A mountain of distrust still needs to be overcome in dam project, write Kevin Bloom and Richard Poplak

AN engineer sidles up to the bar at the Phokoje Bush Lodge in eastern Botswana, just outside the town of Selebi-Phikwe. He is a reticent man in his early 50s, wearing the regulation khaki and groomed moustache of his caste.

He is here to dine with two other white engineers and three of their Chinese counterparts, all of whom are building one of the largest infrastructure projects in Botswana's history: the Dikgatlhong Dam.

He points out his table: five big-bellied men, their silence broken only by hiccoughs of awkward conversation. Their mutual suspicion is tougher to cut through than the overcooked steak.

"Perhaps they've brought us here to bribe us," muses the engineer. "Although they usually do that one on one." He lumbers back to his table, carrying a stiff cocktail.

What the engineer has just done is echo the town's ambivalence to the vast project in their back yard, undertaken by the Chinese construction monolith Sinohydro. He is one of five Southern African lead engineers on the job, and it's a working life defined by sullen distrust and reservations.

Selebi-Phikwe, the centre of Botswana's nickel deposits and the Copper Belt, is no stranger to this brand of wariness, especially when it comes to industrial development. The nickel mine that has long dominated the town's economy spews a cloud of effluent over the surrounding tableland, filling the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide. A recently built dam, about 15km outside town, was, among other things, supposed to jump-start a recreation boom that would diversify local industry. That never happened.

Dikgatlhong seems, to many locals, like one more specimen of a familiar species: an ill-considered, environmentally dubious project that will do little for the town's fortunes.

That said, it is the single-largest civil engineering project being built in the country. The 1.13-billion pula contract was awarded to Sinohydro in January 2008. It will take 47 months to complete, and they're on month 35.

There was no funny business: Botswana has a regulatory process that makes the EU seem louche by comparison.

The Chinese-built dam lies about 65km due east of Selebi-Phikwe, past the hamlet of Mmadinare. Slope-backed cows graze at the side of the road, contributing to the country's foremost environmental emergency: deforestation caused by free-grazing livestock. Gaunt men bounce donkey carts over the rutted road; a pastoral scene giving the lie to Botswana's status as a Southern African success story: a per capita GDP of $13100 and a 3.1% annual growth rate. Botswana isn't booming so much as it is stable.

Following a right turn at a dusty T-junction, 3km from the Zimbabwean border, Dikgatlhong announces itself with a billboard. It depicts a space-age piece of infrastructure, baffling in its complexity: a hybrid dam, launch pad and dry dock, all for vehicles yet to be invented. In other words, we're looking at an ecstatic rendition of Sinohydro's signature development, the Three Gorges Dam in China. "Keep truthful and faithful," it reads. "Create the best."

The main compound is boomed and gated.

We got to a second compound, a series of single-storey buildings, where we meet one of the senior project engineers. A stout man, ruddy of cheek and knee, he's a white Zimbabwean who has worked on many of the bigger dams in Southern Africa. This one, he willingly concedes, has been somewhat different. "It's not that the dam is being badly built - it meets the standards. But to me, it's scraping through."

We sip bottled water in his sterile office, where the only decor is a multi-coloured topographical map of the dam site.

The diagram depicts the Tati and Shashi rivers, and the catchment area - the swirl of lime-green highlighter - where they meet.

Then, in the engineer's 4x4, we are subjected to a reasoned, if sarcastic, lecture on the corners that are being cut. His words contain a yearning for a European past in Africa that may not have existed, at least not on the levels of uncompromising excellence he seems to remember.

But while the forces that protected white-owned and driven construction projects in pre-independence Southern Africa were far from innocent, the engineer's major gripes remain technical: a lack of a "best practice" culture in the Chinese compound; an unwillingness to question authority; and a reluctance to aspire to anything beyond cost and deadline.

Sinohydro, one of China's largest parastatals, has 240 projects globally, with 100 in Africa, many of them in dangerous areas. Five are in Botswana, including the extension of the Sir Seretse Khama International Airport in Gaborone and the upgrading of the Francistown road up to Zimbabwe.

Six hundred Chinese nationals work in Botswana under the monolith's auspices. (As one of the Chinese managers puts it to us later, "To use the wrong word, we are 'flooding' Africa.") They're stretched tight, and the implication is that they do not send their best and brightest to the continent.

"Very often," says the Zimbabwean engineer, "we're the teachers. The kids are great on paper, but in the field ...

"This is Botswana's Three Gorges," he deadpans, reminding us that his Chinese colleagues recently built one of the largest dams on Earth.

It's a poignant statement, all the more so because Botswana suffers from a dire lack of potable water. Dikgatlhong is part of an initiative by the Botswana government to deliver drinking water to its people, and in such a critical endeavour the stakes are high. Sinohydro has done this before; on paper, they're more than a safe bet.

Three Chinese engineers walk to the Zimbabwean and ask his opinion on the viscosity of a concrete compound. "We'll work it out," he says. "Tonight I'll stay awake thinking about it." They appear baffled by his wryness, and we are reminded that this encounter of cultures often resembles a collision.

The principal resident engineer, Botswana national Boikanyo Mpho, has the job of negotiating this environment.

According to him, the Chinese contingent have an "inability" to adapt readily to the local situation. They are used to doing things in a certain way, he says, and have yet to come around to the African way. But progress has been made, he stresses; the project is moving towards - not away from - common understanding.

It's a sentiment shared by Mr Xu (who refuses to provide a full name or a business card), Sinohydro's commercial manager on the project. From his office in the Chinese compound, using an electronic translator on his laptop to search out the correct words - and improve his spoken English at the same time - Xu informs us this is his first time in Africa, and that before he came he was terrified.

A compact and well-presented man in his mid-30s, Xu was born in the province of Henan, on the south bank of the Yellow River. He has a master's degree from a university in Jiangsu, and has been with Sinohydro for just under a decade. When he landed in Botswana, he tells us, he was afraid to shake hands with the locals. He knew there was no possibility of contracting HIV by touch alone, but in his heart, he admitted, "he had discrimination".

"We are coming from Asia," he says earnestly. "Here is Africa. There has been a lot of heartbreak due to cultural differences." According to Xu, mirroring exactly the white engineer's assessment of the Chinese engineers on site, the local labourers are not as skilled as he's accustomed to. "They are not diligent like the Chinese," he says. "They don't want to work, but they want a better life. That is the conflict."

Xu himself compares the mainstream Chinese view of Africans with the mainstream American view of the Chinese. He looks up a word on his translator, and struggles to enunciate it.

"I had bias," he says. "That's what the Americans get off the internet about the Chinese."

Days later, at the Phokoje Bush Lodge, none of these cultural challenges appear to have been surmounted. Dinner continues in stilted silence. We recall something our engineer guide said. "It's sad. We ask them: 'What are you doing today?' They'll say: 'Same as yesterday, same as tomorrow.'"

That's how Sinohydro built China. It's how they're building Africa.

• Next week: Mozambique