Err.. you asked for it. Currently at 19 pages. I haven't quite edited anything...soo forgive all the silly grammatical errors and typos. I promise to look through it and correct the mistakes once I'm done.

I hear the drums echoing tonight
But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation.
She's coming in twelve-thirty flight
Her moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards
salvation
I stopped an old man along the way
Hoping to find some old forgotten words or ancient melodies
He turned to me as if to say: "Hurry boy, it's waiting there for you."

It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never had.

The wild dogs cry out in the night
As they grow restless longing for some solitary company
I know that I must do what's right
Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti
I seek to cure what's deep inside, frightened of this thing that I've become.

That’s Africa by Toto for you.

Africa, Africa, what can I say! It was so bloody amazing words can’t express the mind-blowing time we had.

It was everything I expected Africa to be like. Cloudless skies. The red earth. Indescribable sunsets.

And the team gelled tremendously. Those pre-trip sessions together did wonders for team bonding. I no longer hold Rafflesians in contempt and now realize that rumours about the majority of them being arrogant bigots are untrue.

Day One,

I shall skip boring narrative about the plane ride and our time at the airport (lounging about at Starbucks).

We were greeted by a magnificent sunrise when we arrived at Johannesburg (a.k.a Jo’burg). Half asleep due to an entertaining plane ride spent chatting with Balps, Kal and Vane-SAH, I stumbled onto THE continent for THE first time. Logistically, things went smoothly, with much thanks to Tina’s (the connection being Lam = Llama = Tina the llama in Napoleon Dynamite, the movie we watched during our JB pre-trip bonding session) UN pass.
The bus ride to Gaborone took approximately six hours with stopovers at a petrol kiosk and a food outlet where Tina took some of the boys out to takeaway food for us to munch on during the journey. I was too sleepy to take part enthusiastically in the shameless karaoke session (PA system blasting emo songs) that went on! We had the whole team spirit thing going for us. Those with cameras had a photo-whoring session at the border while Tina and the adults ‘paid’ for Shin Jung’s visa to Botswana; money solves most things in some places.

After checking out our spiffin’ rooms (I was to room with Bee Juan), we trooped over to the Grand Palm for dinner with members of the Rotary Club, the organisation we had chosen to work with due to slow response from the Botswana government itself. Basically, Rotary selected some of its projects for us to help out at. Dinner was atypically Western and was carried out Rotary style, with the vice-Chairman saying grace, several members talking about Rotary, a raffle (lucky Janessa walked away with a bottle of red wine) and other bell-ringing protocol. I sat next to a lady called Alessandra who educated me about Botswana. The weather, the language (how disillusioned I was when I thought they spoke in Afrikaans!), nice places to visit. The end of dinner came as a relief as none of us felt particularly comfortable with the formality of the whole dinner.

Then came the drama. The keys to the incredible bond our team had were two entities – Milk and Tina, two unfortunate people, uncannily alike, who were perfect conversation. So, on our first night, we had the drama-mama-rity of Milk. A certain someone with the initials of H and L = Hi-low milk = Milk. Our creativity knows no bounds. We had 5 GEPpers (and one renegade GEPper- selected but rejected the place) and 5 Humans Prog (3 overlaps) people on the trip! You see, Milk was supposed to room with Goki who was scared as hell of rooming with her (Milk’s own-slightly rephrased- words- ‘I want to room with Goki because she has the most relationship experience.’) In the end, Tina moved Goki with Balps, our Logistics IC and put Jane-SAH, Oli and Milk together in a room with a queen-sized bed. Bad move. He put three girls into a room that was smaller than the rooms (with double beds) he put the other pairs of girls in. Sooo, one of the three was to move. And obviously, it was Milk. No one was going to let herself be subjected to the agony of rooming alone with Milk. Milk was horrified and claimed she wanted to room with Jane-SAH. Since they were in the same class, she wanted to get to know her better. Jane-SAH’s response. ‘She had six months to “bond” with me and now she wants to come all the way to Botswana to do that?’ Right, so Milk was to come to either Vane-SAH’s or our room. After much discussion, we volunteered ours. When Milk arrive at the door, she was distraught. She hoped to room with Vane-SAH and Michelle because she felt she could relate to them better. She sat cross-legged at our door while the relieved pair of Oli and Jane-SAH who now had the burden off their shoulders moved Milk’s belonging spiritedly in our room. After much coaxing and soothing of the ‘the whole world is against me, I’ve been pushed around’ thing Milk had going, things were fine. Then the best thing happened. Milk lost her camera, one of the many things she was going to lose and find (in this case, not find) during the span of nine days. She had already lost and found her mobile on the bus ride to Botswana. We helped search high and low- visited Goki’s room once, Oli’s thrice and the stairwell twice- and kinda came to the conclusion that it was hopelessly lost. Great. She locked herself in the toilet and started sobbing loudly while Bee Juan and I already tucked well into bed tried consoling her and telling us to sleep and wait till the next day to look for it again. She wouldn’t listen so in the end, we just kept quiet. And several minutes after there was silence, guess who crept out of the toilet and started making a din in the room. You got it. Now she wanted to let herself out and as dutiful roommates there was no way she was going to leave the room and go wandering about on her own. It was past midnight. So we accompanied her for the umpteenth time to Oli and Jane-SAH’s room (we had to hammer away at the door to wake them up) to search. Still not trace. Next, the sprint to the stairwell.‘The whole world is against me again, my family is so poor you don’t know how long I got them to agree to the trip, and it took me three years to get my parents to buy me this camera… et cetra whining went on and on and on. Finally, after much eyeball-rolling, we went back to the room and tucked ourselves back into bed. Milk sat on her half of the bed (Bee Juan and I were kind enough to give her a whole half of it while we settled for a quarter each but apparently that wasn’t enough as she made some pretty good kicks at Bee Juan in the middle of the night) while we tried to sleep. Like any true blue attention seeker, there was no way she was going to let us sleep while she wallowed alone in her misery. So the minute we were silent, she went, ‘Rachel, are you awake?’. I didn’t reply. Then she tried, ‘Is anyone awake?’ Bee Juan did. That did it for her. She went on with her whole pity me drivel. And that did it for me. I yelled at her. Applause please. Bee Juan was laughing so hard while I did the shouting. I shouted things like ‘What do you want from us?’ till I started trembling… with anger or guilt I don’t know. The scare tactic seemed to work. She tried answering back but her answers made no sense. In the end, she said, ‘I want you to forgive me?’ And I said, ‘Yes, we forgive you. If you really want to do something for us, go to sleep?’ And then she quietened down. The thing about Milk, as Vane-SAH said two days after, was that she gets you really infuriated and then you burst out at her and feel really guilty because you know she didn’t really do anything really wrong but it’s some unspeakable thing about her that gets you really angry. A whole throng of ‘really’s! There you have it, that’s how we got her to sleep, that’s how we lost two and a half precious hours of rest on our first night at Botswana and it made fantabulous conversation fodder the next morning.

Day Two,

The name of the day care centre we visited eludes me. Most African names do. The only two Setswana phrases I can remember are ‘Du Mela’(hello/good morning) and ‘Basadi’ (toilet)… oh, and ‘Aiyayayayaya Aiyayayaya Aiyayayaya Yoho Amen’ which I don’t think is in Setswana either. When we got there, the game team split ourselves up and Shawn and I went to a classroom to meet a group. We taught them nursery rhymes as planned before instructions came to take them out for a mass song and dance session. While that was going on, I whipped out my camera and started taking photos. It was then that I learnt how much children are fascinated by cameras. At first, just one boy stuck himself to me, hankering after a chance to fiddle with it. Then came a whole pack of them and I had to divert their attention elsewhere (i.e, the lao ying zhuo xiao ji game that was going on). Still, the five or six who remained began snatching the camera from each other. I heard the clicks go off incessantly and thought, ‘Oh God, Chayhim is going to kill me.’ While I wanted to pull the camera away from them to protect it from scratches, I didn’t actually want to take that moment away from them. I could see from their eyes how delighted they were with each click. My saving grace came in the form of games when the kids were again ushered indoors. I rushed to the canteen, put the camera back into my backpack and returned to the room where games were conducted. That was the kind of my whole photographic experience. I decided that I’d want to interact more with the children and get to know them better; to come away from the whole experience with a few familiar and unforgettable faces instead of a mass of them. Basically, the games didn’t really work out very well because we made a mistake in giving out the toys first. So instead of having a responsive crowd, we had a rowdy group of excited children blowing into their balloons and shaking their shakers. Probably the most poignant moment of the morning was when a girl came to sit on my lap and as I cradled her in my arms, she called me Mama and Daniel Papa. I didn’t realize its significance at that moment but later when I was told that the children we were playing with were AIDs orphans.
A while later, it was off to the kitchen to serve the mee goreng, cabbages and eggs the cooking team had prepared. The food was lukewarmly received. Some wanted extra servings, some dumped their food. We gave out biscuits to the children and I thought it was really amusing how exasperated Oli was with the ‘naughty children’ who kept tricking her into giving more biscuits to them. ‘They hide their biscuits under the table and then hold out one hand to ask for more laaah, don’t give them anymore, this table has got a lot already!’ Another agitated figure was Kaleni who was upset that we had come to bring aid to such a well developed day care centre and that the kitchen staff and some American volunteers were heartily helping themselves to our bag of biscuits without asking. As Goki said, ‘You don’t know the background of these people. For all you know, the set of clothes they are wearing might be the only clothes they have. Who are we to judge who we should give to? The reason why the place is so nice is because the US government had donated 1.2 million to build the place and not because the children are rich.’ I really don’t know who to agree with. I have the same dilemma with the football field and the compound. That I will expound on later. Anyway, after lunch, we had to chase after the children who were about to be sent home to stay behind to watch the (unfortunately) one and only puppet s0ow we were to perform. Once again, the response was lukewarm. I think the language barrier was a problem. They didn’t really understand us although they did laugh at some points. While we were leaving the centre, Vane-SAH and I spotted some pathetically clothed children across the road. ‘Those are the ones that need our help,’ we said as we ran over to give them packets of biscuits. Then, I didn’t know the children at the centre had been AIDs orphans. There you see is the huge dilemma – to help poor children with parents or to help AIDS orphans who already have help from charities. But at the end of day, I guess, it’s people like us who clothe and feed the children at day care centres like the one we visited. If everyone decides to stop funding them because they think they already have enough help, they’re going to be poor children without parents.

Lunch at a seafood restaurant called ‘Something Fishy’ which I thought sounded really fishy! I mean, who would want to give the impression that the fish they serve is fishy! Fortunately, we had a very sumptuous AND delicious lunch; the first of Tina’s extravagant splurges on meals (I can’t complain!).

Next stop, the Red Cross Rehabilitation Centre. Throughout our journey there, we were making guesses at what kind of rehab centre it’d be. It turned out to be nothing suspicious (e.g, drugs, smoking). It was there we had to do the whole Singapore segment thing Vane-SAH and I came up with. I was horrified to find that I had left the postcards I had brought along for that purpose at the hotel. Goodbye the conversation starters, hello awkward silence. Not quite. After singing a couple of Sing Singapore songs for them, Tina’s bright (indeed) idea was to get them to sing their own songs for us as part of a cultural exchange and then pair up with some of them to talk. I must admit, it worked. The Africans really put us to shame with their spirited impromptu performance. They had so little time to discuss and prepare but they could harmonise and come out with some kind of canon! Even though many of them had severed limbs and physical disabilities, they joined the dancing with what little they had. I think this is one quality of the many Africans, old and young, we met that we ought to learn. Despite the little they had (bodily and materially), they retained a love for life and for people. It is instinctive for humans who have had so many things taken away from them to become reclusive hermits but the African people fight on. They give so much of themselves. The Bible is spot on when it says the rich will be poor and the poor rich. During interaction time, I’m proud to say I met a guy with six fingers on both hands! I kept telling him how cool I thought he was but he was obstinate in insisting ‘two fives!’ Would you rather six weak fingers or five strong ones? God knew best, I guess. It was really funny when Balps started playing pool with one of the guys from the centre. I wanted to push this lady in a wheelchair to play pool and told her I’d help her hit the ball with the cue but she kept desisting. I didn’t realize until I tried to play chopsticks with her that she couldn’t hold the cue with her hands as she had lost all feeling in them. She couldn’t really speak English well and I couldn’t speak Setswana so it was a bit difficult to communicate. I must learn it someday and go back to Botswana to talk properly to these people! The fellow I really remembered well though was the very lovely seventeen year old chap who held my hand and showed me around his classroom (for sewing and design). He and a friend were about to take us somewhere when Tina stopped them before we were about to move on. Disabled people are not exactly ‘cute’ enough for his photo opps. We needed really cute and pathetic looking people. We needed slums, which we later learnt to call ‘compounds’ instead.

Ahoy slums and poor people. We stopped at a random street and walked in groups from house to house to distribute the aid. Our experience was uneventful, apart from a family trying to get aid from us a second time. Vane-SAH’s one was far more exciting and I shall tell you about it! Ha. In the process of distributing aid, her group seriously interrupted an infamous someone in red underwear and unzipped trousers. Loud music and all other signs (e.g, taking a long time to come out) told them the guy had finished ‘the job’ before coming out. When they asked him how many people were in the house, he said two even though his neighbours claimed there was only one occupant!

Tina had another bright idea – stopping in the middle of a football field to distribute aid. As we stood by the van during crowd control, we could literally see people running in from the streets towards the van. And as expected, it got really messy and rowdy (fantastic for photo opp-ing, desperate faces, hands stretched out) and things didn’t quite go to the people who needed them most. Girly clothes ended up with guys thrice the size of them and the good ones who queued obediently at the back of the queue were unable to get the items as people kept cutting in at the middle of it. In the end, we had to retreat into our vans as we were starting to get swarmed by throngs and throngs of people. As we took off, it was disheartening to see how ungrateful some people were, replaying the action of throat slitting with their index finger and threatening to throw rocks at us. We bring aid but we’re not God. We’ll never have enough to give something to every one of them, especially if they take the things, run home to drop them off and come back to cut the queue for more. But I guess this they will never understand.

Dinner was a blast. We had Thai food and lots of really dirty talk. While Tina’s table was enjoying terribly serious conversation about the next day’s programme, we discussed umbrellas (apparently Setswana for a certain type of contraceptives), bananas and other ‘wrong’ stuff. Xue Hao, Goki, Balps and Shawn were on a roll. Xue Hao’s one-liners were legendary, his comic timing excellent. It’s hilarious how everything people say, consciously or unconsciously, can be made to sound ‘wrong’! The dessert Tina (unaware of the conversation we were having) chose was… timely and most appropriate! Goreng pisang (fried bananas) with vanilla ice cream and paper umbrellas. It had us in fits. Unless you have the purest of minds, you can pretty much guess what each was representative of. When Jasmine scrapped off the skins of the goreng pisang to eat the bananas alone due to her wheat allergy, we went delirious. Think circumcision!

The bus ride back was a whole lot of fun, recounting our really ‘wrong’ dinner experience to an innocent Vane-SAH and roaring with laughter at the Daniel joke.

Balps: Daniel, fly.
Daniel: Fly? Where?
Balps: Your pants.
*Daniel starts to hit his trousers, looking for the fly*
Balps: The fly of your pants.
Daniel: *calmly zips up* Say earlier lah.

Scandal! Shawn and Milk slept together… on separate beds. Much to our relief, we were saved from Milk for a night though admittedly most of it was spent in Xue Hao’s room watching Lost, playing bridge and slamming our ‘two favourites’. According to Shawn, we were laughing so loud, he could hear us from two rooms away as the rooms had paper-thin walls. Hmm, right, wasn’t he supposed to be asleep though? We ended up eating chocolates in Vane-SAH’s room before Kal took over Milk’s place in our bed for a night. You can rest assured that nothing sordid happened though. Gay… ahem… metro guys are the most harmless of creatures, Vane-SAH says.

Day Three,

Milk came banging on our door at seven. Thank God for her wake up call. ‘What time is it?’ I asked her sleepily. ‘Six, you still have half an hour to sleep.’ Lovely. Kal catches a glance of Bee Juan’s watch, ‘Is this Botswana time?’ Bee Juan nods. ‘It’s seven o’clock.’ Major panic attack. I slipped into my flip flops and charged down to 124 to wake Jasmine’s up while Kal covered the 2nd floor (205, 220, 224, 237, 240 and 238). Fortunately, the others were already awake. Rafflesian self discipline. Hrmm.

This was one centre’s name I remember because it’s in English name- Anne Stine (pronounced Annastin). It was set up by a Dutch couple who lost their daughter to a swordfish (she was impaled by it). Interacting with the children at this centre was a very different experience from yesterday’s in the sense that they responded more slowly and could not understand English as well due to their mental and physical disabilities. As in the Red Cross Rehab Centre, many of the children did their best to take part in the song and dance we organized for them. On the whole, the games and the songs ran more smoothly. The children especially liked the ones not originally planned for, like ‘It’s I who build community’ and ‘London bridge is falling down’. In essence, the more actions the better. Tina was right on one count but wrong about the ‘running in circles’ bit. During the previous day’s debrief, he said, ‘In the video, if I take away the music, all I’ll have is you running in circles.’ We ran in circles during London Bridge and limbo AND those were the most well received! In retrospect though, he might have been quite right. On the third day, we were far more organized than the day before. We had a specific ‘goal’ in terms of songs to sing and games to play. At the day care centre, we were basically just piggy backing the children, distracting them and keeping them occupied before the food was ready to be served. When we ran out of things to entertain with children with, having exhausted our songs and games reserve, we whipped out our mahjong paper (a very clever move) and got the children to draw something for us while we drew something for them! I strayed away to play a little boy bouncing a ball on his own and we started playing a simplified form of volleyball. I thought he had astounding ball sense given his disability.

Lunch was mee goreng again before the shipment had yet to arrive. The children enjoyed it more than the previous day and the cooking team was praised by the lady in charge of the centre for the wonderful meal they prepared. Before we left, we recorded two highly amusing videos – us doing a human carousel and a music video of ‘I believe I can fly’ with us on a see saw flapping our wings and singing at the top of our lungs. We had such a legendary team!

Camphill came next and it was probably the most picturesque of all the centres. The children were decked in Adidas tracksuits (donated ones I’m sure). It also had the most enthusiastic tee-chas (as pronounced by the African children) who boogied with us and did the Macarena. Encouraged by our success at Anne Stine, we replayed the more popular songs and games and they worked relatively well again although I was rather sad that some of the kids in wheelchairs couldn’t play limbo and do the stomping for ‘If you’re happy and you know it’.
Our balloon team was activated to sculpt balloons for the children while they were entertained by the little toys (paper balls, footballs, shakers etc) we distributed. I played with one little boy. I have a thing for little boys… I’m a paedo like Xue Hao. Haha.

Headed back to the hotel to dress up for the Charity Gala Dinner some Rotary Club members had very generously sponsored us for. Bee Juan and I ended up spending a little more than an hour trying to fix a spoilt microphone. I dismantled it to find that the wires had snapped and we set out to solve the problem by reconnecting them but that was by no means an easy task considering the sheer thinness of the wires. After much tweaking and snipping (cutting off the rubber insulation and trying to tie the copper wires together such that the live and neutral wires didn’t touch each other), well… I, clumsy-handed me, pulled out all the wires and effectively eliminated all hope of us ever fixing the microphone. So we stuffed all the wires back in and decided to declare it unfixable. As a result, we had fifteen minutes to take our showers and wore wet hair to the dinner, a big fashion no-no (I’m always chided by my brother for going out for dinner right after a shower). And to top it all off, we were dressed like clowns in our red and white striped tops for a black tie dinner (not exactly black tie because there were people who were not in tuxs but formal enough). Uh-oh. I ended up getting seated at the wrong table, Tina’s table, but we did have an interesting evening indeed. Tina was sprouting nonsense the whole while and was highly entertaining (especially the relationship advice he gave Kaleni). We did more laughing at him than laughing with him though! This was one man who was hopelessly self-righteous, and oblivious or at least pretended to be oblivious to what people thought of him. He acted in a terribly obnoxious way towards the waitress yet turned to us to say, ‘See, that’s how you make people happy’, just like how he said the exact same thing after calling a male waiter ‘Miss’ at breakfast one morning. Kaleni feels he behaves just like a colonial master.

At the end of the evening, we had a group of very bored and drunk teenagers (too much wine) in clownish attire meeting the president on his way out. I found it amusing how we went out before dessert to get into formation, like planes at the national day parade, and ended up having to go back in before politicians in Botswana are far too down to earth to leave a dinner without ‘looking good on the dance floor’ (cue Artic Monkeys song). The president was very cordial though and shook our hands warmly before posing for a photo.

Mike Lakin, the president of Rotary, didn’t allow us to escape without (Owl, I know you’ll love this) ‘singing for our supper’ and sing we did. Led by the ever so sing-i-li-cious Vane-SAH who I really think should take up a career in singing, we belted out Home for the crowd that remained. The deed of thanks was done.

We headed back to the hotel to resolve the crisis of the night. Michelle had spilled the beans and Milk had been informed of what we thought of her. Mama mia, we had drama every night! What would the trip have been without Milk! Basically, the whole night was spent having a relatively heated debate on whether we should stop bitching about Milk (because twelve owning one wasn’t exactly fair), be nice to her and get on with what we were there to do or continue bitching about her… or something like that. I couldn’t quite pin down what the whole purpose of the debate was. After about two hours of rather pointless discussion, Goki asked Kal who invited Milk on the trip (him). End of discussion. This was one of the few nights Bee Juan and I had our beds to ourselves during the trip.

Oh and that night, we posed in our red and white YC shirts for a photo that would have made it on Stomp. If only the Internet connection had worked.


Day Four,

In fact, we had such a cosy night that we overslept! Vane-SAH had to knock on our door to pull us out of bed because Milk’s wake up call (plain door hammering) didn’t quite seem to have roused us from our contented state of slumber.

A long drive out to another centre for AIDS orphans. Stopped along the way at a mud house to distribute relief items to a family. It turned out it was one of the ladies’ birthdays and Tina joked that God had sent him ‘an sms asking him to bress (sic- bless) them’. It’s really funny his ‘l’s become ‘r’s. Later in the evening, he said something along the lines of ‘See, I bress this baby’. Yes, I’m sure he wanted to ‘breast’ the baby. We were allowed to tour their home for our generosity and were stunned by the bareness of their kitchen. No stove, no roof, just bowls on earth. Tina kept going, ‘What food do we have? Give them food, give them more Cadbury biscuits’.

This was to be our first day dealing with a large group of children. We were stunned when we were ushered into a dining hall with approximately thirty preschoolers. ‘Where are the children? I bet they exaggerated the numbers so that we’d bring them more things,’ someone muttered.

It turned out the older children were still at school and would only arrive in the afternoon. So once again, we could repeat our small group activities. The games team led the preschoolers into one of the classrooms and taught them nursery rhymes and songs. I stood at the back of the group trying to get the little kids behind to take part. They were less receptive as compared to the children in front who were mimicking Vane-SAH and Jane-SAH with much enthusiasm. I had to move their arms and bodies for them as if they were puppets and still three of them refused to follow the actions when I stopped ‘controlling’ them. I was very encouraged, though, to see a really cute little girl in a purple coat watching the JV pair intently and singing along with gusto!

After London Bridge and the Rainbow Song, we proceeded to the playground where it was kind of a free-for-all, play-with-whoever-you-like, keep-them-entertained thing. I accompanied some little girls to the toilet where I was very amused by the overflowing miniature toilet bowl they were urinating into. They kept at it even though it was filled to the brim and urine was sploshing out of it and onto the floor. As we were about to leave, I realized there was a dark boy with sad eyes wrapped up in blankets on the floor. I kinda freaked out but tried to compose myself and flashed him a weak smile before carrying a little girl out of the toilet.

To tell the truth, I had a good time in Africa testing out different ways of carrying kids. Piggy backing, I found, was the best liked although your back really hurts after you do it for a prolonged period of time, especially if the kids are really heavy. I remember carrying a girl who later complained that her arms hurt from the ride. Oops.

Got back out into the sun and started playing frisbee with two of the ‘cool kids’ (the coolest guy in the blue beanie included). The wind kept blowing the frisbee towards the fence and I had to try to move them away from the fence and towards the playground to prevent the frisbee from flying out. But in the end, it did fly out. However, as they were ‘cool kids’, they had a cool way to get the frisbee back. The coolest guy in the blue beanie removed a bucket leaning against the fence to reveal… a hole! Yes, a hole they could crawl through to get out and retrieve the frisbee. I thought it was really like a scene in a spy thriller where the hero never fails to have tricks up his sleeves.

No day is complete without drama and Milk didn’t disappoint. This time, it was the kitchen saga. I have no clue what happened (neither did most other people) but according to a source, Tina told Milk to get out of the kitchen for interrupting and she took his words literally and left. Tina and Milk at loggerheads, how apt. Thankfully, the situation was resolved when Vane-SAH and Goki managed to get Milk to calm down and pull herself together. According to Vane-SAH, Milk did actually behave better after the incident. Tina has his ways? His reaction, though, was legendary – ‘She’s gila. She’s gila.’

DHL shipment was due to arrive but before it did (Goki, Balps and Jasmine were waiting to meet it at the airport) master chef Shin Jung (on Tina’s appointment) had to whip up an impromptu meal of colourful pasta for the preschoolers, who were kept satiated with cereal (Kal’s idea), apples, Cadbury chocolates and sweets.

It was our first pasta day and as with most first days, things happen. One thing we’ve learnt about African kids-they don’t like sweet stuff. If you want them to eat your food, add salt, add lots and lots of salt; don’t just add a pinch, spray salt all over till it’s salty as hell and ils adorent. After sampling our own cooking for lunch, we proclaimed it good. Unfortunately, the first batch of older kids did not agree. We were a little disheartened when the kitchen staff came to us, showed us a whole mountain of pasta and said, ‘They don’t like this food.’ So, for the second batch’s pasta (and for the subsequent days), we were more than generous with our salt.

I guess the whole clichéd saying of ‘we’ve learnt more from them than they probably have from us’ is true. I’ve really learnt so much from the heart and spirit of the Africans. Their voices were always in unison and full of vigour when they sang. I found the ‘I am Jo’ stirring porridge song very creative; it really got us to ‘shake our bodies’!

It felt fantastic distributing aid to people who really appreciated what we gave them (very different from the football field mass distribution experience); they pulled on the tee shirts and slipped into the skirts and looked genuinely grateful for what they had been given. You get this warm, fuzzy feeling from seeing their faces light up!

Next stop- compounds. Yes, compounds not slums! More mud houses, more dilapidated living quarters. Visiting the people in these compounds felt quite surreal. In my mind, I was kind of aware that there were people living in such dismal conditions but to actually meet these people, put things into their hands and come into flesh-to-flesh contact with them! Once again, these were people who had so little but they gave so much of themselves in their warmth and hospitality. There seems to be this Western perception that Africans are savages and that Africa is not a safe place. While it might be true in certain instances, I felt strangely safe in Botswana. The people there were often more honest than people in Singapore! When Michelle left her wallet at a restaurant, a waiter kept it for her and returned it to her the next day when she went searching for it. Back to the compounds. I remember two faces distinctly. The first- of a grandmother on the ground, calling out for sugar. I was moved. How many days, weeks, months, years has it been since this woman has had a taste of sugar? Yet how little we value sugar in ‘our world’? I had sugar in my bag in the form of Halls sweets and this woman would enjoy those two packets of sweets far more than I would ever be able to. The second- the screwed up face of a little boy bursting in tears, terrified at the sight of us yellow creatures. And I remember their dinner – beans with water boiled over firewood. For all eighteen of them.

Right, I’m going to return to my whole ‘they have so little but so much more’ theme. But seriously, the sunset we watched while we were traveling to our last mud house, against the backdrop of the hills/mountains and silhouette of horses in the foreground, was astounding. And need I mention the stars (and the milky way!) that we saw that night as we were traveling back to our hotel! The whole sky was covered in stars. Simply indescribable. I now know why the word ‘indescribable’ exists! Lying on wifey Vane-SAH’s lap, looking up at the stars and listening to Coldplay’s ‘Look at the stars, look how they shine for you…’- one memory I pray I’ll never lose. And the moon we didn’t manage to take photos of! The enormous full moon that hung low above the plains in all its reddish-orange splendour for only a while before reverting to more common whiteness higher up. (Pssh. I’m attempting poetry so allow me artistic license here!)

As we got closer and closer to the city, the stars began to fade away, vanish. One thought hit my mind- God is fair. The people out there living in those compounds will probably never enjoy the material comforts of our lives but they are certainly not any ‘poorer’ than we are. They have the stars and moon for company every night and far more love and happiness than many people who have far more materially than them.

We returned to the hotel for a gastronomical buffet treat at the Grand Palm and were all very excited about snapping away at the red moon after dinner. Unfortunately, as mentioned above, the moon had made its way high up in the sky by the time we were done with our meal. Positively, we did get to admire the ‘rabbit’ on it and laugh at Kal’s misconception that the moon does not move.

Day Five,

On our way to the Old Naledi Nursery School, we stopped over at a police station and I still don’t know what went on there.

Out of all the centres we had been to, the Old Naledi was probably the least developed. ‘The children are still at school’, we were told. For once, I thought, I could help out in the kitchen. But it was not to be. After peeling onions (albeit not being very adept at the task), I was instructed to meet a group of nursery kids and feed them cake. It was an enthralling experience, breaking the cake with my fingers and putting pieces and later crumbs into their mouths. I was particularly amazed by how voraciously they devoured the cake even in its crumby form. Most Singaporean kids would petulantly turn down a serving of crumbs but these children graciously accepted and ate them up with relish. During the cake feeding session, I grew very fond of a little boy in a black beanie. I have a fetish for little ‘beanie-d boys’, it seems. I didn’t quite get to talk to him as he could not understand English well and would only grin sheepishly at me when I spoke to him! Towards the end of our time there, he grew equally fond of me, especially after all the piggy backing and snuggles I gave him, and followed me about the place until I disappeared into the kitchen to help out with lunch. I absolutely adored him and had to keep protecting him from the older bullies who were waiting to pry his harmonica away from his hands (he wouldn’t let me put it in his bag for him). The bullies managed to pounce his brother instead and the poor boy burst out in tears, only to be consoled when my little beanie-d boy offered him his own harmonica, which we had fought so hard to protect. Such a sweetie!

Games turned out to be a little messy again with harmonicas and balloons being snatched away by jealous hands. Capturing the attention of a hundred odd kids in an open space was a challenge. Although it wasn’t the most organized of programmes, I felt I was able to bond best with the children. I was repeatedly pulled into the middle of the circle to dance along with them and complimented by a very lovely boy in a black tracksuit.

Meanwhile, the cooking team was having a pretty difficult time in the kitchen, caught in a tirade of snide remarks. Vane-SAH and Balps attempted meatballs. In their enthusiasm, they ran to the shop and bought porridge back instead of flour, earning them the ridicule of the kitchen staff. Meatballs didn’t work out but lunch did. I went around teaching children sucking their hard-boiled eggs how to peel the shells off them.

Then, it was off to Galamandu Village to distribute clothes and food. We were thanked profusely for stopping by and the people were again very appreciative of the aid we brought them, gobbling up the crumbs of cake and putting on the clothes immediately. They were also very keen on posing for the camera!

We were running late for a barbecue at a Singaporean’s house. Escorted from our hotel by a Malaysian couple in their Volvo (was it?), we arrived at a cluster of houses similar to our Singaporean private estates. We were welcomed by a very lovely couple, Joyce and her African husband (can’t remember his name), and encouraged to go for the food. We were also constantly reminded to feed the government drivers well as this was their last night with us. Barbecuing wasn’t as simple as we thought it would be. The sausages kept catching fire and ended up charred on the outside but raw inside! Vane-SAH and a couple of others devised a method to cook the sausages well. Instead of barbecuing the whole sausage, they decided to cut the sausages up into bite-size pieces. Larger surface area, higher rate of reaction. Thank goodness we had delicious cooked food to rescue us from the barbecuing failure! The dessert (some pie and custard with fruits) was heavenly.

We also found out that we had the Canto-philes in our midst – Shawn, Milk and Jane-SAH. The Canto-philes enjoyed a very animated conversation with Joyce’s mother, an extremely sweet old lady, about speaking Canto (naturally), Singapore and other things.

Oh, and I broke their wine glass while trying to be helpful with the dishes. Olives and Daniel helped clean up while Tina ‘distracted’ the couple outside. I assumed he was going to tell them but he didn’t (later claiming he didn’t know I broke it) so I did the job myself when we met again in Mokolodi.

We sang ‘Home’ for our supper again and made Joyce tear.

Tina enacted a mini farewell ceremony for our drivers.

Midnight feast at Room 204. Cup noodles, grape biscuits and rice crackers with Nutella!
Day Six,

I will never forget House 14.

When we got there, we were given a brief introduction to the Telokweng SOS Village and SOS villages in general before being split up to different houses.

Balps and I were assigned 13 and 14. 14 was where the children gathered for food, food I cooked!

I shall get back to narrating things chronologically. Well, the sweetest of girls (yes, for once, a girl and not a boy) called Sarah (I’m thinking of naming my daughter Sarah in her honour) took me around the village. I thought she spoke brilliant English for a twelve year old. The village had a very homely feel to it, a characteristic unique to SOS villages.

I returned to the house to find that Balps had yet to arrive to cook. She was the cooking half and I the games half. But it turned out she was preoccupied with logistical matters and I had to get down and cook, a task I gladly welcomed. Sarah very kindly lit the stove with a match and a couple of other children helped find pots for me to boil water with. The first task was easily accomplished. Water in pot, eggs into water, pot on stove, boil. Then, came the corned beef. After breaking the tab of one tin, I managed to get the rest of the tins open without much of a hassle. Balps, who enigmatically appeared and disappeared at intervals, had to stab that one tiresome tab-less tin with her Swiss army knife.

I stared at the tomatoes and onions on the table and wondered how on earth I was going to get enough tomato juice for the sauce. Nonetheless, I started peeling the onions and the house mother, who had magically appeared and introduced herself as Caroline, generously chopped up her own carrots and leek to add to my concoction of tomato and onions.

It turned out our house had not been given the regulation Prego Sauce, macaroni and stir-fried vegetables, and Balps had to run around searching for them until she found spare supplies at an empty house. With the Prego sauce and one-third bottleful of water, my concoction was complete. The house mother did most of the macaroni cooking.

I left the kitchen for a bit to teach the children how to make finger puppets with the coloured paper we brought them when I realized that I had forgotten how to make the origami puppets. Sheepishly, I tried to change the session to a paper plane making exercise instead but it turned out I was not any good at that either- the planes I made couldn’t fly while those they made, without my instruction, flew! Finally, the folding sequence came back to me. I called for the children to gather again and taught them how to fold the puppet. Sometimes, my memory plays games with me.

Either the children really enjoyed the food or knew how to make me feel good about my cooking. I am particularly tickled by one incident. I was trying to force down the macaroni on my plate (one they had reserved for me), afraid that I’d give a bad impression if I threw food away, when one of the group of them surrounding me pointed at the boy sitting across me and said, ‘He wants to eat your food.’ Relieved, I handed up plate to the boy who took it to another corner of the table and started taking gulpfuls of the macaroni, all while intruding hands were grabbing macaroni and sauce off the plate. They seemed to like the food so much that they scraped the sauce off the pot with bread!

Cleanup was really fun. Many of the kids willingly volunteered their help and I had to fight to be the one washing. We had this whole ‘conveyor belt thing’ with one person scrubbing the dishes, one spraying detergent, one rinsing and one drying. When the dishes were done, I stayed behind to talk to a fifteen-year-old girl in a Pink Eminem cap (can’t remember her name though) who was tasked to mop the floor being the oldest in the house. She shared a lot about her family, how her father got another woman and how things got messy and she ended up in the SOS village.

I ended up in the TV hall playing African xylophones with some of her friends while she was away doing something (unspecified). They finally got the television set working and soon other children had heard word and swarmed in to watch Anaconda. Someone said we had to leave at three, so I bid farewell to Sarah and a very cute little girl in orange who kept hugging my legs… and basically photo-whored like mad. I was really touched when Sarah hugged me and said, ‘I’ll miss you’, not in a loud, thoughtless sort of way but in her own quiet and soft manner (so hard to describe). Later, when I ran back to the centre of the village, I found out that we weren’t leaving yet but received orders not to return to the TV hall. I had a go at the trampoline and was surprised by how out of breath I got as I bounced up and down on it. The air in Africa is quite different from that in Singapore. Thinner and drier, I feel. Jane-SAH was really shaking it with a bunch of African kids who doing some serious dancing. Their flexibility astounds me. I’m so stiff I can only do a Robo dance (the reason why I’m Robo dog!).

Everyone was pretty sad to leave because we had such a tremendous day. Olives was particularly upset because she felt she hadn’t got to interact with the kids as much as she wanted to. Her pain was aggravated by some silly kid at the window who replied ‘no’ when Olives asked her if she had enjoyed herself. Boo.

The day ended on a high note though with yet another sumptuous meal and… go-karting! Just thirty pulahs for ten rounds of dirt track action. I kept crashing into tyres and had to be constantly reminded to not go so fast. Poor Vane-SAH sprained her thumb from a nasty collision with Bee Juan!

To be continued.

In the meantime, here's a song by JV (Jane-SAH and Vane-SAH!):

Never knew that we could gel like this,
Stuck on the bus with nowhere to piss.
Singing songs very crazily,
Look out for the geography.
Listen to the noise,
Can u hear Peck snore,
Telling us to shut up forever more.
Balpreet loves lime juice,
Arshath gets tanned,
While we are riding on this stuffy van.
Come what may,
Lam will pay.
Come here Xue Hao and tell him what you say.

Ledges!

Botswana Humanitarian Trip 2006
Youth Challenge
x Peck
x Shawn
x Arshath
x BeeJuan
x Michelle
x Jane-sah
x Vane-sah
x XueHao
x Rachel
x Jasmine
x Olives
x JUNGle
x Balps
x Goki
x Huiling


BLOGS!!!
Xuehao's Girly Blog
Rachel the Stalker's Blog
Arshath the Diva's Blog
Bal-pretty's Blog
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August 2006
September 2006



DESIGNER; lonelyME
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