Mothers and babies at the Clinic

In Tonota village, the thatched-roof rondavels are scattered along the road. Three or four huts, each with its low mud-walled courtyard, are clustered into a compound. Each compound is surrounded by dead thorn-tree limbs set upright in the sand or by a green rubber-spike hedge that glistened in the gray landscape.

Under the relentless sun, women cook the family lunch in a three-legged iron pot over a fire. Mealie meal would bubble in a hundred pots and nearby the dinner’s mealie is pounded rhythmically with long wooden pestles in mortars by the girls of the compound.

Most of the women come back to the village in April from their homes at the “lands,” the tribally allocated acreage outside the village. In June, the harvest is past and it is winter. The men plowed and the children helped to chase away the thieving weaverbirds and animals.

The crops were laid to rest on wooden platforms on stilts, high above any animals. Bit by bit, the grains are threshed, winnowed, and pounded by the women to finally cook into porridge, sorghum or corn.  The rain determines the abundance of the crop.

I pass the donga, a tributary to the river that flows only when the rains come. There, Sedombo’s Butchery stands, jerrybuilt. Without refrigeration, they kill a goat now and then and sell it until it’s gone. Rotten meat has a stronger taste. Sedombo’s also sells “kaffir” beer, fermented sorghum or ginger. The land around Sedombo’s is littered with empty plastic beer bottles.

The village is often mostly composed of women and children. The men are out in the desolate cattle posts walking their cattle from the krall (corral) to the water hole and back. Some men find work at the copper mine, a dam site, or a diamond mine in Botswana. Some men journey to the Republic of South Africa to work in the gold mines.

The women and children greet me without fail in the village. The women shout out their greetings from around their fires. They are dressed in ankle-length skirts, blouses, and the duke, a cloth wrapped tightly around their heads. Most carry babies on their backs, held with a blanket tied around their waist and above their breasts.

The way to the clinic down by the river is often punctuated by the crow of the cocks. The sound of the belled cows and goats hovers softly in the air. Tiny goatherds run after their herds, throwing stones to get the goats into the kraals or get them to stay together at a garbage heap.

I leave the main road at the medicine shop where tonics for tired blood made of turpentine are sold. It is just past the gigantic Kgotla tree under which the chief and the village elders  sit each day to hear cases, ask questions, and make judgments.

Most of those on the road go to the river for water. The Shashe River is a great swatch of sand nine months of the year, dividing one horizon of thorn scrub from the other. The Shashe only flows a few months of the year depending on the rains upstream, but water is trapped in the sand. For the rest of the year, women and children carry battered buckets on their heads. At the river, they gather in clusters, dig a large hole, and chatter until water seeps into the hold. Then the clear water is dipped carefully into the buckets. When full, they balance the bucket on their heads and walk to the riverbank and then home.

In a few hundred yards, I catch the first view of the clinic in the distance on the dry river’s bank. The four white columns glisten. Women in colorful clothing move about the porch or in the thatched shed to the north waiting for the nurse. The babies no longer die as they did before the clinic was built. Some women are beginning to accept birth control methods.

As I come closer, they turn to look at me, smile, and say, “Dumella Mma.” They ask how I am. I answer that all is well. When I finish consulting with my friend, Daisy, the head nurse, I  return to the porch, greet the ladies, and bid them to stay well, “Sala sentle.”

I silently curse my lack of immunity to Botswana’s endlessly unique bacteria and then walk

the three miles back to the school and my students.

I might be able to hitch a ride with a kind-hearted donkey cart, tractor, or truck driver. Usually, I walk through the red sand with its scattered mud rondavels and umbrella-like thorn trees that stab out with three-inch needles. From the tallest trees hang the myriad straw balls of the weaverbird. Through the compounds, through the homeward and river-bound water-gatherers, the roosters, goats, cows, the endless greetings, I walk that dusty road.