Namibia weblog 2006

3rd February 2006

Rosanne writes....

"It's registration week at UNAM. Every computer is whizzing, and thin threads of blue smoke are rising from either laptops, computers or frazzled heads. Students are sitting in drifts in the large waiting spaces, some slumped with the special African look which denotes an infinity of patience, minds clearly elsewhere, at peace. The University staff provide a sharp contrast with clipped voices and spilled tea and a sense of frustration and hurry. The computers are slow. The students don’t have the right grades to qualify. Essential documents have been left behind. Students don’t have the right money.

In our office we have a constant stream of students who have come hoping for a place on the Foundation Programme. It is heart-breaking. They hold their statements of results in trembling hands. All have failed to get in to the University because they have low grades. We sit them down and look at just how low they are, and then explain that we are searching for students who are bright but have failed because their schools have had no teachers in a particular subject, or their teacher has died, or the school is just a very bad one. We are blistering with statistics which show us that some of the schools in the rural areas have results to shame any educational system. The top students have Fs, Gs and Us.

We try to cream off the top ten percent of students and give them an entry test. This is cunningly designed to test thinking and aptitude and has a big section of playing with shapes, but we also have to take students who can communicate in English on a basic level and have a grounding of sense in Maths. After all, we are trying to turn them into university entrants in a year. Marking the tests is a dismal affair. We have sixty places only, until the University commits itself to building the labs it promised. We struggle to choose the most appropriate and deserving cases. And this is only on academic aptitude. Once the course starts we find out just how many of them are penniless, orphans, abused…and we just refuse to think about how many might already be HIV positive.

And it is raining with a ferocity that is partly horrifying and partly welcome. The roofs, designed for maximum shade, with long outstretched tin eaves, are throwing off slabs of water and bedraggled students are huddled in the shelter of the walls waiting for the energy to sprint to the next pocket of dry. This is the only time I have ever seen Namibians run, apart from the boys on the soccer field.

The town is looking like a rural Venice. The main tar road which is the pulse of Oshakati is high and dry, but the slopes down to the shacks and shops have turned into gorges and ravines and the lakes accumulating around the houses are beginning to sprout lilies. Cows are standing happily, belly deep in the water, having been on the brink of starvation. Now the rains have come it takes only a week for the whole landscape to become lush green.

Every family is busy with cultivation (read more about this in their 2005 report: Sowing, harvesting and "pluffing"). At the weekends the town workers go to their villages to join in with the ploughing and planting. It is possible to see ploughing by hand, by donkey team and by oxen, straggling figures against the pewter coloured sky, and the rain falling relentlessly.

So this is the start of the year."

More to follow...

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