The great thing about traveling around the world for a year without a plan is that you can make it us as you go.  On our first night in South Africa, I found myself flipping through a National Geographic that was left on a coffee table at our backpackers.  There was a feature on the Okavango Delta, with beautiful photos of elephants pushing through marshy waters at sunset.  That’s something I’d like to see, I thought.

The Okavango Delta is in Botswana, huh?  Oh, and hey, look at the map!  Botswana is right next door to South Africa!  That’s pretty much exactly how we decided to go.

For a country right next door to South Africa, Botswana is very much a different place.  Parts of it matched up exactly with my preconceptions of what an African country would be like (the bus system, the sounds of the spoken languages) and some of it surprised me (3G cellular service, safety.)

A few days before we were set to leave South Africa, we met a couple Canadian girls in Pretoria that were volunteering in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, for a few months (Hi, Brandy! Hi, Angela!)  They offered to let us stay with them at their volunteer house for a couple nights, which was awesome for a number of reasons, not least of which being that we had a couple unofficial guides that had already figured out many of the ins and outs of Botswana society.  Their initial help with things like the bus rank were invaluable.

The Bus Rank

When we saw the bus rank for the first time, I thought, now we’re in Africa!

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The first time I ever fainted, it was immediately after getting a yellow fever vaccination.

This was in 1998.  Our university nurse had offered, for the cost of the shot, to inoculate any student going on the Ecuador trip.  Practically the whole class showed up at the same time and, because yellow fever is a vaccine, she thawed out just four at a time.  I was second in line.

After I got my shot, I stood up and walked out into the waiting room.  There was a girl in our class that had a terrible fear of needles and, on my way out, I slowed down to reassure her.  I remember saying, “It’s really not bad at all, just a pinch.  I am feeling a little dizzy, however…”  Then, as I understand it, my eyes rolled up and I crumpled to the floor.

Always felt bad about that.

I came to just a few seconds later, but it felt like I was waking up from a long afternoon nap.  It took me a while to understand that there were voices around me and another moment or two to understand what they were saying.  The first sentence I could make out was, “Here, break this and put it under his nose!”  Suddenly, I knew where I was and what had happened.

I didn’t want to smell the smelling salt!  My eyes popped open and I exclaimed, “That’s okay!  I’m all right!”  But our school nurse was insistent and she persuaded me to take a little sniff.

I tried to get up after that, but she put her hand on my shoulder and gently, but firmly, forced me back down.  “You’re white as a ghost and profusely sweating.  You’re not going anywhere.”  And then, because the live vaccines had to be used before they thawed completely, she went back to work.  The next few students in line literally had to step over me because I had fainted in the doorway; she wouldn’t even let me roll off to the side.

I’d be much more embarrassed about what happened that day if two other students hadn’t also fainted.  One made it back to the waiting area and sat down at the table where we were supposed to be watching each other for signs of lightheadedness.  Unfortunately, they didn’t catch her in time and she fell forward and smacked her forehead on the table before sliding out of her chair.  On the way down to the floor, she scratched her cheek pretty badly along the corner of a desk.

After that, the nurse scolded us about our low blood sugar and wouldn’t let anyone else get vaccinated without first eating breakfast.

(Update: I completely forgot that there was a student reporter there that day, taking pictures for the campus newspaper! I found some of them — not great, but proof enough! — while packing up my photo albums. I’ll add them to the end of this blog entry…)

Since that day, I’ve only ever lost consciousness one other time, after struggling with a prolonged queasy feeling resulting from an I.V. put into my arm by an oral surgeon… but that’s another story.

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