Before I start, I should apologize to any of you who might be reading this that sent me a letter sometime in the last couple-few months that I have not yet responded to.  I haven’t received them yet, and I probably won’t before next month.  All my mail that was sent to the Windhoek address is being held in the Peace Corps office, and I won’t be going back there until we do our “Reconnect” conference January 4-9.  However, for any of you that may still want to send me a letter, here’s a new (far easier) address:

Stephen Martin
PO Box 186
Aranos
Namibia

So easy, isn’t it?  It’s my school’s mailing address.  It will take a bit longer than the normal 3 weeks to get to me, but…it’s better than the 3 months of the mail sitting in Windhoek.

All right, so down to…whatever I’m going to talk about.  I suppose I can begin where I left off.  After my first visit to Aranos, I went back to Okahandja for another month or so of training.  Again, this mostly consisted of Afrikaans lessons, but it was quite possibly my favorite stretch of time in Namibia so far.  After spending a week in a place full of children that look at you like you are a carnival attraction, you begin to feel a greater affinity for other Americans.  I got pretty close to the other trainees in my class.  That’s just the truth; I’m not being sentimental.

In any case, I graduated from Pre-Service Training on October 16, and swore in as a Peace Corps Volunteer officially.  The swearing-in ceremony was interesting.  We all had to give two pledges.  There was the pledge we gave in front of everyone in the audience about how we would all serve the Namibians to the best of our ability, and there was a sneaky oath we gave before the ceremony, which was the actual American foreign service oath.  The first was led by the Namibian Minister of Education, the second by the U.S. Ambassador to Namibia.  I think.  I don’t know, it was a couple months ago, and my memory’s a little shaky.  But one really cool part of the ceremony was that all the girls learning Otjiherero and some of the girls learning Khoekhoegowab were dressed up traditionally by their host families.  And the Hereros have very distinctive dresses, with a headdress meant to represent the horns of cattle.  I recommend finding a picture online.

After becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer, I went down to begin work at my school in Aranos.  For the first couple of weeks, this meant teaching (some of the other teachers were gone).  However, seeing as the Namibian school calendar begins in January, I wasn’t given any classes to teach permanently.  Instead, I cleaned out the new science lab, made a ridiculous amount of copies for exams, and helped other teachers with odd jobs.  School is over now, but there’s still a great deal of work to do…Peace Corps paperwork never rests, and I still need to do some rudimentary lesson planning for next year.

From swearing-in until about a week ago, I was living with another host family.  There were a few problems, but overall I think they were nice.  I’m glad to be on my own now, though.  After 4 months of being expected to mingle continuously in a foreign language, I’m happy I have some alone time.  Plus, my house is amazing.  It has three bedrooms, hot water and electricity, a shower, a fridge, and a nice stove.  The only things that distinguish it from an American home are the lack of a washing machine, the bugs, and the 7-foot high fence topped with razor wire.  Well, and the fact that I have to run around and wave down the sewage truck every couple of weeks.  I even have a dog.  Her name is Shaka, she’s about 6 years old (I’m her fourth volunteer), and is well known for being fertile despite all the precautions to keep the male dogs out.  I think her scent gives them superpowers.  But yes, she’s had two litters in the past two years, and I imagine more before that.

All right, I know there must be more for me to say. Umm…I got my bathroom window smashed in? That was significant. On the second day I spent in my house, I forgot to lock the front gate, and a little kid (judging by the footprints) came in and tried to break into the house. Of course, the door was locked and there are burglar bars on every window, but that didn’t stop him from throwing a rock through my bathroom window and taking my laundry detergent. I turned on the light, and he scampered off. Hope it tastes good, kid.

Now I’m to the point where I’m just grasping at straws. Let me know if you have any questions. I respond better to questions. Hopefully it won’t be another three months before my next post.

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.

We left off with…well…me leaving for D.C., right? Well, I got there. We had a 4-hour session where we talked about our feelings, followed by a yellow fever shot the next morning.  We then waited at the airport for 6 hours before our flight left.

The >17-hour flight was hardly as awful as I thought it might be. There were lots of things to do. I couldn’t sleep for the first 8 hours or so, but after we left Dakar I slept like a log. Well, a log that snores and drools all over itself. They served us three meals. Tasty. We got to Johannesburg, and the dinner we had there was good…I got a good-sized tuna sandwich at the hotel restaurant for R35 ($4-5). This is a waiter-sits-you-down restaurant, mind you. Not bad.

I woke up at 3:30 the next morning, fully rested. I couldn’t figure out the math on that one. Shouldn’t jet lag go the 0ther way? I don’t know. The flight to Windhoek was also very nice. It was only two hours long, and they served a meal. They didn’t give me a peanut on my 5-hour flight to Washington. Fly South African Airways, I’m telling you. The only downside was that my camera and USB drives were stolen in the Johannesburg airport…but I don’t mind that so much. I was never good at taking pictures, and I have an external hard drive. I then hopped into a bus and rode to Okahandja (where I am now), a 1-2 hour drive.

We were greeted in our training site by all of our trainers singing in…some language. Probably a Bantu dialect…Otjiherero or Oshiwambo or something. They were good. Strong bass section. Training for the first week was awesome…we just lived on the training site and ate the 5 meals a day that they served us. After a few days (and another interview) they finally revealed our languages that we would be learning. I’m learning Afrikaans. They still have not, however, revealed where we will be stationed permanently. I really don’t know why at this point.

Okay…let’s see…

I moved out of the training site a couple of days ago, and am now living with a host family. I have a host mom and dad, and two host brothers. I was originally placed with another host family, but apparently there was a clerical error in which the “female” they requested somehow got changed to “male”. So, I was switched. Ma’s name is Magdalena, Pa’s name is Andries, and the brothers are Dawid and Dodo. The yard is full of dogs, chickens, and doves. Amazing. Magdalena is just about the sweetest person I could ever hope to meet. She makes sure I brush my teeth twice a day, wash my hands before I eat, and do my homework. It’s kind of nice being six again.

Church yesterday morning was…different. In a good way. It was a group of about 20 that met in my host family’s unused garage. It started off with the pastor giving a long string of uninterrupted prayer on his knees in what seemed like a San dialect (lots of tongue clicking), and then moved on to a great deal of singing in Afrikaans, and the sermon (also in Afrikaans). Good times. The worship, for many, was very physical: shouting, running around, and even rolling on the floor. I felt awkward, but I’m not one to condemn it. To each his own.

Umm…all right, I’m running low on time. Sorry. I went to a farm and saw a couple of turkeys, I showed my host brothers Rocky (which I don’t think they liked very much), and I accidentally put powdered milk on my Weet-Bix instead of sugar. The weather here is excellent…much like southern CA in the early summer. It gets cool at night.

I have so much more I could say, but I need to be off. Ek is jammer. Sien julle later.

8/17:  Depart Chico at 5:29 AM (PST), arrive in Washington D.C.

8/18-19:  Attend “Staging” event (basically, a four-hour orientation, lots of paperwork, and some immunizations). Depart for Johannesburg at 5:40 PM (EST).

8/20-21:  Arrive in Johannesburg (after a brief stop in Dakar) at 5:20 PM (GMT +2). If you’re trying to figure it out, that’s a 17-hour flight. I’ll stay there for the night, and fly to Windhoek (capital of Namibia) in the morning. I should be arriving there at 10:45 AM (GMT +1) after a quick 2-hour flight. After this, take a drive to the training site in Okahandja.

8/22-9/12:  A more thorough orientation, followed by “intensive training” in language, nutrition, culture, and other work-related topics. On the 28th (or thereabouts), I will be informed which permanent site I’m assigned to, and move in with a host family (there will be hostel-like lodgings until then).

9/13-26:  Check out my permanent site, and have some on-the-job training.

9/27-10/15:  More training in Okahandja, followed by final proficiency tests in the last week.

10/16:  Final swearing-in and departure to permanent site (assuming I pass the proficiency tests).

Good times, right? I don’t even know what language I will be learning…although they’ve narrowed it down to Afrikaans, Rukwangali, Silozi, Otjiherero, Khoekhoegowab, or Oshindonga. This is good news to me—it means that I’ll be on the same level as everyone else. I mean, if I were going off to someplace where everyone spoke a more common language, I would be competing against the go-getters in my class who went out and bought the Rosetta Stone for that language three months before departure and are already half-fluent. I know, I know, it’s not a competition. But it might make me feel a bit more confident when my pronunciation of “Khoekhoegowab” is just as ridiculous as the next guy.

Also, you may have noticed that the “shifty November-December mark” from my last post has been moved up, and is now October 16. Yes, it surprised me too. Other modifications from my last post include, but may not be limited to:

1) My mailing address. The last address will probably work (they aren’t that different), but here’s the new one:

Stephen Martin, PCV
Peace Corps Office
PO Box 6862
20 Nachtigal St.
Ausspannplatz
Windhoek
Namibia

Yes, it’s slightly longer. Seriously, 7 lines. Keep your words small, or you’ll be writing all over the postage.

2) The nature of the mailing address. Namely, the fact that this address may still deliver mail to me after October 16. Originally, it was said to me that this is my “pre-service training address”. I initially took this to mean that it would not deliver mail after swearing-in. However, more recent information just called this address my “mailing address”, so I don’t think you’re in any danger if you send a letter in late September or something. This is further supported by the fact that the “PCT” (Peace Corps Trainee) has been changed to “PCV” (Peace Corps Volunteer). So I’m thinking that any mail sent there would probably just get forwarded to me periodically. I’ll keep you posted, though, when I get a new, “permanent” mailing address.

3) My hunger. I no longer feel hungry about the mail system. It’s complicated.

All right, this post is far too long. I’ll write again when I get the time (and internet) over in “The Land of the Brave”.

No, I’m not in Namibia yet.  I still have a few weeks.  But I do have a bit of news.  If you’d like to send a letter or postcard to me, my mailing address for the first few months (until either November or December, exact dates are still a bit elusive) will be:

Stephen Martin, PCT
Peace Corps
PO Box 6862
Ausspannplatz,
Windhoek, Namibia

International rates are (naturally) pricier than domestic rates: it seems that postcards and letters both start at $0.98, and letters get more expensive as the weight goes up.

If you do decide to send me something, I’ll try to respond as quickly as I can.  Well, depending on the contents, I suppose.  I don’t think I’ll respond to any credit card offers or pizza coupons.  But friendly updates, postcards, poetry, and the like all merit a response in my book.  A word of warning, though: after my pre-service training (that is, after that shifty November-December mark), I will not be able to be reached at the above address.  As it takes 2-3 weeks for a letter to reach Namibia from the U.S., it might be a good idea keep in mind that a letter might be delayed (at best) if send later than early November.  However, I’ll keep the blog posted as dates become more definite, and when I find out my “permanent” two-year address.

I think I’m supposed to say, now, how I feel about the mail system.  After all, this is my blog.  So, for the record, I feel good.  And a little hungry.

So…here we go:

It may be surprising how little I know about my assignment.  All I know right now is (1) that I leave August 17, (2) I’ll be in Namibia, and (3) I’ll be a science teacher.  The age range I could be teaching is anywhere from 12 to 20.  In theory, I could be teaching physics, chemistry, biology, math, health, or anything else they might need me for.  However, seeing as my experience is all in the physical sciences and math, the vast majority of which has involved tutoring college-level courses, I doubt I will be placed in a 6th grade health class.  In all likelihood, I’ll be teaching 11th and 12th graders physics and chemistry, which, to be honest, is exactly where I’d want to be.  I’ve even been buying some used textbooks and workbooks online to help me out.

On the more personal end of things, this will be the first time I have left the United States.  I’ve lived in California, Nevada, and Minnesota, and yet somehow I’ve never found the time to go to Canada or Mexico.  Odd, I know.  Needless to say, I sort of expect to be overwhelmed by the new culture.  I think that’s the only rational attitude someone in my position can take.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m still trying to learn what I can before I go.  I just expect to make a lot of mistakes.

Also, I’m excited.  Not too excited–I’ve got five weeks left to get overly, hysterically excited.  But I would certainly go as far as to say I am “reasonably excited”, if not “quite excited”.

P.S.  If you want to subscribe to the blog, the only option the site offers is the “RSS Feed”.  I hadn’t used it until a few days ago, so this is news to me.  If it’s news to you too (i.e. you don’t use Google Reader or something like that), then there is an option to post RSS feeds to your email account.  So here we go: 

(1) Go to http://www.feedmyinbox.com/

(2) Enter the website URL (http://chicoinnamibia.wordpress.com, in this case) and your email.

(3) Respond to the confirmation email.

I hope this all works.