Dear friends,

The rainy season is about to end, temperatures have dropped off sharply and we are waiting for winter to come. It rained quite heavily last January, which caused several floods, also because of the compactness of the ground preventing water being absorbed. It is really wonderful to see the desert blossoming at this time of year.

Some of our children left the Home last December to start attending the nursery school in D’kar, while 40 new children arrived in January. At the moment we are taking care of approximately 95 kids. I look after the children going to elementary school and I keep in touch with their parents/relatives and teachers personally. However, the primary school headship noticed that some children were not ready for school at the beginning of the school year. To tell the truth, I knew this would happen. I tried to send them anyways, but the headmistress, obeying the local laws, brought them back to the Home to make them attend nursery school for a further year. These kids are happy to stay with us: in the morning they sing on the school bus and tell me traditional tales. Let’s just hope they will be ready for school next year…

The newly-arrived require special care, a good deal of patience and perseverance. They still have to learn basic skills like going to the toilet, wash their hands and teeth, take off their shoes for the afternoon nap and so on. I am very affectionate with these children, since most of them are frightened, shy and do not know what rules are. Ten of them are very young: they are not even three years old.

Their state of health is quite good, even if some of them are suffering from malnutrition: I hope they will recover soon thanks to a balanced diet and some vitamins, which have been donated by Italy. A widespread problem is Tinea circinata, or ringworm, a fungus affecting almost all our children’s scalps. This is no serious illness, but it is rather annoying and easily transmittable. We must shave our children’s heads and apply a specific ointment on the affected areas (round spots as big as an Euro coin).

A young girl with Down’s syndrome has joined our big family this year: she needs a great deal of attention and love; she follows me everywhere I go, just like my shadow. Three kids are currently under antiretroviral treatment and I am doing all my best to obtain authorization for the HIV test for suspicious children from their relatives or foster parents.

It is a great joy for me to help so many needy children coming from very poor families and which need: food, cloths, healthcare, school education, attention and love. Thank to the support of all of you, WE WILL MAKE IT!!!

The children we take care of at our Centre belong to three different ethnic groups: the Tswanas, the San (or Bushmen) and the Hereros.

The Tswanas (or Motswana, plural Batswana) is the name of a Southern African people which have been inhabiting Botswana since before the arrival of European explorers. They belong to the Bantu group of the Niger-Congo languages and they speak Setswana, one of the 11 national languages of the country. The Tswanas represent the majority of the population of Botswana (over 50%). The Batswana devote themselves to agriculture and farming. Cattle are fundamental for every family: socially, the number of heads a man owns defines his wealth and his social status. Their villages are big and highly populated. Their traditional houses, generally built by women, are thatched-roof huts whose walls are made of cow dung and mud. The sons often set their home next to their father’s: as a consequence, you can find several generations living together close to one another. The daughters, instead, move near their husband’s parents and relatives. Unfortunately, only few women get married nowadays, and many are unmarried teenage mothers who still live together with their children in their father’s house. The Kgosi’s (i.e. the highest authority, the tribe chief) household is generally located at the centre of the village. Nearby is the Kgotla, the traditional court where tribal assemblies are held, marriages celebrated, divorces obtained and minor offences are judged; in D’kar the Kgotla is under a big tree.

The San, also called Basarwa or Bushmen, live in the Kalahari area of Botswana. They are ethnically related to Khoikhoi, whom named them “San”, meaning “outsider” in their language; they generally preferred to be called “Bushmen”. Archaeological data show that the San people has been living in Southern Africa for at least 22,000 years and today only about 30,000-40,000 people of this clan still live in the huge Kalahari Desert. The San have light, almost coppery skin colour, almond-shaped eyes, wrinkly skin, high cheekbones, thin lips and tufted, kinky hair; moreover, they are thin, long-limbed and short of stature, have narrow shoulders and pelvis. They speak Khoisan languages, which use click consonants as phonemes. Bushmen are traditional hunters-gatherers which have managed to find their means of subsistence in the desert for many centuries thanks to their deep knowledge of the surrounding environment and effective hunting skills and techniques. They usually hunt antelope by using poison arrows; however, fruit, berries and desert roots are the basis of their diet. Their social structure is rather simple, being based on the monogamic patriarchal family and having its core in the most expert hunter. As these people move frequently, they have no established home and build temporary huts by planting branches in a semicircle, interweaving them at the top and covering them with tuffs of grass, or they make a shelter by hanging mats on the windward side, to stop after running down game. Bushman traditional habits have almost disappeared nowadays, as many Bushmen have been forcedly relocated to villages which are not suitable for their hunting and gathering activities. Moreover, their integration into the mainstream of society and with other ethnic groups has been rather difficult. Despite a governmental program for sedentary living, Bushmen are discriminated and banned by the Tswana society. Today Bushmen still cover a lot of kilometres with ease and walk for hours to reach far-away relatives for spending some months with them.

The Herero, or Ovaherero, are an African people belonging to the Bantu group, with about 120,000 members living today in Namibia, Botswana and Angola. Most of them are employed as workers on large farms or earn their living as tradesmen in the main cities. The Herero language is a Bantu language, but the Hereros living in D’kar also speak Akrikaans and Bushman languages. Their society is still based on cattle, regarded as the most valuable good. The Herero have a bilateral descent system: a person traces his/her own heritage through his/her mother’s eendag and his/her father’s oruzo. The mother leaves the material goods to the children, while the father sees to the civil and religious education of the children by giving them spiritual and religious goods (like sacred relics). Their settlements look like the Tswana’s. The very particular clothing of Herero women is a heritage of the German missionaries of the Victorian time, who urged women to cover their breasts. It consists of an enormous crinoline worn on a string of underskirts and a headdress in the shape of a horn.

Much more has to be said about these three ethnic group: this is nothing but a concise summary.

Thank you a lot for your support also from all my African grandchildren. Love,

Cecilia