The only thing I have to say about this jet lag: I’m going to need a lot of that instant coffee that I bought yesterday afternoon. But, rewinding a little:

I arrived in Gaborone (pronounced “hah-BOR-RONE-ee” around 11AM yesterday. The airport is very small, and has no payphones. I mention that because, although usually no one uses pay phones, I actually needed one to call my missing driver. Unfortunately, after asking around, I learned that there are no pay phones anywhere near the vicinity of the airport, and no ones in the small offices in the airport that I was allowed to borrow. A lady offered to let me use her cellphone if I had my own SIM card; but to buy a SIM card, I’d have to go into town. I wandered around, and apparently the distressed look on my face convinced a taxi driver and a hotel shuttle bus driver to ask me if I needed any help. I asked to borrow their phones to call the contact number I was given, but she didn’t pick up (I later learned that she was on vacation). After a while longer, the taxi driver realized that I was trying to get to the UPenn-Botswana program, and called the driver because they’re friends and know each other. I was picked up, and arrived safely in my room. That was my little adventure of the day.

The accommodations here at Pilane Court are great! I’m sharing a rather spacious room with Lila for now. There are two bathrooms in our unit of the house, three bedrooms total, and a kitchen. There’s hot water in the shower, everything is clean, and there are plenty of kitchen utensils. As of right now, there’s one Penn PhD student, Alexandra, living in our unit; another med student is supposed to arrive tomorrow. Our maid, or the “mother of the house,” is Alema, and she does our laundry for us every day! After I unpacked and settled into my room, I took a little nap…And woke up after 4PM in the afternoon, when Lila returned from the hospital. She updated me on the progress of the technologies and the work she’s been doing here. Unfortunately progress has been a little slow, but hopefully in the next 10 days that we’re both here, we’ll be able to get a significant amount of work done. Afterwards, we walked over to the grocery store.

I spent P194.70, which is roughly $25 ($1 USD =7.87 Pula), on eggs, bread, bananas, garlic, green beans, rice, two “naartjies” (some sort of citrus fruit), instant coffee, cocoa powder, oatmeal, milk, and peanut butter. There’s a section on the receipt that says “taxable value: P194.70; tax value: P20.86.” I only paid P194.70, so I guess tax is already accounted for in the sale prices. Hm, more than 10% tax on groceries. Just to give an idea of the cost of living here: milk (2L) cost P17.75 ($2.25), and a dozen eggs cost P15.50 ($2). The most expensive item by far on my list was the jar of Nescafe instant coffee, which cost P40.95 ($5.20).

Afterwards, Lila, Alexandra, and I cooked dinner over at the other unit where two UPenn residents are living. One of them, a dermatologist named Raj, mixed some spices together to create a spicy Indian curry that we mixed in with assorted frozen vegetables. Halfway through the cooking, there was a power outage. Not having experienced such a thing since a decade ago when there was a tornado in Alabama, I was extremely confused and thrown off by the sudden lack of electricity, and the lack of power we had (haha, pun) to fix the issue. We lit some candles and had a candlelight dinner.