Alan's musings......

We have no dew here in Windhoek and the earth is generally very dry. But I was at a meeting in town the other week and as I left, there was sheet lightening across the night sky, the sound of thunder and the wind through the trees. “Can you smell that Alan?” asked my colleague. I could smell a sweet almost sickly sweet smell. “It’s like nectar” I said. “That’s the smell of damp earth, and that’s the reason we can never leave Africa” she said. And I think I understood. That despite the hardships, the suffering, there is always hope, always promise, always beauty.

The skies are ever changing this time of year. There’s the intense blue, so intense it’s hard to imagine, but sometimes grey as the dust builds during the day to a glorious red at sundown, the sun dropping quickly below the horizon. Dusk is all of ten minutes here, from brightness to darkness in just ten minutes.

We’ve made some good friends already. Other volunteers, staff at VSO, one of whom is almost a neighbour (and whose given us a washing machine for the year – which is great!) and my friend Johannas who tells me now I’m to call him Iita, his ‘house’ name, the name his family call him. Johannas is a popular name amongst black Nambians as is Pieters. Basically John and Peter – Christian names. Often white Namibians if they don’t know a black Namibian’s name will refer to him as Johannas or Pieters. Like using Paddy for an Irishman or Jock for a Scot, I suppose. I can see it angers Johannas. So now I call him Iita. I asked him what Iita means. “It means War” he said. I must have looked surprised. I couldn’t at that moment think why anyone would call a child ‘War’. “It’s because I was born in the war, the liberation struggle” he said. Later, I met his wee nephew, he’s just four years old and runs everywhere, is into everything and all at once. “We nicknamed him "Omshasho” said his auntie laughing, then explaining to me, the foreigner, “you know, the weapon that bursts and fires in all directions at once”. She was referring to a cluster bomb. So I have a friend called War who has a nephew called Cluster Bomb. My experiences of war are, thank God, only through the pages of a newspaper, for Iita and his family war was all around them, penetrating their beings even to their very names.

We’re off camping at the weekend, to Gross Barmen, a small game park with a natural hot spring. I read the description from the guidebook to Cameron. Told him about the palm fringed swimming pool, the hot springs, the braii (barbecue), the game walks, the dry river bed, the lookout, the zebra and baboons. “Well what do you think?” I said looking into his widening blue eyes. “heaven” he said “It sounds like heaven”. Maybe it will be.

Have a good week everyone.

Alan