More scenes from Oluvango

So here are some more photos- I've been self-conscious about taking pictures while I'm working, so no photos of my students yet, but I'm sure I'll have some sooner or later.

My outhouse- which really isn't so bad, though there is a huge resident population of mosquitos, which don't really bite me, but are still very annoying. At one point I also had a lizard and some spiders living there.


Sinead with a new friend ( a massive millipede- we ate it for dinner :))
The road to my school, which has since been fixed. My principal says they didn't do a good job though, and so it will probably look like this again after the next big rain. The chico handles big puddles nicely though (It really is a Pepe JR. for those of you who know what that means.)

Namibian sunset near my house (its really nice every night, except this is the time Sinead leaves every day, so its also kind of sad)


The sign at the gate to my school (note the AIDS ABC's sign- its a ubiquitous message here). Most days goats or cows get in to the school grounds to eat the grass, and then the principal drives them out at the end of the day in his pickup. Goats also hang out around my flat when it is raining and leave me lots of little presents- I really love them.

Another week of teaching done

So its Friday again- this time its not quite as exciting. Teaching went better this week, but I also felt incredibly exhausted, especially at the end of the week. When I'm teaching it's a constant flurry of activity and I'm running on adrenaline, and then I get back to my flat and I can barely do anything. Yesterday I took a two hour nap in the afternoon, and I think I would feel much better if I could do that everyday!

I'm happy that I'm starting to learn my students' names- especially in the classes I have everyday (in the other ones I don't know if I ever will). The names are really interesting here, a lot of them seem German influenced, like Johannes, Fillipus, Germanus, Wilka, Hilka, Gertrud, etc. And then there are some Oshiwambo names that are really hard to pronounce- like Ndahashifera, Ndapanda, or Ndelinao- mostly girls have these names. Also students here all right there surnames first, and sometimes I get confused about which is which. To make things even more complicated, all the girls have short hair, and sometimes I have trouble telling boys and girls apart. The other day I accidentally called a Gerson (a boy's name) Maria, which is pretty embarrassing.

Oh yes, and speaking of Oshiwambo, my principal keeps telling me I need to learn it, but I'm not sure how I will since everyone is supposed to speak English at school, and then after school everyone goes home and I'm left out here by myself (except that Sinead comes to visit me, which is wonderful, but she's no help with the Oshiwambo!) I picked up a new phrase today when I met some parents who didn't speak English, but then I promptly forgot it, so learning the language will definitely be a challenge.

So that's my school life. This weekend I think Sinead and I are going to a VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) party that a friend invited us to, it will be nice to meet some other volunteers, especially ones that have been here for a while. We were thinking of also going to see a big waterfall about 100 km north of here- Ruacana Falls- but we might wait for another weekend. Other than that its just hanging out here in Oluvango, which is nice and peaceful, but also a bit too quiet sometimes, though there is a bar I can hear most nights that I have yet to check out. It's good its quiet though, because both Sinead and I have a lot of correcting to do- teaching is hard work eh.

Week 2- It gets hot

So at one point I thought last week would never end, but it did, and now I am already in my second week of teaching. The weekend was very nice, Sinead and I went to Oshakati on Friday to go to the internet cafe to put photos on our blogs (you can see them below), and then we had an excellent birthday party for Sinead at our friend Loren's house in Oshikuku (of course these town names mean nothing to most of you.) Then it was back to Oshakati on Saturday for shopping at Game (the Namibian equivalent of Target), Pick-n-Pay (an excellent supermarket), and lunch at Wimpy's (typical fast food, but at least they wait on you). There we had a banana milkshake that was blue, it was really amazing, stay tuned for pictures. Sunday we were busy make teaching plans for the year, which was not so fun, but we also had time to go for a very hot run.

So last week was nice and cool because it had been raining so much, but now the sky is clear and it is nastily hot. I would say Atlanta in August is a good comparison, and you might say oh that's not so bad, but remember there isn't any air conditioning within 90 km. And in September it is suppoused to be even hotter, like in the 100s on a regular basis. So for the time being I don't really mind that I don't get hot water at my house, and doing my laundry by hand is kind of nice because I get all wet. I am looking forward to winter though, when everyone says it is very cold but really it is just pleasant (like 70s during the day, upper 40s to 50s at night).

Teaching is maybe getting better, though I really can't tell. My students are all very well behaved, but they also hate to speak in class, and don't ask questions when they don't understand me. Math is going a little better than English, where I am struggling with years of bad grammar instruction. Students love to say "I used to work" or "I used to pound mahangu" (mahangu is millet, and it is pounded so you can make bread with it), instead of "I worked" or "I pounded mahangu". I'm trying to break them of the habit, but I'm not sure how long it will take. Everyone is getting a little more used to me- I miss how they used to all stand up and say good morning when I walked in, but I'm glad that they stop covering their faces when I ask them to speak in class.

So its getting a bit easier, I'm sure there are many challenges left to come, but I'm beginning to see how I could do this for a year.

Pictures

Ovamboland Scenery
Neighbors
Photo of my school, with goats

Photo of my humble home (I only get half of it)

And now it begins for real......

So I am finally at my school teaching- and it is really hard. The teaching practicum in Rehoboth was like fantasyland compared to the real thing. I have 9 classes of about 32 students and at some point I have to learn all of their names. I teach math and English to two classes of 9th and 10th graders every day, and then I teach Basic Information Science (not sure what that is really yet) to 5 classes of 7th and 8th graders one day a week. So far its been overwhelming, and I haven't even started trying to figure out how to plan for the year and incorporate the national syllabi. So far I've been doing introductions, rules, and some basic assesments to see what they need to focus on. Their English needs a lot of work, especially in areas like verb tenses. In math things are maybe a bit better, though I'm still figuring that out.

In other news Sinead and I purchased a car in Windhoek, thanks entirely to her father who put the whole thing together in less than 24 hours. It is a little VW Chico, which is like a golf, and so far it has been excellent. The roads between our schools are pretty bad though, especially in the rainy season, and so I'm a little worried that after a year of driving on them the resell value will be a lot lower than we had hoped. We've already had an offer though, from Sineads principal-apparently people in Namibia really love these little Volkswagons.

So its been a hard week, but it would have been crazy to expect anything else. The weekend is definitely the light at the end of the tunnel for me right now- I'm about halfway there. Saturday is Sinead's birthday and we are going to have a little party with some other volunteers. So that is my first week- hard but not so bad and I can only hope things will get easier.

More photos

Recess in Rehoboth
Relaxing outside Windhoek

kids enjoying my hair

Rehoboth

So finally we've been out of windhoek (though now we are back) into the less developed parts of Namibia. We spent the past week in a town called Rehoboth about an hour south of the capital, where we practiced teaching with local students. Rehoboth was founded by Basters (a group of mixed race people that came from South Africa about 150 years ago), but we were primarily teaching to poorer black students who lived in the former location ( an apartheid era term that is similar to township in South Africa). Most of the peole in Rehoboth speak Damara, which is a language involving several click sounds written as !, //, /, and #. I tried to learn some, but mostly failed miserably. I've also learned some Afrikaans, and most imp0rtantly Oshivambo, which is the language I'll be speaking up north. Ongiini (hi- how are you in Oshiwambo)

The teaching went well, Loren Niemi (another volunteer) and I taught writing, math, and HIV/AIDs information. The math seemed to be particularly helpful, students really needed remedial help with things like square roots. It was funny, and a little sad because students said they wanted to learn things like integration and trigonometry, but then we found that they were having trouble with concepts like simplifying square roots, so we spent most of our time on that. I think this will be a common theme while teaching here. We also did a class on Hiv/AIDS, and this was interesting because it seemed like students had already heard most of what we were telling them. Granted we had older students (from 15 to 20), but still it made it clear that there is not a huge absence of AIDS education that is behind the epidemic here. (My class is shown in the first picture above).

Staying with a host family was really enlightening. I and another volunteer (Gavin McCormick) stayed in a house with a mother, two sons (ages 1.5 and 6), a daughter (age 11) a niece (21) and a nephew (25) (the second) picture above is of the family). At first I found it hard to relate with them, but after a few days we had a BBQ, and then the next day Gavin and I played games in the street with the younger kids, and both of these events seemed to help us interact with the family on a more personal level. (The BBQ was amazing- I helped to make hand made rolls that we then cooked over a fire, definitely something I want to bring back with me, beer would have been nice though.) At the end I felt sad to leave, and I was hopeful that my experience with my host family was an indicator that it would be relatively easy to make friends with Namibians.

After our four days in Rehoboth we headed south for two nights at a huge reservoir near the town of Mariental. It was excellent to be in a quiet, resort type setting, though it also felt a little artificial. We did see a lot of baboons (eating garbage) and also some hyraxes (little groundhog like critters that are related to elephants). Now we have been back in Windhoek for 4 days, doing more training. Sineads parents come today for a short visit, and her dad will drive us up north to our schools on friday. I am still very nervous, about starting teaching, but it has been good to have some time to get used to Namibia before really beginning this adventure.

New Years Windhoek style

Happy New Year everybody!

Actually, New Years in Namibia is pretty much like New Years in the states, we went to a club called Chez Ntemba, danced to a mix of Afropop, reggae, and American hip-hop, and drank some beers and cider ( a big thing here). They didn't do a countdown or anything, and besides a few guys with sparklers, and some people on the street who wanted to shake my hand and tell me happy new year, the actual holiday didn't seem to be a big deal.

On New Years day we went swimming at the municipal pool, which was clean and really cold and set in this beautiful area outside of town in the middle of dry desert hills- it definitely looked like Phoenix. Last night we ate at Joe's Beer House ("The most famous beer house on the African continent"), where I had oryx (so much for vegitarianism. It was excellent.

Today we head south to Rehoboth to practice teaching for a few days, and to stay with host families. Should push me out of my comfort zone a bit more and be really enlightining.