a canine perspective

She slowed. The farm danced about her. The apple trees bickered with the wind, clasped limbs in union against it, blackbirds and sparrows and chickadees and owls rimming their crowns. The garden cried out its green infant odor, its melange the invention of deer or, now it seemed to her, the other way around. The barn swung her fat shadow across the yard, holding it gently by dark wrists and letting it turn, turn, stretch out in the evening upon the ground but never slip. Faster it all revolved around her when she closed her eyes. Clouds rumbled across heaven and she lay beneath, and in the passage of shadow and yellow sunlight, the house murmured secrets to the truck, the traveler, who listened for only so long before its devout empiricism forced it away in wide-eyed panic to test such ideas among its fellows. The maple tree held the wash up to the light in supplication and received (bright flames) yellow jackets each day, its only reply. The mailbox stood soldierly by the road, capturing a man and releasing him, again and again.

(excerpt from Almondine's chapter in "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle", a novel by David Wroblewski)

(not so) great expectations

I’ve written before about people seeing what they want to see (though I had been writing about how people see me), and I was struck again today by how much I think that is true, or more precisely, how much I think people see what they expect to see. Not that there is some inherently “true” way of seeing, but it never ceases to amaze me how peoples’ preconceived notions (or here I think it’s fair to say their prejudices) really color how they interpret a situation, a person or group of people.

The Coffee Shop in Kasane is a bastion of expatriateness but I can’t stay away—the blueberry muffins and quiche are just too good and they make a half-way decent cappuchino. It’s a good place for me to set up shop and work on my computer, check email (wireless!), eat lunch, sip coffee and bask in the air con. Plus woman who owns the places is quite sweet to me and treats me to a complimentary dessert now and then. However, I have never seen a Motswana eating inside and the chatter around me can often border on the ridiculous.

Today I had my research assistants come into town so we could have a power meeting about their progress on the survey work they are running in the village. Since I’m in town now doing my own set of interviews, it can be a little tricky to manage them from afar, but so far Prince (my main research assistant), seems to be doing a good job of keeping things on track. In fact, he is definitely the most capable, competent, and responsible of all my past and current research assistants. For lack of a better meeting spot, I decided we would rendez-vous at the coffee shop’s outdoor seating. Over glasses of juice, he was his usual self—joking around quite a bit but quick on his feet when it came to providing me with both answers when I grilled him about missing survey pages, and ideas when I brought up the subject of planning the thank-you village parties.

Which is why I was totally thrown off when I walked inside the coffee shop after our meeting ended (getting ready to order a delicious panini for myself) to face a sympathetic-looking smile from the coffee shop owner. “Ooh looks like you were having a tough time of it out there”, she commented. I must have looked confused because she followed it up with, “I could see your helper slouching in his chair”—and here she did the typical expat impersonation of a Motswana, which involves trying to look as lazy and useless as possible—“and just looking off in all directions into space.” Usually I let the embarrassingly racist jokes and imitations slide, but given that she was just so off the mark about Prince, I felt like I had to say something. “Well actually he is really great, and very much on top of things—in fact with him at the healm I feel not too worried about leaving the survey portion of my research to run on its own in the village while I do my interviews in town.” Her eyebrows arched and she didn’t have much to say besides, “oh really? Because it looked like he was just lolligaging about over there” (sidenote: I didn’t know anyone else besides my mom used this phrase, apparently it made its way over from England to former Rhodesia back in the day). “No he is really a great assistant”, I inarticulately reiterated again, and the conversation had nowhere else to go.

I took her recommendation of the daily special (chicken and mushroom pie), still bewildered and reeling from wondering how on earth she could have interpreted the scene outside the way she did. On a literal level, Prince was not even remotely “lounging” in his chair, and if she had stopped for just a second to listen to a word of the conversation, it seems impossible to think that she would have been so dead wrong in her impression of him. But maybe she still would have seen things that way. Maybe, I wonder, she is so accustomed to thinking of the “locals” in a certain light that she now sees what she expects to see, not what actually is in front her—in this case, a smart, well-spoken and charismatic young man. Whose name happens to be Prince.

My research assistants and me on the job...

just another day in the field

Yesterday was the kind of day that loudly reminds me that “just another day at work in Botswana” can often be in fact quite extraordinary! The day really did start pretty ordinarily—I woke up, had my breakfast of bran flakes whilst checking email, fed the dogs, and headed out to town to meet a man at his home in Plateau (the hillside neighborhood of Kasane) for my first migrant interview of the day. The interview went fine, I had my usual lunch at the coffee shop, and happily accepted a delicious-looking container of pasta bake from the owner for my supper (she apparently believes starving students are either a) actually really starving b) don’t like to cook) before heading to another afternoon interview that also went quite smoothly. An uneventful day so far. I had a last interview scheduled at Chobe Safari Lodge later in the afternoon, so I drove over there and decided to sit at the riverside bar for a while working on my computer while I waited. An hour later, my interviewee showed up, we sat at the bar and did the interview, and after we finished I headed back to the truck in the parking lot to grab a water bottle only to find…a MONKEY IN MY CAR! And not only IN my car, but eating MY pasta bake that was supposed to be for my supper!!! Only a small piece of melted cheese left. Serves me right for leaving my windows open, but still, I was pretty mad because the pasta had happened look particularly tasty and I’d been thinking about having it for my dinner for a better part of the afternoon. Grrrr. I chalked it up to mainly my negligence and reasoned that losing my dinner was a small price to pay for living in such an exquisitely beautiful part of the world—I had just spent the afternoon typing away next to what is arguably one of the prettiest riverside views in all of Africa.

So I headed back into the lodge to finish up my work for the day and soon was engrossed in transcribing the last of my recorded interviews. Somewhere in the midst of listening to my interviewee describe the challenges of supporting his extended family back in the village on top of his own quite high living expenses in town, I noticed a slight commotion to my left. Around the lounge couches, a few tourists had gathered and were staring at something behind one of the armchairs, while two lodge employees looked on nervously. Before I really knew what was happening, a juvenile CROCODILE wiggled out from behind!!! It wasn’t huge and I didn’t see big teeth but still it had a mean looking tail and on top of that started moving in the direction of MY chair! Ah!! I hopped off seat and moved back, but the crocodile kept moving in MY direction! (later I realized that “my” direction happened to be the direction of the river, its probable intended destination, but at the time it felt like it had decided that little old me was its favored target)…I scrambled back and without even thinking, suddenly found myself crouched on a bar stool, and as it kept moving, then on top of the bar itself (wearing a dress the whole time mind you)! The crocodile waddled past at a quick pace and like lighting was back in the river, at which point I sheepishly climbed off the bar trying to ignore the laughter of all the wait staff around me. Hmph. I had lost a small amount of dignity which was unfortunate given that I spend a lot of time at that bar (its kind of become my outdoor office of sorts), but then again all those guys were behind the safety of the bar during this incident and I’m not convinced they wouldn’t have done the same if they had been on my side.

So that was my Wednesday at work. How was yours?

i heart sugar cane

Personal Space

Is a great thing. To me, at least. I don’t think I realized how much I missed it until a couple of days ago, when I started house-sitting here in Kasane (well actually in Kazangula, the next little township over). I like waking up in the morning and pottering around in the kitchen making tea, enjoying the coolness of the morning and its quietness. I like not having to check to see if someone’s in the bathroom, or waiting if someone is. I like doing my dishes when I feel like it (which really is not all that delayed!), and not feeling guilty working at my computer in my pajamas ‘till mid-afternoon. Maybe I’ll change my tune in a week or so, but for now I am luxuriating in the peacefulness of being surrounded by only the sounds of birds chirping in the morning, frogs calling at night, and two dogs and a cat padding around me.
It’s Sunday right now, and later afternoon has crept up on me. I did a big grocery shop for myself yesterday, and today took a long break from my slow attempts to make a database in Microsoft Access for survey data to make myself a proper Sunday brunch. An onion and mushroom omelet made from double-yolked eggs from the backyard, with sweet potatoes, toast (fresh honey!), and apple slices—pretty tasty… Now its time to get back to work and then maybe take the dogs out for a walk. We attempted our first “walk” yesterday—me, Ben the old German Shepherd and Sam the new puppy—but it resulted in lots of leash biting, leash tangling, walking in circles, and then a sprint to get past the (potentially croc-inhabited?) river and back to the house before sunset. At least today I know which path to take!