Daily Life

I’ve had several entries in my head that I want to write, but they are both of the “look how weird things are here” variety, and I’m kind of tired of those. Perhaps you are too. Instead, as I’m starting to finally settle into living here, a routine has taken shape and that’s what I want to share.

School takes up a good portion of my day. I’m usually up around 6:30 a.m. Depending on the status of our water supply, I might take a shower. This week, the water wasn’t working so well so I skipped it until today. When I woke up today, there was a hard rain and I put out a bucket to collect the water coming off the roof, then had a bracingly crisp bucket shower. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I stand a better chance of being able to shower, because the hostel students go to church at 6:30 a.m. By 7:15, sometimes there’s enough pressure for a shower, and then I have a very Western breakfast of granola and milk. Well, at least it’s long-life milk.

School officially starts at 8:00, but teachers are supposed to be there by 7:30. For the first couple of weeks, I sat in the staff room at 7:30, often alone, occasionally fuming that no one else was there. Now I make the 60 second walk to school around 7:50. Twice a week we have to be a little early for the morning assembly, which has a prayer, a hymn, a bunch of announcements, and the singing of the school and national anthems. The school anthem cracks me up every time I hear it, because for the first three weeks I thought they were singing, “Canisium, [my school] the best education. We learn thing [sic] and prosper.” Then I just now found out the line is “We learn, think, and prosper.” Well, beam me up, Scotty. That sounds much better.

My official school day is actually not very demanding, at least not yet. The school holds classes from 8:00 to 1:40, with only a twenty minute break. Then comes lunchtime, followed by afternoon classes and/or study hall, depending on the grade. I teach three classes, two ninth different ninth-grade classes and one eleventh grade class. The class schedule is quite varied however. For example, one day I may have class 9A period one, class 9B period 3, and then class 11C for periods 6 and 7. The next day, I might teach 9B period one, 9A period 6, and 11C period 8. If that’s confusing to you, then you know why I don’t have my schedule memorized after a month of school. Because of the weird schedule and extra classes in the afternoons, I actually teach my 11th graders for four periods on Tuesdays!

Three or four days a week, I also work in the library with my newly-chosen library staff. Our library is open 12 hours weekly, during lunch time and after study hall. I’m pretty impressed with the collection for a small school in a developing country. We’ve got over 1,500 volumes for a school of nearly 400 students. The students use the library frequently, and my staff so far seems great. I have many hopes for improving both the collection and the organization, and possibly trying to develop the libraries of some of the nearby schools as well.

In the late afternoons, I often go for a run through the fields and villages (see earlier post), then get my dinner from the hostel kitchen. It’s usually oshifima with tinned fish or pasta with butternut squash or wieners and ketchup. The latter is by far my least favorite, but still it’s better than cooking on my own. I know, I can hear my friend Ronnie groan as I write this, but hey, it saves me 45 minutes of cooking while surrounded by kids, and it only costs me about US $0.45 per meal.

Once a week, I head over to the house of Robin, the Peace Corps Volunteer who lives on the mission. We’ve been trying to get me into that house, but it seems the Catholic mission has some issues with unmarried people living under the same roof. As a result, she’s got a three bedroom house to herself and I have a dorm room. Not that I’m bitter. Really!

Anyway, once a week we get together to hang out, eat, and watch tv. She works as health extension worker doing HIV/AIDS awareness, and so I get to hear her stories of driving into the bush to do outreach or helping out at the hospital. She’s a better cook than I am too, aided partly by the goat which is in her freezer. A few months back she bought a whole goat through one of her Ovambo coworkers, and is only just now finishing it off. After we eat, talk, complain, and sometimes have a beer, we settle in for a little TV, American style. We set up her laptop on the living room table and watch one episode of the old medical show, St. Elsewhere, which just came out on DVD. It’s a fantastic show, and it has some many great guest stars that it feels like watching the old episodes of Mash. In the first six episodes, we’ve seen guest appearances by Tim Robbins, Ally Sheedy, Christopher Guest, and the mother from Everybody Loves Raymond.

Twice a week I have to monitor evening study, which is one of my least favorite tasks. I come on for the 7-8 time slot, replacing one of the Indian nuns. They kids are golden for the nuns, who are scarier than I am. After study hall, a student named Sakaria teaches me Oshivambo twice a week. He’s an excellent teacher, especially for a student. He’s patient and has a good grasp of the grammatical structures of his own language. Tonight, he surprised me by giving me homework! It only took five minutes to finish, but I was touched.

The only part of life that I haven’t really figured out yet is a social life. It’s difficult to meet people who are neither teenagers nor Indian nuns, neither of whom I particularly want to have a drink with after work. So that’s what I’m working on now – figuring out how to meet people, Oshivambo-style.

Simple Pleasures

The water pipe broke and I’ve had to do bucket showers all week. Plus, we had a big storm and lost electricity for a full 24 hours. I love it!!

The Slums of Outapi

I had a really interesting and somewhat surreal experience with one of the development studies classes today. Development studies is an interesting subject -- only 11th and 12th graders take it at my school, and it's a combination of history, geography, economics, environmental science and urban planning. The teacher for development studies is Jona, who is also Meme Monica's nephew. He invited me along on his senior class field trip to Ohnhimbu, our local shanty town, and then to the open market and the town council. The kids had been focusing on health issues in their class discussions, so they spent time examining toilets and areas for dumping garbage.

First, the class visited Outapi’s shanty town. In Onhimbu, there are shared community toilets, some shacks made of corrugated metal, and tiny houses made of poured concrete. It certainly was poorer than in the town proper, but I’ve seen worse. People get their water from communal taps, but the water is treated and safe to drink. Few houses here have electricity, but that is also true of the homesteads out in the countryside. There is a small market near a pond of rainwater which was becoming a bit stagnant. To be honest, I liked that it didn’t look orderly and westernized, but rather was a higgledy-piggledy jumble of small vendors.

While we were walking through Onhimbu, some of the students were vocal about how terrible it was there. I asked the kids how these houses differed from their own, and they indignantly replied “Mr. K, our homes have nice yards that are swept. And we have big homes. Not small ones like these.”

“How big is your home?” I asked one student.

“My home has nine bedrooms,” she replied.

“And how many are living there?”

“Oh, we are four.”

Oh, dear. There we were, 30 private school kids in nice uniforms and their two nattily-dressed teachers, wandering through the shanty town. It’s as if I were teaching in an affluent suburb of New York City, and took my students on a tour of the grittier areas surrounding my former school in Jamaica, Queens. On the one hand, it’s good to expose fortunate students to poverty. On the other hand, it just felt strange to me. Aren’t I supposed to be helping the people who live Onhimbu, not the ones who can afford a private education? And what about those who live in the much poorer parts of Africa, with per capita incomes in the hundreds of dollars instead of the low thousands?

After spending 15 or 20 minutes wandering through Onhimbu, we went to the recently constructed open market. This outdoor market space was clean and well-organized. It also had slabs of meat sitting unrefrigerated all day long. People there also sold a locally-made moonshine called tombe which was consumed out of a communal glass. To someone who grew up with western supermarkets, the carcasses hanging all day was just as disturbing as the poverty in Onhimbu.

Finally, we arrived at the town council building, which was a newly-built, modern structure. The students spoke to an environmental health specialist who worked for the council. The kids asked hard questions about why the city ‘allowed’ Onhimbu to happen, and the representative tried to explain that the city was upgrading its facilities as quickly as possible.

I wonder if this trip was a success, educationally. If wealthier students see how others live, will they be inclined to support policies which help the poor, like minimum wage laws or public health codes? Or will they be horrified, like some of my students, and harden their resolve to become rich and successful so they need never live in a place like Onhimbu?

Recalibrating Expectations

This week will mark one full month at my site, and about a month and a half in Africa. It’s not a very long time, but long enough for me to realize that Africa is not what I expected at all. Like many Americans, when I thought of “Africa,” I had a few iconic images in my mind: noble warriors wearing loincloths and bare-breasted women pictured in National Geographic; desperate, starving children and mutilated bodies, victims of famine and ethnic cleansing, pictured in Time or Newsweek; and lionesses chasing down antelope on the open savannahs, from old episodes of Wild Kingdom. Africa, above all, would be different. It would be the complete opposite of everything I had experienced in America.

I was wrong.

I have seen no noble warriors, no starving children, no lionesses nor antelope, and no evidence of Namibia’s war for independence which ended 17 years ago. I have seen a bare-breasted woman, but only twice, and only because a traditional Himba woman from about 100 miles away happened to be in our town doing some shopping. (I don’t have a picture to put on the site because I was far too embarrassed to take one. I could barely look!). There has been no violence, although two learners did get into a fight yesterday over stolen soccer shoes. While there is no ‘big game’ in my part of Namibia, there are goats, cows, and donkeys are everywhere.

At times I am very disappointed by how ‘normal’ life here seems. For example, for breakfast everyday I eat granola with 2% milk, and for lunch I usually have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. For dinner, I have been making pasta or rice and putting in a can of mixed vegetables. It’s just like home, but without the benefit of a microwave. My little dorm room reminds me of the single dorms at college, although this one has a shower and toilet in the room. The water from the taps is safe to drink, and while the pressure is quite variable, I can usually rinse off the soap before the water runs out. The electricity is on here 24/7.

Moreover, Canisianum Roman Catholic High School where I am teaching is a selective academy and it seems to be a bastion of western culture. We have a fairly strict bell schedule, and ‘African Time’ is not an excuse for lateness here. Although corporal punishment exists, it is rare. More frequently, learners are given the onerous task of ‘weeding’ if they misbehave, which means they must cut grass with a small scythe. Learners are not allowed to use their native language during the school day, and all classes are taught in English except for their Oshiwambo class. Everyone here speaks English fairly well, so there is never a need to communicate in the local language. Though I am learning some of the language, my efforts are hampered by the English speakers all around me.

The school is western in other ways as well. Many of my students are from comparatively affluent families. Although it may not sound like much, they pay nearly US$400 yearly to attend. This figure is nearly 100 times the cost of attending a government school, and equal to the per capita income of Africa's poorest nations. When I asked my students to write letters in which they introduced themselves, many of them told me about their hobbies. Some students liked to go in the fields to cultivate mahangu (the crop that becomes oshifima), but others talked about how they like to read story books, watch movies, and play with their computers. One student wrote about how he loved his Playstation, and another proudly related that her parents were so pleased with her test scores last year that they bought her a cell phone and a laptop! What?!? These sound just like the students back home. Why have I traveled 7,000 miles, and what am I doing here, if the students were just like the ones I left in Queens?

Then I read an interesting passage in Lonely Planet’s Southern Africa guide, “In South Africa and Namibia, two societies/cultures (western and African) run in parallel, although they rarely cross. As you might expect, social customs in a western situation are similar to those in Europe, Australasia and North America…in the other countries covered in this book…the society and culture is predominantly African.” Great, I thought. I should be in Malawi. Here at the school and the Anamulenge mission things feel largely western.

I have not resolved any of these frustrations yet. Lonely Planet helped me to understand why I’ve been feeling frustrated. To some extent, I now have hope that there is an indigenous culture out here if I can only find a way to access it. On the other hand, I am fitfully recalibrating my expectations and trying to find out what role I can play in this partially developed country. Should I spend my time learning the local language, in the hopes of finding something that feels more “African?” Or should I accept that I am basically living in a poor version of the Western world, and work in that context? I don’t know.