Struggles of a Peace Corps Volunteer

            When I applied for Peace Corps I visualized myself and what I would be doing. I imagined several lives; my favorite ones were having a thatched hut along the beach in Fiji, or having a small house on a cliff with the ocean below me in Jamaica. I imagined sleeping under the sounds of tropical birds in Costa Rica, or in the oppressive humidity of South East Asia. Africa was on my mind but it was so foreign and mysterious. I didn’t know what to imagine or even how to imagine it. 

I believe it was the first days of May when I received Peace Corps’ acceptance letter and my assignment. At this point they had told me what day I would be departing and I was able to find out online which countries coalesced with my departure date. Togo, Zambia, and Namibia were the ones. I’ll happily admit I didn’t know a lick about any of these countries. Namibia was the only one that I knew how to find on the map and I had thought that Togo was a Pacific Island. I thought Zambia was Zimbabwe and that Namibia was a jungle like the rest of Africa.

I received my letter informing me that Namibia was to be my home for the next 28 months. By now I had researched these countries and I was happy with where I was placed. Now the engine to my imagination revved up and I began daydreaming what my life in the most misunderstood continent in the world would be like. I was also misunderstood; I imagined living in a mud house with a machete by my side on the lookout for snakes. I imagined lions roaring at night, elephants trumpeting, and witch doctors sending curses my way for not giving them money. Well turns out all those things have happened but Namibia is very different from how foreigners imagine it to be. But I digress, that’s a post for another time. 

When I visualized my life here I knew one thing. I wanted to go beyond the normal service of a volunteer; I wanted to be remembered for generations to come. I wanted to leave as a hero. A year in this country and I have been humbled. Soberingly so. I arrived swaggering believing that whatever the challenge I could just put the shoulder to the wheel and accomplish everything I wanted to. Peace Corps told me to stay away from this frame of mind but I didn’t listen, I’m the wonderful combination of young, naive, and stubborn, I was a flesh and blood Disney character, I believed anything was possible.

My humbling came in the classroom. I am teaching eighth and ninth graders in English and Geography. Like all other challenges I wanted to succeed at teaching, I wanted to improve my student’s performance; I wanted to be the teacher that my student’s would remember into their adult lives. So far I have failed miserably in improving my student’s performance. Their marks are nowhere near where I would like them to be. Up until these past two weeks I have carried all that weight of responsibility on my shoulders. In my foolish wanting to be a hero mindset I was the one responsible for my students performing poorly. I was carrying 190 students on my back. Heaviest weight I’ve ever had to bear in my life. I believed that if I worked hard enough, smart enough, I could make a tangible difference in their grades. I couldn’t and the truth of that tore me down. 

It was the middle of the second trimester when I shattered. Last Tuesday I was marking my 8^th grader’s work and I was handing out 5/35’s, 3/35’s, and even a 1/35 to a poor soul. My breath started becoming shallow, I started grinding my teeth, and my palms were becoming sweaty. I tried to slow down my breath and remain calm. I still had twenty more assignments to grade so I told myself I would go to sleep, wake up early the next morning and finish it then. I went to bed at 7 o’clock that night.

I woke up at 4:30 the next morning, I made some tea, put on my headphones and put on Bob Marley’s ‘Lively Up Yourself’. I got through one assignment and I broke down again. I just couldn’t do it, I felt the exquisite weight of all these students on top of me, counting on me to raise them up. I went to the staff meeting that day wringing my hands, I hadn’t made my mind if I was still going to try to teach that day or not. By the end of the meeting I decided to voice my frustrations to my principal. So I went into his office and told him how frustrated, disheartened, and unhappy I was with teaching. He was very supportive and gave me kind words explaining how most of these children are not going to succeed no matter what we do as teachers. Life has too many chips stacked against them. From parents that don’t care about their education, mothers drinking while they are pregnant, malnutrition, thirst, and lack of interest, these, my students, have an infinitely small chance of finishing high school. Even the numbers back it up, our school has 90 grade 8’s, 50 grade 9’s, 30 grade 10’s, 15 grade 11’s, and 6 grade 12’s. Students drop out en masse each year.

My principal told me to take the day off and go to town and stay with a volunteer friend of mine until Sunday to recompose myself. So I took the day off but told my principal I would be in the next day, I was loathe to miss school, I still felt responsibility for my students and I didn’t want to miss too much time with exams approaching. I went home messaged my mother through Facebook asking her to call me. She called me later that afternoon and we talked for an hour and she calmed me down, told me to get to town and get my mind off my problems for a while. So I did, I got on the local combi the next morning and made my way to Rundu. 

In Rundu I went to the nicest restaurant in town with two other volunteers that were on the way to run a marathon in Zambia. I ordered a large very cheesy pizza with onions, green peppers, and ground beef, two beers, and demolished them. I got back to the Peace Corps office, plopped my ass down on the couch and re entered the beautiful world of the internet. I checked my email and saw that my family had sent words of support and encouragement to me. I remember a particular email from my grandfather Vovo John. My grandfather and my grandmother were country directors for Peace Corps in Paraguay, had worked in international development in some of the toughest places in the world from Somalia to Bosnia & Herzegovina to Colombia and really knew their stuff when it came to living in the poorest and most volatile places in the world. In an email laced with great Spanish expressions (abrazos rompedistancias!) and advice from somebody who has more wisdom than I can ever imagine hoping to acquire, he led me back to the land of the sane and took me out of my dark corner.    

My grandfather, grandmother, mom and dad all taught me very important lessons. They changed my mind about being a hero to my students or at least how to quantify it. They were able to allow me to let go of these intense feelings of responsibility for my students. My students were not going to be successful in the way I wanted them to be. How they do in school is not a reflection of how I am performing as a teacher or my level of effort that I put into my job. I could be the most dedicated and hardworking teacher in the world but with how difficult life is for these students it would not matter. The majority are going to fail. The best I can do is to do my best but not push, give, and care so much that it is hurting me. I won’t make it to the finish line if I do. Paradoxically, I need to care less to succeed. Don’t misunderstand that statement, understand that this is Africa. This is a village in Namibia. Life is hard in a way that cannot even be understood or imagined in first world countries anymore. To be the teacher that these students need me to be I need to let go and accept that there will be casualties but that my mark will be left on the lucky ones whose life is a little bit more tolerable and have not been ruined by the gross weight of poverty and suffering.                               

Hunting Black Mambas

It was 6:30 Monday afternoon. The afternoon before the first day of class. As I have mentioned before, my village does not have water. I only had one 25 liter jerry can left and for the past 5 days I had been using water only for cooking and drinking. As school was starting tomorrow I needed to bathe but I wanted to get more water before I did so. I called my counterpart Mr. Mukuve and asked him to take me to the clinic where I could fill up my five jerry cans. We got in his car and on the way out my host dad, Mr. Mandevu comes up to us. He speaks no English so Mr. Mukuve translated the conversation. Mr. Mandevu said that there was a black mamba in one of his huts and that we needed to go get a gun, come back, and shoot it. So we turn around and drive to a nearby homestead. We stop, Mr. Mukuve calls out to a lady sitting by her hut. She goes inside and comes back out with an old beaten up shotgun. She hands it to me through the window and we drive back towards my host family’s homestead.

Soccer practice had ended at my school and a lot of my students were walking home. So there I was in the front seat of the pickup truck, looking smug with a shotgun on my lap with the barrel extending out of the window. All the learners looked at me with this expression of awe and surprise. I wasn’t too worried about classroom discipline after that drive. But anyway, we get to my host family’s house and there is a group of around 25 people milling about, mostly children. I step out of the car with the shotgun in tow and my principal calls out in a joking manner, ‘Andre you must shoot, you must shoot!’. Instead I give the gun to Mr. Mandevu, but before I take the mandatory camera phone picture. We then walk over to one of the corner huts where the mamba is located. Mambas are able to climb and commonly lodge themselves in the top corners of mud huts. We throw in a small burning piece of tire into the hut so the smoke will draw the mamba out. That did not work, so my host mom being an absolute badass darts inside the hut and starts throwing things outside with the idea of gaining more visibility and finding the mamba. At this point my host father had his gun aimed at the hut while my counterpart and I stood behind him with long spears in our hands ready for whatever was going to happen. The principal stood a bit to the side with his gigantic flashlight pointing inside the hut. Call us the village SWAT team.  My host mom darts back outside and the principle flashes a light in but we can’t find the mamba. She starts poking around the hut with a long stick trying to force the mamba outside where we could shoot it. The entire time my host dad was cracking jokes, making the adults laugh and scaring the little kids. I had no idea what he was saying but the laughing was quite boisterous and the kids were quickly backing away. He was treating it like this was completely normal and didn’t show any concern at all although his eyes were always trained on the door of the hut. Eventually it started to get dark and finding a mamba in a hut without any lights started to seem like a pretty bad idea. So our party broke up, we headed out to get water, my host parents kept the gun and said that in the morning they would open holes in the hut so they could get a clearer view of the snake. I wasn’t there the next morning but I was told that they went back to the hut but the mamba had disappeared into the tall grass so they let him go.     

Journey to Cape Town

First, on my journey to Cape Town. I woke up at 4:15 A.M at my village, gathered my things, relieved myself out in the bush under the moon and hopped on the combi going to Rundu. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve taken this combi but that day it was special, they were playing an international news station! Usually they only play African music, I had not heard any kind of news from the outside world for months and I was jumping up and down in my seat out of excitement. The rest of the bus gave me angry looks but I was past caring. The news was about designer babies, nuclear war, and terrorist attacks. It only increased my trepidation about leaving the village and returning to civilization. I had become a village rat and was not prepared for the technology dominated world that was out there. But then I thought about my grandma’s cooking and it was all good again. 

I reached Rundu and went to the free hike point and saw Kyla there, she’s another volunteer from the west side of Kavango. Complete coincidence that I was really happy about since free hiking by yourself is incredibly boring. We talked about her trip to Egypt, mine to Cape Town, and how our students were failing our classes in spectacular fashion. It was good to hear from another volunteer that their students also weren’t doing well, made me feel like I wasn’t the worst teacher in the world. 

Quick tangent about my students, their exam grades were disgusting. My grade 9’s averaged 45% in English and 32% in Geography while my grade 8’s averaged 42% in English. There was a few days there while I was grading that I just wanted to give up teaching completely but I spoke to the other teachers and the other volunteers and everyone was failing so I pulled myself from the brink. 

Anyway, back to the journey, Kyla and I got a hike within half an hour and made it to Grootfontein. I was wearing a hoodie, jeans, and a Brazil jersey. I walked in the gas station, took off my hoodie, approached the sandwich station and ordered. While I was waiting I heard the two ladies at the cash register talking about me. I walked to the cash register to pay and greeted them. The lady in her twenties asked me if I was from Brazil. I said yes. At this point I had not cut my hair for around six or seven months so it was the longest it had ever been (although not as long as I wanted, I was going for a lion’s mane but all I got was shag). The lady asked me if I could cut my hair and if I could give it to her! A bit of a preface, it is very fashionable for black women here to change their hair often, once every two or three months most of my female colleagues will change their hair. And they look good doing it to; I’ve seen beautiful braids, dreads, weaves, straightened hair and everything in between. I don’t completely understand the process but to change their hair as often as they do, they need to buy hair extensions. Turns our Brazilian hair is the most expensive kind in Namibia! So I here was walking around with a couple hundred dollars worth of hair on my head! I told the lady at the cash register, no thank you I don’t want to cut my hair yet, I want to see my parents in Cape Town first and scare them with my ridiculous hair. She said alright its fine, and then she asked me if she could come live with me at my village as my wife. I told her that I would whisk her away in a fancy car when I came back up from Cape Town.   

Following that encounter we went to the highway, picked a spot, and started hitchhiking again. One guy stopped for us but told us that we would have to pay 50$ to get to Windhoek. It was still reasonably early in the day so we told him we would try our luckk for a free hike and let him go. Fifteen minutes later another man stopped and told us he would take us down to Otjiwarongo for free. We hopped on and enjoyed the ride down to Otji. 

We got dropped off since our driver had to pick up some of his friends. So we walked half an hour to the highway and posted up again. We waited twenty minutes and an old raggedy car pulled up stopped by us. The driver poked his head out, interesting looking guy, in his 40’s, black gloves, a Che Guevara cap, at least ten bracelets on each wrist, and a lazy eye. There was also a lady sitting in the front. We hopped on and got going to Windhoek. The guy starts talking and you could tell right away that he was incredibly intelligent, very well educated, and enjoyed conversation. We asked him his name and what he did. He told us Sem and that he was also a volunteer. We were a bit surprised and when we started asking more about his life we started getting suspicious that he was messing with us. I asked where he was born, he said Argentina. I asked him where he was going to and he said he couldn’t tell us.

We keep talking and trying to figure out who this guy was. He asked us where we are from and I told him my long story. He then started asking specific questions about each place that only a person that had been there would have known. I then ask him how many countries he has been to. He replied, almost all of them. I tell him, you’re lying, you say you’re a volunteer, you’re driving this tiny beat-up car, how could you have visited most of the world? I then started asking questions about lots of different countries and he is answering them all perfectly and even speaking in the languages of all those countries. He even told us why he liked Havana, Cuba so much and why Cuban women are better than Brazilian women. He spoke to us in at least ten different languages and claimed that he knew twenty. 

At this point Kyle and I were completely confused as to who this guy was. We started guessing, I thought he was a professor that had spent time teaching abroad. He spoke with us about several different books that he had recently read, then we discussed Freud and his ideas, and then sexism in general. I thought, with these kinds of topics he has to be a professor. We kept talking and he kept telling us stories about the different countries that he had been to and detailed accounts about those countries. It was clear that he was not making up anything that he said. He even said he was a Yale Associate. At that point I thought, this guy has to be some kind of spy! Maybe he worked for some intelligence agency? He knew twenty languages, had traveled everywhere, and was completely unwilling to tell us what he did or his full name. We told him that and he said, “Yeah maybe, that theory makes sense.” 

Kyla started guessing that due to his clothes he was in some way involved with tourism or environmentalism. He said with a mischievous smile on his face, “I am the Director of Tourism for Namibia.” “BULLSHIT!” I yelled. Kyle and I started reasoning; “no way he’s the Director of Tourism, look at this car! The Director of Tourism would never have picked up to scraggly volunteers on the side of the road. He’s just been to way to many places!” We convinced ourselves that he was lying and told him so. He just laughed and we kept talking. 

Turns out, he actually was the Director of Tourism of Namibia. We dropped off the lady that was also giving a ride to and he pulled his card out and gave it to us. There it said, clear and bold, Sem Shikongo, Director of Tourism. My knees almost buckled and Kyla’s mouth hit the floor. I clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Man, I am so sorry for calling you a liar.” Then he let out a big belly laugh and said no problem at all and told us that everything he had told us was true. 

Sem then told us that he had just come from Etosha and was driving this small old car so he could travel unrecognized, He also told us that he usually picks up Peace Corps volunteers since he appreciates the work that we do. Turns out he is also the head of the International Environmental Conventions Unit for all of Africa. And he is the first Namibian to be selected to the Yale World Fellows Program. Amidst all these accomplishments he was still able to keep his spirit of friendship and told Kyla and I that whenever we are in Windhoek we can call him to enjoy a beer together. Incredibly remarkable man, Kyla and I were blessed to meet him and I hope that we are able to cross paths with him at least once more. It was obvious from the start that he was a man that cared deeply about his country, the people of the world, and our wellbeing on this planet. Mr. Shikongo, if you run into this blog, cheers for re-energizing me in this long road that is Peace Corps and inspiring me to keep fighting for the people that can’t fight for themselves.                         

Quick Hits Pt. 2

Welcome to Quick Hits Pt. 2! This is where I tell you guys about some of the more amusing occurences in this land of Namibia! ·  

•        I was free hiking with 2 other PCV’s from Otjiwarongo to Ondongwa when the driver hit a guinea fowl who was crossing the road. He turns around, stops where he hit the bird, doesn’t check if there was damage to the car, grabs the dead bird by the feet puts it in a plastic bag and tells us that these birds taste nice and will be his dinner.

• ·         Saw children riding cows and donkeys on the main highway.

• ·         I was supposed to go with my principal to Rundu to speak to the Ministry of Education about opening the borehole in our village but he had to cancel because one of our students had fainted. He said that she had been infected by demons during the night and that they needed to go to church to cast them out.

• ·         I have two pet geckos that live under my bed, Godzilla and Lady Gaga, they keep my room mostly bug free.

• ·         For track and field practice most of the students do all the running events barefoot or with flip flops, shoes are very rare. Also javelin is done with long sticks sharpened at the end, discus was done with my Frisbee, and shot put was done with a large rock. 

• ·         One learner ripped out half of a page crumpled it up and chewed it for the rest of class. Another day another learner asked if she could take my chalk so she could eat it. I asked my teachers about that and they said it was normal, they also used to do it as kids, they also mentioned that munching on the dirt from termite mounds was common.

• ·         One of my 9^th graders said he had a business idea for me. He said that with my camera he can take pictures of learners, I take the camera to Rundu and print the pictures and bring them back. He then sells the pictures to the learners. My students are little hustlers!

• ·         One of my students cheated twice on essays for my class. After the second time I told him 15 minutes before school was over to meet me immediately after school so he could clean the area around the teacher’s houses (common punishment here) he did not show up, so I pulled him out of class the next morning,  and marched him to the principal’s office. The Principal asked him why he didn’t show up, his answer, “I had to walk to the clinic because my son was sick.” My mouth hit the floor causing an earthquake, this was a 9^th grader!! I’ve gotten used to a lot of crazy things but whenever I think of that moment I am still dumbfounded.