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.

Coming Home

So 18 June 2015 was Swearing-in Day – or Graduation Day – and, for me, Coming Home Day.  Home for the first time, that is; I hadn’t been near my new town before, nor ever lived in a desert.  I’d been told I’d have a big, yellow-walled, concrete house to myself in a small, desert town in mining country, and I could expect a fridge and oven and three-quarter size bed.  The Peace Corps combi had picked me up at Wilhelmina’s house early that morning so I could transport my giant suitcase, big backpack, medium duffle, small suitcase, knapsack and sleeping bag to the training center, and Lou, my supervisor, and I loaded all of that, plus my new, PC-issued water filter and mosquito net, into the Foundation bakkie (pick-up truck), and headed west.  For about three minutes, and then Lou had to stop at a well-regarded biltong (dried meat; like jerky) shop.  He said his daughter had requested it, but I’d guess she didn’t have to ask.  He looks like a biltong guy to me.

Farewell, Okahandja!  Thanks for everything!

We traveled a four-lane, well-paved highway with 120kph speed limit that soon narrowed to two lanes, still fast and well-maintained.  Lorries (big trucks for transcontinental transport) can only go 80kph, so we would occasionally overtake one, which was usually easy given long sightlines and limited traffic.  The scenery outside was the semi-arid savannah of Okahandja for the first hundred kilometers or so, with grasses, lots of big bushes (say 3-5 meters tall), and plenty of trees (up to 10 meters tall, I’d guess; maybe some even a bit taller), in shades of green and yellow.  Mountains heave up intermittently, though the road is mostly flat.

Semi-arid savannah, about three months after rainy season ended.  It was
a lot greener two months earlier, and would get a lot yellower and browner
before the rains came again six or so months later.

As we traveled, seeing very few signs of human habitation for scores of kilometers at a time – you could be in South Dakota, maybe – the landscape gradually grew scrubbier.  Over the next hundred kilometers or so, the trees got shorter, and eventually pretty much stopped; the bushes got smaller, and the grass sparser and yellower.  The sandy soil was more exposed and looked rockier.  There were a few small towns right on the highway, with filling stations that offered gas, clean restrooms with toilet paper for $2, bottled water, snacks and energy drinks.  Or you could just refill your water bottle in the restroom, since tap water is safe to drink all over Namibia.  Yay Namibia!  This is, of course, not even vaguely true in much of the developing world and parts of Washington, DC.  (There was a big arsenic problem a few years ago that cut water supplies to several neighborhoods there.)

Desert at dusk, with town in the distance

Outside the town of Usakos, we stopped at the Ûiba Ôas Crystals Market, one of the small businesses my foundation works to support.  The market is a project of a small-scale miners’ cooperative; the miners are mostly men, and their wives, mothers, daughters – and some men – sell the stones they mine locally at the market.  Ten years ago they had some rickety tables by the side of the highway; with the help of the Foundation and various grant-makers (the EU, the US Embassy, the Namibian Social Security and others), they’ve expanded to a solidly constructed, three-room showcase with mostly open roof.  Lou introduced me to the sellers, and many of them invited me to buy stones, which I had to decline with regret.  I am bewitched by the aquamarines – maybe that’s related to my fascination with water – and I like the deep purple of an amethyst.  Amethyst, incidentally, is from the ancient Greek for ‘not intoxicated’ and the stones, per those Greeks, was believed to prevent drunkenness.  They don’t really.  The miners also find garnets in the local rocks and mountains, which are supposed to support solitude.  I am not bewitched by garnets; solitude seems to come easily to me.

They also mine many colors of quartz, topaz and other stones.  I’ll write more about Ûiba Ôas in a later post.  There’s a lot to say.

Crystal seller

Eventually we made it to my new town.  We stopped by the office; the building also houses the town library and I met one of the librarians, a lovely woman.  I was so excited to have a library right next to my office!  There was also a custodian/janitor/handyman, whose handiness would become highly meaningful to me over the next few weeks.  We then traveled on to my house, where I met a local plumber who was putting the finishing touches on my toilet, and my Foundation coworker Anna.  Anna had been putting the finishing touches on my furnishings, and brand new sheets on my bed.  “It’s inhuman to ask you to come here and not even give you sheets,” she told me the next day.

She had also provided silk flowers in a shining vase, sweets and chips on a golden platter, a welcome card, and a bottle of sparkling apple juice to toast my new home.  Lou and Anna and I sat together at my new table and wished each other joy and success in our coming collaboration, and they promised to see me bright and early the next morning.  After they left, I kicked a few suitcases out of my way and went, somewhat gingerly, to bed in my soft lilac sheets – with my sleeping bag on top for much needed warmth!

Graduation Day!

On the 18th of June in 2015, the 31 Peace Corps Trainees of Namibia Group 41 officially became Peace Corps Volunteers.  Yee haw.  The training staff were all very pleased with us that NO ONE went home during Pre-Service Training.  Apparently, they usually lose up to 10%, and sometimes more, during the process. 

Graduation day is the same day as moving-to-your-new-home-for-the-next-two-years day, so it was quite busy.  (Well, actually, I and many colleagues moved to our new homes on graduation day, but some people moved to temporary quarters until their new homes were ready, or stayed one more night in Okahandja because they were moving someplace very far away and needed a full day’s worth of daylight to make the drive.  So.  There’s always a wide range of experience in Peace Corps service, even in the same country, specialization and time period.)  I jotted a few notes a day or two later, and took several photos of the ceremony part, and saved my program, so I may be able to reconstruct a bit, from the distant vantage of December.

Trainers prepare the stage.

Two days before graduation – which Peace Corps calls Swearing In – we met the site supervisors with whom we’d be working for the next two years.  (Most of us, of course.  Again, some supervisors did not attend; a few sent counterparts instead; and many PCVs will interact with supervisors only rarely, spending most of their time solo or with counterparts.)  My supervisor is a very cheerful native Namibian man of about 40 who has worked in capacity development for a decade or two.  He is very excited about the opportunities we have to assist local entrepreneurs, both individuals and collectives.  He likes to joke and laugh, so I’m very comfortable with him.

Our whole group – 31 trainees and almost as many supervisors – did a series of exercises on Monday and Tuesday to help set expectations and support our efforts to work together effectively.  For me, nothing surprising emerged from those training sessions, and I think my supervisor felt the same.  I think the most useful and the most fun part was getting to know each other, and other supervisors from other parts of the country, over lunches and tea breaks.

On Swearing In Day itself, we had to be at the conference center – a new one; not our trusty training center – well before the ceremony started, probably to ensure everything was in place when the dignitaries arrived.  Many of the incipient PCVs wore Namibian clothes, either traditional attire or contemporary outfits they had ordered from a fashion designer and seamstress who was one of our Community Economic Development business partners.  We chattered together and took each others’ pictures for an hour or two, and then took our seats for the ceremony.

Traditional Damara dress; contemporary Namibian dress; US dress;
US slacks and shirt; contemporary Namibian dress with US sweater;
traditional Herero dress.  Deliberately silly poses.  Note the 'tradition'
of cloth dresses in Namibia isn't much more than 100 or 150 years old.

We opened, of course, with the African Union, Namibian and US anthems, which all of us PCTs knew well after singing them at least weekly for nine weeks.  Then the Okahandja Youth Choir took the floor and demonstrated how real singers sing.  Benna, our training manager, presented us, and Danielle, our country director, accepted us, and the Peace Corps Regional Director for Africa, Dick Day, celebrated us and all those who supported us through training.  Then Danielle led us in our pledge of service, which we had already had to read and sign, along with an oath of loyalty to the US – a modified version of the ones sworn by federal employees and military personnel.  At that point, we were officially Peace Corps Volunteers, and it was all so exciting we needed the OYC back up for another song or two.

More speeches – lovely and touching and rife with the metaphors of school graduation ceremonies; all apt.  In accordance with Namibian mores, each speaker began by thanking all the other speakers, special guests, and three or four people ‘in absentia’ – those were the dignitaries who had planned to attend but had to cancel at the last minute, who included the US ambassador and the local police chief.  After two to three minutes of thanking, the speaker says, “The protocol is observed,” and moves into the unique part of his or her remarks.  It makes for a longer, slower ceremony than one might find elsewhere.

Benna, Danielle, Dick, Local Official subbing for
Honorable Councilor Steve Biko Boois in absentia

Two volunteers made thank you speeches in their new languages – one Afrikaans, one Silosi – and three recited a poem they had written, together, in their three new languages: Afrikaans, Khoikhoigoab and Rukwangali.  People cheered like crazy.  The Okahandja Youth Choir performed an impromptu song when the P.A. system went wobbly and we sat waiting for it to be fixed.  We did all the anthems again and then went outside on another gorgeous day for a lavish buffet that was not quite lavish enough to feed everyone.  Many of us new volunteers looked a bit bemused, as the realization that training is done and we’re off on the independent, on-our-own part of the adventure.   Two of us will be living in huts made from reeds.

Three days after being sworn in, I took this photo
of the desert sky from my new back yard.  21 June 2015.

Six months later, as I type this, we have a new country director (the impressive and delightful Danielle resigned the day after our swearing-in), and four of my Group 41 friends are back in the States to stay.  Winter has turned to summer, and the difference isn't great:  nights are warm and days are too hot, instead of cool-to-cold nights and perfectly comfortable days.

PCN 41 - My Group

My group of trainees is Namibia 41 – the 41^st team to benefit from service in this beautiful country.  The first team traveled here in 1990, the same year Namibia elected its first president, and became officially independent.

In Philadelphia in April, deployment day.  Three of this
group came to my house for Thanksgiving.

We are 13 volunteers in the Community Economic Development program and 18 in the Community Health program.  We are all college graduates (typically a Peace Corps requirement, which I believe stems more from host country preference than PC prejudice.).  Several of us have lived in Washington, DC; three are from South Carolina.  New Jersey and California are heavily represented.  Enough of us have moved around that we qualify for two or three answers to the question, “Where are you from?”  The Californians like to argue the LA vs. San Francisco question.

The youngest is 21 – there might be two or three of these – the oldest is mid-sixties.  Average age is mid-thirties, although I think there is only one person in his 30s and two in their (late) 40s.  We have five or six in their 50s, and two in their 60s, so 20 or 21 are in their 20s.  Everyone seems smart and committed, and professional experiences vary widely.  There’s a former president of an east African college, a former entry-level investment banker, a coffee-shop manager and a wide range of others.  Religious backgrounds are equally mixed; most of us are not regular churchgoers; a few are devout.

At Heroes' Acres outside Windhoek in May.

Financial backgrounds range pretty wide, also.  There are plenty of us who are accustomed to scrimping, and others who clearly have more substantial financial resources.  The group includes twenty-five whites, four blacks and two Asians.  The blacks and Asians get frequent warnings that locals may not believe they are Americans, since the American media Namibians see is heavily focused on white culture.  The whites get warned that we may get preferential treatment given our skin color, which may make us uncomfortable, or very occasionally encounter anti-white prejudice.  I know I don’t have to check my shopping bags with security when I go into the supermarket, and my black Namibian business partner does.  Ick, right?

It is not uncommon for a trainee or two to decide that Peace Corps isn’t for him or her during the Pre-Service Training, which the staff also admits can be a Pretty Stressful Time.  So far (written in June 2015; posted in December - whoops), we’re all holding steady, even the people learning the quite challenging Khoi Khoi language, with its four precise clicking and popping noises.  Two people have been sick enough to require treatment in the capital, Windhoek, and one person has dropped a water bottle on another resulting in two broken toes.  Everyone seems to have found at least one or two colleagues to look to for support and friendship.  I am still charmed and delighted by my two roommates from the first week, and finding all kinds of other gems in the mix.

Roomies!  In Swakopmund in October.

I wrote the preceding paragraphs in June.  Now it is December, and four of us are back in the US for good – three from the 40-plus demo, which I believe is unusual.  I’ve gotten to know a few of my class better, and two or three from previous classes, and had four PCV friends visit for Thanksgiving weekend, which was wonderful.  (More on Thanksgiving later; probably, like, next May?)  This is probably the most admirable, most likeable large group of not-quite-randomly-selected people of which I have ever been a member.

Shadow Days

In early June, we PCTs got another great practical learning opportunity:  three days shadowing a current PCV (Peace Corp volunteer), with one day at either end for travel time -- which meant a chance to figure out how travel works locally.  Flagging cabs comes into it...

On Wednesday, we partnered up with each other and a trainer or two.  The PC staff wasn't going to turn us entirely loose on our first solo-travel venture!  My gang was three PCTs in the back of a small car with our KKG language trainer and the driver in front.  We were off to Windhoek, where I would debark and spend the next three or four days while the others connected to long-distance combis (vans) that would take them farther south.

I did brave the street with my camera, briefly, to snap this shot of the
Namibian Crafts Centre where I did my shadowing.

Windhoek!  Yes, I got sent to Windhoek for shadowing.  The national capital, by far the largest city in Namibia (viz, about 300k people, so, y'know, not exactly Nairobi, Sao Paolo or Tokyo), the land of delight and danger.  Delight in the form of THREE MOVIE THEATERS, maybe wifi everywhere, and an Indian restaurant; danger in the form of knife-wielding muggers, purse snatchers, extortionist cab drivers, broken-bottle-wielding muggers, and rampant housebreaks.  Yikes.

So simple; so beautiful.
At first I thought they were cartoon-y, but they got to me.

My host (if I was her shadow, what was she to me?  My shadow-caster?  Is there a word for this?) was straight from my own demographic (age, sex, education, professional experience), and had been a community economic development volunteer for a year.  Her insights, which she shared with a generous openness for which I am deeply grateful, were very helpful and honestly come by.  She'd been through some stuff, you guys, and not just living in danger city.

San jewelry, made from ostrich shell fragments.
They get the darker colors by heating the shell in the fire.

Her job was unlike mine in that she was assigned to a single long-running, mid-sized business that she helps out with marketing and organizational management support.  I now work with many different, mostly very small and new, companies.  Her organization is called Omba, and they work with what are called 'formerly-marginalized' communities in local parlance.  They started their efforts with the San people, who call themselves !Kung and Ju'/hoansi.  The second word means 'the harmless people' or 'the gentle people.'  They are the oldest-known human inhabitants of this area, and maybe the original click-and-pop speakers.  Omba has helped them develop their traditional artwork into marketable decorative art and crafts.  My host spends most of her time in the Omba office behind their shop in Windhoek, but occasionally goes out into the bush with a tent and sleeping bag to meet with the San artisans and do trainings or planning sessions.  Fun mix.  They also work with Himba and other peoples.

Traditional San drawing style -- these are reminiscent of the 30,000-year old
rock paintings in the Namib -- transformed into prints for textiles.
Really high-quality textiles.

One of the less-discussed dangers of living in Windhoek is that there are movie theaters and Indian restaurants, and even a few high-end shops.  Excellent in themselves, they sadly tempt you to spend money you maybe just do not have.  My host has chosen to spend some of her 'America money' on taking the lovely one-bedroom flat that comes with her job and turning it into a super-lovely, welcoming home with luxuries like mattress pads, salad forks and coordinating colors.  It was such a pleasure to come 'home' to each evening, and wake up to each morning.  Kiss that good-bye; I am stingy with America money and my walls on site remain pockmarked with prior residents' picture hangers and picture-hanger divots, and my furniture is office cast-offs.  But it was a gorgeous place to have a few days sightseeing.  And we ate well.

Baskets from a drier northern area (not San) use commercial dyes because
natural resources of leaves and nuts and things are in tight supply.

I got to do a lot of database-updating for my host, and sit in on the weekly meeting, and meet her boss and co-workers.  One of the co-workers taught me the Damara greeting, "Matisa," which means more-or-less "How's it going?" and one I use frequently to excellent effect.  There wasn't any wifi.  I didn't get mugged.  I made it back to Okahanja with tremendous success.  I did not make it to the movies or the Indian restaurant, which I don't regret too terribly, as one day I shall see "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and maybe it will be all the better for the long, long wait.

Baskets from more fecund areas use natural dyes.  Judicious representatives
of all these works helped make my host's home elegant and special.

For the most part, I did not dare take my camera into the streets of Wild Windhoek, and didn't want to take any chances with my host's privacy, so the pictures are just of the her shop and its crafts.  I hope you find them as beautiful as I do.

A little info on San artwork.

Technical Training: Results

One of the primary responsibilities many Community Economic Development (CED) Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) in Peace Corps Namibia (PCN) have is working with small- and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs, also sometimes interpreted as small- and micro-entrepreneurs).  We provide counseling, advice and training.  To prepare us to offer those services, PCN provides us with technical training in the form of both classes and practical application.

The classes consisted of 75 to 120 minutes of highly interactive slides, role plays, conversation, exercises and case studies on business-related topics like budgeting, costing and pricing, and bookkeeping.  The practical application consisted of two primary exercises.  For one, we 13 CED trainees planned and delivered a four-day Business Skills Workshop for local entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs.  For the other, each of us worked with a local entrepreneur in starting or improving a small business, and then planned and executed a Market Day where those businesses could sell their products and services to the community.

A tuck shop operator, gone mobile.

The workshop was, I think, a smashing success.  We marketed it around town through various means – mostly just signs posted at all the public gathering spots, plus word of mouth – and got about 40 sign-ups, which included our 13-or-so Start-Up Partners (SUPs).  Probably there were several learners who did not understand English well enough to benefit fully from the training, but many of them were fluent and very engaged.  I know some, too, were not numerate (numbers literate), so they got less from the training than others.  Namibia has an excellent public education system compared to many countries, especially in the developing world (shouldn’t be easier, though, with only two million people in the country?), but plenty still don’t get the level of attention they need to learn fully.

I don’t have any photos.  I co-taught the Business Management and Networking sections, and aired my Afrikaans a bit for each.  Perhaps the highlight was our rugby-playing recent college grad and former banker teaching everyone the Electric Slide.  To a Michael Jackson song.  Now, that was an icebreaker.

Market Day didn't require icebreakers; the kids made their own.

So, on to the Market Day.  We scheduled it for the last Saturday in May, as people in Namibia typically get paid once a month, at the end of the month, so that’s when they’re in a spending mood.  We had a couple of seamstresses, several tuck shops (informal convenience stores, usually run from someone’s home), a pair of braii operators (caterers specializing in regional barbecue), and a few others, including a bathtub-massage-machine operator.  She brings her device to your house and you get 30 minutes or whatever of auto-massage in the tub.  It’s supposed to be very helpful for the elderly.

Not old enough to be getting the demo aqua-massage!

In order to attract the crowds, we also offered a bouncy palace, face painting and other activities for kids.  With massagers and other machines plus the bouncy castle pulling on the electric supply, it kept failing and the castle would deflate.  The kids still had fun with it.  We didn’t actually get much of a crowd – we advise the PCN 43 group to do aggressive marketing!  However, most of our SMEs were pleased with the exposure.  And all of our Community Health and HIV AIDS Program (CHHAP) PCVs showed up, and as per the weather was gorgeous so as the event wore down all us PCVs and our Language and Cross-Culture Facilitators (LCFs) lazed about in the sunshine in great contentment.

A seamstress; her PCV advisor (in glasses) in an outfit of her design

Bouncy!

Not so bouncy!

Namibian-flag face.

Braii-ers basking

One PCV (Not I) Airs Some Guilt

Our Namibian Volunteer Service Network just shared this blog post, a few years old and from Paraguay but an insightful view into what service is and can be.  It includes a link to Peter Singer's 1971 essay on moral action in the face of affluence and poverty, which is thought-provoking indeed.  I hope you'll enjoy it.

Special Days V: Recreation, with SWIMMING!!

In Peace Corps parlance, which is rife with acronyms and initialisms, the initialism PST means Pre-Service Training.  However, some of the PC staff informed us it might also stand for Pretty Stressful Time.  Every now and again, they make an attempt to alleviate the stress.  (The stress-alleviation effort, beginning with Group 42, the one right after mine, has taken the form of a much shorter classroom-based PST with a much longer site-based component.)

Stress-reducing scenery.

Thus, one lovely Saturday (pretty much all days are lovely, at least in terms of weather, in the Namibian winter, so that was nothing special and yet of course wonderfully special), we gathered at the training center and took seats in the combis (vans) for transport to Gross Barmen, about 25 kilometers from Okahandja.  The combis had to make three trips, I think, so some folks got longer at the resort than others.  There was some discussion, during the wait, as to whether spending many more hours in the company of the same 50 or so people (31 trainees plus about 15 staff and trainers) would really reduce any stress.  There was plenty of space, though, and a lot of those 50 people are just wonderful.

Otjiherero trainer Remsey works it, baby, by the small pool.

Gross Barmen is the site of a natural hot spring that was once a gathering site, presumably, for the San people, and definitely for the Herero people as they migrated into the area in the 16th century and pushed the San farther to the drier parts of the region.  Sometime in the late 19th century a group of Germans built a mission there as they worked to convert the Herero to Christianity.  Eventually there was also a police station, and remnants of buildings still exist, though the Europeans seem to have largely abandoned the site with the outbreak of the genocide against the Herero in 1905.

Nowadays it's a resort, run by Namibia Wildlife Resorts, which is similar to the US National Parks Service or the National Trust in the UK.  From what I understand, Gross Barmen is much too expensive for most Namibians to visit.  However, presumably the funds from fees paid by wealthy local and foreign visitors, plus corporations and organizations like Peace Corps, go to help support social services and other initiatives for the poorer people of the country.  So, conscience salved.


The big pool.  I just got in there and more or less stayed.  For hours.

The hot spring has been channeled into a small pool in an indoor facility, which also contains a steam room, sauna, some photos and information of historical interest, and a starkly beautiful spa-services area offering massages, skin treatments and the like.  None of those services was affordable on a Peace Corps allowance!  However, PCN did cover access the the spring and the big outdoor pool for us, and people used them as they saw fit.  The hot spring was toasty but never uncomfortable, and the outdoor pool was sublime.  I did laps and laps and pencil rolls and dolphin dives and hung out in the wet, chatting with other water-centric trainees.  I vaguely recall teaching someone to dive, sort of.  Hmm.



Trainer Rachel, who lived in Scandinavia for many years, took charge of lunch.

At some point we had lunch.  Potato salad, greek salad, chicken and maybe some beef.  Who cares?  Water was the point.

Rather a Pretty View, Really

When I went to Training Manager Benna to make sure it would be okay if a group of us trainees walked one of the hill trails outside Okahandja one Sunday morning, he said something like, "I was wondering when you would ask.  Usually trainees are up there the first weekend."

The road to the trail

Well, we talked about it a lot... but someone said they'd been warned of bad men.  Someone else said they'd been warned of snakes.  No one knew where the trails began or where they went.  Host families seemed to think leaving the streets of Okahandja was a bad idea.  However, I see mountains, I want to climb them, and the bad men don't seem like they'd be much of a match for a dozen or two robust, young-and-strong or middle-aged-and-cranky Americans, and there are snakes everywhere.  So I finally realized that one of the volunteers from earlier classes would be able to assist with locating the trail, and she was glad to do so.  We invited everyone to gather at the training center at 9am, and put up a big sign reminding them (a few of our trainees are city types) to wear good shoes and sunscreen and bring water and a snack.

Steep enough to be interesting, without, mostly, having to scrabble

It's a lovely walk, about 45 minutes to the top of what some previous trainee class decided to call Pride Rock.  There are a couple of nice scrambly bits, though nothing terribly challenging, and great views all the way.  On our first trek we saw numerous baboons.  We never, thank you Tara, saw a snake.

A rocky promontory about halfway up; great lookout and re-group point.

The top was mostly bare rock, with a small tree or two and a few bushes.  The wind was brisk up there.  We broke into clumps and chatted and snacked and basked.  In Namibia, it's always basking weather (pretty much), but I haven't gotten sick of it yet.  At some point I asked whether people would like to try for a few minutes of silence, and everyone stopped talking.  Immediately, the wind seemed to pick up, and it brought the chortling of the baboons with it.  Mystical.

View from the top.  The dry rivers still astonish me.

The next week we went again, and again the wind freshened as soon as we stopped chattering.  That week we didn't have baboons, though.

They are smaller than you, but much stronger, faster, more nimble, and their teeth are huge and pointy.

Here's a link to all the photos, to try to give you an idea of how beautiful it is.