June - July Update

It has come to my attention that I haven’t written in a while, and while I would like to describe my first week-long holiday in Namibia I think I will first provide an update on the last four weeks or so.

The two weeks before the project closed were tough going and in a way it was a relief to close the office on Wednesday. Even before we had heard the news that we were closing, tension in TCE2 and DAPP world had started to escalate, mainly due to a disagreement between the staff and DAPP management that had made it all the way to arbitration. Friday this tension and anger culminated in what amounts to a coup at our final Troop Meeting. Midway through our final meeting a union representative mysteriously arrived. The end of the meeting was effectively turned into a union meeting, with the representative using inflammatory rhetoric, recalling such irrelevant things as the liberation struggle to get a rise out of the Field Officers. Brian and I were livid, mainly because the woman was not acquainted with the facts and was giving the Field Officers false hope that they might be entitled to something, at the same time making them feel angry and cheated, not a nice way to leave a job. It took the whole weekend before we were able to speak to our colleagues in the office, who I am sure were the ones who called the union representative, when we showed them a copy of the Namibian Labour Act and explained how she was wrong. Suffice to say that it was fairly awkward and tense when the office closed on Wednesday and the majority of the staff moved away the following day. Which is a shame because they were all nice people and no one deserves to lose their jobs like that.

On the positive side, Brian and I were able to give one of the Support Groups in the field a small income generating project loan the day before we closed. Along with a short business training course, we presented the group with N$1,000 (USD$150), which they will use to buy and sell paraffin and phone credit in their community, the proceeds of which will go towards paying for transport for the members to get their ARV’s (anti retroviral medication) twice a month. While ARV’s are free in Namibia, oftentimes people are not able to avail of such a fantastic service because they cannot afford the approximately N$100/month ($USD$15) it costs to get to the nearest clinic.

After our week away Brian and I returned to the north of the country and met with Anastasia and Alfred in the head office to find out what we were going to do now that TCE Omusati was finished. Previous to our holiday we had sent off a formal written proposal about what we thought fit our skill sets best, and frankly what we wanted to do. We were both alarmed and set on guard when we were told that we would be told what our ‘tasks’ were at the meeting rather than discuss our options. However one thing we have learned in the last year or so is how to productively get what we want and so with a little initiative the meeting did turn into a discussion and we never even got to go over the list of tasks sitting on the desk, which included us moving 1500odd miles to Katima in the Caprivi Strip. Turns out the passion and energy of the two of us is sometimes a little overwhelming = ). So bottom line, to the chagrin of one of the managers in the head office and the approval of the other one, we will hopefully be spending the next six months in Oshakati working to create systems and programs to improve TCE throughout the country. This will include working with the specific problems of each division (which means we will get to travel for free all over the north of the country!), finding solutions to create more accurate statistical systems, as well as creating systems and programs to improve HIV/AIDS prevention and management strategies such as TRIOS (ARV support systems) and PMTCT (Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission). My main focus will hopefully be rolling out the Support Group Training program that I wanted to start here in Omusati to all the divisions in the country. Practically we are not sure where we will live as the head office is about an hour from where we are living now but for at least the next week or so we will stay where we are and commute while we are figuring out with Anastasia what exactly needs to be done as well as what is feasible for us to tackle in the next six months. Brian and I left the office giggling at how we had managed to change our fates through our incessant (and passionate) talking and how this new job is exactly what we wanted (and in fact, is very close to what I want to do as a career).

It has been an odd and frustrating run of it here in Africa. We originally signed a years contract because we thought that we could do more good, more sustainably in a year rather than six months. However, the way things have worked out we have spent one month in Mozambique, one month in South Africa and two months working for TCE Omusati and we are now left with only 7 months to go. Frustrating, yes, but at the same time had we not worked in South Africa we would not have developed the business course we are using to train Support Groups, and had we not spent the two months with TCE Omusati we would not have the on the ground insight and knowledge that will hopefully prove useful in our next role here. This year truly does seem to be browbeating me into learning patience, a tiny bit of optimism, and the value of letting go of a little bit of control.

To sum up this general update, winter has arrived and feels alternatively like fall and summer. Mornings and nights are cold, considering I don’t have close toed shoes. In the morning I layer up in all the long sleeves I own, hands clutched around a tea cup and by lunch it is summer weather again and I am stripped down to a t-shirt and sweating. At nighttime we drag our duvets into the living room, whose windows are open except for netted screens, and then drag them back to our hut to sleep, Brian with his sleeping bag draped over his duvet for added warmth and me curled around my beloved hot water bottle. The landscape, for its part, is starting to fulfill my desert expectations. Driving along the straight road the oshanas have quickly disappeared and have left behind an alien landscape (literally, it looks like Mars). The trees and scrub of thorn acacias, mopane, and palm dot a land covered in brown burnt stubs of grass and cracked earth. Not a cloud interrupts the blue sky. We are expecting rain sometime in December.