January 9th, 2010

Yesterday morning I went to church with several local girls. I was disappointed by how similar the service was to some I have been to in the States. The music was in English and wascontemporary Christian rock. The pastor was white and from South Africa. The service itself could have been in America. Several members of the congregation I met were very interesting, however. Many were from Zimbabwe and South Africa. I met  several from Kenya as well. About half of the congregation was white, and it bothered me that the members were mostly segregated by color in their seating arrangement with few exceptions.

This evening was the brie, or barbecue. There I met many new locals and several other international students. The locals grilled some of the best pork and cattle I have ever had. I've noticed the meat here seems substantially better and less fatty than much of what I have had in the US. Several of the locals joked with me about what Americans do to their food. I also had some traditional Botswana beer, which was incredibly interesting and different from any other alcoholic beverage I have ever tried. It was served lukewarm, and I can only describe it as an alcoholic porridge. People seem to either love it or hate it. I think I will have to try it again before I can definitively conclude whetehr or not i like it.

I talked with another international student who studied in Ghana last semester. He said he was amazed by how developed Botswana was compared to Ghana. He said that his time so far in Gaborone didn't feel substantially different from America.

We still haven't received our final print outs of our schedules for classes, though they begin tomorrow, from the international office. After talking to several local students about this, however, I learned that most professors don't come for the first week of classes, and no work is assigned. I feel like I am on vacation, and find it hard to believe I will have to return to the academic mindset. However, I am looking forward to classes. I have signed up for a variety of African literature courses which sound fascinating from their descriptions, and very different from anything my university in America has to offer.

We haven't been given a map of the campus or a tour, so we still don't know our way around well enough to find classes. All buildings are numbered rather than named, and because much of the campus has been constructed in different stages, there isn't a lot of order to their numbering. I am settling into the Botswana mindset, however, and I am not even mildly stressed.