Where I Live Now

So I made it through PST, and out into the desert.  My new home is a small town, built about an hour's drive from the coastal town of Swakopmund in the 1970s to provide housing for mineworkers.  The next closest town is another hour in the other direction; this area was probably never settled in any permanent way given how arid it is, how hot the summer days are and how cold the winter nights.  Probably nomadic people came through here at intervals for tens of thousands of years, but they wouldn’t have settled.

Foreground:  probably more less what it's looked like here for thousands of years.
Background:  former company town.

When a big mine began operations here, workers had to come a long distance to dig the ore, so the mine operator created a town for them.  The original idea was that the mine would be worked out within about 20 years, and the town would be abandoned.  However, by the time of independence in 1990, it was clear that the mine would be productive for at least a decade or two longer than originally projected, and the town housed many people unaffiliated with the mine.  So the mine operator deeded the property, buildings and infrastructure to the nascent nation; the national government created a local government; and the local government eventually determined that they wanted to create a ‘sustainable town’ that could survive and thrive independent of the mine.

It’s a small town; I could probably circumnavigate it in about an hour, maybe ninety minutes, walking.  That would be winter walking; in summer I would melt before I got even a quarter way around.  I haven’t tried the circular route yet because it would be pretty boring.  Sand and scrubby bushes on one side; houses on the other.

A street in town.

The houses look largely alike.  Wood is not an abundant resource anywhere in Namibia, and certainly not in the Namib Desert.  All the buildings – houses, markets, administrative centers and churches (one Lutheran and one Roman Catholic) – that the mine operator built are made of concrete.  They are all single-story buildings, as is the norm in Namibia.  You see high-rises in Windhoek, and two- and three-story buildings in Swakopmund (I haven’t been to any of the other ‘big cities’), but they are very rare in towns and villages.  It gets extremely windy in the desert, especially on winter nights, so maybe the lower profile is sensible from that perspective; I think it’s also less expensive to construct single-story than multi-.  Forty years after their construction, the houses still look very similar to each other – they’re too close together to do much adding or altering – except in color.  We have everything from soothing desert hues to eye-popping citric green, hot fuchsia and deep, pastel orange.  Yards are sand, most with at least some sort of plants, usually hardy succulent-y things, but some with more elaborate gardens.  Many of the streets are paved; a few are well-established sand surfaces.

Longer view of a street.  Bicycles are actually quite rare,
which may be why I took pictures of two of the few I've seen.

A lot of people in the town work at the local uranium mine, or at others in the area.  Mining is, with caveats, a major industry for Namibia.  The principal caveat is that it employs only a very small percentage of the population; less than 5%.  Mining’s importance is measurable more in terms of exports:  despite its relatively small size, this country is one of the world’s leading producers of both diamonds and uranium; Namibia also exports gold, tin, copper and other minerals and ores or whatever the correct term is.  Much of the mining is done in the extra-sparsely populated southern half of the country, where I live.

The uranium is very low-grade and about 10K from town,
so poses little measurable danger to inhabitants.

Other locals work in the several shops we have here – one chain and one independent grocery store, a chain clothes shop, three banks, and a number of small market stalls, where people sell onions, apples, carrots and other produce basics, or hats and t-shirts, or chips and knick-knacks.  There’s an open-air barber shop or two, hair salons and nail salons and two or three lunch places that typically sell stewed meat, some kind of starch and maybe fatcakes.  People also operate these kinds of businesses from their homes.  The town is only about 8,000 people, where I think Okahandja has about 20,000 or a bit more and Swakopmund is around 60,000, but I suspect the number of shebeens (bars) per capita is much lower here than in those towns.  I’ve only seen one car wash, but there may be another tucked down a side street somewhere.  We also have a gas station with convenience store and a post office, and a vocational school that has an excellent reputation, I’m told, throughout southern Africa.

There aren’t a lot of cars, and drivers here tend to be more thoughtful of pedestrians than I experienced in Okahandja or Windhoek.  My neighbors often play loud music outdoors at night, but otherwise the town seems fairly quiet.  It has a big mix of tribes, unlike the more naturally-occurring small towns and villages; people speak Damara and Nama and Oshiwambo and Otjiherero and Kavanga here, and usually revert to Afrikaans as the common language if they’re over 30 or from the south, and to English of very variable fluency if otherwise.  We have a senior library for teens and adults (one large room quite full of a mix of literary fiction, genre fiction and non-fiction, in English and Afrikaans), and a junior library for children.  The town swimming pool recently re-opened, after many years, but I haven’t been there yet.  So far, I’m entirely content to be living here.