One Year Since

In mid-April, at the anniversary of my arrival in Namibia for Peace Corps service, I had in my head the idea of a blog post about things I haven’t done for one year or more.  I started a mental list, thinking I would post it on 18 June, the anniversary of my swearing in as an official Peace Corps volunteer and my arrival at my service site.

 

Then I got a cold.

 

Not having been sick for a year or more was one of the landmark items on my mental list.  I usually get at least one cold every year or two, and many of my PCV colleagues have had multiple bouts of illness (often digestive).  Through my 20s and 30s it wasn’t uncommon for me to get several colds a year, with terrible coughs, and an occasional attack of something the doctor would call bronchitis, and that kind of stuff.  But I had been really healthy more or less since 2013.

 

Then I got a cold.

 

I was up in Otjiwarongo for a permagardening workshop (excellent – expect a post about it by August, maybe, heh heh heh).  I had been in Okahandja twice in the previous month.  The nights are starting to get chilly.  I think, between the travel, the change in the weather, and the very starchy meals I’d been eating in Otjiwarongo, my immune system just decided to take a little break for a few days.  The cold was pretty mild, and did not generate the horrible hacking cough that makes my life, and that of everyone in hearing distance, truly miserable.  Half a box of tissues later, I was fine.

Tangentially part of the permagardening story.

Then my PC boss Linda asked me to go back to Okahandja.  And I had guests, so I would not have time for laundry (a full-day affair, really).  But there’s an automatic clothes washer at the guest house where I would stay in Okahandja.  Dropping my dirty clothes into a machine, twirling a dial and walking away, and returning to magically clean clothes, was another item on my haven’t-done-in-a-year list.  The temptation, however, was too great.  I did not try to get by on the remnants of clean wardrobe I had; I packed some laundry soap and dirty t-shirts and headed to Swakopmund, first stop on the way to Okahandja.

 

And I ate nachos.

There's a creamy cheese instead of sour cream - thicker, a bit tangier.
They call it 'cottage cheese' on the menu but it's not US-style cottage cheese,
thank goodness.

There’s a couple of places in Swakop that offer nachos; I had them at Tiger Reef, right on the beach.  Fifty bucks, or a bit less than five US dollars, and the guacamole wasn’t the avocado-iest thing I’ve ever eaten, but it didn’t taste like frozen lettuce like the guacamole I used to get in Dublin in the 90s.

 

Then I went on to Okahandja and did laundry in the machine.

Forced to choose, I would prefer to live without nachos the rest of my life
rather than go without this bliss-inducing wonder machine.

So that’s three things off my list:  I have been sick, I have eaten nachos, and I have done laundry in a machine, and all quite recently. 

Things I still haven’t done, though, for at least a year:  drunk really good wine, or carefully constructed a menu for a meal to pair wine and food beautifully; driven a car on the highway (I sometimes have to back up the company truck stored in my backyard in order to get at the laundry line, and then drive it forward again into its hiding place); flown in a jet, regional or otherwise, or even been to an airport, or taken a train, subway or public bus; lifted weights; gone on vacation (coming in September); worn tights or nylons; spoken to a member of my family or anyone I knew prior to 13 April 2015; eaten real whipped cream; played with or walked a dog; or been in a city with a population above 500,000.

 

Things I have done in the last year that I had not done before include:  knowingly eaten worms, skydived (tandem and static line, which required riding in a very small plane), ridden in a car going 180kph, said intelligible words that contained clicks and pops, put a condom on a wooden model of a penis with an audience watching, explained what 'noon' means, agreed to allow a small group of total strangers touch my hair, met a US ambassador, and eaten chakalaka.  I love chakalaka.  Kind of.

Oog.  I just ate the nice dried worms, not these slimy-looking cooked ones.

Recommended Reading

"Non-readers become readers, readers become writers and writers become... weirder," one of the Volunteer Service Network members told us in pre-service training.  I do not consider myself a writer, as I don't write for pay, and may I confess I don't feel any weirder -- or even weird, actually.  However, I've had the time and lack of internet access to do a good bit of reading in the last year.

One of the first books I found in the town library was Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's A Human Being Died that Night, and I was awestruck.  Gobodo-Madikizela worked for South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and as part of her efforts she agreed to interview Eugene de Kock, whom the South African media had nicknamed 'Prime Evil' for his role as leader of a police task force that targeted anti-apartheid activists with kidnapping, torture, murder and more.  Her book is about what she learned from him, and about herself, and about trauma and forgiveness.  For me it was mystifyingly uplifting.  I was reluctant to read it, but the jacket blurb drew me in and Gobodo-Madikizela's writing captured me.  She relates an extraordinary experience, and her varying response to it, as she feels fear, horror, sympathy, contempt and empathy for a very ordinary man who committed extraordinary atrocities in service of his people, his god and his state.  He thought.  He maybe was changing his mind as he worked with the TRC and testified, and got convicted with two life sentences plus 212 years in prison.  Many higher authorities in the apartheid regime were never charged or sentenced at all.  (De Kock was granted parole last year.)  This book is astounding.

In a very different vein, in July I received Spencer Quinn's latest in the mail -- Scents and Sensibility.  (How wonderful to have an obsessive sister and compulsive brother-in-law who truly understand me.)  This is the eighth in Quinn's Chet and Bernie series of mystery novels told by a dog detective, Chet, who works with a human detective, Bernie.  Quinn's rendition of Chet's voice is exactly what I think most of the dogs (especially the big ones) I have known would sound like if they were tracking perps (and javelinas, with their 'pesky tusks', and pizza crusts and kidnapped elephants) through the Arizona deserts.  He cheerfully acknowledges he doesn't do well with numbers above two, praises Bernie's beautiful big, dented nose and occasionally is quite surprised to find that somehow the upholstery's gotten chewed, or Bernie's accelerator foot's been nudged.  Funny and wonderful and the good guys usually, mostly, win in the end.

I brought Dorothy Gilman's Uncertain Voyage with me.  This is a precursor to her popular Mrs. Pollifax spy series, and concerns a young American woman using a European tour to celebrate and cement her recovery from depression in the mid-1960s, when people admitting depression were rare and uncertain.  Melissa gets, quite accidentally, involved with what may be international espionage, with a possibly-heartless but often sympathetic playboy, and with her own demons as she travels through Copenhagen, Paris and Majorca.  Her voyage is one of discovering her own value to herself, and her will to live.  I found it in the library in 2013, a year of disconcerting change for me, and had to seek out a copy for myself.  It really resonates in valuable ways as I set about changing my life up a bit.

Another local-library discovery was Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.  I'll let Alex tell you a bit about that one, as she's also discovering it now, as she serves in Peace Corps Namibia.  Kingsolver is a brilliant wordsmith, and with this story she's constructed something ornate, fascinating and honest.  I've just started Dave Eggers's What is the What, and am happy to recommend it on the basis of the first few pages.  He calls it a novel, but it's based on the reminscences of, and a trip to east Africa with, Sudanese 'lost boy' turned American college student and low-wage worker Valentino Achak Deng.  Eggers is always interesting; Deng is tough and true and observant; and the metaphysical question of when a biography becomes a novel adds a head-floating element to the experience.

L. gave me a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck shortly before I left the U.S., and I read these lyrical short stories about Nigerians at home and abroad in my Jersey cottage, on the plane and in Okahandja at PST.  Then I passed it along to F., who has since passed it to others.  When I found her Half of a Yellow Sun on the library shelf, I took a deep breath and ploughed into it.  The Biafran conflict, and the world's response to it, was horrifying, and this story of a half-dozen or so mostly middle-class Nigerians negotiating it and its physical, emotional, political and psychological tolls offers a chance to understand conflict and its consequences in a profoundly human and humane way.  Does that sound pretentious?  Maybe just:  It's terrible but beautiful, true and worthwhile.

The library, and the PCV exchange, has also yielded old favorites Wodehouse, Sayers and Scottoline (no Heyer?!), lots of Mills and Boon, Chuck Palahniuk's interesting Invisible Monsters, an odd Harlan Coben (all Coben is odd), and a bunch of John Le Carré, whom I find immensely depressing though I like the Karla trilogy and was drawn deeply into The Little Drummer Girl, with all its horribly dismal, realpolitick moral quandries and equivocacies.  Worth a read, though!  Whatever else you do in life, may I strongly recommend you steer well clear of a 2011 Harlequin Romance called The Reluctant Princess.  Oh, my stars.  To think someone got paid for that.

Oh, So Thankful

Looking back to November 2015:

Sometime after Halloweekend, a few of us who had gathered for that started e-mailing about Thanksgiving plans. Several of the PCVs had trips arranged already, but eventually five of us decided to gather at my house, which was the largest one available to us, and has a microwave. It’s also close to Swakopmund, and pretty much all PCVs like to go to Swakop when they can.

Saturday we got into some serious cookery -- well, a few of us did.
Others made mulled wine and played with the camera.

I love all of these people a lot, and set to work sweeping out five months worth of sand from the unused rooms happily. Gosh, the top of a closet can get awfully filthy when the east wind gets obstreperous. I put sheets on beds and bought winter pillowcases (flannel) for the manky pillows. The cases were on super-sale at Mr. Price Home, since summer was coming. And I made soup.

J. arrived early on Friday afternoon, the day after Thanksgiving. A. and Y. were stuck at the filling station in Khorixas; the elections had dramatically reduced travel, and they were having trouble finding a hike. While we waited, J. and I watched Dr. No, which he had never seen (“You guys,” he would later tell A. and Y. in amazement, “she has discs!”), and then strolled out into the Namib to look at the rocks. We also examined a small, mysterious structure I had thought might be a nesting box; I never examined it because what if it was, and what was nesting in it was not nice? So I actually gave it so wide a berth I didn’t even know it was a four-panel sign post. We decided it had been put there by aliens, and got the proof minutes later when we saw a whole lot of rocks carefully arranged in the shape of an airplane. Clearly, alien transport.

No explanation for this one.

I got in the cockpit and began to fly the plane. “Wait,” J. said, “that’s not a tail wing. What is it? You can’t fly a plane without a tail wing.” So we stepped to the back of the plane and examined what we had thought was the tail wing, and discovered that those rocks spelled out the word ‘Jesus.’ “Jesus is my tail wing,” I was able to tell J., and got back to my flying.

A. and Y. eventually arrived, tired but happy, and met the spider, and we had soup and watched ‘The Butterfly Effect,’ which was disconcerting. But everyone was eager to get to bed so we could get up early and go off to Swakop! Which we did, landing a sweet ride in the back of a bakkie, the four of us plus one stranger. I was sitting on the foam mattress that is a fairly common feature of bakkie backs, but Y. was half on and half off. I encouraged her to scooch up a bit, but she said no, she was fine, and now she claims it was a traumatizingly uncomfortable ride. Humph. The poor fifth guy was so cramped up that when he got out at the Fruit and Veg he almost crumpled to the ground.

They only put pretty pictures of themselves
on their blogs.

And oh, that Fruit and Veg! The others hadn’t seen so much produce in one place since arriving at their sites, and the exotic treats like tahini (can’t afford it), parmesan (ditto) and chappati (Y. clung to them, trying to figure out how to get them, plus the whole Thanksgiving feast and all the leftovers, into the menu plan for the next forty hours, eventually surrendering) had them exclaiming loudly. We bought a huge lot of food and then headed for the sushi place for lunch. Immediately after the sushi place, we went to the Indian restaurant for more lunch. We did not hit the beach, and the brew pub hadn’t opened yet, but surely we got fancy coffee for the fancy coffee people. Y. had to bring her coffee maker to Thanksgiving as I don’t have one, and someone else had to bring the beans.

I don't know who's wielding the camera here,
but that much garlic means A. at the cutting board.

We arrived back in my town just as M. was getting set down by his cab from the east, which was very convenient. Back at the house, we started preparing everything, and eventually had: mulled wine, seasoned roast chicken, green beans with or without bacon, jalapeno mashed potato, broccoli mac-n-cheese, green salad, apple pie, sweet-potato pie, India Pale Ale and red wine. While A. and J. cooked, Y., M. and I did a short sunset walk, and M. and I boosted Y. up onto the roof of an old water tower. It was fun, but getting down was a bit scary – which J. and A. mocked the next night, finding the ‘tower’ insufficiently high for fear. But we noticed they didn’t clamber up there themselves.

M. wasn't much for cooking, but he strolled into the kitchen anytime he saw
a gap at the sink and washed every dish he found empty.

Lovely meal, lovely memories of U.S. Thanksgivings, lovely, lovely company. And the next day S. stopped by and made us all pancakes, and J. brandied some peaches to put on top, and we watched ‘Age of Ultron,’ which was disappointing compared to the first Avengers, but not bad at all compared to most things. We did a sunset walk, too, and J. spotted what we think was a horned adder! I drove the Jesus plane some more.

Signpost of the gods or aliens or someone we don't know.

On Monday we stood by the side of the B2, sunburning, for about an hour and a half before we got rides to Windhoek for the Peace Corps Namibia All-Volunteer Conference and 25th Anniversary Celebrations. Two swimming pools and ginormous buffets for every meal. But Thanksgiving was better.

Hiking

Ha ha! It’s not a post about backpacking through the wilderness! ‘Hiking’ is shorthand (short-mouth?) for hitchhiking, which is how most people travel here. Even people with cars sometimes choose to hike rather than take on the however-many-hour drive to wherever. Peace Corps volunteers worldwide are banned from driving for safety. And our monthly allowance is too low to cover a car, owned or rented, anyway.

J.'s knee position in a somewhat cramped extended car
(two rows of seats behind the driver, so the car seats eight
instead of five).  We sat like that from Swakop to Okahandja,
fortunately just a gentle two-hour jaunt.

Formal hiking only happens in larger towns. In Windhoek, for instance, there are four or more ‘hike points’ where a fleet of combis (vans), with the driver’s name, phone number and government license number on the side, offer rides in certain directions. You go to one hike point if you’re traveling south; a different one if you’re traveling east, etc. Someone’s sitting at a table collecting the fares. He (I’ve only seen men in this role) writes down your name and a contact number for your next of kin, and then you tell him you need a receipt about 20 times, and finally he gets you one and you pay him. While waiting for the receipt, you hand over any large luggage to a man (so far only men) who puts it in the large, open trailer behind the combi that’s currently loading, and you try to score a decent seat. Once the paying’s taken care of, you board the combi and wait until it fills up, and once it does it sets off – stopping after about 100 meters for gas. The whole process may take ten minutes or an hour and a half. Good luck.

Informal hiking is what most people do. In almost all towns, including the bigger ones, there are sites also called hike points where car-less travelers gather and drivers stop by to see what they find. Someone hangs his head out the window and says, “Windhoek,” and one person rushes forward while the others all shake their heads. They want to go to Rundu, or at least Otjiwarongo.  Fares are pretty standardized, and maybe even official, but agreeing on the fare beforehand is important.  Some drivers are open to negotiation (some just offer a ride out of kindness, sense of community, or the very-rare-in-these-parts environmental awareness), and a few will try to charge you double the going rate, especially once they realize you're not from here. 

I showed this little girl 'Itsy-Bitsy Spider' on a hike to
Okahandja, and she practiced her English on me.

So here are a few hiking stories: I had a meeting outside Usakos one morning, and planned to travel to Kunene region afterwards. One of my colleagues gave me a ride eastwards and a bit north to Karibib, where I could hitch a ride more north and a bit east to Otjiwarongo, where I could get a ride west and slightly south to Khorixas. Trying to get a ride directly north and slightly west from Usakos would require finding someone who would be jouncing the gravel roads through northern Erongo and southern Kunene regions, and all my advisors were certain my odds would be much better if I stuck to the more roundabout paved route. In Karibib I waited a bit less than an hour, sitting on a low wall under a shady tree, while the local touts at the filling station flagged down potential rides for me and other travelers. I have no idea how these touts get paid. They found me a covered bakkie, and everyone fussed about cleaning the truck-bed up a bit for me, and I clambered in and slung my duffle behind me to be a bolster. It was perfectly comfortable, and I shared the truck with a lovely young man who said almost nothing all the way to Omoruru, where we stopped at another filling station and picked up, not another passenger, but a slightly manky foam rubber mattress to enhance passenger comfort. Lovely! I shared some gorp with my truck-bed-mate; I often share a cooky or orange segments or something with fellow hikers – and the driver if I can reach him.

Omoruru filling station; newly aquired mattress under us.

The bakkie driver took me to yet another filling station in Otjiwarongo, where we learned the hike point for Khorixas had changed, so he drove me to the new location. What service. I waited a bit more than an hour there, and eventually got a ride in a car right to Khorixas. Well, a detour or two to drop off others. As the first one in the car, I was able to claim shotgun, while three strangers who moseyed up later smushed themselves into the back seat. The typical car here is about the size of a Celica or Civic, and drivers like to fill them right up. That driver knew how to get to the Ministry building I needed, and the way in through the back, so he gets a super A-plus.

To get back from Khorixas I went to a filling station at about 9:00 on Sunday morning and waited about 30 minutes until a double-cab bakkie headed for Walvis Bay – over the gravel roads – arrived. Fellow PCV J. and I established our rates and climbed aboard. Once again I scored shotgun. We waited about 15 minutes before a woman with two children and a single man joined us. (Children sometimes do and sometimes don’t count as passengers. Anyone available may be expected to take a lap child, who may be ten years old and 30 kilograms, if necessary.) Our gentleman passenger needed to pick up something from a friend, so we left the filling station and headed in the wrong direction, stopping at a shop. The passenger vanished for about ten or fifteen minutes, and the driver eventually went looking for him. He found him in a shed; they shouted reasonably amicably to each other for a while; the driver returned; eventually the passenger returned carrying a bottle of wine and informing the driver that he knew four people who needed a ride just out of town and would travel in the back of the open pick-up bed. We drove around to find those people, and then there was some price negotiation, and eventually they all clambered into the back. Then – about 30 or 40 minutes after we’d left the hike point – we left Khorixas.

We put the back passengers down by a field somewhere after ten or twenty kilometers and carried on along the gravel road. Maybe 30 minutes later, the single man insisted the driver stop by a very small settlement, about six houses in the middle of nowhere, so he could buy more wine. That was another 15-20 minutes. The driver muttered and sputtered, but made the stop. “These Damara,” he said. “Always drinking.” “I am Damara,” the woman with the kids said, “and I do not drink at all.” The man returned eventually and explained that he needed the wine for his hangover. “Water is better for hangover than wine,” J. asserted. J. knows a few things about hangovers, I suspect. The guy argued with him.

An entirely sober and very friendly Damara mama
on the way to Okahandja.  Actually, she and the little girl
above went all the way to Windhoek.

We let J. out at a gravel-road intersection with no traffic or human habitation in sight, and he told me later he got a safe and comfortable ride the rest of the way to Omaruru almost immediately. Score! The rest of us bounced along toward Hentie’s Bay, stopping once or twice to add oil and once to pull a rock out of the wheel well. The drunk guy was very helpful with that. We only came dangerously close to the ditch by the edge of the road once. So score, I think, for me, too. I got to Swakop healthy and injury-free with all my luggage about five hours after leaving Khorixas, and got a cab pretty quickly for a Sunday afternoon. Shotgun once again, until a large woman about half my age told me I’d have to ride in the back as her legs hurt.

One time I was waiting in a cab for Swakop; just me for a passenger, and a man walked up and told the driver he’d pay $150 instead of the usual $50 if the driver would leave immediately. Awesome! That’s the only time I’ve seen that.

A fully-packed car - I'm shotgun, one more adult on the right in the back.

Coming back from Okahandja one time, I got a ride as far as Karibib, where I waited kind of a long time as the evening drew close. (PCVs and PC staff are not supposed to travel after dark, except on expensive, safe Inter-Cape buses and trains.) Eventually the Karibib touts found me a ride in a standard tiny sedan with a young man in mirror shades and a Fubu hoodie driving, and his similarly-attired friend in the passenger seat, and me alone in the back. ‘They’ (I kept thinking that it was really the two of them responsible for the driving, not just the actual driver) hit 180 km/hr at several points. However, they weren’t passing, braking or tailgating in crazy ways, all of which are common, so I just sat back and SMS’d a few friends. If I’d been worried I would have tried telling them there had been a lot of speed traps along this stretch of road recently.

One more: I got a ride to Okahandja with a man whose ancestors came to this area from the Netherlands and France, and who had served in the South African Defense Force during the war for independence. He seemed very much to resent the Namibian victory in that war and all its results. I did a lot of subject changing that ride. When he told me that “Their brains aren’t developed enough for business,” I replied, “No, that’s not it. It’s just a matter of education. Goodness, it’s a lot browner along here, isn’t it?” Everyone likes to talk about the drought. When he let me out at my destination, I pulled out my wallet to pay and he said, “No, you don’t need to pay. You needed a ride and I gave one.” “Thanks so much,” I said, and so we parted. At the end of the month I head for mid-service conference in Windhoek. Visualize a safe, swift, sane ride for me, please.

Ester

Ester works in the library, so we share an office building, and she has been quite delightfully welcoming and friendly since my first day at my work site.  She kindly agreed to an interview that I could share with you, and told me:

She's not sure she should smile for a photograph.

Name:  Ester    Age:  42    Where did you grow up?  Luderitz    Who lives with you now?  My sister's kids, two boys age 18 and 9.  Who's in your family?  The most adorable people in my life.  [Specifically her sister, who works about a four-hour drive from here over rough roads, the two nephews, her daughter in Swakop and a 9-year old granddaughter and two grandsons, ages five and two.]

What do you do for work?  Cleaner.    What work have you done that's especially fun or interesting?  Gardening - years back.    What do you like best about your work?  I just want to move from this cleaning to another position.    What do you do for fun?  I teach kids Afrikaans and help them with their homework.  Mostly I'm just in work.  And after work I help elders who want to learn Afrikaans.    What has been your best adventure?  There's nothing going in Arandis.  [When I asked, she concurred that 'raising up kids' is an adventure.]    What would you like to do that you've never done?  I want to own my own business.

She does a lot more than clean in the library.  That's not uncommon here.

What's your favorite place to go in Namibia?  Khorixas    Where do you recommend tourists go?  Vingerklip Lodge [where her sister works!]    Have you ever been out of Namibia?  No.  Would you like to?  Yes    Where?  South Africa - Johannesburg, to see how people do business there.

What language do you speak most?  Afrikaans    What other languages do you speak?  Damara-Nama and English.    What's something 'typically Namibian' about you?  The food that I like to eat -- porridge and donkey meat.    And what's something 'un-Namibian' about you?  Nothing.  Typical Namibian.  Just put it just like that.


And here's a brief video chat from Ester, who is usually all smiles and laughs but got very serious for the camera.  She speaks in Afrikaans, her first language, and then says almost entirely different things in English, which she speaks well but is always working to improve.

Ûiba Ôas Crystals Market

One of my favorite projects at work is the Ûiba Ôas Crystals Market, or technically the Ûiba Ôas Small Scale Miners’ Coöperative.  I wrote a bit about them when I reported on the SSC-DF Handing Over Ceremony back in August 2015.  Since then, I’ve created a website for them, and a Facebook page.  (Please like them on Facebook!  And if you know of a free location to host a website with more features and equal ease-of use as Blogspot, please let me know.  It would be great to upgrade them.)

The people of what is now Ûiba Ôas first came to the attention of my foundation in about 2004, when Petra saw them sitting by the side of the big B2 highway.  They would put a cloth or some cardboard on the ground, or set up a table, rig up some sort of shade, and sit there by the road hoping someone would stop and look at what they had displayed on their table or cardboard.  Petra did stop, and saw the beautiful crystals and semi-precious stones the people had mined from the rocks and mountains in the area, laid out on that cardboard or table.

Smoky quartz

She also found a willingness to work, to learn and to change things up a bit, so she set to work herself.  She offered business trainings, including in marketing and selling to tourists.  She sought out grant money, and helped them get funding for a permanent market.  They had to work with the national Ministry of Lands and the elected local councils and traditional tribal leaders to get rights to a plot of land.  With the help of the U.S. Embassy in Namibia, the European Union, Rössing Uranium and other donors, they were able to construct a beautiful marketplace.  The architect, Nina Maritz, offered the idea of using indigenous rocks held in wire fencing as the primary building material, and the finished structure is beautiful.  It stands out but fits in, and serves its purpose very ably.

Office on left; first of three selling rooms on right.

The members of the coöp are all or almost all from the Damara tribe.  They speak Damara-Nama, one of the click-and-pop languages, and many speak Afrikaans, often as their primary language.  A lot of them also speak English with various degrees of fluency.  The name they chose for their group, Ûiba Ôas, means 'looking for a living' or 'seeking a livelihood.'  Pretty good, I think.  You have to pronounce it through your nose because of those accent marks, but the name itself contains no clicks or pops.  All or almost all of the miners grew up around the Spitzkoppe mountain, which is about 40 kilometers outside the town of Usakos, on the edge of the semi-arid savannah as it begins to shade into the Namib desert.

Traditional Damara dress - the men don't have a traditional outfit, poor things.

Diana, the chairperson of the coöp, wasn’t able to tell me how long her people have been mining stones in the area, but she did say she remembers her grandmother heading out to the mountain with hammer and chisel.  Her grandmother was a miner from girlhood, so we figure the people have been miners for at least 80 years and more likely 100 or more.  They once dug on Spitzkoppe itself, but it is now a protected site – there are rock paintings about 30,000 years old there, painted by the San people – so activity has moved to the smaller Klein Spitzkoppe nearby.

Diana with her well-bundled new baby, Rain Patience.
You need a lot of patience here if you're hoping for rain.

The mountains are granite, and they ‘grow’ crystals of many kinds, including aquamarines, a beryl, and many kinds of quartz.  Purple quartz is what we call amethyst, and then there are rose, smoky, silver, clear and other colors.  They also collect minerals like flourite, tourmaline and dioptase and many others.

and garnets

Typically men do the mining out on the mountain, and women do the selling down by the highway, but that’s not 100% consistent.  At the market, you’ll find raw rocks, sometimes called specimens or samples, mostly mined by someone in the seller’s family, but some coming from outside the immediate area from other small-scale miners.  Sometime Ûiba Ôas members will take particular rocks to Swakopmund to have them cut and polished, ready for setting in jewelry.  They also buy pendants and other jewelry from wholesalers, and buy and make crafts like woodcarvings and mobiles made from old soda cans (they’re beautiful!), and sell all of those at their stalls.

The hearts, elephants, guinea fowl etc. were cut from soft-drink cans and painted.

Just so cute.

Each member of the mining coöp has the right to rent a stall in the market building.  Members pay a small percentage of their monthly sales as rent.  Neither the members nor the coöp are getting rich, but the business is growing and they are implementing plans for further expansion.  Thanks to the Namibian Social Security Commission Development Fund, which seeks to provide capital for projects that will reduce poverty and expand employment, and the Rössing Foundation, the coöperative was able to purchase a stone cutting-and-polishing machine and the solar panels to power it recently, and send two members for training on how to use it.  This will allow them to add value to their raw stones – once cut, polished and mounted, the stones can sell for three times or more the price of the uncut stone.  They are now considering funding the purchase of slicing and drilling machines, and training more members.

Polished stones, acquired elsewhere.  Margins are better if you can
polish your stones yourself, eliminating a middle man or two.

There’s a U.S. organization called Kickin’ Back that’s recently gotten interested in Ûiba Ôas, and is raising funds for construction of a soccer field for the community.  The Ûiba Ôas Aqua-Stars (named for aquamarines, not for the area’s almost non-existent water), the community soccer team, have performed very well in local tournaments.  The team player-coach, Gabriël, is also the coöp’s deputy chairperson, and he is a man of impressive work ethic and strategic smarts.  Over time, Kickin’ Back may be able to assist with expansion of the physical site to allow for more income-generating activities, which would be great.  If you want to support the project, let Kickin’ Back know.

Aislinn, Donna and Kieran of Kickin' Back donated 10,000 litres of water
to Gerhard, Gabriël and Patricia of Ûiba Ôas, with Lysias of RF watching.

Gabriël took us on a prospecting walk; everyone found at least a quartz or two.

Petra's friend Thomas introduced Kickin’ Back to Ûiba Ôas, and he is also working to bring a member of the Namibian Hydrogeologists’ Association to the area to hunt for a water source.  Residents currently have no running water in their homes, and two attempts at drilling boreholes have been unsuccessful.  People have to buy water in 25-litre cans.  Another of Thomas’s contacts is looking into the possibility of developing a solar-power grid.  People who have electricity here get a limited supply from batteries, like car batteries, and many do without.

A house near the crystals market

There’s a lot more to say about Ûiba Ôas, but this is a lot already.  So I’ll close now, and maybe add more in future posts.  I am honored and pleased to know these people, and have a chance to help them build on the hard work they have done and do every day, and on the efforts of Petra, many funders and others.

Amethyst.  I love the shiny rocks.

Somewhat Unexpected

If you’ve been following along for a bit on the blog, you may recall that I wrote about the lack of adventure in my Namibian life a few weeks back, and my need to remind myself to allow a sense of wonder to adorn my experience here.  Well.

I live not far from the town of Swakopmund, a tourist mecca on the Atlantic coast.  The center of town, where I buy groceries once or twice a month, is actually the southwestern corner.  If I stand on a street corner there and look east, I can see more town and maybe a bit of the desert where I live.  To the north I see the town spreading – it’s growing; people come from all over Namibia to look for work here.  To the west there’s the ocean.  To the south, there’s desert, too, but not my desert.  This is the beginning of what will become the world-famous Soussvlei dunes:  just sand.  No scrubby bushes, no low-lying succulents, probably a bare minimum of hares or skinks.  Maybe some of the nice chuckling birds whose evening chatter I enjoy so much around sunsets.  I spend a lot of my Swakop time in shops; a good bit in the Indian restaurant, and a reasonable amount on the beach.  But I’ve always meant to step a bit to the south and check out those beginner dunes.

The methi mutter malai redefines sublime.

So a weekend or two ago I had Peace Corps trainees for guests, and after showing them all around my town (“Lutheran church.  Roman Catholic church.  Office, library.  Dreamland Garden.  Grocery store, markets, sunset.  Done!”) for three days, we crammed our four selves into a taxi and headed to Swakop.  I pointed out the key landmarks (“Fruit and Veg for fresh produce; really good fresh produce!  Ocean!  Book store, movie theater, coffee shop, Indian restaurant, brew pub...”) and they set out to explore for themselves.  Our hostel was just two blocks from the southern edge of town, so it made total sense for me to use some of my unaccustomed hours (I usually need to be in a cab back home by 15:00 or so; they stop running once the shops close) to check out the sandy bit.

Looking south from residential Swakopmund

At the end of the two blocks there was cluster of horse paddocks, a few horses nibbling each other in that friendly horsey way and a woman working one on a lunge line.  How I yearned for my breeches.  But the sand looked pretty good, too, and I slid off my sandals, plunged in and headed west, toward the ocean.  (As in Oregon, they keep their ocean on the west here; a very silly and confusing habit.)  There was a good bit of greenery where the Swakop River would be if there were any water now (four years of drought in this part of the world; there’s not much water anywhere, though the Swakop apparently runs a bit underground), so I sauntered just up the bank of that.  I saw footprints, horse-hoof prints, dog-paw prints, a few of the thin lines skink tails make, an occasional poo – dog or human, mostly.  I strolled under the big B2 roadway, and saw some weird hoof prints – rounder and lighter than horse, so maybe some kind of antelope?  But antelope are very unlikely at the edge of a big town, at the edge of a big desert, or at the ocean, and at the confluence of all three?  Probably not.  So maybe small horses in non-standard shoes?  Hmm.  There was also a new kind of poo – not horse, dog, human, goat or other small stock, rabbit... so we’re back to antelope?

Bigger than rabbit; smaller than horse.  Maybe I'll go back and try to find
a hoofprint to photograph, too.

A bit further along, curses!  Someone had built right on the beachfront and fenced off my path.  So I had to scramble down into the reeds of the currently-underground river, which were cut through with crazy-quilt paths.  I followed the paths that would take me most directly to the ocean, keeping a careful eye on the ground and just above, in case of snakes.  Eventually the zigs and zags zugged me into a big, path-blocking thorn tree.  Curses!  So I backtracked to one of the bigger clear spaces and gazed up and around to try to get a sense of whether it would be worth the effort to try a different path, or would they all just lead me into thorn trees.  I noticed a slight noise; the breeze had gentled from that morning’s powerful east wind, but it was still sloughing through the bushes and trees.  As I gazed beach-ward, however, one of the dryer, tanner bushes moved, and turned into a camel.

Actually, more than somewhat unexpected

No, they’re not indigenous to Namibia.  No, there was not a circus in town.  No, it is not local custom to use dromedaries as draft animals.  No, it is not a comfortable feeling to be two or three meters from what was actually about half a dozen camels, grazing in the reeds, with no human in sight.  (Although the reeds would easily have hidden a human, so maybe...?)

They have big, weird faces, supercilious expressions and lots of teeth.  They have, according to signs in zoos and circuses, a reputation for getting nasty when disturbed, kicking and biting.  They are also adorable, but I backed away discreetly, laughing inside (I did not want to startle the camels or dromedaries with unexpected noise), and feeling that sense of wonder well up and flood.

That's pretty well camel-flaged (ha ha ha!), right?

There’s a camel farm about ten or twenty kilometers east of the town, but why would their camels be in Swakop, grazing away?  A couple of locals told me sometimes there are dromedaries involved in some of the town tourist attractions or activities, but again why a clump of them, down in the reeds by the beach but well-screened from any tourists who might have wandered that far south, and apparently unattended by humans?

I realize this is the kind of thing that really could happen anywhere – Provence, Sarasota, Phuket, wherever – but, really – when’s the last time you almost banged into a herd of semi-feral camels on the beach?  I’m calling it an adventure.

I like them better when they are not eye-balling me with attitude.

This is actually rather unexpected, too; the sky over the ocean is usually
very cloudy in Swakop, and there's just some pinkish mist for sunset.