Our Current Residence

View from the front gate.

Thought everyone would like to see a little about accommodations. We are staying in a delightful bungalow walking distance from the Thamalakane River. Like every other place here, there is a fence and a gate with a padlock.




It is very green here as it is the rainy season. This does not mean that it monsoon season or anything, just that it rains some every few days. In fact, the rain has so light (due to El Nino we're told) that the water system has been struggling. This is a euphemism for water being intermittent.

Front of the house.

Around the left-hand corner of the house is a large (5-10 thousand liters is my guess) and small (500 liters or so) plastic green tank for holding water. The way this works is the following:

• The city of Maun supplies water to the property at some varying pressure - some days a trickle, on others a respectable flow - but never enough to really wash the mud off the tires on the car.
• This water supply is used to fill the large tank that sits atop a cinderblock/cement stand about one meter high. When full the level of the water is higher than I can reach...perhaps 2.5 meters...and provides a good pressure to the house.
• Sometimes the city pressure is not high enough to push the water to the tops of the tank, so there is a small tank on the ground that it can (nearly always) fill. There is an electric pump with a switch controlled by the water level that pumps from the small to the large tanks to keep us topped up.
• If the water has been off for a while, I need to open a valve and fill the small tank by hand to insure that it never runs dry and don't burn up the pump and/or run our of water.

Easy-peasy, right?

It is impossible to walk anywhere with being shadowed by Terri.

The front porch is like another room in the house. What, bugs your say? Pshaw! The house is full of open windows with no screens. Indoors and outdoors are all the same. We've already made our visit to the store for Tabard, so we're good (mostly).

Looking toward the front gate.

Yes, here, you'll find many "gated communities,"While not rampant, crime occurs. Glen is not willing to build a large expensive wall that says "rob me, I have valuable stuff". Rather he has a discrete fence to deter the casual crimes. He told us of one episode where someone cut the fence.
Everyone has multiple dogs in our neighborhood. Everyone. Makes for interesting and noisy walks in the evening with our charges.

It is very cosy place. Glen has a house keeper M-F and a "gardener" MWF every week. I put gardener in quotes since what KB (I can't spell his name but it means "thank you") really does is clean the grounds. Each day we come back from our excursions to find all the sandy parts well raked and clean.

The house keeper is a delightful young woman named Kitsiso. When I first saw her I guessed she might be 18. Then she told us that she has four children the oldest of which is 13! An interesting bit of information about her oldest son (the children are all spaced out by a clear design) is that his name means "evidence." Not sure what he is evidence of, but I have my guesses.

Under the trees is cool(er) and pleasant. There is air conditioning in the bedroom and there is mosquito net canopyover the bed so we can sleep. We had a night with several of the pests in bed with us so the next night we sprayed the netting when we put it down over the bed before dusk (Kitsiso lifts to to make the bed each day) and now we are fine.