RM Jones writes an interesting blog about her stay in the Sexaxa Cultural Village. She calls her blog: Blogswana!
A copy of the blog appears below in case the above link stops working!
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2009
Sexaxa
Visit the Sexaxa Cultural Village website: http://sexaxa.weebly.com/
I finished my 480 page book (“Dark Star Safari”) and I’m really proud of how much I’ve been reading since school got out in May. The book was a pretty depressing look at Africa, and while I know that some places are better (like Botswana), it did impact my thinking on foreign aid. I will continue to process those ideas later. Anyway, I might re-read Catcher in the Rye next, since someone has it here and 10th grade was a long time ago.
Sunday we went to another community trust, this one with a cultural village and a game drive. The drive was seriously like 5 hours and there weren’t many animals, but I’ve started to think of it as meditation and life planning time. Needless to say, I’ve spent lots of time thinking about how wonderfuly greatful I am for my life (and all the wonderful people in it!!!). The cultural village was surreall because they were showing the traditional Bayeii way of life, but so much of it is recognizable in Sexaxa today! I learned a lot though, one of the most interesting things to me was that when a woman gives birth she is put in isolation for 2 months. Mosetsana said they still do that in Sexaxa. I have many feelings on this: it’s a time when the man is free to go “play around” and he misses those crucial frist months of his child’s life. Plus the woman is alone! But maybe just seeing your mother or a few other women is nice when you are taking care of a newborn…I don’t know. Anyway, the “village” has demonstrations of games, music, dancing, men setting traps, shooting arrows, traditional houses, food, and a traditional healer. Pretty cool! Camping out was nice…we had a fire and sat around talking until midnight (!!!) with our guide, Kabelo, from Gabs, who visited the US this spring and used to work for SIT. You meet such interesting people here.
That’s all for now! Peace out.