New Blood Art: The Story - Part 4
Botswana 1998 - 2000 The British Council were advertising teaching posts in Botswana. Naturally I applied. The training had been, in a way, a passport for travel - a way back to Africa. I was offered Head of Art at a government CJSS. Two-year contract.
My first post was in a village called Tonota. There was a short internal flight from Gaborone to Francistown. I popped to the loo - it was full of watermelons. Floor to ceiling. I closed the door again, gently, and went back to my seat.
There were only a handful of us on the minibus from the airport - remote postings. One by one, they were dropped into the dust. Then it was just me and one other woman. She was going even further. We’d left the road by then and were deep in the bush. The driver stopped. “This is you,” he said. I held onto her arm, lightly. “I think I’ve changed my mind,” I said. She smiled. I did not get out with enthusiasm. There were goats. (There were always goats. I was always trying to hide the goat in my garden, in case someone noticed it was a good one. If you’ve got a good goat, people start thinking about a celebration. And a celebration means the goat.)
Jetlagged, unsure, holding in the need for the loo, and arriving into something completely other. By the time I reached the school, I wasn’t sure what I needed most. Mma Mazingwa - the headteacher - looked up, unimpressed. She was sucking on a chicken foot. “Mma Ryan, we’ve been expecting you.” The electricity was sporadic. The nearest road was a forty-minute walk. I asked for a transfer immediately, with the calmness of someone ordering tea.
Yet. Alone, unplugged, and in a wild place, far from anything familiar - something in me earthed, adjusted, and settled into the strangeness - like an animal folding into the landscape, no longer startled. I slept under a white mosquito net with a can of Doom and a half-dead torch. It was oddly grounding. Something in me began to find its shape there.
Botswana, 1999[/caption]
