Reflections on a Peace Corps Service

Stories of Students, Friends, Country, Racism, and Kindness

Excuse the blue teeth, I had just eaten blue cake

I sit in my aunt’s and uncle’s house in Cape Town. I am on the porch with a majestic view of the vibrant green slopes of Table Mountain in front of me and a glass of orange juice next to me. Palm trees are swaying in the wind. I hear cars on the road.  China, the family pug is making her pug snorts next to me. I pet her and she looks up at me lovingly much like Mendchen, the village dog would at Shamangorwa. The last time I had been in Cape Town was May of 2013. I looked as Peace Corps as you could look. I had grown out my beard and hair for more than three months. I was underweight, I still had dust from the village clinging to my skin, and my eyes had a glint of bewilderment and confusion. I had been living in the village for about six months. Bathing in the river had become normal. Fetching water from 5 km away had become normal. No bathroom, 140 km from the nearest food market, and all the other realities of my new life had become normal. Being in Cape Town left me shocked at the opulence and luxury that I had previously thought was normal. I struggled with it and had a hard time reconciling this with my life in Namibia. 

Now it is September 2014. My orange juice is half gone and China is snoring happily next to me. I was alone in the house and I had just spent my time looking at myself in the mirror and thinking. I had put some weight back on and felt fit. I was clean shaven, my hair was cut trim, and my eyes where clear. Less lost. I had just completed my Peace Corps service and was heading back into the world that I was from. The world that I had entered as a foreigner and left as a brother was being left behind. I gave myself time to think about what that meant. I couldn’t think of anything. No profound thought came to me. No epiphany, no flash of inspiration or deeper meaning to it all. I didn’t even feel like I had left. 

Off road adventures

It is now exactly a month and five days since I officially completed my Peace Corps service. I am in New York and soon to be in Rio de Janeiro by way of Miami. I have delayed writing this post, my reflections, because no idea, thought, philosophy, or neat way to summarize my service has come to mind. I am beginning to realize that I will never be able to have a tidy, coherent presentation on the entirety of my Peace Corps service. The closest I have come to that objective is to call it thus. The toughest, craziest, and some of the best two years of my life. Hopefully I will be able to unpack that and present my service to you in a way that you can understand the way I felt, why I did the things I did, and what it all meant.  

I had various reasons for why I came to Peace Corps. When asked, my stock reply is usually that I want to pursue a career in international development, I love travel, adventure, and I want to make a difference in the world. If I allow myself to speak from a deeper, more personal place my answer changes. My life has always been blessed. I constantly think to myself that I must be within the luckiest percent of the world’s population. I have always had everything I needed. My relationship with my family is wonderful, I have always had great friends, been to good schools, and had a positive outlook on life. But this did not mean that I was sheltered or kept away from the realities of life. Having traveled extensively even at a young age and having grown up in South America exposed me to poverty. I had never understood why I had been so lucky to grow up in such easy circumstances while other people who were no different from me grew up in impossible circumstances. I didn’t feel guilty about having an easy life, but I knew that I had the capacity and the desire to step away from my life and use what had been given to me to uplift others. To at least give people who haven’t been as lucky as me a fighting chance in the pursuit of their goals and dreams. Dreams that for me are within comparatively easy reach due to a wonderful education and supportive family. So I decided that it was time to step away from the lucky one percent and test myself in the uglier, harsher world that so many have to face. 

Beautiful day in the village

On Teaching

In several of my posts I have described how I didn’t particularly enjoy my job as a teacher. Now that it is done I am happy that that was the job assigned to me. I think back on the relationships with my students. Most where younger, several where my age and a few were older. If I knew then what I felt now I wouldn’t have believed it. My students have caused me to have a meltdown, to make me want to quit, yell at them, throw chalk at them, slam the desk while one was sleeping, and in a an unfortunate circumstance reduce one to tears. This all makes it sound like a pretty negative experience both for myself and for my students. But, those where the darkest moments in a long two year road. I asked my kids to write goodbye letters to me and they were simply incredible. I blushed when I read them. 

My single biggest frustration was the lack of help that I felt I was giving to my students. This frustration caused me to vent my unhappiness on my own perceived failings as a teacher onto them. I couldn’t get them to perform the way I wanted them to. The letters they wrote have melted that regret away. I compared them to some of their previous writing that they had done in my class. The improvement was phenomenal. I had just been too close to the process to notice it. Not only that, their level of appreciation for me was something I never expected. Students would go on and on writing about how they would never forget me, how they loved me, and how they wished I could stay. One girl even wrote that she wished she could speak directly to the President to order me to stay in Namibia. I think back on my students now and I realize that I loved them to. After so many insane days with 50 students, 14-30 years old, in a classroom meant for 30, 35 Celsius outside, even hotter inside, me sweating straight through my shirt while students giggled at all my sweat patches, even through all that, somehow they were able to wiggle their way into my heart. I am now facebook friends with a few of my students, I hope that as facebook becomes more common place I can keep track of all of them. They now feel like my children and all I want is for them to be able to escape the poverty that they were born into and achieve their dreams.       

    

Future entrepreneurs!

One last story on about my students. Back before the water project was completed I would go to the river with the other male teachers to bathe. There were different spots on the river for the men and the women. I arrived there and there were other male students also bathing. Everyone was cool about it so I just joined in with my shampoo and soap and started bathing in the river. We were bathing on a part of the river where rocks where sheltering us from the main flow of water. This spot was picked because it provided some protection from crocodiles. One of the 11^th graders, Alfred, approached me and asked, “Sir, do you want a fish?” I knew there was tilapia in the river so I said yes. Alfred promptly dives down under the water a few times. He starts wading closer to a rock and quickly dives down. He then uses his hands to trap the tilapia against the rock and catch it! He then hit it on the rock, killed it, and we took it back to my house where he cooked a delicious fish dinner for me!  

On my Namibian Friends

Mukena, Bassy, and Osby

Chaze and Petronella

What a group! From my three dogs, Bassy, Mukena, and Osby to my favorite ladies and neighbors Chaze, Petro, and Elyna. All the ones that took care of me; Mrs. Abel, Mr. Kanyanga, Mr. Rumeta. All my vakwetus, bradhas, sistas, and of course the big tate Mr. Mayira. I can absolutely say that I would never have made it without these people and others that I haven’t listed (there’s just so many!) One day that I will always remember was arriving into Shamangorwa. We had been driving for two hours straight into the bush. The sun was setting and the lighting was dramatic. I got out of the combi with the volunteer I was replacing. As soon as I stepped out Bassy comes up with a big smile on his face, offers me his hand and says, “Welcome! I am the big dog in this village, you need anything and I will help you out, we are now dogs together!” And he really did help, we would drive together to fetch water, go to town together, play basketball, watch the World Cup, and in a story I told earlier, went hunting for a black mamba together. My neighbor Chaze was also an incredible person. She became my neighbor about 6 months after I arrived as she had just transferred schools. We started out slightly rocky, she liked to play her music really loudly and I had to ask her to turn it down. She did and we were fine, but turns out that the reason she was playing her music loudly was because she was responding to me playing my music loudly! She just didn’t want to approach me about it, understandable since I was still a strange entity in the village and who knows how to talk to the new American guy about problems like that. Anyway, we became close friends. We cooked for each other, played cards, and hung out a lot. On my last few months Chaze gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. She was from the Caprivi Strip and according to the tradition there, a baby’s first meal of solid food is very important. Tradition states that whoever fed the baby its first meal of solid food would transfer their personality and character to the baby. Chaze wanted me to be that person! It’s too bad that I left before that first meal but it was an incredible honor anyway.

My teachers asked me to deliver a speech at my going away party. The speech focused along the lines of how I had come to Namibia as a 22 year old boy and was now leaving a man. I gave all the credit for the transformation to my friends and colleagues. So many conversations, adventures, experiences, and shared struggles with them created a bond that I will never forget. On one of my last few months I was riding to town with my principal, Mr. Mayira. We were 60 km away and the car petered out because it had run out of gas. He pulled the car over to the side of the highway. I went to the back and fetched a few five liter containers. We chatted for ten minutes while waiting for a car to pick me up to go into town and fill up the containers with gas. I get a ride, stop at the gas station, fill up the containers, and hitch back out. I get back and Mr. Mayira is still sitting on the same spot, car parked under a tree, a monkey orange in hand, vibrant blue sky above, soft breeze blowing by, and an idle smile stretched leisurely across his face. I ask him, aren't you bored or annoyed that you couldn’t get to town on time? He replies, “My braddha, this is Africa, I am enjoying, this day is treating me nicely, I am hammering this fruit, and now you my friend, are back, I have no worries, no stress.” He pounds his chest and says, “My heart is good” So I put the gas down, sit next to him, crack open my own money orange, and stretch out my own idle smile. We then go on to talk about how I must bring him back a nice fat American woman so he can marry and that I must find a wife, have many children and bring them back so he can meet them.      

Mr. Mayira

On Namibia

It’s strange to think that even though I only spent two years in Namibia, it might be the country that I know best. Certainly geographically there is no other country that I have seen as much of. I was blessed to travel the entire country, see all of the largest towns and many other villages. From the Skeleton Coast, to Katima Mulilo in the Caprivi Strip, and all the way down to the diamond mines of Ludderitz. How can I even begin to describe this amazing yet flawed, but also beautiful and rugged and let’s not forget diverse country. I have never seen or experienced so much heartbreaking racism before. I have also never seen or experienced so much kindness. I have never seen or experienced community like this, despair like this, hope, poverty, and most of all a sense of we are all in this shit together, let’s all make it out together and leave no one behind. As a volunteer teacher I made 200 American dollars a month. I was the lowest paid staff member and the average for other teachers was about $800 a month. I lived fine with that money, during vacations I would call home and ask for some extra but I was doing alright. At the end of every month my colleagues would complain that their money was all gone. They all lived like me and I couldn’t figure out where their money was going. Eventually I found out that most of my colleague’s money would go to their families. They might be the one person in a family of six that had a job. Instead of using their hard earned money for themselves, most of it would go back to their families. I asked, but what if you don’t like what your family is doing with the money, what if they are alcoholics (alcoholism is an epidemic in Namibia). “Andreas, it does not matter, they are my family, I cannot leave them, I must help.” 

Bassy

Stories on Kindness and Stories on Racism

Some of my favorite/most interesting/most depressing stories that have happened to me concerned these two topics, I’ve wanted to write an entire blog post on this but I never got around to it so I’m going to do it now.

My boys!

Let’s start with the good: 

First off, know that in Africa, we share. This is the motto that I heard most often, not just in Namibia, but also South Africa, Zambia, and Malawi. On my final trip from my village to the capital I got on a combi. Combis suck. Overcrowded, slow, hot, blaring music, and all kinds of nonsense. I didn’t hitchhike because I had all of my life belongings with me and didn’t think my chances where great to get out of Rundu (my regional capital). So I got on the combi, took the back row and put my music on. Three other grown men crowded in the back with me. I looked outside and saw a mother with an eight year old boy being held by the hand. She puts the eight year old boy next to me, says goodbye to the boy, and leaves. The combi starts moving and I start zoning out. The kid next to me starts fidgeting and I see that he has some candy. I’m looking out the window and then the kid starts poking me. He looks up at me, hand open full of candy and offers me one. To give some perspective, my region is notorious for having very quiet and shy people. My whiteness did not help with that at all. I’ve made kids on buses cry just by smiling at them. This kid did not care though, I took a candy and said thank you. Half an hour later, he pulls out French fries from his backpack and a bottle of juice. Again he offers it to me. I take one because I didn’t want to steal all his food. Thirty seconds later he pokes me again and without saying anything offers me more French fries. At this point I have anointed him as my favorite child in the world. I take out one earphone and put it in his ear and we listen to music together for the rest of the 700 km drive. The boy also offers me some of his juice, and he offers his fries to the three men next to me. We stop at the gas station and I buy a chocolate which we share together. We jam out together for the rest of the bus ride, he was particularly a fan of reggaeton, and we arrive in Windhoek late afternoon. I ask him if someone is picking him up, he doesn't answer, I’m pretty sure he didn’t understand what I was saying. I get out, get my things and hang out for a bit to see what happens to him. The boy runs to his father and jumps into his arms and gives him a hug. I go over and tell him that he should be very proud of his son and how brave and generous he is, I tell him how we shared food and listened to music together. The father shakes my hand and gives me a knowing smile and tells me that his son is very special, they walk away and the coolest boy in the world smiles and waves as I leave.  

Doreen and I (not the boy from the story)

Some of my stories involving racism are pretty lighthearted while others are a bit heavier but it never boiled down to any kind of violence or serious confrontation. One of my first interactions with it was when I was out one night in Rundu with another volunteer and a Namibian friend. We were having drinks at a lodge, it was a good time but we were tired and started to head home at 11:00 (we village, bedtime is early!) On my way out a black Namibian who is standing with two coloreds (this is the term in Namibia for a mixed race person) starts talking to me, he asks me if I am scared. I ask why should I be scared? He says, “Because your ancestors came here and killed my people.” I started to make a reply but my friends shepherded me out of there. It was a bit shocking, first time a Namibian had reacted that negatively to my race. Besides always being stared at and being targeted for money which became a normal everyday event, that was my one moment where I was attacked because of my skin. So really not too bad considering that Namibia was a post-apartheid country, I kind of expected more moments like those. 

Two of my best girls!

The most heartbreaking racism, and the most common that I saw in Namibia was black people against themselves. I have had countless conversations, heard countless comments, and seen with my own eyes how many black people in Namibia saw themselves as less capable, less hardworking, and less desirable than white people. One of my best friends and running buddy, a teacher from my school, would have this conversation with me all the time. His basic premise was that whites where naturally more capable than blacks. He was a young guy, apartheid had finished when he was three years old but he still held this racist belief against himself and the people around him. He would always say that if you want a job done right you hire a white person. A common quote that I heard from multiple people, including my principal was, “Ahh! These blacks! They are not serious!” My colleage and I talked nature vs. nurture, I gave examples of black people that had changed or where changing the world, and we even jumped into a hypothetical. I would basically say, “So, let’s say my parents gave birth to me over there at Nyangana hospital but they abandoned me. A family here at Shamangorwa raises me just like their other black children, my life is no different than anybody else’s here except that my skin is white, are you saying that in school I would have been the best student?” He thinks for a bit and replies yes, you would be getting A’s while the others are failing. I tried so hard to dispel this theme throughout my two years but I failed. My students where more receptive to my message that your race will not limit you (unless you’re working for a racist but I didn’t mention that), you have the same potential as a White, an Asian, or an Indian to achieve what you want to achieve. I think that message did reach my students and I did sense a pride in being black from them. With the adults though it wasn’t the same. Desirability was another issue I noticed a lot. I would always hear Namiban men and women say I want a white lady, I want a white man. I would ask why, “Oh they are just better,” would usually be the reply. A few times I had the sad occasion to want to take a picture with some of my beautiful female colleagues, some of them refused to take pictures with me because the contrast of our skin would make their skin look darker.  Also all the time they expressed that they wished their skin was lighter. I would always tell them that white people where the opposite, that they would go out into the sun and sit there just to get darker. They didn’t believe that that was true! One of my greatest hopes for my students and for Namibia is the growth of pride and confidence in yourself. Apartheid left such a vicious legacy on the country, I hope that there is continual progress on such an important issue.      

My 9th graders

On the bit more lighthearted side was when my kids where practicing dance at school. The sports at school where soccer, volleyball (which I had a great time coaching), and traditional dance. I had finished my marking so I was outside watching. There were three of my boys playing three five foot tall drums and forty students doing their dance moves. Each region has its own particular form of dance, in Kavango it’s all about the shoulders. They gyrate them incredibly fast and do a few steps with their feet but it is mostly in the shoulders with a bit of hips thrown in to. One girl wasn’t very good at it and the teacher calls out “Stop! You are dancing like a white now!”

Everyone looks over at me and starts laughing. I shake my head, smile, and say “Practice me and I will dance like a black now!” That caused an uproar but no one ever did teach me the dance. When I was alone in my room I would practice and I think I was alright! Leading up to my going away all the teachers kept telling me “At this party, you must dance now, we want to see you shake nicely you!” I asked them the next morning how I did and they said “Very good Andreas! Your shaking made us happy!”

I’d like to finish my final blog post with a story of kindness. Thank you for making it through this post, I know it was a long one but I had to get it all out at once. It was one of my first weekends in the village and it happened to be my birthday. I was still feeling weird and trying to cope with my surroundings. It was Friday afternoon and I am at home feeling lonely while watching a TV show. I hear a knock on my door and its Bassy, Mukena, Osby, and Rumeta dressed up in sports gear. They tell me that I am spending too much time inside the house and that they were going to take me somewhere special. We pile on to the back of a pick up truck. They grab a basketball and give it to me with big smile and yell happy birthday! We keep driving as we are all singing together. I still didn’t know where we were going. We were deep in the bush, just a bunch of scattered villages, the Kavango River and Angola to our right side. After 30 km we pull up at a school. A few of the teachers walk up and greet us. We start walking and I’m still confused as to what we are doing. Mukena says, Andre, bring the basketball. I start getting my hopes up, was there a court here? We walk for about a kilometer and out of nowhere, overlooking the river and Angola while the sun is setting is a basketball court! I love basketball and a huge smile broke out across my face. We played for about two hours. After, my colleagues said that they weren’t going back to school but where going to town. I had not brought anything, no money no clothes. Mukena and Osby say, “Don’t worry bra, you are staying with us tonight!” So I go into town with them, take a shower, they give me some extra clothes and when I step out I found that they had cooked a delicious dinner for me! We sat around, ate, talked stories, laughed and listened to music. I was so grateful for that afternoon, I was still a wandering child in the village and these guys had brought me into their family. 

The End

Well, that’s it, I hope you have enjoyed reading my stories as much as I have enjoyed writing them. Thank you for reading this last piece in particular, I know it was a smorgasbord of a post, but hey! This is Africa, and in Africa we share!  I hope you were able to make sense of my time in Namibia and were able to see it through my eyes as I lived it. Please let me know if you have any questions about Namibia, if you plan on traveling there, or just want to hear more stories, there’s a few that I didn’t include! Thank you everyone for reading! – A.H         

 

Our Peace Corps Group 36!