Nathan Pavlovic's Reports

It is hard for me to believe that it was already two months ago that I caught the plane that would carry me to a car waiting to bring me across Namibia’s gravel plain to my home for the next year, the Gobabeb Training and Research Centre. And yet here I am writing my first quarterly report. So much has happened here since I first arrived, but the time seems to have flown by much faster than I realized. In many ways, I’m still in the process of settling in, and I hardly feel ready to put my thoughts down on paper. Certainly, I can’t sum up the whole Gobabeb experience in one or two or five pages, not yet anyway. What I offer here instead is a set of impressions, descriptions of what I have experienced so far that may give a little taste of a few parts of my life here in the Namib Desert.

Desert Living

Namibia. Land of the Namib. Lots of sand. My first encounter with something really Namibian occurred as we flew from South Africa to Walvis Bay, the second largest city in Namibia. An ad in the in-flight magazine for the Walvis Bay seaport caught my eye. The full-page shtick featured a cargo container floating above a deep red dune, part of the Namib Desert sand sea. “That’s silly,” I thought. “There’s no way it actually looks like that.” Turns out it was really no exaggeration - just about everything here is framed by sand. Roads, railroad tracks, homes, even the Walvis Bay municipal dump melt into the surrounding dunes. The scenery is simultaneously monotonous and inspiringly, tantalizingly intricate. It’s the sort of landscape that leaves your eye with no point of reference to the horizon, making you dizzy with disorientation as you look to the distance. Yet when you get up close, and maybe even down on your hands and knees, the biological and geological complexity to be found is spectacular.

That strange mixture of barren landscape and astounding detail was made clear to me on a recent hike taken by fellow Grinnell Corps Fellow David, co-worker Gareth, and myself. For the hike, we laid out a 20 kilometer route across the gavel plain between two inselbergs – mountainous islands of rock rising up out of the expansive gravel plains which lie to the north of the Namib sand sea. Upon arriving, it became clear just what that route would entail. From the top of Chungochoab, our starting point and first camping site, we were able to clearly see the flat, white surface that lay between us and Swartbank, our destination. We were staring at twenty kilometers of the most nothing I had ever seen, and we were about to walk every meter of it. We spent that first day exploring the mountain and a nearby salt spring, and the next morning, we awoke at quarter to five and set out on our trek. For the most part, the path was just as barren as it had looked the day before, with nothing but gravel and dead grass stubs for kilometers on end. And then suddenly, a tiny change would come in the landscape and a whole new world would open up. The land would drop maybe half a meter, just enough to collect a precious little rain from the surrounding plains, and suddenly we found ourselves in a bustling ecosystem of shrubs, termites, birds and lizards. The whole scene might measure only 5 meters across or less. And then on the other side, there was inevitably another endless expanse of gravel.

The thing about this barren landscape is that, after an hour of seeing nothing else, gravel starts to look pretty interesting. You begin to notice reds, yellows, blacks, greens, oranges, whites, and browns, and a rock with a particularly striking shape or hue will catch your interest with surprising urgency. Turn a stone over and you can often find a little patch of green dust made up of microorganisms, known as hypolithic cyanobacteria, which eke out a living there on sunlight and condensed dew. That is one of the really compelling parts of the desert for me: the discovery of little patches of life crammed into whatever spaces are just protected enough from the wind and sun for the residents to stay alive. If you take the time to really look, you discover amazing plants, animals, and other life forms fighting for survival in every dip, crack, hole, and crevice.

Of course, not everything striking in the desert is hidden. It doesn’t take a fine eye for detail, for instance, to appreciate the beauty of the morning fog or the immensity of the horizon from the top of a dune. A herd of orxy, a large, regal species of antelope with long, straight antlers, seen trotting across the open plains is hard not to appreciate. The sun as it dips below the western dunes at dusk never fails to impress, and sundowners, the tradition of dropping everything and running to the top of the nearest dune or water tower to watch the sunset, are an integral part of life here. Surrounded by such beauty, living at Gobabeb is pretty fantastic. The location is certainly second to none. Life here is not all camping and hiking and watching gorgeous sunsets, though. I do have work to do, and I suppose I ought to say a bit about that too.

IT Voodoo

One of my major duties here at Gobabeb is to keep our computer network running and help anyone at the station with computer problems. Like any job, working with IT here has its ups and it has its downs. The all-too-uncommon rush of discovering the proper way to do exactly what you want, perhaps accompanied by a celebratory fist pump, is one of the ups. That, and the thought that I am learning a skill that will serve me for the rest of my life, or at least until Microsoft releases the next software update. The downs mostly come when catastrophe strikes and what had looked to be a day of productive activity stretched out before me becomes a long, potentially interminable slog through IT trouble-shooting. I have lost entire days running back and forth from the old concrete tower that houses our server to the “Action Room” where station computers hook up to the network, trying to fix a problem in exactly the wrong ways. Yet, despite such troubles, at the end of the day, I can usually say that if I haven’t triumphed, at least I’ve survived in the face of adversity. And I’m sure to have learned something in the process.

Coming into the job, I would have thought that working with computers would be a fairly straightforward, logical procedure, but it turns out there’s a certain mysticism that comes with being the IT go-to person. With a fairly minimal background in computers, I am usually taking a shot in the dark when I claim to be “fixing” a machine, and because I really have no idea if one thing or another will work, I have started to develop a repertoire of habits that might, or might not, encourage a computer to do it’s thing. Favorites include chanting “Come on” and “You can do it,” as well as gently patting the computer, much as I would an ailing pet. I can’t say that I have noticed a marked improvement in the health of the station computers now that I have dreamt up this routine, but I can say that I haven’t lost a machine yet. And if that’s not evidence of mystical powers, I don’t know what is.

My favorite power, though, is the one I don’t have to work for at all. It’s a fairly common occurrence that someone will call me over to fix their computer, only to discover that, in the time it took me to arrive, the problem has miraculously fixed itself. This tendency has given rise to the perception that I can fix a computer with my mere presence. Of course, I have nothing to do with it, but I enjoy cultivating the myth just the same. I had pretty much assured myself of my power to fix a computer with a sidelong glance some time ago, but it was not until quite recently that I discovered my ability to crash one as well. Having selected one of my colleagues’ computers for a virus scan, I sat down and restarted the thing, only to have it refuse to start up again. I was shocked – I had killed the computer with the mere suggestion that it might have a virus. It came out later that the thing had been on the rocks for over a week, but I am still convinced that it was my attention that finally zapped that computer. Telekinetic powers are just one of those things that come with the IT territory.

Ok, I admit it, that’s actually a pretty dubious “ability.” Putting curses on computers is not exactly a marketable skill, much less a useful activity. In truth, the best, most amazing computer power I have is the simple ability to type words, save them in a document, and then distribute them to people all over the globe. That, and the capacity to teach others to do the same. The station employs a number of people from the Topnaar communities that lie along the ephemeral Kuiseb River basin, and twice a week after work, I have begun to teach computer classes for the staff. I have been delighted to find such eager learners. Though they started from nearly no computer skills at all, and though they have to fight the additional battles of language and literacy, my students have advanced at lightning pace. Caroline and Jeffery use their lunch hour to practice typing with a program I taught to them to use, and Josef and Jacob have set up e-mail addresses for themselves. Besides learning how to send silly pictures or change their e-mail accounts to display in exciting colors, the staff have begun to learn to write a curriculum vitae and send an attachment in an e-mail. It is a long shot, but I like to dream that one day one of them will be able to get another job by e-mailing out an application. Being able to help them develop such useful skills, and observing their acuity for it in spite of the many obstacles, has been a real pleasure for me here and perhaps my most satisfying activity.

In Summary

There is plenty of work at Gobabeb for me other than computers, including organizing interns at the station, doing research fieldwork, and preparing for the university courses which may be happening later this year. I could go on for pages about every one of these, and a plethora of other stories besides. For now, though, I will just say that the place is beautiful, the work is varied and interesting, the people are great, and life at Gobabeb is pretty darn good.