The View From the Road

Despite being banned from driving and other restrictive travel regulations, Peace Corps volunteers spend a lot of time on the road. Back in the States, my brothers and I used to complain all the time about being forced to sit in the back seat together for any drive at all. Now I'm used to being crammed into over stuffed cars, bakkies, and kombis, expecting multiple hour trips that usually end with something breaking. I spend so much time on the road, that I figure it's about time I learn how write about it.

The most common trek I make is the one to town. I think most people by now know that I live in a farm village in the middle of nowhere. I am so in the middle of nowhere that when my dear friend Emma, who lives in a northern village without running water or electricity, came to visit, she felt the need to comment that I live in the middle of nowhere. I'm 100km from the nearest town and there is nothing but a lodge and a few houses to cover that distance.

 

I make this journey about once every two to three weeks to get groceries. I've made it in the back of a posh BMW and the back of a covered bakkie sitting on a foam China shop mattress. The latter is infinitely more common. Sometimes I have a scheduled ride from a teacher or one of the owners of the tuck shops (small shops that sell basic necessities, often for inflated prices). Other times I go to the community designated hike spot and I wait for someone to drive by. I try to avoid the second option because it often requires getting there by six in the morning and waiting for a few hours in the sun. There's not a lot of trees or tall bushes to hide under. 

Sometimes I get to sit in the front of whatever vehicle I'm in. This is sometimes really great because I tend to know the driver and we might chat a bit. It also means getting to sit in a relatively comfortable position for the next hour or so as we cruise over the dirt road. More commonly, however, I'm in the back of a pickup, leaning against the canopy with some headphones in. I particularly love the rare times I'm alone in the back because then I can sing to my heart's content. Playlists range from a mix of punk to folk to pop rock.

 

Getting the ride out, however is less important than getting the ride back in. I have spent days at the designated hike point in my shopping town, flagging down cars and asking around for rides. If no one is going to to the village, no one is going to the village. There's only been one time when I missed school because of a lack of transportation. I ended up catching a ride back on a Monday afternoon and after that vowed to never again leave the village without a plan to get back in. I have failed to uphold that vow because I'm currently enjoying a long weekend in town with no ride back on Sunday. 

Half of my trip is on a dirt road. Everyone complains about it and one time I even had someone go the extra 30km south to take the slightly better one. It's one or the other though, and most people prefer the short term save on gas to the long term save on suspension. Somewhere in the middle of this dirt track in the middle of nowhere is a dead zone. No cellphone service. Just dying grassland. When I first moved out here, I was terrified of this zone. If we got stuck out in the dead zone, we had as much as 20km in any direction to walk until we got out of it. The chances that someone else would come by were pretty slim. Now I don't care as much. When you have so little control over transportation, it helps to not care. If the car breaks down, it breaks down and me stressing that the driver is only doing 80km/h instead of 120 isn't going to get me anywhere. You learn to make your appointments flexible.

 

The other 50km is on a tar road, the B1, one of the most dangerous highways in the world. When I first moved here, I was terrified that something would happen on that stretch of road. Now I know there's no use worrying because there's nothing I can do about it except tell my students why it's important to follow the rules of the road and hope for the future generations. My favorite part of driving the B1, other than how smooth it is to drive on a tar road, is crossing the Tropic of Capricorn. Hi everyone, coming to you live from the tropics. 

Back home, I was one of those people who never really drove a lot. I was either studying, living in a city, or living abroad. This past summer saw a huge hike in my driving time, largely because I loved my mom's new car and wanted to drive it everywhere. I started learning stick from a cousin and had a brief affair with the Subaru BRZ that made me realize one day I might be one of those people with a sports car. It's hard, sometimes, being on the wide open roads of Namibia and knowing that you aren't allowed to travel them yourself, but it's still an experience that I want to share. 

First Post from Namibia!

I’ve been in Namibia for just over a week now, so I figured now was as good a time as any for an inaugural blog post. Hello and welcome. For those who don’t know me, I’m Mina (Amelia) Sheldon, a soon to be Peace Corps Volunteer in Namibia. I’m already in country going through Pre-Service Training (PST), and until my swear-in date in October, I will refer to myself and the others with me as Trainees.

For training, we have a pretty intense schedule that started this week, but until now, it was quite relaxed. We were staying in a hostel in a town called Okahandja and going to classes at a community hall that we affectionately call the Training Center. Breakfast started at 6 every morning and we usually headed to classes around 7. Now we are all in host family houses. When I wrote this blog last week, such was not the case! But do to the scarcity of internet here, I haven't been able to post yet and this is already quite long, so I'll post about the host family later. 

Our classes are covering a wide range of topics from medical information, safety lessons (which everyone hates),language, and occasionally culture. We were finally assigned languages after more than a week, but we won’t receive notification on our permanent site placement until right before we swear in. Not knowing site placement has been driving everyone crazy, but now that we know our languages the agony of not knowing is a little more bearable. Mostly because now we are all struggling through the stages of early language learning. 

 We have an option of 6 languages we can learn to help transition into our new homes: Afrikaans, KKG, Oshikwanyama, Oshidonga, Otjiherero, Rukwangali. I personally really wanted to get KKG, or Khoekhoegowab, a click language that promises to be the hardest language I’ve ever tried speaking. I practically begged during my interview. Yesterday they finally unveiled our languages to us through a sort of game. We were each handed a slip of paper with our name and an animal on it and then had to find our group without speaking. After finding our group, we were to go to one of the trainers around the perimeter of the room and again mime until we found the correct trainer. I was a cat. I walked around and was rejected from so many different groups and trainers, I was starting to doubt that I was doing this right. I walked by the KKG tutor I already knew, but the people around him were all ‘snakes’ so I started preparing myself to have a different language than my desired one. I still couldn’t find a group. Maybe I didn’t have a group, which meant I would be alone at Community Based Training (CBT). It all made me nervous. Then I found to other people with my ‘cat’ motions. We found only open trainer, who I recognized from the KKG demo. My heart raced. We made our ‘cat’ motions as a group. We waited. Finally, he gave us a thumbs up. That was probably the happiest I’ve been since I came here. So now I’m learning Damara dialect Khoekhoegowab.

I’ve also been making a lot of friends through training. It’s been a pretty stressful week for the introvert that I am, but I realized that I can check out from time to time and no one really cares. A lot of us are introverts and everyone is really nice. Our Namibian teachers are also really kind. They tell jokes with us and teach us to sing three times a week. We love them all dearly. During down time, I have been hanging out with people, sharing media interests, playing card games, playing charades, hiking, drawing, and so much more. It sounds like we stay busy, but over the weekend we had no scheduled events and the days really dragged on. But now that we are all moving out of our hostel and into family homes I’m a little sad. I’ll miss everyone a lot, but I do think I’m ready to move to a new place with a bit more space!

Despite what I have said, however, I’ve already had a few adventures, so I’ll tell you about them now.

Our first big adventure was to the mall on the outskirts of town (or, at least I think it is). It took about 20-30 minutes to walk there both ways. We all went after class on Thursday for cellphones. It was my first time leaving the immediate area around the hostel and Training Center. I felt like I got to see a lot more of Namibia there. I could see the beautiful mountains in the distance. I’m sure I can see them from where we are, but I hadn’t noticed them as much when there were more buildings and people to be looking at. The mall itself was really interesting. It was both outdoors like a strip mall and indoors like what we would think of as a mall without actually having doors except those on the stores. It was insanely clean for being in the sandy area that Okahandja is. It took a long time to get the phones, after which I was thoroughly annoyed and exhausted. I had a good conversation on the way back with another woman in PST that really helped me overcome at least the annoyance bit. It made me realize how much I need to grow and put me at a good starting point for the next two years.

Another adventure was going to the doctor’s office. As could be expected with me, I’ve already been to the doctor’s! Like when I was in Korea, my left ear has yet to pop from the plane. I told the Peace Corps Medical Officers (PCMO) about it and they gave me a few tips of medications I could take from my med kit and told me to contact them again if those didn’t work. They did not, so on Friday I told our head trainer and he contacted the team in Windhoek for me. Within 30 minutes I was at the doctor’s office here in Okahandja. It was such an interesting place and I’m not sure I could describe it. It was much more like a US waiting room than the ones in Korea, but there was definitely something different about it. I met the doctor in his actual office where he tested my hearing by whispering words at me from behind to see if I could hear them out of both ears. The words he used were “Jesus, Joseph, and Joshua.” It started getting a bit predicable after Jesus. In the end, they couldn’t do anything for me. I had an appointment scheduled for an ENT in Windheok, but it started getting a bit better over the weekend so I’m going to see if it’ll just fix itself after a week.

We also went for a hike into the mountains on Saturday morning. Hiking in the sand was really hard, and moving in the group kicked up a lot of sand, which made it a little hard on my asthma. I ended up choosing a spot to stop early on with a friend to sit and draw. We saw some beautiful birds and made a good halfway point to help direct people back as they came back down. I now have a pretty painting of the mountain and surrounding bush.

I'm really pressed for time and internet now, but I'll try to get some pictures up next time. I also wrote a post on some interesting history that I will post next time I have internet! There's also a good chance that I need to make a new blog for my service, so please give me ideas for names!!! I like alliterative things!

Hanging in Helsinki

It’s been a pretty crazy few days for me. I caught a nasty cold on Thursday and as a result spent my last few days in Prague trying to get better as soon as possible to avoid a miserable flight experience. I did, however, manage to spend a few hours out and about with friends and buy a few last minute gifts.

The really exciting part, however, is that I did this crazy side trip to Finland.

Before I start telling of my adventures, two little side notes about myself:

1.       I am a spontaneous traveler. I don’t like making lots of plans when I’m going somewhere. I am much more the kind of person who gets on a bus and figures things out as I go.

2.       I have wanted to come to Finland since I was pretty young. When I was in middle school, we went camping up in Michigan and on the way home found a university (one of seven in the US) that taught Finnish. I bought a sweatshirt and some textbooks to study with at home. Through most of high school, I planned on going to UC Berkeley because they not only had an Asian Studies program (a good one too!) but also were one of those 7 schools with Finnish.

So, I land in Finland. I have a booking at a hostel, somewhere. I have a bus number, a stop, and an address. I get mildly lost in the airport. Luckily, my luggage slept over at the airport and didn’t come with me! I am pretty sure I walked out the wrong gate and all the way to Terminal 1. For those of you who haven’t been to the EU before, they have this little agreement thing called the Shengen Agreement. Because of this, you can travel anywhere within the member countries without going through boarder control. I knew this. But it still freaked me out that I literally just walked right out of the airport without seeing ANYONE. It’s quite convenient though.

Finding the bus was pretty easy, finding my stop was not. At first, I asked a girl a year or two younger than me who had picked up two foreign exchange students from the airport. She didn’t know because she had just moved to Helsinki. Another passenger overheard and said he thought it was about at this one place. Then another guy (who sounded like an American expat) said he was sure it was there. But then when it came up, he wasn’t… And then a lady behind me piped up that it was this next stop and gave me directions as I hopped off, which I barely heard because guess what!? I’ve lost the hearing in my left ear again! Well, then someone else got off the bus. I’m pretty sure he shouted at me as well as I was getting off, but again, can’t be sure since I can barely hear. He was from Latvia and happened to be staying at the same hostel, so he helped me find it. Lovely lad.

The hostel was really nice. Everyone there was really nice. I felt awful for coming in so late (midnight) and waking up pretty much my whole dorm (20 people!). I had a top bunk and the guy below me woke up while I was stashing my stuff in my locker. I tried to be quite but I guess I wasn’t? He felt bad because his stuff took up the whole hallway where the bed was (tiny, tiny space). But was super nice about being woken up? He moved some of it for me. I had brought clothes to sleep in, but by the time I got settled in, I didn’t feel like changing, so I just slept in my street clothes. It was not the best sleep of my life, but it wasn’t horrible either. The place was clean and it wasn’t that loud.

I woke up at a decent time in the morning. Got my stuff together, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and then headed out into Helsinki! Like I said earlier, I went out with no plans. I found a bus, got on and rode until I thought I saw something that looked like a downtown. It wasn’t. But I did find a convenience store and got juice and bread for breakfast. This was when I realized that my backpack set off all the door alarms. But no one stopped me, so…..

I ate breakfast in a park. This part of town was pretty much just offices. I didn’t even take my camera out. One thing that struck me as sort of odd was that compared to London, York, Prague, Munich, and Nurnberg, Helsinki is the one that reminded me the most of Asian cities. Not because it was tall or crowded, but because of the way they managed space. The sides of the buildings were all labeled with the businesses that owned the space, just like in Seoul. Not that I could read any, but….

After breakfast, I got back on the bus and decided to take it all the way to the end, which I figured would lead me somewhere. It did. Right down to the Sea. Okay, not right to the Sea, but pretty close! But I’ll get back to that. I was trying to find a book store to get my Finnish copy of the Little Prince, which was actually pretty easy, since everyone speaks English and is super nice! The book was a bit expensive (more expensive than the copy of Harry Potter next to it!) but since I do collect them, I had to get one. It’s called Pikku Prinssi. After that, I did a little souvenir shopping. Set off all the alarms again. They had the cutest sweaters. I really wanted one, but Helsinki is painfully expensive.

After the shopping times, I went and sat in the park. There was an interesting statue surrounded by benches so I decided that I would just sit there for a bit and draw the statue. I don’t draw from life very often, especially things that aren’t people, so I ended up screwing up the proportions. As a result, I just drew the parts that were interesting all over the page. Still, it was a lot of fun. After I had had enough of messing up the Finns pretty statue, I decided to walk down to the other end of the park. That was when I saw the sea!! It was beautiful! And right there on the wharf was a artisans and farmers market. It was beautiful! I wanted to buy some more gifts there, but everything was outrageously expensive. I ended up just walking around and window shopping until I got to the other end. From there I could see a pretty church across the bridge. Since I was in Europe, I figured I might as well go see it up close. It was closed but the building was still nice to look at. It was also on a hill, offering a nice view of everything below it.

I also went to a café back over by the bookstore. That was where I discovered the magic of Helsinki City Free WLAN. It totally made up for the ridiculous amount of money I had spent on everything else. I got to read that day’s update of A Redtail’s Dream, a Finnish webcomic I’ve been reading about a man and his dog who have been thrust into the world of Finnish mythology and must save their village. It’s quite good and getting quite dramatic. I can’t think of anything more perfect than actually reading it in Finland.

Around 1:00 I decided to head for the airport. I was able to find the right bus and buy a ticket properly. I got in with plenty of time to spare and decided to start typing up this blog entry instead of exchanging my euros for yen. That was dumb for reason I will go into more when I talk about Japanese bureaucracy.