September 16, 2014

We powered through verbs in the present, past, and future tense in Setswana followed by creating endless sentences to practice the varying tenses. I didn’t realize how far I’ve come in the past few weeks. I’m at the point where I can construct sound sentences, now I just need to start memorizing more of the nouns and verbs. I left class with my head spinning, knowing this is going to be the most intense part of my training for the last few weeks.

At the end of the day the schedule listed a treasure hunt. The sun was blazing down and I had lost all motivation to do anything that wasn’t sitting in an ice bath or taking a nap on a bed of ice. We quickly learned that the treasure hunt would consist of visiting key locations and stakeholders in Serowe as well as identifying various Setswana words. This would have been more appropriate at the end of week one or in week two of training. I understand that this is reflective of what we will be doing during our community needs assessment phase in the first three months of service; however, this could have been planned and executed differently to make it more applicable and effective. Not to mention, it would have been more desirable to complete in the morning out of the hot afternoon sun. My group discussed how we would be able to exert the least amount of energy and finish enough of the list to make it look as though we gave an honest effort. By the end we put in more energy than I anticipated. We spent the first hour at the college asking people in the library the various questions that needed answering. We then visited some friends in the IT department to get the rest of our answers. While visiting, the IT lady agreed to drive us around, so in 20 minutes we were able to get pictures of the majority of locations on our list, what took the other group two hours.

I ended the night with lots of homework, which is also a new concept to me. It is going to be an adjustment from having Greene as a teacher who rarely gave homework. I ate dinner while doing my homework and began clearing dishes. Mme Chiliwa asked me to clean dishes and while I was in the kitchen she started calling my name. She knew I was washing dishes because she asked me to and must have heard me, but she continued to call my name over and over without giving me 30 seconds to wipe soap off my hands. She literally called my name every five seconds until I finally just walked to the living room with soap all over my hands. She just wanted some water. And while she was asking for water she told me to rinse my hands off.