Dogs, Cupids and Locusts

When I first arrived here in Khorixas, Anne asked me, “Do you like dogs?” Of course I do, but this is one of those questions that is put forward only out of courtesy. Had I not cared for dogs I would soon have to learn because she and Diane had already arranged to adopt two dogs. There is a pet rescue shelter in Windhoek where they adopted the dogs from. There was a waiting period to get some paperwork or shots or something done. I’m still not sure why, but it takes over a week to get through the process of adopting a dog. I think I could buy a gun in less time, but that wouldn’t be very “peaceful” of me. That would be an interesting study though, travel the world and see which is faster in different countries: buying a gun, buying a car, or buying a dog.

Skip forward to a couple weeks ago. Anne and Diane went to Windhoek for the day to pick up the dogs on Saturday. Officially, PC policy is that no volunteer is allowed to leave their site for the first three months of service. This is especially true of Windhoek since PC believes that Windhoek is the focal point of all crime, theft, murders, deadly poisons, terrorist attacks, communism, plagues and the Tali-Ban. They threaten us with reprimands and possible early termination if we travel to Windhoek without official authorization. Therefore, I officially stayed at home that weekend while Diane and Anne went to Windhoek by themselves. You may begin reading between the lines. To give everyone an idea of how much driving this is, it’s like driving from Tacoma to Spokane and back again in one day. Anne and Diane left at 6am and did not get home until 10pm. Other things PC doesn’t like: volunteers riding in cars in the dark. The animals here are big and most are pointy so hitting one while going 140kph will bring a quick end to most of the players involved. Good thing I didn’t go with them…

On to the dogs. When the dogs were first adopted, they had some pretty poor names. One was named Smelling Bra (exactly what it is in English) and the other was named Unita which is a rebel force from Angola. Anne named her dog Khori, which is short for Khorixas. Diane named hers Mina, which isn’t short for anything. They are both medium sized and about a year old but it is suspected that Khori is younger than Mina. I don’t know if she counted rings or used tarot cards or what ever, but the woman at the adoption center said Mina is the eldest. They both seem to be a mix of lab with something a little smaller. We dubbed it the Namibian Mix since most dogs seem to be a mix of a small lab with a whole mess of other breeds.

It’s worth mentioning that dogs in Namibia are hardly welcome creatures. They are mostly used in utilitarian fashions as garbage disposals, or general public trash clean up. If it seems like it might have a couple calories in it or if it used to have a couple calories in it, a dog will probably eat it. Bones, seeds, dung… rocks. Like most animals here, the dogs are painfully thin. Ribs, backbones and skull structure are all easy to see with the amount of malnutrition these things get. You feel bad for them, but then you see a kid eating dirt and the animals fall from your mind. I don’t mean just a young kid playing and eating dirt for fun. A girl in our group saw a 19-year-old girl eating dirt and asked her why. The girl told her it was so she would not feel hungry. Dwell on that for a moment. I see students eating chalk and paper in my class almost every day. These kids are fed well, so I don’t really know why they do it. Maybe the chalk as an antacid for their stomachs, but I can’t figure out the reason behind the paper eating.

Anyway, dogs here are on about the same rung as flies or moths. They are almost never kept as pets and when they are, it’s usually by Afrikaaners. Most dogs are strays and will not approach you. When you make prolonged eye contact they run away, and you can forget trying to pet them. They’ve been hit or kicked so many times that a raised limb causes an instinctive cowering. This is actually the same thing that happens when I raise my hand to pat a student on the back. They do a reflexive half-duck and then remember I don’t hit them and straighten up again.

Ok, I just reread the last two paragraphs and I want to make something clear: I don’t think these kids are dogs. It just seems like both face some similar hardships growing up here. So, when a child in America won’t eat his or her dinner you can change the starving-kids-in-Africa phrase to, “Eat your food! There are starving kids in Africa that are dying of disease and being beaten in a sub standard education system with little to no parental involvement!”

This is starting to ramble pretty badly, so I’m going to try and bring it back together. The dogs constantly have the cute puppy eyes, making Anne and Diane basically useless as far as discipline goes. One dog pees on the floor while we are in the other room, Diane finds the mess and says (in the most proper British accent you can imagine), “Alright, which one of you was naughty? Hmm? Fess up! Was it you Khori? Mina?” I can’t tell if she’s actually expecting one of the dogs to raise a paw and reply, “Umm, yes miss. It was me. Sorry about that. I was going to just chew on one of your shoes but then I drank all this water and, being that I have no thumbs to let myself out, I figured urinating in the middle of where everyone walks would be the best course of action. I will be sure to write a formal request for exodus and submit it to you the next time my personal needs require it.”

Anne is a little better. She’ll at least raise her voice to them. (In your best Norwegian accent) “Oi!! Which one of you did this?! Accllh! Bad dogs.” But I think she is starting to slide more my direction in the dog training department. After cleaning up most of the messes, she is getting more willing to shove the dogs when they jump up or chase them out of the pantry. Of course Diane still just holds their paws and coos over them when they randomly jump up onto her hip.

I try to drop subtle hints that they don’t actually understand English and we should either try another language, or start imposing punishment and reward. Of course this is met with the very diplomatic reply of, “well we can’t punish them until we catch them in the act.” I guess two puddles of pee and four piles of crap in our living room isn’t enough evidence to prosecute. After all, it could have been the plant that did it. We’ll never know the true culprit until we witness the defecation itself. At least I don’t have to clean it up.

The draw back of all of this is that I throw them back when they jump, whack them on the butt when they get into the trash, clap my hands together and do the “NO!! BAD DOG!!” stern voice. But I’m not the one that feeds them, and most of the things I try to train them not to do, the girls either give a neutral response or sometimes encourage it. So, of course now the dogs are terrified of me since most of my involvement is negative. Oh well, they don’t go in the trash anymore when I’m around so I guess that’s a step in the right direction.

After the dogs arrival, it was time for Valentines Day. There is an organization in Khorixas for orphans and vulnerable children called the Sunrise Project. It is a small five room house in the Location that houses fifteen to twenty kids and feeds about twenty more. The whole show is run by one woman, Annita, with a few other helpers who do minor tasks during the day. The other helpers will do some cooking, or fix/build things around the house. Annita does everything. Cooking, cleaning, making sure the kids are doing their work, and all of it for little to no pay. This woman should be nominated for sainthood. Most of the kids that pass through the orphanage would almost surely die if the orphanage wasn’t there. The kids range anywhere from two to fifteen. The eldest is a very bright student in one of my nineth grade classes. Any time I feel like I’m not doing anything for improvement here, or that there is too much to deal with, I’ll go the orphanage. I know it sounds cheesy, but I’ve been there four times now with Anne, and each time I leave I feel like I can do anything. It’s like a swift kick to the head telling me I am doing something and I need to keep going.

When we arrive, the kids all come running from the back of the house and latch onto whatever free limb they can find on us. We carry as many as we can back to the back yard. Annita is usually back there doing some sort of work sitting on the tattered remains of the bench seat from a truck that is scattered around the house. The chassis provides part of the fence, the body is divided between the walls of a shack, planter division in the garden, and patch work on the back fence, and the engine is taking up space near the back door of the house. We sit on the broken school desks that serve as chairs in the back and provide bouncing leg rides for the smallest children. I have a picture where I’m sitting in this desk and I’m covered by six grinning kids. We buy flavored ice from Annita and watch the kids sing and dance. At least a couple kids will show us their school work while we are there and I try to practice my KKG with them. There is a great kid named Alexander who is mentally disabled and has started calling me Papa. I’ll try to speak with him in KKG and he’ll jump between Afrikaans, English, and KKG all in the same sentence. It must be the most comical thing to watch: me trying to form a sentence while he pokes me in the arm and says something in Afrikaans. Neither of us understands the other so what little was said before deteriorates into both of us repeating the same word and poking the other in the arm. Eventually, the kids have sung all the songs they know (twice) and my arms are shot from lifting kids up and down off my shoulders, so we head back to the house.

On Valentine’s Day, the Gowati Lodge in town held a benefit dinner for the Sunrise Project. You buy tickets for about three times what the dinner should cost, and the rest of the money goes to the orphanage. Dinner was some great mashed potatoes, a sweet rice with raisens, carrot salad, fried chicken, and (my favorite) goat. I traded my big section of goat thigh with Anne’s boss, Willemsa, for his mashed potatoes. I did give it a taste. It was spiced well, and cooked very nicely… but it was still goat. Goat is a taste that is pretty hard to cover up. You can marinade it for two days, bread it and pan fry it and it would still have the underlying taste of a petting zoo.

After dinner, the kids from the orphanage put on a play entirely in KKG. I have no idea what was said since we could hardly hear them in the first place but Willemsa told me it was about a girl and guy who love each other but she gets AIDS from him because they didn’t use a condom. The play ended with two kids coming up and reciting the clinical description of HIV in English and why everyone should use a condom. None of the kids in the play were older than nine or ten.

Valentine’s Day evening was the start of some very heavy rains in Khorixas. During our walk down to the lodge, Anne and I got a thorough soaking from a full on downpour that has become an almost daily occurrence in this region. All the rain is nice, but it has played havoc on the utilities. I don’t really know why, but most days my cell service will completely shut off for about thirty minutes and then turn back on again. I’ve tried to decipher some sort of pattern, but it seems to be completely random. It will happen in the biggest rain storm, or without a cloud in the sky. I can be in class, at home, or just walking down the street. I look at my phone and it says no service, usually at a time when I need to send a text message to someone. So I write the text message anyway, thinking I will just save it, and then service magically comes back. Our power will also drop off for a little while once every day or two. This does usually correspond to changing weather, though. It’ll either be just starting to rain, or thundering everywhere around us. Of course if this government house is any example of how the other government run things are held together, I wonder how we have cell service in the first place. It’s probably all held together by packing tape and twelve-guage wire with power coming from a three legged donkey pushing a turnstile.

The most constant problem that all this rain has caused are locusts. Big ones. The small moths are just the normal size we have in Washington, but the big ones can easily be larger than the palm of your hand. And they are vengeful little buggers. If you miss killing them on the first try, they fly violently in circles around your head until they remember the light bulb hanging from the ceiling, so they take out their anger on it. Being fixed in place, the bulb has no defence but to make an annoying clunking sound every time the locust runs into it. I found out today (Saturday) that the largest locusts are actually matured mopane (mo-pahn-ee) worms. Dried mopane worms are sold by the road side as a snack to locals. Volunteers, tourists and other white people in general usually get pretty sick from them since our digestive systems are a house of cards compared to the natives.

Well, that about sums it all up. There are two volunteers from Holland who are with SCORE (Anne’s organization) here right now. We were talking about mail and packages last night and they said they use the “four days to seven weeks” rule. They sent two packages that were approximately the same size one day apart. The first one arrived four days after being sent and the second one arrived seven weeks later. My guess is that three legged donkey that powers the cell tower probably does the mail sometimes too. So, if I don’t get a letter or package for a month or two, don’t worry. Rain, sun, sand, or locusts, the donkey will go through!

Quick Thank You

I just wanted to thank everyone who has posted here, written an e-mail, called, sent a letter/post card/package, read this silly page, or just had a passing thought about this boy on his little adventure. It all means a lot to me so, THANK YOU!

School Is In Session

School is now in full swing. And by “swing” I mean the kind of old rusty swing that cuts your hands and digs into your ass, but you keep playing on because it’s an adventure every time. I’ve had a regular schedule of classes every week now that the registration period has calmed down a bit. However, that doesn’t mean that my week is regular. I still get interrupted by surprise meetings with the Director of Education (or as Carl and I have started calling him, Heir Direktor), extra long assemblies and classes randomly showing up during my free periods because their teacher didn’t come to school. They usually just sit around, play chess and talk all period.

The region of Kunene, where Khorixas resides, came in dead last (or “most-last” in Namblish) nationally for education. The quality of education in Namibia is measured in terms of the number of 10th graders that pass. Secondary school is only mandatory up to grade 10 in this country, so that is where the bench mark is made. The optional grades 11 and 12 are only for those who pass grade 10, but are required to get into the University of Namibia. Kunene had a grade 10 pass percentage of only 29% last year. This is a negligible improvement over the year before. Don’t know what the best performing region was, but I doubt it is more than 60 or 70 percent pass. The lack of performance has made Heir Direktor very upset. In the second week of school, he had a meeting with all the teachers in the Khorixas region (four or five schools total) where he sat and rambled on about how we must perform better. These were mostly disconnected snippets of different pep talks and he never really made the education connection. He would start on one crazy analogy only to stop just before it was about to start making sense and instead start on another analogy. One of the best ones began with the question, “What is the greatest threat to the world today?” I was thinking he was going to say education, or poverty, or hunger. Nope. Instead, he gestures to where Carl and I are in the audience and says that he thinks his “American friends will agree” that the greatest threat in the world today is…

are you ready?

International terrorism.

This is my director of education telling me that the biggest threat to the destruction of earth is the ability for “someone to walk through the door and blow themselves up.” I guess they must have Fox News in Namibia. I really wanted to know how he was going to make the connection with education, but he never did. The only thing that actually gave his passionate, but ultimately ridiculous, speech any structure was that he wrapped it neatly in one idea at the beginning that was repeated in the end: If students do not want to study, they should go home. I should mention that for this guy, “study” means pass. He is ready to shut down underperforming schools and kick out struggling students so that the little numbers he gets every December will put him higher on the list. His invitation to teachers was to kick out students. Not only did they have his approval, they had his order. He told the teachers he wanted to see the paperwork for expelled students on his desk every semester. At the end of the meeting, Carl and I left with our hands permanently slapped against our foreheads.

I thought it would end there. No such luck. The next week Heir Direktor calls a meeting with all of the students and staff of Cornelius Goreseb Senior Secondary School and Welwetchia Junior Secondary School. I am in the middle of a lesson when a student comes to my door and tells me I have to read this note from the principal out loud. “All students must be at the assembly field at 11:30 so they can walk together to the Youth Center (across the street). All teachers must be at the Youth Center at 11:45 for a mandatory meeting.” I look at my watch, it’s 11:43. Later, my Principal will tell me that Heir Direktor called him from the road just outside of Khorixas and said that all his students and staff must assemble with the students and staff of Welwetchia. The meeting was similar to the one with only the teachers. Except this time, it was praising Goreseb and condemning Welwetchia in front of all the students. He repeated his statement of, “study or go home” to everyone and then took inventory of all the Welwetchia kids to make sure that all had attended.

This guy has shifted all the blame for poor grades from the lousy teachers to the students. Never mind that students are beaten in almost every class and teachers have a complete lack of knowledge when it comes to effective teaching methods. When I walk by classrooms it’s always the same scene: the teacher sitting, reading out of a book while all the students madly copy the text that’s been written on the board. They never make the connection that the text on the board is an exact copy of what came from their books that they carry everywhere. The only thing that matters is that they have the date in the corner, the lines are perfectly straight, and everything is first written in pencil then rewritten in pen. One day it was raining hard enough that the teachers switched class rooms instead of the students to keep the level of mud down. I got to see five different teacher’s previous lessons because they were written all over the board when I came in. I came into one class and asked the students which section of the board the previous teacher had written and which she had copied out of the book. I began correcting the English of the part she had written and erased the section she copied out of the book. I left the corrected portion up when I switched classes. Don’t know if she ever saw it, but the students and I thought it was a fun way to spend five minutes of class.

Heir Direktor also sent a memo to all the schools in the region this past week. It said that all teachers must conduct mandatory afternoon and evening classes for all students and they must complete the entire syllabus in only two trimesters. I’m assuming this is to leave the last trimester for review. Yes, thirteen weeks of review is a good thing and the key to teaching better is to teach faster!

Anyway, what was this post supposed to be about? Oh yeah, school is getting into a “rhythm” which means I get more stuff to do. With classes settled, the other science teacher started the science club. We meet once a week and I’m mostly there in an advisory role. Students come with ideas for projects and I make sure they are focused and have a reasonable work load. I’ve already had three students come to me with a volcano project, a table salt experiment, and a water-cooking oil separation method. It’s a lot of fun to see how they will really latch onto a project as their own really protect it. The student who wanted to do the table salt experiment initially came to me asking if I had any Sodium Hydroxide. He didn’t know it was called Sodium Hydroxide, he only had the formula. I told him I had it, but I needed to know what he was going to use it for. He refused to tell me because he didn’t want anyone to steal his idea. I had to show him the jar and then explain that I couldn’t just give it to him before he would tell me that he wanted to make salt. Even then, he made sure the door to the lab was shut before he handed me the formula.

My second little project has been helping three students to make a school newsletter. This continues the possessiveness of these students. Even before approaching me, these students (all 10th grade or younger) had their paper and funding sources organized and over half of the first issue written. They just needed me to get access to the school computers and copier. This was how I found out I was in charge of the school’s computers. The students came to me saying they needed to use the computers. I told them to ask the principal. They said that they had. He told them that I was in charge of the computers and they should talk to me. After dealing with lost files, crashing computers, and the madness that is MS Word auto-formatting, they released their first issue last Thursday. I’m sending a copy home and I’ll try to post the document here for download.

Last, I’ve had lots of students asking me about when I’m going to start the chess club up again. PC warned us about taking on too much work in our first few months and to be willing to say ‘no’ to people. I’ve mastered saying no to almost everyone (I can throw out “No, I don’t have any money. Go away” in KKG without thinking). But, I’m a complete pushover when it comes to these kids and their ambitions. They ask me for a dollar and I’ll blow them off like a fly. They ask me how to do a table salt experiment and I’ll stay up late trying to figure out how to explain molarity, stoichiometry and balanced chemical reactions to a thirteen year-old. Now I’ve made an announcement during the morning assembly that I’ll be having the chess club on Thursdays after study period (4:30 on). I barely know how the pieces move. One student beat me three times in the course of a half hour during break one day. I was going to threaten to change his grade if he kept winning, then I remembered he wasn’t in any of my classes. Now I only play against my own students.

So that’s it. School during the day and back in the afternoon for these activities. We’ll see how they change as school goes on, but it’s fun to be a part of all of them.