It seems that the situation is politically charged in southern Africa at the moment. As you might know the vice president of South Africa got sacked by the President for corruption and money laundering charges. Pretty impressive. Zuma (the sacked vice President) made a pretty calm speech yesterday about it though which was surprising. However, the front page of Namibian, the leading English newspaper in Namibia covered Michael Jackson's story rather than covering what is happeneing in South Africa. The labour uniouns and the communist party in South Africa seem to support what happened with Zuma. What is interesting is that the communist party actually has aprescence in South Africa. However, Zuma is still going to be the vice president of ANC which is the ruling party of South Africa till 2007 or till ANC decides otherwise.
Let me now tell you about my school. It is my third day at the school and so far so good. The computers seem to agree with me which is VERY good. The schools get computers through a government owned organization called School Net. They give 5 or 10 computers to schools and I think so far about 300 schools in Namibia have computers. Now don't think state of the art computers, think very basic computers. It is a good programme but comes with its own sets of problems.
1)The school might be based 100s of miles away from the nearest technical support.
2)It takes days sometimes weeks to get a technician.
3)The main problem is teachers are extremely intimidated by computers. I have tried to have training sessions for them and nobody shows up. Well its only day 3 so I'm still hopeful.
My school has 1477 kids. Its a primary school so they are from grade 1-7. This means I have about 40-45 kids per class. How do you teadch these many kids in one class, good question? How do you teach 40 kids with 20 or less textbooks? How do you teach when there aren't enough desks and chairs for everyone to sit on? I'm figuring out the answers to these questions. For computers I will have 40 kids and 9 computers which makes it pretty interesting.
There is no printer and the internet works preeeeeeeeeeeeeeety slowly.
There are 39 teachers in the school which means they are either over-worked or don 't give a damn about the students. The students are trained to rote learn and refuse to think for themseleves. They want you to write on the board so they can copy it, memorize it and spew it make at you. Obviously, language plays a big part in this too.
Though its an English medium school and english is the national language of Namibia, kids still have a hard time understanding it. On top of that my foreign accent doesn't make it any easier for them.
Namibia has 11 main languages. Oshivambo being the most prevalent as Oshivambo people make up most of the population. 60% of the country lives in the north as it is the wet part of the country.
A little more about the school. My school is in Katatura and as I worte in one of my earlier blogs this is where the blacks lived durign the aparthied. When driving through the city you can still see how different areas have different colored people. Town is where you'll see most whites, then some areas like Durato Valley is mixed. Some neighborhoods is colored. But Katatura is still predominantly black population and is one of the poorest parts of the city. Its amazing how you can tell what the plumbing in the houses will be like looking at the skin color of the people living in the neighborhood. I can't even articulate what race signifies here.
And on top of that there are tribal differences. Oshivambo, Harara (there was a genocide against them as well), Tamaara, San (more commonly known as Bushmen). You can see this in politics everywhere. Whether it is national politics or school politics. People complain that the government favors the Oshivambo people more than others and thus the north gets most of the benefits of any form of economic development. I mean it isn't extremely bad but it is still an issue. So its not just white and black, its black and black, and dark and light. I think its the same in many other countries as well. It is just that living in such a country and seeing how it really plays out is an eye-opener.
Even in schools you can see the ethnicity clicks among teachers. I don't even know if the words I'm using are PC any more and frankly I don't care. This is what I hear and see everyday and I don't care if we try to gloss it over in the US.
The leading party is SWAPO (South Western African People Organization). This is the same party that fought for the independence of Namibia. As you might be able to tell, their name has South Western in it. Under South Africa, Namibia was called South Western Africa.
I've also been told that Oshivambo people have the least mixed people in it or who they call colored. To quote my host mother “As they were in the north away from the Germans who lived mostly in the center, their women got raped the least by German men. If you want really black people you should travel to the north.” I don't know how muchof this is true but it is a perspectie nevertheless. The whites still own most of the land all over Namibia, including the North. If you look at the map you can see giant outlines of farmland owned by these people. Though there are land reforms going on the process is slow. For someone to buy the land they need to have 300-500 cattle. Well you can't really have that much cattle if you don't have the land to raise it. This is just an example, because the land size and cattle proportion vary. There seems to be moves by the government to make the process easier, for example people can pay for the land or raise the cattle number in installments.
Let me move on to the roads and traffic here. Well thanks to alcoholism there are a LOT of accidents. People drive when they are drunk. So between AIDS and car accidents, you have a lot of people dying. I think if I had written all of this a few days ago there might have been more emotion in my writing. You could possibly seem glimpses of pain and sorrow but now its just shock and then just a state of blankness.
Is my presence here making any difference? I don't know. How can I as a foreigner empower people/students here.....don't know.
On top of that the media drives me NUTS. If you can afford it you get a decorder which gets you DSTV which is like cable but with less channels. Otherwise you get 2 or 3 channels. And atleast on one of them there will be some priest preaching most of the day. On a side note this country is pretty Christian. Assembly, staff meetings, everything starts with a prayer. The students might not even know what they are saying but they bow their head in dedication and conviction and pray. Something like this also happened in Pakistan and now it makes me want to scream. Such institutionalized religion. However, religion is more a public thing than a private thing. God and Jesus appear a lot less in private conversations and mostly they aren't mentioned at all.
Then obviously you have your Catholic priests going around performing miracles on HIV + patients. They pour water on their head and pray and abra cadabra you are cured. As you can see I'm not very happy with this.
Don't get me wrong I don't have a problem with religion but its this enforced, colonized, institutionalized, imperializing form of religion.....aaaaah I don't know. I don't think I can explain it fully right now.
I remember all the conversations I've had with friends back at college about the role of religion in colonization and imperialism and Namibia is a fine example of that.
Ok back to media: its mostly white people. Its mostly Ameican stuff, even dubbed Spanish and Brazillian soaps. Haven't seen one Namibian soap yet and I'm watching those 2 or 3 national channels. The music also drives me up the wall. Let me present you a song,
“ something something in Afrikaans and then ....just get down, just get down, just get down I wanna see you naked, just get down.”
You'll find a lot of such imitations of American hip-hop here. Even the pop videos are pretty annoying. Obviously the traditional music is great. I just wish I heard more of it.
Oh there is also this traditional dance called Kwasa Kwasa.....and its hilarious. There is a LOT of pelvic thrusting in it, its amazing.
These are all random pieces of experiences. I don't know if I can make coherent sense of all the thoughts in my head.
Oh one more thing....the kids here love my hair. The first two days they kept wanting to touch it and the younger ones want to touch my face....yay for being a foreigner. “Teacher teacher your hair is so long teacher.” “Teacher teacher your hair is so soft teacher.” “Teacher can i touch your face teacher.” They don't quite understand when I say no. Aww...kiddies.
As for the reality of AIDS that is a whole new story, A whole new bunch of questions. Ya that and sexism.
