. (When I unearth Dorothy Korber’s corgi card to me, it will be propped here, too. Corgis rule, as Dot will tell you.) And then I’ve made a book collection alongside: the Bible from 7-year-old Trent, the Thich Nhat Hanh book “Peace is Every Step” from Mell, Stacey and Maya, the prayer books of the Bahai’i faith that the artist who had lived in Africa 28 years, Mary Jane Volkmann, asked me to open once I was on the plane to Johannesburg, taking a deep breath and in the air. One of the books she carried with her for 30 years, and Mary Jane selected me as its next proper home. (Thank you, Mary Jane.) You can create sacred space anywhere. And I make sure I have art, even in a bare room. And I always have music: birdsong. And, now, at night I have castanets, a la crickets.

For bedtime reading I have my Amazon Kindle. What a great invention! It’s an electronic gadget the size of a paperback that holds 200 books, a real winner for me, because I read constantly and there’s no way I could haul all of the books I would need in a year in my suitcase. Whenever I whip out the Amazon Kindle in public, I have an audience. It’s got buzz – it sold out in November in only a couple of weeks – and every accolade is on target. With no dictionary in hand, I have a miracle in this device: It lets me look up any word in the books I’m reading with two clicks of a button. Zee, the Amway home executive here, has already visualized her purchase, saying, I will own one of those things; I own it already. No doubt she will find a way to get one.

The rest of the house: This is a one-story brick house surrounded by a cement block wall with razor wire on top. That’s the norm here, anywhere you go in the city. There are 3 bedrooms and two and half baths. No shower. The kitchen has a gas stove with a giant propane tank that Puni and Sechele bought after incessant power shortages. They rarely use the built-in electric stove anymore. They have a water filter (lucky me!), a microwave, a washing machine, dish TV, a stereo and a sweet young woman who comes two times a week to clean. She even irons my clothes. The fierce German Shepherd mix, Junior, serves as the watchdog and loves that other Maria, the housekeeper. He didn’t like this one – at first.

You should have seen me come home the first time when no one was here and I had to unlock the gate and face him. With his bark I was sure he’d chew me up and eat me before anyone got home. Nope. He let me in. And now we are friends. He wags his tail when he sees me, and I’m glad he’s here. He’s our impassioned askari, which means watchman in Kenya.

Puni and Sechele didn’t just take me in. Their 16-year-old nephew Pfummy (pronounced Foom-ee) is with them now that his boarding school in Zimbabwe has closed because of the country’s perilous condition. He is quiet as can be, very handsome and dutiful. He gets up at 5 a.m. and home around 6 p.m. He cooks his own food (except now he seems to be lapping up most of the groceries I bring home; cheers! I guess I wasn’t going to eat that yogurt anyway.) and washes his clothes. He and I have watched some Setswana soap operas together. But when he turns on world wrestling, full volume, I run back to my room and my mosquito net. (You can tell I’m really jumping out there into the rockin’ city night life. In bed by 9:30-ish, up at 6 a.m. or before. But it’s good. I’m getting on the schedule for safari camp life.)

Bottom line: I couldn’t ask for a better place to stay or nicer hosts. Isn’t it grand?!

Puni's dream

I was so happy to see Sechele Sechele yesterday afternoon. He had just come back from the CDC's workshop in Ghanzi. Puni was waiting to be picked up for her trip to the Amway meeting in South Africa. I told Sechele how she got up that morning and out of the blue said, "Maria, I tell you I'm going to be a millionaire in many currencies! Rand. Pula. Dollars. Euro!"
I told Sechele I had cracked up.
He looked over at Puni and said, "You see why I am never bored!"
They've been together 17 years. He made sure he waited until she was off with her friends before he high-tailed it to the squash courts. He hadn't played in days and was feeling the effects of too much road food.
Good to have him back in Gabs.

The namesakes

In the media studies department, I work with several distinctively named staff: Precious, Patience and Blessing (a man). Last July when I was in Africa, I met Honor and Gift, who worked at safari camps.

Novelist Alexander McCall Smith has captured the country’s sweet qualities, including the giving of such names to babies. I won’t be able to do better than the author who made his female detective, Precious Ramotswe, famous.

But I wondered about this name phenomenon when I awoke this morning. If people have names like those found in Botswana, does it mean they feel they have to live up to them? Do names alone inspire people to be their best? The “word” is powerful. That’s in part why I’m a journalist, because words make a difference.

All of this led me to wonder: For those of us who have worked in newsrooms in the States for many years, what names would we or our colleagues carry?

It’s your first day at work. “Welcome, I’d like you to meet Rage, the investigative reporter. Over here is Anxiety. In the corner over there is Stress; she’s on the education beat and had a late-night meeting. And over there? That’s Pout; he wants to do projects. You’ll be sharing the pod and a phone with Icky Habits. He’s a G.A.”
Hmm? What if we had names like Patience and Blessing? Would hard-boiled journalists smile more, relax more?
P.S. Rage and Anxiety (and all others) are fictionalized versions of people I met many, many, many years ago and have no relation whatsoever to the Sacramento Bee!

A geezer's view of Botswana

Friday saw a reprise of my role as mystery guest at the University of Botswana, this time in a 3rd-year class on environmental and business reporting. But this time, to my dismay, a female student gasped when I revealed my age. A guy then piped up, “Wow! My father didn’t even have me as a thought in his head then!”

Those kinds of responses can really inspire optimism and joie de vie in a guest speaker, not to mention sweat. I found myself exclaiming, “But I’m young at heart! I kayak. I ski. I cycle. I hike mountains.” It didn’t do any good. I was a geezer for the record books, one foot toward the Metamucil, the other toward the grave. Like Nora Ephron and her neck book, I have this thing about age, as do many of my women friends who are established in that decade known as the “new 30s,” and you know who you are. Friday, then, marked a setback in the fight against the clock. Weep for me, my allies at Saks and various offices that dispense magic potions. We hold these beauty secrets sacred….(Are there refunds?)

Steve Magagnini of The Bee gets what they call in South Africa “a massive shout-out” (praise) for having been a huge help in coaching me on how he teaches at the Univ. of California, Davis. I had experience as a mystery guest in his “Professional Reporting: Explain, Entertain and Relieve Pain” class in the fall, so I learned the drill, thanks to him, and adapted it to these audiences. I think it worked great. I could tell they were engaged. Not one dozed. About 25 students were in the first class, and we divided them into groups. The groups got to work on coming up with questions together, then we opened it up for business, like a press conference, and I kept track of how many questions groups were asking. (Prizes await winners next week, but obviously I get the chump prize for being old.) I can’t complain about their questions. They were lively, probing, respectful, sometimes personal, right on target.

But I’m left now with the profiles of me that they had to write on a 20-minute deadline, and I am somewhat baffled. By one account I majored in art at Harvard. By another my favorite car is a limo (Where did that come from? As Bill Bishop and Julie Ardery in Texas know, that is not the case after our experience in a limo before the Bob Dylan concert. Au contraire. Going through a drive-through Wendy’s window in a stretch mortified us. Our bon vivant pal Joel Pett, the editorial cartoonist, who paid for the flashy ride -- do you notice how I’m practicing my French for my upcoming hostess job?-- was having a ball. But I digress.)

One student said of me, she is “not married and does not have children; this is probably the reason she is a well accomplished woman.”

Another wrote, “On the lighter side of her life, Ms. Henson enjoys the fried mopane worm and beef stew, if it means going out.” Amen, sister.

And another: “Educated in the University of Wake and having been an editor for ten years and winning the Pulitzer award, it is undisputable and undoubtable that this lady is indeed a world class material.” Nice ring to it, that one.

One thing they all jumped on was the question about my biggest fear. I blurted out, “Snakes.” Almost every student mentioned that fear in the profiles. But in the light of day, I feel I let them down. It was an insufficient answer, woefully insufficient. I would be justified in dropping a mail bag of fears on their wobbly student desks. Snakes wouldn’t even be at the top. Closed spaces; stuck elevators with me in them; grizzlies; mountain lions; scorpions; crocodiles; angry Cape Buffalo that would require me to lie down flat on my stomach and play dead so they can’t scoop me up to kill me; driving over that long, monumentally high bridge across the Chesapeake Bay; falling newspaper stock prices; singing in public; my pet cat Dauphine on a bad day; going 33 mph, white-knuckled, down a mountain on my bike; a cheap half-slip with the elastic band about to give way; Rice-a-Roni – now, those things scare me. And did I mention 4-inch-long thorns in elephant dung?

I was pleased by a quote most students paraphrased and got exactly right: “She said that she would like Batswana (people of Botswana) to remember her as an American who learned and respected their culture and made friendships with them.”

I’m going to enjoy getting to know these students. There’s no doubt about that or the many friendships that lie ahead. Just let me grab my sensible shoes, a can of Ensure for the road and start shuffling my arthritic legs back to the classroom to begin the adventure. A votre sante! Meet you back at the counter de beaute on the flip side.

First teaching gig

More later on this, but a quick note: I was the mystery guest in the beat reporting class yesterday at UB. Students had to interview me to figure out who I was and what I was doing there. Then they had about 20 minutes to write a profile on deadline. Their questions were fantastic. Their writing had some surprises. According to their papers, I work for:
The Sacramento Bee, The Sacramental Bee; The Sacramento B; the Sacramental bunga bee; the Secretmental Bee; the Sacramento Bamboo Bee. Take your pick. There's only one correct answer. Apparently, my mission, since I decided to accept it, will be simple: Accuracy is job one.
Signed, Maria Henson, Maria Hanson, Maria Jenson, Mariah Henson,
Take your pick.

News of Note from Gabs

Two items caught my attention in the local paper yesterday.
The first: President Festus Mogae has already moved into a luxurious house in a new development, a residence supplied by his countrymen and countrywomen. He gets a sweet deal: a Mercedes to drive him around, a 4-wheel drive station wagon and a van; first-class air travel in Botswana; four trips abroad a year and he can decide the per diem for him and his wife; plus he can decide his per diem housing allowance from here on out. He also gets to set his entertainment budget and has his own security force.

Mogae's much loved in Botswana, and he's on a tour of the country. The tradition is that an outgoing president travels throughout the country on a sort of farewell tour, to bid adieu and allow the citizens to thank him for his service. They give him lots of gifts, especially cows and goats. The farewell tour takes him to Maun on March 13 (hmmm. ides of march?) and I'm sorry I will miss it. Posters were up on bulletin boards throughout the village that said to come and bid "our beloved president" farewell. Can you imagine that in the U.S.?

The other striking story was in the entertainment section. A photo showed a white haired old man, waving what looked like a cane, and dancing up a storm. Others behind him were dancing, too. Turned out this old guy must be quite the star. His name? VOMIT. He used to be an Afro-pop star but then turned to "ragga tunes," which, sadly, I'm not sure what they are. Reggae? Ragga? As far as I know I haven't heard VOMIT's songs interspersed with Teddy Pendergrass tunes, but I'll let you know how they sound if I get the pleasure. The story had a few lines that were quite good: "'None of my albums have done so well for me. I thought Mthshidiso was the real deal but this one has gone beyond my imagination,'" Vomit said proudly. He used to believe that the corporate managers were not giving him any jobs because of his name Vomit but all that has changed."
You heard it here first. Vomit is on the move up the ladder, with his songs becoming hits "especially at parties and weddings."
Anyone in the U.S. planning nuptials and need a wedding band, Vomit's your man.

Okavango Delta whereabouts

I got my assignment for my volunteer gig at Desert and Delta safaris, in case any of you want to book now for your time in the last Eden and wish to have me serve as your hostess. (Check out D&D's Web site to see the scene.) In April I will be in Savute Camp in the Chobe National Park. May, it's Xugana Island Camp. June, it's Camp Okavango and a bit of time at Camp Moremi. The only bad news: I'm expected to teach the staff some French words. Quelle shame. I can't even remember how to spell that! And all of you who gabbed with me on my road trip from California to Austin know that I failed to apply myself to listening to hours of Michel Thomas' French lesson CDs. Good intentions and all that.

Why Girl Scouts matter

Already, only few days into my Africa journey, I ask myself: Now why did I fly up and out after Brownies?

I was initiated into Girl Scouts in the late 1960s, but for some reason after the ceremony where you look into the water, which is really a mirror, I took my prissy self home and said I was done. I got interested instead in fashion, Tiger Beat, Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy, not tying knots, orienteering and earning badges for firestarting. I figured I'd had enough training after having crafted my "sit-upon" out of old newspapers at one Brownies meeting and singing the Indian (now Native American) song, "Hi-ya! Hi-ya, ipsi ni-yah!" around a fake campfire in a Sunday School room at the Lutheran church where our troop met.

Any Girl Scout wouldn't have made the mistake I did yesterday. I was walking from Riverwalk shopping center (did I mention free wireless?), along a major highway, past people waiting for public transportation -- mini-buses called combis. The only vegetation in sight along my side of the road was one beautiful tree with feathery green leaves. I ducked under its branches to pass. Next thing I knew I was living a horror flick. That tree had thorns -- no kidding -- four inches long, shaped like Freddy Kruger's fingernails. They grabbed my white shirt and wouldn't let go. The more I moved, the bigger the holes being poked in my shirt -- and my right arm. It was as if I was getting that smallpox vaccine all over again. Those people in the combi line must have been laughing. I was jumping around -- ouch ouch -- and tearing my newly pressed cotton shirt. When I finally freed myself, I hung my head and walked on, rubbing my arm, humiliated again at my lack of wilderness skills. When I got home I inspected what was a nasty bruise and puncture wound. I showed it to Puni. "Do you think I'm going to die from this? Are those trees poisonous?"

She laughed at me. Obviously, she thinks I will be fine. Then she offered me some advice. Don't step in elephant dung. Elephants eat those trees and the thorns show up in the dung. Why -- those thorns will shoot right up through your foot if you step in it! Very dangerous!

Great. Another thing to worry about in the outdoors.
I bet Girl Scouts know which trees to avoid and don't have to be reminded not to step in elephant dung. But not dropouts. Oh, no, not dropouts. Hi-ya. Hi-ya. Ipsi-ni-yah.
Oh, well.
Since I'm at the mall I'm thinking of going shopping for girly-girl stuff. It looks awfully safe in there.

The funk lives!

Those of you who have known me since college remember how I loved the funk.( Why, I was founding mother of the Funk Band, for Pete's sake.) Cameo. Luther Vandross. Earth Wind & Fire. Rick James (my journalist friends are now making a collective gagging sound. I hear you.) And who can forget the road trip to Greensboro to see Teddy Pendergrass, where women were falling into faints when he bent down and caressed that microphone and sang, "Turn out the lights..." ? Yep, my friends and I were there. Not many white girls in the house, but we were there, although we didn't scream, "Teddy! Teddy! Take me, Teddy!" Well, maybe we did.
Anyway, college pals will be happy to know that Teddy is big in Botswana. Ain't no oldies' thing here, either. He seems to be playing on the radio or in hotel lobbies wherever I go. I had to share that with Ernest this morning. He had Teddy going full blast on the radio as he drove me to the Riverwalk, to the Equatorial coffee shop, blessed home of free wireless Internet. I'm going to take advantage of that free wireless while I can and flood your computers with blog entries. Then it's lights out when I'm back in the Delta.

Ernest, by the way, yelled out at his cab buddy through the window yesterday that I'm his best customer. I call Ernest my main man. And we laugh all the way to the coffee shop and home from the University of Botswana.
Today, I begin teaching....

Be all you can be (with Amway)

Africa 5

Puni Sechele, the 46-year-old woman who instructed her husband, Sechele Sechele, “to open (our) heart and our home” to me, is on a mission. She listens to inspirational Les Brown CDs on a player in a bag she carries around like a purse. She reads entrepreneurial books, one of which she handed me the other night for bedtime reading: “The Slight Edge: $ecret to a $uccessful Life” by Jeff Olson. Nearly every night after she knocks off from her job at Botswana’s Industrial Court, she goes out to make presentations to build her “network,” pursuing the American dream that is now a big-time African dream: her multi-legged organization of “home executives” who sell Amway products – a plan, she informs me, that can turn ordinary people “like truck drivers, clerks and house help,” such as a Mexican cleaning lady in the States, into millionaires.

Puni invited me to an Amway meeting on Monday night at the Gaborone Sun hotel’s conference center, and I leapt at the chance. As I expected, I entered the vast room as the lone white person among smartly-dressed doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, even lecturers from the University of Botswana. These were seriously happy people, optimistic, exceptionally welcoming and intent on networking. They were upbeat and fabulous. Zee – a former IT lecturer and computer professional, is now a home executive and mentor to Puni. Puni proudly noted when we drove over to Zee’s house one morning that Zee gets up “when her body clock tells her to.” Zee’s husband, Ericton (sp?), was the motivational speaker for the evening. He said he has had private-sector jobs, policy jobs at Parliament and now is in the Ministry of Education for the Republic of Botswana, but he and Zee have already reached a high Amway level that means extra income every month and it’s obvious they are working on reaching something called diamond level and beyond. I admit I didn’t follow all the numbers thrown around about when exactly ever-growing monthly checks come in until eventually, after hard work building enough connections and delivering quality, “biodegradable” products for home cleaning and personal grooming, a person can walk away from a salaried job for good and have two important things in life: “time and freedom.”

Ericton let it rip (without ever using the word Amway): He bounced across the stage, smiled broadly and spoke to people where they live: Some who have made it didn’t have a “thebe” in their pockets to begin with, meaning a penny in our lingo. He drew a circle and divided it into quadrants. On the left were the poor employees, who have to depend on 100 percent personal performance or luck of the workplace to keep the money coming in, plus they have to deal with bosses. The other quadrant in that half of the circle was the self-employed -- capable people, Ericton said, who can end up being slaves to their jobs. What do those people in both quadrants lack? Time and freedom. He drew a frowny face. Eighty percent of the world fits in that half of the circle.

On the other side of the circle are the investors and the “B.O.,” which stands for business owners. The B.O. crowd depends on the performance of lots of people and takes a percentage cut of their network members’ monetary success, so everyone wins! It worked for that retired colonel who started KFC, Ericton said. It can work for the rest of us -- once we know the secret! And it is simple! It really is ! And now we know it! He draws a happy face. That’s where the 20 percent lives, in those two quadrants. And when the B.O. crowd makes it, then they can dabble in being investors, using what amounts to “play money.” All of this means that anyone can go after his or her dreams with this formula; the dreams don’t have to be ground down as the years pass. (Newcomers see Ericton or the hosts who invited them to the meeting after the break…)

Puni is so fired up that she’s headed to an Amway conference in Johannesburg this weekend. She has already made a trip to Baltimore, where there was no time for sightseeing, what with all of the motivational speakers to meet in person. They came alive after all those CD lectures half a world away. And she wanted to investigate the program in more detail. Satisfied, she came back with her dreams intact: First on the list will be a vacation in Mauritius.

I have to admit I’m enjoying being on the B.O. side of the circle, at least with the time and freedom part of this journey. But, alas, I’m exhibiting faux B.O. By my choice of career, I rest on the wrong side of the circle – a mere employee, a sincerely grateful one, but an employee nonetheless, one lacking even a salary at the moment.

I made it only 5 minutes into “The Slight Edge” before falling asleep the other night, exhausted after my Gaborone treasure hunt for my residence permit. But I have to say those Amway products did a nice job of washing my clothes on Tuesday and cleaning the tub after my baths. And the “stylist” at the fancy hotel salon who gave me the bad bowl haircut even skipped all the Paul Mitchell products at arm’s reach and wielded an Amway bottle to spray a “brilliant sheen” on my hair. Let it be said there was nothing lacking in the sheen department—thanks, Amway -- only in the misshapen mop that passed for hair on my head.

Which leaves me thinking, my friends: What will you be today? What dreams do you have? How’s your hair?

Smiley face.

Obama in Africa

Some people in Botswana do seem engaged by the presidential primaries in the U.S. Mr. and Mrs. Wanzala in Maun were over the moon when I gave them an Obama bumper sticker. I took a photo to mark the occasion. Mrs. Wanzala is from Alego, the neighboring village to Obama's father's village in Kenya. She, too, is from the Luo tribe, the granddaughter of a king for that region. She looks like a queen, especially in the photos from the 1960s, with her hair in an updo like Queen Nerfiti's. Cathy Wanzala is glued to any news about Obama. She's proud that a man with African roots is doing so well.

And she feels connected to him -- Cathy and Joe lived in Nairobi and shared a roof in a kind of long house with Obama's father and his family headed by a white woman Ruth as the matriarch. (That was after Obama Sr. and his wife from Kansas divorced. Barack Obama saw his father only when he was 10-years-old when his father returned to America for a visit.) A wall and a fence separated the two families in Nairobi, but the Wanzalas saw them frequently, of course, and Joe used to go to the pub and have drinks with Obama Sr. "He was a man with a large voice that filled the room," Joe says. He also liked to drink -- a lot. He'd order "a double brandy," and when the waiter would ask with what, he'd say, "A double."

So one double brandy would come with another double brandy. Joe recalls him as a brilliant and generous man, one who used to be country's chief economist but got in trouble when he criticized the government, of which he was a high official. He fell from a very high post to impoverished circumstances for a long time; he was on a list not to be hired. Eventually, he made his way back to a better lifestyle, but the hardship had really taken its toll and he was drinking much too much. (If you haven't read Obama's book, "Dreams from my Father," you should. It explains the amazing story of Barack Obama's Kenya roots. I wish I had a copy to give the Wanzalas. They'd love it.

Wade in the water -- scary water, creepy water....

My first walk in the bush upon my return to Botswana turned out to be a world apart from my Wilderness Safaris experience last July. First of all, I hadn’t signed up for a walk at all. I’d signed up for a mokoro ride. As I did last summer, I was traveling through water channels lined with papyrus, this time in the original, leaky wooden boats carved from mokoro trees, not the plastic boats of July designed to be more environmentally friendly. Local “polers” whom our driver picked up at a compound of huts made of mud and dung spread straw over the watery flooring to make placesfor us to sit. There was a jovial couple from California: Charles Rudolph and Jennifer Jones (he from Santa Cruz and she from a tiny town near Oakhurst outside Yosemite. Dorothy K., I forgot to ask if he knew your piano man Tom).

Charles had been made “redundant” by his computer sales job in London, so he took the buyout money and set off on an adventure with Jennifer. They went to 4X4 driving school outside Krueger National Park in South Africa for about 3 hours of practice off-road driving and navigating, rented their truck and camping gear in Joburg, then headed, maps in hand, for Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Botswana. They signed up for the Audi Camp day trip, the place they were camping for a few days. The other guy on the mokoro outing = a regular Mr. Mean guy – insisted that he bought a single-person Land Rover ride and a single-person mokoro trip. Imagine my horror when the camp manager said I’d been assigned to ride with him in the mokoro. (Another reason I hate being single on some days.) I paid extra not to have to sit with him after he uttered an obscenity at Jennifer when she was trying to get us started; we were already late and Mr. Mean was being nasty with the Audi Camp manager. The four of us, however, had to ride in the vehicle together for 1 ½ hours, and we all steered clear of Mr. Mean as much as one can in that situation.

The real reason the day was very different is that the local polers didn’t inspire as much confidence that our safety was front and center. It was bloody hot. The sun was beating down, and we didn’t know how long we would be riding. It was gorgeous, though, with the water lilies popping open in all their glory. Summer is scorching here, and there was little protection from the sun, except for our hats pulled snug. We were all sweating buckets (except Mr. Mean, who was shirtless and in my estimation in need of a man bra) when we glided to a grassy bank so that water could be bailed from one boat. When our lead poler got back in his boat, he winced, reached down and plucked a leech from his foot. It then wrapped around his finger in a neat circle, a leech ring. Still wincing, he showed it off to us before tossing it ashore.

EEK, PREY, LEAVE! – (perhaps there begins my parody of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir.)

At our next stop, we are told to get out and start hauling all our belongings. We were going on a “game walk.” We had no idea about this, at least I didn’t. We were walking through full-on bush. My microfiber REI pants attracted all manner of thistles, which scratched and cut me through the fabric. Youch. I was covered. We plowed on like that for a bit, then the lead poler stopped, surprised. Aiyeh. The usually dry spot we needed to traverse had flooded. He tells us we must take off our shoes and wade through the water.

One thing I promised the former U.S. ambassador and his wife in Texas was that I would not go swimming or frolicking in water in Botswana. This game walk jaunt thus was not in the plan. I was thinking of that leech, along with various diseases that the CDC warns about, especially the one in which a worm that must be nigh on invisible crawls up your woo-woo and causes grave and irreparable damage. I was the whiny gal. Are you sure we should do this? Won’t there be leeches? No comment. The poler was on a mission to deliver our mokoro experience in all its splendor, not to mention by the clock. No one else was balking and so off we waded – through thigh-high water. Every scratch, every prick on my feet in the muck – I was sure it was a leech the size of an ottoman. The only thing worse was knowing we’d have to wade through the same muck on the way back.

I’ve had this thought sometimes during my travels over the years: I PAID for this kind of fun? What am I crazy? But what was I to do? I had no choice but to carry on, grimly, imagining with the furor of the worst hypochondriac that it would be only minutes before some river illness struck me down, and, no doubt, the lead poler would leave me because he was, after all, on a schedule. (Now, I know that with my family reading this, all sorts of alarm bells will go off, and this pretty much seals the deal that my Martha Stewart mother will come nowhere near Botswana. But I can’t forgo describing the adventure. I promise in the future a gentle and safety-conscious mokoro trip, should my mother ever wake up with an urge to board a plane to come see me. Mom, they do have luxury hotels here, and your outdoor activity could be confined to a crossword puzzle session at poolside. Really, I’d love to see you and Dad.)

The way things were going it was no surprise that when we got to the hippo pool -- our destination it turns out -- there were no hippos. Lead poler looked through the binoculars (mine, of course) and pointed to some black spot afar, but I couldn’t tell if it was a hippo or a rock. We ate our lunch and returned the way we came. Mr. Mean, however, couldn’t get enough. He’d been muttering all the way, off and on, about whether we might see anacondas in his broken English (he was from Brazil). Before we got back on the Land Rover, Mr. Mean asked once more about anacondas and, I guess satisfied by a poler’s answer, plunged into the river for a long swim. Where’s an anaconda when you need one?

Bureaucracy overcome!

It's official: I'm a Motswana for a year, which means citizen of Botswana, although I am just a temporary resident.
Of course the search for the official document was anything but easy. Last I heard in the United States from the Bots embassy, I was supposed to call a woman to check on where to pick up the permit in Gaborone. She was out sick the day I called in January. So I left the country hoping it would all work out.

Today, my hostess Puni took off plenty of time from work to help me navigate the bureaucracy. The sick govt. worker woman is now officially on leave and I was in the lurch. Puni spoke Setswana and wouldn't take no for an answer at every office we visited. I cooled my heels for over 2 hours in the U.S. embassy, which independent of botswana immigration officials was helping to track down the paperwork. I'd hoped to see the U.S. ambassador, but she is out of the country. She had wanted to have coffee after former ambassador Bob Krueger had told her a lot about me by phone. Bob and his wife, Kathleen, hosted me at an amazing dinner at their home in New Braunfels, Texas, on Valentine's Day when I was traveling across the country. I didn't leave their driveway until 12:30 a.m. We had such great conversations about Africa, destiny and spirit-- and politics. When I gave his wife a thank-you gift at the beginning of the evening that included a card with a quote I love from Doris Lessing, Kathleen burst into tears. She, too, feels the pull of the African sky and misses it every day. I'll share the quote later when I have my journal nearby. I recommend with great enthusiasm the book the Kruegers wrote together called, "From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi," published by the Univ. of Texas press. That was their first ambassadorial post before Botswana; they were there for the genocide that coincided with what was happening in Rwanda. They both were brave in trying to stop the killings, document the massacres so that the murdered were identified and support the choked gasps of democracy. They are an exceptional couple and among the precious guides along my path.

On the lighter side -- but don't judge it by my waistband --at the moment I'm in the Gaborone Sun hotel business centre, having downed the biggest celebratory lunch you can imagine with Puni to mark the occasion of putting the permit into my backpack and becoming official and able to come and go as I please across borders. The lunch, as usual, included major spillage -- beets on my white jacket that I wore today to meet govt folks and the dean of the university. There is an emergency laundry crew on the job. I'll pay whatever it takes for a bleach-out. I also took the afternoon break to have my hair trimmed, and was it ever a disaster! I've returned to my childhood haircuts that looked like someone put a bowl on my head and cut around it. Egad. This head is going to have to be under a hat for weeks. Of course, I didn't let on to the nice guy who whacked my hair; he might as well have used a weedeater.

So Puni is coming back soon from her office to hang out -- government workers "knock off" at 4:30 pm. Her husband, Sechele, has set off today with U.S. embassy officials to Ghanzi, a full day's drive away, to do some workshops for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he works as a communications director, as local staff. I'll see him again Friday, and I'm looking forward to it. He's a trip -- funny, friendly, former editor of the Mmegi newspaper who took it from a weekly to a daily, a history buff, a maniac squash player and a fan of "township jazz," which he promises to introduce me to. I'll be attending tonight's AMWAY motivation session with Puni here at the hotel; she's got big dreams to be a millionaire selling Amway products and she's making it happen, she says. (Wonder if they have miracle hair care potions to make my hair return to curls from frizz and to grow really, really fast?) We'll see. My savings will be draining away for hair products. Ain't it always the way for us girls?