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.