Our Friend Uranium

Looking back to November 2015:

Our Peace Corps cross-cultural training warned us about humor -- use it, for sure, but take a cautious, wait-and-see attitude at first.  That is, of course, true all over the world.  The Japanese take business cards very seriously.  The English aren't, typically, crazy for slapstick.  A German friend assures me her people have trouble with sarcasm.  Still, I was surprised when my PC boss, Linda, took me very seriously when I joked about getting radiation poisoning in my desert home.  It took months to reassure her.  The PC medical officer just laughed and said, "I'll read up, just in case."

Anyway, I'm not at all worried about radiation poisoning, despite the half-dozen or so uranimum mines in my area, all of which I believe are 'open-pit' and some quite enormous.  The uranium is very low-grade here, and widely dispersed.  They have to blow up a huge amount of rock, crush it, wash it, pulverize it, treat it with deadly chemicals, and so on just to get a barrel of yellowcake.  So there's probably no more radiation in my hometown than there is in yours.

And not a whole heck of a lot more when we go off to tour a uranium mine!

Rössing Uranium Limited, which is largely owned by Rio Tinto and less largely by the Iranian Foreign Investment Company and a few smaller shareholders, has been blasting uranium from the Namib Desert since 1976.  The company offers public tours on the first Friday of every month, for a small fee that supports the Swakopmund Museum.  I went in November 2015.

They loaded everyone into a company bus in Swakop and drove out to the mine about 70km away.  At the company's communications building they showed us a couple of short videos about mining generally and the Rössing mine specifically.  Then it was back onto the bus and a few more kilometers south to the mine itself.  At the entrance, we stopped and everyone got a breathalyzer test!  If you didn't pass it, you had to get off the bus and wait at the the guard building until all the sober tourists got back!  Everyone passed, though, so we drove through the gates and around and about the mine.  Here's some of what we saw:

Having passed my breathalyzer test at 10:00am on a work day, I am

no longer of interest to the security guard testing us.

Ammonia is just one of the dangerous chemicals in use at the mine.

Past the total strangers' heads, through the bus window, you can see the big

pipes through which the crushed rock travels on its journey to yellowcake-dom.

I think this rock is mostly granite.  But I'm not clear on the differences
between granite, gneiss and schist.

We exited the bus at a scenic viewpoint above the pit, milling about and gazing over the safety railings.
The world's longest-running open-pit uranium mines is also one of the largest; it's 390 meters deep, so you could stick the
Empire State Building (102 stories) in there, and just the spiky thing on top would stick out of the pit.

They put explosive charges in the grid area between the towers; up to 200 of them, I believe.

The ore trucks that carry the rock up from the pit are enormous.

You can fit a lot of rocks in there.

The roads change around as new areas get dug.

It must be interesting to push that enormous truck, loaded with rock,
up a steep grade.  They say the safest drivers tend to be women.

This is part of the processing facility, once the rock has been crushed a bit.

I'm not sure about these pipes -- ammonia and friends, maybe?

Once again:  really, really big hole in the desert.

Introducing Efraim

Efraim Akweenda is one of the first Namibians I met.  He works for my Peace Corps boss, Linda, at Peace Corps Namibia HQ in Windhoek, and he is unfailingly helpful and responsive.  He is one of the first people any PCT or PCV phones when IT or telco problems erupt -- he solves them all.  Last December, he sent a long, eloquent e-mail to all his Community Economic Development volunteers to share his respect and affection for us all, and it was so kind I could feel my insides warm as I read it.  Here's what he told me about himself a couple of weeks ago:

May 2016; PST Group 43

What’s your name?  Efraim Akweenda     How old are you?  31      Where did you grow up?  The northern town of Ondangwa – actually a small village called Ouiipa established by Finnish missionaries back in the years.     Where do you live now?  Khomesdal in Windhoek     Where else have you lived?  At the coast in Walvis Bay for a year and in Ongwadiva for three years in college.  Who lives with you?  No one – I’m a full-time bachelor; I like my personal space and my privacy and my freedom and my recklessness and carelessness!  Who’s in your family?  A brother and sister; I’m the last born.  Another brother and sister passed away.  So my mother, a cousin, my brother, niece and nephew – my sister married out and is no longer staying there [at home].

What do you do for work?  I’m a PTA – program and training assistant – for Peace Corps Namibia.     What’s an exciting or important thing you’ve done?  I’ve done so many things – I’ve been presented an Information Communications Technology award for helping staff at my college.  Plus I was awarded overall best soccer player in college.  The experience of my life was flying from Namibia to West Africa last July to attend a conference abroad.  Being part of Peace Corps Namibia is exciting.  It stands out from the crowd; the experience is everlasting.

June 2015; PST Group 41

What language do you speak most?  Oshindongwa and Oshikonyama – they’re only slightly different.     What other languages do you speak?  English, Afrikaans, some survival Spanish and basic Portuguese [Efraim comes from the North, on the Angolan border; Portuguese is one of the principal languages of Angola. -ed]

How do you spend your free time?  Most in activities involving soccer – playing, watching, talking about it.  I also like media – music and movies.     How would you like to spend your free time if you had unlimited time and money?  Go out for adventures game watching and game driving.  I’d like to visit Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and Maasai Mara in Kenya.

What’s something that’s ‘typically Namibian’ about you?  My generosity.     And something that’s ‘un-Namibian’?  There’s a lot.  I like things to be on time now, the American way.

Thanks, Efraim!

Halloweekend

So, in addition to the Bash Out HIV and AIDS Camp for teens at the end of October 2015, I also got to do some way fun socializing in Khorixas.  There was grilled pizza and chat Thursday night, and the lovely T. gave up her bed to me, pulling off one mattress (she has two, you see) for herself on the floor, otherwise one could never, ever agree to take her bed.  Could one?  (Because, you see, as a hostess she could never, ever agree to let a guest sleep on the floor.  Two mattresses solves the potential impasse, because actually I would never, as a guest, try to boss a hostess around.  Just not done.)  So we had a little bit of a slumber party.  We toured the shops of Khorixas and bought pot-lucky contributions to a collective dinner for Friday night, and had the movie-watching party on Saturday afternoon, with all the kids and our costumes.

Queen of the Vampires - or Zombies? - gets a certificate from Miss America.

And on Saturday night?  We had teased G. all day because of how often she had reminded us that it was her birthday, and occasionally threatened to do nothing to celebrate.  But how could that be?  It was not, of course.

Alcohol sales in shops end at 13:00 on Saturdays in Namibia, and do not resume until 08:00 on Monday.  Our HIV bashing had taken us well past 13:00, so a couple of the PCVs sought a shebeen to buy a few beers and ciders, which we drank in comfortable sunshine as the evening drew toward us.  Then T. supervised preparation of a feast, which included a pan of brownies made with a mix my friend C. had sent from Virginia a few weeks earlier.  The mix brand is 'Among Friends,' which was perfect.  I told the others a bit about C., who is an amazing woman, so they could become her friends in absentia, and she could be with us in spirit.  Lovely to have her.

A. and T., who never met until the former arrived in Khorixas one year
after the latter had, became great friends in a matter of hours.

We frosted the brownies with a can of that pre-made frosting that T.'s mother had just sent her from Texas (well, that T.'s mother had probably sent 6-8 weeks earlier, but that had just arrived).  Then we piled on blueberry-cheesecake ice cream, as the birthday girl was yearning for ice-cream cake.  After our delicious dinner, we plugged in the candles and lit 'er up.

Candles are the most important part of a birthday to me.

Can you see G., getting ready to blow?  She's there -- on the left.

Then we all went out dancing at Club India, in our costumes -- though my face paint had long since glowed away ("ladies glow"), so I was a simple pumpkin, no longer a Jack-o-lantern.  We had a bit of a walk through some residential neighborhoods, and got a lot of funny looks and surprised greetings as we strolled along.

lifeguard, ghost, bad surgeon, pumpkin, butterfly, Miss America

No cover charge at the club, where the music was mostly various forms of electronica played through a sub-par sound system.  (The good sound system was too expensive a rental for a no-cover night.)  There were some fairly young men who did some athletic performance-type dancing - showing off their moves, which were good - and a fairly drunk woman who really wanted to dance with other women, and a group of men who mostly didn't dance but were much more stylishly dressed and coiffed than most men I've seen in Namibia.  In the USA, I might guess they were gay.  In Namibia, many tribes are unaccepting of homosexuality, especially in men.  But Khorixas is often called the capital of Damara land, and the Damara tribe is said to be more open to variations in sexual identity.  I prefer not to draw conclusions on insufficient evidence.

Okay, fine - although those forearms are surprisingly strong.

About this point, I started spinning away.  T. kindly
brought her strong cardboard butterfly wings into play, too.

I love dancing.  I showered when we got home, well past midnight (I had already turned into a pumpkin, so that's all right).  T. and G. said they both like to go to sleep stinking of beer and sweat and strangers.  Scary!

Bash Out HIV and AIDS!

Sometime in October, the delightful A., a Peace Corps volunteer for the Community Health program in my Namibia Group 41, invited me to join a collaboration of volunteers to host an HIV/AIDS awareness training in her home site, Khorixas.  I was delighted to accept.

She and her PCV friend T., also living in Khorixas but from Group 39, had christened their event, ‘Bash Out HIV/AIDS Halloweekend Camp.’  They designed a three-day training for teenagers to educate them about preventing and living with HIV and AIDS, and also about the American holiday Halloween.  (That’s just timing; HIV/AIDS and Halloween are not related, unless you want to claim they’re both scary.)  I wasn’t dead sure what my contribution would be – I came close to flunking the condom-putting-on pop quiz in PST – but I really wanted to be involved.  Southern Africa has the highest rates of HIV prevalence and incidence in the world, and apparently there remains significant stigma for people who contract it.  There’s little stigma around sexual activity; many people start fairly young and there’s a lot of out-of-wedlock baby-having, but catching a disease is considered at least embarrassing for many people, and outright shameful for some.  With about a 15% prevalence rate (over 30% in some regions), that seems hypocritical and worse.

They started the camp on Thursday, but I had an important meeting that morning in Usakos.  I’ll tell you about my travel experience in a future post.  Sufficient for this post is that I eventually arrived in Khorixas on Thursday evening, with a driver who knew where A.’s Ministry office is!  She was impressed; few people can find it, apparently.  I got there an hour or two before sunset, while the others were still out shopping for dinner, and sat on the curb theoretically writing.  (Theoretical writing is when you daydream with a notebook on your lap or someplace handy and a pen in your hand, or something similar.)

I travel to Khorixas, in the back of a bakkie part way, with a barefoot guy.

Then my friends showed up!  With frozen pizza!  That we cooked on a charcoal grill while the sun set behind the Ministry, and a car or two showed up with various livestock that got tied to trees, and a few people made preparations for poaching the hall A. and T. had reserved weeks in advance for their camp, and had been using for the previous two days.  Whoo, was A. ticked about that.  She is impressive when ticked, but you cannot fight this particular city hall very effectively, so she just made deeply and amusingly derisive comments to a decision-maker or two, and then ate pizza.  It was good.

T's Mum visited, and bought her a braii stand
and charcoal.  Yay, mothers!

The next day we convened for camp, with two girls and five boys eager to be back for day two.  We did some icebreaker/energizer games; the C.H. volunteers know about 20,000,000 of these things each.  One involved trying to tap the person next to you; if he or she got touched, he or she couldn’t use the affected limb or side for the rest of the game.  If not, you had to freeze in position while he or she tried to tap the next person in the circle.  Or something like that.  After another game or two, everyone sat at desks and A. reminded the learners that they were there to consider strategies they could use to protect themselves when they got involved in sexual or romantic relationships.  Then she introduced me, and asked me to tell the kids a bit about myself.

This is more or less what I said (slowly and distinctly; these kids had pretty good English, but few people’s is perfect here):  “Hello, everyone.  Thank you so much for letting me be a part of your camp.  I’m very happy to join you, especially because I can remember when AIDS first began to spread in the USA.  It was a very scary time, because no one knew why so many people were dying, or how the disease spread.  And it seemed that no one survived AIDS.  That was about thirty years ago.  Now we know so much more about it – how you catch it, how you can prevent it, and even how to live with it.  I’m so glad we can share this information with you, for you to share with your friends.  And I’m really looking forward to learning how you protect yourself in relationships.  I feel like very often, when I get involved in a romance, I wind up getting my heart broken.  So it will be good to learn how I can prevent that!”

A. took up my comments and asked the kids whether they had known before that AIDS was a problem in the USA, not just in Africa.  Some had; some hadn’t.  She also reminded them that relationships don’t just have physical ramifications.  The emotional component can be challenging, too.

They called this game 'Ninja.'

They moved into the learning exercises then.  One that really impressed me was asking the kids to write down what they hoped to be doing in five years, and again in ten, and in twenty.  They could read their ideas to the group, or keep them private.  One of the kids wanted to become a pharmacist; several planned to attend university; a few mentioned having children and spouses; one or two were hopeful of careers in I.T.  After they did that part, one of the facilitators handed out slips of paper with possible scenarios on them.  They asked each learner to read out the scenario on his or her slip, and then reflect on how his or her ability to achieve the ambitions they had just discussed would change if, for instance, “In 11^th grade, your friends start to pressure you to join them drinking at the bars several nights a week.  You resist for a while, but give in once or twice.  Eventually you decide that being with your friends is more fun than studying, and you start going out every night.  In 12^th grade, you fail all your exams but one.”  The scenarios were all very realistic ones, and the kids looked really thoughtful as they considered the possibility and the impact something like a sick aunt’s three kids coming to live with them might cause.  I really liked that one.

The next day was Saturday, and Halloween!  The team had spent some time explaining this peculiar, polyglot American tradition, and invited everyone to wear costumes on Saturday.  The PCVs were ready to accept the kids showing up without costumes, but my gosh!  They all wore costumes, and they were all GREAT.  Especially, I think, the toilet-paper mummy.

Several zombies.  I am one of two Jack-o-Lanterns; face design by C., the ghost.

We spent Saturday morning admiring each other’s outfits, doing more energizers, and doing negotiation role-plays.  They were amazing!  Boys and girls cheerfully pretended to be girls, boys or whatever the script demanded, and no one mocked anyone else, and they all came up with, variously, strong, clever, funny, deflective, smart replies to help them make and stand by good decisions about drinking, drugs, unprotected sex and other options that do not serve their long-term best interests.  I hope they weren’t just doing it to impress the grown-ups, and that they’ll stand by what they learned at camp.

Negotiating.

A. and T. distributed a brief quiz that would help them measure what success they had had in instilling correct information in these malleable young minds, and then we all crammed into a tiny office that, with the loss of the big hall to some political event, was the only place we could watch a Halloween movie.  First they distributed certificates to all the learners who had attended each day of camp – people are really big on certificates here – and Halloween candy.  Technological issues limited our movie choice, but we got Hotel Transylvania running and I think everyone enjoyed it.  It’s pretty sappy and predictable, but the jokes were good and the animation excellent and overall it was plenty fun.  At the end, we applauded, shook hands and hugged and wished everyone brilliant futures.  A. and T. would see these kids again (in fact, we met one of them at the market later that day), but the rest of us almost certainly won’t; not in two years of service in different towns many kilometres away.

That night, we celebrated G's birthday and then went out dancing, still in our costumes.  Khorixas is awesome.  That'll be my next post.

This is only part of what we taught them!

A Sense of Wonder

A friend wrote recently to say, among other things, “I hope you’re having lots of adventures,” and I thought, ‘Boy, has she misunderstood my situation.’ (She’s not a blog-watcher.) And then I thought back to October 2015, in Oshana, and a revelation I had then, or at least a reminder.

I was staying at a guest house in Oshakati with three friendly colleagues, and it was hot, which reminded me of my three un-air-conditioned apartments in the Fenway, where for several days every summer all I could do was lie very still and sweat, or run a cool bath and stay in it until I was something far beyond prune-y. There were mosquitoes, which reminded me of almost everywhere I've lived except my current desert home, and a small possibility of malaria, kind of like the possibility of West Nile virus or Lyme disease in the mid-Atlantic states. There were pigs wandering the yard; one of my Irish friends brought the pigs into the family kitchen if the weather was bad when she was a girl. So, you know, nothing’s that different from anything else; what in any of that would you call an ‘adventure’? My Namibian friends wanted to go for a walk. Yay! I love to walk.

Also goats wandering about.  We kept Toggenburgs when I was a kid.

It’s a small town; there are a few strip malls, but where we were the houses were nicely spaced. We strolled (few people ever seem to want to walk as briskly as I prefer) through what the others call ‘the bush.’ We had sand underfoot, and various bushes and trees around us, which E. would stop to touch, name and describe. There’s one that, when – burned, maybe? – becomes an excellent hair relaxer. “Just as good as Revlon, my dear, and smells just the same.”

We came to a pond – a shallow pool of water in a deep hole – with an egret-looking bird standing in it, and I clambered down the edge of that hole to get as close as I could to the water. Water! It was just sitting there, very full of green furry scuzz. Then I scrambled back up and we strolled some more. E. picked up a clot of clay and said, “In my village, the pregnant ladies, they eat this.” L. said, “No, not that. That’s too hard.” E. said, “Oh, my dear, these ladies, they eat this like fatcake,” and mimed chomping on it. “Like fatcake, my dears.” We crossed a field, and carefully watched some dogs for signs of hostility, and wandered along a dirt road. And I reflected again that this really is a very quotidian experience, and people who think this is some grand adventure, or extraordinary life-changing two years, are really just sentimentalizing Peace Corps service, or romanticizing Africa or poverty or rural life. It’s just not that different from anything else you do.

About that point, I realized that the person who had shouted, “Victoria,” twice was shouting it at us, and my PC friend V. who lives in Oshakati is compulsively gregarious, introducing herself to everyone she sees. So I turned and walked toward him, and indeed this guy thinks I am V. Who is 22 and has very short hair. I explained to him that I am not she.

We all look the same, apparently.

So that, and the clay eaten like fatcakes, my dears, is maybe just a bit outside the norm, and made me laugh. And I always smile when I think of lovely, friendly V. And I grabbed myself by the brain, and shook myself a bit, and reminded myself that it is right and proper, sometimes, to be amazed.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t been blasé since adolescence, and then I was faking it. Probably quite obviously. And I find plentiful joy and amazement in all kinds of ordinary experience – looking out an airplane window and seeing trees or highways or tidy little farms; seeing cows by the road, or purplish flowers or autumn leaves; eating a big bowl of cornflakes with cold milk. For whatever reason, though, I tend to temper that amazed joyousness with the reminder that this is nothing unusual. It’s hardly an adventure. It’s just, y’know, life, and life sometimes catches your breath or your pulse with a troop of baboons by the highway or a couple of warthogs; a really cute baby or a cool evening with a light breeze and dark sky.

Standing in the sandy bush, though, that October evening, I recognized that I miss out when I deny myself what I thought of, right then, as a sense of wonder. There’s some value in drawing parallels, in seeing the connections between people, events, customs. But that’s my default, so surely I can benefit by acknowledging the uniqueness inherent in landscapes, moments, experiences. I can benefit by allowing myself that sense of something undeniably, venturesomely wondrous.

So. I’m standing in the Oshana bush, learning about the toxic qualities of some spiky tree, and I realize: I am in the second-most sparsely-populated country in the world. I am with an Owamba, of whom there are maybe 600,000 in the whole world, and two Kavanga, of whom there are fewer. How many people in this world ever even meet a Kavanga? And I’m with one who calls me ‘sister.’ And the other one is wearing a large, fluffy, yellow bath towel and silver slides.

Euro-American mixed breed, Kavanga, Owamba, Kavanga

Yup. Really. We walked for about an hour, over very mixed surfaces, past strangers’ homes and alongside a major roadway, and I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and hiking boots, and the Owamba was wearing, maybe, jeans and a t-shirt and low-heeled pumps, and one Kavanga was wearing pajama pants and a blouse and flip-flops, and the other had wrapped the towel around herself, tucked it into itself, and slid her feet into those silver shoes. And only had to re-tuck it two or three times. Please, do tell me how often you have gone for a suburban walk with a friend wearing nothing but a towel. And silver slides.

It’s five months later, and as I type this and remember, I am once again enraptured by a sense of wonder. And of gratitude. Okuhepa.