Back to Africa
... just for one LiveJournal entry.
I never did write my visit to D'kar, Botswana, even though it was very eye-opening.
I was there towards the end of my trip in September. The town is named after a tree that had the initials DK and AR carved into them... I've never heard of a town named like that before, and I suppose the apostrophe was an afterthought. Trees are important, though, because some people live under them, instead of in one of the more well-to-do shacks. You could tell which trees were homes by the belongings that were strewn under them, like litter at a park.
rachaelbrennan's place, where I stayed, was even more upmarket in that it had electricity. Only three other dwellings in the town that boasted that. She didn't have hot water, though. I made do by showering with a kettle.
So this is third-world poverty. Despite the fact that not everybody had a roof over their head, people weren't starving, and they could go and live with the in-laws when the rainy season started. But it's also where the impact of the AIDS epidemic became tragically clear to me. The population was young; I didn't see a single native older than me. I suppose that's the only observation that hinted at the problem, but I heard most of the stories while I was there, and the backdrop made them all the more dramatic.
So there's this one woman... well, girl-she's 15 or 16. She already has a kid, but in addition to that, she's looking after her sisters' kids, because they've both died from AIDS. She's also looking after her youngest siblings, because her mother has also died from AIDS. Still, the town elders are giving her a hard time for not having more kids herself.
I made a lot of judgements that rachaelbrennan said were natural, but I might change my mind if I lived there for a while. I can't imagine myself ever approving of the gender roles, though. Women have no social standing at all until they have children. Once they do, they get a certain amount of respect, and when the children get older, they can help them get by. So early in their teens, girls will decide it's time to go to a bar and look for somebody to knock them up, because they're tired of being treated like shit. And so the AIDS cycle continues. Luckily, humanitarians like rachaelbrennan have helped dramatically reduce the rate of HIV infection to children through birth by distributing drugs and encouraging people to use them.
'The bar,' which is where most of the men were when I wandered around town, was any of a bunch of shacks, not really any different from any of the houses in town. It's the place where they buy Chibuku, a room-temperature beverage that the locals call 'shake shake', as that's written on the carton. It smelled like a blend of methylated spirits and the body odour of any of the homeless folks who live around the entrance of the underground BART station on 16th Street. rachaelbrennan insisted I couldn't leave Botswana without buying some and trying it. It was absolutely the most foul thing that I had ever put in my mouth; I immediately spat it out and ran to the bathroom to tightly squeeze toothpaste onto my tongue.
But not the whole town was so pathetic. It actually had a cultural museum, explaining how the three San groups, the Naro, the Ju|'hoansi (also known as the ‡Au||eisi) and Dcui (G/wi). Those punctuation marks are actually consonants; I presume they're various clicking sounds that exist in the local language. rachaelbrennan taught me a few words to use with the locals to be polite; one of them had a combination of one of the 16 clicks and the Dutch 'g' sound (similar to the 'ch' in Loch Nes) that I had no hope of pronouncing. But I tried, and at one point left a shop realising I'd spoken four languages in one conversation with the shopkeeper: the local language, the national language, Afrikaans and English.
The other interesting building was the art studio. The locals made paintings and sculptures, and sold them for about the same amount as artists in San Francisco would expect for their work. The cost of one piece would surely support a family for a year, which is why humanitarians like rachaelbrennan have helped get the industry off the ground.
There are more photos of the gallery on my flickr page, which, as always, you can get to by clicking on images in my LJ. Please respect the copyright on them, though; I don't want the artists' work to be reproduced without royalties.
D'kar is the most unlike any town I've ever lived in. Even though they have sandy streets and fragile buildings in common, Black Rock City is less like D'kar than like any other city in the United States. I'll never look at the world the same way again.