Random thoughts that I wanted to share!

Here are some funny/interesting moments from the past couple of weeks:

-We drove by a graveyard on the way to one of the secondary schools. It was not at all what I expected, because I figured it would be just like ours...I mean, graves are graves... All of the gravesr were CRAMMED into the gated space. Most of the graves are above ground. They are a mound of dirt, covered by rocks, which is surrounded by a cage-like structure that has a sign on the front saying the name, date of birth and date of death. Unlike in the U.S., they clearly do not put an emphasis on the way that the graves/graveyards look. We try to make the look presentable and not like there are a bunch of people buried there. But in the graveyards here, theres is simply no hiding it. I think the graves are above ground because the ground is so hard, it would be difficult to dig 6 foot holes.

-On our way to work one morning when we had fewer people to drop off, Taps tooks a SHORT detour so that we could see the grave of El Negro of Banyoles. This is the body of an African man who died in 1830 whose grave was robbed. The body was taken and displayed for years and years in museums in Spain. It finally was able to be returned to Africa in October of 2000 andhis grave site is in Gaborone. It was a really fascinating story and I was so excited that some of us got to see it!

This is the sign-really hard to read-that was in front of the grave. It told the story of this man and his body's journey from Africa, to Europe, and back to Africa where his body now rests in a park in Gaborone.

Grave (above ground, like most of the graves that I have seen)

I was surprised because for a kind of monument grave site, like this, I thought that it would be a nice-looking, stone, engraved grave site...obviously not the case!

-We have gotten used to the little kids in Old Naledi running up to us and yelling "Makoa!" We all have kind of started to answer to it like it is our name...haha

-Tshego, a girl we work with at SAPSSI, told us that two women were talking across the street while we were walking by and little kids were running up to us to check us out and greet us. The two women were saying to eachother, "When we were kids and white people would walk by we would run inside and hide!" We thought this was hilarious :) And I love the fact that we had Tshego to translate that for us.