Namibia weblog
December 6th 2004
"The small rains have been. They transformed the arid endless stretch of brown and beige into a lyrical green pastureland, graced by huge trees, roving cattle, small lakes and pools - that is if you choose to ignore the now rather charmingly moated car dumps or the floating rubbish pits, the slithering roads and the brewing soup of festering matter. At least a walk in our nearby wasteland, or wilderness, is now refreshing and gentle on the eye. We walk with one eye up to enjoy brilliant green foliage and exquisitely contorted flowers and seed pods, and one eye on the ground to avoid branches or twigs of vicious acacia thorn or scuttling lizards: in brown, harris tweed, or free-from-Rice-Krispies blue plastic. The blue and brown ones are fun to tease; when confronted they do a bold little head waving, impressively fearsome, but then they panic and take cover behind the tree. If I go one way and Michael the other, the head waving gets out of hand. We torment them for a while and move on. But this weekend the rains are over and the glaring relentless heat of last month is back again. Out of bed by habit now well before seven even on a weekend, the rush is on to water the garden and get a walk before it is too hot to move. The watering is either a leisurely affair, each with a bucket, poured quietly and lovingly on every poor striving plant or the frenetic style whereby one of us holds a hose and the other has to leap about emptying water with a violent slopping jerking movement and rushing back for the next bucket before it overflows. The frenetic method is chosen today to allow for more walking time. The route to our nearest lyrical parkland is now past the Centre for Holistic Healing and Cure for Aids and across the scrappy wasteland filled with broken bottles and discarded shoes, black hair extensions, condoms and coke cans. Our shorter route takes us through the building site and the skip, much frequented by the cows who like to eat the cardboard bits, but is no longer possible as the house is finished and the path fenced off. We have to cross the road, and there we are, in African paradox: extreme beauty tempered by impossible violations; trees huge in majesty with lumps of gearbox and broken beer bottles under them. We managed an hour, padding through grassy sand and seeking patches of deep shade before it became too hot, by 9.30. Home for a shower and change into a sarong. Now is the difficulty. How does one pass the rest of the day? Answer: Pick through newly acquired second-hand camping equipment. Gloat at the thought of accommodating longed-for visitors in the impressive looking tent. Put up the tent as useful practice, outside in the shade of the bean tree. Return to investigate battered tin trunk and its contents. Consider odd-looking cutlery, plastic plates in three colours, jaded thermos flask but feel pleased with an old whisky tin tenderly protecting two wine glasses. Michael and I begin to look through a collection of car spares and feel too hot to continue. Michael showers again, I droop off to lie in my paddling pool.
The curtains are closed and the door shut to keep out the heat. It is very hot inside though, stifling. The fan is on but it is just stirring the hot air about. So I creep outside to see what shade can be found in the garden. The acacia thorn tree manages to offer a circle of shade. And so I sit on a garden chair, trying to relax in the pleasant ambience of my sandy garden - but it is too hot. The pool is too hot. Everywhere is too hot, too still, too breathless. I remember seeing the metal structure for supporting the tent and creep in and past Michael to bring it out to the pool. I assemble a contorted canopy over the pool with the tent frame, string, pegs, two sarongs and a fly sheet. Michael arrives and makes some obvious improvements and we lie in the pool, in shade. Within the hour we have visitors, other drifting VSO volunteers, who instantly join us in the pool with cries of delight. So far the pool holds five of us, comfortably. Lunch time drifts by, but I go and gather plates of salad and bottles of cold beer and pass them to the pool dwellers. When we are all shrivelled and wrinkly we slop out of the pool and arrange the sofas into cinema rows and sit and watch a movie: DVD on the computer screen. Several of us wear wet towels to cool down hot legs. The fan is whirring and it is tolerably comfortable. By five it is cool enough to move and we start to live again. Tonight the local bar is having its big deal: the Southern Cross Live Music Event. We arrive an hour and a half after the start time, to find we are an hour and a half before it actually starts. This is normal. We chat to a surprisingly large number of people we have met so far. It’s a lively scene. The live music when it comes is dire. It is a cross between a bad karaoke night and a poorly organised 6th form concert. There is a painful excess of rap numbers. Cool dudes do good breakdancing, though, while the singers drone. People announce their set with lunatic statements like: I’d like to dedicate this song to AIDS, violence and everything….or…Let's get together and fight AIDS, we can do it by joining together..??? David, in good shape after his afternoon in our pool, sings Steve Miller songs as our Angolan drum teacher plays. The Zulu dance group come in and do amazing stamping and swirling dances; small lithe girls spin with unbelievable agility and energy. The American Peace Corps do their version of the wild stamping dancing to loud cheers and clapping. The moon rises and it is a stunning starry night. We drift home. I slide my clothes off as we walk through our garden and I slip into the pool again, this time in the moonlight. Tomorrow? A walk, a swim, reading, eating, chatting, emails, watering the garden, feeling hot".
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The pool is warm already, but delicious. I scoop out some creatures, all small and black. I then decide to spend the rest of my life in it, only getting out briefly to fetch the essential drinking bottle, book, sunglasses and sunhat. After an hour I realise my stomach is blotchy red, on fire with sunburn, so I go inside to finish my book, with a wet flannel on my burning middle. Michael is trying to persuade his computer to take a voice message on email and keeps repeating "The Papaya is Ripe" to satisfy the voice recognition component.