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The five most report-worthy events since last November, in order of relative sweetness:
5) Jamming to Grover Washington Jr. with a borrowed saxophone in the dune sea
4) Launching expired emergency flare-rockets from the water tower for New Year's Eve
3) An ephemeral desert flood pulsing to the beat of uprooted trees
2) A 50-knot paint-blasting building-razing sandstorm, followed by 2x our annual rainfall
1) A caustic desert biome flushed green with the sprouting of a prairie (see: 3 and 2)
Bizarrely, I chose to address none of these in my report. Instead, I briefly dig into three other topics. I begin by recounting a desert garden project I dove into haphazardly. Next, I discuss mining in Namibia as it pertains to Gobabeb. I conclude with some thoughts about race in Namibia, especially regarding the role and impact of international volunteers like me.
***
My experience at Gobabeb consists of being repeatedly assigned to positions of undue authority. Occasionally my supervision goes over well with the masses, and the project moves smoothly. Other times, I am placed in charge of desert gardens. In early December, the intensity of our 215th consecutive blue sky short-wired my logic circuits, and I asked for funds to double the size of the fallow Gobabeb garden. My director authorized a US$500 jump-start.
Any self-respecting crop withers in the Namib Desert. The soils, if you can call them that, are chronically saline and Nitrogen and Phosphorous deficient. Some areas suffer from high sodicity, or excess sodium (not salt), while others from high acidity. There are few soil dwelling organisms, and the earth is extremely hard and retains water poorly. The resulting landscape is not unlike my elementary school soccer field.
Before I proceed: In Namibia, we call sand "soil." Sometimes, to make the "soil" more "rich," you can mix in "silt," which is actually sand powder.
To exacerbate its impoverished soils, the Namib has practically no water in the ground or air, and desiccating winds blow chronically from the East and Northwest, which in late summer causes sandstorms. Also, the Namib has an evaporation potential about two hundred and fifty times its average annual rainfall, and one of the most intense solar radiations in the world, with soil temperatures occasionally surpassing 160° F.
To appease these factors, I intended to design the garden like a jawbreaker. First, I would enclose the garden in a patchwork of wooden poles and shade netting, to reduce wind and radiation at varying degrees according to the needs of different crops. Next, I would line the inner perimeter with hardy maize, to further buffer the garden's delicate vegetative center from wind and sun. Consorting with other staff, I drafted a garden map, and sent word out to the local settlements for four temporary workers interested in paid labor.
Enter: John the Carpenter. I am no stranger to woodwork. I spent several summers framing and roofing with my dad, and feel vaguely competent with a Skillsaw, drill, box of 2 1/2" wood screws, and truckload of 2"x4"s. Yet on-site, with eight eyes awaiting my instruction, I thrashed like a bushman in a swimming pool. First, no one had any idea what a 2"x4" was, and I had to immediately move metric. Second, the wood shortage in Namibia and our small budget meant that our boards were stacked like a carton of curly-fries. Third, I knew nothing about constructing foundations in sand. Fourth, there was only one confident English speaker.
I started by three-dimensionally choreographing my vision for the garden. Quickly, everyone grew accustomed to my response: "Well...what do YOU think?" In return, I received a crash-course in desert construction. Dennis showed me how to wet the sand before digging holes, to stabilize the sides. Seth used wooden Y-braces to straighten the kinks in the wood. Alex demonstrated how to sew the shade net together tightly using a jerry-rigged wire. Eventually, an inviting 200 m2 sanctuary rose from the earth, ready to harbor the fruits of our labor.
Next came the sowing and transplanting, things that I again knew nothing about. To supplement the soils, we mixed in silt from the riverbed and Gobabeb compost (one of my students' side projects in progress since last October). The garden is entirely organic and depends exclusively on recycled station water. In the following weeks, thanks to the experienced gardeners around me and the staff's willingness to share watering duties, plots full of beets, spinach, maize, tomato, carrot, cucumber, radishes, onions, and herbs checkered the garden floor.
The fates of our crops were to be similarly checkered. While the spinach thrived robustly, the cucumbers and radishes died slow, bitter, moth-ridden deaths. The beets and onions scraped by, dwarf-like, thanks to a local organic pest control. The mother lode arrived in late February with the maize harvest and first flush of tomatoes. Hundreds of ears and red orbs were plucked in a few days, inducing nightly salads and orgiastic sweet corn assemblies.
A realization hit me while eating a garden carrot. I imagine it happens to a lot of gardeners. It was a small, stumpy carrot, crunchy and sweet, but not extraordinarily so. Mostly, it was just a carrot, with the normal carroty traits: orangish triangular taproot, floppy dark green foliage, lots of beta-carotene. My realization was that my carrot was mostly made from air. I was chewing an organism built from Namib Desert air processed via photosynthesis. My carrot didn't need magic, grocery stores, or monetary compensation to be delicious, just TLC, water, and a few basic vitamins and minerals. With a few water-saving modifications, this equation works as readily in Namibia as in Iowa's fertile fields. I grasped at last why I went to great lengths to toil in the garden: Attn: students and staff: The food chain starts with earth and air.
***
God put those metals there for the benefit of mankind, to be mined.
- Jared Diamond, being facetious. Pp. 462 in Collapse
I live on Uranium. Not far from the radioactive alluvium beneath me is a ridiculously rich vein of copper under exploration. On my runs I pass an old gravel mine. Southwest, the sandy soils are aptly named Diamond Coast. On the road to town, I pass entrances to quasi-legal marble and granite mines. Namibia has the world's largest zinc-oxide mine (Skorpion Zinc). Other significant mineral extraction operations include gold, tin, vanadium, tantalite, phosphate, sulfur, and salt.
On a recent holiday, Jaimie and I ascended a 300m white dune for a relaxing sundowner in the town of Uis. The breeze and beer were crisp as we absorbed the 360 vista. But Uis's history besmirched its beauty. Behind us was an enormous tin mine abandoned overnight in 1990, with rusted bicycles, fallen signs, and rotting wood frame skeletons. In front of us was the town born in 1953 to supply the mine's manpower, now destitute and dependent on scavenging roadside gems for tourists. The white dune upon which we lounged was not sand, but waste gravel. In Collapse, Jared Diamond reminds us, "no one denies our economy is dependent on mining, the only question is where and how." Right now, the "where" is new, developing countries that don't yet have a legacy of "rape-and-run" hard rock mining operations like we do in the U.S. The "how" is by any means the government allows. Until stricter mining policies are written and clean-up requirements enforced, the world's mines shall run amok in Namibia.
The most ostensibly conscientious way I'm involved with the mining industry is as an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) contractor (well, "Junior Supervisor"). Conducting an EIA is a scientist's fantasy stood on its head. You are dropped into a pristine environment with a team of specialists to search and scavenge, rock rolling, bat netting, invert trapping, hole digging, butterfly catching, scat sampling, ultra-violet scorpion hunting, snake fishing, bird watching, and plant pressing until you glimpse just how many awesome, beautiful, and bizarre species and phenomena exist in the area tabled for annihilation. At a job last November our team found two highly endemic (or geographically localized) species of lizards, Pedioplanus husabensis and an undescribed lizard species observed only once before. We (zoologist, entomologist, arachnologist, myself, and five students) collaboratively wrote a report with mitigation suggestions and submitted it to the mine for consideration. This accomplished very little. As
I write, monster trucks are drowning our virgin valley with a cubic kilometer of tailings.
This mine (Rossing Uranium Limited) is far from unique. The same team has already completed a second EIA for another enormous nearby Uranium mine. Active and prospective hard rock mines speckle Western Namibia. Recent legislation now requires each new mine to perform an EIA. This means more work for Gobabeb and others, but time will tell whether these efforts come too lightly too late, as Namibia's environmental watchdogs tune into to the game.
***
In Namibia, and at Gobabeb, I've become increasingly conscious of my skin color. Not in the wow-I'm-whiter-than-all-these-Africans! way, but in a more sinister I'm-White-like-almost-everyone-else-in-charge way.
Apartheid fell four years after independence, in 1994. That means that every Black citizen older than 14 was politically considered a primitive species of human at some point in their life. Ten years prior, every able-bodied White man was forced to serve in the military, directly or indirectly shooting-to-kill constituents of the Black uprising. A decade of militaristic brainwashing profoundly affects a nation's perception of race. Segregation of this magnitude is not washed away in a century (see: U.S.A.), let alone in less than two decades. Even at Gobabeb, I've heard a White ex-soldier drunkenly boast beneath his breath about a day-trip to Angola to shoot exiles during the war.
One night in town last July, I invited some friends to a pizzeria in Swakopmund. We shared a few pizzas and drinks. On our walk back to the youth hostel, my friend Richard Kavari cited our audacity for sharing food inter-racially in a White restaurant, and asked me if I had noticed the staring (I hadn't). Nowhere in Southern Africa is it still legal to discriminate based on race (except via affirmative action, which is widespread), but that night in the pizzeria was my first sobering reminder, to be followed by many others, of how deeply entrenched racism is in Namibian society. Racial stereotyping is so severe in many people I believe change is only possible through younger generations. This is one reason why it is so exciting to work intimately with young Black professionals in Namibia.
Yet as the dust of my arrival has settled, the excitement from working with Black students aspiring in a racist society has turned bittersweet. The large responsibilities I receive as another White Grinnell-at-Gobabeb Fellow - and we've all been White - are without clear justification. If one of my students, who is older and technically more educated than me, were to speculate how I received my position, knowing that I had no pre-existing knowledge or time spent in desert habitats, little teaching experience, and little work experience, I only see three possible answers: "He has a better education than me," "He is American," and "He is White." None of these make me feel particularly comfortable during my lectures. A major reason for my appointment by Gobabeb is, "Grinnellians are consistently good English speakers and have proved their mettle in the past," but I'm afraid few students conclude this. Thus, on darker days, I see a Catch22: The more competent I grow with authority, the more I perpetuate the
destructive ethos of racial superiority. In an ideal world, programs like GIST would find local role models to empower young adults in developing countries, and not outsource those leaders from America, or the White overprivileged Namibian elite.
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