pit latrines, elephant dung, and albino peacocks

3.13.10
hey from namibia! (note: a sign in the airport read, 'you in namibia.' gotta love it.)

internet has been sparse lately and is about to get sparser, but i at least have the chance to send out this update email before that occurs.

we made it safely to namibia, arriving in the windhoek airport (deja vu of 11 years ago, when my family arrived in africa for the first time). we stayed several nights kind of out in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of the city at a place called penduka. we visited informal settlements, USAID headquarters, TB clinics and DOTS points, schools, a market, a women's empowerment activist organization, and an organization seeking to raise awareness and prevention of AIDS. we also broke into small groups with guides and visited different things in the katatura community. my group visited an art studio and a shop with all these hand made items, which were both really interesting. (sad news: i left my nalgene with all the stickers in the taxi and didn't realize till it drove away :( it is unhealthy how attached i get to my water bottles...)
we had the opportunity to go to megameno house (where a women has taken in twenty-some orphans from the community) three different times to hang out with the kids and love on them. the kids were so precious, and dr. maher said they've made huge strides since furman first started visiting megameno a few years ago.

we were split into pairs for 3-night urban homestays with families from windhoek. kasey and i were together with an adorable family. we went to a soccer game, china town (what the heck?), a "country club" (which was actually a casino with restaurants and a pool) just to walk around, and supermarkets/ outdoor markets. 

one of the most memorable stories of the weekend: the last night, our mama started telling us about her gall bladder surgery that she had back in '87 and whipped out a jar from under the sink full of all her gall stones!! then she proceeded to yank her dress up so we could see the foot and a half scar on her torso (underwear = slightly lacking/ could've used some situating). it was marginally horrifying.  

on another note, i got to visit the flat where my family used to stay when we lived in namibia 11 years ago and saw an old family friend, which was so surreal and exciting!

we then drove to the north for our 3-night rural homestays near khorixas. hannah and i were together and had such an interesting experience. we stayed in a room made out of a framework of big sticks covered in cow dung, slept under the mosquito nets we brought, and adjusted to the SLOW pace of life there. for the first 5 hours, we sat around with ouma (grandma) who didn't speak english and her 6-year-old granddaughter (beyonce) who wouldn't offer the little english she did know. after being offered some tea, at the bottom of which i found a spider, i started making some dinner with ouma over the fire. finally the daughter arrived with her baby son from khorixas, the nearby town, dropped of by usher. she was great, and her english was wonderful.

we went on a few walks, saw where elephants had recently left their mark, listened to jackals, played with baby turtles, kept an eye out for scorpions, peed in a pit latrine (or a bucket in the room if it was the middle of the night), had clicking lessons, and watched unbelievable sunsets. our mama braided my hair. her first attempt at braiding a white person's hair turned out impressively well.

we learned how to make pap, aka maize meal, or as i decided would be appropriate, 'cream of corn'. it made me think of my mom and her lumpy cream of wheat. i've never had so much of it in such a short amount of time. we would eat pap with salt, pap with milk, sugar, and cinnamon, pap with bbq flavoring, you name it. we also learned how to make fat cakes, aka 'olie bolle' ('oil balls') -- essentially donuts (like the beignets we used to have in benin).

one day hannah and i went out to try to milk the goats. it was tedious, between having to hold the goat still, not letting it kick the milk pail, watching out so that it didn't poop in my face, and getting milk up my nose. 20 goats later, we had about 3/4 cup of milk, complete with dirt chunks and maybe a couple goat hairs.

we spent the night after our homestays at a lodge in khorixas which had all kinds of game out in the open, right on the other side of this wire fence, including springbok (which are so cool to watch leap around), a huge ostrich, another kind of bok, and peacocks which would come over the fence and roam around a few feet away from us. one was albino! they had a "hot" tub, which was about 1 degree warmer, if that, than the pool, which had a cool waterfall and algae on the bottom. i can't leave out that there were germans in speedos too, adding to the atmosphere. 

today we drove about 8 hours to swakopmund on the coast of namibia. tomorrow is our free day, and a group of us are going sand boarding on the dunes! in a couple days, we're off to windhoek for one more night, botswana, and zimbabwe to see victoria falls!

looking forward to seeing everyone back home in a few weeks,

barton