On our way to Victoria Falls that day, I didn't realize that it would be twenty eight years until I'd return. I was only 26 and there was so much life in front of me. Botswana had been my home for nearly three years and I really couldn't have understood why I would be away for so long. I'm here for just three days this week, but as I think about some words or stories to tell to guests of my university's reception tomorrow, and there are many tried and true stories of elephants and crocodiles, life in a small village and life in a large village. And then, crystallizing in my memory is one that I haven't touched in nearly three decades.
Tshimoyapula. That was the name of the village I was headed to after two weeks of Peace Corps language training in Setswana. I didn't know it at the time, but Tshimo ya Pula means Fields of Rain in Setswana; the irony of that name for a village squarely in the Kalahari wasn't lost on any of the ten or so volunteers after six weeks living with our families.
So many memories now. My family was a compilation of two. I never found out where the fathers were, but the two women, one of them my host mother, made me feel welcome. And the children, well there were enough to field two nearly complete football teams after dinner each evening. My bag of food supplied for the duration of my stay by the Peace Corps, cabbage, dried soup, beef, chicken, etc, lasted a few days. After that, I ate the traditional diet of bhopi jwa mabelle (sorghum meal) prepared with goat milk for breakfast, prepared with cream of tartar and goat milk for lunch and prepared with oxbow soup mix as gravy and cabbage for dinner.
My host mother would wake early and cut wood for the fire to cook the porridge in a black, three-legged pot. The smoke would drift throughout the compound and mix with the rooster banter and the first rays of light. We would eat sorghum porridge, with some goat milk, adults first and then the children, and I would ply them with my broken Setswana. Laughter, learning, some headaches and struggle, but that's the way learning works.
My mother was a shebeen queen, which meant she was the village brewer of chibuku, a barely fermented distillation of, of course, sorghum. As far as I could tell, it would take about three days to brew in an open 55 gallon drum. Flies would land and meet their demise and then need to be scooped off the surface in great globs of fly and foam. I don't think the Peace Corps knew that my mother was a brewer, but it made my compound the center of village life. After hours of studying Setswana verb declinations and noun classes, I would stumble home with a headache, eat, play with the kids and then sit under the tree on a small stump of wood and pass the gigantic copi of chibuku around the circle of increasingly talkative men.
A few days into my second week, my mother was alone with me. We were chopping the marble-like wood she used for cooking. Her serious eyes looked at me, "When are you coming home?" At first I thought I'd confused coming and going in Setswana. "Oh, it'll be at least two years." "No," she said in English and pointing to the ground, "When are you coming home here?"
Twenty eight years, my mother. Twenty eight years.
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