August Break

So Term 2 ’06 ends and I get… bored. I stuck around for a couple days in Khorixas helping learners with some science fair stuff. They needed to type up some things and needed to get access to the computers at school. I checked with them Monday and Tuesday to see if I needed to do anything to help them. Satisfied that they only had the slow busy work of typing and changing fonts, I got out of Khorixas. The town dies after all the kids leave for the break making it into more of a ghost town. I had packed Monday night in anticipation that I might be able to get out on Tuesday night, which was true (thank god!). I got a ride with a neighbor to Otjiwarongo and arrived in mid-afternoon.

A bunch of other volunteers had gone to Etosha that week and they arrived on Wednesday. They had rented the nicest VW I had seen in a long time and crammed it with eight full size Americans complete with travel gear. Some people may have claimed this as “official” vacation with Peace Corps, and others may not have, so we’re going to keep the names out of it. Stupid Internet…

Six of us took a day trip down to Waterburg Plateau on Thursday. About an hour southeast of Otjiwarongo, Waterburg is a prominent plateau that stands above the surrounding bush. It has relatively more water than most surrounding areas and so has much more dense foliage. At the base of the south end of the plateau is a resort, appropriately named Waterburg. After convincing the gate man that we were volunteers and getting our discount, we parked next to the pool and got out the park-supplied map. The “map” is really just a hand drawn sketch that has been photocopied too much and not updated enough. Waterburg is one of the few parks that allow you to do unguided hiking. I’m guessing because the terrain is just not right for getting run down by a cheetah, stalked by a lion, gorged by a rhino, or bit in half by a hippo. But there were a plethora of trees that I wanted to see holding a leopard waiting to get the drop on us. The trails meander through the hillside leading up to the cliffs of the plateau, much like the rest of the park. We left the pool parking lot and took the “tree” path up to the bungalows. As promised by the trail name, we saw lots of trees. One of them was even laying across the trail in front of us! We joined up with the “cliffs” loop on the other side of the bungalows and continued uphill. After about twenty minutes walking, we were greeted, as promised, by the base of the plateau. We skirted the base of the cliffs until we got to a pass that took us up to the top. At this pass, we found a family of these small little animals that looked like marmots, but with a much more ugly face. At first, we all kept our distance because we assumed that they would run off. The babies and adolescents took off up the rocks away from us, but then the adult came straight at us. Probably trying to distract us from the rest of the family, but becoming a prime target for a million pictures from our cameras. The furry thing finally took off up the rocks after its family, which is good because I think we would have spent the rest of the day burning up our camera batteries taking the same picture of this thing over and over.

We reached the top of the plateau and had lunch overlooking the resort and the rest of the surrounding countryside. The rest of the countryside consists of dirt and scrub trees all the way to the horizon. It was a nice view, but there’s a reason why the post cards from Namibia usually have an animal on them. Without them, the caption might as well read, “Greetings from yellowish brown! Wish something were here!”

The rocky top of the plateau did lend itself to an interesting game: Camera Self-Timer EXTREME!! The game is that you have to set your camera for self timer and get to the most difficult place possible before the picture is taken. It’s kind of like the basketball game “HORSE”. We would start the timer and then have to dive off a rock, dodge thorny bushes, and then climb another rock and still have a decent shot come out. I think this could become a good PC game. Maybe I should apply for a grant! Luckily, everyone was able to make the walk back down the hill after the game had lost its novelty.

We had lunch next to the pool, which was freezing, and then started the drive back to Otjiwarongo. The VW was a sort of station wagon and on the drive back, it was my turn to ride in the very back where there were no seats. I was facing backwards, watching the plateau fade away when the car suddenly slammed on its breaks. I heard a ‘THUNK!’ and saw a pile of feathers spiraling out behind the car. We had hit a guinea fowl that was being too lazy getting out of the road. Now, I don’t know who said it first, but we got on the conversation about what a guinea fowl tastes like. Turkey? Chicken? So we decided to turn around and go get the bird. This didn’t really seem like a good idea at the time, but it I guess it wasn’t a bad enough idea to bail on… yet. We drove back to the cluster of feathers and pulled over. Of course, none of us had de-feathered a bird before, much less gutted one. I suppose we figured we’d go back and just find it sectioned off and wrapped up plastic on a Styrofoam plate. Looks like that doesn’t happen naturally since the bird was very similar to the way we had seen it in the last moments of its life. Just as feathery, though now much less alive. We poked it a little and turned it over. One wing was pretty well severed, but it was still a small bird that would have to be feathered and cleaned. Not to mention it was just gross. Killed by a car? Fine. Consume road-kill? Sounds good. Unknown quality of meat? No problem. Possibility of bid flu? Whatever. But, ewwwww!! It’s all squishy!! Yuck!! And we have to do all that work? No way! I’m almost ashamed to be typing this. Almost. Satisfied that we are complete idiots we went back to Otjiwarongo, sans bird, of course.

Most everyone went down to Windhoek the next day. Mariel, Brock and I stayed behind since we really had no reason to be there, and Windhoek is an expensive place to just be for no reason. With nothing to do for a couple days, we ran some errands and took advantage of Megan’s two channel television. She technically has three channels, but one of them is The Bible Network, which is really only entertaining if Mr. T from “The A-Team” is on to tell you that after pumping up his body at the gym, he goes home and pumps up his soul. I am not making this up. And then there are the “in-depth” reports on the 700 Club where Pat Robertson delves into the complicated world of suicide bombers in the Middle East. Who better to explain the mind of a crazy Islamic Fundamentalist than a crazy Christian Fundamentalist? Come to think of it, I’ll count TBN as a channel since it can be pretty entertaining! But that’s not what this is about (since I’ve probably offended some pretty crazy people with that last rant).

With nothing else to do, Brock, Mariel and I went to Pick-and-Pay and bought three Frisbees. Each put us back a whopping fifty cents US, so you can tell the quality. We then spent an entire day setting up and experimenting with an 18-hole Frisbee-golf course around Megan’s house. In case I never explained it, Megan lives on a Ministry of Education compound that is made up of two large office buildings and a couple of small two house condos. My favorite hole is where you go from the flag pole, over the parking lot, and between the two office buildings, finishing at the lamp post just outside an office window. The course turned out so good that we want everyone to make their own at their sites and then we can have nationwide competitions during the breaks. Mariel and I are scouting out the Khorixas course. We plan on creating a marathon course that covers the entire town. Again, we should get international funding for these things!

We cleaned up and got on the road the next day, and it’s a good thing too. Who knows what would have happened if we had been left to invent more games to occupy our time. I have to say, the hike from Otjiwarongo to Windhoek was the easiest that any of us have ever had. We walked to the edge of town and Mariel was the only one who could get a bag off before not one, but two cars came to a halt. The first one wanted money so we let them go. The second was a Tanzanian professional wildlife guide and a French woman who taught at the University of Namibia. The ride was free, with air conditioning, and seats for all three of us! Sorry, I’m sure no one back home cares about this, but it was a huge deal for us.

We were in Windhoek for five days for medical work. Two days of travel, one day to get a TB test (negative again, when will it be my turn?!), one for a physical, and one for a dental cleaning. This was all very boring and I’m not going to go into it, except for when the dentist didn’t like the color of one of my fillings. She wanted to X-Ray it to see if there was any decay so I sat down in the X-Ray chair. At home, I always had to put my head into one of those brace things and bite down on the uncomfortable film thing while the assistant ran out of the room and hit the button. Here, I sat down in the chair and the dentist put one of the big lead vests on me. She positioned the X-Ray thingy and then held the film in my mouth using a pair of tongs. I was ready to hold the tongs when she left the room but instead, she just told me not to move, leaned over, and hit the button. I don’t know if that was normal procedure, but I know that ugly dress she was wearing was not made of lead.

My down time in Windhoek was spent making sure my students, Ester and Florence, at the science fair were doing ok. The exhibition was being held at the fairgrounds which were just down the street from the apartments where PC had put us up for the medical stuff. I showed up on the setup day and found out that the girls had forgotten all their typed materials in Khorixas. Great. Another teacher had hiked down with her laptop to be used in a presentation so I used that to type up all the material they needed. It was only a few pages with some graphics I had taken pictures of before. I had saved the pictures on a CD along with all the other pictures I’m sending home later. I had the CD with me and put the graphics back in and typed the four or five pages needed. I got them printed in Windhoek and had them back to the girls just before the 5pm setup deadline. Confident I had averted a crisis, I was feeling pretty good about myself. Later, I would find out that they had also left an entire project (they had two) in Khorixas. Oh well, at least they got one in.

After the medical stuff was done, I had to kill another three days in Windhoek before I the next official PC thing I was involved in. I spent those days getting books for my school library from the Education Library Services which is the local contact for Book Aid International. ELS has a store room where they keep extra copies of books that have no real organization or theme. They are just extra books they had donated and don’t have a place for yet. I filled five boxes with relevant books and kept them in the storage room until the next day when I could get a taxi to take me and the books over to the University of Namibia where there was a bus from Khorixas. A handful of teachers from my region had come down with the students for the National Science fair and were part of a workshop that was going on for science teachers. If you didn’t follow that, don’t worry, it wasn’t important. Just know that I rule cause I got free books and didn’t have to ride in government transport. And I got a free lunch out of the teacher workshop because I arrived at the right time.

So what other official PC business am I in Windhoek for? I’ve volunteered to help with Pre-Service Training for the next group of volunteers who arrive in November. Our meeting was held up at Grieter’s which was the lodge we stayed at for Reconnect. They’ve improved a lot since the last time I was there. Still no consistent architectural theme, but it’s a more complete sense of schizophrenia. After the day was done, I am now set to help with a training on hiking, what to do when a volunteer first gets to site, and training the new secondary education teachers. This is all for the November training. I’m also tentatively involved in two trainings for the new group’s Reconnect next April on teaching study skills and brain based learning. Me and my big mouth…

Not wanting to pay for a hike back north, I sat down on the onramp for the highway and stuck my thumb out. After about five minutes, a huge big rig pulling a two story trailer full of cows stopped and let me on. The Afrikaaner driver had a pair of the shortest shorts I’ve ever seen. He was from Gobabis and had some… interesting… things to say about “the blacks” I was teaching. Nothing terribly offensive, but I could read between the white lines.

I got back to Khorixas on Friday afternoon and spent the weekend getting over a cold. Nothing like a PC medical exam to get you sick! Monday, one of my teachers approached me and said that I looked very nice in shorts. I had no idea what she was talking about at first. And then it hit. She had brought the laptop down to Windhoek where I added the graphics to Ester and Florence’s poster. I had left the CD in her laptop over the whole break. The CD that had the pictures of the Afrikaaner party. Crap. And so ends the vacation. We’ll see how this turns out…