From house maid to Botswana’s Top 10 crack shots
Source : Kutlwano
Author : Aron Moreeng
Location : Gaborone
Event : Profile
She was seperated from her mother at age six, stayed in boarding school for the next 16 years, worked as a maid thereafter and posted from Tsokatshaa to Gaborone like an application letter, Lieutenant Apelo Letsomo is a true embodiment of courage married to dedication. Listening to her life narrative is like paging through a catalogue of adversity, her deficiency and fortitude to extinguish all the discriminations bestowed on her kind.
In all respects, she remains RADP`s outstanding national hero. The fact that, at a young age she used to think of RADP as a well-stocked wholesale shop in Tutume is immaterial today.
That was then. Today, Lieutenant Letsomo is the best target shooter among the few female soldiers. She is the only lady among the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) Firing Team. Her name appears among the BDF Top 10 crack shots (marksmen). The BDF would surely have lost an asset, had the ‘mail` failed to arrive in Gaborone on time. The year was 2002 when Apelo had just completed her Form Five, awaiting the results and was working as a maid for a local police officer. “I used to ask him about how to apply so that I could obtain a social work qualification,” she says.
The local police officer embarked on a somewhat risky, yet noble expedition to see the teenager achieve her dreams. And the ‘post` was dispatched. Like a letter, the police officer posted her from Tsokatshaa to his friend in Sowa who then addressed her to Francistown where she was to be placed on a Gaborone bound bus, with strict instructions to the bus conductor to hand her over to some nurse who was to receive the mail at the bus rank. For a teenager whose closest encounter with civilisation was only the inside of Mater-Spei College, the neon lights of the big city presented quite an alien future. With all the patience in the world, the nurse, a local police officer`s wife, assisted her to apply for different institutions and was admitted at the University of Botswana.
Apelo, at least by her own admission, was never an academically bright student but rather an average girl next-door. However, with determination and the courage as well as the resolve to succeed, she managed to graduate from UB with a Degree in Social Work and subsequently worked at Kuru Development Trust in D`Kar in the peripheries of Ghanzi township.
It was while at D`Kar that she learnt of the first intake of women recruits into the BDF and tried her luck. “I was seven months pregnant at the time but I didn`t let that demoralise me,” she recalls. Two months into maternity, she left for Tanzania Military Training, leaving behind her newborn daughter to become part of a history in the existence of the BDF; the first batch of women cadets in the army.
This is the woman, who had never flown in an aeroplane nor had ever seen a hill before she went to Mater Spei in Francistown. The woman who had difficulties writing a composition about the nicest journey she has ever embarked on while at Primary School. Narrating the ordeal like a comic story, Lt Letsomo tells of an incident at primary school when they were implored to compose an article about their journeys during school vacations. She had never had any other journey except from the cattle-post and back to boarding school at Tsokatshaa Primary on the back of RADP trucks.
She did not know what to write. The one thing she remembers was that the truck drivers used to propose love to them and the girl who usually rode in the front seat had to know that she would be the driver`s ‘mince meat`. Nonetheless, the sacrifices she made, and the example she and her peers set, constituted an integral part of the ethos that determine the sense and definition of the programme, defining relevant factors in the context of empowering remote area dwellers to realise the objective of equal opportunities for remote area communities.
A classical example of RADP and affirmative action, Lt Letsomo was selected among the first batch of female soldiers despite her pregnancy. Her selection and the subsequent indelible mark she made in the BDF makes hers a success story whose sacrifices would communicate the message that what the RADP seeks to achieve is a practically realisable objective, provided that, at all times and in all circumstances, officers remain loyal to principles.
Major Collen Seema of the BDF cannot help blowing his junior`s trumpet. Lt Letsomo`s achievement, he says, is a source of education and inspiration to many other remote area dwellers and the beneficiaries as government strives to address the challenge of fundamental social transformation, focused especially on the eradication of poverty and underdevelopment and the elimination of the inherited cultural imbalances.
“We need people like Lt Letsomo to help us further advance the objectives of the Remote Area Development Programme and inspire the masses of the people to take ownership of these programmes of fundamental social transformation,” he emphasises.
As a lieutenant, Major Seema says, Lt Letsomo supervises 400 – 500 troops at the battlefield. Couple that with the reality that she is one of the best target shooters in the BDF and you get the grind of what Major Seema talks about. The woman who used to think of RADP as a shop has kept her eyes on the ball and benefitted from the ‘imagined shop`.
And for people like Lt Letsomo and other remote area dwellers, the future looks brighter thanks to the Affirmative Action policy, a ten-year blueprint that seeks to close imbalances by accelerating living standards of remote area dwellers.
All that needed, she says, is for parents to encourage their children to study hard and achieve the best they could become. She emphasises that remote area dwellers are not far from the services but instead, services are just too far from them. Because services could be moved, she implores the authorities to move the services nearer to the people rather than vice-versa. ENDS
Teaser:
In fact, she is emblematic of how the Remote Area Development Programme (RADP) can be used as a stepping stone to greater heights. In all respects, she remains RADP`s outstanding national hero...
