Namibia weblogOctober 12th 2004 In Country Training with VSOMichael and Rosanne spent a week of learning about their jobs and Namibian history and culture, economy and ecology.
We ate a traditional Ovambo dinner of chicken and dried spinach and millet porridge. It was much better than our previous experience as it was considerably less sandy. A large group of visiting Lutheran Church people from Germany arrived and were most put out to find a noisy crowd enjoying the homestead. They sang some hymns and then settled to eat their local meal with obvious horror and then went way, poor things. We could not believe how cold the night was. A sleeping bag would have been more than welcome and all we had was a sheet. We were also woken up by a loud braying donkey that then stampeded past our kraal at 5 in the morning with the rest of its herd. The homestead was close to one of the earliest missionary churches. It was built in 1870 by a Finnish Lutheran church foundation. It was right up in the North of the Country. There were no roads in those days just tracks. How did they travel and how did they survive without the infrastructure that we take for granted? There was a museum which had fascinating photographs of this astonishing Finnish family as well as many local artefacts. We drove to a craft centre where they had a tree nursery to help the locals replant the trees that had been cut down for buildings and fire wood over the last ten years; there is serious deforestation here as well as overgrazing. A Swedish volunteer organisation had helped them set up a paper-making enterprise which seemed to need a little more organisation but did produce some excellent cards and posters made from paper using millet stalks. On our way out we found a green snake up in a tree. It was very well camouflaged so it was really hard to see. We were told to be careful as it was venomous - though probably not lethal. We finished the course with a braai or barbeque for forty people consisting of the 24 new volunteers, the VSO head office staff and some older VSO volunteers. Somehow, and we are not really sure why, the Hodins seemed to be in charge of finding a venue, buying the food and organising the preparation of it. It was great though and the food, lots of meat, was delicious."
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"One session concentrated on all the spiders, scorpions and snakes that can kill you if you are unlucky enough to be bitten or spat at by any of them. We were just about getting used to walking around and not worrying too much but we are now all paranoid again. What the lecturer did not point out was that we were hundreds of thousands of times more likely to be hurt in a car accident than bitten by a black mamba.
We spent a night in a traditional homestead which is has an outer high circular fence made of stout timbers seven or eight feet high, with a maze of paths leading to a kraal, place for livestock, or lots of huts under a thatched roof and stick sides. Each hut is allocated to girls or boys or butter-making or the chief wife or guests or millet storage. It was really exciting arriving there as the shadows lengthened and wandering around and choosing a hut to sleep in on a simple mattress and a fresh cotton sheet and fat pillow decorated with leopards.
They missed all the little kids dressing up in jolly colourful skirts and doing some brilliant local dancing to a drum beat. The kids were hustled into individual performances, and really went for it. I've got some great photos: one girl was wearing a little hat made of a pair of old tights and another had a skiing cap on. Several of the boys were real cool dudes, of course.