We Live and Learn

So I made a mistake. Everyone here does it, but people here are just so laid back.

People at home warned me.

“Use protection” they said. “I will” I said.
“Be careful” they said. “I will” I said.

But I was foolish and now I’m paying the consequences. I can’t quite believe that it happened. I mean its Africa – you can’t say its not well known.

Yet here I am, paying the price. Sunburn is not a laughing matter – my thighs are red raw and I’m lacquering myself up with aftersun three times a day. I sat out for a couple of hours under the beating sun as if to say “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”. And it did. And it won.

Bloody brits abroad.

On a lighter note Happy New Year, I'll strive to update my blog more regularly in 2007.

Pick a card. Any card

There is some sort of magic going on out here and, like all magic tricks I’ve seen before, I’m desperate to know how it is done. But deep down I know that after two years here I’ll be non-the-wiser.

I’m not referring to any illusions or parlour games or even witchcraft or tradition healing which is common here, but an uncanny ability of all Namibians to just know what is going on without anyone saying a word.

I’m sure this makes no sense so I shall try my best to explain.

One of the main parts of my job at the moment is working alongside a lady named Padelia who is a Medical Rehabilitaion Worker. This is Padelia:

When I get round to writing about work, Padelia will be a leading character, so this is the first of doubtless many introductions to her. For now though, I'm using her as my example to illustrate the "magic" abilities to which I am referring. I shall continue.


As I write this I am certain that Padelia knows I am writing about her. I am also certain that when I go to work tomorrow, Padelia will just drop into the conversation somewhere something subtle like “did you send your email?” or "that was a terrible photo of me" or, most likely "Did you enjoy your steak last night?", yet I’m here writing (and eating - its delicious) on my own. I can only think of two possible explanations of how she could know:
a) I took a photo of her yesterday and said I was going to put it in an email (and mentioned the steak come to think of it)
b) She is magic.

This is clearly not the best example, I'll try harder. In the hospital is when I’m most often amazed by how much she knows about what is going on. This morning we were sat in the office and I went to look for a colleague in her room. “She’s not there. She’s on ward 1”. And she was right. She was on ward 1. Yet I had been sat with Padelia in the same office for at least an hour. How could she possibly know someone’s exact whereabouts? Things like this happen at least three or four times a day – its incredible. She often fills me in on what I have done over the weekend when I forget.

I'm trying desperately not to make Padelia sound like a stalker - she certainly isn't - and its not just Padelia who possesses this all seeing ability as I've decided to call it. All Namibians seem to have this sixth sense of knowing what is happening or about to happen in a completely different part of the building, the village or the country.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a celebration day for people who work with disabilities. A traditional band came at the end of the day and everybody started to dance. It was all going great, people were eating, drinking, being merry. And then all of a sudden – and all in unison – everybody just left. The band were in the middle of a song (I didn’t offend with my dancing I promise), and everyone knew it was just time to go. That’s what I’m talking about. No messages had been passed around, no whispering in the crowd, yet they had all known (and forgotten to tell me I noticed as I continued to eat on my own).

Maybe its not magic at all, just that nobody tells me. It wouldn’t be the fist time.

I think I prefer to believe its magic.

The Centre Of The Universe

Its funny what perspective does to you. Having lived in the UK pretty much all my life, you just get used to being in populous areas.

Okahao is a pretty small village. Driving through it from the “welcome” sign to the “leaving” sign takes exactly one minute and thirty nine seconds. I’ve timed it. A friend is driving in tomorrow and she asked for directions to the hospital. “Drive into Okahao and turn left” I told her, “Then what?” she replied, “That’s it.”, “That’s it?”, “That’s it”. I’m confident she’ll find it.

Yet this is the thing. I live in the happening place around here. In fact, it’s the second biggest settlement in the whole of the region. Because it has the hospital, market, church and post office, people come from miles around to access the place you live. It is the big trip of the week. When you go out into the communities, as I’m starting to get to do, you realise how big a place this small settlement you live in actually is. It sort of gives me a warm buzz (in a self admittedly very sad way) because I’ve never lived in the hub of anywhere before.

I went for a visit to Windhoek last week. Windhoek, I should mention, is no giant, sprawling city either. By European standards it would be classed as a large town, I guess not too different to the size of Gloucester. Yet driving in I felt like I was entering a metropolis. I mean, as we’ve discussed I live in what I class now as a large town, so what the hell was this?

Its all just a trifle odd and I’ve only been here for two and a half months. My plan is to create a new reality TV show called “Shell shock” where contestants live in Okahao for two years and are then warped to a major world city, Tokyo, for instance, or Los Angeles. Their first few days of survival (or not) are aired to a gripped world audience. I reckon it’s a winner.

Now to work on that warping machine…

A Rip Roaring Success

So here you go. My first successful picture from Namibia. Oh hold on...

There's two more that have just popped up to say hello. Its like London buses. The top people are Kate, Caroline, Ndatala and myself in Etosha whilst above are a few animals I've encountered thusfar. More to come and I promise to try to keep my blog updated more regularly (whats a broken promise between friends?)

I don't believe we've met

I thought I may write a fairly sobering account of life in the hospital in my blog entry, but I’m in far too good a mood to get you all depressed about HIV statistics and other grim things that instead I’ll give you an insight into the eventful life that is Namibian meetings.

As a manager (depending on who you ask I’m a coordinator, advisor, manager or plain old physiotherapist) I’ve attended a few meeting up to this point. I want to attend more, yet strangely would rather be anywhere else during parts of them.

Now don’t get me wrong, I attended a few interesting meetings in the UK, but I can’t imagine being sat in a meeting when mid discussion somebody stands up and bursts into song. Actually thats a lie, I can imagine a few people doing that, but they would be ushered out quicker than the pigs trotters I ate last week passed through my system. But not here. In fact if soneone stands up and bursts into song, most other people stand up and join in. The person who was making the point before being rudely (but brilliantly) interrupted just has to wait, possibly wondering what words triggered the outburst. The song ends and the debate resumes as if nothing had ever occurred. A days workshop contains at least as many songs as it does information. Everyone gets issued with pad and pen as standard at the beginning of the workshop. These are used, without fail, to create new lyrics for the song you are about to sing and distribute them through the audience. I may try “On Ilkley Moor Baht’at” at my next meeting.

Then there is cellphones. It is perfectly normal, no expected, that you answer all calls during a meeting. This is not done in a subtle sneak out of the room apologetic manner, but answered aka Dom Jolie with at best a half hearted attempt to duck your head under the table whilst lifting your bottom high into the air. I recommend anyone to do it at their next board meeting. Yet nobody stops the meeting, it just goes on without a flinch. Last week I was at a meeting where a board from Windhoek was feeding back to our Chief about recommendations from their visit. Three times her phone went off, each answered with a few minutes of proceeding conversation. But here is the best bit. They continued to feed back to her. Minutes of really quite useful information about how the hospital could be improved was lost because they carried on talking whilst our chief was huddled under the desk pointing her bottom out towards us and, for all I know, discussing what to have for tea tonight.

But the voting processes outdo it all. If someone needs to be elected to perform a task/action etc, then the system becomes a quickdraw of who can nominate somebody else before you get nominated yourself. Its honestly like a fastest fingers round. Then you have to vote to confirm that the person/people nominated can undertake the task. But you have to nominate far more people than are needed just so that the voting process isn’t pointless and some people will be voted off proving their unpopularity (and the irony is the person voted off didn’t want to be nominated in the first place, so in fact wins).

Lost? Welcome to my world.

Taking out a small village

This is the first photo which I've managed to post. I hope that you like it, it is a lion I saw whilst walking to the shops last week.

Its not really. Its actually a lion I saw whilst I was in Etosha National Park a couple of weeks ago.

It was either at night or downloading photos has a knack I've yet to discover. I'll let you choose which.

Anyway, in order to upload this image for you all to download, it has taken a fair while and possibly drained a small village of what little electricity they were going to have for the evening.

Enjoy. I'm going to bed now to read. With a candle.

Oh and you'll notice a title change. Decided to go with my common given names out in Okahao - The doctor White Man. Kind of catchy I think. Any other temporary title names will be openly received.

If Language Is The Food Of Love...

Language is always an amusing source for a story or two, and though I’ve already alluded to it in a previous blog, I thought I’d test your patience with a bit of an update that none of you have asked for. It seems pertinent to do this today as I’ve just found out the language I’ve been being taught, by someone who doesn’t speak it herself is, in fact, not the one used in Okahao at all. Brace yourselves, this may get a bit confusing.

The catch-all language is called Oshiwambo which is a Bantu language (i.e. Southern African tribal language). Within this are I think about 7 to 10 dialects all subtly different enough to cause major confusion at, say, a multi-tribal tea party. I’ve been learning Oshindonga from my Rehab Worker who actually speaks Oshikwanjarme. But I found out today that I actually should be speaking Oshikandjera.

To try and explain this on terms you may understand, a simple analogy may be that of living in Liverpool, being taught Cockney by a Geordie. Got it?

Fortunately I’m an Oshilumbu (stupid white person – oddly the same word in whatever dialect you say) which means that people are awfully nice and smile and nod and pretend to understand what it is I’m trying to say. Either that or people speak Afrikaans presuming I’m a White Namibian. Think being an Oshilumbu is probably the better option.

Other than that slight technical hiccup it seems to be going moderately well on the old language front. I can count to a hundred, say the days of the week, quite a few body parts and, above all, apologise profusely.

The most confusing aspect is the number of languages I’ve found myself speaking in the past six weeks. There is a VSO schoolteacher here called Caroline who is French (teaching English – though not in Oshiwambo fortunately which would totally mess with your head) and, hence, has become excited at the prospect of being able to converse with someone in her mother tongue. So far she has found out “the monkey is in the tree” (“la sange est dans l’arbre”) and to “turn into the third street on the left just in front of the tourist office” (“prenez le troisieme rue a gauche juste au fond de l’office du tourisme”). They were both whilst stood in her kitchen, so took her quite by surprise. Actually, I’m doing a bit better than that and quite enjoying it. She’s lent me a couple of films in French to practice one of which, you’ll love the irony, is called Lost in Translation.
Then there are the Cuban Doctors at work whose English is pretty limited. So from time to time I loosen the lips and throw in the odd Spanish phrase or two.

So there you have it. Language in a nutshell. Easy.

No longer afraid...

I would like to extend a hearty thanks to those of you who contributed to my snake dilemma email. I had a wide variety of suggestions and feel now that my main problem is not the fear of being bitten, but choosing from the wide range of options that are seemingly available (actually, I'm still afraid of getting bitten by a black mamba - we had a few horror stories whilst doing "first aid for bites and stings" training last week. First Aid if you get bitten by a black mamba is the last rites it would seem. A second story involved 8 people admitted to hospital with multiple fractures having jumped from the back of a speeding truck when a black mamba got caught in the axle and was flung up into the open back with the passengers. Locals obviously felt to jump was far less risky to your health than to stay!).

The Lester Meister should have special mention for the ream of info she sent on serpents and their wiley ways and a prize may be winging its way to you (though it may not get there given stories of Namibian postal services). My favourite remedy, however, and first remedy of choice if feasible should a venomous creature sink its fangs into my flesh was a medival remedy for snakebite as follows:

"If one is bitten by a snake, one thing that one can do is to have sexual intercourse, as the force of an orgasm will drain all the poisonous substances from the body"

- Albert of Aachen, Historia Hierosolymitana 5.40, in Recueil des historiens des croisades, historiens occidentaux, 5 vols. in 6 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1844 -95) 4: 459.

Many thanks go to Angharad and especially Albert.

For once I didn't knock anyone out

Many of you will have had the (mis)fortune to have been on a night out with me at some point or another. For that I heartily apologise for anything I said or did (or didn’t/couldn’t say or do). One feature of my drunken antics has come up as a focus for discussion on a number of “post night out analyse the evening discussions”. The feature in question is my dancing style which seems to vary between mild-twitch and full-seizure at any moment and for no apparent reason (though if I were a mathematician, which I’m clearly not, I’m sure some formula could be developed between amount of alcohol consumed and style of dancing, where I imagine style would peak at about 4 beers – a point we will call the optimum hip loosity - and then be inversely proportional to each beer drunk afterwards).

Anyway, there is a point to this rambling. I may well be mocked around the world for my unique dancefloor moves and grooves, but I have recently discovered that I can dance. In Cuba. There are a group of Cuban Doctors working at the hospital who invited us to theirs for an evening of Cuban festivities. It quickly became apparent that dancing was going to be involved way before optimum hip loosity could be reached. Before a drink had even touched my lips in fact (Gareth, you would have been in hell). Add to this a cute Cuban Doctor who seemed eager to dance and I was thinking of booking my flight home already. Until I saw them move. I won’t say it was like looking in a mirror (I did mention the cute one didn’t I?), in fact they did have style and grace and rhythm in abundance, but it seems that its dancing without control (they say they’re dancing from the soul or some crap like that). More importantly, standing on people’s feet is not only accepted as an inevitable consequence of the “free-dancing” but actually shows to your partner you’re really getting into the rhythm. The eagle has landed.

This is, of course, only my interpretation of events. Chances are that floating somewhere in cyber space there is one cute Cuban Girl’s blog mentioning stupid English pigs with no rhythm. But I felt better about my dancing, and I think that that’s not bad work for one evening.

I really should tell you about things happening out here, but figure I have two years to filter all that out to you in small, bitesize chunks. And, hey, when you’ve just found out that you may well be a dancing god somewhere in the world, development work in Africa has to take a small step aside I feel.

Its qll in French

Qpologies if there are mistakes, but toady I'm using a french keyboard. Obviously.

So here we go. One week down, one hundred and three to go (not that I’m counting already). Arrived in Okahao, my hometown for the next two years, last week. Was told that I would be living with another guy who works in the hospital. As you can imagine, when your going to meet your housemate (and the only person you know who lives in that village), a whole host of potential scenarios unfold in your mind. Housemates over the years have been cool with the odd moments of tears of pain, post spinach toilet avoidances, hairplugs, chilli con carnes and relationship dilemmas (an aside game for all former housemates is to match your name to the moment).

So I opened the door to my new house and was greeted by a crate of beer. I think I’ll be OK. Ray was the owner of the beer, a Zimbabwean Doctor, who as an added bonus had been bored prior to my arrival (and probably since), so decided to invest in a hifi and surround sound TV. Yes, you heard correctly, I have more stuff here than I did at home.

Nice. You’d think. Until I tell you about the one TV channel in Namibia. The first half of the day is the same news for half an hour in a different language each time. This is then followed by a variety of imported soap operas (mainly from Mexico) which I’ve been told I will become addicted to over the next two years. Hmmm, can’t wait.

The hospital I’m working in is interesting, but thats a whole other subject for another blog day. Keep tuning in and thanks for the advice on snakes and language. New topic for this week is interesting to do with eggs, which seem to be one of the more common foodstuffs I can find in the village.

Ant