The big news from Botswana is that it's been raining - not just any old rain but a deluge of Biblical proportions. It rained pretty much solidly from Saturday morning to late on Sunday night; in fact it rained so much that a large proportion of our yard is now inside our house. It's now (I guess) about 17c and cloudy, so everybody but me is wearing two coats and a woolly hat. At least I'm not melting anymore.
The Skillshare people very kindly leant me car for the weekend (a 3-litre Isuzu double-cab, in case anyone's interested) and Koreen, my host at the DSS, put some 'explore Botswana' routes together for me. So I spent Saturday morning driving from Gabs to a place called Kanye (sadly, there is no Kanye West) and calling in at interesting places on the way.
One of the interesting places was a lookout point at the top of what you could only really call a mountain pass (although mountain is overstating it a bit). To cut a long story short, I came to a bit of dirt track which I didn't dare to try even with 4x4; jumped out of the truck to walk the rest of the way (half a mile or so) and, about 10 yards short of the summit, trod on loose stone and sprained my ankle. I managed to hobble back to the car and, determined not to miss out on anything, drove the rest of the way with gritted teeth. There were six inches of water in the roads when I got there, so I gave up and came home. However, on the way back I called in at a game park and got to meet a couple of Cheetahs so it wasn't a complete wash out.
On Sunday the weather was even worse so I put in 12 hours at the IT coalface and got the interface finished. Which was pretty cool.
Just got back from a meeting with my end users, there are a few changes that they'd like to see but overall they're very happy, if a bit scared of the full day's training I'm planning for Wednesday...
Some funny Botswanan signs:
Ja-Bana funerals - free collections!!! (their exclamation marks.)
Slow but sure glazers
Reading of newspapers is forbidden (in a fruit shop)