Life At The Intersection of Nothing and Nowhere: It's a Whole New World

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.