Hiatus

Hello Friends.  I know I haven't been posting very frequently in the past few months. The issue is that I’m still not well and the sickness is significantly limiting my mobility, which limits my experiences here, which limits what I have to write about.  I’ll likely be heading back to Windhoek this week to see a doctor there. I won’t be posting much until I feel better unless I have something significant or interesting to share.  Here are some photos from my walk to work this past Friday.

I pass these kids most days.  This abandoned car is their clubhouse.

I never thought I'd get used to constantly walking through sand, but I barely notice it anymore.  It's always in my shoes and pockets, often in my bed, and sometimes in my food.  I won't miss sand when I leave here.  This is a small part of the long sandy walk to my office.  It's rainy season now, so everything is very green.

 My entourage.

Part of my walk takes me through a big school yard.  There's usually about a dozen kids taking turns doing flips off this wall.

 

The Churn

Hello friends.  Not a good post for kids.

I see a lot of strange things out of my kitchen window.  A completely naked man walked past my house the other day.  All he had with him that he wasn’t born with was a t-shirt that he had slung over his shoulder.  He seemed unconcerned and quite at his leisure.  Possibly drunk, possibly mentally compromised.  Mental health services don’t exist here, or at least the lack of capacity makes them constructively non-existent. 

A few days after the naked man’s stroll, there was person sleeping inside of a discarded section of a large drainage pipe that sits across the street.  A day later, two friends had moved in with him.  They slept practically in a pile and reminded me of how my dog and his friend used to sleep on top of one another (the things that make you think of home).  The morning after that, my drain spout neighbors disappeared, and a woman in dirty purple dress replaced them.  She didn’t look good.  She was just standing there looking around and talking to herself.  When she’d turn I could see that the back of her dress was torn wide open.  She looked like she was maybe 20.  I was considering asking her if she needed help when two men in matching blue shirts arrived on foot.  Behind them followed an older woman and two children.  When the men spoke to the girl, she got irritated and started yelling in Rukwangali.  I couldn’t make out much of what she was saying besides “kembo” and “kapi tani diva” which means ‘home’ and ‘I don’t know’.  The men seemed flustered yet mildly entertained by her while the older woman showed no emotion at all.  The girl appeared quite drunk.  A cab pulled up and one of the men opened the door and the other took the girl by the shoulders and tried to guide her into the back seat, which made her erupt.  She fought and screamed and the men laughed and retreated.  They appeared to be friends or family and no threat to her.  The older woman just watched blank-faced, as did the children who now stood atop of the abandon drainage pipe.  The girl walked away crookedly, yelling while the men watched and smiled wearily and spoke to one another.  The cab pulled off and the group stood there, obviously uncertain of how to deal with their friend. 

The other night I was walking home from a friend’s house when a woman offered me a ride.  It was late, just after 11PM, but I was in a pretty safe part of town.  Though I’m recovering from mono, I still have moments of weakness and dizziness and about 3 blocks into my walk the whole world started spinning and I had to lean against a wall and wait for it to stop.  She said she’d thought I was drunk because of how I was walking, which is reasonable given the amount of drinking that occurs in Rundu during the holidays.  I explained to her I wasn’t drunk, but was just a bit weak from a sickness.  She was in town to spend time with her sister whose son had killed himself the previous day.  She said she’d passed me in her car and thought to herself that it wasn’t safe for me to be walking out here alone at night and so turned around to come collect me.  She spoke about Jesus and helping others while I sat there feeling like shit and trying to maintain the conversation through my headache.  Her name was Ester and she asked for my number and then texted me for the next few days to see if I was feeling better.  The fact that she was in town for such a reason as a family member suicide didn’t shock me. 

It’s not unusual to hear of the death of somebody’s friend or family member.  Pickup trucks full of the mourning friends and family of some recently deceased person are a weekly sight (and often multiple times a week).  Car accidents and suicides top the list of the causes of deaths that I’m actually told about, though far more often than not no explanation is offered (likely meaning HIV).  One day, I think in September, a gentleman came to my office seeking help in creating a funeral program for his young nephew.  The boy was only 7.  After completing the program and printing copies I told him I was sorry for his loss.  He said, “These things happen”.  I asked what happened.  He said, “He was sick”.  I left it at that.  Life expectancy in Namibia is 52 years, but in the Kavango, Namibia’s poorest region, it’s 42.  

Coffin making is a big business here.  There was a month-long coffin making training just outside of my office window.  They started it a few days after I’d hung a Halloween skeleton in my window I’d received in a care package.  The skeleton stood smiling and waving over the coffin making students for a month and I came to see it as their school mascot.  I probably should have taken it down, but I didn’t.  

For a kid, the death of a parent is often far more than just an emotional hardship.  Family members sometimes swoop in to claim ownership of the deceased's property, the traditional authority often supporting these claims (*a brief explanation of difference between traditional and government authority at bottom of this post).  Sometimes kids simply get kicked out to find their own way.  Recently, my friend Anneke had a young girl (16 years old) staying with her for a few nights.  The girl’s father had died and, since then, she’d been kicked out of three successive houses in a matter of weeks.  The girl then hiked to Grootfountain, a town about 150 miles from here, to stay with an Aunt.  Anneke hasn’t heard from her since. 

One of my closer friends here, Klemi, lost her father when she was 13.  He contracted a lung disease after working for many years in an uranium mine.  While she, her mother, and siblings were away for the funeral, her great uncle (and oldest male relative of the deceased) emptied their house of all of their belongings except for their clothing, which he left on the floor.  He found the father’s will and destroyed it.  He then took claim of the father’s business, a restaurant, and property.  He even tried to kick the family out of the house, but the community stepped in to stop him.  He left them with nearly nothing and there was little anybody could do about it as the traditional authority dictates that ownership goes to the oldest male relative.  Klemi, her mother, and her siblings would have been in a position of abject poverty if it weren’t for her late father’s boss, who helped to support the family and hired her oldest brother to work for him. 

Klemi is part of the Kwanyama tribe, which comes under the larger tribal group known as the Ovambos.  Many Namibian tribal traditions and ceremonies are beautiful, complex, and interesting to witness and take part in.  Then there are the customs that leave your jaw on the floor in utter disbelief, such as Okufukala.  Okufukala is the Kwanyama tradition of taking 16-year-old girls and parading them nude (except for a “tiny skirt”) in front of men who then choose a wife from among the selection.  When the time came for Klemi to participate in Okufukala, she snuck from her home and walked 30 miles to her grandmother’s village where she hid for a month.  I asked her what would have happened if she had simply refused to participate.  She said, “They would have come into the house and taken me.  You can’t refuse.  Even my mother wouldn’t have been able to stop them.  The men would have come and taken me.”

Klemi’s flight from Okufukala occurred 10 years ago.  In recent years, Okufukala has become the controversy it ought to be and its practice is diminishing.  However, it still occurs in some of the more remote communities. 

That’s all for now.  I realize this is a bit of a dark post.  Namibia is a beautiful place full of friendly, welcoming, and often very happy people.  I’ve been treated well and have never once feared for my safety.  There is, however, the poverty, disease, alcoholism, and the sometimes-troubling aspects of Namibian culture that result in a lot of despair for a lot of people.  The frequency of tragic and otherwise life altering events is greater here than in a more developed country.  There is a great sense of stability in the states where, here, there's a constant churn in the foundation upon which people establish their lives.  As I become closer to the people in my community and hear more stories of their lives, I start to get a better sense of the often treacherous and painful path of a typical life in the Kavango.  Thanks for reading. 

*Traditional Authority vs. Government

I am no expert on the complex relationship between tradition and government authorities in the Kavango, but the basics go something like this:

The three biggest tribes in the Kavango region of Namibia are the Thimbukushu, the Romanyo, and the Kwangali (that’s my tribe).  Within each of these tribes there is a power structure (“traditional authority”) that is headed by a Chief, or “Big Man” (except for the Thimbukushu Chief who calls himself the “Fumu”, which I’m told translates roughly into “God”.  Historically speaking, men who call themselves God tend to be dicks.  The Fumu is no exception.  I’ll delve into that one on some future post.)  When it comes to who makes the rules and who calls the shots, the Kavango is a bit schizophrenic.  There is the established government authority, which in the Kavango is the “Regional Council”, and then there are the unofficial tribal authorities noted above.  The Regional Council claims ultimate authority, but they go to great lengths to keep the peace with the traditional authorities and often work directly with them on development projects, protecting the environment and wildlife, and health initiatives.  However, in cases regarding issues such as petty crime, property ownership, land disputes, and disputes between families, often these things fall to the traditional authorities to deal with.

Please remove your arm from my bedroom

Hello Friends.  As I was warned, just about everything in Namibia comes to a screeching standstill this time of the year.  Most of my friends are off in other parts of the country or the world.  I’m staying in Rundu for much of the holiday season as I have an absurd amount of travel planned next year and will need all of my vacation days (and then some) to accommodate it.    My only responsibility over the next few weeks is maintaining my friend Nathan’s garden and checking in on his two puppies.  So I’ll do that 240-mile round trip hike to his site once a week until mid January.  I’m thankful for having at least that to do. 

The only drama that’s unfolded for me in the last few weeks is that my laptop was briefly stolen.  I had a gang of PCVs staying at my house and all were fast asleep when at about 1AM, a noise woke me.  I saw a guy standing at my bedroom window with his arm through my burglar bars and something in his hand (turned out to be my MacBook that I love with all my heart).  I jumped up and tried to grab him but he was a fast little thief.  Door locks here don’t allow you to exit your home quickly (hopefully I’ll never have a fire), so by the time I got outside he was long gone.  I scared the hell out of everybody sleeping in my house, as they had no clue what had happened or what/who I was cursing loudly at. I was able to track down the kid who stole it with the help of some people in my neighborhood.  The look on the kid’s face when he answered his front door was pretty priceless.  Pure shock.  I got it back in less than 24 hours.  No damage.  The police, his mother, and I are orchestrating a scared straight style lesson for him.  We’ll see how that goes.

In other news, I did a boat tour of the Kavango River near Divundu (120 miles east of Rundu) last weekend with some of my PCV friends.  The most eye opening part was seeing a large crocodile sunning itself on rocks that Nathan, Geri, and I had hiked on just a few months ago.  We also saw a lot of hippos.  They’re huge.  You never go very far on the Kavango River without encountering a naked family bathing and washing their clothes.  Nudity isn’t a big deal here.  It was unusual to see folks bathing just about 75 yards from a pack of about a dozen hippos.  They kill more people than any other animal in Africa and I often hear stories of attacks.  I’m so used to rivers being a nice safe get away.  It’s still unusual to me to feel like I need to watch myself when hiking along the Kavango.  

My belief that my mono issues were behind me has turned out to be false.  I knew I was being a bit stupid when I started training aggressively for an ultra marathon so soon after “recovering” from mono.  What I learned is that aggressive training can make mono right back if you haven’t given yourself sufficient time to recover, which is where I am now.  So, lesson learned.  I’ll be putting my sneakers in my closet and trying to find other ways to occupy my time for the next few months.  Shitty timing, but if Peace Corps has done anything for me, it’s made me more patient. 

I’ll spend Christmas Eve and Christmas day at the pediatric unit of the local hospital.  The doctor that oversees the hospital’s operations told me it was fine to hand out as much candy as I wanted.  I’m not sure if that’s wise, but I’m going to make it rain candy.  New Year’s I’ll camp with some PCV friends at a local campsite on the river.  It’s hard being so far from home during the holidays and all the down time makes it that much more difficult, but I have made some good Namibian friends that will make the days a bit less lonely.  I also have some great travel and visitors next year to look forward to.

I hope this holiday season is a good one for all of you.  Take care and thanks for reading

What would you say you do here?

Hello Friends.  I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.  Mine was nice.  I spent the weekend with 19 other volunteers at the Popa Malaria Camp in Divundu.  I think it’s an indication of how I’ve gotten used to things here that it didn’t faze me that I was having Thanksgiving dinner at a malaria camp.  My Christmas dinner last year was at a snake restaurant outside of Hanoi.  I guess that still wins the odd-holiday-dinner-location award. 

I often get questions about what exactly it is that I do here, so here you go…

Accounting training at local schools: 

Money is a big issue for Namibian public schools.  They get some government funds, but that only covers a portion of their needs.  If you ask any government official, they will tell you that school is “free” and that “school fees” should not be charged.  However, all schools charge school fees as the support received from the government is inadequate to support day-to-day operations. 

It’s up to each individual school to manage school-fee funds.  I’ve begun working with one of the larger schools in Rundu to help them address their accounting issues.  This particular school has been plagued with money issues including a large embezzlement situation last year.  The school has over 900 learners and, constructively speaking, zero accounting procedures.  The only thing they really keep track of is who paid them what.  Expenditures are not tracked and school fee money is always long-gone before the end of the year, meaning there isn’t money left for basic needs such as paper for tests and light bulbs.  I, and another volunteer, are currently developing some accounting procedures and tools that we’ll begin training the school staff on in early January.  If the project goes well, we’ll try to get other schools in Rundu to adopt the procedures.

Rundu Hospital Tuberculosis Clinic:

My prison project was a quick one (I hope).  It seemed to only require a few phone calls and some clarification of expectations.  However, I’m skeptical.  The fact is that people will often say “yes” here when what they really mean is “we’ll see” or just plain “no” or “I would do or say anything that would result in us ending this conversation”.  I’ll follow up with the clinic in a few weeks to see if things have improved. 

My new project at the hospital is working with the tuberculosis clinic.  The clinic is spilt into two wards.  One ward is for normal tuberculosis, and one for multi drug resistant tuberculosis.  Regardless of the ward you are in, your inpatient stay will be between 1 and 6 months.  It’s similar to prison in a lot of ways.  The wards are small, the only outside area is a tiny courtyard, and they are not allowed to leave.  The hospital social workers and I decided that we would try to introduce some training programs in the TB clinic to address the issue of boredom while simultaneously providing skills that the patients can use to generate income once they’ve been released from the hospital.  After interviewing some of the patients, we found that sewing was the skill they were most interested (followed by basket weaving and jewelry making).  They already have a women that does some sewing training on site, but she only has one sewing machine and there are no materials available for the patients to practice with.  She hasn’t been paid yet and is losing patience (with a “c”).  My goals are to significantly expand the project and to make is sustainable.  I’ll need to work with the hospital administration to get an outlet to sell some of the products produced by the patients to generate revenue so that materials can be purchased for future patients as well as to pay the trainers.  I have a project kick off meeting scheduled with the hospital administration and social workers next week.  Hopefully, I’ll have good news to share on this project in the coming months. 

Nyangana water tower

I mentioned in an earlier blog that my friend, PCV Mary, had a set back in her garden project when a stand holding a 10000 liter water tank collapsed.  Her garden is meant to support persons living with HIV/AIDS in her community.  Our original plan was to just rebuild the single tower that collapsed, but then we realized that the other towers weren’t in much better shape.  So, we’re now getting a large 4-tank tower built.  It won’t be cheap, but the contractor does good work and I’m confident this tower will be there to support the garden for a long time.  I managed to get the price down by begging and offering to write a business plan for the man’s company.  It helped, but we’ll still need every penny of the money that we have and I’ll have to beg, borrow, and steal the rest.  Work on the tower should begin in the next week or two.  I’ve done some workshops and trainings and business plans here, but this will be the first project that involves actual construction.  I’m looking forward to that.

Odds and ends:

Then there are my day-to-day activities of working with various aspiring entrepreneurs in Rundu as well as small business owners.  I work with people on business plans, product pricing, marketing, accounting, and other typical small business challenges.  These meetings vary from fun to excruciating.  I get some very level headed aspiring entrepreneurs and sometimes I get people demanding thousands of dollars because they were born to act and I have to help them make a movie (this has occurred twice now). 

I had been working on a expanding a local school to include a tailoring program.  It seemed like the project was going well but then my counterpart lost interest.  I tried to encourage him to follow through, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere.  It’s disappointing because I’d already done much of the footwork for a grant application and I think the project had a good chance of being sustainable.  Failed projects are a fact of life in the Peace Corps.   

Down time:

Down time is a big part of the Peace Corps experience.  Try as you might, you will only ever fill up a few hours of most days with actual work.  When I do have some real work to do, it’s a treat that doesn’t last very long.  There are some great, super busy days, but they typically take weeks of planning and phone calls and frustration and sometimes begging to get to them.  Sometimes I look for ways to help during my down times, but often I just turn to a book or exercising or texting friends to pass the time.  Socializing with people in my community is fun and it's part of why I'm here.  It’s also a way to pick up a bit more Rukwangali, though nearly everybody in Rundu speaks English.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that while I do my best to stay busy, there are often days of boredom and questionable productivity levels.  This is a common theme in many PCV’s lives.  This down time will increase over the coming weeks as everything in Namibia shuts down in December and early January.  Learning how to deal with that down time in a constructive way is a challenge, but I’m doing pretty well at it.  However, I’m at a point now where I can understand why some volunteers quit and go home.  It can be tough, particularly as a health/business volunteer that doesn’t have a prescribed job.   You have to be a self-starter or you will sit on your ass for two years.  Even when you're really fighting, real productivity can be hard to come by.  While I don’t want to quit, and have never considered it and never will, I can understand now why some do.  It takes a lot of work to be a little productive here and if you measure yourself by your productivity, as I do, it can make you question the value of your presence. 

So that’s it for this week.  I hope you are all well.  Take care and thanks for reading. 

Afrikaner Mullet: The Nuclear Option

Hello All.  Things had been moving in the right direction project-wise for me until the time I went to reconnect (mid August).  After that, a lot of things got in the way.  Two weeks at Reconnect, followed by about 5 weeks of sickness, then a week long power outage, and declining support from the ministry I’m attached to left me feeling like all my work had come to a standstill.  However, over the past few weeks, I’ve managed to get things moving again.  I will give you all some more details on what I’ve been working on here in my next post, but for now I’ll just say I’ve been busy and all is good on the volunteering front.   

So, what’s been going on other than work?  I finally got to do some personal travel.  Other than a trip to Oshikati (north west) and a couple small trips within the Kavango, I really haven’t traveled much since I started Peace Corps.  One of the nice things about being in the part of Namibia that I am is that I’m relatively close (8 hour drive) to one of the 7 natural wonders of the world, Victoria Falls.  Vic Falls is located near the town of Livingstone, Zambia (as in “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”).  Google it.  Even though this is the worst time of year to visit due to low water levels, it was still a beautiful site.  After having seen only savannah and desert and some nice mountains over the past 8 months, walking through the woods and encountering a massive 360-foot deep crevasse was out of the ordinary.  Late in the rainy season, the entire length of the 1-mile long gorge is a roaring waterfall.  I’m excited to return and witness that.  So, in the pictures below, imagine that entire face is a waterfall.  I’ll post some before and after rainy season pix in April.  The elephants below delayed our travel a bit in the coolest way possible.  The passengers of the car I was in weren’t the least bit happy when I got out to take pictures.  I was later given the following warning about elephants, “if one looks at you and waves its ears back and forth, you’re in trouble”.   

The city of Livingstone was a blast.  Being able to visit nice restaurants, bars, nightclubs, was a welcome change of pace.  It was small enough and safe enough that everything was walkable.  They even had a gym!  The people in the town were all very friendly and accessible.  I’m sure I’ll visit this town many times between now and whatever comes after Namibia for me.    

I need a haircut.  The last haircut I got was in Nazareth, Pennsylvania over 8 months ago.  It’s gotten long enough that I now often catch myself reminiscing about my skateboarding days when I look in the mirror.  I’ve resorted to slicking it back for work, which is a ridiculous look for me but passable for work purposes.  My options in Namibia are pretty much this: 1) shave head 2) hand PCV friend scissors and wish them luck, or 3) Afrikaner mullet courtesy of local barber.  The PC NAM35 mullet club is now defunct (you can’t cut the party off and still call it a mullet.  no.), so I don’t need to consider the unthinkable option 3.  On the bright side, my consultees and attendees to my presentations all seem to still take me seriously.  However, I feel that I’m pushing it a little and need to act soon.  Maybe by Christmas.   

Thanksgiving is coming up.  This is a particularly big day for my family back home as we have our yearly family reunion at “McCauleyville” in New Tripoli, Pennsylvania.  I’ve been to every McCauleyville Thanksgiving since I was 3 years old.  I’ll certainly miss it and be thinking a lot about my family that day.  I’ll be celebrating this Thanksgiving with some PCV friends in Divundu.  We’ll have chicken instead of turkey, but we will have stuffing.  Turkey is hard to come by here and expensive when you do.  We’ll have a big gang for a river cruise, safari, and a Thanksgiving meal.  It’ll be nice to have so many of my PCV family in the Kavango. 

I love my country, but I cannot tell you how nice it was to miss an election season in the states.  I highly recommend moving far far away sometime in early 2016 and returning, say, sometime after early 2017.  Maybe the Peace Corps is right for you?

A final note.  I started this blog sitting in my sister Kate’s house in Shepherdstown, West Virginia on November 21, 2011.  Just about one year and 34 posts later, I feel like there’s a whole lot more between me and that first post than 365 days.  Thank you to those of you who have stuck with me.  I know my writing consistency hasn’t been great since I got sick, but life is getting back to normal now (Namibia normal, anyway).  I’m hoping my blogging enthusiasm will recover soon too.   

That’s it for now.  Have a great Thanksgiving and thanks for reading. 

roadblock

Baboon looking for handouts near the Vic Falls craft market

Baby zebra chillin in the shade

Small portion of the mile long Vic Falls.  In the rainy season, the entire right side of this scene is a roaring water fall. 

Long hair Jimmy