After 33ish hours of relatively uneventful travel I arrived back in America Friday October 28 (almost a month ago? No way.).  Aside from some trouble with the meals on my flights (which weren't, as I'd been promised, Vegetarian/Non-dairy), my travel home was smooth - even the 1-hour layover in Doha when I had to go through security twice and was questionably touched by a lady security guard the

Dear Namibia, Today, I'll leave you for, well, at least a little while. And I'm going to miss you.  Well, I'm going to miss parts of you, like: My beautiful, peaceful walks to and from school Those people who took the chance to get to know me and were my friends through the good and the bad Adding emphasis/urgency to something by repeating the same word (now now, soon soon, hot hot, here

Tomorrow's my last day as a PCV. 799 days ago we left D.C. 797 days ago we landed at an airport in the middle of the bush and wondered where the hell Peace Corps was sending us. For the last 740 days I've had the privilege of calling myself a Peace Corps Volunteer. Some moments have been really good, some have been really bad, others have been really ugly, but all of them have impacted me and

This past weekend I packed and cleaned and sorted all the things I brought with me and accumulated since coming to Namibia.  I'm amazed at how much I managed to accumulate over the last 2 years. This morning, I left Gobabis for the last time. Lucky for me, I managed to get Ministry of Education transport for this morning.  I had alot of stuff to bring to Windhoek to either leave in the

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2 years ago today Group 30 swore in as Peace Corps Volunteers!  Certainly the time has gone by in some sort of time warp.  I can say that I'm glad things are drawing to a close. I have been meaning to post an update for about a week now, but something happened about 2 and a half weeks ago that’s commanded my attention and cast a shadow on the joy I should have being so close to the end of my

<!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> Today was my last Monday at school. It was pretty surreal. This past weekend was the annual Lucky Star Marathon, which takes place in Swakopmund, the most touristy town in Namibia. Volunteers come from all over the country, some to run, some with learners who run, and some just to hang out. For some of us (

The weekend was dreary. Overcast, cool, breezy - admittedly a refreshing change from the hot, oppressive summer sun - but dreary all the same. Yesterday I walked to Spar (the grocery store down the street) with Blair, the World Teach volunteer who's now living with us, and predicted rain.  It felt like rain, smelled like rain... but as of sunset yesterday, still no rain. Yesterday

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2 years ago today Group 30 flew from Johannesburg to Windhoek.  We watched out the windows as we descended into an airport surrounded by bush with no signs of other civilization in sight and wondered where exactly Peace Corps was sending us. It's been a wild 2 years.  Only 54 more days to go!

Coming from a country where people protest the mention of god in the Pledge of Allegiance, the level to which church and state are integrated here is sometimes still shocking.  It's certainly less shocking now than it was on that first morning of school during site visit - before i'd even been sworn in as a PCV - when my HOD lead morning assembly with a bible in one hand and a stick to whack the

Internet is tricky business here in Namibia.  It's expensive. If you go to an internet cafe, they charge per hour, and their computers tend to be slow so you end up paying more than you thought because you couldn't do your interneting in a timely manner. If you get broadband in your house, it's about USD$50/month, and it's slow. If you use a 3G stick or your phone as a modem, the going rate is N

Just as suddenly as winter interrupted a perfectly nice Namibian fall, summer has barreled in with all its sunny hotness. The sounds of spring are all around, and while the smells of spring in Namibia can't quite compete with the smells of spring in the East Coast - melting snow, thawing ground and growing spring grass - they are refreshing.  Gone are the mornings of walking to school while the

Despite my prediction of blogging proliferation over the last few weeks, it turned out that life was too busy.  I’m now back in Gobabis and back at school after 2 ½ weeks of conferences, Close of Service medical nonsense, and a few days of sickness. There’s a lot to catch up on, so I’m going to update in a couple parts.  3 weeks ago Group 30 gathered together for the last time for our Close of

It REALLY IS the small victories and baby steps of progress that get me through. Today I had both! And I got to talk to my dad! One of the learners I nominated for a Deep Roots Scholarship (see previous post for what that's about) is a clever, clever boy. He and a girl named Merlin always vied for the high score on tests in Maths last year, and the maths teacher he has this year has said

Last week in Rundu, a fairly big town in the north, 300+ learners walked out of their school due to unsanitary and unhygienic conditions. This morning on the news it was noted that now was "not a good time" for them to walk out because of approaching examinations.  There was no mention that the conditions had improved, only that the learners are missing important exam revisions.  Sigh.  The 26th

There is no separation of church and state in Namibia.  We have morning devotion everyday before the morning staff meeting.  God seeps into every nook and cranny of life here. In many ways I can see the benefit of organized religion in the lives of the community here. Unfortunately, it is also abused.  I have shamelessly used stories and ideas from the bible to help with classroom management. 

I hate waking up at 5:40am.  But when the sun comes discourteously streaming in my window, it's almost impossible for me to sleep longer.... And I love walking to school in the pre-dawn minutes.  I walk past the Gobabis Golf course in the morning.  Here is a (blurry) picture of the sunrise today.

Dear Motherland, On this, your 235th birthday, I would like to write you a special note declaring my true feelings for you. While I have not always appreciated your good qualities, and indeed have often felt disdain for your short-comings, my stint on the great continent of Africa has given me ample time to reflect on those parts of you which I long for most, and miss the least.  Sometimes, I

What does a bored climber with no rocks to climb do on a Sunday afternoon? Climb the tree in the backyard. Honestly, this tree has it in for me.  I was climbing around it this afternoon (not even UP it) when a dead stump of branch broke off and I fell, head-first onto the concrete patio below. I now have a mild concussion.  Too bad head lumps don't photograph well. This is the biggest lump

<!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> Patience is a virtue, right? Does that mean that every time I lose my patience, I become less virtuous? This week has been frustrating. Alot (but...  not all) of my frustration this week stems from technology. Technology can be frustrating. It can be frustrating to learn new technology, and frustrating to teach new

The bush along the road is becoming increasingly (and mysteriously) burned.  According to my principal, there's an old belief that if you burn the bush, it will grow sooner and faster in the spring.  (And apparently this isn't an environmental concern, but rather a way to draw wildlife back from wherever they go each winter faster.) Each day more and more of the bush is burned, but I never

I have a blog tracker... It's fun to see where in the world people are reading my blog. Every once in a while I get a surprise:

I don't know if that's for real or not... but wouldn't it be fun if it was?

Yesterday I sent in my paperwork setting October 14 my last day as a volunteer. It had to be signed by the principal (formally the HOD), and when I gave it to him to sign, he said, "...And if I don't want to let you go?" .....what?? Sometimes I just don't understand you, Namibia.

My morning walks to school continue to be one of the best (if not the best) parts of my day. I pass various groups of boys walking to the other schools, and they like to greet me by name. It makes me smile. I've been advised that I should resume riding my bike to and from school due to the escalated gang activity in and around Gobabis... but in the month or so that I've been walking, I've never felt unsafe.

I think that most volunteers would agree that problem solving and the power of deduction are skills lacking in general among learners and even our colleagues. They can tell you that A+B=C, but if you ask them how to get back to A using B and C, they can't. This morning on the radio (at about 6:10, on the English NBC/BBC station) there was an Early Childhood Education specialist (African in descent, although I'm not sure from which part of Africa) talking about the importance of ECE and how a lack of proper early childhood stimulation in Namibia is having long-reaching, long-lasting effects here. The woman speaking evenn went so far as to point out that if the neurons created by early childhood stimulation are not maintained and die, "that child is not so clever anymore." To hear this problem being addressed on public radio was encouraging. Unfortunately, I know that the population to whom this issue should be directed (ie the parents of my learners) is not listening in to the English language news.

I love climbing. I love the climbing culture. I love climbing gear and the sound it makes. There aren’t many places I’d rather be than on a climbing trip, hanging off the side of a rock, or sitting at the bottom of it. I find great joy in waking up in my tent with the early morning sun streaming in, stumbling out into the crisp early morning air to have a cup of coffee and look at the guide book; spending the day at the crag climbing, watching everyone else climb, meeting goals and setting new ones, pushing myself past what I thought I could do; returning back to camp in the evening, tired, sore, dirty to enjoy dinner and beer and good conversation around a fire before crawling back into my tent for the night.

Before I left for Peace Corps, I had a summer free to enjoy life and climbing (thanks for that, Mauritania!). It was a magical summer.

But since coming to Namibia, there’s been an unfillable hole where climbing had been. Finding other climbers and talking about it eases the discomfort of not climbing, but nothing compares to being on the rock.

Last year I’d contacted some Namibians in the MCSA (Mountain Club of South Africa), but nothing really came of it. Unlike my group of climbing friends, I didn’t find them particularly welcoming to an ‘outsider.’

Last week, we had a 4 day weekend, and feeling a little desperate (ok, a lot desperate), I contacted the MCSA person again to see if there was at least bouldering (climbing close to the ground that doesn't need a rope) around. She put me into contact with another member of the MCSA which turned out to be pretty great. I gave him a call, found out that people would be climbing for the weekend, that the climbing community in Windhoek is pretty young and fairly new to climbing, that they’d love to learn new techniques, including trad (traditional) climbing, and, most importantly, that we’d be able to join them wherever they decided to climb over the weekend. I got in touch with the other PCV climber; she was easy to wrangle into the weekend.

So to Windhoek we went. We climbed at a spot just outside of Windhoek (with very sensitive access issues – you have to be a MCSA card carrier or a guest of a MCSA card carrier to climb there) – it was pure bliss to climb outside on real rock again. It gave us a chance to reacquaint ourselves with everything before the big show: Spitzkoppe.

We headed to Spitzkoppe Friday. I was in a state of high-strung excitement. The drive from Windhoek west towards the coast goes through a beautiful part of Namibia – large, sharp hills, small towns, open spaces filled with African bush. I drove with a South African pilot who lives with the MCSA guy I’d contacted. He’d been climbing once before at the crag outside Windhoek, and showed signs of a possible climbing addict. We had interesting conversations the entire drive, which made the drive quite enjoyable.

Distances in the desert are deceiving. Something that’s 20 miles away seems much closer in the wide open spaces. The drive to Spitzkoppe from the main road is a tease. It’s a 30 kilometer drive on washboard dirt roads that seem to be passing the rocks before finally turning off toward them. I’d been to Spitzkoppe once before, but just passing through, and not even entering the park itself. The rocks are beautiful sandstone outcroppings in otherwise relatively flat, open African bush. They kind of remind me of Devils Tower, but instead of just one outcropping, there are several. Knowing I’d be camping amongst and climbing on these beautiful rocks put me in a state of high-strung excitement.

Spitzkoppe is made up of several different areas of crags and boulders, and you can camp anywhere inside the main entrance. We drove to a campsite between 2 of the peaks. I felt like a kid in a candy store driving in (as most climbers do when they’re surrounded by big, beautiful rocks). We set up camp in a narrow valley between 2 peaks looking out onto a larger rock called the Potocks and the main Spitzkoppe peak (which is to the left and not visible in the picture of my tent).

We arrived just before sunset, and it felt like we were camping in a cathedral of rock. The setting sun against the peaks of sandstone, the silence of the desert – it made my forget the hassle of getting there, and in fact made me forget the general state of discontent I’ve been in the last few weeks. We made a fire and drank some beers and admired the twinkling sky from our perfect campsite.

In the last photo, the main Spitzkoppe peak is on the left.

Namibia’s getting cold (it’s been in the 40s in Gobabis in the morning). The desert gets very cold at night, and Saturday morning I was pretty chilly. We set out early Saturday morning with the Spitzkoppe guide book in search of easy routes, but time and again would arrive at climbs to find that they weren’t what the book described, that the bolts had been cut, or some other disappointment. Additionally, it seems that climbs have been set that aren’t in the book. We walked around for a few hours before finally arriving at a big boulder with some easy sport climbing. We each climbed once, then went back to camp to wait for the rest of our group to arrive. In the afternoon we did a bit more climbing, although Caitlin and I were both getting sore and our hands were starting to hurt from the sharpness of the sandstone. We climbed until just after sunset (rappelling in headlamps) and headed back to camp for an awesome night of cooking and drinking and talking and laughing. I feel so fortunate to have met this group of people.

Sunday morning we wanted to climb a bit, but after breaking down camp, and looking for climbs that never materialized, we’d run out of time, and headed back to Windhoek, where I’d come back east and Caitlin would continue south to her site.

It’s hard to describe how the weekend so positively affected us. Both of us, kind of regardless of how happy we are, have a constant underlying level of misery that we deal with (I think this is true for many volunteers). Just like other athletes passionate about their sports, climbers suffer when there’s no climbing to be had. Not climbing has definitely negatively influenced me and my psyche. To be able to sit and talk to someone for a couple hours about climbing things (that no one else here cares about and doesn’t want to talk about) was a relief. It was refreshing. To be on the rock and be thinking only in that moment was good for my soul. To meet people who are eager to climb and eager to learn about climbing and eager to share their experiences did us both a lot of good.

The downside to feeling so blissful is that the presence of the underlying misery becomes more acute. It was a reminder that, no matter how much I like what I’m doing here, I’ll never be completely happy with such a big part of who I am missing. I’m also getting to the point where I’m ready to be rid of the underlying misery, to make a real salary, to be able to drive a car when I want…. to be a real person again. And honestly, that could be anywhere where I can have friends and climbing – Africa or America. And so, coming back to site was hard.



Of course, the upside is that now I’ve found climbing friends here, and I’ll be climbing again in less than 2 weeks in an amazingly beautiful, peaceful place.

Throughout my travels in the last few weeks (I’ve been back and forth to Windhoek for the dentist and the climbing trip) I’ve had some very interesting conversations with people from many different backgrounds, about a lot of different things. One recurring topic is the state of things post-independence. Most people – black, white and coloured – will tell me that they think things were better before independence. I do a lot of listening during these conversations, because the topic is sensitive and one wrong comment from me can make for a very long, uncomfortable, or even hostile, car ride. People that I talk to feel a general dissatisfaction with government agencies, but most shrug it off with the “this is Africa” justification. However, it was explained to me by someone who I would describe as of Latin descent, therefore not fitting into the white/black/coloured categories, that at independence the SWAPO party (Southwest Africa People’s Organization) – today still the ruling party, and the organization responsible for the freedom fight – was so eager to oust the white ruling party of South Africa that they ousted people from office and government posts without first training the people who would be taking over those posts, resulting in the posts being filled by someone who had no idea how to do the job. It has been hinted to me that even today the family of freedom fighters are given preference in certain governmental posts, whether they are qualified for that post or not.

The trip to Spitzkoppe included a discussion of culture on education. Discussions about culture and how culture affects things can come dangerously close to being xenophobic and racist without either party intending them to be. The line between xenophobia/racism and cultural observation is very blurry.

My least favorite conversations begin when the other person (who is almost always white) begins with “I’m not racist, but….” followed by some unmistakably, incredibly racist comment or tirade. This happens quite a lot, unfortunately. And the line between racism and cultural observation isn’t blurry at all. It’s quite bold, and the other person is obviously standing on one side.

I’ve been mostly impressed by the kindness of strangers over the last few weeks. Coming back to site from Windhoek this last time, I got a lift to the airport (which is 40 kilometers from Windhoek on the road to Gobabis), and was starting to get a little nervous I wouldn’t get a lift to Gobabis before dark (it’s getting dark around 5 now). Shortly after I started to get nervous, a farmer from Gobabis stopped to pick me up. He also runs a drilling company that drills boreholes in communities with limited water access. He told me that his church wants to get involved in helping to improve the lives of the people in the location; while I know that he certainly means well, his ideas did seem to have the “taming the wild savage” undertones to them. We also talked about how some volunteers in the north are beginning to talk about family planning at their clinics. Of course, this isn't a new idea, but in the past there have been clashes of culture, and those promoting family planning have been called racist. It's difficult to bridge the cultural gap to help people alter their ways of thinking, to help them understand that they don't need 8 children to have a "pension," that Namibia's population is growing rapidly and that the country can't support so many people.

I could go on and on. I think I should save it for another post.

As always, thanks for reading. :)

Term 2 will be my last full term as a Peace Corps volunteer. 4 and a half months to go. It seems surreal. And it's scary. It's hard for me to see past my last day as a PCV.

Winter came barging into a pleasant Namibian "autumn" this week. Thursday morning was in the low 40’s, and in the afternoons it’s been in the 60s and 70s. It’s certainly refreshing, not feeling like I’m living on the interior of an oven. Let me remind you: winter is cold. Maybe it's not as cold as a Maryland or Pennsylvania winter. There's no snow. But it does go below freezing. My house doesn't have heat. Getting out of a warm bed in the morning is hard when the rest of the house is in the 40s and it's still dark outside. I’m not sure I’m ready for namwinter just yet.

The last few weeks have been pretty boring. The end of my holiday was definitely pleasant until a visit to the dentist, during which I made an emergency/temporary root canal performed, with the promise of a more thorough root canal to come (it happened to be this morning, more to come on that).

While on holiday, I managed to break my phone and lose my sunglasses (which I suspect were actually stolen, but since I have no proof of this, I feel like I have to take the blame). Being without a phone doesn’t really suit me, so the day we arrived back in Namibia from Victoria Falls, I had to buy a new phone, spending the remainder of my living allowance, and recognizing that having a phone was probably more important than fresh fruits and vegetables for the next 2 weeks. I got a nice phone for what I paid for it, it has a qwerty keyboard, a music player and a micro SD card slot that turns it into an mp3 player, and a radio – the Nokia I broke had only the radio.

The beginning of the school term is off to a good start. I had braced myself for all the women teachers to tell me how fat I’d gotten over the holiday, but then I realized that they, too, had gotten rather fat over the holiday. So fat, in fact, that the first day I was back ( I missed the first 2 days for the aforementioned emergency root canal) several of them were wearing blouses with the bottoms 2-4 buttons unbuttoned because, well, they couldn’t be buttoned. (I actually smsed some other volunteers and asked if that would be ok in America. Clearly I’ve lost my perspective.) To my great relief, none of them pointed out how fat I’d gotten.

I’ve have spent the first 2 weeks doing software installations/updates/troubleshooting, trying to prepare the computers for the classes I’m supposed to be giving to the teachers. On my personal computer, I’ve been using Edubuntu (a Linux operating system geared towards learners and teachers) almost exclusively as an alternative to Windows. One of the biggest advantages of Linux over Windows is that the viruses that haunt us are made almost exclusively for Windows, and don’t operate in Linux, making Linux immune to them. As anyone who has had to deal even a little with computers here will tell you, after a general lack of knowledge, the biggest challenge facing IT is viruses. Some volunteers have computer labs that have been rendered inoperable due to the destruction and devastation of viruses. With all those things in mind, I made the case to my HOD/the acting principal (and it’s almost certain that he’ll become principal when they open the post up for applications) that since I’ve figured out how to install Microsoft Word and Excel inside Edubuntu, and since Edubuntu is geared toward educators and learners, and because the viruses that are running rampant around Namibia won’t run in Edubuntu, it’s the perfect operating system for the several computers to be used by the teachers. And he said ok. For me, this is a huge victory. Not only have I freed my school from the chains of Microsoft Windows (well, mostly – they are on a dual boot system, the user chooses whether to use Edubuntu or Windows), but if I leave nothing else, at least I know I’m leaving computers that won’t be riddled with debilitating viruses 2 weeks after I leave.

The holidays were unkind to my figure: not enough running/walking/exercise in general, and too much fried/good food. Last week I decided that walking to school would do me good. Since school starts at 7am, I have to be out of the house by no later than 6:25. The sun is just peeking its head over the horizon, and it’s quiet and cool and good for my head. I listen to the news in the morning (the New at 6 from the National Broadcasting Company of Namibia) on my new phone, which is great – I feel like I always meant to listen to the news in the morning while getting ready for school, but was always too sleepy to remember to turn it on until it was time to leave. I also pass a lot of people walking to work in town from the location, and I like greeting people in the morning. As I mentioned shortly after moving to Gobabis and was still living with my host family, the walk to and from school was often the best part of my day. It’s becoming so again. The walk home lets me unwind and listen to music and greet people. (As an aside, I refuse to give up wearing my Chacos (sandals) for the cold; at least 2 of the 5 days I’ve walked to school since it started, my toes have gone numb from the cold. Almost time to start rockin the socks and sandals!)

Listening to the news in the morning is eye-opening. To say that NBC’s news has an anti-western tilt would be too strong, but certainly the way that the news is presented is not always objective, and does not always portray the US and other industrialized nations in the best light. Sometimes I also wonder how the some of the people giving the news ended up as radio voices; their English is, ahem, pretty bad.

Last term, it came to light at Martin’s school, and then the following day, that the learners have organized themselves into gangs. Last week, members of one tribe (the Herero tribe) killed an old lady from another tribe (the Damara tribe) in the location, and so in addition to the gang activity, there’s now inter-tribal dispute. The Namibian published a story about the gang activity last week; see below.

Last Friday, after Thursday’s article, the principal (formerly the HOD) observed during the morning staff meeting that no one is going to pay attention to these things until someone dies. I can’t disagree. And unfortunately, tribalism is so common in Namibia that it can only escalate. He asked if we thought we should gather the learners in the hall and talk to them. OF COURSE. So the learners got a talking-to on Friday morning, although I’m not sure what was said, as I was busy trying to get Edubuntu to install and update using our one internet connection.

I found out that Yolande (the secretary at my school) will be finally getting married in December. I’m happy for her, but sad at the same time, since I will no longer be in Namibia (although my whereabouts are still unknown).

Yesterday I underwent the worst dental procedure I’ve ever had. I’ve been to the namdentist far more times than is reasonable. The dentist I saw for my mid-service dental appointment found "soft spots" that he felt the need to drill and fill. I saw the dentist 6 or 7 times between May and November last year, and one of the things he "fixed" has been causing me pain. Finally PC sent me to a dental surgeon who discovered that I needed a root canal. I've never had a full root canal before. It was excruciating. I teared up. I've never cried at the dentist before. If I never need another root canal, it won't be too soon. BUT, for the first time in ages, I can chew food on that side of my mouth without pain. It's pretty great.

The upside to having to come to the dentist in Windhoek is that I get to hangg out with my friend Kamy, who lives here, and Debbie, who lives just too far to hang out often.

Thanks for reading. I hope wherever you are, you're well.

Namibia received record rainfall this year. This article was on cnn.com (I also posted a link on my facebook page a few weeks ago):

Record flooding has affected half a million Namibians, Red Cross says

Heavy rains that began early in January in northern central Namibia have reached staggering proportions, with 80 people drowned and half a million others affected directly or indirectly, officials said.

President Hifikepunye Pohamba declared a national emergency in all six northern regions on March 28.

The affected region is in the Cuvelai Basin, which drains southern Angola via a complex of streams that typically result in an annual flood called the efundja, which is named for the fish that spawn in spring.

This year's efundja has resulted in the wettest year since systematic measurements started in 1891, with rainfall in affected areas nearly double the normal average.

Government figures cite 263 school closures, with a total of 320 affected, leaving 114,000 schoolchildren shut out of their classrooms.

Up to 40 health clinics are under water, and more than 100 health mobile outreach points have been made inaccessible as a result of damage to roads and bridges, according to the World Health Organization.

In addition, roads, bridges, homes and staple crops in all six northern and northeastern regions in Namibia have been destroyed, according to UNICEF.

They represent some of the country's poorest areas.

The Red Cross Society of Namibia estimates that 500,000 people have been affected, with the densely populated central-northern regions -- Omusati, Oshona and Ohangwena -- hit worst.

But other areas are also threatened, as rivers -- including the Zambezi -- drain southern and central Angola. Forecasters predict areas like Caprivi, which is about 500 kilometers (310 miles) east, may experience more flooding by next week.

About 40,000 people have been displaced, some 10,000 of whom have been accommodated in 68 camps set up by the government, officials said.

The death toll is expected to rise as water-borne diseases, mainly malaria, are predicted to spread.

The Red Cross and the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs are appealing for help, and the U.S. government and some European countries have made donations. OCHA said in its southern Africa flood and cyclone report, published Wednesday, that 2011 marks the third consecutive year of heavy rains in the region. The result is that the water table has risen and that "flood water levels are unlikely to recede for the next three to six months."

More rain is expected.

Peace Corps relocated volunteers located in the affected areas to stay with volunteers in the south. We hosted 4 relocated volunteers, all from Group 32 (Martin’s group); it started out that they would only be relocated for 2 weeks, but they ended up being with us for 3 weeks and change. I really enjoyed having them; most of us who hosted were a little apprehensive about having volunteers for so long, but the group that stayed with us was great.

The end of the term has passed uneventfully. Not having a register class, or having to enter marks of my own, made things pretty easy for me. That’s not to say I wasn’t ridiculously busy; I just wasn’t busy in the way I was last year at the end of the term, running around like a headless hen. I’ve been updating the school’s computers in preparation for computer classes this coming term. The process of updating computers using only one internet connection has been time consuming, and I usually can’t do much without being interrupted or beckoned to another part of the building. One of the shining moments of this term: my counterpart has started using Microsoft Excel all by herself. Considering she couldn’t really do anything on computer when i got to my school at the end of 2009, and remembering that computers aren’t as popular here and most people don’t have them in their homes yet, it’s pretty great that she’s doing as much as she is independently. We even started using formulas in some of her marksheets. It’s pretty exciting stuff for me. The last day of school was a funny day; the learners come to school to collect their reports, but they come and go when they want. With the exception of one other volunteer, every other PCV either wasn’t required to go to school on the last day, or was out of school by 10 am. Me? There till 12 because a staff meeting had been scheduled for 10. Sigh. At least they fed us before the meeting, and I had a fun weekend to look forward to.

Even though the end of my term wasn’t super stressful, I was definitely ready for a holiday. After the last day of school, I was able to spend a few days with my best friend here in Namibia – it was really what I needed. We did some interneting, listened to endless hours of music (and watched YouTube videos! Whoa), did some skyping, and had a very tasty taco night with some Namibians, PCVs, and a couchsurfer. I then travelled to Windhoek to meet up with a Group 31 health PCV to travel to Victoria Falls, Zambia side. (The Zambezi river runs between Zambia and Zimbabwe at the falls.)

We got into Livingstone, Zambia on Sunday night, after a hugely successful day hiking, and managed to find and get to Livingstone’s Indian Restaurant before it closed. The place is tiny and kind of hidden at the back of a lodge; nonetheless, it was the best Indian food I’ve had for years, maybe ever. Even better than being delicious? Being cheap.

We’re staying at a Jollyboys Backpackers here in Livingston, where there happens to be a large number of Group 32ers running around, too. Thankfully most of them are cool, and it’s been fun to hang out with them and get to know them a little better.

I’m sleeping in my tent instead of in the dorm rooms – camping is cheaper, and it’s nice to spread out in my tent. The dorms rooms are also way smellier than my tent. I’m all set up underneath some palm trees, with my hammock hanging between 2 of them. I have a nice, secluded set up that I can retreat to at the end of the day.

Monday evening we went on a sunset cruise on the Zambezi (we saw crocs and hippos!), and yesterday I went to the falls. Some people say that they’re nicer from the Zimbabwe side, but they’re pretty great from the Zambia side, too. There’s been so much rain in Southern Africa this year and the river is so high that it’s hard to see the falls for all the mist. The trails around the falls get very close, and being that close is like being in torrential downpours. There’s a healthy baboon population inside the park, and there were a couple moments when we felt like we were running the baboon gauntlet – one time we were cornered by a large male on one side of us on the trail and 2 smaller baboons on the other side; we decided to back off the trail and let the big guy pass, which he did, then jumped into the tree just next to us. People inside the park foolishly feed them sometimes, and the baboons know that if you open your bag, you might have food inside. One of the other PCVs did just this and was charged by a baboon.

Tuesday evening we rounded off an already amazing day with another trip for Indian food.

Wednesday morning we visited the market in Livingstone, rumored to have cheap shitenges (large pieces of colorful fabric that the women wrap around them here). Shitenges are multipurpose, serving as wall hangings, wraps, towels, blankets, tablecoverings, and scarves. In Namibia, they’re N$20 – N$30 (US$3 – US$4.50). Here, they were rumored to be around N$15 at a market far away from the backpackers we’re staying at. So yesterday morning we went in search of these cheap shitenges. What we found was a large, open market similar to those in Latin America, selling clothes, vegetables, kitchen items, meat, shoes, beans and ground nuts… I’d been wondering how people live in Livingstone, because the grocery store are much more expensive than in Namibia – but this market is where the local people shop. And unlike the other markets in Livingstone, there weren’t other white people around. Also unlike the other markets in Livingstone, the vendors didn’t harass us as we walked around. We found a shitenge stand being run by 2 small boys who spoke fantastic English. There were shitenges all over the floor and one of the boys was in the process of cutting them to the proper length; we kind of wanted to dive in and small in the sea of shitenges. We were also approached by a lady who saw us shopping for shitenges and offered to make clothes out of them – for us, pants and skirts. Turns out that she also speaks French – a drastic difference from Namibia, where people only speak their mother tongues and English and/or Afrikaans.

The remainder of Wednesday was spent lazing around (although I managed to lose my sunglasses, which I’m pretty bummed about), reading, etc….

Yesterday morning we went back to the market to retrieve our clothes early in the morning. Most of the 32ers who are here were planning to either bunji, swing (50ft swing) or zip line into/across the Zambezi gorge from the bridge going into Zimbabwe; we were planning to go and watch, so we wanted to get to the market as early as possible. The 31er I’m travelling with has commissioned pants from one of the tailors; me, a traditional skirt and a pair of pants. They were unfortunately not finished when we got there. We did manage to buy more shitenges, though, before heading back to town. We ended up not going back to watch the bunji/swing/zip extravaganza. Instead, I ate a nice lunch, napped in my hammock, and sat by the pool. I went back to the open market in the afternoon and picked up my clothes. I’m really excited about my traditional skirt. And my pants.

‘

Today, we’re preparing to head back to Nam. I’m doing wash, and we’re eating as much of our food as possible to compensate for all the shitenges we bought (we can either carry food, or shitenges, but not both). Tomorrow it’s back to Katima, and southward from there. Since coming to Zambia, I’ve lost my sunglasses AND broken my phone. Once we get back to Namibia, I’ll be able to buy a new phone. It’ll be nice to feel connected again. From Katima, I’ll travel back through Rundu, and then south to Windhoek and back east to Gobabis.

Even though I’d rather be putzing around Namibia with my Dad and Rose, my last-minute alternative holiday has been really nice. If only I’d had big rocks to climb, too. :)

As always, thanks for reading.

I've never been one for following the rules or been very good at maneuvering through bureaucracy. Policies and procedures? I get that they're important. I get it. I just don't always like it.

The Namibian school system is laden with bureaucracy and full of policies and procedures put in place to try to improve the school system, therefore improving the lives of the learners.

It's difficult to come into the school system not having grown up in it, full of American ideas and not understanding the importance of some of these policies and procedures. The implications of not following some of these rules, regulations, and norms can be far reaching and seemingly ever ending.

One such norm is the marking of the learners' workbooks. Upon starting at the beginning of last year, I only marked the books when I gave the learners an assignment that I needed to mark for a recorded grade. Other teachers mark the books weekly, or even daily; I just didn't see the need. All assignments, marked by me or not, were always gone over in class, and the learners were responsible for marking and making corrections.

The parents of several learners who failed either maths or english last year came back and said that their learners failed because I didn't mark their workbooks, that their learners didn't know that they weren't doing well because I wasn't marking their books. It wasn't good enough for me to respond that they were responsible for marking and making corrections. And apparently the fact that they were getting 10-20 percent correct on their tests (which I always sent home to be signed by the parent/guardian) wasn't indication enough to them that their learner was failing.

And so this issue continues to come up. At the morning staff meetings, after the bible is read, religious texts are interpreted and prayers are said, of course, the issue continues to come up. And of course my “lack of administration” is always talked about abstractly, I'm never directly accused of wrongdoing, but... I don't need to be to know exactly what's being referenced.

But the term is mostly over. The upper primary learners wrote exams this week and the lower primary... did whatever lower primary does. I mostly wrote the grade 5 end-of-term exam, along with my grade 5 english teacher counterpart, and think it was a damn good exam. This term we taught about the desert for the whole term (under the cross-curricular theme of environment) (and by we, I mean Ms. Kandetu taught and I helped with the lesson planning). In other subjects they studied the solar system, ecosystems, population information, etc etc etc.... So all the topics on the english exam corresponded to something they'd learned about in other subjects. All that being said, the average score on the English exam was somewhere between 10 and 15 out of 30 marks. Sigh. 10/30 is passing, at least.

I came to the big city of Windhoek yesterday for a VAC meeting this morning (VAC is Volunteer Advisory Committee). VAC is a group of elected volunteers that represent the different geographic regions in Namibia as well as the different sectors (health/education/small enterprise development) and the different intake groups. Three times a year we meet with senior staff to discuss the issues that volunteers all over Namibia are experiencing. We come the day before the meeting to hold a premeeting, to make sure everyone is on the same page about the agenda topics. One of the groups before us had the great idea to make it a tradition to drink a bottle of whiskey during the premeeting; the meeting opens with whiskey and doesn't end until the bottle is kicked. Needless to say, VAC is a good time, always.

Because of various reasons that I don't feel like explaining, VAC has had a significant turnover and only 3 of us were at the last VAC meeting, and all the other members are newbies from groups 31 and 32. It's always nice to meet new PCVs. I hadn't met 3 of my roommates before I arrived yesterday, but had a really nice conversation with one of them this morning before the meeting about school, teaching, the Nam school system, etc etc.

VAC meetings consist of PCV reps and Senior Staff: this includes the Country Director, 4 APCDs (Associate Peace Corps Directors) for the different regions/sectors, the safety and security officer, the administrative officer, the IT specialist, and the Medical Officers. Before today, the longest meeting I'd been in was 3 hours. Today's was 5. Five hours. Phew.

Group 33 swore in yesterday. Except for the Group 28 and 29ers who extended their service, Group 30 has been in country the longest. We're the old heads! So crazy.

This morning in the shower I realized that 6 months from yesterday will be my last day as an official PCV; 6 months from today, I'll officially be an RPCV (returned peace corps volunteer). More than three quarters of my service is gone. Done. Over. Whoa.

I don't know how I forgot to write about maybe the most exciting evening I've had in a long while here in Namibia. A month or so ago my friend Debbie came to visit for the weekend. My good friend Ruben joined us with a couple of his friends, and we decided to go play pool. There's only one place in Gobabis safe enough for us to play pool, a lodge on the other side of town owned and frequented by white people.

When we arrived, Debbie recognized some of the white guys from her town; they frequent the same bar she does. They greeted each other, then we went to play pool. Debbie and I were the only white people in the group. I was involved in some friendly flirtation with one of the guys, and the white guys sitting at the bar didn't take kindly to it. One made a comment to the effect of "Oh, you like the darkies, do you?" Along with my friend, I walked away, and the white guys started making racially charged comments across the whole bar, and before long they were calling me and Debbie kaffer lovers (kaffer is the Namibian n-word), slurring the parents of my friends (as in "your father is a kaffer"), and not long after that things started flying: pool cues, bar glasses, fists, nasty nasty words.

The good thing is that Debbie and I were never in any real danger. I never felt fear - only anger and disgust. I know I talked alot about feeling like I was living in the segregated south when I first moved to Gobabis, but looking back now on this incident makes it so much more real. The feeling of supremacy that the whites in Gobabis feel simply because of their skin color disgusts me. And it's said that race relations are improving in Namibia, at least in the towns. I say that at least Gobabis has a long way to go.

Somewhere, a long time ago (ok, only 19 months ago), we arrived in country still optimistic, still hopeful, still clean, suffering from homesickness together, finding our ways together, forging lifelong friendships.

Returning to Kukuri Center, the location of our Namibian debut, for GTOT (General Training of Trainers), was bittersweet. This week, I've come full circle – I've returned for PST (Pre-Service Training). This time, I'm on the other side of the page.

I know I've mentioned it before, but... The Kukuri Center has a very special place in my heart.

This week, I realized that Kukuri Center at night has a particularly special place in my heart, particularly at night. It brings back a rush of memories – laying in the grass watching movies, trading media and playing cards under the thatch roofs, sitting on the benches outside the rooms having heart-to-hearts and predicting the next 26 months, the calm of the Okahandja night being broken by the ringing of the public telephone when someone’s family miscalculated the time difference and called in the middle of the night. That first week spent here was full of such raw emotion.

Since I last updated my blog, a lot of things have happened.

Things are busy.

I'm torn between the feeling of “the busier the better” and “dear time, please slow down.” The busier I am, the faster time goes. The busier I am, the more rewarded I feel. Awesome. But the more things start to work, the more I want to... just keep doing them. And I'm running out of time.

Management at my school has changed. My principal took a post at the Ministry of Education, and the HOD of my school is currently acting principal. This change of administration has definitely changed the atmosphere and work dynamic at school. Despite this, things at school are still going positively, on a whole. I've been working on getting things with the school computers straightened out. I've introduced several Namibian colleagues to Linux, an alternative operating system to Windows. The specific type of Linux I've been using, Edubuntu, is an operating geared specifically to teachers and learners, and has a lot of great tools built in for educators. The other huge advantage of Linux is that since Linux does not recognize Windows' viruses, it aids in preventing the spread of viruses. Computer viruses, much like AIDS, are a huge problem in Namibia.

I've been working closely with the grade 5 English teacher this year. It's been hugely rewarding. I hear her English improving. She has started using Microsoft Word by herself. She has started using Microsoft Excel by herself. She's learning to use the scanner. PROGRESS. SUSTAINABLE PROGRESS.

I've also been in and out of Gobabis since my return from America for various meetings, workshops, doctors' appointments, and other random things. While these things have kept me out of school, they've also kept me busy, refreshed and optimistic.

2 weeks ago I attended a microgardening/permagardening workshop. It was the best workshop I've attended during my entire time here. The first 2 days were facilitated by a Namibian man from the north who works with the Ministry of Youth to build community gardens, youth center gardens, income generation gardens, etc, using microgardening techniques. (Microgardens are also commonly known as table-top gardens. They are most commonly hydroponic gardens - growing the roots in water with special nutrients or some type of substrate.) The 3rd and 4th days were facilitated by an American expat and RPCV based in Tanzania. His portion of the workshop was phenomenal. He has taken permaculture ideas, scaled them down, made them manageable on a smaller scale, and created the “permagarden.” A permagarden His permagardening concept has been taught to Peace Corps Volunteers all over Africa; they've then been sustainably passed on to community members who then pass the ideas to other community members – the model of sustainability. (To see the far-reaching sustainability of the project, Google “permagarden”.)

With the ideas of a permagarden in mind, I have already started teaching Yolande (the school secretary) many of the basic ideas. One of the most important parts of it is water control and management by using catch-holes; since she and her mom already have beds planted, we have to wait to do the majority of the digging until the next harvest, but we've started digging catch holes and started a compost pit/pile near her house. Hopefully I'll have some quality before/after photos to put up. I've also, with the agriculture teacher, identified an area at my school to create 2 or 3 permagarden beds and a compost pit/pile.

Namibian Independence Day was spent in Mariental. A good time was had by all. Despite the overall positivity of the last 3 or so months, they haven't been without their challenges.

Homesickness still comes and goes at inopportune moments. My contact with people at home dropped off significantly after my visit to America during the holidays – partly because I've been so busy, and partly for lack of contact initiation by people at home. I'm missing a lot of fun things at home – climbing trips, festivals and parties and celebrations, important life milestones in the lives of family and friends.

Loneliness comes and goes, too. I have formed great friendships in the community – people in whom I can confide, to whom I can speak frankly and to whom I look for support and comfort. Even having formed such great friendships, occasional loneliness coupled with boredom and homesickness can be unpleasant. I'd hoped that having a permanent roommate would aid in easing some of these things, but it's turned out not to be the case.

The anxiety of what happens in 7-9 months is heavy.

One day at PST I sat with a group of the trainees for lunch, and asked them where in the states they're all from. One of the guys said “Pennsylvania,” I asked where in PA, he said “Williamsport.” Ha. It's a small world! (For those of you who don't know, I grew up 15 or so minutes from Williamsport.) One of the other trainees was living and working in Baltimore before he left for Peace Corps. Pretty crazy.

The married couple from Group 32 was recently moved from their site in NW Namibia to a site just south of Gobabis (actually the site where the married couple from my group had been placed before they ET'ed). I had a chance to meet them this weekend, they came to Gobabis with their dog Patches to do their shopping. Just like listening to Group 33 reminded me what it was like to be in PST, listening to all the Group 32ers talk reminded me what it was like during my first term of teaching. And although they're often experiencing the same things we did, making the same mistakes we did, they're necessary mistake to make.

And this week, it's back to school for a few more weeks before my dad and Rose make their debut on the continent!

For the last 2 weeks, I've been trying to write a blog update. Clearly, I've been unsuccessful.

Namibia's been tugging at my heart strings, hard. And consistently.

I've already expressed that I feel so good about the coming 8-9 months that it almost makes 2010 seem like wasted time. I know that without 2010, 2011 wouldn't hold so much promise, but somehow I wish I could turn back the clock, do some things differently... but you know, hindsight's kind of a bitch.

The PVCs who'd been here a while when we arrived in country kept telling us that year 2 would be better then year 1. My goodness, they were right.

This year I'm focusing on tolerance, patience, understanding, and positivity. Gone (I hope) are the days of wondering WTF I'm doing here, of cultural intolerance and impatience. Part of all this is knowing how to pick my battles. Sometimes, the better option is to smile, nod, and walk away.

I received some news yesterday that put a bit of a damper on my obnoxiously optimistic moods... but even this morning, riding to school, I found myself with a stupid, shit-eating grin on my face. I hadn't been to school in a week, and I was happy to see most of my colleagues again and get back down to work. Even kids from other schools greet me by name in the morning now, and I still get great joy from shocking people (in a good way) just by greeting them in the morning.

2 things in particular made me smile today. I made a turn at Yolande's (the secretary) house after school today. I forget what we were even talking about, but I made the comment that I'm only white because that's what color my skin is. She replied that I'm blacker than lots of people she knows. Even writing about it makes me smirk.

Most of the shops here have security guards at the entrance/exit that check your receipt on the way out. If I only buy a couple items, I usually just put them in my purse instead of taking a plastic bag. Today I bought 3 cans of cat food, and stowed them in my bag. I handed the receipt to the guard, who couldn't work out why I had a receipt but no bags. He's not the first to be baffled by this, but he went so far as to call over the other guard to help him figure it out. He, in fact, reacted as if I had too MANY items, not too few. In the end, it was too much for him to work out, and he sent me out of the shop (I did then show him that my items were in my bag).

Last week I was at GTOT (General Training of Trainers), the week-long workshop required for anyone participating as staff or Resource PCV at PST (Pre-Service Training) for incoming groups. It was a great week. I hope to write a little more about it soon.

I'm starting to plan out my secondary projects for the coming year. Computer classes and adult basic literacy classes are on the top of the list.

Lately, I've been traveling alot, so I've had the opportunity to talk with a diverse cross-section of people while hiking. However awkward, upsetting, pleasant, compelling, or interesting the conversations are, I always come away with something I didn't know before. I had particularly interesting conversation with a South African this past Sunday, which I hope to write about in more detail soon.

I'll close with a quote from an episode of This American Life that I watched earlier, that struck close to home:

Everybody hears what is easier for them to believe.

Thanks for reading!

I have come to realize that the absence of stress and dread and anxiety is contributing to the overwhelming feeling of happiness and optimism and hopefulness that I currently have.

And this is in spite of some really seriously pessimistic happenings since my last update.

I continue to be happy with my current arrangements at school. Just like anything else, everyone is adjusting to my new role at school, and the adjustment’s been a little harder for some than for others. I’ve also had to back step a bit and remember that, while I don’t have to completely compromise who I am, I DO have to tone down certain aspects of my personality in order to function within the framework of my life here, both working and personal.

Last week there were some incidents at school that temporarily put a big damper on my optimism. I’ve had to really focus on accepting that some things and some people won’t change, “changing” the things that I can, and being able to distinguish between the two. (I say “changing” because Namibian culture is resistant to change, and so if my objective is to change ANYTHING, already I’ve set myself up for failure; I have to instead look at what I can do to improve things.)

I had a lazy weekend, and on Monday had a fair day at school. I have been working at gathering resources for the grade 5 and 6 English teachers, and Monday sat down with the grade 5 teacher to start planning how to incorporate cross-curricular topics. I predicted that changing lesson plans to start teaching new things would be a hard sell, but really she seems excited to be following the Ministry mandates (and doing it even without being forced by management), and excited that she doesn’t have to try to navigate it alone. This week she’s covering “self” with the grade 5s, like, this is who I am. Next week we’re going to start talking about the Environment, starting with how we, ourselves, fit into the environment around us. All simple topics, but in the process of covering these new topics, we’re finding new resources, we’re brainstorming together, and I’m teaching her how to use the computer, slowly but surely. Our interactions on Monday alone really made me feel hopeful about the potential for the rest of the year.

And it feels good to feel hopeful.

Monday an acquaintance was in Gobabis for work, with one of his colleagues, and they came over after work for a braai (BBQ). It was a good reminder of why I try to avoid hanging out with Afrikaners. Throughout the course of the evening, I was repeatedly insulted and offended in my own home; my guests were fixated on bashing me for being vegetarian, and while ordinarily I would AT LEAST defend myself, I said NOTHING. I find this to be ironic, because often it’s the vegetarians bashing the meat eaters at events like this, but for the sake of civility, I just let them talk. One of them continued to say how he could never do it, he could never bevegetarian, and after about the fifth time, I responded, “Hey, you know, no one’s asking you to be.” This same person then went on to talk about how he HATES vegetables, how he never eats vegetables (because apparently a healthy, well balanced diet consists only of meat). He went on talking about topics that seem mundane and unimportant here (like the frequency with which people should shower, and why some tribes in Africa are so stupid), but in that setting, are very telling… and the more he talked, the more I laughed on the inside, as he just proved himself another closed-minded, small-worlded white Namibian. Further on in the evening, as I continued to be the object of ridicule, I had to remind them that it was, in all fairness, my home, and I walked away before I retaliated with comments about their shortcomings. It was an unpleasant reminder that, regardless of how open-minded I may try to be, others are not necessarily so.

I went to Windhoek for x-rays on Tuesday and to the orthopedic specialist Wednesday about my hand. The good news is that there are no broken bones or joint injuries, but I severely strained the ligaments in my thumb. Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can do but rest my hand. Fortunately, I’m in a place where I have no temptation to climb, and I’ve got another solid 8 months to rest it and let it heal.

Tuesday night I had the pleasure of hanging out and sharing Jam Jars with some awesome folks. I have a tendency to show up at Primi (the restaurant at the mall that we tend to gravitate towards), so I'll usually do some work or write in my journal while I'm waiting. Primi is also a great place for people watching. It’s easy to forget that Windhoek is a bit more advanced than most of the smaller towns in terms of racial integration; I even found myself staring at racially mixed groups of people who walked by, because you almost never seen whites and blacks mixing in Gobabis. I’m also always so pleasantly surprised at the amount of English I overhear being spoken in Windhoek. It is almost never the mother tongue of either person speaking, but both parties are making an effort to make it their medium of communication, and I find a lot of encouragement in that.

PC/Nam’s peer support committee, the Volunteer Support Network, also happened to be in Windhoek this week, so I got to see and hang out with some of my favorite fellow PCVs. I’m heading south for the weekend, and then to a week of training for the upcoming PST next week.

Today I met with Waldo, my APCD, about things at school. It felt good to tell him that, although last year was really rough, and I’d highly considered coming back for my things and then going back to the states after the holidays, I was SO glad that I came back, and so happy and excited for the coming year with the current arrangement I have at school. He’s a great problem solver and troubleshooter, but I know he enjoys hearing about things when they’re going well. In the process of troubleshooting some things during our meeting, the possibility of a school-transfer was discussed, and I found myself really sad about it, because I realized that I’ve worked hard to establish myself and form good relationships with the people at my school and would be sad to lose that. (A site transfer was not brought up, but the thought of THAT is scary! I didn’t realize just how scary until sitting in this meeting wondering if Waldo was going to suggest it.)

Even though I’ve mentioned it before, I feel like it’s worth mentioning again that I feel like a new person this year and feel like I’m starting anew.

This year Namibia is reporting record rainfall. The typically dry air has turned muggy, and on my way to Windhoek I saw the normally dry river beds full of running water. Never in the 17 months that I’ve been here have I ever seen more than a trickle of water in the river beds. The rain is turning the bush green green, and the hillsides surrounding Windhoek are beautiful. I am hoping to catch some photos of the green before the rains stop and everything turns brown again.

Lastly, I’m getting VERY excited about my dad's and his wife Rose’s upcoming visit to Namibia. I am glad that they’ll be visiting after a very wet rainy season, since I feel like Namibia is at its best when it’s green.

As always, thanks for reading. I hope you're well, wherever you are. :)

My desire to blog comes and goes, just like most other things. Unfortunately, the last time I updated my blog was months ago and of course a lot has happened since then.

The last time I updated, there were some doubts about the end of year examination timetable. I suspected that the timetable would change. My suspicions were correct. Due to elections, the exams were moved up several weeks, which was bad news for me because it meant I had no time to do revisions (review) with my classes. And then, just when the timetable put in place to accommodate the elections was solidified, the Ministry of Education decided to change it again, to keep the learners in school until a later date than the revised timetable. Then there was another change, to keep the learners even longer. We more or less decided to disregard the last change and kept the revised timetable.

Despite my best efforts to prepare my learners for the exams, performance was pessimal. For the maths exams (there are 2 question papers – one with structured/word type problems and one with straight up maths problems that leave little room for interpretation) I more or less went over exactly what the learners would need to know in the days before the exams. They still performed poorly. In English it was like they'd been sleeping all year. Marking the exams was exhausting, because marking 42 of anything is exhausting, and the disappointment I felt at my learners' performance drained me of any optimism I'd had for my class. Of course teachers' performances are evaluated partly on learner performance, and based on the performance of my learners on the exams as well as in classwork, it was implied that I hadn't performed my job as a teacher well.

In the end, 14 out of 18 girls in my Grade 6 class passed. The 4 that failed went to Grade 7 anyway, because they already repeated either Grade 5 or Grade 6 and so can't repeat another year until the go to Grade 8. The boys didn't fare so well. Of 20 boys, only 4 passed. Of the 16 who failed, seven were transferred to Grade 7 because they already repeated either Grade 5 or Grade 6. The other nine will repeat Grade 6. Amongst these nine are the son of the schoolboard chairman (he failed English, mostly because he's lazy) and the Maths Advisory teacher's son (he failed, you guessed it, maths). When the HOD saw this, he chuckled in an ironic sort of way, and made like he was going to suggest doctoring their marks to pass them. I was like, hey, do what you want, but I’m not passing them. Then the principal called me into his office to discuss it. He basically told me that they were going to be passed to Grade 7. I firmly stood my ground, told him that it was his choice if he wanted to do that, but that I strongly disagreed with that decision and felt that both would benefit from another year in Grade 6. I made a solid case for keeping them in Grade 6, but I left his office feeling even more beaten down and frustrated than I already did. I'd made the conscious decision not to doctor their marks before the marksheet hit his desk, and my opinion as their teacher, and the teacher who spent the most time with them, had been completely disregarded. Then... lo and behold, I was called back into his office. They'd reviewed their marks for the year, both of the boys', and decided that, based on all their marks, keeping them in Grade 6 was the right decision. Score one for the American lady.

Being a teacher for the first time is hard, but for me, the end of the year was especially hard with all the administrative bullshit required to close the year. As a 'register teacher' or class/homeroom teacher, I was required to do a lot of paperwork and complete record cards for each and every learner in my class. Some paperwork I didn't know I had to do until I was being asked for it, completed. It was... stressful. And I was always wondering what more I was supposed to do that I hadn't done because I didn't know I was supposed to do it.

In addition to the stress of the end of the year, I started to experience anxiety at levels I've never had before, due mainly to my approaching visit home. I'd purchased my ticket in October, and had all the time in the world (aside from the time I was stressing about school) to think about it and romanticize about it. I've heard people with severe anxiety describe a feeling of wanting to crawl out of their skin, and of having a feeling of not wanting to be here, or there, or anywhere.... and I'd never been able to understand it or even remotely relate until I started feeling that way. I started having a lot of trouble sleeping, and started running to try to help stave off some of it. I even thought about asking the Peace Corps Medical Officers for some sort of anxiety drug or at least something to help me sleep, as a last resort, but in the end things got too hectic that I couldn’t deal with them on top of everything else. (It was during the exam period that I began losing sleep, and started to understand how severely crippling sleep deprivation can be.) I started to feel like I didn't want to return home at all, that staying in Africa would have been a better choice for my mental well-being.

I was correct in thinking that returning home would be difficult. The trip was a double-edged sword. I needed time to recover from everything going on here in Namibia, needed to restore my sanity, and this didn't always match the expectations others had for me. I had a hard time coping with changes in my life, changes in the lives of people in America, but it was beautiful to see people I'd really been missing. I had some funny/terrible culture shock. It was REALLY COLD and really weird. I did lot of laughing and a lot of crying. By the end, I often felt like I'd never left (that is, until one thing or another would jolt me back to remembering how much had changed since I'd been gone). I questioned my desire to come back to Namibia, especially since the end of term had been so hard and I felt like my work here hadn't accomplished anything. In the end, I stuck to the idea that I made a commitment to do a job here, for better or worse, and came back with some inkling of optimism that I would be able to muddle through the next 10-12 months, because in the grand scheme of things, what's 10 months? And while in America I was able to resolve some of the sources of my anxiety residing there, and was also reminded by some key people that I chose to apply to the Peace Corps because there wasn't a lot going on for me in America anyway. And however good or bad visiting America was, it provided me with important perspective that I think I really needed.

So, I got back on those planes (after an amusing situation at Dulles caused by some suspicious packages, which in turn caused United Airways to suspend all flights for a couple hours and turned the check in counters into a bit of a mess) and traveled the 40ish hours back to Gobabis. I returned feeling a little beaten down, still very sad about things that happened at home, unsure about my decision to return, but was welcomed by Chico the africat, my new roommate, and some other amazingly positive, supportive volunteers. Knowing they'd be here when I got back definitely made the return trip and first 72 hours back in Namibia bearable. Without amazing friends here, life would suck. Bad. And I'd probably be back in America by now.

It was a little surreal to think, sitting on the planes, that I would, in a day, be back in Africa, Namibia, Gobabis, at my house at the Regional Ministry of Education office. And being back was surreal. Again, there was this feeling that I'd never left, and the reality check that school would start shortly after my return. There was the uncertainty of what the school year had in store, and still the overwhelming feeling that I'm not really accomplishing anything here. I was jet-lagged for days, still struggled with bouts of anxiety/sadness/guilt/insert crippling emotion here. I had trouble sleeping at night, and had trouble staying awake during the day. The four days between my return and the first day of school simultaneously dragged and flew by; I welcomed the chance to decompress and relax a bit, but looked forward to filling my time with school and whatnot. Even more, I really started to look forward to making this year better than the last.

Having a sitemate is great. Just the last 2 weeks have shown me that many volunteers who are otherwise struggling would prosper in Peace Corps service with a sitemate. There are the typical cohabitation issues, things that arise learning to live with someone you barely know (but are about to know waaay better than you want!), but in general it's been nice to have someone to talk to who (more or less) understands. Because Martin and I are at different stages of our service, he's still discovering things and finding his own way, so we can't talk about things the same way I could (and do) with people in Group 30. It's entertaining to me to watch him going through many of the same things I went through last year, and just like parents must, I have to resist the urge to guide him or advise him or prejudice him. His situation is also a little different – for starters, he's a dude, and men tend to have much different experiences than women. He's teaching at a secondary school (also in Epako), whereas I'm at a primary school. Regardless of differences, even having the option to talk to someone who can relate on any level with how i'm feeling is reassuring and helpful. The other night we were playing Scrabble, and I thought to myself how it was a perfect example of why sitemates are awesome – because I would have otherwise been in bed watching a movie or TV - or worse, be lost inside my own thoughts - instead of using my brain and interacting with another human being. And having a sitemate who likes to play Scrabble is a super bonus. Seriously.

And so, we're 5 school days deep into the new school year. As much as I may have been dreading going back to school, it was nice. I am quite good friends with the secretary (she's young and hip) and it was really nice to see her and give her a hug and talk to her about her holiday on the farm. My principal was happy to see me (and I think surprised, as I don't think it was a secret to anyone that I was struggling toward the end of the last school year), and the other staff cordially welcomed me back. The first 2 days back were teacher-only days, no learners. I had a chance to meet with my principal about what each of us had in mind for me for the upcoming year. I knew that they'd been planning to remove me from teaching English and Maths, and last year when I found that out, I was upset/pissed off/frustrated about that. While I was home, though, I decided that not teaching a 'promotional' subject (a subject in which the grade determines passing to the next grade or not, like English, maths, science, etc) might just be how I survive 2011. Last year I would have liked to spend more time in the library, utilizing and helping others to utilize the available resources; I felt like I was doggie-paddling against the current for the whole year, trying to keep my head above water, and I simply failed at this objective. I realized that not teaching promotional subjects would allow me the freedom to spend more time in the library. During our meeting, my principal released me of my duties teaching Grade 6 and 7 English and maths, but proposed that I teach Grade 5 English. I said no. Of all the classes other primary school volunteers have taught, Grade 5 English is the class that causes the most problems. Learners have a really hard time transitioning between mother-tongue as medium of instruction in grade 1-4 to English as the medium of instruction in Grade 5, and other volunteers report that the learners have no idea what they're talking about for months. And really, I was a little confused by the proposal, since I'd been removed from grades 6 and 7 because I wasn't teaching well enough for my students to perform well. I told the principal that, of all the classes he could propose I teach, that was the one I wanted to teach the least. And I counter proposed co-teaching grades 5 and 6, helping those teachers find better resources and plan more creatively, and working more in the library, serving more as a resource volunteer than actual teacher. In terms of sustainability, this makes much more sense than just struggling through by myself in my own classroom, especially since finding sustainable secondary projects has been a challenge for me. I also let him know that I have anticipated Peace Corps-related absences that, without a relief teacher, could negatively impact teaching a class like Grade 5 English. My principal is a sensible, reasonable man, and often if I can make a strong case for something, he'll agree. And he agreed.

The learners came back to school this week on Monday. Much to my surprise, attendance was pretty good. At most schools in Namibia, learners trickle in for the first few weeks from the farm, and most schools don't make a timetable or start teaching until the 3rd week. My school? The timetable's done, most learners are coming to school, and things are rolling right along. That's not to say that things aren't (almost absolutely) chaotic, but the chaos doesn't faze me the way it did at this time last year. Also, not being a class teacher anymore, I don't feel compelled to babysit until the other teachers actually start teaching.

A few notable, bloggable things have happened at school this week. · The secretary is a quite talented seamstress, and made me a fancy, plunging neckline dress. She knows I'm a super sucker for a pretty dress, and it was a really thoughtful, heartfelt gift. · Today, 2 boys showed up in the office asking to speak to the principal. When he came out of his office and asked what they wanted, the older of the 2 said that they were looking for a school. The story is that both of these boys are orphans who are now living on the street. One is 13 and would be placed into grade 2, the other is 8, has never been to school, but appears to be quite clever. However, because these boys are street kids, my school won't admit them. (The matter was further discussed at our staff meeting this afternoon, I think the school is going to investigate getting them placed in an orphanage so that at least they aren't sleeping in boxes on the street.) The sad thing is that this case is pretty common. Namibia claims to have an “Education For All” policy, meaning that any child classified as an OVC (Orphaned or Vulnerable Child) should not have to pay school fees, and so in theory education is available to all children. However, in practice, that's not what's happening, because the process of classifying a child as an OVC is cumbersome and involves documentation that is sometimes hard to come by. And really, according to the definition of OVC, most of the learners at my school could be classified as OVCs. · I was highly entertained by one of my colleagues resetting a clock with dead batteries 2 mornings in a row, like somehow, magically, the batteries would start working again.

This afternoon, we had a meeting for the Grade 5-7 teachers, during which we discussed a few very interesting things. The first interesting thing was the 2010 pass rate at my school. It was 86%. That means that 86% of the learners at my school were promoted to the next grade. However, this also includes the learners who were transferred – those that were already held back once and can't be held back again. If you take away those learners, the pass rate drops significantly. In fact, my region – the Omaheke Region – dropped to 12th place out of 13 regions in academic achievement in 2010. The Director of Education is up in arms about it, and called a principals' meeting for next week. The second interesting thing came up while discussing this drop in academic performance. The principal said that we should now concentrate even more on those learners who earned Es last year. He asked why any learner is earning an E in the first place. I was the first to speak up and observe that some of the learners at my school have such severe learning disabilities that would be receiving special education and one-on-one attention were they in larger town or more developed country. These types of learners simply aren't capable of processing things the way the others can. This prompted a lively (but disheartening) discussion about the utter lack of resources available to learners/children with special needs in Namibia. And in many of these cases, the teachers' hands are more or less tied, because most Namibian-trained teachers aren't qualified to work with special needs learners.

All this week I've been.... well, hiding, for lack of a more concise word, in the library. I've actually been working on finding good resources for cross-curricular teaching. English is supposed to be taught in a cross-curricular manner, meaning that themes from the other subjects (HIV/AIDS, population education, Information Technology, Human Rights and Democracy, etc) should be incorporated into English lessons. I'm also bound and determined to expose both the learners and teachers more to the library, especially using encyclopedias and dictionaries and some of the spare textbooks. I had a frustrating incident earlier this week when again the issue of “we have this really nice thing so let's not use it so that it stays really nice” came up, this time in reference to the library. But, I'm trying to stay optimistic and not let all the cumbersome policies get me down.

And so, I can now positively say that I'm hopeful about the next year. I feel free of a lot of things that weighed me mentally and emotionally down last year. I'm doing something that I believe to be far more sustainable than what I did last year. And the end is in sight: unless something changes, I'm planning to end my service mid-October and travel for a bit before my return to the states.

I’ll leave you with 2 funny anecdotes. The first: I’ve come a long way since my arrival in Namibia. 2 nights ago I killed cockroaches with my bare hands AND my bare feet. It had to be done, there were no shoes in sight. The second: today was the first day of “athletics training,” 90 minutes of exercise in the afternoon to prepare the learners for the intramural competition that qualifies them for the regional competition. I offered to train the distance runners. Picture me running, like a pace car, at the front of a pack of 30-40 school kids, through the location of Gobabis. I only wish I’d had a picture of it.

If you’ve made it this far, well, either you’re really bored, or actually interested. Either way, thanks for reading.

I’ve been sick the last 2 days; now when I return from school after an absence, my learners tell me how much they missed me while I was gone. Of course, they’re still so disrespectful that I’ve started telling them I’m going to hang them from the tree by their toes and then tickle them (of course, before you panic, they know I’d never do that).

We’re still talking about space in Grade 6 and Grade 7 English. Friday, Grade 6 watched Space Camp, the 1986 movie about kids who go to NASA’s space camp and somehow end up in space. It does a good job of demonstrating non-gravity in space, the instruments used to get into space, the vacuum of space…. All the things we learn about science and space and whatnot when we’re kids are completely lost to these kids. They don’t know that the moon orbits the earth, or that the earth orbits the sun (no, the sun does NOT go around the earth…), or that the sun is a star, or about comets and asteroids and the rings of Saturn…. For being over 20 years old, they really liked the movie. :)

Today I gave Grade 6 a poem about space to read. Apparently, the only poet they want to read is Shel Silverstein. HOORAAAAAAY! Thanks, Shel Silverstein, for making poetry cool to Grade 6 Namibian learners.

We started learning about angles in Grade 6 maths today. After a stroke of genius (which probably isn’t THAT genius) I made my class and the principal’s Grade 6 maths class protractors using overhead projector transparencies. It cost me only 8 transparencies (10 protractors per transparency) and earned me a whole lot of brownie points with the principal. And, maybe my learners will actually learn how to use them, since they’ll each have their own now.

Group 30’s been in Namibia for 14 and a half months. Regardless of your level of immersion and integration, living for so long in a foreign place, riding the highs and lows of culture shock, changes you. And sometimes the changes aren’t good. I sat in school today during the periods I wasn’t teaching feeling overwhelmed by apathy. The learners were running around, I’m pretty sure that none of the teachers after me taught my Grade 6 (and they have 4 periods after me), and I just sat there, thinking, Not my period, not my problem. The bureaucratic bullshit that permeates government run schools is frustrating, infuriating, time consuming, often seemingly pointless, wasteful of the precious resource of PAPER, and so cumbersome that after a while you wonder…. What’s more important: teachers who have perfect paperwork, or learners who have actually LEARNED.

Today I told a couple of my colleagues that I can’t visit America and be as fat as I am now. One of the men responded: “You just have to make them understand that you’re coming from Africa.” It’s true that chubby women with hairy legs are seen as beautiful and are sought after here, so they don’t understand why I’d change a thing about my appearance. Then they started asking questions about how I felt about marriage to a non-vegetarian African man. I fled the conversation shortly thereafter.

Sometimes life sneaks up on me, and then when I least expect it… BAM! it sucker punches me in the face. I’m not much of a crier; in fact, I’m a terrible crier. I never cry when it’s appropriate to cry. Today, I cried. A lot. And I had lots of good reasons to cry, so I feel pretty good about it. It’s funny how Namibia is changing me.

Going to my Grade 7 English class is often the worst part of my day. No matter what I've tried, how I've approached them, they're just... disrespectful little assholes 95% of the time. Add to that the fact that they are all going to Grade 8 thanks to Namibia's genius (read: counterproductive) transfer system (a learner can only fail once between Grade 5 and 7, after repeating one grade the learner is "transferred" through grades until the junior secondary phase, which begins in Grade 8), all my learners are going to Grade 8 if they want to, regardless of whether or not they pass Grade 7.

Because of this, Grade 7 has been a struggle for me the entire year. It's really hard to motivate learners that age to do anything they don't have to, especially if they know that they're advancing to Grade 8 with little to no effort. On top of it, the class as a whole is incredibly disrespectful and has a severe case of senioritis.

Like I said: the worst part of my day.

I gave them homework last night, was going to collect and mark it today, but when I got to class, half of them told me that they'd forgotten their workbooks at home.

(It's relevant to add that yesterday was such an amazing today, today I had amazing-day-hangover. Not a literal hangover. Today just had no chance of being as good as Monday and Tuesday. And I didn't sleep well last night, so I was incredibly tired today.)

My grade 6 lesson plans collapsed today, and I was having a hard time coming up with something to do with Grade 7 that didn't require workbooks, text books, or paper of any kind. I'd taken with me a poster of the solar system, so i decided to just go with that and have just talking time. We talked about the sun being a star. We talked about the orbits around the sun and how that creates the seasons and years. We talked about Earth's axis and its rotation and why it's light in Gobabis at 10:30 am but it's still dark in NYC at that time (4:30am EDT). We talked about the other planets and gravity and all kinds of space crap. (For those of you who know me well, I was transported back to being a kid when I wanted to go to space camp and studied the stars and the planets and astro-nerdy things). We talked about what you need to do to leave Earth, and how on other planets there's less gravity, so if you went there, you'd just float around. Then this:

"Miss, have you ever been to Jupiter?"

Uhhhhh.

No...... I've never left Earth.

Let's go back to what you have to do to leave Earth and travel into space.... You have to be an astronaut to travel around space. Astronauts are really smart and study a long time.

Then:

"Miss, if you leave Earth, and you look at it from space, will it look like that, all blue and green?" (In reference to the poster of the solar system.) I tried, I'm sure futilely, to explain the picture from the moon of the earth "rising" in its beautiful glory. I then told them that I'd try to find an appropriate space dvd to show them so that they could see these kinds of things. Easier said than done. I decided on the 1980s movie Space Camp, I think they'll be into, at least a little.

At the end of the period, one of the boys said, "Miss, this is a very nice period." I mean, nice probably because they actually LEARNED interesting things, and didn't mind. And it was one of the first days I walked out of Grade 7 without having wanted to stick my face in a pillow and scream.

Thanks for reading. :)

I’m having a super awesome day.

Today, I played Mozart for my learners. I was…. nervous. I was…. uneasy. Really, it could have gone in many different directions. Last week, in my absence, I gave them a reading passage and comprehension questions about Mozart; I wanted to make it all make sense to them by playing them some pieces that Mozart composed. I remember how junior high school students reacted to classical music when I was that age, hence the trepidation. I told them that maybe they would like the music, maybe they wouldn’t, and it was ok if they didn't like it. I told them that it was different than anything they’d ever heard before, although they might have heard bits of Mozart’s music here and there (like, in cell phone ring tones). We finished up going over the reading comprehension questions. I had 2 sets of computer speakers set up and 3 different songs queued up and ready to go. I had questions for them to answer while they were listening (if they’re not busy, they’re terrors): How does the music make you feel, and If you heard this in a movie, what would be happening in the movie while the music was playing? So far, so good. The only thing left was to actually play the music.

It was a magical moment. Maybe not as magical as the moment when we finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but magical nonetheless. Or perhaps I should say that I was prepared for it to be disastrous, and it wasn’t. Some of the girls stood up and solo-waltzed around the room. Some of the boys put their heads down and just listened. Regardless, even when I was ready to turn it off, they told me not to. I took that as a good sign.

I’d planned for 3 songs, and we made it through 3 songs. It’s always nice to get through what was planned. And when I told them that we would listen to more music like Mozart again before the end of the year, they were into it. SUCCESS!

Part of integration is eating what the community eats. Namibians eat maize meal porridge. A lot. I ate it quite a bit at the beginning, but the truth is that it’s incredibly high in calories and low in nutritional value and so I eat it only on rare occasion. The learners involved in the government feeding program are given porridge (pap) during break and also after school, and they walk around shoveling it into their mouths out of empty ice cream containers. I know some people make pap with milk and butter or animal lard (because some of the learners are so skinny, they need anything to fatten them up a bit), but I’m not sure what the women making the pap for the feeding program at my school put into it.

Anyway, yesterday, while I was waiting for the learners to finish cleaning the classroom, a couple of the girls were harassing me into eating some of their pap. I keep telling them that I don’t dislike pap, I just don’t eat it because it makes me too fat. They were hell bent on me eating a spoon of it…. so I did. And that one simple action made them all so happy. And they were still talking about it this morning, about how Miss ate their pap nicely yesterday.

The same girls tried to get me to eat pap again today. I told them it makes me too fat. Their response (while poking and pinching my legs and arms): “Miss is not fat enough yet. Miss is sexy.”

I’m still celebrating small victories. I have a little party inside every time I hear my learners use the correct verb tense. Even the adult Namibians don’t use them correctly. I celebrate every time they use is/are and was/were correctly. I celebrate every time they use part of the question to form their answer. It’s really true that their progress is visible now.

I mentioned that Namibia has a way of working things out. Here’s another example. I’ve managed to lose 3 Nalgenes since coming to Namibia. I nearly lost my last one (one that I didn’t even bring here, but somehow inherited) in Swakopmund on Sunday. I was feeling a little panicked, because, even though I could get new ones in December, that’s 2 months of drinking out of flimsy plastic water bottles. Luckily, Ashley saved my lost Nalgene and brought it to me today. BUT… I received a super awesome package from my great friend Barb that contained 2 shiny new Nalgenes, so even if I hadn’t recovered the Nalgene left in Swakop, everything still would have been ok. And Barb sends great packages. Thanks, Barb! And thanks to Brian for sending a package filled with climbing magazines. You guys rock. :)

Other small things that have fueled my nam happiness today: My bicycle is fixed. The derailleur was broken. The gear shifter was broken. It was all…. broken. And broken beyond the point that anyone in Gobabis could fix it. So, I took the front derailleur off. My bike is a 6-speed now, but I don’t mind. I didn’t really use those other 12 speeds anyway.I found an Indian shop in Windhoek that sells authentic Indian incense AND imported spices for really cheap. Score!I’m trying to prep Grade 7 for the end of year exam. I gave them a passage from an exam prep book about solar eclipses. I figured I should give them some basic space background, like why do we have day and night. One of the brighter learners in the class informed me that it’s because the sun goes around the earth. The funny/sad part: I’m sure he learned this from another teacher. Avocados are 4 for N$19 – about US$2.70.I'm adjusting to the heat. I'm still a sweaty mess 85% of the time the sun is up, but I can really tell the difference between last year at this time and now. Of course, this means that I'm going to freeze on the east coast in December, even under 18-20 layers....I've also gotten updates from folks I haven't heard from in a while. I feel so out of the loop most of the time here, so update emails are really nice. :)

I hope you're well, wherever you are. Thanks for reading!

Everything happens for a reason. And in Namibia, things have a tendency to just work themselves out.

I went to Windhoek last week on Thursday, to see the dentist… again, for what I hope will be the last time until Close of Service medical. Since I had to go to Windhoek Thursday, I didn’t go to school on Thursday, so Wednesday night I woke up to use the free internet from 1 am – 5 am. I slept a bit later than usual Thursday morning, and was then, of course, rushing around to pack things up for the 2 days in Windhoek and 2 days in Swakopmund.

For the last 6-9 months (hard to say when exactly I started) I’ve been collecting coins in a jar. I’ve been putting off counting and turning them into notes because the jar was started to fund something specific, and even though it likely won’t happen, I’ve secretly been holding out hope. Anyway, in light of the fact that I have about N$200 in the bank until the end of the month (that's about USD$26), I decided that this was as good a weekend as any to count. The result: N$335! And some smaller coins that I threw back in. Thank you, Namibia.

It seems the older I get, the longer it takes me to pack to go somewhere. Added to this is that I almost always travel with food to Windhoek, because produce there is astronomically expensive. So after rushing around packing, doing wash (that wouldn’t dry and wouldn’t dry and wouldn’t dry), trying to clean up a bit, I finally headed out to the hike point. I had to stop at the grocery store and the bank on the way, and by the time I got to the hike point, it was just after 11 – a bit late as far as getting a reliable hike goes. I waited at the hike point for about 20 minutes, and had just complained to Ashley, the other group 30 PCV in Omaheke, that I wasn’t having much luck, when a really nice white Mercedes with Windhoek plates drove by. It didn’t stop (being driven by a single white woman, I wasn’t surprised), and neither did the next 5 to drive by, but then there was the white Mercedes, coming back. The driver stopped, asked where I was going, and told me to get in. Turned out to be a FANTASTIC hike. The driver was a 27 year old woman who travels around Namibia as a medical rep. She was super nice, well spoken, and we talked a lot about hiking, and how of course it can be dangerous, but how sometimes you get really lucky and hiking goes from being a hassle to a pleasant journey. And I do love when people tell me that hiking is dangerous, and I tell them that it’s not when people like them pick me up.

I had a dentist appointment Thursday afternoon, slated to be the last of 5 since April. Of course, despite (or maybe because of) the more or less fantastic day that I was having, something was bound to go wrong. The appointment was to fill cavities in my back molars; the dentist made the contact between teeth too tight and couldn’t fit floss through, so was using a tiny saw to create that gap when something went horribly wrong and he cut the corner of my mouth open. We’re not talking a minor scratch here; he was actually talking about having to put a stitch in it before he sat me upright and it stopped bleeding. And so, visit #5 turned into visit #6 the following morning, for him to take out and redo the fillings he’d done Thursday. Dude is nice and all, but I really hope not to see him again until I’m about to leave Namibia.

Friday night I got to hang out with a couple other group 30ers, which was really nice, and then on Saturday morning we left Windhoek to hike to Swakopmund to cheer on the people running the Lucky Star Marathon. As it turned out, we didn’t actually make it in time to Swakop to catch the end of the marathon, but it was nice to hang out with people after the fact. I ate sushi (sans mayo!), and saw some people that I hadn’t seen in a while. (As an aside, congrats to all the PC/Nam PVCs that finished the half and full marathon!!!)We fit 13 people in a 6-person bungalow, so needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep, as I was sharing a twin bed with another volunteer. Around 6 am Sunday morning some other people got up to try to catch a bus they knew was going to Windhoek, and since I was awake, I got up too, figuring a free ride to Windhoek is a free ride to Windhoek (I have to pass through Windhoek to get to Gobabis). Turns out said ride was a bus of learners who’d run in the marathon (all boys). We managed, after some finagling, to get some seats on the bus, but it was smelly, slow, and broke down about 2 hours into the journey, between towns. It happened to break down across the road from a pack (?) of giraffe, so that was cool, but the matter at hand was that we were broken down in between towns, with no new bus in sight, so 3 of us decided to get on the side of the road and start hiking again. In the end, we managed 2 really nice hikes to Windhoek, one with an owner of Safari Hotels, 2 swanky hotels in Windhoek. Once we got to Windhoek, my luck ran out, and I stood on the road trying to get a hike for an hour (and, mind you, I was already sunburned from the weekend, and Namibia’s getting HOOOOOT). Finally, I decided to take a hike to the airport, it’s between Windhoek and Gobabis, and hoped that I’d get a hike from the airport. Got a hike with a super nice dude who actually gave me a little cash (since I’d mentioned my cash flow issues this month) and asked me to sms when I got a lift to Gobabis (since I’d expressed my concern at being stuck at the airport). I ended up getting a lift not even 5 minutes later with a lorry, super nice driver, being able to make conversation, however simple, really makes the time go fast. Good thing, too, since he didn’t drive over 95 kph (about 60 mph). And so, 10 hours after leaving Swakop, I was home sweet home.

In America, if you’re a teacher and you miss school, the school gets a substitute. Here, unless you pull a lot of strings, my classes just go unsupervised if I miss school. I gave another teacher some things to give my grade 6 class to do while I was gone, but really, it’s easier to just pick up where I left off after a couple days than it is even to have to go over work left for them to do while I’m gone. Regardless, my learners gave me their reactions to the assignments I left (Miss, I didn’t understand these maths) this morning when they saw me.

One of the things I gave them to do was a reading passage about Mozart (but written for kids, stop groaning) and reading comprehension questions. One of my goals this year, in addition to surviving it, is to expose my learners to things that they’ve never been exposed to. Things like… classical music. Today, we read the passage, we looked at his 18th century portrait, we talked about him… but tomorrow? Tomorrow I play Mozart for them. And it’s true that some of them will love it, some will hate it, but at least they can say that once, they heard it. They’ve been exposed.

The weekend left me sunburned. Some of my learners have apparently never seen a sunburned white person before. They said, “Miss, you are pink!” and “Miss, what happened here??” One even asked me what I was wearing under my dress (in reference to my pink upper chest) and when I told her it was just my skin, she just stared at me. I also suspect that she may have been dropped on her head as a small child, but it’s hard to say. :)

I'm still finding immense pleasure in listening to my learners speak. Of course, their English isn't perfect, but, in the spirit of small victories, I'm still celebrating every time I hear a learner say, "Miss, that boy stole my pen" instead of "That boy steal my pen," or "But Miss, I swept the classroom on Friday" instead of "Miss, I sweep Friday." This week: we're working on go vs. went. Baby steps!

In the next 2 weeks, I have to finish teaching everything require on the syllabus, and the following weeks are for “revision” (reviewing), then the learners take the end of year exams. I’m feeling a bit anxious, about finishing everything on time, about the exams, and about my journey to America in December. It seems so far away, but in terms of all the things I have to do before I leave, it’s really right around the corner. Lastly, today I reached a maximum tolerance level for the people in Gobabis who call me /nûs – literally, white lady. In the north, most volunteers are the only white people in their villages/towns. Here, Gobabis is full of other white people. Why must people yell /nûs at me??? In America, I wouldn’t say “Hey, black guy!” or “Hey, biracial guy!” While I understand I’m not in Kansas anymore, come on! Really? Here it’s acceptable to call someone /nûs if you don’t know their name (apparently), but even a year+ into service, I’m still not totally ok with it.

Lastly, after some visits with my friend’s son Vija, who is in pre-primary at the school near my house, I’m convinced that English education from the start is absolutely the way to go. But that’s for another post.

Wherever you are, I hope you’re well!!! Thanks for reading. :)

And, as always, I do appreciate your updates…. Even if don’t respond to them.

Tis the season for me to be bitter than I'm in the southern hemisphere, on the edge of the Kalahari, in a place where temperatures are easily reaching above 95 everyday... in the shade, while people on the East Coast are basking in glorious autumn weather. Things I miss about the east coast in autumn: apple cider, pumpkins and root vegetables, chilly mornings and cool afternoons, the changing leaves, climbing on cool rock amid the changing leaves….

I’m calling this blog “the Namibia Amplification” because Namibia seems to act as an amplification agent for every emotion I experience these days. Even the most mundane emotions seem huge some days. For me, loneliness, anger, frustration, and happiness tend to be the emotions amplified the most. If I’m angry or frustrated about one thing, I find 100 other things to be angry and/or frustrated about. And while this is often true of most people, for whatever reason, here it seems to be 100 times worse. Some days are just lonely days, no matter how surrounded by people I may be, I feel completely isolated and alone. It helps to SMS other volunteers or talk to people from home, but some days nothing helps.

Yesterday was one of those super lonely days when nothing helps – not talking about it, not writing about it. The one funny thing that happened to me yesterday: I became the butt of a “How many PCVs does it take to change a lightbulb” joke. There are 2 kinds of light bulbs here: the kind like we have in the states that screw in, and another kind called “bayonette” style bulbs that have just 2 prongs on the part of the bulb that fits into the socket. I’d yet to figure out how to change these pesky “bayonette” style bulbs (you can’t just unscrew them… whose bright idea was THAT?) until I was balanced precariously on the tank of my toilet and toilet paper holder trying to work it out. And THEN I figured out that you have to PUSH and then TURN.

The flip side is that sometimes every bit of a day is good. And every action by others toward me is amplified 100 times and makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. My learners behave in an adequately Grade 6 manner, and say nice things to me like, “Ah, miss is looking so beautiful today,” or they get the right answer during class, or they show me that I’ve taught them SOMETHING (bc on those other days, I often feel like I’ve taught them NOTHING). Lately my grade 6 has been really catching onto verb conjugation, like using the past tense when appropriate (“Miss, this one stole my pen!” and “The electricity shocked me” are the2 that stand out in my head right now.) On their way out of the classroom, they tell me to have a nice afternoon and low-five or high-five me. The joy of riding my bike home from school in the afternoon is increased 100-fold by the myriad of children yelling “hello!” at me. Some of them even call me Miss Nikki, even though they aren’t students at my school….Today was a day when Namibia really pulled at my heartstrings. I had a pretty good day at school (aside from marking workbooks in which some learners hadn’t even bothered to so the assignments), and then came home and ate a ginormous bowl of beets and cabbage and carrots and avocado. I had a nice meeting with the director of Omaheke Ministry of Education (she’s a really nice lady), and then took a walk to town in search of more avocados (in preparation of a weekend in Windhoek and Swakop). I ran into my friend Lydia and her son Vija, who’s super rockin’ it in English these days. He walked with me the whole length of town (of course in his barefeet) and we talked the whole time. SO funny to watch people’s reactions to a white lady having teachable moments with a small black child. And pretty uplifting for me to spend some time with a clever little kid who speaks 3 languages.

On days like today, it takes a lot to get me down. And sometimes it’s important to share that things are not always amplified in a bad way.

Also, I posted some pictures of my house on facebook! You can see them here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2100078&id=39904769&l=9d655b80bc

Wherever you are, I hope you’re having a great day. I have another post in the works, so check back soon.Thanks for reading!

Sometimes Namibia sneaks up on me and I’m suddenly so happy that it’s hard to remember all those moments of unhappiness. Last Thursday I had to go to Windhoek for a dermatologist appointment and to see the dentist (again – we’re unfortunately becoming buddies, I’m not really sure how I feel about it). I got to hang out with another volunteer from my group who was also there to see the dermatologist, I got to visit Superspar, I got to drink Camelthorne beer (the only beer apparently anywhere in this country that tastes remotely like beer). During a trip to Superspar on Thursday, the clouds opened and we were stuck in the entrance waiting for the rain to stop at least long enough to get a taxi. We sat under the roof, watching the rain, drinking Camlethorne American Red ales. It was great. Friday I met Debbie and Emily from Mariental for sushi, and to subsequently travel to Okahandja. It was the first time I’d had sushi at the mall in Windhoek (only sushi place in Windhoek), and I learned during this visit that they put mayo in all the sushi (after I’d already eaten enough to know that I was going to get sick from the mayo). I told them that real sushi doesn’t have mayo. The sushi chef informed me that he was classically trained and that all Japanese sushi has mayo. Leave it to Namibia to find a way to put mayo in EVERYTHING.

We had fantastic hiking luck getting to Okahandja (although there were a few tense moments during the hike), and the weekend was great. We stayed with Debbie’s PST host mom, who is really just a lovely woman. Unfortunately, due to the volume of sushi I’d eaten combined with the mayo, my stomach was not quite right for about 24 hours. By Saturday afternoon I was feeling better, and we went to the craft market in Okahandja and then met a group of the new trainees. The new group seems great, they’re a little young, most of them straight out of college, but overall they seem like a nice group. I met the person that is coming to Gobabis and will be my roommate after his 6 week homestay. He seems alright. Shall know more after his visit to Gobabis this week. Hopefully it won’t make him want to go back to America. :) I had incredible hiking luck on the way back to Gobabis, too. My lift from Okahandja was a younger guy with a nice car and a/c, we had nice conversation and the trip went fast. No sooner had I gotten out of his car at the Gobabis hike spot than another car stopped for me. The ride to Gobabis was crowded, sweaty, and hot, but aside from that, it was quite pleasant. The hiking gods certainly were smiling upon me yesterday.

On a sad note, it was brought to by attention this morning that one of my learners has tattooed himself on the forearm, street style. This is the same kid that was in jail for a week during term 2. He’s a clever kid, as most of these street kids are. He also tends to be fiercely protective of me and often is more respectful of me than the other learners.

Normally we have morning assembly in our school hall, but this morning one of the pastors from Epako was invited to speak, so we assembled outside in front of the classrooms. I had to actually walk away from the group at one point to avoid laughing out loud. The dude kept talking about Jebus Christ, and added “ah” to the end of every word. “Jebus(ah) Christ(ah), he will save(ah) your soul(ah).” Even the learners picked up on it and outbursts of giggles rippled through the assembly. Quite an entertaining way to start the week.Last week while I was at the doctor’s, I left work for the relief teacher to give to my classes. One item: a math test focusing on rounding, metric conversions and calculations, and time conversions and calculations. I marked them today, and while I haven’t scored them yet, I predict the high score to be somewhere around 4/10. I’m definitely predicting a handful of learners repeating Grade 6 next year, even with the 30% pass rate. That’s right. My learners only need a 30% in math to pass to grade 7. Sigh.

I do my best to avoid writing about things that could get me in trouble if the higher ups read them. However, more and more I’m fighting disillusionment with PC/Nam. There are volunteers who have really terrible sites at schools that don't want or need them, and most of them have requested site changes and have been refused. Some people even have questionable security risks that make life unpleasant and scary (like drunk people rattling burglar bars at night on the weekends). Sometimes I’m baffled when it seems that the organization does not have the best interest of volunteers at heart, and I feel frustrated listening to the stories that other volunteers tell about troubles at site. I complain about difficulties at my site, but the truth is that my difficulties don’t even compare to what some of the other PC/Nam PCVS are facing. Anyway, as I sit here writing, it's so hot that there's sweat trickling down the back of my neck. I hope next year Namibia decides to include spring in its repertoire of seasons.

That’s probably enough for now. Thanks for reading!!!

Term 3 kicked off on the wrong foot for me, I was rather ill the first week of school. Luckily, by the second week of school , I was feeling better and school didn’t seem so daunting.

The first weeks of school have been going well for me. I hope that saying so won’t jinx me. Even though term 3 has as many days (65) as the other terms, there is less actually teaching time, because ¼ of the term is spent reviewing for end of term exams and the a ¼ is spent actually taking the exams (or at least that’s how it seems). The last day to finish “teaching” is the 29th of October, and then it’s reviewing and covering problem areas (which is actually like… every area). That means I’ve got to have every taught as least covered in 4 more weeks. Thinking of it like that, the school day isn’t long enough, the days aren’t long enough, and the class periods aren’t long enough.

I teach only 21 periods a week (unless I steal periods from other teachers, which I sometimes do). That’s 7 English periods for Grade 6 and Grade 7, each, and 7 maths periods for grade 6. Other volunteers are teaching as many as 32 periods a week, which is a lot (more than we’re officially allowed to teaching according to Peace Corps). But, despite the fact that some days I have off more periods than I teach (like Tuesdays, I only teach 3 periods, I’m off 5), it seems that I still don’t have enough time at school to get done everything that I want to get done. At the beginning of the year, I wondered, “How am I going to be able to fill all these periods??”. Now, filling the periods isn’t the problem. It’s figuring out how to steal periods from other teachers that I try to figure out now. 

All grades take exams at the end of every term, which seems, on many levels, like a colossal waste of time, but it does help to keep the teachers up to speed on where they should be in terms of the national syllabus. It also reinforces the material taught during the term, which learners so quickly forget. (Seriously, I’ll teach something on Monday, I’ll give a practice assignment on Tuesday, by Friday, my learners will have forgotten everything I taught them on Monday.) All across Namibia, volunteers struggle with information retention of learners. It’s why I spent 4 weeks teaching multiplication, it’s why my colleague teaching secondary math can’t teach variables (because his learners in grade 8, 9, 10 still don’t know times tables), it’s why I’m struggling to teach my learners to round. In my case, much of what I’m teaching is grade 5 math, because grade 5’s math teacher left halfway through last year to take a post in the ministry, and left the school without a math teacher. It’s hard to teach grade 6 math when the learners don’t have the grade 5 foundation. BUT… all that aside, there’s an issue of basic information retention, and much of it goes back to basic necessity. If the learners don’t use the information daily, they see no need to know it or learn it. And, most of them refuse to study outside of school, so telling them to make flashcards and study at home is a joke. And, to add insult to (injury??), a lot of my learners are OVCs (orphaned or vulnerable children), so they might not have parents, or live with a relative that doesn’t want them. Many of them ARE the parents in their families (mind you, these are primary school learners), so assigning homework is difficult, because if I assign homework to a learner that cares for 4 or 5 or 6 younger siblings, and that learner doesn’t complete the homework bc he or she is caring for a family, in essence I’m punishing that learner for doing “the right thing.”

Assigning homework and marking exercise books are a Namibian tradition that I don’t necessarily agree with. Namibian teachers mark exercise books everyday, or several times a week. When you think that every class is 30-40 learners, that’s a lot of marking. However, one of my keys to success this term has been giving them assignments to complete in their exercise books, and then the regular marking of exercise books (at least once a week). It’s also helping me collect the necessary marks in a timely manner.

In Namibia (and even Namibians will tell you this) there isn’t much of a reading culture. Most people don’t read for pleasure, or are illiterate. That’s why I get really excited when I stumble upon things that my learners love to read. The first and second terms it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This term it’s Shel Silverstein poems. I’d seen the poems that appear on the exams, and I’d seen the poems in the English books (there are several different English textbooks used throughout Namibia), and OF COURSE the learners hate poetry. The poems given to them by other teachers don’t have relevance to their lives, or they’re just boring. Apparently the syllabus lays out exactly what kind of poems the learners must read (at least that’s what the Grade 5 English teacher told me when I suggested she do haiku with her learners), but me, I’m just trying to promote a culture of reading and enjoyment of poetry in my classroom.

So to show the learners that poetry doesn’t have to be boring, and that it can even be fun, I made Shel Silverstein’s poem “Lazy Jane” into a poster for my classroom. They loved it. I had them copy it into their workbooks with their own illustrations. We also read “Rain,” and they made illustrations in their books for that poem, too (and that was better, because they weren’t predisposed to the ideas of Shel Silverstein. It was fun to look through their workbooks to see what they saw in their minds when we read the poem as a class. I also found a collection of mp3s of Shel Silverstein reading the poems from Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends. I burned the poems onto a CD, hoping to use one of the CD players that my school has in class on a day when it seemed appropriate (of course, I’ve given up on planning for such a day because even my best laid plans have a tendency to collapse. Friday the 24th in the morning turned out to be the day, but of course it didn’t go smoothly even then because the one CD player that works (the other’s broken? Go figure) was locked in an absent teacher’s classroom cabinet. I managed to use the principal’s office radio/cd/cassette player, and we read and listened to “Boa Constrictor.” First I read it, then they read it, then we listened. 4 times. MAGICAL. I get so excited when things work in my classroom. So excited, in fact, that I gave the CD and some poems to my HOD, who also got quite excited. (And score one for me, it’s seldom that I share my resources with him and he doesn’t find some way to criticize them or find a reason for them not to work.)

On the maths front, I’m finally caught up with the principal (because he teaches the other grade 6 maths class). For a while I was SO far behind because I couldn’t in good conscious move beyond a subject if a majority of the class was scoring in the 30%-40% range. Then I remembered that I could, since learners only need 30% in maths, English, and science to pass. So, despite the fact that most of my learners can’t reliably multiply, divide, or navigate word problems employing any of the four basic operations, on we go. Teaching maths is hard, because often the subject matter has little relevance to their lives now now, like changing millimeters to centimeters or meters, or changing hours to days, how to read an analog clock (most of them don’t have clocks in their homes, or have only digital clocks), etc. Of course this is important subject matter for them to learn, but it’s hard to convince them of that.

The week before last, I walked into the principal’s office and said, “Sir, I’ve been teaching for 9 months now and you have not observed me yet.” I got an observation that same day. Really, I just wanted to showcase the usefulness of the overhead projector, since I use it almost every day. Despite not having lesson plans, I think my observation went well.

In terms of interpersonal conflict at school, Term 3 is going much better. I’m really sensitive to interpersonal conflict to begin with, and life here tends to amplify all of my emotions. However, I’ve been trying really hard this term to avoid situations which could lead to comments or actions that will upset me. I’ve been trying to be more forthcoming and a bit more extroverted, which is emotionally draining but seems to be paying off. I just hope that the remainder of the term is good.

The week of September 20th was (apparently) Readathon week. I admire the effort by the Ministry of Education to promote reading, but (in my humble opinion) every week should be Readathon week. In 2004 the Ministry sent out a circular to schools outlining what English teachers should be reading every day of the week with their learners; of course, they didn’t send out such a circular this year and (typically) I didn’t see the circular from 2004 until the last day of the Readathon week. All week they were talking about a “programme” but in Namlish “programme” can mean any number of things; in this case I interpreted it to be the program of reading I was using for the week. It turned out to be an actual assembly on Friday the 24th (the same day we read/listened to “Boa Constrictor) in our school hall in which the learners from each class stood in front of the school and read something. Lucky for me, I was able to pull some Shel Silverstein poems for my learners to read. I even made a transparency for the poem “Rain” printed from the computer complete with blue raindrops, which I projected onto the wall behind the learner reading the poem so the rest of the school could read along. It was cute.

That same Friday the volunteers from Group32 left Okahandja for site visit. I’d been in contact with the volunteer coming to Gobabis, but of course one can’t tell much about another person based solely on SMSes, but he seemed perfectly nice. When I arrived in Gobabis for site visit during PST, the volunteer here was nice enough, but in some ways really made my experience here unnecessarily difficult and sometimes uncomfortable. I vowed I wouldn’t do that to another volunteer if they decided to send one here, so on Friday after school I took the new volunteer around town and gave him the lowdown on everything. At the risk of predisposing him to certain ideas, but keeping in mind that he’s an adult capable of making his own decisions and forming his own opinions, I gave him the ins and outs, goods and bads of Gobabis (as I see them). Friday night I talked about my school, the things that have been successful, the things I like, the things I struggled with at first, both at school and in life, and the things that I still struggle with. No new volunteer wants to think that they’re struggling alone, or that the struggles will never stop, so I did my best to highlight good things, while being honest about the not-so-good things. Saturday I realized that something wasn’t right, we talked a bit, and he told me that he was starting to think that maybe PC/Nam wasn’t a good fit. We talked about it, I listened, I told him that he wasn’t alone in any of his feelings. However, the bottom line is that Peace Corps isn’t for everyone. Even people who do well in Peace Corps programs in other countries might not do well here. In the end, he decided that leaving Namibia was the right decision for him. It was a super bummer for me, too; I was really looking forward to having a sitemate.

Anyway, there’s another post coming soon soon, it’s already mostly written (!), I’m just putting the finishing touches on it. Check back soon!

I hope you’re well, wherever you may be! Thanks for reading. :)

The end of term two went smoothly, and group 30 joyously reconnected for our last IST. What I failed to mention in my last blog update was the death of my friend Floria on the 19th of August. Floria worked at the Ministry of Education office just behind my house, and I would often go and sit in her office after bad days at school. She was taking classes and often asked me questions about how I do my lesson planning. She has a 12 year old daughter who’s reading Charlotte’s Web.

I knew that Floria was sick, but I didn’t realize that she was so sick. The last day I was at school, Yolande (the secretary) told me that she’d passed. I didn’t think that we could possibly be talking about the same person.

The thing about living in a place with such a high HIV/AIDS rate, poverty, hunger, etc is that life and death just kind of…. happen. Don’t misunderstand. Death is tragic. It’s heartbreaking. But it happens so often, to everyone, there is a sense of desensitization. Many of my learners are orphans, living with aunts and uncles, older siblings, grandparents, friends of the family. They speak nonchalantly of dead parents, cousins, aunts, uncles. Learners without parents are the norm, rather than the exception. I’ve had to get myself in the habit of saying “parents or guardians” when talking about, well, parents and guardians in my classroom.

Part of the culture shock cycle is thinking that you understand a particular element of the host culture (and maybe even being pretty stoked about understanding it), only to realize at times that actually what you (thought you) understood is… inaccurate. I feel that way about the perception of life and death here. I’m not trying to generalize an entire culture’s view of death and dying, because, just like everyone in the US deals with death in his or her own way, so do Namibians. But, because of the prevalence of death here, on the surface there appears to be a feeling of desensitization. Just when I think I get it, I don’t.

Moving on. I returned about a month ago from my first trip to the northeast of Namibia, to that narrow piece of land that extends east called the Caprivi strip. I crossed the red line the first time during the April/May holiday, but Caprivi is another world altogether. It’s almost like its own country (and in fact, there is a secession movement there). I stayed with another volunteer in Katima Mulilo, and did a lot of reading, relaxing, and buying things at the open market (which I sorely miss from my days in Latin America). It’s been nice branching out form group 30, and meeting the other volunteers in country. Hiking north, it seemed like one of our group had some bad hiking karma. Hiking south, 1400 kilometers, was an adventure all its own. The people you encounter mostly always have a story about volunteers. Maybe they had a teacher who was a PCV, or maybe they’ve given a lift to another volunteer before. Of course, there are those people who have met PCVs or other volunteers and have a bad taste in their mouth. I managed to get a lift with some Israelis who’d bought a car in South Africa and were driving all the way to Ethiopia, where they are going to resell the car. We overnighted in Rundu, and I left before they woke up, hoping to get an early lift all the way south to Windhoek. An hour and a half later, when they left Rundu, I was still looking for a lift… so I rejoined their roadtrip again for a few hundred kilometers. I then got a lift with a family returning to Windhoek from Rundu (well, their farm 180k from Rundu), a family clearly run by the matriarch, who, 10 minutes after joining them, told me that I was now part of their family and informed me that I’d be joining them for December holidays at their farm. The last leg of that trip was in a VW Golf taxi from Windhoek to Gobabis, with 4 drunk men in the back seat, me in the front seat, and African techno music blasting most of the way, and the driver trying to make conversation with me over the techno. It goes without saying (but I’m going to say it anyway) that I was happy to be on terra firma in Gobabis that night.

The first week of Term 3 didn’t go so well for me, I actually didn’t go to school due to some health problems (I saw the doctor in Windhoek, everything’s ok). Things are on track now, though, for a great term. And, thanks for my dad and his lovely wife Rose, there’s a nice light at the end of the tunnel that is Term 3.

More to come soon!

Man, blogging is hard. I’m not good at updating weekly, but apparently I’m also not good at updating infrequently, either.

I have a lot to write about this time, though!

Term 2 is over! And, I’ve been in Namibia for over one year now. Marking one year in country was a nice opportunity for reflection: reflections on the things I’ve done here and haven’t yet done here, the things I want to do and don’t want to do, and what to do when I’m done here.

Term 2 just ended. Last Friday was the learners’ (and my) last day at school. Saturday was the anniversary of our arrival in country, so Group 30 convened in Windhoek for some celebrating. Sunday we traveled to a conference center outside Windhoek (unfortunately not the Harmony Center, the location of all our other In Service Trainings) for the 2-day midservice IST – our last IST together as a group until we gather again for Close of Service (COS). (Although there is a TENTATIVE All-Volunteer Conference on the calendar for next year. I hope it happens!)

Before I get too far ahead of myself, let me go back to school. Term 2 was, in some ways, much easier than Term 1, but in some ways it was a lot harder. Classroom management was less of an issue this term. I’m not sure if it was because I grew more accustomed to the chaos always present in the classroom, or if it was because my learners are getting used to me and the way I do things; I’m sure it was a bit of both.

I had some health issues this term, and struggled a little bit with the blues, and as a result missed some school. I also missed a week for a training in Windhoek (and 2 days at the dentist). My absences from school put me really far behind my plans, and put my learners behind even further than they already were. (As an aside, substitute teachers are almost non-existent here in the sense that we know them in. there are relief teachers, but they often aren’t trained teachers, they are just people who come in and supervise the class to make sure that they don’t destroy the classroom or each other.)

Classroom management is getting easier, and dealing with the other issues at school is getting harder. I struggle with racism everyday, racism of the variety that is deeply ingrained and will likely never ever change. I never thought, coming to Africa, that racism would be the thing to slap me in the face consistently, everyday. And, no matter how much I try to avoid it, sometimes it’s completely unavoidable.

I also face some interpersonal conflict at school that is hard for me to handle. It’s true that some people are just not my cup of tea. One of the people with whom I have conflict digs consistently on the “privileges” of Peace Corps volunteers. On Friday, as I was happily leaving school like the weight of the term had been lifted off my shoulders (because, well, it had been), I commented to this individual to have a nice holiday, to which he responded “Holiday? Don’t you mean weekend?” I told him I wouldn’t be at school this week (teachers’ last day was yesterday, Wednesday, when they handed out report cards) because of a conference Monday and Tuesday and a meeting yesterday. He responded, snidely, that he wishes he worked for the Peace Corps. When I asked why, he responded that we’re always on holiday before the rest of the teachers. I explained, again, that I would be at a conference Monday and Tuesday and a meeting on Wednesday. He then looked at me, stricken with panic, as he realized that I wouldn’t be there for all the administrative bullshit that comes with having a register class (a homeroom class). I wanted to be like… what did you do before I was teaching that class? Because there was no teacher there last year, and somehow the school survived… I understand that I’m a teacher, but I do feel like I (and other volunteers) should be exempt from the bureaucratic administrative bullshit that that consumes the existence of all the other teachers. Have I mentioned the files every teacher needs to have? It took me fully a week to compile all the necessary documents in the even that someone from the ministry should drop in and investigate the volunteer.

Anyway, back to school. Learners in grades 5, 6 and 7 have exams at the end of every term. The exams in April were written in house, but the August exams were written by another school in our “cluster” (the group of schools that my school belongs to). Exams are a stressful time, until you stop taking them so seriously. On one hand, it’s really sad that my learners averaged 7/60 on the maths exams, and slightly better on the English exams, but some of their answers made me laugh out loud. Even when you tell them to read before they answer, they don’t. In their defense, I was (am?) also bad at reading things before I answer.

Marking a year in country has been a weird experience for me. This is the longest time I’ve ever been away. I think about what it was like going to Holiday Inn to staging, meeting all these people that I’d be spending the next 27 months with, making first impressions and forming first impressions. The people I know today in Group 30 are mostly not those people that I met one year ago. And the funniest thing is, the thing that continues to come up again and again, is this simple truth: most of us would never be friends in America, but here, we are great friends. We rely on one another for support, to cope with the absurdity of everyday life. We share this common thread of understanding that people elsewhere just don’t have. No matter how well I articulate my troubles, it’s very difficult to understand them unless you’re experiencing the same thing.

I think about that funny feeling in the pit of my stomach when our plane left Washington DC, the excitement (and relief) or preparing for landing in Namibia. I think about looking out the plane window and wondering where the eff Peace Corps was dropping us; when you approach Hosea Kutako Int’l Airport, your don’t see a city. You don’t see a town. You see desert and bush. Kilometers and kilometers of sand.

And I sometimes have to think back to the feeling of anticipation and excitement and unknown that filled me the first day in Namibia. Life now is so normal, even the absurd is beginning to seem less so, and when I think back to the newness of everything, it helps me to remember why I came here in the first place, and in the larger picture, why I wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer.

When asked to identify successes and challenges of the first year of service, we were reminded that making friends is a huge success. In fact, integration into the community has been one of my biggest challenges. But, I have made a few fantastic friends in Gobabis that have helped me through some really bad days. One is the secretary at my school, Yolande. She’s simply fantastic and frankly I’m not sure how I would cope at school without her. The lower primary HOD (Head of Department) is my other saving grace at school. These two women are wonderful. The Ministry of Education IT guy, Ruben, is my other saving grace. Sometimes I get home from school and go to his office and just sit there. Ruben’s educated and speaks really nice English, and we’ve developed a relationship in which we just give each other a bunch of shit all the time, and it makes us both smile.

One thing about my experience so far that’s markedly different than the experiences of my colleagues is my relationship with my learners. Most volunteers who live in town actually live on the school grounds in the hostels; other volunteers live in villages where their movements are tracked every minute of the day by… well, everyone. My case is much different. I live in town, my school is in the location, and most of my learners have no idea where I live. Other volunteers complain about the learners invading their homes often – knocking on doors, windows, at all hours of the day. I have none of those problems. However, these volunteers are really close to the learners, and I still feel a certain amount of detachment from mine. I’ve identified this as one of my challenges, something that I want to address and be better about in the coming year.

Some other challenges I’ve identified from my first year: frustrations with secondary projects, having the energy to return to school in the afternoon for afternoon classes and sports, and feeling the “miracle worker” expectation. Teaching is my primary project, but within my school, the library is supposed to be one of my secondary projects. My school already has a nice library, and a library teacher. She is, however, worried more about how the library look than the functionality of it, which means that the learners can’t actually use it, because they just mess it up. She’s also so bogged by policy and procedures that it makes it virtually impossible to have a working library. In addition to that, I’ve been asking since January for a key to the library. My school simply refuses to give me one, which means that I have to depend on the library teacher every time I want to do something. All these things wrapped up mean that I’ve done very little in the library. And it’s such a nice library (by Namibian school standards) that I’m really upset about that, and I’ve resorted to having to ask my APCD to talk to my principal about giving me a key, especially if I’m going to be asked to teach Basic Information Science next year (BIS is the class in which learners “learn” how to use the library).

Back in January I set up computers in our media room (where we keep the overhead projectors no one but me uses, as well as a TV/VCR and ceiling mounted projector). There was no cable to run to the power source. They’ve been sitting there since January without power, because the school won’t buy power cables for them. Frustration. And I’ve been tasked with teaching the staff how to use the computers, and I keep telling them that I’ll start computer classes as soon as there is power to the computers. I feel validated in that, but so far, no power, so no computer classes.

In the community, secondary projects are trickier. Need is the first consideration. Does the project address a need of the community? Is it a need that the community sees, or a need that the volunteer sees? Sustainability is the next factor to consider. If you start the project, and then leave, will it continue? If the answer is no, walk away. The obstacle then becomes creating the sustainable project with a Namibian counterpart, or find a shorter term project that doesn’t perpetuate the idea that volunteers give hand outs. With all those things in mind, I’ve not yet found a project in the community. It’s on my list of things to do in the coming year.

The “miracle worker” expectation is something lots of people encounter. We’re American, and the expectation is that we’ll come in and fix everything that’s wrong at our school. The reality is that not only can we not come in and fix everything, but most of us are struggling to keep our heads above water. The frustrating part for me is that PCVs are alleged to be “agents of change” but most Namibians are resistant to real change, so even if we identify something that we can help with, our suggestions tend to be shot down anyway. For me, it’s the expectation that I won’t struggle with the things that teachers normally struggle with, or the implication that I should have all answers. (The flip side of this, of course, is when everything I do is questioned by dint of being American. That’s fun, too… especially when the object in question is my ability to speak (and identify!) proper English.)

On the home front, my cat is great. Chico is the best africat ever!

And, sadly, I said goodbye to my German long term couch surfer Donata today. She’s heading back to Germany, but will return to Namibia next year. I look forward to it, it was a blessing to have her with me in my house.

Now that I’ve written entirely TOO MUCH, I’ll wrap it up here, and hope to write again soon. I hope you’re well, wherever you are in the world. J

A for Absurd.

The urge to write on my blog or publish my experience and emotions always strikes me at the oddest times. Like today, for instance, while sitting watching my grade 6 class write a maths test.

Life here, at least right now, can be summed up with the word absurd. It may be part of the culture shock cycle, recognizing and identifying things as absurd when they are just another part of what’s going on here. Whatever the reason, my life is laden with irony and inconsistencies and contradiction; these things can either lead me to laughing fits or to wanting to stick my face in a pillow and scream, depending on the day, my mood, and the circumstances.

I’ve struggled in the last months, I just marked 11 months in country and can’t imagine another 16, I’ve thought seriously about leaving at the end of the school year in December, but every time I consider I as a feasible option, the universe tells me that I am where I need to be, at least for now. We’ll see what the universe says closer to December, I suppose.

I know I still haven’t written about the end of last term, or about my super vacation, and already we’re nearing the end of the second term. Really all you need to know about the end of the term is that, after my last post in April, life got very very bad. School was stressful, other PC-related things were stressful, I welcomed the last day of term with open arms. After term ended, Group 30 reconnected. All you need to know about that is that it was awesome. Mostly. We had some very interesting sessions at reconnect, I may try to touch on those in a blog post soon. Post-reconnect, I went north in a bakkie (4x4 truck) and saw elephants, giraffe, crazy running ostriches, oryx, springbook, zebra, and various other forms of wildlife. While in Puros, a desert oasis famous for its angry desert elephants, I got our bakkie stuck in the sand, and an angry elephant tore out the water pump for the toilet closest where we were camping. The following day we got our bakkie stuck again, this time in such a way that I thought maybe we’d never get out. The sand in that part of the Namib Desert is like baby powder; imagine trying to dig a bakkie out of a swimming pool of baby powder. Maybe one day I’ll post pictures. We were.... very dirty. After vacation, I returned to Gobabis, and chilled out for a week or so. At that time, and for the remainder of my holiday, I suffered pretty severe mefloquine side effects, including messed up appetite, depression, hallucinations, and dreams so vivid I’d wake up super confused. I’m glad to be off that shit. It’s poison. (And if you want to find out more about mefloquine, like how it transcends the blood/brain barrier, check out this.)

When I returned home from holiday, I found that my pantry had been raided by some sort of vermin, either mice or outdoor cockroaches (they leave droppings that are sometimes hard to distinguish). At first I thought keeping a clean house/kitchen/pantry would eliminate the problem. It didn't. I sprayed chemicals around all the areas where there have historically been cockroaches, but when none turned up dead in the monrings, I decided that i must have mice. I bought rat poison, and spread it around, but then decided that a cat was a better option, and would also help with my loneliness. The result: Chico the Africat. Possibly the cutest (and most spastic) kitten on the continent. So far he's won over the hearts of everyone to come into my house, even the cat haters. He's simply fantastic.

I’ve had the great fortune to have had really great house guests since mid June. A couple of South African girls stopped on their way from Botswana to Swakopmund, then a bunch of group 30ers came to celebrate the 4th of July (it’s always great to see group 30ers!). The celebration turned into a rather larger party than I was expecting, but it was really a fun night. That same weekend a German volunteer who’d been working in South Africa arrived; she’s still here, and will go back to Germany at the end of August. Having her here has been wonderful, she’s super easy to get along with, she’s doing good work at a project in Epako with street kids, and it’s nice to talk to someone facing the same challenges (and absurdity!) as you every day. Plus, we make amazing salads every night; I miss having a roommate who gets as excited about food as I do (shout out Julie Little!). Then, last Sunday a couple biking across Africa made Gobabis their first stop in Namibia (well, first stop if you don’t count a night in the bush); again, just super cool people to have in my home for a few days – full of interesting stories and opinions and conversations in general. All in all, I’ve been really fortunate in the last eight weeks to share my home with such great people. It’s been really uplifting for my spirit in general.

It’s been really cold in Namibia. REALLY cold. In the morning when I go to the kitchen to make breakfast (avocado on toast these days), I check the thermometer. One morning it was so cold that my tears froze to my face on the way to school. My HOD said that I should be getting rides in the morning, but I do enjoy the bike ride to school, so long as the temperature is above freezing. Only twice have I had to ride when the temp was below 0° Celsius (the first time it was because I thought I could hack it; the second time was because I couldn’t find a lift).

And so now, term 2. On a micro level, time moves super slow. Day after day after day, life is the same... time at school moves at the pace of molasses. On a macro level, holy shit, it’s the end of term 2 and I’m still teaching fractions. I started teaching fractions 5 weeks ago. The reasons for still teaching them are varied; that’s another part of the post, though, I suppose.

School starts at 7:00 in the morning. Teachers are supposed to be at school at 7. The first bell rings at 7, and the late bell rings at 7:10. Every day we have a staff meeting, which used to start at 7, and now starts at 7:10 after the late bell. This leads to a shorter first period, to the learners running around after the late bell rings, to inconsistent late-comer punishment (because how are you going to punish a kid that comes late when the teachers are otherwise occupied when s/he comes). Teachers going to class late (or not at all) is a problem that I’ve talked about before; the principal often brings up this issue (ironically) during these morning staff meetings when he himself is making the teachers late for class. This morning’s meeting also touched on teacher professionalism. Again, apparently I’m the only one who sees the irony in preaching teacher professionalism when the person preaching it often doesn’t go to the classes he teaches at all. But, who am I to criticize?

I’ve had some trouble externalizing my stress this term. Often, I can’t figure out why I’m stressed, only that the stress is there. I’ve missed school days because my stomach is running (do we say this in America? I have a running stomach? I don’t think we do, but I imagine you can figure out what it means), or because I wake up with headaches.

I’ve finally returned to my happy vegan roots. My diet for the first several month here was, admittedly, not great. Although I managed to maintain veganism, doing so in a host family meant eating tons of soya mince (a flavoured TVP that comes in a box and is really handy for people in the village who can’t buy meat all the time, but seems to contain a lot of chemicals), rice, porridge, bread, soup packets that contain a lot of salt, and other... Namibia fare like super starchy vegetables. Sacrificing my veganism wouldn’t have improved the situation, because the meat here tends to be super fatty and prepared in unhealthy ways. After moving to town, to my own house, my eating improved, but I was using food to cope (as lots of volunteers do) – and I was still eating the super starchy, fattening foods. While in my mefloquine haze, I lost my appetite, and in the process lost some weight, but also stopped eating the crappy food I’d been eating and started feeling tons better. My appetite returned, but I’ve now cut out most refined carbs like the porridge and pasta and rice that they love here, as well as most bread. As a result, I’ve lost most of the weight I gained, I’m on a veggie/fruit/raw nuts and beans-rich diet, and I feel much much better. I’m eating lots of raw food and sprouting legumes like crazy(in fact Donata, the temporary roommate, and I are eating a jar of sprouts a day. it’s impressive). It’s really true that what you put in your body has a direct effect on your physical and mental states.

So back to the absurdity of life. I’ll see things everyday and the first word that comes to my head is: absurd. Most of the time they’re really small things. Today I wore a dress to school. I often wear dresses or skirts to school. And I almost always bike (except when it’s below freezing). When I wear dresses and skirts, I wear black leggings underneath, always. I may as well be wearing pants under my dress/skirt. And STILL men stare and yell and whistle, as if I were wearing nothing at all. It’s... very funny.

I’ve been wanting to rearrange the desks in my classroom for ages, but my learners just.... can’t handle anything other than sitting in pairs that all face the front of the room. A couple weeks ago I put them in groups of four, and as I suspected it would, it was a failed attempt. Last week I got ambitious, and needed to rearrange, so instead of going back to the pairs that face the front of the classroom, I made myself president of grade 6. At least, that’s what one of the learners who helped me to rearrange told me. My desk is now in the front and center of the room, and all the desks arc around mine like the seats in parliament arc around the president. Me, president of grade 6. :)

Aside from being President of grade 6, teaching is a crap shoot. I’m becoming accustomed to the absurdity that is 90% of my life at school. I’m making small strides in my classroom. We finally finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory a few weeks ago. It was hugely satisfying for all those involved – for me and for the learners. It’s the first book any of them have ever read (or even had read to them). We finished the book on a Thursday, and I showed them the old movie the next day. It was fun to watch them forming their own visions of the book in their minds, and watch their reactions to the portrayal of the book in the film. Even better was listening to them during the movie: “Miss, that’s not what happened in the book!” “Miss, it’s just like the book!” “Miss Nikki, Mrs. Bucket didn’t sing in the book!” “Miss, the boat isn’t pink!” I was anticipating the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory hangover; that is, my class had been on such a Charlie high for so long that I was worried that no matter what I tried to follow it up with, there was going to be some unrest in the classroom. I was right. We started reading Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, but it’s just not the same. I’m trying to come up with another book to read with them, but I’m coming up short at the moment.

Apart from the Charlie hangover, there are good things happening in my classroom, mostly. And the best things that are happening are the things that can’t be measured in end of term marks. My learners are a product of my classroom (which is, in turn, a product of my personality): a bit disorganized, and mostly a peaceful, relaxed herd. I can see and hear their English improving faster than the other classes just by dint of being with me all the time.

I’m a stickler for good grammar. I always have been. At some point since coming to Namibia, I’ve become proud that English is my mother tongue. Maybe it’s because I know I speak good English when necessary, combined with hearing it repeatedly butchered day in and day out here. It’s true that we don’t speak the Queen’s English, but regardless of that, it is the national language of the US, and it is spoken properly by at least some of the population. There is a recurring implication that American English is not proper English, and this recurring implication is made often by someone who says “we doesn’t,” “they doesn’t,” “I doesn’t,” and “they isn’t.” AHH. It’s a bit like a knife twisting in my side every time I hear it.

That brings me (and you) pretty much up to date. If you’ve made it this far, thanks! I hope you’re well, wherever you are and whatever you might be doing.

I'm embarrassed that it's been nearly THREE months since my last blog update. Time here seems to move simultaneously slow and at super-speed. After that happy patch of Namlife that I stumbled upon back in April, I stumbled upon a not-so-happy patch of life, but I survived it, and the end of the term. Group 30 re-reconnected in Windhoek for a couple of weeks, and then I went on a whirlwind tour of some out of the way spots in northwest Namibia. Now, almost halfway through term 2 and nearing the 11-months in country mark, I figured I should post SOMETHING to let people know that I'm still here. :)

I've been working on a more thorough update to post, because alot of important things happened in the last 3 months. Hopefully, the next time I can come up for air, I'll be able to get it posted.

In the meantime, I'd like to thank everyone who has generously sent care packages my direction. They really mean alot! A special shout-out goes to Frank Sanders, owner of Devils Tower Lodge and climber/guide extraordinaire, for sending HUNDREDS of pens and pencils and erasers along with some books. The stationary is being sold at my school to raise funds for the library. Thanks, Frank!!!

I've finally fallen back into my old groove of cooking as a form of relaxation. Nam cooking is different, everything here is salted or full of MSG, and finding good spices is hard (most are available in Windhoek, and being so close, you'd think I'd be there more often... but, getting there andd back is a hassle, not to mention expensive) and when you do find them, they tend to be quite pricey. Along that vein (is that namlish? proper english? hmmm) I'm adding the following to my list of things I'd love to unpack from a carepackage:

Nutritional yeast

Cumin

Cardamon pods/seeds

Fenugreek

Raw (untoasted/cooked) nuts

dry chickpeas/blackbeans

large tupperware containers (can be packed and then packed into a box)

When I returned from holiday, I found that my food cupboards had been… invaded, either by mice, or large outdoor cockroaches. The result is the request for large Tupperware (no larger than 9”Hx18”Dx16”W) for food stuffs to be kept in.

The other exciting update is that I’ve now got a 4-legged, furry roommate (also a result of the rodent issue). His name is Chico, and he’s a 7-week (ish) feisty farm kitten. He’s possibly the cutest africat ever.

I shall continue chipping away at the other blog, and hope to have the motivation to post soon! Hope you’re well, wherever you are.

While the last update I posted here wasn’t the most upbeat, happy post, it was as realistic a view of my life as I could give you.

The good news is that this post will be significantly rosier.

Autumn is arriving in Gobabis. It’s always a toss up for me, trying to decide if I love autumn or spring more. Regardless, the coming of cooler weather is quite welcome, although I’m sure I’ll be taking that back when it’s near freezing, my house doesn’t have heat, and I’m riding my bike to school in the morning in the dark AND the cold. The other day I walked outside and the air smelled like autumn. It filled me with joy.

The week before last (the week following my last post) was a complete 180 from how things had been going. Some contributing factors were:

• Miscellaneous funny happenings in my classroom.

• The fact that I’m tricking my grade 6s into reading a book book, but they don’t know it’s a book because I’m giving it to them chapter by chapter. More about that later.

• Last Friday I got a lift to school, which means that I wasn’t sweaty and gross before classes even started, and meant that I could actually dress nicely and do my hair. My learners went wild. Best comment of the day? “Miss, your legs are so fat.” (Like they’d never seen my legs before…) My response: “Thank you.” This comment was closely followed by “Miss, you just look so beautiful” and I knew that the comment about my legs being fat was actually a high compliment. Go figure.

• On that same day, one of my learners asked if I relax my hair. I suppose they’ve probably always wanted to ask a white person that, but of course have never had the opportunity to do so.

As you’ll remember from past posts, Thursday tends to be…. a difficult day in my classroom. For no solid reason (aside from the excitement of the coming Friday) my learners can’t seem to get it together. Once I realized that it was a pattern, I started trying to anticipate the problems, which wasn’t super successful. Until 2 Thursdays ago. I took a different approach, and I split the double period at the end of the day into a Maths period and an English period, and planned to work them during Maths, and do something I knew they’d enjoy during English. And it was hugely successful.

On this particular Thursday, I’d decided to wear my contacts for the first time since school started in January. Gobabis tends to be too dry and dusty to wear contacts (especially riding my bike to and from school, where dust in the eye could be quite dangerous). The first people to notice were the grade 7s; I explained that I was wearing my glasses inside my eyes, on my eyeballs. I walked around the room and showed them the little circle that’s visible with contacts, and they were captivated. Captivated as they were, they still didn’t get the whole concept, so I took one contact out. They were enraptured. I walked around with the lens on my hand, and showed them one eye with the lens, and the other eye without the lens (mostly because somehow they’d never noticed my eyes were blue behind my glasses?), and then I put the lens back in in front of them. They were ENRAPTURED. I got the same response from Grade 6 later that day (at the beginning of the double period I mentioned above). I’ve actually never had every single learner’s undivided attention before that moment (except maybe my first day at school, when I was still a novelty and they were still curious about me).

The week before last, one of my behavior problem’s mother came into school, because this learner often dodges after break, if he comes to school at all, and this is often unbeknownst to his mother. He is one of a couple learners in my class who I know comes from a very violent home environment (this was confirmed when his mother and father/mom’s boyfriend got into a physical altercation in the principal’s office); while it’s true that I want my classroom to be a peaceful place for all my learners, it’s especially true for these 3. The principal mentioned this learner at a morning staff meeting, using him as an example of how we can’t judge the learners at face value, how we always have to consider what’s going on in the background, too. Of course, this is something I already knew and took into consideration, but I was happy to hear my principal make that connection and relay that to the other teachers, most of who don’t think too much about it.

Two notable events came from this initial recognition that the home environment (and particularly those that are violent) plays a huge role in the classroom behavior of the learners. The first occurred when I went into the principal’s office to have a chat, and the conversation rolled around to this topic. I told him that there are 3 boys in the class who come from very violent homes and whose behavior reflects it, and so I have been working to make my classroom a safe place for them to be. (This is a… foreign concept for lots of Namibians.) Because my classroom is a safe place for my learners to be (i.e., I’m not beating them), if the other teachers are beating them in my classroom, and they’re getting beat at home, there’s no difference between being at school and being at home. I then told him that, particularly for these learners who need a safe place to go away from home, I’d like to work with the other teachers to come up with a discipline plan that doesn’t involve beating them in my classroom. His reaction was so favorable that I almost couldn’t believe it. We’ll see how things play out from there.

The other notable thing that came out of the principal’s acknowledgement of the need to look beyond classroom (mis)behavior was a conversation with the teacher at my school who is the most consistent corporal punisher. We happened to be in the staff room at the same time, and he referenced the fact that we have to consider what’s going on at home, and I took the opportunity to make a snide remark about how that’s why I don’t beat ANY of my learners. Then I smiled and walked away. Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it was. And one day I’ll be able to have a real conversation about how the learners otherwise like him, and how if he didn’t beat them, he’d be highly revered. But… baby steps.

One of my behavior problems was absent Monday and Tuesday last week, and on Tuesday one of his friends told me that it was because he was in jail. Since my learners like to lie about a lot of stuff, I didn’t realize believe it. Turns out it was true. The shitty thing is that he’s actually a clever kid who runs with the wrong people. I know, classic story. He came back to school on Wednesday and wrote an affidavit stating that he’s been with a group of people who broke into a store and stole money, that he hadn’t been one who physically broke in, but that he’d benefitted financially from it. Overall, a sad case.

I have been reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Grade 6. It’s been… amazing. The whole concept was something I just stumbled across through doing exercises out of one of the Namibian English books, which has a unit on chocolate. It’s provided a wealth of vocabulary, it’s easy to come up with activities for the learners to do, and it’s FUN. And, as callous as it may be, my learners can relate to Charlie Bucket, who lives in a 2 room house with his parents and 4 grandparents, who is so poor that he eats cabbage everyday, etc etc etc.

Last week was good too, exams started and so I was kept busy writing exams, trying to prepare my learners for them, and invigilating exams on Thursday. Trying to calculate end of term marks for my learners has been a challenge, because what’s required in the syllabus and required for end of term marks doesn’t always match up logically for me. Whatever the case, I have to have it all done soon soon, because this coming week is the last week of term!

Rachel GR, from group 27, keeps/kept(?) the Dear Namibia blog, a comical narrative of her service. I often have Dear…. moments in my head. One I have daily is: Dear Namibian Drivers, PLEASE leave more than a foot of clearance when you pass me, especially when there are no other cars on the road. Riding my bike to school is definitely an occupation hazard some mornings.

Another thing I always intend to mention and always forget to is the ice cream vendor man. Maybe one day I can take a picture without it seeming offensive… He’s a man that rides around on an adult tricycle selling ice cream; he comically wears a bicycle helmet (even though he’s riding a tricycle). I suppose, given what I just wrote about Namibians’ disregard for those on bikes, it makes sense to wear a helmet, but it still makes me smile every time I see him.

Group 31 swore in 2 days ago. It’s CRAZY that they’ve been here for 2 months already. Group 30 is nearing 8 months in country and 6 months as PCVs. I had the pleasure of riding from Windhoek to Gobabis with the new health volunteer who will be working with the Catholic AIDS action in Epako (but who, after 2 months of homestay in Epako, will be living in town and commuting to Epako everyday). It was nice to hear about the new group, talk about his hopes, and give him the information (at least some of it) that I wish someone had told me. It’ll be nice to have another volunteer in town, too!

Next Sunday (one work from today), we’ll converge in Windhoek for our ‘rereconnect,’ otherwise known by Peace Corps as Project Design Management (PDM) and male engagement (ME) with Namibian counterparts, and after those sessions end, counterparts will go home and we’ll have a few days of in-service training with just PCVs and PC staff. I’m excited to get to work with Ben in the capacity of a workshop. So far I feel like I haven’t been super useful to him, especially working against the constraints of school.

I’d been indecisive about what to do with the 2.5 weeks of holiday remaining after PDM/ME/IST until this weekend. I knew that I wanted to try to climb (thanks again to Mark Webb, Julie Little and Kaitlin Weideman for getting my rack and rope to Namibia), but aside from that, I had no idea. Thanks to Brad Rollans for making up my mind. We’re going to rent a truck and drive up the skeleton coast from Swakopmund, a trip that should be worth the rental fees and gas money. Following that trip, a few of us are going to hike Waterberg, and perhaps get some climbing in, although the climbing is TBD, as I’m not sure what’s available there, and also not sure what’s permitted. All in all, it should promise to be a good holiday. :)

As always, thanks for reading. I hope you’re well, wherever you are.

I recognize that the last few posts I’ve written have not been rosy; the fact of the matter is that life here isn't always rosy, just as it's not always rosy anywhere. The purpose of my blog is not to paint a happy, shiny picture of PC life; rather, I write this blog to keep my friends, family and loved ones in the loop, to provide a glimpse of PC life to those who are curious, and keep a running record of events and happenings in my life. Just like all grey clouds have a silver lining sooner or later, or just like whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger, the happenings of my life (and the things that I subsequently write about) may seem negative, but in the long run, I am often thankful for the experience. Furthermore, when things aren't great, they can only get better.

With that said, this post is not super rosy. If you're bothered by that, please stop reading here.

My last post described the misery of Thursdays for me; I mentioned the fact that I'd had to give my class detention the following Friday afternoon. The detention was more or less a success, only 2 of my learners dodged it. They did, however, have to stay till 2:10 (10 minutes extra) because they couldn't keep quiet. I guess I'm still working on my "how to talk to grade 6 learners" skills.

Monday (last week) I asked the learners if they know why we were going to have a 4-day weekend. Most of them know that it's for a religious holiday, but many of them didn't know what Easter was, exactly (as in, the Christian belief that Christ was crucified and rose three days later).

Other funny things from the classroom:

Petty theft is a rampant problem at my school. Learners steal each others' pens, pencils, books, notebooks, really anything that isn't tied down or hidden under clothing is liable to be stolen. I've tried to explain that stealing isn't nice, it doesn't go well with the peace in my classroom. That... didn't stop them from stealing. Last week, I told them that even if I don't see them stealing, and even if their classmates don't see them stealing, GOD sees them stealing. That didn't seem to work, either. Next up: Thou shall not steal. The key to my bicycle lock looks like a car key. No matter how many times I tell them that I don't have a car... they don't believe me. There are 4 boys in my class who are behavior problems. When they are fortuitously absent on the same day my classroom is like a different place. One of them behaves well for me, but the other teachers dislike him and talk about what a problem he is in their classes. This particular boy likes to sit in the front of the classroom, which I appreciate since everyone else wants to sit in the back. However, because he sits in the front of the room, I tend to stand very close to him, and often right in front of him. The other day, I looked down while I was talking, and he seemed to be ogling me. Perhaps that is why he's not a behavior problem for me..... I am, currently, basking in the last day of a 4-day holiday weekend. Last week was maybe the hardest week I've had in Namibia, emotionally, since I arrived here. I had a couple "regroup or go home" moments, during which I managed to regroup. On top of it, I had a case of Africa tummy that was likely caused my emotional turmoil, or a virus, or something in the water or food, or a combination of it all.

(Almost) Every volunteer reaches a moment when they ask themselves "what am I really doing here?” It's a hard question to answer. Group 30's been in country just over 7 months; it's been (unbelievably) almost 6 months since we swore in as official PCVs. It's nearly the end of the first term, and I still don't feel like my learners are... learning. Well, maybe except for the fact that they have a firm grasp of the word "false" and can multiply without counting tick marks on a piece of paper. Most of them, at least.

I still maintain that I prefer living in town over living in the village. PCVs in the village have lots of transportation woes, food woes, and other village life woes (like learners knocking on windows, doors, everyone knowing your business, etc etc etc). I'm not a small-town person in the US, and I'm not a small-town person here. However, Epako is just like any small town. Ashley, one of the other Omaheke volunteers, is able to go out to the bars in Epako with Namibian our age. I simply can't do that. I can picture my learners now: "Miss, you were in the location on Saturday. My brother saw you with someone who was drinking alcohol" or "Miss, I saw you at the shebeen". Ashley, on the other hand, has the advantage of relative anonymity, except for the fact that people know she's not Namibian, and Namibian men are drawn to her like sailors to a siren. Once people find out she's American, they associate her to me (because clearly, if we're both American, we know each other), which means that instead of my learners asking about why I was at the shebeen during the weekend, they ask me about why she was there. Hanging out in the location (Epako) is also not always safe, and getting back to town can be a hassle (and can be dangerous) at night. Of course, if I had to burning desire to hang out there, I would find a way, but it often seems like it's not worth the trouble or the worries.

Of course, not all Namibians go to shebeens on the weekend. A lot of people in the Omaheke region go to the farm; others just stay at home and do housework and whatnot (like me). I've had a hard time finding things in common (read: things to talk about) with some of my Namibian acquaintances, which makes hanging out sometimes awkward, and the awkwardness sometimes leads me to avoid hanging out, which leads to solitude.

Because Gobabis has a large Afrikaner population, and most of them live in town, the other option for me would be to make friends with Afrikaners and hang out at traditionally white establishments. I hope that you can already see the problems there. We were warned in PST that lots of volunteers make friends with the Afrikaner community at their sites. It is highly advantageous in many ways: Afrikaners tend to have cars, which means that inevitably, if you need a ride to the capital, someone you know knows someone who is going around the same time you need to go; at least in Gobabis, many of the businesses are Afrikaner owned, and if you have a good relationship with the business owners in town, it makes life a lot easier when you need quotes for a purchase, or are asking for a donation, etc etc etc. The downside is that, well, because of Namibia's history, the white (and colored) populations tend to be quite racist, still, even 20 years after independence. It isn't fair to make a blanket statement like that, because of course, not all white and colored people are racially prejudiced, but there is still a huge schism between the white, colored and black populations in Gobabis. (And for the record, the term "colored" is the accepted term for people of mixed ethnicity here, and during the years before independence, colored people fell below whites but above blacks in the social strata. You'll remember in one of my posts that I wrote during PST that I was living in what was formerly a colored neighborhood, physically located away from town and the location in Okahandja.) We were warned that...... if we associate ourselves more with Afrikaners than with our target communities, we could lose credibility in our communities (and losing credibility as a teacher is lethal; if the parents and students lose their respect for a teacher, for whatever reason, it makes teaching very, very difficult).

All of those things aside, I've found the bigotry of Afrikaners to be nearly insufferable. It's a touchy thing to talk about and write about. There's often a fine line between observed fact and interpreted observation.

One day, when all my thoughts are together, I will write something about my observations of development and dependency of the developed world (have I already promised something of the sort?). I've never formally studied development; I know only what I observe, and what I've talked about with other volunteers. The bottom line is that sometimes, despite the best efforts otherwise, development creates dependency. And sometimes, in spite of the best intentions, development and aid that is not sustainable ends up being more detrimental than helpful. One example of this is the donors who sent shoes to kids in Kenya. Having these shoes caused the kids to lose the calluses on their feet, and when the shoes wore out, the calluses that protected their feet were gone, and the kids ended up with cut-up and infected feet.

Another example, closer to home, is with my community counterpart. He'd been receiving funding from some donors in the Netherlands for his projects at the garden and with the street boys; specifically, he was given monies to buy chickens, and was promised another installment after the initial donation made to purchase the chickens. A couple of things happened after the 25 chickens were purchased in December. Immediately after procurement of the chickens, which lived at the garden, several of them were stolen, slaughtered and sold (and those 3 things happened within hours - too quickly for any preventative action). Because all the initial money had been spent to purchase the chickens there was no money left to feed the chickens, and the chickens ended up in a state of starvation. If that weren't bad enough, several weeks ago, the garden was vandalised, and all but three of the chickens were stolen. All this time, since December, my counterpart has been emailing the Dutch donors, trying to find out when the next installment will arrive, with no response at all until last week (by which time only 3 chickens (who were still starving)) were left.

Because I more or less inherited my counterpart and his projects, and wasn't given too much information about him or the projects, I don't know where his funding/income came from before December. I know that the garden provided some food for him, and the boys. Whatever the case, for the last month or so, my counterpart has been hungry, and in the last weeks, starving. I invited him and one of his sons for dinner a couple weekends ago, and after dinner, his body was in such shock from being so hungry and then suddenly so full of food that he collapsed in my kitchen.

This otherwise shitty situation has lots of silver linings, although some of them are harder to see than others. The first is that my counterpart is extraordinarily progressive and forward thinking; he is ambitious and proactive. These are, however, not qualities seen favorably by a majority of the community, and he therefore doesn’t receive too much support from people in Epako (and for that reason forms such good working relationships with volunteers). However, in terms of sustainable development, these are favorable conditions: a counterpart who relies on aid workers only for support, and not with absolute reliance to do everything (which is the case for many volunteers here in Namibia, and I’m sure elsewhere). He has also just signed on with the Namibia Human Rights Commission full time, which means that he’ll have a steady income, and can work from his office in Epako. He’s also drawing up UNICEF grant proposals, and we’re going to work again on trying to find someone in the greater Gobabis/Epako/Nossobville area to host a Peace Corps volunteer, both in a homestay and for permanent housing (his application for a volunteer from group 31 had been approved, but because his organization can’t financially support the housing for a volunteer for 2 years, the health volunteer went to Catholic AIDS Action instead). There is also talk of moving the garden to a more rural location, away from the violence and theft of Epako. I’m also in talks with the choir director at my school to get some of the street boys involved in instrumentals (drums, tambourines, other noise makers) in the hopes of adding life to the choir at my school, and getting more of the boys at my school involved.

On a lighter note, I seem to have rid my home of cockroaches, however temporarily. I haven’t seen a live cockroach in ages, and the dead cockroaches are few and far between. I also have discovered that skinks like to live in the towel I keep at the base of my back door. They like to poke their little heads out when I open and close the door (and consequently move the towel). Perhaps because it’s a warm place? Who knows. It has provided for some entertaining chases of Nikki vs. lizard through my house, though.

We’re nearing the end of term and another Group 30 reconnect (re-reconnect, if you will) in Windhoek. It will be nice to see everyone again, and this time, we’ll meet everyone’s counterparts. It’ll be fun to meet some of the more infamous talked about counterparts in our group. Hopefully I won’t be such a slacker and will take better care to update my blog more often. Let’s hope that hitting the 6-months-at-site mark will be as magical as everyone says it is so I’ll have only good things to report.

And, no matter how bad things get, at least I'm not in Mauritania.

Since the beginning of the school year, every single Thursday has been terrible. They are longer days for me than Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, with 2 double English classes after break, which is when learners are least attentive. And I have 6B for the last 2 periods of the day. No matter how well the morning maths class goes, by Thursday afternoon they’ve morphed into monsters. At the beginning of the term, I thought it was just coincidence, but after a bunch of consecutive terrible Thursdays, I started to be proactive against the pattern. Today’s attempt at averting a bad afternoon was an epic fail, resulting in an hour of detention for Grade 6B tomorrow afternoon. That’s really the last thing I want to be doing on a Friday afternoon, but if it breaks the bad Thursday routine, I guess I can’t mind that much.

Tomorrow we have an inspection by the Ministry of Health. The female staff decided that the table clothes in the staff room were too dark, and requested N$500 to buy new table linens for tomorrow’s inspection. I said I wouldn’t sign the letter of request on account of STILL not having extension cords to plug in the computers in our library. The inspection did provide the catalyst needed to start talking about rearranging the library; on top of everything else that happened today, I ended up staying at school until 3 pm putting books on the shelves in “alphabetical” order. The great thing about my school’s library is that it already had a librarian before I started. Most other volunteers inherit the librarian post from the former volunteers because most of their coworkers don’t want it. The bad thing about the situation is that we don’t always see eye to eye about things, but I figure that whatever I can help with is better than doing nothing, or doing things in a way that make her not want to do it anymore. Funnily enough, when she returned to school at 3pm and all the books were on the shelves and the library had been tidied, she said that she could almost kiss me at the moment she walked in. At any rate, the library is going to be really challenging, and I know that almost every volunteer that starts or maintains a library runs into a few of the same things: stolen books, mishandling of the books, and more advanced issues like maintaining semblance of order on the shelves, teaching learners to actually apply their knowledge of alphabetizing to doing it with the author’s surname (I was thinking today while I was putting books up that it’s already too much for them to alphabetize the books by surname, we don’t even talk about first name, and heaven forbid if the same author writes more than one book), arranging afternoon library hours, teaching the other teachers how to use the library….. It’s overwhelming how many resources we have for teachers to use, and how little actually gets used. I’m hoping to aid in changing that, but have to remember that baby steps are best sometimes.

During PST and Reconnect, the PCVs all told us that teaching in Namibia takes a lot of settling in. I imagine it’s like that for most PCVs teaching English and other subjects, worldwide. Namibia just has its own set of benefits and drawbacks. Definitely, though, there’s lots of trial and error. Dasha and I talk about it often – what works in her classroom failed (sometimes miserably) in mine. What works in mine would never work in hers. And even now, nearing the end of the term, I still feel like I’m flailing in the dark in many ways.

I had a nice conversation with my principal yesterday. By nice, I guess that I mean that I asserted the fact that I feel really good about the progress my grade 6s are (finally!) making with multiplication. We’d spent 2 weeks on drilling facts and learning how to read the tables/squares, but they still weren’t getting it, but when I taught them how to count multiples of a number, and then to count multiples on their fingers, we had a breakthrough. They’re still not great, but they’re LOADS better than they were. So I was telling him that because I felt that the multiplication foundation was so important to everything else coming up, I was putting it down as solidly as possible, but as a result I was behind where I should be in the syllabus. I was happy to have at least voiced what was going on, even being at fault for being behind the syllabus means less than the fact that my learners can multiply.

Dasha and I met the new health volunteer coming to Gobabis in May yesterday afternoon. He’s working at the Catholic Aids Action office, and he seems to be doing ok with his new host family this week. It was funny to find out over the weekend (in Mariental) that the new training group (Group 31) is already out on site visit; it just doesn’t feel like that long ago that they arrived. I’m sure they’d disagree. At any rate, I’ll be happy for another PCV in town. I joked with Dasha that it was a good thing we didn’t meet him today, because I didn’t have a lot of good things to say after school today.

I think everyone has moments when they’ll do anything to avoid doing the task at hand. For me, the task at hand is almost always either lesson planning, marking papers, or both. The thing I’ve started doing instead of either of those things: bread baking. I’ve baked a lot of bread in the last few months, and while I’m baking edible bread, it still seems to be hit or miss for me. And I’ve definitely not baked anything nearly as good as Michael Jones’ banana peanut butter bread.

Some of you have asked about what you can send me. I think there’s a list to the right, but in case any of these things aren’t on the list, here are a few more things that I’ve thought of that would be nice to have:· Nag champa incense· American candy for my learners· bic pens (again, for my learners)· cheap American t-shirts or hats to barter with at the Okahandja craft market (like, things that say something on them, the cheesier, the better)· dried garbanzo beans – they’re pretty expensive here· NY Times or Post – mostly to show the learners· Magazines – climbing, news, entertainment – favorites are National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, Climbing, Rock and Ice· quinoa· Trader Joe’s dark chocolate covered anything (preferably nuts or espresso beans) – as long as there’s no milk in the chocolate

I think that a slackline or 2 is coming my way. It’s an experimental venture setting up a slackline at my school, but if it’s successful, it may be something I’ll ask for again.

It’s difficult asking for things, and really, the best packages are the ones that are full of surprises.

Anyway, tomorrow’s Friday, and even though the health inspection people will be there (which I’m sure will have all kinds of unforeseen surprises), I’m hoping for a better day tomorrow.

Today I had about 15 spare minutes at the end of the day, when I was trying to explain to the learners why their behavior today was not appropriate for grade 6. I find it helpful to remind them sometimes that I’ve come a very long way to be their teacher, and that I’m there because I want to be there. But something occurred to me the other day that was imparted on me by my dad, which certainly applies to my learners.vvI told them that their education is the only thing no one can ever take away from them. If they listen to anything I say in the next 2 years, I hope it’s that.

Thanks for reading!!

This past weekend, the dirty 30 celebrated 7 months in Namibia; Namibia celebrated its 20th Anniversary as an independent nation. On Friday the 19th, a group of us converged on Mariental and celebrated at Debbie’s nam palace with good food and adult beverages. As always, transportation was a challenge, but everyone made it there safe and sound and in one piece. We rode from Windhoek to Mariental in a Namibian Chef’s Association truck, which I’m not surprised to know exists, but is comical, at least to me.

The weekend was great, there was a lot of catching up, eating, showing How I Met Your Mother, drinking, games, and fun. Group 30 has a new addition, an evacuee from Benin who’s been placed in Mariental and will be living with Debbie. Friday night was her first night in Mariental at her new home, after arriving in Namibia Wednesday. I’m sure she was slightly overwhelmed. She’s the third Emily in our group!

I’ve worked hard to make my house a home. Even though 2 years isn’t forever, it is a long time to spend somewhere I’m not comfortable. This was aided by the generosity of my family, who sent me a photo printer. One rainy Saturday, I watched movies and printed photos. It was glorious. Hanging them up in a semi permanent manner: not quite so easy. The houses here are painted cinder block, which means you can’t nail anything to the wall. I’d originally had the photos hanging on strings taped to the wall, but after picking the strings of photos off the floor a bunch of times, I moved to plan b: pinning ribbon to the crown molding and baseboards, and pinning the photos up that way. Success! I now have lots of photos in my living room. They make my house more like home to see familiar faces every day.

On the way home from Mariental, Dasha and I stopped at the Peace Corps volunteer lounge. What was waiting there for me, you ask? A duffle bag full of climbing gear.

Before I left America, climbing was a big part of my life and when I came to Namibia, I accepted that I might not climb for 2 years. At reconnect, I found another climber in the PC/Nam family, a group 26er who was extending for a 3rd year. Volunteers who extend for a third year are required to take a month of home leave before the third year, and Kaitlin was preparing to take her home leave after reconnect. She agreed to bring my gear back, as long as someone sent it to her in the states. And so, through the kindness of Julie Little and Mark Webb, my rack, rope, and helmet made their way to Kaitlin, who kindheartedly brought it all back to Namibia.

And so I found this duffle bag of greatness awaiting me in the lounge.

The first peek into the bag prompted a flutter in my stomach; pulling the gear out and sorting it on the living room floor, flaking my rope on the burglar bars, brought me full on bliss. Along with the chocolate covered espresso beans that travelled with the gear.

So owing to the fact that yesterday was a public holiday, and next week is Easter, we have three 4-day school weeks in a row. We are required to cover a certain amount of material which fulfills requirements laid out on the syllabus every term; I’ve realized that I don’t know how in the world I’m going to get it all covered by April 23, the learners’ last day of classes.

One of the first things I did with my classes was have them make nametags, for a couple reasons – it shows that I want to learn their names, which shows an interest that not many teachers take in the learners, and it helped me learn their names, which is important for classroom management. I had them fold their papers into little tents, and on one side, they were instructed to write their first names, and on the other side, they were to write one adjective to describe themselves (which I explained, giving examples, etc etc). This exercise taught me a few lessons off the bat: 1. that Namibian school kids are not good at following instructions, 2. that Namibian school kids are not familiar with more than a couple adjectives, as most of them used the examples I gave, or the same as the learners seated directly surrounding them, 3. that colored pencils are a highly valued commodity in grade 6, and 4. learning 43 names isn’t so hard with a seating chart and name tags. I would hand the names out every day, and the learners got to give me a mark (grade) every day until the day that I didn’t get any wrong and didn't need any help.

During the first few weeks of school, I made friends with the folks at the Teacher Resource Center, which is literally just behind my house. The TRC has a computer lab, which, while slow and set up in a while that makes it safe from inept users, is free for me to use and has internet and a printer!

I’m finding that I enjoy teaching math, a lot because everything you have to cover is all laid out for you already. English is a little trickier. At the beginning of the year, I gave grade 6 a maths pre-test to figure out how much they’d been taught prior to this year, or at least how much they remembered being taught. The pre-test included addition and subtraction or single and multiple digits, single and double digit multiplication, and division using division signs and long division signs. I learned that some of my learners could add and subtract consistently, some of them had no idea, and that at least one had at least seen long division before, even though he couldn’t remember how to do it. I struggled for a minute trying to figure out where to start, so I did the logical thing – start with the book. The first topic in the book was data handling – bar graphs and pictograms. One of the fun things about data handling is that you can make graphs using just about anything, so it’s easy to give the learners practical examples. We did lots of graphs about goat, sheep and cattle populations. The first test I gave them resulted in a pretty nice bell curve, the top of the curve over 6/10. Fortunately for me, and lots of my learners, 60% is passing. Even 5/10 is passing. The next day I put the graph on the board and used it for that day’s warm up problem.

After data handling we moved to whole numbers and whole number operations, and I thought I was smooth sailing because the only things that have to be covered before end of term are data handling, whole numbers, and fractions. This was before I realized just how much time I was going to have to spend on multiplication. We’ve been working on it for 3 full weeks now – single digit 4 x 5 = type multiplication, and it wasn’t until last week that I finally figured out a method they could use that might help them progress. But the fact that I’m really behind in the syllabus is unnerving, because like I mentioned before, it doesn’t matter if the learners understand, it matters that the necessary material be covered, with or without understanding. The last test I gave resulted in an average score of 5.1/10; for me, this means the learners don’t understand half the material, and how can I continue building on that material if half the kids don’t understand it. I did tell my principal exactly this, explaining why I was still on multiplication instead of something new. This past week, grade 6 finally showed me that they can multiply without making tick marks that they have to count, instead of knowing the facts. That’s a breakthrough for me. And them.

There are 5 rules in my classroom. 1. Respect your teacher, yourself, and your classmates. 2. Ask before you leave your seat or talk. 3. Be on time every day. 4. Keep the classroom and yourself neat and tidy. 5. No fighting or hitting.

At the beginning of the year, the learners would get up from their seats and walk around the room in the middle of class, sometimes even while I was talking. I recognized that as a learned behavior, and one that’s never been a problem with any of the other teachers. They also had the habit of just calling out in the middle of class, sometimes even while I was talking. These 2 behaviors are now almost not problems anymore in my classroom; usually only the same learners can’t stay in their seat, or feel the need to call out in a spastic manner.

Rule number 5 is the one we repeat most often in class. I recognized even last year that fighting was going to be a major classroom management challenge; I was hoping to nip a lot of it in the bud this year with a more structured classroom management plan than they are used to. While I may have succeeded on some level, it’s certainly not a great situation, still. The learners are still beating each other, but not to the extent that they were, and they aren’t stabbing each other anymore, at least not with frequency. One day, one of my behavior problems beat another boy with a broomstick, while I was standing there. That was… unpleasant.

When I arrived in October, my principal, HOD, and the other teachers made it clear that teachers don’t “beat” learners anymore. In lots of places, you aren’t “beating” a learner if the object you’re using to beat with isn’t bigger than your thumb. At my school, the teachers all have Mr. Orange – a piece of hollow orange plastic about the size of my pinky.

Creating rules was a big part of classroom management; creating routine was another. Every day, the learners queue up outside the classroom before they’re allowed in the room. If they can’t enter the room like grade 6s (that’s to say, quietly, and not like a herd of elephants), they have to go back outside and re-queue. Every day at the end of the day, we follow the same procedure – the last bell rings, they get quiet, I give them the go ahead to put their chairs on their desks, and they wait quietly until I dismiss them.

All of these random things are going to come together soon, I promise.

Often, I have to stop in the middle of teaching to diffuse problems. This one won’t share his book, that one is shooting papers across the room, this one is trying to beat that one, this one stole that one’s pen. There are daily issues with writing utensils; theft, loss, pens that won’t write, pens that leak… the pen issues are never ending. But also never ending is the fighting. And it’s usually over stupid shit (like “this one stole my pen”). Sometimes there are teachable moments, other times it’s basic negative attention seeking behavior and I just ignore it.

So one of these “teachable moments” days, I stopped the lesson and wrote PEACE on the board. I talked about how my classroom is a place of peace, but we have to work together to make it that way (and that beating each other is not a good way to do that). I talked about how, as part of this environment of peace, that I would never beat them. They asked why, I explained that I respect them too much to beat them, etc etc etc.

So that day, in the afternoon, I went to my classroom a few minutes before the last bell. My class was having arts. The desks were pushed back away from the front of the room, and there was a girl standing in the front of the room with the teacher, who was playing music with his cell phone. I thought that they were dancing, so I sat on my desk to watch. Then a boy came to the front of the room, turned around to face the class, and the teacher hit him across the butt with Mr. Orange. That boy sat down and the next boy came to the front, turned around, and the teacher hit him. That boy sat down, and another boy came forward; same thing. I noticed as the boys were walking to the front that they were tucking in their shirts, so they knew what was coming. And with every boy that came forward with the full knowledge that the teacher was going to hit him, I got more confused. Finally, I said “Sir, why are you hitting the learners?” and he answered, “Because they don’t want to dance.” With the next boy that came to the front, I saw why none of the boys wanted to dance: Boy dances with girl, and the whole class laughs.

That particular incident was really hard for me, on a lot of levels. The fact that we’d just talked about making my classroom (our classroom) a place of peace that same morning was beyond frustrating. Some people asked why I didn’t stop him, but because of practical reasons (like the fact that the teacher in question is well established and liked at my school, and I’m the “new” “foreign” “volunteer”) I couldn’t say anything to him at the moment, or really even after the fact. I’d like to tell him that he’s not allowed hit the learners INSIDE the classroom (which means that he’d have to at least take them over the threshold, outside), but I think it’s still too soon to venture towards asserting myself that much. I know that the learners were watching me, watching my reaction, and watching to see if I’d taken any action. Due to the aforementioned limitations in reacting at that moment, I did nothing. I didn’t feel like walking out was appropriate, and luckily for me, the bell rang soon enough and I was able to kick the offending teacher out of my classroom.

The following day I wrote the words, crime and illegal on the board, and we talked about what each word means. I told them that it’s illegal – a crime, against the law – for the teachers to beat them. They said that they knew that. I told them that their parents can go to the principal if a teacher is beating a learner, for any reason.

So I don’t mean to focus on school, and I especially don’t mean to focus on the negative things happening at school, because really good things are happening there, too. Since the beginning of the year, fighting in my classroom has dropped off. There are still fights, almost daily, but they aren’t daily, and they usually aren’t more than once a day.

But the rigor, the rules, the routine, and all the effort, has paid off. The other teachers have noticed the behavior improvements in my class… The life sciences/agriculture teacher made a comment one day that they are better; even the principal commented the other day that they are more attentive during the only class of the week that they have with him – RME (Religious and Moral Education). I think, though, that the moment that I realized that there were improvements in my class came last Friday, when I hadn’t slept well the night before. A bunch of teachers weren’t at school, which meant that a bunch of classes were unmanned at any given time. I opened the library after break (there are 4 periods after break), and during each of the 4 periods, grades 6 A and B, and 7 A and B came to the library to read. (More about the library in another post…) My class (6B) was there during the last period, and they were the best behaved of the 4 classes to be in the library. Even the secretary commented on their good behavior. And since Thursdays ALWAYS suck (every week it’s the same, no matter how I try to fend off the Thursday bad behavior), I always look forward to good Fridays. Ending a Friday with an exceptionally behaved grade 6, the last period of the day on Friday was spectacular. And it was so nice to be able to start Monday morning with praise of how well behaved they were in the library on Friday.

Even the small victories – like when the BIS (Basic Information Sciences) teacher, who is also the librarian, told me that my grade 6 alphabetizes better than the other classes – give me purpose. They are tangible results to the amount of effort I put forth every day.

I shall continue updating, now that I feel like I’ve put a dent in catching up. As always, thanks for reading!