Description
With her husband (a Dartmouth professor) and two young sons, Alverson (now an anti-apartheid activist and educational administrator at Dartmouth) lived in a manure-and-mud-floor hut in Botswana in the early 1970s. Bringing a minimum of clothing and very little else, the family worked side by side with their Tswana “age-mates,” shared “efforts and smiles” and learned to drink (but not enjoy) kadi beerand Alverson started a school for children. She debated with Tswana women (in Setswana) about traditional and Western attitudes toward marriage, religion, medicine (witch doctors vs. “white coats”) and agricultural methods. A few years later, a new airport displaced their neighbors and swallowed up the community, so this is a valuable as well as entertaining account of disappearing African society.
