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.
