The Time, Part 2

This is the sequel to my previous expose of my school’s time change issues: http://danielleinnamibia.blogspot.com/2008/09/spring-ahead-fall-behind-switch-seasons.html.

After last year’s time fiascos, I had resigned myself to the confusion that would inevitably follow the daylight savings time change. So I was pleasantly surprised one Friday in early April when, at our daily morning staff meeting, a teacher brought up that the time would be changing that weekend, and said we should discuss how our school would handle it so that we would all be on the same page. Ok, those weren’t his exact words, but it was something along those lines.

He mentioned that in the past we had usually kept the old time for the rest of the term, but we could discuss what to do this year. It was decided that rather stat at either the old or new time, we would split the difference. School normally starts at 7 am, which, after the clocks changed, would become the new 6 o’clock. We would start at 6:30 for the remainder of the term. So we essentially gained a half hour, rather that an hour, when the time changed.

We had actually coordinated all of this ahead of time – I was impressed! My body clock was still pretty much on the old time come Monday morning, so I took my time getting ready and meandered over to school, a few minutes earlier than necessary for our 6:30 start time.

Or so I thought. I arrived, and everyone was already far along into the morning assembly. We happened to have a group of missionaries visiting for two weeks, so they were having a welcoming ceremony of sorts (as mentioned in a previous post, ANY sort of ceremony takes FOREVER, never mind that we were cutting into class time) and it had been going on for a while and would continue for a while longer.

What happened to our 6:30 agreement? Well, the teacher who was supervising the hostel that week – the person responsible for overseeing the waking, feeding, bathing, and study of the 200 kids who stay in the school hostel – hadn’t been there on Friday and thus wasn’t aware of the time change or our time agreement. And apparently all of the other teachers had forgotten, so I was the only one who did not show up at 6 o’clock. Sheesh.

It’s not just my school that doesn’t understand the concept of changing the time. The rest of Namibia can be equally confused. One PCV told me that his site doesn’t change the time. Not his whole town, but just the youth center where he works. Yet he does a fair amount of projects outside the center, so he does generally follow the time change. But this becomes problematic when he has a meeting scheduled with someone at the center. He’ll arrive up for the meeting, and no one will be there. He waits around for a while, then gives up and leaves. He’ll bump into the other person at some later point, and then be accused of not showing up for their meeting. The other person had shown up, but on the non-changed time.

Then there are stores and businesses. They at least change the time when they are supposed to and operate on set, posted hours. But it would be too simple to leave it at that, so they go and change their actual hours. A store that’s open until 6 before the time change will close at 5 after the time change. They actually have “Summer Hours” and “Winter Hours” posted on their doors. So in reality, the time change is more of a name change – they still open and close at the same point in the day, it’s just called by a different number.

Oh, and I can't forget the whole time zone issue, which, based on my experience, Southern Africa doesn’t really get. All of Southern Africa, from Namibia on over to Mozambique, is on the same time zone. Look at a map – that’s a pretty wide swath of land. When I traveled along the South African coast and up to Swaziland and Maputo, I kept expecting to be told to change my watch, but never was. And sure enough, by the time we reached Maputo, the time seemed out of sync with the sun. Sunrise was around 4:30 or 4:45 am, and sunset at about 7pm. Come on, people, join the East Africa time zone! Then there’s the fact that Namibia and Angola are on different time zones. Refer back to your map. Angola is directly north of Namibia. It’d be like having Washington State and Oregon on different time zones. Somebody’s off somewhere. I suppose it’s not just Africa that has time zone issues though. Apparently all of China is on one time zone, which makes even less sense than having the Southern Africa region on one zone. So I guess Africa is beating China in one regard…

Namibia happens to be the only country in Southern Africa that follows Daylight Savings Time. I don’t really know what that says about the country. On the one hand, if there were no time change, the sun wouldn’t rise until a half hour or so into the school day. On the other, well, you just read what happens when the time changes. I feel like it may be one of those things Namibia adopted because the developed world does it, even though it doesn’t necessarily make sense here. The other countries in the region probably thought it would cause too much confusion and haven’t bothered. Honestly, I’ve always thought it was kind of a weird thing to do anyway. (And parts of the US agree. I have a college friend from Arizona, which doesn’t follow DST. When people were talking about the time change her freshman year of college, she thought they were playing some sort of elaborate prank on her. It took quite a while to convince her it was true.) I should also mention that the Caprivi Strip, that little piece of Namibia jutting out from the Northeast corner doesn’t follow DST either, which naturally causes more confusion when Namibians from other parts of the country visit. A Namibian PC staff member was apparently quite annoyed by the inconvenience it caused. Everyone says Peace Corps gives you a new appreciation for America and American things, and I fully expected to like my country better (not that I disliked it before) after this experience. But I never anticipated that “widespread understanding of daylight savings time and time zones” would be on the list of things I now miss and love about America.

The Education System

I’m in Namibia as an Education Volunteer, working to improve the educational system. In addition to actually teaching, part of my job description is to share better teaching methods and strategies with my colleagues, in the hope of reforming education from the ground up. That’s the theory at least.

The reality is a bit more complicated.

First of all, the system itself is just in shambles at every level. At times even calling it a “system” feels like a stretch. From the curriculum to the teacher’s own education to the manner in which schools are supplied – so many things are more like a patchwork of various, at times contradictory ideas, than a coherent structure. The schools, the learners, the teachers, the parents, the administrators, the government – it ALL needs to change, and that makes it awfully hard to even know where to start, let alone how to get results. Now, to their credit, the majority of teachers and government officials recognize that the education system desperately needs to be improved. There are numerous plans in place that try to address the problems. However, half the time it feels like those plans are just part of the problem, because they just create additional responsibilities and bureaucratic hassles for teachers without effectively addressing the true problems.

Schools are overburdened and underresourced. There are too many students and not enough teachers. Classes are officially capped at 35 – which is still too high in my opinion – but frequently exceed that. My school doesn’t have enough classrooms or teachers, so while we have two Grade 1 and two Grade 2 classes, Grades 3 and 4 have just one class each – with 38 and 48(!) respectively. With classes of that size, it’s impossible to give every child the attention he/she needs, and far too many end up falling by the wayside.

There’s no such thing as, say, a reading specialist who gives extra, individualized attention to those with reading difficulties. As far as I can tell, teachers aren’t trained in how to teach reading and they don’t do a very good job of doing so. Most of the Grade 5s I teach really can’t read and while many seem to kind of pick it up as they move through Upper Primary, plenty of kids make it all the way through Grade 7 without learning how. Even among the Grade 6s and 7s who can read, the books that they choose in the library are inevitably either children’s pictures books or easy-reading books that are at most for a second grade reading level in the states.

Now, bear in mind that my experience with kids reading involves reading in English, which isn’t their mother-tongue. Learning to read is a difficult process, and naturally, recognizing words and sounds in a foreign language is that much more difficult than doing so in your first language. And English is a notoriously difficult language when it comes to spelling sounds and pronouncing letter combinations. How many sounds does “gh” make? It’s not that surprising that even the best readers among the older kids prefer picture books – there are still so many words in English that just aren’t part of their vocabulary yet.

However, many of them can’t read all that well in their first language either. Their grades in Khoekhoegowab (the first language of the majority, but not all, of the students at my school) class and English class are usually pretty similar. Those that can read can read, and those that can’t can’t. Since the Khoekhoe language was first written by Europeans using the roman alphabet, most of the letter sounds are the same as in English. Thus I can “read” Khoekhoe, though I don’t understand any of what I’m saying. The same is true for most of the kids – those that know how to read can pronounce words even when they have no idea what they mean. We have a significant minority of Herero-speaking children at my school. They learn Khoekhoe from being here and interacting with Khoekhoe speaking children all the time. But when they first arrive they don’t understand the language. One of the current Grade 7s is a very smart Herero girl who began schooling here in Grade 5. As the Khoekhoe teacher told me, for the first year or so she could read aloud beautifully in Khoekhoe, but she didn’t understand any of what she was reading. Now, after two years, she is nearly fluent in Khoekhoe and her marks in that class have improved substantially.

The Namibian education system is, in theory, fairly similar to that in the US. Children begin Grade 1 at age 6 or 7 and progress on through to Grade 12. I didn’t work in education in the US, but from what I remember of my own schooling, the material students are supposed to master at each grade seems to be more or less equivalent to what a child of that grade would be learning in the States. The key phrase in that sentence is “supposed to master”. The gap between what is taught – or even supposed to be taught – and what is actually retained is vast. For starters, a passing mark is 30%. That’s not a typo. You get thirty percent on a test and you pass. Heck, you can get thirty percent on a multiple choice test just by chance. And yet many kids are still struggling to reach that. Granted, rural schools like the one I and most Peace Corps Volunteers teach at are at the lowest end of the performance spectrum, and those in town schools do do better. But considering the standards, better still isn’t good. An A is anything over 80 %, a B is 60 -79%, a C is 45-59%, and a D is 30-44%. So the same 62% that would be a failing grade in the US is awarded a B here, and to quote the Ministry of Education, means the student has “achieved basic competencies well”.

That seemed absolutely insane to me at first. After being here for a while though, that grading scheme actually seems pretty accurate. The marks of the top learners at my school, those who are fairly smart and who really try to do well, generally hover around 60%. Of course, one could argue that students should meet a set of standards, rather than having standards that are set to meet the students, and in theory I would completely agree. The reality here though is that requiring, say, 65% to pass would result in most kids failing and dropping out even sooner than they already do. Plus, I think that part of the problem is the tests themselves. The tests are often poorly written and confusing. Students don’t have good test-taking skills or strategies. I think students are learning and retaining more in school than the tests actually reflect, though I harbor no illusions that they are mastering anywhere near the amount of material that they would in a better system.

Then there’s the policy of “transferring” learners who do not pass. Education is divided into four “phases”: Lower Primary, Grades 1-4; Upper Primary, Grades 5-7, Junior Secondary, Grades 8-10, and Senior Secondary, Grades 11-12. A learner is only allowed to repeat a grade once in each phase. After that, s/he is automatically “transferred” to the next grade. Thus someone who fails and repeats Grade 1 cannot repeat Grades 2, 3, or 4, even if he or she does not attain passing marks. That child will likely fail and repeat Grade 5, but then be transferred to Grades 6 and 7. That’s how you wind up with so many Grade 7s who can barely read. The reasoning behind the policy has to do with social promotion and the benefits of keeping age cohorts together. Granted, there are some legitimate reasons for doing so, and social promotion is practiced on occasion in the US as well. However, it is not working here and by and large only serves to exacerbate problems in the education system. Many teachers recognize this reality, and the policy is being phased out, and I’ve heard rumors that the Ministry of Education officially abandoned the policy. I don’t know if that’s true, as it is still widely practiced. However, as of this year, my school has stopped transferring learners in Upper Primary. Only those who received passing marks are being promoted, and we thus now have numerous learners who are in Grade 5 for the third time.

Virtually all learners repeat a grade at some point in their scholastic careers; usually they repeat several. Thus though they start Grade 1 at age 6 or 7, by the time (or if) they reach Grade 12, many are in their early 20s. It’s not unheard of for PCVs who are straight out of college to teach Grade 12 learners who are their own age or even slightly older.

Lots of students drop out along the way, especially by the time they reach high school. Primary schools like mine are not doing a very good job of preparing students for further studies. Many of our Grade 7 graduates drop out of school at some point in Grade 8 or 9 because they can’t keep up. My coworkers often say they wonder if they are wasting their time – they spend years trying to help the kids succeed, only to watch them wind up back on the farm, doing nothing all day, a year or so after they graduate. In their words, a major part of the problem is that this is just the culture of rural areas. Their parents, siblings, and peers don’t generally have formal jobs or much education beyond primary school. It’s perfectly acceptable to spend one’s life in a 2-room mud hut raising goats for a living. Many of them have not been beyond Kamanjab (see previous posts for a description of the nearest “town” to my village), and even if they have, they haven’t spent enough time in bigger, more dynamic places, to realize that there could be more to life – or at least to believe that they have any realistic chance of attaining more. I’ve had several students drop out of primary school as well; they just get tired or bored of schooling and decide they don’t want to do it anymore. And that’s that.

And of course there’s the teen pregnancy issue. If a girl gets pregnant, she drops out of school. I’m sure there are exceptions here and there, but that’s how it goes for virtually everyone. Even in Life Skills classes (that’s an actual class the have every week), kids are taught – and I’m quoting from notes on the board here - that “getting pregnant ruins your life” because “you have to drop out of school to raise the baby”. NamCol, discussed below, is an option, but only the most motivated actually complete it. I recently found out that one of my former learners, a girl who received very high (by Namibiaan standards) marks last year in Grade 7, is going to be giving birth fairly soon. So she “fell pregnant” as they say here in the third term of last year. She’s 16 or 17 and never started Grade 8.

Education is open to all learners up to Grade 10. I believe its compulsory up to that point, but that would be a “compulsory” on paper, not in practice. No one’s gonna force a child to go to school or punish parents who don’t enroll their children. At the end of Grade 10, learners take examinations that they must pass in order to proceed on to Grade 11 and 12. These exams are fairly difficult for learners here, and a fair number (don’t ask me for stats; I’m sure the government has them but I don’t have access to ‘em.) Keep in mind that plenty of learners drop out long before Grade 10, so by that point the students remaining are mostly the ones who had been passing all along. There has been a lot of controversy over the past 2 years about repeating Grade 10. Since I’m at a primary school I’m not fully aware of the details, but from what I’ve gathered from conversations and the newspaper, it seems that an unusually large number of students failed the exams at the end of 2007. The Ministry then made an exception to the rule that someone can only repeat Grade 10 only once; after a second failure they can’t repeat the grade or the exams again. That exception only applied to those who had taken the exams in 2007, causing a public outcry of unfairness to students from previous years. I’m not sure how the whole thing was resolved.

Those who fail Grade 10 or Grade 12 and can no longer repeat the grades do have another option for continuing their education. They can sign up for NamCol, which is basically Nambia’s version of the GED. Candidates complete coursework and study mostly on their own, then take examinations at set times.

How many students do complete Grade 12? I honestly have no idea. I don’t have the statistics, but I’d say not nearly enough. Having passed Grade 12 is quite an accomplishment. Last year my coworkers were discussing how the graduates of our school fare. This is unofficial, but as far as anyone can remember, in the past ten years, only four or five of our former learners have gone on to complete Grade 12. We’re turning out, on average, 35 Grade 7 graduates a year. We’re a poor rural school, meaning that many of our students are at our school because they can’t afford or can’t get accepted into a better school in a town, so we end up with lots of students who, even in the best of hands, might not make it academically. Even so, I was pretty shocked by those numbers.

Math and Science education throughout the country are unbelievably poor. That stems in large part from the fact that under apartheid blacks were intentionally prevented from being properly educated in those fields. Apartheid only ended in 1990, so most current teachers were either educated under that system or taught by teachers who were. And if your teacher can’t really do math, there’s little hope for you. I’m not sure if this is accurate, but I’m under the impression that the qualifying standards for Upper Primary teachers are tougher than those for Lower Primary. So the teachers who did the worst in school themselves end up teaching at the lower primary level. I can understand the rationale there, but that policy is simply detracting from the educational environment during a critical developmental period. While the Upper Primary teachers at my school seem to be able to handle math, at least when it comes to things like calculating marks and other situations that I’ve seen them in, the Lower Primary teachers really can’t. I’ve had the Grade 3 and 4 teachers ask me to explain to them how to do the problems they were giving to their classes. One teacher couldn’t add 30 repeatedly in her head; she needed me to do it with her – we were totaling the school fees that had been collected, and she frequently made errors as we calculated the 30 + 30+30+30+30, etc that had been collected. How can students learn math if their teacher doesn’t have any idea what she’s doing? Except for the few kids who grasp math easily on their own, by the time kids reach Upper Primary and have a teacher who actually knows what s/he is talking about, it’s too late. They are too far behind and the teacher – already facing a class that’s too large – has to follow the syllabus for the grade, not spend the year teaching Grade 5s what they should have learned in Grade 2. It’s a sad cycle and it’s the kids who loose out. Our Upper Primary Math teacher (I teach math to one grade, but he was the only math teacher before I came) seems to know what he’s doing, but even he once said “I never understood why they use letters in math.” Oh boy.

As I’ve alluded to in many places, many of the teachers are not the most qualified individuals. Until fairly recently, the only qualification necessary to teach was completing Grade 12. Many teachers had no official training whatsoever; they finished Grade 12 one November and started teaching the following January. There’s been a huge initiative over the past decade or so to ensure that all teachers are “qualified”, meaning they’ve completed some sort of Ministry of Education-approved training curriculum. So the numerous “unqualified” teachers took part in distance learning programs, completing coursework and assignments on their own and taking periodic examinations. There’s also a similar sort of in-service training program for those who want to teach but can’t afford to spend three years as a full time student at Teacher’s College. They begin teaching while taking a four-year distance learning course. Several of my coworkers are in this course, and I have grave doubts about its efficacy. I’m frequently asked to help them with their assignments, which involve educational and psychological theory and practical classroom applications thereof. For the most part, they understand very little of the material and have no idea how the theory relates to actual situations. Furthermore, those who are studying to be both lower and upper primary teachers are placed in lower primary classrooms. So all of those lower primary students are being taught by someone who is being taught how to teach upper primary by reading some textbooks which s/he doesn’t understand and has no idea how to, for example, teach basic reading skills. Yet when there’s already such a shortage of teachers, I don’t have a better solution.

There’s a dire lack of critical thinking skills throughout the country. Once again, this harks back to the apartheid era, in which whites didn’t want blacks to learn how to think. Teachers teach how they were taught, and most teachers here were never taught how to think critically or creatively. Even the most basic thinking questions are beyond most of the students here. When I ask “why” about events in a story in English class, I usually get either blank stares or students trying to find a phrase in the story that gives the answer. Extrapolating beyond what is written is quite rare. Of course, the lack of critical thinking is a major component of the poor math skills. You may be able to do the math, but if you can’t apply it, word problems and real world situations are nearly impossible. Even when we do art projects, they kids don’t grasp the concept of creating their own unique piece. They keep asking me what they are supposed to draw, how they are supposed to draw it, what colors they are supposed to use. It takes a LOT of explaining “whatever you want” to get them to understand that they can choose how to do it. Despite my repeated protests and admonitions, they often end up tracing something anyway. In theory (yes, that’s my phrase of the day) I’m supposed to be both improving the critical thinking skills of my learners and teaching the teachers how to teach these skills. In reality, I think a handful of my brightest learners are grasping the idea of critical thinking, but the rest have no idea of what I’m talking about. As for the teachers, I know this sounds cynical, but it’s probably too late. Actually, most of the Upper Primary teachers do use methods that encourage some form of critical thinking. But it seems rare among the Lower Primary teachers, which is sad because such skills ought to be cultivated from an early age.

For those lucky – ok, capable, hardworking, and lucky enough to be in semi-decent schools – few who make it all the way to Grade 12, there are several options for higher education.

The University of Namibia offers Bachelor’s degrees. Sort of. Applicants must have achieved certain minimum scores on their Grade 12 exams in order to be admitted (and from my understanding, all applicants who have those scores are admitted). As the only University in the country, UNam is the most prestigious institution one can attend in Namibia. However, it is not accredited outside of Namibia, so other countries do not recognize the degrees it awards. The Namibian education system is of such low quality that in order to even be considered for acceptance to a university in South Africa – the most common foreign destination for Namibian students – a graduate of Namibia’s public schools must attend UNam for two years, and can then apply to begin a 4-year degree program in South Africa. Begin, not transfer into. So after two years of Namibian University, one is more or less on par with South African High School graduates.

For those Grade 12 graduates whose exam marks don’t qualify them for UNam, there are several options for higher education. One of those, and probably the most popular, is Teacher’s College. There are a handful of Teacher’s Colleges in Namibia, and they offer a three year degree program, which naturally isn’t recognized anywhere outside of Namibia. In other words, most of the students training to become teachers are those who didn’t qualify to study for a Bachelor’s degree at a University whose Bachelor’s degrees are only recognized as such by 2 million people in the entire world. Of course, the US faces the same problem of trying to attract highly qualified students to the teaching profession. But in an educational system where the standards for passing are so low to begin with, the problem becomes much more profound.

One of the other options for those who don’t qualify for UNam – and also for those who do; this is a pretty desirable position – is to attend the Namibian Institute of Mining and Technology. Mining is one of Namibia’s major industries, and a job as an engineer or in a related field is a pretty cushy one. Admission requirements state that applicants must have completed Grade 10 (or higher) and passed math and physical sciences. NIMT receives thousands of applications annually for 350 slots. Even so, they are still forced to accept about 100 students every year who do not meet those minimums. In other words, one of the most sought after professions in the country can only attract 250 applicants who have achieved 30% in math and science. That’s how bad math and science education are here.

Everything I’ve talked about applies to the public schools in Namibia. There are private schools, and anyone with enough money sends their children to those. I know very little about private education in this country, but it is common knowledge that it is far superior to the public schools. Most private schools follow a British curriculum and high school graduates are basically on par with their European counterparts. Virtually all private school graduates go directly to universities in South Africa or Europe. A majority of private school students are white, and virtually all whites go to private schools. Thus the education disparity between whites and blacks that was formalized under law in the apartheid era simply continues under a different guise. These racial educational inequities have to be rectified before there will be anything approaching economic equality between whites and blacks in Namibia.

Athletics

Before we begin, a few notes on terminology. What we call “Track and Field” in the U.S. is known as “Athletics” in Namibia. I think it’s one of those British-English terms. So when I say “athletics,” I’m talking solely about various forms of running, jumping, and throwing, not generically referring to all sports. I’ve never heard the word “meet” used by a Namibian; an athletics competition is simply referred to as- drum roll, please - “athletics”. Nor have I really heard the word “coach” used, except occasionally by one of the teachers who had all of her schooling in English (most of the others at my school are old enough that all or nearly all of their schooling was in Afrikaans). But I’ve never heard the teachers refer to “coaching” the kids in any sport; they just refer to being there, watching them, or teaching them the sport. The kids naturally, have never heard the word. For clarity’s sake, I’ll be using the words “meet” and “coach” anyway. Lastly, I can’t figure out if “athletics” is a singular or plural word. Which is correct: “Athletics is fun” or “Athletics are fun”? The American version would be “Track and field is fun”, but that “s” at the end of “athletics” is throwing me off. Your commentary or research on this grammar point would be appreciated. For confusion’s sake, I’m just going to alternate my usage throughout this post, so that I’ll be half-right rather than risk being all-wrong. And so that I won’t have to bother with editing.

Athletics, like so much else here, is dictated by the Ministry of Education and overseen (I use that term loosely) at the national level. It takes place at the beginning of the school year, for absolutely no reason that I can discern. That’s both the hottest part of the school year and the middle of the rainy season, so practices and meets are either incredibly hot or flooded out. Traveling is also more dangerous in those months: rivers only run when it rains, intersecting dirt roads and potentially causing cars to get stuck in the mud, or worse, overturn. So while it seems to me that February is the worst possible time to hold athletics, that’s exactly when they’re held. And considering the lack of critical thinking skills here, I doubt anyone has ever thought to question that scheduling.

Last year I thought athletics was utter insanity. This year I loved it (them?). That’s both because I knew what to expect the second time around, and because this year I took over coaching and chucked out some of the more bizarre practices (I use the term “practices” in both the sense of a sports training and of a custom). Athletics goes something like this:

School officially begins in the middle of January. Shortly thereafter, the Ministry sends out an Athletics schedule. The “InterHouse” meet is to be held the last Saturday in January, the Cluster meet the first Saturday in February, and the District and Regional meets on the second and third Saturdays in February, respectively. However, it is virtually guaranteed that the later two events will be postponed, possibly multiple times. Nationals are held two weeks after regionals, which this year happened to be the last weekend in March due to all that postponement. (“InterHouse” is a competition held at every school for the learners at that school to decide who will go on to represent the school at the next level. “Clusters” are groups of schools geographically close to one another who collaborate for both academic and extracurricular purposes. Grootberg is part of the Kamanjab Cluster, which also includes the two schools in Kamanjab and Edward //Guirab Primary School in Anker, where another PCV works. Districts are several groups of Clusters; and Kamanjab is part of the Khorixas District. “Regions” in Namibia are roughly the equivalent of U.S. “States”, though considering the small size of the population; county might be a more analogous description. There are 13 regions in Namibia, and I’m in the Kunene Region.)

The last week of January, athletics practices begin. Last year we gathered the entire student body (I suppose “learner body” would be the term in Namibia, but that sounds weird) at 4 pm, immediately after afternoon study had ended. On subsequent days, we were equally likely to begin at 3 or 3:30, thus holding practice instead of study, rather than after it. There are two study sessions held every day: the afternoon session, from 3-4, is compulsory for all learners from grade 4 on up. The evening study, from 7-8pm, is for those learners who live in the hostel, which is in the case of my school is 200 out of 350. Study is the only time when learners might attempt to do their homework (might), so pulling them out of study for an athletics practice is guaranteeing that they won’t even try. But since the Ministry says we must practice for athletics, according to what I like to refer to as NamLogic, it’s perfectly acceptable to pull a kid, or all of them, out of study to run. In 110 degree heat no less.

So there we were, 300 some odd learners ages 6 -16 and 10 or so teachers under the scorching summer savannah sun. 10km run anyone? Seriously, that’s what we did. Ok, not QUITE everyone. Grades 1-3 were told to run several laps around the outside of the school yard, a lap probably being half a mile or so. But the learners in grades 4 and up were told to run to a certain farm, which is approximately 5 km down a dirt path. (I should clarify that “farm” in this case just means a place where there are a few mud huts. The residents, like everyone else in Namibia, own some goats and cattle, and hence live on a “farm”). The kids always get excited about whatever destination they are about to run to, mainly, I think, because it means seeing something different, even if its just different cows. Of course, after running for about 3 minutes most are markedly less excited and will start complaining about how far it is. So the kids were off to the farm and the teachers stood around chatting. After a little while, we teachers piled into a bakkie (pick-up truck) to follow after the learners and make sure they all made it to the farm and back safely. We caught up the last group of kids, who were waking, and the driver started honking the horn, while the teachers began complaining that our learners are “very lazy” and don’t want to practice. Right, 9-16 year-olds who only walk, rather than run, 10km in the middle of the summer afternoon are clearly lazy. And for the next hour or so, that’s what we did: drive slowly behind the stragglers, honk at them, and berate them for laziness. By “we” I mean all the teachers minus myself, who sat there rolling my eyes at the teachers rolling their eyes at the kids.

Practices followed that pattern for the remainder of the week. Sometimes the kids ran around the “dam”, which is more like a small pond that only fills up if there is sufficient rain in the rainy season, as a warm up. Then the teachers would shake their heads at the kids who cheated by either walking or cutting through the middle of the dam (it did not yet have water). They would then run to whatever farm the teachers had chosen. Within a day or two I decided to start running at practice. Though in terms of temperature I’d rather run around 6:30 or 7, it made more sense than just watching the practice and then going for a run on my own later. Plus, I much prefer to run with and talk to the kids than to join a bunch of people calling the kids lazy while sitting in a car.

Another day that week we went to Atlanta, a farm 8 km away. Yes, we had the 170 or so kids in grades 4-7 run 16 km in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the summer in the middle of the savannah. Seriously, that cannot be good for them. When I said something about it being very far, the other teachers brushed it off, saying that theses kids are used to it. In a sense they are right. These are farm kids, and farms are far from other farms and from towns. While people wouldn’t run 16km, they think nothing of walking that distance. In fact, one weekend last year, a group of girls from my school, ages 10-12, decided they wanted to go to Kamanjab and they set off on foot. They walked halfway there and a passing truck gave them a lift the rest of the way. Kamanjab is 65km away. Of course, most of the kids didn’t actually run most of the 16km to Atlanta; they ran for a little while and then walked until a car came along honking at them. In light of how far it is to Atlanta and the fact that most kids would walk most of the way, this was one of those days when we started at 3, rather than bothering to have study at all, so that we could be sure to have the kids back in time for the hostel dinner at 6.

I mention that we always run to a farm, some of which are awfully far away-especially considering the age of the kids, and the fact that they aren’t doing this voluntarily because they want to be on the athletics team, but because the teachers tell them that everyone MUST practice for that first InterHouse meet. If it’s so far, why not run just partway and then turn around? Water. No one around here has a water bottle that they carry to practice. Ok, a handful of kids have or find an empty plastic bottle that once held some other drink-soda or juice-, fill that with water, and bring it with them, but I’m the only one with a non-disposable water bottle. Understandably, they want to keep running until they can get water, and then turn around. Do they show up at a farm, knock on someone’s door and get water from their tap? Nice try, but no. They go straight for the most readily available water source: the animals’ water trough. Yup, that long pit that the cows, donkeys, horses, and goats drink from is where my learners quench their thirst. And often take a dip as well. I really should have taken pictures of this. But I guess they’ve been doing so all their lives, because no one seems to get sick from it.

Now I keep mentioning these 10-16km runs. So are all of my learners cross-country runners? Hardly. That was part of the insanity I felt last year. Virtually all of them are sprinters who compete in 100-800m, and the farthest distance any primary learner runs is 3 km. Then why all these long runs? Because the teachers have no idea how to properly train for athletics. This isn’t the sports-science-fanatical culture of America. They know you should practice for athletics, but they have no idea how. Last year when I tried to get them to do sprint drills and practices on the field, rather than 10km+ runs, I was shot down. “Running is running” one said – and that’s a direct quote. To be honest, I wasn’t too disappointed because I was going to run that far anyway, and I enjoyed the company of the kids, but still, I knew it wasn’t helping them any.

As I mentioned, the Ministry had scheduled the InterHouse meet for the last Saturday in January. However, one of the matron’s (matrons are women who work at the hostel, cooking and cleaning and looking after the kids) sons had died, and his funeral was on that Saturday. Most of the teachers would be attending, so we decided to hold the meet on Friday instead. A Friday afternoon event? Of course not. Who wants to hang around school on a Friday afternoon? We held our athletics meet in the morning, rather than having classes. So there we were, three weeks into the school year, and we had had a whole 4 days of classes. We had spent the first two weeks waiting for all of our learners to arrive, and now we were taking a day off from classes to hold an athletics meet.

When we gathered together on Friday morning, a teacher announced that the learners could go back and change, and head over to the “stadium”. The stadium??? I was confused. My village doesn’t even have a grocery store; it couldn’t possibly have a stadium. And if it did, I couldn’t possibly have missed it. It would have been towering over, uh, everything. I eventually realized “stadium” is one of those English words that is commonly misused here; they think it is simply a synonym for a sports field, rather than the building surrounding one. I still find it amusing when I am directed to go to a “stadium” in the middle of nowhere, where the closest thing to even bleachers are rocks. So we spent Friday watching kids run, run, run some more, jump long, jump high, and throw a shotput. I can’t say I minded not teaching, but standing around a hot sunny field for hours wasn’t the most enjoyable experience either. For my own amusement and curiosity, I timed some of the kids. I noticed immediately that the times seemed awfully low – either all of the learners at my school were much faster than American kids, or our distances were off. The later seemed more likely.

InterHouse determined which kids would be going on to compete at the Cluster Athletics meet in Kamanjab. Thus our group of athletes attending practice was narrowed down from around 300 to around 30, a much more manageable, normal number. While that was a definite improvement, practices continued to be the typical craziness of a forcing a bunch of 12-year-olds to run 10km. Keep in mind that these kids haven’t voluntarily joined the track team; they just happen to be the fastest runners in the school, so the teachers tell them they “must” practice and make the school proud. But it’s awfully hard to motivate someone to run if they don’t want to. My suspicions about the size of our “track” were confirmed when a teacher was encouraging these athletes to practice very hard in order to win in Kananjab. “Remember,” she said “The field is bigger there, so the 400 and 800 meters are longer.” Oh how I love NamLogic.

Cluster Athletics was held in Kamanjab the first weekend in February. I was looking forward to it mainly because I would get to see the PCV from Anker and go shopping. After school on Friday, the 30 or so kids and 5 teachers piled into two bakkies (everybody squeezes into the back, that’s how we travel here) and set off for Kamanjab. Everything was fine until we hit Katemba, the largest river nearby. As I said, rivers only run when it rains, so I had never seen it with water before. This time though, it was a good 20 meters wide and flowing with some force. We parked and waited. And waited. Several other cars joined us in waiting. A few crossed, but they were larger vehicles that presumably had four wheel drive. Finally, after about an hour and a half, we decided to cross. The river had subsided only slightly, but another storm was about to start, which would only pour more water into the river. So all of the passengers walked across – it wasn’t more than a few feet deep – and the drivers gave it a go. They made it, and we were on our way. We spent the night at one of the schools in Kamanjab, with the girls and female teachers sleeping in one classroom and the boys and male teachers in another.

The meet was scheduled to begin at 9 on Saturday morning. However, that storm that had been approaching Friday afternoon had brought us rain for most of the night, and come morning, it was still raining on and off. The field itself was mostly mud. Field?, you ask. Don’t you run on a track? There are very few public schools in Namibia that have actual tracks. Most schools just take their soccer field and draw lines in the dirt surrounding it. So a muddy field really does present a challenge to running.

We waited all morning as it rained on and off. Eventually it stopped, and after a few hours the field was dry enough to begin. Well, mostly dry enough. There was still one section that contained far more water than dirt, so a bunch of people began shoveling drier dirt from other portions on top of the water, transforming it from a bunch of puddles to nice, solid mud.

The meet itself was, to my Nam-innocent eyes, a fiasco. All of the athletes were just milling about the school ground and there was no loudspeaker to announce when their events were starting. There was a schedule, but only a handful of copies had been made, and they were in the hands of a few teachers, not posted for public viewing. A teacher at the start line would call out the event that was beginning, and those athletes were supposed to come forward and participate. But if only 20 or so people were even within earshot, how was anyone supposed to know when to head over to the starting line? That’s how pretty much all athletic events go, and I still don’t really have an answer as to how the kids find out that they are up. At every meet some kids do miss their event(s), and then their teachers get angry and get into a fight with the teachers of the host school, accusing them of not properly announcing the events. But considering the state of the announcement “system,” and the numbers of kids who do realize it’s their turn, I’m impressed by how well it actually functions.

I was surprised to regularly see kids dropping out of an event before the finish line. They’d be running, running, running as fast as their little legs could carry them, and then suddenly give up. Anyone who could see he or she wouldn’t be one of the top 2 or 3 finishers was apt to just give up mid-race. They know that only those top two places will qualify to compete at the next level, so they don’t see the point in continuing if they won’t win. Plus, their friends (and occasionally teachers) will make fun of them for not finishing in first or second, but not for dropping out completely. Occasionally someone will be timing the runners and recording the times, but they never tell the kids their times, and the kids wouldn’t have a previous time to compare it to anyway, so there’s not the motivation of racing against yourself for a personal best that we promote in track in the States. Plus, there’s the issue I mentioned earlier, of tracks being different sizes, thus making the same distance “different”. I sometimes hear teachers telling the kids that they can’t drop out, that they must finish their race, but this is only after the person has already done so, and there’s never any encouragement beforehand to stick with it to the end.

Then there was the food issue. Most of the learners at my school live in and are fed at the hostel, so we brought with us enough food to feed the kids for several days, as well as a matron to cook it all. Saturday morning the kids were fed breakfast, and then we sat around hoping that the rain would stop, the field would dry, and we could begin the meet. That’s exactly what happened, and around 12:30 we left the school we had slept at to drive to the school where the meet was being held, and around 1 things got underway. Now as the school day ends at 1, that is the standard lunch hour in Namibia, but no one mentioned feeding the kids. Apparently the 5 minute drive between the two schools was too much to undertake just to get food for them. So they proceeded to spend the whole afternoon in the hot Namibian sun, running their fastest, on only the four slices of bread they had consumed at 8 that morning. As for hydration, this was not your American sports event with water stations every five feet and a water bottle in every athlete’s bag. The only water I ever saw was in the two Nalgenes belonging to myself and the other PCV. I’m sure the kids found a tap at the school and walked over occasionally for a few sips of water, but I’m equally certain that even so, they were dehydrated. Both the food and water situations are pretty standard at Namibian sports events, so I’ve come to expect that, and now whenever the kids ARE fed on such a day I’m impressed.

It came as no surprise to me when, around 4:30 in the afternoon, a girl of about 12 from Anker collapsed in the middle of a 400m race. She fell to the side of the track and started screaming and shaking. Several teachers – as well as many learners- rushed over to check on her, and one from my school began giving her chest compressions a-la-CPR. Clearly, he had never been trained in CPR and was just mimicking something he had seen on television, because the first thing they teach you in a CPR course is that you NEVER give chest compressions unless the person isn’t breathing and has no pulse. Anyone who’s screaming clearly has both. Among other things, chest compressions properly performed can break the person’s ribcage, which is one thing if doing so also revives their heart and thus saves their life, but not something you want to risk for the hell of it. Due to malnourishment, bones tend to break quite easily here, so I was genuinely concerned. After a few minutes she calmed down. Sensing that the girl was probably dehydrated and hungry, the PCV from Anker offered the girl her water bottle. The other teachers found this hilarious, and proceeded to tease her about it for the rest of the week.

The day’s events concluded in the early evening, we headed back to the school where we slept, and the kids were finally fed dinner around 6:30.

A few weeks later, we headed to Khorixas for the District meet (as I mentioned earlier, this meet had been postponed until the week after the originally scheduled date). The meet was basically the same as Kanajab’s had been, though with many more kids. I hung out with two other PCVs, and we spent most of the time at the meet under a tent, debating how much time to spend there. We developed a theory about putting in “face time.” It’s important for us to show up at these things, greet everyone we know so that they know we were there, and stay for a certain amount of time so that we are seen watching and can pretend we are enthusiastic about the event. The three of us stayed for two hours, then left, claiming we needed to go do some shopping before the stores closed at one. We made it sound like we would be back afterwards, though we had no intention of coming back.

That was the biggest difference between last year and this year. At meets last year I was literally counting the minutes until I could get out of the sun and relax inside. This year I truly enjoyed them. It’s a lot more fun to watch kids running when you actually know who’s who. Last year I was still trying to learn 120 names, but this year I had taught most of them for a year, knew them and their personalities, and had been coaching them American-, not Namibian-style, for a few weeks. I got really into the cheering thing. Whereas last year two hours seemed like an eternity, this year I was sad that I could only spend two hours at the Khorixas meet because I really did have errands to do in town and at the Ministry.

When it came time to start Athletics this year, I was mentally preparing for that first week’s madness, when 175 or so learners would be told to run to this or that farm. I needn’t have worried. Remember how last year we held the InterHouse meet on Friday rather than Saturday so that the teachers would be able to go to a funeral? Well this year we held it on Tuesday rather than Saturday, simply so that we wouldn’t have to practice with the entire school. So instead of having the kids practice for the several days leading up to InterHouse, we just jumped right into the meet and eliminated all but 30 or so right off the bat. And again, the meet was held during the school day, so once again, by the end of the third week of school, we had had only four days of classes. Oh, Namibia.

I more or less took charge or practices right away, which helped to eliminate some of 2008’s craziness. Last year all of the teachers were expected to be present for every practice, because apparently it’s not fair for some teachers to have that added responsibility and others not to. The whole delegation of extra-curricular responsibilities is really bizarre here. By this year, the teachers realize that I actually like to run, and they’ve picked up that I know more about training techniques than they do. So they were just as happy to leave me with the kids to run practice as I pleased. We did a handful of distance runs, but I focused a lot more on sprinting, since, well, that’s what they’ll actually be racing in…quite a concept, right? Although I did realize an additional reason for the teachers’ love of sending the kids off to the farm. When I tried to hold a practice of sprinting and drills on the field, it pretty much bombed. Trying to get them to run sets of sprints and drills for more than15 minutes was impossible. They complained of being tired, that the rain was coming, that it was almost dinner time. Wait a second, you can run 10km, but you’re tired after running 100m 5 times? I figured the problem was actually that they didn’t like running back and forth over the same ground again and again. They like a change of scenery.

So I came up with a workout that combined the best of both worlds. There’s a telephone line with poles every hundred meters or so running from the soccer field to a farm about 3km away. On some days we alternated sprinting and walking every hundred meters, or every two hundred meters, and on others we did lots of drills – running backwards, sideways, high knees, etc. for 100 meters and walking in between. They loved these workouts, probably because they were neither being forced to run insane distances for their age nor to run across the same soccer field again and again. I’d like to think that my fabulous coaching skills were the reason that one of our learners made it to nationals in the 200m, and placed fourth in his age group, but he happens to be the kid who almost never came to practice because his ankle hurts when he runs.

But I will take credit for the four girls who placed first or second at the District level. According to the rules we had been using for all previous meets and in previous years, the first and second place finishers in every event should have advanced on to the Regional meet. So those four girls were quite excited; they’d be going to Outjo, a town 3 ½ hours away that while not much by American standards, is still bigger and more exciting than anywhere they had yet been. For a week and a half afterwards, they excitedly came to practice every day, thrilled that they had done so well and eager to practice more and win in Outjo. Then two days before we were supposed to leave for Outjo, we received a call from the Ministry. Only one kid, the boy who would eventually go on to Nationals, had qualified. They had apparently decided to base qualifications on times rather than on finishing place, and none of the girls had qualified. What?! This was absurd. For all the lip-service the Ministry gives to self-esteem, they certainly don’t follow through with it in practice. The kids who had been all excited and proud of themselves were now crushed. As previously mentioned, times are so rarely recorded that no one has any concept of what a normal or good time is for a particular race. The kids absolutely did not understand the reasoning behind this, and I don’t blame them. If they were the first or second fastest in one of the 3 districts in our region, why couldn’t they go to the regional meet? I strongly suspect that this decision had far more to do with transport than anything else. The concept of planning ahead and budgeting is another that gets a lot of lip service and not a lot of follow through. I’m willing to bet that the Ministry suddenly realized they could only afford to send one vehicle to pick up all the kids in our district, and then invented a new policy that would make the numbers work. There’s always a lot of stuff like that going on, but when it so directly affects the kids, it really kills me.

It's Good To Be Back

The most surprising thing about this year so far is how happy I am to be back here. Not that I was unhappy before; but I wasn’t expecting to feel this excited to be back in the village. When I was traveling over the Christmas Holiday, the PCVs I was with kept saying that the long vacation had made them really appreciate Namibia and feel ready to go back to work. I just couldn’t honestly say the same thing. I was having a great time traveling, and apart from the being ready to not live out of a backpack, I wasn’t particularly anxious to go back to work.

The PC mid-service conference was held at the very end of break – the beginning of the school term actually; it was the first two days that school was back in session. It was great to see all of Nam 27, many of whom I hadn’t seen since our Reconnnect conference in May. We swore in with 69 volunteers, and we still have 63, so we’ve had an incredibly high rate of sticking-with-it – and three of those who left hadn’t wanted to; they were sent home for medical or other reasons. The timing of Mid Service was great; it really gave me an opportunity to get excited again about what I’m doing and could be doing here. It was essentially a time to share ideas and strategies, and I found it incredibly helpful. It was great to hear ideas and strategies that work here, and to share difficulties and brainstorm solutions.

I’ve noticed this phenomenon at every school break (it’s a trimester system, so that’s quite a few): I’m always enjoying myself so much over the holiday that I don’t want school to start again. But really that has nothing to do with my particular school or village; it has to do with me liking vacation better than working. And how many people really want to go back to work at the end of vacation? But again, every term, when I do go back I’m surprised at how good it feels to be home – and this is home for now, though Home is still where I grew up – and how much more enthusiastic I am about doing my job and doing it well.

Teaching was difficult at first, there’s no doubt about it. That’s true everywhere, and particularly so in a foreign country. It got better with each successive term, as I learned how to behave as a teacher here, what is and isn’t acceptable behavior (not the same as in the states), learned how to assert myself, and found teaching methods that my learners responded to. At first even the tiniest things were difficult. It took time to learn nearly 120 names, and in the meantime, discipline was that much more difficult. Yelling “hey, stop,” just isn’t as effective as yelling their name. Even for minor infractions, when saying a name in the middle of class would have sufficed to stop the problem, I just didn’t know it and had the options of a) disturbing the entire lesson and class to admonish someone, or b) ignoring it and continuing the lesson. Despite every bit of advice I read or received in training, I usually opted for b, to my eventual regret.

Teaching is just something that you only get good at through experience. After a year I’m making no claims of being a good teacher, but I’ve certainly come a long way.

There are lots of cultural differences that I either wasn’t aware of, didn’t understand, or had to get used to in order to be a more effective teacher here. In the US, we tend to see solely the professional aspect of our teachers – someone who comes to school, lectures, gives assignments, etc. When we see them outside the classroom, it’s because they are coaching a team, mentoring a club, or participating in some other school event. Running into them in the grocery store is awkward, seeing them, say, in their bath towel is unimaginable.

That distinction between personal and professional is non-existent here. While American kids would probably have less respect for a teacher who they saw in her pajamas, the opposite is true here. Nearly all of the teachers live within 20 meters of the school, and 75% or so of the kids live at the school in the hostel. This is a much more communal, less individualistic culture than the US, so people are just around one another a lot more. Teachers are constantly calling the kids to their house to do some sort of chore or errand, and some kids more or less live at certain teachers’ houses – they aren’t related to them, but teachers tend to choose a few kids they particularly like and trust, and they become their de-facto children. It’s perfectly normal for twenty or so kids to be hanging out in or around a teacher’s house – and that includes at all times of day. The more time you spend with the kids outside of class, be it in a semi-structured after school activity, just hanging out in your house, or even having them do chores for you, the closer they feel to you and the better they respond to you in class. Two of the teachers live in a house directly outside the hostel gates. Their bathroom is attached to their house but outside, so they regularly walk outside in a bath towel – and in fact, will sometimes casually stand outside in their towels sipping tea, with the hostel kids just a few feet away. The kids expect to see you as a real person, and the more they do, the better.

So after a year and change here, I’m much more comfortable with all of these differences and difficulties, and in general, no longer see them as such. After learning what to expect, I’m no longer caught up on the disheartening details and am free to really enjoy the encouraging ones. Time and experience make all the difference, because things I would have once counted as utter failures I now see as minor victories. A year ago, if only five kids in a class understood my instructions – written on the board and repeated multiple times and demonstrated – to take a word from the “noun” column and a word from the “adjective” column and form a sentence, such as “The shirt is green”, I would have marked that lesson off as a flop. This year I was thrilled that a whole five (5!) kids understood it. It’s the little things, the small successes, the random moments that make my day; the rest of it I can just brush off and forget about. Perspective is everything.

Inauguration

When the CNN announcer said “the whole world is watching this moment” I have no doubt that he was right. I can attest that this little corner of Namibia was watching - or at least those with TVs were. I watched the inauguration at the house of the two teachers I’m closest friends with. I headed over around 6:00pm my time, 11:00am on the East Coast. They told me that NBC (the Namibian Broadcasting Company, unfortunately not quite as good as the American NBC) had just announced that it was suspending regular programming to show Obama’s inauguration. It picked up with the live CNN broadcast from the US.

I enjoyed watching it in the company of Namibians. My preference would have been to be out on the National Mall, but this was the next best thing. Well, maybe second best – being in Obama’s father’s village would have been better. If only Peace Corps had sent me to Kenya! Seriously though, this was one of those rare occasions where I felt I was really able to share and explain certain aspects of American tradition, government, and history. I occasionally get questions about what things are like in America, but it’s not often that people show a whole lot of interest for all that long. I don’t fault them for this; its just that even for the educated educators, America and things American are outside their realm of day to day reality and not all that important. How many Americans care about Namibian politics? It’s the same thing here. When I do get questions, I’ve learned to make my answers as brief and straightforward as possible. Trying to explain the complexity of any given situation in the US is just pointless – my audience looses focus and fails to grasp any of the points I’m trying to make.

But in watching the inauguration with two of my coworkers and a cousin of one, I was bombarded with questions. I had a captive audience whose only distractions were the further questions being raised by the sights on the television screen. I described who each former president was as he entered, who certain Senators and Cabinet officials were. I explained the layout of the National Mall, Capitol Building, White House, and Museums. I told them that people were so eager to be in Washington for this event that apartments were being rented for tens of thousands of dollars for a single week. I talked about the election process, term limits, and the role of the vice president. One coworker asked me how I feel when I see the Capitol, if it’s a sense of “Wow” and …she gestured something that I would describe as pride, if pride could be captured in a gesture. I smiled and nodded. It’s a difficult feeling to describe. They were awed by the size and beauty of the capitol, and astonished by the size of the crowds gathered in Washington and around the country. I was rather impressed myself.

As Obama was about to take the oath of office, one coworker asked if it would be long. No, I told her, it was virtually the same as the oath the Vice-President had just taken. Not the oath, she replied, but the whole rest of the ceremony. I told her that events were going on all day and night, but I didn’t know how long the actual inaugural ceremony would last. Well, in less than an hour the Obamas and Bidens had waived goodbye to Bush’s helicopter and coverage ended. “Wow, that was short!” my coworker exclaimed. “I see there’s no time-wasting with lots of songs and speeches and things.” I had to laugh.

It’s true, Americans are very much about keeping things to the point. In Africa there’s lots of fluff and pomp and flowery speeches and making a big to do about everything. Heck, when quilts were donated to my school, we spent a day preparing for a ceremony. The regional director drove three hours to officiate the “handing-over”, there were five or six speeches of appreciation (including one from yours truly), dramas performed by the kids, and endless songs of gratitude. All this as a “thank you” to donors who weren’t even there – the quilts had been mailed from Canada by people who had visited the previous year! Now if a “Quilt Handing-Over Ceremony” at a little village primary school in Namibia takes over an hour, I can only imagine what a Presidential Inauguration Ceremony must be like! I’d put my money on 5-6 hours.

My coworker wasn’t the only one surprised at the brevity of the ceremony. The television channel itself indicated that it would be showing the Inauguration until 10 pm our time, or 3 pm eastern time. That says to me that NBC either didn’t know how long it would last and figured 3 hours was a reasonable assumption, or did have the official schedule but read it as “Africa Time”, under which everything would start a few hours later and last twice as long as originally projected.

Meanwhile, the American CNN commentator and the CNN factoid box at the bottom of the screen were harping on the fact that the ceremony had been behind schedule, that Obama officially became president at noon, though he had not yet taken the oath of office. By my estimate they were about 5 minutes behind schedule, which is inconceivably early on African Time.

One Year In

Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and had time to relax and enjoy some good family time! As the new year begins, I wanted to say hello and give you a brief update on some of my experiences in Namibia. It’s hard to believe that I've been gone for over a year now. I'm midway through Peace Corps service, with one year of teaching completed and one more to go. I figured this would be a good time to publicly answer some of the questions I get asked most frequently, which will give you an idea of life here. (And yes, some of these questions I don’t actually get asked, but wish I did.)

"So, how's Namibia?"
Well, it kinda depends on when you ask me.
It’s fantastic when a kid who always fails math suddenly understands a concept and gets 100 on the quiz, and adorable when his ten-year-old friend, wearing a bright purple secondhand sweater, gives him a congratulatory handshake.
It’s annoying when he has forgotten all of it on the test two weeks later.
It’s sad when a really bright girl drops out of school and spends her days at the bar because she’s tired of being the 16-year-old in grade 5.
It’s cool when I see giraffes, elephants, springbok, and zebras when driving to town.
It’s frustrating when I’ve made a great worksheet, but have to make up a new lesson plan for the week on the spot because the power is out, or the copy machine is broken, or we’re out of paper, and I therefore can’t make copies.
It’s hot when – oh wait, it’s always hot. Except for when it’s really cold. On winter nights, the temperature does drop to below freezing, and houses here don’t have heat or insulation. But even then it warms up around 9 am, and by noon it’s in the 70s. (Namibians, however, still consider it cold, and think I’m crazy for wearing short sleeves while they keep their “winter” jackets on all day.)
It's tough teaching classes of 35-40 kids, half of whom are performing far below grade level.
It’s interesting to be in a country only 19 years old, watching it transition from the colonialism and apartheid of South African rule.
Overall, I'm very happy here and enjoying my job and community. I love my school and the kids I teach (though granted, I like them better outside the classroom than in...) and the village of Erwee has been very welcoming. Once I adjusted to and accepted the realities of life here, things went pretty well. The country is definitely making progress and in some respects is far ahead of other African countries I've seen. There are tar roads between all major towns, and those roads are very well kept (pretty much pothole-free), which is quite an accomplishment. While landlines are usually down, cell phone towers are popping up everywhere. I live in a village of 500 people, but I have a good cell phone network. Of the 60-something volunteers in my Peace Corps group, placed all over the country, only three don't have cell service at their sites. While there is certainly a lot to be done in terms of development, the government recognizes and has plans in place to address many of the issues.

"Do you miss America?"
Yes and no. Sometimes I miss understanding what's going on - ie, Why are we driving randomly around this town for an hour? Why do we spend the first week of every term in the staff room instead of actually teaching? - but I've gotten used to the not knowing, and have stopped questioning it. Most of what I miss is the things that would make doing my job easier. There've been so many times when I wished I could just run to CVS and buy a few things that would make the next week's lesson really fun and exciting. But I don't have a car, can't drive here, and the nearest CVS-type store is four hours, not four minutes, away. So I make up for that by hoarding everything in the hope that it might one day come in handing for a project of some sort - I have yet to throw away an egg carton, cereal box, newspaper, or magazine, all of which can be used for a variety of English or art projects.

"What do you do on the weekends and for fun?"
I may live in Africa, but I'm not exactly in a mud hut and walking a mile for water every day. I watch lots of movies and TV shows on my laptop, I read, and I visit friends. (Sounds exotic, right?) Almost all of the teachers live in houses right next to the school, as I do, so I spend a lot of time with them, and watching their TVs. Although television here isn't very good: the biggest hits are Big Brother Africa, which is shown 24/7 on one channel, and Mexican telenovelas dubbed into English. The kids often come to visit me, and that's one of the highlights of my time here. I love the random questions they ask and the things they say when they're at my house. I have a picture on the wall of my house in the US covered in snow, and they find that enthralling. They LOVE looking at pictures of my family and picking out me, especially the ones from when I was growing up. And lots of kids, even little ones who I don't teach, will spend hours looking at the books in my house, even though they can't read or understand English yet.
About once a month I spend the weekend with another Volunteer or two, often when school events, such as sports, bring me to their town/village. Did I mention that I read? I read a lot, even more so than I did in the states, which is saying something. If you're looking for a great historical fiction about South Africa, try The Covenant by James Michener. For African travel, Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik by Marie Javins is a fun read. A good Peace Corps book is Dear Exile by Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery, and some good life-in-Africa books are Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller.

"Did you support Obama?"
I get this ALL the time, not from Americans, but from Namibians. Everyone here LOVES Obama and is very happy to see him in office (try as I might to explain it, nobody seems to understand that he isn't actually the president for a few more weeks). There is a family in my shopping town that I spend the night with if I can't get a ride back to my village, and they jokingly told me that I was welcome to stay with them any time, so long as Obama was my president. The other teachers at my school were very excited about the news. The day after the election I gave a short lesson about him, complete with pictures from six-month old magazines - the most recent I had - to each of my classes. I was surprised by how much they did know about the US, and by the fact that the next day they actually remembered everything I had told them. If anything, the symbolic significance of Obama's victory is even stronger here than in America. In the course of that lesson, one of my Grade 7 learners said "Miss, blacks are stupid." Comments like that break my heart, and is unfortunately what their teachers - also black - have told them for years. I've heard that sentiment stated less explicitly stated from many, many black people, and I think that's the worst legacy of colonialism. Blacks were told for decades that they weren't as good as whites, and that has been internalized and is basically part of their identity. And I do struggle with the fact that as a white "development worker" I am essentially perpetuating that belief. But at least in this case, in response to the learner's comment, I was able to point out that in America, a mostly white population elected a black man as their leader. (And to answer the question, Yes, I did support him. Or I tried to. Hopefully my absentee ballot made it back in time, but with this mail system, one never knows).

‘What do Namibians think of America and Americans?”
Namibians’ knowledge of America comes essentially from one source: the news. America appears on the news for two reasons: the war in Iraq and development aid. The general, if not universal, opinion is that the war in Iraq is bad, and that Bush is therefore bad. (Though I should add that I don’t think many people know why the war was fought in the first place, or have specific reasons for opposing the war.) There has been a fair amount of coverage lately of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and they do like America’s development efforts. Basically the only Americans they’ve met are volunteers or aid workers from Peace Corps, World Teach, or USAID, and we seem to be doing a pretty good job of cultivating friendships, because everyone I meet who has previously worked with an American seems to love us. And as aforementioned, they are wild about Obama. So despite any animosity towards Bush, Namibians love American people. The comment I hear most frequently is along the lines of Americans being very generous, because many of the books, computers, and aid money in Namibia have come from the US. There’s certainly none of the anti-American sentiment that exists or existed in some regions of the world.

What’s the HIV/AIDS situation like there?
In a word, bad. About 1 in 5 people are infected with “the virus”, as it’s generally referred to. Awareness is a big dealing in the country, heavily promoted by the government through the ministry of education, the ministry of youth, the ministry of gender, etc, as well as every aid group and NGO you can think of. And to an extent, the awareness campaign is working. By grade 4 or 5, every kid can tell you the basics of what to do to protect yourself. But being “aware” doesn’t necessarily translate into protecting oneself. In the US we say that “knowledge is power”, but all too often that’s just not the case here. There are numerous other factors that prevent people from actually practicing what they know they should. For one thing, there’s a disconnect between what’s taught in the classroom and applying that to real life. Much of what is taught in school is so far removed from the day to day realities of life here that it’s almost a realm onto itself. The school curriculums and textbooks are constantly being revamped in recognition of this problem, so I think things are slowly improving, but it will take time. Unfortunately, protecting oneself against HIV becomes just another topic that is discussed in the classroom, but not necessarily followed in real life.
Furthermore, there’s a general lack of the sense of agency and control over one’s own destiny. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make it much more difficult to fight the HIV/AIDS crisis. In one class discussion about HIV/AIDS, a student told me that diseases are “just the bad luck of life.” Considering the conditions most people live in, it may be good that they don’t feel ashamed and can blame “life” for misfortunes. I think that stems partly from long-embedded cultural traditions of societies that are more communal and less individualistic than the US, partly from the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, and partly from generations of poverty. But I do wish I had a way encourage them to move on beyond that kind of thinking.

That said, I do think there is hope for the future. The generation of kids who are in school now are starting to absorb the idea of protecting themselves into their culture. I am confident that some of them really have taken the message to heart, and that practices are starting to change. It’s frustrating though. I know and accept that change is a slow process. I’m okay with the fact that the vast majority of the kids I teach are never going to finish high school, because I believe most of them will be educated enough to enable their own children to do so. But when dealing with an epidemic that’s killing a fifth of the population, that pace of change just isn’t acceptable.

“Any good travel tales?”
Funny you should ask that. I’m currently on summer vacation (and it’s very odd to have summer in January), writing from Mozambique. With a few friends I traveled down to Cape Town, then along the South African coast to Stellenbocsh, Mossel Bay, Chintsa, and Durban. We went to Swaziland for a few days, are currently in Maputo, and will head to the Mozambiquan coast tomorrow. Then it’s back to Namibia by way of Pretoria. This has been quite a trip, and if you ever want to travel to any of those places, feel free to ask me any questions.

But my best travel story is this. Over the August break, a few friends and I went to Victoria Falls in Zambia. It’s an incredibly beautiful site to see, and I highly recommend it if you have the opportunity. We went white water rafting - on the toughest river in the world that they allow non-professionals on – and bungee jumping, so we got our adrenaline rush.

On the way back we were planning on hitchhiking across the northern part of Namibia and staying with friends along the way. However, the couple who picked us up on the second leg of that trip happened to run a lodge next to Etosha National Park, a huge game reserve in Namibia. They invited us to spend two nights there, free of cost. As we hadn’t been to any game parks yet, and as it’s difficult to go at all without your own car, we jumped at the offer. We were even more amazed at our good luck when we found out that the lodge we were staying at is considered the most exclusive in the Etosha area, and costs about US$500 a night! We ate three gourmet meals a day and were taken on private game drives, rhino tracking tours, and nature walks. We saw elephants, rhinos, cheetahs, zebras, wildebeest, kudu, lion… the list just goes on. We stayed in a “tented camp” around a water hole. The accommodations were essentially luxury cabins with canvas instead of solid walls. The lodge was on a private game reserve known for its lion population, and those lions like the watering hole. There have been many times when the staff woke up in the morning to find lions lounging around the pool and dining area. Therefore, we were not allowed outside out tents alone after dark – we literally had an armed escort walk us back to our tent from dinner every night! Oh, and two nights at the lodge somehow turned into five, so I really couldn’t have asked for a better vacation : ).

Thanks for reading this far! Please continue to keep in touch – I love receiving emails and letters from home. Best wishes for a successful 2009!

The School Bazaar

Part 1: Preparations

The weekend of October 10-12 was the Grootberg Primary School Bazaar. This had been mentioned here and there for several months, but I didn’t really know what to expect until about two weeks before.

The week leading up to the Bazaar was characterized by more and more bazaar preparation and less and less actual school. On Tuesday we took all the kids out to the fields following afternoon study and had them clean. What does cleaning a field entail? Well, these aren’t grass covered fields. We’re in the middle of the savannah, and it hasn’t rained a drop since March (though I have seen clouds on three occasions; twice in the past week – the rain’s a’comin’!), so soccer field grass would be quite the luxury. Any grass that remains from that time is patchy spots of two-foot high straw. So the field is the bushless, strawless patch of sandy soil near the school. “Cleaning” the field means picking up all the rocks and glass from the field – or at least as many as possible.

Glass, you wonder. Why is there glass on the soccer field? That would be from the broken beer bottles. There’s no formal garbage disposal system here (to say nothing of recycling), so everyone burns their garbage (yes, the environmentalist in me is appalled and embarrassed to admit that I do as well, but sometimes doing as the Romans do isn’t actually a choice.) and then tosses it in piles here and there. Not everything is burnable, though, so many don’t bother tossing glass and cans in such quasi-official garbage locales. There’s broken glass all over the place – around all the paths, around the school, everywhere. The shebeen (unregistered bar) is close to the field, so there’s plenty of broken glass around. And as most of the kids play barefoot, it’s nice to clean it first. I intentionally say “nice,” rather than “necessary.” These kids are barefoot the majority of the time; even if they own shoes, the don’t usually wear them outside of school. Sneakers are quite rare, so they almost always go barefoot for athletic events. When they run on the gravel road during track and field practice, nobody wears shoes. They’ve got tough feet.

In any event, the teachers wanted to clear the field of glass and rocks. Now clearing it of glass is perfectly understandable, but rocks? The soil is rocks – or at least about 25%, so removing them from the field seemed rather ambitious, but so be it. As this post will illustrate, appearances are everything here, will illustrate, and the teachers wanted to impress the other schools with how clean our field was.

So from 4-5:30, most of the 150 upper primary students picked up pieces of glass and rocks from the field. The following day the teachers decided that the clean-up wasn’t going fast enough, so we skipped afternoon study altogether and headed straight to the field at 3 o’clock and remained for a good 2 ½ hours. At our daily 6:50 staff meeting on Thursday morning, we discussed the preparations that still needed to be done – painting the fields, hanging the nets, moving netball posts, cleaning the school, and it was decided that the afternoon time would not be sufficient. So we would have classes up until the first break at 9:10, and after that we would resume Bazaar preparations. In other words, 5 of the day’s 8 periods would be devoted to “preparations” aka, general insanity. So after break, the kids took paint out to the field and outlined the boundaries of the soccer and netball fields. Other kids washed the outside of the school, mixing laundry detergent and water in buckets and basins and scrubbing the outer walls. The school looked exactly the same to me. The youngest kids went around the school grounds picking up garbage, bits of paper, glass, etc.

Part 2: Concessions

Friday, the big day, finally rolled around. At Friday’s morning meeting it was determined that there was still lots of preparatory work to be done, so we would not be having classes at all. (I can tell you I was really glad I had put so much effort into lesson planning that week. Really.) The first half of the day would be spent cleaning the classrooms. The visiting schools would be sleeping on the classroom floors, so we needed the soap them down (with the laundry detergent again) and pile the desks along the walls. The second half involved more field preparations, though at this point I had no idea what they could be doing down there. The lines were already painted, and it turned out the nets were being brought by another school. Maybe they were picking up more rocks? I went down towards the end of the day, and it seemed they had decided to paint again, reinforcing the lines so to speak. I should also mention that when the paint they like to paint themselves as well, making lines and designs all over their bodies and their clothes. However, the most popular look is whiteface. Yup, that’s right. They paint a neat little white mask over their faces. Trust me, I’m bringing my camera next time.

We had requested meat for the occasion, and it arrived that morning. Erwee lies on the grounds of a conservancy called ǂKhoadi //Hoas (Elephant Corner in Khoekhoegowab). While I’m still a little vague on what that means exactly, the basic purpose is to make sure that the people (as opposed to corporations or tourists) benefit from the land they live on and from protecting the wildlife itself. The conservancy regulates hunting, and I’m under the impression that hunters pay a fee to hunt on conservancy lands. Money generated by the conservancy is intended to benefit the people who live there; thus the two schools within the grounds, mine, and the one in Anker, where another PCV is, receive funding from the conservancy. Thus, at our request, the conservancy gave us an oryx (gemsbok) that had been recently killed. Look up a picture of these animals. They are quite beautiful (they’re my favorite antelope in Africa), and quite large.

So around noon on Friday, a massive amount of meat arrived in the staff room. Five of the female teachers, including myself, were tasked with preparing the meat to be cooked for the following day. Are you picturing us tying back our hair, pulling on gloves, and saran-wrapping the staff table? You must be in America. Washing hands, sterilizing, preventing germs are certainly not part of the mindset here. A giant chunk of meat was plopped in a silver basin, the same basin that would later be wiped down with water and used to clean dishes. With a few sharp knives and our bare hands we cut the meat into smaller portions, sprinkled them with spices, and pounded them with glass cans (which apparently softens the meat). We placed the prepared portions on a large unwashed tablecloth, which I suppose is a step up from on the table itself. There was an entire oryx to prepare, so this went on for quite some time. I ducked out early to nap and prepare for the evening festivities.

The “disco” in the school hall was scheduled to start at 7. I knew that would never happen, so I arrived at 7:30 and found nothing was anywhere near starting. Another teacher and I had been tasked with selling concessions for the weekend, so we began carrying the candy, sweets, soda, etc that had been purchased for the event from the school to the hall. The evening’s concessions also included fat cakes, a type of fried bread, and mincemeat.

It was about 8:30 when the disco actually got started. The whole purpose of the weekend was to raise money for the school, so a N$ 1 entrance fee (about 12 cents US) was charged. While there were at least 400 learners at the school that weekend – our 250 plus the visiting schools – most of them don’t have money lying around. There were maybe 100 kids in the hall by the end of the night. The rest hung out outside, listening to the music and dancing. Most of those 100 didn’t have the money themselves anyway; whenever there are events like these, they go around the village trying to “zula” it - getting someone to give them the money. So while you might think they’d be sure to be there for the entire event to get their money’s worth, they were still trickling in at 10:45 because they had just finally “zula-ed” successfully. I didn’t quite understand why we were trying to sell concessions at this event in the first place, since if the kids had a dollar, they used it to get in. A handful of kids and teachers bought food, but We ended at 11 to get a good, or at least adequate, night’s sleep.

The morning’s events were scheduled to begin at 7 with coffee and tea for the visiting teachers, followed by a meeting to discuss how the weekend would proceed. The “opening ceremony” was planned for 8, and the first game would kick off at 9. Naturally things took a tad longer. Coffee and tea weren’t exactly served on time, and the meeting that followed took an hour and a half. Now I was present at that meeting, but I still can not tell you why it takes 90 minutes to decide what order six teams will play in, particularly when nobody even had objections to the initial proposal. But that’s how it goes.

The “opening ceremony” commenced at 9:45. I put that in quotes because it consisted of welcoming remarks by a teacher, the principal, and a traditional leader, all of whom said essentially the same thing and all of whom began their speech with a remark about being short and not wasting time. These were followed by a Bible reading, a prayer, and the singing of the national anthem.

The first game kicked off at 10, and games continued throughout the day, with a short break to consume that oryx at lunch I was at the concession table for virtually all of that time, attempting to stay cool in the shade. To be honest, it’s quite amazing how hard these kids play when its about 100 degrees out. The concession selling picked up a bit; adults were buying and presumably kids were “zula-ing” money from around the village. Remember those fat cakes and the mincemeat from the night before? They had been stored buckets in the school, far from any refrigerator, and were now up for sale again. And sell they did; meat is huge here and greasy bread is huge just about everywhere.

Part 3: Pageantry

The day’s games ended at 6, and it was time to rest a bit and prepare for the Beauty Contest. Yup, that’s right, the Beauty Contest. Beauty Contests are HUGE here. They start young and hold them for all age levels. I was first introduced to them shortly after arriving in November 2007. I was walking down the main road in Okahandja when a car drove by with a teenage girl all dolled up and waving. It’s one of those memories that’s a little fuzzy now, but she was either standing through the skyroof of an exceptionally nice car by Namibian standards, or, more likely, in the back of an open bakkie (pick-up truck). The other trainees and I were rather perplexed by the pomp, and asked some current PCVs about it. They gist of their description was they we hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. The following day we went to a church service. Towards the end of the ceremony (well, I’m guessing it was the end; we left after 2 ½ hours), the pastor called three girls to the front. It was the same girl we had seen the day before, plus two others. They were the winner and runners up from a beauty contest in Windhoek, and were now touring the country (well, most likely just a handful of towns). These girls were 15 or 16, and they don’t actually do anything, other than look pretty – there’s nothing like a platform they promote or a talent that’s part of the contest; they were simply visiting some towns to show off their beauty. I had my true inauguration into this world back in February, when my school had its first beauty contest of the year. What do these entail? Here’s the rundown.

The Beauty Contest was scheduled for “7 till late” in our program. Although the soccer games had ended on time, I knew there was no way the Beauty contest would begin at 7. I showed up at 8 to arrange the concession table, and was one of the first teachers there. But things had been set up: decorations had been hung, the audience’s chairs were in neat rows, and the catwalk was in place. There is a cement stage at one end of the hall, and long tables were arranged in a cross shape extending from it. (These are the same tables that the kids theoretically use for their meals. In reality, there aren’t enough chairs, so they just sit in the sand outside to eat.) The two judges’ desks were in place at either end of the cross. Things actually got underway at 9, and a teacher from Julia’s school commented that we were “really on time”. When events are scheduled for 7 at their school, they never start before 10 or 11. And they last for just as long.

This particular pageant was for the lower primary, meaning grades 1-4; ages approximately 8-12 (though they look younger because they’re undernourished). To open the contest, all of the contestants march out together dressed for the first portion of the competition: swimwear. That’s all fine and dandy I suppose, except that hardly anyone here has any swimwear. They barely have the clothes they actually need, so forget about a luxury item like a bathing suit, especially in a place where the only water around is in the two-foot deep rivers that run for maybe two months during the rainy season. What do you do in a beauty contest if you don’t own swimwear? You put on the next best thing: underwear. So the evening’s pageant featured 8-12 year old girls parading all over the stage in their underwear. Marvelous. Oh, and there was one other addition. One of our 16-year old grade 7 learners is a flamboyantly gay boy. This wouldn’t be particularly remarkable in the States, but let’s just say that the gay rights movement hasn’t hit Namibia yet. Being openly gay is quite a rarity, especially outside of the capital. I’m quite impressed he has the courage to be who he is, particularly in this culture where the teachers are shaking their head at him. So behind the line of 4 ft-tall girls marched a 5’9” teenage boy stylin’ in a wig, stuffed bikini top, and makeshift wrap-around fashioned out of a random piece of fabric – possibly somebody’s curtain.

After the girls left the stage, on came three shirtless grade 4 boys. What was going on? I hadn’t seen this in other pageants. Turned out it was a “Mr. Muscles” contest. These scrawny little kids showed off their muscles, flexing in various poses at each judge’s station and for the audience. They had written on their chests and backs in marker; mostly random nonsense that I couldn’t understand (Maybe they thought they were in English class?) as well as their names and decorative designs – dots, lines, etc.

The girls came out again in their underwear, one at a time now. They walk in a well-rehearsed pageant strut, slow and graceful, in step with the music playing. They stop at each judge’s station and at the top of the “t” for the audience. For each portion- swimwear, casual dress, eveningwear, dance - the judges mark the contestants on a variety of factors: clothes, smile, personality, etc.

I’ve judged beauty contests, (Yup, there’s a sentence I never dreamed I’d write in my Peace Corps Namibia blog. Or write, ever. ) and I though had no idea how to judge any of it, one category really had me flummoxed: clothes. For one thing, apart the swimwear portion, half of their clothes are the same. There are only so many nice clothes around the village, and this is a very communal society, (In general, I recognize all the clothes the kids wear, but never know what belongs to who because the same shirt will be worn by 5 different kids on 5 consecutive days), so at pageant time, the nicest clothing that anyone within a 3km radius owns is on display. As they take turns walking the catwalk for the casual and eveningwear portions, you notice that contestants numbers 3, 5, and 8 all wore the same skirt, 2 and 6 the same tank top, 4 and 10 the same 5-sizes-too-big (hideous) shimmery stilettos, and that the lovely shawl number 1 had became a sarong for number 9. Plus, lets be honest – none of these clothes are really all that nice. At first my deeply embedded American ideals of fairness made it difficult for me to judge this category. Most of them can’t afford proper food, so how can I penalize someone for not having the prettiest outfit? But by my second experience judging, I had overcome those quaint notions and had no qualms rating the girls based on how much I liked their attire. Now that’s progress on the integration front, dontcha think?

So the contest proceeded through swimwear and casual wear, and it was time for the dance portion. I mentioned earlier that there are no talent portions in these contests, and I maintain that. “Dance” is not something that’s rehearsed or even unique to each contestant. The DJ merely puts on a random song, and the girl dances for a minute or so. All the dancing here is what you see in a typical night club in the states, and by age 6 or so, these kids are pros at it. They’ve got some serious rhythm! So the girl dances randomly for a bit, and that’s that. Then it’s on to eveningwear, and the crowning of the winner and three runners up. I took a few photos, and that was that.

Part 4: Can I Sleep Now?

Sunday morning. I didn’t get back from the beauty contest until nearly 1 am, but the schedule calls for breakfast for our visitors to begin at 7 and the games to begin at 8. Umm…yeah I’m not getting out of bed that early. This is my weekend, people! I arrive at the concession table on the soccer field around 9:30, and things are just getting underway. But by now I’m twice as tired as I was the previous day, and the sun feels twice as hot. I find excuses to slip back home – water, bathroom, water, food, my water is getting to hot, etc. – and manage to spend half the day indoors. No, I’m not being a good team player, but I’m exhausted! I think the my concession stand partner and I should have simply divided the time at the table in two, and run it in shifts, but that just isn’t the way things are done here. While I think it would have been fine with this particular teacher, in general people don’t like to show up for shifts if there’s isn’t first. At a tournament at my friend’s school, she ended up running the concession stand alone for the entire day because the person scheduled to relieve her didn’t come – he was at the event, but didn’t feel like going over to the booth. The following day, he never bothered to open the booth at all, so nothing was sold. It’s therefore better and fairer for both teachers to be on duty for the entire day. Plus, Namibians tend to be very cautious about money, and whenever money is involved, they want more than one pair of eyes to make sure nobody’s keeping some for themselves. While I’ve never seen anything of the sort at my school, I hear lots of stories from other PCVs, and this is a very valid concern. Corruption exists at every level, and there are plenty of principals and teachers who steal money and food from their schools. So while in principle I understood why my responsibilities were the way they were, I was tired! And hot! And bored!

Things wound down around 3 in the afternoon. My school’s boys team won the soccer tournament and our girls placed second in the netball tournament, meaning they won a fairly substantial amount of prize money (about US$100) for our school. The kids were ecstatic, jumping up and down, screaming, honking the horns of the (2) cars parked nearby. So all in all, it was a successful weekend on many accounts. Now I just needed a nap.