So Then I Pushed My Own Self Out of an Airplane

looking back to June 2016:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucy practices altimeter checking with David's oversight.

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

Kitted.  Borrowed sneakers;
biggest helmet they have.

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

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

Lucy made her second jump at sunset.

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

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

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

Trained Men and Women!

Looking back to July and August 2016:

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

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

English afternoon learners.

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

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

My boss addresses the English evening class.

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

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

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

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

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

Anniversary

Looking back to June 2016:

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. and Mrs. Ambassador listen to PCV stories.

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

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

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

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

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

Sunrise of Namibia

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

 

The lounge

The courtyard at PCN HQ

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

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

Sunset over Windhoek

Indian dinner at Garnish

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

I Am A Resource

Looking back to May 2016:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shadows Enlighten

Looking back to May 2016:

Most PCVs will tell you that 'shadowing' was one of the most valuable parts of their pre-service training.  I both enjoyed and learned from my shadowing experience toward the end of PST, and was delighted to have a chance to pay it forward when Group 43 came to Namibia.

Given a generous house, I was able to host three (could have done four) shadows, and given a paucity of current, available volunteers versus trainees, my PC boss, Linda, was happy to send three.  I got an M&A lawyer from Chicago, a DJ and entrepreneur from same, and a realtor and gem expert from Boston, all of them interesting, well-mannered and excited to be serving.  All, also, as is usual, very excited to be nearing the end of their training!

Groceries to feed the shadows came from Dreamland.

Before they arrived, we e-mailed with ideas about scheduling and meals, and I told them how much of their shadowing allowance I would usurp to cover the extra groceries.  I also asked if they'd want to spend their last night in Swakop, and they were all very pleased to have that opportunity.  So I booked a dorm room at Amanpuri; two hundred bucks each and worth it.

Shadows do their initial travel in groups, with a local PC facilitator to help them in working through the mysteries of hiking, and mine SMS'd when they got close.  I walked down to the filling station that also serves as a transport hub, and was able to wave to Tante Martha, Afrikaans teacher and PC stalwart, as her combi full of PC trainees swung into town.  I had bumped into a local entrepreneur at the station, so introduced the shadows to him as soon as they debarked, and we had a brief conversation about his business and the opportunities and challenges of our town.  Good start, right?

I mean, seriously packed.

For day one, we settled into my house and had some cheese sandwiches, and then  packed ourselves into kind Petra's car and headed to the crystals market.  They looked around the operation, talked to members, helped consult on some computer questions and bought some jewellery, good them.  The former realtor was scheduled to work with a local small-scale miners' group, so this visit was especially useful for her.  Then we went to see Johanna in nearby Usakos, who was on the verge of closing her PC service after three years and one venomous snake bite.  I presented her with a certificate (certificates matter here) and some brownies, and the shadows got to see what my fellow community economic development volunteer M. gets up to at the Children's Education Center.  Back at home we had lentil soup and bread for dinner; pretty typical.

On day two we went to the office, met everyone there, used the library wifi.  The shadows got lunch at the local market, which consists of variously-stewed meats and vegetables.  You pick up the lids of the many pots and request a scoop of spinach or macaroni or carrots, and that piece of chicken, etc., and pay $5 a scoop for veg and starch, and $15 and up for chicken or meat.  In the evening we went for a sunset desert walk and then had pap and chakalaka for dinner - quick, easy, very Namibian.  The DJ hadn't cooked much, ever, and was pleased to have a pap-whisking lesson.  (Pap is a white-corn polenta or corn-meal mush, essentially; blander and probably less nutritious than the yellow-corn kind of Italy.)

Filling and oh so traditional luncheon at the market.

Shadows in the sunset.



On Friday we went to Dreamland Garden, discussed and toured their operation, and pitched in with weeding, litter pick-up and spinach harvesting.  Great hands-on experience, I hope, after their six or seven weeks sitting in classrooms.  We also met with another local entrepreneur at my office, and the three shadows grilled him enthusiastically.  One shadow had a host brother attending the local vocational school here, so we invited him for dinner and sat outside eating homemade pizza, with wine contributed by the kind shadows.

I had booked a ride for Saturday morning with a taxi driver I know -- four of us is a full load, and the shadows were happy to take the easy option rather than fool around with hike points and waiting.  They, of course, loved Swakopmund, which that weekend offered the unusual excitement of containing several dozen other PCVs.  The group before mine was having its close-of-service conference there, and the young-leaders camp committee was meeting, and the five existing Swakop PCVs were hosting a total of four Group 43s, so you could not get two blocks without bumping into a PCV.  We grouped and ungrouped throughout the day and sometime toward the end of it found many of ourselves in a new dance club, where we meeted and greeted and foxtrotted (not really) the night away.

Shadow with shadows of his own.

Next day we had a *fun* time getting a hike back to Okahandja, the training town!  I took the back seat and recommended they confirm pricing before we left; the driver initially said he'd charge $260 for each of us, when the going rate is $130.  So that was an invaluable experience, I think.  Plus it was a pretty uncomfortable vehicle, and I lost my phone.

I have had great experiences on both sides of PST shadowing.  I am really grateful to my shadow host, and to my three shadows, for their generosity, flexibility and wisdom.  And I am hopeful of getting to do it one more time, in May 2017, when Group 45 is here.