Another Atypical Day

looking back to November 2016:

Weird things happen everywhere we go, right?  And some days just get a bit weirder.  There was nothing exceptionally weird about the 19th of November in 2016 in Swakopmund, but the number of interesting things I saw in the span of a few hours was... unusual.  And however often one sees men dressed as fairies in Boston and etc., in Swakop it's about a million kilometers from the norm.  (There was a gorgeous, small, slender, darkish-skinned man who dressed as Tinkerbell in Boston in the mid-80s and pinned condoms to the reeds where a lot of casual sexual contact occurred, as people were just starting to become terrified by AIDS, but still resisted safer sex practices.)

As I type this up in May, there are no flamingos at the Swakop lagoon.
Plenty in Walvis Bay.  But I need them in Swakop.  Note camels in background.

I love them so.  The colors, the grace, the very weird profile in flight.

They may actually be dromedaries.  These Namibian tourists are braver than I.

Camels, and probably dromedaries, bite and spit.

No idea what the story is on this guy, who was with several friends.

I saw him again, hours later, at the fancy hotel on the other end of the beach.

I see more dead seals than live, especially right up on the sand like this.

Pelicans are more at home in Walvis, but today there was one on the aquarium.

Fun!

Planning and Training

looking back to November 2016:

I wrote about the Ûiba Ôas Crystals Market about a year ago, which was about a year after I first visited and started working with the miners and sellers of that group.  They have always impressed me, and my respect and affection for them continues to grow.  Their lovely market has great potential to evolve and strengthen, to enrich their lives, their families' opportunities and Namibia's global reputation.

Also, they're fun.  So having four members of their leadership team visit me at the office for a planning session, with two staying over for some training, was great.

Selma brought her daughter, about six months old.  Patricia was about five
months pregnant.  Nelson was training in part to cover her maternity leave.

We had done a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis for their co-op back in the winter of 2015, shortly after I arrived and started work.  We started from that base for this training session, adding in some new ideas and issues that have arisen since.  You can imagine that it's not always easy keeping fifty-some people with different interests and needs working together well in a business setting, but they usually manage quite admirably.  We came up with an action plan, much of it concerning marketing the market more aggressively, and sent Gabriël and Selma back home, while Patricia and Nelson headed for the Town Council's bungalows for the night.  Patricia phoned me from her bungalow later that evening to report the electricity didn't work and neither did the lock, and she was locked in.  I contacted a friend who works for the Council, and she forwarded the message to the maintenance staff, who got everything sorted.  Whew.

Baby, Selma, Gabriël, Patricia, Nelson and my boss, Lysias.

On day two, Patricia and Nelson worked on their Word and Excel skills.  They both have basics, but wanted to learn things like tables in Word and sorting and using formulas in Excel.  They were really excited to see me do those tasks, and then to do them themselves.  Great fun to teach.  We also reviewed the market's Facebook presence and website, and they posted text and a photo to Facebook.  They aren't able to do that regularly as they often don't have money to pay for data plans, so their internet access is limited.  We're working on it.

Extremely rare photo of Patricia sharing her gorgeous smile with the camera.

Namibia's Social Security Commission provided us with the funds for the training, including money for transport, accommodations and meals.  I made the two morning tea breaks:  sandwiches, cookies, tea (donated kindly if unwittingly by K. in Sarasota; thanks!) and coffee.  The first morning, when there were four of them for teatime, I brought about 250 grams (half a pound; one cup) of white sugar to sweeten the tea or coffee.  They used it all and I had to go borrow more from Silas!  It's quick, cheap calories, and people eat a lot of it here.

Nelson has about a million Facebook friends, though he's not often on it.

Please Like the market on Facebook, and if you visit Namibia, or if you live here, make sure to stop.  They've got beautiful wares, and the people are well worth any support you can offer.

Vacation, Peace Corps 'Style'

looking back to October 2016:

Since I was traveling a significant distance to collaborate with A. on his business-skills workshop, and help celebrate his birthday, I thought it made entire sense to visit two other PCV friends who are up in the northern stretch of the country and check out their work and homes.  So instead of heading south toward home when I left Mpungu, I headed north, toward M.

M. lives in a small village - smaller than Mpungu by a bit - on the Kavango River, a gosh-darn perennial river.  She's a community-health volunteer, assigned to the village clinic, where her job description is pretty open-ended.  She lives with a local family in their compound, which consists of a modern concrete home built by the government for the family patriarch, who participated in the fight for independence from South Africa in the 70s and 80s.  It has electricity and indoor plumbing, but the plumbing is not connected to the local water system, so they still get water from an outdoor tap and bring it in to the sinks and bathtub.

The modern house, with some decorative landscaping.

That patriarch died a few months after M. arrived in the village, and now one of his daughters lives in the house.  The other daughters, and various family members, live in traditional huts in the compound.  Their husbands leave the village for weeks and months at a time, finding work on farms or at mines.  M. has her own one-room rondavel with a thatched roof and a shower in the back, with a bit of curtain for privacy.  She uses a latrine about 10-12 metres from her rondavel, which is in its own little hut, with no roof.  The latrine itself is painted black, so when it spends a day in the bright, direct sunlight, it gets pretty toasty on the buttocks.

The latrine

She has electricity that powers a mini-fridge in the hut and a hot plate, but does most of her cooking in a pot on an open fire in the compound's open-sided kitchen hut.  Also, the electricity runs out about half to three-quarters of the way through a typical month, and she does without.  (There's a lot of carpe-ing diems in rural communities here, as I believe is typical globally.  Somehow, even though most material resources are scarce, people don't make the choice to conserve them -- blowing the monthly paycheck in a few days is commonplace.)  We didn't have electricity when I visited, but with fires for cooking, a hot hot sun for heating shower water, and a solar lamp and a couple headlamps for light, we really didn't need it.

M's hut; B. is just visiting.  On the right is the shower entrance, under a papaya tree.

I got to visit the clinic where M's boss works, and stand in the air-conditioned medicines room.  So nice!  We also met with the secondary school's Garden Club, which is developing a community garden with support from M. and all her good Peace Corps training in permagardening, and M. filled me in on her fundraising campaign to enable the purchase of dozens of solar lights for local families.  It was very successful, and especially when the days get short in winter, a solar light can be a rich blessing for a kid who wants to study and do homework to improve his or her test results.

B. spends a lot of time on condom demonstrations, so double-digging
the community garden with M. on a burning-hot day makes a nice break.

PCV B. visited us one day and helped work in the garden, and we all went down to the river for a picnic, eating up the cheese I'd brought that really doesn't do well in a powerless refrigerator.  We did not see either hippos or crocodiles, and thank goodness for none of the latter, though the former kill more people.  We did see cows.  And we did move very, very slowly:  these were three of the hottest days I have ever spent anywhere.  Thank goodness we could sleep outside.  That part, and hearing M's delight in her neighbors and project,  were the best things about this most excellent visit.

The river; cows on the other side, in the shade.

Cows headed for shade, as are the people.

Our sleep shelter!  We brought M's mattress out, and hung the mosquito net
more to keep out snakes, and by morning we'd need to pull a bit of sleeping
bag over some part of ourselves for a warmth we would not need a few hours
later, when the heat got to full-on debilitating.  And it's only October!

Then I got in a combi and headed to Rundu, Namibia's second- or third-largest city, where I spent a few hours wandering the town of 60,000 (as of 2011; it's probably grown a lot since the census), which was mostly hot and dusty, until a reasonable hour to go sit at a fancy tourist lodge over the RIVER! and have some noodles and watch for hippos that did not appear.  There were people going in and out of the river, though; not everyone shares my crocodile aversion.

The Kavango River, looking east toward M's distant village.

And west toward the, y'know -- sunset.

Off to V's the next day, west and a bit south into the most densely-populated part of Namibia.  Her town, Oshakati, isn't officially one of the largest, but paired with Ondangwa and Ongwadiva, its two neighbors, it makes a formidable semi-metropolitan stretch of strip malls and highly variated housing.  V. is a community economic development volunteer, working in an office coordinating the activity of a dozen or so solar-light salespeople.  Her non-profit, Elephant Energy, provides lights and radios that run on solar power and enable cell-phone charging.  She also undertakes secondary projects, including assisting with computer-literacy classes and supporting a 'soup kitchen' for orphans and vulnerable children.  I got to attend both, and see two very different sides of Oshakati.

The kids mostly segregated themselves by sex to eat their rice and chicken.

Boys cleaning is not an everyday sight.  Kudos to the soup kitchen.

This is the back side of Oshakati, away from the main road with its shops
and denser neighborhoods.

V. has a modern house in a modern compound, and a lot of great friends in her area.   It was invaluable to me, for my Peace Corps experience, to spend a few days getting a sense of the very different ways volunteers live and work.  I brought, as one does, plenty of groceries to my two kind hostesses, but I think I'll say thank you once again to both of them.  I'm so pleased to have been welcomed generously into these (very different) homes.

There are cows in Oshakati, too.
This late in dry season, they get a bit ribby.

PS:  All the many hikes involved in this journey were hot and boring and moderately uncomfortable and relatively safe.  Yay!  And I got to do some laundry in Mpungu, so I wasn't impossibly sticky and rumpled by the time I got to Oshakati.  So I was stylin', more or less.

Party in Mpungu

looking back to October 2016:

A. timed his workshop, fortuitously, with a marathon in Swakopmund and... his birthday!  He's also a great cook every day, and M. and Y. are not bad with a spatula, either, which, combined with the success of our workshop and the dramatic change in landscape for me, made for a stellar visit.

A.'s breakfasts are some of the highlights of my Peace Corps service.

 

I live in a town of concrete homes, purpose-built for the men who worked the mines and their families (the mining concern, in 1970s and 80s apartheid, was trying to build a 'non-racial' company, which is kind of cool though of course one wonders how the white men in charge defined 'non-racial' in both their heads and their hidden-most hearts), and they all have electricity and water available.  Only people who can pay for electricity and water can avail themselves of such, of course, but most people here swing it.

The compound has cold running water and electricity most of the time.

Mpungu was settled naturally, by herders from the Kavango tribe.  Most of the population of this region, also called Kavongo (for political administrative purposes, there are two regions:  Kavango West, where Mpungu is, and Kavongo East), lives in the northern stretch of the territory, along the Kavongo River, which is a PERENNIAL river.  That's very rare around here; most rivers are ephemeral, and show usually just as depressions in the earth, filling only in a serious rainy season.  There are a few other perennial rivers in the north, kinda-sorta connecting with the Kavongo (Zambezi, Chobe and Kunene, which got dammed years ago so a large part of its flow is underground now), and then the only other perennial river in Namibia is way south, the Orange River.

It takes a lot of wet (relatively) to keep the country this green.

So a lot of Kavongo people fish and grow crops with river water and stuff like that.  But not in Mpungu!  The village is about 25km from the river, so folks stick to cows and goats and maybe a sheep or two, plus perhaps a spot of gardening.  It's a tiny town, with a clinic and a few small shops, a post office and primary school and a handful or two of shebeens, which often double as shops.  If you need serious groceries, or a bank (the post office provides some banking services), or a secondary school, you have to head those 25km north to Nkurenkuru.  We stopped in Tsumeb on the way into town and picked up supplies, and then M. showed up carrying everything necessary for a Diwali feast, and Y. was packing some birthday surprises, so we were in good shape.

Getting a group together is a good excuse to fuss around with pizza-making.

Mostly we worked on our workshop, and talked about what we'd do the next day, and sat by one of the shops to offer business advice if anyone wanted.  We cooked and cleaned and at some point did some laundry in A's family's semi-automatic washing machine.  Walking to and from the constituency office where we held the workshop took some time and offered views of all those trees, and a decent workout through the deep sand that subs for dirt in much of Namibia, and a chance to make up horror movies in which we might, unknowingly, be acting.  Just hanging around the compound was a thrill; it's so very different from my town and the tourist hotbed of Swakopmund, where I do my big shopping once or twice a month.

And sunset watching, of course.

At some point the three of them did a spate of interval training.  We celebrated A's birthday with a song from the workshop participants in the morning, and a man-bonding experience at the shop/shebeen for M. and A. while Y. and I (but mostly Y.) concocted white-chocolate chip and macadamia cookies, which she knew A. had been craving.  She had the chips shipped in from the US.  I think white chocolate is an abomination against nature, but those cookies were delicious.  And one night A's Kenyan colleague's wife had us all over to dinner.  That was one of the best meals I have ever eaten in my life.  The pumpkin dish!  Eish!!

The chin-up station.  M. was worried by significant weight-loss in his first
six months in Namibia; I offered tips for keeping the pounds on.

On the Saturday night, we had a bit of a bacchanal at a local shebeen, with help from Mpungu's PC teacher volunteer and many locals.  The Kenyans gave A. a kind of cloak that may be Masai; he loved it.  Kept stroking it.  It's really meaningful, somehow, when your village friends show an overt sign of respect or appreciation like that.

Birthday card, cooky and embraces

Bush beer, Saturday afternoon warm-up

Pre-Kenyan shebeen time

I think not usually worn with a t-shirt, but that's kind of A's thing.

I left hoping to go back, but it looks like that won't happen.  Maybe someday.  Mpungu is really, really different from my home, and I'm so glad to have experienced it.  And as I waited by the car for Tate Joseph to give us a ride to the hike point, he gripped me by my meaty upper arm and told me, "You are fat, Frede," in an admiring tone, with a warm smile.  It's a compliment.  It really is a compliment.  I know it's a compliment.  Nonetheless, I couldn't get to, "Thank you," and had to settle for (an only-slightly-rueful), "Yes.  I am fat."

And here's a cool flowering plant in front of the stockade-style fence.

Mpungu. That's Right, Mpungu.

looking back to October 2016:

My PC friend A. lives and works in Mpungu, in Kavango West, which is in the Kalahari Woodlands of northeastern Namibia.  Woodlands means it's low-density forest with "plenty of sunshine and limited shade" per Wikipedia, i.e., the treetops do not provide dense canopy, but some.  I.e., it does have trees, unlike my desert home.

It also has an HIV support group, and A. wanted to provide that group with a business-skills and event-planning workshop.  So he invited Y., M. and me to hike on over and cover a few topics like budgeting, goals and objectives, bookkeeping and such, and we were delighted to accept.

Very kind driver #3, in the shade of a tree.  With A.

Getting to Mpungu involved three hikes of widely divergent natures - 1) pregnant Grizelda and the elephant; 2) 'the back of the bakkie is dirty' and 3) ice cream!  Ask me sometime and I'll tell you.  It takes about 10-12 minutes and includes eye-rolling and arm-waving.  But there we did indeed get, and it was EXCELLENT.  A. lives in a traditional compound, with Tate Joseph and his family.  ('Tate' is pronounced TAH-tay and is a term of respect for men over about 30.)  A. offered a tent if I wanted to sleep outside, and I asked whether I'd really need one, as the weather was edging toward hot by early October, and he said it depends on how you feel about waking up with a snake nestling up to share your body heat, and I slept in a spare room in the compound, in a bed off the ground.  Eish.

One chunk of compound

A. and Y. are both community-health volunteers, and M. was up to his ears in preparing for a big hullabaloo in his northern town, so I organized the materials for our presentation.  We had three half days, so I focused on basics with plenty of in-class exercises to try to drive the material home.  A. was hoping for at least 12 people, though he warned us it might be less, and thought we should cap the group at 20 if we got more than expected.  We didn't do the capping, and had just over 20 every day, not counting the usual complement of babies and toddlers.  Everyone came back on day two even though they did not get free food on day one; this is a major success here.  A good turnout with free food is a whole lot easier.

Registration, day one - and they're still coming...

We were all completely jazzed by how well this workshop went.  When we divided people into small groups to do exercises, there was always at least one or two per group who understood the material and could do math.  This isn't a given here (nor in too many parts of the USA).  We also had at least one or two people per session whose English was good enough to translate our lecture-demos into Rukvangali, the local language (one of about a dozen widely spoken in Namibia, remembering that 'widely' has a different connotation in a nation of two million than it might elsewhere).  Women outnumbered men in the group - that's pretty common - and there were several who were unafraid to participate in group discussions.  That's not always the way, but is always good to see.  People contributed money and goods to enable us to offer a morning tea-break (tea-time is 10:00am here), and several helped with clean up.  And on day two we had two lunches for each participant, and on day three, one each.  There's something enjoyable about feeding people who skirt poverty's dreary edge, even when it's just for a day or three.  Better, of course, to support them in figuring out ways to feed themselves for the long-term!  (And send their kids to school, and get medical care when needed, and...)

A. does intros

Y. and M. listen while a student presents his findings.

Small group collaborating

Guest speakers present on saving at the post office, fielding
a random kid from the audience.

On the last day, as we were tidying away all our flip charts and such, a contingent of women participants hung back to make a special point of thanking Y. and me for being there.  They were deeply grateful to have seen women in positions of authority.

Multi-tasking student; paying attention while nursing.  She was one of the stars.

Most people here just love to pose.  I am so glad to have had the chance to work with these great folks.

These health/business volunteer collaborations have been some of the absolute best experiences of my Peace Corps service.  I am so glad my foundation and my colleagues have made them possible.

Vacation! The Water Mountain

looking back to September 2016:

Karen, Kit and I closed our vacation with a visit to the Waterberg, which I first encountered in November 2013, when I visited the Cheetah Conservation Fund outside Otjiwarongo.  For two weeks, I ate almost every meal (except a couple days spent at Etosha) at a picnic table gazing at this magnificent plateau of striated rock.  The sun rose over it sometime before breakfast, and at dinner the sunset glinted off of it.  I wanted to go there.

Close-up or from a distance, it's glorious.

So did Kit and Karen, so we drove south from Grootfontein and checked into one of the 'self-catering' chalets or bungalows operated by the national park service.  'Self-catering' meant a braai (barbecue) stand, a sink and a small fridge; no pots, pans, utensils or stove.  You can figure out most things on a grill, but not how to boil noodles without a pan to hold the water.  Luckily we had frozen pizzas for back-up.

Dinner also not so important when this is the view from the braai stand.

Even luckily-er, the baboons who had seriously frightened a friend staying here months earlier left us alone, although they were a constant presence at the site.  They had gotten very aggressive with S. and her family, coming right up to their chalet and climbing on their car, apparently trying to open doors or jimmy locks or something.  When we checked in, the desk clerk recommended throwing rocks at them if they bothered us.  Those suckers are big, they're strong, and their teeth are very serious.  I am not throwing rocks at them.  We found, fortunately, that they tended to move away from us as we walked around the campgrounds, and more fortunately we didn't run into any on the more isolated trails.

I didn't take many baboon pictures.  It's like photographing
pigeons in a city park in the USA.

'Water' in Afrikaans means 'water,' and 'berg' is 'mountain' in both Afrikaans and German, so 'Waterberg' is -- AMAZING.  For those of us who've been in the desert a bit of a while, at least.  There were trees (canopies touching!), grass (green, not yellow!), mud (muuuuudddddd!!!!), an occasional little stream or squelchy spot to be leapt, oh my swooning heart.

This is making my brain explode all over again.

We did not see rhinos*, which have been relocated here as a safe and nurturing location for them.  Lots of mongooses, dik-diks, baboons, and Kit and Karen saw the one Namibian parrot and some love birds during a stroll whilst I tried the swimming pool.  Mostly it's about the water with me.

Damara dik-dik

Black mongoose

Ringed or banded mongoose with indigenous tourists

Also another dassie; it's smack-dab in the middle of the photo.

Once enough baboons convened at the pool, I elected to vacate.
That's how seriously I take that musculature and confident attitude they radiate.

Oh, and the views climbing and at the top were pretty good.

Thanks so very much to Kit and Karen for visiting, and for lugging me along.  Also, I'm very sure they did not divvy the bills up quite so evenly as they might have; my Peace Corps stipend thanks them, too.


*I've wimped out on trying to decide whether rhinoceri, rhinoceroses, rhinocerat or rhinocera is the correct plural.  Blogger likes the second, but I think it inelegant.