Beth Shanholtzer - 2

(Beth is from the Harvest family and is currently travelling the Botswana countryside with 4-H. She can be reached at: bshanholtzer@gmail.com
The following is an update from her adventures.)

Hello again everyone!!!! I have now finished host families 7 and 8 and am in Gaborone for an agriculture/business expo called Global Expo. It is great to be back in Gaborone, where we started our trip four months ago. First and formost I am happy to be in a hotel where I have running water, a toilet that I can flush and has no bugs, and a shower!!!! Yes...running water, a luxury after living without it for the last two weeks. You see it is the dry season right now in Botswana and everyone is patiently waiting for the rains so in some of the smaller villages, water has been scarce. In the last family I lived with we had a collection of buckets and barrels that we collected water in every other day. The village tap that we walked/drove to was only a five to ten minute walk so we usually didn't have to wait in line to get water like I have seen so many other people do. But, the day I left the water at the village tap we had been going to was no longer there so they were loading the truck to go to another tap a few kilometers down the road.

Besides the water scarcity, Botswana has been GREAT!!!! I have come to the realization after so many families of varying types that it is definitely the people and not the accomodations that make this trip so memorable. My 7th family was O.K. but not really very social so I spent a lot of time with Lindsey and her mom at a Home Based Care facility where they counsel, test, and guide people with HIV/AIDS. I got some experience in grant writing by helping them with one grant they were working on. Lindsey and I corrected their English and wrote more concise explanations to the questions asked. It was a lot of fun but a little stressful at times. In this family I had my own house on the "compound" but as I said before not a lot of conversation. In my 8th family, I had seven kids under the age of 12 to fill my time and two sisters who were around my age, so we had a lot of fun but lived with no running water. I was able to attend the World Food Day here in Botswana and got to tour a pig farm, my first here, an industrial laying hen operation, and a huge vegetable operation. I learned a lot and was able to collect some great information from all the informational booths.

Learning the language is coming along very well and I know can understand quite a bit of conversation by picking out familiar words. It feels good to know that I am making progress. One lesson I learned recently though is that even though the word is spelled the same it can have two very different meanings. For instance, mabele pronounced ma-BALE-ley (voice raises during the middle syllable) means sorghum and I use it a lot when talking about the foods here in Botswana. What I recently learned is that mabele pronounced the same except for the voice lowers during the middle syllable means breast. So...I hope I haven't confused too many people by talking about a breast in my favorite foods list!

Speaking of food, one thing I have gotten very good at is eating certain food here with one hand! With some of the stiff porridges here the consistency allows for you to eat with your hand and everyone does. You tear off a piece of porridge and mix it with whatever morogo (vegetables) or soup you have on your plate. It took me a while to get good at just using one hand and not using two, but I can honestly say that I have mastered the art quite well! In fact, I think it is a skill I may have to establish in the U.S.!!!

The last thing I have to talk about in this email is grandparents raising grandchildren, I may have touched on this before but I had some first hand experience with it in my last family. They have four daughters all who have at least one kid and no husband, which is also common here. Anyway, the family I lived with was a set of grandparents two of their daughters and 7 grandchildren. They were nice but I could tell sometimes the grandparents became exhausted dealing with the seven grandchildren. I think a lot of my own family...I don't know if my grandparents who have enjoyed raising all 11 of my cousins and I!

Well, I had better say good-bye. Enjoy the cool weather in the states...here it is HOT!!! Only six weeks left until I return to the states!!

Love you all,
Beth