Since my tardiness in submitting this report has afforded me the opportunity to read Ari's first, and I see that he has focused on describing our surroundings here, I will (as I was intending to anyway) focus on my job.
I am the TAOS Grinnell Corps Fellow-this stands for Training and Outreach Support. Since this is not a particularly descriptive title, I would like to elaborate on my job a bit more fully. So far at least, "training" forms the most significant component of my work at Gobabeb. Training can more or less be summarised as environmental education, but I would like to qualify this-it is not just teaching about the plants and animals and soil and water of the Namib Desert, but also how to find out about these things for oneself. That is, I also teach the process of science. At least, I aim to. With my first two training groups-a small secondary school group from Walvis Bay and three biodiversity management MSc students from the University of Namibia-I was starting to become confident about communicating concepts in desert ecology and the scientific method.
I have to say a bit about the MSc course. Teaching MSc students from Namibia was one of my biggest worries before arriving here, and there were definitely some tense moments. The first gray hair multiplier came two days before the students' arrival for their ten-day field course, when I was informed that their lecturer was unable to come to Gobabeb. Another was when Ari (who good-naturedly allowed himself to be coerced into helping) and I were preparing to lead a statistics workshop, which clearly would have been disastrous. (Fortunately, at the last minute I was able to recruit an unwitting Australian field biologist who is now a stats god in my eyes.) Even with these difficulties, the course went quite well. I am obviously not qualified to and was not expected to give lectures on variability and autoecology of arid environments. I did, however, plan the course, lead discussions about how to write research papers, provide the students with critical feedback about their experimental design, and assign readings. (And I am currently agonizing over grading their papers and presentations. Professors, I have new-found respect for you! Grading takes a ridiculously long time and is much more difficult than I imagined.) These are things that I could not necessarily envision myself doing before I arrived.
Of course, my job was going much too smoothly for this be a permanent trend.
Then this past week, two groups arrived from The North, as they say here (meaning above Etosha National Park). The first group was comprised of 52 secondary school learners, three teachers, who appeared little older than their students, and their slightly inebriated bus drivers (ok, only one was inebriated). They arrived 11 hours late and did not call to let us know when, or if, they were coming. The learners (as primary and secondary students are called) were exhausted after a nearly 24 hour drive, and most had a very minimal command of English. And, because of shoddy planning on the part of the school, their two day visit was shortened to less than one full day. How, under these circumstances, does one even begin to communicate something meaningful about desert ecology or science? To their credit, most of the learners tried very hard to remain focused and engaged with the activities. Some activities worked better than others, and it helped that two of the interns whom I had enlisted to teach the large group spoke Oshiwambo, the language the learners were most familiar with. Overall, I am sure that they enjoyed their visit, but how much they learned here is questionable. I had a similar experience with the second school group, except that they were younger, understood less English, and there was no one at the station that spoke their first language.
I hope that I have not painted this picture too grimly. I do think that the students took away something meaningful from their visit to Gobabeb. The language barrier is a real challenge, though, and I am still not sure of the best way to navigate it.
Even with these difficulties, I find that I love the teaching aspect of my job. Though I am not always successful, I enjoy trying to coax answers out of shy students who are probably seldom asked to come up with their own ideas in response to a question. Even the much better-resourced learners from Walvis Bay who spoke English well took some time to come out of their shells, and I was so happy to watch them become absorbed in conducting mini vegetation transects, identifying tenebrionid beetles, and classifying soil types. I can't avoid the clichй-seeing the spark of excitement in my students is so gratifying and is one of the best parts of this job. I also have to say that teaching outside is great. What better way to learn about the keystone !nara plant than to go observe the ridges on the stems, touch the spines, identify the tracks of animals around the base, and find the pollinators? Except for the heat, which even in winter is sometimes overpowering by 10am, I really think that being in the field is the best way for students to learn about ecology and science.
I suppose that is all I will say about training. My job is not always so exciting. In between school group visits, I spend most of the day in front of my computer. Fortunately, I get to work on many different projects. Planning school visits is rather time-consuming at the moment, but Ari and I are also in the process of advertising and starting to review applications for Gobabeb's internship programme (and yes, I am fully onboard with the British spelling system). We also just finished revising a substantial funding proposal for this internship programme. When we started, we had no idea how to write a funding proposal, but like so many other aspects of our jobs, we are learning as we go. Interviewing internship applicants? Not a problem. We stumbled through our first interview and will do better next time.
Apart from deskwork, the other major component of my job is supervising interns. We currently have seven interns here, from Namibia and Germany, with diverse projects such as compiling an ecological restoration primer for Gobabeb, and creating a teaching resource about appropriate building techniques in Namibia. Only a few of these interns are directly my responsibility, but ensuring that their projects are making headway and editing their work can take a lot of time.
I believe it is time to deliver the coup de grace to this rambling report. But no news of Grinnell Corps in Namibia would be complete without at least a brief expression of awe about Gobabeb's environs. Enter Dr. John Irish, an abundantly-whiskered entomologist with boundless patience and a soft spot for volleyball. (I also feel compelled to mention that whenever I peer into one of the solar ovens at the station and see a single potato sitting at the bottom, I know that John is making his supper.) When John was leaving the station late the other evening, he smiled tiredly at me and said "It doesn't matter how frustrating the day gets; when I walk home, I see things that make me forget about it."
And it is true. During my 30 second walk to work every morning, I gawk at the blue-green fuzz of the gravel plains dotted with granite outcrops to my right and the smooth orange dunes bounded by the deep green of the river trees to my left. Surely it is impossible to become tired of a view like this. My job is certainly challenging, but the people here and Gobabeb's location help keep things in perspective.
