2 July 13: Sarah Buries Millie :(

I know, I know. I didn't succeed at my goal of writing more. I think it's been 3 weeks-ish since my last update. I don't really have an excuse so I'll just jump into what I haven't been writing about...

As I type this I'm sitting at Wimpy, a fast food chain in Gaborone (the capital city of Botswana.) I'm fixin to drink me a frozen lemonade and wait for 6 o'clock to roll around. What happens at 6? EMBASSY INDIAN RESTAURANT AKA HEAVEN OPENS!!!!! Chicken tikka masala: you ain't ready for me!

So the last few weeks have been ROUGH and GREAT. Both. At the same time. A couple of weeks ago, my neighbor/GrassRootSoccer student told me she thought she had seen Millie hanging out in the school head's yard. At this point, Millie had been missing for weeks so I was excited to hear a tip. I went to my school head's house and there was Millie, happiest chicken in the world, hanging out with the school head's flock. Her tail feathers were missing but I just assumed she was molting. I decided to let her stay there because if I brought her home 1)she would be unhappy, and 2)she would just go back. A few days later, all hell broke loose.

As you know, my relationship with my school head is rocky to say the least. I'm not particularly fond of the woman and here lately she has taken to trying to "provoke" me. I don't know if she wants me to say something so that she can get me in trouble with PC or what. But anywho, a few days after I found Millie in her yard, she came up to me and told me that since Millie lives in her yard now, she can kill her if she wants to. She kept on running her mouth until I marched over to her house and called Millie home. Millie, being the smartest chicken in the whole world, followed me home when I called her name. But she didn't look right. Not only were her tail feathers missing but she was covered in poop. Even her beak had poop on it. I picked her up to look at her and realized that the reason her tail was missing was because she had been mauled. A dog or a wild animal or something attacked her and, literally, bit off the back quarter of her body. Of course, I just started bawling (it doesn't take much.) How could I have let something so terrible happen to my precious Millie? I called my chicken expert neighbor to come over and take a look at her. He confirmed what I already knew. There was no way she was going to be able to recover from her injury and she was suffering.

Millie's grave :(

I fed her some of her favorite seeds, corn and sunflowers, and held her for a little bit. Then, a crying, snotty mess I walked over to my neighbor's house, handed Millie over, and ran back to my house. Ten minutes later, my neighbor and his sister brought Millie home. I dug a grave for her right in front of her chicken house and buried my best friend. I made a grave marker, a sparkly heart with a big "M." It was the most awful, hardest thing I've had to do here but I couldn't allow my little lady to suffer any more than she already had.
So let me tell ya. That fuc*ing sucked. The next day Ashley came over and we ate bread stuffed with butter and cheese. I don't think I've never  needed comfort food so badly in my life.

Snacks!

Thing improved last week when I became totally consumed with planning my kids' GrassRootSoccer Graduation parties! I am the proud "mom" to 45 GrassRootSoccer Graduates! Before GRS started, I gave the kids a pre-test to gauge their knowledge on all things HIV. After the last practice, I gave them the same test to see if they had learned anything. 21 of them got a perfect score on the post-test. 32 of them improved. The kids whose score remained the same had already performed well on the pre-test. I am soooooo proud of them. For their parties, I made each kid a snack back, a banana cupcake, and a certificate. I made a big ol' deal about it and made signs! We watched Despicable Me and pigged out. It.Was.Amazing.

Certificates!

Party tiiimmmeee!!

Look at these precious faces!!

Prison yoga and health talks are still going well. Last week, we played the "High Risk, Low Risk, or No Risk" game. I divided the guys into teams of 5 and then read them various activities (e.g. an HIV+ mother breast feeding her child, sex without a condom, etc.) and they had to decide if the risk of contracting HIV would be high, low, or none. It was a lot of fun! Yoga is still my favorite activity of all time. My most dedicated student came up to me after class and said, "Maduo. This is helping my stress so much." :)
My decision to come to Gabs was made on Saturday night after I saw some teenagers beating a donkey with a tree branch as big around as my arm. Picture it: I'm watering my garden all zen and shit. Then, some teenage assholes ride by beating their donkey about the head and neck. Unfortunately for these boys, I don't have a single fu*k left to give when it comes to cultural sensitivity. Also, I had just watched a Madea movie the night before.

Boys: [riding by beating donkey]

Me: [sees the nonsense and stands up] "OOHHHH NOOO! I KNOW THAT YOU ARE NOT BEATING THAT DONKEY IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE. YOU DO NOT BEAT THAT DONKEY IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE. I WILL COME UP OUT OF THIS GARDEN, GO OVER THAT FENCE, AND BEAT YOU. I WILL BEAT YOU!"

Boys: [awkward moment so one of them starts giggling]

Me: [sees boy laughing] "OOHHHH NOOOO! IS IT FUNNY? IS SOMETHING FUNNY TO YOU? I WILL COME UP OUT THIS YARD AND BEAT YOU!!!!"

Boys: [shocked, continued riding along but didn't beat the donkey until they were out of sight.]

So after that, I was HEATED. I have never met a group of people that so thoroughly enjoy hurting animals. IT MAKES ME SICK. So after Millie, and dealing with my school head, and then the donkey incident I needed a beer. Not I wanted a beer. I NEEDED a beer. My nurse friend, Florence, had promised to pay me back the hundred pula she owed me that night. I went to her house, told her what happened, and asked for the money so I could go buy myself a couple of beers. Florence, all of a sudden, decided that she didn't approve of me dealing with my stress via booze and REFUSED TO GIVE ME MY MONEY. Seriously Florence? SERIOUSLY? Then when I explained to her that it wasn't her business what I spent my money on, she suddenly didn't have the money anymore. Then I find out that the teachers at my school have decided that I am to blame for a kid falling and breaking his hip playing soccer. Because the ball he was playing with was the GRS ball. They also beat all of my kids for good measure. WTF? So I left Florence's house, penniless and royally pissed, and went home and cried myself to sleep.


Before I feel asleep I decided that for my mental health and the lives of the teenage boys in my village, I needed to get away. I had cancelled my trip to Victoria Falls in order to go with Diane at a later time, so I resolved to go to Gabs on Tuesday (today) for a couple of nights. On Thursday, me and a bunch of volunteers are getting together in Ranaka, a village about an hour from the capital, for a 4th of July shindig. I CAN'T WAIT. PCV shindig = booze, dance party, and a rowdy game of UNO.

This morning, I left my house at 5 am, walked 5 km to the bus stop wearing a sleeping bag, and then rode the bus for 6 hours. Don't care. Happy as a clam. I then pampered myself with cheese cake, gourmet coffee, and ridiculously expensive body care products. There is a Body Shop here. Boom! Lotion, body spray, body scrub, and some other goodies too. If I can't be clean at home at least I can mask my funk with the sweet scent of Indian Night Jasmine.

So yeah, I'm taking a hot shower tonight. It's going to be amazing. Then I'm going to sleep in a real bed. And then I'm going to do it all again tomorrow. Heaven.

Now for some random old pictures that I didn't get a chance to post:

I realize this picture isn't relevant to this post but it's from when Me and Diane went  to Gabs!!

Also late: Me, Herb, and Greg. Met these awesome dudes while I was in Maun!!

Birthday cupcakes for some of the police officers in my village. I call them "Death by Chocolate."

It's winter here now, which means sleeping bags and hats and gloves and layers. It's cold cold cold at night and in the morning but it warms up to a pleasant 70 degrees or so during the day. I only bathe twice a week (you wouldn't judge if you had to bathe in a house without heat and without hot water!) I haven't been doing much working out because, honestly, I don't want to sweat and then have to bathe. My garden is still flourishing, lettuce growing like crazy, cherry tomatoes finally ripening! I have transformed Millie's house into the Millie M. Stewart Memorial Garden. I'm going to plant something special in there when it warms up. The weeks are flying by, as they do, and its only 40-something days until the new group of victims, I mean volunteers, arrives. I'm looking forward to some new faces and finally meeting my friend and mentee, Marshy Marshy Marshmallow Face.

I'm reading the Bhagavad Gita, a  Hindu spiritual text, and one of the lines has rooted itself firmly in my brain. "No one who does good work will ever come to a bad end..." I am holding on to this with every fiber of my being right now. I have to think that the sacrifice and the emotional suffering is worth it. And when I see my kids smiling and showing me how they would say no to someone who offers them a cell phone for sex, it feels worth it. But for today, I'm going to pig out on Indian food, get wet from head to toe AT THE SAME TIME, slap some clay on my face, and pretend like I'm back in America, land of the free, home of the brave! HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!!!!!

Namaste from the newly neurotic.

PS-Just for the record. My school head is still kickin' which means that killing someone with kindness doesn't work (plan A.) Sorry, Granny :) Now I'm gonna try a slow, painful death from hundreds of tiny word wounds inflicted by my very own sharp tongue (plan B.)