My Day, or Another Peanut-Butter Sandwich Closer to Swearing In

The Pre-Service Training (PST) program for Namibian Peace Corps Trainees lasts about nine weeks.  For the first week, I lived in a dorm-style room at a conference center.  There were three bunk beds and four wardrobe-y cupboard things, three trainees, and one or two trainers in a room about two meters by maybe five meters, plus six large pieces of baggage and about eight medium-sized ones.  It was a bit of a squish.  We also had three or four mosquito nets draped about the place, which made sitting on the bed, or putting a backpack on the bed in order to dig around in it to find a shoe, rather difficult.  Fortunately my roommates were delightful.  I wonder what they typed about me...

I'm supposed to have the net up at my 'homestay', but the
ceiling is impossibly high and the mosquitoes few.

After a week, we each moved into ‘homestay,’ to live with local people and learn their ways.  The locals get a lot of training before meeting us, so they won’t freak out when the Americans hang their underpants to dry in an open area or expect 1,000-calorie lunches or refuse to eat meat or go to church or something.  We trainees got a lot of pre-homestay briefings, too, informing us that we should keep our undergarments in our own rooms and communicate our needs clearly if we’re not getting enough to eat.  So I moved in with a 70-year old widow named Wilhelmina, who has hosted more than ten trainees over several years.  She’s very welcoming, laughs a lot, and communicates clearly if I don’t lock the door properly or study ‘too hard.’  Ha ha.

My typical day begins at about 4:00am, when the neighborhood dogs start barking.  Most homes have at least one dog on guard duty, and often two or three, so my residential neighborhood gets a choir of about thirty.  I fall back asleep, or at least doze a bit, until the alarm rings at 5:30am.  It’s still dark out.  On bath mornings, I jump right up and creep down the hallway to switch on the geyser – pronounced ‘geezer’; it’s the hot-water heater.  A bit of stretching, some washing and dressing, and two Weetbix cereal bars (think shredded wheat, but thicker shreds) with a banana, some milk and hot water, and I’m out the door around 7:00, by which time it’s light out.  It’s a one- or two-kilometer walk to the training center, gazing at the mountains around the town and at the ground.  There are skinks running about, and I don’t want to step on one (though they’re quick enough I probably couldn’t), but there’s also the small possibility of snakes.  Really toxic snakes, even.

An unusual day: the Hon. Thomas Daughton, US Ambassador
to Namibia, joined us for a classroom session.  The Peace Corps
staff sang for him, saving him from the Trainee Chorus.

On Mondays our class of 31 learners and about a dozen staff and trainers begins the day at 7:30 with a cappella renditions of the Namibian and American national anthems, plus a verse or two of the African Union anthem, and a Namibian folk song or two.  On Wednesdays and Fridays we do the folk songs, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays we don’t sing.  We have two hours of language training almost every morning, then a break for ‘tea.’  Instant coffee, tea, instant hot chocolate and juice are the beverages, and there’s a food offering as well.  That’s either packaged cookies – rather delicious ones – rusks (dry, fairly bland, sweet cookies similar to biscotti) or, most often, soft white rolls, peanut butter, butter and jam.  Then we have another two-hour class, an hour for lunch, and then two ninety-minute classes in the afternoon.  At 4:30, I stagger homeward, unless there’s a get-together at the beer garden next door or it’s Monday, when one of the yogic types puts on a 20-minute routine, or Thursday, when we do a longer yoga routine.  Wilhelmina has dinner ready by 5:00:  meat, starch and plenty of it, and sometimes a salad so I don’t forget completely what vegetables look like.  We eat together if I’m back at 5:00, but she doesn’t like to wait for me on days I’m coming in later.  She washes the dishes; I dry and put away, and then she watches half an hour or an hour of American soap operas while I study a bit and relax with reading, writing and music.  We are both usually lights-out by 10:00 at the latest.  Some of my colleagues report that their families watch ‘soapies’ from various countries for hours.  Around midnight, the dogs do some more barking.

Sundays are especially meat-intensive.  I ate most of the pork
and almost all of the chicken.  The squash was delicious.

So, classes take most of the day.  As a community-economic-development (CED) volunteer, I have had classes in bookkeeping, personal finance, registering a company in Namibia, income-generating activities, creating a business plan and much more.  Many of us, of course, knew a lot of this information already, through work or school or volunteer activities.  Our group of 13 is also partnered up with 13 local people who want to start businesses, and we hosted a business skills workshop for local entrepreneurs and a market day as well.  More on those projects later.

The 13 CED volunteers move into the big room (with the lousy acoustics) with the 18 Community Health volunteers for several sessions weekly on topics concerning safety, medical and cross-cultural issues.  Safety includes warnings about harassment and stalking, prohibitions on riding in the back of open pick-up trucks or in commercial trucks, and ideas about how to intervene if you see another trainee or volunteer at risk.  Medical sessions have included nutrition reminders that included a recommendation to rinse any food you’re not cooking in a bleach solution, a truly grisly slide show with photos of genital warts and other STDs, and a couple of heartbreaking videos, one telling a bit of the story of Danielle Dunlap, a Peace Corps volunteer who died of malaria in Ghana in 2013, and one featuring five volunteers who contracted HIV while serving.

Many of the cross-cultural issues sessions have dealt with the ways Namibian life, mores and people differ from American, both actually and stereotypically.  In one session, our trainers asked questions about American habits they had observed while we Americans asked about Namibian habits we had observed.  Some of the questions from the Americans:  “Why doesn’t my host family rinse the soap suds off the dishes?” and “Why is the toddler in my family allowed to hit her parents and siblings?”  The answers from our trainers were, “Why would we?” followed by a chorus of Americans describing dish-washing in England, Ireland and Canada, where the suds are a permanent part of the place setting; and “Poor discipline.  She shouldn’t be hitting anyone, but some families don’t teach their children proper manners.”  Corporal punishment in the home and schools is not uncommon here; though it’s illegal for teachers to hit learners, they often do so.

A kid I met one day.  They mostly love
to have their photos taken.  I hope someone
is teaching her manners without hitting.

The Namibians wanted to know, among other things, why Americans eat so much peanut butter and what we carry around in our gigantic knapsacks.  The answer to the first, of course, is because Peace Corps’ Namibian staff keeps feeding us peanut butter, though we actually talked about nutritional density and cost-effectiveness.  The answer to the second, of course, was that we carry around about fifteen pounds of paper they’ve given us with information about the national economy, self-assessment, safety and security, sexually-transmitted infections, personal budgeting and how to tell a taxi driver to drive slower, not cheat you and let you out here as you need to use the bathroom.  There’s also a three-pound Afrikaans-Engels woordeboek vor tweetalige aanleerders.  That’s a dictionary for bilingual learners.

We are all feeling quite well prepared for service by this point – week six in the process – and perhaps just a tiny bit sick of each other.  Nonetheless, on weekends there’s usually some group activity, like hiking in the mountains that ring the town, gathering for a movie or visiting a local crafts market.  It’s actually a fairly impressive group, and getting to know some of the members has been a pleasure and an education.  Everything’s an education lately.