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.