first things first

My apologies to you, faithful readers (whoever you are), for my long silence. It's too much at the moment to bring you good people up to speed in one post, so let's cut straight to the important stuff: I was on TV!

A friend of mine sent me an SMS last week, inviting me to a 'son of the soil' party. The message went like this:

i am inviting u 2 son of the soil, where we cook traditional food, play games in tlokweng on the 27th, traditional attire, whole day, bring a friend, camera and urself.

Now, for all I knew when I received this invitation, 'son of the soil' was a well-established genre of party in Botswana. I started telling people I was going to a 'son of the soil' party, hoping someone would respond along the lines of: "Oh, son of the soil! So you'll be doing... etc., etc." No such luck.

As I learned, this was only the Third Annual Son of the Soil. My friend Allison and I arrived around 9:30am, and soon we were hard at work removing the skin and claws from a small mountain of scalded chicken feet. (Removing chicken claws feels a bit like breaking someone's nails by bending them backwards. I think this proved to me the unsuitability of 'professional torturer' as an potential occupation.)The rest of the day was spent drinking, singing, dancing, and playing games (as promised). I peeled some more chicken feet, I tried some chibuku (which was way over the line in terms of yeastiness to my palette), I danced when I could pick up the steps, and watched women jump rope while chanting something about dirty panties. I stayed until about 6pm, when I dragged my tired, sunburned butt home. I know: this lekhoa is a serious party light-weight.

There was more than one video camera about, so I took the rumours of Botswana TV (BTV) with some serious salt. So I was in the middle of a game of Boggle when my friend, Tiro, SMSed me to say that Son of the Soil was on the news. I have no idea how my housemates/hosts found BTV, but they did, and there I was, displaying my flaming red shoulderblades to the nation! There was a spot of footage in which I was among a group dancers, and another bit wherein I stood facing 90 degrees from the camera behind the person being interviewed.

Son of the Soil may only be three years old, but it bought me my fifteen minutes of fame.

And you should really see the pictures.