Oshakati is a town that has sprung up in the last five years and it isn’t on old maps. It also started life as a road with a filling station, but has grown up into the northern capital, with the Bank of Namibia building with a heliport on its roof, a hospital staffed by Cuban doctors, three shopping malls, two new national banks, an internet café, a large frozen pilchards warehouse, much much more, and countless tiny shops. Of course there is the covered market, not very covered really, but bright with pyramids of apples oranges and tomatoes, and ramshackle shelters made from strips of coloured cloth or netting. The big market product seems to be imported Granny Smith apples from South Africa or locally killed meat hanging in great bloody strips with lots of flies enjoying themselves. People sit about and no-one really hurries to do anything, so it can hardly be called bustling, but the smells and noise bustle instead.
Where there is real mad speed and frenzy is The TRAFFIC. Cars hurtle about up and down the one main street and on the sand beside it. They overtake, undertake, honk to see if you want a taxi ride, honk if thy think you aren’t driving well, pulse out loud music and the number of cars is huge. The town is sprawled out along this road and so everyone drives from one part to the next or takes a taxi or gets a lift. There isn’t a town centre, everything is a bit too far from the next bit. It’s incredibly dusty and the dust flies around the cars, sometimes drifting across the road and even blowing up into a dust storm and making a deep fog.
The tiny shops offer an amazing range of services: beauty clinic, keys cut, car repair, mealie maize restaurant, bridal wear, tailoring, all out of a hut. There are residential areas and some very smart houses and also settlements for the poor people.
Many local people have left their traditional homesteads of a big enclosed wooden fence within which many thatched huts are accommodated, and instead go to the town to make money. They build shacks out of brick or corrugated metal walls and roofs. I saw a good sized shack made out of the construction notice OSHAKATI TOWN COUNCIL REDEVELOPMENT OF OFFICES, quickly taken down and turned into two walls of a little house. There are even tinier outside loos with a roof and a chimney, I suppose for ventilation. There can't be running water for them, so I guess they are sand toilets. Most poor shack settlements have a standpipe for fresh water, though, and little children struggle with big plastic containers, dragging them home. Sometimes you see the women carrying these containers on their heads and they carry their babies on their backs or are heavily pregnant. It's hard being a woman here.
We went to one of the settlements to join in with an Aids Programme. There was a roofed area with a smooth concrete floor, worn shiny with use. Here the tiny kids from the area had gathered to play and a local volunteer from the settlement had unlocked two big boxes of toys for them to play with. We just arrived as this happened and instantly two tiny little kids ran up and grabbed a hand each and took us off to play with them. We sat on the floor and I did loads of puzzle shapes and teasing and Michael did a jigsaw, with kids from a year old to maybe ten.
They can’t speak English as they don’t go to school. In Namibia you pay to go to school so these really poor kids just don’t go. Some of the children have parents but lots don’t; they are the orphans of Aids victims. After we played there was a ‘school’ session where the volunteer, Paulina, wrote up on the wall My Favorite Animal and wrote up the names of several local creatures, elephant, zebra, chicken. All the kids were given an old sheet of reject photocopying and a pencil and with great delight they copied the lettering and drew brilliant pictures of zebras with spots and weird elephants.
Paulina was harsh with them, parading up and down with a stick, but they accepted everything she said. She then got them singing for a while before we did FOOD, which is really the point of the programme. She had cooked a gigantic pot of rice and made a slop out of tinned tomatoes and tinned pilchards. We doled out rations of this into plastic plates and put out all along the wall a dish of food and a plastic spoon and a mug of the local mealie meal like a thin drinking porridge. Then everyone lined up, and when their names were called they got to go and choose their plate, and all fifty of them crept off and found a quiet place to sit and eat with their friends. They came back for more of the drink and so did many other kids from all around and then I did a massive wash-up operation in two buckets. We set up a chain-gang of bringers and sorters and rinsers and stackers and they were just great. Quite a day!