Friday

Morning

6.55am. Jolted awake by the sound of the alarm, body aching from the wooden slats and thin mattress of her bed, she rises and gets ready for the day. Calls out to Katura that she is ready to leave. But Katura, their new housemate, socially awkward to the point of rudeness, has already left without saying a word. So she locks the door, crosses the yard of sand, and starts her walk to work. Halfway there a flatbed truck stops, as usual, to pick her up. She squeezes into the cab next to the two other passengers. Good morning. How are you? The weather is fine today isn’t it? These everyday pleasantries leave her with a sense of accomplishment for having made a human connection with someone. It is a win.

8.30am. The sounds of African religion drift over the scuffed white cubicle walls, music both haunting and joyful, harmonies drifting in and out effortlessly. The meeting has begun. Bright red, white, blue and green plastic armchairs form rows in the cavernous concrete hall. She takes her place next to the Field Officers scattered haphazardly in the chairs, blank expressions on their faces, and listens to the morning announcements. Grimaces inside as they take the usual form of accusations and aggression before she herself slumps in her chair, mirroring the Field Officers around her, and waits for it to be over. Heavy silence as questions posed to the Field Officers hang in the air unanswered because no one bothers, or is brave enough, to answer. Rage and frustration at the abhorrent management skills wells inside her but she turns it to apathy, there is no point in feeling anger because what can she do? She is tired of feeling unheard and angry and is close to giving up. Fortune’s words wash over them all, as gray and bleak as the concrete warehouse, the dirty cubicle, the sand strewn town. The figures are not accurate. Transport money is not accurate. Sunday is Condom Day, Field Officers are expected to attend local events. Katura stands and opens the topic that is on everyone’s minds, the program closing, contracts ending. He reads the memo sent from the Head Office, poorly written and intended for management, not the Field Officers. Like an embattled politician, he repeats the now well worn, meaningless line,

“The five year funding has ended. This means you contracts will finish on the 31^st of September. The funding is ending but this does not mean that the project is closing. Is it clear now?”

No, it is not clear. But the faces of the Field Officers do not change. Blank expressions prevail.

Afternoon

1100 am. Brian walks through the cubicle door, laden with the familiar backpack, red from heat and emotion, close to tears. In all the time she has known him she has only seen him close to tears three, maybe four times. He is returning from yet another hospital appointment with their old neighbor Trinity. The fight to get the Zimbabwean national onto life saving ARVs, the fight to save her life, is failing and it is taking an emotional toll. They have known that her CD4 count is hovering in the high 80s for two weeks now and she is still not on medication. Setting down his backpack - anger, frustration and helplessness emanating from his voice - he informs her that as of two days ago all non-Namibians are no longer entitled to medical care. In this tiny strip of land jutting into Botswana and Namibia, bordered by four different countries, many of whose citizens have made Caprivi their home, this is serious news. But all Brian cares about is Trinity. He has spent the morning sitting with her, four doctors, and the head of the hospital, fighting to get her access to the drugs she needs. He has sat next to her as she has been informed that the number of non-nationals receiving ARV treatment in the border town with the highest prevalence rate of HIV in the world has gotten too high and needs to be controlled. He has sat next to her as she has been informed that the Namibian government no longer cares about her and so she will die.

Silence. A silence heavy with the significance of this new reality. A silence charged with emotion. Which then erupts into sound as they try to pin down the situation, to create a sense of control, with words. Maybe the CDC could help. Who can we call? Maybe the Red Cross holds some sway. What do we tell our clients in the field? How could they do this to all those people? For the first time Brian mentions leaving, going home. What is the point of getting people tested if they cannot be treated? What hope can we offer them?

Evening

3.00pm. The brightly colored plastic chairs have been rearranged into a horseshoe and the Field Officers stare at the white wall. Together they stand in front of them, ready to begin. Projected onto the wall reads the words ‘Field Officer Survey: Review’. She hands back their corrected quizzes, making sure to avoid eye contact as she reads the names aloud to hide the fact that she does not know who is who. They begin. Confident, passionate, at ease working together and in this format the pair moves through the quiz, using each question as a platform for mini-lessons on the intricacies of the virus they are there to fight. Adherence. CD4 cells. Breastfeeding recommendations. Opportunistic infections. It surprises her how familiar the terms are, just how much she knows about this disease that one year ago was just a term heard on the news.

They try to jolt the Field Officers out of their usual seeming indifference using any means necessary. Used to a top down approach of, at times, aggressive lecture, at first the Field Officers don’t know what to make of these white foreigners trying to instill participation and interest through sheer energy, passion and willpower. When asked to stand if they think the answer to the question is True, no one moves, unsure what to do. Given statements of behavior to place on a Continuum of Risk projected on the wall, they stand looking uncertainly at one another. Laughter erupts when she jumps up and down shouting YES! EXACTLY! THANK YOU! When someone volunteers the right answer. But slowly, she sees signs of participation. She watches as the normal blank expressions become focused. As Field Officers, still mostly men, but nevertheless, begin to ask questions and are rewarded for their bravery. As small groups start to talk to each other about the information they are learning. As they start to approach her with plans to bring their community together, to start Support Groups and youth clubs.

Baby steps. A small win, but a win nevertheless. Smiles all around.

Walking home along the sandy path Brian let’s out a half laugh, emotionally exhausted yet surprised at the positive end to the day. “What a day. Let’s get a drink.”

TCE, Katima Mulilo

I’ve taken a bit of a blog sabbatical these last three weeks, keeping the phrase “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” in mind. And indeed it has not been a joyous few weeks, Katima is still not my favorite place in the world, nor is this job. But it is time to suck it up, acknowledge that I am not going anywhere anytime soon, and make the most of it. So welcome to my new home…

The House. The house, while a complete and utter disaster upon arrival, is a cleaner complete and utter disaster three weeks later. We have acquired a fridge and second bed so Brian doesn’t have to sleep on the floor. Although because our living room furniture (two red plastic chairs) were causing serious back pain one bed has now been moved into the living room. It’s classy. The carpets and walls have been professionally cleaned, removing the pee smells and grease and food covering every vertical surface of the house. The bathroom has been bleached to within an inch of its life. After two bug bombs and a constant three can a week habit of bug spray, we are stemming the tide of cockroaches although for the life of me I don’t see why they still insist on living, or how for that matter. Our yard is probably the worst kept in the neighborhood, since I just can’t seem to get the hang of raking our sandyard every morning like everyone else. That being said, we have a DS TV where we can watch Top Gear, Will & Grace, and Supernanny to our hearts content, we have hot water, and our house is stocked with things like Pantene Pro V shampoo and even Kerrygold butter would you believe it – we are not exactly roughing it.

The Town. Katima Mulilo is a fairly large town by Namibian standards, set two miles from the Zambian border. (We are just at the top of the little finger jutting out from Namibia on the map, on the Zambezi River). The nearest Namibian town is 500km away and we are closer to the capital of Zambia than the capital of Namibia. Having grown up in the northeast, where towns don’t end, so much as run into other towns, this place has left me feeling both isolated and claustrophobic. Katima itself is a dusty, one road town with two main grocery stores and an outdoor market. It is a little bigger than Outapi but smaller than Oshakati. Although it is built along the Zambezi River you have to go to one of the lodges to see it – so far I haven’t seen a hippo or crocodile yet, although we went last Sunday to one of the lodges in search of one. Our house is set in a suburb about a half hours walk from the main street in a grid of suburban sand roads.

The Job. So far the job is fine, if not exactly inspiring. We have spent the last three weeks setting up a working database system. Inputting 3 years of paperwork into a computer isn’t exactly your idea of cutting edge development work but I am fairly confident that in the long run it will prove useful. And in the process I am learning some new Excel tricks. As a result of this new database system and Brian and I (mostly Brian) interrupting during Troop Meetings we are seeing a gradual change from merely yelling at Field Officers for not meeting weekly statistical goals to actual analysis of what the numbers mean. This week we are giving the Field Officers a ‘test’ to see how much they know so that we can begin to make courses for them. We are also kick starting a campaign to increase the numbers of Trios and Support Groups in the Troop, since these numbers are fairly disgraceful. More importantly, until the Field Officers form more Support Groups I won’t be able to do my Support Group training, and that wouldn’t do at all, now would it. Still, the main problems to be solved, and also the main reason I am not liking my new work/life situation, seem to be the direct result of the people.

The People. I am having a hard time figuring out the Namibian people. On the one hand in general I have found them to be friendly and polite, and generous at times, if not exactly welcoming. I think this is mainly because, bottom line, they do not have a sense of humor. Everything is so serious. Anastasia, one of the bosses in the head office who is from Zimbabwe (Despite the country being demonized in the West, Zimbabweans are fantastic, educated, friendly and DO have a sense of humor) said this was because “they spent so much time up north”. I think this is referring to the fact that during colonization indigenous Namibians were forced north of the Red Line, a line dividing the country between both black and white people and industrial and subsistence living. Therefore the majority of black Namibians have not only not travelled much outside a 400km radius, they also historically have had minimal education and have lived as subsistence farmers for centuries – and living hand to mouth does not exactly a comedian make.

Anyway, this is all used as a prefix to explain away the fact that I do not like those that I work with. I am sure they are nice people, they are just not nice to me. There is Anna, our boss, who is very nice but does not possess strong leadership skills (not a great quality in a boss) and as a result often comes across as just plain awkward socially. Katura, just below her, does possess leadership skills but is extremely rude. Fortune, who is in charge of the Field Officers, is my favorite as he has been the most welcoming by far. Then there is Sadness and Rodney, who are both fine I guess, just after three weeks I barely know them because they don’t say anything. By the way, names here in Caprivi are awesome – try Beauty, Pretty, Sadness, Fortune, Charity, and Trinity. In general, no one here is especially unfriendly (except Katura, who for some reason often will just ignore my good-mornings and good-byes as if I wasn’t there), they are instead indifferent to us being here. Which, as I learned during fundraising, is often far worse than hatred – at least when someone yells at you they are acknowledging you exist. We sit here in our small cubicle in the back of a large drafty warehouse, oftentimes the only ones here, and exchange good mornings and goodnights with our colleagues. Now how are we supposed to ‘capacity build’ in such an environment?

Even more awkwardly, the white population in Katima has been very friendly. So far we have met three white guys and each one has offered to take us around the area and show us around. In contrast, even when we had no bed, no fridge, and no food none of our colleagues offered to cook us food or even show us where the grocery store was, we had to find it ourselves or ask them. I keep excusing this as being a cultural thing, but this explanation is starting to wear thin. Last weekend Brian went out into town with Bruno, who owns a local sweet shop. And on Sunday we went with Julian, who works in the warehouse across from us, to one of the lodges in the hopes of seeing a hippo (we didn’t). This makes me feel partly uncomfortable and partly a failure. Uncomfortable because I feel like I am inadvertently playing into the prevailing culture of black/white separation by only being friends with white Namibians. And a failure because I know that other DI friends in other countries are forging close relationships with local communities and people, and I seem to be unable to. On the other hand, these people that we have met have been the only ones to reach out to us, and whether I like it or not the fact remains that the white Namibian culture is closer to ours than the black one.

So welcome to Katima – a dusty, bleak town as far out in the middle of nowhere as you can get, but I guess, for now at least, its home.

When The Going Gets Tough

I failed at letting go. I admit it, I completely failed. The intention was there. I was going to accept the inevitability of our move and to prepare for it during my usual two day ritual of leaving my place of residence for any period of time longer than a weekend – this ritual involves lots of washing, list making, winding down the refrigerator, and cleaning. I suppose it’s all relative. I thought I was making personal progress at letting go control over where I was living and working, which I compensated for by tightly controlling the moving process. However this inner negotiation was put into disarray when, in a typical TG move of what they interpret as the common good and I interpret as a complete and utter disregard for personal time and space, we were told on Saturday morning that we were going to leave on Sunday rather Monday, so could we please bring all of our belongings to the head office that afternoon? This call was received around 9.30am as I was lying in bed preparing to pack, clean, and bake road trip cookies (no I am not kidding) in order to be free Sunday morning to go to Patty’s for a good-bye brunch.

I must say, with my carefully structured weekend out the window I was left unequipped to ‘go with the flow’. I did not handle it well. There was screaming, door slamming, and some crying. At the time I raged at this latest example of management (by which I mean TG) forcing its beliefs about common time on everyone around them. And I raged about my loss of control throughout this whole experience – I do not do well with authority in the best of times and being informed about where I will be living, what I will be doing, and when I will be leaving instead of discussing it felt like a slap in the face. I walked around slamming doors and yelling, thinking that I was pissed off…until I started crying. And it wasn’t until Brian came over to sit down beside me and said “You had just started to make this a home, hadn’t you” that I realized that I just didn’t want to leave, to start over again.

And so we spent Sunday not chatting over mimosas at Patty’s homestead, but instead driving the 12 hours to Katima Mulilo, our new home. As we entered Kavango Region the vista began to change. The trees became taller and here grass still grew. Village life, too, looked different. The homesteads were closer to each other and the road than in Omusati and were ringed by thin fences instead of the tall, tightly packed together mopane fences I was now familiar with. The homes were square instead of round and made of wood frames packed together with mud. In general the homesteads looked sparser, poorer. I was surprised at the strong reaction these changes evoked in me, something like local pride in the beauty and relative richness of the homes in what had been my home and distaste for the differences presenting themselves around me.

We arrived in Katima after dark, tired from the long and bumpy road. There I met Ana, our new project leader, who seemed nice if very young and shy. She assured us our accommodation was more or less ready. Then she led us to our new home, located at the end of a cul-de-sac in a maze of houses that seemed not dissimilar to the ones in South Africa.

The house was, and is, a complete and utter disaster. The place crawled with cockroaches and the owners belongings were still occupying the house. The smell of urine was everywhere and in the one empty room there stood only one single bed and two ratty old mattresses. The window of our bedroom was smashed and broken and there was no fridge in the kitchen. I felt like crying and throwing up at once, a fact which I am sure my face did not hide. Looking around me at the roaches crawling over every surface, thinking about the comfortable home we had left behind, I could not help but think, if our new Project Leader could not even manage to secure us decent and empty accommodation, how could she possibly run a project? I felt defeated before we had even begun.

Our belongings were unloaded, to my chagrin, into the roaches lair, and we were abandoned to spend the night in our new ‘home’. Brian made a little safehouse in the glassless room and blocked the bottom of the door with his Irish flag, the only piece of cloth available. With images of bugs crawling over me, I had finally managed to fall asleep (Brian had to sleep on a mattress on the floor) when I awoke to Brian jumping up and running to the door. Then I heard the sound of voices. It was our landlord, who had decided to ‘come home’ at 12am because he had nowhere else to go. It seems he had planned to rent a room in elsewhere and move his belongings there but had found out that day the room had been rented to someone else.

In general it was a nightmare of a night and we arrived at work the next day exhausted. I don’t know how people with kids do it, I really don’t. We have spent the last four evenings struggling to make the house livable. The cockroaches have withstood two separate Holocaust-type bug bombings and still more appear. In the first day alone Brian killed well over 1,000 cockroaches, with me acting as spotter (I refuse to kill anything but don’t seem to have a problem as accomplice). To date I would estimate that we are well over the 2,000 mark. We have taken down the curtains, vacuumed the floor, moved all of the landlords belongings to one of the bedrooms (yes we had to move his belongings) and begun the great task of disinfection. After our nightly cleaning marathons we sit down on the hard plastic chairs that serve as a couch for a cup of tea before going to sleep on beds made of wooden frames with wooden slats, covered with mattresses 3 inches thick, slats digging into our backs.

So far the one silver lining, in a very twisted way, is our neighbor. The first day we arrived she introduced herself to Brian and said she wanted to talk to him. Two nights ago she came to our house and sat down. The scene was like something out of a movie or a textbook, and it was the first such conversation I have had since coming to Africa, most likely because it was the first one I was able to understand, since she was able to speak very good English. She sat down and began by telling us that she had seen the TCE truck drop us off and had said to herself in relief “They might be able to help me”. (I was very impressed that she had recognized the program!) She explained that she had been tested in 2008 and had tested positive for HIV. Her husband had been working in the mines in Tsumeb but when the mine closed he had lost his job and he is now in Ghana looking for work. They are both from Zimbabwe and have two children, a girl and a boy. When she was diagnosed her CD4 counts had been very low, around 130 (HIV officially becomes AIDS at 200) but she had started on ARV’s and as of last October her count was in the 900’s. However, since her husband lost his job she had to move in with her uncle and she had to stop taking the ARV’s because she could not afford them. She is afraid to go to the public hospital because most of the staff there are Zimbabweans and she is afraid of the stigma. She has not had her count checked since last October but she has been losing weight and she is stressed and afraid. We listened and promised to help her all we could. I mentioned joining a support group and Brian said we would find out from the Ministry of Health what help she is entitled to.

It is a sad, sad story that unfortunately does not have the shock value here that it would have at home but it does represent, as a twisted silver lining to our crappy living conditions and forced move, the good work that can be done here. Even if we only help our neighbor.

P.S. - I was walking to lunch today, angry and depressed at our living and work situation here, listening to my ipod. My ipod was on shuffle, which for me is a little like emotional Russian roulette. As has happened so many times in the last two years, a song came on, the Eagles, that immediately transported me back to my father - specifically to the innumerable early morning car rides north in search of good skiing. If he were alive, I thought, and had read the blog I was composing in my head (let’s be honest, he would never call me), what would he say?

When the going gets tough, the tough get going

Of its own accord the familiar phrase, voiced in the familiar self-assured, slightly self-righteous way popped into my head instantaneously, with no time for thought.

On the Road Again

Like the great Willie Nelson of my childhood, we are “on the road again”. Our passionate intervention last week had the effect of proving our competence and energy, but not of convincing those in Windhoek to change their minds. Yesterday we loaded up the car and drove the 1500odd miles to Katima Mulilo in the Caprivi Strip. While many of the volunteers we trained with are finishing up their work in their projects, ours is just beginning.

I am of two minds about the ‘relocation’. My main objection comes from a reluctance to move. While not ready to start ‘nesting’ yet, I have been feeling the strong urge to put down some sort of roots - somewhere, anywhere - after six years of not seeing further than the next six months. Call me old (I am almost 26 after all) but I am tired of living out of a backpack and tired of not having a home. We had just started to make friends in the area, the poor nameless dog, mother of the pups, has recently intimated her intentions of becoming our housedog, and I was ready to plant a garden. I wanted to see how the seeming barren land surrounding us will spring to life once the rains come. Driving through Oshakati the other day I was given a glimpse at the pain I will experience at leaving this country. For I truly felt a stab of pain and regret at the prospect of leaving the ugly, dusty town with which I have begun to feel a sense of ownership, a sense of belonging. In short, I am loathe to start again. Getting to know a new town, a new culture, a new set of people, a new job. Again. After all, this is our fourth move, our fourth new beginning, in just five months.

And yet I know how incredibly lucky I am. How lucky I am to get to have new beginnings. The day before I found out I was moving I had read an entry in a blog I have been following for the past two years. The writer is eloquent, full of grace, strong of mind, and heroically positive in the face of the unimaginable, and I know her much better through her words than through life. Yet the words that she does share, which no doubt are her way of making sense of her world, help me to make sense of mine. For the better. How interesting that in today’s small world we are able to learn from the insight and wisdom of people halfway across the world, oftentimes strangers, when just two hundred years back, a second in the grand scheme of things, we would have been forced to struggle on alone. I say this because after reading her entry I was able to overcome my usual pessimism and, shall I say, tendency to tantrums, and see this through the eyes of opportunity. Which it is.

The job is a good one, for Brian and I personally, for me professionally, and for the end goal of achieving something worthwhile. The HIV/AIDS prevalence in the area if 41%, the highest in the world. 41% of adults over the age of 15 are HIV positive. The TCE program there is ending in September and seems to be in a bit of a mess. The staff and management there admit not having the skills to fix the situation. They don’t know it yet, but we have just received funding from the CDC to begin a new five year program which will include field testing – this is huge and represents a massive opportunity to reach people and to change lives. Our job is not to be normal DI’s but to go in and strengthen the programs, review the systems and staff, and build the capacity of the Division Commander in preparation for the rollout of the new program. I am not giving up on my Support Group Training, which I hope to pilot in the Caprivi and then roll out in the other divisions. I also hope to help in some way with the creation of the new program, since this is effectively what I want to do ‘when I grow up’ and since contacts with the CDC can never hurt my future job prospects.

The location presents a new adventure, a new experience. The Caprivi Strip, if you look at it on a map, juts out from Namibia like finger. It is bordered by rivers and touches Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana and as such is minutes from both the famous Victoria Falls in Zambia and the Okavango Delta and Chobe River in Botswana. In culture and climate it is more like Zambia than Namibia. It is full of lush vegetation, bird and animal life, and political strife. I have heard that it is not unlikely for people living in the bush to come across elephants and lions in their day to day encounters. The Caprivi Strip is currently in the legal process of succession, which I doubt will ever happen, after a civil war from 1994 – 1999. So, as in many parts of Ireland, talking politics is a no-no. Don’t worry, I will be safe.

So we are taking this week to say our good-byes and to pack, once again, our backpacks. Except this time I will be traveling with much more than one backpack. It seems I have acquired a number of home comforts in the last two months. And, in quite a different context to its original meaning,

I’m letting go. Little by little.
But I am.

Letting go of unrealistic expectation and learning to accept things as they come. Not an invaluable lesson, to be sure. In fact, I think I am starting to get excited…

“On the road again, I can’t wait to be on the road again”

Going Foreign: Personal Investigation Period I (Etosha and Waterberg Plateau)

Personal Investigations are one way that our organization retains control of its volunteers – rather than giving us holiday time which implies that the time is ours, we are given one week personal and one week professional investigation periods every six months. Because we were denied permission to attend the wedding of two DI friends of ours in Zambia Brian and I decided to take a week off anyway and see a bit of the country.

Etosha was the first safari experience for both of us and it did not disappoint. It was without a doubt fantastic, and to quote Brian ‘the best holiday I have ever been on’. Etosha is 22,000km2 of protected parkland and is designed more for the self-drive safari than the hired one. So early Friday morning we set off in our rented red Toyota Corolla (very inconspicuous for the wildlife) filled to the brim with tents, mattresses, guidebooks, tons of food and a basket full of homemade cookies.

Friday: Arrived at the park at 9am and as we were signing in a man leaving the park told us there was a lion in the grass just ahead! Drove until we saw about 40 wildebeast and 40 zebra standing stock still at attention staring intently at something on the other side of the road. The lion was a bit far away but we could see her from our car, although she was not as interested in hunting as in laying down for a rest. Spent the day driving around the east side of the park. From both the road and the waterholes we saw for the first time: warthogs, violet breasted roller birds, ostriches, springbok, zebra, wildebeest, giraffes (drinking!), kudu, gemsbok, and bustard birds. Half an hour from our campsite in the middle of the park we had seen pretty much everything I had come there to see and more (as I had not expected to see any of the big cats) except an elephant. Brian was just remarking that maybe the elephants were still to the west of the park as it was not the height of dry season yet when he slammed on his brakes and pointed out a huge male elephant not 25 metres away eating mopane, whom I would have missed. I am not a very good wildlife spotter, turns out. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, as the elephant seemed to be fanning himself with his ears which we were not sure was because of the heat or if he was warning us to back off. We reversed a bit to get out of his path and watched him as he ate and then crossed the road right in front of our car. That was when I felt truly in Africa! That night at our campsite we met two Australian guys spending 6-8 months doing the Cape to Cairo route. We ended up drinking with them for the night, fleeing from an aggressive honey badger rummaging through out campsite trash, watching Ghana lose dramatically to Paraguay and meeting a bunch of American legal students in Namibia here observing the current Caprivi Strip succession case.

Saturday: Five minutes after leaving the campsite as the sun was rising, we literally came upon a leopard sitting on the side of the road! Scrambling for our camera we attempted to take some pictures while not scaring off the elusive cat sitting just outside the car window. He sat there for one or two minutes before slipping off into the tall grass. Two or three steps into the grass and he was invisible. It was amazing. However, having woken up without a plan, as a consequence we took the most ridiculous path in the park. Two hours of broken roads and dense mopane bush with no animals to be seen. Halfway through we heard the hiss of our front tire as it rolled over a thorn of the acacia tree and quickly deflated. We looked at each other, uncertain of what to do. Outside of the parks designated accommodation we were not allowed to leave the car, a seemingly logical rule to us after having seen the lion, the elephant, and the leopard. We spent a nervously silent ten minutes while Brian changed the tire and I acted as lookout. The rest of the day was a bit of a bust as we worried about not having a spare tire. However it redeemed itself that evening as we sat outside overlooking our campsites waterhole. From the bush emerged the elusive white rhino, which made his way down to the waterhole for a drink just as the red African sun was setting overhead. The perfect way to end the day.

Sunday: Crazy day. Spent 2 hours sitting at a waterhole hoping a lion would show. It didn’t but we did get to see two zebra fighting which is an amazing sight to see. Saw another male elephant at the in-house waterhole at our new restcamp (this time staying in a real room with beautiful princess mosquito nets, hot water, and crisp white sheets!). Decided to drive down to one of the entrance gates where people had seen lions the day before. As we were driving the car in front of us stopped forcing us to stop. Frantic finger pointing ensued as we realized that lying hidden by mopane trees was a male and female lion! More frantic grabbing of the camera. Utter disbelief as the male lion stood up and began to mate with the female lion! After sitting in amazement for a few minutes we started the car and began to drive on. Just as we were between two other cars the female lion decided to stand up and walked straight at my open window, turning left when she was maybe three yards away. The pair then proceeded to walk straight down the paved road. As we were now the first car in line we followed the two lions for a good five minutes as they promenaded down the road; we were in turn followed by five or six cars as well as a massive bus tour full of tourists hanging out the windows for a better shot. Eventually the lions turned into the scrub and we drove off, astonished. On our way back we were even more surprised to meet a baracade of cars and tour vehicles surrounding the two lovebird lions sleeping in the middle of the road. One idiot parent in the car in front of us let their child hang out the window to take a photo, which provoked the male lion who charged the little girl! Thankfully it was a warning and he settled down again next to the female. Eventually the cars began to move off and we drove past the lions, lying two feet away on the pavement. The strongest impression I got from this experience was just how powerful and huge their heads were.

That night at the waterhole in our new restcamp, Okaukuejo, was fantastic. There, under soft yellow light that the animals don’t seem to notice we saw five of the elusive, endangered, and aggressive black rhino. One was particularly aggressive that night and provoked a stand off and fight with the other rhino. It was amazing, at one point one rhino bucked in the air like a horse to warn the other one away. To make the evening even more special, we witnessed a massive male elephant scared away by one of the rhinos. It was a sight to behold such a massive creature left temporarily panicked and unsure by the snorts of a single rhino. Throughout the whole episode a giraffe watched bemusedly from a safe distance while black backed jackals ran around looking like tiny mice next to the giants around them. Who needs TV.

Monday: Woke up and went straight to a waterhole the visitors log had tipped off for lion sightings. We were not disappointed, and parked 25 metres away from a pride of lions. Seven lions – four adults and three cubs. We sat there for about an hour and witnessed something truly special. We saw cubs about a year old playing with each other and the grownups. I saw a female cub walk straight at our car and by the driver’s window towards a group of zebra grazing nearby and then mock charge them, practicing it seemed. I watched as an adult female played with a rock like a house cat chasing after a flashlight. The rock kept falling off the ledge and she had to try to roll it back up with her paws, without the help of a thumb. Her cubs tried to copy her play. When she ignored them they would try to encourage her to play with them through both enticement and provocation, biting her tail and nipping her back legs until she gently swatted at them. I’ll never forget it. That afternoon, back at Okaukuejo waterhole we saw 12 elephants troop in for a drink and to cool off by rolling in the waterhole and hosing water onto their backs using their trunks. And that evening after dark we saw 7 rhinos, both black and white and 16 elephants. One of the black rhinos was desperately trying to get some lovin’ from his partner but she was having none of it. Enough said.

Tuesday: On our way out of the park we stopped at the waterhole just at the gate in the hopes of seeing something before we left. We had repeated over and over again how lucky we had been in our surprise encounter with the mating pair of lions, and how getting to see lions mating was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Apparently not so once in a lifetime as you might think. At our last waterhole we again came across the mating pair. It seems that when a female lion is in heat she will go off with the male lion for four days, whereupon they mate every 12 minutes or so (or so we were told) without fail and without food. I don’t know about every 12 minutes, but after observing, along with 10 other tourist vehicles, for about 45 minutes we had seen another 2 of the elusive mating rituals. And yes, at the end, they both roar.

We spent the rest of the day driving to Waterberg Plateau, whose obvious natural characteristics have been put to use as a breeding conservancy for endangered animals such as the eland, and black and white rhinos.

Wednesday: Tuesday and Wednesday we relaxed at Waterberg, hiking the short trails and lying by the mostly empty pool. The baboons kept us entertained. Our last night there we took a ‘game drive’ to the top where we sat in a hide and watched wild buffalo, eland and a very skittish black rhino at the waterhole.

In all it was a fantastic holiday. Throughout the whole trip I was engrossed in seeing new things and I think because of that I didn’t think of any of the practical day to day worries you think about at home, which made it a complete getaway. To my mind, experiencing this part of Namibia was as if we had ‘gone foreign’. If we had gotten on a flight and flown to a different country we would not have experienced as big a change as the differences between Namibia north and south of the ‘Red Line’ (to the north of which land and life becomes communal, aka traditional). South of the Red Line was in large part Westernized. For one, we saw white people! We had white sheets and air-conditioning, I was shocked to find zucchini and broccoli at dinner, and the Spar at Otjiwarango was heaven. I couldn’t stop staring at the beautiful things. Real cheese, brie, cream cheese!, meat without bones, a bakery, it was like being in the West. Yes, I know we were in tourist areas but the change was noticeable all the same.

As we drove home and crossed back over the Red Line the sights immediately became more familiar. Colourful in both paint and name, cuca shops appeared. The mopane fences of small farms and goats and donkeys in the road replaced the long stretches of nothing, save the bought wire fences of the commercial farms to the south. The north is dirtier, more crowded, and I think more beautiful. The familiar road from Oshakati to Onambelela was turned blood red from the sun setting behind the makalani palms bordering the quickly diminishing oshanas. We turned into our gate.

Home Sweet Home.

Until we realized we had almost been robbed.

Someone had tried to quietly open the padlock to our living area with an ill fitting key, which had broken off making it impossible to get into our house without breaking the lock with a brick. To make our homecoming even more welcoming, we heard that our whole complex had almost burnt down while we were away. Jacopina, the day she moved out of one of the huts in the complex, had lit the garbage pit and left it burning after she left. The wind had then carried the flames to the dried out grasses, which had burst into flames. Had the wind been in the opposite direction, my hut, the entire DI complex, and a large part of the school’s sports grounds would have been burnt to a crisp. As it was the fire reached to eight feet from our house and a large section of grass and mopane is burnt.

This is the real Namibia. Gotta love it.

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.

Of Firing and Hiring, Soccer Madness, and Erupting Volcanoes

It’s been a quiet week at the office to say the least. Last Tuesday at our weekly DCCC meeting we found out that our Global Fund funding has still not been renewed and so at the end of the month all three TCE2 programs in the country will be closing down. We went on to discuss our ‘exist strategy’ in order to ‘professionally close down the areas’ but the reality was that while for Brian and I the most impact this news will have on our lives will be some uncertainty with regards to where we will work come July, our new friends sitting across the table from us had just lost their jobs. One about to get married in August, one with a baby a little over a year, and one with two kids in boarding school in Oshakati. On Friday, at our bi-monthly Troop Meeting we relayed the news to the 58 Field Officers working in the Omusati Region. I went over their ‘exit strategy’ responsibilities to shut down their fields and kept saying the phrase ‘if and when our funding gets reinstated’ – because the fact is our funding can come in two months, six months, or never. Although they knew this was a possibility I think many of them were surprised. Suffice to say that in our office (as I am sure in the Field Officers Fields) little work got done last week or this. Brian and I have spent the time alternatively bored and helping our new friends as much as we can to start the job hunting process. We are helping them get their CV’s up to scratch and giving them crash courses in computers – Word, Powerpoint, Excel – so that they can include these programs in their credentials.

Aside from this rather sobering news life goes on. World Cup fever has hit southern Africa like a storm. The primary school next door to our office held what might pass for a pep rally last week. Decked out in jerseys and horns, the students went soccer mad. Three children, each wearing a different jersey representing a different country, paraded up on stage in front of the school. The students alternatively cheered or booed for the different nations, South Africa inevitably winning the contest. Solemnly, the three representatives then left the stage, shaking hands with the principal and teachers as if they were indeed six figure athletes. The students then broke out into the now familiar World Cup anthem -

“Ohhhh ohhhh ohhhh ohhhh….”.

They knew the words by heart. It was priceless.

For our part, in true World Cup spirit we went to watch the USA match last Friday at the house of one of the American Peace Corp volunteers. The soccer was fine but the food and sangria were delicious! During the week Brian has been watching the matches in the yellow shebeen across the road. Onambelela, the village across the road does not have electricity, but the yellow shebeen has both a generator turned on at night and a flat screen TV. Brian says the place is packed AND that no one buys a thing all night. Can you imagine?!

We officially opened our afterschool youth club on Monday and surprise, surprise were inundated with 58 students registering for the club. I am both optimistic about the opportunities this club can offer for both Brian and I and the students and dreading the chaos which I know, from experience, embody the afterschool program. For now Mondays will be for homework and lessons and Wednesday will be Fun Days and I am hoping that Caroline, one of the Peace Corp volunteers will help out. In about a month’s time we will hopefully start to do a little teaching tempered by fun activities; Brian and I went into Oshakati today, did a little research online, and bought some supplies which included glitter, markers, Jenga, a plastic cricket bat and lots of baking soda and vinegar. Can anyone say volcanoes?!

In puppy news the eight puppies still cannot open their eyes but are moving more and more, sometimes bumping into the wall of their cozy little straw cave in search of their mother. I can go see them now when I want, and the mother lets me sit and watch while they feed, most likely because I am in turn feeding her. Still not sure if I can have one, especially because all of the people who said they would take care of my dog when I leave now no longer work here…..