The Phase 2 Ambiguity

So. I finished training. Moved to my village. And now everyone (myself included) is a little fuzzy on what I’m up to these days.

You see… I’ve entered the grey area known as phase 2… (Cue twilight zone theme music)

Seriously though… when they say that PCV’s should be prepared to deal with massive amounts of ambiguity – they aren’t kidding around!

So here’s what I’ll be doing from now until December:

        Settling into my community

·      Getting to know my host family, neighbors, coworkers

·      Practicing Rukwangali!

·      Establishing my daily routines

·      Observing Namibian teachers at my school

·      Shadowing a near-by volunteer (for 1 week)

·      Brainstorming ideas for my own classes

·      Doing some preliminary lesson planning

·      Investigating some potential secondary projects

·      Working on the school library

·      Helping learners prepare for exams

The first week of December I will be heading down to Windhoek for another week of training, and then in January I will take over my own class load!

And all of this is good… And I’m glad I have all this time to adjust and plan and really get my head on straight. But it’s a VERY drastic change, after the intensive schedule of pre-service training (PST), to come out to the village and have to go looking for things to do, people to talk to, etc.

Some days I sit and think: what DID I do today? I cooked. I got water. I did laundry. I got water again. I read a book. I wrote a letter. I played with a baby. I chased a goat off the homestead… hmm…

But – even in the midst of the daily, miniscule activities, I’m learning. And to be honest, although two months seems like a long time, it won’t be enough! There’s just so much I don’t know about life here…but I’m soaking up as much as I can every day, and loving every minute of it. :)

p.s. Anyone who realized the title of this blog is supposed to resemble a BBT episode title gets cool points. :)

The lost goat and other adventures...

Thursday, September 20

Well…here goes nothing! I am now an official United States Peace Corps Volunteer! It’s been a long and crazy process, but I made it. Now it’s finally time to do what I came to do. I move to my village tomorrow!

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Saturday, September 22

I’m here! I arrived to a pretty quite homestead last evening. My host mom is away in town, and Lauren (the volunteer I’m replacing) is running a marathon this weekend. So there’s not very much going on at the moment. Which is a nice change from the past couple of weeks. The new school cleaner, Maxima, has been keeping me company, along with her 1-month old son. He’s adorable! Pictures coming soon!

I also got to talk to some of my wonderful family today! It’s crazy how moving 6 hours north made them feel further away. In actuality I think I moved closer to home…but communication is a bit more difficult from the bush. We’ll get through it though. :)

While I was on the phone with my mom a baby goat came onto my homestead and got lost… he was very unhappy to be separated from his mother, who was stuck on the other side of the fence (she wasn’t too happy about it either). I helped him out the front door and received a disgruntled bleat for my efforts. Oh goats…

I also christened my cooking hut with some chili and cornbread! It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. And I have plenty of leftovers for the rest of the week!

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Monday, September 24

It’s been a hot, hot day. I was laying in my bed this afternoon trying to take a nap, just sweating. Ick. It was definitely one of those “I’m really in Africa” moments.

But, then people got back and it made my day 100 times better! My host mom came back from town this morning. I also got to meet my host grandmother and great aunt this afternoon. The two of them are just precious! They don’t speak English, so it was a chance to truly put my Ruk skills to the test. They said I was doing well, which was quite encouraging. So, I now have two more reasons to strive for fluency. :)

I also got adventurous this afternoon and decided to try carrying water on my head… It was quite an event. I went to the well with my host mother and observed. Then I was like: “Okay, I got this.” Turns out, I didn’t. The lid wasn’t all the way on my container so I basically just splashed a lot of water in my face. But…like I said – it was a super hot day! So I just pretended I did that on purpose and tightened the lid. Take two…water up – all good. Except… in the process I loosened my shitenge and as I stood up it fell off. Oh dear…thankfully I was wearing some shorts underneath. Anyway, I then took a slightly embarrassed but simultaneously victorious trip back to my homestead. All together, I consider it a success. I definitely have room for improvement!

Afterwards I took a trip to Maxima’s homestead to visit her and Junior. The view of the sunset along the way was glorious, and I spent most of it kicking myself for not bringing my camera along. I definitely will next time! I had a nice visit with them and came back to find that Lauren had arrived! Hooray! Then I embraced a cooling down evening bucket bath, returned my feet to their normal shade of white, and brushed my teeth while examining my star chart, :)

It’s been a great day!

The Final Countdown...

Well...things are winding down around here. I just conquered my final LPI (language proficiency interview), tomorrow is our last day of training, and Thursday is swearing in!

It's hard to believe we've been here barely 2 months. PST possesses strange time-warping abilities. When I think about everything that has happened (in Namibia and the States) since we've been here, it seems like it could be a lifetime. But at the same time, I don't feel like it could possibly be over so soon. And yet, here we are... just days away from officially becoming Peace Corps Volunteers!

While training has had its rough days...it wasn't all bad. I will miss: getting to spend time with some of the most awesome people in Namibia (group 36!), laughing as we butcher the Star Spangled banner for the millionth time, playing hangman in sessions, morning Garden Cafe runs for real coffee, fun times at the chess club, and living with the best family in Okahandja.

Shout out to my wonderful mom, grandmother, and amazing friend Amanda for making me the most envied package recipient in group 36 :) I've gotta say...nothing brightens my day like a little piece of home that traversed the ocean for 4+ weeks and made it safely to Namibia! Thanks guys! Also to my wonderful SWU pals for that skype date this morning! 4am had never been such an awesome time of the day! :D

Everyone is getting on me to take more pictures... and I will, promise! I will try to be diligent to record these last few days in Okahandja and I will definitely take plenty of pictures at site. Speaking of pictures... here's one I snapped this morning:

I didn't even know this was possible...but this morning while at our pick-up spot, we saw this van lose a tire while it turned the corner. As you can see I got a great action shot of the tire rolling away... it was pretty crazy.

In other news... I've been selected from my language group to give the Rukwangali speech for our swearing in ceremony on Thursday. Which is really exciting and frightening, all at the same time. I don't mind public speaking, but I've never tried to do so in a language I've only been learning for 6 weeks. So I'll keep you all posted on how that goes!

I think that's all for now... Feel free to comment or facebook me if you have any burning questions about Namibia! :)

Quick update!

Hello everyone! I’ve once again let my blog slip…sorry about that. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, and I’ve not had the time to gather my thoughts well enough to write about them.

So, let’s see…two weeks ago was model school. The school system here runs in trimesters (January to December), so the learners had just finished their exams for term 2. During their week and a half long break, we bribed them to come back to school and be taught by the new Americans. While I can’t imagine this plan would work very well in the states, we had a pretty good turnout of around 230 learners. I taught two classes a day, grades 6 and 8, and had a blast! It was a great experience to get up in front of Namibian learners, be awkward, get slightly more comfortable, and have the benefit of there being virtually no pressure. I was also observed by both Peace Corps staff and a few Namibian teachers, over the course of the week, so I had the opportunity to get some great feedback. It was hectic, stressful, and exhausting, but overall – it was a fantastic week.

Since then, it’s been back to a fairly normal training schedule. Training has its good days and bad days, and some sessions are repetitive (or just common sense), but overall, it’s really not bad. My group is awesome, and they make it bearable – even on the worst of days.

I’m steadily picking up three new languages… Rukwangali (the language I’ll speak in my village), Afrikaans (the language my host family speaks) and Namlish (the English dialect spoken by Namibians). It drives some of the Americans (particularly the English teachers…) a little crazy, but I tend to find Namlish pretty endearing. It borrows some words from British English (such as boot and lorry), but some phrases I’m fairly certain are entirely its own. For instance... a marker is a kokie, a bar is a shebeen, and a soda is a cool drink. In Namlish, you wouldn’t say you had a headache you would say: “my head is paining”.  If you live in a neighborhood or suburb, you say you live in “the location.” If someone is leaving but coming back soon they say: “I’m coming now.” And “now”…is a whole story of its’ own. “Now” can mean anything from 30 minutes to several hours. “Just now” is usually sooner than “now”. But if something is literally happening right away it’s “now now” or “now now now,” depending on how serious you are. It can get really fun. :)

It’s been a bit of an emotional roller coaster around here lately, and I’m sure that will only increase as swearing in approaches. I’m really excited to move to my village and start getting to know my community, but I dread saying goodbye to my amazing host family here in Okahandja. With all the stress and information overload we’re going through right now, my first response is usually to shut myself off for some alone time, but I’m trying to balance that with the fact that I’ll soon be living in a very isolated village. Some days I feel like there is nothing worse I could do with my time than sit in PST sessions, but at the same time I know I’ll soon be missing all my fellow trainees and wishing for any excuse to see them. So… life is a bit oxymoronic right now. But it's still good. I love it here. I love my group. And I know this is where I'm supposed to be.