The road out of town – where two girls try to fix a car….

Last night I accompanied Sara on a supply delivery into the bush. We left around 6pm and shortly after dusk descended upon us. The line of houses on the side of the road out of Maun quickly thinned and the houses changed from cement looking blocks to traditional one room mud huts with thatched roofs.

The round mud huts generally belong to low (or no) income families and few will be built near each other. If the family can afford it, they will build a hut for different family members and extended families will all live together. The single room mud brick houses are considered more modern, and apparently are more comfortable. Sara tells me that up to 17 people will live in the single room houses. The single room brick houses dominate within town and are seen everywhere in Maun. However, the traditional round mud huts are also in town and not just at the edge of town or in rural regions. Houses that have more than one room, much less a kitchen or a bathroom, are afforded by a minority.

Maun does not have much for outskirts. The houses quickly thin and eventually stop. Once it takes minutes to drive between houses, the pavement disappears in an abrupt jolt and yields to an extremely bumpy gravel mix. This jolt occurs less than an hour outside of the center of Maun.

We were jostling along on this very bumpy rocky path in darkness (electricity is not afforded by many houses that far out of town), when the engine started chugging. The motor cut in and out before it finally just stopped and we rolled to the side of the road. In defeat, we called to camp and asked for them to come save us. I wish I could describe the ridiculousness that followed of me and Sara (in her posh heels) with the hood raised peering in. Hey, at least we tried (and no, it wasn’t out of oil).

Our only sliver of luck in failing about 45min out of town (on a 2hr drive,) was that we were not beyond the buffalo fence. The buffalo fence runs for hundreds of kilometers across Botswana and was built to separate buffalo from the cattle south of the fence. The idea is similar to the Australian fence, which tries to control rabbits. One goal of the buffalo fence is to control hoof and mouth disease from spreading to the cattle (beef is a major export of Botswana, along with diamonds). In addition to controlling the buffalo, the fence separates, lions, elephants, and all the other scary beasts from the people. Once you are past the fence, you can’t just get out and walk around; it’s too dangerous.

Eventually Sven and the camp’s mechanic came to save us. The relief of seeing the red land cruiser approach was second only to the moment when the car failed on Sven and we knew we hadn’t needlessly called to camp. It did take Moses and Sven about10 minutes to tighten a loose cable, but we won’t talk about that…