The hand over in the parking lot of the Choppies grocery that sits on the edge of Gaborone, Botswana’s capital city, is complete. My possessions and I leave the Mothers’ Union officers, with whom I’ve spent the past week, and join five representatives of the Anglican Women’s Fellowship. As we drive toward the center of Gaborone and the home of Cyril and Magdeline Mabuse, I make small talk with my fellow backseat passengers.

On Shrove Tuesday I shared a Lenten meditation with some friends in Botswana. It included a message that had recently been forwarded to me: Pray for the International Anglican Women’s Network as it connects Anglican women across the world, encouraging them to become influential, equal participants throughout the Communion and in their own communities.

Since, a week earlier, Cecilia was the last person we collected on our journey into Tsabong for the annual conference of the Mothers’ Union, she is the first person to get home. Home is Moshupa, a large village with a population of about 20,000. The afternoon sun is waning as we exit the van to help wrestle Cecilia’s belongings from the overfull trailer.

Travel on the two-lane Sir Seretse Khama Highway (named for Botswana’s first president) is uneventful except for encounters with those animals who prefer meandering in the middle of the road. Singing, talking, eating and dozing in the sun streaming through the windows of the Mothers’ Union van help us pass the time.

There’s a problem with the trusty, hard-working white van that will take us out of the Kalahari Desert and back to Botswana’s capital city, Gaborone. While the repair is being made I take a seat outside to bask in the morning sun and watch the village of Tsabong come to life.

The early morning procession of the flags, where members of the Mothers’ Union carry the standard for the MU branch at their parish through the streets of the host locale, has taken place, as has the closing communion. Chairs in the meeting hall have been stacked, posters removed from the walls, the hiccuping microphone unplugged (the large cow bell which was also rung to get the attention of conference goers worked as well as anything else anyway), and meeting supplies put back into boxes.

There’s hazy sunshine and a good breeze the day I’m to address the annual conference of the Mothers’ Union in Botswana. In the hall are MU representatives from neighboring South Africa, clergy from a range of faith groups, the chief of Tsabong (which has been hosting the assembly), and John Toto, who represents in the national legislature the district in which Tsabong is located (and whose mother was a devout member of the MU.)

Years ago I went to Canada on the business of the missions office of the Episcopal Church. My time north of the border was spent with Anglicans from Canada, the Caribbean and Africa as well as American Episcopalians, and it struck me then how, though we spring from the same root and share many things, Anglicanism and Episcopalianism can at times seem dissimilar. I get this feeling again while in Botswana.

It’s 8:30 p.m. and a group of us attending the Mothers’ Union annual conference in Tsabong, having finished a late dinner capped with cups of hot tea and bowls of cream and fruit (the fruit bearing a strong resemblance to what Americans know as canned fruit cocktail), are ready for the last act of the day. It’s time, one of my dining companions says with a big smile, for “some fund-raising.”

The choirs have finished competing and are again sitting with the other members of their delegations from churches throughout the Diocese of Botswana. The judges are huddling together, conferring about the energetic performances of the women. Then - BAM! - as if out of nowhere a person appears.

Activities ran long during the Saturday morning session of the Mothers’ Union conference and now there’s an early afternoon lull. The slower pace, so different from other days at the large gathering in Tsabong, is a little disorienting at first. Then I realize all is not as it seems on the surface. In fact, many women have gone off to prepare for the evening’s “music competition,” the second of the big contests held every year.

In Setswana, the most widely spoken dialect in Botswana, “moruti” (moe-rue-tee) means preacher or teacher. The female version of this is “maruti” and typically refers to a priest’s wife.

Competitions are an integral part of the annual conferences of the Mothers’ Union in the Anglican Diocese of Botswana. Women from different parishes vie for top honors in a variety of categories. These showcases for skills are friendly competitions, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t taken seriously. The first contest at the conference in Tsabong is the “handwork.”

The annual conference of the Mother’s Union, the focus of my first week in Botswana, begins each morning at 6:30 a.m. with Holy Eucharist and, according to the official “programme” I’m given when I arrive in Tsabong, concludes every evening at 8:00 p.m. The mornings do indeed begin bright and early.

On the first full day of the Mother’s Union annual conference, and our second day in the desert village of Tsabong, I leave the assembly hall to stretch my legs. It’s late morning and a dozen or so of our hosts are preparing for the lunch crowd. Soon hundreds of people will be lining up under the mokha trees, plates in hands, waiting to be served generously sized portions of what we in the southern U.S. know as a “meat and three.”

I slept soundly the night the Mother’s Union officers and I finally arrived in Tsabong, but woke early the next day. Eyes closed against the bright sun streaming through the window next to the bed, I lay still, listening to birdsong, men calling to one another, and the tinkling of bells.

Like the Episcopal Church Women of the Diocese of North Carolina, the Mother’s Union of Botswana rotates the place of its conference. In August 2010, Tsabong, on the southwestern edge of the country in the Kalahari Desert, was the home for the annual event.

A journey of a 1,000 miles may begin with a single step, but the 324 miles between Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana, and Tsabong, the administrative center of the Kgalagadi District in the Kalahari Desert, is best begun with a reliable vehicle and trailer.

Within a few days of the tornadoes that tore through North Carolina on April 16, 2011, I began receiving e-mail from Botswana. The people there had begun to get word of the destruction wreaked by the storms and they were concerned.

The Mother’s Union, active throughout the worldwide Anglican Communion, is one of two primary women’s ministries in the Diocese of Botswana. The Episcopal Church Women of the Diocese of North Carolina has unique relationships with both these groups as they focus on different things at different times.