First Day

So lest you think that all we do here is go to brunch and swanky embassy parties, we do in fact have jobs. My two colleagues and I are splitting our time between two centers which cater to at-risk youth. One of the sites, Stepping Stones International, is outside the city in a traditional village called Mochudi. In a car, it takes about 45 minutes to get there from where we live. 

It took us three hours. 

First, we have to walk from our flat to the main bus depot- an experience I won't soon forget. Perhaps the only place in Gaborone that is at all crowded, the bus depot is an inpenatrable maze of taxis, food stalls, shops, and hawkers selling everything from apples to dried caterpillars (apparently they're a delicacy?). Once we finally found the right bus, we boarded the 1950s relic and said a  few Hail Marys that it wouldn't explode en route. After spending an hour getting to Mochudi, we disembarked to find that we were still 20 minutes walking from our site. Since we were already running late, we hired a taxi to drive us over. In one of my finer moments, I began bargaining with what I thought was a female taxi driver, haggling over the price. Only after a few minutes of this back-and-forth did I realize that she was sitting in the passenger seat (this driving on the other side of the road thing is really throwing me for a loop). There are no pictures of this escapade as I certain that any iphone or camera I would take out would immediately be snatched. 

We finally arrived just as the after-school groups were settling in for homework time. I sat with one girl who was studying "moral education", which as far as I could tell were lessons on how to recognize and report things like child abuse, sexual assault, cruelty to animals, etc. Pretty cool for a 14-year-old to be talking about these issues, I think. For a pretty complacent society, the rate of domestic violence here is nearly 80%. Another girl asked me to help her with her sex ed homework in which she had to list common myths about pregnancy and HIV and dispel them. I was floored that the education system here is so progressive as to start teaching kids about these kinds of things in middle school- something I'm sure would never happen in a lot of US states. 

Finally, we did an interactive activity with the kids to judge their baseline knowledge about legal and illegal drugs. We observed as the facilitator drew two circles in the dust- one 'agree' and one 'disagree' and asked them to questions like, " is addiction is an illness?", "marajuana is a legal drug", etc. 

One thing I kept coming back to was that the issues facing these kids are not dissimilar than those facing kids in many parts of the States. A lack of supportive parents, poverty, bullying, peer pressure, substance abuse at home, and parents' mental illness were all mentioned as reasons kids might be recruited to Stepping Stones. Some issues the kids mentioned they specifically wanted to know about were how to clean themselves, how to brush their teeth, and how their body works. It's amazing that I can travel more than 8000 miles only to find that so many things are universal. When you boil it down, kids just need to feel safe.