I'm here!

Dumela bo-rra le bo-mma! (Hello ladies and gentlemen; basically just hi)

I'm here, I've made it safely and I'm having an amazing time in Botswana. It's such a beautiful country, and I'm really excited for the semester. I met up with some people on my trip right away at the Atlanta airport just by recognition of college-age kids with overstuffed backpacks. So it was fun to meet some of them right away. Our flight was slightly delayed (~1 hr) out of atlanta so when we arrived in Johannesburg, S. Africa our bags didn't get transferred to Gaborone, Botswana:( Most people were able to get their bags the next afternoon, and 4 of us were left waiting. The other 3 came that evening, and mine was still gone, and I didn't know where it was. Finally it came yesterday, thankfully. However, it sort of put things into perspective of how necessary everything really is. The only really irreplaceable things were malaria meds, but everthing else became less important when I lost it, and people in my group were great about letting me borrow things so I could at least shower. And I did happen to have underwear in my carryon :D Good call on my part.

I love my group. There are 15 of us, and we seem so cohesive so far. Everyone is really friendly and we get along wonderfully. Right now we're staying at Mokolodi Game Reserve, which is a ranch-turned game park that is home to a lot of different wildlife. We stay in separate men's and women's dormitories-just a big room with lots of bunk beds. It sort of feels like summer camp. The staff at Mokolodi feed us breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which have all been very good. There's always meat, usually sausage or beef. Breakfast is usually eggs, bacon, sausage, often some beans, toast, cereal. Yesterday we were all surprised when we tasted our cereal to find that the milk was warm. It was sort of hard to get that down, but usually it's cold milk. Lunch and dinner are often meat, noodles, a vegetable (cabbage, squash, mixed veggies, etc). We drink a lot of juice, water, tea and coffee; never milk. They call juice concentrate "squash" so we were all very surprised when Simba (our academic director) told us that the juice was made from squash:)

We've been having class every day, but since it's orientation a lot of what Simba teaches us so far is just what we'll be expecting for classes and cultural tips, etc. Matts is our Setswana teacher. It's pretty intensive, but hopefully we'll start to pick it up. So far I can have a conversation about how I/you are, what your name is, ask where something is, along with a few others. The funniest thing is that none of us can remember how to say "I don't understand" It's a tricky pronunciation so I guess we'll really have to not understand if we're going to go through the effort of saying so.

Mon. we went on a game drive-super great. We saw so many things. The first thing we saw was a rhino, followed by impala, kudu, wildebeast, zebra, giraffe, warthogs, and so many others. Tues. we went on a hike through the park, hwere we learned about the plants, and some other things like termite mounds (actually really interesting), dung beetles, etc. It was a lot of fun.

Right now I'm actually on my "drop off" where we get dropped off in Gabs with 2 other students and have to complete certain tasks, such as what I'm doing now-writing home, making a call, eating lunch, buying something, taking public transportation, etc. We were dropped in the main mall, and we went to the museum, which was fun to learn some natural and cultural Botswana history. Our next task is lunch. Tommorow we have the village drop-off, and the next 2 weeks are our homestay in the Otse village. I wish I could write more, but my internet time is running out. I hope you are all well at home or school!