Happy New Year!

Well here we are, at the start of a brand new decade- Happy New Year to you all! Technically of course we are already 16 days into it but it is only now that I have recovered from the shock of getting back to work after our three week holiday that I have managed to sort out proper internet time.

Our Christmas trip was great, camping gear  all piled into our Nissan Patrol, my Mum, Eilidh and Cameron fighting for space amongst sleeping bags, water bottles and nintendo games in the back, Alan's beloved jerry can and spare wheel on the roof, me in the front with a mottley collection of dog eared maps and the all important Haynes manual, and off we went. 

Travelling up north through Namibia, across the 'red line' and along the Caprivi Strip, we entered Zambia and travelled the length of the country to Malawi. There we visited the school we have been in contact with for the last year and a half, a humbling experience. Two days swimming in Lake Malawi allowed us to chill out just a little before our drive back through Zambia, returning to Namibia via Botswana.

There are so many tales that could be told, but perhaps the highlights are Eilidh losing one of her only pair of shoes with her, which doesn't sound too dramatic except for the fact that we were swimming 3 ft from the lip of Victoria falls at the time. She completed the rest of the overland adventure in a quickly purchased pair of Mr Price gym shoes. Another funny-looking-back moment was breaking down in the middle of Chobe National Park after not seeing another vehicle all day (the kids had to go on Lion Watch while I retrieved 3 cans of cold beer from the fridge in the boot) three hours before dark and the brakes failing as Alan slammed them on hard to avoid a suicidal cow (at least it wasn't an elephant).

The children have both now settled into school, Cameron in the laid back International School which suits him perfectly, and Eilidh in one of the High Schools in town. She has made friends instantly and now declares she wants to live here forever, well, until the first major teen fall out I suspect. This of course translates into me making popcorn at 5.30 am the other morning (Cam's enterprise project), revisiting Maslow's heirarchy of needs (Cam again) and running Eilidh here there and everywhere across the city to keep up with her various social engagements. Still, at least its nice and sunny here....


We have now an early start to the day, schools starts at 7.oo/7.20 am and I start work at 7.30, a routine of sorts seems to be emerging, despite my best efforts. My work is tough going, the management style is somewhat different to what I have experienced before, but the curriculum resources that I am writing are slowly coming together and in two weeks time I will be based at two schools in the informal settlement area to help set up organic gardens. I remain optimistic (read doggedly determined) that this placement will still work out.


Anyway, I am going to make a big effort to keep in touch between now and August now that we are a bit more settled, starting off with updating this blog with Alan's recent ramblings. Visions of having hours and hours of spare time in which I dreamed of revisiting the old art of letter writing, proper paper letters, haven't materialised, although perhaps I could pretend that they have been intercepted by Somalian pirates. No, thought not.


Take care everyone, and all our love and best wishes for a happy 2010.


Jo x

Doughnuts and pink icing

The journey between Lusaka and Chipata was a long one, but the road was better than expected and our progress was good. At lunchtime we pulled off the main road at the sleepy little town of Sheswe. We were hungry.  Traditional mud houses on one side of the street, a petrol station and row of shops on the other, a bakers proudly, and interestingly, pronouncing itself as ‘al halal’ beside a small general store and a couple of doubtful looking take-aways.  Stepping from the car we greeted the small group of smiling, barefooted children who looked on curiously as we crossed towards the shops. 

A determined, rather manic looking middle-aged man approached us, torn trousers and tea shirt, a white plastic banding strap (the type used around cardboard boxes containing hoovers and microwaves) hung incongruously around his neck. He carried a small wooden box from which he took a crumpled and dirty brown banknote. This he held towards us, repeating words we couldn’t understand. We continued across the street. The man persisted, his manner agitated. We hurried on. 

The take aways’ wares had been taken, so we moved along the row of shops to the general store. As we entered, the man with the banding hesitated to follow.  The children stood open mouthed eyeing the deep fried doughnuts, each covered in bright pink icing as we decided what to buy.  I watched as another customer entered. He handed a brown banknote to the shop keeper, who in turn handed back a single cigarette from an open packet on the counter.  In that moment I understood. 

I turned just as the banded man entered the shop, desperation in his eyes. In one hand a match box held high, jabbed frantically with the index finger of his other.  All in a second the man moved towards us, the shopkeeper shouted harshly, a smartly uniformed security guard rushed in, raising a stick four feet long and as round as your thumb, above his head.  The man continued his desperate gesticulations, but the raised stick was no idle threat. The banded man tried to turn, tried to jump ahead of the blow, but the stick came down with all the guards might, a terrible crack against the desperate man’s thigh, a crack which seemed to echo around the tiled shop interior. The shop keeper smiled, laughed nervously…

As the children ate their doughnuts I stood beside the petrol pump attendant as he finished filling the tank. It started to rain, all who were outside rushed inside, for rain can be heavy in Zambia. Quickly I counted out the bank notes and jumped back into the car. The rain was torrential now. I hit the wipers as I pulled away. Fifty feet ahead, stood the man with the band, drenched and motionless, the small wooden box in the mud at his feet. He starred directly at me. But there was no more determination, no wildness, no more desperation, nothing but a helpless resignation.  I drove on.

Over Christmas we stayed at Flatdogs Camp by South Luangwe National Park. It’s a remarkable place where elephants wander under your balcony and hippos cross your path as you walk back from the bar. On Christmas eve all the local lodges join together for a carol service in the bush. Two hundred lodge guests sipping wine, eating canapés and singing carols along with the fabulous staff choir under the spreading branches of an enormous sausage-fruit tree.  Although we sang heartedly about them, contrary to your experience, our frost was not cruel and the mid winter not so deep! As we drove back to the lodge, Eilidh looked at me through tired eyes. “Dad” she said “Why did that soldier hit that man?”…..

On the Sunday after New Year we battered down the tarmac from Kasane to Maun, past huge solitary elephants and wonderfully graceful giraffes. We would have stopped each time but we had time and distance to make up. All went well until slowing to pass a small heard of cattle, a suicidal cow turned and jumped in front of the car. Swerving and braking hard we managed to avoid the beast but a loud crack and the brakes failed completely. Earlier heavy driving in Choebe National Park had taken its toll and a damaged brake hose had given way. It could have been a lot worse. Just two hundred yards along the road was a lay by, in which I could safely view the damage. There would be no Hobbett bodge job here! We limped along to the next village, Gweta, just five miles and where we knew from the map that there would be a petrol station, the only one for a hundred more. Trying to maintain our spirits and knowing that spare parts can take days, we joked that what we needed was a Mr JLB Matakoni, the respectable owner of Speedy Motors in the wonderful television series The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency.

Arriving at Gweta I went into the petrol station shop. There were plenty cans of beans, packets of Maze flour, mops and buckets but nothing in the way of spare parts. I stood by the counter looking at the cans of motor oil. A middle aged man stood chatting to the cashier. He opened a sachet of indigestion powders which he poured into his mouth and washed down with a can of coke. “Hello Ra” he greeted me in the traditional way. “How are you?” “I am well, thank you Ra” I said returning the greeting “but I am afraid my car is not. Would you know if I could find a mechanic in Gweta, Ra?” “But Ra” he responded, the car’s life is not your life. Provided your life is good, that is all that matters.”  “I think you are right, Ra” I said. The man smiled. “And besides” he said “I am a mechanic”

In less than an hour we were on our way, Mitre turned out to be a fine mechanic indeed and his young son an avid apprentice. From his own scrapyard of crashed and abandoned cars, Mitre found just the right part and charged a very fair price indeed.  As we drove away we looked at each other and laughed….

Alan

Steinbeck's Tortoise

Before heading to our placements VSO volunteers are required to attend several training courses at Harborne Hall in Birmingham, a curious building and one time convent, hospital and stately home. By the last of these courses, a week’s long ‘Skills for Working in Development’, a strong camaraderie has developed and excitement runs high. The last evening, lubricated by tepid English ale and cheap red wine, becomes a crescendo of emotions as VSOs share their formative experiences; childhood traumas, lovers and sweethearts, the death of parents, the birth of a son or daughter.

I was sharing a room in the gatekeepers lodge with Paul, a young man older than his years, modest but confidently spoken, an astute observer. Sharing a bottle, sitting on the steps of the lodge, we spoke of books, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A House for Mr Biswas, Under Milk Wood (complete with Burtonesque renditions of the slow dark, crow dark, fishing boat bobbing sea),  A Man’s a Man, and later, much later into the night, The Grapes of Wrath and talk of Steinbeck’s tortoise, the symbolism of the struggling creature so poignant now, Paul closing his eyes as he spoke…….The wine ran out, we went to bed.

Raising our weary clouded heads the next morning we joined the other pasty faces for breakfast. I stood in the queue next to Stu, one of the trainers. “So Stu, how are you?” I said “Sleep well?”  “Not so well really.” He said, yawning.  “I was woken by a couple of drunken wankers talking about a bloody tortoise at three in the morning”…….

I was at an event at the American Cultural Centre, some weeks ago, (yes I know, the irony wasn’t lost) when I met one of the OYO Directors, Sandy Rudd, Director of Namibia’s National Theatre.  I mentioned a book I had read shortly before coming here, Mukiwa, an autobiography by Peter Godwin, a white Zimbabwean who wrote of his experiences during the war for independence, a conscript for the forces of White Rhodesia. “I’m in that book” said Sandy, and she was, “the girl in the orange skirt, with fishnet stockings and platform shoes”. When the laughter subsided, Sandy spoke of the importance of the book to those like her, white Zimbabweans, whose fathers and brothers never spoke about their experiences, soldiers on the wrong side in a war that should never have been. “I gave that book to my husband. We’d been married thirteen years. He read it in a day. We walked around Avis Dam and we cried as he told me things I didn’t know” She closed her eyes “of things that he had seen and things that he had done. This is an important book”

There are just two of us in the office today. Namibia closes early at Christmas as thousands return home to villages and homesteads, for many the one time in the year when families are together. My colleague Ivan ‘Fly’ Meuse, he who starred in the brilliant OYO DVD, The Virgin Pumpkin, the story of a boy from the village moving to the school hostel in town, teased by the cool guys who call him a pumpkin. He whose character falls in love with a girl, but who denies their relationship when she becomes pregnant, Fly who played this part so well, showed me his poetry. And this young man can write.

The Flame in My Heart

No one teaches the sun to rise

A bird to level its wings to fly

A fish to swim

A plant to grow and flower

A child to cry

Raindrops to quench the earth

The heart to glow

You had the instinct of a comforter

When life went up and down

You were my true companion

Always willing to listen to my tears

You helped me celebrate my victories

And with you by my side

My troubles had no principal role

My smile is a gift from joy

My love is steered by your happiness

My touch a sign of your affection

My candle might melt and its flame might die

But the flame in my heart will remain a lifetime

Time might ask you to forget about me

But knowing you were once in my lifetime

To have held a person like you

Is a true sign that God has been good to me

I think he likes her.

We’re off to Malawi on Thursday, driving via Zambia, the mighty Victoria Falls and South Luangwa national park with the greatest concentration of leopards in Africa, Cameron and Eilidh just bursting to see one.  In Lilongwe, Area 25, we hope to visit the houses we built last year with the Dunfermline Building Society, Habitat for Humanity Team, and the teacher’s house we have all since funded. I remember Gordon cutting the ribbon, the day we danced the Dashing White Sergeant in the dust and sang Auld Lang Syne together.  It’ll be different this time, my mother-in-law is with us……

Have a good Christmas everyone.

Alan

Let us Pray

“When the white man came to Africa, we had the land and he had the bibles. He said “Let us pray”. When we lifted our heads we had the bibles and he had the land.” This is how Archbishop Desmond Tutu described the indefatigable link between western religion and colonialism. Certainly there are communities in Namibia who have retained their own beliefs and others who have assimilated elements of their own into Christianity, but there is no doubt that Jesus is booming in Africa. On Sunday I can hear the congregation of the Church of Our Saviour, singing and swaying like Christ’s return will be tomorrow. There are no empty pews here, no falling congregations, no churches turned into carpet warehouses or nightclubs, in fact more churches continue to be built, Evangelical, Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian.

I struggled to make sense of this. If Afrikaans was the language of the Oppressor then Christianity was his religion. The Dutch Reform Church, with the same Calvinist roots as our own, infamously using scripture to justify apartheid. I consulted the oracle, I asked my friend Iita.

“Oh yes I was very religious” he said. “I would pray many times each day.”  I pressed him on this, repeating how he had once said that the missionaries stole his culture. “It was necessary” he said. “When a child is frightened, when he can make no sense of things, when he needs protection he runs to his father. When the soldiers came to our house, when they held their guns against our heads my grandmother comforted us, saying that God would deal with these men, that he would look after us, and we prayed. When I was a young man so full of hatred, when the white garage owner in Tsumeb killed a man because he complained about his car, I prayed. If I didn’t have God I would have been like a wild animal, I could not have stopped myself.”

Iita no longer prays. “When I went to Britain I tried many churches.  I went to the Catholic church where they said prayers written by someone else, I went to the Church of England and watched the Boys Brigade marching, I went to the Baptist church and the Evangelical church. To Africans, God is white, yet in Britain, the people don’t believe. It was in Liverpool I lost my faith.”

Two years ago, a friend of mine was in Malawi when a statue of David Livingstone was unveiled. The guest of honour was no other than Nelson Mandela. Pulling the cover from the statue, President Mandela referred to David Livingston as Africa’s first freedom fighter. In Windhoek there is a street which was renamed in honour of the Reverend Michael Scott, the British clergyman who worked so bravely and so closely with Chief Hosea Katako against South African rule. And recently, the state funeral of the Reverend Hendrik Witbooi , the first deputy prime minister of the new Namibia, a much loved man and the grandson of  Kaptain Hendrik Witbooi  leader of the Nama peoples in the genocidal war of 1904-07 when the God fearing German army killed half of the Nama and 80% of the Herero people.

Waiting for Cameron and Eilidh last week, my eye was caught by the posters on the bus shelter. There was notice of a concert by Gazza, a big hip hop star, details of a fashion show, SWAPO posters urging all to vote for President Pohamba, and a picture of a smartly dressed young man in a three piece suit, “Apostle Daniel D. Double Portion. Fresh anointings.” It read  “Jesus is performing miracles today. Bring deads, cripples, deaf and dumbs, HIV/Aids, oppressed. Katatura Community Centre.” For some reason I thought of the time that Cameron, just six, had asked me if Rabbie Burns and Jesus were friends. Somehow, here in Africa, the question now seems a wholly reasonable one.

Alan