Gobabeb as a place seems to have changed little since Ari and I arrived, although I am growing more attuned to seasonal variations in the environment. We were greeted in July by the scent of Ana flowers overflowing from the Kuiseb River. Now, much of the riverbed is carpeted with curly purple and red Ana pods. The bright green Zygophyllum simplex plants, with succulent leaves that taste like a Granny Smith apple, are mostly brown and dry now. The dunes, river trees, and gravel plains, which I admire just as much as on my first days here, look a bit more surreal in the heatwaves of the Namibian summer. Otherwise, the landscape looks the same. We have received less than 2 mm of rain, so the gravel plains grass is still sparse and dead, perhaps grazed a little lower by the Topnaars' bitter donkeys. We are still waiting for the flood—I squirm with excitement whenever I hear talk of rain near Windhoek—and the Kuiseb remains a white sand highway crisscrossed with the tracks of goat, tenebrionid beetle, jackal, guinea fowl....
In contrast to its environment, the Gobabeb community is constantly changing in very apparent ways. By my count, eighteen people—interns, permanent staff, and researchers who lived at Gobabeb for at least a month—have left Gobabeb since we arrived six months ago (our current staff is seventeen). I usually appreciate this flux of people, but it is also means that we have to say goodbye to many Gobabebians that we would rather not see leave. Overall, though, I really enjoy and have learned a lot from working and living with so many different people: students from all over Namibia, environmental education specialists from South Africa, Australian field biologists. A German MSc student who dissected ant brains. A crazy yet brilliant postdoc from Denmark who glued LED lights to the backs of Dancing White Lady spiders so he could monitor their movements at night. And of course, the Grinnell Corps Fellows preceding us, James Anderson and Alex Brooks. A snapshot of tea time gives an idea of the diversity of Gobabebians.
We celebrate tea time each workday at 10:30 and 3:30 by drinking rooibos and instant coffee on the station's front porch. (I vowed when I arrived at Gobabeb in the winter that I would not drink hot tea twice a day in the withering heat of the central Namib summer, but I do.) At any given tea time, and sometimes all at once, one can hear Afrikaans, Oshiwambo, Nama, German, and English being spoken. (There are also Subia and Otjiherero speakers at the station, but they usually have no one to talk with in their first languages.) I have found that this cultural and linguistic mixture can sometimes present challenges to connecting with my coworkers, but it has also been an enlightening look into the various peoples of Namibia, and has afforded me insight into some current political and socioeconomic issues.
In particular, I have found it both interesting and saddening to learn about the local Topnaar (≠Aonin) community. The Topnaar are the Nama-speaking original inhabitants of the lower Kuiseb River, and from what I can gather, they represent one of the more marginalised groups in Namibia. Several aid organisations, and Gobabeb itself, have over the years attempted various ways of helping the community improve its standard of living. For many reasons, none of this aid seems to have done any good for the great majority of people. So for almost fifty years, Gobabeb has sat comfortably a few kilometres away from the Topnaar villages, where people have no electricity or running water, women cook over wood fires, and except for the chief, everyone lives in huts made of corrugated iron and driftwood (which are typically 18° F hotter during the day and colder at night than our houses at Gobabeb).
This is difficult for me to accept. Many staff at the station are Topnaar. I play volleyball with them and their kids, we braai (barbecue) goat meat and dance on special occasions, and occasionally, we have long conversations about their community (although discussion can be difficult because few Topnaar are comfortable speaking English, and I know only the very basics of Nama). Not surprisingly, I still feel very distanced from their experience. I recognize that someone from outside the Topnaar community living a short time in the area, with a major language barrier, cannot expect to be able to contribute meaningfully to the community as an individual. Fortunately, part of Gobabeb's core purpose is to “enhance the sustainability of socio-economic environments”, which includes a commitment to work constructively with the Topnaar community to improve their quality of life. Though past efforts to this end have had mixed results, a few very committed staff at Gobabeb give me reason to hope that the Centre will evolve into an effective facilitator of positive changes in the Topnaar community. They are developing plans to offer computer literacy classes, help discouraged students graduate from high school, and build a workshop to create the potential for a greater cash income. (These ideas, and several others that we are exploring, have originated from the community, not from Gobabeb.) I am excited to support these developments and hope that we will reach the implementation phase before I leave.
One of the many things I like about my Grinnell Corps position at Gobabeb is that I can spend time on projects that are of interest to me, such as Topnaar community development. There are several basic duties that I have to fulfill, but within these I have quite a bit of leeway to focus on my interests. For example, part of my job is to improve existing environmental education/training materials and develop new materials. It is largely up to me to decide how I would like to accomplish this, and one project I am in the middle of is creating a Namib Desert version of the Enviro-Picture Building game. Because this project is somewhat representative of what my job entails when I am not working with school and university groups, I will attempt to explain what this game is and why I have decided to work on it.
Three months ago, I drove North for fourteen hours in a mechanically unsound combi, with four Gobabeb coworkers, to engage ninth-grade learners in environmental education activities. The most popular activity at all six schools was the subsistence farming-focused Enviro-Picture Building game. This resource was developed in South Africa to contribute to a more holistic understanding of the effects people have on the environment and how environmental issues can be addressed. The game also aims to get kids thinking about the suite of environmental issues that specifically occur in their region. Northern central Namibia, like the area of South Africa where the original game was developed, is mostly rural, with people depending primarily on subsistence livestock and crop farming. The subsistence farming Enviro-Picture Building game we used in the North was effective and fun, but this version, along with the others that have been produced, is inappropriate for the hyperarid Namib Desert. I decided to develop a version that we could use at Gobabeb and distribute to schools in the central Namib. We currently have some outside funding for environmental education projects, so I was able to hire an intern to create the artwork for the game. I have also enlisted the help of another intern who is working with me to research the issues and decide on the layout, in consultation with various scientists and environmental educators. It is my hope that the Namib Enviro-Picture Building game will be a useful environmental education resource in this region long after I have left Gobabeb.
I would rather not end on a serious note, because even though my work is usually serious, I spend a significant amount of time laughing and running out of my office because someone brought in a half-rotted vulture (that I obviously need to inspect), or a puff adder escaped in the lab (snake hunt!), or we discovered a pelican trying to land on the flagpole (a pelican, in the desert?). Some of my coworkers, too, are a reliable source of comic relief. Gobabeb is a great place and I am happy that I have another six months here.
