This quote could have easily been referring to the curator of the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe, Scobie Lekhutile. Unlike those unlucky people who trudge to work everyday with a frown on their face, regretting every minute spent at the job they've been forced to do to keep food on the table, Lekhutile loves his job and has been known to do it even when there were no funds to pay his salary.

A series of accidents, unlikely offers and just sheer good fortune has allowed Lekhutile to be one of the lucky few who have work they are truly passionate about. "When people come from overseas and I give them a tour of the museum and they might see a photo and make a connection with something they know from home - I cherish these moments. To me it's very important," Lekhutile says with a smile.

But how did a boy born and raised in the Serowe of the 1960s and 70s, grow up to become a museum curator? By accident it seems. "Before I started working here I accidentally ran into this German guy who was in the country to do the second part of his study on Basarwa languages and he needed a field assistant." At the time Lekhutile had finished his form three at Swaneng Secondary School and was at home doing nothing and thought that joining this German man might prove interesting and indeed it did. So in 1983 he set off. "I went with this German scholar and together we did parts of Ngamiland, Ghanzi, extending into Kgalagadi, chasing the people of the click language. It was during this trip that I developed an interest in other people's lives and languages. Language is not just for communicating, it's actually a complex thing that has a structure and develops and is there for a reason." The trip lasted for about six months. "It became longer, you know 5-6 months living out of your backpack and sustaining yourself through canned foods can make it very, very long," Lekhutile remembers. Upon his return, Lekhutile heard news that a committee had been formed to set-up a museum in Serowe. "The Bangwato and the people of this area had always attracted the attention of the international media. You know of course about the marriage and before the marriage was the flogging of a certain McIntosh which attracted people's interest from outside. And before the flogging was the trip to England that also allowed people to know that there is a village, a tiny spot in this world, called Serowe. So with these stories people thought that there was a need to have a museum or a cultural house where those stories could be cared for and told."

In 1985, a group of local Serowe residents got together to form a committee to start a museum. Members included the late Lady Khama and the still active, local businesswoman, Vivian Watson. "Leapeetswe Khama gave the committee the property; the house and the yard and whatever was contained in there." After this the committee raised funds to start the museum. Now they had a place, they had a bit of money, but they also had a problem. "If you look at all of the members of the committee and the people of Serowe, none of them knew how to go about starting a museum so they had to source from outside."

From the Danish Volunteer Service, the Khama III Memorial Museum got its first curator a woman named Marea Rytter. Rytter began to get the museum organised and Lekhutile volunteered to help. "I remember when we were putting up the first exhibition which was a national basket exhibition. It was shown at the national museum and then it was brought to Serowe and from Serowe it went to Francistown. The founding curator, Marea, approached me and said that if she was able to find funding would I be interested in working here." Lekhutile seized the opportunity. He thought it would be a great chance for him to get some of the knowledge he felt he was lacking. "I've always had friends who came here with volunteer organisations. They always wanted to know more about our culture and the things happening in Botswana, about Batswana, about Bangwato, about Serowe, but by then I was still a young man and only interested in what was happening in the great United States. So I never had answers for all of those questions. So I thought if this goes on for a long time I will appear more and more stupid." After 20 years with the museum, he has found a lot of those answers, and stupid he is undoubtedly not. The founding curator stayed at the museum for about three years and was later replaced by another Dane. But the committee didn't want to be left in the lurch when the Danish might decide that they no longer had money to fund a Danish volunteer curator for the museum, so the committee went in search of a Motswana understudy for the Danish curator. "Since I didn't have the educational background to suit the post, I was not a likely candidate. So they started looking for someone at the university." They found a person and the man was sent overseas to get a specialist education in running a museum. He stayed for a few years but then left for greener pastures. "And then there I was again," Lekhutile says. The committee decided that perhaps the more important qualification for the job was passion and gave Lekhutile a chance. "So I became the acting curator. With my shaky educational background, I've managed to keep the place open until now. After acting for three years I was appointed." Keeping a community-based museum open is no easy task. Lekhutile said the problem of funding for museums stems from the idea that museums and cultural institutions have no role in development. He believes that museums have an important role to play in development because how can we know where we are going if we don't know where we have been. History also lets us see what mistakes we have made so that we don't repeat them. Currently, the only museum under government is the National Museum in Gaborone. All of the other museums in the country are community - based and operate like NGOs. Originally, most of the funding for the Khama III Memorial Museum came from donor agencies, but as Lekhutile says, "No reasonable parent would let anyone come in and feed their children if they are still alive." Because of this, government stepped in and the museum now gets a grant from both the national government and the Central District Council to cover salaries and their recurrent budget.

But the grants are not really enough to sustain them. "We would get this money and work a little magic," Lekhutile says. But this past financial year their magic ran out and the money finished before the year, leaving them in a mess. For December, Lekhutile and his second - in -command decided to take only half of their salaries so as to pay other staff and pressing bills. January was even worse. Luckily, they have recently been given a top-up grant to see them through the end of the financial year. It's tough to run a museum on such a shoestring budget but this situation may soon change. The government is in the process of developing a Museum Policy. Lekhutile believes that a policy could help solve many problems. "We have all of these museums in Botswana all doing their own thing. The idea is to have us all under one umbrella. Either we will all be government or Non Governmental Organisations but it will be one structure, all being the Museum Service of Botswana." In this way, museums will be able to share limited resources. "For example if I collect an artefact that needs to be restored but I don't have the facilities. The only place where artefacts can be restored is the National Museum. It would be unrealistic, considering the resources that we have, for each museum to have its own restoration centre. So why don't we equip that one and staff it properly and then whenever we have a problem we can send our things to them to be done at a central place." A policy would also formalise the relationships between museums. Currently, the relationship between the National Museum and the many community - based ones depends on the particular point of view of the director. Lekhutile says that it used to be that the National Museum viewed itself as the father to its children, the community - based museums. Then they had a director, Mrs. Pule, who viewed the National Museum as separate from the community-based museums. The current director is drifting back to the fatherly role. This type of insecurity also plays havoc with the community based museums and would hopefully be solved when the new policy is in place. For 20 years now, Lekhutile has been with the museum. Since his appointment as curator, he has travelled all over the world learning about how museums are run. He has dug in the icy cold of Denmark, searching for uncovered treasures and worked on establishing an integrated museum database in the tiny Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic. He loves his job at the museum. He's no longer the "stupid" young man with no answers for now he is the one called to Serowe's Main Kgotla when dignitaries are visiting to explain about Setswana culture and the rich history of the Bamangwato. He says; "Working here has cleaned my hands and allowed me to eat with the elders." It is one of the many things that make him proud of his accomplishments at the museum.