Orientation

So I’m officially on my third day in Botswana now. When I got in on Wednesday I was on a plane with about six other kids from my program, and our flight got in about an hour and a half late. So when we got to the University of Botswana, all the staff had gone home and we weren’t able to move into our dorms. They decided to put us in the graduate school “village” for the night, but ‘for the night’ has now turned into indefinitely (maybe two weeks?) although students will be needing these rooms for the start of classes on Monday, so there will certainly be some chaos.

On a more interesting note, another reason that the dorms weren’t quite ready was that last Monday was declared a national holiday a week ago, and so the school lost a day of preparation as the staff was home for the holiday. And the kicker is that the reason for the holiday was the government felt that since New Year’s fell on a weekend, people needed an extra day off. I guess the New Year’s parties here must be a little crazier than back home.

Yesterday we had our first day of orientation and I got my first lesson in “Africa time”. The night before orientation we asked the local woman who has been our liaison if we could get breakfast in the morning. She said that we could and that we should meet her in the courtyard an hour before orientation. So we show up and there was no sign of her for at least 15 minutes, so we went to track down the cafeteria on our own. The cafeteria was supposed to open at 8, but even as we rolled in at 8:20 there was no sign of life in the whole place. Eventually our liaison caught up to us and led us to the staff lounge around back, where we actually had a nice breakfast of eggs, bread and chicken liver. A lot of kids were saying that they had never had chicken liver for breakfast before, but I had never had chicken liver, period. It actually tasted fine, but the texture held me back from cleaning my plate.

So then we went back to the student center for orientation and a woman told us that the program was delayed and that we had time to go eat breakfast if we wanted. That’s the last time I wake up early to do something here, because chances will have it that wherever you need to be won’t be starting on time.

The first part of the orientation was great. The assistant director of the international office gave a fantastic, if overly-rehearsed, speech welcoming us to campus and another woman told us about the bevy of interesting events that are happening on campus this semester. The inter-varsity games are being held in Botswana this year, which is, I understood it, a tri-national tournament in a variety of sports, the headliner of which is soccer. They also have an event called cultural days, where they have the international students prepare traditional food and music from their home country and put it on display. (What is traditional American food and music?)

The orientation started going downhill from there, though. A woman in charge of student affairs gave a talk about rules and regulations and it was almost laughable with some of the things she brought up. We should avoid throwing drinks all over the walls of our dorms, we’re not allowed to put our textbooks on the floor of our rooms and “could you please just make your beds, because it’s gross when the beds are unmade.” She then moved onto a lighter subject and talked to us about the importance of mingling with local students and making new friends. This turned out to be a major paradox, however, which has thus become a theme of the advice given by many people. Everyone stresses the importance of mingling with the local people, but then an even greater stress is put on not trusting anyone, because he or she is probably a thief. The woman from student affairs, after advising that a key to coping here is to make friends, said that kids here will be your best friend until they are two weeks left in the semester and then they will rob you and disappear forever. So hopefully I end up meeting the trustworthy locals.

I don’t know how long blogs are supposed to be, but I’m going to stop this one here and tell about the rest of the day in the next post. So if you were really excited to hear what I had for dinner, I’m keeping you in suspense until I post again…(I'll try to have pictures in the next one, too)