Happy Easter!!
I am writing this e-mail in my library dreaming about the Easter holiday. In 2 days I will be making my way down to Ludertiz, a coastal town in the deep south of Nam, to spend the 4 day weekend with 25 of my closest Nam-fam PC friends. I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am to see everyone. I would normally not see most of these people all year, so we are all pretty psyched for the weekend. It is actually a lot of traveling for a long weekend, but to be honest with you, I could be traveling for 24 hours and it would be worth it. Sometimes you just need to get away! (This will be the second time I have left the village for a period longer that a few hours all year…)
Life is going really really well lately. I started this year with a little bit of the Nam27-second year blues. Nothing really big, I just wasn’t quite feeling like myself. Coming into your second year is easier because you basically know what to expect, you feel more confident teaching and Nam culture has become your own culture. But, on the other hand, you feel a lot of pressure. You only a year to finish what you started and that really scared me. I also have a lot more teaching responsibilities this year as we are really understaffed, and, to be honest, sometimes you have just had enough of the little cultural differences that drive you crazy (i.e. going over a week without water because there was a piece of the machine that is supposed to be disinfecting the water blocking the pipe that leads to the village. Really? No one could check that? Our poor hostel kids literally had less than a cup of drinking water a day and were all sharing tiny buckets of bathing water…it was maybe the smelliest week of my life.)
Long story short, I was stressed and in a bit of a funk. But, good news! I am completely out of it! I am back to my usual chipper self! I have no idea what made the blues fade away, but they are gone, and I feel great. Don’t get me wrong, I have had a lot of happy great moments since the new year, it’s just that I didn’t feel 100%. But now I do
Here are some stories/thoughts I would share with you. As you know, I tend to overwrite since moving here, so feel free to just skim and scan or just not read at all!
Throwing Rocks in the Mouths of Dogs
My learners, teachers and friends are very protective of me. I am constantly being warned what I must/must not do and feel the watchful eye of others as I roam around the village. Bad things happen all over the world, so of course they can and do happen here (none to me though…don’t worry!), but what reassures me about bad things happening here is the kindness of Namibians and how they always seem to step in when the time is right.
The other day I was getting ready for a run. It was a Saturday on an out-weekend (where our hostel learners go home) and the village was pretty quiet. As I was walking I stopped by a friend’s house to talk to a learner who was staying there for the week. We were chatting when a clearly drunk man came up shouting, “USA for Africa!” He walks up and starts talking to us, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. and telling me all about Obama and the changes he hopes he makes in America (this man was surprisingly intelligent and I’m pretty sure he was more informed on current events than I am…which doesn’t say a whole lot). He is asking me about where I am staying and how long I am here. I tell him that I am here until December when a learner I am standing with grabs my arm, tilts his head to the side and says, “Meme, are you not leaving next month?” It was one of the cutest things I have ever seen. He was so concerned about this drunk man asking about me and wanted him to think that I was leaving next month. The drunk was completely harmless and actually the guardian of a learner, but my concerned little learner was just watching out for me.
After another 45 minutes of hearing about politics, how I looked like the people Hitler liked (blond hair, blue eyes) and how the learners and I are the future of Nam, the man confided he was drunk and had a problem before stumbling away. And I went for my run, making sure to run with two large rocks to throw at dogs that think I look like a tasty afternoon treat. As I was running, I came across a couple of aggressive dogs. Before I could even pull my hand back to throw, a group of 4 small boys started throwing rocks into the dog’s mouths. The dogs scattered away and the boys ran with me for a few minutes before running off into the bush. I continued my run without as much as a bark from a dog until I got closer to my house, where the same dogs started to bark as they saw me approaching. Before I could even shriek, the boys jumped out of the bush and attacked the dogs with rocks. And that is my village for you. Before you can even become afraid of a crazy drunk or a few dogs who are ready to attack the crazy girl who runs, someone is there to throw rocks into the mouths of the dogs.
Second Year Confidence
The good thing that comes along with the PC second year blues is the PC second year confidence. I guess even more than confidence, it is just a comfort. I feel comfortable here. Otjimbingwe is home. My school is home. My teachers, learners and friends I have made here are my family. I have adapted much of the school, village and Nam culture as my own. When I go for a run, I feel comfortable making turns to the homes of my learners. I stop, say the few words I know in their home language and have a kid translate the rest. I did that a little last year, but this year it just feels so much more natural.
My Bing-Fam
I have a lot of different families here in Nam. I have my PC fam full of the other volunteer and the PC staff who I have grown to love. I will have a special bond with the other volunteers who know exactly what I am talking about when I use my completely Namlish vocabulary (it’s sad, but sometimes I forget how I used to talk in America…) or when I complain about those little Nam traits that drive us all completely insane. And my love and appreciation for the PC staff grows more and more every time I spend time with them. Most of our staff are Namibians and have really helped all of us bridge that gap between being American, having those American way of doing things/thinking and integrating into our Namibian communities. They have played so many roles for us here. They are our bosses, trainers, parents and maybe best of all, friends.
Of all my nam-fams, I think the one I appreciate most is the one I have become a part of in the village. When I first came to Nam, I remember another vol telling us in training that the kids in Nam are awesome but the adults kind of suck. I don’t know why this person said that, but it kind of made me nervous about working with my teachers. All of us volunteers become extremely close with our learners. You take on so many roles with them. I am mother, teacher, friend, sister, leader, learner and a role model. They mean the world to me, and I am so grateful for the close relationship I have with them. But the other relationship I have at the school that I am equally grateful for and much more surprised by is the relationship I have with my staff.
The staff at my school are quite possibly the most amazing people I have ever met. I really don’t know if I will ever work in a place where I have as much fun with my colleagues as I have with my colleagues here. There is not one person who I don’t love and who I wish would leave. I really feel like they are my brothers, sisters, moms, dads, uncles and aunts. We argue like family, laugh like family and love each other like family. And most of all we have fun.
This morning at our daily briefing we heard an inspirational speech about sweating the small stuff, had one of our new young male teachers dressing up in the girl’s netball (kind of our version of basketball) skirt and matching top and ended up leaving in laughter after something Tate said. And I think the thing I love most about them is how much we all love our learners. I really think we are all here because we love our learners and we love teaching, and I cannot imagine teaching in a better, happier environment!
Plus, if I am ever having a bad day, I know I can always show up on one of their porches to listen to music, laugh, cry, drink tea (and maybe a beer on a Friday) and everything seems to be OK!
Chanda’s Secrets
So…I started Chanda’s Secrets!! It has gone well…definitely had some ups and downs, but I think I finally a way to teach it effectively. And the kids just love the novel. It is a little above a lot of their reading levels, but the good thing is that the cultural differences are not there, which makes life a lot easier. I don’t have to explain the million little things about American culture that you don’t even realize are different from another’s until you live a million miles away.
We have brought up a lot of really good topics. One of the best conversations I think we had is about why when someone has clearly died of HIV, we never say that they died of HIV. It is always that they were sick for a long time or died of TB, cancer or another disease. A lot of my learners have had someone they love or someone who has cared for them die of HIV, so I think it is good to talk about it. We also have talked a lot about the shame that is associated with HIV. There is shame in having someone you love die of HIV. There is shame in going to the clinic for a test. And there is shame in even having a friend who is positive. We played four corners with different issues in the novel (4 corners is a game where you label each corner strongly agree, agree, strongly disagree, and disagree. Then you say statement and move to the corner with your stance on the subject.). I had the statement, “If my friend told me she/he was HIV positive, I would treat them the same way as I did before.” I was amazed at how honest my learners were and moved to the strongly disagree corner. There biggest fear was that if they stayed with someone who was positive then people would think they too were positive. I hope to get into more conversations and debates about these kind of issues next term when we finish the novel.
Although the topics that are being brought up and the conversations we are engaging in don’t always go the way I want and are somehow upsetting, I am happy we are having them. I told them that by the end of the novel I hope that a lot of our views and opinions on issues that we don’t usually like to talk about will be challenged. I keep reminding myself that my job isn’t to change the views and beliefs of my learners, but to instead challenge them and hope that they choose to change them. Easier said than done.
School Partnership!!
I can’t remember if I wrote this before, but my mom has made me a million fabulous connections with the novel! She contacted the author, who in turn e-mailed her back and connected us with a school in America who is reading the novel as part of their grade 9 curriculum. So my school will be working with their school! I am very very excited about working with them and my kids are as well!
I am not all too sure the exact details of our partnership, but my learners have already been brainstorming ways we can share our culture and life with our American friends a sea away. We have talked a lot about how much culture influences the characters in the novel and how different America and Namibia are. So we want to share those differences with the American school in different kinds of creative ways. I hope to have a committee of learners who will be in charge of making videos, taking photos and motivating the rest of the learners and school to create other amazing pieces that represent life in the Bing. I will keep you updated on how all of this pans out!!
The Nam A, B, C, D’s
So, in Nam, we are pretty open about sex, HIV and condoms…or at least it appears that we are. Condoms are free and provided by the ministry at all clinics and other ministry buildings. Children learn about HIV and condoms from grade 1 up. Programs are in place at all school levels talking and about and educating learners on all these issues. The problem is that somewhere between what we say and what we do, all of those “healthy practices” are lost and we still have an extremely high HIV infection rate.
One of my very favorite Nam ways of preventing HIV are the A, B, C, D’s. Abstain. Be faithful. Condomise. And last but not least, Death. This is what is taught from lower primary through secondary school. Any learner can recite it, but the practice of it doesn’t really happen. Case in point, the vast majority of the girl’s club finds it nice when a boy or man has more than one girlfriend or wife…hmmm…
One of my more funny moments with the A, B, C, D’s was the other day with 9A. I had them twice that day for English, it was a Friday and the last period. And no other teacher was really teaching (happens a lot). So, they wanted to play a game, I was still kind of sick and really didn’t feel like teaching. So I told them we would make a compromise and if I could get through what I needed to catch them up with the other classes, we could play a game for the last 10 minutes of class. I knew they didn’t know what compromise meant, so I went through the whole, let’s figure it out as a class thing. I used it in a few sentences with blank stares returned and then wrote it on the board. Then a boy in the front row raised his hand and told me they thought I was saying “condomise”. I guess they thought I was trying to condomise the class. Ha! Maybe the funniest thing is that no one really thought anything of me trying to condomise the class…I can just imagine it going a little different in America…
OK…I hope everything is well in America!! Miss you lots!!
XO,
Aly
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment