To Build a Home

At what point does “home” stop being one place and start being another?

Is it when you can offer better travel advice and more up-to-date restaurant recommendations in one place than another? Is it when you feel you have closer ties to friends in that newer place, because you’ve done a horrible job keeping in touch with people “back home”, or is it when you can speak fluently about the social ills of a country you once knew little about, but you don’t really know who is running in the next elections that you once would have followed closely, or is it simply when you give up the idea of a firm departure date?

It’s a slow, rather insidious process, this transferring of allegiances, and I don’t think it will ever be final or complete. Certainly I wouldn’t claim that a single year in Gaborone could alienate me from my family home (don’t worry, Mom) or make me a “real Motswana”, but as I settle comfortably into the notion that I don’t exactly know when I’m leaving here, I find myself more and more at ease in claiming Botswana as “home”, for now.

Perhaps the most significant moment in making Botswana home, more than finally buying a car or convincing my bosses that they should keep me on to coordinate a project I’d written a large grant for, was bringing my family here to see this magnificent country and the life I’ve built myself in it. Certainly it was the most meaningful moment.

It’s actually hard for me to express just how meaningful it was—my parents are very supportive of me, but now I’ve spent two and a half years wandering around 13 countries on this continent with an unforeseeably long time ahead and bringing them here felt like I was finally introducing them to this really important part of my life and of who I’m growing into, even though I had no expectations that I’d ever cross that barrier. Now they’ve been here and, even better, they had a good experience: they “get it” more. I’ve got this overwhelming feeling of love and gratitude that frankly I never anticipated.

From my first moments in Uganda five years ago, I knew with absolute certainty that my family would never come to Africa. We do forested, isolated, mild-summer Maine. An equatorial hut with no electricity or running water? Hm, nope. Even as I know that Africa is far more than the stereotypes and misperceptions common in Western media, the places I’d lived in and loved (in one way or another) were too hot, too loud, too crowded, too far away, too chaotic/dirty/vibrant/under-serviced/foreign/diarrhea-inducing/effusive, and simply too challenging to think of planning a family vacation in. But the idea took root that a safari might just provide a little something for everyone, that Botswana—the easiest, least “difficult” place I’d ever been to in Africa—might just suit them. After about four months of cajoling, I was thrilled to realize I’d talked my family into it.

I won’t lie: I started dropping hints about this wild, crazy idea a year in advance, and have spent an inordinate amount of the intervening time thinking through how to make their stay perfect (as all of my extended Gabs family knows). It took a lot of time and effort, and there’s a part of me that still doesn’t believe I pulled it off.

But believe it or not, my mom, dad and brother arrived at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport on a Friday afternoon in late June, mid-winter for the southern hemisphere. I picked them up in my new, cute little Toyota Vitz and brought them to the fancy central-Gaborone hotel whose executives I’ve befriended (for anyone reading this interested in traveling to Botswana: Lansmore hotel is the way to go). I won’t describe every moment of their stay, but I will highlight the following:

1. In Gabs, my family got a crash course on my life. First, they met some of my closest friends over a jet-lagged dinner. Then, I brought them to a session of the 100+-person peer support group I’ve been running at the clinic this year and while I suspect their lasting impression may be of me running around like a headless chicken (not an unfamiliar site, I’m afraid), I think it helped to put human faces to the work I’ve been doing. I know my dad appreciated the chance to engage with some of our “Young Adults” on business management tips. Then, I hosted a braai-turned-dance-party for 60-70 of the wonderful constellation—both foreign and Batswana—of wanderers, do-gooders, co-workers, hippies, hotel executives, Frisbee fanatics, academics, athletes, doctors and fellow adventurers that make up my social circle.

2. On our four-day safari (in the Linyanti region of northern Botswana and the Okavango delta), we saw how majestic elephants are, what messy eaters cheetahs can be, how powerful a male lion is, how many (indistinguishable) types of antelope there are, how striking a zebra’s patterns are, how elegant the stately giraffes are, how lush and peaceful the papyrus-lined waterways of the delta are, and how utterly stunning and difficult to find and quintessentially cat-like a leopard can be. The entire time, the feeling of how incredibly awesome it was to have my family on a trip that, under normal circumstances, I would have done on my own ebbed and flowed through me. It was indescribably exhilarating to share the thrill of new exploration and the beauty of the region, which normally I would be struggling to capture with words and photographs. Trust me, you’ll just have to come.

3. I finally got to visit Planet Baobab and have a deep, compelling gut feeling that I’ll be back more than once before I leave this country. There’s something about being out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by these ancient plants. As I lay in a hammock under the camp’s biggest baobab tree, reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fantastic book of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, I thought about the number of people that had passed by that tree, the heartrending romance that at least one young couple has surely felt at its roots, the arguments that may have been held in its presence, the longevity that has held it here longer than I can comprehend. The salt pans, where we camped under the open, star-filled sky, are one of my favourite parts of the country and they are even more striking following a visit to the Okavango delta: how could there be such lush abundance of water and life, on the one hand, and such an expanse of bone-dry emptiness, on the other hand, in such close proximity?

4. My family was more attentive to the livestock wandering the streets of Maun town and to the stark differences between urban and rural than I was. I guess I’ve been desensitized. We drove by cattle posts and village homes and football (soccer) pitches of packed dirt with makeshift goal posts, and the gleaming malls of Gaborone seem a world away. I suspect I’ve been comparing rural Botswana with rural elsewhere-in-Africa, rather than with urban Botswana. It was good to be reminded not to miss the forest for the trees.

The moments of greatest cognitive dissonance at my “US life” being present in my “Botswana life” were the most mundane: waiting at the small, rather dreary Maun airport, where I’d previously been stranded for hours thanks to (utterly typical) Air Botswana delays on my way back from a business trip to visit our local satellite site, or admiring a sunset in the fragrant, scrubby bush (African sunset #826, give or take). Because these little, day-to-day moments are the bread and butter of life, the things that add up to make our understandings of what a place really feels like, for lack of a better phrase.

Much of our safari time felt like another dimension—not so much because the luxury safari is out of reach for the vast majority of local people (which it is), but more because I just didn’t connect it with my everyday life in Botswana or other parts of the continent. It was a wonderful vacation adventure of great beauty that had only circumstantial connection to normal life. Which is perhaps why I felt almost comically off balance when serial safari-goers at the lodges would tell me, with a sincerity that I am by no means trying to mock, that they “just love Africa” and ask conspiratorially whether I’d “caught the Africa bug.”

Oh yes, it’s wonderful, I’d say, unsure if “it” meant the specific and highly diverse towns/people/hassles/miscommunications/smells/delights that come to mind when I think of my times here, or if “it” meant the world of safari adventure. Then I’d find myself giving mini-lectures over the dinner table about Botswana’s health system relative to neighbouring countries, the latest national HIV/AIDS statistics and the social context behind them, and day-to-day life wouldn’t seem so far away after all.

My plan for the coming year is to stay in Botswana to work at the same clinic and with a new organization of passionate Batswana youth, on a project that we hope will reduce teen pregnancy and new HIV infections. If successful, we’ll expand through the Southern Africa region. I’m near the bottom of the bureaucratic food chain at the clinic I’ve been working at and, simultaneously, running the Finance and Development division of a start-up NGO in my spare time. My job(s) are fulfilling and frustrating and challenging and exciting and, in many ways, perfect.

Meanwhile, my collection of quiet, breathtaking moments of exquisite contentment is growing: a potluck Thanksgiving-Hanukkah with a few dozen Americans and foreigners, massive braais and smoky campfires in the bush, all-day wine tastings in the sun, clambering around on thousand-year-old baobab trees looking out on the vast expanse of the salt pans, swimming on the ledge of one of the world's biggest waterfalls, lazy Sunday breakfasts, driving along stunning mountain passes in Lesotho, and—now—setting off in a safari vehicle to see some of Africa’s most incredible animals with my family around me.

So even as I miss Mom’s cooking and the feel of walking alone in the evening through the streets of New York, I've built myself a home here in Botswana. And it's pretty darn great.

Cape Town Adventures

I wrote this mostly from the Cape Town International airport, waiting for the flight (five hours delayed…) that would take me away from the vacation of a lifetime and wondering how to sum up my nine days in Cape Town and the surrounding area. Primarily, asking myself how I can avoid overuse of the words “beautiful”, “stunning”, “amazing” and “incredible” – I suspect it’s a lost cause.

Cape Town

I arrived in the city on a glorious Friday afternoon, evidently the first after a long week or so of rain, wind and early winter conditions. You could feel it, too: the sidewalk of Long St was buzzing with the sounds of early Friday happy hours bursting from bars and cafés, laughter, smoke and the clinks of glasses in the afternoon sun. This exuberance matched my own excitement perfectly. Long St, the party street of Cape Town, was to be my base for the coming four days, a decision that both served me well and that I regretted at times (like, say, 5am when the trash collectors were yelling at the tops of their lungs for an hour, shortly after the bars shut down).

Lower end of Long St, Cape Town

That night I ate magnificent food at Fork, heard the incredibly talented Shane Cooper perform live and danced with happy Khosa women at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival. The following day, fellow PiAf fellow Dana and I sampled raw fish, cured meats, olives, cheeses, champagne, wine (overheard at 10am: “no drunk texting!”), oysters and more from local food vendors at Old Biscuit Mill, where it seemed every single person was eager to make friends, and finished my day’s culinary wondertour with a Cape Malay dinner in the Bo-Kap.

Delicious food at Old Biscuit Mill 

The Bo Kap by day -- an iconic view

It was the closest to “home”, i.e. the U.S./Boston/New York, I’d ever felt in Africa. I’d wake up and emerge onto Long St to hear the rumble of trucks, chatter of people and sounds of a city center coming to life, walk down streets—all concrete and pavement with that familiar pattern of historic gum pressed into the sidewalks, so unlike anywhere else I’ve been in Africa—that could have easily been in some of my favorite New York neighborhoods. The V&A waterfront is touristy and expensive in exactly the same way that the Boston waterfront and Fanieul Hall areas are on a late August afternoon, the same salty breeze whispering through (overcharged) wining-and-dining foreigners. My walk through “The Fringe” to Old Biscuit Mill brought me through neighborhoods of such obvious, recent gentrification I couldn’t help but compare it to Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and similar – the stretches of run down shop-fronts, semi-deserted plots and brightly colored stores the wealthy have no interest in interrupted by small pockets of artistic high-end furniture stores, coffee shops, and art galleries that pre-existing residents will never afford to frequent.

The V&A Waterfront, Cape Town

This feeling of being near and yet so far from home was bittersweet. As happy as I was to reconnect with all the luxuries, joys, idiosyncrasies and annoyances of life in a big city, being immersed in the sights and sounds of the familiar made me remember what I’ve left behind, the absences I don’t even notice in my life anymore.

On Sunday, I took a cable car to the top of Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain to see the city tucked into the nooks and crannies around the mountains, before descending to the other side (Camp’s Bay) for an afternoon of glitzy beachside cafés and my first beach trip in what feels like an ETERNITY, drinking in the salt air and the rhythm of the ocean. I didn’t know until living in Gaborone how important living by the sea or a major body of water was to me. The mountains of Cape Town on one side, the ocean stretched out on the other, it was blissful and heart-rendingly beautiful.

Camp's Bay, Cape Town

It was in this milieu that something Dana had said the day before really started to reverberate in unavoidable ways: the challenge of living in beautiful, luxurious, wealthy, (white) Cape Town but working in Khayelitsha, a huge and growing (black) township of great poverty and little opportunity was wearing on her. How to reconcile the worlds? Cape Tonians have a huge amount of pride in their city—as they should!—but seem to consider their city to consist primarily of these glamorous, metropolitan neighborhoods (Camp’s Bay, Clifton, Sea Point, Observatory, City Center, Waterfront, etc.) as though the townships of Gugulethu and Khayelitsha sit on another plane of existence. In some ways, they do.

A friend of mine who studies slums/informal settlements for a living said that the townships of South Africa were the worst she’d ever seen. Now I get it. I didn’t spend much time in Khayelitsha and certainly won’t claim great insight, though I did briefly visit Dana’s office and attend a commissioner’s meeting about developments in the police department that I found a little hard to follow. But you could see from the outside, from our drives through parts of the township, and from the vantage point on Lookout Hill that this place is dense in a way I haven’t seen before. Something about that lack of space and concentration of poverty was so visually striking—and there was something about that visibility and yet invisibility that will form a lasting impression on my Cape Town experience.

It was a theme of my trip, the jarring view of these townships, which I knew were there but… couldn’t quite believe in while wrapped up in the glam of Cape Town life. Seeing them right there along the highway from the airport, to the beach, off a wrong turn along my coastal drive, and on the edge of a non-descript town in the midst of rolling hills and golden fields. The way a driver in Stellenbosch mentioned the “coloured” neighborhood and the township “where the black people live,” but didn’t really have to point out which was which because you could just see it. There is great inequality and segregation in the US (and around the world), but I just don’t think it’s as visible as it is here. But maybe (probably) that’s my outsider’s perspective?

A glimpse of Khayelitsha from the airport road

Two other quick notes on Khayelitsha, things that others said that will stay with me: I had a chance to sit down with the brilliant, inspiring and super friendly Mitch Besser, founder of mothers 2 mothers, an NGO I greatly admire that does peer-to-peer health counseling. He was talking about a new project he has been working on, expanding the organization’s work into elderly healthcare.

“You can’t imagine,” he said, “the sight of our elderly people in Khayelitsha at the graduation ceremony after our training. These are people who have never had jobs, who thought they’d never get work in their lives, who are now trained and employed. They are so proud. That’s empowerment.” [Emphasis mine. Paraphrasing the rest of it]

And Dana, on her work with an NGO that promotes youth empowerment, student activism and advocacy around education services in the townships: “The kids say to me, ‘We don’t remember apartheid but it can’t really have been worse than this. We live in shacks, we can’t get good education, and we can’t get jobs. How is this so different from how it was back then?’” Contrast with those who claim change has come too quickly, that blacks “weren’t ready” for leadership handovers. South Africa is a magnificent parallel to the U.S.

Stellenbosch and Franschhoek

I left Cape Town by train, finding a chaotic, disorganized, and rather shabby train system lying behind the gleaming modern Cape Town station. Upon arrival (finally!) in Stellenbosch, I befriended a local student who had been equally confused by last minute track changes and who graciously walked me all the way to my guesthouse across town. It was the start of a few days of spontaneous friendships, curiosity about this girl traveling all alone, and fun conversations. Not to mention incredible food and wine!

Standout moments included the tour of the Fleur de Cap winery, where I enjoyed seeing the “home” of an unfiltered chardonnay I came across in Gaborone (“Let’s google the best SA wines and see which ones we can get here” = research skills), amazing lunch at Cuvée at Simonsig, after-dinner silliness and laughs with new Stellenbosch friends, and tasting at the Meerlust estate, where the wines were great and the staff delightful.

I can’t say enough how beautiful this area is. I rented a car on Thursday (many thanks to Ingrid at Banghoek Place and Dave’s cousin Julie for assistance) and struggled less with driving on the “wrong” side of the road than with not running over or being run over by other drivers while gaping at the scenery: the mountain ranges, the vineyards, the beautiful estates…!

Much like the Cape Town metrorail that had brought me to the winelands, behind the beautiful façade lies a shadow world. As a tourist, it is hard to see past the cute small-town feel of Stellenbosch, the stunning scenery, delicious food and wine: life seems great. But that world depends on the labor of farmers, may of whom have little pay, little access to health care despite dangerous working conditions, little tenure security and often terrible living situations (a 2011 HRW report found people living in pig stalls and former pit latrines). Under apartheid, workers were paid in alcohol, creating an environment and legacy of massive alcohol consumption that persists today, much to the detriment of the community.

View of Franschhoek in the valley

In Franschhoek, I went straight to one of their top restaurants for a “splurge” dinner (having missed lunch due to car rental logistics). It was incredible. Since I was mistaken for an undercover American food critic (!!) by multiple people in the restaurant, it seems only fair that I should try to offer my thoughts on the amazing five-course meal (with wine pairings, about $65) I assembled.

1. Basil risotto: visually appealing with some sort of frothy bubbles, but somehow I didn’t really get the basil taste and the texture was sort of lumpier than I expected; a little disappointing.

2. Salmon: the salmon was paired with several variations on fennel, which were delicious and definitely made me enjoy fennel more than I ever had, but didn’t really bring out the flavor of the salmon, which had been brined (?) in one of the house wines; good.

3. Duck, wonderful, with various corn-flavored things, including an amazing cornbread koeksister (like a donut); very nice.

4. Duo of kudu with pumpkin, smoked blueberry, walnut chutney, harrisa and gingerbread. I looked up the full listing on the menu because it was SO GOOD. South Africans really know how to cook their venison meats. The warmth of the pumpkin and the tart juiciness of the blueberry went so well with the kudu steaks, half of which had a sauce on them that just exploded with flavor. Amazing!

5. Trio of plum (?) – I admit, by the time I’d worked my way through all of that, I was stuffed and my memory of the dessert is a little hazy… but it was visually stimulating and full of flavors that combined in interesting ways.

I was also growing somewhat concerned about the fact that I had not yet checked in to my guesthouse for the night and it was getting towards 10:30pm. I drove off down a long, dark, winding road into the middle of nowhere, ever more convinced that I’d be spending the night in my car. The guesthouse was open, dark, and empty as I crept cautiously into the upstairs of the old country house and peeked into a room with two small beds and no signs of recent habitation. It felt safe, so I lugged my stuff upstairs, wrote a note apologizing for my intrusion and assuring the reader s/he could wake me up and kick me out—since the door didn’t lock anyways!—and fell asleep sated and dreaming of guesthouse owners who destroyed the belongings of sleeping intruders.

(The very bemused owner/manager pointed out the next morning when I took him by surprise wandering into the reception area to settle my bill that there was a bell I could have rung, had I seen it in the dark.)

Days of driving

I left Franschhoek on Friday afternoon after an unexpectedly delightful breakfast at the very cute Moreson estate and a disappointingly stuffy lunch at La Petite Ferme (yes, this trip was 95% about food, 5% other stuff). For the next couple of days, I was treated to some of the most beautiful scenery. Driving up into the mountains from Franschhoek, I wound around and between the green peaks that had risen tantalizingly in the background for days.

Since I was driving, I couldn’t take as many photos as I would have liked. Much of this beauty couldn’t be captured by a lens anyways, but it also seems to be escaping my words.

I wove along the coast, in and out along the rocky crags jutting out into the perfect turquoise blue ocean. The views were breathtaking, the late afternoon sun illuminating every crevice and bathing us all in a perfect glow, though the towns (including one I stayed in) were decidedly uninspiring.

Heading inland from the coast, I encountered wave upon wave, mile upon mile, of rolling golden fields. I took several detours over my days of driving, either due to (extensive!) road construction or my own errors, and cut through huge amounts of completely empty territory—one of the most striking aspects of the southern Africa region, which I still haven’t quite wrapped my mind around.

After a quick trip to the southern-most tip of Africa, I returned to Cape Town on what was likely the last beach weekend of the season. Passing through the towns of Muizenburg, Kalk’s Bay and Simon’s town made me wish I’d set aside more time to just chill out at the beach there. Fortunately, I did have a chance to meet the absolutely adorable penguins at Boulder’s Beach (they were less adorable when screeching right outside my guest house room that night!).

Ready for his modeling debut!

Not only were the penguins adorable, but the location was beautiful too

The final days of my trip left me overwhelmed with the beauty of South Africa, a sensory overload of visual stimulation. And as I raced to the airport, I almost didn’t even notice those cramped, colorful shacks of Khayelitsha to my left…

HIV in Botswana: The Case for an Aggressive Approach

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m in Botswana to work at a pediatric AIDS clinic. Work is going much more slowly than you might imagine. But I’ve spent much of the downtime of the past month learning more about just why what my corner of the clinic does, providing psychosocial support to teenagers, is so important.

First some background on HIV/AIDS in Botswana, which is the second hardest-hit country by the epidemic after Swaziland. Currently, about 17.6% of the population is infected with AIDS, though a decade ago nearly 40% of adults were infected. Compare this with the recent news that Kenya’s HIV prevalence has dropped from 7.2% to 5.6% in the last five years. I often find myself thinking about the peak years of the epidemic in much the same way I think about years of conflict or genocide in Uganda and Rwanda, with the societal impacts (particularly demographics and the long-term effects on the workforce, education system, family structures, etc.) playing out in ways that remind me greatly of post-conflict societies. HIV/AIDS isn’t just a medical problem, it’s a social and economic problem as well.

The government has been highly effective in curbing the devastating effects of the disease. In the early days of the epidemic, infection often resulted in death within a few years. Unity Dow and others talk of social life being overrun by funerals in 2004 and 2005 to the point that people couldn’t keep up, that traditions around burial and ceremony had to be adjusted to accommodate the surge. Life expectancy was under 40 years in the early 2000s; now it is 53. Thanks to the government’s work (in partnership with other organizations and companies) to end transmission of HIV by 2016, HIV testing is something you must now opt out of to avoid, anti-retroviral medications (ARVs) are widely available and covered by public healthcare, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission services (PMTCT) have caused a drastic drop in new cases in children (now only 4% of newborns get HIV from their mothers).

In fact, the government has been doing so well that people are starting to talk about redistributing funding. “These programs are great, but is it still the best allocation of limited resources?” Critical minds in development/aid work (always) want to know. Why pour more resources into eliminating transmission of HIV, an infection with which many people can live long, fulfilling lives, when there are other infectious diseases and rising levels of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) that kill lots of people and do not receive enough attention?

That is a question I likely would have posed before I got here. Not that it is a bad thing to try to stop HIV transmission, I would have hastened to ad, but hasn't there been so much progress over the last decade that we're reaching a point of diminishing marginal returns on investment? I still think there's a lot to be said for re-examining health spending priorities, but here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the points I'd now make in favor of continuing efforts on this front:

1. Children infected with HIV face a significantly higher likelihood of developmental delay than HIV-negative children. Those delays can, in some cases, cause them to slip through the cracks of Botswana’s education system. Not to mention the school they miss or work the adults miss to receive medical care. So not only has the previous generation’s working population been eroded, but also a portion of the current generation of youth is growing up unable to succeed academically or in the workforce.
   

   

   
   
2. Improving HIV/AIDS-related health systems strengthens more of the health network than just the HIV-related components, just as having HIV/AIDS makes you susceptible to a range of other health issues and often complicates treatment for other diseases (e.g. the rise of cancer in Botswana and other resource-poor countries is linked to HIV). The clinic I work in specifically targets HIV-positive children, but provides a broad range of services to them and their families. As fewer and fewer children are HIV-positive, I wonder whether the clinic will expand to adult HIV-positive patients or HIV-negative children. Overall, I expect the health infrastructure that has been put in place to combat the epidemic can be extended to cover more general health services.
   
   
3. Although life with HIV can be long and fulfilling, it’s not easy. Adhering to a strict daily drug regimen—taking your medicine at specific times of the day, with food—for the rest of your life is more difficult than it sounds, and non-adherence can allow the virus to develop resistance to your medications, which makes the disease more serious, for you and for society as a whole.
   
   

It’s this last point that’s most relevant to what I do. Following the implementation of PMTCT programs, the number of young children with HIV is diminishing and most infected youth are adolescents born pre-PMTCT (which was introduced in Botswana in 1999). And adolescents tend to have a hard time with adherence.

Adolescence is a difficult time for people anyways, with trying to prove yourself and establishing independence and rejecting authority and having insecurities and developing new relationships and being overexposed to narratives of what “normal” is—while still negotiating a sense of self to counter those narratives. Hyper-awareness of stigma and the opinions of others can tip the balance for adolescents grappling with issues of disclosure to their partners and others, of taking their medicine regularly when friends and dorm-mates are around, of wanting so badly to be “normal” that they play tricks with themselves (“maybe if I just don’t take my meds it will be like there’s nothing wrong”). These problems aren’t unique to HIV-positive youth.

I think there’s also a really interesting tension in adolescents between, on the one hand, the desire to live in the moment—with greater reward-seeking leading to greater risk-taking—and on the other hand, a growing appreciation of the idea of permanence, particularly among older adolescents. I think (though I’m no psychology expert!) it’s in late adolescence that people start to grasp what they can, and more importantly cannot, expect to change over the course of their lives and what it really means to have a medical condition that will be a part of them for the rest of their lives. And I imagine that can be a pretty scary, desperate place to be at times.

Last Saturday, over a hundred teenagers turned up to the clinic to hang out with other HIV-positive teens and do activities and hopefully learn something about how to have happy, healthy, fulfilling lives and (most importantly) to have a lot of fun. I’m responsible for planning these events every month, and it feels like a big task to shoulder—not because the logistics are difficult, but because I think about all the potentially dark things happening in their hearts and minds and wonder how to break through all that, to get them to healthy adulthood in day-long installations once per month.

Our co-facilitators for the day started off with some song and dance in the clinic lobby, coaxing the kids to mingle, then clap, then turn to their neighbors to say “you’re special”, then make some noise. I saw a girl of about fifteen roll her eyes at her friend. And somehow suddenly the entire room of 144 teenagers and volunteers was jumping and cheering and singing and waving their arms and bursting with impossible grins and in the deafening noise and exuberance, I swear you could feel the joy as a tangible force in the room. These kids were so full of life. I choked up; it was one of the most moving experiences I’ve had.

I don’t want these teenagers to get sick, don’t want them to feel they won’t be loved if they disclose their status, don’t want them to struggle with normality/identity/secrecy/insecurity any more than any other teenager does. And maybe they don’t, mostly – the small discussion group I joined talked about their biggest obstacles being stress over exams, just like any other teenager. But the facts are that adherence rates are significantly lower among adolescents and young adults than they should be.

I watch the teens elected to be leaders among their peers work magic bringing the teens together and taking responsibility to make sure things run smoothly, and I see kids turn up every Saturday for extra tutoring (and wait patiently for me to remember how to explain their basic chemistry problems), and I feel such fierce, affectionate admiration for them. They are what makes my being here worthwhile, and why I want to see what else Botswana can accomplish in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

First impressions of Gaborone

Nearly four weeks into my stay in Botswana, I’m starting to feel like I’ve found my footing and am really getting settled. Unfamiliar pronunciations are starting to roll a bit more easily off the tongue, seemingly-identical intersections are becoming landmarks that help me build my mental map of Gaborone.

Work has been somewhat slow, but I am looking for projects to get involved in. When I’m not working, I’ve been filling my time with braais (barbeques), slowly improving my disastrous frisbee “skills”, camping, cooking and being cooked for—including a glorious eggs benedict breakfast and a Shabbat dinner, finding my way around the combi system, wine tasting at the aspirationally-named “yacht club”, reading, running, learning new boardgames, and, mostly, meeting a lot of fantastic people.

Just outside Gaborone

Botswana is dry. And, because it’s winter, surprisingly cold in the pale mornings. “Just wait ‘til the summer comes,” says every Motswana and long-term expat I’ve met. The sky stretches out blue and blue and blue without even the faintest thought of a cloud, and even the two days so far that have been overcast yielded no moisture. Gaborone is more of a sprawling town than a city, but it’s the largest in the country, so I’ll leave the condescending New Yorker behind for now. The deep pink light of sunset slanting through air thick with dust, the quietly imposing backdrop of Kgale hill rising at the southern edge of the city: these are moments of striking beauty that will stay with me. Botswana is often considered an African “miracle”—a stable, middle-income country with strong government investment in infrastructure, social services and population health. Indeed, I have to say I’ve been impressed.

I’m lucky to be living in a nice apartment provided by the clinic—primarily for American medical residents here to do month-long rotations at the clinic—in a neighborhood surrounded by embassies. So I know I can’t assume my experiences of reliable internet, electricity and running water are at all universal. A quick look at Old Naledi (a high-density, low-income neighborhood that was historically an illegal settlement) and villages just outside of Gaborone, neighborhoods that many of my teenagers call home, certainly makes that obvious.

Nevertheless, I’ve been impressed with the immaculately paved main roads, the relatively easy public transportation, the general quality of building construction, and the potable tap water, and I don’t think my impressions here are too overly biased by my living situation. Even an article critical of Gaborone’s planning, land allocation and development calls the city “extraordinary in African terms… a city lacking in mass poverty, extensive squatter settlements or recurrent civil strife: for all appearances, an orderly, affluent urban area.”

It seems to me that one of the most crucial differences between Accra and Gaborone is population density (about 9,600/km² and 1,500/km², respectively). I notice it in the different textures of daily life, the feel of the city as you walk down the street. Density is more concrete than just noise and bustle: it’s also the traffic that makes everything run late, the restaurants and small-scale businesses that can pop up and slowly grow in unexpected places, and (arguably) greater overlap of rich and poor. And, importantly, it’s the additional wear on infrastructure, including roads, water delivery and electricity grids. Brian Larkin points out that such “material structures produce immaterial forms of urbanism—the senses of excitement, danger, or stimulation that suffuse different spaces in the city and create the experience of what urbanism is.” I can think of numerous similarities between Gaborone and Accra, but ultimately the forms of urbanism in these cities are drastically different.

The simpler explanation for the differing material structures is that Botswana’s GDP per capita is over five times that of Ghana. But I suspect that Gaborone’s public services and infrastructure seem impressive because they endure less wear, and that the cloistering of low-income populations makes it that much easier to extol the prosperity of the rest of the city. These are density-related issues more than financial ones. It will be interesting to see if density rises significantly as the economy further develops and mortality declines (particularly HIV-related mortality), or if the city will rather sprawl.

Jane Jacobs (1961) writes that cities, and creativity and innovation within urban centers, flourish when there is sufficient density for street-level interactions between a diverse array of people. She would certainly prefer Accra to Gaborone, which was designed according to exactly the principles she most opposed. She would also, I think, prefer Old Naledi to Gaborone’s other, more sterile neighborhoods, much as I preferred Kariakoo to Sea Cliff Village in Dar es Salaam.

I imagine a future Gaborone with the same sparsely-populated center and ever more densely-packed neighborhoods around the periphery. Would those densely populated neighborhoods be pockets of collaborative innovation, or would the structural problems of poverty underlying the need for such close quarters staunch such creative vibrancy? A call for better education, health services, and investment in these neighborhoods….

Now that I’ve found my footing, I hope to venture further out of my privileged arena. I’m sure my thoughts on Gaborone’s neighborhoods, infrastructure and urbanism will develop—and probably change completely—as I get to know the city better and from different perspectives.

London Charm and the Colonial Legacy

I landed in London, over a week ago now, and felt an irrepressible grin take hold of my face. The reality of my latest journey having truly begun, after months of planning (nearly a full year since I began my application for this program), finally sank in as I walked through Heathrow. But that was only part of my excitement: I was in London.

I would never have expected to be so excited about visiting this city, but I guess over the last several years of reading the BBC, watching British tv shows, becoming increasingly familiar with the culture, and meeting many wonderful people who had claimed the city as home at one point or another, I’d worked up a subconscious curiosity about it. The U.K. is easily the country I know most about of those I’ve never visited. Without my realizing it, it’s been in the background of my mind as a sort of friendly “Other”, a reflection of my own country—or some sort of parallel universe. London and New York, the U.K. and the U.S. occupy similar spaces for most of the world, and yet there’s a distinct identity (primarily reinforced by them). Comparisons between the two places abound.

As I navigated my way to meet up with a friend, I walked into a place that had only existed in my mind. I paid for my ticket with POUNDS! I was on THE UNDERGROUND! It was charming and small! I emerged from the station and all of the buildings around me were stunning and I was in awe. Give me a few years in this place, I thought. Let me repeat: I had zero expectation of feeling this way. But I recognized my behavior. It was the same as someone from another country visiting the U.S. for the first time and seeing the iconic NYC sites and recognizing that, yes, this was the place in the movies and books and news. There’s something about being, in the flesh, in places that permeate our culture and our imaginations for years before we visit in person.

I was thinking about how the U.S. holds that position for many people around the world, and how it’s our cultural hegemony that engenders such widespread curiosity and desire to come to the U.S., not just hopes for prosperity (even if this is commonly expressed). On the other hand, I was also thinking about how different such a trip would be for someone coming from a developing country or the Global South. In my case, patriotic narratives and America’s global stature easily counterbalance British critiques of the U.S., but many others would have been told implicitly or explicitly that this other, more powerful country and culture was superior to theirs. The internet and other new technologies both challenge and reinforce this dynamic.

On that note, I thought of this beautiful letter on decolonial aesthesis from a Singaporean woman to her younger self about her experiences studying at Cambridge University. How many people would feel, in the face of Britain’s imposing cultural stature, as she did: “There’s not much culture [where I’m from]… There’s not much nature”? She writes, “[Colonialism] happens these days not by the strength of arms or the power of states, but by the captivation of the eyes, the training of the taste, by unwritten rules of thumb – that we all learn everywhere, without even knowing it.”

A recent map showing all the countries Britain has invaded reveals the global spread of its potential cultural influence. Source.

My entire time in London, I didn’t think for a moment about the fact that Botswana had been a colony of the U.K. That even if Botswana wasn’t itself Britain’s most lucrative colony, it was still part of a structure that gave the country wealth and power in the international arena, that had helped install British culture as a dominant aesthetic. Botswana had made London lovely, and I didn’t even notice it until I had landed in Gaborone.

When I left Ghana last year, I had a layover in Amsterdam, where I was also charmed by the beauty of a European city. I stopped into the Rijksmuseum and saw a portrait of a couple that had been based in Elmina, Ghana. The placard announced that they’d worked for the Dutch West India Company, which traded in gold and slaves from Ghana for nearly 300 years before the British took over. I remember the jolt of connecting the two sides of the same story, having seen the slave forts and trading posts owned by the Dutch in both Ghana and Benin. A recent AIAC post on Dutch denial/ignorance of their historical slavery practices notes that less than half of Dutch history textbooks in a recent study so much as mentioned slavery, and even in those, the emphasis was on hardships the Dutch colonists suffered, rather than those of the slaves. Walking through that museum less than a day after leaving Ghanaian soil, I was taken aback by the normalization of this terrible history and the narrow-minded focus on what the Dutch got out of this trade, the nostalgic pride in the Dutch empire at its peak. Ghanaians certainly hadn’t forgotten the price of that empire.

In Gaborone, I stood on my new balcony and looked out at the dusty scrub in the afternoon sun and crisp, dry air, wondering at the difference in my reaction to arriving here. I was excited, exhilarated and absurdly happy, to be sure, but the truth of it was I just didn’t know Botswana and its cultural references as I did the U.K., and that’s a sad fact. Normally the lure of exploring the unknown is a huge part of the joy of travel, but I’d sampled another style of encountering a foreign place the previous day and I couldn’t help but feel I was missing out. What would it have been like to feel in Gaborone that same sense of arrival in a mythical place?

Botswana challenges popular notions of “Africa” – including my own, based on previous travels. (This is not terribly surprising.) The airport lacked that smell of heat and fruit and human bodies that has greeted me in Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana. Sometimes I think I’m in Arizona. The city, like the rest of the country, is sparsely populated and the lack of traffic, the lack of bustle, the relative lack of streetside vendors throws me off a little. The clinic is, as my housemate said, “nicer than any clinic [she’s] seen in the U.S.” and the teens I work with would fit in at your typical American middle school. I live in a wealthy area, and have only been here a week, so my perception is drastically limited, but I like that I’m forced to re-evaluate perceptions of the continent I didn’t quite realize (still) I had.

I’ll end with a quotation from that letter preparing the Singaporean girl for life in a new culture.

Modernity is someone saying to you: look, we have made you better. And you believing it.

But the question is not how to retreat or how to prune yourself back to some pristine, native state. In fact, it is the opposite: how to recognize the narrowness of this so-called broadened mind – to realize that Europe is not the universe – and to take your sensing and knowing beyond those dominant ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful. To move towards a pluri-verse that gives dignity to both the girl in the pajamas and the one in the little black dress – and yet to do so in a way that, unlike Western liberalism, is not naïve about either the ‘equality’ of the two, or about how we got from the one to the other.

I loved London, truly, but I don't want to lose sight of its context. And I look forward to wondering at all that makes Botswana magnificent.