Earlier this term, one Thursday night while sitting at my computer trying to bang out some lesson plans before a weekend in Rehoboth, I got an sms from one of the teachers at the local junior secondary school that said simply "Hi."

I suppose I should detour this story for a moment, before it even begins, and explain why this is significant. The community where I live in southern Namibia, if not exactly Westernized, could at least be described accurately as being very Western-conscious; I daresay probably more so than a lot of our neighboring communities, thanks to the dual influence of American media and American volunteers. In addition to the two Peace Corps Volunteers who proceeded me in the community, the schools here have had a handful of World Teach volunteers over the past couple of years, so most people are accustomed to encountering real flesh-and-blood Americans. They know, for example, that Americans like things to start on time, and they know that Americans do not generally like to beat around the bush.

Knowing these things, however, does not change the fact that, just as Americans are inherently American, Namibians are inherently Namibian. My colleagues are usually willing to be direct with me, unless it is in regards to something Very Important and Serious, in which case their Namibian upbringings kick in and they go back to being...well, Namibian.

In Namibia, you greet first and ask questions later. How formal you need to be can vary depending on the situation and who's involved; for example, with the older gentleman who drives the only combi in town, it is usually necessary for me to exchange quite a few pleasantries, inquiries after family members, and comments on the weather before I can ask him if he has a seat for me to go to Rehoboth this weekend. (Assuming I want a positive answer, of course.) On the other hand, when I can't get the fax machine to work, my school's secretary will allow "Good morning, how are you, can you please help me get this f***ing fax machine to work," to suffice.

But as I said, things that are Very Important and Serious tend to cause people to jump to the highest echelon of formality, in which you greet first, await a regreeting (which is officially a word, starting now now), and only then begin the exchange of pleasantries that will proceed the actual reason you initiated the conversation in the first place.

The good integrated Peace Corps Volunteer in me appreciates the gesture of respect. But mostly? It just drives me nuts.

So here we go, the beginning of a Very Important and Serious conversation. "Hi, what's up?" "It's fine, and with you?" (BTW, this is a retelling of the story in American English, as opposed to Text Namlish.) "Good, just busy." "Are you very busy these days?" "Yes, very busy with the school. And you?" "Yes, the school and the library, there is a lot of work." "Yes, a lot of work." "Anyway, I just wanted to know how it was with you." "It's good." "Good to hear. Are you busy now?" "Yes, I'm trying to get some work done before I go to Rehoboth." (Work that this not-really-a-conversation is keeping me from.) "Oh, are you going to Rehoboth for the weekend?" "Yes." "Enjoy it." "I will." "Say, I wanted to talk to you about something." "Okay, well we can talk about it, but only on Monday because I am busy now." "So you're too busy to talk today." "Yes." "Oh, I just wondered if you were busy." "Yes, but I think I'll have time to talk on Monday." "Yes, Monday. That will be fine." "Okay then, talk to you Monday." "Yes, we will talk on Monday. You must enjoy your weekend." "Will do." "And I will talk to you on Monday." "Ok." "Okay see you then."

Thank God MTC gives me 100 SMSes per day.

So come to find out, once I finally got him to actually state his inquiry, the thing that he wanted to talk to me about but I was too busy (in addition to being fine and very busy and what), was co-teaching a basic computer class for adults in the community. To which I immediately agreed, in spite of a) being way out of practice at teaching adults, b) never having taught computers to anyone of any age or any technological skill level, and c) not having any of the relevant vocabulary to teach a computer class in Afrikaans. What could possibly go wrong, right?

Fortunately, this story doesn't end in disaster - if anything, I think it proves just how much faith my community members have in me (or how much they'll let me get away with because I'm American), and how quickly good ideas spread. The first day of class (which was Valentine's Day) we had about 10 students show up - eight adults and two of my Grade 7 learners. My co-teacher was late, our students were mostly on time, and so there I am, standing alone in front of a group of people, most of whom I know only tangentally, and all of whom are paying good money to sit there and have me teach them computers.

I thought I was going to throw up.

But actually, it went pretty great, for a first day. Turns out that Microsoft Paint is fun for all ages. Cool, I figured, we'll go at this one week at a time, work out the bugs, if it goes well maybe we'll have another class next term. Giving computer classes is something I'd previously thought about doing as a secondary project, since not all of the learners at the junior secondary school take computers and neither of the primary schools offer it either. Integrating ICT into primary and secondary projects...check.

The next day at school the rest of Grade 7 and most of Grade 6 came and asked if they could sign up for computer class. And all of a sudden what was supposed to be one class, twice a week has turned into two ten-person classes twice per week, plus prep and the inevitable post-class line of students with questions. I've already got parents sending notes to school with their children asking me to please pre-register them for next term's class, and the ones who got in for this term want to know if there will be another class for them to take in the winter. I went to explain the registration procedure to Grade 7 (come talk to me and be sure I write your name down before you leave - super fancy and complicated, I know) and my colleague took several minutes to extol the value of beginning computer classes in primary school.

Holy crap. If I'd known people were going to jump on the bandwagon like this, I'd have tried to start earlier.

To be sure, it's challenging. For one thing, neither I nor my co-teacher speak an adequate amount of Afrikaans to teach this class to the non-English speaking portion of the community. (For both of us, Afrikaans is a fourth language.) Fortunately, we've found that our more English-proficient learners are willing to help the less-English proficient when neither instructor can figure out how to explain "Click and drag to find your name, then press start" in Afrikaans. With the primary school kids, I have had no language issue, but they are used to my English; we'll see how he fares this week when I'm away on a workshop. We also have one student who we're pretty sure is functionally illiterate and are trying to figure out how to conduct the course in a way which will benefit him without boring everyone else. And of course, there's the problem that we're both balancing our regular teaching jobs, compensatory teaching, and other after-school clubs and activities with this class. Oh, and we're trying to get Telecom Namibia to lay cables so that we can get internet in the computer lab, and my school is starting to get on my case about acquiring some computers of our own...

Time flies when you're working hard! Can't believe it's the end of February already. So much for my plan to teach fractions this term.

To those of you who still check this blog for updates on how I'm doing in Namibia, I'm sorry that it hasn't been a better (read: more frequent) story. I'm resolving to do better in 2011.

Those of you who have kept up with me through alternate means of communication (i.e. Facebook or my mom) during the past 18 months know that this experience has had way more than its fair share of ups and downs. In pre-service training, they show us this PowerPoint about the cycle of ups and downs of Peace Corps life. I remember being freaked out by it at the time, but honestly, the real thing is so much more intense. Waking up every morning, even this far into service, I still never know what kind of day it's going to be.

Though my second year technically began back in October, the commencement of the new school year in January feels much more like a new chapter in my service than my group's "Vol-iversary" as marked on my calendar did. And this year has started...not so much with a bang, but with a rush. I am already swamped with responsibilities, not only at school, but also for those secondary projects that all seem to have materialized at once - Camp GLOW 2011, for which I'm on the planning board, and an adult basic computer class that I'm co-teaching with a colleague at my village's secondary school. I am really excited to be working on both projects - being a part of Camp GLOW was a dream of mine before my service even started - but my free time for the rest of this term has already gone completely out the window and it's only Week 3...

You can check out my Flickr site for some photos I uploaded on my recent trip to the U.S.; hopefully in the next couple of weeks I'll have the opportunity to upload the photos of my other December trip to Zambia and Zimbabwe as well.

Until next time, which I hope will be soon!

Let me just start by saying this: I am still here, and things are better.

I have come a long way since the exercise in awfulness that was Term 1. A LONG way. I am no longer actively thinking about quitting every five minutes. I have some degree of control over my classroom the majority of the time. There is actually evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, that my learners are actually learning things* and that it might possibly be related to something I'm doing. It is a much more exciting and rewarding feeling to be here now that I'm able to bathe, eat and sleep on a regular basis, to say nothing of actually relaxing.

Second term was challenging in a completely different way than first term, in that instead of having a million little problems every day, I had a handful of really big, serious problems that would last a few weeks before finally being resolved. Things like sporadic attendance of learners ultimately resulting in kids dropping out of school. Things like borderline learner-learner sexual harassment. Things like kids losing parents and spiraling into very real and very serious depression. Things like learners excising their anger about issues at home through random acts of violence against classmates. They tell us about these things in PST - out of school youth and gender roles and relations and the effects of HIV/AIDS and domestic violence - but the fact is that helping kids to deal with all this heavy stuff is a completely different ballgame.

A lot of volunteers say that you spend the majority of your first year, if not the whole thing, just trying to figure out which way is up. It's so true. There are so many mornings when I wake up, go through the motions of starting the day, and find myself wishing that I'd known something or other back in February, that I'd thought to ask a certain question back in PST, that I had prepared myself in a completely different way for this experience. I feel remorse for not working harder to start certain projects earlier, even as I know that it just wasn't possible, because the one year and change that I have remaining doesn't seem like nearly enough time to accomplish...well, anything. I spend my tough days now thinking about how I'm going to explain what often seems like an utter lack of activity to everyone and their brother when I go home for Christmas and Adrien's wedding in December.

I know I'm not doing nothing. I had fantastic improvement in most of my classes between first and second terms - 9 kids in Grade 5 English alone improved to the next letter grade, and half the kids showed improvement in math. I'm hoping to at least see continued improvement this term, even if not quite as impressive. The work this term, at least in math, is substantially easier - moving from the horrors of fractions and decimals to topics like measuring, basic geometry and telling time. I'm trying to push the Grade 5s to read more, the Grade 7s to think a little bit harder and the Grade 6s to just get it together. We'll see what happens.

*Actually this is only true in two of the three grades I teach, but I'll take it.

There are a lot of reasons that I've been neglecting this blog for almost five months now. The fact that affordable, computer-based internet only exists from 1-5 AM is a major one. But the biggest reason that I haven't done a better job of chronicling my Namibian life for everyone to read up to this point is, quite simply, for that very reason.

They say that the toughest part of Peace Corps service is the first three months at site. And they're not wrong; the first three months was a total roller coaster ride. But for as difficult as the first three months were, I found that I was usually able to stay positive by reminding myself that coming in at the end of the term was tough, that getting technical training at our Reconnect conference in January would help me to fix all the mistakes I knew I was making but didn't know exactly how to rectify.

And then the end of the term passed. Spending December break on the road with my friends renewed me. Reconnect gave me tons of great resources, tips and ideas I wished I'd had when I started teaching in October. I was so ready to go back to school in January, to start over with new classes where I was in control and where I was certain to be able to accomplish something, however small. Term 1, I was certain, would be better than Term 3.

I was so wrong. I have never, in my entire life, been more miserable than I have been for the last four months.

I honestly cannot say much about my days of teaching this term; every single one of them is no more than a blur of yelling and frustration and self-loathing. When I am in class, I am an ogre, and I hate myself for it. When I am out of class...well, I'm never really out of class. When the bell (mercifully) rings every day at 1 PM, I know that I have about half an hour to get home, prepare and eat my lunch, and get back to work. I teach 37 periods per week (out of 39), for four different promotional classes and two non-promotional subjects, which means that I spend approximately 90% of my waking hours devoted to lesson preparation and various school-related tasks.

Seriously. I've stopped bathing every day because I know that the time I spend in the tub is time out of my lesson preparations, which in turn is time out of my already-light sleeping schedule. The only dreams I have anymore involve all my learners and colleagues being in my house, in my bedroom, in the middle of the night asking me to do things - mark papers and teach classes and coach netball and make photocopies. Any time that I take to do things to relax inevitably ends up with me feeling guilty about not spending that time preparing for classes and stressing even more about how I'm going to fit it all in.

Walks around my community? Social visits to my host family? Playing with my neighbor kids? Having learners over for cooldrinks and conversations? Forget it. Integrating requires far more energy than I've got to give. I'm putting my all into survival.

This is not how it's supposed to be. At all times, I am distinctly aware that something is seriously wrong here, that giving all I've got to an endeavor that's giving me nothing but heartbreak in return is no way to live. And yet every time I think that I need to demand that something changes, I immediately start worrying about the domino effect that I'm going to have. If I ask to reduce my teaching load, we'll have to recombine Grades 6 and 7, and the kids will suffer. If I ask someone to take time to help me with Afrikaans or to help me learn more about the community, that's time that person doesn't have to spend on something important. Other people have real problems of their own and don't need to be bothered with stuff I should be able to handle on my own.

This is something I've known about myself as long as I can remember: when given the option, I always elect to suffer in relative silence rather than telling people how I feel, until I reach a breaking point. That point was Week 8 - the middle of the term - when I spent an entire week sobbing uncontrollably on the phone with one of the VSN representatives. It was kind of awful and liberating at the same time. As much as I hate talking about my problems, it was really nice to have someone validate how overwhelmed and frustrated and angry and isolated I was feeling.

I know that I have to ask for things to change, and I know that no matter how much I know it's acceptable and normal, I'm still going to feel guilty. But I've also realized that, especially as a teacher, that suffering in silence simply isn't an option. As much as I try to keep things bottled up, I'm kind of like that flask I inherited from Milan and Pat...shiny, but noticeably leaky. My constant state of exhaustion gives me a short fuse. Grade Whatever disrespects me during first period, which upsets me even more because I can't think straight. I start the next class in a funk from how badly the first class went, which just magnifies the problems that invariably crop up during the following class. And so on. And so forth. For eight periods per day, five days per week, fifteen weeks per term.

Right now I'm at my last night of IST (in-service training) in Windhoek. Although the ten days with my friends has been a great way to push aside some of the frustrations from this term (especially the last two weeks of exams and marking and report card-writing), I'm honestly not leaving with a significantly more positive outlook than I had before. I feel more confident about taking steps to do something about the things that are bothering me, but I also feel incredibly stupid for letting things go like this for so long before speaking up and daunted by how much back-tracking I'm going to have to do now.

Even as I write this, I'm having second thoughts about whether I want to put this out there, where it's ultimately going to serve as a reminder of a rocky first quarter I'd much rather forget. I've been avoiding my journal like the plague since October for that very reason - if I don't write it down, I can pretend it's not happening. I guess my hope is that admitting, in a semi-permanent format, that I've hit (or am damn close to) rock bottom will make it easier for me to hold onto the conviction that I do have to do something.

So there you have it, the best explanation I've got for my prolonged silence. Hopefully next time I'll have something more positive to say.

So I moved out of the family's house and into my own flat last weekend, and spent most of Saturday and Sunday cleaning and attempting to organize the place. Here's what I found:

1 flask, which was apparently left for Milan by Pat due to a leak. I may be so classy as to repair it with duct tape.1 pair men's briefs, found folded in the cabinet under the kitchen sink.1 unused tampon, still in wrapper, also found in the cabinet under the kitchen sink.5 keys (and counting), none of which actually unlock any of the locks in the house.Don't get me wrong: homestay was a great experience for me and I really enjoyed my time staying with the family. That being said...having all that space all to myself is just glorious. I come home after non-stop days at school to peace and quiet (well, relative peace and quiet - there's usually some noise at the hostel across the yard). I can leave my stuff all over the place and nobody cares. I get to cook my own meals, which was admittedly a somewhat terrifying prospect at first. (Having perishable food items to mix it up a little will be welcome.) I've finally got a decent-sized workspace (as opposed to no workspace).I promise I'll try to post some pictures of the place when I get back to The Farm.

In lieu of actually having anything interesting to say, I'll let my pictures do most of the talking for me. More posted (including some from PST and Swearing In) on my Flickr site.

This is where I live. Well, not literally - this is the road between my house and the school. The clouds were particularly spectacular when I took this picture, but the sky is always this big.

This is my library. There is a family of lizards living in the closet in the corner. I am letting them stay for now because they eat the bugs. We actually have a lot more books than you can see in the picture - I'm in the middle of reorganizing the stock and had about 1/4 of them off the shelves when I took this picture.

The smaller bookshelves under the windows will eventually hold our non-fiction books...assuming I can ever finish organizing, recording and contact paper-ing all the books...

Lake Oanob, site of our end-of-year staff party. (It was a braai, of course.)

OH MY GOSH YOU GUYS THE ELECTIONS WERE TERRIBLE AND VIOLENT. THERE WERE BURNING COUCHES AND TEAR GAS EVERYWHERE. THINGS ARE SO BAD IN NAMIBIA THAT BOTSWANA, ZAMBIA AND SOUTH AFRICA ALSO COLLAPSED AND THE ONLY PLACE THE PEACE CORPS COULD EVACUATE US TO WAS ZIMBABWE. I'M IN HARARE NOW.

Haha, just kidding. So far. There's still a whole week until results get announced! Literally anything could happen!

I spent the election weekend braving the mean streets of Windhoek, and even in the capital, the evidence that this was the country in the throes of an election was limited. After spending Saturday morning watching election coverage on NBC (who didn't have any sweet maps or holographic reporters, btw), I had kind of hoped to get a passing glance at a polling station as we drove around town making turns. And I did, it just wasn't at all like on TV: no lines, few signs, and only a handful of security personnel here and there. All of the lampposts on Independence Avenue and Mugabe Street were adorned with campaign posters (and also Christmas lights); I saw billboards for SWAPO (no surprise there), RDP and Congress of Democrats (CoD), whose claim to fame is that they are the only “zebra party” (i.e. the only party who alternated men and women on their National Assembly list).

Since NBC's coverage of the election wasn't terribly exciting (even if I hadn't been spoiled by the last U.S. presidential election, I suspect I would still say that), I spent a fair chunk of the weekend reading election news and analysis, mostly on allAfrica.com, which is a pretty fantastic site.

Here are links to a couple of articles I really enjoyed:

“The Pathology of Power and Paranoia”: I read this article and immediately wished I was back in class at Madison. (Actually, that's kind of how I've felt for the last couple of weeks as election coverage has heated up. Sometimes I really miss critical thinking...or even regular thinking...) A fantastic look at how the political machine works in this country – and furthermore, why it works the way it does.

“After SWAPO-RDP Tension, We Need to Work on Tolerance”: Amazing article by Gwen Lister (editor of The Namibian, who has recently taken a lot of flak for publishing articles critical of SWAPO) that I think is every bit as applicable to American politics as to Namibian.

“Worst Case Scenario About Tribalism and Race”: This article provides a lot of insight into just why the formation of opposition parties in Namibia has been so slow and why their success has been so limited up to this point.

There are also a couple of more news-oriented reports up about the climate at the polling stations and about NBC's election coverage that are well worth reading. Enjoy! And tell me what you think!

My poor NamFam is in the midst of an identity crisis, except the identity that is giving them grief is mine.

It all started way back in September, when I first arrived at The Farm for site visit. The previous American volunteer teacher at the primary school was a young lady by the name of Rachel (if you are an adult) or Miss S. (if you are a child), and for most of that week, that was how most people – even those to whom I had been personally introduced – addressed me. I have seen pictures of Rachel that were taken during her stay here; that we are both young, white females is as far as our physical resemblance goes. However, given that I literally stepped into her NamLife, I can understand why there was some confusion. It took me about 3 days before I got used to responding to “Rachel!” or “Miss S!”, but once I did, I quickly fell into a pattern of acknowledging the speaker, correcting them with the appropriate form of my name, and moving on. No need to harp on it or get upset, they will figure it out eventually.

The ability of my community members to recall my actual name has improved significantly since I moved back to The Farm for good. I think that to some extent, it helps that the learners in my class address me simply as “Miss” or “Teacher” - whether this is normal or a practical adjustment to avoid having to recall precisely which teacher I am, I'm not entirely certain, but hey, the shoe fits.

(Actually, very recently my learners have started to address me as “Juffrou,” which is the Afrikaans word for “Miss,” a move that I think started out as part of a ploy to confuse me by making requests in Afrikaans instead of English. I have deliberately avoided letting the learners find out exactly how much Afrikaans I understand because the looks of terror and confusion on their faces when I respond to the comments they think I can't understand is more awesome than you can possibly imagine.)

In the last week we've had a slight setback, name-wise. (Town-wide exam-induced brain drain? I don't know.) “Rachel, come eat!” Auntie Tina has been yelling from the kitchen. “Rachel's not here, but can I have dinner?” I reply. “Rachel, can you take pictures at the award ceremony on Saturday?” “Yes I can, but I'm Liz, not Rachel.” As I cross the school yard to my classroom, one learner will inevitably call out to me “Good morning Miss S!” And then, “Ouch!” (as they are hit by one of their peers who probably made the same mistake yesterday) “ay, sorry, Miss Wise!”

...and then, there was this weekend. My family drove up to Windhoek on Friday after school, since we were having Milan's going away party that evening, stopping along the way to collect American and Namibian friends in Rehoboth. At the house, we all pitched in to make a huge dinner (really, it was unofficial Hardap Thanksgiving), and as I was helping one of the other Volunteers chop vegetables for the salad (American salad, not NamSalad – no mayonnaise here), my aunt looks at me from across the counter and says to my face, “Milan, bring that here.”

I was less than thrilled. And my degree of thrilled-ness did not increase when, during the course of the evening, two other family members – both of whom were completely sober – also called me Milan, also while looking directly at my face.

Um, let's compare. Milan: 6'3” (ballpark estimate). Half Nepali. Wears glasses. MALE. Liz: 5'7”. Unmistakeably white (albeit with a sweet farmer tan). No glasses, visible scars, peg leg, or any other real distinguishing features. FEMALE.

They can call me Rachel until the cows come home, and I will correct them (more or less) politely. If they call me Rachel, there is an outside chance that they are calling me by the correct name. But people, please. I AM NOT MILAN.

I have joked that I should just wear a name tag around town, but I'm not sure what more I can do to impress upon people that although I am not Rachel, I am a female. Discard all my pants in favor of skirts? Trade in my Keens for heels? Start wearing makeup and styling my hair again? Suggestions welcome.

Happy Danks-giving everyone! (And happy birthday to Jennifer!) Please enjoy a couple of new blog posts (two from today, one from last week) as well as a handful of new pictures on my Flickr site (the link is in the left sidebar) from our school's merit awards last weekend.

SMS from Tracey: So, dare I ask? What are you Nam-thankful for?

My freakin' awesome host family. Life with them is hardly ever boring, and when it is, it's okay, because frankly I need the downtime to recuperate.The Dirty 30.Nescafe, which makes it possible for me to actually start work at 7 AM five mornings a week.Afternoon naps, which make it possible for me to actually stay awake until 9:30 PM.Fantastic care packages from home!Lorenzo's Wife.Exams, which provide me with a much needed break from Grade 5 (and they from me, I suspect). I have a much better attitude about some of those kids when I don't have to see them for 3 hours every day...The prevalence of carbohydrates in the Namibian diet. Mmm, roosterbrood...Electricity, indoor plumbing, and hot water.

As I'm sure you are all aware, because it has undoubtedly been all over the major U.S. newspapers, tomorrow the first day of voting for the 2009 presidential and parliamentary elections here in Namibia. So far, no indication that the country is going to go up in flames, through the combination of elections and my association, but fear not, there's still time.

(Kidding. Sort of. You've all seen the evidence.)

As you may remember, this election is really significant for two reasons. One, this is the first election wherein the “Born Frees” - Namibians born after independence in 1990 – are eligible to vote, and there's a lot of speculation about how the youth voice will (or will not, jury's still out) change the face of government in Namibia, which hasn't changed much in 19 years. (This not a criticism, it's a fact; there are quite a few ministers and MPs who have been serving in the government since independence.) Two, this is the first election where parties other than the ruling party, SWAPO (South West African People's Organization), are predicted to make any kind of substantial showing at the polls. RDP, which is the primary opposition party, apparently did very well the U.S. overseas voting (which I think was mostly embassy and consular personnel), and it'll be interesting to see if that victory will boost the party in the polls here or if it'll just drive SWAPO supporters out in greater force.

I would say that the time leading up to this year's elections has been a really interesting time to be living in Namibia, but of course, election preparation has been in full swing (not quite as full as the 2008 U.S. elections, certainly, but at least Nam-full) since I first arrived here back in late August. I don't really know a Namibia that isn't busy gearing up to elect their entire government, but the Namibia that I do know is hugely focused on this event. Every other commercial on TV is for something election related; back in September it was for voter registration, in late September it was to announce the election dates, and since then it's been reminders to a) get out and vote, and b) do it without having any sort of rioting. The latest ad, which came out about a week ago, is this easy-listening type song playing over images of various Namibian landscapes and people dressed in green, blue and red (the colors of the Namibian flag, also the SWAPO colors), I personally think it's a little hokey, but nobody asked me.

Since moving to The Farm, I've been getting most of my information about the elections (and everything else for that matter) from NBC (that's Namibian Broadcasting Company), given that we lack newspapers and radio coverage out here. It's a less-than-ideal situation. Although NBC isn't a state-run channel, to say that it's completely independent journalism would also be something of a stretch. There's a definite bias towards SWAPO, but their coverage of other parties has been fair, if not extensive. I've also been reading The Namibian sporadically on my cell phone; they had a series recently where they profiled the different parties' platforms on various issues. It was kind of like hearing party platforms in the U.S.; everyone's in favor of things that are generally good for society, against things that are generally bad for society, and nobody has any tangible plans to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

There have been two SWAPO rallies in recent weeks in the field across the river from my house, both of which were pretty well attended – I'd say at least 100 people at each, which in a town of 1500 is pretty substantial – and pretty tame as well. (I actually didn't even realize the first one was a political event until I heard people cheering “Viva SWAPO!”) I'm under the impression that the majority of my community supports, or at least accepts, the SWAPO government, although we do have some fairly vocal critics around town as well. Even when I was living in Okahandja, though, I didn't find the political campaigning to be particularly aggressive, in stark contrast to the lead-up to elections in the U.S. I have heard reports that RDP supporters have been attacked and rallies broken up, often violently, up north in the Oumsati region (which is where the current president is from), which is really upsetting and kind of scary for my fellow Volunteers serving there.

Stay tuned for more election news!

Assignment: After reading Shel Silverstein's poem “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout,” complete a dialogue between Sarah and her father.

On this assignment, about half the learners just copied lines from the poem into their dialogue (guess we're working on that in next year's English classes), but those who actually tried to write something semi-original got reasonably creative. Oh, and by the way – in Afrikaans, “stout” means “naughty,” which the learners thought was very fitting.

Sarah: No, I will not take the garbage out.

Mr. Stout: Fine, let it be then, let the whole world [drown] in garbage!

- female learner

Sarah: Dad, I will not take the garbage out.

Mr. Stout: You must take the garbage out or I will beat you with the broom.

- female learner

Sarah: No, I will not do it.

Mr. Stout: Sarah [,] you must take the garbage out, or I will banish you!

- male learner

(I think he meant “I will punish you,” though I guess “banish” works too.)

Mr. Stout: Sarah, you must take the garbage out.

Sarah: No, I will not. You take it out.

Mr. Stout: No, I am not your kid! You must take it out!

- female learner

Assignment: Read the passage (about a ceremony to bring rain) and answer the questions that follow.

Question: How do you know the ceremony was successful?

Answer: Because I read the paragraph.

Friday

While rummaging in the refrigerator for milk on Friday morning, I stumbled upon a sheep head, feet, and various innards in a plastic bowl. By this point, finding sheep heads places other than attached to sheep is not really unusual; I would venture to guess that at any given time, the proportion of Namibian refrigerators that contain at least one sheep head is probably pretty high. The procedure for dealing with such discoveries past one's first month in Namibia is straightforward: move the sheep head, along with the accompanying receptacle for catching sheep-head drippings, out of your way and continue your search for more familiar food products.

What was unusual was the question that my 73-year-old host aunt, Auntie Tina, posed to me at lunch that afternoon. “Liz,” she asked me, “are you game for smiley tonight?”

“Am I game for smiley tonight?” Am I game for smiley tonight? As I sat there, with my entire family looking expectantly at me, two questions entered my mind. Who or what is smiley, and where did Auntie Tina learn to use “game” as a verb?

And then Sai, my 13-year-old host brother, pointed to the bowl of sheep parts, now sitting on the counter next to the sink, and an entirely different question popped into my head. Am I game for smiley tonight?

Oh boy.

I was torn between my desire to be open to new experiences and my lack of desire to eat a sheep's head (or feet, or intestines), and so I took a moment to try and formulate an appropriate answer, all eyes still on me. Okay. On the one hand, this family is by now very much accustomed to having Americans come to stay – I'm the third Peace Corps Volunteer at The Farm – but even taking that fact into consideration, it still seems rude to vocalize my gut reaction to the proposed menu. What do I do? How do I walk the fine line between being culturally sensitive and not finding a boiled sheep head staring up at me during dinner tonight?

An eternity later, I managed to come up with what I felt was a pretty diplomatic response. “Okay,” I told them, “I think it's important for me to try new things while I'm here. So yes, I am game for smiley. But you all have to promise me one thing: that you won't tell me what part of the sheep I'm eating until I've decided whether I like it or not.” They agreed that this was fair, and I, somewhat laboriously, finished my non-sheep-based lunch while trying not to listen to Sai's description of the various intestines that would be a part of the evening meal.

Friday Night

It's about time they introduced an elaborate murder plotline to Lorenzo's Wife. And here I was thinking that the heyday of soap operas ended when Passions got canceled. (Isn't that the one where the one lady – Marlena, I think was her name? - was a serial killer, but for some reason nobody in town could figure it out? And with the witches? And those two brothers who never knew which of them was the father of someone's baby?)

I am not going to lie to you, there are many weekdays where knowing that I have a new episode of Lorenzo's Wife waiting for me is the only thing that gets me through the day. When I'm short on patience with my learners, it's nice to be able to picture myself at home, parked in front of the television in my sweatpants, enjoying the mindlessness of Mexican telenovelas rebroadcast in English by the fine people of the Namibian Broadcasting Company. Maybe throw in a glass of South African boxed wine just for good measure. Is it sad that this is my happy place? Maybe a little.

On Friday, though, I could not muster up my usual enthusiasm for the Oscar-worthy (or maybe Desi-worthy?) acting, compelling dialogue (it's like something George Lucas wrote), or subtle camera work that defines the show. Because I knew that when the credits rolled at 8 PM, I would have to go into the kitchen and eat dinner with the family, and that dinner would contain things that I still was not entirely convinced were edible.

Time had no consideration for my concerns, however, and the end of Isabella's antics, Laura's deciet and Natty's naivete rolled around as it always does. Fortunately for me, our guests for the weekend – Manie's cousins from Windhoek – hadn't arrived yet, and so I still had time to reflect on my life prior to when I ate a sheep's head (or feet, or intestines). Unfortunately for me, I was starving, as I usually am by the time we sit down for dinner just after 8 PM, and I found myself deeply regretting my failure to smuggle a couple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into my room. You know, just in case.

The family showed up around 9, and we sat down to dinner shortly thereafter. Sai said grace. We passed around the roosterbrood. (If a more delicious bread product exists on this earth, I don't want to know about it.) We passed around the potatoes. And then there was the afall, head and all. I scooped myself a small, bony portion and passed the dish on. Bite of potato. Bite of roosterbrood. Sip of wine. And then there was nothing left to do but try the sheep.

This would be a much more interesting story if it ended with some sort of superlative, but it doesn't. That sheep part (which I learned the next day was the foot) was not the worst thing I ever ate, but it was far from the most delicious thing. There wasn't any distinctive taste to the meat itself, beyond the spices in which Auntie Tina had prepared it. It was a little chewy, but not offensively so. Really, the biggest issue that I had with it was that for the amount of work it took to get the meat off the bones, it just wasn't really worth it.

They asked me how it was. “It's good,” I replied, trying to sound neutral. I think that not looking like I wanted to die helped my credibility, but it was clear that they expected me to elaborate. “I mean, I like the spices on the meat. The texture is fine. It's just weird for me to think about where it came from, since we don't eat these parts of the animal in the United States. That's all. It's a psychological thing.”

Apparently that was satisfactory, because nobody made any jokes about me needing to have a second helping, or said anything when I ate three pieces of roosterbrood.

Saturday

I don't know why I thought that after Friday's dinner, the sheep-centered portion of my weekend would be over. As it turned out, Friday was only the beginning.

We got up at 6 AM on Saturday, drank about a gallon of coffee each (except Sai, obviously), and jumped in the bakkie to go out to the farm. This is not to be confused with The Farm where I live, which is “the farm” for people from the city (such as it were). For those of us who actually live on The Farm, there is an entirely different level of farm 20 km away, the level of farm where there are actually (live) sheep and goats, and in our case, cows. (The cows belong to Manie's sister, Ousie, who – if what I have heard is accurate – got them as part of a legal settlement.)

Sai had told me on Friday that we were going to “move sheep,” which at the time I did not understand at all, but then again I don't understand Sai 80% of the time, even when he's speaking English. And that's not because his English is bad – it's quite good, really – it's because he's 13 and regularly says things that make little to no sense. Manie explained it in a way that I could actually understand: because the main road (such as it were) to all the area farms (lowercase farms) cuts right past their farm, in the past they've had trouble with animals getting stolen. So we were literally going out to the farm (lowercase) to move the sheep, goats and cows to another part of the farm where they'd be more secure.

This was my second trip out to this part of the farm – we went mid-week when I was here for site visit back in September – and it was pretty much the same as the first time. Manie talked to the farmhands, Sai chased some goats, and I watched sheep got stuck in the fence.

(Question from Mom: Are sheep in fact the dumb and generally irredeemable creatures portrayed in Bellweather [my second-favorite Connie Willis novel] or just mildly retarded as in Babe? Answer: These sheep can barely muster the collective intelligence to get out of their pen when we open the gate and chase them out, let alone to storm Management and eat Romantic Bride Barbie. Connie Willis gave the species WAY too much credit. And they are certainly not smart enough to come up with a secret password.)

So we chased the sheep and their slightly-more-intelligent goat cousins out of the pen, jumped back in the truck and drove out to the main farm. Truly, I have no idea how the animals managed to find us there that afternoon – the evidence is strongly against them being able to figure out the way – but find us they did.

The main farm consists of a couple of small outbuildings – storage sheds, a cold room, and a few others that I don't know the function of – and the farmhouse itself, which though small could comfortably sleep at least 10 people. When we got there, Manie's cousin Boetie and a few other guys (who may work at the farm, I'm not certain) were already working on carving up the first of approximately a dozen sheep we would slaughter that day.

I use the term “we” loosely; I myself did not do any slaughtering. Honestly, what I mostly did was make coffee (according to the precise Nescafe to sugar to milk ratio specified by each family member) and record the weights of each sheep carcass. It's not that I was completely horrified by the whole process; on the contrary, it was actually much less shocking than I originally thought I'd find it. It was more that these people have all been doing this sort of thing for years now – most for longer than I've been alive – and they really have it down to a science.

The guys would go out to the sheep pen and bring an animal into the main yard. One or two people would hold down the sheep while a someone else cut the neck; this is important, because those things do an awful lot of writhing around while they are being disposed of. (And in some cases, even after they've been disposed of, we had a few that were still doing quite a bit of moving on the table.) After the skin was removed (Namibian sheep aren't woolly), the carcass would be hung on a frame and its guts would be removed before weighing. (I did help out with this portion by weighing, recording and tagging all the carcasses.) Once weighed, the rest of the butchering would be done before the carcass was moved to the cold room and the whole process started over with a new animal.

Meanwhile, there was another table where the rest of the family worked with the guts. In my opinion, this was the worst part of the process, since it entailed removing the contents of the stomach and intestines so that those parts could eventually be cooked and eaten. We probably filled at least 5 wheelbarrows with partially- and fully-digested material. It smelled like a manure factory, which is more or less what it was, and at one point fairly early on, when Auntie Tina was working with some or another intestine, she accidentally squirted its contents all over me. Gross.

After I came back from washing up, Mariana advised me not to fall in love with a Baster because if I do, I will have to prove to my future mother-in-law that I know how to properly butcher a sheep. Good to know.

Lunch consisted of a variety of grilled intestines, along with – thank goodness – ribs and leftover roosterbrood from the night before. I will say that coated in braai spices and cooked to crispiness, sheep innards are not so bad; of the four different internal organs I sampled, there was only one (an intestine, but that's as specific as I can be) that I would flat out decline to eat again. Too chewy.

By the time we left the farm just before 4 PM I was exhausted, and I hadn't even done that much (beyond making 9000 cups of coffee). Auntie Tina and I got dropped off at our house, where I went straight to my room for a shower and a nap, while everyone else went to Ousie's dad's house to slaughter 2 goats. Because apparently there hadn't been enough slaughtering already.

Sunday

On Sunday morning I awoke (at 7:30, thank you Namibia for destroying my ability to sleep in) to find the whole family in our kitchen butchering a whole goat carcass on the table.

I got my coffee and excused myself to go watch CNN. There's only so many dead farm animals a gal can take in one weekend.

Last week was my first week at site. I am not going to lie to you, it was terrible. I didn't cry every day (just most of them), but I did think about quitting every day. Usually multiple times. When the dog started barking at 5:30 AM, I would wake up and think about quitting. When my alarm went off at 6:05 AM, I would think about quitting. While I was drinking my coffee and eating my Weet-Bix, I would think about quitting. While people prayed six times a day*, I would close my eyes and fold my hands and think about quitting.

But most of all, I thought about quitting every time I yelled at my fifth grade class, which is pretty much all I did that first week.

I am 95% certain that all the problems I have with my fifth graders stem from the fact that they have spent this entire year being taught by a succession of relief teachers and foreign volunteers, for some of whom bribery was a key component of the classroom management strategy. They are perplexed as to why I do not bring them candy every day or let them watch movies and play games in every class. I am perplexed as to why they do not know the multiplication tables or how to use high-frequency verbs (like “go” or “do”) correctly in the past tense**.

Mercifully, I do not have any students with serious behavior problems, although sometimes I wonder if that might not be preferable. If I had a class of 23 students, with one or two on the extreme end of the misbehavior spectrum, I could (at least in theory) deal primarily with those one or two students, secure in the knowledge that the others wouldn't significantly compound my discipline problems. But I don't have one or two bad apples out of a bunch, I have 23 students who all have a tendency towards moderate misbehavior – and en masse, the effect is overwhelming. They chatter all through class, even when I tell them to be quiet. They steal their classmates' pencils, not because they don't have their own, just because they can. They smack each other with rulers in retribution. They tattle – oh my word, do they tattle.

The ruler-smackers tattle on the pencil-stealers, the pencil-stealers tattle on the ruler-smackers, and the students sitting in the immediate vicinity tattle on both the ruler-smacker and the pencil-stealer for making noise. They yell at each other in Afrikaans (or sometimes in Khoekhoegowab) and then tattle on one another not only for being loud and mean, but also for not speaking English. They tattle on one another for things that happen in the schoolyard during breaks (which have the potential to be issues that demand an appeal to authority, but in practice rarely are), for things that happen in other classes, and for transgressions that occurred months before I even arrived in Namibia. They tattle for things that aren't even tattleable offenses; today I had a girl tattle multiple times on a classmate for mispronouncing the name “Joel” in an English exercise. (And yes, I've checked – there is no permutation of “Joel” in Afrikaans that could possibly construed as inappropriate for classroom use.)

I have tried everything I know how to do, plus some things I read on the internet. Last week, my approach to tattling was to try and infuse reason into the situation by asking the tattler if the offense they wished to report was really damaging their well-being in class. (As in, oh, Johannes is speaking Khoekhoe? Given that you do not understand Khoekhoe, is that really distracting you from doing your work?) I do not know what on Earth made me believe that fifth graders would respond to reason. The Mefloquine must be destroying my brain much more rapidly than originally predicted.

Luckily, my mom came to the rescue with this website about elementary classroom management, and with the exception of the mysterious “Joel” incident this afternoon, the outrageous tattling has more or less come to a halt this week. My new approach involves responding to anything that does not really merit a response (“Teacher, he is writing with a pen!”) by saying “Thank you for letting me know,” and then moving on with whatever I was doing before the interruption occurred. For offenses that I have already responded to a thousand times before (such as pencil-stealing and ruler-smacking, recently expanded to include gum-chewing), I refer them to the posted classroom rules and their prohibitions against these actions. (Rules No. 4, 5, and 8, for the record, and that's actually how I respond. “Teacher, Lusin hit me with a ruler!” “Lusin, Rule 5.”) Tattles that may reveal more serious underlying problems (“Teacher, he was teasing me during break!”) get follow up questions.

Unfortunately, getting control of the tattling situation is only the tip of the iceberg. Monday and Tuesday of this week were good days, according to my new, significantly lower standards for what constitutes a “good day” in the fifth grade, but today they demanded a game as soon as they walked in the door for second period. I said, “We must do our work first,” and I think that was where I lost the battle. They consented to work on the Afrikaans assignments Manie gave them to complete in his absence (he had to be in Mariental today) after I pointed out that all of us, including me, would get in trouble if they did not do their work (one girl said “Yes, you will be beaten.”), but my refusal to devote four periods of English and maths to games? Unthinkable!

(Have I mentioned that Grade 5 has to write a national exam in English and maths in 3 weeks, the results of which will be submitted to the World Bank [or something like that] for their use in reassessing educational funding for Namibia? Or that a failing grade in English – even if the student passes all other subjects – is enough to hold that student back a year?)

I admit that before last week, I did not believe in self-doubt as part of this experience. Even when things sucked in training, as they sometimes did, the possibility that I might not ultimately succeed and thrive in this environment...well, it wasn't a possibility. The challenges that I faced in PST were ones that required me to work harder at things I was already vaguely aware of how to do – study harder, ask more questions, reflect more on the situations in which I found myself. I never had to reinvent the wheel during training, which is partially a credit to how Peace Corps training is set up. They give you more wheels than you know what to do with, more than you could possibly use in just eight weeks.

And now I'm here, and I'm an old clunker sitting on cinder blocks in a trailer park. I'm not just dealing with a lack of wheels here, I have so many problems I hardly know where to start. During PST, I looked at the Volunteers who had gone before me – not just here, and not just the ones I know, but all of them in all the countries in all the world – and said, “Well, if they could do it, I can too.” And now that I'm here, all I can think is “What the f...how did they do this, and how am I to be expected to do it? Are you people completely insane? WHAT AM I DOING HERE?” It's not a good feeling, and I truly believe that my stubbornness is the primary – some days, the sole – reason that I am still here right now.

But dammit, I am determined that I will not be driven out of the Peace Corps, after over a year of waiting, by a bunch of fifth graders. No freakin' way. Either they've got to get better, or I do. And thus far, they haven't proven themselves to be a safe bet. So back to work I go.

*Before you even ask: yes, we are a public school, and yes, this is cool with everyone involved. I am aware of the existence of no less than six churches here at The Farm (pop. 1500), and would not be entirely surprised to find that there are more of them lurking around.

**Reminder: Namibian schools are mother-tongue (or prevailing-area-tongue) medium for Grades 1-4, with English taught as a second language throughout. Beginning in Grade 5, the medium of instruction for all subjects switches to English and students study the mother-tongue in much the same way that students in the U.S. study English in school. But it's not totally a language problem; my kids don't know that “five times five is twenty-five,” but they don't know that “5 x 5 = 25” either.

Congratulations Peace Corps Namibia Group 30 (aka The Dirty Thirty). We did it!

(I promise more pictures and a real update later this week - I am exhausted after the first day of school!)

Dear Mr. President,

Congratulations on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. It would be fitting if you were to use the momentum from this honor to push for increased funding for the Peace Corps...just sayin'.

Sincerely,

Liz Wise

(Who is seven days away from becoming a real Peace Corps Volunteer!)

Dear Karen, Ryan and Tara,

Thank you for the fantastic care package! I loved the photos and letters, and I'm really excited to work on the friendship bracelets with the kids in my community.

Lots of love,

Liz

Dear Random Namibian Person Who Keeps SMSing Me,

Here's what I propose: you stop sending me 40 text messages per day, and I will tell all the women in my training class to stop giving your number to creepy men in Okahandja. Sound like a fair trade?

No Love,

Liz

Dear Women of Peace Corps/Namibia,

Until the conditions set in the previous letter are fulfilled, please feel free to contact me if you're in need of a fake phone number to give out to creepy men in your local area.

Solidarity, sisters.

- Liz, Group 30

Here's my new address, to which you can start sending mail as soon as you want to! (It probably won't get there any sooner than I will!) If there's something on it's way to me at the Peace Corps office address, it's still got 3.5 weeks to get here; letters that arrive there for me after I swear in will be forwarded to me, packages I'll be able to pick up.

Elizabeth Wise, PCV

PO Box 4562

Rehoboth

Namibia

If you are thinking of sending me a package at my new address, I would encourage you to do so no later than the first week of November to ensure that it gets to me intact and in a timely manner. All of our mail comes in via Johannesburg, and service from to Windhoek tends to slow down around the holidays, making packages left sitting in offices or shipping centers more likely to be tampered with. Letters don't run the same risk, and will be every bit as much appreciated!

Things I'd love to receive if you're thinking of sending a package: books, single-serving drink mix packets (the water at The Farm is safe to drink, but hardly tasty), any candy that won't melt, books, magazines (news, entertainment, whatever), movies/music (even better if they can be copied to share)...did I mention books?

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Integration and inactivity are the enemies of regular blog updates. I'm not sure that I can claim to have hit that first mark just yet – although I am using little meaningless Afrikaans phrases such as “Izit?” (which is not quite the Afrikaans equivalent of “yanni” or “mumkin,” but is equally devoid of any real communicative function) like a pro – but the level of activity that would even be remotely interesting to people not part of PC/Namibia Group 30 has basically come to a complete halt.

To illustrate: the highlight of last week was when my friend Nikki got not one, not two, but THREE GIGANTIC care packages ON THE SAME DAY, and one of them contained boxed hummus mix. (And also Larbars, which are probably the most delicious bar-food product ever created by man.) And we went to her house and ate said hummus with carrots and she gave me a box of it to take home with me and it was ridiculously exciting.

Rest assured that with swearing in and the move to site on the horizon (just 10 days!), I am sure that I will have some good stories to share over the next few weeks. In the meantime, enjoy some brief updates from life here in Namibia...

...and then there were 32

Group 30 had some sad news the week after site visit, when one of our members announced her decision to return to the United States. We have really felt Amy's absence over the past two weeks and will continue to do so as we wrap up training and prepare for swearing in. Amy, thanks for being my travel buddy and co-dishwasher extraordinaire, and know that you are loved and missed very much here in Okahandja! I will think of of you every time I eat KFC...or hot browns, if those make an appearance in Namibian cuisine during the next two years.

...just wait 5 minutes.

The more time I spend here in Namibia, the more I am convinced that it is kind of like what the Midwest would be like if the Midwest relocated to Africa; this is particularly apparent when it comes to the weather. Much like in the places where I grew up, the weather in Namibia is rather unpredictable, and it is difficult for Namibians to agree on what "typical" weather for any given season looks like. For example, I had initially been given to understand that the rainy season began in November and lasted throughout the southern hemisphere summer. Not so; the first week back from site visit it rained almost every day and was gloomy and overcast whenever rain wasn't falling. And thus the tune changed. "Oh yeah," the Namibians told us, "it's totally normal for it to start raining in late September. Hope you brought an umbrella."

And with that note, we had a week of blue skies and warm breezes, followed by one of the most spectacular thunderstorms I've ever seen in my life. Since then, the skies have been clear, but now it's the temperature that's starting to get a little screwy: mornings are back to being a little chilly, but the afternoons are ridiculously hot, especially with 40 or so of us sitting, sweltering, around the main hall at the Kukuri Center all afternoon. We've now got the same trainers who assured us on the 90F days in September that it wouldn't get much hotter than this telling us "just wait until November," as we refill our water bottles for the eighteenth time and fold our handouts into fans. "But wait," they qualify, "you're going to Hardap, never mind, don't worry. It doesn't get that hot there." "No," counters the person from Hardap region, "it is much hotter in Hardap than it is in Owamboland." "Uh-uh, no way. You have never lived in the north in the summer. Oh my word!" And so on, and so forth. (Or as they would say, "And what, what, what.")

...wait, really?

I very much appreciate everyone who emailed or Facebook messaged me about the Afrikaans rant I posted after site visit; I'm happy to report that Afrikaans and I are in a much better place now than we were two weeks ago. (Although I do have to say that my mid-training language proficiency exam was NOT a fun experience – I cried afterwords, which I only mention because I'm really proud that I didn't cry during the test – but I ended up doing pretty well [Intermediate Low on the ACTFL scale, if that means anything to you] on it, and upon review of the tape, it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd built it up to be in my head.) There are definitely some very ridiculous aspects of the language, and of the particular language-learning process that my fellow trainees and I are currently undergoing, that have become very apparent to me recently.

The first is just how unattractive a language Afrikaans is when spoken by non-native speakers. (And even occasionally by native or near-native speakers.) Like its cousins, German and Dutch, Afrikaans uses the gutteral "g" – the one that sounds like you are hacking up a lung – in many of its organic words. This is not a pleasant sound, but it is exponentially more unpleasant in words where it appears more than once. The word "smile," for example, is "glimlag" in Afrikaans, which actually sounds something like "[hack]limla[hack]." Similarly, "happy" is rendered as "gelukkig," or rather, "[hack]lukki[hack]." This particular word makes "Happy Birthday," a song that when translated already suffers from having way too many syllables squeezed into not nearly enough space, one of the most cacophanous tunes ever. (Though to be fair, our Afrikaans class' vocal shortcomings don't help much. Lauren, I'm sorry that we subjected you to that on your special day. Twice.)

Sometimes – and by sometimes, I mean almost every day – the other languages call us out on not being hardcore, on account of Afrikaans' many resemblances to English. To some extent, they are correct. We do not have noun classes, or concords, and we definitely do not have any clicks. (Can I get a hallelujah?) However, in spite of the knowledge that we do have it easier than a lot of the other language groups, we in Afrikaans do not like it when people remind us of this. It's like talking smack about your own family; you can do it, but you better not catch anyone else doing it or there will be hell to pay. After last week's lesson on vocabulary in the home, though, I think we collectively need to reconsider this attitude.

J.J.: [referring to a dining room] Hoe naam ons dit? (What do we call this?)

Me: [shrugs] Ek ken nie. 'n Eet-kamer. (I don't know. An eat-room.)

J.J.: Ja! Dit is die eetkamer! (Yes! This is the dining room!)

Johanna: [referring to a wardrobe] Wat is dit? (What is this?)

Dasha: Dit is 'n kas. (That is a cabinet.)

Johanna: Nie, dit is nie 'n kas nie. (No, this is not a cabinet.)

Dasha: Dit is 'n...hang-kas. (That is a..."hang"-cabinet.)

Johanna: Ja! Dit is 'n hangkas! (Yes! That is a wardrobe!)

...huh?

Truly, the language-learning process does not stop when we're dismissed from Afrikaans class every day at 1 PM (after FOUR HOURS), because even though we're walking out into an environment where English is the medium of communication...well, let's not forget that this is Namibia. I'd heard tell of the linguistic phenomenon that is Namlish prior to my arrival in the Land of the Brave, but Namlish is so much more than English spoken by non-native (often multilingual) speakers. So, so much more. Namlish is literally what you would see if you could put Namibia into a little room and observe it through a one-way mirror for about a week. This language, such as it were, is so fitting for what life here is like, it's unbelievable.

"Izit?" (which literally means "Is it so?" – like I said, it doesn't really serve much actual purpose in a sentence) is really just the tip of the iceberg. My latest favorite Namlish turn of phrase is the tendency to end every utterance with "nay?" Remember Alyson Hannigan's character from American Pie, who ended every sentence with rising intonation, such that it always sounded like she was asking a question? It's kind of like that. Ma and I had an exchange on Sunday afternoon as she and Pa were leaving to go to her brother's house for a while:

Ma: Liz, you must lock the door.

Me: Okay, Ma.

Ma: Adriaan [my 16-year-old host brother] will be home later, nay?

Me: Are you asking me if he'll be home later, or are you telling me that he'll be home later?

Ma: Yes.

AND THAT'S THE OTHER THING. This happens to me EVERY SINGLE DAY, and every time it happens around other Americans, they say "You brought this upon yourself. You should know by now not to make this a choice." It happens in language class, too; we will ask "Is this a verb or a noun?" and J.J. and/or Johanna will say "Yes." And it's not necessarily that they mean to confirm that the second thing you said is true. Evidently, there exists a belief in Namibia that "yes" is a valid answer even when the question isn't one that those of us who speak American English (or any other English, I suspect) would typically think to answer in the affirmative or negative.

...and that, kids, is the story of The Goat.

(So this isn't my story, but it's way, way too good not to share. Though it was better when Shannon told it with facial expressions.)

Here in Namibia, we like to eat meat. A lot of meat. Preferably one to two different varieties of meat at each meal. And we don't just like to eat meat, we like to eat fresh meat. Liz, you may ask, what do you mean by "fresh meat?" Well, ladies and gentlemen, what I mean to say is that the more recently our meat was running around on its two to four legs, the better.

So on Sunday afternoon, when after a weekend at the farm (not my The Farm), my friend Shannon's family decided they wanted some fresh meat for dinner that evening, naturally they determined that the best course of action would be to tie up a goat, throw it in the trunk of their car, and bring it back to Okahandja to slaughter and prepare on the braai. In order to have a proper braai, however, there are always certain preparations that need to be made, and so the family was not immediately ready to slaughter the goat upon arriving home. No problem, they have a big house; they decided to corral the goat in a small room in the house until killin' time.

Of course, it wasn't that straightforward. If it had been, you wouldn't be reading this story. What happened was they – for whatever reason – had some difficulty persuading the goat to go calmly and quietly to await its fate (who'd have thought it?), and the goat got loose and started running around the house. Which was a problem, because a) having a goat running around your house is a recepie for disaster, of some sort, and b) Shannon's twin four-year-old host brothers were terrified of this goat. (I'm not clear on whether they are terrified of goats in general, or just the ones that get loose in their house.) So upon seeing this terrified goat running through their house, the brothers make a beeline for their bedroom to hide under their blankets until the goat is recaptured. Except that the goat has the same idea and runs into the room after these little boys, and so when they peek out from their hiding place to see if it's safe to emerge, what do they see? The goat. They scream, the goat screams and runs from the room, and the chase continues.

They did eventually catch the goat. And Shannon said it was delicious.

(Also on the subject of food, my friend Julie's family recently butchered a whole warthog on their kitchen table, and she made a video of it to share with everyone in training. The music track she selected was "Hakuna Matata." It is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Check it out here.)

...I guess there are things going on here, after all.

Also, I'd just like to share the fact that I'm posting this FROM MY OWN COMPUTER. Huzzah! And thanks, John!

Namibia feels you on the hand thing. (This is my friend Julie demonstrating.)

Saturday, September 19, 2009

I just got back from a week-long visit to my permanent site, which for the purpose of this blog will henceforth be known as The Farm. Everyone in Namibia has a farm (or if they don't, then someone they are related to does). This has thus far been a source of great amusement for me, because people will talk about sending their children “to the farm,” which in Namibia literally means that the children go to stay on the farm, as opposed to that the children are being discretely euthanized.

If you would have told me about The Farm before I moved to Namibia, I would have wondered how anyone could possibly live in such a place. There are maybe 1 500 people there, and the only stores in town are little tuck shops that sell bread and soap and cold drinks and not much else. To get to the nearest major road, you have to drive 50 kilometers down a dirt and gravel road, the last 20K of which is not so much a “gravel road” as “a bunch of dirt and gravel that people happen to drive on.” In a few months, when the rain starts, many of the depressions along said road will become rivers, and leaving town will become an infinitely more complicated matter.

Now that I've been there, I cannot wait to go back. My host family is terrific. My students are energetic; a little rowdy, but loveable, especially my fifth graders. My school and community are full of possibilities.

The school itself is quite small – just under 150 learners (which is what we call students here) from pre-primary (kindergarten) to Grade 7, and five teachers plus the principal, Manie, who also serves as a teacher for some of the upper primary (Grades 5-7) subjects. My poor fifth graders, who will be my main responsibility when I return in October, have not had a permanent teacher this entire year, and I think they're feeling (understandably) neglected and a little wary of yet another new face in the front of their classroom. I worked with their English and math classes this week, as well as with arts and library for all the upper primary learners. (Thank goodness I spent so long working at DCM.)

When I wasn't in the classroom, I spent a lot of the week getting to know the community; not just in The Farm itself, but also a number of people in Windhoek with local roots. I met quite a bit of Manie's extended family in Windhoek and The Farm, attended a party for the pastor's wife's 70th birthday on Saturday night (2 hours of speeches, toasts, and songs in Afrikaans), and visited the actual farm (the part with cows et al.) on Tuesday afternoon. And spent a ridiculous amount of time playing Uno and Hangman with my thirteen-year-old host brother.

I had kind of realized this before, but the drive down to The Farm last weekend confirmed my suspicion that Namibia is ridiculously beautiful. Seriously. From here to Windhoek, it's mountains to the east and savannahs to the west; there's one point on the B1 where the road cuts through the rock and as you reach the crest of the hill it's all right there, framed like a picture. About 30K south of Windhoek, the mountains begin to trail off further to the west, and suddenly it's just flat, and the contrast is unbelievable. It's savannah exactly the way you imagine it should look, the tall yellow grass and the stunted trees and the brown scrub. And it just goes on forever, until it hits the sky, which is about a thousand times bigger here. The stars are like nothing I've ever seen before, even better than I remember them being in the Wadi Rum or Mt. Sinai, and when the moon is full it's so bright you could read a book outside in the middle of the night.

Thank you to everyone who has written to me offering up resources for my students; once I've figured out what our most pressing needs are, I will definitely let you know.

Monday, September 21, 2009

(“Afrikaans, I will bite you!”)

Afrikaans and I are not friends right now. Not even a little bit.

It all started at site visit. Or rather, it did not start at site visit, because exchanging greetings and basic introductions was the extent of the Afrikaans that I spoke the whole week. And even that was pretty one-sided, since most of those conversations went something like this:

Me: Goeiemiddag, hoe gaan dit met u? (Good afternoon, how are you?)

Afrikaans-speaking person: Oh my word! You speak Afrikaans! [To everyone else within earshot] She speaks Afrikaans! Wow! [To Milan, the other PCV] Milan, why is her Afrikaans so much better than yours? Why don't you ever speak Afrikaans?

Milan: [Thinks about pushing me in front of a speeding combi; lucky for me there aren't many of those on The Farm.]

Me: Nie, ek praat net 'n bietjie Afrikaans. (No, I only speak a little bit of Afrikaans.)

That's a problem, but it's not my biggest problem. The real issue, as I am continually having to point out to the many well-intentioned Afrikaans-speaking people in my life, is that my current working vocabulary consists of perhaps 150-200 words, a good chunk of which are non-content words. And unfortunately, when one's vocabulary is that limited, discerning meaning is unbelievably freaking difficult, even with the assistance of non-verbal cues. When my host mom tells me “Go to the cabinet and get me the salt,” I hear “Go to the...and get me...”. I know that she is not asking for carrots or water or milk or onions or a spoon, but that still leaves approximately 5624 things in that kitchen that she could be asking for, the terms for which I do not know.

Don't even get me started on how frustrating it is to have people use the “repeat slower and louder” approach when I don't catch what they say the first time. Or the second time. Or the thirty-fifth time. There are literally not words to describe the humiliation. Choosing how to spend my evenings is agonizing: do I hole up in my room all evening and risk everyone thinking that I'm rude, or brave the kitchen or living room and leave everyone convinced that I'm an idiot, an object of ridicule, even?

Do you understand what's going on? As long as you have no follow up questions then yes. Yes, I do.

Our mid-PST language proficiency exam is on Friday, and I am actually not that worried about it. Those 150-200 words that I know, I know like the back of my hand. I can greet any person I might meet, formally or informally and in a temporally appropriate manner. I can tell you who I am and why I'm here and where I stay and for how long. I can ask if this bus is going to Rehoboth or where the principal's office is. I can tell you that I have danced, am dancing, and will dance. But it's the things that I don't know, and the limited amount of time I have to learn even a portion of those things, that worry me. Today in class they asked us to draw up a list of the things we want to review for the exam, and a list of things we want to learn – the second list was three times longer than the first, and could easily have gone on further.

I've got four weeks. Better get back to studying.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

I got my first choice site!! Yay!!

I am going to be teaching upper primary English (grades 5-7) at a small, rural school in the Hardap region, about 80K from Rehoboth and 100K from Mariental. I will be the first Peace Corps Volunteer to serve at this school, though there is an education Volunteer from Group 27 who lives in the village and teaches at another school there. (Maybe the secondary school? I don't know for sure.) I am really excited for the challenge of being the first to work at this school, though I admit that I'm glad I'll have another Volunteer there to help me out for the first few weeks at site...especially after Raymond (our Safety and Security Coordinator) scared the pants off us during our transportation safety session.

My school is quite small – just under 150 learners (leerlinge) and only 6 teachers (onderwysers), according to the site profile the Peace Corps gave me – and like many other rural schools in Namibia, it has a student hostel (koshuis) where many of the learners will live during the school year. After a few weeks living with a host family in the community, I will move into a one-bedroom flat on the school compound (skoolterrain) where I will have running water and electricity. My principal (skoolhoof), who I'll meet on Friday, has worked with Peace Corps Volunteers before (including the guy from Group 27 who precedes me in the village), and all of the Education staff have mentioned that he's a great mentor. Awesome! Possible secondary projects include working on the school library (biblioteek - whether improving it or developing it from scratch, I'm not certain) and working on community projects related to HIV/AIDS education.

There are two other Volunteers from my group in the same region – Debbie (ICT) and Steve (Secondary Science Ed.). I believe we'll all be using Mariental as our banking/shopping/postal town; even though Rehoboth is technically closer to me, I'll go the extra 20K if it means I can meet up with friends for a day. I've been told that I may also be able to use my school's mailing address, but that's something I'll find out for sure next week during site visit. Another Volunteer, Tracey (Secondary Math Ed.), is in the southern part of the Khomas region (the next region north of Hardap), within reasonable traveling distance for weekend visits. Most of us in the south are quite spread out, though we're definitely planning to make an effort to see one another as often as our schedules permit.

After getting our site assignments, we went out for pizza (and Windhoek Lager, Namibia's beer of choice) in town to celebrate our future and Sarah B.'s birthday!

Saturday, September 5

So, let's talk about one of the most important topics that any travel-related blog can possibly cover: food. Today was my training class' traditional cooking day, when we gathered with our trainers and host families at the Kakuri Center to prepare and enjoy a wide variety of foods from around Namibia.

Prior to today, my experience with food in this country really hadn't differed substantially from what I encountered in the United States, excepting the Namibian affinity for butter and “ketchup” (a term I use loosely) that I alluded to in my last post. While attending Camp Peace Corps during our first week in-country, we were introduced to the two major food groups in Namibia – starch and meat – but in familiar forms: rice and pasta, beef and chicken and fish. I think the most “Namibian” food we ate during that week was porridge (pap in Afrikaans), which was memorable primarily because it strongly resembled the amazing mashed potatoes we'd had the night before in appearance, but definitely not in taste. (I remember sitting next to Amy at dinner that night and both of us remarking that the porridge-masquerading-as-potatoes tasted a little different tonight!) At my homestay, the types of things on the menu have been much the same, although we did have an excellent curry the other night.

We arrived at the Kakuri Center before 7 AM today to start setting up for a long, hot day of cooking. (Forecast for today was 36C, which is about 95F – yes, this is spring in Namibia!) After helping to set up the braai (barbeque) and tables for the Afrikaans group, I headed out to where the river isn't with my friend Steve, a few training staff members, and our Resource PCV for the week, Emily, to get some firewood. By the time we returned, they'd slaughtered the chickens (who were bought in Windhoek yesterday) and were beginning to clean the carcasses over at the Owambo area. I am not really sorry that I missed that part of the program; evidently, in my absence, my classmates Irina and Dasha took care of one of the birds.

I floated around for most of the morning, helping to prepare slaai (salads – potato, carrot/apple, and beet), roosterbrood (bread cooked on the braai), goat and vegetable stew, and skaap braai (barbequed sheep) at the Afrikaans fires and observing the cooking at other stations. I got to sample some Otjiherero sour milk (tasted like unflavored yogurt, which is pretty much what it is) and watch the Herero women, all decked out in their cattle-horned hats, prepare bread in an earth oven, clean fish and chickens with the Silozi and Owambo groups, and enjoy some fresh (and hot!) fat cakes by the Khoekhoe fires. In spite of snacking on and off all morning, by the time lunch was served at 1 PM, I was starving. I tried a little bit of everything – all the Afrikaans dishes I'd helped prepare, fried fish from the Caprivi region, two delicious spinach dishes from Kavango, bean stew with peanuts from Owamboland, two kinds of porridge (honestly, they all kinda taste the same), the Herero earth bread (served drizzled in goat fat and quite delicious), sheep intestine (a little chewy, but inoffensive flavor-wise), dumplings in sauce, and of course, more fat cake. Because it is not a party in Namibia without fat cakes. And butter. And ketchup.

Tracey and Irina washing/thawing the goat meat.

Steve checking on the roosterbrood (bread made on the grill).

My ma teaching Brad to braai.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Goeiemiddag! Afrikaans is coming along slowly but surely. This morning, we had a “walk around” lesson, wherein we descended upon the unsuspecting population of Okahandja and forced passersby to converse with us; not an easy or comfortable task, given that after four days we still only know how to greet and take leave. I guess the good news is that I am now highly proficient at greeting people according to the time of day and their status with respect to gender and age.

I can also say that I am an English teacher (“Ek is Engels onderwyseres”) and sing a song about how Jesus made me beautiful and I am therefore going to shake what he gave me. (And of course, when we sing this song during assembly, we do shake what Jesus gave us.) Thanks, Peace Corps!

On Friday, I moved out of “Camp Peace Corps” and into my host family's home on the outskirts of town. These particular neighborhoods were the coloured section of town under South African rule (the next neighborhood in was the black area, and whites lived in town), although it's diversified to some degree over the past two decades. My family consists of an older married couple (who I call Ma and Pa) and their teenaged grandson, who I've seen for a grand total of 15 minutes since I moved in. The grandson was appropriated to help out around the house; his family lives a few blocks away (though I haven't met them yet), and they have many other family members – both in the American sense of “people related to you” and the Namibian sense of “people who are up to six degrees of separation from you” - in the neighborhood and in town. At the house, I have my own room and bathroom, complete with hot and cold running water and a Western-style toilet, and we have a TV in the living room that gets two channels (NBC [Namibian Broadcasting Corp.] and Africa ONE). So in case you were wondering, no, I'm not exactly roughing it here – but nobody really is.

Ma is hypersensitive about my health and is convinced that my stuffed up nose and sleeping habits (I go to bed around 9 PM and wake up at 6 AM because life here is exhausting) mean that I have Swine Flu. Apparently there have been several cases of H1N1 in Namibia, and people are pretty freaked out by it. Personally, I am more concerned about rabies, having had the fear of God put into me by Kate, the PCMO, on Friday afternoon. I am giving the dogs in my neighborhood (everyone has at least one dog for security) a wider berth than the speeding cars. Seriously.

I am eating quite well, although the Namibians believe that everything is improved through the addition of either a) butter, b) ketchup, or c) both. Today for lunch, Ma packed me two peanut butter and butter (yes, I typed that correctly) sandwiches, two fish fillets and two apples...I ate one of the sandwiches at lunch, the apples during tea breaks, and gave one of the fish fillets to Tracy. I had been glad that we hadn't run into any problems related to my eating habits, but when I got home I learned that we have; I told her that the food was good, but she had packed me too much, and she said that she doesn't think I eat enough. Namibian food is heavy on starches and meats, although Ma is pretty good about getting some vegetables on our plates as well (tonight we had cooked pumpkin and beet salad with our meat and rice). Since coming here, I have stopped drinking coffee (since it's all instant – NesCaf, anyone?) and fallen deeply in love with Rooibos tea. It's so good, and my Ma gives me at least four cups a day, although she cannot believe that I take it without sugar.

Thanks to loads of downtime this weekend, I'm almost done with my first Peace Corps book (Paul Theroux's “Dark Star Safari”), which has been a pretty good read. My friend Caitie is bringing me “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” tomorrow – right now we are all trying to read books belonging to other people, figuring that we will have months to be alone with our own books in the not-so-distant future.

Speaking of said not-so-distant future, site announcements are a mere 9 days away, and our site visits will begin at the end of next week. Since I am learning Afrkiaans, I am able to narrow my placement down to the following: not the Caprivi Strip, not the Kavango, and probably not Owamboland. (Please refer to a map of Namibia for the irony here; basically, this means I could be nearly anywhere in the remaining 85% of the country. I promise to provide you with a totally sweet “map” of Namibia in the next post.)

All for now! Totsiens!

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

I got my language training assignment this morning, and I will be studying Afrikaans! My trainer's name is Johanna, and there are two other girls (Dasha and Irina) in my group, which is one of four groups studying Afrikaans. Other groups are learning Rukwangali, Silozi (which is spoken in the Caprivi Strip), Oshindonga, and Otjiherero.

So far, all we've done is review the alphabet (there are a few pronunciation differences in Afrikaans, and the letters c, x, and z aren't used except in loanwords) and learn some greetings and responses.

“Howezit?” “Lekke.”

“Vera?” “Oraait.”

“Verder?” “Goed.”

“Isja?” “/na!”

(They all basically mean the same thing. The last response is actually borrowed from Khoekhoe [pronounced kway-kway], which is the Khoesan [i.e. clicking] language spoken in some parts of Namibia.)

(Keep on reading - there's another new post below!)

Wow, I can already see that translating my extensive journal entries (I've been averaging 5 pages per day in my Moleskine...shoulda brought more than two of those!) into blog posts is going to be much more difficult than I'd anticipated...well, I'll try to give you a decent rundown of the past week!

August 18: Staging. Probably necessary, but not exciting. I did get my own room at the hotel in DC (since we're an odd number and I am the last alphabetically), that was pretty sweet.

August 19: Yellow Fever shots at the Department of Health and Human Services. Saw lots of nice things in DC...from the window of the bus. We arrived at Dulles 7 hours before our flight was to depart, only to find that the Air South Africa desk doesn't even open until 1:30 (we got there just before 11 AM). Spent lots of time sitting on a pile of luggage, gathering dirty looks from TSA.

Flight Part 1 (DC to Dakar): There was a screaming baby seated two rows behind me. I am not normally a praying person, but I was begging for them to either get off or be booted off the plane in Dakar. Unfortunately, they stuck around for the second leg of the flight. I watched 17 Again, which was even worse than I thought it would be, and a couple episodes of House.

Flight Part 2: I actually got about 4 hours of sleep before being roused by the aforementioned screaming child. Okay, fine. Around lunchtime, we started flying over Namibia, which from the air does look quite a bit like Tatooine, actually; red-brown earth with sporadic patches of brown scrub (it is winter here, afterall) and metal-roofed buildings. Maybe moisture farms.

August 20: Arrive in Johannesburg, where it is FREEZING, and are quickly shuttled off to the hotel. I ate dinner and enjoyed some Windhoek Lager with my fellow trainees before calling it an early night.

August 21: Johannesburg to Windhoek. No missing luggage for me, yay! Although one girl in my group did miss our flight because she lost her Peace Corps passport with her Namibian visa...she made it here, though, don't worry.

We were greeted in song by the entire training staff at the conference center gate, and once inside they performed about half a dozen songs for us. If these people are half as good at training us as they are at singing, we are all set – I think my friend Brad made some recordings, so if he manages to get those up online anytime in the near future, I'll be sure to link that here. We actually begin every morning with songs – usually one performed by the training staff, then the Namibian national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner, and our Group 30 anthem, to which we all know the words but not the meaning (I think it's in Oshidonga, but I'm not certain). Later in the day, we were taken on a walking tour of town, where we visited several grocery stores (well stocked, peanut butter, even!) and the local artisan's market.

Since then, our training has mostly consisted of general knowledge sessions – health (I've gotten two shots so far, plus started on Lariam – that's the one that makes you crazy), safety/security, administrative issues, etc. Again, not too exciting, but probably necessary. We have two resource PCVs here this week (they actually leave Tuesday morning), Katie and Parker, who have been amazing. Parker is just finishing up his first year (his blog is Paka in Afrika on the PC Journal site), and Katie is extending her service for a third year. I haven't gotten to know our Language and Culture Facilitators (LCFs – i.e. language teachers) very well yet, but that'll change on Tuesday morning when I start my language training.

On Sunday, the English education trainees (I think there are 18 of us out of 33 total) had our permanent site interviews. We find out those sites in two weeks, and travel to them for a two week stay shortly thereafter. All my preferred sites were small, rural schools, and my APCD (Associate Peace Corps Director - basically, my boss at PC/Namibia) had great things to say about the principals at all. Hopefully they'll see fit to place me at one of those sites, but we'll see. I honestly cannot imagine being unhappy at any site - I LOVE it here, and I am smiling non-stop. I'm sure that it will be more challenging when I move out into the town to live with a host family, but I am ready for anything.

This weekend, our town hosted ceremonies commemorating the Herero genocide. The Herero people used to be the majority ethic group (Namibia has 11 major languages, and many additional minority languages) in central Namibia, but when the Germans invaded in 1904, they sought to colonize this part of the country. The Herero resisted fiercly, but ultimately their armies were defeated and 80,000 men, women and children were slaughtered not far from here. The surviving soldiers and leaders fled to Botswana, where they lived out their days in exile. In 1924, the remains of several important Herero generals and heros were moved from Botswana and reburied in a church across the street from my training center. We went to watch one of the ceremonies, but unfortunately the Volunteers who took us didn't speak any Otjiherero (the language of the Herero people), so we didn't really know what was going on! Wednesday is another holiday, commemorating the first battle in the Namibian war for independence from South Africa.

Hello from South Africa! I am sitting in my hotel room in Johannesburg after two exhausting days of meetings and travel, but I am so thrilled to finally be in Africa (although I'd barely know it - I've only been in the airport and my hotel) and to be going to Namibia tomorrow morning! We actually got to see Namibia from the air this afternoon. My first reaction? My mom and brother were right, this is Tatooine - lots of sand and scrub, big stretches of empty road and small groups of houses and buildings scattered across the landscape. I got a little bit of sleep on the first leg of the flight (we stopped in Dakar to refuel), and about 3-4 hours more on the second leg - not nearly enough, but not too shabby.

There are 33 of us in my group, about 2/3 English teachers and the remainder are math, science and computer teachers. The majority are fairly recent college graduates, but there are some people who have had more professional teaching experience as well. It's a fantastic group, and I'm looking forward to getting to know everyone better during training!

It is freezing here, and I really hope it's not as cold in Namibia or I might wish I'd packed that second fleece after all...

It's done. 70.2 lbs. and 101 inches - larger and heavier than I would have preferred, I think, but I can manage them on my own and they're within the weight and size limits that the Peace Corps and United Airlines permit.

I spent about 4 hours yesterday pouring over my lists, cutting things out, moving things around, and I think this is the most functional configuration of stuff I could possibly have, if maybe not the most efficient use of space possible. I'll be living out of that blue nylon bag from Tuesday until Friday morning, when we finally arrive (assuming all goes off hitch-free) in Windhoek. The backpack is for use during training (I even managed to fit my sleeping bag in there!), and the black duffel has the other half of my clothes, plus my rewards for after swearing-in: 20 new pairs of underwear, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and A Civil Campaign.

Here's what we've got...

Clothing: 2 long sleeved t-shirts; 5 short sleeved t-shirts; 3 tank tops; 2 long sleeved button down shirts; 5 short sleeved dress shirts; 2 pairs of dress slacks; 1 pair of jeans; 3 ankle length skirts; 2 dresses; 2 pairs of knee length shorts; 1 bathing suit; 30 pairs of underwear; 4 pairs of socks; 2 bras; 4 sports bras; 1 pair of long underwear bottoms; 1 pair of athletic capris; 1 pair of pajamas; 1 pair of sweatpants; 1 fleece; 2 cardigan sweaters; 1 warm hat; 1 pair of gloves; 1 scarf; 4 bandanas.

Shoes: 2 pairs of slip-on sandals; 1 pair of flats; 1 pair of sneakers; 1 pair of rubber flip flops.

Hygiene: 1 camping towel; 1 large bottle of hand sanitizer; 1 travel size bottle of hand sanitizer; 3 toothbrushes; 1 bottle of sunscreen; 1 tube of body lotion; 1 pumice stone; 1 pair of tweezers; 1 pair of nail clippers; 1 pack of disposable razors; 1 hairbrush; 1 comb; various hair accessories; 1 Diva Cup; 1 compact mirror; toothpaste, dental floss, deodorant, shampoo bars, and soap divided into bags for staging, training, and service.

Electronics: Acer Netbook; external hard drive; iPod; digital camera and memory cards; AA and AAA batteries; 2 USB flash drives; Solio solar charger.

Teaching Resources: Folder with activity ideas and worksheets; my 8 favorite TESOL resource books; approximately 5000 stickers. (Really.) I also have all the electronic versions of my worksheets and materials from my ESL and TESOL classes saved on my hard drive.

Entertainment: 1 deck of cards; 1 book of crossword puzzles (NYT "Tame" puzzles); Seasons 2-5 of The Office; 6 paperback books. (First up on deck, in my carry on bag, is Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari.)

Miscellaneous: 2 Nalgene water bottles; 2 bags of drink mix packets (I think it's about 6 boxes in total); 1 box quart-sized Ziploc bags; 1 Leatherman Micra multitool; 2 combination locks; 1 headlamp; 1 solar-powered flashlight; 1 battery-powered alarm clock; 2 legal pads; 2 Moleskine journals; 3 folders; 1 box of Bic pens; 1 address book; Sharpie markers; 1 tape measure; 1 sewing kit; 12 ID photos; 1 flat sheet; 2 pillow cases; 1 summer-weight sleeping bag; 1 camping pillow; 1 jump rope; 1 resistence band; 1 photo album with pictures of friends and family.

Gifts for host family: MSU and Chicago Cubs hats; crayons/markers/coloring books; frisbees; bubbles; Bert's Bees products.

I went back and forth a little on a) how many, and b) which TESOL books to bring. I have absolutely no idea what kind of resources we get during training, or what kinds of resources my school might have available, and that was really what tipped me towards the choices I made. They're like my safety net. One of my TESOL professors from Wheaton College told me that when she goes abroad to teach, she does not hesitate to purge clothes from her bags in order to make room for more books, and I think she's right. I don't know if they have these kinds of books in Namibia, but I know that they wear clothes there. In the end, too, I could accommodate them in my duffel bag (both in terms of size and weight), so I figured why not?

[For the record, I chose: Basic Grammar in Use and Grammar in Use Intermediate (both by Smalzer and Murphy); Five Minute Activities for Young Learners (McKay and Guse); Five Minute Activities (Ur and Wright); 500 Activites for the Primary Classroom (Read); two of Carolyn Graham's jazz chant books; and Pronunciation Contrasts in English (Nielson and Nielson). I've used all of them previously except for the children's activity books.]

I think I am going to have to drug myself if I plan on sleeping between now and Tuesday. Probably if I plan on sleeping on Tuesday as well. The last time I remember looking at the clock last night, it was 12:17 AM - I'm not sure if that's because I fell asleep after that, or because I just stopped checking the time when I rolled over - and I got up at 7:15 this morning to meet my friends for breakfast. Theoretically, that's plenty of sleep. But I feel like I haven't gotten any rest in days.

Maybe the coffee's just worn off.

I am not done packing yet, but that's only because laundry day was yesterday and I haven't gotten around to putting those now clean clothes into my bags. It'll get done this afternoon, along with a post about the whole process and one of those coveted packing lists for the Group 31 kids to enjoy in a few months.

I'm excited and anxious - not worried about any one specific thing, just overwhelmed by all the looming newness. Reading blogs has helped. Putting together a photo album has helped. Uploading all my TESOL materials to my external hard drive has helped. Hey, I gotta take what little control I have and run with it!

Through a variety of social networking media, I learned this evening that Peace Corps operations in Mauritania have been suspended, and that the Volunteers currently serving there will be heading back to the U.S. fairly soon. Their words are much better to tell it than mine: check out Peace Corps Mauritania blogs here.

Even as I've prepared for my new assignment in Namibia, PC/RIM has kept a special place in my heart, and I'm so sorry for the Volunteers and for the communities they've come to know and love. This is a truly fantastic group of people whose dedication to and enthusiasm for their work is just incredible. I know that all of us in the disbanded Mauritania staging class truly appreciate how welcoming they were and really wish circumstances had allowed us to meet. I wish everyone a safe trip home and the best of luck in their next endeavors.

Yesterday afternoon, I received a phone call from a number that I didn't recognize, but I went ahead and picked it up anyway.

"Hello, is this Elizabeth?"

"Yes, it is."

"Hi Elizabeth, this is Melanie [or whatever] from Sato Travel*."

I am 90% sure that I didn't respond with any obscenities, but there were definitely some choice words on the tip of my tongue. And for this, I apologize.

For the past five weeks, I have had this crippling fear that something is going to go wrong with my visa application, or my passport is going to get lost in the shuffle, or something else that will result in a phone call from Sato that will lead to my becoming distressed. Either that, or Sato drew the short straw when they were deciding who would have to give me the next round of bad news.

And it's not just the phone calls that get me a little worked up. Last week, I got four emails almost simultaneously from my Country Desk and I had to stop and focus on breating evenly for a minute so I wouldn't keel over. (This was important, because if I had, I would have hit my head on the edge of my desk, possibly resulting in some sort of medical issue that the Peace Corps would be unable to accommodate.)

Luckily, the phone call was just to inform me that my flight to staging has been changed - I'm taking off two hours later, which is more than fine with me, since now I can wake up at a reasonable hour and still get to staging on time. Awesome.

*Sato, in case you haven't caught on, is the federal government travel agency that, among other things, handles all official Peace Corps travel and processes our visas and passports. I have spent an ungodly amount of time on the phone with these people in the last six months. Like, so much time, that for a while there the passport guy and I were on a first name basis.

Today, like so many other days, I found myself with absolutely nothing to do. And believe it or not, I am getting a little tired of watching TV on DVD all the time.

So, I went to Hobby Lobby, and this is what I made:

Why yes, I do have awesome crafting skills. Thanks for noticing!

19 days to go. (Maybe "Only 19 days to go." Or "Only 19 days to go!" Or even "Only 19 days to go?")

It's incredible to me to look at a calendar (or my little countdown app) and see the time ticking down, because it still feels so far away. Maybe it's because in my unemployed state, I do not really pay attention to the date outside of ESL classes. Maybe it's because June felt so long, first because of the anticipation and then because of the letdown. Maybe it's because July is just an epically long month. (31 days? Really? Is it totally necessary to have all those days?)

It's definitely attributable, in part, to doubt. Not "Can I do this?" doubt, and not "Do I want this?" doubt, but "Is this really happening?" doubt. My continued presence in the U.S. (like many from my former cohorts) is kind of an inside joke between me and everyone I know, and even between everyone I know and the people they know. My mom asks me nearly every day, "So, did you hear from the Peace Corps today? Still going to Namibia?"

But Namibia is gradually working its way into my system. The host family videos have become viral among Group 30. (And that's another thing - I finally have a staging class with a number! That I'm aware of!) I've gotten Facebook messages and emails from a few PCVs currently in Namibia, including a welcome message from PC/Namibia's Volunteer Support Network (VSN) forwarded by my CDO this evening. I recently stumbled upon this blog, which is maintained by a Group 27 TEFL volunteer, and let me just say: Danielle, this is pure gold. Seriously. Thank you.

It's the little things that make me excited. We got an email from the Country Desk this evening with a multitude of wonderful things, including a breakdown of our training (subject to change, of course). Pre-Service Training (PST) will be in and around a town about 45 minutes from Windhoek (which is properly pronounced Vin-hook, by the way) that I am fairly certain I am discouraged from identifying by name on the internet, so I will make up an appropriate moniker for it when I get there. We find out our permanent sites about 3 weeks in, which blows my mind (I had thought it would be longer than that). And yes, Khoekhoegowab is one of my possible languages...but that's another post for another day.

(Oh Liz of 3 months ago, you had no idea...)

As reported by AP and other news outlets, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who led the coup last August, has won the Mauritanian presidential election with a reported 52% of the vote. Opposition parties are calling fraud, but according to this article, African Union observers have stated that the proceedings were fair and transparent. So we'll see where it all goes from here.

Also, thanks to a tip received on my last entry, I actually have some information about the Namibian elections that will be occurring later this year - just a few weeks after my class swears in, actually. I found this article on AllAfrica.com (it's from mid-March), which discusses how the role of opposition parties (i.e. parties other than SWAPO) has changed in Namibia since independence, and especially what kind of role they might play in the upcoming presidental and parliamentary elections. Another piece from AllAfrica published earlier this month talks about elections and democratization in southern Africa more generally. Got more Namibian news needs? Check out the online version of The Namibian (Namibia's largest daily newspaper) or The Namibia Economist. Have no fear - their letters to the editor also start with "Dear Sir...".

It's election day (or was, since it's now nearly midnight over there) in Mauritania, my ex-future host country. I actually learned this morning from a Namibia PCV's blog that my current future host country will be having its own presidential election later this year - in October, to be exact - but so far Google isn't turning up much information about it. I admit that my immediate interest in any upcoming Namibian political developments has as much to do with my desire to educate myself about any possible obstacles that said developments might pose to my being able to serve there as it does with my desire to learn more about the place I hope to spend the next two years living and working. Forgive my trepidation, but I think that after the placement process I've had, it's to be expected that I'm approaching new developments with caution.

Anyway, the reason I started this post in the first place was to share some of the preliminary news on what's going on in Mauritania. The latest AP story on the electoral proceedings has some pictures and plenty of background, and BBC also has a nice FAQ article that outlines all the major players. Results are expected tomorrow.

Just got done booking my flight to staging, which is in DC this time around. I am also currently recovering from the minor heart attack I had when the SATO representative said to me, "I'm sorry, I don't have any record of you being in this group." Crisis averted; It turned out to be a misspelling of my last name. WHEW.

Anyway, I'll be arriving in DC just before lunch on Tuesday, August 18 and am currently accepting bids for my limited free time.

Guess this means I need to start turning my attention back towards packing, which will be a much more difficult endeavor now that I'm going to a country where it's socially acceptable for me to wear pants. And where winter exists.

EDIT: I also just realized that my interview was a year ago today. It's crazy how much has changed since then.

I found the link to this video series on another Namibia PCV's blog, and it's pretty much a jackpot! So cool to get a glimpse of what my life might be like come August...

I am concerned that calling to accept my invitation tomorrow will be the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings that ultimately causes some unforeseen disaster to strike Namibia.

Logic:

1. Thus far, my understanding of the Peace Corps process is that you fill out paperwork, wait, get accepted to a program, and then that program gets canceled. Rinse and repeat.

2. There are five of us who are ex-Madagascar and ex-Mauritania; thus, there is a 20% chance that our woes are my fault. (Of course, it is possible that the odds of one of us being at fault may be greater than that, or that we all may be partially responsible, but I've never been great at percentages, so we'll just go with 20%.)

3. I recently saw The Hangover (which was hilarious, btw), and before the movie there was a trailer for The Final Destination. I have not seen any of the Final Destination family of films, but my impression (confirmed by Wikipedia) is that they are about a supernatural force - in this case, Death - trying to catch up to people who have somehow managed to evade it and screw up its ineffable plan. In my case, substitute Cosmic Anti-Peace Corps Force for Death, and there you go.

Let me be clear: I am totally, completely, absolutely, positively 100% committed to doing this. I am also totally, completely, absolutely, positively 100% freaked out that the third time is in fact NOT going to be the charm and that in six months I will be sitting in this very same spot in this very same predicament.

Destination: Namibia

Assignment: English Teacher, Upper Primary and Secondary Education Project

Departure: August 19, 2009

After spending the past couple of days staring obsessively at my cellphone, my new invitation arrived - as predicted by several of my ex-Mauritania stagemates - in my Gmail inbox early this afternoon. I'm still processing the news, and to be quite honest, I haven't really decided how I feel about it just yet. There is a huge part of me that is very reluctant to do anything committal simply because I've had such terrible luck in this whole process so far and I'm not eager to be let down again.

On the other hand, according to Wikipedia:

"Namibia is one of Africa's most developed and stable countries, with a stable multiparty parliamentary democracy..."That being said: if you (or anyone you know) has inside information about any imminent political disasters in Namibia, please let me know before I accept my invitation.*

*I am only partially kidding about this.

Waiting for my original invitation to Madagascar was stressful, to put it mildly. I thought that waiting to get my replacement would be less stressful. It wasn't. Not by a long shot.

So what on earth possessed me to think that I'd be able to wait patiently and calmly for another jaunt through Placement?

Maybe I can get my professors to confiscate my phone tomorrow. It wouldn't make it ring, but at least it would keep me from staring at it all through class...

My Placement Officer (the same woman who did my Madagascar-to-Mauritania replacement back in March) called on Friday morning to touch base with me regarding my re-replacement. Our conversation was pretty brief, if only because they are (or were) still working on formulating some answers for us. The gist of it is that they're looking at programs departing between August and October, and that they definitely have a preference for keeping me in Francophone Africa. A quick glance at the Wiki suggested to me that Togo and Cameroon are the my most likely options; my next project was to read up about the governments of both countries to gauge if either is likely to collapse in the near future. I am not kidding about this.

Four or five people from my group have already been reassigned to Togo - all for Girl's Education and Empowerment - and a few of those were former TEFLers, so I'm not sure exactly what that means, except that Togo is definitely an option that's on the table. There have also been two reassignments to Senegal, leaving in August, one in the agricultural sector and the other in small enterprise development. Shannon, the one who got invited for ag (and was part of the February '09 Madagascar group), posted this Facebook status in response to the news:

Going to Senegal August 10! Now here's the best part: "Senegal — a former French colony that has never known a coup d’état or military rule, and for 48 years has been one of the most stable, peaceful and enduring democracies in a region so long beset by tyranny and strife."I think that sums up how a lot of us are feeling about this whole situation. At this point, all I can ask for is a country that I'll actually be able to get to.

As for me personally...it's been a rough couple of days, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I've had some second thoughts about going through re-replacement. There is not even a hint of doubt in my mind that this is what I want to do, but it's also hard to suppress the voice in my head that's saying "But what if it doesn't work out this time, either?" Alex, who is briefly back in touch with the real world (and at exactly the right time, as far as I'm concerned) has been enormously helpful in talking me through this whole thing, and so for now, I'm back in the "tomorrow's-Monday-maybe-my-PO-will-call" state of mind.

(And I'm hoping that this whole Honduras situation doesn't end up disrupting a whole other batch of prospective Volunteers...they're supposed to leave Tuesday. I like to think that I'm generally up-to-date on my international news - this has been a pretty big story today - but it's kind of amazing how even little stories about countries where I know the Peace Corps is active tend to catch my eye more often!)

EDIT: Also, just to clarify - the cancellation of my staging class in Mauritania was 100% due to the visa procurement issues that caused our initial delay. All official indications are that the death of the American aid worker in Nouakchott did not play a role in that decision, and at this time there has been no change in the status of Peace Corps/Mauritania. The program will continue at about half capacity (since there will still be a group COSing this summer) until the Peace Corps is able to organize a new staging class and be guaranteed of securing all necessary documents for that class. Whether they'll just hold off and increase the size of the class for summer 2010, or send new people earlier than that, remains to be seen.

My staging class for Mauritania is canceled.

I'm taking this quite well, if I do say so myself.

Third time's a charm, right?

As you may have heard (if you are in the habit of seeking out news about Mauritania), an American aid worker - NOT a Peace Corps Volunteer - was killed in Nouakchott yesterday morning. Details are still pretty sparse, although several reports have indicated that he was killed after resisting a kidnapping attempt. Motive and responsibility are still anyone's guess. I should note that I haven't spoken to anyone from my country desk, but all else being equal, I do not think this incident alone is going to keep us out of Mauritania. In spite of the Peace Corps' heavy emphasis on the safety of the Volunteer, if they went around pulling out of every country where this sort of thing happened, there wouldn't be a Peace Corps.

In other Mauritanian news this week, it is still up in the air whether the negotiations between the current government and other parties participating in the election will resume in Dakar, and the cause of a Mauritanian journalist recently arrested over the content of his website has been taken up by Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF, i.e. Reporters without Borders).

Just got this from the National Peace Corps Association on my Facebook newsfeed! You can check out the original post here.

Despite limited funds to work with, the House Appropriations Subcommittee for State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs today took a major step forward to provide the resources for a bigger, better and bolder Peace Corps. In its "mark up" of programs within the International Affairs budget for Fiscal Year 2010, the subcommittee agreed to recommend a $450 Million appropriation for the Peace Corps. This decision was announced last night on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews by Subcommittee Chairwoman Nita Lowey. Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Upon finding out that my staging had been postponed, the biggest problem in my life suddenly became not "How am I supposed to make all this stuff fit?" but "How am I supposed to fill all this time until I leave?" The answer? Take a stab at the second biggest item on my current five-year plan: graduate school.

Call it luck, call it fate, call it whatever you like, but two days after I got that phone call from Nicole, I stumbled upon what seemed like the perfect opportunity: an intensive summer TESOL program offered by Wheaton College. So, for the past week, I've been rising dutifully at 6 AM and spending my evenings reading and studying for TESOL Methodology (i.e. how to teach English) and English Phonology (i.e. how to teach pronunciation). It's been a good experience so far, aside from how sore I am at the end of every day from sitting at a seriously uncomfortable desk for more than 6 hours, and I think that I'm going to be a lot more comfortable going into a classroom situation for having taken the classes. Phonology in particular has captured my interest (which may surprise those of you who remember how vehemently I hated French Phonetics); I've been going around for a few days making friends and acquaintances speak to me in foreign languages so that I can look at the differences in orofacial muscule movement. It's really fascinating!

After classes are done July 3, I'll be going back to teaching ESL a few mornings a week until early August. I also have Caprill and Corey's wedding to look forward to at the end of July, and maybe another big adventure before (insha'allah) leaving for Mauritania in August.

And for your enjoyment, a clip from Chuck (my favorite show of late):

One of my stagemates posted a link to this article, which does not exactly fill me with hope.

An interim administration was to have been established twelve days ago with the civilian president toppled in last August's coup as its head. But Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi will not formally resign as president until the ruling military council that deposed him is dissolved.

The man who led that coup - and is now running for president - Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, says the military council must stay in place until elections July 18.

Fingers crossed that the elections will proceed smoothly.

Spring semester of my junior year of college, I took what was probably the most difficult non-Arabic course of my educational career: Schechter's international law class. I reliably showed up for the 8:30 AM class early, and in the time before class began, Schechter would amuse us early risers with little stories. One of my favorites was how as an elementary school student during the Cold War, he was assured by his teachers that on the day that the Soviet Union nuked Washington DC, the wind would be blowing away from them in Virginia. And he said that he always wondered how they could be sure of that...

But that's not the anecdote I'm thinking of right now. The one that is running through my head is one he told about his father's business travels, and how it initially struck him as odd that whenever his father returned from business abroad, the country that he'd been visiting would end up all over the news - bombs and coups and assassinations. But eventually he stumbled upon the reason for all of this: obviously his father's presence caused governments to spontaneously collapse, buildings to explode, and leaders to fall from power.

I'm thinking of that anecdote, because right now that's how I'm feeling: that my association, like that of the elder Mr. Schechter, must cause things to go very, very wrong abroad.

This afternoon, I got a call from my Country Desk Officer (i.e. the Peace Corps person in charge of me while I'm stateside), and the fact that she started the conversation by saying something akin to "I see you were supposed to go to Madagascar originally, I hate to do this to you..." should have clued me in to just how awful the rest of that conversation would be.

The Mauritanian government has denied visas for my staging class (as well as for other U.S. Americans trying to enter the country; no word on how or whether this will affect PCVs currently serving in Mauritania). I will not be leaving for Philadelphia a week from today, or Africa in nine days. There is talk about continuing to pursue the matter with the people in charge of handing out visas, and there is talk about us leaving maybe in July, maybe in August...I'm fuzzy on the details, honestly, because I could not hear Nicole over the sound of the voices in my head screaming "No no no no no no no no no!"

I feel sick. (I feel even sicker for the people in my group who were supposed to go to Madagascar in February, who have now been delayed twice.) I wrote one other post today (which remains as yet unpublished), it was about how I finally finished packing. The thought of unpacking makes me sick, but so does the thought of looking at my full duffel and backpack sitting in the corner of my room every day for the next who-knows-how-many weeks.

And who does know? How long will it take to know for sure if we can or can't go? And if the answer is that we can't, how long will we wait to go somewhere else?

...what now?

News that the Mauritanian elections have been pushed back - to mid-July - was leaked to the press yesterday; the BBC reports this morning that they will now be held on July 18, and that members of the opposition movement (who were previously planning to boycott the June polls) have agreed to take part in a transitional unity government. A current Mauritania PCV provided this link to a Mauritanian French-language news website, which is quite interesting...and would no doubt be even more interesting if my French were a bit less rusty.

Also, there was another nice article about the Peace Corps in the LA Times yesterday. Enjoy! (And don't forget to bug your elected representatives to support the Peace Corps if you haven't already!)

This is the post you've all been waiting eagerly for...my address at training is as follows:

Elizabeth Wise, PCT

Corps de la Paix

B.P. 222

Nouakchott, Mauritania

West Africa

Helpful suggestions...

This address will be valid until mid-August; I'll update everyone with my permanant address when I know it.

Airmail is the most reliable way to get things to me (typically taking 3-4 weeks), so be sure to write "Par Avion" on the envelope. Ground mail is NOT reliable, and can often take up to a year to reach its destination.

If you are sending me "stuff," padded envelopes are the way to go - they are (comparatively) cheaper and much more likely to arrive intact than large parcels.

There will definitely be things that I will want sent, but above all, I want letters.(On a completely unrelated note, we have been having thunderstorms on and off all day, and right now the sky is all cloudy, backlit by the pinky-purple sunset. Amazing. Seeing the sky, especially at night, is one of the things that I'm most excited to do in Mauritania. Lying in the desert under the stars...well, you haven't lived until you've tried it.)

I'd be lying if I said that the fact that Mauritania is having rather contentious elections just over a week before I get there doesn't make me a little nervous. On the other hand, to paraphrase Juno, they already had a coup d'etat, what other kinds of shenanigans could they get into?

Much like Madagascar's recent political troubles, there hasn't been much about this in your local paper, but here's an article from AFP about the mediations hosted by Senegal over the past few days, and another (slightly older) article from Reutuers about the election campaigns. (Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade was also on the mediation team working in Madagascar earlier this year.) I'm not really sure what to make of all of this just yet.

Staging's in Philadelphia, starting June 15. I just got done making my travel arrangements with Sato, and the pile of Peace Corps "stuff" in the corner of my room is growing larger every day. To say nothing of the paperwork.

Yikes. I have a lot to do in the next four weeks.