Don’t ruin that memory for me

On Tuesday, I was feeling lazy after work, so instead of walking home from my office I grabbed a cab.  Every cab here has its own personality.  What I noticed first about my cab this day was that it was immaculate which is hard to pull off in a city with so much sand and dust.  My cab driver called himself “Under Better” and he was listening to Michael Jackson. I asked him if he was a big Michael Jackson fan.  He said that he was and that he could sing like Michael Jackson and that he was saving money to record his own CD, but that his songs would be about safe driving.  He pulled a folder out from under his dashboard cover (most cars have heavy covers protecting their dashboards from the relentless sun) and handed it to me.  Under Better slowed his car to a crawl on one of the city’s main roads and watched me (and not the road) as I paged through his portfolio of photographs.  The pictures were all of himself at various crash scenes and other scenes of moving vehicle violations.  He explained each image.  “This is a picture of an overloaded boot (they call trunks “boots” here).”  “This car has too many people in it” “This is a car that was involved in an fatal accident.  The driver was drunk.”   “This is a picture of a man hauling a cooler on a tricycle with two children riding on top of the cooler.”  While he explained all of this to me, he drove about 10mph and was oblivious to the increasing line of cars piling up behind us and passing us, and to the ugly looks, shouts, and beeping coming from each passing car.  I looked at him as he spoke and watched a slow parade of angry faces pass behind him. 

Under Better said he wanted to get a dashboard camera and another camera with a zoom lens so he could capture images from far away.  I asked him if he took these photos while driving.  He said “yes” and then produced a camera from underneath his dashboard cover.  As he began telling me about the movie that he intended to make after his CD was finished, my phone’s text message alert went off.  Under Better began explaining the plot of his planned movie as I read the message that I received from my friend Nathan.  It read, “Someone just got attacked by a hippo in a boat.  flipped him out.  somehow was able to swim away and now stuck on one of the islands with hippos surrounding him”  My calm and mature response was,  “WTF?  Holy shit.  Are you watching this?” Hippos are extremely dangerous and responsible for more deaths in Africa than any other animal.  They’re big, mean, very territorial, and fast on land and in water.  Nathan lives on a part of the Kavango River that many hippos also call home. 

At about this time I realized that Under Better had taken a detour and I inquired as to where we were going.  He said “just here” and gave no further explanation.  He then stopped in front of a house with a car in the front yard that had been involved in a front-end collision.  He explained that the driver of this car had died the previous weekend and that he had been drunk.   He said that he wanted to see the senseless deaths on Namibian roadways stop.  As Under Better pulled away from the crushed car, my phone beeped again.  Nathan had responded “Yeah at the water.  They have no idea what to do with the guy.”

Just this past Saturday, I passed the scene of a multi car accident while running.  One car had rolled many times and both cars were damaged enough to make me wonder if occupants in one or both were killed.  The crash victims had all been removed, but a crowd of well over 100 remained.  The Thursday prior, our youth center van was involved in an accident and one of our Youth Officers was also involved in a separate two-car accident that resulted in the death of the person driving the other car.  Earlier last week, a young girl was struck and killed while walking to school. 

I’d been laughing at Under Better in my head, but then in dawned on me that he might be onto something.  Drivers here (in Rundu at least) are reckless yet seemingly oblivious to their own recklessness even though they are constantly surrounded by the consequences of it.  I saw that he wanted to launch a sort of awareness campaign that he would act as the singing spokesman of.  It’s not a bad idea.  I’m not sure if Under Better is the appropriate man for the job, but he couldn’t have picked a more appropriate city. 

My funeral-precession-pace ride home with Under Better came to an end just as he reached the exciting climax of his movie description, where he was being put in jail for having had too many moving violations.  Under Better put his turn single on (A highly underutilized device in Namibia) and carefully pulled to the side of the road to let me out.  I paid him and wished him luck on his plans and encouraged him to come visit me at the youth center if he wanted any help.  He seemed confused by my suggestion and reminded me that his name was Under Better and that if anybody ever introduces himself to me as Under Better that that person would be him.  “If anybody ever says to you ‘I’m Under Better’, that will be me.”  I left it at that. 

I continued my text conversation with Nathan.  He was with a pack of community members on the river’s edge.  He said he could hear the man yelling for help, but that any attempt to save him would have to wait until the morning.    It was already dark in a place where hippos own the night.  Taking a boat out through a pack of them would be suicide. Eventually, Nathan headed home, as there was nothing he or anybody could do.  The next morning he got word that the man had been rescued, but received no further details. 

Odds and ends;

I’m currently locked in an epic struggle against the Namibian tendency to be very late to absolutely everything.  To address this, I started a “Punctuality Club” at the Youth Center.  The benefit of being in my Punctuality Club is that members will be able to join me on tours of local schools where I will give presentations on MCP (multiple concurrent partnerships), HIV/AIDS, and alcohol abuse.  The club members would then do a quick play (or drama as they call them) to illustrate my message.  The youth here really love this sort of activity and I thought it would be the trick to getting a few to show up on time.  The only club rule is that you must show up to the weekly meeting on time.  Showing up to meetings late (or not at all) is a big problem here.  It’s generally accepted that no meeting will ever start on time (or even close to on time).  I’ve written entire blog posts sitting in rooms waiting for meetings to begin.  It makes planning a full day impossible and brings productivity to a standstill.  My hope for the Punctuality Club was to instill some good habits in just a handful of Rundu youth and to then release them into the world and hope that their new respect for punctuality would slowly spread.  We had our very first meeting on Tuesday and not a single person that signed up showed.  The adults here are no better about showing up on time and I believe I may discover a flying pig before I find a punctual Namibian.  I’ve decided to accept defeat in this.  There’s a difference between quitting and knowing when you’re beat.    

It’s clear skies every day here.  Sometimes there will be a few clouds near sunrise, but they vanish soon after the sun arrives and you’re left with an enormous dome of blue throughout each and every day.  It’s winter now. Our mornings and evenings are cool and our days are warm and short.  My highpoint this week was finding a huge bag of oranges (about 35 in a bag) for N$20 (about $2.50 US).  They’re the best oranges I’ve had in a long time and as I often lament the lack of fruits and vegetables here, the past few 5-to-6-orange days have been a nice break.  Before coming here, I didn’t fully appreciate the enormous bouquets of swisschard I used to get at Wegman’s, or the big bags grapefruit and pears or throw pillow sized bags of frozen blueberries or jars of hot salsa or big scoop bins full walnuts and raw almonds.  I used to buy four big low fat cottage cheese tubs at a time, one of my training diet staples, but it doesn’t exist here.  Nor do boneless chicken breast (or boneless anything).  A friend tells me that the lack of enormous chicken breasts here is due to the fact that Namibians don’t turn their chickens into hormone enhanced steroid freaks that are unable to bear the weight of their own body on their tiny chicken legs.  That may be true, but even if “those things can’t even walk”, it doesn’t make me miss them any less.  Thanks for reading.  

workshop and little else

Yawn Alert; this blog post is particularly unexciting.  It’s hard to be entertaining when writing about a business plan-writing workshop.  For those of you that power through, thank you.  For those of you that abandon me for this week, no hard feelings and I hope you visit again next week.  

My business plan-writing workshop went well.  There were a few hiccups, but overall I was happy with it.  Things started off with the traditional overhead projector issues, but got on track quickly after that.  There were 54 attendees from Rundu and the surrounding region.  The first morning went well, but when I began leading everybody through the financial discussion in the afternoon, I’m pretty sure I lost a good portion of my audience.  I anticipated this, but there’s really little I could do except to repeatedly stress that they were welcome to come to my office for one-on-one discussion of how the financials of a business plan work and how they would work up their own numbers.  Trying to teach a group of 54 people of varying education levels what a revenue forecast, profit and loss statement, and a cash flow forecast are and how they fit together in a single afternoon is challenging since many of them have never even heard of (much less seen) these things before in their lives.

The workshop participants consisted mostly of aspiring entrepreneurs, though there were some that had already launched businesses.  Some were trained in vocations such as plumbing, welding, electrical, mechanics, and masonry construction.  Others were unskilled and considering starting small vegetable farms, butcher shops, or chicken and cattle farms. 

After I wrapped up the first day, I spoke to many of the attendees outside of the meeting auditorium.  I wanted to gauge their feelings on the workshop.  Some were confused by the financial discussion, but some said that they understood much of it, which was a relief.  Namibian facial expressions don’t give a way much and I guess many of the blank stares I saw in the crowd were not blank stares of confusion.  A group of 6 women were standing on the steps outside of the building and called me over.  They were all smiles and happy with the day’s discussion and excited to work with me on finalizing their business plans.  Two of them agreed to visit me at my office to work through their business plans.  I’ll call them (and every other attendee) next week to encourage them to follow up. 

By far the most frustrating aspect of my workshop was dealing with the common Namibian mindset of “I must be provided money if I have any hope of starting my own business”.  The third day of the workshop started with two guest speakers.  Both were Namibian ministry representatives presenting on grant programs for small businesses. Some of the people in my workshop insisted that they must receive money either through a loan or grant before they could even consider opening a business.  Some, though thankfully not many, clearly had no interest in any other subject, even though they had no business background, no grasp of basic business concepts, and no reason at all to believe they would be able to run a business successfully.  One gentleman only woke up when a bank or ministry was talking about grants or loans.  He would debate the bank or ministry representative passionately about why he needed to be provided money to launch his business, and then he would promptly fall back to sleep when I again took over the floor.  I doubt he will ever visit my office. 

I wrapped the third day of the workshop up with a guest speaker, Rose Mary.  She’s a very successful Namibian businesswoman who started her career by selling handmade jewelry under a tree near a supermarket.  She now owns multiple businesses in Rundu and is regularly hired as a business consultant around the region.  Her message to the group was clear; Don’t sit on your butt waiting for a grant or loan.  Start your business with what you have, educate yourself on how to run a business, and grow your business through your own hard work.  Her message was received, it seemed to me, more positively by the women than by the men.  I was happy to have a Namibian saying exactly what I had been thinking.  She continued to read my mind when she told the group that many of them would have to start their entrepreneurial life by running a different business than they had in mind in order to save up seed cash for their intended business.  A group of aspiring homebuilders in the back of the room reacted to this statement by crossing their arms and shaking their heads as if any other business was out of the question or below them. 

Rose Mary drove her point home by telling the crowd that if you are ashamed of the money, the money will be ashamed of you.  In other words, if you are ashamed to do the type of work you need to do to scrape together an initial investment to start your business, you will never make any money at all.  The construction worker crew was still unimpressed, but the rest of the crowd nodded in approval.  I plan to adopt her message going forward. 

Since the conclusion of my workshop, I’ve been getting a steady stream of visitors and calls.  Some visitors were not even in the workshop, but had heard about it and came seeking advice anyway (which is fine by me).  I’m clear with each person that grants and loans are unlikely and that in order to work with me they have to dedicate themselves to building their business without the help of banks or ministries.  If I find that their particular business or situation puts them in a position to qualify for a grant or loan, I will certainly help them pursue it, but it’ll be the exception.   

 

A problem here in Namibia with new businesses is that often the business owner is doing little else but mimicking what they see others doing.  Many small business owners have no clear understanding of revenue, expenses, profits/losses, product pricing, competitor analysis, marketing, differentiation, or really any of the basic business concepts.  For instance, two men who own a bar in Rundu visited my office today to seek my advice on their plan to expand their business by adding firewood sales.  As I’ve mentioned before, selling firewood is a common business in Namibia as many families do not have electricity and therefore cook their meals over fire.  It can be profitable, but it depends on a lot of factors.  I walked them through the steps they would have to take in order to figure out if they could sell firewood profitably.  I could see that my new bar owner friends had no concept of how to calculate profits and so I asked if they could tell me about some of the other items they sell at their bar and how much they charge for them.  It turned out they sold a number of types of candy.  They told me how much they pay for each type of candy (per box) and how much they sold it for (per piece).  I showed them how I calculated their profit/loss and showed them that they were selling all of their candy at a loss.  How is this possible?  It’s possible because they simply did what they saw other people doing.  Selling gum, for instance, for $0.30/piece.  They went to the store, found the same gum, bought a box, and started selling if for the same amount they saw it sold for by-the-piece in the local markets.  One of the two men now looked concerned, the other, I believe, didn’t quite understand what I was saying. 

I moved on to shrinkage (or losing stock to theft, damage, giving items away free, vendor fraud etc).  I often notice bartenders and restaurant help sipping on beer at work.  I explained to them that based on what they buy their beer for and what they sell it for, that they have to sell 4 bottles of beer to make up for one bottle of beer they lose to shrinkage.  Now both men looked concerned.  I asked if they kept any records at all.  They didn’t.  I’d been with them for over an hour and told them to go back to their business and to write down every type of item they sell, what they buy if for, what they sell it for, and to return to me with the information.  I will try giving them some basic lessons on book keeping and product pricing.  Sometimes you have to start with the very basics, even with people who already own businesses. 

It’s sometimes hard for me to reconcile my responsibilities as a business volunteer with my responsibilities as a health volunteer.  I feel like I’m breaking some unspoken rule by consulting bar owners on how to run their businesses in a country with significant drinking problem.  But I justify it by telling myself that business skills are business skills and that anybody that learns the basics from me can apply them to any number of businesses as well as teach and be an example to other would-be business people.  Also, the fact is that bar ownership is one of the few ways a poor and unskilled Namibian can lift him/herself up from nearly nothing.  

So that’s all I have for now.  I’ll spend this week working out my approach to my next workshop and also trying to make some progress on some other mini projects.  I hope you are all well.  Thanks for reading. 

I’ll leave you with a couple pix from my workshop.   

Me and my Rukwangali translator.

Cracking eggs of wisdom.

Maurk U

Some of this post isn’t good for kids.

Hello All.  Not much of a post today.  I’m excited and nervous about my workshop, which will begin on Monday.  I feel prepared and all the arrangements have been made.  But, in Africa, things never ever go how you think they’re going to.  The question is just how not-as-planned will things go.  I’m optimistic, but I’m sure I’ll have some stories for you next week. 

I have the support of a couple other PCVs who have traveled to Rundu from their sites to help me out with any complications that might arise.  They will also be subjected to hours of my presentation practice this weekend.   

Elsewhere in the world;

Something that occurs to you when you travel in places like Myanmar is that you’ll almost certainly hear some bad news from there sooner or later.  It didn’t take long.  Those of you following my blog since my Southeast Asia travels know that I spent much of this past January there.  Recently, violence broke out in a remote region known as the Rakhine state.  Remember the tattooed faces and the guesthouse being run mostly by children?  That place.  The worst violence was in Sittwe (remember the police convention?).  Maurk U, a small, remote, beautiful riverside town surrounded by temples, was also impacted.  About 30 civilians have died, and more than 2,500 homes been burned and 30,000 people have been displaced.  Mosques, Monasteries, and stores have been destroyed.  The troubles started after 10 Muslims were hung in retaliation for the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman, allegedly by Muslims.

So, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the people I met in those towns.  For many of the people there, tourism is their only source of income (and hope, for that matter).  Events such as this put at risk the slim glimmer of hope that the recent pro-democracy developments in Myanmar have provided them after 50 years under a brutal military regime.  It was similar unrest in the 50s and early 60s that the Burmese military used as an excuse to take over in 1962.  Even if the unrest is handled responsibly and stability is restored, the impact to the lives of many of the people I met there will likely last for many months if not years.  It’s difficult to describe just how hard the people there work to try to make a better life for themselves and their families.  It’s also difficult to describe how friendly people are to complete strangers such as myself, even though they are living hand to mouth and facing near total uncertainty about their future. 

So, my Photo Friday pix are from my Myanmar travels.  Some are ones I’ve posted before. The first is of a young girl at a cockfight in a village in the Rakhine state near Maurk U, Myanmar.  I’ve also included a few others from Maurk U and Sittwe.  I hope you are all well.  Thanks for reading. 

Young girl at a cockfight near Maurk U

Children in a small village near Maurk U

My breakfast being prepared in Sittwe

Maurk U temple

My Maurk U guesthouse owner and tour guide with a chin village elder

Grace.  Maurk U Guesthouse owner's daughter and the person that ran the whole show.

Complications

I'm busy planning a 3-day Business Plan development workshop.  The workshop will be from June 18th through the 20th.  My biggest stress is that the subject matter is a bit technical at times and my Namibian English, or "Namlish" as they call it here, isn't great.  I find that in most conversations with Namibians, I have to repeat myself often.  That's fine when you're speaking to one person.  However, my workshop will have about 40 attendees.  Further, the attendees' grasp of English and education levels will vary widely.  I'll have two translators; one for Rukwangali and another for Thimbukushu, the two most common languages in this part of Namibia.  I'll try to make the material as clear as possible, but I can only reduce its complexity so much before it becomes useless.  

My counterpart, who is responsible for all of the day-two planning and securing guest speakers, has vanished for over a week.  This is not unusual in Namibia.  My supervisor seems unconcerned.  I am concerned.  I'll wait a few more days before panicking and taking over that portion of the workshop as well. 

The water in Rundu has gone out 5 times in 10 days.  The electricity has gone out 6 times in the same period.  Each time they go out, they typically stay out for somewhere between 6 and 24 hours.  One water outage event began in my yard.  The story goes like this; 

 On Tuesday night I was woken at 2AM by the sound of water rushing by my bedroom window.  That’s a disconcerting sound to wake up to in the desert.   I peaked out of my bedroom window and found exactly what my ears were telling me I would find, a wide stream of water.  I went out to my kitchen to see what the situation was in the back yard and found an even wider stream.  My house had become an island.  The water was only about an inch below my front door, which is about 8 inches off the ground.  The water, I assumed, was coming from a water-main break, but I wasn’t interested in wading out in the stream to find the source.   The water continued to flow until about 5AM.   

Got pretty close to making it in my door which would have been a disaster;

When I finally made it out of the house to find the source of the water, I didn’t have to go far.   Just a few feet from my front door I found this:

By 3:00PM, the scene looked like this;

I have a bike.  It’s a brand new Chinese made hunk of crap.  The crank arm fell off the other day as I rode it home much to the entertainment to all who watched.  The crank arm is the part of your bike that the pedal is attached to which makes it of considerable importance.  Traditionally, they remain attached.  I’ve been trying to find a socket wrench and a washer to fix it all week.  I even pressed the NamWater folks that dug up my yard to see if they had anything.  Nope.  This weekend I’ll try a few service stations.   Complications are a way of life here. 

The good stuff;
We have about two dozen goats at the youth center.  I help our grounds keepers run them out of their enclosure in the morning to go feed in the larger field at the back of our grounds.

One had babies last night.  One lived, one died.  Here's the new member of our goat family. 

I got to spend a day last weekend in Divundu, a small town about 120 miles east of Rundu.  There, I visited with my friends Nathan and Geri.  Some shots;

Nathan is assigned to the Popa Malaria Camp, which is where regional mosquito control efforts are based out of.  

Nathan's hut. He can hear hippos in the river behind the hut at night and had to help one of his host brothers chase a Hippo off their property last week.

One of Nathan's host brothers.

We found this snake skin not very far from Nathan's room at the Malaria Camp.   That'll make you watch your step. 

 My favorite photo of the week I took during a walk near the Popa Malaria Camp in Divundu. 

That's it for this week.  I may be quiet for the next two weeks as my workshop will likely take over my life.  However, I'm sure I'll return with more than a few good stories.  I hope you are all well.  Thanks for reading. 

I can't stare at this title line any longer. I can't think of a good title. Just read the post and forget the title. It's just a title. It's really not that important.

I’m growing a mullet and I have a cat in my apartment named dieciocho, or ocho for short.  It's not my cat.  The cat belongs to my housemate, Gio.  It didn’t have a name.  Well, it had a name but Gio forgot what it was.  I call that not having a name.  He said, “its name is Rukwangali for hiccup, but I forget what that word is.  It’s really long”.  Her name is Ocho now.

The mullet is a Peace Corps NAM35 Mullet Club requirement.  We have 2.5 members.  The .5 is rock-star Rob whose commitment level to the club is debatable.  I guess the take away here is that you can all look forward to a picture of me rocking a hardcore mullet by late summer or early fall.  Nothing commands respect like a man with a mullet in a suit.  Part of my mission here is to expose Namibians to American culture.  And though the mullet is not my culture, there are some in America who sport them proudly and that’s good enough for me. 

Long before my mullet comes in, I will be facilitating a large Business Plan writing workshop.  Preparing for the workshop has kept me busy.  It’ll be a 3-day event and will include one day on business plan writing, a second day on financing start ups, and a third day that will be on Rundu small business success stories.  Besides developing all of slides and handouts, I also need to worry about things I have little experience with (particularly in Namibia) such as food, facilities, and identifying and inviting guest speakers.   It’s been many months since I left my job at Alere and it’s nice to be work-busy again.  I never anticipated having this sort of gig in the Peace Corps, but at least it feels familiar.

As promised, here are some photos of some of my daily sights;

First, we have my lunch friends, Maria (red hat) and Kito in their restaurant/bar.  

Maria - left, Kito - right

Some sites on my walk back to work after lunch;

This is the road Kito's place is on.

Some young entrepreneurs I chat with on the walk back to the office.  They just started a little car wash and were excited to show me the puppy they just bought.  

 This is where I get my fat cakes (fried dough, so good, so cheap, so not good for you).   This is an Angolan family.  They never smile.  Ever.  It has become a mission of mine to get them to smile at me.  Just once. 

On this particular walk home I struck up a conversation with two men, Albinus and John.  They're brothers and they live in an informal location near the youth center.  Binus wanted to show me a certificate he'd gotten a few years ago from the Red Cross.  He'd once done volunteer work for them and was hoping to find similar work.  He makes a little money by catching fish in the Kavango river and selling them to people in his neighborhood.  After about 30 minutes of conversation on where/how he might find some other sources of income, he mentioned a farm his family owned about 15 miles outside of town.  He said there was a lot of lumber on the land and that much of the fire wood used in Rundu came from the same area.  

We started talking about a fire wood business (firewood is big here because many don't have electricity and have to cook over fire).  John (right) said he'd sold firewood in the past and thought he could sell a lot of it if they could just get it back to the home.  We talked a bit about how much it would cost to hire a truck and how much they could make from a truck load of firewood.  They said they would talk to some people and find out how much it would be to hire a truck.  I'll visit them again next week to see how their plans are coming. 

Binus (left) and John (right)

This is their house.

Sometimes there is a language barrier and drawings in the sand go a long way to get over these little hurdles.  This is me clarifying what these gentlemen mean by a "4x4 truck" and "2.6 Namibian after truck".  

I work in a modern building.  The full name of the facility is "The Rundu Multipurpose Youth Resource Center".  This is our receptionist, Venicia.  She never stops smiling. I should bring her to get fat cakes with me someday so she can give the Angolan family a smiling lesson.   

This is our intern, Leticia and her grandmother.  

This is my counterpart, Mr. Kamushambe.  He is the director of the youth center.

This is my office spider.  It's a wall spider.  They're everywhere here.  You hardly notice them after a while.  

Besides the modern apartment and a nice office, another thing that makes my Peace Corps experience a lot different from many others' in my group is my access to internet.  It's very rare here to have fast free wifi available.  It's nice to be able to keep up with friends and family when you're so far from home.  Here's my ever faithful friend, Rosellen.  She lives in Italy and she doesn't like getting her picture taken. 

I'm a laundry (hand washing) pro now.  Only takes about an hour.  This is what the beginning of the process looks like.  

This is my apartment (in the middle of cleaning).

The view of my laundry drying from the back room window.  Yes.  Exciting.  

This guy showed up in my yard when I was taking pictures so now he's in my blog.

The front of my place.

 

This is Emanuel and Uno.  They're host siblings to my friend, Alice (PCV).  They're getting ready to show me how well they sing.  I was invited to their house to celebrate Alice's birthday.

This is PCV Alice (sitting).  Her host family hard at work preparing her birthday dinner. 

Meat getting grilled for Alice's birthday party.  

 Here are some random shots of people and places around my neighborhood;

My favorite photo of the week.  These girls hang out in the park near my house.  They think it's hilarious when I try to speak to them in Rukwangali.   It's very common to see a young girl hauling an even younger child on her back as seen here.  Kids start to help caring for younger siblings at a very early age in Namibia. 

Some of the neighborhood boys.  There are so many kids here.  You almost never see boys playing with girls here.  

Neighborhood barber shop.  

Shop owner.  Super nice guy.  The road rash is from falling off the back of a truck.  I didn't ask for further details though I wanted to.  I don't think I'd be able to get a proper mullet here. 

Sunset over the Kavango River.

 

 

 

That's it for this week.  Please note I've updated my mailing address over there on the right side of your screen.  I've also added a couple other blogs I've been following.  I hope to post a more wordy blog next week.  I hope you are all well.  Thanks for reading.