Transitions

This is my last post on this blog. Or perhaps penultimate post as I may be seized by the need to elaborate on some details once I recover from the pure surprise of finding myself back in the states. To put it concisely: last weekend I ended my stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer and flew home to California.

About a week before leaving my community I made my rounds to say goodbye to my friends. I baked a cake for my host family and Selma’s kids became confused and sang “Happy Birthday” to me as I frosted it. My friend Auntie Capilene made plans to stay in contact with me through her son’s facebook account. Selma’s kids made me painfully cute cards and commandeered my frisbee for their own personal use.

On my last day at school, my colleagues arranged a braai: Ivan explained that the only way to say thank you in Baster culture is to prepare massive quantities of meat. I woke up the next morning with something that can only be described as a meat hangover  After the braai we took a staff photograph. I have never seen so many Namibians smile in one photo, and suspect that I have set some sort of record with this shot (Namibians mug in most photos).

My students’ goodbyes were heartbreaking not only for their sincerity but also for the terrifying spelling mistakes that made me again silently thank Ivan for not assigning me English classes.

Peace Corps’ superb travel agents booked me a flight to San Francisco through Accra, Ghana. After confirming with the desk agent at Air Namibia that my bags would be checked through to my final destination, I boarded the plane to Accra. Arriving in Ghana at 10 pm I was confronted my a much rawer and busier African atmosphere. Even at night it was hot and humid, and the arrivals terminal was crowded by a wall of aggressive taxi drivers and food vendors. At immigration arrivals the officer waved me through when I explained that I was not staying in Ghana (remember this plot detail); I then hurried past the baggage claim and out onto the street.

After some searching I found the departures terminal which inexplicably was not connected to the arrivals terminal. At the check in desk (i use this term loosely, as it was a podium sitting in the middle of what looked like a small warehouse staffed by a lady with a netbook) I tried to present my passport.”Where are your bags?” asked the lady. “I think they are checked through to San Francisco,” I explained. “I don’t think we do that….” countered the attendant. Looking up at the chaos around me, I was convinced and turned to run back to the arrivals terminal.

Luckily, there were not many rules at this airport so I was able to run upstream through customs and immigration and find my bags on the floor in the arrivals hall. With my baggage cart I began running back towards the departure terminal. I kept encountering stairs and having to run my bags up the stairs, then run back down to retrieve the cart, and then continue on my mad dash through the airport.

With my bags checked I had 15 minutes to make it to the terminal. I hurried upstairs to another immigration check point. The officer examined my passport. “But where is your Ghana entry stamp?” He asked. After deliberation, he decided that I needed to go back to the arrivals hall. “But I need to go now,” I begged. The man turned to go find a superior, and I saw my chance. I scooped up my passport and boarding pass and dashed into the crowd heading for security. I didn’t look back until I had cut in front of the security line and slipped into the gate as it was closing.

That’s the thing about Peace Corps; nothing is ever easy, not even leaving.

For the next six weeks, Greg and I are heading to the Eastern Sierras and Utah for a last gasp of pure freedom before we start medical school in August. Thanks to all who have read and commented on this blog.

Brief Notes on my Vacation

Just 50km from my site rise the Naukluft mountains which boast zebra, springbokke, leopards, baboons and a 120 km seven-to-eight day hiking trail. I won’t say much about this other than to highly recommend it to your average African-adventurer-masochistic-tourist because it was essentially an endurance suffer-fest crossed with a safari. On the fourth day, the other girl on the trip caught a ride with a park worker back to my site (hence the misleading ghost/angel in the cartoon) and lived in my house for a few days, during which Ivan decided that a burglar was living in my house and was moments away from grabbing his rifle and going to investigate when she came out the front door and he decided that blonde American women don’t fit the profile of your average Namibian home invader.

For a little more than US$ 100 you can ride the Intercape 20 hours to Cape Town and 20 hours back, which means essentially that you can pay $2.50 an hour to be proselytized to by the evangelical Christians who own the company. I was informed, somewhere near the South African border, that Europe is the new ”dark continent” since only 3% of its citizens are evangelical Christians (this new nomenclature, I think, is not common knowledge yet in Europe). I guess they attempt a modicum of subtlety; the entertainment on the bus ride back was about a husband and wife who are headed directly for a divorce until the husband discovers GOD (although it really seems more like the husband discovers basic communication and compromise skills). Overall the Intercape makes up for its missionary zeal with things like, punctuality (only 5 minutes late for me) and reclining seats.

In Cape Town I intercepted a deeply jet lagged Julia Roake and dragged her up and down various local mountains while jabbering in Afrikaans (which she now wishes she had payed more attention to, hmmm, Julia?). We also enjoyed afternoon tea at our (rather swanky) hotel at the base of table mountain, where we mixed coffee, tea, cheesecake, samosas, chocolate, and cheese (The unfortunate fact is that my return to the Western world is frequently marred by debilitating stomach cramps because my level of restraint around the type of food variety in these places is essentially nil). On the last day we took a combie tour of the Cape on which Julia hit the high point of her African adventure at Simon’s beach where she found sunbathing penguins. We also stood at the Cape of Good Hope and tried to see Antarctica (because where did all those penguins come from?) but were essentially unsuccessful.

A brief aside- at home I looked up the Afrikaans word for Penguin, which is pikkewyn. I found this pretty disappointing since the word for ”skunk” in Afrikaans is stink muishond, or ”stinky mouse dog.”

I guess I hoped the word for penguin would translate something like ”fancy whale bird.”

The 4 Types of Peace Corps Volunteer

So I was accused the other day of writing rather selfishly about only my Peace Corps assignment and neglecting the experience of other volunteers. The obvious rebuttal that ”aren’t all blogs/tweets/facebook status updates at their core self-centered calls for attention” aside, I can stop talking about Rietoog for one week and discuss my colleagues. Here they are, the 4 types of PCV.

Education Volunteers:

Education volunteers like myself mostly find their time consumed with teaching (especially if your principle blatantly ignores Peace Corps policy and assigns you a teaching load far exceeding the 70% maximum…) Some do find time to start secondary projects, and these often concern (appropriately) the school. One Group 32 volunteer designed a computer program that allows teachers to input their marks and then it (the computer program) generates report cards for the learners. In a school system where everything is done painstakingly by hand and an entire week is allocated for generation of report cards, this is revolutionary. She does however report that her teachers now just waste the first four days of that week and then enter their marks into the computer on the last possible day. So in a way she has invented a wonderful method of procrastination. (I kid. This is a beautiful secondary project and I wish I had thought of it). Education volunteers form the largest and most homogenous PC contingent, with most of us being fresh from college, idealistic, and relatively unskilled.

IT Volunteers:

Ha, joke, there are no more IT volunteers! Well there are a few left over from my group, but the program has been discontinued as a result of Peace Corps budget cuts. Because Peace Corps spending, which represents .01% of the budget, is really the problem and not, say, the $150 million that the military spends on each new fighter aircraft (for reference, the PC budget last year was somewhere in the range of $400 million).

Business Volunteers

Business Volunteers AKA SEED Volunteers (for small enterprise …..development? Small entrepreneurial development?) work to support small businesses and entrepreneurs at the community level. Often they end up teaching Entrepreneurship classes at secondary schools, helping locals write business plans or holding workshops on how to manage cashbooks. One SEED Volunteer I know started a tuck shop at his school that sells cool drinks and nik naks during breaks and employees the learners. SEED volunteers tend to be older than education volunteers and stand out at Peace Corps gatherings as the ones wearing ties and closed toed shoes in a sea of polo shirts and Chacos.

Health Volunteers

Heath volunteers do…health projects. I am being vague because the variety of health volunteer assignments really defies generalization. One volunteer from Group 31 supervised a series of garden projects at government clinics designed to improve nutrition for those people living with HIV/AIDS. Another volunteer from a more recent health group works with a woman’s craft center in Keetmanshoop that preferentially hires women living with HIV/AIDS (and, if anyone is interested, I can send you their catalog). Some health volunteers do….nothing, as the Ministry of Health often has difficulty finding work for the volunteers that it specifically requested. And the health volunteers themselves are a strangely heterogeneous bunch. I know health volunteers who are ex-lawyers, political science majors straight out of college, counselors, pre-meds, emergency medical technicians, you name it.

Contrary to popular opinion, PC is not a two year paid vacation (and if so, it’s the worst vacation I have ever been on…) and there are volunteers doing important and fascinating work. If there is interest in any particular PC project, I am happy to tell you more about it.

Vocabulary

It occurs to me that many of my posts are jargon-heavy. So if a sentence like “I took a hike in a bakkie with my learners to the combie rink after the braai” makes no sense to you, please check out the new vocabulary page on the right.

Easter Egg Hunt

I know it has been a long time since I have used this blog, but here is another one of those Somehow-everything-always-works-out-even-if-in-unexpected-ways stories that are so common in Peace Corps.

When school let out on Thursday for the long weekend, my colleagues rushed to Rehoboth to spend the 4 days in town. Easter here merits two vacation days; the Friday preceding and the Monday following. I am fuzzy on the actual nomenclature of the Easter weekend; I know there is Good Friday, and Something Saturday, but I suspect Monday is not a holiday at all and rather just an excuse to have another four day week.

Since last week was the last week of the term, I spent it hunkered down in my classroom marking mountains of books and hunting children who, despite the 20 assignments I gave this quarter, had managed to be absent often enough to lack the requisite 4 assignments for my mark book (this happens every quarter and causes me such consternation that I dread the last week of the term more than any other week). So I elected to stay the weekend and regain my composure and hopefully make banana bread out of the mix my parents sent me.

In fact, the banana-bread-as-reward-for-dealing-with-moldy-brained-minors idea had so lodged in my head that on Thursday the first thing I did upon coming home from school was beeline for the kitchen and read the instructions on the box. The realization that the recipe called for eggs (which I do not have) almost motivated me to go to Rehoboth, until I realized that it was insane to travel 120 km for 3 eggs.

So somewhat ironically, my Easter weekend turned into a half-hearted search for eggs in Rietoog, which for a village with so many chickens certainly has an egg deficit.

On Sunday I hiked to the cell phone tower (which made me realize that climbing mountains has left me with a need for an OBJECTIVE, however silly). I did get fantastic reception the whole way though. I didn’t find any eggs, just some Dr. Seuss plants and a gecko which somehow hitched a ride back in my pack.

I tried a more traditional approach and went around asking people. At the bottle store, I met a couple who were building a lodge/rest camp inside Rietoog. The man is from Turkey, and showed off some of their desert camp innovations- a water tank equipped with magnifying lenses to heat water, another water tank that automatically refilled itself from a well when the water level dropped.

By this morning I had given up and was patiently waiting for my roommate to return from Rehoboth with my requested dozen eggs when the children with Easter baskets showed up. Turns out that last night when the Easter bunny came (strange, I know- here the Easter bunny is more like Santa Claus) a few of the eggs were labeled with my name. Now, chocolate eggs don’t have quite the egg-like properties required to make baked goods, but they do make a very satisfying breakfast. Maybe even as good as banana bread.

Sorry World Challenge…

A few years ago a group of British Volunteers from the group ”World Challenge” came to WJD Cloete and painted the school seal on the side of the office. Today, inexplicably, a building appeared covering the wall. After some investigation (read: shameless gossip hunting) on my part I was able to determine that Mr. Cloete is expanding his office. Sorry World Challenge. Development work is often just building sand castles.

Off the Grid

On Wednesday, the cell network in Rietoog went out during a thunderstorm. Outages like this always worry me, because I remember how the electricity went out for two weeks last rainy season and we were all reduced to eating peanut sandwiches and hanging around the Cloete’s whenever we could see that they were cooking outdoors. Or the time the water went out for an equivalent amount of time and we ran around placing buckets under gutters. It’s not that we’re utterly dependent on these things, but that we’d rather not go through the hassle of hauling buckets of water around or through the hazards of navigating a dark house in the evenings. I guess you could say my room mate and I are lazy rural people.

Since our land line was damaged last summer (the telecom people told us that the part needed to repair the line is no longer made, anywhere, and thus we will never have a land line again), the only connection Rietoog has to the rest of the world is through cell phones. We don’t even have a post office. And we love our cell phones. My colleagues and I do our banking on cell phones, buy airtime and internet time on our phones, and even send money to friends and relations through the network. Even my internet connection goes through the cell network.

This isn’t unusual. Every PCV I know in Namibia has a cell phone and network at their site, and every adult Namibian I know has one too. Cell phone usage here has a distinct Namibian flavor. Calling plans are rare; usually people just pay as they go. At the end of the month, as people run out of money before the next pay day, my Namibian friends will start to give me missed calls to try and force me to call them back and pay for the call myself. Of course, I also do this whenever I need to call a member of PC staff. More often then calling, we send text messages (smses), with entire conversations composed out of 160 character exchanges. Since sim cards are cheap ($1 US) people often have multiple numbers. One of my colleagues has a jealous girlfriend who makes him change his number every week so he can’t give it out to other women.

When the network went down I thought I would be the only one who cared (after all, network only came to Rietoog in the last 5 years). But I was surprised to find my attitude relaxed in comparison to my colleagues. My room mate threatened to go into town and only return when the network did. She also told me that ”if we don’t have network, I want the rest of the country to not have network.” I heard many people make ultimatums such ”if it is not back up tonight, I will just die.” After about 24 hours rumors started to fly. The learners told me it would be back up in a week.

I am deeply skeptical of these small town rumors having heard multiple false rumors about myself (including, recently, that I was a Swiss volunteer). I decided to investigate, and went to a parent to confirm. She had heard the rumor from a drunk man in the shebeen, which diminished the credibility of that particular piece of information. After everyone had worked themselves up into a nice frenzy the network came back up this afternoon.

I am a Foot Model

In a small Eastern Sierra online magazine wearing large boots to hide my necrotic toes. But, still. The article is at http://www.mammothtimes.com, go to special sections and then Mammoth Sierra Magazine. The article is on page 21. It’s an interesting history of crampons.

Peace Corps Intermission

I have been hesitant to write blog entries during my “Peace Corps Intermission” in the United States. Partially because I think that the US is less interesting than Namibia, and partially because most of what I was doing was related to med school admissions. One of my questions during an MD/PhD committee interview was “will you write about this medical program in your blog?” and the answer is probably no. I write about Namibia because one of the goals of Peace Corps that I really agree with is to promote cultural understanding between two countries. I am less interested in writing about things that happen in the United States.

That being said, there were some things that happened during my stay that make me smile and I think are stories worth telling.

1. I became a foot model: One of the mountain guides we met while learning to ice climb took a picture of my feet in boots and crampons. Since she is writing an article about the history of crampons she asked for my permission to print a picture of my feet in the Mammoth newspaper. The funny thing about this story is that when I announced that my feet would be published both Greg and my dad independently quipped ”In a medical journal?” which I think is some unkind reference to the fact that I have lost probably 10 or so toenails in my life to date.

Greg demonstrates proper ice climbing technique

2. I learned how to walk in high-heels: A day after my flight from Namibia arrived in San Francisco I needed to shop for interview clothing since I had Southern California interviews the following week. I bought a pair of high heels to avoid hemming some pants. At my first interview in Irvine I nosedived in front of a student-interviewer. Later in Seattle I took a fall down a staircase. What is perplexing to me is how I can walk in crampons with a dozen metal spikes on my feet but not in shoes with a raised heel.   Tangentially, I had to replace my heels after the first round of interviews because the many long campus tours had taken their toll. ”Have you been going to garden parties?” asked the appalled cobbler. ”Because people throw these garden parties on turf and gravel and dirt and they don’t think at all about their guests’ shoes!”

3. I owned a smart phone: After showing up at the first set of interviews with my very hip Nokia flip phone and being mocked by the much cooler members of the general MD/PhD applicant pool I transferred my phone number to my mom’s old droid. No longer would I get lost in New Haven a half mile from my hotel or forget all my flight information. I did have a problem getting used to the touch screen and pocket dialed Greg a dozen times. I still think it’s weird that everyone in America has a smart phone.

4. I circumnavigated a mountain: Greg and I tried Basin Mountain in the Eastern Sierras again after noticing the mild winter weather in California. Unfortunately there was a wind advisory the day we climbed and we stopped perhaps 50 vertical feet from the summit from fear of becoming human kites. We bailed out on the northwestern side of the mountain. After our escape route ended in cliffs and ice falls we chose a different route and spent the rest of the day and long into the evening crampon hopping from snow encrusted boulder to snow encrusted bolder. The only casualties of the day were Greg’s big toenail and my credibility with the Inyo Mountain Ranger station. (”Call your mother!” implored the ranger on my answering machine after repeated inquires from my family.)

5. I woke up at 3 am to see a football game: This is ironic, because if I want to watch/listen to live football in Namibia I also wake up at 3am. But Greg drove us from Lee Vining in the eastern sierra to Glendale Arizona in one day to watch Stanford play in the Fiesta Bowl, because nothing follows an ice climbing trip like college football.

Right before the heart break

Now I am back in Namibia for the final stretch. Here’s hoping that this school year is as strange as the last one.

We’re on the map!

So the Grade 6 class, after much coaxing and cajoling, produced something this week that passed for a wikipedia article. Here it is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rietoog

The words are theirs (well most of them. In the few hours that is has been up it has been edited, as is typical for wikipedia), the pictures are theirs, and any mistakes or inconsistencies are their fault.