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!

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.

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.

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.

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.