This one is long

Before I continue my recounting of community based training I must
clarify a misunderstanding. The key lime pie and cheesecake I wrote
about were consumed in Philadelphia. However, I have savored a variety
of desserts, the most notable are apple crisp, no-bake chocolate
cookies, chocolate chip cookies, neopolitan ice cream, vanilla ice
cream, oatmeal raisin cookies, sugar cookies, 1 girl scout thin mint,
and a wicked good chocolate milk shake.

Its seems that I should try to explain a bit more of what the month in
Otjimbingwe was actually like before the memory gets lost in the
whirlwind of Christmas and New Year's. We arrived in the Bing on a
Tuesday and after much sitting around attended a nice welcoming
ceremony that involved us introducing ourselves in Otjiherero and one
of the regional councilors falling to the floor when his chair broke.
We met our host families at the end of the ceremony and went to get
settled in for the next month. Here is where my orphan experience
begins. My host mother wasn't at the welcoming ceremony b/c she was in
Karibib for the week, so the lady that lives two houses down acted as
my surrogate mother for the week. She has three kids who were fun to
hang out with, and the two boys slept in the house with me while she
stayed at her house with her daughter. Everyone would come over for
lunch and dinner which was always interesting because they were
leaving on holiday at the end of the week and had run out of
groceries, so the only food we had was the food delivered by Peace
Corps to help the families out for hosting us. PC gives the families a
lot of food because that is there only compensation (along with a
contribution to their utilities) but it is mostly staple foods. We had
a huge bad a rice, macaroni, flour, sugar, maize meal... you get the
picture. Really, it would not have been an issue at all except that
Herero people eat meat and porridge and rarely anything else and PC
didn't bring meat besides some frozen chicken which isn't really meat.
My host mother wasn't much of a cook because all she ever cooks is
meat and porridge which we didn't have and I think they felt bad about
just making porridge, so when meal times came they would all look at
me and ask what was for lunch/dinner. The saving grace was that the
three kids were really helpful, so I would just start pulling
potatoes, carrots and onions out of the fridge and start stirring up
some soup while they peeled and cut the vegetables. But, it couldn't
be that easy, if you used more than one burner on the stove the
breaker would flip, so we could only cook one thing at a time so it
would take over an hour to put together any sort of lunch and by the
time I had eaten I would be due at a language class. This was the best
part of the situation because the kids would wash all the dishes while
I was away. The first week of CBT was language classes daily and some
planning for the Model School that was starting next week.

Phase Two: Meeting my host family.
Having lived in the house for almost a week my host mother came home
and my host sister came back as well. She had been staying with her
aunt in town. It was a bit awkward considering I had gotten used to
having free reign on the house and cooking every meal but she was very
hospitable. Because of cultural norms my offers to help clean the
dishes were rejected and my host mom would have lunch ready when I got
home from school so I could eat lunch and then rest or study before
language class. So, starting the second week of CBT we ran a model
school so we could all practice teaching before getting thrown to the
wolves in January. I explained the basics of the insanity of the
timetable change in the middle of model school so I'll spare you all a
repeat of that but I will explain how a day went for the almost three
weeks of model school. School started at 7:50/7:20 and we would teach
6/5 periods that were 30/40 minutes long and finish by about 11:30.
The kids came because we gave them a sandwich, apple and juice during
break every day. Once we were done teaching we had a debriefing
session and lasted anywhere between an hour and 2 and a half hours
which was in direct proportion to my frustration level and the
temperature in the unairconditioned world on Namibia. Then I would go
home for lunch which was always ready when I finished the hot, sunny
walk. Afternoon meant fighting the heat and having 2 hours worth of
otjiherero class then we had the rest of the evening to work on lesson
plans, study language, watch soap operas produced in portugal and
dubbed over in poorly inflected English, and hang out with other pct's
and host families.

Phase 3: Orphan again
Well, my host mom is most concisely described as a jobber, although a
very trusting one. The paradise of lunch being ready lasted until
Thursday when my host mother left for the farm. Everyone in
Otjiimbingwe spends the December holiday on the farm with the whole
family, so my host mom saw no reason why she shouldn't get to spend
part of her holiday there as well. I thought I was going to be living
alone until I found out that my host brothers were coming back to the
Bing from school in Windhoek for a weekend of debauchery while mom was
at the farm. They were fine, but I wasn't particularly pleased to hear
them knocking on my window at 4AM Saturday morning to let them in the
house after a night of partying that left them unable to reach through
the kitchen window to get the key I left for them. Otherwise the
weekend was uneventful, but full of replanning for teaching off of the
new timetable. It would be an understatement to say changing
timetables was annoying, but it solidified our group of 12 against a
common enemy with an animosity strong enough to overcome any
interpersonal conflicts within the group.

Phase 4: Unfortunate abandonment
My host mom returned from the farm on Tuesday and right when I thought
I might have a host family, my host mom got word that her father had
past away. At this point I can't really say anything bad about my host
mom anymore, but the fact is I was left in the house alone again. She
also missed the thank you party we had for host families because it
was the same day as the funeral. This part of CBT worked out well
because we were able to use my kitchen to do some of the cooking for
the thank you party. We made hamburgers and goat (because hamburgers
aren't real meat), potato salad, macaroni and cheese, apple crisp a la
mode and no-bake chocolate cookies, all of the food was amazing but
people kept coming so none of us got to eat anything except for the
ice cream that we saved back for ourselves. My host mom did return
from the funeral before we all left the Bing for good, but at that
point it didn't really matter anymore. The highlight of the host
family experience was dinner with my host mother's sister who was also
a host family, the last night in the Bing and they gave me and Juli,
their PC sister, Christmas presents (I'll take pictures later) and
made a great dinner. The kids were really fun but it solidified the
generally lame host family I had the rest of the time.

I don't think there is a whole lot else to say about model school. The
main drawback to switching timetables, besides the hassle of switching
timetables was that the class sizes were unrealistically small. I had
more time in front of students but lost the challenge of working with
a large groups of learners. I taught my two sections of grade 8
physical science about electricity and was able to do a 3 day demo
with 5 different circuits, changing the number of cells & bulbs and
putting the bulbs in parallel and observing the brightness of the
bulbs. We did prelab and made guesses about which circuits would shine
brightest, then I hooked up all the circuits and we read voltage and
current and made observations and on the third day we analyzed the
data, which turned out pretty good. The learners were able to reason
about the circuits qualitatively but anything
mathematical/quantitative was difficult. We tried doing calculations
of resistance using our measurements and V=IR but it was like pulling
teeth. Even once I did the algebra for them we had problems with
division and reducing 6/3 to 2.

What is the earliest you have ever woken up on Christmas morning to
get your first present? I set a new record this Christmas at 2AM. I
was a little concerned that Santa wouldn't have made it through
Namibia yet, but Sportscenter started at 2AM and I wanted to watch SC
before the football game started. My Christmas present to myself was
to go to bed at 9:30 on Christmas Eve and sleep for 4 hours so that I
could stay up the rest of the night and watch ESPN, including the
Hawaii Bowl featuring Conference USA losers Central Florida against
WAC co-champions Nevada. I have to say it was one of the worst games I
have ever watched, partly because UCF's quarterback was awful but the
final score was 49-48 so at least it was entertaining. If you missed
the game, let me fill you in. UCF scored 14 quick points on two lucky
plays before Nevada's running game took over the middle part of the
game. George O'Leary placed too much faith in his offensive
coordinator who called a ton of passing plays in spite of the
consistently bad throws from the quarterback. Nevada runs a new
formation called the Pistol, which might make you think it is like the
Globetrotters with Maravich style passing, but its really a modified
shotgun. How did the shotgun get its name anyway? I reckon it is based
on the wide open passing game with the ball flying everywhere, but I
guess its ok to call Nevada's formation the Pistol even if it is
designed to hide the running back behind the quarterback and really
doesn't do anything special for the passing game. But I digress,
Nevada took a solid 28-17 lead into the half, although it should have
been 35-17 if the Wolfpack quarterback wouldn't have been so
absent-minded and just set his feet to throw the ball into the endzone
instead of running three yards past scrimmage. UCF made a little
comeback despite failing to convert a 2-point conversion twice, but
Nevada was still ahead by 10 with 3 minutes left. To stem the
rambling, we'll just say UCF caught some breaks and recovered an
onside kick to send the game into overtime. This game earned the
distinction of the worst game I've ever watched in Namibia when it
ended with the UCF kicker missing the tying extra point in the first
overtime, although to be fair the snap wasn't great and the holder had
trouble getting the ball down. The real tragedy of this situation is
that if Tulsa would have lost the C-USA championship game they might
have been playing in the Hawaii bowl and I could have watched the
Golden Hurricane blow the Wolfpack all the way back to Reno, but I'm
holding out hope for the Liberty Bowl on New Year's Eve. By the way, I
am serious about people calling me during the game, if you can find a
decent phone card and want to inform me about all of the major plays,
scoring drives, whenever Garrett Mills catches the ball or Nick
Bunting blows up a Fresno ball carrier, ok, that might be asking too
much but I think I posted a phone number before Thanksgiving that I
can receive calls on.

Christmas in Namibia has been hot, but we have been gorging ourselves
on a variety of tasty foods. The country director brought treats from
the Embassy yesterday, home-baked cookies, brownies, chocolate cake,
some sweet breads, etc. Then last night we had a finger food dinner of
sausages, meatballs, samosas, salami, rice krispie treats, 5 types of
cookies that some girls made yesterday afternoon and other stuff I
don't remember before we had more chocolate cake to celebrate a
birthday. Then we chased that meal with smores roasted over a fire
that was much to large for marshmellows, but provided some good coals
to cook the pork roast that we had for Christmas Day lunch. The best
thing about this Christmas weekend is that we've had nothing to do
since Friday afternoon. Yesterday I layed around and starting reading
Catch-22, and today I've layed around, played some football around
noon which wasn't the smartest thing to do but it was very fun, and
eaten alot. I haven't even busted into the fudge that came in my
package from my parents along with a Chillow. The fudge was pretty
melted, but it has been in the freezer while I have been eating the
rest of the sweets around the Rest Camp. A chillow is a cooling
pillow, but since I haven't tried it yet we will all have to wait in
anticipation to see if this ingenious idea is useful. Anything that
can cool in Namibia is a great present though. I've come quite
accustomed to cold showers and even look foward to a cool shower in
the evening before bed. Strangely enough, the water still comes out
warm because the pipes in the ground heat the water up enough to take
the bite out of it.

Our Christmas celebrations have been modest but a tree did get
decorated, although it was not an evergreen, sugar cookies have been
frosted, but without the benefit of cookie cutters, carols have been
sung in a variety of languages, and we did a huge 80 person dirty
santa in three separate groups in the interest of time. Several phone
cards and other practical gifts (spices, paring knives, waterguns,
markers) were in the hopper along with some very creative gifts
(emergency chocolate chip cookie pack complete with everything except
butter and eggs) and just good stuff like the set of 2 cappuccino cups
complete with little saucers and stirrers with 3 packets of instant
cappuccino, 1 packet of kool-aid (lemon-lime flavor), pencil
sharpener, and a small pumpkin scented candle that I received.

I think I'm going to hold off on commenting on the books I have read
until I get to Coblenz so that I give each of them a fair treatment.
For now I will offer one more request. Don't send links to other sites
because chances are I don't have enough bandwidth to get to another
site, so please kindly copy the relevant text into the body of an
email. Also, I promise I will catch up on correspondence once I get to
Coblenz, but in Omaruru we're running 4 laptops on a shared dial-up
connection that is painfully slow and needed by 58 trainees.