The Adventure Begins

Written Tuesday 14 April 2015

I am sitting in JFK airport, where I have been standing and strolling and, just now, sitting, for five hours.  Peace Corps had us check out of our Hampton Inn in Philadelphia at 2:00am, to board a bus to New York at 2:30, to arrive at 5:00 (I have no idea why the 150-mile drive required two-and-a-half hours; I napped intermittently throughout) and wait until South African Airways opened their desk at 7:30, so we could check in for our 11:15 flight.  There has been some grumbling:  “I mean, we could have left at three thirty,” but I keep thinking, “What if the bus broke down?”  There are 31 of us, each with all the luggage we hope will get us through two years in a developing desert nation, and while we are mostly young and even us older volunteers are still reasonably springy, as a group we move slowly.

Other passengers started showing up at about 6:30.  They dragged themselves into line behind us, mouths agape at the sight of 31 weary adults surrounded by the piles of big suitcases, huge suitcases, oversized backpacks, bulging knapsacks and a wide variety of totes and hopeful carry-ons.  The airline confiscated my carry-on – it exceeded the maximum weight allowance of eight kilograms by about 60% – and a few others, but they kindly refrained from charging me for my various overages.  Why, oh why, so very much baggage?

Let’s review:  two years.  Desert.  Developing nation.  Southwestern Africa.  So.

Two years is a long time to go without your favorite... (fill in the blank, please.  I’ve got my trusted paperback thesaurus, whose back, front and spine are all now actually as much tape as paper, a small teapot, and the wide-spray sunscreen that makes getting the backs of my shoulders so much easier – six bottles.)  Two years also allows time for a lot of activities requiring different outfits:  working, hiking, traveling, having a nervous breakdown.  Actually, the hospital probably provides the outfit you need for breakdown-having.  But I can wear out a pair of hiking boots in a year or two, so I packed two, and they take some space.

Deserts are characterized by low humidity, low rainfall and sharp intra-day temperature swings.  Winter nights in some parts of Namibia hit freezing (and the Peace Corps doesn’t tell you in which specific part you’ll be until several weeks after you arrive, trailing luggage fit for anywhere), with days in the double-digits on the Celsius scale.  That’d be around 50 degrees to you Fahrenheit types.  Summer days can hit triple digits Fahrenheit.  (That’s quite horribly hot.)  Late in the packing process, Peace Corps sent some final reminders that claimed temperatures could drop as low as 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and if they do (I find this assertion suspect), I need a parka.  Do deserts require sandals, or do I have no excuse for the two or three pair I added toward the very end, when my reasoned, thoughtful packing process came up against entropy and a cyclonic level of doubt, second-guessing and base-covering?

There is this interesting cultural phenomenon at work in our increasingly global world:  most developing nations are skipping several steps in the evolution of technology, going directly from sporadic postal service to nationwide cell networks.  That doesn’t mean, though, that every Peace Corps volunteer has sophisticated resources like electricity and running water, and internet access at home is a very long shot indeed.  So I’ve got flashlights, I’ve got batteries, I’ve got many fancy chargers and 84 CDs and DVDs to keep me in music and movies for a while, and a sheaf of airmail-letter forms that a friend sent two days before I left.  There’s not likely to be a washing machine, and a dry-cleaner is out of the question (even if there is one, my Peace Corps allowance won’t cover dry-cleaning), and there’s very little water, ’cause it’s a desert.  So enough clothes to see me through between hand-laundering days.  And they don’t necessarily have luxury items like extra-damaged-skin-repair lotion and denture cleaner for my night guard, so those got sprinkled through the cases, too.

Southwestern Africa, or at least Namibia, has certain expectations of its businesspeople, and one of those is that they not show up to work in cut-offs, tank tops and flip-flops.  I’m to keep my shoulders, knees and toes covered on duty, and look like a responsible, professional, middle-aged female at all times.  That’s extra yardage.  It has long distances between towns and villages – though that may be more the desert, or the developing country issue, and anyway I already explained the hiking boots. 

Explanations aside, I feel really bad about having packed as much as I did.  I’ll let you know in a future post which of it actually proves useful.  I have suspended my phone service and suddenly realized that means I can’t e-mail myself the photos I took of the group and its baggage.  I panicked briefly, and almost paid Bongo $15 to get ten minutes of internet access on my laptop so I could un-suspend the phone, forward the photos and then re-suspend the phone.  I expect there are a lot more brief panics in my future, but first there’s a 15-hour plane ride.  Away we go.