Life in all its permutations

The past few weeks have been a bit tumultuous. We've diversified our initial course of Setswana study, basically developing our own course (with the help of a few Setswana speaking friends and an old Peace Corps manual from the sixties). When we're finished, we'll have something that could be used by fellow LBTers coming, if they find they have need of it. In the midst of all this, there was a death in the church family, the niece of some friends of ours, and the resulting funeral preparations and ceremony was the better part of a week. I still haven't written a report on the Wayeyi festival for the blog but I'm not sure how soon that'll even be feasible; our Setswana official learning period will be ending in July and we really want to have a solid basis before I move on to Shiyeyi.

So, it's my birthday next week. In its honor, we're making a personal trip to Gaborone, a 3 day vacation-like thing. True, it's also to get a much needed oil change done on the company car, meet with Maria at ELCB, pick up an immigration document for the Rudowskes, maybe meet with Lydia (if she's available), pick up our mail in Francistown on the way back. But, for me, it's about my birthday. I mean, I haven't gone to a movie in months. We haven't even got a TV yet. I'm a little visual entertainment deprived. Also, I'm getting my hair hennaed again. I do have some henna on hand but it sure is nice to have someone else do it for me. With the dry heat up here, anything I can do to keep my hair manageable and reasonably attractive is a help.

In other news, we're performing at Poetavango on Saturday (tomorrow). Poetavango is a spoken word poetry event that happens every month here in Maun. Most performers are local but we went a few months ago with Bonty and we're asked to do something, so we did. Rob sang “The Dog”, I recited an old poem I write back in high school. The next month the we went, we sang “In the Resurrection” (these are songs Rob has written, by the way). We were well received and they asked us to keep coming. So, we are. This month, it's all Eshinee songs: “Time to Kill”, “Little Birds” and “Revenge is Sweet”. These are 3 short songs; Rob's are usually much longer than typical songs, that's why he only does one. Since it is actually a poetry venue, not an open mike, we've decided to keep our contributions to stuff we've actually written ourselves, the stuff that would be solid poetry if we took away the music.