An Atypical Day

from September 2015:

My boss, Lou, was due to pick me up at home at 10:00 Tuesday morning.  What with a circumstance or two impeding, it was closer to noon when he arrived.  We spent a bit of time locating keys and moving cars (not I!  As a Peace Corps volunteer, I am banned from driving any vehicle unless I’m on official vacation), and then loaded up the bakkie thus:  Lou had many blankets, a variety of tote bags, an empty cooler and one full of pots and utensils, a portable barbecue, and an ax.  I had my knapsack, a small duffle, and my sleeping bag.  We were going camping.

The Foundation has been a supporter of the Ohungu Conservancy for several years, and Lou had identified a grant opportunity that might be useful for them.  So we needed to talk with the conservancy members and learn from them what their top priorities would be if we could help rustle up a bit of funding for an initiative of two.  Such a conversation would require a multi-hour, many-person meeting, and while the distance from me to Ohungu is not that great, the roads aren’t either – so we left on Tuesday and met on Wednesday, and that gave us enough time to drive there and back.  Given the dearth of both EconoLodges and Four Seasonses in the area, we spent Tuesday night in tents.

The eventual campsite - part of it, anyway.  Separate tents for all.

We stopped first in Swakopmund to shop at the Pick ‘n’ Pay, where we got more groceries than we needed, then drove up the coast, me ogling the ocean from the shotgun seat.  Oooh – kilometers and kilometers of ocean.  At Henties Bay, we stopped and bought a fish at the small fishers’ co-op.  All the fish have unfamiliar names, but they look more or less like cod or haddock.  Ours was caught that morning, and dropped on ice, but hadn’t frozen through yet.  At Henties we turned inland and started bumping along the unpaved road toward Uis.

The unpaved roads of inner Erongo are not like the dirt roads of New England and the mid-Atlantic, which are often rutted by rains and sometimes quite muddy and replete with rocks that want to get you, so traversing them can be quite tricky.  The Erongo roads are a mostly-thin layer of sand – with a few rocks that want to get you – over a fairly firm and even surface that is more stone than dirt.  Deep sand, which can threaten drivers in the American southwest and probably otherwheres in the USA, is rare, though if you go off-road, especially outside Erongo, like up in the northwest or by the eastern border, you can find trouble.  On these established routes, though (with numbers and everything), the ride is fairly smooth.  However – pretty soon the road started to undulate, sometimes quite dramatically.  Lou normally kept us around 80kph, but would slow down a lot when he got to the bottom of a hill, as the dip could be dangerously sudden and deep.  A bit roller-coastery, but in a big pick-up truck.

Not Brandberg, just a beautiful view.

As we moved further east, and north, the scenery changed from desert to savannah, including lots of acacia thorn trees and some mopane trees.  The acacia are very good for tangling your hair or pulling off your hat (when you walk under them, ducking down carefully so you won’t get scratched; honestly, it's like they reach for your head).  The mopane trees are great for firewood and house their namesake worms, which make good eating.  We saw some handsome mountains, including Brandberg, the highest peak in Namibia at 2,606 meters, or in non-metric terms, high but not all that high.  Mount Hood is 3,429 and Old Rag is 1,003.  The highest of the Rockies is Mount Elbert, 4,400 meters.

We passed through some small towns and villages, too; one or two were former mining towns whose populations sank dramatically after the mines got worked out.  Now the town where I live is working assiduously to ensure that doesn’t happen to it.

Chronic poverty with a view.  That probably doesn't make it a whole lot better.

At the conservancy, we met the secretary, Lexia, her sister and a couple of the volunteer game guards who had waited at the office for us.  They lent us tents, which the guards use when patrolling to do general monitoring, animal counts and poacher control, and helped us set them up in the office yard, behind the wall that’s supposed to keep elephants out but doesn’t look like it could.  We checked for ant colonies before pegging and staking.  Then Lou set off with a guard to collect some wood for the braii!  He’s a village boy turned city man who loves to cook and camp but doesn’t get to very often.

Lexia's sister is sewing a weave into her
tightly-braided natural hair.  She posed willingly,
though with maybe a rueful smile.

Lou jokes and laughs a lot but takes his braii seriously.  He made sauce/gravy with a powdered soup mix, boiled rice, grilled chicken and some vegetables, and stuffed the fish with a mix of tomatoes and onions and an herb-and-salt blend we bought with the fish.  We also had corn to grill.  I stayed pretty still, chopping veg, while Lou was in constant motion poking and stirring and moving pots to warmer or cooler spots by the fire.  The feast that followed was impressive, and we had enough to share with our hosts, whose numbers increased as Lou cooked.  The fish tasted more or less like white fish.  The corn was outstanding, amazing, baie lekker as the Afrikaans speakers say.  We did not share the corn with the Ohungu-ers, but nabbed two ears each for ourselves and let the hosts have at the rice.  Now I feel a little bit bad about that.  The corn was gooood.

Starting the fire pile.

Portable grill, well-laden.

Lou stirring.

My plate.  I did bear up to a few bites of fish.

The fish.

I slept better than I usually sleep in a tent, showered in the ablutions block and put on my go-to-meeting clothes.  Then I sat in the office with a lot of other people, including the village headman, a most important personage, and waited.  Almost everyone was there on time, but one or two necessary people ran late, so the whole meeting was delayed by about ninety minutes.  People here call it, “Africa time,” and warn you to expect things to start late, but my experience is that most of the people arrive on time.  I think we can all just start starting things on time (by which I mean five to ten minutes after the posted starting time), and the chronically tardy can borrow notes from someone else.

Morning in Ohungu.

The only human commuting I saw was a truck from an abbatoir.  Oh, dear.

Once started, it was not the most efficient meeting every conducted (Marshall N. Carter, as CEO for State Street Corporation, wins that award), but it was very productive.  It was mostly conducted in the Otjiherero language, which Lou understands “about 50%” because of his family’s business dealings with Hereros when he was a kid.  His first language is Oshiwambo; he speaks fluent English; he can cope pretty well in Afrikaans and Otjiherero, and has a few words of Damara as well.  Maybe more.

Anyway – everyone had valuable ideas to contribute to the discussion.  We heard from the volunteer game guards, the Ministry of Environment and Tourism rangers, the headman, the Conservancy executives, the local constituency councillor and a few of the Conservancy members who attended.  The issues to address included chronic poverty in the community – how can we generate some revenue? – and elephants.  Much of Namibia is suffering the effects of several years of drought, and the elephants are wandering more than they normally do in search of food and water.  When they find water at your village’s borehole, they start tearing things up to get at it.  When they find food in your garden, or smell it in your home – they have very acute olfactory senses – well.  Not so good.  The conservancy has also had some issues with poachers going after the local antelope without permission, most likely just for meat for the family; cf: poverty above.

Footwear was diverse, and in one case non-existent.

They offered up a lot of good ideas, which I wrote on the flip chart (Lexia and Chairman April translating to English), and came to consensus about the grant application.  It was impressive.  Everyone was respectful and engaged and thoughtful.  How often do you see that in a meeting?

The headman is quite ancient and had to leave before we got to the group photo.

On the way home, Lou stopped at the woodseller’s house.  He was very excited because the man had promised him a truckload of wood at far less than Swakop prices – but when we arrived, the man said he had slept late, gotten to work late, and not been able to chop the wood for Lou.  Lou was incensed by the unreliability, and I said, “But they teach us in Peace Corps training to expect unreliability.  You’ve lived here all your life; how are you not used to it?”  He just exhaled strongly and threw a few loose branches into the bakkie.  Eventually the three of us had about a quarter of a truckload, and Lou and I jounced the three hours back to paved roads.

The mopane trees are pretty good about yielding their wood quickly.

Tuesday's sunset.  Sunset is, like, a thing here.