And the Word Opaque

OCTOBER 30 2008!!!!
(I get really excited about dates lately… they seem to come as a surprise to me most of the time)

Well, the good news is that October 30th is right in the middle of Nam 27’s Week O’One Year Anniversaries. The celebration mostly just includes Facebook updates and SMSes about what we were doing one year ago – who we met first, who we thought was crazy, how many times we broke down crying/freaking out/calling home, how great per diem was when it was in American dollars instead of Nam dollars, etc. The week started on October 28th, when all the west coasters were flown to DC for PC staging on the 29th. The group flew out of DC on October 31st and finally made to Namibia on November 2nd. And the rest is history. Well at least until January 9th. That’s when we became real volunteers. And that anniversary means I’ll only have 11 months left.

The bad news is that October 30th means that it’s Namibian springtime, which really means its summertime. Make sense? No? Let me try explaining another way: I’m in an oven. At first this weather wasn’t so bad. It was just searing sun. When I went inside, it was easy to cool down. Now, the heat follows me everywhere. It’s because of the humidity. Recently the clouds came back and added humidity to my life. I thought maybe I was being a wimp because it’s probably only about 1.1% more humidity than normal. And being springtime, there are still a lot of pleasant days. But on bad days, by adding that extra stuffy humidity to the regular 125-degree weather, I think I’m going to pass out in class if I talk too loud.

Today was actually a bad day weather-wise. I was sweating in the morning meeting at 7am. When it’s this hot the learners actually do pass out, sleeping. At first, I thought that this was unacceptable. I would wake them up and insist that they participate in class. Now, I just let them sleep. Honestly? It’s the best thing for everyone. Over the past two days, I’ve seen more acts of violence in the school than all of term 2. Kids are just irritable.

Actually, violence is typical at school. It’s all pretty tame violence though, if there is such a thing. Everyday, at least 5 to 35 times, I hear, “Miss, this one is beating me!” or “I’m going to beat that one!!!”- Which is usually accompanied by a unique to Namibia pointing-glaring combination to ensure that I understand which child they are about to beat. In January, I was lucky enough to come across Appropriate Touch in the Health portion of the Natural Science Curriculum. One of the solutions grade 7 thought of to deal with inappropriate touch was to move away. Even though I had only been teaching for a week or so at that time, I could already tell peer beating was a problem that I wasn’t going to be able to put a scratch in by myself. So I took the opportunity to make them put down their pens, fold their hands (how I make them show they’re listening to me) and listen to my mini lecture. Ahem:

“If someone is making you feel uncomfortable, or bad…”

(I usually say the big word first, then the easy synonym second).

“You should MOVE AWAY! Don’t keep staying by that person. If someone is beating you or not respecting you, MOVE AWAY! Even in this class, move away! Lift up your hand and tell me that you need to move. Don’t sit there. Move! …”

I’m all about taking control of your own destiny. Since that lecture, its not uncommon for me to be writing on the board and turn around to see a learner holding his desk – “Miss, I need to move away.” And he’ll shuffle his desk over to the other side of the classroom. It’s hard not to laugh because they’re so cute. But I try to stifle the laughing because they’re also usually really angry at whomever they’re moving away from. I just get so proud when they choose to take the high road. It’s rare and it takes a self-restraint that they don’t have much practice with.

Anyway, all that’s to say, there hasn’t been much moving away the past couple of days. Yesterday was the big blowout. We have a break from 10:00 to 10:30. It’s “required” for all the teachers to come to the staff room during break in case there is an accidental meeting during that half hour. I kid you not – “Some information may slip out during that time and all teachers must be present if there is something important said”. I like to gamble and skip. Some teachers don’t gamble at all, they just don’t care if something important is said and they don’t come. Others have teamed up with their friends and one of them has to go every other day and then relay the important information, if any, to the absent friend (Now seeing how there are 20 teachers all together, I don’t see how this relaying information thing would be so hard to establish school-wide… especially since small boys are sent with all note carrying/message delivering matters anyway. The teachers wouldn’t even have to stand up).

So, we’re all sitting in the staff room during break and there are movie-quality shrieks out of the window. I look through the lace curtains and only see a lot of dust and a sea of blue uniforms. I turned and looked back at the teachers. One of the teachers takes a bite of his mayonnaise and margarine sandwich. He says over the bite, “Oh, they’re fighting” and then continues chewing. No one else even blinks. Trying to make more sense of the situation, I walked out of the office block to the courtyard of the school. Sure enough, there was a fight of over a hundred kids in progress. One of the prefects (handily wearing a white uniform shirt for easy identification) was standing there to inform me calmly, “Miss they are fighting”. I said, “No, really?” before I realized that my sarcasm doesn’t fly here. She said, “It’s true, miss”. And I said, “hmm”. I think what surprised me the most was that I wasn’t that surprised.

Maybe a minute later, the teacher with the mayonnaise-margarine sandwich came out, casually wiping his hands with a dishcloth. He said something to the prefects standing around and pointed to the bustling crowd. The prefects ran off into the fight. A few seconds later the intense crowd broke into smaller fights and soon kids were just standing around looking angry – the prefects were still hanging onto the shirt tails of a few of the most guilty contenders. About that time, a few more teachers came out of the office block waving sticks and yelling in their Damara angry voices.

Damara angry voices are truly a trait worthy of awe. 60% of the women and girls I know here are capable of this tone. Never have I experienced a tone of voice that I would believe is literally poisonous. You can almost see the green cloud of toxins coming from the person using this tone of voice. Really, an inspiring tool in the area of crowd control. But definitely not one I envy. The teachers were yelling in their angry voices and waving sticks around the courtyard. Less than 30 seconds later, the kids were in perfect lines, boys and girls, outside their classrooms waiting for class to start again. Even the dust took longer to settle than the kids. Unbelievable.

Actually, a school-wide fight is pretty believable here if it weren’t for the two things that happened later.

Later in the day, I passed a crowd of teachers and a grade five learner on the sidewalk. They were using their Damara angry voices so I just kept walking, as usual. A few minutes later, one of the same teachers came into the office behind me. She was talking to me about Peace Corps and how they had called earlier that day. As she was talking, she pulled out a phone recharge card and started to scratch off the silver layer over the number. She tried her fingernail first but it wasn’t working so she pulled out a big flip knife (I don’t know anything about knives, but it was big) and started scratching with that. I said, “uuuuuuuuuuumm. Ahem.” And pointed to the knife. The teacher said, “Oh, that boy brought it to school today” and then waved the knife around in a displeased manner and went back to the phone charger. That was it. Angry poison voices, taking the knife away and sending the kid back to class! Unbelievable.

Luckily, the knife thing was towards the end of school. And also luckily, it was Wednesday so I didn’t have to go back for study. I just sat in front of my fan all afternoon. I loooooooove my fan. Love it.

This morning was pretty calm. In my third class of the day, I was doing a serious lecture about finding the area of a rectangle. I had to keep talking louder and louder because the kids next door were making so much noise. A few months ago, one of the teachers told me I needed to take more initiative in discipline and general order around the school. I do have a tendency to ignore things that don’t have anything to do with me. That’s a very American thing to do. Plus, I’m really quiet compared to most of the learners and teachers here. So, keeping the more initiative suggestion in mind, I left a practice problem for my class on the board and headed next door.

A girl was standing in the door. It was a grade 5 class. Apparently, I look like I need the obvious explained to me because the girl said, “Miss, they’re fighting”. Then? She laughed! I looked around the room and everyone was enjoying themselves! And in the very center were a boy and a girl fighting. I thought, more initiative! So I walked over and grabbed their arms and pulled them apart. It didn’t do much though because they just twisted free and kept fighting. This fight was something else. I wanted to look around the room to make sure there were no cameras – it almost seemed scripted. The boy was obviously winning. And he was obviously not going to stop. I didn’t really know what to do so I grabbed his ear and his shoulder and pulled him back. It didn’t do a single darn thing. Then, do you know what he did? He pulled free and bit into the neck of the girl he was fighting and started twisting his head back and forth trying to tear the skin.

Alright. Initiative schmitiative. I called the prefects.

Sure enough the prefects pulled them apart and carried the boy outside. I was checking the girl for blood when the class teacher came back (mayonnaise margarine man). He glazed over the class and walked to his desk and started shuffling papers… Um, excuse me? This boy just tried to exercise his canines on this girl. Both of which were hanging out in your abandoned class! Was this homework or something?

But I didn’t say that. I just walked out and went back to rectangles. I was totally traumatized. Every time I turned around to write on the board for the rest of the period I would almost start crying. I don’t understand how anyone can go to school and try to learn about rectangles when they don’t even feel safe. Obviously these kids are way tougher than I was at their age. But some degree of safety and security is needed just to be a normal person, let alone move on the other things like geometry.

I never felt in danger. I wasn’t even upset because all these things were happening in proximity to me. No one is angry at me. I give them stickers – they love me. They’re angry at each other. And the fact that no one is watching their backs is upsetting. That’s not a normal childhood – in any culture.

But, yeah, it’s been a crazy few days. In the last class of the day, half the kids fell asleep. So, I took up the papers we were working on and said, “shh, nap time. We’ll review tomorrow”. It was too long and miserable of a day for anyone to have to think about science.


November 6th 2008

Yesterday was an incredible day! With the time difference, McCain made his concession speech at about 6:00 in the morning yesterday. I got an SMS from a teacher at my school at about 6:01 that said, “Obama wins election!!!!!!” Then, not even a minute later I got an SMS from one of the Nigerian volunteers that said, “Congratulations fo d excellent manner ya country conducted her elections and d subsequent victory of B. Obama. That is why I love Americans”.

Let me tell you, I have not received that much America-love in the entire time I’ve been here. Well… that’s not entirely true. A lot of men love America. That is until I tell them I won’t marry them and buy them a plane ticket to my homeland… then they’re full of words one should never use whilst in an attempt to woo a future spouse.

Anyway, the rest of the day at school, it was easy to pick out the kids who have TVs at home. They would run up to me and say, “Miss, your country is having a new president! He’s a black man!!!!” To which, my two favorite responses were, “Oh my! I have a new president?! That’s so exciting!” and “So, what country is that exactly?” The answer to the latter was split three ways: South Africa, Germany and North America (They don’t let volunteers teach social studies… but I’m not exactly sure why because I feel that I could at least explain that just because people look alike it doesn’t mean they’re from the same country).

Kids and adults alike are equally inspired by the “son of Africa” that will be the head of the free world. I’m sure that Barak wasn’t running to please the African continent. And I’m also sure that he wasn’t elected because people in Namibia have been holding their breath since May for a black man to become the next American president. But I am sure that the soon-to-be 44th president has already restored a huge amount of faith in America from overseas.

I know that image isn’t everything. I also believe that we shouldn’t choose our leaders just because of what they look like. And I am interested with the issues and plans for the next four years. But I do want to say that, while living in an African country, I have never been so thankful that the American image has significantly improved in the course of the last three days. Earlier this year, some volunteers were on a tour of Botswana and actually got boo-ed for being American… Let’s be honest, an image boost couldn’t hurt, right?

All that’s to say, it was a good day for America across the globe… no matter who you voted for.


November 7th 2008
The new group, Nam 28 gets here today. I can’t believe it – we’re not the Peace Corps freshmen anymore. Weird.

Well, today, I had a couple of really cute conversations. The first one was with a learner named Silvanus. He is one of my favorite learners because he tries so hard.

Silvanus’s sir name ends in a B. On the other hand, his mother and sisters’ sir names end in an S. That’s the way Damara sir names work. If the family name is Gaingob, all of the sons will keep Gaingob and all of the daughters will get Gaingos. Gaeb/Gaes, Nunueb/Nunues, and Aebeb/Aebes are all family name pairs. And while Silvanus’s actual sir name ends in a B, all of the learners make fun of him by changing it to an S and calling him Miss. But Silvanus is one of my favorites because it doesn’t faze him. He usually deals with it by saying “Ai! Leave Me!” and making a waving motion – no beating or yelling as with other learners. He does have his fair share of actual friend… all of them girls though.

So, a few of the teachers were missing from work today. That usually means my library is full of learners who are bored. Silvanus was hanging out in there during an early morning period. He was looking through our new collection of Ranger Rick Magazines – donated by generous American kids. I was busy making “turn in your library books or else!” posters for every class and he was just chatting away. I don’t know if he stopped to breathe for the whole 40 minutes he was in there. My favorite part of the conversation was about his plans for secondary school (high school): He doesn’t want to take Khoekhoe in secondary school because the teacher is mean. Instead he wants to take the Afrikaans option. But he’s upset because his mother won’t let him take Afrikaans. He said, “My mother tells me that I will pick up Afrikaans in the street. But I go out in the street and no one is out there teaching it. Even yesterday, she tells me that I can learn Afrikaans in the street and I go outside and there is no one, Miss. I don’t know how I am going to learn Afrikaans in the street if no one is out on my street teaching it.” All I could picture was him going outside everyday looking for an impromptu classroom set in the middle of the dirt road. I thought about explaining the phrase “on the street” but decided against it. He’s so good at English already he’ll figure it out soon enough.

A little later, Elma came in. Elma is another favorite because she never gives up. She’s in my math class. In math class, I try to get them to work faster by giving a sticker to the first four or five who finish their problems. Elma gets so excited she’ll raise her hand to show me each step of the problem she writes, just in case she accidentally wrote the answer and she’s inadvertently won a sticker. She has a lot of problems with columns (you know, not adding in a diagonal) and multiplication (for some reason 6 times 0 equals 6 no matter how many times we practice it) so she only has four or five stickers in her book. But that doesn’t get her down. No sir-ee, she just works harder. That sticker is hers; Miss Jessica just doesn’t know it yet.

Elma is also in our girls’ club. The very first girls’ club, we had the girls decorate their journals with some markers that Jill got in a package from home. Most of the girls copied drawings from each other or had the one good artist draw for them (they’re so afraid that they might mess up, they’d rather not risk it). But not Elma. No, Elma took the full time allotted. Elma used every color in the box. And I’m not exactly sure what Elma drew but it’s really colorful and really enthusiastic and it’s a hell of a lot more exciting than the other girls’ journals.

Anyway, Elma came in and she wanted to know about the last girls’ club meeting next week. Yesterday, I made the announcement that the last girls’ club would be on Thursday next week and that we would do something fun. The words “something fun” were then run through the middle school gossip gamut and reached Elma’s ears as “a great big party with lots and lots of food”. I tried to explain to Elma that we weren’t having a party but it just wasn’t getting through. So, then I switched to explaining that the meeting would be a “tiny party”. She kept asking why we couldn’t have a big party. She even suggested we take up a donation. It took her a few moments to calculate how much money we would have for our big party if everyone brought in a dollar… she used her fingers and looked up and the ceiling… We would have… 2… 5… 9! We would have 9 dollars for our big party! …We have 13 girls in our club. I’m not sure where 9 came from. Finally, I explained that we just couldn’t do a big party. It was going to have to be a tiny tiny party – like the size of my fingernail. She looked at my fingernail really closely and then said, “oh” and looked a little sad. I said, “Its ok. It’ll be like Wooo!” and put my hands in the air like a roller coaster. Hesitantly, she mimicked me, “Woo?” and kept her hands in the air as she looked at me for approval. “Exactly,” I said. Hands straight up in the air in a Charlie-Brown-good-grief fashion, she walked out of the library she practiced her, “Woo” – it was still a little half-hearted. Then, from down the corridor I heard “Woo!!” and knew she had gotten it… I am SO looking forward to our fingernail-sized party next week. You have no idea.

Well, TGIF. Plus? One more week of teaching! Then, two weeks of exams. Then, Merry Christmas to me – I don’t have to go to school for a month and a half! Woot.


November 18th

End of the year exams started today. All of my classes take their exams today or tomorrow. It’s really nice that way because I’ll finish all my work this week. Then next week I can visit some other volunteers for Thanksgiving and focus on making my house into a fortress for the Christmas month. We don’t have a lot to steal, but we also don’t have a lot of money to replace things that are stolen. An ounce of prevention…

… I don’t really know the end of that saying.

I wasn’t allowed to invigilate today because the learners were writing my exam. So instead I cleaned my corner of the library so I would have a place to mark the exams when they were finished. In the library, I have a learner’s desk and a learner’s chair tucked behind the checkout counter for my workspace. The desktop doesn’t really attach to the metal frame below. I never really thought it was weird until today when the whole desk collapsed with my papers on it. Guess it serves me right for laughing at the learners that had similar troubles all year.

But while I was cleaning up all of my papers, I found some old papers I hadn’t returned to the learners yet. Two of them had answers that I had to share with you.

Question: What are the colours in the rainbow?
Answer: Pollo and beber and rett and vaett and baroont and blue

That’s to say, yellow and purple and red and violet and blue. I’m not sure what baroont is. When I’m grading I usually have to take on a Namibian accent and read the answers aloud. Sometimes, still, I have no idea what I’m reading.

And the second,
Question: Why does your body make a shadow in the sun? (Please use the word “opaque”)
Answer: The body mas ket the energy and the word opaque.

Ha, he used the word opaque (“Mas ket” means “must get”) but I still didn’t give him credit. I was trying to get him to use one of the properties of light – light beams travels in straight lines. And at the same time, make him remember the vocabulary – opaque and translucent. But, while wrong, I do admire the creativity that went into his answer. And the word opaque.

In some ways I’m going to miss my grade 7 classes a lot. They’re growing up and moving on to secondary school. They were with me through all of my learning experiences (like when I discovered that you can’t lean on a learner’s desk when you come over to help them – you end up falling along with the desk. Or the time I learned that a crazy man lives in the boys bathroom – he’s perfectly friendly but gets a little too curious about new teachers). They’ve been gracious in a lot of ways and, overall, they’ve been good sports about the whole cross-cultural science experiment. But in other ways, I’m excited for a new year and some new experiences.

Well, I’m ending it here. I’ve got less than a month before I get to visit America for Christmas. I’m really excited for friends and family and a hair cut (October 2007 was my last) and fresh fruit and cold cold cold weather (it’s around 130F today, so “cold” isn’t hard to achieve). Never fear, though, I’ll be back to write in January again.

And for those of you who continue to read my ramblings and opinions and random stories, I really appreciate it. You’ve been reading for over a year and you don’t think I’m crazy yet. Or you do and you’re just being polite. But either way, thanks for listening.