AFOVA New Letter 2 of Year 2021

Section 6 - Memoirs CV 2 No. 02 / 2021 Page 204 of 332 Civic sense and environmental awareness are quite high among the local people. The streets are kept clean with people generally observing cleanliness in public spaces. Traffic used to be very orderly and it was a surprise to see that even in the middle of the night, a single car at a traffic junction would wait for the green traffic light to move. I used to wonder if it wasn’t insane from a practical standpoint, but then, a few people breaking the rules can be the beginning of chaos. Moreover we realized that this discipline in the local people was formed by years of sustained lessons on civic responsibilities, beginning at the level of primary education and the effects of that were quite evident in their habits. On environmental consciousness, I will mention one experience that we had. During one of our holiday trips to the Okavango Delta, as part of our holiday package, we were being taken in a motor boat by a local guide to one of the thousands of marshy islands to spend the day. Since the area was quite isolated and we (my wife and I) were the only occupants of the boat, we got quite a scare when, in the middle of nowhere, this person switched off the engine. To our amusement, we saw the boatman pointing to an empty water bottle floating in the stream and then trying to maneuver the boat to pick up that plastic bottle. He tried to convey to us in his broken English that whoever had thrown it in the stream had been irresponsible. In the above paragraphs I made an effort to highlight some of the good qualities that I found in the people with whom I had spent about 12 years of my working life, based on our experiences. It does not mean that they had no undesirable qualities. Alcoholism, crime (more accentuated by neighboring countries South Africa and Zimbabwe rather than by the locals), certain departures from well-established traditional lives such as choosing the live-in culture over marriage etc are some of them. However, as someone who enjoyed their hospitality, I felt that it would be appropriate to highlight that thorns have roses rather than complaining that rose bushes are surrounded by thorns. I also felt that as expatriates, when we are called to help and train them, it would only be just to appreciate them for their good qualities, hand-hold them and encourage them to adopt good practices and ways of life not only in their profession but in all walks of life, by integrating rather than only instructing. Personally, we had a satisfying stay and association in that country and