Ongwadiva is where we are living. It’s just a main road which has grown into a town, so imagine a long straight dusty road and start there. The road is high and strong and was well built for the SWAPO guerrillas it is rumoured, or maybe it was just part of Namibia’s burst of national pride on independence. But beside the big road lie the remaining bumps and patches of the old road and the sand stretches downwards to a dusty track marked with a million footprints. The sand roadside path is wide and used by most of us, for driving along or sitting about with a basket of stuff or for loitering about on if you are a goat.
Ongwadiva is a mostly residential area and the dusty plain has been sectioned off into plots for houses. These range from plain but adequate bungalows made of concrete with a garage and quite large yard, to smaller housing estates with rows of single storey tiny houses, seemingly with one or two rooms only, built around a large courtyard with a large space in the middle and a skip for rubbish. The goats and cattle regularly cruise about looking for people’s gardens to raid. Everyone has an attempt at barricading them out. The best fences we have seen have been made from car panels, but there are the more obvious chain link, razor wire or brushwood. Some people have a few trees and shrubs and one rich furniture trader has a TWO storey house with an oasis in her yard. It’s the envy of the neighbourhood.
Our yard is like an enormous sand pit in which four thorn trees, acacias with pompoms and long seed pods, are growing and giving off welcome pools of shade and a delightful peppering of smooth brown seeds on the pale sand. There are several dead trees but I am hoping that they are only pretending and that if I keep watering when leaf time comes round (when is it?) they will burst into glossy life. We have planted assorted seeds in strategic positions around the garden. Spinach up against the wall to shade it a little, sweetcorn along in a dryer place, a little row of lettuce edged with bricks to shade the seedlings etc etc. We do an energetic burst of watering morning and evening and have watched in delight as everything has germinated in a few days, and watched in dismay but resignation as everything is eaten a few days later by some ravenous insect. We are now trying larger: this weekend we will plant a banana tree and two papaya trees and hope that a two year stay will see them large and luxuriant.
Our house is made of concrete and is quite plain. It has a smooth cool tiled floor and walls mostly painted gloss caramel. There is a sticky patina of cooking grease everywhere and a healthy population of huge cockroaches. My first activity was to sweep every old cottonbud and sock into a rubbish bag and buy significant quantities of cleaning gear. There are two sofas and a big chair which I have covered with blue African cloth and we have managed to get a new tabletop to replace the bendy cardboard one. There are three bedrooms, one of which is being lodged in by our boss, the Dean of Studies, while he relocates. There are metal bars on every window and glass and mosquito netting and the whole establishment seems like a prison, bristling with security measures. We have an electric fence on the garden wall and a lock on the gate and the inner and outer doors. Michael has managed to electrocute both himself and the Dean. I have a nightly ritual of stamping on the cockroaches which make a satisfying pop as they burst. As you can tell I do not love the house and will have to do much in the way of redecorating and hygiene to improve things.
We are experimenting on ways to deal with the heat which is increasing all the time. The morning is beautifully cool and I am out of the house at dawn at 6.15 and I go running around the area and watch the moon set. A straggle of schoolkids are on their way out to school. Sometimes I persuade Michael to leave the sweltering stale heat inside and have breakfast outside. All windows and doors are open. By 10.30 it has got really hot and increases until by 3.30 it is unbearable and many people have slid comatose into nearby shopping precincts or offices to bask in the air conditioning. If we can persuade Secilia our housekeeper (!!) to keep the curtains drawn and the doors and windows shut the house can keep a bit shady and cool, but we can't and when we return from work at 4.00 it is like an oven in there. We put the fan on but the house stays hot and we sleep naked under a mosquito net. I think the way forward is to abandon the house and spend a lot of time in the yard with lashings of mosquito repellent on. Things will continue like this and get hotter, up to 42 degrees with no humidity in November, and then it will rain and cool down a little.
We have friendly neighbours who greet us and the children make nice squeaky chattering noises. The women are up thumping the maize meal with traditional posts in a small wooden pot, each raising and thumping in turn, a bit like bell ringing. It seems incongruous to see this traditional housekeeping going on in a house with a TV satellite dish. One of our neighbours has a regular card party for men in the garden under a tree. Everyone has a guard dog whose duty it is to bark loudly and conversationally in the middle of the night. The cattle and goats mostly go home at night, taking themselves back to where they belong, although I have seen tell-tale piles of dung beside the Spar, which indicates a sleepover.
We really do have a Spar and assorted mini markets in the locality. There are plenty of little bars called cuca bars where very loud music is played and you get to drink Pepsi or beer or home made stuff. They all have brilliant names like Let’s Push Bar, or The Hard Work Bar or Friendship Only, or Cape to Cairo, Bon Appetit or The Hot Box. They are all the size of a garden shed, even the one proudly called Picadilly Circus, and most are painted mad bright colours, with hand-painted writing.