Seasons Greetings

X-mas is all around!
The shops are exuberantly decorated.
Those who haven’t left to their home-village by now are seriously considering to wait till after X-mas because travelling is becoming more and more impossible.
Buying building-materials gets equally impossible. It seems like everyone is fighting over the last bags of cement, stones and doorframes, because X-mas is the time to go on with your house.
The goats that survived the many weddings just before X-mas have to beware.
We’re all dreaming of a white Christmas, and if the white is finished, we’ll take red, no ice, please.

Bashi

This master bathroom is mainly build by Bashi, as is the rest of the house. When we hear other people about building in Botswana, we realize without Bashi we would have been lost!

Landlord

Our landlord Bester, all dressed up for his job-interview with the EU, is as happy as we are with the building-results.

Google Earth 2

Being a mining engineer our neighbour Jeff owns a fancy gps, so he could tell us where we are. The coordinates of his plot are:
S 24 degrees 26’ 05.3”
E 026 degrees 04’ 08.4”
The last time he looked at GEarth the pictures were from around 2000, and the place seemed quite uninhabited.

Ours

Double event: Motushi hops over from Serowe, and Pelo’s daughter Yvonne comes back from college in Mafeking. They would sleep at Jeff’s, so our contribution is dinner. This makes us feel really officially settled in: loitering, eating, drinking, talking on our porch!
Yvonne is enjoying vegetables after 3 months of student-food, while her brother Edu Zachary enjoys sleep and daddy Jeff dreams of scouting - minerals of page 3-girls?

WWS 7

Where We Sleep 7: Finally settled in our master bedroom in Morwa.

WWS 6

Where We Sleep, 6th bedroom: Hille’s Sunset Bar in Morwa.
Because the house wasn’t totally ready on December 1st Jetske & Peter offered us two extra nights for free, braai included. When their spoiled rotten guests finally left, because they felt being nearby the building project would put just that extra bit of pressure, the house still was almost, but not enough, ready. Therefore Hille offered us his spacious office behind his Sunset Bar as a roof over our head.
Sounds like a dream come true to some people: living in a bar. It was great we could stay there, and it put a lot of pressure indeed, to our landlord and to the main builder, Bashi, who lives across Sunset and didn’t like it at all that we had to stay there.

WSWU 1

Google Earth

Our view

How to find our Morwa-mansion?
Go to Gaborone and face north. Look for the railroad to the north (direction Mahalapye), left from it is the old tar road up north, and a little more to the left is the A1 highway. Go to the A1, face north and look for the Pakhalane-crossroad (about 10 k’s north of Gaborone). At the right, you should be able to see the Pakhalane Golf Estate: golf-greens, mansions and a small lake. Follow the A1 further north. 14 k’s after Pakhalane there’s a tar crossroad. To the left you should see Bokaa with Bokaa-dam (a lake). Go right instead to enter Morwa. After 2 k’s on this small tar road take a left turn to enter the dirt road up to our house. First try to find Jeff and Pelo’s house: a green roof high up the hill. We’re on the other side of the dirt road a bit down from them. Depending on how recent the Google-pictures are you should see an empty plot, or a grey structure, a white house (2 weeks ago) or an apricot mansion (since yesterday). At night in the incredible starry skies we see the satellite passing about once an hour.

Who’s who

Our mansion

This month the white and the Dutch population of Morwa metropolis ‘our side of the railroad’ tripled. December 1st George moved in, and two days later we followed. Rumour has it that there are at least two whites at ‘the other side’, but this railroad seems to be like the Berlin Wall, so our side don’t know them.
If you enter our side and ask anyone for the Dutchman, people will direct you to Hille. He worked as a teacher all over Botswana and now owns Sunset Bar. Ask for the white man next to the graveyard and you’ll find LJ hailing from Michigan in the US, who is retiring in Morwa from his building company and carpentry workshop. That leaves the white man on the hill, our neighbour Jeff from Minnesota.
In other words: Morwa is a village without street-names or plot-numbers. People find you by your distinctive features. Around our plot for instance live the blind man who used to be a teacher, the old lady who’s plot everyone wants, and the man who works in Orapa.
We’re curious what our distinctive feature will be. The shopping bag, as our Nissan is called in Botswana, the bald white man, the woman who doesn’t allow catapulting at birds, or the empty fishpond?