A Lovesome Thing

Looking back to May 2016:

Dreamland Garden is an ambitious enterprise:  a garden in the desert.  For a person reared in New England (dark, rocky soil; okay for planting; short growing season) and recently expatriated from the mid-Atlantic (insanely fecund), nothing in Namibia looks garden-able.  The south is rock and sand and no rain, with blazing summer heat and freezing winter nights; the north is deep sand with four months of downpour, eight months of dry, and hot, hot, hot most of the year.  However.

Seriously, is your first thought, "Let's plant some cantaloupes!"?

Namibians have figured out how to grow stuff.  And Patrick, our Peace Corps Namibia Director of Programs and Training, is not intimidated by anything!  He served in Peace Corps in Tanzania in the Agriculture program about ten years ago, and now gardens here in Namibia.  Namibia has a few more (like, a billion) gardening challenges than Tanzania, but he is digging in (ha ha) and getting the thing done.  And he likes training us newbie volunteers, too.

Where shall we put a garden?

So in May he hosted a permagardening workshop for the southern PCN contingent, and about 12 of us made our ways to Otjiwarongo, where T. volunteers as a PCN teacher.  His school was allowing us to construct a garden on their grounds during vacation week.  T. had promised Patrick that the soil was dreadful, and by T's mid-Atlantic standards no doubt it was.  By my Namib Desert standards, it was Eden.  Patrick also felt doubtful of a real challenge to vegetative flourishing.

Positively brown, that Otjiwarongo soil.  Paradise.

We had three days, and spent a few hours of each in the conference room, with Patrick teaching us about the correct ratio of nitrogen to carbon in our compost, which plants cross-cultivate best with which others, the academic understanding of double-digging and other invaluable topics.  Then we drove out to T's school with a full load of tools and materials, and Patrick tried to share his eye for scrounging valuable gardening resources with us -- look, cardboard by that dumpster! -- on the way.

First we had to consider sunlight, shadow, distance to water tap and
administrative preference to determine the best location for the garden.

On day one we sited the garden and built a compost pile.

Otjiwarongo has tons of brown and green material you can chop up with a hoe
to start your compost pile.

T. knew where we could find cow poo to add to the compost pile!
(A judicious amount, blended with the leaves and dried grasses.)

Patrick carefully directed the blend of brown, green and manure.

Brilliant!  We covered the pile with straw to help it stay moist.
The kid, Mario (green t), joined us while we were scooping manure,
followed us back to the school, and stuck with us through the workshop.

On day two we double-dug two beds.  The raised one incorporated plant compost, which gardeners in this area do not typically use, and the flatter bed contained just manure and the local soil.  That second approach is the commonest locally.  Thus T. would have a test bed to demonstrate that, most likely, the raised-bed, compost approach works better, yielding more and more fertile plants.  With an hour or so to spare (many hands make light work, though if you only have one pick and two hoes, 12 pair of hands don't make that much difference), we added a third bed and planted all three.

In Britain it's sometimes called 'bastard trenching,' which I love.  And in
Virginia's clay soil, where I double-dug two fair-sized beds solo, it was quite
a labor.  However, I did not have a pick-axe.  Anytime you get to swing a
pick-axe, you have to admit to at least a little bit of fun.

I punched holes in all the soda bottles.  Fill them with water, and it will
gradually leach out into the soil, nurturing your plants.

On day three we fine-tuned our beds, poked at the compost and urged it to hurry, and 'cemented' the modestly decorative rock wall around our raised bed with a dirt-manure-water mixture.

 

 

L., crouching, is flinging a big ball of home-mixed concrete substitute
onto the rock wall.  This was fun, too.

 

Patrick brought all the tools, some pre-fab compost, some marigolds and
other plants, up from Windhoek.  We had to pack them carefully so he
could also get several PCVs into the combi and save us from the horrors
of hiking home again.  At least part way.

 

Ta-dah!

Throughout the three days, we reveled in the magical properties of the Otjiwarongo Super-Spar (big supermarket), the limited wifi and miniscule wading pool of our lodge, and listened or, maybe, sang along with K. and others as they tore off 'She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy,' 'Seasons of Love,' the Spongebog Squarepants theme song, 'Let It Go' and other seemingly random selections of musical pop culture.  Ah, you guys are fun.

Now I am working to share some of these ideas with Dreamland to help them increase production and stave off insects (stupid insects; go someplace fertile).  I haven't had an update from T. yet on how the garden's doing, but I'll share this post with him and ask.

Not My Idea of an Adventure, but Something New

Some of my earliest memories are of dogs, and few of my childhood memories are dogless.  Mum loved dogs; Dad tolerated them, and all my many siblings delighted in them.  I hope.  Life in a seven-dog-plus-probably-some-puppies household would have been pretty miserable for anyone who didn't delight in them.  Honestly, I feel a strong affection for the lovely, black-and-tan female dog in my neighborhood who has decided my yard is the right place to bring her snacks.

Her snacks, however...  This element of life in Namibia seriously has, I think, no parallel in any of my previous life experience, which is a surprise.  It's a pleasant surprise to know this is something that can happen in your life, and it hasn't happened before in mine.  It is no longer, sadly, a surprise to me to come home to find sights like this in my yard.

Welcome home!

You know what that is?  The white-and-blue spot in the upper left is a diaper, well-chewed; the curvy thing next to the bit of greenery in the lower right is a horn.  Probably a cow's horn.

Why are they in my yard?  We get strong winds in my desert home, but no, these did not blow in through the various fences.  The lovely doggie brings them in, and munches on them for a while, and then departs, leaving her detritus for me to collect.  Yes, she eats significant portions of used diapers.  I get a nasty gag reflex just typing it.  And maybe once or twice a month I have to pull on the gardening gloves and pick up one of those - or a collection of truly bare bones - and turf it into my black plastic for the weekly trash pick up.



Just to be very clear about what I'm dealing with here.

Most houses in town have a dog or two attached; this is commonplace in Namibian towns, where housebreaking is also sadly commonplace.  The dogs are generally not companions or loved family members; they are guardians, ill-fed and rarely washed or brushed, so they become scavengers.  Some get aggressive with people, but almost all will run off if you bend down as if you're picking up a rock to throw.  So how useful are they as guardians, I wonder; but many locals I know are very scared of dogs.  My neighbor dog has her full measure of that skittishness, which makes it very difficult for me to establish a rapport, and clarify for her that, while she is always very welcome to visit, I prefer she do her gnawing elsewhere.

I think there was a wedding in town this weekend, and this is a trophy from a fatted calf.

 

I don't like picking up other people's toothmarked horns, either.

The lovely culprit.

I think I'd best resign myself, however.  While, perhaps, keeping a small brain space turning over the question of how to convince Foxy - Matilda - Saddle - what am I going to call her? - to take her nibbles elsewhere.

Without Music, Life Would Be a Mistake

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that, in the 1880s, shortly before succumbing to syphilis, manic depression, an hereditary stroke disorder, or something else that manifested with an abrupt collapse in a public square and left him mentally incapacitated for the last ten years of his life.  He was 44 at the time of the collapse, and not widely read, but what he accomplished between 20 or so and 44 made him one of the most influential thinkers in human history.  He was, I contend, correct in his aphorism about music.


looking back to March 2016:
I listen to digital music at home, and I occasionally hear some beautiful, mostly a capella singing from youth choirs, street-corner choirs or Gideon.  Taxis and private hikes usually have music playing from a flash drive or the radio -- Jimi Hendrix once (the driver didn't know him; it was just the radio selection), Adele a few times, African rap often, lots of gospel of various provenances, and frequent doses of electronica/dance stuff.  The skydivers introduced me to Swakopmund's Desert Tavern, which had a good acoustic guitarist playing and singing covers, and a dance club that had two guys playing electric guitars (one flying-V) against a drum machine.  But a truly live band... oh, a live band.

In late March 2016, it had been almost one year since I had seen a live band.  I saw Houndmouth in Philadelphia on 4 April in 2015.  They are great.  I think that was the last full band I'd seen when I noticed, somewhere, an announcement that a four-piece, electric band would be playing that Desert Tavern on Easter Saturday.  There was, of course, a very real possibility that they would be disastrously bad -- that is always a very real possibility with an unknown band.  But I liked their looks, and the name The Fate of Ms H, and I had a yearning and enough frequent-flyer miles to book a free hotel room, so I headed for the big city with a song in my heart.

First I stopped at the COSDEF Center, where PCV S. works.  They were having an Easter festival, and S. was hula-hooping in celebration.  I watched awestruck and then bought a powerful ostrich-shell necklace.

I am a complete incompetent with a hula-hoop, but S. is great.  She's also a
former competitive diver, which I guess means she knows how to twist.

With my new necklace for back-up (this makes no sense in writing, does it?  But in my head, it's spot on), I stepped along to the Tavern around sunset.  Stepping involved tucking my skirt up and splashing through the edge of the Atlantic, which at one point got a bit playful, tried to pin me against some rocks and knocked my reading glasses into the surf.  Oh, ocean.  We have such fun together.

Fortunately I didn't need to read the tavern menu, because I remembered the veggie pizza is called the Popeye, and their drinks all stink so may as well just order a Savanna Dry.  I had seen the band photo, so I could i.d. the lead singer futzing around near the stage, and she looked kind of fun and low-key.  Soon enough she stepped up onto the stage with an acoustic guitar and announced that she'd do a few songs solo, and then the three others would join her, and oh, yes, her name is Heather and she grew up in Swakop.  She's got a great voice -- covered Four Non-Blondes and Tracy Chapman with aplomb -- and admirable stage presence.  She did an original, by audience request, that she laughed was 'dirty' or something like that.  It was good.  The lyric seemed to involve lusting for a woman in a taxi, but I very often get lyrics really wrong.

Ms H moves among her people

Real band.  Seven months later, my heart lifts just seeing this lousy photo.

The full band was well worth the $30 cover.  The bass player was shiny blond (and talented, thank you), the guitarist tastefully understated, the drummer strong.  Every now and again they'd get silly and strike guitar-heroic poses, which seemed to me very obviously tongue-in-cheek and great fun.  They did mostly covers, but again a few originals that showed promise.  And no drum machine.

One of the interesting things, for me, was the audience.  It was, like, Hipster Swakop or something, which I had not seen before.  I suppose, since most of my Swakop time is Saturday afternoons in the Shop Rite, I couldn't really expect to catch the hipsters en masse.  But they were fun to see.  I wonder where they congregate the 300-plus nights per year that there's no live music worth the cover.

There's a poster at Milk Boy in Philadelphia that delineates the similarities
between hipsters and hamsters.  I think it's kind of funny.

So I danced through the Fates and Ms H's two sets, and was so sorry to be turfed into the night, music-less (bar the beating of my heart and pulsing of my cells etc.).  As I walked away from the club, a young-ish (30?) man with gauges or plugs or whatever in his earlobes loped up to me, saying, "Sorry.  I just.  I wanted to ask.  How old are you?"  I stopped, answered truthfully (rounding is still truth) and watched him droop.  "Oh.  I just wanted to know," he said.  "I got that," I assured him, and walked away.  The Fate of Ms H (sometimes she is Miss and sometimes Ms; Miss on Facebook if you want to look them up) has not been back since.  I wish they would.

On the way back to the hotel I saw this kit-cat.  Pretty.