It’s been
nearly three weeks since I’ve left Namibia and only now has my body and brain
reached the correct balance of relaxation and deep thought in order to reflect
on the changes I’ve seen in the last 60 days.
It took a three hour bus ride to find that sweet spot, and I’m afraid
the halcyon moment may be fleeting so I’m going to write while the thoughts are
flowing.
Everyone is
asking (and will probably continue asking once I’m back in America), “What did
you learn?” The answer is not simple,
nor can I say I “learned a lot.” It was
life – two years of life, two years of experience. Even if I’d stayed at home, I could’ve
learned just as much. About different
things, of course, but it’s still learning.
They say life is what you make of it…and so is learning.
I learned
some serious things and some less serious things, so let me lay them out for
you.
SERIOUS
THINGS
Being a celebrity sucks.
They warn you about this when you have your entrance interview. And you really think you can deal with
it. And you really want to be in Peace Corps
so you say you can. But after months of
someone watching your every move – washing your laundry, cooking your food,
walking to school, reading in your room, going to the toilet…you reconsider
your answer. It’s much harder than it
seems, and way less fun. In my opinion,
a good test for wannabe-PCVs would be 3 weeks in a glass house in the middle of
Times Square. If you can handle all the
gawking, you can probably handle village life.
Or we should just send teenyboppers that want to be pop stars to a
remote village for 6 weeks. If, after
that, they still want to be famous, then they should be sent for therapy
immediately.
Facebook gives you goggles. For awhile, using the internet, especially Facebook, was difficult for
me. All I saw were people’s happy
moments – new jobs, new homes, engagements, marriages, kids. And when people would talk to me, they’d be
jealous of my amazing experience or my vacation to Victoria Falls. Or they’d say that living without electricity
and water must be so hard and they could never do what I’m doing. And finally I realized, no one’s life is ever
as awesome or as happy or as difficult as you think it is. Wherever you are, it’s just life – there are
ups and downs, people and places change and we adjust. And the grass is always greener on the other
side.
We are what we know.
When my family came to visit the village, they wondered why we had a gas
stove but still cooked most food on a fire outside. I found the answer hard to explain – just
because. Because it’s tradition, because
there are still enough trees, because sitting around the fire has an important
social aspect, even if it’s inefficient, unhealthy and environmentally
unsustainable. You might also ask,
how can students be satisfied with sharing textbooks and sitting on half a
broken chair? Because they don’t know
any different. We are a product of our
realities, so if you don’t know that sharing a textbook isn’t normal, then
it’ll never really bother you. There’s
probably some new gadget in America that everybody’s using and can’t live
without, but I’m not bothered by it, because I don’t even know it exists.
Does Namibia need us?
Perhaps the most difficult part of working in Namibia has been seeing
the Genie coefficient in action (that is, income disparity). While I know I had a positive effect on some
kids’ lives and I wouldn’t take back the experience, it was difficult to teach
in a tin shack or run a library out of the multi-purpose room when I knew that
there were unused classrooms at other schools, or that some schools had
computer labs that collected dust. Even
worse, I’d hear about (and occasionally attended) poorly run workshops where
teachers missed school days but were still paid their salary, plus “per diem”
(even though lodging and meals were provided) and learned very little
information, often skipping sessions or missing entire days, especially at the
end week. As you go up the chain, the
waste seems to deepen – more workshops, more per diem, more trips to the
capital, even last minute flights. While
there were exceptions, it seemed to become more about enriching oneself and
one’s family than enriching the lives of children with quality education.
Spending
time in bigger cities, especially Windhoek, made the disparity seem even
worse. When you can shop at a shiny
mall, work out at the Virgin Active gym and buy Gruyere or Roquefort cheese,
all within 200 meters of each other, you begin to question a country’s
neediness. Of course, this happens all
over world – the juxtaposition of sickening wealth and equally sickening abject
poverty is common. But there’s not just
one ritzy part of Windhoek. Namibia, in
fact, is a middle income country, one of the wealthier in Africa. It has abundant natural resources and a
fairly well educated population. The
government has money, sometimes left unspent, sometimes wasted, but often not
reaching the people that need it most.
Could a
teacher from Namibia move to a Spanish-speaking inner city neighborhood in
America and be an effective educator while helping implement programs to aid
development in the community? Probably
not. But what about a Spanish-speaking
teacher who grew up in that neighborhood?
Much more likely. There are many
young people in Namibia that, with a bit of training and support, could make
big changes in their communities. If
they wanted to. Motivation is key.
LESS
SERIOUS THINGS
Pee is smelly. Ever
used a chamber pot? Squatting over a
basin probably doesn’t seem ideal, but it’s better than stumbling outside in
the middle of the night. The convenience
of having a toilet right next to my bed is something I’ll miss. Through this experience, I mistakenly found
out that if you leave your chamber pot in your room while you’re at school
(particularly on a hot day), it’s pretty smelly once you get back.
Free exfoliant. At
first I was horrified when my soap fell on the ground and got covered in
sand. And as I washed, the little
buggers continued to work themselves further into the tender bar. As time went on, however, I came to realize
that sandy soap was a free, natural exfoliant.
Move over loofas, Neutrogena, spas with hot rocks and mud masks…Namibian
sand soap comin’ through.
Traveling is a lot of work.
(Yes, parents, I know you already know this.) Three weeks in, my vacation, while
interesting, has been anything but relaxing.
I really don’t know how these people who backpack for an entire year do
it. After some time (days? months?
years?) I’ll get restless again, but right now, I’m ready to come home.
