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!