Twenty-nine years ago almost to the month, I boarded a plane for Africa. I was headed to Botswana to teach math as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV).
At the time I thought I was choosing the path in front of me. Years later and after a lifetime of greater insight, I now understand that I wasn’t really choosing as much as I was running as fast as I could from a life out of control. Heading halfway around the world to a place totally unfamiliar seemed like the best option at the time. Maybe even, the only option.
In the spring of 1985, I was graduating from college. I had no clue what I was going to do next. I remember clearly the day I walked through the lounge in the Engineering building. The usual end-of-semester recruiters were lined up attempting to persuade upcoming graduates to join their companies. I passed the FBI table, some insurance companies looking for actuaries, and Boeing was there. Way at the end of the hall was a returned Peace Corps Volunteer recruiting for math teachers in Africa. I saw my future ahead of me and signed up for an interview.
Over that spring and summer, I had a number of interviews with the Denver Peace Corps office. I had various medical exams, and I took mega doses of iron to get my iron levels to an acceptable level. I told all my friends I was headed to Africa to see the last of the great mammals on the planet and to cook my meals over wildebeest dung fires. And then, I waited and waited and waited for my placement papers to arrive.
Finally, in early August my placement papers came in a big brown envelope. Instead of heading to Africa to teach, they were sending me to the Caribbean to be an actuary. There was some description about riding a scooter around some paradise island collecting data from farmers and analyzing it for some greater good.
Not Me!
If you’ve ever been a PCV you know that one of the qualities they look for in a volunteer is the ability to serve without question. You don’t get to choose where you go. You go where they send you—with joy. So what did I do? I called them up and told them I didn’t want to go to paradise. I wanted to go to Africa as they promised me.
Long story short, the woman on the other end of the line was not pleased. She told me that I had to go where I was needed and she seriously doubted I would get reposted, but she’d call me back. Three long weeks later I got my re-posting for Botswana. Botswana? I had never heard of Botswana—who had except the British back in the 80s. I didn’t care though. I was just thankful that Botswana was on the continent of Africa and they desperately needed math teachers. They wanted me!
The night I left Denver my sister, Phyllis and her then-husband took me to dinner before dropping me at the airport. Over conversation, they asked how much cash I had to hold me over during the three-month in-country training period. “$40 bucks”, I embarrassingly answered. Being the loving family they are, they emptied the tip money they had earned that night from their restaurant jobs onto the table. That brought my total available cash as I boarded a flight to travel across the world to $99.10. Of course, I was way underfunded for training but I figured, I’d wing it. Peace Corps wouldn’t let me starve. And as my funny friend toasted at my goodbye party, I was the only person he knew who could join the Peace Corps to raise their standard of living.
Botswana in the mid-’80s was a paradise. With only 1 million people and diamonds and gold aplenty, they were in the throes of expanding their infrastructure and educating their children. HIV was only a whisper in the international health community. I fell in love with my students, the village where I was posted, and the slow, everything-in-its-own-time pace of life. More, I did indeed get to see the last great mammals on the planet. Turns out I had an electric stove so I never had to cook my meals over wildebeest dung but I would have, I swear it!
And today, my second husband and I are returning. The population is twice the number it was in the mid 1980s, HIV transmission rate is 50%, and there is tremendous pressure to develop the Kalahari Desert and the Okavango Delta. Yet Botswana remains a relatively stable country while the rest of Africa declines ever more quickly into political and environmental chaos. If there is hope in Africa, it is hard to find—but maybe, just maybe there is a little hope left in Botswana.
29 years later I am different too. I’m not so afraid of my own shadow and I’m more conscious of the choices I make. Rather than being at the early stages of life where choices seem endless and any unfortunate bad choices can be overcome, I feel a tremendous awareness of time passing. Good or bad choices, there is a limit to the number of them left to make.
Botswana was pivotal in changing my life’s trajectory. Certainly not as I thought it would, though. All of the problems I left with, I arrived with. It took many more years to sort through those. Still, living and working in that village with dirt roads and mud houses, preparing math lessons for the 100 plus grateful students I taught every day, shopping in the market where there was only one brand of soap, one kind of toilet paper, and only pilchards in tomato sauce to purchase—opened my eyes to the world and my place in it. I came home a different person in many ways.
The Botswana that I knew is largely gone but it is with thankfulness and tremendous gratitude that I return. It saved this Colorado girl or as the local village police called me, “the skinny, blonde school teacher”.
Still blonde, but no longer a school teacher or skinny, I am overjoyed to be back
