Life At The Intersection of Nothing and Nowhere: May 2014

Let me preface this blog post and the following by saying that the traveling to Malawi has been nearly as exciting or more than actual Malawi itself. So lets begin.

We planned to leave Rundu at first daylight because we wanted to make it as far as possible. We knew this journey would take us forever and we wanted to get it done as fast as possible. The first leg of our trip was provided to us by three very attractive men who blew by our outstretched hiking hand signals but then turned around and came back. They were all teachers and one actually worked at the same school as a fellow PCV of ours. I have found that when hiking I am most commonly picked up by someone who knows another volunteer. “OH I saw you with your white skin and your big bag and I knew you had to be so and so’s friend!” It provides a nice conversation starter and I then know that if I end up in a dangerous situation that you probably assume happens with a blonde haired girl on the side of the road, I have a name and a location to fall back on. The guys were all really cool, they drove fast and when we stopped for gas or food they came out to chat with us. They also blared Top 40 from the US so when we did stop 3 large black Namibians unloaded from the car that was blaring Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball. They also loved taking pictures with us, which I didn’t mind because I still looked cute in my “I’m traveling across Africa gear” (This look did not last).

6am sunrise and hike

We made it to the Zambia border much more ahead of schedule and were prepared for chaos. When we arrived we stepped out of our cab and were bombarded by people suggesting a cab across the border. One thing I have learned about Namibians, and this may apply to others in Southern Africa as well, is that they hate walking anywhere. If you didn’t know that the border was about half a kilometer long, you would have paid a man double the normal cab rate, plus the vehicle fee to drive across the border just to turn the corner and look at the small border building approaching. This is probably a very useful service for people who are doing a lot of shopping on one side or another but for a few Peace Corps Volunteers with giant hiking backpacks, we were pretty capable of walking. This however did not stop every car from following us or stopping next to us asking if we would like a taxi ride. At first we politely said no, then we began adding small comments about how we had capable legs to walk, but then it turned into us just asking REALLY? We can see the building, its like 200m away, are you kidding me? But I guess if you didn’t know any better you would have fallen for it and the dude would have ripped you off. Oh well. We effortlessly enter Zambia and make our way to a family run bus service. The bus was scheduled to leave in a few hours so we had time to relax, make sure to stretch our legs, and grab some Zambian Kwatcha (which did not work because the only ATM available in the Zambian border town conveniently did not accept VISA.)

Welcome to Zambia

When the bus arrived I was amazed, actually we all were, at the beautiful coach bus waiting for us to board. I’m happy my expectations were so low for the transportation part of this trip because I was so excited to be on a comfy bus for the next 5-7 hours all the way to the capital Lusaka. We jump on and knew that it should only be about 2 or three hours to Livingston where we were planning to meet up with our 4^th person. Brandon was already in Livingston with other PCVs and so we thought it’d be easy for him to just hop on the bus we were on when it stopped. Without cell phone reception we tried desperately to contact him and let him know the plans. If he wanted to ride to Lusaka with us he needed to get on a specific bus. If we missed him in Livingston, there was no telling where he would be or when we would see him next. We all had confidence he would be fine, but if we were in his situation we wouldn’t want to be left either.

As we soon found out, much of the information regarding transportation to Malawi that we got from other people was incorrect. The first being this short 147km between the border town and Livingstone. When I see 147 km I think less than 2 hours. Namibians dive fast. Like super fast whereas the rest of Southern Africa has lower speed limits that are abided by, and now we are on a coach bus so we are going slower than we anticipated. To top it off, this road is like the road to hell or at least to a flat tire or totaled car. I don’t know how it got to this condition but the road is littered with potholes the size of tires and cars that are 6 inches to a foot deep. This results in the bus and every other vehicle on the road driving on whatever side necessary to take the best path. Our giant ass coach bus just drove on the side of the road in the bush and on the shoulder half the time. Or at least that’s what we thought, we couldn’t see a thing because it was already dark and there were no streetlights. Obviously.

We arrive in Livingston after about 4 or 5 hours and we begin to execute our plan of finding Brandon. I am going to run to the bathroom really quick because Lord knew how long the next leg was going to take and scan the area for Brandon, Derek was going to jump out stretch his long legs and watch to make sure our bags underneath stay on the bus, and June was going to hold our seats and wait for me to hurry back so she could go out and ask around for our white person. I climb off the bus and immediately have keys, pointing fingers, snapping fingers, and loud noises all bombarding my senses. A white person stepping off a giant coach bus means they are visiting and need a taxi. I needed to find a white man and a toilet, not a taxi so I pushed them off and began my search for both. I found the bathroom but no Brandon so I ran back to the bus to switch with June. About 10 or 20 minutes go by and there is still no Brandon. After talking to people around the bus station, at the ticket counter, and any other random person who could understand our English-random Bantu words jumble we conclude that he has definitely purchased a ticket with the company we told him, he is supposed to be on the next bus leaving yet there is a possibility he is walking around, maybe drunk, with other white people. There is no way to contact him so we take this information and ask the ticket people to tell him he is on his own, we will see him in Malawi because we are never going to find him now.

The bus ride was extremely efficient, every hour, on the hour we stopped at a small town where people got off and on. The private coach busses are like the equivalent of public transportation, its what people rely on to get them from one city to the next. All was going good until the bus stops, the engine gets turned off and every male on the bus steps off. No this was not a pee break, we had broken down. It is now conveniently 2 in the morning (maybe), we don’t actually know what time zone we are in, we don’t know how far we are from our destination considering the previous bus ride was about 5 times longer than it should have been, and we are at a gas station in the middle of presumably nowhere. About an hour goes by and I think to myself well, I might as well stretch my legs, go pee, and get some fresh air. There is a small shop at the gas station that I think opened just for the bus being there but we quickly realized that we actually had no Zambian currency on us. We purchased our bus ticket in the border town and they accepted Namibian dollars and ever since then we have been on the bus. Thankfully we packed plenty of food and in all honesty we were fine but we were in the true literal sense of stuck. No money, no phones, and a hammer to fix the bus. I try to find a bathroom, I have no luck unless you consider the great outdoors the world’s largest bathroom (which I have found out is a common mindset for many people here because civilization is so far spread out and if you have to go, you have to go). I look to one side of the gas station and there is bush and weeds and lord only knows what kind of scary African wildlife and critters hidden there. I look to the other side and there is what I assumed was a homeless man sleeping, alright straight to the tree on the side of the road we go. This was the second of many times I wished I was a man on this trip.

In about 2 hours we were up and running and back on the road. It was a nice break to stretch our legs and find a tree to pee on. This unknowingly and exhaustingly long leg of our journey was only the beginning.

Well my first term of school is officially completed and to celebrate my friends and I were headed to a small beach village on the coast of Lake Malawi. It was a very successful term, nearly all my students passed which is really good because without passing English a student fails the whole year. So I now have much better grounding for the upcoming terms to really make sure my students are successful. I also suggested and implemented compulsory afternoon study for the school. It was super effective! because for the first time in the school’s history all the grade 10’s passed their first term. The staff and administration attribute this to the new afternoon study and foresee even better results in the future. So there was certainly much to celebrate over my holiday.

Adventures began in Windhoek; I needed to get a visa to pass through Zambia and was able to purchase a multi entry one at the consulate. As with many things in Africa, there are certain weird hours the office is open, you need exact change to purchase your visa and extra passport pictures. If you do not know all this specific information you have to take the time to go there one morning have some one tell you what you need, leave and collect the items like a scavenger hunt, and then if you are lucky enough to complete all items in the short three hour window the office is open, you can go drop off all the collected items but you cannot collect your grand prize until the following day. So I was pretty much stuck in Windhoek for the night. The following day however my friend Brandon and I picked up our visas and made our way north to Rundu where we were meeting other friends.

I was so ridiculously excited to be on the road because I had not been this far north in Namibia yet. I live in the southern part of the country, which is vastly under-populated, full of sand, and pretty normal looking living accommodations outside of the corrugated tin shacks of the locations. In the north though, we have half the nations population, humidity, green things that grow out of the ground, and MUD HUTS! Mud huts are a pretty normalized for many Peace Corps volunteers because that is what they live in, but I am an abnormality and was about to cry when I saw the traditional homesteads made of mud buildings and thatched roofs. The memes carried the babies on their backs, the groceries on their heads, and everyone had a garden of crops on their plot of land. I REALLY LIVE IN AFRICA!

I spent the weekend hanging out with June and Derek, cooking delicious food, running around Rundu, and celebrating Easter. It is technically “fall” here so Easter dinner was a roasted chicken with carrots and squash and garlic mashed potatoes. It was lovely. We also found this gem Celebration Juice. No joke this was the name of our Easter beverage. It had the British flag on it, was bottled in Belgium, imported to South Africa, bought in Namibia, with Russian and Arabic labels. Truly international.

For actual Easter day we went to June’s host sister for a traditional Kavango meal of mutatae and pap, which was a ridiculously delicious sautéed bush weed and porridge. Before that though we shared some American cultural traditions of Easter with the three little kids of the house of egg dying and an Easter egg hunt. Holidays in Namibia generally consist of shops closing down, people going to church, and maybe the family will get together for a meal. It is very low key, much different from how I grew up celebrating holidays in the US, and very surprising because families here are HUGE. Regardless, the kids absolutely loved coloring eggs and then finding them hidden in their yard with a small pile of candy. We then spent the rest of the afternoon watching a music channel and catching up on all the hot hits coming out of the Western world. We had no problem watching this for the whole day because the little girl in the house who spoke very little English knew too many words to “Loyal”. To say we were surprised when she sang “These ho’s ain’t loyal” is a bit of an understatement. All in all it was wonderful to be taken in by a women who did not know Derek and I and be fed the traditional food after exchanging American cultural traditions. Very Peace Corps-y if I say so myself.