Dorms & Campus

We are in undergraduate housing, the snazzy Block 480, also known (due to its very snazziness) as “Las Vegas”. The building is pretty new, relatively functional, and clean. Six rooms in a unit open into a shared big room, which has a table, a kitchen sink, and a few empty cupboards, one single-person bathroom and one shared bathroom with a few sinks, toilets, a shower. You can’t really put things in the cupboards because anyone could walk through and snag it, as they could the toilet paper, so you keep things in your room and you carry some toilet paper around in your pocket if you are clever. I am generally not.

The rooms themselves are shared. I am sharing with Madeline, another girl on the ACM program, and the other two ACM girls, Emilie and Jordan, are in the room next-door. The shared room is U-shaped with a wall between my side and Madeline’s, which is where we each have a closet. The bottom of the U is where the door into the hall is. We each have a bed, built in desk, chair, two shelves, a bulletin board, and a window. We have furnished things with a fan, some food, books, plates and cups, etc. Not much decoration on my side yet – everyone else brought pictures and art; I brought my still-life from 3-year-old Evie. We tend to have electricity in our plugs and hot water in the shower. Sometimes electricity and hot water wander away, and the Batswana laugh at us when we report it because no one else ever has these problems.

Campus is big. We are in the corner so it takes ten or fifteen minutes to walk to classes, the library, the refectory, and the piles of offices we have to visit every time something goes wrong (holla, admin building!). The library is much nicer than UChicago – big beautiful glass windows and simple, open spaces. It also has wireless internet, but we can’t talk in there, so I’ve been Skyping on the planters right outside (where the bitey ants and the bees live, unfortunately). Classroom buildings are one story with various lecture configurations and sometimes air conditioning. There is also a track, pool, business building (also nice with these cool zigzag ramps that lead you processional style, as if from the sky, straight from the upper floors across everyone’s vision to the doors), snack shop, bookstore, etc.