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To those of you reading this because you're considering applying to Grinnell Corps, I encourage you to e-mail me with questions (even if you are reading this far, far in the future!). Doug will have my most up-to-date contact information.
Ooooh...
There's a serious wow factor involved with life at Gobabeb. In the mornings I get up and see the dunes flanking the station as I make my way to work. It's a view that's difficult to get tired of.
Nighttime is particularly special. Before coming to Namibia I never noticed the moon-who knows and who cares if the moon is full? But out here it matters a great deal. On nights with full moons almost as far as I can during the day-I can even make out the red of the dunes from over a kilometre away. On nights with no moon the sky is an extraordinary field of stars with the Milky Way a bright splash directly overhead. We're spoiled for beauty out here.
Also, with a full moon I have no trouble finding my way home. When there is no moon I occasionally run into buildings and stub my toes on the ancient granite boulders that some capricious soul placed in the middle of path from the station to Luxury Hill. Namibia is an enlightened (ha!) country where flashlights ("torches") are readily available in shops, and I do own one. But for a variety of reasons mostly involving laziness and forgetfulness and a perverse desire to "challenge" myself, I do not use it.
If you plan to come here, a word of advice: do not pass up a chance to fly over the Namib. It's worth it. And get ready for some phenomenal sunsets over the dunes, best viewed from high up either on another dune, or on our watertower.
Before coming out here, Doug gathered all the Grinnell Fellows together to have a talk about safety. He asked us what our fears were, and I said "nature": I have never been an outdoorsman of any sort. Well, so far the nature has been one part fascinating, one part beautiful, and no parts harmful. I've been pretty pleased about that.
On the shoulders of giants
If you read reports from Fellows in years past, you will read frightening tales of life at Gobabeb: the cave dwellings, poisonous snakes, pirate raids, and nonexistent internet access. Luckily for me and for future Fellows, the tireless work of countless Gobabebians has ensured that the Gobabeb of today is actually an extraordinarily comfortable place to work. Sure it gets hot, and sure the showers are sometimes a little cold, and we have no microwaves or toasters or dishwashers. And I've run into a few snakes, scorpions, and spiders (also hundreds of beetles). But I live in a place called "Luxury Hill" where the bathroom is en suite. Supply trips every couple of weeks to Walvis Bay (which looks for all the world like your average European seaside town, if you close your eyes as you drive in past the apartheid-era suburbs for black and colored Namibians-not that you should be closing your eyes to these things) mean I generally have fresh food-and the meat here is the best and also some of the cheapest I
've ever eaten. With the new hybrid energy system we have 24-hour power and an internet connection that is almost always up. It's a good life.
This isn't actually my field, but...
My first ever academic conference was early this September, at a conference for ecological researchers in Malawi. Joh-our illustrious Director and a remarkable man-told me to present a paper, so I did. At Grinnell I studied a hodgepodge of international relations and development-related social sciences. My experience in the natural sciences comprises several semesters of physics, and no biology. This is pretty much par for the course at Gobabeb: as a Grinnell Fellow at Gobabeb you get entrusted with tasks for which you feel you are entirely unqualified. But you know, these things always seem to work out: it did in Malawi and the same, I think, goes for the various teaching and IT positions I have been tasked with. It's all been an enormous challenge, but things seem to be going all right.
Hello/goodbye
One remarkable thing about Gobabeb is the type and the degree of contact we get with outsiders. Some weeks it's just the staff out here, at others we have multiple groups of students or researchers here in a single day, meaning that dozens or even hundreds of people are moving through a space that was almost empty a day earlier. Visitors seem to come in waves-late August and September is particularly busy-which certainly keeps the rhythm of life at Gobabeb from growing repetitive or (perish the thought!) boring.
Also, staff turnover is high. The station depends on a small group of core, long-term staff (and the Grinnell Fellows pretty much qualify as part of this core) supplemented by a interns, master's students, PhD researchers, and postdocs who come here for periods of a weeks to over a year. The result is that I've been here for almost three months now, and I've already been to six farewell ceremonies at a Station where the staff complement including temporary Gobabebians is rarely more than a dozen. The variety is exciting, but all the farewells can wear you down.
That said, I have made some very good friends here, and some of them are actually sticking around for more than a couple of months, which among other things means that my German, Oshivambo, Afrikaans, and soccer lessons can proceed apace.
Weather today will be cloudy, slight chance of rain...
Last week, at the very beginning of September and still very much in the middle of Namibia's long dry season, I experienced my first rain at Gobabeb . I grew up in Belgium, a country renowned for its grey, drizzly days-and I never thought I'd be excited about a little evening shower. But I did. It might have helped that our little downpour came in the middle of the most extraordinary lightning storm I've ever seen: there's so little obstructing your view out here that you can see strikes for kilometres in every direction. It also had something to do with the fact that most days out here are absolutely glorious, sunny with blue skies.
Bring me my pith helmet
For the amateur organizational ethnographer or aspiring development practitioner, Gobabeb offers some wonderful opportunities for observation. Gobabeb is at the front lines in terms of developing and implementing workable capacity-building strategies, of improving environmental management, of working effectively with local people, of applying appropriate technology, of linking active ecological research with concrete development goals...all in all it is a rather exciting place to be, and I'm provileged to be a part of it. But it's also fascinating place to watch these processes, to see the politics and the practical difficulties involved in doing this kind of work in Gobabeb's unique and rather complicated political and organizational context. And you get to watch people like Mary Seely at work: people whose experience in this field in immense and who are more than a little inspiring. So I've been taking plenty of mental notes.
The desert brings out the crazy in everyone
Now this is true of many places I've lived and laughed, but I've had some great times with some very strange people out here. In the desert, no one can hear you hoot like a chimpanzee. And if they do, they don't seem to mind.
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