Contact Us

By Phone:

You can contact us by phone by calling the numbers below which  include (I believe) the correct numbers you have to dial from the US to reach us.  It won’t cost us anything to receive a call, but it will probably cost you a bunch, so you may want to call the phone companies to see about the rates.  We are 7-8 hours ahead of Chicago time.  We will be unavailable from 1:00 am Chicago Time to 11:00 am Chicago Time pretty much all week, including Saturdays, but Sundays we are supposed to have off to rest and recuperate and study on our own.

The best time to call us would be any day, 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm, Chicago time.  We should be at our houses having dinner or studying.

011 is international access

267 is the country code for Botswana

John Mark    011 267 76744160

Carol           011 267 76744115

 If you have a Skype Account you can make calls from it to our cell phones for a minimal charge ( $0.10 / minute we have heard).  You will have to figure out how to do this.  Joyce Halcomb  (joycehalcomb17@yahoo.com) and Rick Reckamp (Rick. Reckamp@charter.net) have both figured out how to do this.  You can email them for assistance if you want to have a nice long call with us.  

Here are some other PC Staff for any Emergency Numbers if you couldn’t get a hold of one of us:

011 267 71222666

011 267 72440005

011 267 71222555

011 267 71557212

These should only be used in an Emergency, as these people do not have direct access to us, but can get to us with messages, etc…

By Mail:

The easiest way is to print this packaging label and tape it to your box.  If you can print it in color we can more easily distinguish our boxes from the dozens of others in the room at the post office.   Thanks so much!

Packaging Label

or use this address:

Carol Gofaone Reckamp/John Tiro Ratkovich

Peace Corps Volunteer-Botswana

Private Bag 0018

Kwena Sereto CJSS

Molepolole ,  Botswana

Phone numbers 76744115  – Gofaone/Carol Reckamp

76744160 John/Tiro Ratkovich

Be sure to highlight the phone numbers so the post office staff can call us to come pickup our packages!

Postal mail should take about 4 to 8 weeks to reach us and the same for us to send to you.  From our research before we left, we found that of  UPS, FedEx, DHL and US Postal Service, that by far the cheapest way to send anything other than a letter was at the US Post Office.  They have various size boxes with fixed prices attached to them and weight limits.

Boxes are delivered to the post office and then a notice is sent to the school that we are to pick up the boxes.  However, if we dont get notice the Post Office will return the boxes to you after 30 days.  So please add our phone numbers to the address.

It also does not hurt to provide a Jesus comment such as “Jesus Loves You” and/or “Educational materials” on the side of  the box.

By Blog:

www.stayintouch.us

Our Blog is set up so that you can read our Posts and make a reply, but each reply must be approved by us before it is “posted” on the blog.  Because of this, it could take several days or more for us to respond because we don’t have constant access to the internet.

We will constantly be looking for ideas for new Tabs or Pages on the blog that would be of interest to everyone.  We appreciate your feed back.  Feedback is best gotten to us by email.

By Facebook:

Carol Reckamp

John Ratkovich

We both have Facebook accounts so you can always post messages or send messages that way.  We check this as often as possible, but it may be days or weeks.

By Skype:

Works on Occation now.   – We can often start calls, but please be prepared for calls to end suddenly or audio and video to fade in some way.  But we still love the few moments we can get in.

Jmrwebcam

Cdrwebcam

If you open a free Skype account at www.skype.com you can send us a Skype invite and we can then do audio and maybe video phone calls for free.  The video will depend on the quality of the internet connections.  We are not online all the time, so we will have to make “appointments” for this.