Into the Kalahari

a chronicle of my time in the namibian desert

Apologies

Just wanted to post something real quick to apologize to those that follow this blog for not keeping it more up to date.  I would love to post on here more regularly, but unfortunately, our wireless has been down for a couple of months and, while I do have internet, I share it with the other 6 members of this household on one computer.  It’s tough to find time to get online and when I do I mostly just write a quick email and get back off. 

However, this week we are hoping to have a man come from Aranos to work on the internet so perhaps the dry spell is coming to a close? We shall see.  If I get my wireless back up this week, I’ll be able to resume my techy correspondence with the world at large and hopefully this blog will once again be an interesting one to follow.  :)

In the meantime, things are still chugging along here.  This week my students are learning about how to express preferences, how to tell time and how to speak with the ‘simple present’ tense.  Time has been a really fun thing to explore as mechanical time is a totally foreign notion.  It’s been a philisophical kind of week as I teach them to tell time in a way that radically defines how we think about the world.  They’re interested in the way that I think and the way that the farmers I live with think and I know that this whole window into our point of view on time tells them a lot about things they’ve had trouble understanding.  Why do we run in and out of camp? Why do we suddenly get anxious when it’s time to go?  Why am I always looking at my wrist during class? These behaviors are not things they understand- why the rush?  As they learn about how we speak about time in English (we talk about it like it’s money, after all) I think they are beginning to see where our paranoia stems from.  They may still find it ridiculous but it’s an insight all the same.

Well once again my computer time is up.  Hope to post again soon.

My Desert Book List 4.0

With my immense wealth of time, I have decided to read every free book I could get my hands on with my Kindle (and some books that I paid for as well…) So here is a running list of my reads:

The Count of Monte Cristo- Alexander Dumas

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert M. Pirsig

Sex on Six Legs - Marlene Zuk

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

The Sense of An Ending - Julian Barnes

1Q84 - Haruku Murakami

Out of Oz: The Final Volume of the Wicked Years - Gregory Maguire

A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf (no matter what…this book never gets old)

The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Middlesex: A Novel - Jeffrey Eugenides

The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbury

The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan

A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

To be continued….

My Desert Book List 3.0

With my immense wealth of time, I have decided to read every free book I could get my hands on with my Kindle (and some books that I paid for as well…)

So here is a running list of my reads:

The Count of Monte Cristo- Alexander Dumas

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Life of Pi - Yann Martel 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert M. Pirsig

Sex on Six Legs - Marlene Zuk

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

The Sense of An Ending - Julian Barnes

1Q84 - Haruku Murakami

Out of Oz: The Final Volume of the Wicked Years - Gregory Maguire

A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf (no matter what…this book never gets old)

The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

To be continued….

Yikes Sorry for the Hiatus

Having not had wireless internet the past few weeks, I haven’t really been able to give my blog the tender loving care it deserves.  I guess there is a lot to be caught up on, but I’m not sure I’m up to it quite frankly.  Life is an ongoing experience so let’s just start where we find ourselves, yes?  We’ll go from now.

This morning, I woke up in Mariental, a ‘city’ (town) midway between Aranos and Windhoek.  Awie and Sonia hopped in the front of the pickup and the kids and I hopped in the back.  It’s nice in the back- Awie straps a green cover over the bed of the truck and we pile up mattresses and pillows.  This morning, as we left as 5 am with the stars just fading in the Eastern part of the sky, I laid down on the mattress at the edge of the truck bed and fell back asleep moving beneath the stars.  I slept most of the two hours to Windhoek and woke up just as some of the desert mountains signaled the approach of the city.

When you drive into Windhoek, you approach from the top of a hill so you can truly appreciate how very small it is.  While Windhoek is the capital city of Namibia, it boasts only 400,000 people.  The highest buildings are perhaps about 15 stories tall and it looks like a very wide small town spread out in the arid hills.  The environment around Windhoek reminds me of New Mexico….although it lacks the flat plateaus.  But that same greened scrub brush on white-yellow sand look.  Windhoek lies in a valley, with little rolling hills across the whole city.  

Awie and Sonia dropped me off near the visa office and I went into hell on earth.  I stood in line for awhile, inquired about my visa extension, was told to look through about 10 piles of randomly thrown together paperwork, didn’t find my name and was told to check tomorrow.  Somehow I think tomorrow the extension won’t have gone through either.  Who knows? Organized is not a word that comes to mind.

Afterwards, I headed to an internet cafe, found a hostel online and walked across the city with my backpack to the backpackers hostel.  How fitting.  It’s a nice little spot called the Cardboard Box.  It runs about 11 dollars a night, has a pool, includes breakfast and (other than the see through shower curtains in the community bathrooms) it’s really very nice.  Tomorrow I’m thinking of doing a bike tour they offer—if it’s cheap.

Today I laid by the pool and relaxed.  I bought an Economist (Merry Christmas to me) which I intend to read tonight.  It’s been a nice little relaxing afternoon.  I even made a friend from Finland who sat with me and made me pasta and tuna for dinner with sweet corn on the side! I am a lucky lady and I feel like this day couldn’t have gone off much better despite the visa issue. 

Tomorrow who knows what I’ll do.  Windhoek doesn’t offer a whole lot- I think one might find more entertainment on the farm, incredibly enough.  Ah well, I’m sure I’ll find something.  And Wednesday on a flight to South Africa and then Mozambique!! Exciting times here in Africa.  The holidays approach- though I haven’t felt it yet.  It promises to be an unusual Christmas.  

Some assorted pictures around the farm

I’m Hamlet. 

I’m Hamlet. 

And about my jack-o’-lantern

I forgot to tell one of my favorite stories from the past week!! I guess I forgot to tell stories in general- sorry got a bit too philosophical with things there.

I took my turtle pumpkin to class the week following Halloween to try and show my students what I had been talking about.  Hatei, the grandmother of the Bushmen clan, laughed pretty hard when she saw it.  When I showed her the candle inside, she completely lost it.  Shaking her head, she took it from my hands and walked off to cook it. 

“In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
Many are convinced that mechanical time does not exist. When they pass the giant clock on the Kramgasse they do not see it; nor do they hear its chimes while sending packages on Postgasse or strolling between flowers in the Rosengarten. They wear watches on their wrists, but only as ornaments or as courtesies to those who would give timepieces as gifts. They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. they feel the rhythms of their moods and desires. Such people eat when they are hungry, go to their jobs at the millinery or the chemist’s whenever they wake from their sleep, make love all hours of the day. Such people laugh at the thought of mechanical time. They know that time moves in fits and starts. They know that time struggles forward with a weight on its back when they are rushing an injured child to the hospital or bearing the gaze of a neighbor wronged. And they know too that time darts across the field of vision when they are eating well with friends or receiving praise or lying in the arms of a secret lover.
Then there are those who think that their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. As such, the body must be addressed in the language of physics. And if the body speaks, it is the speaking of only so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.
Taking the night air along the river Aare, one sees evidence for two worlds in one. A boatman gauges his position in the dark by counting seconds drifted in the water’s current. “One, three meters. Two, six meters. Three, nine meters.” His voice cuts through the black in clean and certain syllables. Beneath a lamppost on the Nydegg Bridge, two brothers who have not seen each other for a year stand and drink and laugh. The bell of St. Vincent’s Cathedral sings ten times. In seconds, lights in the apartments lining Schifflaube wink out, in a perfect mechanized response, like the deductions of Euclid’s geometry. Lying on the riverbank, two lovers look up lazily, awakened from a timeless sleep by the distant church bells, surprised to find that night has come. Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.”
—   Einstein’s Dreams - Alan Lightman

48 Hours

At the request of my sister, I am writing again.  Sorry for the hiatus for those that check this regularly.  

The initial problem in writing on my blog began a week ago when the internet quit for several days.  I didn’t have access to the web, including Tumblr, until we could get someone out here to fix it.  That time of internet silence coincided with the departure of my students to an area called the ‘corridor,’ a sort of reservation style location allocated to a variety of native groups who live in Namibia.  The Bushmen I teach used to live there, but apparently sharing the land with such a large number of ethnic groups was difficult and they were sometimes targeted.  They also tell me that they had to live in rather tight quarters and that quarreling and jealousy became major issues.  At any rate, they return to the corridor every so often to visit family and to collect money, which I understand to be from the government, although admittedly I haven’t been able to figure out much about the situation.  

During the time I had no internet, when Awie and Sonia went to Windhoek on an errand and when I had no one to teach with the Bushmen absent, I spent five days understanding a whole different meaning of the words ‘loneliness’ and ‘boredom.’  Lucas and I played a lot of bananagrams, I read a lot of books, I counted down until 6 each day when I could go running.  But really the solitude is a bit of a killer.  I found myself in ill spirits several times and homesick unlike I’ve been since moving East.  At any rate, it’s really not so bad, but there really isn’t much to do.  I found myself thinking about just how relative time really is.  It reminded me of a chapter in a book called Einstein’s Dreams (which, incidentally, you should read if you haven’t yet) about mechanical time and body time.  In this chapter, the author explains that there are two types of time: mechanical time and body time.  Those who believe in body time eat when they want, make love when they want and live according to their needs and desires.  They wear watches for decoration and never check them for accuracy.  They know that mechanical time is a lie and only the individual can know what ‘time’ truly is.  Those who believe in mechanical time understand that mechanical time must be strictly adhered to.  They eat at 8, 12, and 5.  They make love in the evening.  They know the body is a collection of cells that must be controlled and willed.  The author ends the chapter by stating that both times are true, but they are not the same truth.  And I thought about that this weekend as I tried to watch mechanical time only to find that out here, with nothing to mark the hours, it means very little.  

I thought about my own time relativity a lot.  It seems impossible that a weekend I spent at BC trying to go to a game, do my homework, train for my half marathon, go to Sunday brunch, read the Sunday times, go to Acoustics rehearsal, see my friends, call home, etc etc etc— it seems impossible that that weekend could contain the same 48 hours that dragged past this first weekend of November.  Who knew that 48 hours was such a very long time?  It seems a well kept secret that an hour may travel past so slowly.  Ironically, it made me feel that life is short.  At least, life as I have ben leading it.  And I felt precariously aware of the fact that I am a quarter into my life and feel as though it has flown by.  

To get back to the Bushmen’s time away— It’s an interesting thing, the way the Bushmen live spread out from one another.  The family I am living near to and teaching has family members spread throughout the corridor and into Botswana.  They visit family occasionally, but they do not see each other entirely regularly.  Further, the issue is complicated by borders.  Today, I learned that Pietrus, one of my students, has two children I had never heard about.  They’re young and they live in Botswana.  I asked if he sees them.  Magnus answered for me (Pietrus speaks very little English and I very little Bushmen) that when he can drum up the money to get to the city and acquire a passport, then he can go see them.  And it struck me that this man, whose tradition knows nothing of political borders and bureaucracy, is separated from his children by a dividing line he did not create and does not really want any part of.  The state does not pretend to speak for him; he merely lives within its anonymous guidelines.  It seems unjust in the extreme.  I suppose everyone in the modern world lives within political borders, but political borders feel strange, unfortunate and perhaps somewhat anti-liberty in the context of this world.  

At any rate, today we got to talking about borders, about land and about ownership.  Magnus explained that ‘living on the farm is alright’ and that it’s much better than the corridor, but he told me that until his particular group could have land all their own, the situation would never really be desirable.  Here, they live by another’s leave.  It’s not that Awie and Sonia and the farm aren’t good to them- it’s just that they must live by the rules of the people they ‘impose’ upon.  And living in the corridor offers no solution as they live in a crowded space at the mercy of stronger, bigger groups and frequently suffer without food or with violence.  They want a space to call their own, which of course makes my heart beat a little faster and prompts me to look into Namibian land advocacy and just how to realize this dream.  Then, I am halted.  And how will you make money to support yourselves? They are unsure. Not farming.  Too difficult, tedious, something.  But they don’t really have an effective way.  Magnus suggests that they will make money selling their medicines and I wonder how effective that will be as the world becomes ever more modern.  Relying on healers to make a modern profit capable of supporting a family seems problematic at best and completely inadequate at worst.  Perhaps they could rely on tourists?  But to turn their way of life into a spectator sport seems ugly and imperialist in the extreme.  It’s an interesting conundrum: one I faced when coming to teach.  Does one pollute a way of life with language, culture, tourists and the like, importing ideas, technology and assumptions from an exterior world? Or does one leave well enough alone and risk the complete disintegration of a culture unable to adapt?  I’m not sure, but I’m open to ideas.  

My Desert Book List 2.0

With my immense wealth of time, I have decided to read every free book I could get my hands on with my Kindle (and some books that I paid for as well…)

So here is a running list of my reads:

The Count of Monte Cristo- Alexander Dumas

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Life of Pi - Yann Martel 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert M. Pirsig

Sex on Six Legs - Marlene Zuk

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

To be continued….