TBS is back and so am I

It's been a while since I posted anything, so I thought I would bring back these Tiny Botswana Stories (TBS). They are vignettes into the lives of people who touch my life here. I hope this gives you some insight into life in Botswana. I seem to be drawn to sharing the more saddening and occasionally heartbreaking ones, only because those are the ones that I seem to carry with me. But I'm conscious of that and will try to bring along some positive ones as well--because there are a lot of them, I promise.

Read on. //

Tiny Botswana Story #5

We recently got another Peace Corps Volunteer at the Senior Secondary (High) School in my area. He has been writing letters to students to help them practice their English. One student told him about some medical issues she has been having, specifically vaginal discharge since over 5 years back. Upon sitting in a health class recently where they were learning about STIs, she realized the symptoms she had been experiencing were not commonplace. It turned out she had an untreated STI. She did not know the source of the infection, only that it had been plaguing her for so long. At the urging of the Peace Corps Volunteer, she phoned her mother to try and find some answers. As it turns out, her grandmother had suspected witchcraft in their home and had brought in a man to have sexual intercourse with the virginal young girl as a way to combat it. Years of suffering were clarified that day. But it still breaks my heart that it took so long for her to know that truth. And it will undoubtedly take her even longer to come to terms with it, if she ever can. 

Tiny Botswana Story #4

One of the nurses here at the clinic is attempting to get Master’s degree through the internet. The university she is using is based somewhere in India, despite the fact that it has the word “Americana” in the title. For the first few months she was enrolled in the course, she would come to me frustrated and seeking help on how to download her assignments and modules from the clinic computer with internet (and also with a ton of viruses). It's a whole lot of school work that she had to do each week on top of working full-time at the clinic. If she falls behind, she 's pretty much done. 

Unfortunately, on her personal computer she didn’t have any Microsoft Office products, and none of the files were opening despite my attempts to download other off-brand typing programs and PDF readers. We eventually found a way around this by converting the assignments to PDFs and transferring them on a CD to her computer, but every few weeks she has to be connected to reliable internet to take an exam. That means she spends her own money to go to Maun (a 6-7 hour bus ride away) to use an internet café with ridiculously slow internet to take an exam at a very specific and uninterrupted time. And sometimes the cafes are inexplicably closed or the internet isn't working.

 A few weeks ago, she ended up having to purchase her own internet data to use on a dongle (like a USB personal hot spot using the cell phone network). I know for a fact that purchasing enough data to use for a few hours of test writing is anything but cheap. I’ve watched and listened to her struggle and persevere in ways that I don’t know that I would have the strength to do. The barriers she has to overcome to further her education are large and discouraging. She still has several months left in her program (maybe over a year?), but at least she knows I'm rooting for her. 

Tiny Botswana Story #3

Yesterday my co-worker and I went on home visits to do contact tracing with the co-workers for someone who has Tuberculosis. That means giving health education about TB and also investigating whether or not any of the co-workers have symptoms of TB. This particular person is very infectious and has only been on treatment for three days (the first two weeks of treatment the patient is still very contagious). 

On the way back we went to visit a few patients at their homes, as the health educators here often do. We entered the yard of a man who is a psych patient at the clinic. We found he wasn’t home, there were only young kids at the house unattended. My co-worker told me this morning that the psychiatric patient was actually home and in the house, and a couple hours after we were looking for him to check-in, he went into the bush and hanged himself with a soft wire. His mother found him later in the afternoon yesterday.

Psychiatric support at home and at the medical facilities in this country is severely lacking. There is one psychiatric hospital in the very southern-most corner of the country where all of the resources are for the most part. We have a psych nurse at my clinic who has just arrived, but the problem is the patients rarely come and see him. There’s never transport for him to follow-up with the patients, so as a result they often don’t get the help they need through counseling or medications. Occurrences like this are not uncommon.