September 8, 2007

I’m feeling behind on this already. I don’t know where to start to catch up, so I might not and I’ll just do here and now and try my best to keep up.

We spent the morning walking around Katatura with local guides. The idea was to do a little price checking activity in the supermarkets and the outdoor markets to try to get a feel for what life is like here, but really we just walked and talked to our guides. Every group ran into their guide’s sisters, cousins, brothers, you get the idea. This is definitely an everybody knows everybody else knows everything everyone does kind of place.

After lunch in a local restaurant, we came home and found ourselves tangled up in the predictable, maddening, totally un-resolvable conversation about how privileged we are, how we’ll never truly understand the culture, the poverty, how ultimately useless we are as outsiders. These are the why are we here questions that we need to be asking, but leave me frustrated and unsettled. I know that I haven’t really described Katatura at all, yet, but I don’t know how to start. It just makes me feel like a tourist of poverty. Maybe we are.