a few photos:

Namibia

I ran into an elevator in JFK wheeling one suitcase, a big backpack on my back and another smaller one slung out in front of me, a shoulder bag dragging behind me, and a purse dangling from one hand.

A man standing inside with a briefcase took one look at me and said, "Could you possibly be carrying any more stuff? Or you could be like an African woman, carry something on your head!"

And so I am back in the USA. In the odd hours in between jet lag induced naps, I spent the first few days enjoying the fact that I could walk around by myself after dark, looking for traffic on the wrong side of the road, and marvelling at all of the white people everywhere, how easy it is to slip back into blending in. Here I am just walking the streets, wallet still filled with Namibian and South African change, nobody asking me to repeat things, because of my thick American accent.

As sick of the five roommate and very rickety bunkbed situation as I was, I miss our house in Windhoek. The barbed wire fences and the guard dogs, that very vicious terrier around the corner near the Chinese ambassador's house that would always squeeze out of the fence, Tom Thumb's convenience store that reeked of fries (I mean chips) and sausauge starting around six in the morning, that dry desert heat, my second summer.

october was too much to ever recap. i can't rehash the details at this point, and i won't recount a travel itinerary. i won't abandon the blog, though, so i will do what i can to try to put a few of the pieces of what i can remember on paper.

i didn't realize how much i could crave the ocean. the first part of our group's three weeks of traveling was to Swakopmund, a little city on the coast where i had my first encounter with this side of the Atlantic. I'd heard that Swakop is kind of like a neo-Nazi stronghold in the country, but in our few days of visiting with city officials and wandering the town and climbing dunes i didn't pick up on any of that.

and then there were homestays, we got our last sets of mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. we stayed in a region called Omaruru. i was placed in a town called ozondhati with a Herero family where i stayed in a room with 6 kids under 7 years old and my host sister. the grandpa and grandma of the family slept in a tent out front next to the car parts that they sold to supplement the income from the goat post a couple of miles away where i saw my first slaughter. a bunch of the other students staying in the village in town and i piled into the back of a pick up truck to pick out a lamb for the cook out the next day.

i have to go for now. i'll write more soon, but i just wanted to put something up in the time between now and when i actually do that.

I've spent my last night under hot pink Barbie sheets in my little bedroom in Khomesdal. No more falling asleep after watching that evening's soapie (English dubbed Mexican soap operas, a national obsession), belly full of porridge and beef liver. No more mornings awakened by kids' Christian rock followed by a drive down Mahatma Ghandi Street, taking a turn down Florence Nightingale to pick up kids and
take them to Van Rhyn primary.

I will miss it. There is something to be said about coming home after a long day of classes for a good hour of jumping rope with Kelly and Tiaan, my little sisters for the past week and a half. I became less scary halfway through, and I'm not entirely sure what I did to earn a little affection. One day I was walking towards the house, and Kelly bolted towards me with a big grin only to jump into my arms for a hug.

I've loved spending the evenings with my host mom and brother, washing dishes after dinner and talking politics. My host mom appreciated the willing ear, the chance to go on her tangents about all the kids out at shebeens (local bars people run out of their houses)every night, the education system, how expensive this life is.

By the end, I was ready to go. Weekends can be long with the family, and I just couldn't handle any more church functions. Saturday night I was at an open mic youth night called Floetic Vibes from six pm until two in the morning. The next day we we were back at church at eight thirty. I've just had so many conversations about Jesus, and by conversations I mean I sit there quietly and listen to people tell me about, to use their own words, their personal relationship with the Lord Christ. I can't help, but feel that my host brother feels that there is something just a bit off with me. I am tired of pretending to be neutral, wondering what my host mom is thinking about me and my non-church going Jewish/Catholic background, when she goes on about non-believers and how her own Catholic family is ritualistic and, as the pastor said in Church, "almost pagan."

I have learned from going to their church. It is one of the most integrated settings that I've seen so far, but that integration is more superficial than it appears at Sunday services. At floetic vibes, I was the only white person, and social circles are color coded. While most people in the crowd are black, the leadership and all of the speakers are white. Services are totally in English, rare around here where most worships are three hours long to accommodate translations in multiple languages.

This last service also surprised me. The congregation is sending a mission to Germany, driven by the statistic that there are ninety witches to every one priest. I wouldn’t have expected a Namibian church to send a mission to Europe, but everyone in the crowd that I spoke to, including a German born woman seated beside me, thought it seemed like a wonderful idea.

All things being equal, everyone was much more open than I expected. I don't mean to go on my own tirade, but this was the big culture shock for me. People speaking a language that I don't understand, talking about their histories, their lives, eating new foods; that's the novelty, the picturesque part about study abroad. People that assert a totally foreign set of beliefs and values and hope that I will adopt them as well; that's a bit more culture shock inducing.

Friday night, I am pretty sure that my host dad, Tele, hoped to induce some culture shock. We drove out to the fringes of Katatura, to the informal settlements to visit his brother’s family. The Informal settlements are what people call the expanses of zinc shacks north of Windhoek. This is where the poverty of Namibia, a country that rivals Brazil and South Africa for the largest gap between rich and poor, emerges. Every other house is a shebeen, music blasts from five pm until dawn, and red dirt streets reek of urine, a testament to the luxury of indoor plumbing.

We pull into a lot. Tele’s brother is a mechanic, and we work our way single file through a maze of cars into his home, and I am introduced to the family. I greet them in Nama Damara, trying to make the most of my 5 or 6 phrase vocabulary, which surprises them. I don’t think they’re used to white people trying to speak anything besides English or Afrikaans, but I am not sure if my butchering of their words is really any better than just smiling, nodding, and shaking hands.

In his sister in law’s bedroom watching a soapie, Tele turns to me and asks, “So, what do you think of this, this life here?”

He is looking at me expectantly. I don’t know what to say. I feel like he wants to hear some revelation, some testament to his family’s hardship.

I am not saying that I understand what it means to live in a shack in Katatura, but I have seen a shack before. I know, at this superficial level, what poverty looks like. It is difficult, it is sad, it's made me cry, but this time I'm not in tears. Does he want weeping?

I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to cry out “Oh! This terrible, desperate life! I am so lucky, so privileged- you poor, poor people” while I sit beside them in their home.

But I felt like that’s what Tele wanted me to say, the reaction he wanted me to have.

“What do you mean?” is all I manage.

Tele looks frustrated, gestures around him, taps a corrugated metal wall.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I say flat out, and turn to talk to my host mom for a few minutes before I am led outside.

Back in the lot we lean against cars, feel the breeze that hints at the start of a rainy season and look at the Windhoek city lights. I talk to Tele’s niece Johanna, a fourteen year old girl who wants to talk about the US. She asks if there are any Namibians there, and I say I haven’t met any. She tells me that she would visit if she had the chance, but that she wouldn’t want to leave for good. She loves it in this part of Katatura, says she can’t imagine moving away.

On the drive home, I try to explain myself to Tele. I thank him for taking me, that I really appreciated it, and tell him outright that I just didn’t know what to say when he asked me what I thought when we were in the house. I told him that it looks really hard, but that I have no idea what it would really be like to live like that. Driving away from that evening’s half an hour visit, of course I still have no clue.

September 14, 2007

As of last night, I live in a house in a neighborhood called Khomesdahl. Khomesdahl is an area that was reserved for coloureds during apartheid, wedged between Windhoek city limits and Katatura, the black area. I have two wirey and adorable little sisters, another little brother at the university, a stay at home dad that drives me to school as part of a seven kid carpool in a five seater, and a mom who, despite all of my initial awkwardness, made me feel instantly comfortable. This home stay is looking like it will turn out to be one of the best things that has happened to me since I got to Namibia.

Our families came to pick us up one by one. We’d all received short descriptions of our families, so whoever happened to be glued to the window at when a car pulled up would shout out “Okay! Who has a mom and two teenage sisters?” our program’s student intern would shout up a name, and then we would rush down the steps to meet our new families.

My host parents are trying to teach me a couple words of Nama, which is one of the most gorgeous languages that I have ever heard and will never be able to speak. The clicks don’t click on my lips, and, according to my housemates, when I say the word for good (/Kaya) it sounds like I have a serious Brooklyn accent. Not exactly what I’m going for. My host parents have had something like ten students before me, and I’m the second Californian they’ve had. Arnold Schwarzenegger, much to my embarrassment, has already come up. George Bush did, too. I’m starting to think that, as an American abroad, I should just starting wearing a pin that says ‘No! I do not support the Bush administration.’ I feel like it would put a lot of people at ease, and get that inevitable conversation out of the way from the start.

We had a conversation that I’ve had too many times since I’ve been here, which basically boils down to me explaining that I actually only speak one language. It really does make me realize how ignorant and culturally isolated that makes me, because the question that then begs to be asked is how do I communicate with different people? Good question.

My parents are born again Christians, and a good chunk of the evening was spent with the girls watching a cartoon version of Adam and Eve. I already told them that I’m not religious, but that I would be happy to come along to church, and I meant it. I’m just anticipating some uncomfortable situations. On my last home stay in Soweto I was flat out told that I was going to hell and that, yes, I should be scared of eternal damnation.

The two little girls are still pretty frightened of me. I caught them whispering in Nama (I could hear the clicks behind their hands) and I just smiled and told them that they didn’t have to whisper. I couldn’t understand a word.

There's a soap opera on in Afrikaans in the background right now. It's a good break from Big Brother 2 Africa. A Namibian girl was voted off yesterday.

We started internships this morning. The ironing board came out, blouses were buttoned up, dresses, slacks, and tights were pulled on, alarms rang at seven am.
I'm at the Namibia National Farmers Union. The van dropped me off for that first day, and so I made my way across the street (not easy with the driving around here and this driving on the left side of the road still feels like it turns the traffic inside out and upside down and confuses me). So I rang a doorbell. No answer. I knocked. I tried another door, then another, and then I tried that first one again. I sat myself down on the stoop, and imagined coming back to the house and having no stories to report. I had nothing else to do, so I was prepared to wait at least an hour and a half, part of me expecting not to even get in the door that day.

I didn't have to. Fifteen minutes later, a truck pulled up into the lot. A man walks out, sees me sitting there and gives me this smile that just reflects back to me exactly what I am: the quintessential confused, early, nervous student intern. Some American kid dropped off in Namibia sitting on the steps, hoping and waiting for some kind of direction.

People filtered in. I was led into a board room, and looked up at a big poster with that day's agenda. Final item: Orient student intern.

We started with that while people filtered in. I learned names, shook hands, forgot names, asked again, forgot again. It I am just not used to the language, and so all the sounds just don't seem to stick to my tongue. I really hate introducing myself, too. Especially five times in a row when I already feel awkward and out of place.

After that very brief orientation, the new president walks in, car keys in hand, and announces that he's just come back from the farm. The official debriefing begins, and I have to say that it felt pretty cool to be sitting there listening to people talk about land reform and politics and policy as it actually impacted them. My exposure so far has been academic articles, non profit analysis, governments reports. Working at an organization like this will also be so different from everything that I've done before. They work so much more closely with the government, and it's not a little non-profit that I am hoping represents my personal politics.

I spent the day writing up a newsletter article. I'm not sure if they wanted me to or not, but I edited the parts that I was meant to cut down until they were pretty unrecognizable. I want to do as much as I can here. Writing up another newsletter article, I felt a little like I was back at the Center for Victims of Torture last year. For a second I felt nostalgic even about those thirty minute waits for the bus on University Avenue in twenty five degree windchill. That Minnesota winter I'm missing this year.

So, how exactly did I end up working with farmers in Namibia? Writing up newsletter articles on resolutions passed regarding livestock reports and the organization's galas and presidential elections? Chatting about my co-workers farms in Eastern Namibia? Listening in about government negotiations on land reform and exports and the politics of policy in Southern Africa? I really don't know.

September 9, 2007

Friday night, a big group of us went out to a concert showcasing local music at the University of Namibia. It felt like a school sponsored event. There were more people hanging out in the parking lot than inside the stadium, and showing up in the first hour was clearly socially unacceptable. We purchased our tickets from two guys through a little hole in the fence and then walked down a couple of feet from there to the gate where tickets were collected and wrists were stamped. We squinted at the stamps on our hands, these neon orange smiley faces and thought 'what kind of color for a stamp is this?' And then there was the pause, the embarrassed realization. On black skin this is a better color. Noticing our whiteness, yet again, and feeling pretty ignorant in the process.

That was the general theme of the night- just how much we stood out. One student walked up to us, asked us where we were from, and then proceeded to say, "Why aren't you guys standing over there by the German beer stand? That's the closest you're going to get to home." We just looked at him blankly, shrugged.

We left before the big name act, a local kwaito star that goes by 'the Dog,' came out on stage, but we still heard some good music. A very tall man in a shiny sweat suit who had some pretty smooth dance moves that he liked to show off while walking alone through the crowd also provided some serious entertainment.

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.

August 27, 2007
Writing from a former convent in Johannesburg, South Africa
This is home for the week.

So begins part two of this crazy, breathtaking , wholly and totally unpredictable year of mine. It started with my longest plane ride, yet, which was not at all as agonizing as expected. Two days to get to the other side of the world really isn’t too bad when you think about it. Despite those 35 or so hours in transit, when our plane landed at the airport in Joburg, I don’t think that it’s really sunken in with me that I’m now on this side of the Atlantic, this hemisphere, this continent, starting this semester in southern Africa. Driving around the city didn’t do much to change that. I felt like I could be driving around Chicago, and the neighborhood where we’ve been staying basically feels like the South Side of the city to me. One of the professors that is going to be working with us in Namibia is in charge of us here in Joburg for our ten days here, and he has been shuttling us around touring Soweto for the past two days. We’re staying in what used to be convent until we start homestays in Soweto for a couple of days before we fly to Namibia. Spending time in Joburg, the economic heart and the heart of the liberation struggle, is absolutely crucial for understanding this place, its politics and it’s history, even though it isn’t exactly the most fun place to visit.

There have been the typical foreign travel novelties, too. It was the first time I’d been on a flight with instructions translated into French (we stopped in Dakar to refuel, pick up and drop off passengers), and this whole driving on the other side of the road business keeps catching me off guard. We turn corners and I swear that trucks are going to come straight at us, and, being a group of American kids, we get collectively startled.

There’s also the novelty of stares like I’ve never gotten before. Our gaggle of white American kids receives a good dose of stares, comments in languages that I don’t understand, and enthusiastic ‘hello!’s wherever we walk. Seeing what it means to have white skin here is obviously a big part of the whole experience, and I think it’s going to take awhile to begin to understand and to realize how we fit/don’t fit in to this place.

Two girls in the group have been to Nicaragua in the past year, and so we’ve had some Nica love and nostalgia moments and resolved to practice speaking Spanish together. We’ll see how that goes, but I am sure that we’ll continue to compare our first impressions and experiences in southern Africa with what we’ve seen in Latin America, too. Something that one of the other students noticed is just how quiet it is here, and it’s true. In Nicaragua, you’d walk past shacks and so often you’d hear that machine gun raggaeton beat or crooning bachata blasting out from corrugated tin walls, but here you walk around dusty roads in Soweto and all you can hear is the traffic in the distance. I guess that I just make sense of new places by piecing them together out of where I’ve already been, and maybe my frame of reference will get bigger as I keep traveling.

We’ve been touring the icons of the liberation struggle so far, walking along the paths of the 1976 student protests, sitting in the Regina Mounde church and looking up at the bullet holes left in the ceiling as a tribute and reminder of past struggles, listening to the people who were there, former prisoners in Robben Island and who were there at the June 16th protests. It’s been an iconic history, and as amazing and moving as it is to be here and experience these places first hand, we had a speaker today who sparked all of our interest in a new way. A scholar and activist who grew up in rural Zimbabwe and worked for the South African communist party, he spoke to us about the realities of post 1994 South Africa. He talked about the some of the failures of liberation and this new government to create real land reform or change migrant labor practices (the things that my independent study project is probably going to be focused on, so I was pretty into it).

No real stories, yet. This has been all about orienting ourselves and seeing things first hand. Retelling what I’ve seen doesn’t really do much justice to the experience of the place. No reason to recap the schedule.

So, after last year’s confusing and drawn out mess of study abroad decisions, applications, a bad case of the flu, a lost recommendation letter and an unread application, I’ve ended up here. I guess that sometimes things actually do work out, and I’m pretty happy and grateful that this one did.

September 5, 2007
Namibia.

We’re here. I felt like I was homesick for this house even though I hadn’t even seen this place, yet. Really I’ve just been wanting to settle into something, to have some independence (a.k.a. not shuttled around in a group of twenty students all day) and start getting into my life in Namibia- as temporary as that is going to be. The whole group was ready by the end of the week in South Africa, each of us antsy and anticipating.

Watching our plane land at the airport in Windhoek, I couldn’t tell the shrubs from the trees. It was all one indefinite expanse, even and flat, cracked red brown dirt stretched out under dry heat. So, here I am, dropped of on the other side of the world in the middle of a desert. Ready, set, go.

Student visas were issued, all of our bags appeared on the conveyer belt (a miracle! Definitely not the case in South Africa), and the group was collected into two vans. We drove past, at most, three or four people, and spotted two monkeys just trotting on down the highway. Springbok crossing signs, mountains, a trailer full of luggage rolling along behind us, and then Windhoek suddenly appeared.

There is serious wealth in this country. Going towards the city center we drove past tremendous stucco houses, gated and neatly gardened with big cars tucked into their garages. The streets feel empty, and it’s a little eerie at first. They’re wide asphalt roads, built for cars, but we only have a couple of people walking around at any one time and not much traffic outside of the city center.
We’ve gotten out of the city and into an area called Katatura twice now. Katatura means, to translate a word that really can’t be, ‘the place that we live where we don’t want to live.’ Less than a ten minute drive, and the roads turn to dirt, house walls turn to tin, and you can step out of your taxi and look out over miles of shacks that have sprung up just in the past 15 years or so. You can see Windhoek from Katatura, but you can’t see Katatura from Windhoek.