Aranos

I’m writing this on my computer now, so I’m not in a huge rush. This is nice.

I believe I left off a couple of weeks ago, so I have a lot to cover. Don’t worry, I’ll forgo the “blow-by-blow” and leave it to a summary of my favorite topics. Currently, though (at least while I am writing this), I am at my permanent site in Aranos (Hardap region) for a weeklong visit.

Topic 1: Food

I have eaten quite a few different organs over the past couple of weeks. Let me see if I can list them:

sheep liver
sheep intestine
chicken stomach
chicken lung
goat brain
goat stomach
goat tongue
sheep stomach

That was chronological, in case you were wondering, and omits redundancies. I feel like I should construct a Venn diagram with the three circles of “sheep,” “goat,” and “chicken,” and write in the names of the various body parts. Perhaps I’ll leave that as a project for one of my avid readers.

Topic 2: Training

This is an odd subject. There are two sessions to each training day, a morning session and an afternoon session. The morning session is done in classes of 2-3 students (3, in my case), and is simply four hours of language training. Easy peasy. The afternoon session is combined (all 33 of us), and can be on any of a variety of topics: history, cross-culture, safety and security, health…you get the idea. The latter session, I feel, tends to be redundant from day to day. Somehow, they always manage to tie the subject material to excessive alcohol consumption. Let’s see if I can give an effective topic-spanning summary. Children, cover your eyes:

It is not a good idea to drink at bars, because Namibia has a culture in which excessive alcohol consumption is not uncommon. This may pressure a volunteer to drink to excess, which may result in impaired judgment. This may lead the volunteer to walk home alone, increasing the chances of getting mugged. With nowhere to go, penniless, and injured, the volunteer would then be more likely to stay with a friend of the opposite gender for the night. However, said volunteer’s judgment being impaired, s/he may be more likely to succumb to the friend’s sexual advances, which may lead to unprotected sex and possible contraction of HIV. There may also be no mosquito net, and the bed might hypothetically be soaking in a pool of snail-infested standing water, increasing the volunteer’s susceptibility to malaria and bilharzia. Being hopelessly pathogen-infested, the community might, theoretically, ostracize the volunteer, throwing him/her into the middle of a desert to be slowly and painfully picked apart by vultures.

Such activity is grounds for administrative separation from the Peace Corps.

Case study: Maria, a first-year health volunteer, is considering drinking to excess in a bar surrounded by known criminals and political separatists. She is alone and 15 kilometers from her house. What should she do?

(On a completely unrelated note, I’d like to direct you to the nice little disclaimer on the top of the sidebar to the right. Thank you for your time.)

Topic 3: Racism

Aranos, it should be noted, is a town founded (and still mostly controlled) by white farmers. There is a large, red dune (“Rooi duin” in Afrikaans. That’ll be important later.) that separates town from where most of the people (including myself, now) in Aranos live. This segregation was instituted so that the white farmers living in town would never have to walk through (or see, for that matter) the settlements of their black workers. Although things are getting better (they have roughly painted over the sign that says “Non-European Entrance” at the hospital), racism is still a big deal here. There are still rich people who have lived in Aranos their entire lives and have never made the 20-minute walk over the dune.

Topic 4: Insects

There are a lot of them. I think there was a moth cult here that committed mass suicide a few days ago. Seriously, moths covering the ground. Big ones, too. Slightly smaller than hummingbirds. Furry. The chickens all seemed pretty happy about it, but I was just sort of weirded out. The locusts here are 2-3 inches long (they’ll land on you, too), and I’ve seen a couple of scorpions. I’m not normally that creeped out by bugs, but I think the combination of walking home at twilight, anxiety side effects of my malaria pills, and insects as big as my index finger have softened me up a bit.

Topic 5: School

The name of the school I’ll be teaching at is Rooiduin (aha!) Junior Secondary School. First impressions:

(1) These kids can sing. All of them. There are about 230 students at the school, grades 8-10, and all of them were gathered at a school assembly (which, I felt, was held primarily to welcome me). They started out the assembly with 3 or 4 songs, to which everyone knew all the words and everyone knew their part. The intonation was wonderful. It wasn’t something they were forced to do, either. They loved every second of it, and asked to sing more. Remarkable.

(2) Discipline holds an important role here. Learners are expected to wear uniforms, line up going to and from class, remain standing in class until the teacher tells them to sit, and take diligent (and regimentally organized) notes.

(3) I think I can accomplish something here. First of all, there is a new lab, with new lab equipment, that has yet to be utilized. I am very excited about this, especially in the context of the well-established science club (which I have yet to see). Also, the learners at the school have a very low pass rate, by American standards…averaging about 20-30% for 10^th graders allowed to proceed to the 11^th. The math ability of the learners is especially low. My thoughts regarding this are (and I refer back to the upper right sidebar) that the learning environment is, and always has been, one in which students are trained to receive, remember, and regurgitate, but not to process. In math classes, what I have observed happen is that the teacher will begin by showing the class how to do a certain kind of problem, and then give the whole class a group of problems of almost exactly the same nature. This creates a severe dependence of thought that, I feel, must be dissolved before real improvement can occur. I have some ideas. I’ll let you know in several months whether they are working.

Topic 6: Not a Topic, I Just Need to End This, but I Don’t Want to Confuse the Reader, Who Might Think that Any Text in Un-bolded Font Signifies an Attachment to the Previous Paragraph

I like it here. The End.

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