Painting, Porridge, and Dancing

Rainy Season vs. Dry Season

Here are two pictures - the first one was taken about a year and a half ago on our first day in Mayara. It was the peak of the dry season. All the grass was dead and sand was everywhere. The second is one that I just took yesterday. The grass grows to be about three feet high and I even had to dig out a path for us to walk in to avoid walking through waist high grass. Our fence isn’t in as good of shape, but it is still doing pretty good considering it is in the midst of its second rainy season. A little different eh?

Our homestead after many, many months of no rain.

Our homestead now.

Namibia Map

This was a project that Lindsey and I actually finished back in December during finals. Like the World Map we painted last August, we also wanted to paint a map of Namibia on the school to help the students learn about their own country. Most of the kids here have never even left the village, so we wanted to give them something that would help them visualize where and what things are in Namibia. This was not a big project that lots of students helped with or anything like the world map we painted- it was just Lindsey and I. It was still a lot of fun and gave us something to do in the downtime during finals last year.

The finished product.

Feeding Program

Those are the giant iron pots they cook the porridge in.

Do you ever feel tired or cranky after missing a single meal? Now imagine this as your daily routine: You wake up in the dark and walk 3 miles one way to school (maybe even hop in a canoe and float across the Kavango River first). No breakfast, no lunch, maybe dinner if porridge is available at home. You are at school from 7:30AM to 3:30PM in the 100+ degree heat and are expected to be alert and focused the entire day. Sound impossible? Well, I just described the daily life of many of our students. How can they possibly stay alert and focused if they haven’t had a bite to eat the entire day? They can’t..... could you? 

To help solve this problem, The Ministry of Education started a school feeding program where bags and bags of iron fortified porridge are delivered each term to the schools in villages. The porridge is cooked in giant cooking pots over a fire by a few of the community members each day and is distributed to the kids usually around 1:00 PM. This at least puts something in their bellies to help get them through the rest of the day and keeps them from falling asleep during afternoon study. The kids are always so excited to eat, and are incredibly satisfied when they are finished.

The distribution of the porridge.

While the feeding program is an excellent thing to have in place for village schools, there are a couple of problems that we consistently run into. First, the Ministry is often late in getting the bags of porridge delivered to the school. For example, we have had school everyday for the last 6 weeks and we just received the bags of porridge yesterday. So the kids have had nothing to eat since school has begun and probably won’t for another week or so, or at least until they find some community members to cook for the students. Second, we are always given enough porridge to last the entire term if each student is given about half a liter of porridge each day (it certainly is not a lot, but better than nothing). The problem is rationing. The cooks are not really monitored, nor given instruction or training on what to do, so usually the porridge that is supposed to last for 3 months is cooked and gone in 1 month. So while the feeding program is definitely a step in the right direction for Namibia, it still needs a few tweaks here and there to make it more reliable and effective. For the meantime, the students sure do enjoy the feast during that one month though when they eat an entire plateful of porridge each day.

The happy costumers.

Talent Show

Right before the chugging began when I still had a smile on my face.

Lindsey and another teacher at our school helped plan and organize the first ever talent show in Mayara history. It gave the students a chance to come together and sing, dance, read a poem, or show off any other talent they had. I competed in a drinking competition (with Coke... relax) against 7 other students as a “filler” in between acts. We raced in drinking an entire liter of cold, fizzy, freshly opened Coke from a glass bottle. Let me say, it was truly terrible. Drinking that much of anything is hard, but when it is cold and fizzy - it is the worst. I didn’t win but I somehow managed to get second place by default since a few competitors were disqualified for not stopping when the judges yelled, “STOP!”, and a few others immediately threw the Coke back up on the ground when they finished. Yum.

Overall, the talent show was a huge success and everyone had a great time. It started a little late, about three hours late actually, and went until 1:30 AM. More than 250 people came, both students and community members, and the school raised about N$740 - which is a big chunk of change here. It was also great to see some of the students come out of their shells. Most of them are so timid and shy in class (which is mostly the culture of all students in the Kavango Region), but they have no problem jumping in front of a crowd of hundreds to bust out their dance moves. And man, they can dance. 

Some of the students dancing. 

Lindsey with some of the students after they performed.

Books

An organization called Darian Books donated a box of books via Lindsey’s request to put in our school Library, which is sufficiently lacking good books. She opened the box with her 7th grade class and they were incredibly excited.

Some happy students showing off their new books.

The Night Of The Spitting Cobra - An Epic Tale

This was by far the most scary of our snake experiences so far. Lindsey woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and after a few steps outside in the pitch black heard a loud hissssssss just a few feet away from her. She of course had a flash light, but being that we hadn’t seen a snake in several months, we had both grown a little lax on scanning for snakes before we stepped outside at night. She yelled, “Tim! Snake!”, which of course caused me to jump up out of bed with my adrenaline pumping and my heart racing. I looked outside and Lindsey was standing about 10 feet away from a 4 foot long cobra with its head reared and hood spread, which was now constantly scanning back and forth between the two of us like a pendulum (I was still in the hut looking outside). I didn’t want to try to hit it with a stick, being that it was pitch dark outside and the fact that it was a spitting cobra - I didn’t see it as wise to get close enough to try to kill it with a 3 foot stick. In my dazed mindset (remember I had just been jolted awake), it took me a few minutes to figure out what to do. Lindsey was at a safe distance and it would have been possible just to leave the thing alone and let it slither away off into the bush. But then you always run into the possibility of it coming back later and hiding somewhere else (maybe inside our hut) or, it could end up biting someone else, like one of the little students who play soccer barefoot nearby. Anyway, in my opinion, it is always better to kill a deadly snake when you see one instead of letting it get away.

So I decided to pick up a brick that was outside of our hut door and chunk it at the snake with the hopes of crushing it. I stood behind the door of our hut, kind of like it was my shield, and threw the brick as hard as I could. It smacked the snake and hurt it, but unfortunately it just rolled over the body instead of pinning the snake down as I had hoped. Then the injured, hissing, scared, and angry cobra tried to seek shelter inside of our hut. Inside of the hut that I was in. Not good. 

It came at me full speed and luckily I slammed the door closed in just enough time to pin its head in between the door and the door frame, about six inches from my bare feet. Nice. I grabbed one of my trusty axe handles, conveniently located next to the doors in each of our huts for just these situations, and raised it up to smash the head. Just before I came down with it though, it pulled its stupid head back out and slithered around to the front of our hut. My adrenaline was in full force now to say the least so I was certainly not thinking clearly at this point. Hence, I opened the door, threw another brick, and chased after it like a wild man with my axe handle in hand. I chased after it for maybe a total of 5 seconds and hit it about 10 times before it stopped moving. Neither of us slept the rest of the night.

What I haven’t mentioned yet was that both of our cats (Shiner, the cat we got after our last spitting cobra incident and one of her kittens) were also present during this event, watching from about 5 feet away. Who knows how long they had been watching/messing with the snake before Lindsey went outside? They both seemed fine after I killed the snake, so we assumed they were both fine. However, the next morning when we rolled out of bed after a long, sleepless night, Shiner was nowhere to be seen which has never happened before. The kitten appeared to have been spit on because his eyes were completely swollen shut and all goopy. I was then incredibly angry. Angry at the fact that I had just laid in bed for 5 hours without sleeping and that our cat was most likely dead (if you read anything about cats, they always disappear when they know they are about to die). When we went to school, the other teachers told us not to worry because they claimed that cats can be bit by snakes but will never actually die. I however, was not so optimistic. Shiner was gone the entire next day and we both just accepted that she wondered off to die somewhere. Then, out of nowhere, she appeared in the middle of the next night and started meowing like nothing had ever happened. She was definitely bit, maybe even a few times, but somehow survived. I guess curiosity doesn’t always kill the cat.

Also, everyone here has always said, “It is good that you have cats because cats kill snakes.” Well, it is clear now that cats in fact do not kill snakes, but rather just deter them from coming. Snakes will come more readily if there is food around, which is usually mice, and cats kill mice which will theoretically make the chances of a snake coming by slightly less. I think. No joke though, Shiner has killed one to two mice every single night for the past two months. I don’t even know where she gets them! If our cat weren’t around though, it would be mice galore around here and we would certainly encounter even more snakes.

Last Sunday around noon, Lindsey and I were washing our clothes and we heard some of the other teachers yelling at the house next to ours. I asked what was going on and they said, “Thiyoka! Wiye Timo!” Snake! Come here Tim! Of course, I grabbed my axe handle and ran over. What was there? Another spitting cobra. And what did I do? I threw a brick at it and promptly beat it to death. I am developing an effective system here I think. That is two spitting cobras in the last two weeks. I feel like I have met my snake killing quota for my Peace Corps service.

Peace!

Tim