5 August 1986: Letter to Jim Bachman in Colorado about my Pending Job in Botswana

Half Way House, South Africa

Dear J.B.,

This damn Brother typewriter is acting up again although I’ve now figured out how to fix it when in has one of its little spasms.  The Brother service manager in Cape Town explained what was wrong so now I know how to physically abuse it to get it to work.  How long before this little piece of shit totally breaks down is anyone’s guess.  Complicated machines are a real bitch when you can’t just run over to the local repairman and get them fixed. 

I seem to have landed the teaching job at the University of Botswana after two months of bureaucratic paperwork.  The only remaining hurdle is getting the university my actual B.A. and M.A. certificates.  Hopefully, this hassle is about over.  By next week, they should receive my Ohio State B.A. diploma that you mailed. And, the nice lady in the graduations department at the University of Montana sent out a notarized certificate saying that I have an M.A., and she’s ordered a new diploma for me to replace the one you can’t find.  She’s agreed to send a letter on official University of Montana stationery saying that a new copy of the degree diploma has been ordered from the printing company.  One way to act convincingly with Third World bureaucrats is to snow them with official-looking paperwork.  It also helps to smile a lot and act really patient.

I’m surprised I received this letter.  It was sent to my last known address in Zimbabwe!
  

I’m sorry about all the work you had to do to find my diplomas.  I can visualize you up in your dark third-floor loft, flashlight clinched between your teeth while you rifled through all my boxes of stuff.  I should have been more careful about putting the diplomas in a conspicuous, organized place.  It’s just that I’ve had that M.A. diploma for 13 years, and this is the first time anyone has shown the slightest interest in seeing it.  How was I supposed to know that a perspective employer in Africa would not accept certified transcripts from my universities and would want to see the actual diplomas?       

What really frustrated the bejesus out of me was that  I’d gone to all this work to get a respectable and rewarding job 8000 miles from home, and now some little thing like a degree certificate stood in the way of my getting hired so I could actually use my education.  Geesh!  As a medical doctor, you get lots of respect but my being a geographer doesn’t count for squat.  I know this may sound funny coming from a nair-do-well, free spirit like me, but being able to say that I’m a lecturer at an African university gives me back a certain sense of self-respect that I’d lost about eight years ago.  I’ll try not to let it go to my head and given the peanuts the university is going to pay me, I doubt I can afford to!

Hope your love life improves!  Sounds like your little fling with Kansas City Mary turned out to be a real downer. 

Hopeless horny in Africa,

Will 

    

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