In the wee hours, they had arrived in Francistown from Gaborone, primed to start the 456 km trek back to the capital city on the Sunday morning of June 23.
Arrival in Francistown at 1am, in the back of a van, had been preceded a fortnight earlier by a pre-walk of about 25 km by three women walkers to test their limbs for the arduous task that lay ahead.
Departure from Gaborone at 7pm Saturday night had however gone awry. Some sponsors had pulled out at the last minute, leaving the organizers in a lurch and short on funds. But too much emotional investment had gone into plotting the Lavender Walk to stop it in its tracks now.
“We have been planning this for the last two years,” Neo Nkele, the Chief Walker and Sales Manager at Cresta Mowana had told journalists at a press briefing at President Hotel ahead of the Lavender Walk.
So at 6:30 am on that Sunday morning, Nkele, in the company of Sharon Munyoro and Khumoyame Gaobolelelwe of the Cancer Association of Botswana (CAB) waited at the Botswana Meat Commission (BMC) for the police escort to arrive. They had coasted into Francistown some six hours earlier with a support crew of two people from the CAB office in Gaborone, Kadimo Galeboe and Khumoyame Mogotsi.
Nkele, Munyoro, and Gaobolelelwe would be joined in Francistown by Arcirfa Mothoosile, the sole male among the four trekkers.
This year’s Lavender Walk, the brain child of Nkele, was a CAB initiative, a calendar event that would aim to raise cancer awareness and funds for an office in Francistown. Despite the organizers being thrown off track on the eve of the walk by the sponsors’ pull-out, planning had been meticulous enough.
The approach was for dikgosi (chiefs) to lead villagers along the A1 to join the walkers at various places. This year’s Lavender Walk would unfurl with the support of district health committees, health practitioners, with mobile testing centres for cancer initially planned along the way.
The testing ground had been the pre-walk on the Saturday a fortnight earlier, where Nkele, Munyoro and Gaobolelelwe had trolled about 25 km from Sebele Centre, onto Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, into Gaborone North, before following the A1 highway back.
Gaobolelelwe, who had been tasked to coordinate the Lavender Walk, was initially adamant she would not walk but joined the trek when one of the original four withdrew after pulling a ligament.
Layana Makwinja, a final year student at Wits University in Johannesburg, had also been penciled in for the walk, having done the Francistown-Gaborone trek before for Childline. She too withdrew and Mothoosile, a student at Botho College in Francistown was roped in.
“The pre-walk was in preparation for the whole thing,” says Nkele, who plays squash three times a week and does some habitual cycling.
“But it had no impact given the reality of the actual walk. No amount of physical training prepares you for the torment on the emotions, body and mind of walking that distance.”
In the lead-up to the walk they had no illusions, knowing it would be grueling. Yet the reality of trudging doggedly over endless kilometers of tarmac for eight days and the toll on the human body proved grimmer still.
“On one particular day we walked 15 hours. We would do 800 metres then stop, do another 100 metres then stop again. And we were not arriving at our next destination,” says Nkele.
Gaobolelelwe speaks of the strain on her body, the pain and anguish of the 25 km pre-walk itself and of trepidation at the trek ahead of nearly 500 km.
“At that point I was thinking I’m in trouble,” she says with a glint in her eyes.
With transportation arrangements skewed and finances low, they nevertheless set off on the Saturday night of June 22 determined to accomplish the mission. On Sunday the following morning they started walking to Tonota at 7am after the police had arrived.
The first day was rather buoyant, the four walkers still fresh, their spirits high. As they started walking, they decided on a routine of doing at least 15 km before stopping to rest.
“We saw that too many stops were not so good on the muscles,” says Munyoro, who is the Interim Coordinator of the CAB. “But by day seven we were doing just about three kilometers in between the rests.”
They arrived in Tonota at 2:30 pm, the affable Kgosi Ramosiniyi Radipitse meeting them along the way and offering them accommodation in his office. With load shedding kicking in at 6:30pm there was a power outage, but at this early stage the team was still lively and feeling quite contented with the way the day had gone.
Morning broke on the second day, the team rousing from slumber at about 5:30am to face the road ahead from Tonota to Foley Siding. It was on this day that the conflict between body and mind started to play out, the mind willing the body to trek on.
“Day Two was not really about the distance and physicality,” says Munyoro. “It was more about the mental ordeal we were going through.”
Both she and Gaobelelelwe speak of gazing with a daze at the nothingness ahead, the utter astonished silence as they pushed on, bush on either side of the A1, and kilometer upon kilometer of tarmac disappearing into the hazy distance.
They trudged for 15 to 20 km with no food and water. At this point hunger pangs were acute and in Gaobolelelwe’s case dizziness was setting in. A meal of dried fruit followed at one of the rests.
That meal played havoc with the digestion of some of the walkers, who began to experience diarrhoea. And so the love-in with the pit latrines along the highway started. “It will be too soon if I never see another pit latrine again,” says Gaobolelelwe amid peals of laughter between her and Munyoro.
“Look you can warm up to a pit latrine because you have no choice,” cuts in Munyoro. “But it’s the ones that we were seeing, the one’s facing the road and without a door that got to you.”
But they both agree that if anything this trek opened them up even more to the sheer reality of the dire poverty that exists in areas outside the cities. “The body was a bit sore now,” says Nkele. “It was a becoming a bit of a struggle.”
They arrived at 4pm at Foley. A presentation on breast and prostate cancer at the kgotla ensued, some elderly women asked if they could be tested, and rued that that team had carried no kits. By night fall, the four walkers facing a night without electricity and the borrowed support car having to return to Gaborone, Raju Thomas, one of CAB’s volunteers, rented a Toyota Corolla for the team. Kadimo Galeboe, one of the two on the support crew, returned to Gaborone to collect the Corolla.
That night supper was a fare of tinned food donated by the Lutheran Church. “We had tried to get bread from the village but there was none,” says Munyoro. “They get bread for about P10 and it is delivered from Selibe-Phikwe.”
Since Foley does not have its own police, the Land Cruiser from Serule Police came to pick up the team just after Shashe River.
The third day, the walk to Serule was hard. The walkers were tired at this point, and Gabolelelwe recalls them ranting at road distance signs. Serule has a fly-over that turns back into the village, and this added to the walking distance for the weary four. At this point merely making contact with the ground was a painful undertaking.
“We are tired now and ask the police how far we have to go and they say ‘up to where the tarred road ends’,” says Gabolelelwe. “The depressing part is you look at a car going ahead into the distance and it just seems to be going and going forever and here’s the cop saying ‘where the road ends’.”
By now Nkele had her walking stick out as the trek began to take its toll on tired bodies as they made for the kgotla. There was some mirth as an old man accosted them from behind and on seeing Nkele in the darkness struggling to walk with the help of her cane asked the team why they were abusing “this little old lady” by making her walk long distances.
“He couldn’t tell Neo’s age in the dark and seeing the stick assumed she was old,” says Munyoro. “It was hilarious.”
They arranged a meeting for the support team to address the kgotla while they could push on. “At this stage, you are cold, you are tired, you are hungry,” says Gaobolelelwe. “And people want to talk to you. It’s all nice but now all you want to do is sit there, stare into nothing and just be.”
It was the first night that they had what Munyoro calls ‘the first real hot meal’, comprising rice and Lucky Star sardines. “Thing is they just didn’t take the fish out of the tin; they put a bit of onions and tomatoes in it so it was a meal and pretty cool after what we’d been eating.”
“And we had electricity and hot water too,” Goabolelelwe chimes in. “That was like the height of luxury for us after the toils of the previous days.”
On the fourth day, they set off toward Topisi. Both Gaobolelelwe and Munyoro remember it as the day the Confederations Soccer Cup tournament was played. At Topisi the welcome from villagers was overwhelming.
“People came out to welcome us, singing and dancing,” says Nkele. “We were moved. We were in tears.”
By now, the four were tiring even more, the joints ached, and walking was an existential ordeal of just putting one foot in front of the other and using will power to trudge on.
