Abstinence Only

Everyday I see things worth blogging about but when it comes time to sit down and write, I find myself resisting. It is daunting to try and wrap my head around whatever it is, let alone to assign words to the thoughts I am still trying to process. Not to mention, the conditions for writing aren't ideal. Right now, I can hear the twins screaming outside my window and a fly is buzzing around my head. But for you my friends, I'll try...


My jaw dropped as I watched the news coverage of the Pope's visit to Angola and his resulting comment, "condoms are aggravating the spread of HIV." I understand the Pope is not a simple man and that was not a simple statement, but taken out of context, it was damaging and my heart sunk. I watched to see if NBC (Namibian Broadcasting Corps --funny coincidence) would play more or his speech or perhaps explain it, but the next footage was of the resulting outraged Frenchmen and other rallies calling for the Pope to resign. I was eating dinner with my family at the time, but just sat there speechless, wondering how that one sentence would effect my work over the next two year and more importantly, the future of Africa and the fight against the pandemic.

Today, a presenter from Christ Church international came into training to introduce the faith based approach that some of us may choose to work with. Though I personally don't believe an abstinence only policy would be completely affective, I conscientiously reminded myself to keep an open mind. I put down my notebook (or rather doodle pad) and listened carefully. The organizations director, an American missionary, went through the program for us as if we were the Nam school children for whom the lesson is intended. I'm not sure she completely understood her audience, health volunteer dealing with HIV, because during her talk she laughed and said things like, "and some people think that condoms are actually going to help the problem, but they're not even effective are they?" Someone from the back spoke up, "they are actually 99% effective when used correctly."
"Well who's going to teach these children how to use condoms?!"
"We will," I said (perhaps in a more confrontational tone that I had intended).
"Good luck with that," she said somewhat sarcastically and continued her presentation.

Our training group 29 is a very diverse group so by the end of the session, tempers were flaring even from our Christian PCT's and many were feeling personally affronted.

Our trainers sensed this and brought us together for a meeting after the woman had left. Initially, many people were saying they could never teach this or even support it because using scripture would conflict with their personal beliefs. The jury was still out for me and the conversation that followed made not only this issue, but my purpose here much clearer.

Benna, a Namibian father of two boys, described watching the same news coverage as I had a few nights earlier, but what stood out to him was not the Pope's words but the protesters calling for him to resign. He said, "all of these people from the outside are telling us what we should not hear, but we are the Africans so isn't it our choice to decide the best way to eradicate HIV?" It's true, since the implementation of programs like Christ Church and the "Choose to Wait Campaign" that is all over Namibia, the number of HIV has fallen. The abstinence approach does make an impact. This is not to say they deserve all of the credit, after all condoms in Namibia are government issued for free and are ubiquitous. But at the end of the day 90% of Nambians (this is just totally base on my observations) would call themselves Christians and using scripture really resonates amongst a large population of the youth. Many of our trainers spoke up and said that they hoped their own children would go through this program at their school. Though the idea of teaching abstinence may make some uneasy, it should no more be eliminated than the use of condoms. It is going to take effort from all sides by as many means as possible to eradicate this virus.

It reminder for all of us that we are not here to push our own personal agendas, but rather to work with the culture and efforts that are already in place. We can't possibly know the best way to make an impact in our community until we actually live amongst them and get to know what their values are, and for many of them religion is a big one. After all, that's why we're here for two years, so that we might learn the needs of the community first hand and then rather than replacing their ideas we add what we can. My friend Shawn, closed the meeting with four words, "it's not about you."

One Month

*note* if you click on the photos in the above slide show, it should take you to my picasa web albums page where you can see larger views of my photos with captions.

A month ago today we arrived in Namibia, jet lagged and without bags (I did finally get all of my bags for those of you who haven't been updated). In the first week, we were so slammed with information and overwhelmed by our surroundings that on Friday, it felt like a month had gone by. Now that I've actually been here for a month and have begun to adapt, some things are actually becoming predictable again and I've almost developed some semblance of a routine. I'm not quite as exhausted after each day because I have shifted back down from "high-alert" mode.

My language is starting to come along. It must be funny for the cleaning staff to walk by our class and overhear us practicing our simple sentences. "My name is Lindsay. I come from America. I like socks and peanut butter. I do not like mosquitos." And I never thought the day would come that I'd be texting my friends and Nam family in Afrikaans! However, knowing Afrikaans and English still doesn't mean you're covered. There are 11 languages spoken in Namibia and most people speak 3 or 4 of them. Once they find out you are actually attempting to learn the "local language" (whatever that means because there is never just one) then they expect you to learn theirs aswell. I guess I should take it as a compliment that they are actually pitching the language to me since speaking the tribal language is supposed to be for that tribe only, and the esoteric language is particularly useful when they want to discuss the foreigner in their midst. Nothing's better than looking over at the gossipers and saying, "ya, I'm American, but I can undestand what you're saying" in their mother tongue.

At my office in Mariental, they mostly speak English because it is the Namibian Government and technically English is the nat'l language. The locals speak Nama to each other (clicking lang.), my new friend Beata, who recently moved from Northern Namibia speaks Oshiwambo so she's teaching me a little bit of that. So I only really speak Afrikaans in training and to my family in Okahandja. At first I was nervous about learning Afrikaans because I was afraid that people would think I was an Afrikaaner (white African whose native tongue is Afrikaans), but my accent is not that good. I asked Beata if people who don't hear me speak would look at me and think I'm an Afrikaaner and she laughed, "no, they won't think you are an Afrikaaner because you are with the blacks!"

Sadly, racism is still very alive here. I've gotten dirty looks from Afrikaaners when they see me riding in the same car as my black colleagues. It's so jolting to see this blatant racism first hand and on a daily basis. It is such a damaging thing that impedes the progress of every transformative effort and I fear that it is something I am bound to run hard into once I begin my projects. But for now I'm in training, a protective bubble, which at the moment some of us resent but we will surely long for it at times when we're on our own at our permanent sites.

Please Don't Tap on the Glass

If you ever want to know the feeling of overnight fame, move from the US to a small town in Namibia -or have a common name like Joe and do something common like plumbing as a profession. Everyone notices when I come outside my house. They notice what I'm doing, what I'm wearing, where I'm going and they're talking about it. It must be a lot like being a newly purchased fish in a fish bow. I'm confined by my limited knowledge of the area and I can't escape the stares, but eventually, just like that the fishbowl, as time goes on, I'll becoming less interesting and fade into the background.

One day, after hours of sitting on the front proch and staring at nothing with my grandparents, I decided to take a short walk around the block. Meanwhile, Ryan, another PCV in my town who has already been here a year and knows most of the town, started getting text messages,"Who is the new American girl? Why is she walking in location (the outskits of town)? I saw here with the entire city council!" He told me this story a few days later saying, "ya, they're watching you."

Who ever was watching me was right, I had met with the city council, I met the mayor and a number of community leaders. My supervisor drove me from church to church on Sunday morning and interrupted services, which made me very uncomfortable. This was all so I could stand up infront of hundreds of eyes and say, "My name is Lindsay. I come from America and I am a health volunteer. I look forward to becoming part of your community," and then I would just stand and smile as the pastor would translate this into the Nama tongue, a clicking language. Now, when I walk down the street, people are waving to me and when I meet others they say, "I saw you in church."

Having such little alone time and having so many people looking at me all the time, has been one of the most exhausting aspects of my experience. I used to spend time alone to recharge but without the ability to get away, I've had to adjust. Homestaying is great because it really gives you a good sense of the culture, plus it's just nice to have family here now, but the downside is that you have to do live on their terms and adjust your own habits. Though I have my own room, it's considered very antisocial for me to keep it shut, but if I don't I am inviting guest (i.e. the children and their grabby hands and a knack for breaking things.) I do shut my door, though for short periods of time to do things like write this blog, but they always look somewhat concerned that I have spent so much time in my room.

Packages

For those of you interested in sending letters or packages, I can now receive them more directly if you send them to my permanent site in Mariental rather than to the Peace Corps HQ in Windhoek. Here's the address:

Lindsay McAuely
PO Box 908
Mariental, Namibia
Africa, 9000

Packages take anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months to arrive (3 months if it's really big and ends up on a boat).

Here are some tips on how to send it:
*Make sure you write Africa in the address because some PCV's mail was going to Burma.
*Don't declare exactly what's in the box, particularly if it's an item worth stealing. The mail goes through Johannesburg before it get here and it very likely to be riffled through.
*It less likely to be opened if the address is written in red ink and religious notes like Bible verses are scrawled on the outside.
*label it sister Lindsay, so they think I'm clergy
*If you feel so inclined, it also helps if you pack the top of the box with feminine products (tampons, pads,ect.) so that the thief will open the box and likely close it again right away thinking it's not of interest to him.

Some suggestions of what to send:
*letters, newspaper, magazine clippings from home that I can use to decorate my house.
*ground coffee (it's all instant here, and thanks to Peet's I'm now an coffee snob).
*If you're going to send candy, I like gummy bears, m&m's, skittles, dots, dark chocolate, swedish fish, pay days, but I'd be happy with anything
*If you'd like to go the healthier snack route, I like dried fruit (cranberries, apricots, mangos), nuts, and granola.
*music
*movies
*books (this is a great chance to get me to read you favorite book and perhaps understand you a little bit better.)
*inexpensive bracelets or some token of the US that I can give to my new friends.

For the most part, I can get everything I need here. No need to send toilettries or anything like that. There's no Target here or anything like that, but I suddenly don't need as much as I used to.

In Real Time

There is supposed to be a slideshow of some of my pictures at the top of this blog, but my connection is too slow to see them. Please comment and let me know if they are there. There are only 5, I think, because it takes 12min. to upload each picture.

My Namibian cell phone is nicer than my cell phone was in the US, namely because it has internet access. Since Mariental (where I am currently checking out my permanent site) doesn't have an internet cafe and my office doesn't have access, this is currently my only option. It's slow, but it's so nice to be connected. Internet is one of those things that I did not have access to all my life, but once I got used to it, I don't know that I could ever give it up completely.

Edward Abbey, author of the "Desert Solitair," (what I am currently reading right now) would probably sneer at the above comment. His book is about his time working for the park service and living alone in a trailer out in Moab, Utah. Though the deserts we dwell in are on opposite sides of the world and we are isolated under different circumstances, some of the lines in his book could have easily been written in my own journal. This one made me smile today:

I like my job. The pay is generous, I might even say munificient: $1.95 per hour (per day, in my case). The firinge benefits are priceless: clean air to breathe...stillness, solitude and space; an unubstructed view every day and every night of the sun, sky, clouds, stars, moon, cliffs, canyons ....the discovery of something intimate -though impossible to name - in the remote.

...What little thinking I do is my own and I do it on government time.

This evening I joined my grandmother out on the front porch in location (this is the outerskirts of town, what we might call a shanty town or the "slums.") to read. She had no reading marterial and seemed to be perfectly content staring at the sky and listening to the children play on the dirt roads. I put down my book and decided to join her in this silent meditation. We can not converse because she speaks the Kwe-Kwe, the click language and I have been studying Afrikaans. My host mother assures me I will be speaking both naturally by the end of the week. I doubt it. They have taught me some words but they are hard to wrap my mouth around. There are four different types of clicks and they are used just like letters infront, in the middle, or at the end of words. I can hardly differentiate between them, let alone speak them.

Mariental is a nice, small town. It would not even exist were in not for the nearby man-made dam that allows them to irregate their crops. Alcoholism is a large problem here (and in all of Namibia. Further, drunkness contributes to the spread of HIV, for obvious reasons). The youth complain there is nothing else to do. I used to complain of the same thing when I was in high school, but they actually mean it in Mariental. There is no cinema, no mall, nothing is open past 5pm except the bars. Most people have TV but no internet and it is unsafe to walk the streets alone at night, so come sundown, one stays at home and sits. I don't know how much people are interested in reading here, but I'm pretty sure there is not a library. There are many things I want to do for this community and I will see what I can do within the next two years, surely not everything I dream of now.

I am only here for a week to familiarize myself with the community and my work and I will be joining the rest of the group in Okahanja again for another month. I never thought I would miss training, but I do. I am really on my own now and I haven't seen a familiar face in days. This is just a preview of what my first few months will be like when I finally move her to begin my work.

My fellow PCT were giving me flack about being in "Posh Corps" because I live in a town and it's assumed I will have running water and electricity. When I got to my host family yesterday, I no longer felt robbed of the Peace Corps experience of washing from a bucket and fighting the bugs for space on my cot. My host mother is very kind to take me in and share what little she has. That has been one of the most inspiring things to see: people share here without a second thought. There is no sense of ownership over things like food as we do in the US. The idea that it's your box of Cheeze-its and someone must ask before taking, does not exist here. The house is two bedrooms. I have my own (because it is required by the PC) but 4 other people live here.

My battery is dying some I going to wrap this up. I am doing fine, but these next few months are going to be especially tough. Thank you all for your support. It's emails and phone calls from home that really get me through the rough patches, now that homesickness is beginning to set in.

A Day in the Life (from 3/2/09)

Every morning I wake up to a rooster crowing (classic) and take a second to gather my thoughts. Much like the Saturday morning of many college students, I wake up confused and in a strangers bed. "Where am I?!" But this isn't the morning after a night at the bars, I've joined the Peace Corps and I'm in Namibia living in an 11 person household. The amount of time it takes me to realize this diminishes every morning.

I quietly make my way to the bathroom trying not to wake up my 7 year old niece or the 4 year old twin boys because if I do, I will never get anything done. They love to play with, or rather, on me, though we don't speak each others' languages. 

We are lucky to have clean water flowing through the pipes in this house, but it only comes out cold. I kneel in the basin and wash myself with the shower hose. There is no drain so the water collects at my feet. Later on, my Ma will come and scoop the water out with a bucket. She won't let me do this myself, and I am perplexed because I don't know what she does with the water. After sharing my confusion with my friends, they teased, "did you have soup last night?" Gross.

Between my 3 days of language classes and my Ma's tv-learned English, I am able to communicate that I would like instant coffee this morning instead of tea with my eggs. Ma is always demanding, "Eat! Eat!" She told me she wants to send me back to the states fat because in Namibia, fat means healthy. Being heavy is also a status indicator, so Ma would be very proud to show off her plumped-up American daughter after a few weeks. Anyway, I'm always negotiating with her. She wants me to have 3 cheese and butter sandwiches, I only want one, so we settle on two before I'm off to the bus stop. Our PC driver, Shokwambe, picks all the PCT's up each morning and brings us to training. Just like in elementary school, we tend to get rowdy during the drive. 

Class begins at 8, but most of us come in early to sing traditional Namibian songs with the trainers. Each morning begins with language classes. I'm in a four person Afrikaans class which is very difficult. Language class here is different than in the states --much less structured and much more throw-you-too-the-wolves. It's also difficult because our trainer has a thick accent and our language books are written with the expectation that we speak British English. This becomes difficult when it comes phonetics and the book describes the sound as "like the a in law" but what it's really looking for is the sound of the o in "low." Not to mention, the spelling totally throws me. The word "good" is spelled g-o-e-d and is pronounced "hoot"!

The rest of the day we do group sessions on everything from our own personal health to how to teach a condom demonstration. Sadly, no one got pictures of that event! 

When I come home, I try to ask Ma if I can help make dinner with her, but she thinks I'm asking for food right now and moments later I am eating again -defeated. The next few hours I spend watching cartoons with the kids until "All about Camilla" the Mexican soap opera captivates the family via satellite (that's right, no working plumbing, but satellite tv. priorities.)

Before I turn out the lights, I check my bed and the walls for mosquitoes and other bugs. Before I know it, it's morning again and I can guarantee it won't be anything like yesterday.

I Have Arrived! (From 2/24/09)

 I write this in the dark from underneath my mosquito net. My body hasn't adjusted to the 7 hour time change, so after 2 hours of restless tossing, I decided to be productive. There's so much to think about it's difficult to quiet my mind.

Before I go into that, I'll explain what's been going on these last couple of days. Our group of 22 community health volunteers arrived at the Windhoek airport Sunday morning to find mangled luggage or nothing at all. Many people were missing batteries, headlamps, leatherman tools, ect. My bags never arrived, along with 8 other PCTs. I feared the worst, but remained hopeful knowing these things usually get worked out (in the states...). Luckily, I'm with a group of compassionate individuals who have offered me anything and everything until my bags arrive. A shipment of luggage was transferred to our training site yesterday and I was happy to see my guitar case, but my suitcase is still somewhere between NY and Namibia (hopefully not literally, or it's in the Atlantic). If it never arrives, I guess I'll get the real PC "roughin' it" experience -but I am still hopeful.

Out training site is located about 40 min outside of Windhoek in a town called Okahanja. We are staying in what seems to be a church camp facility with dormitory style housing, a dining hall, and friendly staff. 

Our Pre Service Training or PST (Peace Corps loves three letter abbreviations or TLA's) began on Monday. There is a large training staff, all Namibians, aside from the Program Director. They will spend the next 9 months teaching us everything from safety to how to purchase a cell phone (yes, pretty standard here).

What I've seen of the country so far is beautiful. It reminds me of Australia's Northern Territory with its large tracts of uninhabited land and small, sparsely populated villages. It's green now because it's the rainy season. That means, every afternoon, the clouds roll in on a perfectly beautiful day and start dumping rain like a shower with good water pressure! We're usually outside when this happens and just move under the overhang to continue our discussion. 

Currently, my internet access is very limited because I can only get it at the town's one internet cafe when I'm able to sneak off at lunchtime. Remember, in the PC, no news is good news. Peace Corps has their eyes on us at all times and if anything were to happen, they'd contact home within hours. But no need to worry, I feel very safe here.