Currently I am sitting in the Vancouver airport waiting for my final flight to John Wayne at 7:25 this evening. Its wonderful to finally be on the way home. Rachel won't be home for a couple weeks as she is helping her sister take care of their soon to be born baby boy. Right now she is on a train to Seattle and will actually be to Anthony and Beth's long before I get home. Home again home again jiggity jig...I will put pictures up of our trip once I get home and can go through all this stuff. Thanks for all your support through our time in the Peace Corps and we can't wait to see all our friends and family again!

Stephens, Hennessees and Lee at Shaolin Temple

(Its the birthplace of Kung Fu

We saw a guy hurl a pin needle through glass like a bullet!!!)

love,

Caleb and Rachel

We left Windhoek after a whirlwind last week involving teaching a Peace Corps training and insanely closing our service out with the Peace Corps. You might think this sounds easy but most PCV’s have 3 months to finish some things and usually a week or so to finish the rest; we had two days coupled with Easter Week holiday which meant half of PC staff was out. We finished everything just in time though I(Caleb) had a doctors form that was to be turned in the next week. Rachel and I both got a clean bill of health and were off to Johannesburg, South Africa the next day. Good Friday to Monday night was a blur involving a long bus ride, almost getting mugged, free cargo shipping to the states, a lightning fast pyramid sightseeing in Cairo, problems with our passport, and finally arriving in Istanbul, Turkey at around midnight just in time to make the last train to our hostel in old town Istanbul. Phew. Oh yeah and we had awesome Egyptian falafel which is really really good. We had never had it and both loved it. Also we got to ride a camel around the Giza pyramids. So Cool!!! Asam a maleku (spelling?) So lets explain we almost got mugged because our bus from Windhoek arrived in Joburg at 7:30 pm which meant all public transport was shut down and either we pay for a cab to the airport then take a shuttle from there or find nearby accommodation and figure it out in the morning. Fortunately Rachel befriended a local journalist who helped us find a local hotel for $299 rand which is a great price. The bad part was we had to walk about 200m down a dark alley to the gates of the hotel with two full backpacks, 1 duffel bag, 2 smaller backpacks, and 2 shoulders bags. As we breached the exit of the bus station we immediately noticed a group of transients in the shadows on the left. These would be the people I would inevitably drop kick and throat punch in defense of my dearest Rachel…ok that didn’t happen but it could have. Anyway we made it to the motel and when I asked if it was ok to go get some food from the local store they said it was not safe to go outside. Praise God nothing happened. Next is free shipping at Joburg. After a night in a shady motel next to the bus station we easily got a taxi ride to the airport for $240 rand (outrageous but unavoidable with all our luggage) Just taking the bus and getting to the airport showed us carrying all these bags was not going to work. Once we arrived at Joburg International we started asking around about shipping from airport to airport and really didn’t get anywhere. Finally we were referred to the Delta offices and found one of the most helpful people I had met in our experience overseas. He seemed to completely buy into helping get out things shipped at a reasonable price, this being Easter Sunday and a public holiday. Being a master of the inter-workings of airline luggage systems he figured out a loophole for us to get our luggage shipped back to John Wayne at no cost. This was awesome and a complete blessing because it could have cost us upwards of $200 USD to ship all that stuff home. As it was we got to stuff my backpacking (4800 cbi) and the duffel to the brim for free. Wahoo!!! Now we were down to 1 large backpack, 1 small backpack and 2 shoulder bags which is must more doable. We took a flight from Joburg to Cairo to enjoy our 12 hour layover in Cairo. We took a quickie tour with Karnak tour company accompanied with EgyptAir. Would not recommend them as our guide didn’t speak English well and rushed us around from site to site only slowing down when we refused to move so we could take in the wonder of the Giza Pyramids. It was a total tourist trap which we knew was coming but try another tour company if you’re interested in seeing the pyramids in a day. Part of me was wondering whether I would really marvel at the pyramids having read about them and seen videos etc. but there is really nothing like seeing them with your own eyes. When you stand next to Cheops in the Giza complex you realize how amazing they are and how absolutely enormous they are. The Egyptians essentially built mountains with stone hauled from as far as 1000km away according to our guide. The biggest is approx. 140m tall (420ft) and built with stones some of which are over 100 tons whilst cutting them so precisely you could not put a piece of paper between the seems, aligning them with stars and seasons as well as precise angles and measurements throughout. How is this possible? I have no idea! Well done though guys because these babies have been around for 5000 years and they seem to be doing pretty well:) A few warnings for fellow travelers when doing a day tour on a layover in Cairo you will have fun but if you choose not to go through customs they will keep your passport all day and reluctantly give it back to you an hour before your flight. After asking for it like 6 times we literally went and stood outside of the glass walled office of the customs agent who was supposed to do our passports and just stared at him until he did it. I guess that works too. Istanbul We spent two days in Istanbul which was a lot of fun. Istanbul is pricey though so watch out! Highlights were definitely the Aya Sophya (Hagia Sophia), underground cistern, channel boat cruise, the food and the people. People in Turkey are SO nice and helpful!!! At every turn people are helping us find our way and figure things out. And this country gets millions of tourists!More picture to come...

Caleb and Rachel in front of Cheops Pyramid

Caleb and Rachel on a camel ride in front of Cheops complex pyramids

This is Donnie, Gary and Elizabeths jack russel terrier that i have grown to love. He is a very funny, stubborn dog. He has a thing for water - he will sit in any dish of water he can find - his freshly poured water dish, the mop bucket or even these bins for catching the rain from our leaky roof. . .if there is an open container of water, Donnie will find it! It cracks me up! I took this picture on my phone yesterday and found it particuarly funny and ironic when coupled with the previous bar picture that i also found on my phone that i took months ago! Maybe this is what they were thinking of when they named that bar??;-)

We pass this bar everytime we hike out of Rundu and it makes me giggle every time i see it - even after 2 years!

Hello All,

Currently we are doing great here in Tsumeb. The rain continues making this an unusually long rainy season for this region, or so I'm told. This last week Rachel and I have been doing many things around the compound not least of which is grant writing for By Provision. Rachel will be doing this fulltime next week when I'm going drilling in Rundu. We had some Peace Corps friends over yesterday and played a round of Pandemic which was a lot of fun.

Life around here consists of drilling, putting pumps in after drilling, repairing wells, preparing for drill trips, grant writing, administrative work for BP, doing hygeine and sanitation trainings with people in villages, going on walks, reading, watching movies/tv from our computer and playing with the dogs. Honestly most days we aren't drilling we don't get off the compound for much else than shopping and exercise because of all the other work we have to do. I have also been asked to preach at our church every other week until May so that has been a fun adventure. I have never really preached consistently like this so it has been a good experience.

Last weekend was Independence Holiday for Namibia and we had the only other married couple in PC Namibia over for the weekend. We took them to Etosha and had a great time with them. Funny thing we found out on Friday of that weekend is that we have the same anniversary to the year August 4, 2007. How crazy is that? But this story is about what happened while at Etosha National Park for animal viewing. I (caleb) drove most of the day but then was tired and let Rachel take over early afternoon. About an hour after she starts driving we begin hearing a faint whining coming from the undercarriage. Thinking its just a stick or something we stop and look but its nothing so we just ignore it for the time being. Then it turns into a clunking, grinding sound coming from the back rear tire. This is disconcerting, especially since we are in the middle of Etosha with very few tools to fix anything (not that any of us could actually fix something on a car) Needless to say this sound said pull over and check me out because I am destroying something internally.

So we pulled over at the only rest stop near us which constitutes a 5 ft fence, not very reassuring when their are lions, cheetahs, leopards and elephants all of which that little fence means nothing. With our 5ft peace of mind ,and that's all it was, we pull the truck in and jack it up to take the tire off and see what we can see. After taking the tire off we can't see anything so we go further and take off the brake cover, and as we do this two little pieces of metal fall out of the brakes. Yeah! I'm sure those weren't important. As we look further we find that another large piece had broken off and wedged itself in the brake assembly, grinding on the wheel hub. After a little work we were able to get this piece out but then thought, what do these pieces go to? It seemed like the brakes but we don't know anything about brakes so to be sure we needed to take off the other side to make sure. So we put the right rear tire back on and proceed to take off the left rear tire and brake cover. Here is a picture of the left rear assembly.

As you can see there is a cog looking thing in the middle and a s-shaped flat metal piece next to it. These things had fallen off and the cog thing was grinding on the wheel hub. So now we have decided that everything is "ok" because these parts obviously had something to do with the brakes and only having one wheel out isn't so bad. So as we try to put the brake cover back on we find out next problem, getting the brake cover back on. We pushed and pulled and prodded and forced and jerked and still after about a hour of this the cover was still not on. Well the sun is getting low in the sky and its about 6:15pm at this time so our options are sleep in the aegis of a worthless 5ft fence or do something drastic to get this dang thing back on. So we decide to disassemble the left rear brakes as well until we can get the cover on. We started by taking out all the parts in the above picture and then started pushing and prodding again and presto magico the cover went back on. Don't know how or why that worked but I'm just glad that it did because if had taken any longer we wouldn't have made it out of the park. So then we rushed out of the park, probably a 40 minute drive from where we were, and just made it at 7:25pm which is the exact time the park closed. Now all we had to do was drive home with front brakes only at night with headlights that didn't work very well...piece of cake:)

Hello All,

Its been a while but that's because we've been busy. We've been drilling almost everyday for the past two weeks and it can be kinda grueling sometimes. On one of our recent drill trips I decided to test making a time lapsed video of 1 hour of drilling. It took me a while to get all the software right but here it is. I plan to make a time lapsed video for an entire well from start to finish but I need a few more gadgets to make that go smoothly. For this video I literally sat there taking a picture every 15 sec for 1 hour, and that was horribly tedious. I can't imagine doing it for 8 hours for drilling plus 1 hour to put in the pump. All I need is an intervalometer for a sony dslr and an ac adapter for the camera. Me thinks these things will be showing up at my parents house in Huntington sometime soon (please be ready folks)

To explain a bit of the drilling process you can see that our drill rig is quite large. It weighs somewhere around 8-10 tons. The drill is a hydraulic rotary drill that uses 5 ft steel rods and bits of various sizes. The drill forces water down through the drill steel into the end of the bit which is turning and grinding away at the bottom of the hole. Stuff that the bit breaks loose is collected by the water and forced up and out of the hole into the green trough. The engine on the ground to the right pumps the water out of the trough, into the drill and down into the hole. That's why people are shoveling stuff out of the trough because you can imagine how the soil and rock builds up in that trough. As we put additional pieces of steel into the hole we have to add chemicals to the water to help collect the drill cuttings and to keep the wall of the hole in place while we are drilling.

Hope this is interesting,

Caleb

Also let me know if you think pictures seem too fast. This video is at 15fps. When I do a whole day I think it will be between 15-30 fps

Hello,

From the work I did with my fellow PCV Levi Self in fall 2010 I have made a manual to instruct others on building a biosand filter without the use of a steel mold. If you are someone who doesn't have access to the materials to make a steel mold then we have found a successful way to make a mold from wood. If you have any questions let me know by leaving a comment or emailing me at calebandrachel@gmail.com.

Here is the link: http://www.mediafire.com/?5bualdxyjy5tbtc

Hope this works for you,

Caleb

After a wonderful month and a half long vacation at home we are back in Namibia. We are settled in our new house in Tsumeb and absolutely loving it!! We do miss Nkurenkuru and Kavango a lot, but Tsumeb is a really nice place to live. It is the middle of the rainy season here, so everything is growing and green. Tsumeb is especially green because there are lots of big trees, making for very beautiful neighborhoods and streets. (yes we have neighborhoods and streets in Tsumeb!) Tsumeb is a bigger town so we are enjoying having all the stores and groceries we need right here, and not having to travel to Rundu every month to get necessities. Our house is wonderful; we are thoroughly enjoying all our new luxuries...and I am especially enjoying our new housemates Titus and Donny, Gary and Elizabeth’s dogs! Even more than that, we are really enjoying working for By Provision. Not having to go back to teach the first term of school was such a huge relief! Working for By Provision is much more relaxing and much more fulfilling for both of us. In the past few weeks, Caleb has been helping organizing all the work equipment and doing various other things around the compound to get ready for drilling. Caleb and Gary went to check out possible drill sites near Rundu in the Kavango region and drilled for three days in a nearby village called Tsinsabis. I have been busy doing some fundraising and grant writing for By Provision well projects as well as the D.A.T. Home for orphans and disadvantaged Namibian teens that By Provision started last year. I also spent a week in Okahandja at a PC training to plan the Pre-Service Training for the new group of Peace Corps volunteers that will arrive in Namibia on February 18th. I will be going back down to Okahandja to meet these new volunteers at the airport and be a part of their first week of training. This week Caleb and Gary will go back to Tsinsabis to finish up one remaining well, and then we will all head to the Rundu area for about a week to drill 3-6 wells. We are looking forward to being back in Kavango and getting the chance to speak a little Rukwangali! We are also hoping to get away from drilling for one day and travel back Nkurenkuru to see some of our friends and to check out some possible drill sites for later this year. Although we miss family and friends always, I think we can both say that we are glad to be back in Namibia and very happy to be working with Gary and Elizabeth for By Provision. Last year we both felt like the change in assignment from teaching to working for By Provision would make the world of difference in our contentment living here and that has been confirmed after almost a month of living here again and working for By Provision. We are energized to be supporting an organization whose goals are to bring clean water and God’s love to people in need and to encourage and support young teens who do not have a stable place to live. We love the pace of life, the adventure, the new and interesting people we meet who are so warm and welcoming and working for such a fulfilling mission. Keep us in your thoughts and prayers, and please remember – we LOVE getting letters, emails, pictures and chats from you! We may be far away, but it really makes our day to get an update from family and friends!

This is Gary and Elizabeth Wilkins, founders of By Provision and our generous hosts!

They are great people to work with and we are so thankful for their generosity

in giving us such a great place to stay!

My new BEST friends - Titus and Donny. Love them!

Our new digs! Thanks for the awesome hammock JD and Hope!

Our neighbors - the girls who live in the D.A.T. Home for orphaned and disadvantaged teens. They are a great group of girls and I look forward to getting to know them more and doing HIV/AIDS club with them this year.

Helping the girls start a garden! Soon we will be enjoying

cucumber, squash, zucchini and baby spinach!!

Caleb busy at work cleaning out the drill rig, getting ready to go drill!

Some community members in the Rundu area where we are going to go drill this week.

After our recent water filter training at our house one of the women, who is also one of the garden women, proudly held up a bright pink 9L bucket. She was full of smiles and talking rapidly, in Rukwangali mind you, about the bucket she just bought from money earned through the garden. Evidently some of her produce has ripened and she was able to sell it in order to buy a new water bucket. We will never forget how thankful she was to us for helping her be able to buy something so simple, and hot pink at that. Thank you old nane(woman) for that blessing, may God continue to bless you and your work at the garden.

Caleb and Rachel

Rachel and I both have 1 week left of school, well really 1 week of exams. We will be leaving soon and my school (caleb) is having a going away "tea break" for me. This basically means some hordevoires and juice. 2 years of teaching at your school at a value of $240000 NAD and this is all they can rustle up? Oh well and thanks to you too:) Rachel's school is at least throwing some kind of function for her sending off, albeit they are asking us to pay to attend her party. They are also asking community members from our projects to pay in order to attend the function. Not sure where women who can't come up with $6 for a new water tap will come up with $100 each. Oh well, and thanks to you too:) These kinds of things remind me to be thankful for everything we receive and that we do everything for the glory of God and not for ourselves or the praise of others. Hopefully we can keep this in mind for the next 7 days

On the project front we installed 3 filters in homesteads this week and showed the women how to use them again. They were so thankful and happy when they received these filters. They are so happy that they can have clean water now instead of the bacteria ridden river water. Lets hope the filters can last for years to come. We will do 1 more next week for a total of 4 filters built and installed. This is a far cry from the 5-10 that I wanted to build but a lot of the money was used getting a working mold. On top of that my project partner was sent out of the country for reasons, not his fault in any way, but in any case private. This made all the work with the filters take much longer since it was just me (caleb) at that point.

The hostel activity center grant was approved as we said before but the project start date has been pushed back to Dec 1st by the Embassy for budgetary reasons. This means we won't actually get to do much with this project, but will pass it off to volunteer Lindsey to finish up next year. Here's hoping things turn out well!

With the garden project we met with the women and figured out the problem they were having with the keys. Many of the plots in the garden are being cultivated now and women are beginning to even sell their goods since some things like cabbage and tomatoes are ripening. Its so exciting to see things growing and people getting hope where there wasn't any before. Praise the Lord for this!

And lastly some more exciting news regarding grants came through recently. Through former PCV Amanda Rose we heard about PetroFund and their grants to schools for science equipment and such. Both Rachel and I helped our schools apply and after some time we learned that our applications had been accepted!!! That means Rachel's school will receive a grant of $24500 NAD and mine will receive $69000 NAD. Isn't that awesome? They will be able to get so many things for the physical science and chemistry labs.

In other news we have been having serious electricity problems at our house of late. By serious I mean no electricity from 7pm to 6pm the next day in one instance. We can handle a few minutes or hours at a time but when you get into 10+ hour stretches of no power things start to go bad in the refrigerator and the lifesaving fan is rendered useless when you try to sleep at night. In the words of Namibians, "We are suffering." Yesterday I think the maintanence people at the mission finally fixed one of the problems and allowed us to get power for the last few days. Hopefully this continues:)

See you in America,

Caleb and Rachel

Here is a video of what I've been working on these past few months. Its called a bio-sand filter. It cleans up to 99% of all contaminants in the water!

We have had quite the time developing an effective wooden mold. Our first mold attempt ended in complete disaster and was completely destroyed, while our second mold produced a working filter but only had to be partly destroyed. Our 3rd mold has now produced two filters and is working great. It seems we have finally found a working design for wooden mold for a the biosand filter. Thank God!!!

Today we are having a training for the households that are interested in receiving one of the filters. We hope to produce 4 or 5 filters in all. Today is designed as a test to see which families are truly interested in learning about the filter and later receiving one. We tried to have a similar meeting yesterday but nobody showed up. Of course everyone told us they were coming but that is besides the point around here. After nobody showed up we went down to the store where the garden women usually are and found many of them there. They said they were working at the garden and that's why they didn't come to the meeting yesterday, but then enthusiastically said they wanted to come today at 3pm for the training. Who knows what will happen today? Yesterday I got my translator to show up because I let him borrow some movies from me. I don't have any leverage to encourage him to come today, maybe he'll just be nice and come without getting anything in return?

We are officially leaving our site on November 20th and will only be returning maybe one time next year. Rachel's school is talking about a going away party for her but there has been no such talk of one at my school. We are looking forward to going home so much!!! We can't wait to be back in America where things make sense and be around our family and friends. We should be back in America on Dec 2nd or 3rd; we don't know yet because we haven't received our final tickets. Its been a wonderful experience living here and we're going to miss so many things about our little rural town. We have learned a ton about working with people in doing community projects and the rigors of living in another culture for an extended period of time. We pray that God will bless the people we have worked with and that what is from Him will stick and what isn't will fade away.

Thank you to all who read this blog, think about, and pray for us. We couldn't have made it through without all of your support, and that is definitely the truth. We are looking forward to our time at home now and our next year drilling water wells all over Namibia.

God bless you all,

Caleb and Rachel

When we came back from Windhoek after our Peace Corps conference we brought some gifts for the people in our garden project compliments of Dave Kurz. While he was here we conferred about problems we were having with the water system at the garden we came up with a few possible solutions. On our way to Windhoek we got a ride with an Afrikaaner who worked in construction. He told me the best place to go to find the necessary piping, clamps and whatsoever for plumbing. I had already been to every hardware store in Windhoek that I knew about so it was great that he gave me this headsup. The place is called Sinclair Services and wasn't very hard to find. With their help I was able to get everything we needed to replace some of the current water system. Here are pictures of some things we repaired.

Here are the pictures of the water system repair at the garden. Everything worked out well and the system is up and running which is good. The first picture is of the pipe and clamps connected to the water pump.

This leaked a tiny bit at first but then I put on two clamps pinching in different directions and it didn't leak. The second picture if of the "union" system which would be clamped onto the existing black hose and then could be threaded onto the water pump without turning the black hose.

Luckily the 1st idea worked so we haven't needed this one yet. The next picture shows one of the industrial clamps we were able to buy that tighten using a wrench instead of screwdriver. What a difference a clamp makes!

This pictures shows how one of the boys had already broken the air filter:(

(not irreparably but still...cmon people!)

Basically the wing-nut it attached to the pole which goes into the filter housing. Inside the pole is

attached to some plastic tubing and was manufactured inside the mold with a bulge to keep it from coming out. Well it seems the boy just kept turning the wing-nut on top until he had ripped the pole out of its fitted hole, never to work properly again.

Tomorrow we will be traveling to Windhoek for Rachel to get her giardia followup checkup and for me to do all the shopping and quotations to be sent to the US embassy for the Hostel Activity Center Project. Oh yeah I don't know if I told you but the Hostel Activity Center Project is going to happen after all. We will be buying a ton of tables and chairs, theatre equipment, sports equipment, craft supplies and reading materials. We have about 5 teachers on the committee now plus Lindsey the new PC health volunteer in Nkurenkuru. Hopefully everything will work out and the kids will get to enjoy the all the new activities. Lets pray that they take care of all these things well. Now for a few days of walking around in +100 degree weather:)

Thanks,

Caleb and Rachel

Hello All,

When Rachel's parents came in August they brought the most wonderful early birthday gift from Beth, Anthony, Josiah and Shaylah. It was a tortilla flattener to help me in making my tortillas. This tool has been so wonderful and I have loved using it. It helps my tortillas to be nice and round everytime!!! Here are some pictures of me using it. Thank you so much for my awesome birthday gift:)

Typical tortilla making setup

Pressing the TortillaMaking tortillas is so much fun with my new tortilla press!!!!

What a jolly tortilla making man!!!!

Look at that perfectly round tortilla

(they still need to be worked after pressing them in order to get them to the right thickness)

In other news we were supposed to have a training for making the bio-sand filters tomorrow but Rachel has informed me that the teacher involved at her school is going to a funeral and so are all the people he was bringing. That's the second time they have bailed on this for a funeral...hmmmm I guess we can't compete with how wonderful funerals are or they are not being upfront regarding their level of interest. We might just build the mold tomorrow anyway and show them how we did it next time. We don't really have time to wait for people to decide when they are gonna show up. Training people to be able to make these filters is a secondary goal to the project and we don't want to jeopardize the main goal of families actually receiving filters because these guys aren't serious.

Hope all is well and God bless you today,

Caleb and Rachel

Hello All,

We are finally back from our vacation and Peace Corps conference in Windhoek. We had a wonderful vacation with Rachel's parents and went all over Namibia. We will put up pictures of our trip soon. Now we are back in Nkurenkuru for our final semester of teaching!!! We will be gone from site by sometime in late November and will be flying back to the states on Dec 1st 2010!!!!! We'll be in the states from Dec 3rd to Jan 13th and we can't wait. Family, friends and food...that's a nice alliteration and it fits the goals for our visit quite well.

This semester we will be working on the Bio-sand Water Filter Project, the Sewing Project, the Garden Project and then possibly the Hostel Activity Center grant may come through this month in which case we would have that to work on as well. We will also be finishing up our last HIV/AIDS club this semester. I (Caleb) is way behind in his math classes and will need to do some extra afternoon classes to catch up. We have a lot to do and are glad that things will be finishing up. We want to say thank you to all of you who have helped support our Bio-Sand Water Filter Project. We have almost reached our goal of $350 and are standing at $280 right now. We are really excited about all the things God has in store for us this semester. May He be glorified in all that we do and may people experience the love of God through us this term.

Here's a shout out to all the people still reading this blog, thank for sticking with us for our first tour of Namibia. We hope to bring you some good stuff this semester and some even better stuff next year while drilling wells.

Love,

Caleb and Rachel

Hello All,Want to help rural Namibians get clean drinking water? Donate to our community project to build home bio-sand water filters that eliminate 96% of all harmful bacteria and substances. We only need $350 USD to fund the entire project! If you are interested in supporting our project please go to the link below to read an in-depth description, and then donate any amount at the bottom of the description.http://appropriateprojects.com/taxonomy/term/29Namibia | Appropriate Projectsappropriateprojects.comCommunity Description Nkurenkuru is a growing but still small rural town, 140 km west of Rundu in the Kavango region, northeastern Namibia. It was recently awarded “town” status by the government, and has roughly 9,000 residents.

Hello all we are available for Skype so please contact us when you're available!

Love,

Caleb and Rachel

Well everyone,

We have a big announcement to make! After much thought, prayer, discussing, more thinking, discussing and months of waiting to hear from Peace Corps …we decided to extend our Peace Corps Service a third year! Peace Corps accepted our application to work with the water NGO, By Provision, that we have worked with a few times during our two years here. This means that we get to spend a month or more at home in December with family and friends, and then we will back to Namibia in January for one more year. We are very excited for the much needed break and time at home with family, friends, hot showers, washing machines, dish washers, and delicious, convenient food made for us by someone other than ourselves!! (ok, with that said, if we’re lucky, maybe we won’t even have to use the wonderful invention of a dishwasher!) By Provision is located Tsumeb, a bigger town about 4 hours south of Nkurenkuru so we will be moving there in January. We will miss living in Nkurenkuru, our friends and community, the beautiful river and slow paced village life. But it will also be nice to be in a bigger town with two restaurants and Etosha National Park less than an hour away!! We will be working with By Provision drilling boreholes in villages without potable water all around Namibia. Caleb will be learning the drilling process, drill and well maintenance and the inner-workings of an NGO. I will be helping with the administrative and financial side of the NGO as well as providing hygiene/sanitation education and HIV education at the drill sites. We are very thankful to our generous hosts at By Provision, Gary and Elizabeth Wilkins, who have allowed us this wonderful opportunity to work with their NGO, learn from them and help those in need in Namibia. We are really looking forward to the opportunity to work hands on with an NGO, provide such a basic need to people and share God’s love in a tangible way. It was a very tough decision to make because we really miss home, friends and family and it will be hard to put our “lives” on hold for another year, but we think this is a great opportunity that will be well worth it! Though it was a difficult choice, we are choosing to take life one step at a time and not let future worries, plans and timelines hold us back from doing something so meaningful to us and to God – maybe a lesson we need to learn is that this actually is “life”, and not all plans and timelines we feel pressure to set for ourselves! We’ll let you know how that turns out in about 5 years when we are another year behind in our timeline! ;) Thank you for your support during the first two years of our Peace Corps service, and we hope we can continue to solicit your prayers and support during our third year extension! Pray for us as we finish our last term teaching and are quite tired out. Pray for the continued success of our secondary projects; that these income generating projects will continue in our absence and provide a source of income for the hard working women involved. Lastly, pray for safety working with the drill equipment next year, and most of all that God’s love and care will be experienced in a real way as we seek to provide for a physical need of people in a way we know God would desire. We look forward to seeing many of you when we come home in December! Love, Caleb and Rachel

Well the day finally arrived for us to hand out the mattresses and mosquito nets, while on the same day the ministry of education brought new mattresses and bunk beds for all the kids. Mattresses galore!!! I guess the kids little insurrection they pulled a few weeks back paid off on getting things changed around here. The kids looked really happy as they received these new mattresses. All the credit for them must go to the previous volunteer Sarah Buffie and all the work she did. She had a heart for these kids and this community and did what it took to get them what they needed despite the oppression from the pastor running the mission grounds. And as I understand it none of this would have happened without the support for Sarah back home from Southport United Methodist Church. The children thank you with their smiles and we thank you with our words. May this sort of kindness and love never cease in the world as people continue to help those less fortunate than themselves. Praise God for all these blessings for the kids!!! Way to go Sarah!!! Way to go Southport United!!!

Nets and Mattresses in Storage

Kids lined up for mattresses

(note the old "mattresses" on the left with those girls)

This will be like going from cardboard, for some literally, to Sertz posturepedic

ELCIN Church choir singing songs of thanks to those

who gave such wonderful gifts to the children

We just started a new group of kids in our HIV/AIDS club and we decided to play the name game so we could learn all their names. These kids’ English is not quite good enough to easily think of an adjective that starts with the same letter as their name, so we just had them think of any word that starts with the same letter as their name. We explained the game and it seemed to be going pretty well. “Healthy Haingura, Red Regina, Enjoy Emmy…” . Then we got to Victoria, she started well, “Healthy Haingura, Red Regina, Enjoy Emmy, Jam Jonas…and I am….. Victoria BANANA!” She shouted out gleefully! We all started laughing hysterically and her friend explained the game again to her, this time in Rukwangali. Ok, she got it and started again confidently, “Healthy Haingura, Red Regina, Enjoy Emmy, Jam Jonas…and I am ….Banana Victoria!” We all started laughing hysterically again (don’t worry, Victoria was laughing too, especially when she finally actually understood the game), it was a great moment and we haven’t laughed so hard in a long time! These kids are so much fun!

love you all,Rachel

Elephants

A few weeks ago we had elephants in our town. It was pretty exciting and the whole town went to see them. Our host father who is the consummate historian of the area said that this had happened before in the 50's and 60's. Evidently they crossed the river from Angola, some twenty strong. We were only able to see two of them who had been separated from the group. A few weeks before this there were lions sited within 30km of our town. Evidently they had escaped from Etosha National Park. Hopefully someone rounded them up. Lions and Elephants and Snakes OH MY!!! Here are some pictures of our experiences with the elephants.

Walking to the elephants

A rare picture of both of us:)

Looks like the whole town came out for this one!!!

Maybe its aliens!!!

After this whole scene people actually followed the elephants further into the bushes. I thought someone was going to get trounced.

These two elephants were lumbering around in the town graveyard trying to get reconnected with their group. This one made a run for it but then turned around back into the bush.

Rachel and Caleb with their host father Nairenge (see how crappy his truck is? I love telling people that I have a truck that is even crappier than theirs haha)

Garden Project

Here is the garden we helped to build and complete. There are 14 official women who are part of the garden project. They decided on having 4meter by 21 meter plots. Many of them have cleared their plots. A few have even started planting!!! This is so much fun. The other day I went by to see how the work was going and found that they had cut the pipe that we used to pump the water into to tank. If you look at the picture of the tank its the black pipe going into the top. They cut this pipe while burying it and so now we have a quandry of how to fix this. At first I was livid that they had cut the pipe because it was the only pipe we had that was long enough to go from the waters edge to the tank. Luckily I found some fittings at the hardware store in Rundu (1 hour away from Nkurenkuru) with which we can easily connect the cut pieces. Crisis abated.

Women from the Tulikwateseni Garden Project

Water tank and stand

(Those things are a bear to get upright on top of the stand. It took many people and about 20 minutes)

The most beautiful women involved with the garden project!

Three of the women on the garden administration committee

Pump Problems

Funny thing happened while pumping the water into the tank. Since I had never run a water pump over this distance before I first put the pump 10 feet from the tank with another 40 feet to the river. This caused the pump to run for quite some time with little water going into the tank. The next day I moved the pump to just outside the fence so that it was about 30 feet away from the tank and 10 feet from the water. Same result. Frustration. Then we moved the pump to within 5 feet from the water and 45 feet to the tank. Success!!! This pump goes at about 520L per minute so it didn't take long once the water finally started pumping since the tank is only 2500L. The instructions to the pump say it could pump water up to 8 meter from river to pump and up to 20 meters from river to tank. Little did I know that was a bunch of crap. But hey the school of hard knocks is a good teacher though it likes to dish out failures up front.

Time for a little Africa magic...

In addition to these setbacks the pipe didn't quite fit to the pump fittings(though they were the same diameter), and under pressure there would be water everywhere. What could we do? Evidently Namibians have one solution for improper plumbing fittings, that is strips of rubber. They take skinny strips of rubber and wrap them tightly around the pipe fittings then force on the pipe, using clamps to tighten it down. This is amazing. The reason I call this Africa magic is because while doing similar work to get a leak to stop on our water heater, our friend Tate Thom pulled out the same rubber strips and said, "Ah now it is time for some Africa magic" then started laughing hysterically. Conclusion, strips of rubber is to Namibians as duct tape is to Americans.

Sewing Project

Around the same time as the garden project got going we also had our sewing project get off the ground. We finally were able to purchase all the machines and materials and began with training. The first training included sewing instruction of course, orphans and vulnerable children care, HIV/AIDS information, and small business training. They were not able to finish the sewing training in 1 1/2 days so we set a date for Aug 8 to finish, with other trainings as a possibility. So far they have sold a little girls dress and made a number of baby carriers (adaptation of baby bjorn). Now if we can help them understand cost prices and how to keep track of profits so they don't spend all their earnings before buying more material.

Random pictures of birds

African Wood Hoopee

(affectionately called zebra bird, don't see this one very often)

Violet Backed Starling

(this one looks amazing in the sun with all the iradescent purples)

UNESCO Event and Project Success Today Rachel went to a meeting to plan an event called “Education for All” funded by UNESCO. It is designed to help Namibia reach the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education. It is a wonderful idea but like many UN objectives gets the trickle down effectiveness of 1 or 2 out of 10. Because we live in a rural town all our learners are counted as rural in Namibia’s population survey which says that 6.5% of rural girls, 4.8% males and 4.0% females, ages 7-16 do not attend school. This event is designed to bring awareness to this fact and encourage people to go to school. Their budget is $20,000 and if you didn’t already guess $15,000 of it is going to buy cool drinks for the learners and a catered VIP lunch for “special people”. By special people I am at least talking about infamous characters such the subsidy stealing hostel embezzler as previously named on our blog and a principal who has already been found guilty in a court of law for impregnating at least 1 learner. By the way, one of these VIP will be contributing by giving the opening prayer, and then he will get a free catered lunch. Way to go UNESCO!!! So that leaves $5000 for the actual event which is an essay contest and soccer game. If this money were used for buying uniforms for underprivileged kids it could buy about 175 uniforms. If it was used to pay school fees it could help 153 kids go to school for a whole year. The people who need to be encouraged to attend school live in the deep rural areas, the bush, all over Namibia and this event will be for learners and “special people” in towns, not geared at all for rural children not in school. So instead they are going to buy cool drinks for hundreds of kids and a catered lunch for “special people”. Now on to our project success stories!!! We have purchased all the sewing machines, material and other misc items for the Tusikameni Sewing Project. We are preparing for the sewing training which will be tomorrow afternoon and all day Saturday. They will learn to make a bunch of items they requested that they know people will want to buy from them. This is very exciting and we are looking forward to it a lot. In addition to that our Tulikwateseni Garden Project has been built and the fence is put up. The water tower is built and installed. Now all we have to do is get the 2500 liter water tank setup and get the generator ready. On Sunday we are going to have an official ceremony and hand the garden over to the women to begin planting. They are very excited as well and even visited our house yesterday to get the key for the garden so they could begin preparing. On top of that we have leftover chain link fencing and some support tubes, and the hardware store agreed to let us return these things in exchange for hoes and picks which the women need. It seems God has helped us work everything out for this project and we are very thankful. Originally we didn’t know how we were going to get the needed fencing wire, hoes, and picks because these things weren’t provided for in the grant originally. Wahoo!!! We are pumped to see these women utilize this garden to grow tomatoes and onions, among other things, and cut out the middleman for their business. Also in the project category we just graduated 15 learners from our first HIV/AIDS club of the year and have begun another one with 25 kids signed up! This is a fun club for us to do because we get to spend quality time with these kids and really try to teach them about the truths regarding their sexuality and relationships both family and personal.

In other news...no we have not heard back about our extension applications. PC said they were going to meet at the end of June and they didn't, so we're waiting to hear after they actually meet to confer about our extension possibilities.

Thanks for listening,Love,

Caleb and Rachel (written by Caleb)

The Village Boys Dancing I(Rachel) came across these boys while I was walking down to the river like I do almost everyday. This day the boys gave a rhythm to my walk, and a cute one at that. It was really entertaining to see how much fun these boys were having playing a simple beat on an old rusty car, dancing and singing. It will go down in my book as one of my favorite Namibian memories. Enjoy

June 8th 2010

Today we were all shocked and surprised when the hostel learners went on strike because of how they are being treated. They refused to eat today then marched around town with signs while singing and dancing. What an amazing sight!!! It was such a blessing to see these children standing up for themselves. The story goes that Pastor Karoyeva promised to bring food back from a recent trip and didn’t make good on his promise. This incensed the students and the organized themselves for this strike. After working for over a year trying to help these hostel learners it was a wonderful thing to see them stand up for themselves. They have promised to do it again if their demands are not met. The Mr. Karoyeva has blamed the uprising on the hostel mothers, saying they are the people that instigated the learners to do this. In a hostel committee meeting that day (which is unheard of to have a meeting on such short notice) Mr. Karoyeva wouldn’t hear of the problems at hand and refused to do anything about it. He then left the meeting in an angry mood. The same thing happened the next day in a meeting with the principal and teachers when these problems came up, only it came from another teacher who became extremely livid when people started asking questions about what is happening with the money and why aren’t the kids being fed very well. This same teacher was there the afternoon the students decided to strike, telling them they would call the police on them and take them to jail. What an encouraging role model! Rachel and I felt good when we were able to talk to the learners and give them courage that what they are doing is perfectly legal. We think this helped them to continue with what they wanted to do. Evidently the hostel has been given NAD $126000 by the ministry, plus some NAD$27000 from other funds, bringing the grand total to NAD $153000. For some reason this money is completely controlled by the Mr. Karoyeva (others call him “pastor” however I have stopped doing so) and nobody is willing to take him on within the town. We have no idea why except that he and others in the committee are skimming off the top and have been doing so for years, in conjunction with people from the ministry also skimming off the top before the money even gets to the hostel committee. This would explain why the government has not questioned where the money has gone and why nothing has ever been done. At any rate the hostel saga continues but this time it’s the learners fighting back…can we have an amen to that. Below are some pictures of the hostel learners parading around town.

Since we wrote the above words in this blog the Minister of Education came to visit Rachel's school and promised to get the kids new mattresses and blankets and push for building a new hostel on the school grounds. This is wonderful news as he is the highest level person in the country to take notice of these problems and we hope that he makes good on his proposals for the sake of these poor children.

May Holiday Vacation 2010

Our May holiday began with Beth, Anthony, Josiah and Shaylah coming to visit. We had such a great time with them and cherished every minute! It was so good to connect with them and share our Peace Corps experience and life with them.

Burchells Zebra Butts

We we were lucky to spot this cheetah. What an amazing animal!

Should have gone to manual focus on this one but its still a great picture of lion.Jackal looking quite stellar if I may say so. These jackals were scavenging off the lion kill

8 Foot Termite Mound

Not sure if the subject should be the clouds and grass or the giraffeBig Sky in Etosha National ParkLavender Breasted Roller (our favorite bird by far)

Black Shouldered Kite AKA Super hero Bird(mostly because its piercing red eyes)

Etosha Sunset (Take your pick!)On our way from Tsumeb to our house we stopped by the largest meteorite in the world. Yes that's right folks. We visited a humongous rock composed mostly of iron ore in the middle of the desert...for fun. FALLING METEORITES!!!!!!While we were staying at our house in Nkurenkuru we visited the homestead of one of Rachel's co-workers. Traditional Homesteads are beautiful and peaceful. At the end they gave us a chicken for our troubles. What a kind gesture!

Spiny Cucumber (grows wild in Namibia)Traditional Kitchen at Mr. Sivera's HomesteadFishing in the bush...Nkurenkuru style

While we didn't see rhino on our Etosha safari we also never go to see a Chameleon until we were leaving from the riverside and almost drove over one. It was difficult to rangle him onto a branch but he was great fun once we got him.

Shaylah and Caleb (Shaylah and Josiah made us brightly colored oven mitts with this cool kids sewing kit)On the last day at our house our friend Sikwale had to gather some newly born chicks for branding them. I happened to run into him and quickly got the kids to take part in the chase. It was a lot of fun trying to corner them and grab them. The kids said it was one of the favorite parts of their trip.In order left to right Josiah, Caleb, Rachel, ShaylahOur last night together at Joe's Beer House in Windhoek. We had tons of game meat including ostrich, kudu, oryx, zebra, crocodile and springbok...yum!!!!! Do yourself a favor and find a specialty shop selling ostrich fillets in the states, they are now our favorite kind of steak.After they left, we embarked the same day to start our long drive to Mozambique for the second half of our vacation. We drove from the airport in Namibia through Botswana, South Africa and into southern Mozambique. This took two full days of driving over 12 hours a day! Driving through Botswana was particularly stressful as their cattle apparently live on the shoulders of the highways and seem to have no fear of cars but just cross the road at their leisure. Driving through South Africa we were pleasantly surprised to find a McDonalds in Pretoria!! I know, I know, McDonalds you say?? Well, if there were a Panara Bread, Togo’s, In N’ Out, Pick Up Sticks or any other American restaurant out here we would have been thrilled to go there…but McDonalds is all we got folks, so yes, we were pretty dang excited for the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, French fries and coke from the fountain! One interesting note if you ever travel to South Africa – around here restaurants don’t give you anything for free or included in your meal like a bread basket or chips and salsa, and apparently free refills are completely unheard of! I went to the counter to ask for a refill on my coke (fountain drinks are also a rare delight for us!) and the lady looked at me like I was completely crazy and said “A refill?! No, we don’t do that.” I had to buy a whole new coke and fought my urge to tell the lady I was not crazy but in other places it is common to get unlimited free refills. After two long days of driving we finally got to the Mozambique border and the backpackers where we planned to stay that night was in Maputo, only about 100km away. Overloaded enormous truck with whom we repeatedly played chicken on the roadsMozambique SceneryMozambique Traditional Dwelling As soon as we crossed into the border post of Mozambique we could tell we had entered a very different country. We were immediately swarmed by 5 guys all trying to “help” us with our paper work, telling us we needed to get the mandatory insurance which was sold from numerous offices that looked more like joints in a redlight district than places of business. They even posed as border officials and tried to take our paperwork out of our hands. Inside the customs office it was not any better. The men were still following us around insisting that they must help us with our paper work and the officials inside customs did nothing about these menaces. I hoped that this experience was not a foreshadowing of what our entire Mozambique trip would be like, but my gut told me it was. My gut was right. Driving into Maputo was like driving into TJ on steroids. There were thousands of people walking on streets filled with trash amongst shacks made into small bars and shops. We did not have good directions to get to our backpacker so we drove around for a long time trying to get oriented to the city and find someone that might be able to point us in the right direction. We had been warned about the corrupt police of Mozambique and got our own vivid taste of that within the first half hour of being in the city. Caleb was stopped by two policemen for making some sort of illegal turn. The police explained that he had made a “big mistake” and needed to pay a fine on the spot of $4000.00. Once they had his drivers license in hand that’s when the bribing began. Caleb asked for a ticket but these cops don’t even carry traffic tickets to issue, you simply have to pay them the cash at the scene. (Seems like the whole system is designed for corruption!) Luckily since we just got into the country we did not have any Mozambique currency. Caleb explained this to the police over and over again but they were still in disbelief and insisting that we must give them some cash. Finally I opened up our wallet and showed them all we had was $10 Namibian dollars and offered that to them. They laughed at this as Namibian currency is useless in Mozambique. They still had Caleb’s license at this point so in desperation Caleb offered to give them the only items we had to offer – bananas and a small pack of trail mix. Seeing that they really were not going to get any cash out of us they accepted the food and finally let us go. This was the first of 6 police stops we encountered within the first 24 hours in the country. The cops always insisted on a bribe and even fabricated our “big mistakes” to threaten us. Wonderful:)The next day we promptly left Maputo as fast as possible instead of staying a day like we had planned. The roads to the first main coastal town were great but between Xia Xia and Tofo the road was HORRIBLE!!! This was very stressful driving on these roads. The road was mostly made of potholes and we could only drive 30 mph for long stretches. In addition to ever present possibility of ruining the undercarriage of the car we had to deal with oncoming traffic mostly composed of semis and large trucks or crazy bus drivers. In many parts it was a one lane road and you had to swerve off the road into the “shoulder” to avoid a head on collision. A friend of ours who we ended up meeting in Vilanculos told us that just 5 years ago trees were growing out of the potholes because the roads were so unused during their 20 year civil war. Despite these things Mozambique seems to be a people who are really trying to make it and improve their lives. We were impressed by the vitality of the people, despite the annoying street peddlers that make getting out of your car a chore. The road between Xia Xia and TofoImagine to whole road being spotted with duzzies like this one (if you look carefully there are at least two others directly down the road from this one)So now on to the beautiful scenery. Mozambique has incredible jungle like landscape. Though there is no real canopy everything is verdant and lush with palm trees everywhere. If there were ever a country where you could OD on coconuts Mozambique would be in the running. We would pass piles of piles of used coconut husks ready to be burned, and an equal number of huge piles of just coconut that had already been husked. There were not a lot of animals in the road like in Namibia or Botswana but there were a ton of people on the road, seemingly unafraid of the cars going past at highway speeds. The beaches of Tofo were wonderful with long stretches of untouched coastline and beautiful sparkling blue waves. While Rachel was shopping in the market for a bag (I Caleb was pretty much done with shopping in open markets at this point because of the constant hasseling) I was sitting on a bench in the sand watching a people play soccer with waves crashing just feet from their game. As I sat little boys came up and tried to sell me stuff, only after they had finished fighting over a trashed piece of Styrofoam. One of them came up to me and started speaking in Afrikaans. I told him I don’t speak Afrikaans in my best attempt at the language. He then proceeded to started screaming a song in Afrikaans at full volume about 6 inches from my ear. As wonderful as this cultural experience was I told him if he didn’t stop I would get the cops who were sitting a few feet from us. Once I said that he took off without a word for fear of their retribution. I guess the policia criminales can come in handy after all, though corrupt to the core.

While in Tofo we had wonderful food like ½ chicken and coconut rice, prawns and rice or calamari and rice. Lots of rice but all the food was really good. It was even better when we figured out you can get the same food from the hole in the wall place selling for 150 meticals as the restaurant selling it for 280 meticals.

After Tofo we traveled to another coastal city called Vilanculos. Here the town was much bigger and we stayed at a place called Baobab Beach Backpackers. After settling in we spent the afternoon perusing places that offered snorkeling trips to the islands off the coast. We decided to go with Dolphin Dhows after they offered a deal for 1600 meticais ($50 US) with a free nights stay at their place. This was unbeatable though the guy that sold it to us we quickly renamed “Slick” because of how much of a pure salesman he was. The next day we went snorkeling which was the highlight of our Mozambique trip outside of the scenery. We swam around for hours with beautiful, brightly colored and bizarre looking fish for a couple hours in the morning and afternoon. We had a wonderful lunch of seafood and fruit, sitting on the sand of this beautiful tropical island. On our way back home we sailed instead of using the motor for a quaint and calming experience. This made us think that sailing would be a wonderful hobby because of how peaceful it is.Low Tide at VilanculosHermit crab during low tide at VilanculosThis is a picture of our boat and the island we snorkeling off ofSparkling azure seaTraditional sailing dhow of Mozambique (pronounced dow)After snorkeling that night the owner of the place made us a beautiful lobster dinner (well two lobsters really) with rice and salad. We also bought some coconuts to mix a fruity drink made of all fresh juices in the local homebrewed rum called Tipo Tinto.

The view from our room at Dolphin Dhow...priceless when you wake up to the ocean breeze and this view, not to mention the fact the room was comped:)On our ride home we saw a very peculiar truck with an animal on the back. Look at this picture and see if you can identify what animal is on the roof of this bus and where it is.Did you find it....its a goat!!!

In summary highlights of the trip were: 1) Seeing beautiful countryside of Mozambique 2) Having fresh prawns numerous times 3) Snorkeling on Bazaruto Islands 4) Buying freshly roasted cashews from people on the side of the road 5) Spending time with one another Dimlights of the trip: -1) Corrupt Cops -2) Bad Roads -3) Annoying tourist peddlers -4) Expensive accommodation and food Interesting facts: -We were pulled over by police in every country we traveled in -We were asked for bribes 4 times-We didn’t pay any money to any country for the road violations -We illegally reentered because we didn’t have enough money for the road permit (well we thought we did but in actuality it turns out our car already had a Namibian road permit so it was good that we didn’t pay that fee when we didn’t have to in the first place) -Mozambique market vendors do not barter for price like Namibians will -When dealing with police in southern Africa not having money on you is a plus:)

If you haven't heard anything from us lately it's because we are in Mozambique right now without regular internet access.

We had a GREAT trip with my sister Beth, Anthony and Josiah and Shaylah. We saw tons of animals on our safari in Etosha including lions, cheetah, elephants, giraffe, zebra and all the antelope. We proceeded to Nkrenkuru where we stayed for 4 days and had a really nice, relaxing time. We visited a collegues homestead in a nearby village and the kids loved playing with his children and the chicken they gave us as a gift when we left! The trip was especially fun traveling with Josiah and Shaylah because of how much fun and excitement they exuded at all the new experiences! It was so good to see the kids again and hug them every day =), and to spend quality time with Beth and Anthony. Thanks guys for such a wonderful time!

After we dropped them off at the airport we started our drive to Mozambique....a long drive!! We spent 3 nights in a small beach village called Tofo and we are stopped in a little town right now, Inhambane, on our way to Vilancuos - a little beach town where we are going to go snorkeling at the Bazuruto Archipelago!! Our Mozambique experience so far has been a little bit crazy - in our first 24 hours in country we were stopped by police 6 times and asked for bribes as they fabricated the "big mistakes" we had made! Once we got out of the capital city it was better. The country side is green, lush and beautiful - tons of palm trees and villagers selling fresh fruit and cashews on the side of the road. The beach is beautiful and nice and warm! The local food is delicious - coconut rice served with every meal and great fresh seafood! We won't have internet access again for a while, but when we get back to Namibia we will post pictures and get back in contact!

Finally vacation is here. The 1st semester is over and we've only got two to go before we return to the states. We can make it. We're excited to begin vacation with Beth and Anthony, Josiah and Shaylah. Its gonna be such a fun 1 1/2 weeks with them! After that we plan to go to Mozambique for some serious beach going and snorkeling. We've heard that Mozambique beaches are amazing, the water will be just like the Caribbean with far as the eye can see white sand and palm trees.In other news besides vacation and school our grant was approved for the Tusikameni Sewing Service. We should be getting the grant money in soon and hopefully can buy the sewing machines while here in Windhoek! Beyond that we're still waiting to hear back regarding the hostel projects. The grant for the Theatre Project in conjunction with the Youth Activity Center has been denied because we wanted to charge $1-2 to see a movie. I thought this was funny because the whole reason for having the theatre is to raise money for the Youth Activity Center, so not charging money kind of defeats that purpose. Oh well maybe we will resubmit after the holidays.Boy with wire car (these kids make these cars out of trash and they are really cool. they have steering columns and front axles for turning)Maize and Mahangu in the Sun

Can't get enough of the amazing dragonflys hereBoys playing soccer on a walk recentlyI call this flower the purple flower. Its not an original name but it works I guess.Typical rural scene in NkurenkuruI'm not sure if the master is checking out his cattle or his future wifeThe next Nolan Ryan

Hello All,

We just got back from a very long extended b-day getaway for Rachel. We went to stay with our wonderful friends in Okahandja for the long Easter weekend (its a 4 day weekend here). We had a fun relaxing time using the fast internet and talking to friends and family. Rachel especially enjoyed the many Skype birthday parties and they made her feel very special so thank you all for that!!! Sadly she wasn't able to eat her birthday brownies until yesterday becasue we didn't have access to an oven until now. It was an extended birthday because we stayed in Windhoek for the rest of the week so Rachel could receive some much needed physical therapy appointments for her neck and back. They have helped a lot and her headaches have gone away so far. She is also wearing her glasses more often and got a tennis ball to help massage her back when its hurting.

Rainbow over Nkurenkuru

(as usual rainbow pictures are never as awesome as they are in real life)

Yesterday Rachel and I were leisurely strolling down our typical riverside walkway (the river is extremely high by the way) and on our way back we saw a snake in our path. Rachel screamed and I immediately ran at the snake and as it struck I grabbed it by the fang and tore its head off. Okay well actually I just also yelled(well actually cursed but...) and ran away with Rachel for a few yards until we were safely away. The snake had slithered off the path but it was a big snake. From what I saw it was probably 2-3 inches in diameter and a greyish color. That means to us that it was either a mamba or a cobra. The problem was this was the only path and the sun was going down so we slowly walked back up the path while clapping and stomping our feet. The snake had gone by then and we slowly made our way by. Some people were coming up the path and I said "Ezoka ezi" which is my best attempt at "there's a snake." They just laughed and said it is okay to walk. Anyway today we had a more pleasant reptile encounter when we found a chameleon in our yard while returning from grocery shopping. Here are the pictures of us and our friend. We both decided that a chameleon would be a really cool pet. Just watching the different pictures and you can see his skin color change, pretty cool indeed. Also his eyes can move independently of each other and rotate 360 degrees!!!

Our Chameleon Friend

Though non poisonous I am still a bit freaked out by these things

Rachel and the chameleon

This is when it was angry from us trying to pick it up and pulling it by the tail. The expanded throat with the orange stripes means its a male and its ticked off.

Crazy eyes as promised

Full sized view

The stare down

Here are some pictures from our last failed trip to Katope with By Provision

Amazing Preying Mantis with Cool Coloring

Butterfly in Katope

Kid on donkey in Katope

Kids in Katope

Caleb blowing excess water from the well

Gary measuring the well depth

(ended up being 3 meters of water in the bottom)

Pintailed Whydah

I call this one the lion butterfly but who knows what it is

In other news while I was waiting around for Rachel's appointments everyday I did some snooping around in the Windhoek libraries doing research on hydrology and Namibia's groundwater. I ended up finding a list of 28,000 boreholes north of Okahandja where they work, most of which have all the information they want. I also found where to purchase a geological map of Namibia and hydrogeological map as well. Gary and Elizabeth already had a the water one so I bought them the geological map. I also got the people at the ministry to make some maps of various portions of Namibia with boreholes on the map. This way when they are going to drill in an area they can find it on the map and then look up the boreholes to find the water depth and total well depth of surrounding holes.

Talk to you later everyone!!!

On our way home from our time off from school we got stuck in a small town along the way. Much to our delight two giraffes came up and started grazing right next to us. They let us walk up to about ten feet away to admire them. What a beautiful creature! This is definitely the coolest animal that I have ever seen. After that we got a ride with a semi going all the way to Rundu which is great. Hopefully well get home and get all our shopping done in town too.

This is the sign to the hemingway restaurant that says "relax for a lifetime" I guess some people relax longer than others.

Hey all we're in Okahandja now and can skype or if you don't have that we have our Magic Jack courtesy of Clark with US number 480-463-5715. The Magic Jack dials just like a regular phone and is a AZ number. If you don't want to use your minutes but still want to talk to us just email or let us know and we'll call you.

Caleb and Rachel

Trip to Rundu

This last Friday we were finally able to get a free ride to and from Rundu and pick up all of the remaining items for the garden project. Now all that must happen is to get the fence tightener machine borrowed from a local, buy some cement and pay someone a small amount to help us build the fence. Luckily all these things are being arranged by our project group and have nothing to do with me. What you can pray for is what God is in charge of and that’s the height of the river. Pray that the river level will stay down and everything will dry up so we can get on with building the fence and erecting the water stand. The water stand has already been built but is just sitting behind one of the local bars where it was built, waiting to be finally put up at the garden site. The water was down for all of February and literally a few days before we were supposed to build the fence and have the stand put up it started raining again and the river flooded to well past our garden plot. The flooding is a blessing in that it fertilizes the ground with the river silt but bad because we may have to wait until late April to start building everything.

Drilling for water

In other news By Provision is coming this afternoon to go to Katope and Sawato to start drilling. We were finally able to visit Katope, Sawato and Mukekete 2 with the clerk to assess the situation and see if everything is ready to go. Katope and Sawato were ready so we thought we would spend this whole trip going here this time. Mukekete 2 is really a prime site because the existing wells have a static water level of around 11m and are completely encased in rock. These are good because the water is so close we can feasibly get a high volume well out of them and the ground is solid rock so the well has no chance of caving in after being drilled. However they will try to come back there later this year but the road to that village is deep sand in parts and could be inaccessible until next years rainy season when the sand gets more compacted. Anyway this week they are gonna try and drill three wells in Katope and two in Sawato. I think if we drill two in Katope and they are dry we will just go to Sawato because the water table is too low. Pray that by drilling in the valley we will be close enough to the water table. The last time we drilled we had water immediately after drilling but then weeks later only wet mud in the bottom. That tells me we were close to the top of the water table so that by going to an adjacent valley instead of the crest of a hill we will find success. It seems a bit ridiculous to me that finding water is this haphazard but that’s what happens when all the government boreholes have no measurements recorded so you can’t judge the relative water level of an area.

Vacation

We have been planning our coming vacation in April/May. At first Rachel’s sister Beth and her family will be coming for 9 days starting April 28th. Then we plan to visit Mozambique for 13 day trip with about 9 in the country and 4 traveling. We plan to go to Tofo and Vilanculos which are southern coastal towns of Mozambique. Should be a lot of relaxing, snorkeling, archipelago visiting and whale shark diving. Before that we have the Easter holiday when we will be in Okahandja and are able to Skype that whole weekend. If you would like to Skype that weekend we made a schedule and you can choose a time from below. The time on the left is Pacific Standard Time Friday 4-2-10

PST Namibia

7am 4pm – Beth and Anthony

8am 5pm

9am 6pm – Jon and Lisa

10am 7pm

11am 8pm – Brian and Kerri

12pm 9pm

1pm 10pm

2pm 11am

Saturday 4-3-10

PST Namibia

7am 4pm – Clark and Kathy

8am 5pm

9am 6pm – Katie Burke

10am 7pm

11am 8pm

12pm 9pm

1pm 10pm – Nate and Jen

2pm 11am

11pm 8am

Sunday 4-4-10

PST Namibia

12am 9am

1am 10am

7am 3pm

8am 4pm

9am 5pm – Mystie and Dan

10am 6pm

11am 7pm

12pm 8pm

1pm 9pm

2pm 10am

Since I (Caleb) started writing this blog we began drilling at Katope and our first well had an initial 3m of water in it. Hopefully it will rise overnight and be more than 5m. The static water level is at 75ft with the well being 84ft deep. Praise God for the water and hope it rises!

Sewage Also in the amount of time I(Caleb) have been writing this blog our septic tank filled up and has been overflowing in our yard. This makes it so you can’t have a shower without everything backing up and probably some sewage water working its way up to the shower. Yum!!! Lets hope they can get it fixed soon:) This reminds me of the time my Grandpa Stephens septic tank filled up and we had to dig down to it to check and then call in the honey wagon. I remember learning the word “spell” from Uncle Bob and I think “honey wagon” was also a new word at the time. I think the smell of the sewage in my yard is a potent reminder of that memory when I was a kid.

More Drilling

Today Wednesday) Gary and the crew went out to drill and Gary got stuck in the mud because it rained a lot last night. Evidently it rained all night in the bush and there were large lakes where the road used to be. The hole they had drilled to 90ft the day before and planned to drill to 120ft started to cave in so they pulled out and decided to move spots. When they were moving they had to go over a hill and because of the rain the large truck with the drill and air compressor slipped as they were gunning it to make it over this hill. Because of the mud the large truck slipped into a tree and did some major damage to the air compressor. This is not your ordinary air compressor. Just imagine something the size of four refrigerators stacked like a cube. Its six tons and takes up a large part of the flatbed truck. This means drilling is over for now in Katope and they need to go back and retool the compressor with their repairman. A total bummer for us and the people of the villages. We're not sure of the Lord's plan on this one but I'm pretty sure this wasn't part of it. Please pray that Gary can get their air compressor working again without major cost or repair and that it does indeed get fixed. Otherwise they would have to purchase a new one which is very expensive and has to be shipped from the States.

Water Bucket in Mukekete 2 Wells

Mukekete 2 Hand Dug Well (11m to water)

Cattle Trough next to well with old man

The clerk I work with often and the principal from Mukekete 2 with well in background

Another Mukekete 2 Hand Dug Well. They have over 16 wells like this

Old Men of Mukekete 2

Mahango - This is the staple food of the Namibian people

Mahango - notice the small seed balls. They strip these off, beat them, soak them, beat them, mash them then cook them into a wonderful bland paste called porridge

Meerkat squirrel thing in my yard. Thought it was cool and hadn't seen it before. If you can identify it and tell me you'll win $1,000,000,000 cash.

We have been writing grants like crazy people. The project we have in the grant pipeline are a Nkurenkuru Theatre Project, Hostel Activity Center, Tulikameni Sewing Project, Tulikwateseni Chicken Farm (Not our project but helping write/submit the grant), and soon to be the ELCIN/Nkurenkuru Combined School Laboratory Proposal. Wahoo for grant writing!!! Though a tedious and arduous task the idea of helping people who want to give help to people who need help is an absolutely wonderful feeling. Working out budget numbers or getting price quotes is actually quite horrible but the end product is great and even better if the proposal is accepted and the work can begin. Work is beginning this Saturday (or next Saturday or the one after that who knows actually because this is Namibia where time matters little) on the Tulikwateseni (working together) Garden Project. The grant has been approved and the fencing materials are ready to go so we are going to start building the fence and working the soil. Regarding the water tower for the water tank, it seems that the business the project is actually paying to do the work has put us off for more than two weeks now. Here is a typical conversation just to wet your whistle to what it’s like trying to actually help something to happen. (and yes we really do talk like this on a daily basis) Me: Morokeni Tate! Businessman: Morokeni None Me: Ngapi? Businessman: Nawa Businessman: One Ngapi? Me: Nawa Me: So how is everything going today? You are busy or no? Businessman: Yes yes I am busy today, many many things to do. Me: Yes so I am thinking about this project we are doing and wondering maybe if you can start to build that tower sometime this week because would be good that it could be done then. Businessman: Oh yes we will start today even, except that the man who is doing it is in Nepara so we must get him. We will start tomorrow and it will be finished. Tomorrow comes: Me: Morokeni Tate! Businessman: Morokeni None Me: Ngapi? Businessman: Nawa Businessman: One Ngapi? Me: Nawa Me: It is good to see you, how is everything going today? Businessman: Oh I am just working, but not so busy today. Me: I remember talking to you and you said the tower might be built today, so what is the news with that one? Businessman: But you see the problem is that man has not come from Nepara yet so we must wait. I am going to a funeral for the weekend and he will come tomorrow and Friday. He must do that work Friday because then he will go back to Nepara. Me: Okay but it must be done that day because we will start building our fence on Saturday and we would like the tower to be there. Mpandu Tate! Businessman: No problem it will be done, you don’t have to worry about that one. I have had the above conversation with this man (except for the starting to build the fencing part) probably three times. The first time I talked to him was on a Saturday and he told me it would be done on Sunday. Why would he tell me that when he knows full well people don’t work on Sundays, or very rarely on that day? In fact when he told me that, the person who could do the work was still in a village 40km away so why in the @#$%& would he tell me the work will start and finish on a day when nobody works when the man is not even around? I have no idea. The funny thing to me is that we’re paying him for it and he still won’t do it, and of course we won’t pay him until he does it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like everyone is late or blows you off, its more of a case by case basis. Some people are very punctual (few and far between however). Hilarious and all we say anymore is “Oh well, we’ll try again tomorrowJ” Besides that we’ve been doing alright lately. We’ve both had problems with our principals at our schools involving scheduling and work hours. They seem to think that staying at school while doing nothing is better than helping with the stuff we mentioned above. We politely disagreeL My principal was clearly livid at me, evidenced by his 30 minute diatribe about my failure to attend all the staff meetings. Sorry dude but your staff meetings suck, there is very little accomplished and any input I have is rarely taken or considered, not to mention the meeting is somewhere between 3-5hrs long. We’ve also both been homesick and it kinda came to a head this week. We just miss our family and friends. We miss the familiar and the normal. We miss being able to relax in the evening and buy some sandwiches from Togo’s then get some frozen yogurt. Or go over to the houses of family and friends and talk about whatever, just enjoying one another’s company. Or going to play basketball with people who can actually play basketball Being in a different culture just wears on you and it makes you realize how much the culture of our home really has shaped the way we think and feel, not to mention being awesome and wonderful in many ways. It made us both really think about whether we want to stay for a 3rd year and whether we can really handle it. We’re still not sure but we’re gonna still apply anyway because we can turn it down if we change our minds. Anyway thanks for listening, for those faithful readers 16 months later, and we still love to hear how everyone is doing. We are commonly on google chat from the hours of 7am to 12pm (PST) during the weekdays, and on the weekend as early as 6am-3pm(PST). I know that’s your work hours but if you want chat on the weekends we would love you. All you need is a gmail account and just log on, considering you have emails from us. Love, Caleb and Rachel

So I learned today that I have new gift - apparently I can talk to the birds!! I know, I know, you are probably thinking we are taking this whole bird watching and enjoyment of birds way to far - but humor me and give me a chance to explain this amazing occurrence! :)

The Grey Headed Kingfisher comes to the tree above our bird bath almost every day now. It's a beautiful bird, but from the front it looks very plain. So I got out the camera yesterday to take a picture but this bird never turns around so we can see the beautiful, colorful part of the bird. So I started mumbling to myself, out loud, "Come on King Fisher, just turn around so I can take a picture of your back!". Didn't happen. I was thinking about you guys you know - wanted to take a picture of it's back so I could post it on our blog and you could see how beautiful it is.

Well......today, when I already had the camera out to take pictures of some finches in the bird bath the King Fisher flies down right into my camera view - his back facing me! I started snapping shots immediately and continued in amazement as it proceeded to open it's wings and turn as if to show off his beauty! It was pretty cool! Enjoy the pics, and it's ok if you think I'm a little kooky - I do too! But whatever it takes to keep going and find enjoyment in PC Nam! This is Rachel btw - Caleb had me put that disclaimer so you wouldn't think he was kooky too :) Picture captions by Caleb.

Grey Headed Kingfisher Frontal (mostly boring and plain)

Grey Headed Kingfisher Rear (pretty cool with the blue in the tail)

Boom!!! Kazow!!! Shablam!!!

(next he pulls a rabbit out of his tail feathers)

Hello All,

The beginning of the school year was just as stressful as last year, but at least this year we were more prepared for it. We both had to re-do the timetable multiple times, and I (Rachel) will still have to redo our timetable at least once more because we are expecting a new teacher. This year my school enrolled a record number of learners which is good, but unfortunately made it so I had to give up my classroom for a home room teacher. I am not a home room teacher (they call it a “registered teacher” here) and they needed to use my classroom for a home room, so I sadly lost my classroom. Now I have to rotate to the open classrooms throughout the day, which means I am teaching in a different classroom every period. I was very sad and a bit disoriented when I had to give up my own classroom but it seems to be going ok rotating, and is much better than all of the added responsibilities of a registered teacher. After we came back from vacation I have been realizing more and more the things I really enjoy about living in Nkurenkuru. I think I have reached a new level of feeling at home and enjoying where we live. I especially enjoy the beauty of our surroundings, the river, hippos, long walks on the river, the birds that live in our back yard and the excitement of the new birds that migrate to our area during different seasons (we came home from vacation to find the Southern Carmine Bee Eaters have migrated to Nkurenkuru – see pictures below and call us nerds if you like!:). I enjoy the small town and community, all the friendly faces we see in town and shopping in the market. Besides the stress and frustrations of working at the school and the constant clashes with our western business mindset, we are really enjoying Nkurenkuru.

On the note of frustrations and clashes with our Western mindset here is one clear example and an update on the hostel at my school. I was sick the past two weeks and finally went to Rundu to see the doctor last Friday. I came home that evening only to see many of my hostel learners in the streets with their bags packed trying to get hikes to their villages. The Health Inspector came and closed our hostel that day and all the learners were informed at 4pm that they could no longer stay at the hostel. Most of these kids live in villages far away where it is difficult to get a hike, especially starting that late in the evening. We ended up taking in 7 girls who were not able to get a ride home that day. The illogicalness of the whole situation was fairly maddening. The health inspector had already inspected our hostels last year, so you would think a logical decision would be to close the hostel at the end of the year last year so these kids could make other schooling arrangements for the next year. However, they decided to close the hostel three weeks into the school year. Additionally, the ministry already invested thousands of dollars, two years ago, building a new boys’ hostel which would now just be given over to the church. A seemingly logical idea would be to invest the additional money needed to renovate the girls’ hostel so that the entire hostel would not be closed and the new boys’ hostel would not be wasted. I found out that one of the main reasons they decided to close the hostel last Friday was because the Pastor of the church, who owns and manages the hostel, had conveniently been out of town for this meeting and the meeting the previous week regarding the hostel issues. Because he was not present to discuss and resolve some of the issues the Health Inspector simply closed the hostel. I was very saddened and frustrated to see these unfortunate learners be put through this whole ordeal. It seems the learners are always the ones who suffer because of this disorganization and corruption.

The good news (few! Aren’t you glad there’s at least some good news in all of this!!:) is that this week the parents came to Nkurenkuru to meet with the Ministry of Education, the school management and the pastor to protest the closing of the hostel. When I heard about this meeting I met with numerous members of the school management to encourage them to fight for the Ministry to re-open and renovate the hostel. I explained that Sarah (the previous PC volunteer) had already secured mosquito nets and mattresses for these hostel learners and in addition to that Caleb and I were writing a grant for tables and chairs for the dinning hall, sport equipment, books, and craft supplies for the hostel. I explained that the Ministry of Education would receive all these things for the hostel completely for free, therefore reducing the total cost they would need to spend renovating the girls’ hostel. Much to my amazement and delight it turns out that our contributions played a part in their ultimate decision to re-open the hostel and renovate the girls’ hostel!! The learners will temporarily move into other buildings the church owns which are in slightly better condition, until the ministry completes the renovations. We were very pleased with this decision and are very excited to submit our grant for the Hostel Activity Center which will include tables, chairs, sport equipment, books and craft supplies. This will give the hostel learners many different activities to enjoy and we hope, improve their standard of living at least in a small way. We will see if the ministry actually follows through with the promise renovations, or how long it takes, but we are hopeful and glad that at least they were moved into slightly better accommodation and these 180 learners were not turned away from school for the 2010 school year.

We are hopeful that 2010 will include many successful community projects as we are currently working on six projects: The Tulikwateseni Garden Project, The Tusikameni Sewing Project – to provide income generation for 4 unemployed community members who will make affordable school uniforms among other things, The Nkurenkuru Hostel Activity Center, The Nkurenkuru Theatre Project – to provide alternative entertainment besides going to the local bars and an income generation for the Hostel Activity Center, The Mbambi Women’s Basket Project and the Bore Hole project in Katope, Sawato and Mukekete 2. It sounds like a lot of projects but we will be lucky if even two are successful, and these are the projects we have been asked to help with so we are glad to try to help. Additionally, this is the aspect of our Peace Corps service that really brings us both excitement and joy amidst the frustrations and difficulty of teaching. We hope that at least through some of these projects some of the impoverished and marginalized but hard working people in our community are helped and empowered to continue fighting and they get a glimpse of the fact that God does care for them in their impoverished state. That is why we are here, so if we can accomplish that at all we will be very happy.

Sorry for the late post:) Hope you enjoy hearing what's going on with us.

love,

Caleb and Rachel

Pictures From Vacation

Rachel and Bethany in Swakopmund this January

Taking a break while on vacation...

Mahangu Game Park

Rachel and Lisa while on safari in Mahangu Game Park

We saw this guy running from the road and stopped to take some pictures

Little Velvet Monkey

There were a ton of these where we stayed in Botswana, very fun to watch

Ostrich in Mahangu

Warthog and Baby

2nd Largest Antelope in Africa (the mighty Kudu)

Springbok accompanied by the Oxpecker

(referring to the bird on their back)

Dung beetle doing what he does best...being nature's janitor

Turtle (did I need to title this one?)

Swainson's Spurfowl

Velvet monkey with baby

Mom and Dad Stephens with hippos chasing them...

or maybe they are just in the background?!?!?

Little bee-eaters in a tree together

Carmine Bee-eaters in Flight (these have finally arrived at our house)

Pictures from Around Nkurenkuru

Caleb with neighborhood children and sunflowers in the background

(I am 6' tall for reference sake)

Giant Sunflower Closeup

Water monitor lizard (we had one of these in our backyard last week!!!)

Golden Weaver in our Backyard

Beautiful flowers all around of which I don't know the name

Giant Kingfisher (the beak on this bird is huge)

Carmine Bee-eater closeup

(check out those colors!!!)

“Nondjombo water unsuitable for human consumption”

This is a village nearby Mukekete 2 which is on our list this year to renovate. Or at least we have been trying to visit for site development before By Provision comes in March. Interesting the headman of this are got his face in the paper after piping up about the condition of their water in the area. He claims that they community has been “drinking from the same wells since independence”. He also states that the wells are 30m deep. This is awesome new!!! That means By Provision will easily reach these distances with their drill. Furthermore if they have been using these wells for this long it’s a high likelihood that they are accessing ground water instead of rain run-off. In any event it’s good to see that where we are trying to reach is feeling the problems of impotable water.

Some other fantastic things they said in this article are, “Two community members have fallen into those wells. They died and we still drink the water. We get snakes and insects that fall in the wells. We take them out and continue drinking from the same wells.” Additionally he says, “The water shortage also affects children who go to school. Learners at the village benefit from the government school feeding program. Yet the school uses the ‘dirty water’ to prepare food for the learners.”

This article comes at a good time for me and Rachel. We are both considering extending for a 3rd year with the Peace Corps. This means that we would continue here in Namibia for a 3rd consecutive year but would be changing our sites to Tsumeb. We would volunteer with By Provision, with Caleb focusing on drilling and Rachel on administration within the NGO. We would also put together a program for HIV/AIDS education to do at the wells sites throughout the country. Additionally Rachel would serve as a PCV Leader for Peace Corps. This would involve a 60-40 split between drilling and PCVL duties. We would live in one of the houses on the BP compound and they would provide out utilities and accommodation that way. It’s a really exciting opportunity to continue with water provision in Namibia which we have both thoroughly enjoyed and help educate people about HIV/AIDS. We’re very excited about it and just emailed our supervisor at PC to begin the application process. Another cool thing about it is that we’ll be able to come back to America for a month in between our service and our 3rd year. It will take some months to find out if we’re accepted so we’ll be praying until then. Please pray for us in this way!!! Pray that God will guide us through this process so that we end up where He wants us.

Beyond that we’re finally squared away and our schools are moving along as usual. Rachel is finishing up her timetable this weekend and Caleb’s was done last week. Lucky for me the computer teacher understood the program enough to do most of the tweaking by himself. That’s encouraging because I won’t be here next year to guide them through the process. We were able to visit Rundu to start ordering stuff for the women’s garden project. Their plot is flooded right now so we won’t be able to start construction until April or May sometime. Hope everybody reading had a good holiday season and is doing well. We miss all of you so much!!!

Caleb and Rachel

p.s. here are some pictures we hadn’t put up year from our family trip.

Stephens Family Vacation 2009-2010

Etosha Game Reserve

African Open-Billed Stork

Springbok

Grey Crane

Yes, Flamingos in Africa, who would have thought?

Oryx

Wildebeast Crossing

Southern Yellow-Billed Horn Bill

Swakopmund Dunes

Rachel, Caleb and Bethany racing down the giant, burning dune...a bonding moment

Caleb contemplating dune boarding with Rachel, Bethany and Lisa

hiking up the dune in the background.

Peace Corps Tattoo

Nkurenkuru

Clark eating a maguni - a sweet African fruit that tastes better than it looks, trust me.

Caleb's School - Library with Bethany in the background

Rachel's School

Rachel's Classroom

Women walking in NkurenkuruStephens Family walking by the Kavango River, Nkurenkuru

Onane Stephens and Onane Nairenge

Our host Mother honored our family by giving Kathy a live chicken, a very generous gift!

Onane Nairenge teaching our family how to pound mahangu,

the traditional grain and staple food here in Namibia.

Okavango Delta, BotswanaCattle Egret

White Fronted Bee Eater

Little Bee Eater

Blue Cheeked Bee Eater

Wire Tailed Sparrow

Blue Cheeked Bee Eater

White Fronted Bee Eater

Brothers unite once again

African Fish Eagle

Slatey Heron

Cattle Egret

Pels Fishing Owl

Pied King Fisher

Woodland King Fisher

White-Backed Heron

Sometimes watching people watching bugs is just as interesting as watching bugs

Hammerkop

Little Bee Eater

Malachite King Fisher

Simon's Town and Cape of Good Hope South Africa

Aren't they a cute couple...wait that's us!!!

Thanks Stephens Family for a wonderful holiday and vacation!! It was so much fun and very refreshing to get to see all of you and share our Namibia life with you!

Hello All,If you want to skype us we have fast free internet through Tuesday and are available for appointments or random skype calls. If you think you'll be available then shoot us an email to setup a time or just skype us when you're available. Hope to see you soon:)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,Caleb and Rachel

YEAR IN REVIEW Wow, where to begin, it seems like 2-3 years ago that we flew out of Washington D.C. and arrived in Namibia for two months of training, but in reality it’s only been a little over a year now. We have finished our first school year now and officially got our first grant approved for a community project! It feels very good to be done with the school year and we feel like the second year is probably going to fly by. Now we are looking forward to a week at home relaxing and doing some work on our community projects, then our vacation begins. We will travel to Tsumeb, then to Okahandja for a few days to visit our host family and friends at Christ Hope International, then we hop on a bus to Cape Town where we will spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (Hopefully hiking in The Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve or swimming with the penguins and great whites in the Atlantic) then to pick up the Stephen’s Family for a two week family road trip through Namibia!!! We have been so excited for this trip and have been planning it for months! We will drive from Cape Town, through Namibia to Etosha and Nkurenkuru, then to Zambia to see Victoria Falls, then into Botswana to the Okavango Delta then back again to Namibia to Swakopmund and the dunes. Highlights from Peace Corps Namibia 2009 Finishing two months of rigorous training!!Being welcomed into two host familiesSuccessfully completing our first year of teaching and really enjoying getting to know our learnersLearners and neighbor kids coming over to our houseSeeing and killing WAY too many snakes in our yard and front porch (this is not a good highlight, just a very memorable one that will never leave us!!)Working with the awesome people of Katope and Sawato villages and By Provision to try to get some working water wells – more to come 2010!Working with Gary and Elizabeth from By Provision in Botswana, helping to drill 3 successful wells and learning more about drillingSeeing hippos in the river, often!Seeing so many INCREDIBLE birds and making an awesome bird bath in our back yardBuilding our own garden and eating our own home grown veggies!!Learning how to cook some delicious food out of necessity – like tortilla soup, cinnamon rolls and lemon bread to name a fewGetting our first grant approved and working with a great group of hard working women who are trying to provide for their familiesNearly going insane from the ridiculous number of bugs that somehow always find their way into our house and onto my head!NOT getting malaria =)Communicating in Rukwangali, and seeing the great pleasure it brings people when we greet them in RukwangaliHitch Hiking across Namibia, numerous times – what an adventureLots of long, beautiful, relaxing walks on the riverPraying and discerning how, when and who to help out of all the people and children who ask us for helpLearning a completely new culture, adjusting to all the ways the culture clashes with our culture and realizing how much we are effected by our own cultureGrowing as a couple, deepening our friendship and partnership and becoming more unified in our vision for lifeLearning how much we don’t need and experiencing the release of having fewer “things”Getting hot water in April!! Revolutionized our living and got us through winterOnly having about 5 different outfits to choose fromWearing crappy, unstylish clothes and having no one care Some Reflections After Being Here One Year · Life here has gotten much easier than it was in the beginning. We are definitely in a groove; a routine now. We were glad to live with a host family in the beginning and still have a strong connection with them, but are very glad to be living on our own – this made our adjustment much easier. · Life here, while we have gotten “used” to it, is still much harder than life back home. We may not work as many hours “in the office” like we did in the US, but there is FAR more work to be done because there are far fewer conveniences. · We have a much better understanding of why developing countries have a hard time “developing”. One of the reasons is because everyday life here contains SO much more work than westernized countries. This means less work is done ‘in the office” and work is much less efficient just because the normal everyday life here is so much more tiring. Also people look out for themselves and their family first and foremost. That means if they have access to any resources, unless they are especially honest or have good accountability, they will find a way to use them to their own advantage. · Agriculture is the key to development, not industrialization or westernization. For instance computer classes are good, but they’re useless when your livelihood is made from growing mahongu every year. It would be better to be helped with your agricultural needs first and even the most educated people still have farms and highly value agriculture and livestock for their livelihood. · We enjoy enjoying the simpler things in life: walking by the river, gardening, watching beautiful birds, sipping a cup of coffee on the porch, taking naps. · A nap in the afternoon is a must because life here is just more draining. · It’s really hard to be asked for money all the time. · While the stress of life here have added stress to our relationship, being here has made us better friends and better partners and grow in unity of vision and purpose for our lives. I think we will look back to this time as a priceless journey that built a very strong foundation for our marriage. · Love should be shared in both word and deed and when the words and prefaced by dedicated deeds the words are much more genuine and far-reaching. · People who live in a thatch hut with no electricity or running water don’t necessarily want or need what we want and need in western society. They need clean water and a steady source of income to provide for their family and give them options in life. In fact the constituency clerk and numerous teachers we know of still live in a traditional homestead. Why? I think it’s because they like it, its tradition and its very cheap to build. · American food is really good and we never realized what a big deal “food” was to us until we came here! For instance the 1st thing we want to do when we get to Cape Town is eat at McDonald’s. Yes that’s right, McDonalds. A Day in the Life of A Kwangali Namibian Sunrise – wake up 6:00am – make fire, make soft porridge or sikundu(like drinking sweet sand) for breakfast for the family 7:00am – take goats and cattle to bush for grazing 9:00am – Wash dishes with river water or rain water 10:00am – Collect firewood 11:00am – Pound Magangu for lunch 12:00am – make porridge and soup for family for lunch 1:00pm – lunch with family, sit under tree talk and relax 2:00pm – 3:00pm – Afternoon nap 3:00pm – 6:00pm – Walk to river to water cattle and goats, bathe, wash clothes, collect water for the next day 6:00pm – 7:00pm – Pound mahongu for dinner, make porridge, soup and mutete 7:00pm – 8:00pm – dinner 8:00pm – 9:00pm – Sit by fire, drink home brew, talk, relax with family 9:00pm - bed

On Sunday night we had the Finns, the Sikwales and Sarah over for dinner. It was a very fun night and a good time together. When it was over and everyone was leaving, Rachel was walking the group to the door and heard something rustling in the leaves outside. As an adept integrated African woman she noticed the subtle difference between the chooka chooka chooka of a lizard vs. the shhhhhhhh, shhh, shhhh, shhh of a moving snake. Very good Rachel you have now passed Africa level two. Africa level three is when you kill the snake yourself. I(Caleb) personally have killed a snake on my own altogether along with aiding in the killing of two other snakes. I think I have passed Africa level three. Anyway after Rachel heard the moving snake she turned on the light to the porch and sure enough there was a snake in the corner of our porch. By the time I got there it had darted (note I used the verb "darted" instead of the more boring adverb/verb "moved quickly" thank you Jonathan) around the corner and out of site. Sikwale thought the snake was gone and it appeared to have left becuase we quickly checked the ground surrounding our porch. With the crisis abated the group began to leave again only to find the snake again huddled between the drain pipe and the wall of our house. Now its time for snake killing.

Sikwale(the Zambian), Jouni (the Finn), and me (the American)...and no we did not walk into a bar got a shovel, long stick and rake to kill this thing. Luckily it was hiding behind the drain pipe and was not running on the ground. Sikwale said this tells him how young the snake was because an older snake would have taken off immediately. So we pinned the tail of the snake with the stick then Sikwale started hitting the head with the rake. Eventually we had crushed the drain pipe onto the snake so that it was indeed stuck on the wall, though still alive and able to spit an bite. After about thirty minutes of hacking and swinging we had injured it enough so that we could cut its head off without real danger. Sikwale did most of the hitting and killing while Jouni and I were mostly support crew. I was too freaked out of the spitting part. If it had just been a cobra I think I would have helped kill it more but I was afraid of being shot in the eye and blinded. In fact Sikwale got venom on his arm from the snake spitting. So that is the tale of the death of the cobra outside our house.

The head of the vanquished foe, young as he was.

(If it was a daddy cobra I would have been in the fetal position in the house crying)

Check out "Mozambique Spitting Cobra" and tell me you wouldn't do the same!!!

The snake stuck behind the drain pipe

Body of snake and head, though separated:)

This brings me to a discussion of ecoystems. In America(well Huntington Beach anyway) you had bugs and spiders with an occasional bird or lizard to eat the bugs/spiders. In Africa you have small bugs that are eaten by large bugs which are eaten by larger spiders. These are all eaten by small toads/lizards who are eaten by owls/hawks/birds. The toads are then hunted by the 15 species of venomous snake. This ecosystem exists on our porch except for the owls and hawks which we haven't seen near our house yet. The porch light attracts the bugs which attracts the toads which attracts the snakes, or so my theory goes. We will now be leaving our porch light off as often as possible and maybe the snakes will stay away. If I were a snake I would visit the porch every night because if there's a frog in there its a free meal because the frog is automatically cornered.

My wonderful mother had an excellent idea about snake killing. In Europe when heavy calvary became a menace the Spanish invented the Halberd and made quick work of the enemy. In Africa they haven't gone much past the hoe. Granted that is only used by people who don' t have a shotgun, but bear with me. Imagine a long pole with some kind of claw or grip on the end. You seize the snake with the grip and then there is some kind of cutting mechanism which cuts the head off or body in half immediately. That is what needs to exist, well that or a shotgun and I don't have a shotgun.

The Day We Were Actually Really Super Busy

We've had an exciting past few weeks. We met with the women who sell food in front of OK foods store to see about partnering with them on meeting some of their needs for their small business. They said first priority would be to get a shelter for selling, but since they didn't own the land they sold on, they requested we help them with building a garden. Currently they are buying their vegetables from other places like a nearby village of Nankudu or the Mpungu Fish Farm which is in town. We thought that with this garden they wouldn't have to pay for transport to those places anymore and could keep a lot more of the profits by growing it themselves. We applied for a grant to help them acquire land, buy a water system (tank, generator and hoses), fencing for the land, and tools to work in the garden. We were supposed to have this meeting on Sat the 7th of Nov but it got pushed to Wed the 11th with the deadline being Mon 16th. After our meeting on Thursday, Rachel and I were running around like crazy people trying to get all the necessary quotes for the materials of the grant. We got everything in on time and the grant was submitted successfully. After this day Rachel and I realized that this was the first day in a long time where we had too much to do in one day, a wonderful feeling actually.

Then on Monday we heard back that the grant cannot pay for land. So this means we need to talk to the Town Council to get an emergency provision for the land so that the grant can still go through. Finally when we talked to the Onane we found out that they had talked to three people throughout the week trying to find someone who will let them use their land for the garden. They found an older woman who works for the hospital who would let them use her land. All we had to do then was get a signed statement from her to that fact and we would be good. The grant people were satisfied once we had the statement so then our grant was finally submitted totally. Its really exciting working with these women, trying to help them. They work so hard for their families trying to sell everyday, hopefully this project will give them a lift and encouragement to keep going strong.

One crazy day

So this Wednesday it was raining hard all day. That was nice because it keeps the heat off, and the rain is a refreshing break. Our Finnish friend Jounia asked me if I wanted to go fishing using a reel and spinning lure. We thought the fish would be active because of the rain on the water...well we were right!!! Within 10 minutes of getting to the river we had caught and landed a 2 1/2 foot tiger fish. This thing had teeth!!! I can't believe we got a hit so fast. After that we got the lure stuck on the bottom of the river and decided to get in a canoe to release it. This was very interesting when you think about crocodiles and hippos in the river, coupled with the fact that we don't know what in the world we're doing. I had not been in a canoe yet and was a bit frightened by the idea of falling in the river. We went round and round the stuck lure, pulling and tugging in every which way but to no avail. So back to the shore with us and off to silent study duty at school for me.

Here is a picture of Jounia on the left and Tate Thom

on the right with the tiger fish in hand

After silent study I came home to a very peculiar sight and sound. Rachel was yelling my name with her concerned/frantic tone so that concerned me immediately. But beyond that my house was moving. Ok well not the physical house but the outside looked like it was moving. As I got closer I saw the air filled with flying termites, and they were swarming on the front of our house and door around the porch light. Rachel was freaking out inside because hundreds of them had got inside our house as well. So I got in around the back where there were no lights and proceeded to kill bugs in my house for over an hour. All the while I put Rachel in the room because she was a little too freaked out about the bugs:) Below are some pictures of the aftermath from the bugs.

Here is our porch the morning after

Here is an upclose of the trouble makers

The Fruit of our Union

Ok well don't get too excited about the title cause we're just talking about the garden. Our cucumbers are going crazy now and producing a lot. Soon we will have squash and watermelon coming out our ears as well. We are experimenting with dish soap as pesticide because ants have been eating holes into our cucumber. Here is a picture of my beautiful wife with the fruits of our union

Here is a cool picture of a lady bug on a cucumber leaf Rachel took

Some friends of ours went on a game drive to a local park called Mahangu. They saw lots of elephant and hippos, as well as kudu, oryx, buffalo, zebra, tons of birds and of course turtles.

Turtles head butting each other (I think the guy on the right is winning)

At one point they were viewing these elephants when all of them turned and started walking towards the car in what looks like battle formation.

The Challenge

If you accept this challenge you must put this picture of the Lavender Breasted Roller as your desktop background for one week. If ever I was going to worship nature it would probably be the Lavender Breasted Roller. This guy sat two feet from us on a branch and let us take pictures of him. This is my favorite picture we have taken in Africa.

This picture is simply awesome

If sitting on a branch wasn't enough, when this bird flys its wings have an even more amazing color of teal and violet/blue

When we say there are crazy big bugs here we mean it! I was greeted by this giant flying grasshopper in my classroom yesterday. This is one of my learners, Timotheus, and the bug really was almost as big as his head! My class had a fun time catching this bug and taking pictures:-)

Hello again all,

Lately we have been focused on finishing up the school year strong and not letting down on many of things we have done throughout the year. Today Rachel was reprimanded along with other teachers for not following the timetable of the school by one of the HOD (head's of department). I'm not sure what school this person has been going to for the third semester but her school has not been following the timetable(schedule of classes) since October. Yes her school has not been using a schedule of classes for over 1 month. Rachel had been following the timetable up to this week out of principle but many of the learners and teachers had left by the time she was "supposed" to have classes. Because of this she basically gave up following it so that she could teach all her classes everyday in the morning and have all her kids there. I just think its funny that she had been doing the right thing for 1 month but then two days after she stops someone chooses to reprimand her. All we can do is laugh.

Some of our projects are moving along a bit. This Friday we are supposed to visit a new village site for drilling wells. This was the place where over 30 people where taken to the hospital because of the drinking the rain harvest pit water. Hopefully this village is in a place that is not to high on the plateau. Its also possible that we could visit Mukekete 2 which supposedly has deep water wells, like beyond 10 meters. This is good because their drill goes to 40-50m max so if their well is fed by ground water then we could easily reach ground water with the drill.

Regarding the basket project we are pursuing a training with a subsidiary of the OMBA Arts Trust called Shamvura Crafts. Once we get more information about the costs of the training we will send in some grants to help fund the training and purchasing of materials. There is some exciting momentum lately with this as there are two good possibilities for funding for this training through the Ambassadors' Self Help Fund and the PC VAST grants the former of which just received money that must be spent by December of this year.

Tomorrow we are going to a meeting to help start a kindergarten along with Sarah's BEN bikes project in Nkurenkuru. Some people worked with Sarah to start a bike shop in Nkurenkuru that has proved very successful, so much so that they have decided to start a kindergarten on their same property to both help the community and help the children of the community. So tomorrow we are having a meeting with families to see how many people would be interested in sending their kids there.

This Saturday we also are meeting with the Onane (Rukwangali for mothers) who sell vegetables and other things outside of OK foods. They are always there and we buy from them whenever possible to help support local businesses. However they sit underneath a palm tree and are desiring some shelter to be built or something like that. We are having a meeting with them to discuss what their needs are for their very small businesses.

Preliminarily they have discussed having a shelter of some sort built. This is exciting because to me these women represent the heart and soul of this community, because they are the working mothers. Many of them use their profits from what they sell to buy clothes for their children or whatever else they need cash for. Families here have a subsistence living so cash is very helpful because no matter how much millet you have, you still have to pay school fees or for uniforms for instance. Since a whole extended family may have only a few wage earners what these women do is invaluable to their families.

We are praising God for all of these recent developments and thanking Him for helping things to move along, and giving us something to do:) Beyond that we would like to thank everyone for their help with the "project". If you helped out then you know what we're talking about, and if you didn't then you shouldn't worry about it.

Beyond that we can't believe its been one year. November 4th of 2008 we started our first day of staging in Washington DC. Each day has been wonderful in its own way but our hearts have gone through many trials with the things we have seen and experienced. It seems that now we are coming up for air and finally hitting a stride living in our community. We want to thank all of you for your support through prayers, letters, emails, blog posts, facebook updates and of course the lovely packages full of goodies:) It seems like we've been gone for three years, while for many of you this past year has been the blink of an eye. Its funny because sometimes we email people or whatever and wonder, "why haven't they emailed us back?" Well of course its been one day since we emailed them, then we think, "oh yeah they are in the swirling vortex that is America." I remember getting voicemails or emails and not even looking at them again for a week and that time felt like a day. We pity you poor American folks with your schedules from hell, you should try living in rural Africa for a while. You get to hand wash your laundry, the electricity goes out frequently, you drive on a dirt road, live by a beautiful river and meet many wonderful people. All the while trying to do the work on the Lord in helping the poor of the world. In many ways we wouldn't want to be doing anything else, but that's on good days when things are going well and cultural stress is low. Who knows what will happen in the next year but we're staying along for the ride to see what the Lord has in store for us. No doubt it will be full of challenges and blessings alike!!!

Here is another top ten list of the top ten nicest buildings (with pictures mostly)

10. Greenhouse 1,2 (local bars where everyone hangs out in the evening) pics to follow:) 9. Energy Houses 8. MTC Tower (huge cell phone tower just outside of town) pics to follow:)

7. Ministry of Forestry Building

6. Meme Selma’s Hotel 5. OK Foods

4. SME Park

3. Catholic Church

2. Constituency Council Building 1. Town Council Building

Random Pictures

This is one of the "rats" living in our attic

(thank God cause I hate real rats)

This is how many people get their water from the river everyday. These kids are always having such a good time

There are a number of cool stick bugs around here and this is a great example. One time I came up to bike at school and there was this branch attached to my bike. As I got closer I noticed it was moving. Turns out it was a 1 foot stick bug who didn't want to leave my bike!

Bell tower at the Catholic Church. Thought it looked cool

Here are some kids who live around us. One time I accidently hit the kid on the left with a date palm. I threw it at him thinking he was looking and just nailed him on the top of the head. Luckily he's a good sport and ran away smiling.

This is our new favorite tree because it started blooming with these wonderful red flowers. This one will be on our top ten trees list coming soon.

Top 10 Places to Visit When People Come See You 10. Chobe Wildlife Park 9. The World’s Largest Meteor Site 8. The Himba people (UNICEF claim they are one of the last truly indigenous people on the planet) 7. The Skeleton Coast (miles of coast where the desert goes to the water and where old shipwrecks line the shore 6. Joe’s Beer House (best wild game steak in Namibia, so much better than beef!!!) 5. Okavango Delta (Botswana) 4. Etosha Wildlife Park 3. Sossevlei Dunes (Biggest in the World) 2. Victoria Falls – Natural Wonder of the World (Zambia) 1. Our Wonderful Town Nkurenkuru!!!

Top 10 Things You Want People to Mail to You 10. Spices 9. Friendly interaction and pictures of friends and family 8. Trail mix 7. Granola Bars/Balance Bars 6. Ground coffee (we have no grinder) 5. Deodorant (men and women’s) 4. Ziplock bags 3. Australian Red Licorice 2. Peanut Butter M&M’s 1. Dr. Pepper

Top 10 Namibian Entertainment Options 10. Playing soccer 9. Playing snooker (pool) 8. Going to Rundu 7. Braii (Barbeque) or party 6. Funerals 5. Weddings 4. Sitting under a tree talking 3. Shebeen (bar) 2. Shebeen (bar) 1. Shebeen (bar)

Top 10 Habits You've Developed 10. Playing Soccer 9. Studying vocabulary (for GRE) 8. Reading Bible together on Sundays 7. Budgeting every penny of our small PC stipend for maximum efficiency 6. Going for walks 5. Reading 4. Watching birds 3. Watching episodes of the Office/movies 2. Us we are speaking that Namlish this side 1. Cooking all the time and everything from scratch

Top 10 Simple Pleasures

10. Emails/phone calls/chatting with people from home9. Stars8. Rain on our tin roof7. French toast and games on Saturday morning on our porch6. Sleeping past 5:50am on the weekends5. Hot water4. Coke3. Watching the hippos in the river2. Watching all the beautiful birds1. Packages with American goodies

We will also be doing top ten buildings and top ten trees this weekend which will have pictures. Also we will put some pictures on of our rocking garden. We're growing 10ft sunflowers...Can't wait to see how big they get!!!

I scored a goal today!!! It was a cross from the right corner and I was flying down the middle. The goalie biffed the save and I knocked it in. The first goal of my life I'm pretty sure. I have probably run up and down the field the equivalent of 100 times and finally scored. Feelin' good today.

Rachel's workshop went well last week. She had 20 teachers in attendance and the group was lively and talkative. The workshop was 2-3 hours and discussed difficult situations, helped define good and bad actions of learner, also introduce classroom management strategies for teachers to use instead of corporal punishment. The teachers seemed interested and excited about the topic, as they were talkative and taking part in the workshop. Thank you for all your prayers and for your financial support(Mystie and Dan:) to make the food for the workshop happen!!!

In other news we have had some interesting bird sitings lately. We have recently confirmed siting of the grey headed kingfisher and rachel has seen the paradise flycatcher twice and I haven't seen it at all. I think we are gonna name this particular grey headed kingfisher because he just likes to sit out on this tree limb and flys down to the ground and back. It has this absolutely beautiful back and wing feathers that a bright blue and deep violet all at the same time, topped off with a bright orange beak. Birds in Namibia are so cool!!!

More to come,

Caleb and Rachel

Check out the link to an article in one of our local news papers below about allegations against my (Rachel's) principal. In the States a teacher, no less a principal would go to jail for these allegations, but here he will probably get a slap on the wrist, and at worst transferred to another school, or worse yet, a promotion to the Ministry of Education.

http://www.informante.web.na/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5113&Itemid=100

Hello All,

Soccer

Lately I've been playing a lot of soccer. Well a lot for me because I don't really every play soccer. Evidently the teachers of the local schools put together this social league every year and play each other. I was invited by someone from Rachel's school because the people at my school thought I would suck at soccer because the guy before me evidently was horrible or something. So then concluded that all white people are bad so we won't invite Caleb. Well I showed them by being nominal at best!!! ELCIN High School teamed up with Rachel's school to play. We tied our first game and lost our second game. Our third game was supposed to be today but it was moved to tomorrow without anyone really telling me. Rachel and I say something like that at least every week we have lived here, "such and such changed and nobody told me." Soccer takes a lot of running and I know everyone who has ever played soccer knows that. Even I knew that without ever playing soccer, that was until I played back left defender and was chasing strikers all over the field...in sand no less. I mean soccer is hard enough and I am not in great running shape, but sand? I mean why does it have to be sand? But I did some interval training and trail running and have felt nominally in shape the last few times I have played. Funny thing happened the first time I went to play with the pickup soccer games in town. I was put on one team who was deemed the "skins" team. So everyone is taking off their shirts and I went to when my teammate stopped me and said, "It is okay, we know who you are." (alluding to the fact that I am one of four white people in 20 square miles) I said jokingly that it doesn't matter if I take my shirt off because its the same underneath anyway, and he laughed. (I was wearing a white shirt haha) Anyway I am not bad at soccer but I'm not very good either. Playing recently made me realize how much I love sports and how much of a release it is to run my guts out chasing some stupid ball.

Basket Project

Recently we have become involved in what is now called the Mbambi Basket Project. This involves helping women in a local village get further training on making traditional baskets so they can be sold on a national or international level. We got the tip from the constituency clerk again and were off and running kind of. Nothing had been happening for a while with the idea until I contacted somebody with the OMBA Arts Trust who does trainings of this sort. They said they would get back to me after their holiday...so here we sat waiting for an email or something. Today I was feeling bored so just decided to make some of my typical turns around town talking to people I know. This brought me to the constituency office because I wanted to talk to the security guard to practice some more Rukwangali (of which I am marginally horrible) Once there I ran into the councilor and started talking. We ended up having an impromptu meeting with him and he introduced some funding options for the basket project training. He said he is going to meet with these people on Friday and if we can put a proposal together he will give it to them in person. After finishing with him I went immediately to my friend's house who is working on this project with me and we typed up a short proposal letter for this company. Who knows what will happen but it took up two or three hours and he will submit it to the councilor tomorrow morning. Beyond that it sounds like the clerk might be visiting the villages this week and I might be able to go with him to scout some additional water well sights. I also learned the Rukwangli words for rain harvesting pit, actual water well and a large lake to help me in talking to people when we go.

Which brings me to my next point that living here is craziness. I felt bored today with nothing to do this afternoon with any of our projects so I decide to go for a walk and talk to people. Next thing I know I'm typing a proposal for the basket project and working frantically to finish it. Had no idea I would run into him or talk about the project but there I was working away. If I had a day planner I would throw it in the trash because it would just cause me stress because everything I would play wouldn't happen and the things I didn't' plan would happen without me trying. This reminds me to keep my focus on letting God work in and through us here because striving after things just doesn't work.

Classroom Discipline Workshop

In other news Rachel is helping to put on a Classroom Discipline workshop at her school on October 20th so please pray that it would be a success, that people would come and would be affected by what they hear. We are going to provide food and another Peace Corps Volunteer is coming in to do the talk. As you all have read before Rachel's school has a lot of corporal punishment still happening. In fact most of Namibia still has it happening even though it is against the law. This is just one way Rachel is trying to affect things at her school in a positive way outside of trying to be a good influence and example. Hopefully all her teachers will come and take somethings away about how to better manage their classrooms in a non-violent way.

Well that's it for now, here's some pictures of the baskets if anybody is interested in buying them we would be happy to ship them to you if possible. I am currently trying to find some national or international stores/open markets that these ladies can sell their goods to so if anybody has an idea let us know!!!

Cliche Sports Analogy To Follow:

Living here reminds me of baseball, its mostly boring but everyone once in a while you have to sprint to get the ball before it sneaks through the gap and they get a triple. It also reminds me of batting when you swing and totally miss the ball (happened a lot to me so I should know). You feel stupid as you're missing and then after you're thinking, "why and I playing this stupid game anyway?" But then on days like today you just close your eyes and miraculously make contact for a double feeling lucky and good at the same time.(not that you really close your eyes in baseball but you get my drift)

Or like when I was playing soccer the other day and this ball was kicked high in the air. I am not bad when the ball is on the ground but when its bouncing above the waist or high in the air I tend to make myself look like an idiot. So this ball bounces about 20 ft in the air and I'm all alone trying to keep it from going out of bounds. It bounces once and I kick and miss, then it bounces again and I kick and miss again. By the third bounce the ball was out of bounds and I had missed twice while all alone on the side of the field while 20 something Namibian men/boys are watching me just saying, "ah silly sirumbu go back to America." Sirumbu is Rukwangli for white person.

We had an awards Ceremony at my school today during the parents meeting. This meant i spent the past 2 days and this morning typing and printing over 300 certificates. To give you an idea of what its like to work in Namibia let me tell you just one of the conversations I had working on this project. I finally got the certificate 'committe' to give me some of the names so i could start typing and printing - they hadnt given me the names yet bc they had been debating about what to call each award and which learners qualified etc. for days. We had three different colors of card stock so i asked one person what color to use for which certificates. She said 'well we have to bring that before the committee!' (of like 9 different people with 9 different opinions)! Haha. Needless to say they debated about the colors and I just gave up and didnt start printing until about an hour later. The awards Ceremony was great though. I was told that they had never given awards before so it was a pretty big deal. After each name was read the mother, grandmom, sister, aunt or all women in the family of that learner came running center stage dancing and singing traditional songs and proceeded to hoist their learner in the air no matter their size. It was quite the scene and very funny and touching. Some of the leaners were crying bc it was such a special time for them. It was really touching and I was really proud of my school for praising and honoring our learners!

Bird Watching List

Here are the birds we have found around our place. Feel free to look up pictures of them to get glimpse of the beautiful birds we have around our house and along the river near our house. The ones with a star are the more impressive of the lot.

Name; First Viewing:

African Jacana; River

Grey Go Away; House

*Lilac Breasted Roller; Katope and River

*Bradfield’s Hornbill; Rachel’s School

African Grey Hornbill; Katope

*Crimson Breasted Shrike; Caleb’s School, House

*Swamp Boubou; House

*Blue Waxbill; House

*Greater Blue-eared Starling; Katope, House

*Pin-tailed Whydah; River

Yellow Canary; House

Pied Crow; House

Senegal Coucal; House

Baren Wren-Warbler; House

Laughing Dove; House

*Green Wood-Hoopee; House

*Jameson’s Firefinch; House

Golden Weaver; House

White-crested Helmet Shrike; Katope

*Cape Glossy Starling; Katope

African Pied Wagtail; Katope

*Cardinal Woodpecker; Katope

*Violet-Eared Waxbill; Botswana

African Red-eyed Bulbul; Botswana

*Red-faced Mousebird; Botswana

*Pied Kingfisher; River

Green-winged Pytila; Botswana

Cinnamon-breasted Buuting; Botswana

*Black Faced Waxbill; Botswana

Acacia Pied Barbet; Botswana

Black-Throated Canary; Botswana

White-browed Sparrow Weavers; Botswana

Cape Turtledove; Botswana

Emerald-Spotted Wood-Dove; Botswana

Spectacled Weaver; House

African Fish Eagle; River

Hello All,

We are back from our August break and it has taken us a few weeks to get into the groove of things again. Vacation is so desperately needed but at the same time we get used to living a bit of the high life so coming back always saps the energy out of us. Here are some highs and lows of our past few weeks: Over the break I (Caleb) got denied switching to a health position. I pursued this avenue because I thought this would be a good idea since I don’t feel my school really needs a Peace Corps volunteer and there are a number of projects that I could be involved in my community as a health volunteer rather than a teacher. The bummer was my Education supervisor okayed it, Peace Corps Washington okayed it and the Country Director even okayed it. The person who shut everything down was my would-be future Health Supervisor. Her reasons didn’t seem very valid, more that she just didn’t want to deal with the hassle of me switching programs. This was pretty discouraging because I was hopeful and excited due to all the other staff approvals of the switch. I am taking option number two though, which is reducing my periods next year, which will hopefully allow me to spend more time doing community projects. Rachel and I really enjoyed our week spent drilling boreholes with By Provision in Botswana over a week of our break. This confirmed in our minds that this is really something we would like to pursue in the near future. We are looking into how to make that happen and are excited about those prospects. Clean water is such a necessity and it is amazing how many people don’t have access to it. We hope that we can be used toward this end in the next few years. This does however add complications for our desire to have a family some day as it would be very hard to have babies in that line of work. We still have more than a year of our PC service then I need to begin and finish my MA in development, then we want to spend a few years drilling. We both wish we could have two lives, one for adventures like PC and drilling boreholes and one for a family. We have both really been missing home lately and friends and family. I (Rachel) had a cockroach climb on my head in my sleep. How do I know since I was asleep, you ask?? I woke up when it climbed down my face and neck. High or low? I’ll let you make that call! =) Actually, I disturbingly wasn’t that bothered by it – amazing how my tolerance levels are increasing daily! Getting back to school for the third term was tough. Our refrigerator broke for the third time after we bought our months worth of groceries in Rundu and leaving some of our meat green. This was very frustrating. Even more frustrating and discouraging was that Rachel’s school had a new, unused fridge locked in a closet that was given to them by the Ministry, for the “volunteer” and for days refused to give it to us. Little things like that make one feel incredibly irritated and even more unappreciated and supported out here. After negotiating they did finally give us the fridge for which we are very thankful!! But it is crazy how things like that can really get you down out here. Because of these things combined we were honestly thinking about calling it quits out here for a moment. Now that we know more what we want to do in development (drilling boreholes), and we know our time is limited for that type of career, putting up with those little irritations makes us question, what are we doing out here again? But don’t worry, we only actually questioned that for about one day. We are both too stubborn of people to call it quits, and it was never really a legitmate option to begin with. We love our community and don’t want to leave, some days all those little stressors build up and make you question. Do not fret, we will persevere! =) I (Rachel) got an ugly pink bike to ride to school! Also Caleb is now has to ride his bike to and from school every day.

On the bright side we are hoping to investigate some new well sites in the coming month for the water project. The clerk came to us last week after he had been called to a nearby village to transport people to the hospital because of mass, violent illness in the village. He had to take over 20 people to the hospital. The mass illness in the village was due to unclean drinking water so he would like us to investigate this site to see if By Provision might be able to come out and drill here. Stories like these are what keep pushing us toward working in water development. Our watermelon, bell peppers and cucumbers are sprouting in our new garden! Rachel Hoeing in her Garden HatCaleb Hoeing

Also after talking to the clerk about other possible projects he suggested we try to help these women who are making baskets in the community. During our break we talked to some people at the Windhoek Craft Center who might be able to help. They are called the “OMBA Arts Trust” and they showed a lot of interest in these women and their work. Recently we sent an email with pictures of their craft so the lady there could let us know what she thinks. We are hoping to find some national and international markets for these women after forming a committee and organizing a training for them. A lot to look forward to but things move a lot slower out here. In America we could have contacted these people, sent the images, had a phone call with them and setup a meeting with the women and them all in the same week probably. Here it’s already been three weeks and the project has not even been officially okayed by the Councilor for this region. Well, those are some highs and lows from our life out here! We posted some pictures for you – one in particular is our “picture wall-of-fame”. Here we hang all cards and photos sent to us from back home. If you send them, they will be hung!!!!!!!

Baskets from Nkurenkuru Women...now our wall decorations