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From the riverbed, a faint shriek floats through the still dawn air. Glances flicker from tired eyes around the breakfast table. Wry smiles-looks like the girls found a faithfully deposited gift of donkey dung outside of their tent again. Soon to be followed with vivid tales regaled from mischievous 6th grade faces of other nighttime triumphs-furtive midnight games of blackjack, monstrous snakes and a face-disfiguring desert disease looking suspiciously like green toothpaste.
Fast forward one hour. I am tramping down the riverbed, proud leader of the Weather Hunters. The Weather Hunters consisted of a group of five talkative girls dressed in a large amount of pink with an intriguing fixation on "kill Barney" songs. They obstinately informed me that giving a presentation in front of the boys on our microclimate data would make them throw up everywhere. Needless to say, no one threw up, and all of the presentations (for many the first presentation ever given) made me proud. The sweet smell of a rotting springbok carcass showcased by the vertebrate group added to the general sense of scientific victory.
Training becomes all-consuming in my position from late August to mid-November. The beauty and challenge of these few months comes from the diverse array of groups, which ranges from primary school to tertiary level arid ecology field courses to community agriculture workshops to the Namibian Scientific Society. A visit from Dartmouth University students livened up a recent weekend. (Especially witnessing a number of people willingly face plant into a dune. Not so great: their professor asking me the name of the state directly west of Ohio-my home state-and my reply of "I don't know, maybe Pennsylvania or West Virginia.")
One course schedule simply does not fill the bill. About a year's worth of new experiences builds up approximately proportional to sleep deficit. As a note to any Grinnellian thinking about the Namibia program, if training doesn't interest you, save yourself from an unhappy year and don't apply for this position. You will lead courses a lot-a pretty even mix of primary/secondary, tertiary and adult. Challenging yes, but also wonderful and fulfilling.
After a month of almost non-stop training, I gave the Gobabeb calendar a dazed perusal to see what early October held in store for me. Thirty-two 3rd and 4th graders for five days? No problem, piece of cake, schedule ready in advance, use my best "yes, of course I am a professional" tone on the phone with the teacher…Then came the offhandedly delivered sinker. "Did I mention that my students don't really speak English?" Screeeeech went my brain as it abruptly jumped from a warm testosterone sauna and doused itself in a lovely ice bath of stress-inducing cortisol. My mood was not lightened when, the second upon arrival, thirty-two kids shot out of the cars like bullets and started running in every direction while screaming in German. Oh man.
But again, it somehow worked out. My internal monologue surrounding a new training group goes something like this: How is this going to happen? I can't do this, I'm not prepared. Is that ready? Is anything ready? This is completely ludicrous, I wish I could turn into a dune mole and stick my head in the sand…Hold on, this group is actually very nice. They do like the activities, and the teachers haven't dragged me off into the desert. I'm grateful that so and so randomly decided to help me with the group today. Quick prayer of thanks to the powers-that-be of Gobabeb and the elusive cape fox that picked this exact moment to appear and keep the kids entertained for an hour…Do they really have to leave already?
I like teaching little kids. They have energy. They like to learn, and remind me of the uniqueness here if I begin to take it for granted. I very seriously told a group of 3rd graders that my favorite gravel plain plant is the Calicorema capitata and that they would be very impressive if they told their friends and family back home about it. (On a side note, this plant is cool-it survives indefinitely on almost bare rock and reminds me of a faded green and purple dyed afro.) The students spent the next four days jumping on me and shouting "Calimarema capiblahblah" every time I came into the room. One little boy named Raphael finally got the term right and repeated it for about three hours on the last night. And I had a perfect excuse to play Duck Duck Goose again (er, Golden Mole Golden Mole Hyena).
It's strange to feel the year begin to draw to a close. The summer holiday season is pulsating tangibly on the horizon and yesterday marked five months since John and I arrived in Namibia. I feel comfortable here now-Gobabeb elicits images of the superbly worn in pair of jeans. Not that wearing jeans holds any appeal in the building intensity of the summer. I'm still in awe of John's gourmet-tasting rice and his miraculous ability to throw a very random assortment of canned foods into a pot and end up with something often delicious and at worst edible. I am currently attempting to master the art of solar cooking, which not only produces some really good bread, but also makes me feel hard-core on the energy saving front.
I'll end this report with a moment that sticks with me vividly as quintessential Gobabeb. Although Namibians do not really celebrate Halloween, I bought some glow-in-the-dark skeletons and orange and black crepe paper just to liven up our communal space. Decorating snowballed into a full-fledged event, complete with two candle-filled squash jack-o-lanterns doomed to cockroach consumption. The night of Halloween found us dressed up and sitting around homemade solar cooked pumpkin pie telling ghost stories. After incredulously discovering that The Hook and Bloody Mary were unknown in Namibia and listening to John remedy this, I looked around the table. The Rachmaninov "mood" music swelled in the background and the cockroach-filled jack-o-lanterns flickered over faces-Namibian, American, German, Australian, South African-and I realized somewhat whimsically that one of my best Halloweens took place in the middle of the Namib Desert.
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