Sun, Sand and Sossusvlei

After a quick turnaround in Windhoek after Swakopmund, it was time to make like tourists again, jump on a tour bus and head south to Sossusvlei. Impossible to pronounce, it is a range of sand dunes in an ancient dried river bed in the Namib-Naukluft National Park in western Namibia. It is almost entirely desert, and as you drive down, the landscape changes and ends up looking like a cross between Mars and the Moon. But very, very sandy.

Almost 4 months in Namibia hasn’t cured my intolerance to early mornings, but even I have to admit that this barren, deserted landscape looks incredible at sunrise and sunset. Watching the sun come up as we sat on top of Dune 45 was stunning, and the way that the light catches the grooves in all of the sand dunes is both infuriatingly difficult to capture on a standard digital camera, and infinitely more impressive seen with the naked eye. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

We then spent the remainder of the morning on a walk through the desert to Deadvlei – a large, dry pan that is completely and utterly dead. Trees have stood there for hundreds of years, but are entirely dried out and look like something out of a Halloween cartoon. The colours are simply fantastic though, and to see such a unique landscape felt very special. If only a pesky grain of sand hadn’t snuck into the lens to make a uniform black spot on all my pictures!

Our journey back to Windhoek took us back to a bakery in the middle of the desert owned by a man named Moose McGregor, who was very excited at the arrival of two Scots and was desperate to share his Scottish ancestry with us. Fortunately, he was also happy to share two extra large pieces of apple pie for the standard price – most exciting. We also stopped at a cheetah rehabilitation reserve outside Solitaire for a short drive with the cats. The foundation has a great ethos, and what their programme offers really is impressive: although we were only there for a very short trip, it was fantastic to see cheetahs so legitimately close and was a great way to finish our Sossusvlei trip before heading up to Zambia!

Notes From An Amateur Backpacker

Time and Wi-Fi are proving difficult to find in the same place and at the same time, so blogging has been a little sporadic recently – lots to catch up on since April. After a brilliant end of term (they came in, wrote an exam, had an assembly featuring Mrs Kruse’s dancing, and then left by 9am), we’re now on holiday!

Caitlin and I are travelling for four weeks, on a trip that will take us around Namibia, into Zambia to visit Victoria Falls, and then to Botswana to visit some other volunteers. Our first stop towards the end of April was a short safari in Etosha National Park in northern Namibia – a fantastic 3 days with amazing wildlife. There are no buffalo in the park to complete Africa’s Big Five, but we did spot all of Etosha’s Big Four – lion, elephant, rhino and leopard-, plus countless zebra, giraffe, springbok and warthog. Watching the animals come to drink at the floodlit waterhole under the stars was a highlight: difficult to capture on camera, but absolutely beautiful and any pictures I take could never to justice to how remarkable it was to watch.

What also struck me about Etosha was the number of tourists we came across. Living in the middle of southern nowhere, we rarely see any other foreigners, but here, there were hundreds of them. Armies of khaki-clad warriors, with socks pulled high around their knees and permanently brandishing titanic Canon SLR contraptions, were everywhere. Whilst it meant that we were lucky to have only 5 on our tour, and benefitted from a night in a rather nice tourist lodge, it did feel rather strange to be a foreign visitor to Namibia all over again. Whilst I am by no means local, and we are still very much those two white girls with the custard cream addiction, I do have a noticeably different perspective on Namibia: what I see of this country, and the way that I see it, is completely different as a volunteer than it is as a tourist. At least it made me look a little less pasty in comparison!

Our tour of Etosha finished in Swakopmund, a fairly large town on the Atlantic coast. They joke that it’s more German than Germany, which may not be strictly true, but it was truly bizarre how European the town is. It’s full of cafes, boutiques, bars, restaurants and a very pleasant seafront – couldn’t be further from Tses if it tried.  One thing we did do was sandboarding in the dunes just south of the town. Essentially, you take a dune, a helmet and a piece of waxed plywood and...that’s it. You just send yourself flying down giant piles of sand very, very quickly. Trekking up and down was knackering, and I think it’s an understatement to say I’m not really cut out for these things, but it was good fun nevertheless. It was lovely to have some time to relax by the sea, and meeting up with Sachi and Jake (another PT volunteer) also made for an excellent break. Photos from Swakop are, unfortunately, few and far between. This is for several reasons: firstly, we spent a lot of time not doing an awful lot; secondly, it’s a bit difficult taking photos whilst out sandboarding; thirdly, after encounters with dune sand and one unprecedented wave, my camera had a bit of a hissy fit for a while.

 In Livingstone at the moment, due to visit Victoria Falls tomorrow and cannot wait. Updates on Sossusvlei and our pending Zambia adventure coming soon!

Open Books, Open Minds

This post has been a long time coming! Every time I almost write a proper entry about it, something else happens, and stories that started out in my head as short footnotes take up a whole page and end up totally overtaking. So here we go – a timeline of photos should give you some idea of what we’ve managed over the last few months.

We started from scratch : moving those bookcases, cleaning all the surfaces and sorting through the books (4th February)

By 21st February, we had separated the books into fiction and non-fiction, and were busy splitting the non-fiction section into ten divisions by topic.

This was taken on 5th March. Fiction had been labelled with call numbers, taped and alphabetised;  at this point, we had done the same with non-fiction and were starting to put them all back in order.

By the 7th March, you could take a picture of some spines, pretend you had a proper-looking library already and almost kid yourself that there wasn't that much more to do.... 

...but then it took us until the last week of March to sort the rest of them  out and finish. Phew!

The finished product at the end of March. We're using the bookcases to separate the library space from the classroom  that shares the same room, and trying to decorate the backs with some posters. You can also see the mural painted nearly 20 years ago: open books, open minds.

The only teeny, tiny, incy-wincy thing is that it doesn’t look like that at the moment.

We’ve had to pack it all up.

Absolutely breaks my heart taking the whole thing to pieces again. But the wonderful news is that the reason it’s being taken apart is to prepare for greater things. A German firm is sponsoring the development of a computer lab for Nowak Primary School, which is being installed over the school holidays. The room will be painted, 12 computers installed, and we will most likely have wireless Internet access. I can’t tell you how exciting this is – not just because I get tangled up in cables every time I try and hook up my laptop to the dial-up broadband (I am neither coordinated nor good with technology), but it’s. One of our subjects is BIS, ultimately a class in media skills, and although we have started using the library as best we can, it will be brilliant to have some computers. Computer literacy will be a whole new set of skills for them, and after school classes will be offered to the most competent, well behaved learners in each grade. I’ve really come to love finding these opportunities for kids that really deserve a reward: it sounds so terribly cheesy and all very gap-year-y, but chances like these are a big deal for kids at a rural primary school in a region so affected by Namibia’s socio-economic inequalities.Our school is involved in the British Council’s Connecting Classrooms initiative, and we’ve already sent off our first parcel of students’ letters and drawings to our partner school in Yorkshire. Taking those kids with the best work outside and telling them that their work has been chosen  is an absolute joy to watch:  they’re really excited, super proud of themselves and a number of them asked me on Monday morning whether the parcel had been sent safely. You could also see that it took the rest of the class by surprise: they don’t often get opportunities like these, and you could see that they hadn’t really twigged that yes, Miss Macmillan and Miss Mortimer were serious about sending the best work all the way to the UK and yes, they did expect you to put some effort in if you wanted your work to be included. This programme seems to have really captured their attention, and so with computer access, they can get all the more involved online with the programme for themselves.

It will mean I have to take on a bit of ICT teaching, which is a terrifying thought given how truly terrible I am with computers. “Switch it off, switch it on again” may have to get painted on the wall too!

World Health Day

I did promise I’d blog a bit about this one! World Health Day is marked on 7^th April, and does pretty much what it says on the tin: its purpose is to share, educate and raise awareness about different health issues across the globe. It’s something Caitlin and I have been looking at with our classes over the past week, and something I thought was worth a mention.

I am very aware of the picture I will be painting for you, so I feel that now is a good time to formally remind everyone that the opinions published on this blog are solely my own; they are not representative of Project Trust, Nowak Primary School, the Namibian Ministry of Education or any other organisation I am affiliated with during my time here. Just me being me and thinking too much – only this time, I’ve decided to write and share them with you.

Joining in with World Health Day is especially important here, as heaven knows Tses has its fair share of many of the major health issues that southern Africa battles with. The infection rate of HIV/AIDS in Namibia stands at just over 20%, and the government respond to this with lots of funding for HIV/AIDS related programmes, free condoms are everywhere and almost every syllabus throughout the education system stresses some way of linking up the course material with raising awareness of the disease. It’s seriously impressive: many of my students can’t string a sentence together, but almost all of them can effortlessly reel off volumes of information and advice about preventing HIV/AIDS. The devil is, however, in the application. There seems to be a difference between knowing an awful lot and actually being informed. On one hand, we spend forever and a day encouraging kids of all ages to be aware of preventing HIV/AIDS ; on the other, Namibia also has a very high teenage pregnancy rate, and by our roughest guess-timating last night with Sachi, we reckon that up to 10% of our secondary school students  here in Tses could quite possibly be parents already. The question is, if all the kids know about using the importance of protection in the context of HIV prevention, where and why did that wisdom break down? A similar problem exists with managing HIV/AIDS. Health services provide free testing and treatment for those affected – no mean feat, given the extortionate cost of anti-retrovirals-, but the trouble is that managing the disease often requires a very structured schedule of taking medication at intervals and sometimes with food. What happens when you don’t have a watch, or you don’t know when your next meal is going to come? Throw in issues with TB, the fact that 40% of our learners rely on the government feeding programme at school, and a rate of alcohol abuse that our admittedly dubious maths estimates exceeds two-thirds of Tses’ population, and it’s not hard to see that World Health Day is directly pertinent to these kids as the future of Tses, Namibia and even Africa as a whole.

In an attempt to at least address some of these issues, we structured our lessons so that our classes spent all of last week doing work related to health issues. In BIS, they used library books to help them make posters about different diseases.

A, M & M in Grade 7A hard at work

T in Grade 7B (you have no idea how hard it was explaining that I didn't want her to pose for the camera)

S's finished poster, Grade 7A

A, N, A & D with their finished work, Grade 5A

In Arts, each class broke off into smaller groups to create and perform short plays about a health issue of their choice. We weren’t sure how this would go, as asking such a large group of such wild kids to do a task that is pretty unusual for them could all go horribly wrong. I have to say, I feel terrible at how sceptical I was : they were brilliant.

5B perform a short play about HIV/AIDS

The 6B boys attempt a sketch about teenage pregnancy (see below for more on that one)

The 6B girls in action

We had one of our grade 5s stumbling over all the furniture and rolling around on the floor in a play about underage drinking, and one of our grade 6 boys gave birth to a rolled-up-hoody-baby-bump in a sketch about HIV – as you do. The learners were killing themselves laughing. I was killing myself laughing. They were killing themselves laughing at me killing myself laughing. It was highly entertaining, and I think they had a lot of fun tackling what are, to be fair, some pretty serious issues for primary school children. Productive, informative, and amusing – dare I say it, it almost sounds like a proper lesson!

Tiaras, Tears and Jam Theft

Dearest blog followers, what do you all get up to on Friday nights? Anyone been roped into judging two beauty pageants on consecutive weekends? Nope? Nobody else? OK. Just me then.

No word of a lie, this is quite honestly what I spent both last Friday night and yesterday evening doing. The first event was the secondary school hostel’s annual Miss Funny competition, where the boys essentially dress up in the girls’ clothes and take part in a mock beauty contest. As it has to be judged by staff other than the school’s teachers, Caitlin, Jenita & I were given the absolute privilege of becoming judges for the evening.

We were expecting silly outfits, arbitrary scoring not to be taken too seriously and just generally having a bit of a laugh. How foolish we were, to think that this was not going to be a massive deal. Handbags at dawn doesn’t even cover it – the bling was on, the struts were out and the inner divas were unleashed on the dining hall for the evening.  Each contestant had a formal introduction AND three outfits, meaning a total of four trips down the catwalk and a very detailed score sheet. For them, it may have been fiercely competitive, but that only made it all the more hysterical for us. Tears were rolling as these enormous secondary school boys – some of whom are older than me – navigated the makeshift catwalk in heels that my father probably wouldn’t let me out in, pouting and sashaying all in the name of Miss Funny 2013.

In the end, only four could win, but I rather feel that we got the best deal out of the evening. We  must have done something right, as we were asked to judge a second pageant last night. This time, it was the primary school girls’ turn to compete for the title of Miss Beauty 2013. The evening was a fundraiser for our community’s youth development group that all of the volunteers are involved in, which is excellent news for the group and it was great fun for all involved. The difference with this pageant is that it was most definitely not a joke – this was business. This was war (in kitten heels). 

Four rounds were closely fought, and although I found myself cringing at their questionably appropriate modelling, you could certainly never say they hadn’t put in a lot of effort and were all really enthusiastic. In the end,We genuinely had tears. I wasn’t entirely sure whether they were tears of disappointment with a mere Miss Personality or 1^st Princess title, or tears of elation. Fortunately for us, it was the latter – the winning four were so chuffed that they jumped on us when we congratulated them. The mother of the girl who came 3^rd was so delighted, she even ambushed Caitlin with a hug! Given that I cannot imagine these kids ever hugging any of their other teachers, I think we’ve certainly won over a few students . Hopefully they will come to our rescue when we’re faced with the cold shoulders of the other four girls who didn’t win, and are probably furious, on Monday morning at school.

At school this week, we’ve been marking World Health Day in our Arts and BIS lessons, but I feel that this deserves its own post – I’ll write another update as soon as I can. Before then, I absolutely have to thank every single one of The Breakfast Condiment Burglars at PwC for your marvellous contributions to the latest parcel from home.  Jam here is a strange business: either you spend a small fortune on proper jam in a proper jar, or you buy the cheap stuff in a tin and make do with whatever fruit/food colouring counts as ‘mixed fruit’ this week. I had asked Mum to send a few pots from home and when she couldn’t find any to buy in Tesco, one or two colleagues were organised to take a few extra on their next work hotel trip. Word quickly spread, and the PwC masses rose to the challenge, pinching 8 pots of jam and 9 packets of Nutella for me. I am most amused, utterly delighted, and very grateful to all of you. Baie dankie!

Oh, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside

How time flies when you’re having fun! It’s been two weeks since my last entry, and as a result of my tardiness, there’s now a lot to say for the past fortnight.

The big news last week was the annual visit of John Fraser from Project Trust - Overseas Director, Desk Officer for Namibia and general PT legend. We were desperately keen to impress, particularly as it’s a new project. Sadly, living in Africa hasn’t quite cured my mildly obsessive habits or my Oh-Heavens-I’m-Turning-Into-My-Mother Syndrome yet, and so I spent most of last week flapping about cleaning Volunteer Towers. I’m sure that after 30 years with PT, he will have come across greater problems with volunteers’ accommodation than a streaky bathroom mirror, but come hell or high water, I was determined to attack that thing with the vinegar until it sparkled. Both Caitlin and I were surprised at how nervous we found ourselves as we waited for his arrival: what if we’ve missed something? What if he thinks we’re the worst volunteers ever? Will he really bring us the Creme Egg promised to us on Training? Silly us – his visit was absolutely fine. He seems really happy with the project, with us as volunteers, and it looks like Nowak is set to receive more PT volunteers in August. The bathroom mirror received no criticism, and after a quick tour and a chance to drop off the Dairy Milk in the fridge (woohoo!), we set off to visit the other volunteers in Luderitz, Creme Eggs in tow (extra woohoo!).

Luderitz is a small city on the Atlantic coast, about 300km west of Keetmanshoop and thus a few hours’ drive away from us. The two girls there produce a monthly newspaper, and work part-time at 2 pre-schools during the week. With only two pairs in the south, John decided that he would visit Tses, and then take us with him to visit them. I assume that for him, it means a better and more efficient use of his allocated time; for us, it meant a free trip to civilisation for the Easter weekend!

Luderitz most definitely felt like a holiday; I couldn’t imagined a place so different from Tses could exist in Namibia. Even Windhoek has a distinctly African feel to it – Luderitz is far more mixed, with strong German and South African influences. John found it very entertaining how surprised I was by the different in culture, but we’ve become so used to our rural community and its many quirks that ordinary Western habits were something of a novelty. We had a great time exploring Agate Beach, Diaz Point, Shark Island and Felsenkirche, as well as having our first proper braai by the seaside and visiting the renowned Barrels pub with the girls’ friends. We were spoilt rotten in terms of food– gone were the days of lentils and rice as we devoured fresh oysters, lattes and dried cranberries. Not all in the same meal, of course (that’s not exciting, that’s just revolting), but all of the above are pretty much impossible to track down in a 100km radius of Tses and are a very, very rare treat. A treat, however, I feel these things ought to remain. As much as I really enjoyed our trip to Luderitz, returning to Tses was a pleasant reminder of what we have here and how well it fits with what I wanted from a project and from an experience. Upon our return, we went back to simply sitting on our front step, sharing a tub of yogurt that we’d frozen, and just watching the world go by and enjoying a peaceful afternoon in the sun. Living in the middle of nowhere, holidaying in civilisation for (comparatively) luxurious weekends – an ideal combination.

And so Tses it is! I feel like a broken record as I write this, but school really is busy this week. It’s the start of exams, the classes’ marks from their continuous assessment sheets are due, and with the Easter weekend, we had last Thursday as a Friday, and no Monday this week but two Thursdays. Confused? I am.  Setting the tasks, marking them and having to submit the grades has been an eye-opener, as it’s given us our first real chance to pull together all of the marks for all of our students, and take a proper look at what we’re dealing with here.  I look at these CA sheets with mixed feelings – there are still some Es in each class, we have to chase at least 30 learners to actually hand in their books (really, really difficult with some of our students and immensely frustrating), but I’m really glad that there are some As and strong Bs in every class and some kids that I know will be chuffed to get a bit of a boost. In all the mania of this week, we’ve been given a bit of a boost too, as we’ve discovered that the only thing more entertaining than primary school portraits are primary school letters. As part of our efforts with the Connecting Classrooms partnership we’re setting up, the students have had to write letters to the British school in our classes. So far, our learners have told the British pupils that they love them, that a pink My Little Pony pegasus counts as part of daily life in Tses  and that they can all come to one boy’s house if they want (apparently his mother gives her full permission). Utterly baffling, but wonderful. More stories soon!

Contrasting, Beautiful Namibia

Another week has passed, and I’m still learning lots from Africa. So far, I have learnt enough Afrikaans to inform everyone that I don’t actually speak Afrikaans; I have learnt how to bake muffins in tin cans; and I have learnt most of the words to the national anthem (the title is a line from the middle). This proved to be especially useful, as Thursday was Namibian Independence Day. In a historically-accurate-ish nutshell, Namibia was a German colony that was then ruled by South Africa after the collapse of imperialism at the beginning of the 20^th century. Namibia’s struggle for freedom lasted almost 30 years, but the country finally declared independent on 21^st March 1990. There was no school on the day itself, as it’s a public holiday, so the occasion was enthusiastically marked by both the primary and secondary schools on Wednesday afternoon. At Nowak, the students gathered for a celebration with speeches, songs and dancing prepared by different classes; the secondary school also put on quite a show in the courtyard between the schools, involving Danza Kaduro and boys dancing in skirts. What this has to do with political and social liberty I have no idea, but it was great fun to watch and I think the pupils really enjoyed having an afternoon of fun.

Both the lower and upper primary school students gathered for the ceremony

A group from the secondary school perform a traditional dance. At least two of them are actually boys. Highly confusing.

 On Thursday morning, Jenita was helping to run a similar talent show for the hostel kids. The learners that board in the hostel are from all over Namibia, and since each of Namibia’s peoples have a very strong sense of cultural identity, it was fascinating to watch each of the different groups perform the songs and dances of their own cultures. Plus, it’s a kids’ talent show, and thus two things are inevitable: things will go wrong, and it will still be wonderfully endearing anyway.

I’ve had some other new things happen since I last posted. I had my first African cold: it was 38 degrees outside, and I found myself sniffling whilst wearing shorts and flip-flops. All very confusing.

I saw my first African snake. Fear not, Gran, it doesn’t really count and it wasn’t exactly a thrilling wildlife experience. This snake was dead, and one particularly mischievous Grade 6 was chasing the other children around the hostel with it. When we told him to stop terrorising them, he offered to bring the snake into class for us the next morning. No thanks, kiddo. Offer kindly refused.

I got mail! Having your post held in a box 80km away is a far cry from Royal Mail, and still seems very strange, but I had a lovely surprise last week when I found that I had a parcel of goodies from Oz. Our house is now 2 magazines, 3 vegetable peelers, a packet of post-its and a packet of sweets better off than last week – thanks Mum!

Some things, however, haven’t changed– the library is progressing (so close!), we have made contact with a potential partnership school in Yorkshire through the British Council, and most importantly, our classes are as much fun as ever. Having got our classes to draw portraits of their classmates, we are thoroughly looking forward to marking the masterpieces this weekend. I don’t know how many of you remember the days of primary school portraits, but they are most entertaining /bizarre/adorable.  Getting very excited about next weekend’s trip to Luderitz, and Project Trust coming to Tses – I’m sure there will be plenty of news to share next time!