Staying Home

I’m currently half-way through my urban homestay. I am staying with a fantastic and loving family. My host dad owns a butchery. My host mom works for Alexander Forbes. Llewelyn, my 23 year old host brother, is in his last year of university at College of the Arts primarily studying graphic design. Finally, I have an 11 year old sister, Marilize, who is in school. They are a coloured family, which means they are in between black and white. If I brought them to the US, people would probably think they are Hispanic. This bothers me because I know people would make totally irrational assumptions about them just from how they look.

The homestay started last Thursday and extends through this coming Sunday. During the week, we go to the CGE house and have class like usual and we spend the afternoons there too. The rest of my time is spent with my family. Most of the time around the house is spent sitting around watching TV, playing pool, or just killing time. Much of the culture here is spent around the television. It seems like everyone’s homestay mostly consists of watching TV with the family. People make sure to catch their favorite ‘soaps’ every night. Some of the TV my family watches is in Afrikaans or is South African. Otherwise, most of the programs and movies are American.

The biggest foreign influence in average life here is without a doubt American pop culture. Music, TV, and movies dominate people’s existence. I find it backwards that there is more of an effect from this here than what I’ve found in the US. Sarah, our Namibian cook at the house, believes much of the attitude about relationships and treatment of men/women/cheating comes from TV shows. This is a whole different dynamic that I’ll discuss later. In South Africa, some Afrikaners asked me if I’ve ever had Dr. Pepper (it doesn’t exist here…it’s all coke and fanta). They wanted to know because they have seen it in the movies, but they’ve never had it. Trying to explain what Dr. Pepper tastes like is not an easy task either.

On the other side of pop culture, I spent much of this past weekend feeling like I was in high school. Llewelyn, Marilize, and the 10th grade cousin, ‘Naldo,’ and I cruised around in Lew’s VW golf running some errands. We definitely bumped loud American hip hop for hours as we drove around. It was interesting/disturbing hearing 11 year old Marilize sing along to “I wanna Fuck you” again and again. Yet all 3 of my compradres are pretty straight-shooting. As I played hide-and-seek with some local youngsters Friday night, three drunk 16 year olds interrupted our game, to which Naldo claimed that alcohol is the worst thing for Namibian teens today. He stays away from it himself. I might contend that teen pregnancy or AIDS is quite the issue here, but I suppose alcohol contributes to those issues.

After talking to my host dad about some political issues and health care on Friday evening, he proceeded to ask me if I had been to the public hospital (my family pays for a private clinic). Upon saying no, we were driving our way towards Katatura Hospital at 9:30pm on a Friday night. He made sure to drive by the shebeens (informal bars) along the way to point out all the people starting to get drunk on the streets already. When we arrived at the hospital, one gentleman was at reception with a nasty bloodied skull. He stumbled around, clearly wasted. I’m guessing he received a bottle to the head. My host father had me take a seat to be a spectator. He told me, “Just watch.” We watched for five minutes and saw a young teen come in with a large puncture wound in the back. Stabbing? I don’t know. After my host father seemed to get bored with the inactivity, we wandered to the ER and saw an informal mess of people in a big room on beds partially behind curtains. The whole experience made me uneasy to go and observe all the new incoming injuries, but I saw my host father’s point. He said that by 11pm, the place would be loaded with people that have drunken injuries from fights, knives, or what have you. The hospital itself was not an inviting or comfortable place.

Alcohol definitely is an issue here in Namibia/South Africa. Maybe I’ll touch on this and AIDS in a later post since this one is getting fairly long.

My host dad owns a butchery, so I’ve had plenty of meat. There’s a good supply of biltong (basically jerky, made from beef). After Friday’s meal of KFC (basically the only American fast food here), we had a braai (barbeque) for Saturday’s dinner. It consisted of goat rump, goat steaks, boerewors (a delicious sausage), puffadder (a beef sausage with meat and liver), and kabobs. Sunday allowed for an exciting meal. By noon, I was eating a sheep’s foot, some sheep stomach, ox tail (the tail of a cow), and for dinner we topped it off with the sheep’s head. I got a nice slice of skin and fat off the top of the skull and waited my turn while Marilize scooped brain out of a small hole where the spinal cord was and ate the brain like cereal. I got several bites of the brain as well. Surprisingly, none of it was that bad. He had some good spices in the pot. The stomach was a bit chewy, the feet were delicious but all skin and fat and tendon, the tail was extremely tender but pretty fatty, the skull skin had a gross texture, and the brain was a bit mushy. It all pretty much tasted like eating some beef fat. These are all very cultural foods of Africa. Please note that I’m eating them in a very nice middle-class home in the city.

A quick note about the house, my dad bought it 5 years ago for about N$170,000 and now it is worth N$650,000 (divide by 7 for US$). And we thought real estate was going up in the US.

My host dad also woke me up at 5:45am to take me to the place where he buys his meat. About 20 black workers were in an assembly line. The first guy chopped off the head of a live sheep. Then they hung it up to skin it, gut it, and rinse it. It was an efficient process run by a white guy.

Not too much

On Tuesday in our History class, we had Prof Kerina visit us. He was a Namibian lucky enough to study at a University in the US. He came up with the name "Namibia," cofounded the ruling political party, and was friends with the like of MLK, Malcom X, Maya Angelou, JFK, and such. It was pretty incredible to hear his story and to have the opportunity to hear from him in our class.

I talked to a guy from the Scripture Union today, which sounds like a Namibian "young life." I've been waiting a couple weeks for a volunteer opportunity, and this thing sounds sweet. They go into schools and teach life skills after the schoolday. I visit the office tomorrow, so I'll let you know what becomes of it. We also start our 10 day urban homestay tomorrow. I will be staying with a family in which the parents work for a financial company and a butchery, and I will have a 23 year old brother and an 11 year old sister. Their home is in Khomasdal, which is kind of like the colored neighborhood from apartheid. Colored refers to those whom are partially black and white. Thus, this neighborhood is slightly better off than Katatura, the black township from apartheid. By the way, Namibia used to be South West Africa until 1990. Before then, it was governed by South Africa and so it also underwent apartheid.

Mainly, I thought I'd post a few pics in this post since I didn't get around to it in the bottom of the last one...

the first pick is my homestay family from Soweto in South Africa. There's me, Malume (Uncle, as he called himself), Yoliswa, and Nontjatjambo.
The second pic is from last weekend on the farm.

Despite what these pictures and some of my writing might represent, we are in a very urban setting in Windhoek. We are a 10 minute walk from downtown, live in an posh neighbourhood, and it would take us at least a 10 minute drive to get out of the city. I'm sorry that there are no lions that I will get eaten by here.

Castration

We started class on Tuesday. Tuesday morning's class is history of Namibia/SA, Wednesday's is Religion and Social Change, Thursday's is Politics of Namibia/SA, and Friday is development. Each class lasts from 9am-1pm, so the mornings are pretty long. For a study abroad experience, this program is very academic compared to what other people I know have done elsewhere. I don't mind.

Anyways, this weekend was the exciting part of this week. Yesterday, two friends and I were picked up at 6am and taken to a farm 2 hours to the north. Micah met a guy named Papyeni, who is a friend of a friend, so he offered us to come up with him and his mother to help out for the weekend. The farm had no electricity, but it was not an issue. The house was very informal looking, was basically all concrete, and the neighboring stuctures were shacks that a few people live in. Yet in no way do I feel like their situation is rougher than mine. Instead it makes me realize that we have way too much crap in our homes. I simply can't justify spending hundreds or thousands of dollars simply to make our homes "look" better when it serves no functional purpose. This isn't a new thought for me, but being here puts more reason behind this idea. This farmhome had the essentials and it was not weighed down with unnecessary junk.

Enough of that short rant...We spent yesterday and today doing farmwork in the morning until 2pm. Yesterday, we had to chase goats and grab them by the horns to vaccinate 100 of them. Then we herded cattle to vaccinate about 100 cows. This morning we lifted the poopy tails of the cows and painted oil around their tick-infested anuses in order to kill the ticks. I also had the opportunity to castrate a few young males...Interesting.

After working, we'd enjoy some food cooked in a pot over an outdoor fire. It was food like home except for dinner we had traditional pap with a local spinach type of food. Today we tried sour milk. It's milk that never gets refridgerated, thus it ferments and becomes quite chunky and sour. It's a different milk and is a different sour than letting your gallon sit in the fridge for an extra week. This stuff wasn't too bad, but I'm not going to ask for it again.

Yesterday, a few of us sat around a circle in some lawn chairs. Conversation was slow-paced and there was probably a 15 minute period of silence in which we all just looked around, but it was comfortable in my opinion (Erin might disagree). Only 1 of the 5 people around the farm knew english fluently, so that made for a slower pace of convo. Later in the evening, we played dominos for over 2 hours by candlelight (the actual game, not the lining them up and tipping them over). It was great to be able to join in a game and laugh together even though we couldn't communicate verbally. The three of us sucked at first...we weren't even playing right. It wasn't until Papyeni came over and explained the rules correctly to us in english that we caught on.

As I'm righting this, I'm realizing that there is no effective way to communicate what I'm experiencing. So I've decided the best I can do is to describe the events as they happen and maybe explain some of the things I'm learning along the way. I also don't really care that half of these sentences in this blog are overly wordy and maybe unclear. meh

oh, and we saw a cheetah crossing the road when we left the farm today. coolness.

some pics

This and That

The last few days in Namibia have been pretty solid. On Friday, we had the "Katatura quest." Katatura is the neighboring township that only blacks live in. The people there figured we are either tourists or people coming to take their land because that is the only circumstances when they see white people there.

On Saturday, we had about 15 local students from UNam and the Polytech University nearby come over. We had a good chance to interact with people our age. Later that night, they took us out as a whole group. We ended up at house with pretty much 95% guys, of which I believe only 2 were not looking to take advantage of our 16 girls. We later went to a club which was pretty rocking, even though that's not much of my scene. Two of the Namibian dudes would somehow dance in unison to every song. We decided to leave the place after a photographer that does a gossip column started taking our pictures.

Yesterday, the four of us from Valpo and Micah, one of the other guys that's from PLU, went to the Macedonia Lutheran Church in Katatura. Supposedly this church is the largest non-white Lutheran church in the world. It was a great experience despite the 3 hour service not being in English. The only english was when the pastor looked our direction in the middle of the service and said, "I see we have some visitors...why don't they come up and introduce themselves." So we went up into the front and introduced ourselves into the microphone. This pastor wasn't preaching, so he actually came out and sat next to us during the sermon and basically summarized it for us as the sermon went on. What a cool guy.

After the service, we met a lady that took us to her house and then walked us to the local market where we had a home-cooked lunch with delicious juice. The juice down here is amazing. And to everyone who thought I would starve, food here is more delicious and plentiful than home.

Some of us had today off because we aren't doing internships and our volunteering isn't set up yet or people's internships have fallen threw. So this morning I asked Passat of a nearby place to hike and we ended up at Daan Viljoen Park a few hours later. 10 of us took a 9km hike. We managed to see a variety of animals such as zebras, baboons, and a few other kinds of animals that I don't know their name. The wireless network at the house hasn't worked yet, so I haven't been able to use my computer to upload pictures so you can see them.

Our first class starts tomorrow. It feels nice knowing I only have 8 weeks of actual class. I'm

Too much

There's so much to cover about the last two weeks. I probably won't write it all down because it would either be too much or too hard to explain. We arrived in Windhoek, Namibia yesterday. Thus, I finally have access to some internet. The only problem was that it didn't work until now and it's still a bit sketchy. I'm not going to write much now because we are still settling in, but the experience in South Africa was incredible. We visited the Apartheid Museum, talked with two people directly involved in the 1976 Soweto student uprising, met with the Secretary General of the South African Council of Churches (kinda a big deal), had conversation with someone at the US embassy, went to a one-man play, and stayed with a family in Soweto for last weekend. For those of you that aren't familiar with South Africa, Soweto stands for South West Township and it is the city that whites forced blacks to move into during the apartheid area. Despite apartheid ending in 1994, its legacy of segregated neighborhoods still lives on. Several million people live in this area that is not at all big. The reaction I got from white people when I said we were in Soweto was the same as one that I receive in response to Gary, Indiana. However, Soweto was still amazing and the people were more friendly than I could ever imagine.

One of the most intriguing parts of being in South Africa was the attitude towards us as Americans. Once people learned we were from the US and were not just Afrikaners (a large population of the whites of Dutch descendant), they were so incredibly welcoming. People treat us like royalty and honestly think we might know famous rappers or whatever. When we would hang out with Afrikaners and blacks alike, they would both very proudly introduce us as their "american friends." It's a quite a different attitude than how some of Europe would view us. So much of popular culture here is from the US. As one local put it, "In the US, JayZ is a hero. In South Africa, JayZ is God."

I'll post a few interesting stories that took place, but not right now.

I'm definitely glad that I am here in this program. It's plenty of fun, but it still is very academic as we did meet with some very important people. I almost feel like I'm an expert now on South African history under Apartheid, but I still probably know nothing since this is what I'll be studying all semester. It has mainly just been cool to go and experience this history by going to the places it happened and by meeting the people it affected. We haven't started classes yet (they start Monday), but I've learned more than what 2 weeks of any class could teach.