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!

Gated Community

The mission where I live is, in many senses, a gated community in Namibia. Seriously. It’s not easy to get in here at night, as I have found out when trying to sneak back in ‘after hours,’ and people here are very fond of locking up everything behind closed doors.

I first realized just how ‘gated’ this place is when I came back from a brai (barbecue) the second week of school. We had been out rather late and I arrived back at the mission around 10:30, half an hour after the kids’ bedtime. My friend Jona dropped me off on the gravel road that was the entrance to the mission. The gate for the road was locked up, so I had to climb it to get onto the mission grounds. No big deal; the gate is only four feet high and it has been climbed so many times that the footholds are obvious.

After jumping the front gate, I walked in the dark to the boys hostel, which is enclosed in an 8-foot tall mesh fence. Both the boys and the girls hostel areas have tall fences around them, and they are locked at night, presumably to prevent boys and girls from sneaking out at night to fornicate. Anyway, I had to climb this fence too. Once I was perched at the top and ready to jump down, one of the hostel dogs woke up and sat herself right on my landing point. We stared at each other for a good ten minutes until she got bored and walked away, giving me a chance to jump down. The next day, I made sure to get a key for the boys’ compound!

The obsession with security and keys is, unfortunately, probably quite well founded. Two volunteers I know have had their houses broken into, and there has been a spate of computer thefts from government offices around the country. Even on the mission, Robin and Nicola noticed one boy, whom they invited into their home to listen to music, stealing small items like soap and lotion. As a result, there are keys for everything, and any room with something valuable in it has both a metal door with a regular lock and a door made of thick steel bars which is secured with a padlock. The mission has a security guard at night as well, armed with a bow and arrow. In the early evenings, I usually see him in the boys’ hall, watching television. In the early mornings when I go running, sometimes I see him huddled over a small fire in the center of the mission. I always wave so he knows I’m a teacher, not a thief.

The problem with the keys is that there is usually just one key for any given room, even though many people need to use it legitimately. The room where I keep my food, for example, is locked and the key hangs on a wall near my bedroom door. That room also stores snacks for the disabled children’s home, so sometimes Gotard takes the key to feed the kids and forgets to put it back. I end up wandering around looking for Gotard when I want to eat, and he apologizes profusely for forgetting to return the key. I myself have walked away with it on several occasions too! Likewise, learners are frequently sent to track down keys for the laboratory, computer lab, secretary’s office, library, etc.

Living in such a community has advantages and disadvantages. I feel very safe here at the mission (knock wood). Nothing has been stolen (again, knock wood). Now, after getting to know the students, I feel comfortable inviting some of them into my room even though there is a wide array of tasty goodies to steal (iPod, computer, camera, flashlight, etc.). On the other hand, there is a sense that I’m not living in the ‘real’ Namibia. The kids at the mission are mostly all middle-class, and free from serious want. What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a poorer community, where my food, my blankets, and my clothes would be more coveted by learners? What would it be like to have to worry about security a bit? It’s not that I want to have those concerns, but I would like to know what it’s like to live in a typical Namibian community, not a gated one.

First Day at the Mission

I have been at my site, the Anamulenge Mission, for one full day now. Life at the mission requires an adjustment after the urban, totally westernized feel of Windhoek. In a day, we moved from the comfortable training environment into our job sites.

For myself and the 11 other volunteers in the northern portion of Namibia, known as Ovamboland, our transition started with a day-long ride in a ‘combi.’ A combi is simply a tiny van into which the Namibians cram a few more people than we would feel comfortable. Most of the ride was hot, cramped, and uneventful until we crossed the ‘red line’ which divides the northern 1/8 of the country from the bulk of Namibia. This line is a holdover from colonial days. It roughly corresponds to the malaria zone, and it marks the northern extent of white settlement. It is also divides the free-range grazing areas of the north from the commercial farms of the south, whose meat is certified for export.

At first glance, the north didn’t look like much. It consisted mostly of sparse fields, as the rains had not been good so far this year, and many goats, cows, and donkeys were grazing everywhere. We drove through Oshakati, the north’s big city, which seemed to be a collection of sandy, run-down strip malls. The roads were good however, and the biggest driving hazard was goats and cows wandering into the path of traffic.

When I finally arrived at the Anamulenge mission, it also looked grim. The mission is just about 300 metres off a small tarred road. It has the same sandy soil and sparse grass of Ovamboland, a modest two-story church, and perhaps a dozen single-story buildings and houses scattered around. My first thought, after spending 10 hot hours in a combi, was “I’m going to live here for a year?!?” A small but energetic Indian nun strode out to the combi and introduced herself as Sister Annie. She showed me to my room; the outside of my housing block is pictured, and I am currently in room 2. It’s basically a dorm room, long and narrow, but with its own bathroom and shower; I had been told to expect a house with a TV and A/C, so I was a little surprised. The first night was hard. The place was empty, without students, teachers, or the rest of the missionaries. A dog wanted to be friendly, but I held back because its scars suggested fleas or some other nasty beasts. I was hot. I wondered how I would survive a year here. The room was stuffy, but I didn’t open the windows because of the bugs. Thanks goodness that I got calls from my parents, my godmother, and Lynn that night!

When I woke up the next day, I resolved to explore the town which was two miles away. Outapi, my nearest town, is big by Namibian standards. It has two tarred roads, several markets to buy food, three banks, a post office, two gas stations, many shebeens (bars), and a hospital. Very little was open because it was Sunday, but I was able to buy a fat cake, a yummy piece of fried bread, from an outdoor vendor.

You can actually see Outapi if you go to Google Maps. You can find the town and then look at it with a satellite overlay so you can see houses and roads. The hospital is at the southern end of town, viewable on Google with a big cross. There are numerous sand streets where new government houses have been built, just north and west of the hospital. Each is a brightly painted concrete box, with a small yard and usually a fence. As you go north on the tarred road from the hospital, there are a variety of shops until the road comes to a T at another tarred road. On Google you can see a big building just north of this intersection; that is a ‘supermarket’ which sells everything from hats to noodles to bicycle parts. If you turn right at the ‘T’, and then follow the first left turn off the main road, you will be able to see the Mission. It’s just beyond the end of the tarred road.

Towards the end of the first day, though still a bit unsettled, I went running with Robin, a Peace Corps Volunteer who also lives at the mission. As usual, running set me right. We ran through open fields in the late afternoon’s sun, fading but still hot. A few animals wandered near our route as we ran through fields of grass and by small, seasonal ponds called oshanas. By the end of the run, having had some companionship and sweat, I felt ready to for the first day of school.