Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm turning in my third report rather late. What this means is I have a mere two months left at Gobabeb! Two months! I've had enough time to get settled in, to really know what I'm doing, and soon I'll have to leave.
Enough whining. On to my reports.
It never rains around here
..it just comes pouring down. Seriously -- I come out to the desert and it just happens to be that once-in-thirty-years sort of year, when the weather's all strange and the rain comes at odd times. In April -- when the region normally has little to no rain -- we got 40mm in one week, which is twice the rainfall of an average year.
The year's heavy rains mean that the plains around Gobabeb are covered in grass. The contrast between the swaying green plains of today and the starkly beautiful, desolate gravel plains of last June is absolutely remarkable. It's a privilege to be here at such an unusual time.
It's funny, I come from Belgium -- a grey and rainy place -- and I never expected to be excited about rain. But I get excited about it out here. The first real rainstorm I experienced in Namibia was back in November, when Sarah and I were on our way down from the north. We started driving through some serious rain, and there was of course only one thing for it: to pull over a dance in the rain like maniacs. I'm pleased to say I did that a few more times when the rain actually hit Gobabeb.
A river runs through it
And sometimes it has water in it -- when the rains up near Windhoek are heavy enough. This year we got lucky with floods, and had water flowing down for almost three weeks when you add up all the flood events. The change in landscape was remarkable, and the floods were a great chance to get wet and muddy -- generally impossible at Gobabeb. We even went inner-tubing, in water barely up to our calves.
Finally getting it
Back to my earlier comments about finally getting settled down: that really is the feeling I've got now. I've more or less figured out my place in the organization, how things work here, and how to do my job properly. It's a very satisfying feeling, and pretty close to that smooth sailing I hoped for in my last report.
But I still hit snags, and there are still plenty of times when my course does not seem clear. There are still some IT issues I'm very hazy on, and there are still some areas (notably data management) where I wish I had done better. Generally, though, I'm satisfied.
A pleasure to interface with you
Gobabeb is generally a well-run place: things tick over more or less as they should. Guests get served, trainees get taught, research gets conducted, and the work of the station moves on. But the Centre does suffer from under-management, from (sorry if this phrase is close to the boundaries of good taste) too many Indians and not enough chiefs. A real problem.
Unfortunately, until a new middle manager can be found who can assist our overworked Executive Director, the best solution has been to hire a management consultant.
Oh dear.
I'm an odd sort who finds bureaucracy and organizational practice fascinating in many ways; I may even want to take up the study of it some day. But the strange world of management consultancy, with its charts, figures, performance scales, and its peculiarly empty language, leaves me cold.
We get to interface with our consultant every month or so, seeking synergies, new paradigms, and all sorts of things that I thought had been mocked to death sometime in the late 1990s.
It's not without value, and I do get something out of some of the sessions, but in an organization as small as Gobabeb the whole thing feels absurd. I had been warned that this sort of thing was out there in the "real world", but I had not expected it to find me quite so soon. Not even the dunes are safeâ¦
Old House
Most of the younger staff on the station live in the Old House community, centered around communal eating and cooking areas in, well, an old house next to the station.
Lots of fun there: games, braais, parties, all kinds of laughs.
But since the rainy season started we have had a horrendous cockroach problem. Not much useful I can say on this front, it's just been really bothering me.
Snake wrangler
One of those "Oh, I'm in Africa moments" happened yesterday. I was in the office late, working on the webpage (almost finished!) and reading the Guardian, when the phone rang. I ran off to answer it, and almost stepped on a horned adder. It was sitting just inside my office, about eight inches long and completely still. So still that I, seasoned field biologist that I am, decided it was probably a fake snake put there by people who wanted to make me look silly. So I poked at it with a stick and it got angry. Well, frightened, really: it slithered off behind a filing cabinet. But it turned out okay: I fetched someone more competent and we herded the snake into a terrarium, where it will stay until next week's Open Day. And I get the cachet that comes with having found the first live specimen for the event.
Oasis of Learning
That's Gobabeb's tagline, and it's pretty accurate. I was thinking yesterday about some of the different skills I've been building up here: web design, GIS, Linux skills, teachingâ¦I'm pretty sure all of these will be useful to me sometime later in life. Oh, and every month or so Gobabeb teaches me how much I can hate computers. But I guess that just comes with the IT territory.
Well, two months left, and I look forward to stuffing as much learning into them as possible.
