On my computer at work, in the budget office of Chicago Public Schools, my screensaver has a dozen of my favorite pictures from Namibia on it. A stunning Namibian sun sets over the semi-arid savanna. One of my favorite students, who taught my Oshivambo, looks up smiling from a test that he made me take. My portly principal watches a volleyball game, shading himself under a parasol while wearing a Chicago Cubs t-shirt.
I've been looking longingly at these pictures for the past two years, particularly after a snowy year in Chicago crunching out a budget with a $370m deficit. But it makes me wonder -- was my experience there as great as I remembered?
Earlier this week, I was chatting with my neighbor Katie Green, a returned Peace Corps volunteer from Cameroon. She told me that her group of volunteers recently had a reunion, and they looked at old slideshows of their years in Africa. "If Cameroon was really like the pictures we had," Katie observed, "then it was awesome. But you know, while you remember the market fondly, you forget how it was full of mud, and crappy food, and poor, desperate kids." As the years go by, it's only too easy to remember the good experiences and minimize the bad ones
Later that week while walking down the street in the midst of a hot spell, the pungent odor of summer garbage wafted by. Usually, this would remind me of why I don't like big cities. This time, however, it reminded me of a low patch of ground in Outapi where the rains collected, garbage stewed, and insects swarmed. And that whiff then reminded me of lonely hours alone in my room, a deep longing for friends and family, and stultifying heat in the summer. Were my glasses not a faint rose, but a ruby red?
I suppose I'll find out tomorrow, when I fly from Johannesburg to Windhoek. My girlfriend Carolyn and I will land mid-afternoon, after having spent two good days in Jo'burg with my friend Steve. We'll first spend a couple of days in the capital, catching up with old friends and former students. Then we'll have a week as tourists. We'll visit the coast, followed by a long hard drive to see some ancient cave paintings, and a visit to the Himba, Namibia's most remote people. Finally we'll end up back at Canisianum, where I'll visit with old students and colleagues and set up the Canisianum Scholarship fund.
I'm excited, but also nervous: Was Namibia as wonderful as I remember? Have I changed to a point where I may not fit in anymore? Nothing will remain exactly as it was several years ago, so will these changes be for the better or for the worse?
I'll find out tomorrow.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Help Kids in Namibia Escape Poverty – But not Poor Fashion Choices – Through Education
In 2007 in northern Namibia, I coached Canisianum (Kuh-knee-see-ann-um) High School’s first-ever debate squad. The team was full of crazy personalities, such as Inamutila Kahipi, whose name meant “I am not afraid.” Inamutila lived up to his name but never took himself too seriously. For example, when I first met him at the Valentine’s Day dance, he arrived wearing a full-length leather coat over a white t-shirt and sported a single glove, like a hip-hop Namibian Michael Jackson.
His opposite was Miriam, the team co-captain. She prepared for debates with a ferocity and thoroughness that could only mean she was headed for a career in law. The team did well, winning both local and regional competitions. Miriam and Inamutila were selected to represent our region in the national competitions, which was a big feather in Canisianum’s cap.
Through the debates, I met students from all around northern Namibia. Our competitors made me realize what a special school Canisianum was. Whereas our students used English to inform, persuade and inspire, students from competing schools still struggled to piece together coherent sentences. While my students researched debate topics in the student-run library, students at other schools lacked basic reference materials like encyclopedias and textbooks.
That split is still evident today on the national exams. Canisianum’s pass rate in 2009 was over 95%; neighboring schools were well below 50%. These exams are required to advance to college. As a result, poor grades usually mean the end of a student’s academic career and the beginning of a life of subsistence farming. In contrast, attending Canisianum markedly improves a young child’s chances of success due to its rigorous teaching, high standards and unique management structure.
Unfortunately, many of the eager students in the region cannot afford to pay Canisianum’s fees of about US$100 per year. Just think about that: in America, you’re lucky if $100 pays for books and school supplies for a semester. In Namibia, it gets a student a top-notch education for a year, and a very good chance at qualifying for one of Namibia’s three universities. With your help, more Namibian children can have this chance.Think about donating now to help give kids like those in the picture a quality education. A $100 donation pays for an entire year of school for a poor child, but even $25 makes a difference. All donations are tax-deductible!
The goal is to raise $5,000 to establish a permanent scholarship endowment at the school, and we’re already 1/3 of the way there! When I return to Namibia this September I’ll be setting up the scholarship in coordination with the school and the US-based nonprofit, WorldTeach. Donations can be made online via WorldTeach/PayPal or via mail by sending a check to:
WorldTeach
c/o Center for International Development
Harvard University
79 John F. Kennedy St., Box 122
Cambridge, MA 02138.
Your donation should be made out to "WorldTeach." Please make sure to write “Namibia-Canisianum Scholarship,” in the memo field, and thanks.
If you have any questions about this scholarship endowment or Canisianum RCHS, please write me at joshua.kaufmann.72@gmail.com. If you would like to learn more about Canisianum, many stories on this blog, Outapi Odyssey focus on school life.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The Last Word
All good things come to an end, and so too with my time in Namibia. It ended, for those of you who don’t know, with more of a whimper than a bang. For several months in the beginning of 2008, I worked at the library in Outapi doing a job that wasn’t particularly necessary. Every day I saw my former students walking to Canisianum, and I missed them. I wanted to find a way to stay for another full year, perhaps teaching again. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Education couldn’t find a spot for me. So, with many regrets, I decided on April 10 to come home. Just a few days later, I accepted a scholarship at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, for a one-year degree in Public Administration. Just a couple of days later, my mother fell ill and went to the hospital with a serious lung infection. I was in the capital city when this happened, and luckily had my passport with me, so I boarded a plane and headed straight home. Fortunately my mother has recovered, as much a testament to medical science as to stubbornness and strength of will.
Because of the process I described above, I didn’t really have a chance in Namibia to say my goodbyes, both to the people that I worked and lived with for 16 months but also to the experience itself. What did those 16 months in Namibia mean to me? What lessons did I learn? That’s what I’ll be trying to answer in this final culminating blog entry. This entry will be unlike previous entries, which hopefully were tasty morsels of life in Namibia liberally seasoned with policy and history and anthropology. This one will be navel-gazing, the sort of self-obsessive speculations that I tend to find dreadfully boring to read! So, please continue at your own risk!
Why did I go? For one, it was a life-long dream. In high school I learned about the Peace Corps from my friend Carrie, whose parents had met in Ethiopia in the 1960s. That summer, stoked to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, I refused to use my air conditioner because I was “in training.” However, during college I encountered a few roadblocks and some dreams faded to be replaced with new ones. With my theatre major in hand, I went first to England and then to New York, in search of greater perspectives and a life as an actor.
The dream began to resurface after I had become a teacher. Inchoately dissatisfied with teaching in New York, the pull of the developing world began to reassert itself. I looked at Peace Corps again and also at graduate programs in public policy, where graduates tended to work with exciting institutions like the World Bank, the U.N. Development Program, and the International Red Cross. Several grad school advisers recommended that I get the international experience before enrolling in a program; it made sense to see if I liked working abroad before committing to such a course of study. With no small trepidation about leaving behind family and friends, off I went to Namibia to see what the developing world was all about, and what my place in it might be.
The short answer, about what my place in it might be, is that I love working in the developing world. I love being immersed in a different culture, in trying to figure out what’s going on, in challenging myself to learn a new language. For all the frustrations and hassles or working in a developing country, it is immensely rewarding. The volunteer community became a place where I felt at home, reveling in the shared sense of purpose and an appreciation of other cultures and simpler ways of living. But I also felt very detached from my friends and my family back home.
So what lessons did I learn in going abroad? Some might be transitory lessons, and others may stay with me. Yet other lessons may remain vague for now, only to be realized at a later time. Nonetheless, this is what I think I’ve learned so far.
First, I learned to love a simpler way of life. In Namibia, there wasn’t much going on. There weren’t a lot of people. A good Friday night consisted of making dinner with a friend and then hanging out at his or her house. A good Sunday started on Saturday night, when I would put my clothes in my wash bucket to soak overnight. Then on a slow, luxurious Sunday morning, when the students were in church and I had the hostel to myself, I would hang my laundry in peace and quiet, write or read, go for a run, and then do a little work for school. By not trying to do too many things, the few things that I did became much, much more enjoyable.
This lesson might be transitory. Life moves much more quickly in America. Last night I met up with some new friends from my program – including two returned Peace Corps volunteers. We had dinner, dessert, and then a movie in just a few hours. That would have been a full weekend’s worth of excitement last year. When we did an activity on resource scarcity this week in class, one group of students pointed out that our scarcest resource right now is time. Last year in Namibia, there were many scarce resources, like telephone credit or cheese, but time was in abundance. I’d like to keep this sense of simplicity, but am not sure how to do so in America. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
Along these lines, I came to appreciate living outside a city. This lesson is, I fear, the most transitory. Right now I would love to live away from a big city, on a farm somewhere near enough to a job that I don’t have to commute for ages. It’s possible, especially if I stay in education, to get a decent job in a rural area. But my friends and family are all concentrated in the U.S.’s first and second cities, New York and Chicago. My good friends sent me a birthday card last year which said that anyone who moves far from their friends is, well, just plain stupid! In many ways they were right, and yet I can’t see living in a big city anymore. What’s the advantage? I think acting on this lesson will be one of the hardest for me to do.
Another thing I learned was that I can indeed enjoy teaching. In Namibia, I taught at a good school with smart, motivated students and a dedicated and ethical administrator. It made all the difference from my time teaching in New York City. It made the work fun, and yet, I’m still reluctant to commit fully to a life working at educating our nation’s youth. The big advantage of it, as I can see, is flexibility. I could work in big communities or small ones. I could work all over the country, and could easily go abroad again. But do I want to educate 16 year-olds for the rest of my life? When I decided to return from Namibia, I certainly had the option to go back into the classroom, and even though I had a very positive classroom experience last year, I didn’t do it. If I’m not a teacher at a high school, what else will I do?
Finally, and probably most up in the air for me now, is trying to figure out what role international work will have in my life. On the one hand, I really love being abroad. It’s hard, sweaty, difficult, and nowhere else do I feel as alive. On the other hand, I don’t want to be that far from my family for that long right now. Once I’ve started a family, if I can convince them to come with me, it would be a different story. So what can I do that builds on my interests in policy and education, international work and development, but allow me to live near my family in Chicago? That’s the question for this year.
Certainly, living abroad I learnt many lessons: simplicity, appreciation of a rural life, knowledge that I need to balance my need for exploring other cultures and worlds with my need for family and friends, and some further appreciation of teaching as a career. The question becomes now how I’ll apply these lessons. Can I find a place to live in the country that’s still close enough to my family? Can I find a way to balance the thrill of living in other countries with staying connected to my family? As so often happens, these questions come down to the concept of balance – how does one organize his or her life to keep things in balance?
So, after 16 months and 45,000+ words, it’s time for me to wrap up this blog, this journey we took together. Thank you so much for taking the time to read and to give me your comments, your emails, your critiques and praises. I hope that I’ve been able to crack open a window onto another world for you, a world that I loved inhabiting. Many people have asked me if I’ll continue to blog now that I’m back in the United States. I wasn’t planning on it, especially because I’ll be in grad school this year. Most entries would go something like this, “Woke up. Studied budgeting and/or statistics and/or economics. Went to class. Did group work. Studied more. Ate. Slept.” That probably wouldn’t be a very interesting blog. But thanks for your attention over the past year and a half, and I hope to have the chance to explore another world for you sometime in the future.
Peace out.
Because of the process I described above, I didn’t really have a chance in Namibia to say my goodbyes, both to the people that I worked and lived with for 16 months but also to the experience itself. What did those 16 months in Namibia mean to me? What lessons did I learn? That’s what I’ll be trying to answer in this final culminating blog entry. This entry will be unlike previous entries, which hopefully were tasty morsels of life in Namibia liberally seasoned with policy and history and anthropology. This one will be navel-gazing, the sort of self-obsessive speculations that I tend to find dreadfully boring to read! So, please continue at your own risk!
Why did I go? For one, it was a life-long dream. In high school I learned about the Peace Corps from my friend Carrie, whose parents had met in Ethiopia in the 1960s. That summer, stoked to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, I refused to use my air conditioner because I was “in training.” However, during college I encountered a few roadblocks and some dreams faded to be replaced with new ones. With my theatre major in hand, I went first to England and then to New York, in search of greater perspectives and a life as an actor.
The dream began to resurface after I had become a teacher. Inchoately dissatisfied with teaching in New York, the pull of the developing world began to reassert itself. I looked at Peace Corps again and also at graduate programs in public policy, where graduates tended to work with exciting institutions like the World Bank, the U.N. Development Program, and the International Red Cross. Several grad school advisers recommended that I get the international experience before enrolling in a program; it made sense to see if I liked working abroad before committing to such a course of study. With no small trepidation about leaving behind family and friends, off I went to Namibia to see what the developing world was all about, and what my place in it might be.
The short answer, about what my place in it might be, is that I love working in the developing world. I love being immersed in a different culture, in trying to figure out what’s going on, in challenging myself to learn a new language. For all the frustrations and hassles or working in a developing country, it is immensely rewarding. The volunteer community became a place where I felt at home, reveling in the shared sense of purpose and an appreciation of other cultures and simpler ways of living. But I also felt very detached from my friends and my family back home.
So what lessons did I learn in going abroad? Some might be transitory lessons, and others may stay with me. Yet other lessons may remain vague for now, only to be realized at a later time. Nonetheless, this is what I think I’ve learned so far.
First, I learned to love a simpler way of life. In Namibia, there wasn’t much going on. There weren’t a lot of people. A good Friday night consisted of making dinner with a friend and then hanging out at his or her house. A good Sunday started on Saturday night, when I would put my clothes in my wash bucket to soak overnight. Then on a slow, luxurious Sunday morning, when the students were in church and I had the hostel to myself, I would hang my laundry in peace and quiet, write or read, go for a run, and then do a little work for school. By not trying to do too many things, the few things that I did became much, much more enjoyable.
This lesson might be transitory. Life moves much more quickly in America. Last night I met up with some new friends from my program – including two returned Peace Corps volunteers. We had dinner, dessert, and then a movie in just a few hours. That would have been a full weekend’s worth of excitement last year. When we did an activity on resource scarcity this week in class, one group of students pointed out that our scarcest resource right now is time. Last year in Namibia, there were many scarce resources, like telephone credit or cheese, but time was in abundance. I’d like to keep this sense of simplicity, but am not sure how to do so in America. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
Along these lines, I came to appreciate living outside a city. This lesson is, I fear, the most transitory. Right now I would love to live away from a big city, on a farm somewhere near enough to a job that I don’t have to commute for ages. It’s possible, especially if I stay in education, to get a decent job in a rural area. But my friends and family are all concentrated in the U.S.’s first and second cities, New York and Chicago. My good friends sent me a birthday card last year which said that anyone who moves far from their friends is, well, just plain stupid! In many ways they were right, and yet I can’t see living in a big city anymore. What’s the advantage? I think acting on this lesson will be one of the hardest for me to do.
Another thing I learned was that I can indeed enjoy teaching. In Namibia, I taught at a good school with smart, motivated students and a dedicated and ethical administrator. It made all the difference from my time teaching in New York City. It made the work fun, and yet, I’m still reluctant to commit fully to a life working at educating our nation’s youth. The big advantage of it, as I can see, is flexibility. I could work in big communities or small ones. I could work all over the country, and could easily go abroad again. But do I want to educate 16 year-olds for the rest of my life? When I decided to return from Namibia, I certainly had the option to go back into the classroom, and even though I had a very positive classroom experience last year, I didn’t do it. If I’m not a teacher at a high school, what else will I do?
Finally, and probably most up in the air for me now, is trying to figure out what role international work will have in my life. On the one hand, I really love being abroad. It’s hard, sweaty, difficult, and nowhere else do I feel as alive. On the other hand, I don’t want to be that far from my family for that long right now. Once I’ve started a family, if I can convince them to come with me, it would be a different story. So what can I do that builds on my interests in policy and education, international work and development, but allow me to live near my family in Chicago? That’s the question for this year.
Certainly, living abroad I learnt many lessons: simplicity, appreciation of a rural life, knowledge that I need to balance my need for exploring other cultures and worlds with my need for family and friends, and some further appreciation of teaching as a career. The question becomes now how I’ll apply these lessons. Can I find a place to live in the country that’s still close enough to my family? Can I find a way to balance the thrill of living in other countries with staying connected to my family? As so often happens, these questions come down to the concept of balance – how does one organize his or her life to keep things in balance?
So, after 16 months and 45,000+ words, it’s time for me to wrap up this blog, this journey we took together. Thank you so much for taking the time to read and to give me your comments, your emails, your critiques and praises. I hope that I’ve been able to crack open a window onto another world for you, a world that I loved inhabiting. Many people have asked me if I’ll continue to blog now that I’m back in the United States. I wasn’t planning on it, especially because I’ll be in grad school this year. Most entries would go something like this, “Woke up. Studied budgeting and/or statistics and/or economics. Went to class. Did group work. Studied more. Ate. Slept.” That probably wouldn’t be a very interesting blog. But thanks for your attention over the past year and a half, and I hope to have the chance to explore another world for you sometime in the future.
Peace out.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
More Tread than Brains
Unfortunately, my laptop has been stolen, and with it all my pictures. As a result, in this penultimate blog entry, I’ll try to paint a picture of our adventure into the Kaokoveld, the wild, undeveloped territory of the Himbas.
It began with the four-day weekend that honors Namibian Independence. If I were a true cultural observer, I would have stayed at home and seen what Namibians do on this day. I asked what Namibians did to celebrate, and the answer was, “Not much.” As a result, I felt free to join my friend Ant and three of his friends on their adventure. Ant is a short, stocky Yorkshireman with an easy laugh and a hard accent. There’s a picture of him pretending to dive into a pool of flooded water somewhere earlier in this blog. Rose, his friend and future travel partner for his trip home, bubbles with stories and humor in an archetypal Irish fashion. Laura is a tall, blond Dutch woman whose thin lips easily break into a smile or compress into disdain. Edna, a short Canadian, is the quiet one in the group – she would rather read her book than even watch the scenery out the window.
Part of the motivation for this trip was for Ant and Laura to test out their vehicles, both 4x4’s which they claimed yearned for the unpaved road. Ant has a cherry-red Jeep Wrangler, the consumer version of the Army jeeps which plied the roads of Europe during WWII. Laura had a little Suzuki 4x4. In the past, I had always thought that people who went “Off-roading” as a leisure activity were just silly, and that it was just a wasteful motorsport. I still do, but now I’ve learned it’s a hell of a lot of fun too.
The first day’s drive was easy – just about three hours on tar roads and ‘good gravel’ to the city of Opuwo, the jumping-off point for the Himba hinterlands. We camped that night at a beautiful lodge in Opuwo, where a kidney-shaped ‘infinity’ pool overlooked the spartan, dusty mountains of the Kaokoveld. With the sun setting over these hills, a pool in front of us, a casual game of scrabble going on and a drink in hand, there seemed no better place in the world.
The next day we headed off for Epupa Falls, a waterfall on the Kunene river 75 miles north of Opuwo. Driving those miles took seven hours. The first 30 miles of the trip were on relatively decent gravel roads despite a light rain. About 10 miles out of town, we picked up a Himba man who had been walking on the road for over three hours already, and took him the next 10 miles to his destination. He was quite lucky that we picked him up; he told us that in three hours, only two other vehicles had passed by. Even by Namibian standards, we were on a very infrequently used road.
First, a few words about ‘rivers’ in Namibia. If you look at a map of Namibia, you will see that it has no rivers that run permanently through the country. There’s one, the Kunene, that divides Namibia from Angola. Another, the Orange River, divides Namibia from South Africa. That’s it. However, if you look carefully at standard road map, you will see faint, dashed blue lines all over the country. These are ephemeral rivers, which usually flow for a few days on and off during the rainy season. Some of these rivers, especially in the dryer part of the country to the south, may flow only every few decades. Because the rain is so infrequent, no bridges have been built. When it does rain, however, the roads can become impassable for hours or days. During my first year in Namibia, even during the rainy season, I never saw an ephemeral river with water in it.
After an hour we reached Okungwati, a medium-sized village with several shops and a school. It lies at the foot of a large ephemeral river, but there was nothing ephemeral about it now. A wide, sandy plain, perhaps 30 metres across, was covered by 3-6 inches of flowing water. Standing in the river was perfectly safe, but the wet, heavy sand was a car killer. To the side of the road, a huge overland vehicle listed like a sinking boat in the sandy muck. These trucks are ex-military transport used for the tourist trade, with tires four feet tall and engines strong enough to win a tug of war with elephants. When we came upon the truck, a crowd of Namibians with shovels were trying to dig it out, and two of its wheels were completely buried in the wet sand.
Now, sensible people would have seen this as a bad omen and back-tracked to dry land. Not us. Armed with the confidence that comes from naivete, we plunged ahead. Laura’s car bogged down almost immediately, but fortunately we were in a town. All the local men and boys who had been working on the truck ran over and pushed her little SUV out in just a few moments. So, no problem.
As we continued north, however, the road deteriorated. We had to climb over small rocks in the vehicles and pass through several lightly-flowing rivers. Most of them were no problem, which bred overconfidence. With just about 18 miles to the campsite, we finally hit our nemesis.
At yet another unnamed river, I drove Ant’s car through it first. Driving in first gear the whole time, never slowing down for fear of losing momentum, his little Jeep did fine. Laura’s car, however, bogged down right in the middle of river. No problem, we thought, because we had a tow rope. I backed Ant’s car up to Laura’s and he attached the tow rope. Then, with one car on damp sand trying to pull out another car on damp sand, I put the Jeep in gear and it promptly sank six inches into the muck. Both of the vehicles were stuck. We had just learned our first lesson in backcountry driving: never, never endanger your second vehicle to rescue the first.
We spent a good three hours in that river, trying to find a way to free the vehicles. This was one of those situations where the ‘A’ that you get for effort is completely useless. We jacked up the car, and the jack sank down in the mud. We dug out underneath tires to lay stones underneath the treads, and the car sank even further. We tried to dig a trench to siphon water away from the car, and quickly could see why building large canals costs thousands of lives and millions of dollars. After two hours, not a single car had come by, and I started to think of our alternatives. We had about two and half hours of daylight left. I could run to the campsite, but it was 18 miles away and I couldn’t get there before dark. We did have our tents, however, and there was water nearby to drink.
Fortunately, before we had to put any of those plans into action, the cavalry arrived. Coming over the rise of the next hill, a pickup truck laden with Namibians slowed down as it approached the river. The men piled out, and with fifteen bodies pushing, we freed both vehicles quickly. We gave the men some money and bread, and watched as they all walked across the river and let the pickup drive across with a light load. Lessons number two and three about backcountry driving: there’s safety in numbers, and lighten your load before crossing a river. After that, we made the final 18 miles to the campsite without incident.
The next day, after hiking up and around to see the waterfall, we returned down the same road. We picked up as many hitchhikers as possible to have extra manpower in case we got stuck. Before each river, all the passengers piled out of the cars. The river that had foiled us the day before proved no problem just 18 hours later. We were learning our lessons.
Halfway to Opuwo, we turned toward the east and began heading along a rutted, wet, muddy track to the Kunene River Lodge. In this normally dry section of Namibia, the desert was blooming. Flowers were everywhere, and the air was laden with humidity. Brown plains had turned lush and verdant. Occasionally, a springbok or other antelope grazed off in the distance. For an hour’s drive, green replaced brown, water replaced sand, and the hills in distance looked inviting, not menacing.
We reached a section where the road crossed a wide river, perhaps five times wider than the one we had been stuck in previously. Daunted by the size of the crossing, we took no chances. We unloaded the heavy items from the vehicle. We positioned people along the route, a few feet from where the car would go, ready to run up and push if need be. But before we tried our longest river crossing yet, in typical tourist fasion, we decided that we should document the entire event on video. Unfortunately, the video was lost when my computer was stolen. I’ll do my best to paint the pictures, however.
The first video was Ant’s version of a BBC African Safari documentary. Camera in hand, he walked the entire route that the car would take, narrating which parts were sandy and which were rocky, and describing the strategies that I would use to drive across. Then, Ant placed himself right in the middle of the river to film the car’s progress. Inside his Jeep, I took another camera and strapped it to dashboard with tape, so we could have a ‘cockpit’ view. Then, we were off.
Ant’s video shows his car starting on a hill about 10 feet above the water. My video captures the nerves in my voice as I talk to myself, prior to putting the car in gear. The car plunges into the water, and the outside camera captures the powerful arcs of water as the wheels plow through a flowing river. Inside the car, the camera rocks crazily as the car bounces from rock to rock, yet I never slow down. Outside, Ant is audibly praying “Come on, Josh. Come on, Josh!” The car slows a bit in a sandy patch, then rushes past Ant’s vantage point in the center of the river. Hitting harder ground, the Jeep begins to climb toward the opposite shore, and I keep up the speed until it is safely on solid land, 15 feet from the water. On the inside camera, I warble a nervous “Woo-hoo!,” while the whole crew cheers on the outside camera. Success! We made it!
After Laura drove her car across, a convoy of five vehicles approached to cross the river from the other direction and to burst our bubble. These were the serious off road vehicles: LandRovers with snorkels for driving through four or five feet of water, Jeeps with extra tanks of gas hanging off the sides, and Toyota trucks with clearance so high they could leap small buildings in a single bound. These guys slowed down for about ten seconds, looked at the river from the height of their big rigs, and then just drove on through. So much for walking each crossing first!
Nonetheless, after a little more gnarly driving, we finally reached the campsite along the overflowing banks of the Kunene. After two days of hard driving, none of us really felt like cooking, so we took advantage of our hosts’ dining room and a well-deserved treat.
By the end of the trip, we had covered over 500 miles on rocky, sandy, flooded roads. It was wasteful, noisy, messy, and bad for the environment. Unfortunately, it was loads of fun too. I know that I shouldn’t, but if a chance for a 4x4 trek comes my way in the future, I’m in.
It began with the four-day weekend that honors Namibian Independence. If I were a true cultural observer, I would have stayed at home and seen what Namibians do on this day. I asked what Namibians did to celebrate, and the answer was, “Not much.” As a result, I felt free to join my friend Ant and three of his friends on their adventure. Ant is a short, stocky Yorkshireman with an easy laugh and a hard accent. There’s a picture of him pretending to dive into a pool of flooded water somewhere earlier in this blog. Rose, his friend and future travel partner for his trip home, bubbles with stories and humor in an archetypal Irish fashion. Laura is a tall, blond Dutch woman whose thin lips easily break into a smile or compress into disdain. Edna, a short Canadian, is the quiet one in the group – she would rather read her book than even watch the scenery out the window.
Part of the motivation for this trip was for Ant and Laura to test out their vehicles, both 4x4’s which they claimed yearned for the unpaved road. Ant has a cherry-red Jeep Wrangler, the consumer version of the Army jeeps which plied the roads of Europe during WWII. Laura had a little Suzuki 4x4. In the past, I had always thought that people who went “Off-roading” as a leisure activity were just silly, and that it was just a wasteful motorsport. I still do, but now I’ve learned it’s a hell of a lot of fun too.
The first day’s drive was easy – just about three hours on tar roads and ‘good gravel’ to the city of Opuwo, the jumping-off point for the Himba hinterlands. We camped that night at a beautiful lodge in Opuwo, where a kidney-shaped ‘infinity’ pool overlooked the spartan, dusty mountains of the Kaokoveld. With the sun setting over these hills, a pool in front of us, a casual game of scrabble going on and a drink in hand, there seemed no better place in the world.
The next day we headed off for Epupa Falls, a waterfall on the Kunene river 75 miles north of Opuwo. Driving those miles took seven hours. The first 30 miles of the trip were on relatively decent gravel roads despite a light rain. About 10 miles out of town, we picked up a Himba man who had been walking on the road for over three hours already, and took him the next 10 miles to his destination. He was quite lucky that we picked him up; he told us that in three hours, only two other vehicles had passed by. Even by Namibian standards, we were on a very infrequently used road.
First, a few words about ‘rivers’ in Namibia. If you look at a map of Namibia, you will see that it has no rivers that run permanently through the country. There’s one, the Kunene, that divides Namibia from Angola. Another, the Orange River, divides Namibia from South Africa. That’s it. However, if you look carefully at standard road map, you will see faint, dashed blue lines all over the country. These are ephemeral rivers, which usually flow for a few days on and off during the rainy season. Some of these rivers, especially in the dryer part of the country to the south, may flow only every few decades. Because the rain is so infrequent, no bridges have been built. When it does rain, however, the roads can become impassable for hours or days. During my first year in Namibia, even during the rainy season, I never saw an ephemeral river with water in it.
After an hour we reached Okungwati, a medium-sized village with several shops and a school. It lies at the foot of a large ephemeral river, but there was nothing ephemeral about it now. A wide, sandy plain, perhaps 30 metres across, was covered by 3-6 inches of flowing water. Standing in the river was perfectly safe, but the wet, heavy sand was a car killer. To the side of the road, a huge overland vehicle listed like a sinking boat in the sandy muck. These trucks are ex-military transport used for the tourist trade, with tires four feet tall and engines strong enough to win a tug of war with elephants. When we came upon the truck, a crowd of Namibians with shovels were trying to dig it out, and two of its wheels were completely buried in the wet sand.
Now, sensible people would have seen this as a bad omen and back-tracked to dry land. Not us. Armed with the confidence that comes from naivete, we plunged ahead. Laura’s car bogged down almost immediately, but fortunately we were in a town. All the local men and boys who had been working on the truck ran over and pushed her little SUV out in just a few moments. So, no problem.
As we continued north, however, the road deteriorated. We had to climb over small rocks in the vehicles and pass through several lightly-flowing rivers. Most of them were no problem, which bred overconfidence. With just about 18 miles to the campsite, we finally hit our nemesis.
At yet another unnamed river, I drove Ant’s car through it first. Driving in first gear the whole time, never slowing down for fear of losing momentum, his little Jeep did fine. Laura’s car, however, bogged down right in the middle of river. No problem, we thought, because we had a tow rope. I backed Ant’s car up to Laura’s and he attached the tow rope. Then, with one car on damp sand trying to pull out another car on damp sand, I put the Jeep in gear and it promptly sank six inches into the muck. Both of the vehicles were stuck. We had just learned our first lesson in backcountry driving: never, never endanger your second vehicle to rescue the first.
We spent a good three hours in that river, trying to find a way to free the vehicles. This was one of those situations where the ‘A’ that you get for effort is completely useless. We jacked up the car, and the jack sank down in the mud. We dug out underneath tires to lay stones underneath the treads, and the car sank even further. We tried to dig a trench to siphon water away from the car, and quickly could see why building large canals costs thousands of lives and millions of dollars. After two hours, not a single car had come by, and I started to think of our alternatives. We had about two and half hours of daylight left. I could run to the campsite, but it was 18 miles away and I couldn’t get there before dark. We did have our tents, however, and there was water nearby to drink.
Fortunately, before we had to put any of those plans into action, the cavalry arrived. Coming over the rise of the next hill, a pickup truck laden with Namibians slowed down as it approached the river. The men piled out, and with fifteen bodies pushing, we freed both vehicles quickly. We gave the men some money and bread, and watched as they all walked across the river and let the pickup drive across with a light load. Lessons number two and three about backcountry driving: there’s safety in numbers, and lighten your load before crossing a river. After that, we made the final 18 miles to the campsite without incident.
The next day, after hiking up and around to see the waterfall, we returned down the same road. We picked up as many hitchhikers as possible to have extra manpower in case we got stuck. Before each river, all the passengers piled out of the cars. The river that had foiled us the day before proved no problem just 18 hours later. We were learning our lessons.
Halfway to Opuwo, we turned toward the east and began heading along a rutted, wet, muddy track to the Kunene River Lodge. In this normally dry section of Namibia, the desert was blooming. Flowers were everywhere, and the air was laden with humidity. Brown plains had turned lush and verdant. Occasionally, a springbok or other antelope grazed off in the distance. For an hour’s drive, green replaced brown, water replaced sand, and the hills in distance looked inviting, not menacing.
We reached a section where the road crossed a wide river, perhaps five times wider than the one we had been stuck in previously. Daunted by the size of the crossing, we took no chances. We unloaded the heavy items from the vehicle. We positioned people along the route, a few feet from where the car would go, ready to run up and push if need be. But before we tried our longest river crossing yet, in typical tourist fasion, we decided that we should document the entire event on video. Unfortunately, the video was lost when my computer was stolen. I’ll do my best to paint the pictures, however.
The first video was Ant’s version of a BBC African Safari documentary. Camera in hand, he walked the entire route that the car would take, narrating which parts were sandy and which were rocky, and describing the strategies that I would use to drive across. Then, Ant placed himself right in the middle of the river to film the car’s progress. Inside his Jeep, I took another camera and strapped it to dashboard with tape, so we could have a ‘cockpit’ view. Then, we were off.
Ant’s video shows his car starting on a hill about 10 feet above the water. My video captures the nerves in my voice as I talk to myself, prior to putting the car in gear. The car plunges into the water, and the outside camera captures the powerful arcs of water as the wheels plow through a flowing river. Inside the car, the camera rocks crazily as the car bounces from rock to rock, yet I never slow down. Outside, Ant is audibly praying “Come on, Josh. Come on, Josh!” The car slows a bit in a sandy patch, then rushes past Ant’s vantage point in the center of the river. Hitting harder ground, the Jeep begins to climb toward the opposite shore, and I keep up the speed until it is safely on solid land, 15 feet from the water. On the inside camera, I warble a nervous “Woo-hoo!,” while the whole crew cheers on the outside camera. Success! We made it!
After Laura drove her car across, a convoy of five vehicles approached to cross the river from the other direction and to burst our bubble. These were the serious off road vehicles: LandRovers with snorkels for driving through four or five feet of water, Jeeps with extra tanks of gas hanging off the sides, and Toyota trucks with clearance so high they could leap small buildings in a single bound. These guys slowed down for about ten seconds, looked at the river from the height of their big rigs, and then just drove on through. So much for walking each crossing first!
Nonetheless, after a little more gnarly driving, we finally reached the campsite along the overflowing banks of the Kunene. After two days of hard driving, none of us really felt like cooking, so we took advantage of our hosts’ dining room and a well-deserved treat.
By the end of the trip, we had covered over 500 miles on rocky, sandy, flooded roads. It was wasteful, noisy, messy, and bad for the environment. Unfortunately, it was loads of fun too. I know that I shouldn’t, but if a chance for a 4x4 trek comes my way in the future, I’m in.
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