Bots Cribs

Hello Everyone!

Welcome to the first (and probably only) addition of Cribs Botswana. I wanted to be able to show everyone where I am living so that you can get a better idea of my little piece of Bots. Though I cannot speak for every volunteer, my home is the one place in the village where I don’t have to be “on” or have people constantly staring at me. Maybe this is why my house is the only dwelling place I have ever lived in that I have been able to keep remotely clean on a regular basis. So anyways, let me give you the virtual tour:

This is the view from my compound on my way back from work, at my gate. You can’t see her but Bambino comes out to greet me pretty much every day. It’s wildly cute and as close as I can get to Beaver Cleaver, while in Africa. 

This is the outside of my house on laundry day! The house you see to the right in the foreground is that of my landlady, Mma Monyatsi. The lovely tin roof is where the devils doves live and the window on the left is my bedroom. As you can see my porch doubles as a dryer (which is apt because my bathtub doubles as a washer.)

Welcome to my dining room! My kitchen table is a bit of a clutter because I just went to the general dealer to grab some groceries and a mixing bowl so I can make bread. The pictures on the wall are a collage that I made from a magazine Peace Corps issued us and the other things posted up are an assortment of maps, pictures and letters. I have a bunch of you wonderful people to thank for that :) 

Turn slightly to the right and you are in my kitchen! 

That wonderful little drawer/ cabinet thingy is my prep, station, my fridge is fully functional and even has a little slide out freezer. Behind it is the giant gas tank that powers my stove top and oven!

The picture below (the blog is not letting me format on the other side of the page) is when you take a few steps forward and turn around. Voila! My living room! You may think that I forgot to take the paper towel out of the picture but it is, in fact, there to prove to my mother that I occasionally clean my house :)

You turn around, walk the two steps down my
“hallway” and this is the sight you will see while looking into my bedroom. I have my calendar on the world, my scarf hanging off the open door of my wardrobe thingy (I keep it open because there isn’t much space and I hang my sweatshirts off the door.) 

My bed! The lovely blanket thing you are seeing is standard, Peace Corps Botswana issued, and comes in only one color pallet but has a few different center pieces. I’m really glad I don’t have the horses because it would remind me too much of the Godfather, which I finally watched!

Yeah…so if this is any testament to how well I take panoramic photos, you should never trust me to take one again. It gets the point across by way of what I see whenever I look in the mirror next to my bed though, which was really the only point.  

So that is about it when it comes to my house. I could show you the spare bedroom but it is currently acting as a storage space/ extra drying rack for my undergarments since it’s not really culturally acceptable for women to hang their panties on the line in Botswana. I don’t think our relationship (the one between myself and the internet) is ready to go there yet.

There you have it, my house! I hope you enjoyed this episode of Botswana Cribs, and I look forward to seeing you again in the near future. Until then, many hugs and smooches!

~Claire/ Tlotlo