Back in Botswana

It has been about two months since I had left the village for my trip to the United States. It is great to return while I love the United States, the laid back environment in our village is a nice change compared to the stress of the U.S. I believe this stress is caused by the 24 hour news cycles. It seems everything in the news is critical and dramatic, and any issue should be fixed in a matter of hours, rather then months or years.

One exciting item on the family side is my nephew “Z” the great poker player had his senior prom. Everybody was so excited in that he asked a girl to the prom. For the longest time his parents did not think he knew what girls were. See attached picture.

Not much has changed in the village since I left. Let me update you on a few things. Compost toilets; we have had 2 in operation for several months now and everybody is in agreement they like the one donated by Chephart Yosh best. The two villagers we have hired into our newly created public works department to shovel the compost and fill the compost pit have been doing a great job. It looks like we will not need to buy elephant dung this year (saving me $50.00 U.S. Dollars) as our natural compost should work just perfect for the pineapple fields.

As soon as we have a surplus in our treasury we will add some additional compost toilets. Our goal was to have five operational by now, but with the elders being a little loose with our treasury we have had to reset the expectations.

The village elders have not done any fund raising for the matching funds for the wind generator.  We have a year to raise the $5,000.00 U.S. Dollars to get the grant from the US stimulus package. Feel free to donate to our village, just pennies will help out.
Please Donate to DUG's Village

One exciting thing is the U.S. government did give us some funds to do an air survey for placement of the wind generator. Since we have no pilots in our village my nephew Austin “A” flew over and did the survey. He is a new pilot at only 14 years of age, but the price was right. We had to fly from Gaborone, since they had a landing strip. We did have a little bit of a scare, the first plane we rented had a major engine issue and if you watch the video you will hear the warning siren. We had to loop back and get a different plane. We flew over the village looking for a site that would get plenty of wind while being close enough to the stream to pump water up to the village. We found a perfect site. See attached video and picture.





Other then that nothing special has been happening at the village.

Poker has been an issue for me over the last few weeks. I will update my poker stats which are not very good in my next post.

Cheers,

DUG