Falling for Vic Falls

For my two-week August holiday this year, I traveled over 3,000 miles by land and touched on three different countries! The first week, I met up with a bunch of fellow WorldTeach volunteers to visit Victoria Falls in Zambia. I’ve tracked the entire trip on the map below. The red line is the trip to Zambia, the green is the one back to Windhoek, and the very squiggly blue line is the route my father and I traveled through Namibia.


The travel to Livingstone in Zambia, though it took 24 hours, was not bad at all. From my town I hiked into Oshakati, then took a taxi to the next big town of Ondangwa. From there, I caught a ride with a kindly old man who spoke almost no English. He owned a bunch of stores that made wooden furniture, and after about an hour and a half, he proudly dropped me off at one of his stores. From there I paid for a minibus to take me to Tsumeb where I met up with several other volunteers to wait for the bus to Vic Falls.

Tsumeb was one of the more surreal cities that I’ve been to in Namibia. Like many cities in the south, it has a number of affluent white residents who have developed the town along fairly western lines. In the part of town where we waited for the bus (which was only 3 hours late), all the roads were paved, with trees on either side. Small but cute houses with driveways lined the side streets, and cars zoomed up and down the road. I saw more white people in those three hours of waiting than I would in a month or two up north. All in all, it had the feeling of a small, quiet, American suburb.

The overnight bus ride was crowded but uneventful, and when I woke up we were nearing the Zambian border. The landscape was similar to Namibia’s north, but now there were some rolling hills and much more greenery. This section of the country, unlike everywhere else, receives substantial rainfall and has one river, the Kavango, running through it. From the border, we drove a scant couple of hours to Livingstone, which is the gateway to the Falls on the Zambian side.

In Livingstone, we stayed at the Jolly Boys hostel. It was a perfect hostel, designed by people who had spent a lot of time on the road. It was built around a covered, open-air courtyard that had a recessed seating area of comfy couches and futons. Near the futons were a small shop and internet café. In the yard, a small pool lay next to a friendly bar. Although there were loads of activities to do, you could have a nice time just relaxing as well.

The first day, we took a day trip to Botswana’s Chobe National Park. At 6am, a group of 25 or so hostellers clambered into a rickety double-decker bus that looked as old as I am. After an hours’ drive, we approached the border crossing into Botswana. 18-wheel trucks lined the road for a reason that soon became obvious. To get to Botswana from Zambia we had to cross the Zambezi river, but there was no bridge. Instead, two motorized ferrys went back and forth all day. Each ferry could accommodate a large number of people, ONE car, and ONE truck. Our guide told us that at this time of year, when the river was low, the ferry crossing took only 10 minutes. As a result, truck drivers could get their turn on the ferry after waiting “only” one or two days. During the rainy seasons, truckers might wait four or five days to cross. Still, the guide told us, it was better than the alternative: taking the bridge across the river into Zimbabwe, where petrol shortages and runaway inflation made freight hauling fraught with difficulties.



We debarked from our ancient bus, walked onto the ferry, and then were picked up by a different guide on the other side. Once in Botswana, we took a half-day game drive through the national park, followed by an afternoon game-and-lunch cruise on the Zambezi river. Between the two, we saw loads of beautiful wild animals: elephants, roan antelope, kudu, lichwe antelope, crocodiles, water buffalo, and hippopotami. The best part was the game cruise on a pontoon boat. We ate a leisurely meal of chicken and salad, while our driver took us right to the edge of a marshy island in the middle of the river. From there, we were less than 30 feet from water buffalo and hippos. Later, we came across a small herd of elephant crossing from the mainland to the island. One little baby elephant wasn’t tall enough to walk across, so he wrapped his trunk around his mama’s tail and she pulled him across. It was so cute!



The next day, I indulged in my aviaphile tendencies by purchasing a 15-minute microlight flight over Victoria Falls. I was more excited by trying a microlight that I was at seeing the falls, but it turned out the view was more fun than the ride itself. From the air we could see the broad swath of the Zambezi leading the very wide falls (I forgot exactly how long, but over a kilometer). My pilot/guide also pointed out how the water was starting to cut the next Victoria Falls. At the right side of the waterfall, the force of the water over the rock etched a fissure in the rock, just upstream of the current falls. In time, this fissure will grow into a new waterfall. When that happens, water will then cascade over the newer falls, a couple hundred meters upstream, and the old falls will just be a chasm the water flows through.


That day I also had fun running with a military escort. On the advice of the hostel, I ran out by the airport and then beyond, down a dirt track. I was enjoying the greenery when a Zambian military chaplain drove by in a pickup truck. He warned me that there might be buffalo or elephants roaming about, and then he drove curiously slowly behind me until I ran the back to the main road. Thanks, Father.

That same night, we went for a dinner/booze cruise on the Zambezi, whose highlights were meeting a bunch of Indian peacekeepers, an American volleyball coach, and learning about Zimbabwe. On our cruise there were three soldiers on holiday from their work in the Congo, where they serve as U.N. Peacekeepers on the border with Rwanda. Vivek, Avek, and Munish were extraordinarily nice guys, very articulate and interesting. Back in the states, many people frown on U.N. Peacekeepers, and my impression is that many military personnel would not want to be part of a peace-keeping mission. In contrast, Munish saw his duties in a very positive light. He said that his unit was assigned to Congo as a reward for its excellent anti-terrorism work in Kashmir. Some reward I thought to myself, but he was very proud of it. Recently I have read that fighting near the border flared up again, and I hope that those three are ok.


Our bartender, Tyson, told us a lot about life in Zimbabwe just across the river. The country is imploding right now because of the misguided policies of Robert Mugabe, its president since 1980. He has crushed the opposition with intimidation and beatings. Electricity is only available a few hours each day now. He began a program of land reform which took the land out of the hands of white farmers and redistributed it to black subsistence farmers. As a result, the agricultural output of Zimbabwe has plummeted. Where it was once called the “breadbasket of southern Africa,” now it has to import grain to feed its own people.

Inflation is a massive problem. The rate of inflation is nearly 10,000% per year and rising, similar to the skyrocketing inflation seen in Weimar Germany after the first world war. I heard the story of a businessman who went for a trip to Zimbabwe with two suitcases: one for his clothes, and the other for his money. Tyson showed us some Zimbabwean currency which had an expiration date!! The money had been issued on August 1, 2006 and it expired July 31, 2007.

As a result of all these problems, The Economist has estimated that roughly 3m of its 12m people have fled the country. South Africa in particular is a favored destination, because of its strong economy, but all the surrounding countries have migrants because of Zimbabwe’s collapse. Some of these are poor workers, but many are well-educated people who would love to go back if only the country could sort things out. My doctor and my pharmacist here are both from Zimbabwe. In fact, one of my colleagues once drew for me an acrostic during a meeting:

ZIMBABWE =
Zero
Income
Because
All
Brainy
Workers
Emigrated

As sad as the situation is, the surrounding countries are also now happy that someone else is in far worse condition than they. A bit of African schaudenfreude.




The last day in Vic Falls, I went to see the falls themselves with Steffi, a volleyball coach from the U.S. We hiked down a canopied trail that led to the river below the falls, and watched crazy people bungee jump off a bridge. Then we hiked around to see the falls up close, seeing rainbows, double-rainbows, and triple-rainbows in the spray of the falls. Finally, we found an ‘illegal’ tour guide to take us rock-hopping across the Zambezi river just above the falls. After a half hour's walk, we came to the “Angel’s Armchair.” This pool of water was surrounded by tall rocks just at the edge of the falls. We could safely jump in and swim around, just meters from the mighty falls. It was an excellent and exhilarating way to wrap up my trip to Vic Falls.

Walking around the Mission

If you don’t mind the conceit, I’m going to take you on a little walking tour of the mission today, courtesy of Google Earth and my camera. It turns out Google Earth has some pretty decent satellite pictures of Namibia. Before I had even come here, I checked out Outapi, and I knew where the main roads and the hospital were before I got here. The last time I had a good internet connection (Cape Town), I was able to download this satellite imagery of my home, the Anamulenge mission. Let’s take a little look. I’ve saved the file at a fairly large resolution, so if you hold down the CTRL button and click on it, it should open in another window and be a bit easier to see.


A – This is main entrance to the mission grounds. There’s a gate for cars to drive through on a gravel road. Just above and to the left of the ‘A’ is a watering hole used by local livestock, and children sometimes fish in it too. At this time of year it still has some water, but it is drying up rapidly.

B – The mission’s church. From the air, it looks like a cross. It’s actually a rather pretty building, though I’ve only been in it half a dozen times. The church is the only two-story structure on the mission and thus a good landmark. Although the kids go to church 10 times each week, I have never been pressured to go. Sometimes they will ask me, “Why aren’t you going to Church?” I politely respond, “Because I’m not Christian,” which shocks them. Although they have read about other religions in their religious studies class, many have never met someone who is not Christian.



C – This is the computer lab for the mission, which is sadly underutilized. If our internet service ever starts working again, I’ll probably be posting this entry from this little white building.

D – This is the main hall, where all the parent meetings and large assemblies take place. On regular days, however, it is used by the girl’s hostel as a recreation area. They have a TV/DVD/VCR inside, so the girls get to watch movies on the weekend if they have any. The boys aren’t so lucky; they have a TV but no DVD or VCR. Just the other day I was talking with some of the boys in my room about movies, and they noted how unfair it was that the girls have a DVD player. I responded, “You know, if each boy put in just N$5, you could buy a DVD player.”
Samson responded, “Yes, Mister Josh, but it would cause too many problems. There would be too many arguments about what video to play.”
“So, you’d rather stare at the walls than find a way to share the DVD player?” I countered.
“Yes.”
What more could I say?


E – This area is the girls’ hostel compound. It gets locked every night to keep the girls in and the boys out. The bluish building that looks like an “H” from above is where the Ovambo nuns live.

F – This compound is for the Indian sisters on the mission. The ‘L’ shaped building is their home. They have a small, lush garden in the shade of their house and a few tall trees. The other small building is used to prepare food for the Indian priest. In the picture, I’m standing with the sisters and Johanna, one of the cooks, in front of the sisters’ house.



G – This is the main dining hall.

H – Here’s main school area. The two buildings with red roofs house four classrooms, the staffroom, the secretary’s office and the principal’s office. It seems Google Earth doesn’t update its satellite imagery very frequently, because there are two new classroom blocks, dedicated in early 2006, which do not appear in the photo. These are the library and the classrooms for grades 11 & 12.




I – This small building holds grades 9A, 9B, and 8B. I think the kids like being far away from the principal.

J – The Priest, Father Joe, lives here. He has a pretty nice pad. He’s got loads of room and a large 30+inch television hooked up to a satellite dish. The first time I visited him, he invited me in, gave me some nice wine from a box, and we watched CNN. I think he’s kind of lonely sometimes, because he can’t really ‘hang out’ and watch sports with the nuns. He also let me stay overnight in his house at the beginning of the year so that I could stay up all night and watched the Bears get their butts kicked in the Superbowl—live.

K – This is the boys’ hostel compound, which is also where I live. There are about 80 boys who share two large hostel rooms and a small shower block. Fortunately, I do have my own shower!

L – This little house, technically within the boys’ hostel compound, is where Robin and Nicola live. It has almost all of the comforts of home: a couch, a kitchen, three bedrooms, a brai pit that Robin built, and a bathroom. Ok, so they haven’t had hot water for three months, but otherwise it’s a nice place and it’s where I was supposed to live. However, the clergy who run the mission kept saying that it would be ‘too crowded’ for three people to live in three separate bedrooms. What they meant, of course, is that they didn’t want a man living with two women. At the beginning of the year, I seriously considered a “Three’s Company” approach to the problem, pretending to be gay so that I could live there. Fortunately, Robin talked me out of it.

M – Behind the mission is a cemetery. When my Dad was here, we took a slow walk through the cemetery and I was surprised to see how many headstones were from very young people. Although there are some in the cemetery who died in their eighties, most people were under 50 when they died. This is unfortunately a recent phenomenon. AIDS has hit southern Africa so hard that despite advances in nutrition and basic health care, the life expectancy has dropped to below 50 years. More frustrating, no one acknowledges deaths from AIDS. Although going to funerals is a common occurrence here in Namibia, I have never heard anyone say, "She died because she had HIV." There is such a strong taboo against the illness here that people will simply say that someone ‘got sick’ and then leave it at that. It’s frustrating! If only some HIV-positive Namibians would come forward, the disease would start to lose its pseudo-invisible status. Then, people here might start taking safe sex or abstinence much more seriously.


Well, that’s the end of my tour of the mission grounds. Ending with the cemetery was a bit of a bummer, so perhaps we should continue walking north. Just 300 metres past the cemetery is a small collection of shebeens called Ohamutsi, and we can relax there with a cold Tafel or Windhoek Lager. Let’s go!

Teacher Talk 1

Two of my best friends back in NYC, Ronnie & Leslie, are a couple. Leslie works in an office for a mysterious Asian man named Fred. Ronnie is a teacher in the Bronx. When we three got together back home for drinks or more likely for food, Ronnie and I would start often discussing our schools, our students, the idiocy of Department of Education, etc. Hours might pass without us noticing that the rest of the dinner party was thoroughly uninterested. Leslie politely termed this practice “Teacher Talk” and ruled, quite correctly, that it should take place in very limited amounts when non-teachers are present. With that warning, I’m going to begin the first of several Teacher Talk installments about school life in Namibia. I'll start off with the physical school itself, which may only be interesting to us teachers. I won't feel hurt if you decide to have another piece of garlic bread and read a blog about, say, Big Brother Africa 2 (which aired this Sunday).

Schools in Namibia look nearly identical, as if the same architect designed one school and then that design was copied for hundreds more. The schools generally consist of several long, narrow one-story buildings. Each building consists usually of 2-4 classrooms. In addition to the classrooms, there is usually one separate building that contains the principal’s office (sometimes, but not always, with electricity), a staff room for the teachers which is piled high with exercise books to mark, and a library. Outside the staff room at our school, we have several indigenous 'chalk' trees whose trunks are covered with dust from our erasers.


Each classroom has many windows on each side. At my school the windows are in good condition, but at some government schools many of the panes are broken. On the inside, most classrooms are terribly plain. Teachers rarely have their own classroom here in Namibia, so there is little motivation for them to decorate it with posters, displays of schoolwork, etc. White walls remain unadorned, and a large chalk board hangs at the front of the room. Desks are always arranged in rows; in overcrowded classrooms, sometimes learners must share desks and even chairs.

At some short distance from the school there is a toilet block consisting of a row of aerated pit latrines. If it is a hostel school, long, low hostel blocks will lie a short distance from the classrooms as well. Usually, one or two dilapidated looking buildings stand off to the side where the school custodian keeps his tools, provides a home for broken desks, extra wooden doors, etc. There is usually at least one good shade tree for outdoor assemblies, and some schools may have small agriculture projects going on their grounds – a few scraggly bushes being grown, two rows of mahangu, etc. The grounds are enclosed in a low fence.


Just outside the official grounds there is the ubiquitous soccer field and perhaps a netball court, both signified by goals standing opposite each other across a dusty field. Some schools have real soccer goal posts made of metal, but many just have two poles, across which a wire with aluminum cans has been strung.

Canisianum, being a fancy-pants semi-private school, has a few things that are beyond the norm. Our school secretary has her own, albeit small, office space. Our library is the size of regular classroom, not a closet. We have laboratory that all the science classes share, and we have a sadly under-utilized computer lab. We also have a main hall that is large enough for the entire school to gather in, which is very handy for assemblies, parent meetings, etc.

Compared to other schools in Namibia, mine is medium in size. We have 362 learners—they’re not called students here, though I don’t know why—spanning grades 8-12. There is a staff of 18: one principal, a school secretary, a custodian, and fifteen teachers. Our teaching staff is remarkably diverse, and that diversity has helped create a hard-working culture in the school: of our fifteen teachers, eight are Owambos (the majority tribe in Namibia and in my region), two are Caprivian (a much smaller tribe), there’s me, and then there are four nuns from India. Nearly half the staff are not from this area, and we all bring different perspectives and subject knowledge to the school.

Thanks to the higher school fees at this school, and to the generosity of the Archbishop in Windhoek, the school is exceedingly well-equipped in terms of supplies and technology. For example, my English students were each issued three books per student: a textbook, a reading book (either short stories or a novel), and the fantastic Cambridge Learners Dictionary. At many schools, two, three or even five children must share one textbook, and in the worst cases the only textbook is for the teacher to use. Funds for books are clearly not allocated evenly in the Namibian school system.

Our technology here is also quite good. We have workign electricity in every classroom, and occasionally I bring in a tape player or my laptop to play an listening passage for the kids. We also have both a photocopier and a Risograph, or Riso for short. The Riso is a machine for making large batches of copies, kind of like the old ditto machines, except that the ink isn’t blue and one isn’t inclined to whiff the ink fumes. These are better ratios than at my school in NYC, where a staff of over 200 teachers shared about four copiers and four Risos.

We have a computer lab donated to the school by the Archbishop, and three modern computers in the library, laboratory, and secretary’s office. I’m quite proud of the computer in the library, because at the beginning of the year, we had nothing there. For the first four three months of the school year, a brand-new computer sat in the principal’s office. It was used only by the school secretary to play gospel DVDs. I wrote a letter to the principal explaining how a computer could be effectively used in the library. Just hours later, the library staff rushed up to tell me that we had the principal’s computer!

Of course, all the technology in the world won't help if teachers aren't good and students aren't motivated. Fortunately at my school, both sides of the equation are working fulltime. The school isn't good because of the technology, but the extra tech sure helps.

If this short article has been anything like the ‘Teacher Talk’ that Ronnie and I have rudely engaged in, then by now I have bored away everyone who isn’t a teacher. What can I say? You were warned!! Later installments will focus on discipline, school organization, meetings, and more. If there are any questions you have in particular about the schools here, please post them on the blog or send me an email and I’ll try to get the answers up there for y

Huck Finn on the African Queen

I spent this weekend alongside the Kunene River, a broad, slow-moving river that forms the peaceful border between Namibia and Angola for about 150 miles, from Ruacana Falls to the Atlantic Ocean. For two nights I camped alongside the river with my friend Vicky, a Scottish volunteer who is working at a pretty high level in the Ministry of Education.

The journey to the campground was beautiful and exciting. We drove out to a campground that lay on a rough gravel road, perhaps an hour’s drive past the falls. Dry, rocky mountains covered with scrub and small bushes lay off to our left, while a thin strip of green followed the course of the river to our right. We passed perhaps two settlements in this hour, despite driving alongside the only source of water for hundreds of miles. Outside the narrow strip of green, beautiful but inhospitable scrubland stretched everywere.


This part of Namibia, called the Kaokoveld, is one of the least inhabited regions on the earth. It is roughly 20,000 square miles, with a population of not more than 30,000 humans – a population density of roughly 1.5 people per square mile. Even that figure is misleading, however, as a good 10,000 people live in the region’s main city of Opuwo. To provide some basis for comparison, the population density of the United States overall is about 80 people per square mile, Mexico is 130 per square mile, and a large urban city like London is just over 10,000 per square mile!

Our campground, the Kunene River Lodge, is a little oasis on the river covered in tall trees, grass, and sporting lemon trees. The owners are a middle-aged British couple who first came to Namibia when their daughter was serving here as a volunteer. They fell in love with the country during their visit, and bought the lodge from its previous owners. They also give a ‘volunteer’ discount, which I was happy to take advantage of!


The next day, Vicky and I decided to rent a canoe and paddle down the river. We were driven upriver perhaps 6 kilometers and then launched into the river in our little rubber canoe. The lush green riverbanks contrasted sharply with the surrounding orange-coloured rock. Cattle peacefully browsed both sides of the river bank. The river carried us slowly, lazily under the warm sun of midday. Stretched out on the canoe, dangling my feet in the water, I felt like Huck Finn drifting down the Mississippi on his raft.


We pulled off to the river bank for a lunch of waterlogged crackers, cheese, and fruit. Later, we discovered a small island in the river, separated from the mainland by just a few metres of shallow water. Pulling the canoe on land to investigate, we discovered that we shared this very lush island with only a small group of cattle, and no humans. Probably the island is covered with water during times of high water levels. When the river is low, however, it would be a great place to hide out, just like Jackson’s island in Huckleberry Finn.



Pushing off from the island, we immediately stumbled into another allusion. The channel between the island and the mainland became increasingly narrow and overgrown with giant fronds. We paddled, pushed, and ducked branches, searching for a way back to the main part of the river, just like Bogey and Becall in The African Queen. After much effort, we finally emerged from the overgrowth and headed to the center of the river to enjoy a well-earned rest. At the end of the day, after four or five hours of hard canoeing, we pulled up the canoe to the lodge and posed for one final picture: African Canoe Gothic.


The rest of the trip was pleasant but uneventful, although our campsite was visited by a troop of monkeys in the morning when we were packing up. These monkeys knew their way around campsites, scavenging for leftovers. The owners’ tiny dog decided it was her job to chase off the monkeys, which she did both energetically and fruitlessly, as the monkeys were eating all the fruit. Finally we packed up the car and headed back down the gravel road, saying a fond farewell to the Kunene river.