Leave for Change in Botswana

So, it’s been 5 days! I’ve been trying to keep-up on the Twitter feed but data connections are hard to come by (and expensive!) and I haven’t had any internet access yet (the hotel in Gaborone had it, but I couldn’t connect).

Anyway, a lot has happened.

Lola (who also works at Humber, she and I traveled together) and I met up with our WUSC contact, Chillie:

He has been kind enough to offer the following assistance:

• Booked us into a hotel in Gaborone
• Helped us pick-up a few essential items and figure out banking
• Paid for dinner
• Flew with us to Maun (he met us at the airport at 6:30am!)
• Drove us from Maun to Shakawe, which is about 5 hours away
• Introduced us to our partner organizations in Shakawe and the incredibly nice people that work there (more on that in a later post)

That’s a lot! And, I’m probably forgetting a few list items! The assistance that WUSC has given us has been so valuable and has made this experience incredibly easy.

So, today is the first full workday with TOCaDI. I’ve made a brief inventory of the workstations in the office and I’m going to work on pulling together all the software (drivers etc.) that might be required if any of the workstations need to be re-built. I’m using the utilities found in this Lifehacker article (you have to go through the comments to find the full package to download).

Of particular mention;
Double Driver
CCleaner
Recuva

Internet access is available in the office (which is how I posted this update) so hopefully I’ll be able to provide updates a bit more frequently.

Few interesting side notes:

• Batswana (the people of Botswana) are incredibly nice and accommodating
• The country is lovely. The drive from Maun to Shakawe was the first real glimpse we had (outside of a few trips around Gaborone) and I can’t wait to see more
• I wrote the majority of this post out at 11:30pm (Botswana time) so I can actually hear the hippos in the river behind the accommodations (more on that later!). I just hope we get a chance to see them
• When it rains, it really rains…

Here’s a picture of me in Gaborone beside the statue of the first Botswana president after independence in 1966. Check out the Wikipedia article on Seretse Khama for more information.

That’s it for now! Oh, here’s a picture of donkies.

So, the trip is in two days from now so I decided that it is probably a good idea to get this started.

As an introduction:

I am participating in the joint Center for International Studies and Cooperation and World University Service of Canada (WUSC) program Uniterra. Using the United Nations Millennium Goals as a mandate, they partner with organizations in select countries to exchange knowledge and experience in an effort to further the UN initiative.

The Leave for Change program involves professionals from certain disciplines to apply for select positions. The partners in the select countries review the applications and pick the candidates.

Botswana is my destination.

Particularly, a small town called Shakawe. It is in the north, along the border with Namibia.

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