Inspired by Mefloquine, perhaps?

I work in a tiny Social & Community Development office in a wee village by the train tracks. The village of Pitsane, mistakes me for a real social worker which I am not, but my Counterpart is. She’s a short but her patience is long and although she’s pretty young (couldn’t be older than 30), she has the quiet reserve of an old woman. None of Botswana’s civil servants are from the villages where they work. Government housing is provided near their offices and thus I live next door to my counterpart in a row of four sudden government houses, so few they’re not numbered. Depending on which side you approach, my house is tertiary and the last house is vacant—second if you come from the opposite side, and in that case, the first house is unoccupied. Either way, one side is empty. The government transfers employees throughout the country similar to the way we think of the military. They serve their country in the broadest sense of the phrase “civil servant,” so like myself, my neighbors are far from home. The office is always bustling. I don’t speak enough Setswana to conduct business affairs which is why I’m literally a worthless lump in the corner from 7:30-4:30, but my Counterpart is nice and she drags me along for the ride, or lets me sit in the corner while she helps. Besides one other government employee who works across the village, in Finance, we have no neighbors to speak of. Although our houses are near others, the four houses somehow form their own silent community and stand in a four family squad when everyone else’s environs bends into a round sweep. In most of Africa, neighborhoods are situated in round formats, not gridlines with intersecting streets. From our front doors, we face a tree and the backside of an abandoned looking house on a horizon of neglected blond grasses that stand high. Farther behind it is the backside of the family home to the owners of Mustapha’s hardware. In the periphery is the posterior of the kgotla. Behind us, the outskirts of the village curls around us in an open field and lovely as it is, there’s a numbed sensation of isolation, invisible but there like a line drawn in pencil and then erased with only a faint indentation remaining. It’s only the train tracks and the grainery that also runs across in a straight line. The grainery is where the five titan containers stand rigid with maize and all of this is capped by Botswana sky that dips so low to the earth that you can reach up and touch it, dive in, or sail in its undertow. An infinite ocean of blue covers the desert--and clear, (my god its clear) even when nothing feels clear anymore amid imperceptible layers of sky, earth, and the diamonds hidden beneath it. Its culture that hides between the invisible layers and pops out at you when you least expect it. Blurry lines, fuzzy borders, where does the west end and Botswana begin? For all of its blue sky there’s just as much gray in Pitsane, just 10 miles from the South African border. Heaven rests on Pitsane and our houses are naked. No hedges. No “stop nonsense”. No buffer. Civil servants on call in yellow houses with orange trim to match the office right outside our kitchen windows. Villagers knock on my door when my counterpart isn’t in the office, thinking I can help. Mmaboipeloego—mother who listens to all problems. That’s the literal translation for social worker. They’re confused when in Setswana, I tell them I can’t speak Setswana. Botswana has a very solid national identity and anyone from Botswana is Batswana first, tribe second. That I’m black makes this confusing because in Botswana all Batswana speak Setswana, except I’m not Motswana, nor am I Coulored. I’m a black American under a blue Botswana sky who is living in the yellow government house with orange trim right by the South African border, otherwise known as the Rainbow Nation. Darkening under the African sun, suddenly I’m invisible. I appear to be like everyone else, but I’m so so different because culture hides and startles us but then it intrigues. Alone in my blackness, I’ve got a complicated nonlinear story to tell and so right now I’m in a kaleidoscope of confusion.