Happy Valentine's Day

After a particularly hard week at work, we loaded up the camping gear for the first time since our big Christmas/ New Year trip and headed off for a weekend of R&R.

We found a lovely shady camping spot at Arnhem Rest Camp, some 2 hours away from Windhoek. Well off the beaten track, we did not pass a single other vehicle other than one donkey cart in 160 km of gravel road. Arnhem is known for its nearby cave system, the sixth largest on the African continent and home to over a million bats, so we duly booked what we though was going to be an hour tour to give us a taster.

Both our guide Basun and Cameron got a little carried away in their mutual enthusiasm for us to find as many of the 6 resident bat species as possible, so we spent a good three hours underground exploring 2 km of very dark passages. The echolocation ability of bats has always fascinated me, but to experience hundreds of bats flying around our heads and not a single one touching us, was quite impressive. The overwhelming ammonia smell built up after hundreds of years of guano (batpoo) deposits was not quite as enchanting. The guide told us stories of the Germans mining the guano to use in biological bombs and we could see the evidence of the mining operations for ourselves in the upper section of the caves. It was unanimously agreed that this was not a job any of us would aspire to and could not imagine anyone living long in such appalling and dangerous conditions. "It was pre-independance" added Basun, as if he needed to.

Trying to clean away the dust and smell in the shower afterwards, it did cross my mind that some women may have been whisked off to Paris, or wined and dined on finest gourmet food for their Valentine's weekend, meanwhile, as I emerged scrubbed clean and smelling fresh again, Alan had the site filled up with woodsmoke as he struggled to light the braii and cried "did you pack any grub, Joey?"

havering- Feb 1

We are all familiar with Tony Blair’s mantra “Education, education, education” and here too in Namibia education is an important political issue. National elections were held in November and in SWAPO’s (South West Africa Peoples Organisation) election campaign, the party still synonymous with liberation, twenty years after independence, showed posters of school children, black and white, “safe in our hands”.

 

There have been huge strides in education over the last two decades, all schools are now mixed, the apartheid segregation swept aside, and many new school buildings, even in the ‘informal settlements’, shanty towns, where people live in houses of tin. But there are two sides to education of course, the provision and the desire to learn.

 

Soon after arriving in Windhoek I sat up late into the night talking to my friend Etta, keen to learn more of him and his country.

 

As a young boy Etta wanted to go to school, “I had a hunger to learn” he said, pressing the flat of his hand against his belly as he spoke, but his grandmother, whose house he lived in, told him it was his responsibility to look after the goats and tend the fields. “How can you do this when you are at school?” she asked.  When Etta ran away from the house each morning to go to lessons, he would be punished on his return by not being fed, not just one meal but no food at all. “How can we feed you Etta when you don’t do your share of the work?”. But Etta was determined to go to the school and so he stole the food he needed from other houses. His grandmother recognised his determination, knew that compromise was needed. And so it was agreed that each morning Etta would be woken at 2 a.m. when he would go to the fields and work by moonlight, attending school at 7am as he desired. This way he fulfilled his responsibilities ..... and he got fed.

 

On Saturday Jo took me up to the school where she'd been working. We drove through Katatura, the huge township from apartheid days and still home to most of Windhoek's population. The tar ran out and we drove along dirt tracks. The small brick houses gave way to tin shacks, tin shacks as far as the eye could see. We drove on and young eyes began to recognise the car, the children waving excitedly. And there in the middle of the 'informal' settlement is the school, a beautiful new school built by the government after independence. And in the dry dust grounds, under the unrelenting sun, is the vegetable garden Jo has been working on with the school kids. And it's beautiful. Raised beds filled with sweet smelling compost, newly planted seeds and seedlings lovingly tended under white shade netting, draped to look like a marquee. And the kids just love it.......they should, after all, it was they who built it. And it will be these children who will grow their food here. Nothing will be wasted, for the children are hungry……

 

Have a good weekend everyone.

Take care

Alan