T is for Terrible

Hello again from the land where sweating buckets and dirty feet are contrasted with the beauty of the Okavango river. We have almost completed our second week at work and we are excited for the long weekend ahead but I will get to that later.

As for work, this week we relocated to the craft shop and got straight down to work. Monday, I worked on their new price list. There has been some price changes since a similar project was ran a few years back. So I typed that out into excel and changed the prices. Tuesday I started working on a letter we are going to send out re-introducing our project. Yesterday Heather and I made a One-pager, new labels for the baskets and we are just putting the finishing touches on a mini brochure we are making. It is looking pretty good.

Heather and I learned to weave baskets this week, and let’s just say it is a very difficult task and the women who make them for our shop must have a lot of patience. Next week the lady who is teaching us said that we could start our very own baskets, so that is exciting, although I will probably have a very small messy basket by the end of 8 months but it is always fun to learn new things J

The grading system for the baskets based on the ’10 commandments of basket making’. In the Ten Commandments we look at things like symmetry, neatness, colour etc. The grading scale goes T, P, P+, IM and SP.

SP- super premium IM- intermediateP+ - premium plus P- premium T- Terrible – this is not a joke, but they are thinking about changing it to stand for Trying. As a basket weaver of this caliber I would appreciate the change.

This weekend is Independence Day in Botswana which is very exciting because it is a very big deal here. We get Monday and Tuesday off of work, which also is very exciting. Supposedly there is a talent show going on at the Junior Secondary School next to our house, dancing and traditional food at the kgotla (community meeting place) and I am sure there is a lot going on around Shakawe, a lot more than normal anyways.

I am about to melt so I have to stop typing now, I think it is sitting around 40C right now. One would think that it is just because we are coming from Canadian climate that we are not used to the heat and that is why we are feeling the heat this much, but unfortunately that is not the case. Even the people who live here, the Batswana, are all complaining about how hot it is as well, so that gives us no hope of getting acclimatized to the weather, guess we better just get used to be sweaty all the time.