Namibia-proof Banana Bread

Namibia-proof banana bread

I brought two recipes with me to Namibia. I’m not quite sure why, because years ago, when I went to Japan as an exchange student, I carefully packed the Toll House Chocolate Chip cookie recipe only to discover that you end up with a doughy puddle if you try to “bake” cookies in a microwave. I didn’t have any reason to think I would be able to bake here in Namibia, but in one of the advice columns to volunteers that WorldTeach gave us, someone advised that we bring a few favorite foods and/or kitchen utensils from home. So I threw in two boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese, a couple of instant yakisoba noodle packages, a rubber spatula, and recipes for Lois’ Awesome Mennonite Pound Cake and Doffy’s Banana Bread.

Lo and behold (rapidly becoming a favorite expression) not only did I find that my apartment-mate has a stove, she also has an oven. Said oven looked like it was going to be christened by me, so I thought it was my destiny to introduce banana bread to Omaruru, Namibia.

I procured the required ingredients with relative ease at our local “Spar” grocery store, let the bananas ripen to just past edible-ness, and set out to bake. The original intent was to contribute something to our school’s Culture Day, so I thought the investment in an ordinary but expensive loaf pan (about $15) was worth it. I considered buying a muffin tin, too, thinking that it would be easier to make individual servings, but the price (over $20) discouraged me – at least until I knew that it was going to be successful.

Mash 3 bananas with 1 cup of sugar. Hmmm, no measuring cup. The oven was warming and the bananas were ripe, so I used a coffee cup that looked to be the approximate size. I thought if I used the same container for the flour, at least those two ingredients would be in relative proportion. Ignoring the little black specks in the sugar, I mashed away. Although the sugar is of a slightly different consistency than what we have in the US, the mashing proceeded apace.

Add an unbeaten egg. Well, the eggs, even the extra-large ones, are not the size of “large” US ones. So with one batch I used 1 extra-large, and in another batch I used 2 mediums. Add a pinch of salt. Done. I can pinch in any language.

Add the ½ cup of melted butter. Butter comes in ½ kilogram chunks here – with Katherine’s help, we figured that this was close enough to a pound, so I just hacked off what I estimated to be a quarter of it. (When has too much butter ever been a problem?) Melting it turned out to be a challenge – the stove burners heated to slowly that I went off to mark some papers and came back to browned and smoking butter. Given the price of butter and the inadvisability of walking into town to get more, I whisked it in. (My apartment mate also, miraculously, had an untested whisk in her kitchen drawer.)

Add 2 cups of sifted flour – uh oh – with a teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda. We had these, but no teaspoons, of course. Used a soup spoon and eyeballed it. I did the coffee-cup-cup routine with the flour, but no sifting. I had to explain to Katherine what a sifter was. I guess if students who are 19 years old don’t know what a sifter is, maybe we really don’t need them.

The good news was that the batter tasted right. When we had realized that we needed to heat the oven, we also realized that it, of course, comes in centigrade. With a little help from my Harvard biology major consultant, we figured out what temperature we should use. The learners couldn’t figure out what I was doing when I stepped outside to flour the inside of the pan and dump the unneeded flour in the sand. “What are you doing, Miss?” (Oooh, I just love being called Miss.) “I’m baking banana bread.” Puzzled looks and some shrugs, but any kind of food is very, very popular around here. “Can we have some?”

So, into the oven it goes. An hour later it’s still pretty gooey looking and, finding a toothpick, I confirm this. Having no idea if it it liquid mush inside or not, I just keep checking and toothpicking about every five minutes. After an hour and half the toothpick seems to come out easily, so it goes to the counter to cool.

It killed me to wait until it had cooled to release it from the pan, but by now this whole process had taken about two hours, so I had a lot invested in this little loaf pan. Lo and behold (!) it slides out without even sticking to the bottom, and it cuts into nice, dense slices. I suppose you think I” going to tell you it was horrible, but it wasn’t. As my sister-in-law Jenise would say, it was the best d….. banana bread I’ve ever made, and I’ve made that recipe probably hundreds of times! I don’t know whether it was the lack of measuring, lack of sifting, clearly free-range eggs (we see the chickens walking around every time we go into town) or the slow cooking time, but it was delicious, if I do say so myself.

However, it was not going to be something we could make enough of to contribute to the Culture Festival. At two hours a recipe (I did get much more efficient with practice) it would take a week to make enough for all five hundred learners. So I kept it until Monday and shared it in the staff room. It was a huge hit. The second time I made it I took it to one of my classes, and one of the teachers said to me, “You’re not going to give that to the learners, are you?!?” (I did.)

During the making of a subsequent batch, I discovered that the Nalgene water bottle Tony lent me had ounce measurements written on the side, and my coffee cup didn’t turn out to be very far off after all. I never did weigh the butter to see how close I was (and I’ve definitely made it without browning the butter!) and I now put in however many eggs I have on hand. I do wonder if our oven temperature conversion might have been a bit off (or maybe the oven is just a little cool), but think that maybe “low and slow” gives it that nice, dense, even texture. It tastes a little different every time I make it (especially the time I forgot the pinch of salt!), but no one has said anything other than “this is the best banana bread I’ve ever tasted.”

Next up: that awesome pound cake!

S.I. !Gobs SSS, Chapter 2

S.I. !Gobs Secondary School

S.I. !Gobs is a Senior Secondary School, which means that there are learners from Grade 8 to Grade 12 here. Because there are national exams that are very difficult at grades 10 and 12, there is a significant drop-off in student numbers in Grade 11. Grade 8 has 5 classes of approximately 38 students each; Grade 12 only has two.

We arrived on a Thursday, around 5 p.m., and after the morning staff meeting on Friday, we were immediately sent to classrooms to teach. At that point, no textbooks, no syllabus, no plans. I was substituting for the male teacher from whom I subsequently took over Grade 9 English classes; Katherine Xue, my WorldTeach colleague, taught agriculture (“What is the proper time for harvesting cow peas?” ) personal finance, math, and physical sciences that day. She subsequently ended up with a combination of math and physical science classes (she is a rising junior at Harvard, majoring in biology so she’s more than capable of handling that content.)

The classrooms are pretty “bare bones.” There are black (actually green) boards and, in my classroom, some newsprint sheets with examples of things the students have worked on: different kinds of persuasive writing structure, examples of three adjectives separated by commas, and posters with pictures cut out of magazines showing “Namibia in 50 years’ time.” There is one metal cabinet in the corner that houses some random textbooks, lost exercise books, a stapler without staples and, blessedly, a half box of chalk.

Students wear uniforms, basically grey or “nervy” blue (as the kids sometimes write) skirts or slacks (“trousers”) with a “Jessie” (it took me quite a while to figure out that they were saying “jersies” - which can mean a sleeveless or with-sleeves sweater) and/or a windbreaker when it’s cold, which it ALWAYS is early in the morning. Shoes are black lace-up or “Mary Janes”, these t-strap variations are sometimes worn by boys as well as girls. Head Boys (although not, for some reason, Head Girls) wear light blue slacks and sweater vests instead of the nervy blue. Just within the last day or two, some of the girls have begun wearing a long, plaid fringed headscarf – some wearing it around their heads as well as around their necks, and some even making a wrap skirt out of them. They are generally pretty well-groomed, especially since virtually all laundry is done by hand in cold water. The only real contention is about the girls’ hairstyles – some teachers think they look “untidy.” Since there seems to be an endless variety of hair – longish without any kind of ties, braids, intricate weaves, bangs, ponytails, pigtails, etc. Katherine and I have a hard time telling which ones are the cause for consternation among the staff. In addition, we’re trying so hard to remember names of our hundreds of students, we welcome the difference in hair – anything to help us remember who is who!

There are no lockers, so students carry all their materials in backpacks, which are more or less standard-issue. They have a textbook for each subject – math, English, science, history, agriculture, language (Afrikaans, Oshiwambo, Oshiherero, Damara, Khoisan, and maybe a few other choices), and entrepreneurship and, in some cases, work processing and/or typing. In addition, they all have at least one exercise book (like a marble copy book) for each subject. So they carry a pretty heavy load.

I call our school a “hybrid,” because about half the learners commute from the town or the surrounding area each day, and half live in the hostel buildings. The ones who walk can come from quite a distance – easily several miles, in many cases, and these “Day Scholars” go home for lunch and then are expected to walk back for “Afternoon Study” from 3 to 5 p.m. This happens or doesn’t happen to varying degrees. Teachers are assigned to monitor Afternoon Study, and there are complaints in the morning staff meeting virtually every day about teachers who don’t show up for their duty periods. It’s not clear if there are any real consequences for not showing up; at least to Katherine and me, there don’t appear to be.

At 5 p.m., the day students walk home again (presuming they have walked back for the afternoon period) and the hostel students go to the dining hall for their evening meal. Since they eat breakfast at 6 (tea and bread and margarine) and lunch shortly after classes get out at 1 p.m., there is a much shorter gap between lunch and supper than between breakfast and lunch. We are starving by our break time at 10:30 – Kat and I usually have a PB and J sandwich and an apple then. The learners’ lunch is their heavier meal of the day – usually something like pasta and some indeterminate-meat balls, plus either a vegetable like squash or “beetroot” (beets) or an apple or an orange. For supper they typically have “porridge” – it truly looks like something out of Charles Dickens – with some bread. My roommate often has a meal brought to her from the dining hall by a learner. One night I thought I might try it, but when I saw the brownish gruel being dipped out of a giant cauldron with a big plastic ladle, I thought better of it.

After supper, there is a period of more or less free time until Evening Study begins at 7 p.m. 8^th, 9^th, and 11^th graders all sit in the dining hall, and when I’ve stopped in it is usually amazingly quiet given very little adult supervision. Since the Grade 10’s and Grade 12’s are in the testing years, they are divided into smaller groups and go to classrooms for Evening Study. Although there is a great deal more attention paid to the Grade 10’s and 12’s because of the testing imposed on them, it’s impossible to tell if the quality of study is any different depending on the extra time and attention given to them. Some afternoons or evenings Kat and I go to the study area of one of our classes, either to help students whose classes have been cancelled during the day for some reason, or to offer extra help, or just to do something fun.

Although the thrust of the WorldTeach program in Namibia is supposed to be an ICT (Information and Communication Technology) we discovered on our arrival here that S.I. !Gobs has a competent computer teacher, so we are not needed in that department. The principal and staff apparently thought that we were going to be doing technical assistance. Several of the tasks they had in mind for us Kat has been able to help with; things like designing a school web site (when I Googled S.I. !Gobs before coming here, I found nothing – but now there will be something for the curious to read!) and setting up Excel spread sheets for entering grades. Today Kat was teaching the Assistant Principal how to make the spreadsheets, and also how to operate her projector. She was literally like the proverbial kid in a candy shop – absolutely thrilled to see what she could do, and how easily it could be replicated across classes. It’s lucky Kat is here, because I could have struggled through those things, but it would have taken me far longer and far more angst to do so. Also, they only have PC’s, so my Mac is pretty foreign to them. They do have several computers, two in the office and two in the teacher’s room, one of which works. One of the main office computers has internet access, but teachers are not allowed to use it on any routine basis. The computer in the teacher’s room with sporadic internet access is always in great demand. They have a copy room with three copiers (two of which work) and a good color copier in the office. The teacher’s room has a dot matrix printer; Katherine had never seen such an animal before. Despite the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any restriction on making copies, teachers seldom make copies of materials for students to use. The learners more commonly copy whatever the teacher writes on the board.

As an aside, some of the WorldTeach volunteers are teaching computer skills – with a vengeance. Two of our colleagues teach virtually every learner in their respective schools – over 1,000 – over the course of each week. Thus they have little chance to learn kids’ names, much less to really get to know them. We feel very lucky in that regard – between living in the hostel and having more-or-less regular classes to teach, we have gotten to know quite q few learners by now. As Kat says, the first names we learned were either the badly behaved kids, or the “nudge-y” ones! Now we’re getting to know the quieter ones who didn’t necessarily call out for attention at the beginning.

Since I had no guidance whatsoever on my first day of teaching, I had all the classes (3 groups of Grade 9’s, 2 of Grade 10’s, 1 of Grade 11’s) do a little exercise where they wrote “My family consists of…” and “My uniform consists of…” They also wrote down their nicknames, where they are from, and most of them also had time to draw a family tree. This has turned out to be an invaluable resource for me! Some of the kids seem to have as many nicknames as the languages they speak. For instance, one girl who is “officially” named Agnes listed nicknames of Prisica, Uatatumisa and Katakiti. A boy who is listed as Kevin for school purposes, is variously known as Vekhondjisa, Katikisa, and Uakumba. You can sometimes make a guess as to the ethnic background of a child by their name (for instance, names with the “dj” or “tj” combination in them are usually from the Oshiwambo language group.) Virtually all classes have a minimum of 35 learners in them. This, plus the fact that learners write virtually everything in their exercise books and you end up with a heavy stack about two feet high - makes homework assignments a thing to be carefully considered. If you don’t return them the very next day, the kids have nothing to write in or on. Correcting even the most brief assignment takes the better part of two hours.

All the Veronicas (who might go by Ndali, Tataneni, or Komonjiwa) and Vibrischos (also: Ravaneli, Quinton, and “Whity” – presumably because he is one of the “colored” students) who live in the school’s hostels study until 8:30 and then lights have to be out by 9:30 p.m. I try to be asleep by then, too, because that siren at 5 a.m. seems awfully early every single morning, especially since it is still very cold then. My apartment-mate laughs at me, but I get up and make coffee in the little coffee press I was able to buy in Windhoek, and then add frothed milk with the manual frother I was also able to get there – it makes my morning bearable to have real coffee! I brought a pound of Peet’s Major Dickason blend (originally meant as a gift) with me, and it is a nice taste of home when I am stumbling around in the early morning dark. (Plus, our kitchen doesn’t have a working light.) No one drinks real coffee here unless it is in a café or restaurant (thus I could justify keeping the Major Dickason for myself!) – mostly people drink Rooibus, or “bush tea,” a kind of mild herbal blend. There is a coffee mix some people do use – it’s called Ricoffy and it’s made by Nestle -a blend of (reading from the can) “dextrins, dextrose, maltose, chicory, and soluble solids of choice fresh roasted coffee beans.” To no one’s surprise, it’s really and truly awful. I’m the only one carrying a coffee cup to class, although many of the teachers are sucking on the lollipops that the learners are endlessly selling for various fund-raising projects.

Well, it’s time to make some supper and the do some lesson-planning, as fruitless as this sometimes seems. Tonight it looks like French toast (there is good bread here, and eggs are relatively cheap) and what we call “Kapana salad.” This is mixture of tomatoes, onions, and a curry spice we had on meat at a market early in our stay. We’ve eaten it cold by itself, cold on bread, hot on rice and on pasta, mixed with eggs on pasta, mixed into salad, and possibly in some other combinations I haven’t managed to mention. It’s one of the items in the handbook Kat and I are writing for WorldTeach entitled “Namibia Desperation Cooking.” Bon appetit, wherever you are!

S.I. !Gobs Senior Secondary School, chapter 1

S.I. !Gobs Secondary School

S.I. !Gobs is a collection of long, low sandy-colored cement buildings. At first glance they look identical, but with each passing day it's possible to make small distinctions. The hostel (group of dormitories for the boarding students) with the dining/assembly hall between the girls' and boys' groups. Each building has an animal head painted on the end of it; the one I live in has a rhino head and word "Pride."

There are rows of casement windows along both long sides, with frosted glass panels outlined by metal reinforcements for security purposes. All are situated in a large, sandy open area punctuated by trees that have the greyish-green tone of olive trees, but they're not. There is no grass. Between buildings there are cement sidewalks, elevated about a foot above the sandy surface; without these your shoes would be terminally filled with sand. Even with them, sandals are not really practical. You end up dumping sand out of socks and sneakers after just a short walk. Yes, it IS a dry heat - the humidity can be as low as 15%, although often it's nearer 25% during the day, around 35-40% at night. Towels or wet clothes dry easily within a few hours, and if you leave food on dishes in the sink without rinsing, it quickly cements into a detergent-resistant coating.

We have “patios” enclosed by high walls in front of each of the apartments of the hostel supervisors, which are at one end of each of the dormitory buildings, connected to the students' part by a brief breezeway. There is a door inside our apartments that leads through the breezeway to the kids' side (the “block.) Our patios insulate us somewhat from the noise and dust of the learners commuting down the sidewalks about 30 feet from our front door. There are wire clotheslines strung between metal poles (which I routinely trip over when I go anywhere after pitch dark at 6 p.m.) where we can hang our laundry after we've washed it by hand or, in the case of many of the hostel teachers, by the learners. You can basically ask a learner to do absolutely anything for you (although Katherine and I have not adopted this to any great degree yet); carry your books or supplies, do your wash, run and get keys from someone, get food from the cafeteria if you desire, etc. etc.

Every morning starts with a staff meeting that begins at 6:45. The first siren goes off at 5 a.m., so there is no excuse not to be awake, although I usually doze for about a half hour before getting up. The school instituted sirens some time ago so that the hostel supervisors wouldn't have to tour through the buildings every time the students need to be roused or pushed out of their dorms for some scheduled activity. The first morning the siren went off I was sure there was a fire somewhere. The almost immediate rumble and chatter of kids coming to talkative wakefulness quickly made me realize that it is just an extreme alarm clock. In fact I taught my grade 9 English students the word “siren”; they just call it an alarm.

By a few minutes before 6:45 everyone, learners (the usual word for students here) and teachers alike are heading in a long stream towards the classroom buildings, stepping gingerly (me) or quickly (the learners) over the small drainage ditch that demarcates the line between hostel and classroom side of the “campus” On Mondays there is an all-school assembly before school, so the schedule is adjusted slightly, but the classes are basically 40 minutes long. During the assembly the students stand in close-packed rows in a large sandy area between two of the classroom buildings, with the choir facing them from the side. We arrived on a Thursday, so the school had an extra assembly the next Friday morning so that we could be introduced. Then they sang to us. We had heard the choir practicing on Thursday afternoon when we were moving in so we had a little warning, but I was not prepared for the feeling of being sung to by this amazing group of kids. No risers, no sound system, no pitch pipe, no written music or words, no accompaniment whatsoever - it was liltingly beautiful. It wasn't the early morning sun that brought tears in my eyes.

The choir sang the Namibian national anthem, a song about the Erongo region (there are 13 regions, the equivalent of states) and then the S.I.!Gobs school song. All of the songs are in English, but it is a melodic swaying English that is taking our ears a little time to become accustomed to.

The exclamation point at the beginning of the word "Gobs" indicates a click in the Damara language, which is a dialect of the Khoisan family of languages. There are four different clicks in the language, very difficult to pronounce for speakers of flatly-consonanted American English. In addition, Damara is a tonal language, and there is an additional nasal sound that is added to some vowels as well. When you hear people speaking Damara, it sounds a bit as if they are tsk-tsk-ing at you...At any rate, using clicks seems incomprehensibly hard, and singing them seems well-nigh impossible but the kids don’t, as we would say, miss a beat. They are delighted at my attempts to replicate the “!” at the beginning of “Gobs.”

There are four classrooms, all opening off a cement walkway, in each building. They have learner desks, sometimes even enough for all the students, but many with broken wooden tops or chair seats. S.I. !Gobs just received sturdy new teacher desks and chairs, and there is a large metal cabinet in one corner of the room. There is no clock, but the bells (although annoying and insistently “rung,” are not sirens) announce the change of classes. One delightful phenomenon is that when the bell sounds, the learners do not immediately slam their books shut and start to stand. If you (the teacher) are speaking, you can wait for the bell to finish and the students will still be looking at you expectantly. You can even go on and ask them to finish some brief task without a word of protest. They stand at their seats and wait to greet the teacher when they enter (having lined up in the courtyard outside until the teacher motions them inside) and then stand again and wait to be dismissed when the period is over. One unfortunatel characteristic of the classrooms is the scraping of the metal chairs on the cement floors - quite a cacophany, and I’m already known among my classes for saying “LIFT your chairs, ladies and gentlemen.” They clearly don’t understand why it bothers me, but they remember to comply to some degree.

I'll continue soon with more details of what it's like inside an S.I. !Gobs classroom.
Good night or, in Afrikaans, Goiei naand!!

Day of the African Child

Day of the African Child in Namibia

June 16, 2011

I’m not sure whether it’s order within disorder, or vice versa. There are a lot of rules and protocols here, but there is also a lot of built-in flexibility. Today was African Child’s Day (or African Children’s Day, it was not clear which and of course the only access to the internet was locked up so I couldn’t check) and just yesterday teachers were asked to have their students come up with a skit, poem, poster, etc. to help with today’s celebration.

The staff meeting this morning was an exercise in fluidity. The principal announced today’s schedule, which was to have been a “half day,” meaning that we would hold the first five periods of 40 minutes each (from 7:10 to 10:30) and then we would have the celebration assembly for the rest of the day. Normally we would have a break from 10:30 to 11:00 a.m. and then three more periods after that, finishing at 1 p.m. There were a few more announcements, including a reminder about HIV/AIDS awareness activities next week, a visitor from a college in Botswana, and a complaint by a teacher whose classroom was used by others, who said that her classroom had been left in disarray and with materials missing.

The teacher who was organizing the Child’s Day assembly ran through the projected program, but here the elastic started to make itself felt. There were several discussions about which classes were doing what, what needed to be added to the program, how long the skits and choir were going to take, etc. One teacher said that “apparently” her class was going to perform a skit, which provoked some verbal jabs from other teachers, possibly because the word “apparently” usually means “probably” in Namibia…either way, this teacher’s colleagues were ribbing her about whether her students were, or were not, going to perform.

During the course of this discussion, the school day gradually eroded until it was decided that we would only have the first two periods, then a bit of time for people to get ready, and then the assembly would start. No exact time was stated, and in fact it just kind of “happened” when everyone was ready. Everyone except the choir just milled around on the ground outside the dining hall, and eventually one of the teachers opened the doors and learners poured in. There were only enough chairs for about half the students, since there are basically only chairs for the hostel students to sit in when they eat – and there are about 275 hostel students out of a population of somewhere around 500. So the students from the upper grades sat near the front and the younger ones stood in the back.

Given this arrangement, and the fact that all the teachers sat in front instead of with their students in order to monitor them, it was amazingly orderly. There are L.R.C.’s who monitor the students to some extent – this stands for Learner Representative Council and they are like dorm proctors. However, you don’t see them reprimanding or shushing the students continually. At one point, a teacher reminded the L.R.C.’s to do a better job of policing their charges, but this didn’t seem to have much effect one way or the other.

The program was entirely student-run. There was a master and mistress of ceremonies, and they ran the show. The principal was present, but other than a brief mention at the beginning, he played no substantive part in the proceedings. There were some valiant attempts at getting a sound system to work, but on the whole it was more static than it was worth, and no one really needed much amplification. The choir (everyone is going to be sooooo tired of me talking about this choir) sang 8 songs overall, several in languages I couldn’t identify. Most songs do not appear to have verses or stanzas, although the Namibian national anthem is one that does. Instead, the songs tend to be a series of short phrases or even one word, repeated by various voices (soprano, alto, etc.) and in various configurations (overlapping groups, like rounds) or in different registers. One of the “directors” is a young man who was “head boy” here last year; he started at UNam (the University of Namibia) but had to drop out due to lack of funds, so for the time being he is helping with the choir and trying to earn money to go back to university. He sometimes sits in with the choir to provide some drumming, and then a young woman with long fluid arms and white-gloved hands directs. We haven’t yet figured out who she is; she’s not a teacher that we recognize. (This is not unusual – people who seem to have some role on the staff routinely appear and disappear on various days.) The male director told us after the program that the choir has only been practicing together for six days – the day we arrived, when we heard their voices from the dining hall as we pulled into the grounds of the school, was their first day of practice!

(Note: As I write this, I’m sitting outside in a kind of dusty interior courtyard (facing some oil drum “rubbish bins” gathered under a few palm trees) to enjoy the sunny afternoon quiet, and three girls just walked by. They stopped when they saw me, and asked if I had any “polish” for them. Thinking they might be looking for fingernail polish, I asked them that, but they said “No miss, just any kind of polish.” (Light bulb goes on.) Me: “What are you going to use the polish for?” Girls: “We want to polish the floors of the school.” I should have figured this out. Earlier another pair of girls had come to our hostel apartment asking for a mop for the same purpose. I guess if you don’t get to go home for the long weekend, you have the privilege of cleaning the school. Some things are reaaaalllly different here.)

There were two skits, and some cultural performances by different groups. Both of the skits had to do with the Soweto riots of 1976 that eventually prompted the beginning of African Child’s Day. The skits were very realistic portrayals of the scenario where students demanded to be taught in English (“our own language”) instead of Afrikaans.

It looked like virtually all the “colored” students from the school played parts in the skit about the South African Police beating young South African students. The current “head boy,” playing the recalcitrant South African child who refused to answer in Afrikaans, suffered a real slap in the face that brought an uproar from the student audience.

The South African Police skit included a scene where the police beat a group of students that was very realistic; the students adopted the stance of troops holding weapons, and stamped and swung fake blows that made me cringe, even though no one was actually struck. The students seem very familiar with the kinds of injustice black people have suffered in Africa. Compared to Afrikaans, English was shown as the language of liberation, which seemed odd to me. I wonder if this would be the case in other parts of Africa…

One of the cultural performances was also a little unsettling. The boys from Herero families did a marching routine that was clearly familiar to everyone there, but reminded me a bit too much of Nazi goose-stepping. The Herero, despite being horribly persecuted by the Germans who held Namibia as a colony before World War I, have quite a few cultural remnants of past contact with Germany, including the way women dress for formal or ceremonious occasions: long, full skirts of brightly patterned colors (not necessarily “African” patterns) with multiple layers of petticoats underneath, usually with matching blousy tops and often scarves as well. However, they have their own hybrid millinery – calling them “hats” doesn’t do them justice. They look like cow horns covered with the same fabric as the skirts, and in the old days they actually were horns underneath the fabric. Nowadays, we’re told, they use stiff paper, but the effect is still that of two huge horns curving forward from the tops of their foreheads, covered in flowers or patterned cloth.

The Herero are famous for thinking of nothing but cattle. One of my grade 9 students told me with great pride about how many cattle his grandfather has, how many are slaughtered for a wedding or celebration, how good the meat tastes, etc. etc. One Herero man we met told us he dreams of nothing but cows.

The students’ delight and pride in being African children filled the echo-y room, especially when the choir started the last song, “Africa,” and everyone joined in. It was an unlifting sense of pride that literally sent waves through the air. Below I’ve printed some of the poems my students wrote so you can get a sense of how special this day is to them.

“I am an African child, the future of tomorrow.

The one who takes the journey to life.

An African child is one who cares, loves, respects and is determined to fight for the coming leaders.

One who develops self-confidence and does not give up on anything. We are the future leaders, future ministers and we are the AFRICAN CHILDREN.”

By Paulina, Zeshinda, Penehafo, Ester, Elizabeth, Claudia, and Ainy

“An African child is one who believes in other African children

…one who dreams for his/her future

…one who wants to achieve his/her goals

…one who stands up for all African children

…one who stands in position to protect others

Africa Unite!”

By Joe-Marry, Allen, Susanna, Laitago, Deo-Marlon, Quinton, and Carlos

“We are the proud children, proud children of Africa

We come from Namibia, from south of the border and west of sunshine…”

I dream, dream more than I forget for the Future, as a leader of African children who are poor, into the richer kingdom to make a better day.”

I hope that in some small way I’m helping these students to make the changes they want to see happen, in Namibia and in Africa.