Another Saturday at “the Chicken”

So I live in a bright yellow, two-bedroom house nicknamed “the Chicken” with my 31 year-old Namibian house-mate/coworker/ invaluable friend, Beata. We named it that because 1) it’s bright yellow 2) we are down the street from a take-away place called “Jenny’s Chicken” and 3) I have been telling Beata since we decided to move in together that I want to raise some chickens. We’ve lived here for less than a month and it shows because we have no table or chairs, countertops, or cabinets for our food or even a coach to sit on. Our sitting room is full of piles of tiles and buckets of paint (the house is still in the process of renovation). However, I really think I have the ideal living situation. I don’t have to live with an entire host family, which can be a little trying for those of us who have been independent for quite some years, but I am also glad I don’t live alone. I still get the cultural experience of living with a Namibian who can show me the ropes, so to speak. Plus, she is someone I admire and get along with very well (which is fortunate since we both live and work together).

I wake up to heat and brightness of the African sunshine on my face despite the fact my curtains are drawn tightly shut. It’s about 6am and regardless of the suns rays, I wouldn’t have been able to sleep because the neighbors are blasting their funky Herero music (I don’t know how to describe it –it’s heavy on the accordion, though). They are up cleaning or who knows what, but they are clearly making a party of it.

I got into the kitchen to boil some water for tea and then I just stare out the kitchen windows to see what my neighbors are up to. I know Beata won’t be up for another 4 or 5 hours so I try to move about the house quietly. Finally at around 8 or 9, I can’t help myself any longer and I pull out my guitar to just pluck some strings ever so quietly so that it might not be heard through the thin wall that separates our bedrooms.

My only real plan for the day is to cook dinner and to hand wash my clothes in time to lay them out on the fence for drying while the sun is overhead. Cooking has become my new hobbie –kind of accidentally. Before we moved in together, Beata mentioned that she liked cleaning and the sentence that followed was, “okay so you cook and I’ll clean.” She made this decision not knowing that I have a history of subsisting merely on microwaved quesadillas that one semester in college I tried to go without a meal plan. She sounded so excited, “I want to eat American food!” Somehow I fooled my Namibian roommate into thinking that eating the can of beans I dumped into a pot of spaghetti is a cultural experience. Don’t get me wrong, occasionally I go out on a limb and make things like calzones from scratch and peanut soup creole –God bless the Peace Corps for issuing us cookbooks!

Last Saturday was my first real hand-washing laundry experience. You may be thinking, how hard can it be? I was thinking the same thing but there is definitely a “right” and “wrong” way to do it. You’ll know you’ve done it right when your inexperienced hands and wrists bleed because they haven’t been toughened by a lifetime without a washing machine. First, we put one article in a soapy bucket at a time and scrub it -every inch of it! There is a certain sound produced when she rubs the clothing together against her hands that I just cannot seem to emulate. It took something like 3 hours (lengthened by the laughing at my attempts) to get through all of our laundry because we rinsed it multiple times, each time scrubbing and wring out each item. As we carried the heavy bucket of wet clothing out to the line to dry, I was so worried that I’d drop it. If it spilled across the Mariental red dust that surrounds our house and we’d have to start it all over again. Go kiss your washers and dryer because it was 6 hours from the time we threw the first jeans in the bucket to the time we pulled our dry clothes off the line.

Swakopmund

This past week I spent in Swakopmund, the famous coastal town because it is the birthplace of Brad and Angelina’s baby. Sadly I wasn’t on holiday, but rather on duty as a delegate for the Mariental Ministry of Youth at the National Youth Week Expo. The conference was terribly disorganized. It actually took us 3 days and 12 hours in the cue to even get registered! I couldn’t believe that people put up with it.

Fortunately, we found time in every day to get to the beach. There is something comforting about being at the sea because it looks just about the same from whatever side of the world you are looking at it. It’s a home in some ways because it’s always there and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

We stayed in beach bungalows, four to a room for six nights. I learned so much from my roommates, all women around my age, during those days. Over the course of the week I found myself feeling either totally thrilled or utterly discouraged about what my future here holds. I was so lucky to have one of my closest friends from training, Peggy, in town. One night I even went with her to her host families house for a “braai”(basically a BBQ) and they were so kind they welcomed me back anytime. Their daughter lives in Mariental so I may have just found myself an easy ride between Mariental and Swakop.

Our journey back to Mariental was not an easy one. In ideal conditions, the trip between Mariental and Swakop should be about 10-11 hours by bus. Our last night, we went to bed early and planned to wake up and be at the bus at 8am, the time we had been informed by my supervisor. Sometime between when I went to bed and 3am, that time changed to 4am. So next thing I knew, the light was switched on in my bedroom and my roommate was yelling, “come on, pack your things the bus is leaving!” The whole week has been like this so at this point I’ve surrendered. I don’t even question or complain, I just do it, knowing that on African time, there’s no way we are leaving before 6am. I was wrong. We pulled out at about 7am. One hour into the journey, our bus pulled over and it was translated to me that we have broken down. We were on the side of the road in the Namib desert. Rumor had it that a bus would arrive for us, at 11am, one did, but it was full. At this point, some were walking the 5km back to the nearest service station, while others were just trying to get a hike on the side of the road. We were fortunate enough to get a hike from some people working for and NGO we work with. They took us about 20k when were were stopped at a police checkpoint. They said we were overloaded in the car and one of us had to get out. Beata (my roommate –remember) volunteered and I went with her for safety and we caught a ride with a nice fisherman and his wife in the back of their covered pick-up truck with his poles and smelly coolers. We were just laughing the whole way because it was such a ridiculous situation. We were dropped at a gas station in Windhoek to try and catch another hike to Mariental. After buying some water and stepping outside the mini-mart, we were so fortunate to see a bus we recognized from the conference that was heading in our direction. After a little pleading, they agreed to take us on board free of charge. It was truly a miracle that we rolled into town that evening. Even though I’d only been in this house for a day before leaving for Swakop, I was so happy to be home! What a day.