Weird Wild Life

Two weeks ago, I headed into Swakopmund, the small, tourist-heavy coastal city an hour or so from my small, industrial desert town for a bit of shopping and to lie on the beach.  Whilst engaged in the latter, glancing idly at the blue, blue Atlantic under its blue, blue sky, I noticed something large and dark and lumpy bumping on the wavelets.  Seaweed, maybe.  Or litter?  There's not a whole lot of litter on the Swakop beaches -- presumably that's all heading toward the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Then I thought, 'It actually looks a bit like a penguin,' which of course is silly since penguins don't live around here.

A desert ocean mirage?

Cutting out all the speculation and self-doubt, it was a penguin.  A dead penguin.  It rolled with the waves, back and forth, until eventually it beached up on the sand.  I gazed at it mournfully and respectfully for a while, then realized I might want proof of it, for my own skeptical memory if nothing else.  By the time I had rallied my energy to sit up straight, dig my camera from my pack, and get a shot framed, the waves had recaptured the body and rolled it back out again, so it was once more a vaguely animal-shaped lump on the water.  So I almost thought I'd imagined it; dreamed it; hallucinated it.  Mirages, after all, are one of the features of desert living.

But when I eventually realized that it was whatever o'clock and the shops start closing at 1:00pm on Saturdays and the taxis home get really scarce after 3:00pm, and I had better get moving if I expected to eat any fruit other than raisins in the next two or three weeks, I stood and started walking north along the surf line.  And I spotted another penguin, even further out, and very apparently dead.  And then I saw a few people gathered around a dark lump in the sand, and yes, it was a third dead penguin.  But why?  I have no idea.  There is a strong current, the Benguela Current, that sweeps north from the Cape of Good Hope along the southwest African coast, so maybe the dead penguins escaped from Antarctic waters and joined the Benguela?  It's much too big to be an African penguin.

Naturalists and wildlife lovers K&K think it's probably a seal, but cut me
slack on the i.d. as it's tricky with no size comparison.  Also I'm an idiot.

Anyway, I was sad as could be about the creatures I thought were penguins, but now think were seals.  Seriously.  To cheer myself, I thought about some of the other weird wild life I've encountered.  For instance, there are peacocks living near me; definitely not endemic to southwestern Africa.  Although, according to that link I just added, in addition to the green and blue peafowl found in and around India, there is "A more distinct and little-known species, the Congo peacock, [that] inhabits African rain forests."

So I thought it was all kinds of awesome to have a peacock nearby -- at a vo-tech school -- despite the irritation of its frequent shrieks.  However, I have learned that a lot of Namibian tourist lodges (country-style hotels) keep a few for decoration.  They've even got some in Khorixas, for heaven's sake.  When I get a better photo, I'll upgrade this one.  [Update: last week the peacock was even more moulted than in this shot.  It hardly ever shrieks anymore, either; and where is the other cock and the two hens?]

Sometimes it sits on the roof.  That's kind of cool.

Swakop also gets seagulls.

If you grew up in coastal New England, gulls aren't weird.
But I like to see them, so here they are for you.

Also in Swakop, there's these pretty little bright yellow birds that come sit on your table at Bojo's cafe and eat your crumbs.  If you're not assertive, they'll eat from your plate.

Pretty, but a bit pushy.

And here's a spider someone can identify for me, trapped in an Indian take-away container with the dead fly it was carrying away from the windowsill when I nabbed it.  I relocated both to the back-most part of the back yard, but the photos there are even iffier.

I mean, it's supposed to be clearing the house of *live* flies,
not just picking up the ones that are already dead.

My boss drove three clients and me through Etosha National Park in October, so there is plenty of wild life yet to come.  And actually, I'll try to remember to add the Thanksgiving snake to this post sometime in the next few days.  Update:  weeks later, here's the snake:

Probably a horned adder.  J saw it stretched out, and pointed it out to M.
They thought it might be dead, so M kicked sand toward it, from a respectful
distance, and it coiled itself.  A and Y and I joined, and we all looked at it
for a bit (respectfully distant), and M photographed it.  Then we walked on.
This may be the kind that bit H, requiring extensive cutting up of her foot
(where the bite landed) and up into her thigh as the poison traveled.

Stay tuned - lots more of these ahead.

Happy Birthday, Namibia!

Today, Monday 21 March 2016, is Independence Day in Namibia. No parades nor fireworks where I live, but a day off from school and work to reflect on the long, long history of freedom in Namibia, which ceded briefly to German rule in the second half of the 19th century and just into the 20th, and then South African rule for most of the rest of the twentieth. The battle for independence was harsh and long, and the newborn nation has made great strides. Congratulations, Namibia and Namibians!

In lieu of fireworks

The first star of Independence Evening, for wishing great things for Namibia's 27th year, and the future beyond.

 

An Atypical Day

from September 2015:

My boss, Lou, was due to pick me up at home at 10:00 Tuesday morning.  What with a circumstance or two impeding, it was closer to noon when he arrived.  We spent a bit of time locating keys and moving cars (not I!  As a Peace Corps volunteer, I am banned from driving any vehicle unless I’m on official vacation), and then loaded up the bakkie thus:  Lou had many blankets, a variety of tote bags, an empty cooler and one full of pots and utensils, a portable barbecue, and an ax.  I had my knapsack, a small duffle, and my sleeping bag.  We were going camping.

The Foundation has been a supporter of the Ohungu Conservancy for several years, and Lou had identified a grant opportunity that might be useful for them.  So we needed to talk with the conservancy members and learn from them what their top priorities would be if we could help rustle up a bit of funding for an initiative of two.  Such a conversation would require a multi-hour, many-person meeting, and while the distance from me to Ohungu is not that great, the roads aren’t either – so we left on Tuesday and met on Wednesday, and that gave us enough time to drive there and back.  Given the dearth of both EconoLodges and Four Seasonses in the area, we spent Tuesday night in tents.

The eventual campsite - part of it, anyway.  Separate tents for all.

We stopped first in Swakopmund to shop at the Pick ‘n’ Pay, where we got more groceries than we needed, then drove up the coast, me ogling the ocean from the shotgun seat.  Oooh – kilometers and kilometers of ocean.  At Henties Bay, we stopped and bought a fish at the small fishers’ co-op.  All the fish have unfamiliar names, but they look more or less like cod or haddock.  Ours was caught that morning, and dropped on ice, but hadn’t frozen through yet.  At Henties we turned inland and started bumping along the unpaved road toward Uis.

The unpaved roads of inner Erongo are not like the dirt roads of New England and the mid-Atlantic, which are often rutted by rains and sometimes quite muddy and replete with rocks that want to get you, so traversing them can be quite tricky.  The Erongo roads are a mostly-thin layer of sand – with a few rocks that want to get you – over a fairly firm and even surface that is more stone than dirt.  Deep sand, which can threaten drivers in the American southwest and probably otherwheres in the USA, is rare, though if you go off-road, especially outside Erongo, like up in the northwest or by the eastern border, you can find trouble.  On these established routes, though (with numbers and everything), the ride is fairly smooth.  However – pretty soon the road started to undulate, sometimes quite dramatically.  Lou normally kept us around 80kph, but would slow down a lot when he got to the bottom of a hill, as the dip could be dangerously sudden and deep.  A bit roller-coastery, but in a big pick-up truck.

Not Brandberg, just a beautiful view.

As we moved further east, and north, the scenery changed from desert to savannah, including lots of acacia thorn trees and some mopane trees.  The acacia are very good for tangling your hair or pulling off your hat (when you walk under them, ducking down carefully so you won’t get scratched; honestly, it's like they reach for your head).  The mopane trees are great for firewood and house their namesake worms, which make good eating.  We saw some handsome mountains, including Brandberg, the highest peak in Namibia at 2,606 meters, or in non-metric terms, high but not all that high.  Mount Hood is 3,429 and Old Rag is 1,003.  The highest of the Rockies is Mount Elbert, 4,400 meters.

We passed through some small towns and villages, too; one or two were former mining towns whose populations sank dramatically after the mines got worked out.  Now the town where I live is working assiduously to ensure that doesn’t happen to it.

Chronic poverty with a view.  That probably doesn't make it a whole lot better.

At the conservancy, we met the secretary, Lexia, her sister and a couple of the volunteer game guards who had waited at the office for us.  They lent us tents, which the guards use when patrolling to do general monitoring, animal counts and poacher control, and helped us set them up in the office yard, behind the wall that’s supposed to keep elephants out but doesn’t look like it could.  We checked for ant colonies before pegging and staking.  Then Lou set off with a guard to collect some wood for the braii!  He’s a village boy turned city man who loves to cook and camp but doesn’t get to very often.

Lexia's sister is sewing a weave into her
tightly-braided natural hair.  She posed willingly,
though with maybe a rueful smile.

Lou jokes and laughs a lot but takes his braii seriously.  He made sauce/gravy with a powdered soup mix, boiled rice, grilled chicken and some vegetables, and stuffed the fish with a mix of tomatoes and onions and an herb-and-salt blend we bought with the fish.  We also had corn to grill.  I stayed pretty still, chopping veg, while Lou was in constant motion poking and stirring and moving pots to warmer or cooler spots by the fire.  The feast that followed was impressive, and we had enough to share with our hosts, whose numbers increased as Lou cooked.  The fish tasted more or less like white fish.  The corn was outstanding, amazing, baie lekker as the Afrikaans speakers say.  We did not share the corn with the Ohungu-ers, but nabbed two ears each for ourselves and let the hosts have at the rice.  Now I feel a little bit bad about that.  The corn was gooood.

Starting the fire pile.

Portable grill, well-laden.

Lou stirring.

My plate.  I did bear up to a few bites of fish.

The fish.

I slept better than I usually sleep in a tent, showered in the ablutions block and put on my go-to-meeting clothes.  Then I sat in the office with a lot of other people, including the village headman, a most important personage, and waited.  Almost everyone was there on time, but one or two necessary people ran late, so the whole meeting was delayed by about ninety minutes.  People here call it, “Africa time,” and warn you to expect things to start late, but my experience is that most of the people arrive on time.  I think we can all just start starting things on time (by which I mean five to ten minutes after the posted starting time), and the chronically tardy can borrow notes from someone else.

Morning in Ohungu.

The only human commuting I saw was a truck from an abbatoir.  Oh, dear.

Once started, it was not the most efficient meeting every conducted (Marshall N. Carter, as CEO for State Street Corporation, wins that award), but it was very productive.  It was mostly conducted in the Otjiherero language, which Lou understands “about 50%” because of his family’s business dealings with Hereros when he was a kid.  His first language is Oshiwambo; he speaks fluent English; he can cope pretty well in Afrikaans and Otjiherero, and has a few words of Damara as well.  Maybe more.

Anyway – everyone had valuable ideas to contribute to the discussion.  We heard from the volunteer game guards, the Ministry of Environment and Tourism rangers, the headman, the Conservancy executives, the local constituency councillor and a few of the Conservancy members who attended.  The issues to address included chronic poverty in the community – how can we generate some revenue? – and elephants.  Much of Namibia is suffering the effects of several years of drought, and the elephants are wandering more than they normally do in search of food and water.  When they find water at your village’s borehole, they start tearing things up to get at it.  When they find food in your garden, or smell it in your home – they have very acute olfactory senses – well.  Not so good.  The conservancy has also had some issues with poachers going after the local antelope without permission, most likely just for meat for the family; cf: poverty above.

Footwear was diverse, and in one case non-existent.

They offered up a lot of good ideas, which I wrote on the flip chart (Lexia and Chairman April translating to English), and came to consensus about the grant application.  It was impressive.  Everyone was respectful and engaged and thoughtful.  How often do you see that in a meeting?

The headman is quite ancient and had to leave before we got to the group photo.

On the way home, Lou stopped at the woodseller’s house.  He was very excited because the man had promised him a truckload of wood at far less than Swakop prices – but when we arrived, the man said he had slept late, gotten to work late, and not been able to chop the wood for Lou.  Lou was incensed by the unreliability, and I said, “But they teach us in Peace Corps training to expect unreliability.  You’ve lived here all your life; how are you not used to it?”  He just exhaled strongly and threw a few loose branches into the bakkie.  Eventually the three of us had about a quarter of a truckload, and Lou and I jounced the three hours back to paved roads.

The mopane trees are pretty good about yielding their wood quickly.

Tuesday's sunset.  Sunset is, like, a thing here.

What I Wear, or Packing List Part II

The ethos of Peace Corps Namibia is professionalism, and the organization naturally expects and requests that its volunteers dress professionally.  This equates to, more or less, what I've worn to the office since about 1991:  slacks or skirts and word-and-picture-free shirts, or a nice-ish dress.  "Business casual," we call it.

However, Namibia, outside of Windhoek, is largely bereft of dry cleaners, and even if I could find one I'm pretty sure I couldn't afford it.  Plus it can get a skosh warm here and air conditioning ('air con,' as we call it locally, when we even know what it is) is not the norm.  So the woolens, silks and wovens of my old life have ceded to rayons and knits here in Namibia.

Neutrals, all with pockets.  I love pockets.

For work I wear mostly slacks, since my dodgy ankle likes to live in hiking boots, and they look odd with skirts and dresses.  So it's black or tan trousers for me, and I usually pair them with a bright-colored, short-sleeved, cotton knit blouse.




Brights!  Your training class will make up
PCN polos, and you'll have the chance
to buy them in the colors you want.

I did bring a few bright printed scarves, which dress and change things up a bit when I'm feeling formal or bored.  Then there's a black, a grey  and a tan cardigan for warmth.  I'd wear a jacket in the USA, but have little interest in hand-washing jackets and hoping they dry in shape.  They won't dry in shape.  They will get lumpy.  You can buy an iron with your settling-in allowance, and the recommendation is that you do, actually, as apparently most Namibians are compulsive ironers and look askance at wrinkled clothing, but my tactic is to own nothing that won't drip-dry wrinkle-free.

I brought one suit and have used it numerous times.  It's got a lot of rayon amongst the wool and it's holding up pretty well to its current laundering routine.

All with pockets.

I have a couple skirts and dresses.  No one has ever said anything to suggest my trousers are any kind of faux pas, but oh my goodness do I collect the compliments when I wear a dress.
We are having a little early-March heat wave as I type this, and it's hard to imagine I shall ever wear my fleece again.  However, I can remember just seven months back tucking gladly into it.  There were even a few days in August, maybe, when I wore it in the middle of the day, outdoors and indoors.  And that, of course, reminds me that there were a few evenings in July and August when I happily pulled my heavy winter parka on over my fleece, topping two pair of workout tights.  It got outright cold at home at night.
If you're a community health volunteer, you almost certainly will serve in the northern part of the country, and probably not want a parka.  If you're CED or Education, you may wind up in the far south (I'm in the middle, kind of), and then you'll want a hat and gloves, too.  (I've worn gloves a few times, but not so far a hat, except the lovely sun hat I got here for about $200, one-tenth of my monthly allowance.)  If you have someone lovely in your US life you don't mind exploiting, you could pack a little box with extra cold-weather clothes and have him or her mail it to you the second you get your site assignment if needed.  Bring a fleece, though; everyone used them in Okahandja during pre-service training.


I wear hiking boots a lot, as I love them so.  I also have sandals, and two pair of dress-up shoes for when ministers or governors visit.  Then there's my house sneakers -- I bought them here when my cranky joints started aching from the concrete floors, which make an inflexible and unforgiving surface for dancing around the living room.  I don't want to wear outdoor shoes indoors given how extremely grubby everything is -- though maybe, given that, it doesn't really matter -- so off I went to Tekkie Town in Swakop.  ('Tekkie' is Namlish for 'sneaker.')  The wondrous Bernadette there found me a pair of New Balance court shoes that pretty much fit and were on clearance! for $300.  That's about US$25.  How great is that?  I love Bernadette, though I haven't seen her since.  Perhaps I shall choreograph a living-room dance in her honor.

Tasty! (Food Part II)

Andy posted about food recently on his blog, and added lots of inspiring photos.  As it's been about two weeks since my last shopping trip to Swakop, my larder was running low, making emulating him a bit of a challenge.  However, I had acquired the mostly-non-perishable supplies necessary to create a meal recommended by Megs, and I made it a couple of nights ago.  Here's how Megs makes her bruschetta.  I tried a slightly different tactic, and achieved this:

Here's my recipe, which I am very confident I shall alter in all kinds of ways according to availability of tasty stuff:

I started by toasting some fresh marjoram (yay for Fruit and Veg!) in a warm frying pan.  Then I added a bit of oil and sauteed chopped onion for a while, then threw in a chopped red pepper.  Then I added the well-drained canned mushroom slices (on sale at Shop Rite) and some salt and pepper.  As all that was cooking or heating, I mushed up some well-drained-and-rinsed canned cannellini beans (also on sale) with a fork.  When the mushrooms were warm, I pulled the marjoram twigs out of the veggies, the marjoram leaves having all fallen off, and added the veggies to the smushed beans.  Then I spread a thin smear of black-olive cream cheese on a slice of my homemade bread and topped it with a generous pile of the tapenade, and garnished it with marjoram leaves.  It was delicious and probably much more nutritious than a bowl of corn flakes.  Thanks, Megs!

I'm not a big fan of canned mushrooms, but the reality of living a distance from a diverse produce supplier is that it's worthwhile to have canned stuff on hand, and know good ways to use it.  This recipe -- essentially one can of mushrooms, one of beans, the red pepper and scraps of other things -- will cover four meals for me.  (I am lucky to have a refrigerator.)  I can get some of the canned stuff here in my small town, or stock up in Swakop and store for the long-term.  I can buy fresh onions and sometimes peppers at Dreamland Garden.  The only thing that requires a Swakop shopping trip is the cream cheese and fresh herbs, and those are kind of special garnishes, bonus creaminess and flavor.  I can sub in dried herbs and maybe butter easily enough, though the beans get nicely creamy when mashed.  It certainly makes a nice change from rice pilaf and my beloved corn flakes.