Welcome to Namibia, or Matu Mujakurua moNamibia

After the fifteen hour flight to Johannesburg, we had a six-hour layover at OR Tambo before boarding the plane to Windhoek, Namibia’s capital.  Everything went smoothly, although ankles were starting to swell.  I cleared Immigration with ease, walked into baggage, and was greeted by a smiling American woman who demanded, “Peace Corps?” and then confiscated my passport and WHO card.

The passport is a special, no-fee version with a white label on the cover that identifies me as a Peace Corps volunteer, and a special diplomatic-ish Namibian visa on the inside.  The WHO card certifies that I’ve had my yellow-fever vaccine, but still need rabies and a second round of hepatitises.  Eventually I would get both documents back, the Peace Corps rep assured me, and I went to start hauling suitcases off the luggage conveyor.  I grabbed every one I saw with a bit of Peace Corps yarn attached to the handle – we’d been given the purple wool scraps back in Philadelphia, in furtherance of a PC tradition.

All 31 of us strolled through customs without a check, and were greeted by a banner, several signs and numerous Peace Corps volunteers and staff waving and shouting.  The luxury motor coach that would take us to our training center could not contain all our baggage, so we left the sidewalk laden with suitcases that a crew of three or four loaded into a pick-up truck and trailer, and gathered for a group photo, with the banner.  Peace Corps DC e-mailed it to two of my sisters to assure them I had arrived safely.  This is, presumably, a more important step for the parents who have waved their 21-year-olds away from home.

Then it was 90 minutes on the bus – I spotted an ostrich, and lots of cows and goats.  This is a much less-impressive game count than on the ride from Windhoek to Otjiwarongo on my first trip to Namibia, a year and a half ago.  That time, I saw baboons, steenbock, weaver birds, kudu and warthogs and maybe more.  It was dry season then, though, and the animals were moving around more to find food.  April is the end of the wet season here, and the whole world seemed electric green, which was surreal for me after the sere scenery of my previous visit.

But this time, when I arrived at my destination in suburban Windhoek, there was a choir lined up on either side of the drive into the conference center, and they sang and danced a joyous welcome.  The singers were members of the Okahandja Youth Choir augmented with a dozen or two Peace Corps staff members.  They sang a capella and didn’t sound it – their voices and occasional snapping or clapping percussion sounded like an orchestra.  After we volunteers chose rooms (three sets of bunk beds in a room about 2x5 meters – less than 120 square feet, with two closets containing a total of five clothes hangers), the Youth Choir entertained us in the courtyard as the sun set behind some buildings, still managing to share shreds of its pink-and-gold glory.  It was infinitely enhanced by the glory of the nine young singers, whose voices were born to weave and bob together.

There was fish for dinner, and then we got mosquito nets for our bunk beds and a can of something called Doom that would kill or at least repel the skeeters.  I slept really well.

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.

Peace Corps Prepares Us

Written 14 and 15 April 2015

First step in joining Peace Corps is reading the website.  My process started – well, it started in 1985, when I first considered joining, but let’s fast-forward to maybe September 2013.  My recollection is that the website said, in direct words, that Peace Corps volunteers should expect to feel depressed, lonely, frustrated, anxious, bored, isolated, useless, misunderstood and miserably unhappy at points during their service.  Also elated, effective, quietly content, awestruck, triumphant and deliriously pleased.  They spend a lot more time warning about the first set of feelings, though, and kept it up throughout the long application process.  At several points, they asked how I would deal with stress and sorrow.  I told them I would write in my journal, talk to my friends, get some exercise and accept that life, wherever one lives it, includes stress and sorrow.  I did not mention the vociferous swearing and crying.  I presume they know to expect that.

They provide useful, detailed guides to the probable affects of living in an alien culture, including a 34-page booklet designed for volunteers’ friends and families, so the folks back home understand why you’re cracking up.  It is called, “On the Home Front,” and actually begins with a discussion of all the reasons friends and family might worry about their volunteer.  Fun!

After a while of reading all this material, and writing and talking and thinking about it, I began to wonder whether it was a clever method of making us all depressed enough that we’d be accustomed to the feeling by the time we got on-sight.

About six months before I left, I started eating meat.  Yuk.  I was a vegetarian for thirty years for every reason you can name, so this was not amusing for me.  I had a bite of salmon at one sister's house in early November, and a bite of turkey at another sister's house at Thanksgiving.  I was easing into it, you see; I had to grimace extensively to get each of those bites down.  In December, Mandy and Carl invited me to his work party, for which they prepared a massive raw bar tray, and I ate two bites of lobster with admirable facial discretion.  By March, I was forcing myself to consume several pieces of chicken and one of lamb from the luncheon buffet at Palace of India, which I would quickly wash down with a pound of naan and a bowlful of paneer.  Now I can eat beef and everything and look like I'm kind-of enjoying it.

I also got into the habit - more or less - of shaking out my shoes before putting them on, in case of spiders or scorpions.  In the last couple weeks in the U.S., I took long, hot showers every day.  I'm usually more of a short-and-warm shower-er, but I was trying to stockpile some luxury.  That is also why I took to wearing cashmere and velvet in late March, as packing up the house intensified.

The medical preparation was extensive, expensive, time-consuming and necessary.  A few months before I was scheduled to leave, they told me my lymphocyte count was too low for me to serve, and I panicked, very briefly, then went to the health-food store and bought all the immune-system boosters I could find, knowing I didn’t have enough time for them to work.  Lymphocytes are a component of white blood cells.  I swallowed one massive and two normal-sized pills three times a day, fixed myself a kale smoothie with macha every morning, and hoped the shingles vaccine was perking up my white blood cells.  When I got yet another blood draw, the count was still low, and Peace Corps decided I was just a chronic case who would probably be okay.  I kept taking the pills, as I live in hope, and had several more smoothies.  Mango-kale was especially good.
 

The best part of the medical prep, though, was the discovery that my teeth have roots deep enough for a six-foot tall man.  My dentist makes statements sometimes that leave me bewildered as to a response.  Usually I’ve got a metal pick and a suction device in my mouth and don’t need to reply, but this time I was waiting for the films in his hallway, so I had to say something.  I chose, “Oh.  Oh, my.”  “No wonder the novocaine didn’t take the first time,” he replied, smiling.  I really like my dentist.

We did not actually get dozens of packing lists, but it felt that way.  There were probably at least six, mostly written with a lot of additional suggestions made in a conference call about a week before we left.  They recommended bringing sheets, a pillow, a sleeping bag, a blanket, skinny jeans (not appropriate for work!), Chacos or Tevas (not appropriate for work!), anything you especially love, a laptop, an external hard drive, music, books and movies to hear, read, watch and swap, work clothes (slacks or below-knee skirts or dresses, sleeved shirts, something more formal, nothing transparent, covered-toe shoes), coffee, good kitchen knives, Mexican spices, two water bottles, a heavy fleece or two, two pair of eyeglasses, a flashlight, and two swimsuits in different sizes as you will change size.  Your luggage had better change sizes if you’re going to cram all this stuff into it and still meet the size and weight limits.

Some of the 31 members of Namibia 41 were way underweight; a couple brought only one checked bag instead of the allowed two.  Aren’t they amazing?

Floating or dragging, we all gathered at a Hampton Inn in a not-that-dodgy part of Philadelphia around noon on a Monday.  Once we had signed the registration sheet, and initialed to attest we hadn’t been arrested or recruited as spies in the last few weeks, we were officially Peace Corps Trainees, a major upgrade from Peace Corps Invitees.  Then we started the educational activities.  Our icebreaker involved naming the most interesting thing we had packed – it’s not a competition, but if it were, the woman with a yoga mat and a machete would have won.  We made group drawings of our anxieties and aspirations, with plenty of snakes, failures to learn the language, stick figures standing alone, crying, and stick figures holding hands with other stick figures.  One group had a bug on the anxiety side – what if it bites you, and it’s poisonous?! – and one on the aspiration side – can’t wait to eat bugs!

We talked about Peace Corps’ Core Expectations, of which there are ten.  I wrote a limerick to illustrate One and Three:  Bob is feeling homesick and sick/He’s not learning his language so quick/Girlfriend says, ‘Come home’/And he feels so alone/Bob need to commit through thin and thick.

Acknowledging the reasonableness of Core Expectation #1, "Prepare your personal and professional life to make a commitment to serve abroad for a full term of 27 months," I took up meat-eating after several decades without.  This is my US fridge, with February's chicken sausage and bacon, which I ate with blueberry pancakes.  The pancakes were great.  Meat will probably get its own post eventually; it's much beloved in Namibia.

My key takeaway from ‘staging’ was our perky-in-the-best-way facilitator telling us that while initially we might want to rely on family and friends at home for support, we would quickly develop relationships with our fellow PCTs that would provide that, and in the long term, it would be our Namibian hosts, partners and colleagues who would help us keep going.  I like the idea of that progression.

I am looking forward to experiencing it.