Friday 29 April 2016

Fabulous Fabiola

What a pleasure it is to introduce Fabiola Gaingos to you.  She is my friend and teacher, tutoring me in the Afrikaans and Damara-Nama languages and making the learning fun.  She recently taught me a really rude phrase, and then furrowed her brow all up and wondered, quite seriously, why people in our town most often call each other by a rude word that's slang for a female reproductive part, while in other towns a rude word for a male reproductive part is much more common.  She really spent some time on that question - but finally shrugged and said, "I don't know."

Usually we talk about things like the price of milk, the naughtiness of children and the weather.  (The naughtiness of the weather -- it's gotten quite hot again. But then, Fabiola likes the heat.)


She has to take calls during lessons as very few people use voice mail here.
Ruddy nuisance not to have voice mail, but SMSes are cheaper anyway.

She answered a few questions for me, as follows:

Name:  Fabiola Gaingos          Age:  Almost 25          Where did you grow up?  Arandis          Where do you live now?  Arandis          Where else have you lived?  Okahandja, Karibib and Swakopmund           What language do you speak most?  Afrikaans           What other language(s) do you speak?  Damara-Nama and English (She took a year of German in school, too.)

What do you do for work?  I have my own business, providing office assistance to different clients.          What's your dream job?  To have my own bookkeeping business.

Who lives with you?  Cherial, my daughter, and my boyfriend George          How big is your family?  Just us three -- plus my mum and two sisters

Cherial pulled a Christmas cracker at my house in March.
I had to paper-clip the excess crown to keep it from falling down.

What's a place you'd like to go if you had three or four days off work and money to travel?  Etosha -- I've never been.  [n.b. Fabiola says she doesn't like wild animals, but at Etosha you have to stay in your car, so that would be okay.]          How about if you won an all-expenses paid two-week trip to anywhere in the world?  Paris.  Everyone talks about it and I like experimenting; meeting new people, trying new food and having new experiences.

Describe a favorite meal, please:  A lot of meat, but not too much -- meat means beef; the front quarter, which is very soft -- with curry, and pap and pine-nut kooldrink

What are some things you do for fun:  Play video games, especially a driver-car game on the laptop, sometimes with Cherial.  Also walk to the grassy circle in town with Cherial and just sit on the grass, or chase each other.

What's a really 'Namibian' characteristic of yours?  I love Namibian weddings, especially Owambo ones.  They have lots of traditional activities and many kinds of food.           And something really non-Nambian?  Watching a lot of movies.  That's becoming Namibian as more people get TVs.

And you can meet her yourself on YouTube.




We tried again the next day.



Thanks, Fabiola!

Tuesday 26 April 2016

Wonderful Wild Life

On our way back from our business trip to Oshana in October 2015, Lou announced, "I have a treat for you."  Lou is a very upbeat guy, so one cannot be certain that his idea of a 'treat' will necessarily jibe with one's own.  However, in this case we were very much in sync.  He had decided that rather than stick to the boring old B1 route, which skirts the eastern edge of Etosha National Park, we would cut right through the middle of this monument to wildlife conservation.  Woo hoo.

It probably added another three or four hours to the very long drive back to Swakopmund, and Lou had been doing many hours of driving each day for at least the previous three days.  So that's a pretty generous offer.  But he likes elephants, too.

Etosha provides a free-range home for a wide variety of animals native to the Namibian savannah.  The park includes a few artificial or constructed watering holes, and it is fenced.  Otherwise I do not know how much management of the animals they do.  They last saw a buffalo there in the 1950s, and it was dead (per Wikipedia).  There have been several rhino relocated there, and the black rhino especially seem to be doing quite well.  They have lots of antelope, zebra, lions, elephants, blue gnus, giraffes, jackals and hyenas and you're likely to see most or all of those if you visit in dry season.  We did not see lions this trip, but I saw many when I visited in November 2013.  There are leopards and cheetah in the park, but they tend to be shy and sightings are rare.  Plenty of birds, including ostrich.

It is also the location of a large salt pan, or dried-up lake bed.  If you're good with a camera, it can make for dramatic pictures, and if you're into stark scenery, it's pretty much just what you want.  I'm glad to know it's there, but feel little need to look at it.  It is, however, the source of the park's name -- 'etosha' means 'large white place,' and the salt pan is both large and gleamingly white.

I'd rather look at animals -- Lou and I photographed them, and there are 43 photos in this album.


Zebras and blue gnus, also called wildebeests






Probably a young one as its spots are still quite pale.






Male ostrich are black; females are grey.






Female kudu.  The males have fantastic horns.






Blue gnu cantering.  They are just weighted wrong for the most efficient cantering.




Springbok seeking shade; zebra refraining from mingling.






I do not know if there's a fancy collective noun for a herd of ostrich.






Part of a herd of about fifty






Everyone loves baby pictures, right?




Another shady spot for springbok



Friday 22 April 2016

Sunset Schmunset

The title's a bit misleading here; I absolutely love and respect the glorious sunsets of rural life, or desert life, or big-sky life, or whatever works in sunset's favor here.  But check this out.




It rained on Wednesday - seriously.  A two- or three-minute drip in the morning, and then a vigorous downpour for five or six minutes.  Then the sky cleared and was brilliant cerulean for hours.  But at mid-afternoon, it started to get dark, and then it started to rain.  Not hard, but steadily.  Off and on a bit, but on for hours.  A decent wet.  (I think that might be what some Irish people call a glass of whiskey.)  Enough, you would think - if you're a dreamy and idealistic naïf - to turn the desert green.  So I set off on Thursday evening to stroll the desert, looking for vigorous, if short-lived, new growth and shoots and flowers and whatever.  Ha!  Poor me; I got the usual sand and rocks and brownish scrub.  Pfui.  I mean, beautiful in its own way and everything, but.  Not green.  Not especially vibrant.  And all the clouds had cleared well out so the sunset was especially low-key.  So I turned slowly to the east, and saw




Oh, yeah.  Days and nights are pretty even here, just 20 degrees or so from the equator, and I have missed the dramatic moonrises of my 40-degrees-from-the-equator native land.  As we get deeper toward winter, I'll try to remind myself to be on the lookout.  It was worth seeing - as per, much more profound seen live than in the photos.


The setting sun, behind us, has colored the rocks and sand red.


In case you were wondering - the western view





Tuesday 19 April 2016

Another Business Trip

Looking back to October 2015...

You remember Dreamland Garden, from my February post about events of August?  Well, in October, three of the gardeners, my boss, Lou, and I traveled to the Oshana region to consult and advise on some other Social Security Commission gardening projects.

[an aside:  Regions are roughly equivalent to states in the U.S., and there are 14 of them.  So none of them is much bigger than Rhode Island.  And they don't make their own crazy traffic laws; that stuff gets done at the national level.  Anyway, six of the regions touch the northern border of Namibia, but only two of those, plus two that don't, are called 'the North.'  Those four are also sometimes called 'O-land,' as their names are Omusati, Oshana, Ohangwena and Oshikoto.  If you are going to Epupa Falls, which is pretty close to the northernmost point of Namibia, you cannot say, "I'm going up north," because Epupa is in Kunene region, and Kunene region is not 'the North.'  You have to say, "I'm going to the northern part of the country."  Otherwise you are lying.  Same thing for Rundu, Namibia's second-largest city and a popular crossing point into Angola on the Okavango River.  Rundu, although practically tipping off the northern border into another country, is not 'the North.'  You get used to it after a mild confusion or two.]


Source:  http://www.mapsofworld.com/namibia/namibia-political-map.html

Lou had to do all the driving, as Peace Corps does not allow me to drive (I get it; I get it - though I've ranted about it more than once...) and our three companions don't have licenses and probably don't know how to drive.  It's about an eight-hour trip.  Lou and one gardener are from the North, and the other two are from Kavango, in the northern part of the country, and they were very happy as we got far enough along our route to start losing the sere scenery of our desert home and into the trees and grasses of the savannah.  Trees!  "Now it looks like Christmas," one Kavanga said, "with everything turning green."  Things start turning green in October because that is the very, very beginning of the rainy season, which usually hits its peak in January and February.  But at any time of year, the savannah is a lot greener than the desert.  And oh my gosh they have trees.


trees plus pigs


We four women spent the night at a guesthouse, three rooms, each with its bathroom.  (Lou went to his mother's.)  In the morning there were pigs wandering around outside, then goats and chickens and a dog or two.  We were supposed to have breakfast with the rooms, but the guesthouse had gotten a bit disorganized and wasn't expecting us, so no breakfast.  We had stopped at a grocery store the night before to buy provisions with our per diems, and thus were able to snack on our supplies of various non-perishables.

Our first visit was to the Social Security office, a very lovely, modern-style building constructed by a Chinese contractor.  There are a lot of Chinese firms doing business in Namibia, and often winning the suspicions and resentment of locals as they are perceived to import Chinese laborers even for unskilled jobs, and there's some feeling that the Chinese get preferential treatment when competing with Namibian firms.  I have no idea whether any of that is true.  After the office stop, we went out to a nascent gardening project, bumping along minimally-established tracks in the deep sand for quite some time before we came to a large stretch of sand earmarked for a garden that would support some number of youths ('youths' are defined as somewhere between 16 or 18 and young adulthood; sometimes as old as 35).


Not my idea of Eden.


The soil is amazing.  It's quite literally sand, like I'd expect to find at the beach:  deep, fine, white sand.  I dug my toes into it and everything.  And I would never, ever have thought vegetable crops could grow in it, but my Kavanga gardener was almost keening with regret for the fertile land of her girlhood.  "You can grow anything here," she said, lifting a handful of sand and letting it run back through her fingers.  Where she now lives, a few streets from me, you try shoving a hand into the ground you're going to break at least a fingernail, if not a finger.


The compost must be kept covered in the dry season, which is exceedingly dry.


The next day we went to a composting project, another garden and a food pantry serving people with HIV and AIDS and their families.  They're all related; all supported one way or another by Social Security.  Our gardeners were able to share a lot of good ideas, and everyone seemed to feel encouraged and inspired by the interactions.  We spent a third night at the guesthouse, because it's an all-day drive to get back home.


Second-day garden, much farther along.  Shade nets and irrigation lines.


Before we set off that last morning, we stopped at an open market in Ondangwa for special treats like kapana (stewed meat) and Kavango oranges (many other names, and an interesting, squashy, wet, segmented fruit in a hard spherical shell; Andy has a picture on his blog, where he calls it an eguni or bushman's orange).  Then Lou drove for many, many more hours, including a generous detour through Etosha National Park!  Lots of photos to come.


Dried berries, seeds and nuts, mostly.


Meat and produce stay under the shade nets.  Mostly.


We got back home just as the sun was setting.


Lou was almost as thrilled by the sunset as I routinely am.
As the Ausslander, I had to get out of the car and pose.



Friday 15 April 2016

Re-Connecting

At the end of September last year, when my PCV group had been at their various sites for three months, Peace Corps Namibia hosted a mandatory, week-long training they call 'Re-Connect.'  The 28 of us remaining from a beginning count of 31 headed, from our myriad different locations, to Windhoek, the capital and more-or-less geographical center of the country.

[An aside:  not all of us had been at our sites for three months.  Several had had to change sites for various reasons, and a few had spent days or weeks effectively site-less, camping at another volunteer's housing or what have you.  Stay flexible, Group 43 who just arrived yesterday.  I'm typing this on 15 April 2016 -- taxes filed a month ago -- the one-year anniversary of Group 41's arrival in Namibia.  It's one year and one day since I kissed Philadelphia and JFK good-bye.]

I got GREAT RIDES to Windhoek, pretty much.  First a nice cab driver offered a free lift to the highway -- he kept saying, "You are my customer."  Then a shiny, new, empty van stopped and picked up me and the one guy waiting to get to Windhoek, and we rode the whole three hours without someone else's toddler on our laps.  Faboo.  I SMS'ed the van's license plate number to PCN as they ask we do, and when the driver let me out in the big city, he told me, "You know not all blacks are crooks."  "Whaaat?" I asked.  "I know that.  Of course not."  He said I didn't need to write down his license number, so then I had to explain that my work makes me do that, no matter what, and I really appreciated the ride and everything.  I hope he believed me.

Once we were all gathered at the HQ building, PCN loaded us into several vans and drove us to the edge of Windhoek, up into the mountains to Greiters Hotel and Conference Center.  The views were amazing.  Sadly, the swimming pool was amazingly gross; opaque pine green and about 20% solid matter - some kind of vegetation.  They got it cleaned up for us by Thursday, and I risked a few laps.



The view from the dining room patio

The very first night there was a lunar eclipse; one of the PCVs knew about it and said it would take place at 2:00.  I set the alarm, and crept out into the dark at the appointed time, hissing greetings to the half-dozen or so other volunteers gathered.  One of them was quietly drunk, and kept repeating that he felt like he was in an existential play.

It was four in the morning.  How steady a hand do you expect?

The moon was high and nearly full and gigantic in the deep blue sky above our hills.  And it stayed that way for about 20 minutes, until someone with a data plan and a smart phone informed us that the eclipse would be at its height at about 4:00.  I crept back and re-set the alarm, and re-crept out at the new time, and yep, there was an eclipse.  Very beautiful and maybe a good omen for the event.


We had five days of workshops and field trips; lots of information on monitoring and evaluation, Peace Corps grants and how leave works.  Also a networking session with a bunch of organizations that support SMEs in various ways in Namibia.  We also offered each other slide shows describing our sites and our projects; it was very interesting to get those various perspectives.

Group 41 gathers for tea after two hours conferring.
Still another five hours ahead.
They fed us up pretty generously; as at PST, there was a 10:00 tea break every day.  One day, fatcakes; two other days, these sweet muffins that people call cookies.  Several volunteers kind of boasted to each other about how many of each they had.

I think six was the record for these cookies.  Call it carbo-loading for the race.

Many of the volunteers had registered for a marathon in Swakopmund that weekend, and they ran up and down the hills in the evenings.  I walked, with plenty of friends for company if I wanted.  It was such a beautiful space - though we got a lot of warnings about theft.

I like monitoring and evaluation, and the networking was helpful, and they didn't make us do role-plays (there were a lot of role-plays at PST; I remain uninterested in doing any more any time soon), so I found the week very helpful indeed.  Now it's almost time for our Mid-Service Conference.
Plus there were beautiful weaver birds there...

busily weaving their nests.
 
Lots and lots of fresh, green nests.


  

And, y'know, sunset.  It's like, a thing here.



Monday 11 April 2016

Laundry Day

The Namib Desert is enjoying an early-autumn heat wave, and I am not.  Nonetheless, on Sunday I took a deep breath and set to work on the laundry.

This is a standard weekend chore, and it keeps me at home for many hours.  While several of the people I know here have automatic washing machines, that's not the norm.  Most of us use buckets.  I use a bucket and my bathtub, converting the bathroom into a laundry room.


I'll use the same wash water several times, so sorting is important.
Shirts before trousers is my motto!


Mama's Washing Powder and my shower hose generate suds,
and then I swirl everything around and around with my fist,
switching arms 'cause I get tired, to create a washing-machine effect.


After the clothes soak a while, I scrub a bit,
focusing on 'the hot spots,' as V says.
Then I squeeze out the soapy water and toss them
into clean water in the bathtub to rinse, swirling a bit more.


They go out on the line to dry.  This is three buckets' worth of wash at mid-day.


And this is four buckets' worth as the evening draws to a close, which is
happening very early since the clocks changed.  Like, 17H30 sunset.


I scoop up some of the rinse water in my little blue bucket...


...and toss it on the shrubs.
They are doing much better since I started watering them.


A few months back, my fifth or sixth bucket of wash would start to feel exhausting.  (It has been a long time since I had to hike the laundry down four flights to the laundry room, and back up again.  I've actually had - or is this boasting? - in-unit washer/dryer since 2004.)  All the bending, swirling, scrubbing, lifting, squeezing, wringing and carrying still-sopping-wet-despite-all-that-squeezing clothes out to the line, battling the wind to get them pinned down before they flew into the desert sand that hardens to concrete the second it touches a wet shirt -- it just got surprisingly tiring.  Not so much now; I noticed last night that I felt fresh and springy despite the seven or eight buckets of wash.  It was night, you see, and I had swept and mopped and laundered and cleaned the house and my own ferociously filthy self, and the temperature had dropped by about a million degrees.  Out in the desert evening, enjoying the fresh breeze and sunset, a little hand wash feels well worth the effort.



Friday 8 April 2016

Meet Mayinga

I've mentioned my lovely roommate from the first week of PST; a cheerful young former social worker from England, Washington state and Buffalo, New York.  She's got a great attitude and a great blog about a very different Peace Corps Namibia experience than mine.  I recommend it highly.


Mayinga on the left; this is in Swakopmund in October 2015.
Each of her blog posts is brief and pithy.  As an example, the one for 27 June 2015 reads:


Mufenda: You must come and watch the dancing tomorrow.
Me: Ok, where?
Mufenda: Where there is drumming.
Me: Ok, but where?
Mufenda: When you hear drumming, just go there.
Me: Ok Mufenda.

Monday 4 April 2016

Party!

from Friday 25 Sept 2015:


Popcorn with truffle salt for starters.  Note clean coffee table - no sand on top.


I feel more familiar to myself at 22:10 tonight, as I sit to type this.  I have just hosted a small dinner party, my first in Namibia, my first since maybe March 2014, unless you count family parties which I do only about 50%.  However you count, it is an awfully long time for me to go without throwing a party.


Pork.  I had to freeze it, since I bought on Saturday for dinner on Friday.


The occasion was not entirely happy.  I wanted to celebrate the fine accomplishments of my work counterpart, Etta, who was retrenched (laid off, made redundant, reduced in force) after ten years with the foundation.  She got a lot done in her years there, but was sorry to be leaving.  Her clients were sorry to lose her, too.




Apples and onions are a rare side dish here, though the ingredients
are very available.


I surveyed our two immediate colleagues, and Friday two weeks hence was good for everyone.  In deference to the soapie (nighttime TV soap opera) addiction of one, we would convene at 7:00pm.  Then the other got called out of town, so I invited my namesake from the garden project here in town, who is a long-time client of Etta’s.  Yay!  I really like her and four for dinner is a very manageable number for my home and settling-in allowance.  (I own four plates, four forks, etc.)


Lettuce and spinach grown at one guest's garden project.  And delicious!


I made my way to Swakopmund the weekend before to buy MEAT.  The day before the party I cleaned like crazy, willing the strong east wind not to blow ferociously Thursday night.  That wind shoves sand through every crack and cranny the house offers, including the nailed-shut bathroom window.  The bathtub gets a lovely layer of grit then, and I exfoliate responsibly.  Or something.  I sent out regular reminders to my guests, as plans tend to be flexible for a lot of people here.  (I had a rule in the US that when I had plans with one specific couple, I did not answer the phone on the day of the event, knowing it would be them, calling to cancel.  No, it wasn’t you.  You are always a lovely guest; a lovely host.)

Mac-n-cheese because I didn't get enough of it at Culture Day in training.

I cleared the kitchen table for a sideboard, cooked up a small feast, and welcomed my guests more or less on time.  Except one, who forgot all about it despite that morning’s reminder, watched her soapie and then went with a cousin to the clinic for the evening.  We had a grand time regardless, toasting Etta’s past accomplishments and happy future, and discussing our dreams and ambitions.

Cape Cod oatmeal-raisin cookies for dessert.  I don't have a cooling rack,
but a cardboard egg box worked just fine.

They offered to wash everything up, and I agreed, packing away the leftovers to send home with them.  They were so kind, and so generous in their praise of the house and the meal and the hospitality, that I stayed all aglow for the full weekend.  I love to have parties.


Guests at ease.


Guests at work.


Thanksgiving was like a party, too, though extremely collaborative and long.  More on that later.