I would call this "You know you're in Africa when..." but I want you, the reader, to start making a distinction between what is "African" and what is Namibian. For too long people have grouped all Africans together as one and the same. So let's start now by distinguishing that this is not about Africa, but about Namibia, a place in Africa, and the people I meet here. So this page will contain short pieces about events and people that have impacted my stay in Namibia.
Year 2, Term 3
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Oh my god, I'm in Africa
I live in this place, it's far from home. It's called Africa. But honestly, there's nothing truly profound about living here.
A few months ago, I was taking a bus ride down to Windhoek. The driver was playing some gawd-awful music. It was sunset and I realized that except for just how bad the music was, it was completely mundane. It was the kind of experience that would be romanticized in a Hollywood production - somehow it would be profound. Reality wasn't.
During my Kunene weekend, something hit me about the place: the circumstances, the landscape, some combination made it feel more real. Suddenly I was in Africa.
But day to day living is still rather mundane. I get up, go to work, plan the next day's work, do any marking and go to bed. Doesn't it just sound thrilling?
These past few days I've been traveling in Botswana. For some reason, I got very excited about the idea of seeing hippos. They've never previously been high on my must see list, but now they were. Two days ago, I took a river cruise. Oh, we saw hippos: in ones, and twos and groups of twelve.
I'm still running off of the adrenaline. Somehow, I'm back in that magical Africa. (Apr 23)
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Opportunistic food shopping
One of the things that I learned from living in Korea was to never pass by a new grocery store. You never know what you'll find. After two days of solid driving, I'd gotten to Botswana rather burned out. I had a river cruise booked for the next afternoon, but that morning I was free. So I roamed Kasane (the town in Botswana that was my base). Like in Namibia, there was a grocery store called Spar (It's a chain). Rummaging through it for half an hour, I managed to find Satay sauce, Teriyaki marinade, balsamic and malt vinegars and American-style barbecue sauce.
Not sure what the customs officers thought when they went through my cooler. (Apr 23)
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Canadian flag
In Botswana, I had both a German tourist and a Botswanan guard ask me that if I was a Canadian, where was my flag? (With meaningful looks at my backpack.) Do Canadian tourists still do that? (Apr 23)
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Gunshot
I was at the internet cafe in Oshakati, just finishing uploading the changes to this site, when I heard a bang. The owner of the cafe, a former South African soldier, can be short tempered. He stepped out of the cafe and started yelling at someone, "This isn't Angola! Go home if you want to do that!" or words to that affect.
When I was ready to leave, I wanted to ask him what he had been yelling about, but he was on the phone. It turned out that he was talking to the police.
In front of the shop was a 4x4 with Angola plates (black plates with white numbers). It turned out that a man had gotten out, yelled at somebody, fired a shot into the ground and gotten back into the vehicle and just sat there.
The cafe owner suggested that I stay in the shop until the police arrive, which they did promptly. I'd seen the Emergency Action Force when I visited the station a week ago. They're a well-armed group that all travel in one pick-up truck. They surrounded the vehicle, and I left.
The cafe owner, who had walked me out to my car, was talking to the police when I pulled away. (Apr 24)
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The chess set I didn't buy
In Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, we spent a very tiring half an hour at a crafts market. It was tiring because you had to continually fend off people trying to show/sell you their things - each with their own spiel that they wanted you to hear, and they're aggressive about selling things - putting them in your hand and refusing to take them back.
One item that completely caught my eye was a small chess set carved out of stone, The board was a grey rock, with the black pieces indicated by carved flowers. The pieces were all tribal images, a king, a queen, a roundel house for the rook, etc.
I knew that I wanted it a soon as I saw it. I've been looking for a unique chess set for some time, and still regret not buying one I saw in Barcelona two years ago. There was one catch with this one - not all of the pieces were there. I told the man to find the missing pieces and I'd buy it from him.
I came back five minutes later to a total disaster. The man and his friend were busy painting the chess board squares black and white because someone had told him that that was the right thing to do. The engraved flowers, that indicated which squares were black, were no longer visible.
Worse yet, they couldn't find the other pieces, so the man wanted to substitute a different set of pieces. These were plain obelisks, where the size determined the position (King tallest, pawn shortest, etc.).
I told him that I didn't want them. I was interested in the original pieces, and the clean board (they had been using a shoe polish as paint, it was coming clean). When he couldn't find all the pieces he wanted me to mix and match the two sets.
He was so fixated on the sale that was slipping away that he couldn't understand my objections. He hounded me around the rest of the market, not leaving me alone. I ended up getting onto our bus and sitting there at the back for the last ten minutes just to get away from him.
Sadly, I ended up buying nothing from the market, although I did buy a carved stone hippo from a street hawker. (Apr 24)
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Swakopmund is not in Africa!
OK, technically, Swakop (as everyone calls it) is in Africa, Namibia even. But to get there, I had to go through a barren landscape called the "moonscape" then drive through a fog bank. and voila! I'm in Germany!
Swakop truly is a throwback to another time.
It's also the least African place that I've been in Africa. There were three bookstores, each with a variety of English language books. There was a movie cinema (I went to see 10,000 BC, not out of interest, but just to see a movie). And best of all, there's a coin laundromat. For the first time in four months, my clothes were machine washed and machine dried.
This is the only place in Namibia where you can leave a store without a security guard having to sign your receipt.
Compulsive grocery shopping highlight: artichoke hearts! (May 5, 2008)
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Having a bad day
I'm in Windhoek as part of my vacation plan. I'm staying at the Cardboard Box hostel again. I like the vibe, and I always meet lots of people.
Places like this always have a spectrum of clientele. There's the local expats who come here to drink and meet new people, the long term tourists here for three or more months who somehow just never got around to leaving (one left while I was here - 3 months in one place, I hope she doesn't regret the missed opportunities later).
One women, a Brit whom I met last time, is here with VSO. She's working for a legal group and like myself will be here for a year or two.
Well, this weekend, she got mugged. They got everything - even her passport. To add insult to her injury, her food in the communal fridge at the backpackers also disappeared.
I guess this is a warning for all of us about complacency. (May 5, 2008)
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Paths not taken sometimes cross
At the border between Botswana and Zimbabwe, we had an unexpected delay. Our tour, the usual mix of foreigners, included 3 South Africans, and they needed special papers to cross into Zimbabwe. So the rest of us waited, and talked...
One of the women in the group is a Brit on a working vacation. She works as a placement officer for a group called i-to-i, one of the placement charities that was on my short-list until I settled on WorldTeach. One of the deciding factors for WorldTeach was the duration: i-to-i does very short placements - 12 weeks at the longest. And that's not unusual. Many of the organizations that I looked at placed for a maximun of 12 weeks. WorldTeach's placement, at 1 year, is at the short end of a higher tier of groups. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground between 3 months and 1 year.
I couldn't imagine staying for only 12 weeks - I'd be back in Canada (or somewhere else) already! (May 10, 2008)
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PCV isn't half as erotic as it sounds
PCV is short for Peace Corps Volunteer, it just sounds kinky. The longer I'm here, the more I'm interacting with the PCVs. This culminated in a weird experience the last time I was in Windhoek. Part way through our break, I had a two day layover there before heading out to Soussesvlei, the great dune sea of Namibia.
I've taken to staying at the Cardboard Box backpackers. It has a few advantages: One, a lot of local expats hang out there, making it easy to make friends in Windhoek; Two, other NGOs tend to hang out there -- VSO, PCV, Osamu's Japanese volunteer group, Norwegian nurses - I kid you not - and just about every other European nationality that sends people to Namibia for short duration work or learning; Three, it's on the corner of a major thoroughfare, John Meinart Strasse, so catching a ride into the core is easy.
So this time when I arrived, only my second time there, I knew almost all of the guests - the PCVs were in town for a conference, a few locals that I knew were hanging around the bar and a Brit medical volunteer (VSO I think) from my area happened to be around.
The staff, who didn't really know me yet, were stunned that I seemed to know every one of their guests by name.
But yeah, to get back to the point, PCV isn't some kind of kinky clothing. Damn. (May 13, 2008)
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Rethinking even the most basic assumptions
Namibian learners are much less foreign psychologically than Korean students. They have had much more of the same culture and experiences that I had growing up. So when you hit a disconnect, it seems even wider than it would in a completely foreign place like Korea. Today I hit one.
As readers of the site will know I'm a bit of a fan of Shel Silverstein. Well, I used his song "Unicorn," you know, the one sung by the Irish Rovers, as a listening exercise with my learners. I wasn't surprised that they didn't know the song (although one had heard it before), but after teaching it to all three English classes, one of the learners raises her hand, "Teacher, what's a unicorn?"
It never dawned on me that they wouldn't know what a unicorn was. Especially since my Korean students did know. (May 15, 2008)
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Snakes in Trees
During our training we had an orientation on snakes. This was while we were camping in Etosha. That night, I noticed just how dark it was, how many stars there were. When I mentioned to everyone, "don't forget to look up", meaning look at the stars, one of the women in our group ducked down and said, "oh yeah, tree snakes!" (May 17, 2008)
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Groceries
I hadn't been able to figure why there would occassionally be sour cream in the grocery stores, but not very often.
Almost everyone in Namibia gets paid on the 20th of the month. One of the PCVs pointed out to me that she knows when it's pay day because that's when her local mini-mart stocks bacon.
So I put it to the test today, and sure enough, there was sour cream in the store. (May 20, 2008)
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Casualties of Elections
The recent failed elections in Zimbabwe are having odd reprecussions. It is sad but to be expected that it would lead to violence within Zimbabwe, but the violence has been spreading outside of the country. It seems like wherever Zimbabweans go to get away from it, it follows them.
Most of the problems are in South Africa, "the Rainbow Nation." There are daily reports on our news about Zimbabweans getting beat up by mobs in South Africa. They are being blamed for stealing jobs, raising food prices and causing fod shortages. The situation is such that refugees from Mozambique are beign targetted now too.
You can read about it all in the Christian Science Monitor.
Note that parallel to this, the world is suffering through sky-rocketing food prices and regionalized food shortages.
I have one Zimbabwean friend here in town, and having seen the news today, i'll have to make the effort to reach out to him to see that things are OK for him here. (May 20, 2008)
UPDATE: He's fine - applying for a job in Angola, thinking about going overseas, but fine. (May 28, 2008)
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Coca-Cola as an economic indictor
A late anecdote about Zimbabwe... you can not buy Coca-Cola in Zimbabwe. Sprite and the other Coke brands are there, but no Coke. Like most of Africa, Zim bars and restaurants are plastered with Coca-Cola signage and coolers. But there's no Coke. What brought this to mind is that as they talk about possible rice shortages, suddenly it's gotten hard to find Coke around here too. (and Gilette products - not sure why) (May 21, 2008)
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Phys. Ed. vs Life Skills
The beginning of a new term has meant that my schedule has changed. I've lost some of my Life Skills classes, which I enjoyed and apparently the learners did too, and been given Phys. Ed. Yep, I'm supposed to teach Phys. Ed. Stop laughing. Please. (May 23, 2008)
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It's OK that I don't know you, but you don't know me, and that's just wrong
I had an interesting experience Saturday night. I met a learner who didn't know me.
I didn't know him either, but that's OK. There are over 840 students at Ponhofi. I can't know them all. But he didn't know me either, and that set off an alarm. The school has made such a big production out of having a volunteer teacher, and of introducing me, there's no way that he could be a student at our school and not know me.
It turns out he wasn't a student at our school. Some girl's boyfriend had snuck in to visit her, and I had caught him. (May 27, 2008)
UPDATE: I've thought more about this, and the thing is that he reacted to me as most black Namibians react toward an Afrikaner - a combination of challenge and defensiveness. The learners at this school know that I'm good for a smile or a quick joke. They know I don't behave like an Afrikaner, and they don't act that way toward me. (Sept. 22, 2008)
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Ten Things She Hates About Sem
Teaching poetry can be fun. As I've written elsewhere, I like using Shel Silverstein's poems. But one of the criticisms of me last term was that I taught the whole term without ever using a textbook (I actually used 3 grammar textbooks and 2 storybooks, but the learners only saw photocopies, so to them it didn't happen). So I was thrilled to find a few of T. S. Eliot's cat poems in one of our readers. I've been hauling 46 text books between three classrooms every day for the last week so that my learners could read about Macavity, Skimbleshanks and Rum Tum Tugger from real books and not just photocopies.
Then to top it off, I played those three songs from Cats, and with those songs as guides, we studied rhyme and rhythm, and finally, we did a character analysis of the three cats.
Of course, skills development needs to lead to some form of production and the logical path was toward having them make their own poems. In true Namibian style, I got a lot of copying of existing works (It's easy to tell when the learner doesn't know how to say the words they have supposedly written, or in some cases, doesn't know the meaning. Gee, this Namibian boy wrote a poem about heather bloming in Scotland -wonder if he copied it? I wonder if he's ever seen heather before or knows what it is?). I caught three different learners trying to pass off the lyrics of "My name is Luca" by Suzanne Vega as their own work.
But I didn't really get into trouble until today (I didn't actually get into trouble at all, just a moment of "oh no!") You know the poem is going to be interesting when the learner prefaces it with "this poem is about him," and points to one of the more popular boys in the class. She was crying before she was half way through it, but she kept reading. It was hard to understand much of what she said, except for one line, "if you can't see the good in me, then leave me alone!"
The whole thing so reminded me of the movie "10 things I hate about you." Now I feel like I have to show that film to the class or at least to that one learner. Oh and maybe I'll play a song by Suzanne Vega too. (May 29, 2008)
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Everything is linked, even if I can't see it
Last term, there were three teachers at the school who were friendly toward me. They helped me settle in and generally kept tabs on me. But the remainder, about 25 teachers, were distant.
Something changed beginning this term, and I'm not sure what. Suddenly people talk to me. I don't know if it's a time thing - the start of this term I wasn't a new face, but a familiar returnee.
Partially I think it's that I've taken a lot of visible action on a couple of high profile activities. First, the library (I had my life skills classes re-arranging the library - thus learning it and making it work for others): we opened this week, and signed out over 120 books the first 3 days we were open. I'm also working with the principal and computer teacher to get a better network set-up in place, one that would allow us to use all of our resources better (and I'm quietly running internet skills groups in the late evenings). On top of that I'm involved in two high profile clubs, the debate club and the nascent drama club.
But there can be other reasons too. Ones that aren't as immediately obvious, and it all comes down to living in a small town.
One example, there's a teacher who was friendly last term, but not particularly close. All of a sudden, last term, he became very concerned for my safety inside my town. I've never felt unsafe in the town and would often walk through it alone at night. What I hadn't known until just recently was that one of our teachers got beaten up at the bar just outside the school gate. I guess since I'm so easily identifiable as a teacher from the school, there was a fear that I would be targeted by these same people.
Another example: One of the teachers who was particularly disdainful last semester has been all buddy-buddy this term. I couldn't figure that one out, but maybe now I have. Between terms, I was returning to the school one night and I passed a woman walking with a lot of bags of groceries. Frankly, I thought she was one of our teachers so I offered her a ride. It turned out that i didn't know her (not the best night vision, I guess). But I met her again yesterday, at the only ATM in town. She told me then that she is friends with this particular teacher. Case closed? (May 30, 2008)
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It's a small country after all
I don't know a lot of people here but i keep running into people who know the people I know. Sometimes this can be very beneficial.
When I first arrived her, there was a mix up with my work visa. Here I am in the airport, 40 km outside of Windhoek, and they don't want to let me into the country because my passport number is different from the one that they have my visa registered under (this was a known problem and supposed to have been taken care of).
The customs officer wasn't going to let me into the country until she found out what school I was going to - Ponhofi - her old high school. My work visa was duly entered into my passport.
Recently, down in Windhoek and I was out for a night with a friend. A good chance to get away from the same old faces and be around new people. Another of the volunteers had the same plan -- It turned out, with the same friends. My friends and her friends are one and the same. (June 26, 2008)
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Scars of War
Somehow I've never really clued into the fact that Namibia was in the ravages of a war not 20 years ago. From living in South Korea I'm used to the idea that there has been a war and that some emotional wounds are still present, but they were all in the oldest of generations. My (now ex) housemate is much younger than me, but with all this talk in Zimbabwe of civil war, she's experiencing anxiety from the resurfacing memories of the war for liberation.
Today at an assembly honoring some retiring school workers, the war came up and an emotional song was sung. Somehow it made me think of Bob Marley's Redemption Song. I don't know why. The emotion was moving (the words weren't in English). Some of the younger learners huddled together to better see the lyrics. It was an odd moment, kind of like a candlelight vigil without the candles, and it also drove home to me that war is not far beneath the surface here.
Tomorrow Ponhofi is hosting a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of a student revolt against the South African military presence, a rebellion that was led by our school. (June 26, 2008)
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Hair
I couldn't figure out why a bunch of learners were hanging around a classroom this morning (Saturday). Then it dawned on me that they were all girls and that some where carrying curling irons and straighteners. The classrooms each have a power outlet. There must not be enough outlets in the dorms for the girls, so they go to the classrooms. (June 27, 2008)
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Surprise!
Running the library has been interesting. I'm not actually the librarian, but he's almost never around, especially when there are students there. It will be easier when I have my own key to the library, and when I have more learners trained as volunteers.
As it is now, my most diligent volunteer is a Grade 8 learner named Hillary. Unfortunately, she's in the youngest grade and this leads to problems of authority - why would a Grade 11 or 12 listen to an 8? Whenever I've seen it happen I've come down on the side of Hillary, to reinforce her authority.
Just the other day, I thought I was going to have to break up a fight between her and one of my Grade 11s. They were getting loud but not in English. I couldn't understand what was going on. Hillary called me over.
It turns out they weren't fighting, exactly. They were trying to kill a scorpion. The scorpion was trying to hide in a crevice, and Hillary was trying to flush it out with a small piece of paper. The Grade 11 wasn't helping, just getting upset by the scorpion. I grabbed a thick book (an accounting text book if anyone wants to keep score) and squished it once Hillary got it out of the crevice.
That's the first (and as of now, only) scorpion that I've seen. But I'm getting cautious, shaking out shoes and clothes before putting them on. I know that the volunteers in the south had a small plague of scorpions a month or so ago. (July 5, 2008)
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Unknown Guest(s)
Something has dug a burrow along my fence. I'm not sure what it is, but there's been some other strange activity too. Walking home one night I saw a shadow run out of my driveway. It was about the size of a house cat, give or take the darkness, but seemed to have a longer body. Lately something has been setting the dogs off at night, howling like crazy. One night last week I woke up to the sounds of two distinct animals growling at each other outside my window - one was definitely a dog, the other I don't know - it sounded more like the hissing growl of a cat. Maybe it's some kind of burrowing cat, or maybe it's a mongoose (my friends Dan and Kathryn are hoping it turns out to be a colony of meerkats, but this one seems to be nocturnal so I have doubts). Maybe there's more than one - as they say, investigations are continuing. (July 13, 2008)
UPDATE: The locals seem insistant that it's a ground squirel even though the hole is too big and the foot prints look like a predator. (July 28, 2008)
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Winter Windstorms and Moon Shadows
For the last week or so we've had these very strong windstorms in the morning. A strong wind rips out of the east, starting just before sunrise. It really blows up a lot of sand and makes the air hazy. Even though it's winter, the high temperature of the day is around 80F. I keep thinking of a Johnny Clegg album called "Heat, Dust and Dreams." I wonder if he wrote it in the winter.
Another observation, another song. At night, it's so clear here, with so little ambient light that you really do get distinct moon shadows. Even with a half moon you still have enough light to be able to read the face of my cellphone. The other day i was listening to Kudu FM and heard the song "Moon Shadows." Can't remember if that's Harry Chapin or Cat Stevens, but it was appropriate. (Aug 1, 2008)
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Privacy
Each culture has its own definitions of privacy. In South Korea, you have no medical privacy - anyone calling the hospital or doctor can be told what you are in for and what your condition is. And of course in Korea, every mall's men's room has an attendant - an old woman sitting in plain view of the urinals.
In Namibia, people's personal information is seen as being less private than back home. On the local radio station recently, they had a game for learners. They had to call in and try to answer three trivia questions. As each learner was introduced, not only was their full name and home town given, but so was their cellphone number! This is the contact information to an under-aged child being given on the radio. Each year there are nationally set exams for Grades 10 and 12. Each and every learner who writes them has their name, ID number, school and all grades published in the newspaper. Imagine everybody in the country knowing your academic scores!
I remember about 6 years ago listening to the Kenyan national radio broadcaster, transmitted over the internet. On the news one day, the lead story was that this was report card day. I thought that was bad. This is worse. (August 8, 2008)
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Kudu Counts
There's an English language radio station in Namibia called Kudu FM. It's not great, but it's what we have. They usually play either songs you know covered by artists you don't or artists you know, but obscure songs (Not "Don't Dream It's Over" but "Don't Stop" by Crowded House anyone?).
I had to laugh the other day - Kudu was doing it's weekly Top 5 songs. I tuned in at song number 7! Not sure what "Top 5" means at Kudu FM, but 5 goes to at least 7. Maybe all of their amps go to 11 too. (August 11, 2008)
Year 2, Term 3
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