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.