Gaborone, Botswana: Our anniversary – 36 years

I’m sort of celebrating my 36th anniversary today. I say sort of because I’m in Botswana and my husband is in Canada. He reminded me that except for our first anniversary when we were poor students and he was working out of town and could not afford to come home, this is the only other one that we have no spent together. Only now we are not poor students. I am the poor student albeit not as poor as I was back in the day (to use Subhadra’s expression).

I almost thought I would not live to write about this day. Kathy was driving me to work this morning and we were on one of the main roads. A car from a side street literally drove right in front of us. Kathy was driving a land cruiser and the other driver was in a little car. She slammed on her very good brakes and avoided hitting him by about a foot. His passenger looked at us indignantly and showed us some finger signs as if to say “you saw us trying to intercept you, so why didn’t you wait?” Well that was the start of my day. It went downhill. The internet was intermittent so I could not call Robin nor could I post anything on the blog. It’s either the internet not working well or there is something wrong with the blog site because more often than not, the page takes such a long time to load up that it times out. We had a storm today – rain and very cold so that may have been affecting the internet and the cell phone lines.

I was really glad that Lemogang offered me a ride home while I was walking to the combi stop. I left the house today dressed for warm weather (it was quite warm) but by the time I was ready to leave for the day, the temperature had dropped by several degrees so the ride home was much appreciated. I was feeling so out of sorts that I could not skype or call to Canada that I went home and baked a cake. That doesn’t make any sense unless you love to cook and bake and realize how therapeutic it is to do something that tastes and smells nice at the end of a disappointing day.

Some interns from the Coady Institute arrived today and Kathy was giving them some assistance with computer use, grocery shopping rides to their house. I accompanied her to their home which was a part of town that I had not been to. One of the volunteers got mugged yesterday so Kathy went over to visit and make sure she was okay. It’s good to know that someone is there to care when you’re so far away from home. We are all told to be cautious but sometimes we forget or think that nothing will happen to us but it can happen to anyone. It was a sober reminder to all of us that we need to be attentive to our surroundings even when we think it’s safe.

I made a nice pot of masala chai and Kathy and I enjoyed that with a piece of the cake. No much of an anniversary but I hope that in a couple of weeks when Robin arrives, we’ll do something fun to make up for this day. Maybe go to Sanita’s for lunch. Kathy and I stayed up till almost midnight and talked about WUSC, Uniterra and other organizations doing work in Botswana. There are a lot of opportunities for volunteer work in many countries and they all sound so interesting. It’s cold so I’m going to call it a night.