Camp life

I grew up in a little town in Botswana called Selebi-Phikwe. Phikwe, like many towns in Botswana is centred around mining (copper/nickel in this case). The mine is involved in everything, from schooling to hospitals to the annual pantomime. For kids growing up, it was a dream come true. As everyone knew everyone else, we could run wild. No one worried about us or asked us where we were going, as our paents knew very little harm could come to us.

So for me to end up working just outside of Francistown is to truly come full circle. Francistown is about 200km from Phikwe, and the camp where we work is about 80km west of Francistown, toward the Kalahari Desert. It's dry, dusty, and sometimes incredibly beautiful.

The photo above is of the sun going down behind a section of our camp. Our tent is on the right. There are only about 10 people living permanently in the camp, so we really have to fight to make a life for ourselves and still manage to get along well enough to work together every day. We can't really walk around the area due to snakes, so we had to improvise to come up with a way to get a bit of exercise:

Most of the problems here arise from ego-battles between permanent staff (many of whom have never been to Africa before this posting) and contractors (who tend to know their way around the area but don't get all the perks). For example, the annual Christmas party is coming up on Friday. As the 3 contractors on site, who have been here for months, my boss Katherine, Ian and I expected to be invited without question. Instead, only Kat was invited, as our representative. She was told but a glorious accountant that she could invite a guest, but, "Not just anyone who happens to be in camp at the time" (i.e. us). So she went over his head to beg invites for us. It did not go down well. But we're going on Friday. We may dance on tables.