Site Visit

There are many things to report to you from my one week at site so in an effort to convey my experiences so they make some sort of sense – I’ll break it up. Hope it makes sense!

* My Site and Assignment - I have just returned from my one week visit at the permanent site assigned to me on September 8th. My site is located in a small rural village just outside of Okakarara (in case you wanted to glance at a map of Namibia) about 2 hours north of Okahandja. The name of the village is Ongombombonde and it is home to approximately 2,000 people, 1,000 of whom are children. My village is about 7km away from the nearest town with a bank, post office and a convenient type store for basic groceries. For anything else, I would have to travel 110km to the nearest city, Otjiwarango. The village schools in this area are Waterberg Primary & Secondary Schools. I am assigned to Waterberg Primary to teach fifth grade English and sixth and seventh grade BIS (Basic Information Science), which basically means I will be teaching the kids the basics of how to use a library and computers. Don’t worry, I haven’t been assigned to teach these kids how to build a network – just the basics as in “this is a mouse” “this is how to open and save a file in Microsoft Word.” The school just received a donation of 20 refurbished computers from a German charity and there are rumors that the internet is not far behind. Teaching HIV/AIDS awareness to the children is also a project I have been assigned, however I’m not certain how I am to go about it just yet. More to learn on that over the next few months.

*Hostel Living – This is a new concept that I was not prepared for. I guess the brief explanation we received from PC staff just wasn’t enough for me to formulate a true picture in my mind of what this exactly meant. There are approximately 500 primary school students (grade 1-7) and of those, a little over 400 live in a hostel on the school grounds. For most of the students, their families live too far away to walk back and forth to school every day so they live at the school in the hostel. The children live in accommodations that I can only equate to something a smidge nicer than what I would envision a concentration camp to be like. The concrete rooms house up to eight children and they all share a communal bathroom (separate for boys and girls). While there are metal bed frames provided in each of the rooms the children are responsible for their own mattress – many of which do not own one. This leaves many children to sleep on the metal lattice frame of the bed with only a small blanket. Some simply slept on the floor – sadly more comfortable than the metal frame. The children are woken up at 5:30am every morning, then they are fed breakfast in the dining hall before school begins at 7am. School ends at 1pm when the kids report to lunch and then they are just able to play, wander around the village, etc. There are supervisory teachers that rotate duty but in my opinion the kids were completely without supervision when they weren’t in class or eating. The teacher will bang on the metal tub to ring the kids in for dinner around 6pm and then the children seem to wander into their bedrooms for some rest around 8:30 or 9pm. The children only go home one weekend per month to see their families, other than that – they are living at the hostel 24/7 with no organized activities outside of the school day.

*Welcome Ceremony – Monday morning was my first day of school at Waterberg. I started the day at the daily 6:40am staff meeting where I was introduced to all of the teachers and welcomed by the HOD (Head of Department). Following the meeting, we walked to the Monday morning school assembly which I soon found out had turned into a welcoming ceremony for me. The children were all lined up and singing traditional Otjiherero songs. Some children held up homemade pictures of the US and Namibian flags while others had made signs saying “Welcome to Waterberg Primary Miss Amy.” I was introduced to the entire student body and then was treated to more dancing and welcome songs. Then I was asked to address the students, which I did surprisingly at ease. For the rest of the week, I shadowed the current PCV at Waterberg who will be leaving in December.

*My Housing at Site – The PC has started a new version of training with our group. This means that in addition to living with the host family I have been living with for over a month now, when I move to my permanent site in Ongombombonde I will again live with a new host family from October-December (including Christmas). From what I can gather, finding a home in my village that met PC safety and security requirements was a bit of a task given that most are tin shacks. I did get a chance to meet my house family, albeit briefly, and see the home. Without running the risk of offending anyone, I’ll just leave it as it was an extremely uncomfortable and bizarre experience and cannot imagine living there. My gut feeling just tells me something is off. However, after December I get to move into a private one bedroom flat with a private kitchen and bathroom, which is actually quite livable. The only kicker is, the flat is located on the school premises about 50 yards from the kids dining hall and 100 yards from the kids hostel, meaning I can hear the kids all of the time, and they are always around. You can’t step out the front door without kids being all around and they were constantly knocking on the door or stopping by to visit. So, very little privacy and alone time. I’m just not sure living and working at the same place is a healthy option for me. We’ll see. I just have to figure out how to make it through the homestay requirement first.

*Hiking back to Okahandja – I’m proud to say I safely made it back to Okahandja! As part of our training, we were tasked with finding our own way back to our training town. For many this involved trains and several car changes, so I found myself pretty lucky to be sharing a car with another PC trainee and two local women for my two hour ride that only cost me about $14 US. Five of us crammed into a car the size of a VW bug with no air-conditioning wasn’t ideal but I arrived safely so that’s all that mattered. This way of transportation is going to take some getting used to. Essentially there are very few “registered” taxis or combies (bus). Gypsy cabs (which basically mean anyone who owns a car and wants to charge you to take you somewhere but is not registered) are everywhere and are discouraged by the PC but really the only way to get from a village to a major town. Hiking is something I would NEVER do in the United States but it seems to be the only way to get out of the village or nearest town. I’m just not totally comfortable with the safety aspect of it yet, but seasoned PCVs say it becomes normal after you’ve done it a few times and you just have to be smart about it.

*Sleep – I’m beginning to think that the mefloquine malaria medicine is starting to take a toll on my body. The vivid dreams I can handle (although many of them are about being at home and when I wake up in Okahandja it can be a bit sad), but one side-effect is insomnia which I think I’m suffering from a little bit. I’m always exhausted but I can rarely sleep a few hours without waking up. It’s become quite normal for me to go to bed at 9:30pm and wake up at 12am, 1:30am, 4:00am, and 6:00am – which then I just lay awake in bed until I have to get up at 7am. My first few weeks in Namibia I was sleeping like a baby, but now I can barely muster up 4 hours of sleep in a row.

That about brings you up to speed I think. For now I’m back in Okahandja for more training until mid-October. We have a language test this Friday to ascertain our level of conversation skills thus far and will be debriefing from our site visits. Overall, I had a pretty decent site visit and am excited to hear the stories of the other trainees. I’d be lying if I told you everything was great and I didn’t have any concerns or doubts, but those are just some things I need to think through this week and figure out if I can really handle it.

**PS – To those of you who have asked about sending mail and packages from this point forward let’s just hold on these items for now. Mail is taking a little longer than expected (3-4 weeks) and in that time I could be at a different location. So hold those letters and packages until further notice and most of all, THANK YOU for sending anything!!