AFOVA New Letter 2 of Year 2021

Section 6 - Memoirs CV 2 No. 02 / 2021 Page 200 of 332 16 Botswana Experience Wg Cdr S K John Genre: Living & Working Abroad hen I received the letter of job offer from the Government of Botswana, in 1997, I had mixed feelings and reactions towards it. On one hand, I was quite excited, because for myself and my family, it would have been the first opportunity to travel abroad and that too with the guarantee of stay for a couple of years. At the same time, I was a bit apprehensive because the destination and the prolonged stay that I was looking at was to be in an African country. Known as the Dark Continent, African nations were more in the news for tribal and ethnic conflicts, drug trafficking and crimes rather than for their abundant mineral wealth, wildlife, environmental diversity and other positives. We made some enquiries and the information we gathered about the country was quite sketchy, some good and some not so good. Eventually we decided to go for it. We learnt that there was a small Indian community living in that country, some working with their government (including an Indian Defense Training Team imparting training to Botswana Defense Forces), some employed in the private sector and some engaged in business. We ended up spending about 12 years in Botswana, myself working in the government and my wife teaching in a school. Our stay and consequential interactions with the local people in our workplaces as well as in social circles completely changed our perception about that nation, their people and their value systems. There were incidents of crime, break-in, theft, fraud - as in any other society - that we used to hear and fear about, some of which I had to deal with in my official capacity of working with the Government’s Finance Ministry. Amidst the darkness prevalent in that continent, amidst ethnic conflicts, internal strife, crime and corruption in that continent, we realized that there were flashes of bright spots in terms of human behavior and value systems in some of those countries, Botswana being one such. In the succeeding paragraphs, I have made an effort to pen down a few of such good experiences we had during our stay there. W