Cape Town

Cape Town is better than I remember it. The air still smells like cold Atlantic seaweed, the food is sill fantastic, and Table Mountain still glows in the rays of the setting sun. What makes this trip so much better than my last is that I am smelling, eating, and gazing with Diede and Nell. We also have a hotel room at the Sheraton on the 17th floor with free access to a health club, spa, and swanky lounge, which doesn't hurt... yeah, it's nice - a step up from a hostel.

This afternoon, we watched some World Cup, caught up, ate dinner on the waterfront, and listened to a South AFrican xylophone band cover Santana's "Soul Sacrifice." Tomorrow morning we catch a bus at 10am bound for Windhoek. It's a beautiful ride that only takes 19 hours. Yikes! That makes 38 hours for me in 3 days. It should be worth it, though, as the payoff is 2 weeks of roadtripping and camping in Namibia.

A brief look at the itenerary shows:
Days 1,2: the burnt red dunes of the Namib and hiking through the desert peaks of Naukluft Park
Day 3: Driving to the coast to see what the coastal resort of Swakopmund has to offer. Sandboarding? Quad-biking? Skydiving??
Day 4: The Skeleton Coast
Days 5,6: "The Matterhorn of Namibia," Spitzkoppe. A little bouldering, a little hiking, some rock art viewing, and perhaps a ride in a donkey car.
Day 7: Chill at Treesleeper: give Diede and Nell the insiders' tour of Tsintsabis
Day 8: Drive to Caprivi
Day 9, 10: Meet Diede's friend Frederick (a park ranger) and get a tour of a new National Park in Caprivi.
Day 11: kayak at Vic Falls?
Day 12: Back to Tsintsabis.


Stay tuned for details.

Success!

We made beads today! We preheated the oven for a long time, which seemed to make the fire burn hotter and the glass melt more quickly. Everyone was really excited - we're headed toward the manic state of this bi-polar project. The plan for the rest of the week is to make beads, make beads, and make beads. Hopefully the mania will last. Only time will tell.

America Speaks

After work on weekdays I usually do some pushups and situps while listening to the Voice of America on my shortwave radio. The program I listen to is called "Africa News Today" and it usually features a decent blend of news and stories on topics like brain drain in Africa, small businesses development, and environmental issues. A world conference on AIDS just concluded (I think), so many of the stories lately have been related to the HIV/AIDS problem in Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

Today VOA interviewed a journalist from the Boston Globe who was critiquing the way international donors are spending their money to fight AIDS. His main argument was that fewer resources should be spent promoting condoms because it undermines the fight to promote abstinence. He claimed that the proliferation of condoms in Africa and media campaigns promoting safe sex encourage people to have more sex. He advocates using money to promote healthy lifestyles, the main component of which is abstinence. His naiveté is astounding, as evidenced by his plan for promoting lifestyles that will ostensibly win the fight against AIDS: "We can hire coaches for kids, build soccer fields, a few basketball courts, and maybe a few buildings. Unemployment in many places is so high that we need to give people something to do with their time." (More or less a direct quote - no exaggerations.)

 

I personally think this man is an alien robot from outer space. At the very least I doubt that he's spent any time in Africa unaccompanied by state officials. And he certainly hasn't done his homework. C'mon, man, wake up! Building soccer fields?! "Maybe a few buildings"??? I think it's great to encourage kids to live healthy lifestyles, give them the opportunity play sports, and promote the idea of mentorship, but this is NOT the way to fight AIDS. Teaching abstinence doesn't even work in the US. (It's been proven that kids in American high schools, including those in NC, my home state, who take abstinence pledges are more likely than others their age to engage in unprotected sexual activity.) And you expect kids in Africa, where the proliferation of sexuality is much greater than that in the US (the average ages that boys and girls lose their virginity is something like 13 and 14 respectively), to abstain from sex? He must be joking. Seriously. People will stop having sex when monkeys fly out of my butt. Someone is probably doing it on a soccer field at this very moment.

 

Furthermore: "We also need to encourage the enforcement of underage drinking laws because people, especially young people, are going out, getting drunk and having unsafe sex." A good idea, but impossible. Police forces in Africa not only lack the resources to spy on kids, but I think there are more pressing issues for them to attend to than underage drinking. I agree that drinking is a problem; I have seen that it creates huge problems for many communities in Namibia. If you read about my night at the club in Tsintsabis, you know what I mean.  It just seems terribly misguided to send policemen out to fight AIDS. Sending community health workers might be a better idea.

 

This guy is just avoiding talking about sex at all costs. If he spent a couple hours reclining with Freud, he might get over his fixations and see it the way most public health experts (and most well-adjusted people) see it: the simplest and most direct way to prevent the spread of AIDS is to promote condom use. We all know the mechanics of how STDs spread... doesn't teaching save sex make sense? I dare say it makes more sense than building soccer fields. Knowledge is power. If you want a hungry man to eat, teach him to fish. Give him a rod, some bait, and a hook, and then show him how to use them. Don't tell him to ignore his hunger and think satiated thoughts. He wants to eat and is going to find a way to do it. Maybe in a few years your philosophical advice will help him learn to suppress his hunger and live with less food, but in the short term he wants something in his belly.

 

So this guy is a kook, right? I certainly think so, and I'll bet that you'd find others who listened to the interview who share my opinion. What they may not share with me, though, is the knowledge that there is a lot of dissent in the US about how money should be spent in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Not everyone toes the government line like the Globe reporter. Unfortunately, in the end, the "Voice of America" does not represent the Voices of Americans.

The Beads Project

I have been working with three girls from the village on a glass beads project for about a month and a half now. This project is probably my biggest responsibility and it’s definitely the most challenging (and sometimes - usually? - frustrating) thing I work on in Tsintsabis.

 

Stasja first got the idea for the project when he heard of a 3-week bead-making seminar at a women’s development center called Penduka in Windhoek. A Ghanaian bead-making expert had been invited to come teach deaf women to make glass beads out of recycled bottles; Stasja asked Penduka if they would be interested in helping another disadvantaged population – Bushmen – by allowing some girls from Tsintsabis to attend the seminar. He already had three women from the village in mind and by early March they had secured grant money from a small Dutch foundation to attend the seminar.

 

I arrived in Namibia a week before the women finished the seminar. I’ve been working with them since the middle of April building a clay oven (a “kiln”) and a roof to cover the oven, buying supplies to make the beads into jewelry, and securing more funding to get the project off the ground. I’ve also been helping them organize their time and use their resources, the most important of which is free labor from Treesleeper, as effectively as possible.

 

Working with them is kind of like herding cats. Each girl is independent, a little stubborn, opinionated, and (around me) shy. In the beginning I was having a hard time getting them to work together. I didn’t know any of them or their personalities and I felt a little strange stepping in and taking the lead since they were the ones who were supposedly the experts in oven-building and also because I am white (It is uncomfortable to step right into the colonial white role of ordering people [blacks] around. I realize now that they have come to expect such orders and that it is incredibly hard to coax them into telling me what they want since I’m both white and a man.) None of them wanted to listen to the others' ideas. Collecting clay for the oven from termite hills went smoothly enough because there isn’t much teamwork involved, but when it came to oven-building, small issues that had merely caused mild tension blew up. The result was that, for reasons ranging from oven collapse to oven destruction to oven-building apathy to gossip, it took three weeks to build a clay oven.

 

When Stasja gave me the project, he told me not to expect things to happen quickly. We set a goal for the grass roof and the oven to be finished by the time he left for Holland, which was about 2 weeks ago. It seemed to me to be a generously conservative goal, but as it turns out, that law – the one that says what can go wrong will go wrong – well, it holds as well, maybe better, in Tsintsabis as in the US.

 

When we finished the oven, instead of immediately starting on the grass roof, I went to Windhoek to buy a few things that the ladies would need to finally produce beads. I figured it was better to take advantage of their enthusiasm in the wake of finishing the oven to make beads rather than to run the risk of quashing it with more manual labor. When I got back, I gave the girls the supplies and they went to work. I was relieved that we had actually finished the oven and I was expecting them to start making beads and jewelry like pros. What actually happened was that 80% of the beads turned out misshapen or only half-melted. Damn!

 

That was last Tuesday. At the end of last week, I spent a morning with them to get a full progress report and to do some troubleshooting. It turns out that they made a lot of simple errors in the process of preparing the bottles to be melted. I hadn’t anticipated these problems because I assumed they knew what they were doing. Other factors that I had not anticipated, like too much wind, a lack of good firewood, and their best bead-shaper being sick, also helped derail the process. We discussed the problems and together came up with solutions that will hopefully help the process run more smoothly this week.

 

Tomorrow Paul, my assistant project manager, the girls, and I will once again try to make some beads. Hopefully our new plans and a bit of luck will put the beads project on the road to temporary success. Otherwise, we will have to go back to the drawing board.

Picture This

I have been reading a very interesting book, “Picturing Bushmen,” on and off for the last month or so. The book focuses on the 1925 Denver Africa Expedition – whose stated goal was to find the most primitive people in Africa – to try and find the lasting effects of its extensive production and distribution of pictures of Bushmen. The author, Robert Gordon, now at the University of Vermont, gives credence to many different theories. Some, like the idea that capitalism is to blame for making people “consume” images of Bushmen “in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex,” clearly must be taken with a grain of salt. But others I find more attractive and compelling, namely that images can create narratives and perpetuate myths that are damaging to the people they portray.

 

Gordon focuses mainly on “fairy tales” that have been perpetuated by imagery of Bushmen in popular and pseudo-scientific culture. These tales center on ideas of Bushmen as “noble savages,” “uncontaminated by Western civilization” and living “in a self-sustaining community.” Most of the pictures taken by the Denver Expedition reinforce these myths by focusing on “traditional” activities such as hunting, bead-making, dancing, and tracking. Pictures that do not fit into the fairy tale are excluded. Who wants to know that Snow White had a clubfoot?

 

The film “The Gods Must Be Crazy” is another good example of a portrayal of Bushmen that perpetuates these fairy tales. The main character, !Xoi, a Kalahari Bushman, is portrayed as simple, childish, incorruptible, and humorously uninitiated to Western life. The slapstick humor that centers on the collision of two cultures leaves the viewer with lasting memories of !Xoi driving a car while standing on its hood and asking how dozens of little people fit inside a pair of binoculars. It hints at the bewilderment that some Bushmen must feel as they try to adopt certain Western ways of life, but it does nothing to illuminate the more complex or troubling aspects of the Bushman assimilation.

 

That is precisely the problem. Gordon argues that the result of such one-sided portrayals of Bushman life is the perpetuation of a myth that does not represent the true nature of the people and that glosses over or ignores problems such as marginalization and poverty that have been serious issues in Bushman life since the time of the Denver Expedition. Of course I don’t expect a comedy film to address these issues, but I leaves me to wonder what outlet will take responsibility for accurately portraying Bushmen.

 

One source that I certainly expected to provide a more “realistic” picture of Bushmen was National Geographic. Its articles and photos tell the stories of countless cultures around the world in a way that is both captivating and informative. So how do they portray Bushmen? A recent article in National Geographic on the history of human migration as told by genetics identifies the Bushmen and a couple of other tribes in Africa as the possible original inhabitants of planet Earth. Accompanying the article is a picture of a Bushman hunter in South Africa – the only picture of any of the tribes mentioned in the article. We see the back of the hunter’s head; he carries a wooden bow slung over his shoulder and a digging stick in his hand. Two of his relatives – wearing loincloths and with traditional haircuts – approach him over the crest of a rusty red sand dune.

 

National Geographic’s selection of this picture as the representation of the original inhabitants of the earth is telling. As per the fairy tales, the picture tells the story of a timeless people as old as the earth itself whose ways have changed little since then. The people in the picture appear, predictably, to be pristine, in touch with nature and untroubled by the modern world. Ironically (for Gordon and I – it was surely planned this way), the results of the genetic studies in the article reinforce the ideas associated with the featured picture and with the myth that accompanies it. Ultimately, the picture is a metaphor for the beginning of human life as we know it. These Bushmen may as well be walking through “the sands of time.”

 

The unfortunate and untold story is that, in all likelihood, the hunter and his two companions are returning home from a hunt and will arrive soon at grass huts in a settlement with no running water or sanitation. Their kids will be hungry and malnourished and they will go to bed only to wake up and face another day of struggle – that is the reality of Bushman life.