Our first two weeks in Mayara

Mahango Game Park - The pictures you have all been waiting for!

Lindsey and I are really lucky. There are plenty of volunteers that have been here for over a year, that have still not seen a single “exotic” wild animal. Lindsey and I got to go on a safari our FIRST weekend at site in Mayara. It is about 30 minutes away from us and only $10 Nam dollars to get in if you have your own car! Another teacher has a car and offered to take Lindsey and I if we paid for gas - not a bad deal at all. So all in all, it cost the equivalent of $34 US dollars for both Lindsey and I to go on a safari. We saw zebras, giraffes, hippos, elephants, water buffalo, lots of springboks and other crazy antelope looking things, and a male LION - which apparently is very, very rare because lions stay far away from humans. For example, the teacher that drove us has been on many safaris and has lived in Namibia his whole life, but has only seen one other lion - ever. Apparently we are good luck! So if you have your own car and are allowed to drive in a game park (which I think most of the game parks in Namibia offer that), you are free to drive along all of the dirt paths and stay in the park for as long as you want. We were only there for a little over two hours, so I am excited to go on another and bring some food and drinks and just chill in the car with the windows down, just watching all of the animals for the entire day. In Mahango you are allowed to get out of your car, which we did a few times, but our teacher friend told us to always leave the car doors open incase you have to make a mad dash away from an animal. Not bad advice.

A lot of people have been asking if we have seen any wildlife actually in Mayara. The answer is unfortunately no and here is why - animals stay away from humans. We are the most dangerous predators on the planet and the animals know to stay away from us. We see animals sometimes off to the side of the road when we are driving, but they are not around villages. Most of the wild animals are in game reserves where they are protected. However, there are crocodiles and hippos in the Kavango River, but we have yet to see any..... maybe during rainy season?

This is the first thing we saw when we pulled into the park!

A male lion munching on a zebra.

Hut Life

Our sleeping hut

We are finally in our permanent housing! After 2 months of training in Okahandja, and 2 weeks of waiting in Rundu, we are finally here. We have two huts on our homestead - a cooking hut and a sleeping hut. The cooking hut is where we hang out most of the time because the sleeping hut is so small that the bed takes up nearly the entire thing! They gave us a thatch roof on the sleeping hut which keeps it significantly cooler. Our kitchen hut has a tin roof and is like a dang oven in the middle of the day! Both huts have electricity (a very long extension cord is running from the nearest school building to our hut) but we do not have running water, so I have to fetch water every other day. And let me tell you, fetching water is no easy task. We have three big 25 liter jugs that weigh about 65 pounds each when they are full, and it is probably about 300 yards from the bore hole to our hut. That is a long way to carry two full jugs at a time! The funny thing is, they didn’t install the bore hole until about a year ago, so anytime before that everyone had to fetch water from the river - which is about a 25 minute walk from our hut. Now that would have been a workout......

Our kitchen hut. Lindsey is cutting up some vegetables to cook on the fire

Have you ever wondered how they make a mud hut? Well, let me tell you.... They cut down trees to use as the supports for the walls all around the hut, and then use smaller branches and bind them horizontally all across the frame. They then find an old termite mound (they are everywhere and also huge ha) and mix water in with the dirt, until it turns into a sloppy, muddy goop. Next, they pack the mud in between the tree branches and sticks, and smooth it out on the inside to make the walls look nice. The mud dries as hard as cement, so it is not like what you typically think of as “mud”. It is not just mud - oh no, it is termite mud! We have cement floors in both huts which is nice, because most huts have the termite mud for the floor as well. 

That is 65 pounds of water on her head.... how do they do it!?

We have a little bathing area outside our kitchen hut that they tell us will eventually have  grass reeds around it so no one can see in during the day. However, the fence is not up yet so we have been bathing outside at nighttime so no one can see. Exciting right!? No, not really. They are also going to dig us a pit latrine nearby our huts, so we don’t have to walk so far to go to the bathroom. Our school has a pit latrine (which is basically a nice version of an outhouse), and it is about a 2 minute walk away.... so it is a little less than convenient, especially if one of us was to get sick. But hopefully they will actually dig our pit latrine soon!

We have had several kids that like to come up and stand at the fence in the entrance to our homestead, and just.... watch us.... like zoo animals ha. We are some of the only white people they have ever seen, and certainly the first white people to ever live in Mayara, so it is like they don’t even know how to act around us - so they resolve to just staring. Once we actually start teaching in January I think they will open up to us a lot more. 

There are 7 different buildings like the one shown on the left. 

Mayara Combined School

Mayara Combined School has about 480 students in 1st through 10th grade. The students are excited that we are here but are still very timid and laugh when we speak to them. Their culture here is very different from our own. They have a huge respect for authority, so the kids are often so shy they do not even look at you or speak when you ask them a question. This is probably amplified tremendously with Lindsey and I because they are already so timid around elders, we are white, and they are not even remotely confident in their English - especially when speaking to native English speakers. Hopefully they will feel more confident in English by the time we leave! Also for clarification, we found out that a lot of you were under the assumption that we are teaching with all of the other Peace Corps volunteers in the same school - that is not the case. All of the volunteers are spread out all over Namibia at separate sites. Lindsey and I are actually the ONLY volunteers in Namibia that are teaching at the same school. So Mayara Combined School is the only school that has two volunteers. The few other married couples live in the same place, but teach at separate schools. Lindsey and I are the exception I guess ha

Anyway, in Mayara classes are taught in their native language, Thimbukushu, until they are in 5th grade and then it switches to English. All classes throughout Namibia are taught in English after 5th grade. The biggest problem is, no one here is that good at English. A national language test was conducted among all of the teachers in Namibia, and there were only three teachers that passed as proficient in English. Three. And they were all foreigners from Europe! So teachers are teaching in a language that they are not comfortable with or fluent in (this is a general comment of course- there are certainly teachers at our school who speak English very well), to students who do not understand what they are saying. Needless to say, it is obvious to us why the Peace Corps was asked to come to Namibia - to help with the English! Hopefully Lindsey and I will be able to get their proficiency up!

EAP

We had only been at site for five days and the electricity went out in the whole Kavango Region. The final report was that a big group of guys wanted to steal the bolts out of the main electric transmission lines that supply power to the region, and when they took the bolts out a whole bunch of lines fell down at the same time in a bad storm. Since our power was out for a few days, a lot of the food we had just bought went bad, which was a huge bummer, and we had no cell phone coverage - so we were off the grid from everyone. We cooked on an open fire and ate by candle light for a few days so it was like we were camping for real! Then all of the sudden one afternoon, a caravan of other PCVs showed up with some PC staff members and we were told that all of the Kavango PCVs were being evacuated to Rundu until the power came back on for safety reasons. The power being out didn’t really effect Lindsey and I that much, but it could have turned into a very big deal if it didn’t come back on soon. Many of the villages and cities didn’t have electricity, running water, food, or cell phone coverage, so some of the volunteers at those sites went a few days with little to no food or water, and they couldn’t even tell anyone they were in trouble. Hence, it was a very bad situation for some volunteers, and we were all evacuated to make sure everyone was safe and sound. So we just spent a few days at a secluded campsite on the Kavango River just outside of Rundu, where they had food and water brought in from Windhoek for us. The campsite also had a power generator so we were able to live relatively normal lives for those few days. It actually ended up being pretty fun and we got to meet all of the other volunteers in the region.

Peace,
Tim