I have now been at site for two weeks. My latest mantra is, "one day at a time."
Let me take a minute to describe my site. I am in a village just south of the Okavango River, and it is beautiful. Literally one of the most aesthetically pleasing places I have ever been. Last week I watched Lion King one day and couldn’t resist finding Nam in every bit. The desert scenes remind me of my training site and the drive from that site in central Nam to my current site in the north. Windmills are scattered, along with wildlife, on the sides of the highway. The earth cracks with dryness, and as soon as you cross the green line (a mark that divides the fertile, farming land from the dust that is the rest of the country), you are immediately in a new world.
Traditional homesteads populate this region, comprised of wooden huts with thatched grass or tin roofs. Other than homes, there are literally only shebeens—bars that specialize in a local brew made of maize meal. These are usually made from mud or cement blocks. Often, these bars will also sell groceries such as maize meal, cooking oil, and soaps. Many people here are unemployed and receive a monthly pension check from the government. Many children are orphans. Many orphans are also parents. On payday or pension paydays, entire communities will convene at shebeens. The majority of these establishments take credit, so if one buys too much beer than their pension will allow, he or she will spend the first portion of the next check paying back debts.
A large problem with the education system is a lack of equality between urban and rural areas. As teachers becomes qualified, it is much more appealing to go work in a town, where they have access to amenities, can establish a nice living situation for their families, and they can continue to work on their education with postgrad certificate classes. To try and equalize the quality of education throughout the country, the government has an incentive system for rural areas. Teachers outside of the towns receive bush checks, and the amount is variable depending on the school’s situation. The idea is a good one, but the practicality of it is questionable. My school is currently overstaffed, and two teachers will have to transfer by January. An incentive to volunteer to leave is that the bush checks at the hiring schools is higher. While this move encourages qualified teachers to spread their talents into bush schools, it is a double-edged sword. As a result of it, many teachers are constantly moving or rotating schools to find better pay. Their families may live in town, or they may live in the village where the teacher grew up. Consequently, teachers are constantly leaving the school’s village to visit family and friends (every weekend, holiday, funeral, wedding, or other major event). This makes for a migratory community—full of members who migrate across the country. Unfortunately, it makes it hard to establish clubs, projects, etc. because the manpower is not only unavailable to work but also not invested in the work. When a teacher leaves his or her community to follow the bush check or available teaching position, he or she does not view the school’s community as his or her own. Instead, it is a sort of transitory place, and their homes here are temporary weekday homes. This feeling translates to the learners, who, along with the staff, come to school to work and then go home to their own families and lives. School is not their community, where resources and relationships are available but instead a group of buildings where they are lectured to and expected to pass exams as a stepping stone to a possible career. For those who wish to remain in the village after schooling, particularly young mothers, there is not much of a motive to attend classes or pass examinations, because doing so will not directly benefit them. Parents may encourage children to start a family at a young age so that they will have a generation of grandchildren to take care of them and their land on the homestead when they become elders. For those who become teachers, it is expected that their salary will help pay for the family’s food; to compensate for not being there to labor, the teacher must be there for the family economically, and visit often to help with the chores, at the church, with farming and harvesting, etc.
Back to my site. The foundation and ideals of a successful school are absolutely here. I have not seen corporal punishment, which happens with frequency throughout the country, the principal is female, and the facilities are pretty nice. Most learners have textbooks, chairs, desks, and pens, there is a computer lab with a printer and scanner, and there is a tap with running water on the school grounds. The cleaner is wonderful and maintains the grounds, and there is actually a garden and soccer field just next to the school. This winter, the combined school (grades 5-10) will begin planting maize meal, which will feed learners. The primary school’s half of the garden is already up and running. There is a netball field but it needs a lot of work, as the rims are bent and vary in height, and I can dunk on both of them.
However, all of this maintenance is operated by the personal funds of the teachers here. Every morning it seems that there is a new request for money to pay for the computer lab fee (ink and toner cartridges), copy machine contribution (they hope to purchase one next February and have been collecting all year), sport (transportation to nearby school for the occasional Wednesday soccer/netball tournament), end of the year function, etc. It is frustrating to me that the money for bush checks, often spent on alcohol or sent back to another village, but that there is no money for computer paper or a copy machine. Also, there’s a big initiative to involve technology in the classrooms, so there are nice computers, but there are no chairs in the lab, and there is no A/C unit to keep the machines cool enough to function properly. There also, obviously, is no internet in the lab.
I have many project ideas already. I’d like to work on the condition of the athletics fields and participation. I’d like to start a school newspaper club. I’d like to come up with some way to get HIV/AIDS education translate to reality for these learners. But most of all, I hope to find a community within this community that has any interest in these kinds of projects. I would like to find a way to allow the learners to have time to participate in them. They spend all day until 1:00 in classes, then walk, often significant distances, home for lunch, where they will often just get the leftover porridge, then come back from 3:00-4:30 to do large sums of homework they were assigned, and then rush back home to collect water from the river before dark, help prepare dinner and care for younger siblings in homesteads that largely have no electricity. They must arise early the next day to walk the many km back to school by 7:00. So, I wouldn’t say that it’s apathy that prevents projects and clubs from succeeding here but rather lack of time and resources and priorities that rightly lay in caring for and respecting family.
Anyway, all that aside, some are probably wondering about my living conditions. I stay in one of three teachers’ houses at the school. I share it with two female colleagues. There is the infrastructure for running water, but it doesn’t work, so we fetch water in buckets daily by turning on a tap outside the house that sends water shooting out of our kitchen wall. Consequently, that water has to flow through rusted pipes where dust and whatever else has settled, meaning that I boil my drinking water. Unfortunately that doesn’t get rid of the aluminum, but it isn’t so bad. We have a shower room, where I bucket bathe at 6:00 a.m., and we flush our indoor toilet by pouring water into the bowl. Generally, my house doesn’t smell too great. But, good news is that there is electricity, and all of the windows have burglar bars. Aside from the potential snakes and spiders, I feel overall very safe in my home. Occasionally, fishermen will walk by selling fish strung from sticks. This week I will try and cook one myself for the first time.
The rain hasn’t really started yet but we’ve gotten a couple of strong storms overnight, and today is very windy so my fingers are crossed. I run in the evenings, when I get the chance to greet others in my village, many of whom survive off maize farming. The other evening, I stopped to greet and speak with some villagers, and as I ran from the main road, their dogs scattering a bit, I heard a commotion behind me. When I turned around, one of the family’s dogs was rolling, lifeless, across the road. He was struck by a speeding vehicle and killed immediately. Last Friday, on my way into town, I found out that an eleven-year-old learner was struck similarly just ten minutes before. The weekend before, a local principal was killed in a car accident when he was driving home. He had been drinking in town and fell asleep at the wheel, his car getting lodged under a bus going the opposite direction. A big problem is that the tarred road up here is new, and in fact not even yet complete, so people are not familiar with properly crossing the road or walking on the paths to the sides of the road. Also, vehicles are often traveling long distances and the population isn’t very dense along the road, so they take advantage of the new tarred road and speed, and there is no formal traffic police system that will punish or deter drivers from drinking, speeding, or both.
All this to say, if you are in America, don’t take it for granted. Respect the establishment of a police force, even if you cannot respect some of the individuals in it. Relish the security of our schoolchildren and our transportation systems and speed limits. Feel happy that in the schools you attended, A/C and heat, as well as government feeding programs, could allow the learners to remain focused in class. And most of all, love your showers!!!
Sidenote: some have asked if there is anything I need shipped. I am pretty much ok, but I LOVE letters and cards (and they have a smaller chance of getting stolen by customs officers). I will also never turn down any flavored powders for water (Gatorade, crystal light, decent instant coffee, whatever), cheese packets from mac and cheese, or any good Newsweek/Time/Nat Geo. My new address is in Rundu, but because I will not be here for good until January, continue sending anything to the Ausspanplatz, Windhoek address for the time being, and hopefully I’ll get it in four weeks when I go there for reconnect. Hint hint: I’m not overly enthused about missing Xmas, so any Xmas cards will be most cherished!! Also, no more good packages til Jan cause apparently there’s a high rate of postal theft during the holidays, and mail takes forever to get here in Nov-Dec. boo.
Feliz Dia de los Muertos!!!
