Immigration

We have to date done 7 trips to the immigration office in Maun, some trips were more successful than others.

Trip number 1:
4th August: This was the day that we arrived, Matt and I went with Peter to the office to get the appropriate forms. This only took an hour to get 2 forms each. (We also got a checklist of things we needed, which we foolishly disregarded)

Trip number 2:
22nd August: This was the time where we came the 8 hours from the school with the express purpose of completing the immigration process. This did not happen. We had non of the right stuff and the immigration staff did not help by being so anal about it. We got another checklist which included a copy of our birth certificates so we obviously could not complete the process that weekend.

Trip number 3:
We had pulled lots of strings to get letters from the right people and photocopies of our passports and birth certificates. We had everything ready and were determined that this was going to be our last visit. Immigration had other ideas. They made Matt fill out his forms again as the paper was slightly crinkled. So while he did that i stepped up to the plate, the time had come, this process was going to be over. I handed the forms over and everything seemed to be ok. The lady stabled them together, stamped them and stuck a bar code on. I breathed a sigh of relief. She then asked for my passport, she examined it for a few moments with a puzzling look. Then ran off to an office at the back to the main immigration guy. This short stocky man emerged (he looked slightly like Cee lo Green). He told me 'You know you were suppose to leave the country 27 days ago?' I responded with 'Wait, what?' Cee lo said 'Yes, you were only allowed 7 days once you came to Botswana. Why have you overstayed?' I then said 'Because it took us longer than we thought to get the volunteer permit.' This was not a good enough answer to satisfy the immigration officer, he told us to take a seat and then swiftly dissapeared behind the counter to his office. He reappeared some time later with police reports, and informed us that we had to go over to the police station and pay a fine worth about 3 months of our wages each. We tried to tell him that we were volunteers and therefore had a very limited amount of money, but he would not listen. We therefore had no choice but to go to the police station and tell them about our situation. So we got back in the car and traveled all of 500 meters to get to the police station. Once we got there we were fortunate enough to get a nice young special constable to help us. We explained our situation and showed him our police report forms, the police officer then disscussed it at length with his fellow officers and came to the conclusion that we had to go back to the immigration office and get the immigration officer to come with us to the police station so it would be official.

Trip number 4:
We entered the immigration and requested to speak with this man, we told him that the police had asked him to come with us the to police station. He obviously thought that we had never actually gone to the police station in the first place, and this was some scheme of ours to try and get ot of the fine (im not quite sure how that would have worked). But anyway, the conversation ended with him telling us that if we had not payed the money to the police by monday then we would have to be detained and deported -for a wonderful moment I felt as if I was in a Hollywood blockbuster. Then reality kicked in. This was not an ideal situation to be in. Back to the police station. We explained the situation again and they agreed that it would be best to try and gather the money over the weekend and come back first thing on monday to sort it all out.

Trip number 5:
We went back to immigration after we had waited for 2 hours at the police station waiting for them to fill in a couple of forms. We then headed over to the immigration office, we managed to get our overstay sorted pretty quickly which was good. but they then informed us that the network was down and therefore couldn't process our permit forms.

Trip number 6:
This was just a brief trip that afternoon to check if the network was back up. It was, but there was a massive queue and they shut in an hour so we decided that it was wise to wait and go back the next morning.

Trip number 7:
This was our final trip this morning. We got there pretty early so were the first to be served. As we walked in some random guy who we had never met said 'Ah its you, your back again?'. All the staff new our situation by now so were pretty quick to help, we didnt even have to tell them what to do. We got our receipts and are currently waiting for the forms to be processed. It should now be a simple task of picking up the permits the next time we are in Maun.    

braiing up some bbq goat ribs

Graphic picture of the goat, do not look if squimish

Poor goat

Driving up to the school in the truck, it's about a 6-8 hour drive (and one short ferry trip)

MP showing off his Hawaiian shirt, and these two steaks cost about £1.15 each

Africa's Worst Sales Assistant

So today we were driving down to Maun, as always we stopped at Choppies in a town called Shakawe to buy some supplies for the trip. After i had bought some crisps and coke from Choppies I nipped into a little shop next door that sold all sorts of bits and bobs. I was on a mission to buy some lipsalve, my lips were dryer than my fathers sense of humour. Anyway, in i went. I went up to the counter and soon spotted what i had come in for, right there behind the glass counter was a large jar of conveniently sized pots of lipsalve. I then did what any ordinary customer would do, I pointed very clearly at the pots of lipsalve, got my wallet out and said 'Dumella (setswanan for hello), could i get one of those please?'
The shop assistant just stared back, shook her head and said 'No'. I smiled awkwardly in anticipation of the punchline to the joke. But she said nothing. There was no joke. So I thanked her for her time and left. My lips are still dry.    

Swimming

Today to pool finally opened and it was beautiful. Half an hour of relief from the blazing African sun. The pool opens at 2 o'clock, at 2.01 it goes mental. Loads of boys just come jump in, they wrestle in the pool, have races and play tag. You have to understand that this pool is not exactly olympic size. It must be only 8 foot wide and 16 feet long. Oh well, this only makes the fun more concentrated! The boys have made up a game, it's called 'Trying to drown Mr Jack'. This is fun for about 5 minutes, then i need oxygen. Whats fun is picking up one of the small boys and just chucking them in the pool. But Botswana being a land-locked country and its rivers being full of crocs and hippos, most of the boys are not natural swimmers, so we do have to be careful! Defintely one of my favourite things to do at Bana Ba Metsi.

Shakawe

Another crazy week has gone by so quickly. This week Matt was on duty, this meant that he had to get up early everyday to serve breakfast to the boys, conduct the morning assembly, check how tidy the dorms are, supervise study on tuesday and thursday evenings and serve lunch and dinner. Stressful. The good news is that Matt has now finished his duty, the bad news is that it's my turn next week! While Matt was on duty i had to run a few errands, one of which was to drive with Maguowe to Shakawe to pick up a boat engine mechanic. The school boat suddenly sunk and both the engines we fully submerged in the river. We left after my lesson in the morning and got to Shakawe for around 10.30, i had a lovely steak and onion pastry (a lovely change from maize porridge) from choppies, I think it was worth driving all that way just for the pie. We managed to locate the boat mechanic in a nearby village and organised that he would drive up to the school after he had finished his current job. So Maguowe and I went back to Choppies to get all the things that the staff had requested. I treated myself to another pie. I met one of Maguowe's friends who is called 'Problem', after exchanging numbers he said that he would call me up about any business ventures he comes accross in the future. I asked what type of business he had was and he simply replied 'investing'. So then we started the drive back to the ferry, crossed without a problem and headed back down the dirt road for 50 minutes to the school. A successful trip without a problem with a car (although it did have a puncture the following day - but im convinced that it wasn't me).

The Goat

On our second day at Bana Ba Metsi we went out to find a goat. After we had stopped at a few villages to window shop, we eventually found a nice plump goat at a reasonable price. We then had to catch it. We all got into the enclosure which included about 50 goats and kids. We saw the one we wanted and grabbed it by the horns and wrestled it out of the enclosure. We then had to pay the man in the village, the price of the goat was 400 pula (which is about £30) which is not bad for a whole terms worth of meat. We took the goat back on the truck to the school where at Maguowe's house we started the process of preparing the goat. Ben (the german volunteer) volunteered to kill the goat, so after the priest had said a few words he took the knife and killed it. We then hung it up ready for Maguowe to skin and gut. I won't go into details of the skinning but at one point i was holding the goats heart and lungs in my hands - and they were still warm. It got messy. It was the first time that i had witnessed the gutting of an animal bigger than a fish. So i tell you this, the insides of the animal are not the thing that you find most repulsive. The thing you find most repulsive is the smell. As soon as you peirce the bag that holds all the intestines in, you get hit with the most vile smell you will ever smell. One other neat trick that Maguowe showed us was in order to get the left over waste out of the tube attached to the anus, you are suppose to blow air into it. This means that all the pellets of poo come raining down rather like one of those rain sticks you get in primary school orchestra.
So after all this we got hungry. So we decided to locate the liver and fry it up. We must have eaten the liver less than an hour since the goat had been killed. Fresh. Now, whenever we want some meat, we just go to the big freezer in the storeroom and choose the cut of meat that we fancy.