WInding Down My First Semester at the University of Botswana

Currently, my first semester at the University of Botswana is coming to a close. What a strange experience it has been, starting with wandering around the biology building and wondering where, what, when and when I would be teaching, and many other details about the classes. There is incredible bureaucracy surrounding everything from making a photocopy to other minor aspects of the job, and I quickly learned that I would  not be using Powerpoint as a teaching tool (which would have been useful for illustrating graphs in biostatistics), and on and on.  I eventually learned the ropes and things became smoother.  And I am finally finished designing Biostatistics lectures in the evenings.

My Office

Each day started with crossing perilous streets and then a walk through massive construction sites – after a rain, the puddles were quite impressive. Several huge new buildings, including a medical school, are being built by Chinese construction companies – there are many worries about this because the campus infrastructure (internet access, photocopying, water, etc.) are already stretched beyond the breaking point and there are major concerns about construction quality. As we’ve mentioned before, the University Campus is a chaotic jumble of buildings scattered about with deep cement trenches (used to carry the overland flow of water during storms) zig-zagging here and there in unsuspecting places. The pedestrian must always be aware!  There is always a very long line to get into the library because students are ONLY allowed to have a laptop in the library – no laptop carriers, daypacks or other parcels, so the line to check these items can be a half an hour long. 

UB has been officially proclaimed a "world class" University by the government.  The nation and the University are very young and so the rush to become “world-class” may be unwise when the institutions are not in place to support such an endeavor.  Perhaps when a University is proclaimed to be world-class, then the many problems that exist are suddenly unacknowledged and cannot be addressed.  Apparently the HIV rate on campus is ~50%.  Partying is ever-prevalent and wild, which is unwittingly encouraged during the semester because the final exam is worth 60% of a class grade, so many students are not concerned about their grades until finals.  This is a society that on the surface is conservative but underneath is promiscuous -- this may promote the spread of HIV.  In many ways, society's messages are conflicting.  For example, Priscilla and I do not hold hands or show affection in public because it is considered rude, but sex is an important element in advertising of all kinds, and condom advertisements are prominently displayed and dispensers are ubiquitous (although usually empty).

Communication on campus is an interesting process.  Offices do have phones but there are no answering machines and these phones can NOT call cell phones.  Most people have cell phones, but because air time is quite pricey people do not want to make the call.  There are three cell phone service providers in Botswana, and making a call from one network to another is more expensive, so only people that you share a cell phone provider with will want to call you at all.  Avoiding making the call is a national art form! Though they tell you they will call at a certain time, they don't -- they are always waiting for YOU to call to them -- this makes campus communication difficult.  (OK -- there are exceptions -- a few people do call when they say they will.)

Food booth just off campus.

There is a faculty lounge on campus that serves huge portions of samp, pap, fried chicken and beef stew.  Just off campus there are roadside tables where people sell take-away Styrofoam containers of samp, pap, fried chicken and beef stew, and during the lunch hour (1PM-2PM) loads of people stand around in the sun eating.  How do they do it in dapper clothes with no water and wimpy plastic forks?  This is a culture where the idea of a restaurant was unknown until ~40 years ago and there are none near campus.  I have also never known of anyone to bring lunch to campus, and there are no cooking facilities in the Biology Dept (not even a microwave, coffee maker, or teapot) so food remains an enigma.  This is also a culture where people dress to the nines.  The faculty in the Biology Dept. are dapper, indeed, complete with cufflinks and polished shoes – the works. 

The biology building is designed for ease of lockdown – for the pre-meds perhaps?  There are many technicians for each lab in white coats (I will have one next semester for Plant Tax) – a cheerful bunch.  The students are also often in white lab coats.  However, the building usually appears to be quite empty except for fleets of women custodians in green who are washing everything and are very jolly during their breaks.  I am the only person in the building who keeps their door open  – I frequently get visited by students that are endlessly looking for various people.  I do occasionally spot a colleague, and  when I do see one, everything is quite jovial.  When I first arrived I was eager for collaboration – because my time is short, assisting another project would have been ideal.  I soon found out that this was not to be and we have started our own research.   Even after a semester I really have no idea what anybody in the Department does and have not met a bunch of them.

My Biostatistics class.

In the Biostatistics Class that I taught, there were 50 students; we met on Mondays and Wednesdays at 8am for class and Tuesdays at 3pm for lab.  For the lab, I had the help of a great demonstrator (like a TA) named Bonolo who, most importantly, took over the photocopying task (if I got the materials to her a week ahead of time).  She also instructed me on how to manage the lab-Bonolo does not mess around-and she often told me that I should be tougher with the students!  In class I tried to engage the students – to get them to talk at all about anything.  The only student who would willingly talk in class was a foreign exchange student.

Biostatistics lab.

Teamwork

In lab, the students would do the problems and a talk a lot to each other and sometimes I could engage them as I wandered around the lab.  After I made some jokes about white lab coats in a stats lab, the white lab coats gradually disappeared from lab attire.  This was a Biostats class without the use of a computer package so the calculations we had to perform seemed endless, but it was a nice group of students and we all made it through.  They all did quite well considering that biology students take a LOT of biology classes at UB.  it is common for a student to have 5 or 6 lab classes each semester.  It is clear that this is way too many classes as it doesn't not allow the students time to engage in other activities such as research.

Bonolo

This week, the month-long finals period commenced.  As mentioned, finals are mandated to be a minimum of 60% of the grade, which unfortunately fosters a climate of absenteeism during the semester.  Two weeks before the end of the semester, I submitted my final to a review board (Do not email – hardcopy ONLY, do not keep the final on your computer or flashdrive because of hackers!  So where to keep an electronic copy?).  There were many emails about finals' security.  The review board approved my final, but made me change a few things which slightly increased the amount of memorization involved.

After the revisions, I carried the final over to a coordinator who managed the photocopying and had the finals delivered to the exam room at the assigned time.  After grading, I submitted the finals to an examiner whom will assess my grading and then the Department will meet to discuss grades for all the students.  I will also be an examiner for the graded finals from Aquatic Biology.  In addition, a second final is to be ready to go for barely failing students to take, if necessary.

Just before finals month, I received an email with the invigilation schedule (http://mw2.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invigilate) and was assigned to  invigilate both my final exam and another one.  Before, I have always received the invigilation notices less than 24 hours before the test, and due to conflicts, was not able to participate in invigilation.  For the first final I invigilated, I went to a large lecture hall with perhaps 400 students.  There was a host of invigilators.  Because many chairs were broken, there were not enough seats and the hall was hot and parts were very poorly lit.  The exams for two classes were alternated along the rows of desks. During the exam, I was asked to go to each student in the hall that was taking the biology final (there were 250 of them) and take the exam and separate out "Part B" and staple that into the back of their answer booklet.  I was the only invigilator that could do this because the aisles between the tables were extremely narrow and only I could squeeze through.  This took a long time with only staple frgaments and broken staplers.  The other class was a Stats class -- this final had two graphs.  Drawing perfect graphs is stressed in this educational system.  No graph paper was handed out with the Stats final.  So when each student came to the first graphing problem they raised their hand for graph paper.  The professor for this class stood facing away from the class so the other invigilators ran around delivering graph paper.  The instructor said "only one sheet at a time" which meant that when the students came to the second question they had to raise their hand again.  The front of the lecture hall was littered with broken table bases and busted podiums so like always -- be aware!  Things were much smoother for my final which took place with three other finals.  

The other class that I teach is called a “Tutorial”.  The Intro Biology class has 700 students, so there are smaller units called "tutorials" of 30 students each, which are all taught by a separate instructors.  These students are mostly pre-meds, and those that make it through their first year (which is designed to weed out less-motivated students) will continue to be pre-med majors, but there will be far less of them at that time.  I was notified that I was assigned to be teaching this class by a former Fulbright scholar who returned to the US before I came. He sent me an email about it after I’d been at UB for a few weeks.  It took me a while to figure out what the class was about, where it would meet, etc. and I never received a syllabus or any guidance for what the class should cover.  No classroom had been reserved for the class, so we met in the courtyard for a few weeks until we located an unoccupied lecture hall.  But figuring out what to do for Basic Bio is easy and this was an outgoing, bright and cheerful group of mostly motivated students.  These students have incredible tolerance for a curriculum fraught with problems. 

Intro Bio Tutorial.

One of the really pleasant places in the Biology Building is the Herbarium which is directed by the hard working and dedicated Mr. Muzila.  He has helped me identify many a specimen.  Unfortunately for me but fortunately for him he will be going to Sweden for his PhD next semester.  

Mr. Muzila in the herbarium.

I also have an undergraduate research student who is doing a greenhouse project on invasive species.  It is a requirement that all biology majors must conduct an independent research project during their senior year; however, it is difficult for students to find a faculty mentor and the equipment, infrastructure and funding for these projects can be a problem.  Also, because of the many biology classes that a major takes time is difficult to come by.  The undergrad research program is highly structured and the students have many time-consuming proposals and other assignments to write.  Speaking of equipment: so many things are busted -- Bonolo is a graduate student in Molecular Biology and she frequently complained that she could not make progress because everything was broken.  Likewise, the Biology storeroom for field equipment is a stunning collection of busted stuff. 

There are a good number of foreign exchange students on campus.  According to my foreign student, many of them are unhappy for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here, but one of them is that the food, which is part of their tuition, is unwaveringly samp, pap, fried chicken or beef stew!  But I haven’t met enough of them to know for sure what’s up.

We’ll that’s a short description of some of the life at UB.

Buying A Used Car in Gaborone-Stranger Than Fiction

(Jon's Narration)

Our New "Ride": note the spoiler!

We purchased our present car, a 1998 Toyota Saloon (=Corolla), before leaving the US from a former Fulbright and, after a long series of mishaps, finally got it functioning and on the road and us in the drivers’ seat on the wrong side of the road.  Around town, the car was "okay", although we would scrape and bang the bottom of the car on the gargantuan speed bumps installed to slow traffic on many of the major roads.  And each time we went out to the wilds, “low-rider” car prevented us from going some places and made other trips arduous as we crept over humps, gullies and washboard stretches.  If you’ve been reading this blog, you know about our “road from hell” when we went to the Limpopo. 

So one morning we drove over to Mogodishane where many of the used car dealers lurk.  Mogodishane is a former village that is now part of the growing burbs of Gaborone, and is located on the main road to Molepolole. The road is quite literally one big construction project, so that accessing businesses along the road entails driving around on ragged, rutted dirt access roads between the storefronts and the construction with orange cones, concrete barriers, and construction equipment and debris scattered everywhere.  The intersections have no functioning lights yet and people just take turns pulling out.  We were informed how the electrical people lay wires, the carpet (pavement) is laid down, then the water people come and tear it all up and lay pipe and carpet is laid down, and repeat...


This country is the size of Texas and has 2 million people so many things are very spread out with dusty barren lots all over.  Used car lots are an exception, however.  As many cars as possible are jammed onto tiny lots surrounded by razorwire-topped fences.    Because none of the cars have batteries in them, getting a vehicle out involves a long process of moving batteries and juggling vehicles around, and all is done at maximum leisure.  The first place we stopped at was “Auto Lanka”.  We had heard that the used car industry in Botswana was run by Sri Lankan's and this indeed seems to be the case, although they employ many Motswana's too.  We looked around at some 10-14 year old Toyota’s, Honda’s and Mitsubishi’s and what not.  The Sri Lankan guys were very friendly and helpful.  We liked a 2-door Pajero there, although we usually prefer 4-doors.  It was in good shape and we were happy with the smaller size as most of the 4WD vehicles here are either huge or very tiny (i.e. a Toyota Hilux which is basically Toyota Forerunner OR a RAV4 Mini).  These used cars are shipped from Japan and Singapore at about ten years old to supply the African market are are purchased in huge lots at auctions by Sri Lankans -- "globalization".  


We then went on and visited 6 or 8 more lots.  Reception varied.  If Motswana were there to greet us, the reception was mellow to the extreme or you could say none at all.  If we did manage to engage somebody, we were told that every used vehicle we asked about was a 1998 and it may or may not be an automatic, have 4-wheel drive, etc.   If Sri Lankan's were around, we may be feted and supplied with all kinds of information, or it was made clear up front that there was no interest in selling a car at this time.  Stock was random and limited and our favorite continued to be the 2-door Pajero.  We never did feel like we were going to get swindled and were not subjected to heavy pressure or manipulation unlike used car lots in other countries...  It was hot and we were sick of it (we do not go car shopping for entertainment).  We went to a restaurant right there called “The Hot Curry”, which had the same old beef stew or fried chicken and mealie-meal, BUT it actually had a another food item in this case:  roti... so we shared that along with some guava juice-the saving grace of Batswana cuisine.  

Auto Lanka

So we mulled it over for some days and then called up “Auto Lanka” and said we’d like to drive the Pajero over to an auto garage called “Superformance” (NOT a MIS-spelling) recommended by Pat and Karin.  When we arrived at Auto Lanka, the Pajero wasn’t ready but after hanging out for an imponderable amount of time during which enough people had wandered around, chatted, and hung out; enough batteries were switched around and vehicles wedged hither and thither; and then the Pajero was accessible.  One of the Sri Lankan guys came with us.  Superformance was across town giving ample opportunity for the test drive.  Our passenger was chatty so we discussed Kandy (his hometown and a memorable place): he’s homesick, and Botswana food is really-really rough for Sri Lankan's.   The approach to Superformance was a long line of cars wedged into a narrow road with a garage area totally packed with cars.  Leon, the proprietor of Superformance has a strong Afrikaans accent and likes to talk.  He really-really knows these vehicles and was favorable about the Pajero (although the 50,00km on the odometer was way-way too low) and then rambled on about all the issues with these vehicles, shady garages, etc.  A character.  His garage is jam packed with vehicles because of unpaid repair bills -- Leon has had some vehicles on his lot for seven years.  Nothing can be done with these vehicles.  

We returned to Auto Lanka and discussed the cash.  Not being a hardcore negotiator, I was happy with the price and Leon had said it was a fair price.  Of course the money would be wired to Rainbow (Pty) Ltd, which did not inspire confidence.  But the dealers were nice enough and offered us a 3-month warranty on the car, unlike any of the other dealers we visited.

Washing the Pajero before we drove it away-with our car salesman overseeing the operation in the background.

Just calling up the bank that evening to set up the transfer (and being put on hold) emptied the phone of Pula in no-time at all.  We then went away on a 4-day camping trip and when we returned found out that the money transfer had been successful.  We took a taxi out to Auto Lanka and the construction had moved on closing the access road.  After the initial standard requirement of a “Can you come back tomorrow?” upon our arrival, and our reply of “No!” (the taxi wait and taxi ride had been long), we got down the business.  The Pajero was already registered in our name and after we hung out for awhile and learned a little more about the life of a Sri Lankan in Botswana, the car was washed, plates were put on, a modicum of petrol was put into the empty tank and we were out of there.  There is actually a car manual and a GPS but they’re 100% Japanese with cute pictures.   We are excited by the spoiler on the roof (jeeps really need those) and in the back there is a 10cd player.  We’ll see if that works.  The vehicle is now at Superformance getting an aftermarket cooling system which is way better than the one that comes with the vehicle according to Leon.  We also purchased insurance on the Pajero today -- this is our fifth insurance policy in Botswana -- woah!  Now we are going to sell the Saloon.  So all you potential visitors: we now have 4-wheel drive+clearance so we can visit some parks that were inaccessible before.  But you have got to bring your tent!