Permanent Site Visit!

Ok so It’s taken me forever to post this blog so it’s a little outdated since site visit happened 2 weeks ago, but you’ll probably still find it interesting if you think my life in Namibia is interesting…but now I’ll hopefully be much better about posting blogs because I have INTERNET on my COMPUTER!!! The way this works is that I bought a phone with internet which is how I’ve been checking my email (so write me some emails please!) and then I bought a Bluetooth USB port to connect Bluetooth on my phone to my laptop so I can use internet as much as I want! The only thing is that internet eats up my phone minutes. All of the cellphones here are pay as you go, so you buy a phone and a sim card, and then you buy minutes as you need them. SMSing (texting) is basically free, especially if you have the special MTC plan where if you send one sms a day the next 100 are free. So most PCVs just sms each other rather than calling, which is 2 dollars a minute. BUT internet is free from 1-5 am, so my strategy is to go to sleep at 10 or whatever (PC has made me lame) and wake up at 1 to upload blogs and send emails and try to download pictures. So I’ll be more sleep-deprived but better connected. I hope you appreciate and return the favor! Emails are always fun and brighten my day!
Last Saturday all of group 30 dispersed throughout the country to go for our permanent site visits. Before we left we were warned by more than one current volunteer that this week is the most challenging of our entire service. I can’t be sure that times won’t get more difficult in the coming 2 years (actually I’m positive that they will), but this week was definitely rough at times. We left Saturday morning, and Eastern Caprivi (where all of the Caprivi kids’ villages are) being as far away from Okahandja as you can get in Namibia, we left at 6 am to meet our supervisors in Rundu, who drove us the rest of the way. On the way from Rundu to Katima we had car trouble, which seems to be a running theme in all of my travels in Africa. So we had to stop at a filling station in Divundu for almost 2 hours, and then drive 60 k/hour with frequent stops to restart the car. The trip from Rundu to Katima took a good 8 or 9 hours, and the whole trip took almost 16. Eesh. Getting to Windhoek from site is not going to be easy. All of the Caprivi strip out to Kongola is national park though, so we saw plenty of animals on the side of the road, including an elephant which ran in front of our car, a herd of African buffalo and a hyena.
Since we got to Katima so late we ended up staying the night at Kaitlin, a current volunteer’s, house, and we went out for a very strange and awkward dinner at a lodge in Katima. The owner of the lodge, a very drunk, old Afrikaans man, who has what one might say a soft spot for female pcvs put aside food for us, which was nice of him, but then proceeded to sit down with us while we ate making offensive comments, and demanding that we go behind the bar to serve ourselves drinks. It was rather strange, but oh well.
On Sunday we hung out with Kaitlin and Ashley, another pcv who lives in Andrew’s village, Lusese, and waited for Andrew’s principal to drive us to our villages. I ended up getting to Kabbe at around 4 in the afternoon. Kabbe is about 50 kilometers from Katima, and it is definitely a very rural, traditional African village. There’s one brick house next to the school, where the principal lives, but everyone else lives in mud huts with thatch or corrugated iron roofs. My permanent house, or hut, I should say, which is still being constructed, will be right on school property, which is where most of the teachers stay. My homestay is a little further from the school, in another section of the village.
The first night was definitely awkward. I was exhausted, and a little shell-shocked at being dropped off in this village by myself and my host family was also a little confused as to what to do with this American. I’m the first volunteer at my site, so my community is not used to having a foreigner or a white person around. So I ate dinner with my family: buhobe (porridge) and fish, with miloho (green vegetables), which we ate sitting in our courtyard outside the house, on a mat, with our hands. Women have to eat while sitting on mats, and they also must wear shitenges while eating. Men are allowed to sit in chairs, and also must eat before the women, but there are no men in my family. After eating I took a bucket bath (the only means of showering in the village) and my host mom showed me where I was sleeping – which was in the main hut, in her room, in her bed even. Ummm, definitely not peace corps regulations. According to PC all volunteers have to have their own rooms. I didn’t really know how to handle the situation, and I was afraid of offending my host mom, who I was having some trouble communicating with, so I called my APCD and asked him if this was really what the program is. He said no, and asked to speak to my host mother, and managed to convey to her that I need to have my own room on the homestead. There’s another smaller hut in the courtyard, which was supposed to be my room, but I think the problem is that there was no bed to put in there, and no electricity, which there was in the main hut. I ended up staying the night in her room, and moving into my own hut the next morning. She even moved her bed into my hut, which made me feel pretty uncomfortable.
All right, so once that awkwardness was resolved, I started getting ready for bed, and realized I hadn’t seen a bathroom, and by bathroom I mean pit latrine, anywhere in the village. Uhh what? I smsed Kaitlin and said I had no pit latrine, and where do people go to the bathroom? She basically replied that people go, um, anywhere they feel like it, and my host mom confirmed this by telling me to just “pass water” in the bathing area. Uhh no thanks. I’ll wait for my pit latrine to be constructed…So basically I didn’t have an accessible bathroom all week (there is one at the school, which was a bit of a ways from my homestay and not convenient enough for me to use whenever I wanted. Not to mention my host mom was so worried about doing something wrong or me getting lost in my village, even though my village is super tiny and I can see the school from my courtyard, that she wouldn’t let me walk anywhere by myself). Also, to make matters worse I realized I left the water filter Kamwanga snagged from the Peace Corps office in Rundu in Steven’s car, so I had no way to filter water and I was pretty sure the water in Caprivi isn’t safe to drink. In any case I didn’t want to risk it not having a pit latrine and all. Not surprisingly not having water or a bathroom added some stress to my already stressful week. I have been assured by my APCD, the acting principal at the school and my counterparts that my pit latrine is under construction and will DEFINITELY be finished by October when I get to site permanently. Peace Corps also promised to give me a clean water filter, since the one I finally got from the back of Steven’s car was filthy and leaks. So I have high hopes for my site if they can manage to pull everything together. Apparently Caprivians are hard to motivate though, and they need lots of nagging to get stuff done.
So aside from not having a pit latrine or water, and thus teetering between peeing my pants all the time and passing out from dehydration, my site visit went smoothly enough. I managed to observe some classes, and my school is really the highlight of my site. It’s very new, with a Teacher Resource Center, brand new computer lab and some of the best teachers in the region. There is definitely room for improvement, which is where I come in, but I’m excited to start teaching and I’ve already thought of a few secondary projects to get started on (like a school library for one). And I think I’m really fortunate that the teachers and particularly women at the school have already made an effort to get to know me. Two of the young women teachers at my school even took me for a walk, and I absolutely love the school secretary. I’m glad I’ve started to bond with women, because the other female pcvs in my region said that was the most important but most difficult thing to do. Living with a host family also helps with that I think.
On Wednesday, my last full day at the village, my counterparts took me for a walk to introduce me to the community so they could see who I was and get used to a white person living in the village for 2 years, and also hopefully to prove that I exist so they finish building my permanent house and pit latrine. It was good to practice my Silozi, and most villagers were happy that I was trying, even though I definitely couldn’t understand anything beyond greetings. Also Subea is the native tongue in my village, and Silozi is taught in schools as a second language, so I’m going to have to learn some Subea. The Caprivi is still very traditional. When you greet someone who clap your hands twice, bend down to show respect, especially to older people, say the appropriate greeting for the time of day, shake hands Namibian style, then clap twice more. I also should have been wearing my traditional shitenge, which I’m going to have to wear whenever I’m in the village when I’m not at school. I’m going to get a very traditional African experience in Kabbe, which I’m really happy about. My site definitely has its challenges, hopefully some of which alleviated when my village is actually ready for me, but I know there will be many more. Even so, I think it’s going to be really great once I feel like I’m part of the community and I know a little more of the language. And I’m super excited for my permanent hut. I just hope they finish it in time…
On Thursday after school I went back to Katima to meet up with Andrew and Sarah and the other volunteers in Caprivi. As much as I think I’ll be really happy at my site it was still a relief to be away from it after this week, and to be back to accessible toilets and clean, drinkable water. A few of the volunteers took us out for amazing milkshakes in Katima, and then afterwards we went to our consolidation point, which is our meeting place in case something like political unrest or flooding happens and they have to consolidate all the Caprivi volunteers into one place. Our consolidation point happens to be a super beautiful lodge right on the Zambezi river, right across from Zambia, that has a pool! We bought beers and swam in the pool, which was amazing . Then we went back to Kaitlin’s house and made dinner that wasn’t buhobe and fish, and was super tasty.
On Friday we got a ride to Rundu, where we met up with Stewart and Alex, 2 pcvs from our group, and we also got to meet a bunch of current of volunteers staying in and near Rundu. We had a group dinner which was great. I’m looking forward to spending a lot of time in Rundu: Caprivi kids go to Rundu a lot for holidays and just to get out of Caprivi once in a while, since it’s our closest Namibian neighbor.
On Saturday we had to get back to Okahandja. Okay, so a word on transport in Namibia. Basically there are two ways to get around. One is to take combis, which are basically minibuses that go from one point to another, so they’re kind of like taxis or buses except that they won’t leave unless they’re full. So if you’re the first one into one you’re likely to wait for hours waiting for it to fill up with passengers before it will leave. And by full I don’t mean every seat is filled. Oh no, full means African full, like packed in so tightly that people are hanging out the windows. Combis will get you where you need to go, but they’re often dangerous because the driver is usually tired and maybe even drinking, and you’ll wait forever for it to leave and get you where you need to be.
The second way to get from point A to point B is to free hike. Free hiking is hitch-hiking, but it’s somewhat more reliable and organized in Namibia than in America. There are designated hike points to go to if you want a ride, and the way you signal for a ride is to raise your hand in the air and kind of wave it around. The higher your hand is the farther you’re going, and there are even hand signals cars will do back if they don’t feel like stopping, to signal that they’re only driving around town etc. Since there were 5 of us we decided to try our hands at free hiking. We got to the hike point in Rundu at around 7:30, but learned that this was kind of a lull time and we should have gotten out by 6 to get a ride straight to Okahandja. Since I’m a girl and cars are more likely to stop for me (sorry Beth McCoy and Alice Rutkowski, and any other women studies professors who might be reading this) I took full advantage of my little girl in need appeal to stand out front while the guys hid on the side of the road, and managed to get quite a few to pull over. Unfortunately car after car wasn’t going where we needed to go. Finally we got a guy going to Grootfontein to stop, so we got a ride to there, about 270 ks south of Rundu. From Groot we met up with another PCV who helped us flag down a car going to Otjiwarango, and from Otjiwarango we got a ride to Okahandja. So all together it took about 11 hours to get from Rundu to Okahandja, including our time waiting at hike points for rides. But it was definitely more fun than being crammed into a smelly combi!
So that’s my awesome site visit adventure! I think I’m going to like Peace Corps 
ps. I tried posting pictures again but the connection is so slow and I'm almost out of free internet time. So I'll try again soon, I promise.