"Immuno" "Deficiency"

looking back to July 2016:

My Peace Corps Namibia training group included both the Community Economic Development volunteers of whom I am one and a clutch of Community Health and HIV/AIDS Prevention volunteers.  While we had separate technical training sessions, we overheard a lot of each others' material, and of course talked about what we were learning, planning, hoping.  We also all had to compete in some condom-putting-on role-play exercise/game for which the CHHAP vols had a huge advantage.  They spent, it sometimes seemed, at least a little bit of time every day unfurling condoms onto a huge selection of wooden phalli.  They also learned about things like nutrition, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS treatment, alcoholism and sexual mores and oh so much more.

Squish the package - that was a new one for me.

Childhood nutrition, or lack thereof, is a terrible problem in many communities here (less so in my town, where unemployment is very high but the jobs that are available are good).  A lot of kids eat a diet that's, maybe, 80% simple carbs -- bread, white potatoes, white macaroni, white rice, maybe an occasional fatcake, but mostly the ubiquitous pap, a white-cornmeal polenta, or the darker mahangu, a porridge made from millet.  If the family has protein available, probably goat, sheep or chicken, the adults get dibs and the kids get scraps.  If they're lucky.  Vegetables are an occasional bit of spinach, onion or carrot, and fruit is rare.  Especially in early childhood -- from the time the baby's diet of breast milk starts getting supplemented with other food, until two or three -- this can be terribly dangerous.  Without protein and the vitamins and minerals that fruit and veg provide, nothing grows to full strength: not the lungs, the heart, the brain, the bones or muscles.  And they can never catch up.  Breaks my heart.

Good childhood health turns out smart, high-energy teens like these.

So, when I was building the lesson plan for my English improvement trainings, thinking that topics like food and medicine are usual for language learning, I knew I could fold some 'life skills' lessons into the mix.  And, since HIV and AIDS are huge problems here, with more than one in ten adults living with HIV or AIDS (16% according to the UN, and much higher in some regions, and many babies being infected by their HIV-positive mothers at birth), I decided to include a session on HIV and AIDS prevention and care.  So I got in touch with A., a nearby CHHAP volunteer, and invited her to town.  She happily agreed, and decided it would be good for me to spend a few hours distributing condoms at local shebeens (bars), and how could a person disagree with that?

When two or more PC vols get together for a project, we call that a 'collaboration.'  We have to get approval from our PC bosses, so A., the expert, wrote up a proposal and submitted it to her boss, who loved the idea and forwarded it to my boss, who also approved.  I SMS'd our local Health Ministry nurse to run the condom-distribution idea by her, and A. tried to phone, and neither of us managed to reach her, but we figured that would be okay.  Then A. hiked the bumpy roads to my town, carrying a file with pages printed with each of, I believe, 17 steps to put on a condom.  I only knew six.

Gosh-darn 'Africa time'

A. actually approved of my six steps, but she likes to go into detail.  She arrived on a Wednesday, and we sat in my office and discussed our approach.  Since my lessons usually began with some vocabulary and moved on to using the words and concepts in conversation - speaking and listening - we decided to start with the words that make up the initialism HIV and the acronym AIDS.  That was my job.  Wednesday night I fed A. mushroom gnocci with a brandied mushroom sauce and whole-wheat ciabatta, and gave her responsibility for the salad, which was delicious.

Femidom demo

On Thursday, we walked down to the local clinic, introduced ourselves in person to various nurses, which was much more successful than our telephonic attempts, and walked back with a heavy case of male condoms and a couple boxes of female condoms.  We had our afternoon class with lots of teenage girls and an evening class with all adults, mostly women.  I led off, writing "HIV" and "AIDS" down the left side of the flip chart, and asking if people knew what the letters stood for.  They knew many, and got pretty close on the others.  I wrote out "human"; everyone knew what that meant.  Then "immunodeficiency."  "'Immune' means you are protected against something," I explained, invoking the recent measles vaccination campaign that had come through town a week or two earlier.  "'Deficient' means not having enough."  (Then I threw in 'sufficient', 'abundance' and 'excess'.  It's an English class, not a clinic.)  "So 'immunodeficiency' means you don't have enough protection against the diseases that are part of AIDS.  'Virus' means it's contagious - you can catch it from another person, like tuberculosis or flu.  Headaches and cancer are not contagious, or infectious -- they don't spread from person to person."  Same thing with AIDS, ending with the S for 'syndrome', "which means AIDS isn't really a single disease, but a collection of illnesses that can infect a person with low immunity."

I also introduced the word 'stigma,' which A. had identified as the #1 problem for people living with HIV and AIDS, and we talked about what we should do for people who are sick.  Some of our learners were admirably eloquent on the need to treat sick people with compassion and support.

Festus holds the pen-penis.

A. spread out, across the floor, her 17 pages of condom-acquisition steps, and we all gathered around to discuss each one and throw out questions as they occurred.  She used a bunch of pens rubber-banded together to mimic an erect penis, and rolled an unexpired, airy and well-lubed condom over them.  Then she used her fingers as a mock vagina and demo'd the female condom, or femidom, which generated great interest and many questions.  A. had answers for everything.  People demonstrated no squeamishness or shyness about the topic, asking questions and sharing ideas as they had with topics like weather and budgeting.  It was great.

That night, I fed A. pap and chakalaka for dinner!  You like to mix it up.

Friday morning grocery shopping

I've got a beet, so I could make borscht in honor of A's Ukrainian heritage.

And the next day, we gathered up our clinic-provided condoms and headed out to the bars.  (As part of its effort to combat HIV and AIDS, the Namibian government provides free condoms to all, through the Ministry of Health.  They're supposed to be available in bars, but MoH employees rarely have time to do the distribution, and shebeen managers aren't able to or interested in going to the clinic to collect a few boxes, so A. winds up doing this job a lot in her town.)  We left a box or two - or three - at each of ten or twelve shebeens and shops, and a handful or two of femidoms, also.  A. wrote up a thorough report for me to deliver to the clinic, and showed admirable aplomb in shaking off the advances of bar patrons who wanted her sunglasses, her phone number, her company for the evening, or a trip to America.  I just kind of tagged along, smiling genially.  For dinner that night, we had four of my friends over for chicken and lots of veg, from Dreamland Garden, in a Senegalese-style peanut sauce, with *brown* rice.  I love a party.

Genuine interest in HIV prevention, plus a Friday-afternoon shebeen-face.

This is the kind of stuff that makes the PC service seem really worthwhile.  I am so grateful that they trained us with the CHHAP people, and encourage us to get together with these kinds of exercises, and that A. is willing to slog her way over here to help us out.  She does claim she loves to visit my town, which is cleaner, quieter and friendlier than hers.  When we were lugging our condoms back to the office, two boys stopped to ask if they could help us.  A. practically dropped her side of the box in amazement.  Where she lives, children constantly demand money from her, or food, and never offer help.  Sometimes I hear other vols saying, "In Namibia, people..." and I think about the contrasts between A's town, my town, the tiny villages of my northern colleagues, and the slums and middle-class neighborhoods of Swakopmund.

Party!

Friday afternoon on-our-way-to-the-shebeen faces.

Off to Otjimbingwe

Looking back to July 2016:

L. is a Peace Corps volunteer teacher who's been living in a mid-sized village in my region since about four months after I got here.  We didn't meet until about six months after that, when I took to her immediately.  She's sharp and sweet and hyper-competitive (that last she admits with rueful-yet-cheerful self-awareness when claiming the role of timekeeper or referee for games), and her commitment to her PC service and the people and community she serves glows in her aura.  So when she invited a bunch of volunteers to visit her for a belated Fourth of July celebration, I was delighted to accept.  It's fun to see new places -- volunteers have a really broad range of experiences, from sophisticated city living to mud huts strewn with cobras -- and L's open-hearted hospitality would be sure to be excellent.

We head toward the river.

I had just gotten a site-mate -- another PC volunteer living in my town -- and he managed to score us a sweet ride to Karibib, the first leg of our journey, free and easy.  We met up with our hostess and fellow guests there to shop the big grocery store for braai supplies.  Since this was to be a July 4th thing, I guess they were bbq supplies, but it's the same thing in the end!

Karibib is a nice change from my desert town; semi-arid savannah with grass and trees.  And it got better as we headed out toward Otjimbingwe (Oat-jim-bing-gway), jammed into a bakkie (pick-up truck) that was as full as anyone this side of Clown College could make it.  ("This is a very nice bakkie," L. said admiringly, gazing at relatively-new tires with a pleased smile.)  The village is situated on the Swakop River, which is dry on its surface almost all the time, but has water flowing underground.  So we had lots of trees, and it was actually warmer at night than the chilly desert 100km away.  Also, hills.  Gently undulating all around us.  Gorgeous.

So peaceful.  So pretty.

Sadly, we passed the site of a bakkie accident earlier that day in which at least one person had died.  The truck had gone off the gravel (dirt) road and flipped, and the riders in its uncovered back were thrown out, full force and over distance.  This is why Peace Corps forbids its volunteers from riding in open bakkies.  We have to find one with a cover.

L's fuzzy puppy, Strawberry, greeted us at her house.  Strawberry probably didn't get any more love and attention with all of us around than she gets with just L., who lavishes her with affection, but she got a lot of love and attention (except from J.; short, sad story), and earned every scrap.  A dog's a delight, and L. has electricity and a stove and fridge and everything.  Unfortunately, the village had recently switched from borehole water to metered pipeline water, and L. hadn't gotten used to checking her meter and buying more water credits before she ran out.  So she kind of didn't have any running water all weekend, with eight guests and an indoor flush toilet.  Fortunately, she was able to fill jerry cans at a neighbor's tap, and we made do with those quite nicely.

L. with learners at her school.

L. made us all burritos on Friday night, and we talked and relaxed happily, then split up to crowd each other in the two available beds and various floor pads.  On Saturday C. made French toast, which I hadn't eaten in over a year I believe, and then we toured the village.  We saw L's school complex, and a few excellent shops where we all bought chilled drinking water, and walked down to the river to throw stones at the palm trees, trying to shake loose the nuts.  They have almost no nutritional or gustatory value, but it was fun to try one.  You peel the outer shell, scrape your teeth along the inner shell, and swallow a gram or two of woody, nearly tasteless nut substance.  Hmm.  Interesting.

Walking the river, or river bed.  It did have some water in it this year,
toward the end of the rainy season a few months before our visit.

About a million children accompanied us on the walk, poking into the river's borehole and waggling hands and feet in the 'dam', which is a storage container for water to sustain local cattle and small stock.  L. kept warning them not to go too far, as few kids here know how to swim.  We also visited the Powder Tower, where the Herero people stored arms a hundred or so years ago, when Otjimbingwe was their capital.

The Powder Tower, with vols and Strawberry.

That night we braai'd or barbecued, and I got to make the dough for the roosterbrood, using whole wheat flour thank goodness at last and garlic salt instead of regular since that's what L. had and it would taste better anyway.  S. passed around temporary tattoos of firecrackers and stars-and-stripes that her mother had brought on a visit two months previously, and I slapped one on my neck and one on my wrist.  I was very festive.  After dinner, several of L's teacher friends, who have moved to the village from all over, came over to sit on the floor and play Thirteen with us.

L. doing a three-second boogie as part of the Thirteen game.



In the morning we reluctantly ransacked L's sweet little house for our meandering possessions, crammed into another bakkie headed town-wards ("This looks like a very nice bakkie."), and gazed in wonder (I did, anyway) as the hills lifted and sank us through trees and shade and all that good stuff.  Then we had a fun time getting home from Karibib!  It was a truly lovely break from the routine, and I am so glad L. proposed the outing, and made it all happen.





Business Basics

Looking back to July and August 2016:

In addition to the English improvement classes I taught this winter, I also conducted trainings in basic business skills.  The business training was much more detailed, complex and long -- a total of 24 hours, spread over two classes per week for six weeks.  This was GREAT.  It was, for me, not as much pure fun but a lot weightier.  A lot more to dig into, grab onto.  And measure!

For class one, we started with a pre-quiz.  My experience in pre-service training had shown that many aspiring entrepreneurs lacked the math skills they would need for recordkeeping, so the quiz included questions like, "If one banana costs $3, how much will four bananas cost?"  Everyone got that right.  No one got the questions on averages and unit costs right, and the one on percentages was about 50/50.  There were also more theoretical questions, like, "What bookkeeping should you do for your business?" and "What's the most important part of a business plan?"  Average score was 41%.

I re-posted the 'Qualities of a Good Business' list for every class.
Also, 'Components of a Business Plan' to remind them where we were headed.

After quizzing, we talked about what makes a good business -- ethical and honest, good products, good customer service, and PROFITABLE.  That last was my contribution.  So we did an exercise to calculate profit.  Not long ago I had a person come into my office having launched a small business, buying products in town and re-selling them in rural areas.  They had calculated all the costs, but priced the products according to what other merchants (in town) charged, and were actually losing money with every sale.  So.  Clearly this is a critical concept and calculation for conversation.

Then we launched into it.  I designed the course in three modules, with modules one and three following the outline of a standard business plan, and module two chockablock with recordkeeping work.  Yay, math! is my business-training motto.  In the first two weeks we covered product development, target markets, competitive analysis and feasibility.  Then we did two weeks of bookkeeping, costing and pricing, budgeting and financing.  For the final two weeks - module three - we dug into marketing, operations, a session to review things on which people had gotten stuck the first time around, and finally action plans.

Figuring out something or other together.  July and August nights are
*cold* in the drafty town hall in the southern desert town.

It's not b-school.  However, these ambitious learners were committed and engaged.  Two achieved perfect attendance, and most of them were at class within 15 minutes of starting time, which is a bit of an accomplishment in a community that likes to excuse its chronic tardiness on the basis of 'Africa time.'  (Actually, this community, built around a for-profit, commercial mining operation largely held by a global corporation, is pretty good about promptness.)  They had homework for each class and they completed it assiduously.  I included a least a bit of math on almost every assignment, focusing on the areas where people had had trouble on the pre-quiz.  I had such a great time with them!

Presenting the results of a confab, on an apparently uproarious topic.

I hope they did, too; although I know there was some grumbling about all the adding and subtracting.  (Yay, math!)  I tried to keep it interactive, and they had lots of opportunities to work together to learn or practice the material with in-class exercises.  This was also useful time for networking, as people built new relationships that might come in handy some day.

In the last class, I handed out the same quiz we had on day one.  The scores on that round averaged 70% (one got an 85%), for an improvement of 71%.

The Official Language

Looking back to July and August 2016:

Namibians speak over a dozen languages as their home/family/traditional/native languages, and some of those branch out into multiple dialect forms.  Under German administration, from the late 19th century into the 19-teens, German was the unifying language; under South African administration, from the early 20th century until 1990, Afrikaans was the official language of government and the most common in business (the bigger businesses, not village stores and local taxis and such).  When Namibia won her independence, the new government re-considered.  Both German and Afrikaans stirred resentment in many, and there was no way one or even two indigenous languages (Afrikaans is kind-of indigenous; it's a localized version of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch) could be pegged as the official language without stirring other forms of resentment.  South Africa's post-apartheid government went with eleven official languages, but the Namibians chose just one:  English.

Eleventh graders, ambitious for improvement.

For some of the older people with whom I've talked, the transition felt difficult and maybe stirred some resentment of yet another kind, though mild.  They'd been talking Afrikaans all their lives, and were proud of their mastery of that language, and blammo, they were told they had to learn English.  The transition in the schools wasn't easy, either; there were few teachers qualified to teach English and a generation or so of learners had to muddle through as best they could.  (The first Peace Corps volunteers in Namibia, a few months after independence, were English teachers.)

Today, if you visit, you'll meet many people skilled in English, especially in the tourism and hospitality industries.  If you visit my small desert town, built from scratch in the 1970s to serve as a home to miners from all over, you'll find some contention at public meetings over which languages should be spoken.  Lots of people, meeting me, admired my most excellent English and asked for help with theirs; a couple were especially concerned that their accents weren't like mine.  (One told me I spoke much better English than most Americans, and then imitated a typical American accent:  it was a horrifying mush of gabbled glottals.  Overall, they don't like us eliding our ts into ds.)

The world map came in handy for English, too.  Thanks, K&K!

So I started an English improvement class.  I loved this.  I built a slide deck, inspired by English Teaching Forum magazine and my own PC Afrikaans lessons.  We started each lesson with a bunch of vocabulary around a particular theme, and then had conversations to use the not-always-new words and related concepts.  There was homework with each class: read a sample paragraph and then write one of your own.  People were really good about doing the assignments.  For the last class, we read a brief essay together and discussed it.  I tried to get everyone engaged and physically active in each session, in keeping with recommendations for adult education.

I started the class with the reminder that English has many dialects, and none of them is better or worse than another.  I speak standard American English, my friend Val speaks standard British English, there's Black American and Australian rules English, and Hinglish and Spanglish and Namlish.  Your accent is fine, and I'll try to remember that Namlish trends more to the British English and say 'colour' not 'color.'  Ha ha.  'Petrol' not 'gas,' 'trousers' not 'pants.'  Then I shared some words that few Namibians I know understood:  noon, chilly, grab and darn.  And then tried to sort out the lasting confusion between 'lend' and 'borrow.'  Then we had just enough time for greetings; please stand up and say variations on hello to each other. "Now you're meeting a good friend you haven't seen for years."  "Now you're meeting an important politician."

Chilly is less than cold.  Chile is a country, and chili is a pepper.

Session two was weather, which generated one of the best moments of all time.  Me:  "These are words we don't use much here.  'Humid.'  'Humidity.'  Does anyone know what that means?"  Eleventh-grade girl, raising a tentative hand:  "Is it... the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere?"  Me:  "Um.  Yes."  I had photos on the screen of some DC-area friends running on a warm July afternoon, and I tried to explain to them what humidity feels like.  I'm not sure they could relate.

Then we had feelings and senses, and after that, parts of the body and describing people.  Session five was food, built around the 'healthy plate' model for good nutrition.  Then we did budgeting, including idioms like 'nest egg' and 'tighten your belt.'  Session seven was on HIV and AIDS prevention and care, and I shall write specifically about that in a future post.  Health volunteer A. came to town to help me, bringing her 17 steps for how to put on a condom.

For the food class, I ripped up a grocery circular and handed out the pieces.
Everyone chose a food on his or her piece and discussed it briefly:  why they
like it or don't, how they cook it, when they eat it.  This was a fun exercise.

The final session was my favorite.  We sat in a circle and took turns reading, paragraph by paragraph, a beautiful 'Lives' column from the New York Times Magazine.  (Thanks, K&K!)  It's the story of an emigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and his early weeks settling in to a small town in western Massachusetts, and in about 900 words it flows gently from cozy home to sweaty work, "I was young and happy", to recollection of his dad's murder in Burundi, "I was grateful just to be where I was," to a night bike ride home past the woods, a police stop and some confusion around English, "To get home to my wife and child -- that was all I wanted."  It closes with a bachelor's degree within reach, training for the National Guard, and, "the police never bothered me again.  Instead... they sometimes slowed down, turned on the light for a second and made that little whoop sound.  I started to like it when they did that.  I was new to the United States, and this was a kind of hello."  This felt like a perfect piece for our class: relatable, beautifully written but with accessible vocabulary, and evocative of a range of emotions that help demonstrate the power of language, and enable a degree of empathy that connects us with language.  I want more of these!

Condom class was pretty good, too.  More later.

I'm planning to start an English reading and conversation group in January.  Send me stories if you come across any you think would work.

So Then I Pushed My Own Self Out of an Airplane

looking back to June 2016:

Tandem skydiving in February 2016 was fun, a bit, and interesting, but not the thrilling rush, for me, that it most definitely was for the four friends who went with me, and most of the others we met that day.  One man seemed just to hate it, but that wasn't my reaction.  My reaction was, 'Roller coasters are more fun than this.'  That response made no sense to me, so I wanted to investigate further.  When we were signing up for the February go-round, I had seen the company offered skydive lessons, so I wrote and asked about that.

It took kind of a long time and a lot of back-and-forth to find out that I could do something called a 'static-line' dive with a few hours' training, and not too expensively.  So I said I wanted to, and they said someone would contact me, and no one did.  But when the shadows came we stayed at Amanpuri, the lodge from which the skydivers operate, and I bumped into some of them, who remembered me from February, and I told them I wanted to do the static-line, which news they greeted enthusiastically.  And nothing happened.

Winged golfcart.  One of the pilots sometimes
wears a chute when he's flying.  Hmmm.

And then, in June, I was sitting in the bar at Amanpuri and one of the skydivers came in and said hello, and told me Frank was teaching a few prospective divers upstairs, and I could probably join them.  And then I wondered if I really wanted to skydive all by myself, but y'know, so I finished my g&t and stepped up to the office.

It was very interesting to learn how the whole thing works.  There's no motor (which I guess I vaguely knew), no pulleys or levers or springs.  The parachute operates just with air and momentum and a few strings, ensuring a human body safe passage through the sky.  The 'chute, or canopy, is packed up in a satchel or knapsack you harness to your back, and when you pull the satchel open, the air -- which is moving quite briskly as you are a big dense thing plummeting through the atmosphere's relatively-complete undense-ness (physics!) -- fills up the fabric, and you slow abruptly and float the rest of the way.  Physics!  Just cloth and strings and you and physics!  I like that.

Lucy's canopy beginning to deflate.  Mine was more colorful.

Now, in order to pull the strings in the right order at the right time, you need to do a lot of training and a lot of practice, and you jump from 10,000 feet and freefall for a while (less than a minute, actually), and two pros go with you and make sure you don't mess it up, and you plonk down several thousand dollars and commit to hanging around Swakop going skydiving every chance you get for two or three weeks, gradually adding to your understanding of the craft and doing it over if they don't like your altimeter-checking technique and whatnot.  Which is not feasible for me.  But, with just a few hours of being shown a canopy, forced to shout, "Arch thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand," in the office louder than you want to, and throw your hands in the air and arch your back, etc., you can do a static-line jump from 3,000 feet.

Static line means that they attach the opening flap of your canopy pack to a leash, and the leash to a sturdy anchor inside the airplane, so when you fling yourself out of the plane, your weight pulls the leash out full length, and since it's attached to a plane and you're just a person, it stays with the plane and pulls open your pack, almost immediately on your exit, and you spend less than five arched seconds plummeting in freefall before the air catches the canopy fabric, slows you down, and allows you to waft gently groundward.

This is the basic pre-fling position.  Since I didn't expect to be skydiving that
day, I only had sandals, but they loaned me someone's sneakers for the jump.

Lucy practices altimeter checking with David's oversight.

A lovely young Englishwoman named Lucy was in class with me, and together with a trainee diving instructor we drove out to the drop zone the next morning, me thinking about how I'd planned to be grocery shopping right about now.  Lucy was doing the freefall lessons, so they made her lie down in the grass and practice her arching and altimeter checking, and they strapped us both into a chute harness hanging from a jungle gym and jostled us about so we could practice emergency back-up chute releasing, and they waved ping pong paddles at us to practice landing and so forth.  And then we went out to the plane.  As we walked, the teacher/jumpmasters kept asking if we were okay, and ready, and my brain kept saying, "Well..." and then my face would say, "Yep," a second or two later.  So I got in the plane, all kitted out, and away we flew.

Kitted.  Borrowed sneakers;
biggest helmet they have.

It doesn't take that long to get to 3,000 feet, even in a tiny airplane.  At 1,000 feet, I checked my helmet and many straps, working down, and David showed me that my leash was firmly attached, and made me tug it.  (I am getting those weird stomach feelings as I type this, although I don't remember having them at the time.  I was pretty detached.)  At 3,000 feet, I skooshed over to the door, gripped its edges and stuck my feet out until I was perched up on my left buttock.  Then I looked over my shoulder at David, who said, "Checking in?" which is skydiver-ese for, "You ready to fling yourself out of this plane?" and I thought for a moment and replied, "Checking in," which is skydive-trainee-ese for, "Of course not you raving lunatic how much of an idiot do you truly believe me to be, but I guess I'm going to do it anyway, as it would be pretty silly to skoosh on back now and just have a way boring, short plane ride after all this pantomime and Powerpoint."  And then I took a deepish breath - there was plenty of air rushing about just outside that airplane, lemme tell ya -- and flung my right side out and started to arch.

It felt like a complete fiasco; like I'd just turned upside down and gone completely concave and was flailing my feet and arms around trying to get convex, but before I could get from embarrassment to panic, the canopy deployed without smacking a strap into my neck, and I was just moseying down gentle as you please, entirely vertical with the plane high above me.  There was a little twist in the lines that attached the parachute to my harness, as expected, but they just untwisted themselves (physics!).  I had to find my steering/braking cords, which are bright yellow, but the only bright yellow things were way high up and didn't look like they'd steer anything, so I was a bit nervous about that.  I grasped them anyway, and they unfolded with a Velcro(R) skritch, and I steered myself, rather delighted that the whole shebang is held together with Velcro!  You pull on the right cord to turn right, etc., and both cords to brake.  Braking in mid-air was amazing!  It felt like I had stopped floating completely, and was just dangling in the sky.  And my canopy was all beautiful multi-colors, and later Frank and the trainee instructor told me I'd done just fine with my arch, and showed me video on a tablet that putatively proved this, but the me part just looked like a raisin in the ocean to me.

Lucy made her second jump at sunset.

Sadly, I was really uncertain about how much steering I should be doing in order to land myself in the big smiley-face landing circle.  The wind sock seemed to be saying I should float over the drop-zone buildings, but no way on earth should I be floating over buildings at this stage.  Dumb luck, or maybe someone else's planning, got me aligned properly, and then a guy on the ground waved ping-pong paddles at me to show me which way to turn.  You have to be very, very close to the ground before they tell you to 'flare,' which is braking, which is kind of nervous-making; the ground seemed very close and I seemed to be moving awfully fast before he let me try to stop.  But I obeyed orders like an autopilot, and touched down a few centimeters outside the circle, light as thistledown, then unbalanced slightly backwards so I sat abruptly down.  "We won't tell anyone about this part, right?" I said to paddle-guy, who might be named Bones but no one ever bothers introducing themselves here, as I stood, and he said, "You just need to flare a bit stronger."

So my second skydive was great, and I kept smiling about it -- until one of the jumpmasters, and a young German woman (she was in class the night before but couldn't dive because of her job; she came out to the drop zone because she is best friends with all the skydivers) told me that they hate all Americans.  Yep, my mother and me included.  They hate us because, "You act like you think you're cool."  I cannot imagine why anyone would be so unkind to a near-stranger on an afternoon when she has a legitimate right to celebrate.  And yes, they really seemed entirely serious, and this was not as brief a conversation as I wish I had ensured it was.  Earlier, the trainee jumpmaster had told me I was "the princess of the drop zone" for the day.  I like that better.

This vicious insult is so obviously so close-minded, willfully ignorant and prejudiced a commentary that I honestly still don't know how I ought to have replied.  I responded by figuring I would probably not go skydiving again.  Which I would have liked to have done.  But there's another skydive place in town, so maybe I'll check them out. Very, very carefully.

Trained Men and Women!

Looking back to July and August 2016:

The first goal of the U.S. Peace Corps is to help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.  On, a little serendipitiously, the fourth of July, I started three training classes in my desert town.  They have been absolutely one of the highlights of my PC service.

I actually started the process in October, after three months at site.  I had confirmation of both need for and interest in business training, and since a lot of people had also expressed interest in improving their English, I proposed courses in both to my boss.  He was enthusiastic, and promised me a laptop would be available shortly.  So I started drafting Powerpoint slides for both courses, and posted notices that the trainings would begin in January, and interested prospects should visit me at my office.

English afternoon learners.

I didn't want to start trainings in November, since we would quickly bump up against the December festive season, when many people travel.  Since things sometimes move a bit slowly in my organization, and Namibia generally, it was also worthwhile to allow extra time to ensure the laptop really was in my possession.  I knew slides would work a lot better than my imperfect handwriting on flip charts.

Designing the courses was great fun -- I'll post some details shortly.  Meeting the prospective students was an invigorating experience, too.  I gave people applying for English a brief assessment, and asked those who wanted business training which particular topics most appealed to them.  Two highlights:  almost everyone could read a paragraph from Business Week about the merger of Dell and EMC, stumbling maybe a bit over 'converged architectures.'  But almost no one understood the words they read out so fluently.  On the business side, pretty much everyone was interested in pretty much every topic.

My boss addresses the English evening class.

Well, the laptop took a lot longer too arrive than expect -- about eight months longer.  Two applicants with especially good English joined me in my office for an hour twice a week for advanced English improvement, which was fun and quite valuable in refining the class material.  (One of the highlights of those sessions was one learner asking, on request from her sister, whether English has a word for the bad feeling you get when you've been gossiping about someone and you think that person knows.  The closest I could come was 'ashamed' or 'guilty,' but of course neither encompasses the full particulars of the feeling she described.  So apparently there is a word for that very specific emotion in her Owambo language.)  I would have started the larger trainings with the flip chart, but every delay was reported as being just a week or two, and I had this material all prepared in Powerpoint, so I kept hoping.  It was an exciting day indeed when I turned to see Robert from IT standing in the door, clutching my re-purposed Dell.  Then it was just a matter of securing a projector...

Based on the level of interest expressed and a bit of a haircut for people who want to be involved but cannot for whatever reason, I offered an evening basic-business course, two hours an evening, two evenings a week, for six weeks.  The English improvement was in two sessions, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, two days a week for four weeks.

Business learners working on an exercise -- the unheated Town Hall
was chilly on August evenings!

Business training had 12 people the first night, and averaged ten per night for the 12 sessions.  English had much greater attrition, though it was the lesser commitment.  The evening session started with 17 people, and averaged about 10; the afternoon session began with 13, but in late July we lost a bunch of the 11th-graders as they prepped for exams, so we ended with eight.

Those two months were exhausting and exhilirating.  I'm hoping to start everything back up again in January -- I have my laptop and projector hidden away!

Anniversary

Looking back to June 2016:

Peace Corps service is designed to begin with one day of classroom preparation in the US, continue with 2-3 months of in-country training, commence fully with a transfer to a site where the volunteer will live and work for two years, and end when those two years are up.  Some people choose to leave early, some people must leave early for medical or family reasons, and a few choose to 'extend' their service for a year -- in rare cases, more than one might be allowed.  For most volunteers, though, one year at site marks the middle of full service, and thus my volunteer group had a 'mid-service conference' in June 2016.

The sun rises on a second, and maybe last, year of service.

We all went back to the conference center in the mountains outside Windhoek, the capital, where we had had our three-month 'reconnect' conference.  Greiters is gorgeous, though the pool was entirely non-functional this time.  Pfui.  We had a Sunday afternoon of reconnecting, and then two days of sitting around conference tables sharing successes and frustrations and being reminded that monitoring and evaluation of those successes and failures is really important so let's get it right, people.  Also, huge starchy/meaty meals and evening bitch-and-giggle fests.

Tea break with tasty little sweet muffins.  Tea break is at 10am,
because we are upside down here in the southern hemisphere.

On night two they loaded us all into combis and drove us to the ambassador's house.  We met the ambassador, Thomas Daughton, in our first week or so as trainees.  He and his wife, Mindy Burrell, are very interested in the work PCVs do in Namibia, and they graciously invited us over to learn more about it.  It was just a reception, not a dinner, and I don't know whether they were astounded by the quantity of artichoke dip (so good!), black bean stuff, brownies and finger meats we got through, but the crowd around that dip impressed the heck out of me.  They gathered us all up at some point and asked us to share success stories Mr. Ambassador ("He'll introduce himself as Tom, but we call him Mr. Ambassador.") could use at the embassy's upcoming Fourth of July celebrations.  Then they turned us loose on the house, decorated with contemporary American art, as are all embassies, but here of the southwest, as Mr. Daughton is a native Arizonan.  I got to chat at some length with Ms. Burrell, and would have loved to get to know her better.  She specialized in refugee issues, and worked in several conflict zones before meeting her future husband -- I think in Beirut.  My boss's boss snuck a Sierra Nevada out at the request of his boss, our country director.  You don't get a lot of Sierra Nevada in Namibia, at least not outside the U.S. embassy and its staff housing. Peace Corps is not part of the State Department.

Mr. and Mrs. Ambassador listen to PCV stories.

Boss's boss makes a funny face when he sees a camera.  Very professional.

Night three we had a chance to sit down with our director of programs and trainings to talk about why we serve.  He is Patrick, of the shaved head in the photo above, and he served in PC in Tanzania about ten years ago.  His commitment to service, and to Africa, is almost visible in the set of his shoulders or something.  He's worked for PC for a few years, and he's realistic about the pros and cons.  Since many volunteers crack up a bit around the one-year mark (They have a chart that shows the danger points; it's called the cycle of vulnerability and adjustment.), he wanted to give us an opportunity to remind ourselves and each other why we're here, and why this work has value.  He does it in an entirely unjudgmental, no-preaching, open-minded and supportive way, and I think he's great.  If you ever have a chance to hire him, do it.  Peace Corps staffers have to leave after five years, so he may be up for grabs soon.

"Different people have different experiences," they tell us.  "This is a common pattern, but yours may be different."
I have mostly been a lot less mood-swingy than I would be in the USA to date.

The next morning they shoved us back in the combis and drove us to an hotel in downtown Windhoek.  We had three days of medical appointments scheduled!  Everyone got a dentist appointment and a brief conversation with the PC medical officers to make sure we had no major complaints.  A few people with medical issues had pre-booked appointments with specialists, and a few got specialist appointments while we were there; others would have to stay extra time or come back later for specialists.  There aren't a lot of medical specialists outside Windhoek, Swakopmund, and the Oshakati-Ondangwa-Ongwadiva area.  I got a chipped filling repaired and the best tooth cleaning ever.

Windhoek in the distance, last morning at Greiter's.

Sunrise of Namibia

In our down time, we hung around the PCV lounge and charged around shops and restaurants and movie theaters -- always in taxis after dark, since Windhoek is a high-crime town, although two of our vols were in a pretty bad taxi crash the night before the conference started.  On Friday and Saturday we had orgies of hugs and good wishes, and everyone split off to their various hike points and headed out for one more year, feeling tired and revived and inspired and annoyed and really, really clean around the teeth and gums.

 

The lounge

The courtyard at PCN HQ

The free box at the PC lounge.  I scored a cute dress that M. borrowed right away.

Ninth-floor roofdeck!  Most of us haven't been that high up in over a year!
(Except the skydiving, of course.)

Sunset over Windhoek

Indian dinner at Garnish

Not the world's most exciting nightclub, but fun.

I Am A Resource

Looking back to May 2016:

Each April, and again every August, a group of mostly-young Americans debarks from a looong flight at Hosea Kutako International Airport in Windhoek, Namibia, to embark on the glorious journey that is in-country Peace Corps Pre-Service Training (PST).  (Chief Kutako was  a soldier, prisoner, teacher, miner, paramount chief of the OvaHerero, and one of the drafters of the first Namibian petition for independence sent to the United Nations.  Among other things.  Click the link; it's an inspiring story.)  The April trainees are part of an odd-numbered group -- mine was 41 -- serving in community economic development and community health and HIV/AIDS prevention (CED and CHHAP, respectively).  The August trainees are even-numbered and serve as teachers, with a very few in education-related administration or training positions.

Group 41, mine of April 2015, benefited from the services of a number of volunteers who'd been serving for a bit less than a year or two, who came to our training facility for a week at a time and were called Resource Volunteers.  Alicia and Julia were two of the first PCVs I met in Namibia, and they were great.  They and Kaitlyn, Aaron, J.T., and a handful of others provided some of the most useful, practical, applicable info I got at PST.  As with the shadowing experience, when it came time for us Group 41-ers to be Resource Volunteers to April 2016's Group 43, I was glad to apply.  It's that service mentality; that gratitude thing.  Okuhepa.

There's a couple of Group 41 Resource Vols at the back of the room here.
They kindly returned to Okahandja for our swearing-in ceremony.

In early April 2016, I gathered with a group of colleagues at the training center in Okahandja for Training of Trainers.  It was not the best-organized or most-useful of events, which was disappointing, but it was good to see PCVs I love, a few language trainers I admire and respect, and meet some new language trainers.

About four weeks later I went back to Okahandja to be Resourceful for Group 43's Week Three of PST.  They had 18 CED volunteers and 15 CHHAP volunteers, including a sound engineer, a community organizer, an M&A attorney, a DJ (and small businessman; he had run his deejaying business himself) and a clutch of social workers.  Cool.  Linda the Magnificent, my PC boss, had devised a diabolical learning scheme by which the new CED trainees would train themselves.  They had materials from which to learn about things like bookkeeping, creating a business plan and conducting feasibility studies, and they had to learn those things and then teach them - to each other and to a group of the language facilitators, who are all Namibians, albeit with much better English language skills than is the norm here.  So it was great practice for conducting trainings at site.

Gosh, Resource Volunteering gave me all kinds of flashbacks.
Peanut butter and brodjes for tea!  Yaaaaaaaah!!!

The magnificent Linda shows how training is done, y'all.

Cross-cultural conversation out by the bees.  This one was about gender
norms and sexual relationships.  Tannie Martha played the role Mama Rosa
took with my group, of the mother who is thrilled her daughter has attracted
a rich American who will marry the girl and buy the parents a Land Rover!

Week 3 included Cultural Cooking Day, which included our janitor/all-purpose
woman Melodia's awesome fatcakes WITH RAISINS

and a whole lot of other food, some of it still quite new for these trainees.

Thank goodness, and Melodia, for raisiny fatcakes, 'cause it's going to take a
very lot to get me to eat a 'smiley' -- that's the goat's head Afrikaans teacher
Joel is waving jubilantly here.  Guess why it's called a smiley...

I loved working with the trainees, which mostly meant providing feedback on their trainings ("Talk slower."), and felt energized and optimistic about their skills and commitment.  I felt, too, like I had forged the beginning of something like friendship with a few of them.  A few weeks after I got home, Linda phoned and told me that, very sadly, one of my colleagues was suffering medical issues and wouldn't be able to take his week as a Resource, and asked if I could fill in for him.  I agreed readily, although it's a bummer of a hike and PCN doesn't provide their Resources with an allowance to cover the higher cost of feeding ourselves while living in a kitchen-less dorm room, so meals got pretty pricey, too.

Plus I got to climb a little mountain outside Okahandja.  It had been
far too long since I climbed a little mountain.

Man, am I glad I agreed.  I shipped back to Okahandja with a few shadows, and installed myself back at the dorm-style guest house.  I greeted everyone happily the next morning, and did my best to share what I'd learned in my first year at site.  On maybe Tuesday or Wednesday, one of the training staff gave me the full report on the mid-training evaluations, where I learned, among other things, that at least six trainees had found me dramatically, painfully unhelpful and unlikable.  Ouch!

After considering my options, and running a plan past staff and a trainee who'd come to Namibia out of an unusally enlightened corporate HR team, I chose to speak to as many of the trainees as I could, one-on-one, to apologize.  I told 22 or 23 of the 33 that I was sorry to have disappointed them, that my intention was never to cause distress but instead to share my joy in my Peace Corps journey and support them in theirs, and that I would find it very helpful to know what, specifically, I had done to warrant negative feedback.  I also asked them to share my apology and request with others, as I didn't think I would reach everyone.

A couple shared ideas with me, which were very helpful.  (Many said they had no problem with me and appreciated my taking time to apologize, and a few were kind enough to tell me they found it brave.  What else could I do, though?  I hurt people I wanted, quite enthusiastically and unconditionally, to help.  This sucks.)  What I believe as a result of this is that I had, foolishly, underestimated the degree to which some of the trainees, especially in just their third week in training, needed soothing, comforting presences around them.  While I tried to provide that, one early incident in particular came across to some of them as insensitive and officious.  I guess it wasn't important enough that anyone chose to talk with me about it, or express their concern to my co-resource, but unpleasant enough that they recalled it at evaluation time.

Group 43 put on a great Market Day in week 7, which included this very
talented sandal-and-purse-making entrepreneur.

I am so happy to have had the chance to mend, to a small degree, some of those fences.  Gosh, I hate needing to apologize, but doing it when necessary is so much better than leaving the harm unaddressed.  Plus, this is valuable life-lesson stuff. Loving the life lessons, everyone! I just hope I can keep them with me.