"Immuno" "Deficiency"

looking back to July 2016:

My Peace Corps Namibia training group included both the Community Economic Development volunteers of whom I am one and a clutch of Community Health and HIV/AIDS Prevention volunteers.  While we had separate technical training sessions, we overheard a lot of each others' material, and of course talked about what we were learning, planning, hoping.  We also all had to compete in some condom-putting-on role-play exercise/game for which the CHHAP vols had a huge advantage.  They spent, it sometimes seemed, at least a little bit of time every day unfurling condoms onto a huge selection of wooden phalli.  They also learned about things like nutrition, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS treatment, alcoholism and sexual mores and oh so much more.

Squish the package - that was a new one for me.

Childhood nutrition, or lack thereof, is a terrible problem in many communities here (less so in my town, where unemployment is very high but the jobs that are available are good).  A lot of kids eat a diet that's, maybe, 80% simple carbs -- bread, white potatoes, white macaroni, white rice, maybe an occasional fatcake, but mostly the ubiquitous pap, a white-cornmeal polenta, or the darker mahangu, a porridge made from millet.  If the family has protein available, probably goat, sheep or chicken, the adults get dibs and the kids get scraps.  If they're lucky.  Vegetables are an occasional bit of spinach, onion or carrot, and fruit is rare.  Especially in early childhood -- from the time the baby's diet of breast milk starts getting supplemented with other food, until two or three -- this can be terribly dangerous.  Without protein and the vitamins and minerals that fruit and veg provide, nothing grows to full strength: not the lungs, the heart, the brain, the bones or muscles.  And they can never catch up.  Breaks my heart.

Good childhood health turns out smart, high-energy teens like these.

So, when I was building the lesson plan for my English improvement trainings, thinking that topics like food and medicine are usual for language learning, I knew I could fold some 'life skills' lessons into the mix.  And, since HIV and AIDS are huge problems here, with more than one in ten adults living with HIV or AIDS (16% according to the UN, and much higher in some regions, and many babies being infected by their HIV-positive mothers at birth), I decided to include a session on HIV and AIDS prevention and care.  So I got in touch with A., a nearby CHHAP volunteer, and invited her to town.  She happily agreed, and decided it would be good for me to spend a few hours distributing condoms at local shebeens (bars), and how could a person disagree with that?

When two or more PC vols get together for a project, we call that a 'collaboration.'  We have to get approval from our PC bosses, so A., the expert, wrote up a proposal and submitted it to her boss, who loved the idea and forwarded it to my boss, who also approved.  I SMS'd our local Health Ministry nurse to run the condom-distribution idea by her, and A. tried to phone, and neither of us managed to reach her, but we figured that would be okay.  Then A. hiked the bumpy roads to my town, carrying a file with pages printed with each of, I believe, 17 steps to put on a condom.  I only knew six.

Gosh-darn 'Africa time'

A. actually approved of my six steps, but she likes to go into detail.  She arrived on a Wednesday, and we sat in my office and discussed our approach.  Since my lessons usually began with some vocabulary and moved on to using the words and concepts in conversation - speaking and listening - we decided to start with the words that make up the initialism HIV and the acronym AIDS.  That was my job.  Wednesday night I fed A. mushroom gnocci with a brandied mushroom sauce and whole-wheat ciabatta, and gave her responsibility for the salad, which was delicious.

Femidom demo

On Thursday, we walked down to the local clinic, introduced ourselves in person to various nurses, which was much more successful than our telephonic attempts, and walked back with a heavy case of male condoms and a couple boxes of female condoms.  We had our afternoon class with lots of teenage girls and an evening class with all adults, mostly women.  I led off, writing "HIV" and "AIDS" down the left side of the flip chart, and asking if people knew what the letters stood for.  They knew many, and got pretty close on the others.  I wrote out "human"; everyone knew what that meant.  Then "immunodeficiency."  "'Immune' means you are protected against something," I explained, invoking the recent measles vaccination campaign that had come through town a week or two earlier.  "'Deficient' means not having enough."  (Then I threw in 'sufficient', 'abundance' and 'excess'.  It's an English class, not a clinic.)  "So 'immunodeficiency' means you don't have enough protection against the diseases that are part of AIDS.  'Virus' means it's contagious - you can catch it from another person, like tuberculosis or flu.  Headaches and cancer are not contagious, or infectious -- they don't spread from person to person."  Same thing with AIDS, ending with the S for 'syndrome', "which means AIDS isn't really a single disease, but a collection of illnesses that can infect a person with low immunity."

I also introduced the word 'stigma,' which A. had identified as the #1 problem for people living with HIV and AIDS, and we talked about what we should do for people who are sick.  Some of our learners were admirably eloquent on the need to treat sick people with compassion and support.

Festus holds the pen-penis.

A. spread out, across the floor, her 17 pages of condom-acquisition steps, and we all gathered around to discuss each one and throw out questions as they occurred.  She used a bunch of pens rubber-banded together to mimic an erect penis, and rolled an unexpired, airy and well-lubed condom over them.  Then she used her fingers as a mock vagina and demo'd the female condom, or femidom, which generated great interest and many questions.  A. had answers for everything.  People demonstrated no squeamishness or shyness about the topic, asking questions and sharing ideas as they had with topics like weather and budgeting.  It was great.

That night, I fed A. pap and chakalaka for dinner!  You like to mix it up.

Friday morning grocery shopping

I've got a beet, so I could make borscht in honor of A's Ukrainian heritage.

And the next day, we gathered up our clinic-provided condoms and headed out to the bars.  (As part of its effort to combat HIV and AIDS, the Namibian government provides free condoms to all, through the Ministry of Health.  They're supposed to be available in bars, but MoH employees rarely have time to do the distribution, and shebeen managers aren't able to or interested in going to the clinic to collect a few boxes, so A. winds up doing this job a lot in her town.)  We left a box or two - or three - at each of ten or twelve shebeens and shops, and a handful or two of femidoms, also.  A. wrote up a thorough report for me to deliver to the clinic, and showed admirable aplomb in shaking off the advances of bar patrons who wanted her sunglasses, her phone number, her company for the evening, or a trip to America.  I just kind of tagged along, smiling genially.  For dinner that night, we had four of my friends over for chicken and lots of veg, from Dreamland Garden, in a Senegalese-style peanut sauce, with *brown* rice.  I love a party.

Genuine interest in HIV prevention, plus a Friday-afternoon shebeen-face.

This is the kind of stuff that makes the PC service seem really worthwhile.  I am so grateful that they trained us with the CHHAP people, and encourage us to get together with these kinds of exercises, and that A. is willing to slog her way over here to help us out.  She does claim she loves to visit my town, which is cleaner, quieter and friendlier than hers.  When we were lugging our condoms back to the office, two boys stopped to ask if they could help us.  A. practically dropped her side of the box in amazement.  Where she lives, children constantly demand money from her, or food, and never offer help.  Sometimes I hear other vols saying, "In Namibia, people..." and I think about the contrasts between A's town, my town, the tiny villages of my northern colleagues, and the slums and middle-class neighborhoods of Swakopmund.

Party!

Friday afternoon on-our-way-to-the-shebeen faces.

Off to Otjimbingwe

Looking back to July 2016:

L. is a Peace Corps volunteer teacher who's been living in a mid-sized village in my region since about four months after I got here.  We didn't meet until about six months after that, when I took to her immediately.  She's sharp and sweet and hyper-competitive (that last she admits with rueful-yet-cheerful self-awareness when claiming the role of timekeeper or referee for games), and her commitment to her PC service and the people and community she serves glows in her aura.  So when she invited a bunch of volunteers to visit her for a belated Fourth of July celebration, I was delighted to accept.  It's fun to see new places -- volunteers have a really broad range of experiences, from sophisticated city living to mud huts strewn with cobras -- and L's open-hearted hospitality would be sure to be excellent.

We head toward the river.

I had just gotten a site-mate -- another PC volunteer living in my town -- and he managed to score us a sweet ride to Karibib, the first leg of our journey, free and easy.  We met up with our hostess and fellow guests there to shop the big grocery store for braai supplies.  Since this was to be a July 4th thing, I guess they were bbq supplies, but it's the same thing in the end!

Karibib is a nice change from my desert town; semi-arid savannah with grass and trees.  And it got better as we headed out toward Otjimbingwe (Oat-jim-bing-gway), jammed into a bakkie (pick-up truck) that was as full as anyone this side of Clown College could make it.  ("This is a very nice bakkie," L. said admiringly, gazing at relatively-new tires with a pleased smile.)  The village is situated on the Swakop River, which is dry on its surface almost all the time, but has water flowing underground.  So we had lots of trees, and it was actually warmer at night than the chilly desert 100km away.  Also, hills.  Gently undulating all around us.  Gorgeous.

So peaceful.  So pretty.

Sadly, we passed the site of a bakkie accident earlier that day in which at least one person had died.  The truck had gone off the gravel (dirt) road and flipped, and the riders in its uncovered back were thrown out, full force and over distance.  This is why Peace Corps forbids its volunteers from riding in open bakkies.  We have to find one with a cover.

L's fuzzy puppy, Strawberry, greeted us at her house.  Strawberry probably didn't get any more love and attention with all of us around than she gets with just L., who lavishes her with affection, but she got a lot of love and attention (except from J.; short, sad story), and earned every scrap.  A dog's a delight, and L. has electricity and a stove and fridge and everything.  Unfortunately, the village had recently switched from borehole water to metered pipeline water, and L. hadn't gotten used to checking her meter and buying more water credits before she ran out.  So she kind of didn't have any running water all weekend, with eight guests and an indoor flush toilet.  Fortunately, she was able to fill jerry cans at a neighbor's tap, and we made do with those quite nicely.

L. with learners at her school.

L. made us all burritos on Friday night, and we talked and relaxed happily, then split up to crowd each other in the two available beds and various floor pads.  On Saturday C. made French toast, which I hadn't eaten in over a year I believe, and then we toured the village.  We saw L's school complex, and a few excellent shops where we all bought chilled drinking water, and walked down to the river to throw stones at the palm trees, trying to shake loose the nuts.  They have almost no nutritional or gustatory value, but it was fun to try one.  You peel the outer shell, scrape your teeth along the inner shell, and swallow a gram or two of woody, nearly tasteless nut substance.  Hmm.  Interesting.

Walking the river, or river bed.  It did have some water in it this year,
toward the end of the rainy season a few months before our visit.

About a million children accompanied us on the walk, poking into the river's borehole and waggling hands and feet in the 'dam', which is a storage container for water to sustain local cattle and small stock.  L. kept warning them not to go too far, as few kids here know how to swim.  We also visited the Powder Tower, where the Herero people stored arms a hundred or so years ago, when Otjimbingwe was their capital.

The Powder Tower, with vols and Strawberry.

That night we braai'd or barbecued, and I got to make the dough for the roosterbrood, using whole wheat flour thank goodness at last and garlic salt instead of regular since that's what L. had and it would taste better anyway.  S. passed around temporary tattoos of firecrackers and stars-and-stripes that her mother had brought on a visit two months previously, and I slapped one on my neck and one on my wrist.  I was very festive.  After dinner, several of L's teacher friends, who have moved to the village from all over, came over to sit on the floor and play Thirteen with us.

L. doing a three-second boogie as part of the Thirteen game.



In the morning we reluctantly ransacked L's sweet little house for our meandering possessions, crammed into another bakkie headed town-wards ("This looks like a very nice bakkie."), and gazed in wonder (I did, anyway) as the hills lifted and sank us through trees and shade and all that good stuff.  Then we had a fun time getting home from Karibib!  It was a truly lovely break from the routine, and I am so glad L. proposed the outing, and made it all happen.





Business Basics

Looking back to July and August 2016:

In addition to the English improvement classes I taught this winter, I also conducted trainings in basic business skills.  The business training was much more detailed, complex and long -- a total of 24 hours, spread over two classes per week for six weeks.  This was GREAT.  It was, for me, not as much pure fun but a lot weightier.  A lot more to dig into, grab onto.  And measure!

For class one, we started with a pre-quiz.  My experience in pre-service training had shown that many aspiring entrepreneurs lacked the math skills they would need for recordkeeping, so the quiz included questions like, "If one banana costs $3, how much will four bananas cost?"  Everyone got that right.  No one got the questions on averages and unit costs right, and the one on percentages was about 50/50.  There were also more theoretical questions, like, "What bookkeeping should you do for your business?" and "What's the most important part of a business plan?"  Average score was 41%.

I re-posted the 'Qualities of a Good Business' list for every class.
Also, 'Components of a Business Plan' to remind them where we were headed.

After quizzing, we talked about what makes a good business -- ethical and honest, good products, good customer service, and PROFITABLE.  That last was my contribution.  So we did an exercise to calculate profit.  Not long ago I had a person come into my office having launched a small business, buying products in town and re-selling them in rural areas.  They had calculated all the costs, but priced the products according to what other merchants (in town) charged, and were actually losing money with every sale.  So.  Clearly this is a critical concept and calculation for conversation.

Then we launched into it.  I designed the course in three modules, with modules one and three following the outline of a standard business plan, and module two chockablock with recordkeeping work.  Yay, math! is my business-training motto.  In the first two weeks we covered product development, target markets, competitive analysis and feasibility.  Then we did two weeks of bookkeeping, costing and pricing, budgeting and financing.  For the final two weeks - module three - we dug into marketing, operations, a session to review things on which people had gotten stuck the first time around, and finally action plans.

Figuring out something or other together.  July and August nights are
*cold* in the drafty town hall in the southern desert town.

It's not b-school.  However, these ambitious learners were committed and engaged.  Two achieved perfect attendance, and most of them were at class within 15 minutes of starting time, which is a bit of an accomplishment in a community that likes to excuse its chronic tardiness on the basis of 'Africa time.'  (Actually, this community, built around a for-profit, commercial mining operation largely held by a global corporation, is pretty good about promptness.)  They had homework for each class and they completed it assiduously.  I included a least a bit of math on almost every assignment, focusing on the areas where people had had trouble on the pre-quiz.  I had such a great time with them!

Presenting the results of a confab, on an apparently uproarious topic.

I hope they did, too; although I know there was some grumbling about all the adding and subtracting.  (Yay, math!)  I tried to keep it interactive, and they had lots of opportunities to work together to learn or practice the material with in-class exercises.  This was also useful time for networking, as people built new relationships that might come in handy some day.

In the last class, I handed out the same quiz we had on day one.  The scores on that round averaged 70% (one got an 85%), for an improvement of 71%.

The Official Language

Looking back to July and August 2016:

Namibians speak over a dozen languages as their home/family/traditional/native languages, and some of those branch out into multiple dialect forms.  Under German administration, from the late 19th century into the 19-teens, German was the unifying language; under South African administration, from the early 20th century until 1990, Afrikaans was the official language of government and the most common in business (the bigger businesses, not village stores and local taxis and such).  When Namibia won her independence, the new government re-considered.  Both German and Afrikaans stirred resentment in many, and there was no way one or even two indigenous languages (Afrikaans is kind-of indigenous; it's a localized version of 17th- and 18th-century Dutch) could be pegged as the official language without stirring other forms of resentment.  South Africa's post-apartheid government went with eleven official languages, but the Namibians chose just one:  English.

Eleventh graders, ambitious for improvement.

For some of the older people with whom I've talked, the transition felt difficult and maybe stirred some resentment of yet another kind, though mild.  They'd been talking Afrikaans all their lives, and were proud of their mastery of that language, and blammo, they were told they had to learn English.  The transition in the schools wasn't easy, either; there were few teachers qualified to teach English and a generation or so of learners had to muddle through as best they could.  (The first Peace Corps volunteers in Namibia, a few months after independence, were English teachers.)

Today, if you visit, you'll meet many people skilled in English, especially in the tourism and hospitality industries.  If you visit my small desert town, built from scratch in the 1970s to serve as a home to miners from all over, you'll find some contention at public meetings over which languages should be spoken.  Lots of people, meeting me, admired my most excellent English and asked for help with theirs; a couple were especially concerned that their accents weren't like mine.  (One told me I spoke much better English than most Americans, and then imitated a typical American accent:  it was a horrifying mush of gabbled glottals.  Overall, they don't like us eliding our ts into ds.)

The world map came in handy for English, too.  Thanks, K&K!

So I started an English improvement class.  I loved this.  I built a slide deck, inspired by English Teaching Forum magazine and my own PC Afrikaans lessons.  We started each lesson with a bunch of vocabulary around a particular theme, and then had conversations to use the not-always-new words and related concepts.  There was homework with each class: read a sample paragraph and then write one of your own.  People were really good about doing the assignments.  For the last class, we read a brief essay together and discussed it.  I tried to get everyone engaged and physically active in each session, in keeping with recommendations for adult education.

I started the class with the reminder that English has many dialects, and none of them is better or worse than another.  I speak standard American English, my friend Val speaks standard British English, there's Black American and Australian rules English, and Hinglish and Spanglish and Namlish.  Your accent is fine, and I'll try to remember that Namlish trends more to the British English and say 'colour' not 'color.'  Ha ha.  'Petrol' not 'gas,' 'trousers' not 'pants.'  Then I shared some words that few Namibians I know understood:  noon, chilly, grab and darn.  And then tried to sort out the lasting confusion between 'lend' and 'borrow.'  Then we had just enough time for greetings; please stand up and say variations on hello to each other. "Now you're meeting a good friend you haven't seen for years."  "Now you're meeting an important politician."

Chilly is less than cold.  Chile is a country, and chili is a pepper.

Session two was weather, which generated one of the best moments of all time.  Me:  "These are words we don't use much here.  'Humid.'  'Humidity.'  Does anyone know what that means?"  Eleventh-grade girl, raising a tentative hand:  "Is it... the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere?"  Me:  "Um.  Yes."  I had photos on the screen of some DC-area friends running on a warm July afternoon, and I tried to explain to them what humidity feels like.  I'm not sure they could relate.

Then we had feelings and senses, and after that, parts of the body and describing people.  Session five was food, built around the 'healthy plate' model for good nutrition.  Then we did budgeting, including idioms like 'nest egg' and 'tighten your belt.'  Session seven was on HIV and AIDS prevention and care, and I shall write specifically about that in a future post.  Health volunteer A. came to town to help me, bringing her 17 steps for how to put on a condom.

For the food class, I ripped up a grocery circular and handed out the pieces.
Everyone chose a food on his or her piece and discussed it briefly:  why they
like it or don't, how they cook it, when they eat it.  This was a fun exercise.

The final session was my favorite.  We sat in a circle and took turns reading, paragraph by paragraph, a beautiful 'Lives' column from the New York Times Magazine.  (Thanks, K&K!)  It's the story of an emigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and his early weeks settling in to a small town in western Massachusetts, and in about 900 words it flows gently from cozy home to sweaty work, "I was young and happy", to recollection of his dad's murder in Burundi, "I was grateful just to be where I was," to a night bike ride home past the woods, a police stop and some confusion around English, "To get home to my wife and child -- that was all I wanted."  It closes with a bachelor's degree within reach, training for the National Guard, and, "the police never bothered me again.  Instead... they sometimes slowed down, turned on the light for a second and made that little whoop sound.  I started to like it when they did that.  I was new to the United States, and this was a kind of hello."  This felt like a perfect piece for our class: relatable, beautifully written but with accessible vocabulary, and evocative of a range of emotions that help demonstrate the power of language, and enable a degree of empathy that connects us with language.  I want more of these!

Condom class was pretty good, too.  More later.

I'm planning to start an English reading and conversation group in January.  Send me stories if you come across any you think would work.