On Vactation

Hey everyone. The last few weeks have been packed, with the end of the term, creating spreadsheets for the staff to do our marking (and then taking the time to teach them how to use them) and figuring out travel plans for break. Right now I'm in Hogsback, South Africa. It's about 140km from East London and the place where Tolkien supposedly got the inspiration for LOTR and the Hobbit. Just got done with a few days in Cape Town, running into a fellow group 25er. Lots of fun meeting other solo travelers along the way. In fact, I ran into a fellow Minnesotan at Sugarshack Backpackers in East London this morning. Really a small world. Am making up this trip as I go, with the only planning was purchasing a ticket to Cape Town last week. We'll see how it goes or if I make it back to Namibia!

Part of life: the MAN SCAM-X

I still laugh at that name...it sounds like some kind of Internet bamboozle, doesn't it?

That was the phrase the four St. Therese JSS learners kept using over and over at the exhibition the July 6^th weekend. Didn't get enough of the mince/curry/peach chutney that Sir Williams made? Part of life...

Lots of things have been going down the past months. First was the Southern Girls Conference in Keetmanshoop in June. Lots of fun was had by we volunteers and the gals. The closest I've felt to a rock star was when the ministry bus came to pick us up. Rolling in at the crack of dusk, the bus shows. Chester hops off to help load and elementary school learners swarm. Beth, standing on the bus, foolishly near an open window, gets hit by a rock. The learners here are deadly with rocks. I lock up the library and venture out as the learners center on me. They tell me how they'll miss me, touch my hair and start pulling it. Guess they must want a souvenir? Courtney tells the driver to get moving, worried a riot could break out. Ahhh... good ol' Tses.

The sessions from self-image/girl power to gender equity/rights to a phenomenal woman panel to HIV/AIDS (explaining exactly how HIV acts at the cellular level, something the HIV education here doesn't include) and a big dance party – I even broke out some dance moves when JT's SexyBack came up, to the surprise and laughter of my girls club. The only major dampener was the hostel they were staying in didn't have hot water for the showers, but they did for the baths. I woke up every day before 6am to take my hot bath, but I was staying with the volunteers and not in the hostel! The best moment(s): Two nights of making the no-bake cookies and eating it right out of the bowl, sans spoon.

No sooner had we been dropped off by our bus back at our site on Sunday (the primary learners chased after, trying to kick it) had I found out about another conference. A “Sir” Williams was back for two weeks, doing research down here for his doctorate. His other motives became clear, when he talked of the genesis of a St. Therese History Club. He also brought a friend with him, another Fulbright Scholar working on her PhD here in Namibia. The national exhibition was 5 – 8 of July. The three of us plus one history teacher plus one former teacher/community activist had ten days to help our club members do a research project on a topic they wrote in history class the month before, “Namibian Heroes of the South.” We took the two best from grade 9 and two from grade 10. I don't know how we did it, but we pulled it off. In the process, we got to go on a field trip to Keetmanshoop museum to do research and also to see how information can be displayed. The curator offered to help our learners type up and arrange their displays for the exhibition.

The best part about the two weeks was that I got to have visitors at my flat! The earliest I got to bed was 11:30, will all the talking. Even though his friend was just out of grad school, she was an aficionado of the 80's, so we got along swimmingly. No, don't think like that, she's married.

Sidetrack:
A week before it got to be below zero C and I was wearing as many clothes that would fit on my body to stay warm in my bedroom. By accident I left my hot plate on overnight, absent pot or pan thankfully. I walked in my kitchen the next morning and it was about 18 degrees C in there! I pulled my bed into the kitchen and have been using my fan + hot plate as a space heater since.

Back to the story...
So we had a slumber party in my kitchen for the first week. Again with the stories of St. Therese in 2001, how he created a Namibian version of the play Fiddler on the Roof, the glory days of Miss St. Therese (imagine the combined energy of NASCAR race and a monster truck rally) and other things the previous volunteers did during his tenure.

On Thursday, we piled four adults in the front of the bakkie and the four learners in the back, dressed in winter clothes and lots of blankets and made our way to the Rehoboth Spa on Thursday afternoon. Christian and I weren't willing to pay N$600 per night at the bungalow, but through his connections we were allowed to pitch a tent and stay outside, which we both jumped at. Small world experience: in talking about camping and such, it turns out that we just missed each other in the Grand Tetons back in August 2005 (my national park farewell tour before PC), doing the same trail (Lake Solitude&Paintbrush Trail loop) by about a week.

MAN SCAM – X. Nice name, eh? Breaking apart the acronym: MAN = Museum Association of Namibia. SCAM – X = SChools And Museum eXhibition. Some stunning works on display. The winning school got a week trip to Cape Town with a private tour of Robben Island (famous prisoner: Nelson Mandela) among other tours. Second place? A weekend at Omaruru Rest Camp! That's where we did our PC pre-service training.

We didn't place in the top four, but we were just happy for the experience. Saw the Rehoboth hot spring, did a boat ride at the dam, attended some great sessions about history and saw some amazing cultural presentations - each group had to do something to show their culture on the first night.

Anyways, unlike most clubs started here, it looks like this one will be sustainable, with at least one teacher already committed to running it next year. Great news.

I did miss out on a big PC meeting up in Ondongwa that week, but it would've taken me two days just to hike up there and I was only interested in the small part pertaining to training for group 27. Just wasn't worth the investment of $$ and travel time. Besides, I would've missed out on this glorious adventure.

Battle of Attrition in the South

I got a strange question from both of my principal's parents the other day as I walked to their shop. I stopped by for some soda, milk and eggs and talked with Pauline's father on the way in and her mother while in the shop.

After a some time in the conversations, talking about how things were during the day, both of them (uncannily...) asked me if I was lonely. Upon clarification, they meant because a lot of volunteers have left the region. While walking back to my flat, listening to my iPod, it struck me. In January 2006 there were eight group 25ers within 80km of my site. As of now, only three remain.

Friday the 20th

A day in the life of a volunteer going to his shopping town on Friday the 20^th (payday)

This country seems to change to a zoo around two times of the month: the 20^th when government employees get paid. The end of the month when everyone else gets paid. It's like a werewolf in the presence of the full moon.

Usually I wait in the library for the combi to pick me up. Today didn't feel like a normal day. It's the 20th. The good news was that the grocery store was stocked this month in preparation for payday, unlike last month. Unfortunately neither they nor the OK had dark baking chocolate. So much for chocolate chip pancakes. Will need to substitute cappuccino chocolate for dark chocolate.

I got dropped off for some grocery shopping at 2:30pm and to pick up some contact solution. In 35 minutes I've finished everything I need to do. The waiting game begins! The time on my watch is 3:06pm.

I decide to walk around the streets of Keetmanshoop with my backpack. End up running into four of my grade ten learners from last year and some others who are St. Therese grads.

I walk to sit at the usual combi meeting place, adjacent to the Spar grocery store. As I stroll on the scene a fight breaks out between two drunks. The other people in the crowd don't look all that much better. I turned tail and decided to hang out in front of the post office and revise my Nama flashcards, texting the driver to pick me up there. Who'd start trouble in front of a post office? The phrase, “going postal” doesn't have the same context here.

The driver stops by after almost an hour to pick me up. Sitting in the combi I start to notice something. Thanks to a much harder than expected run during my 6^th and 7^th free periods, my digestive system was in fast-forward. I go out for runs when I have back-to-back free periods, that way I can stay in the library for learners in the afternoon for reading, research and computers. I also run according to how my body feels - great this day. Anyways, the words to best describe my issue were eminent and catastrophic.

We do a bunch of stops (like ten+) and then make our way back to Spar about two minutes before 5pm. The driver decides to do some grocery shopping after all, knowing that Spar in on winter hours (we're in the Southern Hemisphere) closes at 5pm. In a glaringly ironical moment the driver mutters that he's angry with people here and how they don't do things on time.

Tses people pile into the combi, including and extremely drunk (even by Namibian standards) guy, all of 20 years old. Two of his even drunker friends are right behind him, threatening to beat him up for something he did earlier. One guy keeps banging on the window while we wait for the combi driver to return. We waited for almost 30 minutes. I run into one of my non-PC friends and catch up with life after not seeing each other since March. Meanwhile, the extremely drunk guy's mother exits the combi and gets in the face of the drunk friends. She nearly takes them to town, pushing one of them and almost slapping the other one. The driver finally shows up, unconcerned about recent events.

We finally head back to Tses. The extremely drunk guy started acting strange, kicking the window and some other things. He kept falling on me as we were heading home, so I told him a few things in Nama. The sober people in the combi busted out in laughter, especially my learners and colleagues knowing I don't speak Khoekhoegowab often. Effectively, what I did could translate in English to 'you got served'! I turn up the volume on my iPod and play the soundtrack to the movie Swingers. Dean Martin possesses a disarming power in the song You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You, unlike Motley Crue and Looks that Kill.

I was supposed to be back at the hostel to supervise the Tses Girls Club Movie Night, starting at 6:30pm. We finally left Keetmanshoop at 7:14pm. Thankfully the principal decided to reschedule it for Saturday night. I didn't find out that my club was going to do a movie night until that morning. To think that I passed up a trip to Windhoek for a Harry Potter party for all that? Missing out on a chocolate scone and mint tea at the Craft Centre and then to the mall for The American Fudge Factory?

Speaking of Khoekhoegowab earlier, a couple weeks ago an elderly Nama couple were walking in front of the library as I was telling my class to enter. I accidentally said !gû to my learners instead of go (!gû = go in America talk). The couple quickly turned around, probably in shock, stared at me and smiled. Words fail to describe the moment. It's right up there with the time during training in Omaruru when a group of us went to the Lutheran Church in the location. Enter Dr. Emmett Brown, Mary McFly, a DeLorean, 1.21 gigawatts and the line, “The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”

We're back to PST 2005 in Omaruru, seven Peace Corps volunteers going to Sunday Lutheran service in the location. We walk in and the people there are so welcoming. Children and adults just stare and smile at us and we smile back. Midway through the service, unexpectedly, the pastor calls all of us (the only white people there, by the way) up front about halfway through the service to introduce ourselves. Visitors are not anonymous here. Some of us do our introductions in English or in Afrikaans. At my turn I risk it, not very confident in my Khoekhoe and say, “!Gai //goas.” The congregation erupts in applause. Then go into, “Ti /ons ge a Mike. Tita ge Minnesota za hu ra hâ. Tita ge Tses !nâ //an hâ," the phrases we'd learnt the previous week - Good morning. My name is Mike. I'm from Minnesota. I live in Tses.