Oh Yeah!

Oshikunde will have a new volunteer teacher for the 2011 school year! I am jealous of him, but happy that there will be one more devoted staff member at the school next year.

Starting to Say Goodbye

The ending of this year has been an extended one. The Grade 10 learners left school in mid-October. The Grade 12s followed them about one week later. The rest of the learners will be completely finished tomorrow. The WorldTeach group held its End of Service gathering on Halloween, and at this event and most every week since then I gave a firm handshake or a hug to another volunteer or two whom I will be unable to see the rest of the year.

As the year closes I have also been ensuring that I do everything I want to before I depart. Last week I attended my first - and last - Oshiwambo church service, which lasted four hours, and this Saturday I plan on visiting one last town in the North that I have yet to see. Also, despite doing my best to remain busy, my to-do list at work has been dwindling. My class and I gave our room one final cleaning, and I finished the year-end library inventory. After taking on an overly ambitious schedule with gusto, yesterday was the first evening I had at school with learners present when I didn’t really have anything to do since March.

I spent long periods of time sitting silently in different spots on the school blocks (including some time on my roof) gazing passively while trying to wrap my head around my experience this past year. I tried to remember all of the sunrises and sunsets, all of the moonrises, all of the cloudscapes and starscapes, all of the pick-up truck rides, all of the long walks, and as many of all the other notable scenes as I could scrounge up from the foggy recesses of my mind.

Once during term one I was sitting on one of the concrete blocks looking at a dark black cloud far in the distance when I received a text message from my friend in Eenhana saying that she was in the middle of a tremendous storm. The cloud I was pondering was the very same one unleashing over her town approximately 50 kilometers away. The vastness and openness of the landscape is conducive to meditative moments, but that same largeness combines with the medley of my emotions and their magnitude to the point where they are difficult to contain. My next door neighbor, Meme Antindi, saw me leaning on our fence and felt compelled to ask me what was wrong. I turned to her with a smile, but although I tried to compose myself my voice still faltered when I told her that I would miss Oshikunde.

We spent the next ten minutes quietly talking as the daylight diminished. I was happy to share that time with her, and it made me remember how in the beginning of the year I sought out “moments” with each of my colleagues. If I ever was able to sit and talk or work closely or ride in a truck and chat with a colleague, I would gladly think that I had been able to get a little bit closer to that person. Of course I will remember the big trips and events, and all the lesson planning, marking, teaching, cleaning, washing, and cooking; but I find that my most moving memories are those times when I got to learn more about the people with me.

The WorldTeach group in particular is one to which I am so proud to belong. While spending four years at what is allegedly one of the better institutions of higher education in the United States, I found myself surrounded by individuals I did not even respect, let alone admire, and I emerged with three people with whom I hope to never lose touch. But this WorldTeach group; it’s a collection of people which represents to me the extraordinary possibilities attainable by thoughtful, responsible, motivated human beings when they unite. It therefore represents to my excitable and idealistic eyes the amazing potential of humankind. It is inspiring to be among them.

I have gathered some email addresses to stay in contact with the school and staff, I am keeping my class rosters to remember names, and our volunteer group has started compiling a United States cell-phone number list. In a week I will part with Oshikunde and its people, probably for the rest of my life, but I am fortunate enough to have gained the possession of memories, thoughts, and a few friends with which I hope to never permanently say goodbye.

Report To Fundraisers

Several months ago I made an appeal for donations to Oshikunde Secondary School. Many family members, friends and other people I didn't even know generously contributed, and I have spent the majority of this year steadily putting those funds towards various projects at school and in the town nearby. The modest amount compiled in February lasted all of this year, to the point where over the past few weeks I was trying to spend money to make sure that the school would benefit from every penny received before I left.

About $400 US was collected, which was approximated to be $2800 Namibian. Because of the fudge-work involved in the conversion I spent a little more than this amount, but I have tried to account for everything donated.

Check out how far $400 goes:

10 Games in a Tin (Chess, Checkers, Jenga, etc) = $180 (X2) = $360
Small Speakers = $50 = $410
Blank CD (for music library) = $5 (X10) = $460
CD Carrying Case = $25 = $485
Colored Tagboard (for signs) = $35.89 = $520.89
Black Sharpie Marker (for signs) = $12.50 = $533.39
Clear Tape (for signs) = $15.68 = $549.07
Glue Stick (for signs) = $10.40 = $559.47
Plastic Ruler (admission) = $1.34 (X30) = $605.61
Case of 50 Blank CDs = $87.39 = $693
Headphones (for music library) = $25.95 = $718.95
Wall Clock = $30 = $748.95
My Skeleton Wall Poster = $35.50 = $784.45
10m traditional cloth to cover cpus (test amount) = $120 = $904.45
World Map Poster = $27 = $931.45
Dinosaurs Poster = $16 = $947.45
Marine Life Poster = $16 = $963.45
Reptiles & Amphibians Poster = $16 = $979.45
12m traditional cloth to cover cpus = $204 = $1183.45
2 GB Flash USB = $100 = $1283.45
3D Chess Software = $59.00 = $1342.45
Reader Rabbit Age 4-6 Software = $129.00 = $1471.45
Flic File Plastic Sheet Cover (X2) = $20.70 = $1492.15
Plastic Ruler (replacements) (X4) = $7.75 = $1499.90
Solar System Poster = $19.70 = $1519.60
Tangram Duet = $16.90 = $1536.50
Donation to Eenhana Basketball Court Construction= $1000 = $2536.50
My Body Poster = $35.50 = $2572.00
Roll of Flip Chart Paper = $65.00 = $2637.00
Permanent Marker Black = $18.50 = $2655.50
Weekly Newspapers (Estimated) = $50 = $2705.50
Padlock for Burglar Door (if we ever get it) = $60.75 = $2766.25
Clipboard = $13.90 = $2780.15
Duster for shelves = $25.50 = $2805.65
Box of 50 Bic Pens = $151.05 = $2956.70
Rechargeable LED Flashlight (for power losses) = $32.85 = $2989.55

Thanks again everyone!

Just an Ordinary Day

At the beginning of the year I wrote a new blog whenever something compelled me to write, and I posted the blog immediately thereafter. Sometimes I posted two or three times a week, and once or twice my posts were so long that I divided them into sections. Midway through the year I settled into the routine of posting a new piece once a week. You may or may not have noticed that I have not uploaded any new material for almost a month. Indeed, when our volunteer group met last weekend and a friend inquired how my blog was doing I responded only-half joking with, “Its dead.” Most of the volunteers present agreed that they had not written anything new in quite some time.

The thoughts “I need to write this down!” or “No one is going to believe this!” no longer occur to me. Each day is just another day. Over the course of ten months has Namibia grown less beautiful? Have the situations that arise become less absurd? The two answers are, “Objectively: no, but relatively: yes.” A friend recently told me that she was intrigued by the fact that when she thinks about things after-the-fact she knows that just as many ridiculous things happen to her as at the start of the year, but in the moment everything seems normal.

The stars are just as mesmerizing. In fact, living in a place with no light pollution for a whole year has allowed me one of my first opportunities to observe a complete cycle of the night sky. Animals are as present and surprising as ever. I rode a donkey for the first time a few weeks ago, and I freed a dog from barbed wire just a couple days before learning that the region was experiencing a rabies outbreak. Absolutely insane things still happen. One volunteer had her principal confide in her that he has killed a man. Also, a recent educational circular informed teachers that at a nearby school learners found a large object in the ground and began to play with it. Upon seeing the learners handling this object, the school’s science teacher joined them. Eventually the object was identified as a land mine, and the bomb squad had to be called. They detonated the active mine several kilometers away from the school, and windows were still shattered by the blast. It was only sheer luck that the bomb did not explode earlier.

In January I wrote a post about a boy I saw on the side of the road. Later in term 1 I wrote a piece about walking to a watering hole with learners. This term a school almost blows up, and my response barely exceeds, “Geez.”

It’s said that familiarity breeds contempt. I only dislike my situation and surroundings when I am some combination of exhausted, hot, and hungry. It seems to me that familiarity simply breeds familiarity. It is true that emotional responses might be subdued, but they depend on more factors. When I see male colleagues on a Sunday evening or coming back from the road on another school night I know they are probably drunk. I hate that. I hate that more each week. When my principal still has not furnished my computer lab with an iron burglar door after four months of assuring me that it will be done soon, I am not surprised. I am frustrated, and I hope always to be so because anything else is acquiescence to the general apathy, but it doesn’t ruin my day like it did the first few weeks of disappointment. When I climb in the back of a truck with 10 other people I know my legs and back will be in pain, but for some reason it still gives me a faint grin. And when I fetch water at night I know that it takes my container a little less than 2 minutes to fill. That makes things easier in the darkness, and it allows me a bit more time to look skywards, where I now know where to find all of my favorite constellations. If you’re familiar with my blog, you will know I like that.

I walked around Namibia and I saw…

three men lift the end of a truck so a fourth could see what he needed to fix.
a teacher lying in bed while a learner mopped her floor.
Che Guevera hats and t-shirts.
a few new kilometers of tar on the road for four consecutive weeks.
a wizened woman being pushed in a wheelbarrow by an adolescent boy.
a box that I had thrown away days before holding a chicken.
a drunken man rolling around in the dirt.
a gas station and a supermarket under construction.
a child picking through things in a trash pit.
a young woman say she wanted to know more about the “niggas” she sees in movies.
four KFCs.
no McDonald’s.
rusted up-side down chassis on the roadside.
four children passing around a bottle of alcohol.
a learner offer me a chicken for a photograph.
Obama sandals and sunglasses.
a teacher towing another teacher’s car.
new tables and turnstiles at the grocery store in town.
a beggar woman asking me for money to buy snuff.
a first grader holding her baby brother.
headstone stores.
South and Central American soap operas dubbed into English.
a white person almost hit a black person with his car and not care.
a man drop off an enormous sack of seeds at the home of relatives he had not seen recently.
a principal buying learners bread.
a man dancing by himself on the street to music coming from a store.
vuvuzelas.
children playing soccer with balled up socks.
living things sitting under trees.
stores owned by Chinese people.
a guy wearing a University of Dayton Flyers sweatshirt.
ATM security guards.
barbed wire fences.
women selling fried dough and fruit.
men selling pre-pay cell-phone minutes.
huge hanging hunks of meat for sale.
a group of friends playing volleyball in the evening.
church sermons being preached to audiences in fields.
Toyota trucks.
cars without seat-belts.
free condoms on offer in bathrooms and bars.
dogs that are not spayed or neutered.
learners washing their uniforms.
two boys walking with a box on their heads and holes to see through playing robot.

Pictures from Kyle’s Camera

Here are a few pictures that I snagged from my friend Kyle’s camera. It is a small assortment from term 1 and the long holiday. The pictures include one of me and Kyle in the back of a truck on our trip to Ruacana Falls (Post: Nature is Beautiful), Kristen and I snugly tucked into a truck bed (Kyle took the picture while crouching at our feet in a small niche, and we rotated these positions for approximately 5 hours), a hippo and an elephant in the Chobe River, me jumping off of a bridge, our holiday crew’s “Family Christmas Photo” at the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, Mocambiquan fishermen, and the stunning sunset from our campsite at Ponta Barra.

The link again is:

http://picasaweb.google.com/104184428031129256317

Sir, What is a Legacy?

One problem a large number of Namibian teachers have is speaking way over the heads of their learners. In order to acquire teaching qualifications a Namibian will have to complete some form of tertiary education, and in order to be accepted into an institution after grade 12 a learner must be excellent, compared to the rest of their class. To give you an idea, I assisted a few grade 12 teachers compile their pass/fail reports, and a generous estimation of how many learners scored high enough on their August examinations to meet the University of Namibia’s entry requirements would be 10%. When working, teachers address their classes as if they were talking with someone of their level of education even though they have had at least four more years of it than their learners (and with younger learners, far many more years) at serious and well-funded institutions (UNAM in the capital has a few more resources than does your average bush school).

It doesn’t help that the style of education here is not conducive to learners speaking up, speaking out, or really speaking at all. It is typical for a teacher to write the next batch of information from the syllabus on the chalkboard, which is called a summary, and the day’s lesson will be simply requiring the learners to copy it into their notebooks. Teachers can arrive late to class if they have already written the day’s summary, a teacher might not attend class if the summary is already up, and some teachers give the summary to a learner and have that child write it on the board for them. If a teacher speaks it is usually to repeat the words aloud and to occasionally ask, “Are we together?” which is Namlish that translates to “Do you understand?” Even primary school learners have already mastered the art of nodding and saying yes in unison so that the teacher will continue.

And so it happens that learners who do not know right from left, cannot identify an adjective or convert verbs into the past tense will come to me during study time with their science summaries and ask, “Mr. Brent, what is ‘sublimation’?” or with their social studies summaries and ask, “Mr. Brent help me ‘monarchy’?”

Earlier in the year our Circuit’s Inspector of Education, a legitimately eloquent man with a resonating voice, visited our school to give a motivational talk to the learners. It is a shame that almost none of his speech was comprehended. He led into one portion with, “All of us wish to leave a legacy…” I nodded at the thought, but grimaced slightly at the vocabulary. That day my English 11 class had a few free minutes at the end of the lesson, so one of my learners raised his hand and asked, “Sir, what is a legacy?” I had the learners walk outside and line up in the sand. Then I told them to stomp their feet into the ground, take a step back, and look at their footprints. I told them that a legacy is how you change something, it is what you leave behind after you go, it is like a footprint.

As the school-year is now in its final term, I find that I am thinking more and more about whether what I have brought to Oshikunde will last. When I teach in different classrooms I see what is left of the posters that I contributed to the walls. All of the HIV/AIDS Awareness posters my Grade 11 and 12s made have been torn down. My hand-written “CAPITAL and lowercase” alphabets are swinging slightly in the breeze and displaying pencil and chalk-drawn graffiti. The ROYGBIV colors poster for my grade 8 class has simply disappeared. When I see these, my lessons are momentarily interrupted as I press my lips tightly, inhale, and grunt before relocating my train of thought. I’m happy I’ve been able to carve out an area of the school blocks in the library over which I have complete control. Possessing the key and being present at all times when learners are inside allows me to ensure that the materials within are used and treated properly.

And use it we do! I teach twelve computer classes a week, and every day Monday through Thursday the library is almost full to capacity during both afternoon and evening study sessions. Monday afternoons I take one of the lower primary grades (1-4) for a short reading lesson and then story-time (I just can’t help myself), Tuesdays grades 5-7 rotate which learners are allowed to come in and take JUST 1 BOOK (to prevent complete mayhem) and read quietly for thirty minutes before I allow board games, Wednesdays are sports days outside, Thursdays grades 8-10 are allowed free rein, and each of these days in the evening two of the eight hostel classes are given priority in admission. Despite this maximization of our new resources, I worry about what will happen next year. There simply are too few teachers at Oshikunde. None of the teachers possess all three of the needed criteria of initiative, skill, and time to ensure that the library remains open next year. There are teachers I consider knowledgeable and responsible enough to entrust the media center to, but these teachers are already too busy to take on something else in addition to their regular work.

Another disturbing reality is the inability of Oshikunde to keep staff. Two teachers have left the school this year as well as both of our Heads of Department, and only one of the vacancies, the grade 7 post, was filled. Even worse, the now transferred HODs were the two strongest staff members that the school possessed. Namibia has begun awarding teachers a “bush allowance”, which is additional payment given on a scale to teachers depending on the amenities present at their school, to encourage teachers to take positions at disadvantaged schools. You would think that Oshikunde, which lacks dependable power and running water, would be in the group of schools whose teachers receive this payout (and every teacher here thought it would), but somebody in some office somewhere flubbed it up leaving Oshikunde off the list.

The truth is, even if the school remains exactly the same after I leave at the end of the year, and especially if it keeps bleeding staff members, the library and its shelves and posters and networked computers, will be used as much as they were last year when everything was in boxes behind locked doors. I have written letters to my organization, WorldTeach, as well as to the Regional Director of Education requesting a volunteer to follow me, and I enlisted my principal to do the same. At this point, that really is all I can do, and I now must face the troubling question of whether my year’s work was worth anything at all.

At first I’m down, but when I take just a moment to consider the answer I realize how absurd the question is. So what if posters decay? Classes still had months during which they could gaze at them and learn, and if learners made them they still benefited from the activity and the pride in seeing their work prominently pasted on the otherwise barren walls. Plus, the loss of a poster doesn’t erase the impact of a year’s worth of lessons. And what about the pictures printed, cds burned, CVs typed? One of my personal gauges of success is how few times I can wear a tie in my life, I shave once a week, and to cope with the heat I come to work with my sleeves already rolled up, but it isn’t too ridiculous to think that I might have been a model of responsibility and professionalism which could help some of these kids in the future. And the media center? Two terms of dictionaries, magazines, newspapers, easy readers, textbooks, Microsoft Word, Children’s Encarta software and more, what is worth the effort if that isn’t? Even if the media center is not reliably used for years to come, it has been used.

Your legacy is those things that are carried away from you in the heads and hearts of people you meet. Every action, good and ill, regardless of how minor or how seemingly temporary has the potential to roll on into the world unendingly. I don’t finish everyday here in the positive. Even so, I sure as hell try, and I go to sleep tired. I think I can be satisfied with that.

Still, I really hope we get a volunteer next year.

The Meaning of the Bush

One term that I now frequently use in Africa is “the bush”. I’ve noticed that I use it freely in my blog posts without ever having explained what it is. I intend to correct that now.

Before coming to Africa I had heard the word, but had very little idea what it meant or how to envision it. Indeed, even after I first arrived the word seem used by everyone so indiscriminately that I still couldn’t pin it down. When learners are suspended from the hostel they are forced to go sleep “in the bush”. Schools are supposed to lock their gates because it is dangerous “in the bush” at night. At its vaguest the term “bush” refers to any area beyond development, almost any area on the other side of a fence, regardless of the plant and wildlife present. If you are off the road you are in the bush. If you are past the tar road or on a gravel road you are in the bush.

My curiosity compelled me one afternoon during the term 2 holiday to slip through our school’s back fence for some exploring and first hand research.

When used with precision, at least in Namibia, the word bush means the environment of sparsely populated, medium-sized trees and sand sprinkled with low grass and plants that dominates the country’s northern regions. The bush is not the jungle. Even at its thickest the bush is still marginally less dense than “the woods” of the United States. The trees are shorter and not as thick. Many are also more mushroom-shaped, often with a dome of green resting above a thin frame as opposed to the fuller, more circular toppings or conical shapes of trees I know from home. The space between trees allows for easy passage, and there are numerous natural clearings, allowing you to see several layers of trees deep. The bush is also dry and severe. Most plants have large thorns. After the rains the bush temporarily owns some deep greens, but the predominant colors are faded green and the varying light browns of the soil, bark, and sun-worn grasses.

There aren’t too many animals in the bush. You can encounter chickens, donkeys, cattle, or pigs, but these are all the possessions of community farmers that round them up every day. There definitely are wild animals such as snakes and birds or (depending on where you are) warthogs and even giraffes, and there are plenty of bugs in the evening. But if you take a peek into the bush at a random time during the day, it will probably appear devoid of mobile life.

On an afternoon not too long ago I was in a truck hitching a ride back to my school. The driver spoke to me rapidly in Oshiwambo and made some gestures toward the bush that I didn’t understand in the slightest. I nodded my head and said, “Ewa” which means “OK”, because that’s what I do when I realize there is no hope of effective communication, and the man turned off the paved road onto a trail of deep sand between the trees. We drove for a while, at least one kilometer, getting stuck only once in the sand before we reached a ramshackle “gate” of some logs piled on top of each other. A boy in the truck hopped out and chucked the logs out of our way to allow us through. Beyond the gate was an enormous clearing with several traditional homesteads (fences made of long, vertical, wooden poles surrounding a handful of small huts or rooms). This place tucked in the bush and accessible by a path indistinguishable from almost all other areas between trees was the residence of his extended family – brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, and more, and he had come to give them a gigantic sack of mahangu seeds for them to use for planting their next crop.

One feature of the bush landscape that fascinates me is the regular eruption of termite towers from the earth. They often appear in rows almost equidistant from the road and equidistant from each other. They are usually gray, but sometimes are reddish. Constructed by thousands of little bugs and held together by a secreted sticky substance the towers start out wide at their base and grow narrower as they extend upward, sometimes eight or ten feet high, or higher. According to one guide, these towers incredibly are only ventilation shafts for series of underground tunnels that can expand into areas of 40 square kilometers around. One afternoon I wanted to better know of what exactly they were made, so I latched my fingers onto a little nub and broke it off. The piece came loose more easily than I expected, and I could crumble it in my fingers. I was slightly concerned that a phalanx of furious soldier insects would burst out looking for a fight, but I had apparently caused no disturbance. The tower, like the bush, can be seen easily and superficially understood from a distance. They both also conceal much more than can be observed with casual glances. If you hit the right spot at the right time it’s possible that you may be overwhelmed, but for the most part there is not much there.

At Home in Oshikunde

Before my sickness in term 2 and after a particularly excellent day, I climbed into bed, and after remarking the naturalness of this action I thought to myself that I was at home. I had after all been living in that room, working in those chairs, and sleeping in that bed for half of a year. I had a refrigerator from which I could pull fresh milk and a cupboard from which I could take cereal for a “late night” snack, and I had a light switch I could flick to officially bring the day to a close. “Oshikunde eumbo pifay!” or “Oshikunde home now!” would be my broken but bubbly Oshikwanyama reply to the friendly greeters in town who recognized me asking, “How is Oshikunde?”

This was a beautiful but brief phase. Illness, work, time, and the inevitable recognition that Oshikunde contained none of my family members or close friends tempered my affection and reduced my label for the place to my “abode”. Sadly, I typically am so busy at school that I no longer have the opportunities to allow the place to seep in through my senses like before. Only in term 1 did I have time to gaze at the sky and contemplate how far I could see, or go for a walk without a destination, or grin while I listened to the foolish sounds of learners staying up irresponsibly late, or make faces at the children who live nearby without placing a time limit on our play in my mind. Also, my desire to spend time with my friends, and admittedly, considerations for my own sanity, compel me to place Oshikunde behind me most weekends. At the lowest point of the second term my school was merely where I stayed to crank out 120 hour stretches of alternating work and sleep, arriving with only the amount of supplies needed, and abandoning at knock off on Fridays.

Over the second term holiday I was able to recapture some of the wonder that Oshikunde had once held. Ample sleep sessions, naps, regular exercise, and all day reads restored me. At night, with the school - a pocket in the bush 3 kilometers from the road - completely uninhabited except for myself, I could sit with a book in my adequately lit room, look out the window into unadulterated darkness enveloping me, and marvel at the sensation that something supernatural might lay beyond the barrier, or perhaps even pure nothingness.

Because I like to share my residence with other volunteers, I try to persuade them to visit me on occasion, and the few “Oshikunde weekends” I have hosted have been carried out with varying levels of success. The first time anyone stopped by my school the water tap which was supposedly fixed a few days prior had already ceased to function. When my house first held a large group for the evening we sat with the front and back doors open to generate a breeze but with the light out to prevent attracting bugs inside. When a friend stayed over to help me install computers he picked up one of my water buckets without knowing that the metal handle was broken and a good ten liters fell to the floor. Just this last weekend when one of my guests tried to manually fill the toilet, the water uselessly drained straight through the bowl because she didn’t know that the flush handle needed to be pressed upward firmly to seal it. Not long after that Kyle grabbed the handle to shut the bathroom door behind him and it came out of the wood in his hand.

Although I have made the exact same mistakes, and I had been aware of all of my house’s loose doorknobs, broken handles, and finicky flushers for about 8 months, I failed to inform my friends of their presence because it just didn’t occur to me to do so. I have grown so familiar with my house’s kinks that I forgot they were abnormal, and maybe even forgot they existed. When I pick up the red bucket I just grasp it by the edge rather than the metal bar. When I close the bathroom door I just put my hand on the door itself instead of the handle. An upward flick of the flusher automatically follows the removal of the bowl’s lid, and the shutting of any door and the pressing of my cardboard bug guards against the gap between the door and the floor with my foot is one complete motion. Witnessing my patchwork house come apart at the seams at the hands of inexperienced residents brought to my attention how well I know my place, and how snugly I fit into it. I couldn’t help grin at the sounds of a metal doorknob crash or a bucket splash. I’ve heard them all before. And it made me curious, if anyone follows me at Oshikunde, will they have the same routines? Will they be comfortable on my bed despite the broken beam? Will I find it strange to eat off of a plate instead of out of my one bowl? How long will I remember the now muscle-memorized sequence of movements I use to successfully bath with a tin cup and a plastic basin? Will the electrical tape stains on the walls from my failed mosquito screen ever come off? Just how long my imprint on the place will remain and how long its imprint will last in me I can’t know. But I know that while my niche in Oshikunde is not and will never be my home, for the moment it is definitely mine.

A Second Helping of Pictures

Believe it or not I have finally gotten around to posting a fresh batch of pictures. In case, like me, you have forgotten where in the world on the world wide web my pictures are, here is the link again: http://picasaweb.google.com/104184428031129256317

The newest album is entitled "The Libulali...and a spider that lives in my house". I think the title is pretty self-explanatory. See if you can find the spider!

Term 2 Progress Report

As my lengthy term 1 holiday ended, I was eager to return to teaching. At the same time, I was bracing myself for what I expected to be the dog days of the Namibian winter. The rain had stopped, and it still will not resume until the end of the year. What problems this would pose for me I wasn’t exactly sure. There were fewer national holidays in the term 2 months, and there were also fewer “volunteer get-togethers” planned. I envisioned this second term as a challenge that would have to be slogged through, and at some points even endured.

At first my prediction was almost palpably incorrect. I was hard at work and full of energy, and I was amazed at how rapidly the term was passing. Wow, three weeks done already, I would think, that’s about 30 percent finished. Hey, now a whole month is gone. My work was enjoyable, I delighted in the progress I could observe in my learners, and my weekends were unexpectedly eventful. I watched World Cup matches, visited Etosha National Park, spectated at cultural dance festivals (at one a Namibian teacher demanded I allow her to take the microphone and introduce me to the entire audience), and I was flying faster through Harry Potter than the eponymous hero could move on his Firebolt broomstick.

Then it all came to a sweaty, cramping, vomiting, moaning halt. I only missed three days of classes, but I quickly fell behind in my work. Despite this, when I returned I continued to take on more responsibility with the library and computer lab, and on top of that, it seemed I would be battered every Wednesday at the staff briefing with more tasks to complete. I was foolhardy and at any given moment worked with as much energy as my recovering body would allow. One afternoon both my principal and the science HOD implied in the Namibian way that I should sign out to go home and rest. “I can tell you are tired”, “Don’t force anything”, “You are not yourself.” It was obvious what they were communicating to me, but I declined their offer and returned to my office. It was weeks before I could go a whole working day without worrying about needing to rush to the nearest toilet during a class (or having to do just that), over a month before my appetite truly returned, and almost two months before I first feebly attempted exercise again. Goodness knows how long lingering symptoms affected me throughout the term, or how much I prolonged my own illness with over-exertion.

By the time the most salient of the symptoms had subsided, it was a few weeks into July, and I had already started counting down the days to the term’s end. At the end of each evening study session I would clean up the library and then exhale audibly as I crossed off that day on the library’s wall calendars. I peeked into my multivitamin container every morning to keep tabs on my progress to the term’s conclusion based on how many tablets were left. I conceived of every weekday in its relation to “hump day” (Wednesday), and I even realized that June 15th through July 16th, was the year’s “hump month”.

At the end of each week I would jet for town as quickly as possible. With my frustrations intensifying every week I was more willing to cut loose on the weekends instead of just relaxing. I was drinking larger quantities, and on Sundays rather than returning to school refreshed, I would be just as tired as when I left on the previous Friday. That meant that on the next Friday, after a full week of work, I was even more fatigued and ready to hop in a car out of Oshikunde, and wanted even more than the last weekend to blow off some steam. All of you are perceptive enough to see already how this cycle worked against me; it didn’t click in my head for several weeks.

Now the second trimester is ending, so it is time for another progress report. When I first arrived in Namibia, days were journeys in themselves. Absolutely everything that I saw, heard, or did was completely new. Each moment demanded my utmost attention and concentration. In term 2 I had found routines. Large portions of my day became automated, and the lack of needed conscious attention made this tougher term subjectively shorter. These past two entries may make term 2 seem pretty bleak, and although it’s true that portions were quite difficult and it didn’t contain as many “do before you die” events, it had more extraordinary moments than I could have justifiably expected. The whole process of building the media center and even just the smiles I got from observing kids flip through books or scroll through computer articles, were worth many years of frustrations - it is one of the most meaningful things I have ever accomplished.

Making kids laugh as I goofily acted out definitions during music night, leaving the classroom after a great lesson, riding back to school as the sun set, fetching water or brushing my teeth at night under the slowly rotating Namibian firmament – these are moments that I am willing to endure almost anything to experience. I am prepared to put up with dirt roads on ancient suspensions, the bell ending the period 10 minutes late, 9 power outages in one library session, incomprehensibly slow comprehension in English class, 5 hour long staff meetings, knocks on my door at 6:30 am, and everything else, just for those brief instants, because as long as you are awake and your head is up, no amount of fatigue can make the stars less beautiful.

Trying Times

I am officially burnt out. No matter how many hours of sleep I get black marks are permanently under my eyes. At first I was surprised after sleeping ten hours to see them in the mirror, but now I am resigned to their presence. I find myself getting irritable, something that would never have happened in term 1, almost every day. Each week it gets more difficult to return to school from town, and Sunday, a day which throughout high school and college I would reserve for doing all of my work, is now a day when I begrudgingly return home, unload my groceries, eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and immediately fall asleep. One night during our weekly Skype call I unexpectedly started free-associating, harangued my family with my frustrations, and although they couldn’t hear me because my microphone was broken, I cried.

I tell myself that after eight months this is perfectly natural, and I try not to add to my aggravation by criticizing myself for my own attitude. Still, my lows are low, and recently the positive moments have been brief respites from a consistent melancholy. It is a testament to the beauty of some of the people and places of this country that they can still momentarily puncture this understandable but heavy weariness.

One source of happiness has been our school cleaner, Tate David Shapwanale. He is a hard worker and a kind, good-humored man. His English is much better than he thinks and more than good enough to make me laugh. I wouldn’t call his smile pretty, but it is pure. He has enthusiastically participated in my weekly staff computer training sessions, and he routinely is the first to sign up.

On several occasions this term he has unknowingly lifted my spirits. After one particularly taxing day I walked to the local store to buy a few food items. The chance to walk by myself was revitalizing, and when I saw David 25 meters off the road carrying an infant, I felt up to more than just a wave and smile, so I hollered, “Is that one yours?” He beamed, and when I drew nearer he responded, “This is my son, the last born.” He introduced me to his boy, Antonious. We then spoke of his family, he told me he had another older son, and about how David was currently on the lookout for birds to shoot for food, something that he does every morning and evening but I never knew he did. After saying goodbye I continued my walk back to school, and shortly thereafter I had one of those, “That’s what this is all about!” moments, nodded my head vigorously, and grinned like a doofus.

This Wednesday I posted another computer training sign-up sheet and was in the middle of preparing the lab for the teachers’ arrival when Meme Anna, the powerful, intelligent, Oshikwanyama teacher, stopped in my doorway and told me that the lesson would have to be canceled. A child of David Shapwanale had passed away. The teachers gathered and spoke while those with cars arranged the transportation. I sat on the concrete of the school blocks next to a colleague who told me that David’s eldest son, who was still no more than a baby, had died, and he understood this to be the third of David’s children to die young.

The fourth grade teacher, Tate Haiduwa, pulled up, and I hopped into his truck. We drove down the road a ways, stopped, and walked toward the traditional home where David resides. The home is a small plot of land surrounded by a low fence of logs and three lengths of wire. Inside the gate there are a few “rooms” or stone huts. Each hut is constructed on a square patch, no more than six feet by six feet, that is dug about 4 inches into the ground. The sloping thatched roof begins maybe four feet off the ground so that one must crouch to pass through the threshold and then can stand with a little hunch once inside.

David’s tears were audible from outside his room, and a group of male teachers and I slowly entered and sat around him silently. A few comforting words were said, and after several minutes we rose to say goodbye. Being a novice at the language, as I exited I simply placed my hand on his shoulder and whispered, “Ombili”, which means “I am sorry.”

The other men drove to a bar, so I walked back to school alone. Thinking about David, there were several times when I nearly burst into tears. Three children. None of them older than a few years. A six by six stone house. I remembered how I noticed his work boots on the floor and heard the methodical ticking of a small battery powered clock he kept by the head of his bed. I have on several occasions criticized some of my colleagues for having what I consider a poor work ethic, but tears pressed forcefully against my eyelids as I began to understand how hard David had to work, just to live. I thought of how exhausted I was after eight months, and I have light! And a stove! His is an existence that must be so hard, so…tiring. It is not an existence that many people would choose, but with the way he carries himself daily, it is an existence of which he can be proud, and an existence which I enormously respect. He deserves so much better.

The Libulali

During the first term of the school year one of the school’s classrooms was used as a boys’ dormitory. Sometime during March the school was informed that technicians from Windhoek would arrive by the end of the month to set up the school’s computer lab using the computers being held in storage. The boys were asked to leave their room and move into tents on the ground, but the technicians never came. My HOD (head of department) Vilo and I decided that it was time to see if we couldn’t plug the machines in ourselves, but the Principal asked us to wait because he had just been told that technicians would be coming sometime before the end of the term in April. They never came.

So for approximately two months a classroom from which learners were evicted sat empty and unused; it bugged me. During the examinations, when learners stopped coming to school regularly, and lessons basically ceased, I decided to busy myself with converting the empty room into something productive. After acquiring keys to unlock storerooms I had learners help me carry boxes of books (fiction, non-fiction, textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, books on tape, that had been collecting dust for years - plural) across the school blocks into the new library. Other teachers and I unscrewed shelves that stood bare in different offices and placed them next to the library walls instead. Each night I loved going to the library to sit at my computer alphabetizing and cataloguing all of our books while playing hip-hop music at just slightly above a reasonable volume. The light in the room must have given away my habits because I was once asked by another teacher, “What time do you wake up and what time do you go to sleep?”

Included in the pile of things rotting in storage were 11 unassembled computer desks. I enlisted Vilo’s help to spend a few good hours lifting and hammering pieces of wood, and by the end of the night the library was outfitted with some pretty sharp looking workspaces. That night just so happened to be the most rewarding, and best night’s work I had ever performed.

At the start of term 2 I adorned the shelves with signs and the walls with posters, printed a library contract, and in the first few weeks of the term I took classes into the library one by one to receive a library orientation (“Fiction means False”, “be nice to the books because they are your friends”, etc). As classes learned how to use their new resources the library opened in the afternoon and in the evening with different classes having different scheduled times for them to use it.

Some things that the learners did in the library were quite frustrating, but I had to keep reminding myself that these kids had no idea what to do because they had never been in a library in their whole lives. For example, when I originally shelved our magazines I divided them into piles based on subject matter. Then within categories I had magazines alphabetical by title, and then within titles I had them in chronological order. It took maybe two nights before I realized that just keeping like magazines in a pile together was sufficient. The kids’ disorganization was partly due to an immature messiness and also partly due to the fact that many of them didn’t even recognize that the piles were organized in the first place.

As the library found its rhythm I decided it was time to start opening computer boxes – and time to stop asking permission to do so. Plugging in the computers wasn’t exactly difficult, certain cords can only fit in certain holes, but I hadn’t the foggiest how to connect them as a network or to manage a server. A Peace Corps volunteer I had befriended who lived in a town nearby was nice enough to pop in one day and set-up a mini-network for me with the school’s server and three client computers, and she gave me a crash course on how to be the server administrator myself. Another WorldTeach volunteer from town was also willing to come by a few weekends later to spend an evening with me listening to hip-hop music at nowhere near a reasonable volume, hooking up the rest of our computers, and zip-tying all of the cords together (a crucial step). That so happened to just surpass my night with Vilo to become the best night of work I have ever completed.

So Oshikunde now has a full-fledged media center, and the kids have become so accustomed to it that I can sit at my desk typing this blog while they read and only have to utter the occasional “Quiet please”. Computer lessons at first were exhausting, running around making sure no one broke anything and repeating myself over and over again. To give you an idea, in lesson one it took every class a full forty minutes to simply turn on and then turn off their computers. But just this afternoon I had a full computer lab with learners doing everything from flipping through encyclopedia software to playing mouse practice games and using typing training programs while we all listened to a local Kwaito (a Namibian form of up-tempo hip-hop) musician at a reasonable volume.

In conclusion, which is a way you should never conclude an essay, I just wanted to mention some other pieces of the library. The library has more substance than just desks, computers, shelves, and books. It also has all sorts of educational posters (world map, dinosaurs, marine life, my skeleton, etc). It also has cuts of traditional Owambo cloth patterns that protect the machines from dust after hours. It has a clock above the blackboard (something quite foreign to your average Owambo). It has a CD-case full of local and international music, speakers, and headphones. It has board game box sets complete with chess, checkers, and what has proven to be the crowd favorite, snakes and ladders. All of these items were purchased using funds that were donated by my faithful readers, and I have only spent about half of what was raised. So on behalf of everyone at Oshikunde I wanted to say thank you.

One night my principal observed as learners lined up outside the library door waiting for it to open and then filed in quietly, took out books and began to read and study. I could not have been more proud of the “libulali” that you helped me build.

The Reading List

I have been rather busy recently. Working 11, 12, and 13 hour days, and keeping your home, clothes, and self clean without running water leaves little time for writing blog posts. All of the free time that I have enjoyed, I have made sure to spend reading (because it makes me happy). So here is a lazy blog post, a list of all the books I have read thus far this year....

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Vol. 1 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
My Bondage and My Freedom – Frederick Douglas (tremendous)
Getting Stoned with Savages – J. Maarten Troost
A Concise History of the Rehoboth Basters
Giving – Bill Clinton
Desert Notes - Barry Lopez
The Inferno - Dante
Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie
The Aeneid - Virgil
Papillon – Henri Charriere
The Geography of Bliss – Eric Weiner
Carry on Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse (delightful)
It Can’t Happen Here – Sinclair Lewis
The Reader – Bernard Schlick (overrated)
Mozambique – I forget who wrote this travel book
Three short novels by Herman Melville (Benito Cereno, Bartleby the Scrivener, Billy
Budd)
Nichomachean Ethics - Aristotle
The Truth: With Jokes – Al Franken
The Life of Pi – Yann Martel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Don’t Run, Whatever You Do: My Adventures as an African Safari Guide – Peter Allison
Profiles of the Future – Arthur C. Clarke
Harry Potter #1 – J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter #2 – J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter #3 – J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter #4 – J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter #5 – J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter #6 – J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter #7 – J.K. Rowling (you may infer that I liked these books)
Messiah – Gore Vidal
Different Seasons – Stephen King (This book contains "Hope Springs Eternal: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption")
Over the Top – Joel Don Humphreys (the absurd Sly Stallone star vehicle in which he plays an arm-wrestling truck driver trying to reconcile with the son he left at a young age, was apparently actually based on this book)
A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning – Lemony Snicket
A Series of Unfortunate Events #2: The Reptile Room – Lemony Snicket
A Series of Unfortunate Events #3: The Wide Window – Lemony Snicket
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

I plan on putting more effort into my post next week!

Stamps 9 – 12: The Indian Ocean and Back to Windhoek

Something Surreal:

Our last ride from the inland out to the long sought after waters of the Indian Ocean was in the back of a truck. There is nothing unusual about that anymore. This particular truck was outfitted with wooden bench seats and an iron frame overlaid with thatching to form walls and a ceiling. Kyle and I were the first two to board, so we initially experienced the enclosed truck bed while it was otherwise empty. Raised eyebrows and head nods were sufficient to communicate our shared approval of this form of transport. Then more people began to board. Men began to board. Children began to board. Ancient women began to board. Women carrying infants began to board. Pregnant women began to board. Pregnant women carrying infants began to board. Pregnant women carrying infants accompanied by children began to board. Squeezed so tight that I began thinking it might actually be safe to have so many people in a car because if we were in a collision no one would have any space to move at all, more people approached the rear of the truck. Despite the ridiculous rides I have had in the past months, I looked incredulously as people neared the truck and thought, “This is impossible.” People began climbing on top of the thatched iron frame. Others hung on like the guys and gals who scoop up your garbage cans. When the truck sputtered forward Kyle and I estimated, because that’s all we could do, that well over thirty people were somehow using this basic pick-up truck to get to their destination.

Upon arrival, after Kyle and I had assertively cornered and retrieved our change from the punk “taxi employee”, for lack of a better term, that tried to pocket our cash and play it off with some half Portuguese half English nonsense, we walked to the campsites near the shore. It was around 5 or 6 o’clock, the sun was beginning to drop, and Kyle and I set up camp and then walked out onto the sand and into the water. The water was not too hot, not too cold, but just right. A few whoops and hollers escaped our lungs, but then after a long and tiring trip the two of us just sat or floated in the mild ocean wordlessly for an unknown, significant amount of time.

The next phase of our South African circuit was a series of two or three day stays on the shore divided by south-bound rides down the coast to the next beach town.

Vilanculos, where we first were immersed in the Indian was where Kyle and I first drank coconut milk, chomped the insides of a coconut, and sipped “sura” which refers to the low budget coconut rum. It was also where we found a seafood market where fishermen bring their catch straight in from the sea. We sat at a table here to chow down on freshly cooked fish and porridge for 20 Mets (about 60 cents). We also bought, if memory serves, three dozen crabs, vegetables, and fruit for only a few US dollars which led to an approximately 4 hour feast that we shared with some of the other campers and campsite employees.

Ponta Barra, the next stop south, was a more isolated and remote point, and we arrived off peak season. We camped near a lighthouse on a ledge overlooking the shore. On the walk to the lighthouse campsite, we passed handfuls of small wooden boats sitting on the sand, and I could not stop envisioning myself on the beach from the last scene of The Shawshank Redemption. Our view from the ledge was such that I once sat down to read and ended up sitting in the breeze staring out over the water for an indeterminate amount of time because I simply could not bring myself to take my eyes off the horizon – and I really, really like to read.

Tofo is a beach town that some of the campers at Barra sneered at as “touristy” and “commercial”. It is certainly more heavily trafficked than our first few campsites, but let’s just say it’s not even a fraction of Ocean City Maryland. On my favorite day in Tofo, I ate some fresh fruit for breakfast, did some laundry, showered, air dried in my trunks, and then read on the beach for several hours.

Our final stop in country was the capital, Maputo. A bus ride took us into town, and a map helped us locate the “budget” hostel accommodations. Maputo is one of the first real “cities” that I had walked through in Africa, and its street signs are a testament to the left-wing histories of the majority of the South African nations. It’s a little funny to walk through “Karl Marx Street”, a little weird to cross “Che Guevara Street” or “Vladimir Lenin Street”, and when you see “Robert Mugabe Street” a person who is vaguely familiar with the names of the world’s most wanted like me thinks “Wait, isn't he a piece of sh**?!?”

On the upside, your average Moçambiquan doesn’t fully understand who these people are or were, and I found the citizens of the place to be friendly and helpful. Kyle and I managed a day of walking and weary sightseeing, and the remainder of our stop was spent in the hostel watching marathons of the Simpsons and Scrubs. We initially justified this by saying that it had been five months since we had vegged on a couch and that every once in a while a good TV marathon is just what a body needs. In hindsight, I now understand that our indolence arose out of utter exhaustion.

Intercape Mainliners, a South African bus company, provided the transportation for the remainder of our circuit. Our last leg was three phases, staying a day and two nights in Johannesburg, and one day in Uppington, South Africa. The most remarkable incidents in this journey are the following:

I bought a monkey skull in a market in Moçambique, and apparently luggage containing the bones of a primate’s head does not raise any alarms when they pass through an x-ray machine at the South African border.

In Johannesburg the marathons continued and I watched the first three Rambos consecutively.

After alighting from the mainliner in Uppington an Intercape employee asked me what city I was connecting to. When I explained that I was staying there for the night, she said, “In Uppington?”

When Kyle and I entered a mall in South Africa, we saw that the “You are here” map had a touch screen, and our exclamations drew a lot of attention.

Back in Windhoek we stayed in a hostel and met our fellow Worldteachers as they arrived. A few weeks later I learned that several volunteers had voiced concerns amongst themselves about Kyle and my health. Apparently I was visibly tired and frighteningly skinny. I do know that I took some SERIOUS naps, and that I had an appetite like I have never had before or since. I ate almost non-stop the entire week I was in Windhoek. When Kyle and I had to decide between two hostels we took the slightly more expensive option because it offered a complimentary breakfast buffet that we dominated every morning. We arose at the start of the meal, stuffed our faces, returned to our tent to nap, and then awoke again a few hours later to get a second enormous breakfast before the staff put away the food.

I still have a lot more traveling that I hope to do in the several decades that the average human is blessed to live on Earth, but I think I can begin to say without boasting that I have seen a fair few places. What I cannot deny throughout these journeys is the constantly building awareness that the more different places you see, the more you learn how all human beings are the same everywhere. It’s more than the fact that almost all South African cultures greet in similar ways, or have identical handshakes, or eat comparable foods. It’s the more fundamental motivations, desires, and emotions that we seem to all share. A small boy at the orphanage in Zambia would not let go of me for the majority of our visit. I thought it was a little strange until Kyle pointed out to me that the child probably behaved that way because he had lost his parents. Joseph once abruptly changed our conversation topic with a worried question, “Where is Albania?” and we discovered that his son’s military unit was recently transferred there. Our Great Zimbabwe Ruins tour guide kept getting too far ahead of us on the tricky rock climbs, and she smiled and said quietly, almost to herself, “My friends always say I walk too fast.” One of our Moçambiquan truckers who spoke no English handed Kyle and I a handful of nuts each after he bought a bushel, smiled and nodded at us, and then turned around to resume pumping his fist and nodding his head to the music on his stereo. And even one of the border employees, after we explained that we did not have the currencies he needed in the amounts he needed, rubbed his head and took a deep sigh, obviously resenting the fools in front of him that were making his job more difficult.

Well, that’s enough philosophizing, I’m hungry.

Stamp 8: Entering Moçambique

Joseph is a middle-aged, slightly jaded, South African businessman who provides construction equipment for various jobs throughout the southern portion of Africa. He still gets a little disgruntled at all of the nonsense that one must put up with when trying to accomplish something in this part of the world (unnecessary paperwork, useless and unreliable people on the other end of the phone or right in front of you, horrible roads, etc) but he knows his way around and through a few loopholes. With his presence behind us, and his transport, Kyle and I were able to successfully pass through a border post that by the looks of it almost no one uses at all (when I showed the border attendant my passport as I departed Moçambique he had to ask a superior if the entry point he saw on my visa was a real place) and put some serious miles behind us on our way through the less developed northern part of the country. He absolutely refused any cash in return for taking us along, but since we gathered that he was a fan of cold beer, when our caravan came to a stop for the night in a small town Kyle and I bought a few to share with him. We spent an enjoyable evening talking to him about everything he knew of Southern Africa from years of living, traveling, and working, and when it was time to turn in we pitched our tent next to his truck on the side of the road.

We got up bright and early because according to Joseph our agreement with the police was that we could camp by the road if we had packed up our tent by six in the morning. Another seven hours of traveling lay ahead of us before we reached Tete, the city where Joseph and our paths would diverge.

After saying our goodbyes in Tete, Kyle and I struggled in spite of the heat to find a ride to our next stop. Tete is considered one of the hottest places in southern Africa, and for good reason. I was reduced to simply sitting with my head down in the small amount of shade afforded by a car door, and could manage to do nothing else. How anyone in that town accomplishes anything, let alone works in pants, a shirt, and tie, is utterly beyond me. Luckily, one of Joseph’s hired caravan members offered to take us even farther. Our journey with the now legendary (between me and Kyle) “Jordan Boss”, as the decals on the side of his compact proclaimed, came to an abrupt end when he was stopped for speeding. His Portuguese conversation with the arresting officer was incomprehensible except for the word “Americanos” as Jordan Boss pleaded his case. This pitiful attempt failed, and apparently Jordan had a little more than speeding on his record because the police confiscated his vehicle and stopped the next passing Mack truck to carry us to our destination.

The next legs of our journey consisted entirely of brief hostel stays while utterly exhausted and long days of traveling in truck cabs with infrequent stops and little to eat.

Things that happened while in a truck:

1) The driver stopped for over thirty minutes to successfully negotiate the purchase of a goat.
2) The driver stopped for over thirty minutes to talk to an old man.
3) The driver’s wife closed a curtain in front of us and motioned for us to lie down as we passed through a provincial border and weigh station.
4) The driver absolutely jammed out to a mix CD featuring Rod Stewart, Brian Adams, and Sting.
5) The driver turned down our (facetious) offer to pay him in bananas after he offered us what was obviously a tourist price hike.

Our breakneck trek to the Indian Ocean just so happened to contain the one and only incident in which Kyle or I obviously and seriously offended a local (unintentionally of course). In Moçambique bananas are ridiculously cheap. You can buy whole bunches for just a few Mets (which in turn are fractions of dollars), so Kyle and I subsisted on bananas, bread, and banana sandwiches during our truck traveling days. In southern Africa most everyone litters. While I pride myself on staying strong when it comes to paper and other trash, I’ll admit to chucking banana peels and other food remains out of bus, truck, and car windows. Whilst walking through a market on our way to a truck stop Kyle spotted an unlikely open metal barrel on the side of the road. I gave him my banana peel after he held out his hand and said, “Here”, and he nodded at the woman beside the can as he tossed our used peels straight into it. “Oh!” she exclaimed wordlessly, and began clumsily dragging the barrel, which we then realized to be evidently full of something, back from the road. Kyle ran up and learned that this woman had been brewing some substance in this barrel; it was not a trash can at all. After a few awkward apologies we put our heads down and made off for our next truck ride negotiation.

More Miscellaneous

The President travels in a helicopter.
Harry Potter books are friggin’ great.
Learners protested against the soccer coach by writing on a large chart paper and pasting it to the administration block.
I saw a learner wearing only a left-hand glove.
Then I saw her friend wearing a right-hand glove.
Then I saw that lots of learners share gloves.
When I walk to the trash hole to dispose of computer boxes, learners take all the boxes from me.
I have no idea what they use them for.
A construction company pledged to pave 50km of the road to my village this calendar year.
As of today they have paved about 5.
Are you all hearing the “Just like a Waving Flag” World Cup song over, and over, and over again?
Porridge is really, really, really, really, easy to make.
I am awesome at making porridge.
When a machine is not functioning properly, it is referred to as “tired”.
There is no one word in Oshiwambo for “promise”.
I watched at least 50 learners climb the sides and back of a cattle truck before they departed for a sports tournament.
Pap, the stuff that the USAID provides for malnourished children, is an acquired taste.
I love pap (the version sold in stores, I’m not taking it from needy kids).
When I saw a table at the grocery store with three white people, I knew immediately the summer volunteers had arrived.
5 power outages in an hour make it much more difficult to maintain discipline in the library.
Roosters crow at all hours of the day and night.
Watching a Namibian 12th Grader eat up Junie B. Jones makes me smile.

Stamps 5-7: Zambia - In...and Out?

On the Zambian side of Victoria Falls there is a path that leads upstream of the Zambezi River. Signs request politely that you not stray from the path, but there is a very good location for a sightseer to do just that. Hopping down a small earth ledge on your left hand side allows you to walk out to and then upon a collection of rocks that juts out into the current. To your right, flows of water with momentum in slightly conflicting directions collide with rocks and each other. To your left, maybe 25 feet, these currents plummet over the cliff. And, at dusk, on the horizon directly in front of you, the sun sets. It’s a view that is, as I taught my learners to understate, “Not too bad.”

The Zambian side of Victoria Falls has a few other unique features. Baboons will walk lazily around and even sleep on the footpaths unperturbed by any tourists that may wander nearby. There is also a footbridge swallowed by the spray in front of the falls from which you can see absolutely nothing at all, but you do get hilariously drenched.

After getting our fill of the Falls from all angles, Kyle and I said our goodbyes to Kristen who was heading back to Windhoek. I realize I do a terrible job of including references to the characters in this chronicle, but she was missed. After a packed first 12 days or so of holiday, Kyle and I prudently decided to take…one day…to rest before putting our noses down and shooting straight for Mozambique and the Indian Ocean. After all, the faster we got there, the longer we would get to relax on a beach!

This day of rest included an afternoon at the Lubasi Children’s Home, an institution I feel obligated to at least describe as an example of the kind of organization that is a part of the solution in Southern Africa. Lubasi is an orphanage funded by donations from travelers and citizens alike that takes children in as early as the age of 5 if the circumstances render it appropriate, and keeps them in their care until they finish their secondary schooling. The home employs all local Zambians as hostel matrons to stay with the children and cooks to prepare their food. The home has numerous projects where the children learn valuable skills and provide revenue for daily operations. Arts and crafts made by the children are sold to raise money; chickens are hatched, raised, and sold by the children for the same purpose. The home also has a rather large field which learners cultivate to provide food for themselves and the wider community. There is also a library and an assembly area where learners are encouraged to study and extra lessons are held after the children return home from school. Kyle and I spent a few hours with some of the boys on the grounds playing soccer, basketball, and army (with figurines the kids had sculpted out of hardened mud), and watched the kids do flips off of a tire tilted at an angle in front of a mat of straw after a running start. I managed to get my feet back under my head when I attempted, but I wouldn’t quite call what I did a flip.

Kyle and I arose in the wee hours of the next morning. “Indian Ocean or Bust!” we thought. We caught a large coach bus Northeast to Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, basking in the ease and comfort of transportation with clearly posted departure times and ticket prices. A brief, sunny walk around the capital followed, before we boarded another bus to Luangwa, a town that our maps showed us was close to the Mozambique border, a good crossing point, and had a campsite. After carrying our bags while avoiding crushing Zambian fingers as we stepped on armrests in order to climb into the far back of this bus (either no luggage was placed underneath or it overflowed into the aisle), we squeezed in and gritted our teeth until Luangwa. The policeman at the stop in Luangwa assured us that the campsite, although it was now night-time was a walk-able 2 kilometers down a gravel road. Tired after almost 17 hours of travel we set off into the pitch dark in search of where we would sleep. I will spare you the details, but the walk was definitely more than 2 kilometers, our day of travel was definitely longer than 17 hours, and at my grumpiest I muttered to Kyle that this walk “might be the least enjoyable experience of my life”.

When we woke the next day, Kyle went to freshen up, and I went to settle with the proprietors (usually check-in desks are closed after midnight). I paid for our night and exchanged some standard pleasantries with the European couple who ran the place - and had relatively poor dental hygiene. When they asked me where we were heading I coolly replied that we planned to cross into Mozambique that day via the border not much farther down the gravel road.

“Oh, you’re going the difficult way,” was the man’s response. Unaware that Kyle and I were making a decision that would make our trip even less comfortable, I uttered, “Really?” The couple explained that the road we saw on our maps no longer existed. They further explained that the only way we could travel once across that border into Mozambique was by hitching a long and unsteady ride on a fishing boat, if one just so happened to pass our way. They informed me that if Kyle and I continued northeast a good day’s journey we would come to a town called Katete, which is approximately 50km from the Cassacativa border crossing into Mozambique. I will never forget the look on the woman’s face, a weary mixture of resignation and sincere concern, as she took a deep drag of her cigarette, exhaled, and said, “Good luck.”

I had paid for our campsite because Kyle was running low on cash, which we needed to pay for rides too, and Luangwa had no ATM. Katete, our destination, had no ATM either. So Kyle and I sat by the side of the road in Luangwa hoping for a ride in a place in Zambia so developed that there was not an ATM for hundreds of kilometers in either direction.

Then Joseph arrived. A convoy of vehicles, an eighteen wheeler hauling a caterpillar machine being led and followed by SUVs with flags and signs saying “Abnormal Load” rolled to a stop at the check-point in Luangwa. I wrote off our chances with this troupe because it was way too official looking and put my nose back into “Three Short Novels by Herman Melville”. Kyle, irrepressible Kyle, ran up to the first car and started talking. When he returned he had gotten us a ride. When we asked how much, Joseph, the Afrikaner in charge of the operation, gestured dismissively and said, “We don’t want your money.” Strapped for cash on a roadside, we had gotten a ride, in a comfortable SUV, for FREE, and Joseph was taking his machine all the way to the center of Mozambique. Better luck, I am not sure I have ever had.

Under the Weather in Oshikunde

Late at night one Sunday - perhaps it was Monday morning - I awoke with discomfort in my belly and in the back of my throat. Because I was still half asleep, the only thought that I can recall having is, “not good.” I quickly came to terms with what I was going to have to face over the next few hours, and because I have no running water, used a determined burst of energy to grab one of my buckets from the kitchen and place it at the side of my bed. You can guess what followed.

There was no way I would be able to attend school, so I tried to find a silver lining in the fact that I would have a lot of time to read while I rested and recovered. I fully expected to have a 24-hour flu bug and be back at work, if not quite at 100%, the next day. Not only was I ill to the point that I could not even bring myself to open my book, this flu spell lasted into Wednesday, and by Saturday I still would feel feverish and exhausted at around 5 or 6 in the evening.

Information has few channels to travel through in Namibia. Furthermore, it has few reliable sources. I obviously notified my principal that I would be missing work, but the message did not make it to the rest of the staff. When I did not appear early on Monday morning as usual, different minds created different conjectures, and as people spoke different theories slowly spread. Mr. Brent is at an educational workshop. Mr. Brent is in Ondangwa. Why is his light on in the dead of night? He must have forgotten to switch it off before he left (It was not until Tuesday evening that another colleague learned that I was ill). Oh, Brent is not well; he must be in the hospital in Eenhaha. He is at the Oshikunde Clinic.

No, I actually was just in bed, and the light was left on so I could see my way to the bathroom whenever I may need to.

As other staff members learned that I was sick and at home, I began to get visitors and wishes for a quick recovery. Inevitably, when a teacher saw that my bed contained only two sheets, one blanket, and one unzipped sleeping bag to cope with the “winter”, I was asked, “Are you not very cold?” Another colleague told me he was very worried about me walking barefoot on my cold floor. Germ theory is printed in the biology textbooks, but in common thought, weather changes make you sick, and every disease is malaria. Fever? Malaria. Diarrhea? Malaria. Headache? Malaria.

I greatly appreciated their concerned. I was also extremely touched by one particular teacher who gave me one of his blankets and cooked me a hot bowl of rice for dinner. However, because malaria season ends with the wet season as pools dry up and cold-blooded mosquitoes can’t quite hack it in the chilly weather, and because two other volunteers that I attended a cultural festival and ate traditional food with on the weekend prior got sick with the same symptoms at the same time, I was pretty sure it was something I ate.

I befuddled some people with my confidence that only a few days rest was needed rather than a visit to a hospital, and although it took a few days longer that I originally expected I am now back on my feet and teaching, and much more wary of traditional cuisine.

Stamps 3 & 4: Departing Botswana & Entering Zimbabwe

Useful travel tip – When crossing a border ensure that you have enough currency on your person to pay your way through, especially when travelling on foot.

Our party quickly learned this lesson as we complacently attempted to enter Zimbabwe (incidentally, a country with which the US of A is not on the best of terms, although I’m pretty sure every single computer in the building was stamped “USAID”). The purpose behind entering this economically and politically tenuous nation for most tourists is to soak in the glory, and the mist, that surrounds Victoria Falls, aka Mosi-Oa-Tunya, aka “The Smoke that Thunders” – what an awesome name. This humungous precipice over which millions of gallons of water flow every instant acts as a border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, and most guide books encourage travelers to purchase value-added dual-entry visas so that they may comfortably travel between the two nations and see the falls from both sides. (Another reason for this that we had yet to fully appreciate was that travelers continuing into Mozambique – us – usually cross through Zimbabwe, not Zambia, but more on that in a later post.) Extremely reluctant to walk or find a car back to Kasane to find an ATM, we opened our safety travel belts and dumped out our cash. Luckily, for us at least, Zimbabwe is so unbelievably unstable financially that they will accept basically any form of currency at all so long as it is not their own. Using this to our advantage we were able to compile all of our Botswanan Pula, South African Rand, and good ol’ US Dollars into a pot large enough that the three of us could each squeeze by with a single entry visa into Zimbabwe. Not so bad, we just had to stay in Zambia once we left Zimbabwe and cross into Mozambique from there. Our financial situation had effectively made a significant itinerary decision for us, and with plans as roughly drawn as ours, as we left the border we could look back on our poor monetary preparation as a boon.

The first non-taxi-driving Zimbabwean beyond the border to speak to us offered to make us trillionnaires. A few years ago the country experienced one of the most extraordinary spells of hyperinflation anyone has ever seen, and is trying to phase out their old currency. “Street boys” go to bank back doors to get wads of the old worthless bills and try to, illegally, sell them to tourists who think they are legal tender or who think it is hilarious to have a 100 trillion dollar bill as a souvenir. After this particular street boy followed us a good 50 feet (a relatively short distance for a Zimbabwean street boy) the second and third locals we met said this, “We are the Zimbabwe Tourism Police. It is our job to keep you safe. Where are you going? We will escort you.” We told them the name of the local hostel, “Shoestrings”, and they strutted a few yards in front of us for the short walk to the gates.

A digression: Zimbabwe is a poor country, with a whole host of things that make life difficult to endure (One big one is a corrupt government. When we asked locals what they did for independence day, which we learned was “celebrated” a few days prior to our arrival, we got mostly head-shakes and grimaces in response). The town of Victoria Falls is the tourist town, where foreigners come to spend their comparatively enormous incomes, and street vendors, craft makers, and beggars are fairly relentless when they see you passing by. I patronized the country. I paid to enter, I rode in taxis, I paid the Victoria Falls Park entry fee, I paid for a few nights stay in a hostel, I utilized the transport “system” to visit the Great Zimbabwe Ruins in the heart of the country, I spent time in an internet café, and I bought food at the supermarket. As heartbreaking and tragic as it is, I simply could not be dropping the little money I did have (which admittedly is far more than the beggars had) into the tin-can or outstretched hand of every adult or child that demanded it, and I could refuse with a relatively clear conscience because my tourist dollars were contributing to many salaries in diverse economic areas. What at first is exciting and humorous (billion and trillion dollar notes!) or dispassionately interesting (is this guy really willing to trade me art for my socks or is he just trying to get his foot in the door in this bargain?) quickly becomes trying and by the end of just three days was, for me, almost unbearable. The beggars and vendors obviously get enough from the tourists to survive because they are on the streets every day. But how much economic disparity justifies training toddlers to recognize and chase after white people with cans parroting evidently rehearsed requests in English, or following someone who has politely and clearly said “No” half a mile, or grabbing someone by the arm and demanding that they take your bus and not someone else’s? And is it a form of discrimination to only ask people with white skin for money? After all, black people from all over the world visit the Falls too, and there are Zimbabwean citizens who are capable of giving as well, but in my brief stay I never saw anyone other than white people stopped. The answers that I tentatively came to were, there is a limit when excessive solicitation is rude, even disrespectful, and that while the prejudice ultimately is harmless and largely justified by the evidence (when white people come to Victoria Falls they tend to have more money than the black people that live there) an obvious prejudice does exist. I apologize for the digression.

Another digression: One thing that I love about the WorldTeach Volunteers as a whole is their limitless curiosity and energy. When any two volunteers meet in the same place and time, they will do something. When Kristen, Kyle, and I arrived at Shoestrings Backpackers we dropped our bags and rested for a few hours; it had been a long day. Lounging in the hostel were some other backpackers. Maybe these people will be interesting to talk to, I thought to myself. I hadn’t had a chance to find out by the evening, and our group set out to see the Victoria Falls full moon lunar rainbow. The next day Kristen rode on the back of an elephant on a safari tour, and that afternoon Kyle and I jumped off a bridge overlooking the river dividing Zimbabwe and Zambia. That night we arose to dodge elephants in the darkened streets (we saw several during our stay in the road literally right outside the hostel gate) and catch a 3am bus to reach the Great Zimbabwe Ruins by around 7:30pm (one of our buses failed to reach the top of a hill forcing us to get out and push), and the next day we hiked around, learned about, and took in the Ruins before trekking back to Shoestrings and arriving after midnight. In our intervals of rest at the hostel, I saw this small group of travelers: smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, eat food, watch TV, skim travel books, and play bongo drums. I do not know how long they had been travelling or how long they had been in Zimbabwe or what kind of budget they were working with, although I do find it hard to believe their budget was significantly smaller than ours, but what exactly did this group of people do all day? I was worried I was dealing with prejudices myself, and fortunately we did meet plenty of energetic, engaging, intrepid travelers over the month, but let’s just say there is some reason for the stereotype of the consistently half-baked, half-naked, indolent backpacker. Forgive me, I promise that I am finished with that.

Back to the sequence of events, yes, Kristen rode an elephant and Kyle and I bungee jumped. Before jumping and after seeing the employees suggest that people take off necklaces, I asked if I should remove my watch. “No, that is okay” replied the bungee man, “What is important is your life.” Indeed.

Like skydiving, where the scariest portion occurs after the chute deploys, the worst part of bungee jumping is after the first stretch of the cord. After the initial free-fall, an incredible swan dive during which I just whooped and hollered for a few seconds and in the moment actually expected to just gracefully slice into the water below unharmed as I have done countless times in pool diving wells, your momentum rapidly decreases to zero and then reverses direction. The jerk isn’t comfortable, but it is expected, unlike the seemingly endless series of bounces that follows during which you SPIN THE WHOLE TIME. After completing an unknowable number of full circles while suspended upside down with the sides of the gorge and rushing water swirling uncontrollably around me I said aloud to no one in particular, “I want to go up now.” A man, suspended upright, eventually snags you, and performs what I considered to be a much more daring and treacherous mid-air exchange of bungee clips than ought to be necessary to secure you to him. After Nick (I asked my savior his name) set my feet on a bottom layer of the bridge I gave him what I suspect was only one of the bear-hugs that he receives every 10 minutes for 8 consecutive hours a day. After all that I even managed to seriously conk my head on a bridge beam as I walked back up to the top level. So, with only a few seconds of free-fall and the terrifyingly protracted process of safely returning to your friends, I highly recommend bungee jumping.

Oh! P.S. Street sellers are even on the bridge asking you to buy things right before you jump! Kyle wittily pointed out that he doesn’t often carry change in his pockets before he leaps off bridges.

Stamp 2: Entering Botswana

The walk to the Botswana border post was only a few kilometers and one of us was sure we had read somewhere that the fairly large river town of Kasane was only another few kilometers beyond the border. We were energized and had plenty of time to spare, so we thought nothing of the walk as we passed people fishing in the area owned by neither country, got stamped into Botswana, and were told by the border employees that we should not count on seeing many cars.

Then we started to walk uphill.

“12 kilometers of this?” we all thought and then said aloud. 12kms had somehow become the number that stuck in our heads as the distance to Kasane. Unbelievably an SUV appeared behind a fence and stopped to pick us up. Ours and the driver’s paths were diverging quickly, but the man did take us far enough to see a sign that read “Kasane – 67km” before dropping us off. Not only was our destination a distance that was impossible to walk, the road there was through a wildlife reserve well-populated by enormous elephants and other large predators, and after entering Botswana our cell-phones were no longer of any use. Our luck quickly improved though as a man and his car seemed to appear from out of nowhere, and he let us jump in. Our driver was displeased that we had no local currency, but we convinced him to accept our South African Rand and went on our way. We had arrived in Kasane by lunch-time, which in budget-friendly travel terms means, if possible, it is time for porridge!*

*A note on porridge. Almost every Southern African nation’s population subsists on a thick porridge that is made by boiling a mixture of water and a pounded form of whatever crop is locally grown (maize, sorghum, etc.) The porridge from each crop and in each country has a slightly different name (Oshifima, Nshima, Papa, Pap), but they all are always the cheapest item on any menu, stuff you full, and taste fantastic when you use your dirty hands to smear a ball of it in the hot juice of whatever you ordered with it (chicken, vegetables, fish, and so on) and swallow it hungrily. I had had Oshifima, Namibia’s porridge, before my trip, but I quickly went crazy for the stuff and since returning I have already purchased the necessary ingredients to begin my own porridge experiments in my kitchen.

On our first afternoon in Botswana, I was determined to taste a locally brewed drink known as “Shake Shake”. Though I never laid eyes on it in any reputable establishments, the drink is apparently sold commercially as “Chibuku”. We stopped in a bar, and our request for Chibuku was met with ill-concealed laughter from most everyone within earshot. The bartender told a man wearing a safari guide uniform that we were looking for “Shake Shake”, and the man rose and led us through several backyards and fences to where a group of Botswanans were sitting in a circle.

We paid 5 pula for a carton of Shake Shake and spent the next hour or so making the locals laugh as we violently shook our carton (the drink needs to be mixed well, hence the name) talking to them, and meeting their babies. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting, sharing time and jokes, and I gather they did too because before our group left one man contributed this to the conversation: “I am so happy you have come to meet us. It is like I have just seen Jesus!” Bemused and humbled, we said our goodbyes.

The next day we hired a speedboat to give us a tour of Chobe National Park via the Chobe River. This trip, during which we witnessed hippos popping out of nowhere in the water, buzzards sitting silently on a perfectly appropriate barren tree, an elephant wading and dunking his head in elephant-waist deep water, and a family of lions accompanied by an enormous, majestic male sauntering in the background deeper in the bush, was easily one of the best parts of the trip. A gorgeous sunset on the river followed by an exhilarating race back to the marina is quite a thrilling experience, not in the least diminished by the innumerable bugs that smack into your face at high speed. I couldn’t stop smiling, so I just had to tilt my head downward to keep from swallowing anything in the wind.

Interesting animal facts (unverified) from our tour guide:

1. Jacana birds, whose long toes allow them to stand on leaves floating on the water are also know as “Jesus Birds”
2. A hippo’s skin is approximately 5cm thick, which protects it from the long teeth of its family members.
3. Hippos also possess almost no melanin in their skin, which is why they spend the daylight hours submerged and the night-time hours ashore.
4. 95% of a hippo’s diet is vegetation. (sorta like mine in Namibia)
5. Kudus (enormous antelope like creatures) are remarkable jumpers, and at least according to our guide, can leap distances upwards of 12 meters.
6. An elephant can remember where bug colonies are even when a river rises and submerges them. They can wade out into the river and use their trunk to dig up their food.
7. Elephants can swim!

Mode of Transport: X Other: Footing

Stamp 1: Departing Namibia

After Nangolo read the exam results aloud to the maybe 100 learners that showed up on Friday, the last official day of Term 1, I hurried to my office to print out the final copies of the school’s once-termly report for the circuit and regional offices that I had been working on with my principal. Vilo leaned his head in the door and said goodbye for the holiday.

“Are you getting a ride to town with Ivan?” I asked expectantly.
“Yeah”
“Are you leaving now now? (in Namibia “now, now, now” means now; “now, now” means fairly soon, and “now” means anytime in the foreseeable future)” I asked, fearing an answer of “yes”.
“Yes”
“Ah, I was going to see if I could squeeze into his car”
“Well, I just spoke with him, and his car is full-up”

Oh well, I thought to myself, everyone is leaving today, there are a few other people that I will be able to ask for a ride. By this point in my Namibian career I had seen numerous Fridays, but I did not take into account that I had never yet seen an end of term Friday. After snatching the reports as soon as the printer ejected them, I stepped out of the office and saw…no one at all. When holidays come around, learners and teachers apparently just vanish.

Fortunately, the secretary, Meme Selma, and my principal were closing up the front office, and I was able to hop into the bed of the principal’s truck for a ride into my home away from home away from home, the nearest town to my school, Eenhana. After meeting my friend Julia in town for a brief, token fulfillment of our weekly ritual of sharing a plate of chips (aka french fries) I rushed to meet Kyle a few towns away. Kyle would be my fellow wanderer and tent-mate for the coming month on a journey for which we only had a rough idea of what we would be doing for the first five days although it would last four weeks.

Inventory check:
- Several books
- 2 Namibia & Botswana travel books
- 1 Mozambique travel book with map
- 1 otherwise fully functional tent with temperamental zipper
- 2 backpacks with socks, underwear, shirts, towel, etc: one for Kyle and one for myself
- 1 large black athletic bag holding pots, plates, rice, washing detergent, and other assorted necessities with a few tears recently repaired by the expert needle and thread of one of Kyle’s colleagues

After uniting with Kyle, his roommate escorted us to a portion of road that had a larger gravel area beside it than the other parts of the road and flagged down a bus. We successfully convinced the driver to allow us to hitch along at a fraction of the price that all the other passengers had paid and climbed aboard.

This ride took us to Tsumeb, a fairly large town, where we met Tina, another volunteer in the area for the night, and Kristen, who would be the third member of our party for the first week or so. Bright and early the next morning we rolled up our tent, packed our bags and hitched a ride with a mute Namibian referred to by his friend as “The Big Man” to the Northeast.

After contemplating the clouds whilst waiting in the town of Rundu for several hours due to our decisions to turn away ride offers that requested more money than we were willing to spend, we came to an agreement with the driver of a government vehicle heading farther Northeast to Katima Mulilo, a town near the border of Namibia and Botswana. The bakkie had an enclosed bed, but the bed was packed full with literally thousands of informational pamphlets that the government employees had been tasked with distributing throughout the regions. This meant that for the next five hours or so, Kyle, Kristen and I rotated so we all had equal time crouched in a ball at the back of the bed of the truck between the door and the stack of pamphlets or laying flat on top of the pile in the approximately 2 feet between the pamphlets and the roof of the truck-bed. While the driver of the car strictly stuck to imbibing coca-cola, his two friends up front were providing their livers with a steady supply of alcohol to process. This resulted in numerous hilarious, and I quote, “wee-wee” breaks, that inevitably morphed into roadside dance-breaks, and these occurred with increasing frequency as the kilometers and bottles accumulated, thankfully allowing us to stretch our limbs every now and again.

The morning after camping at a site beside the Zambezi River and all of its strange and wonderful noises, we watched the sun rise and caught a ride to the Namibia-Botswana border. I referred to my passport to record its number, filled out the rest of the form, and the three of us each paused at the question regarding mode of transport through the border. None of the options above applied to us, so we all chuckled as we checked the box for “other” and wrote on the space provided “footing”. Then we proceeded out of the office, past a boom gate, and into the no-man’s land between the two nations.