Three Muskateers

After one day of teaching at !S.I. Gobs Secondary School (me in “English Second Language” and my teammate Katherine doing a breathtaking combination of math, life science, agriculture, and personal health) the two of us head into town on Saturday morning to get some much-needed groceries and a few more fleece blankets. Knowing that we would probably have the opportunity to buy groceries in Omaruru (as opposed to some of the WorldTeach volunteers going to more remote areas) we had resisted stocking up in the capital, Windhoek before we left there. Last night (Friday) the power had gone out at about 5:30 p.m. Not knowing when it might come back on, we supped on peanut butter and jelly by candlelight – actually, by Nalgene lantern-light. Katherine had learned on a backpacking trip how to strap a headlamp onto the bottom of a green Nalgene water bottle, and that provided enough light for our atmospheric evening meal.

We had scoped out the way into town on Thursday when our driver from the Ministry of Education had made a quick stop at the M of E building before he delivered us to S.I. !Gobs Secondary School, just across the “river” from the town proper. This scoping out did not require an Army Corps of Engineers, because there is really only one road into and out of Omaruru. The Lonely Planet description of Omaruru as “a dry and dusty setting with a real outback feel” turned out to be quite accurate, although as we did our slow tour we actually saw more flowering plants than we ever could have anticipated.

As we left the schoolyard – although describing a large expanse of rocky sand dotted with some scrubby cattlethorn plants as a yard is a bit of a misnomer – we were joined by three learners from our school. Most students (“learners” here) at our school cheerfully greet us as we pass, and these three were no exception. We asked their names and grades as we trudged down the gritty approach to the river bridge.

River, also, might give an inaccurate impression. During the summer rainy season (November to March), this river flows down out of the mountains to Swakopmund on the coast, and can reportedly be up to several meters deep. Now, however, it is a camel-brown pattern of dried rivulets, from the distance of the raised bridge looking like an undulating pattern of cracked mud. As we learned later, it is in reality more like a wide, flat, coarsely sandy beach, with the water just barely underneath the surface.

Crossing the bridge turns out to be a bit of a challenge. The walkway is a high step up from the tar (paved) road and very narrow, the “railing” is only about a foot high, and cars coming in our direction (they drive on the right) don’t swerve away from us even if there is no one coming from the opposite direction. Despite this, we stop on the bridge and take a picture looking back towards the school with the Omaruru koppie (Afrikaans: hill; in reality quite an impressive inselberg, or monadnock) in the background. The desert is not a flat, monotonous landscape here, but dotted with low, sharp mountains in the distance and bushes, some unidentifiable deciduous trees, and even a few tall palms, closer at hand. When we worked on prefixes in our grade 9 English class today, the first thing most learners said when we talked about “semi” was “semi-desert.” At least in the Omaruru area, that is a very accurate description.

It is a kilometer’s walk into town, about .6 of a mile. Although the day is quickly heating up from the nighttime low of around 40 degrees, I’m glad I’ve chosen to wear sneakers with socks, both because the walking is hard on the flat, sandy surface, and because the sand sifts into everything. Sandals quickly find places to chafe your feet. As we move towards more activity, we pass a “China shop” and MTC phone store (just sales, unfortunately no technical service to help me figure out why my internet flash drive won’t work) on the right, and the police station and Ministry of Education office on the left.

By this time, our three boys seem clearly with us “for the ride.” They have told us their names, nicknames, cultural/family backgrounds (one is Namibian but born in South Africa, one is Oshiwambo from the north, and and one is Herero from nearer to Omaruru) their roles at school, what they want to do when they finish school, and what types of music they like. They are also filling us in on local geography, facts about town and the people who live there, where there is internet access, where you can get your hair cut (the cheap place and the expensive salon) – they are, literally, a wealth of information.

After we stop at the second “China shop” and buy yet another warm comforter, we discover that the boya are even more than dfonts of information – they immediately grab our purchases and insist that they carry them. A “China shop” is a small store selling household goods and a small supply of clothing, all typically imported from, no brain surgeons required here, China. Katherine, who is Chinese-American and speaks Mandarin, is able to chat briefly with the proprietors to their delight. At other times, she hears calls of “China, China” as she passes – people are not expecting someone who looks like she does to be American.
There are actually several interesting art gallery/gift shops in Omaruru, a little incongruous in a town that hardly looks like it could support many sales of such things. As we browse among paintings, carvings, and metal and wire bent and sculpted into various animals and shapes, I wonder if the proprietors have ever had S.I. !Gobs students in their stores before. We go by the local arms dealers (for hunting, the boys tell us) and a shop that advertises “woody things” on the side of its building – turns out to be a place that makes heavy wooden furniture. After going in and out of a number of little shops, with nary a complaint from the boys, we stop in a small hardware store and buy a few hooks to hang things, including Katherine’s mosquito net, in our rooms. The boys promise to come to our rooms the next morning and hang the hooks for us. By this time we are most of the way through the town, we’re hot and a bit dusty, so we stop and Katherine and I buy “cool drinks” (sodas) for all of us. All three boys make a point of thanking both of us for the drink. We are feeling a bit guilty because they have certainly done yeoman duty for such a small “tip.”
At this point we are near the outer edge of the town and see The White House, a lovely souvenir store and restaurant clearly run by Germans. I’m quite sure that no S.I. !Gobs learners have ever been in this establishment! All we can afford here is a postcard – the lovely screen-printed t-shirts are on the order of US $60. Every one in the restaurant, emitting lovely smells from a doorway to the rear of the beautifully appointed boutique, is speaking German. Although I can only speak the kind of German heard in The Sound of Music (that is to say, doe a deer, a female deer) we now know enough to recognize that is it German and not the sometimes similar-sounding, but Dutch-related, Afrikaans.

The end of town brings the “holiday park” where the boys find and hold up a really large, dead iguana, and where we see the remains of a collection of exotic birds. Apparently the previous owner had an extensive group, but now many of the cages stand empty. There is an African grey parrot, who reminds me of Alex, the parrot famous to linguists because he made huge strides in learning to generate (not just imitate) human speech. This parrot seems to generate only loud parrot-like squawks of indignation at our intruding on his afternoon nap.

At this stop as at many others, we see lots of flowering plants and shrubs – bouganvillea, hibiscus, something that looks like a rangy phlox, a plant with bouquets of tiny orange berries, even some roses and a few pansies. There are no lawns at all, but there are hedges lining some of the walkways and many of the fences fronting houses – many of these fences including barbed wire or even electrified lines among the rustic stakes and interwoven vines. The boys assert that the fences are to keep out wildlife; we have no reason to doubt them, although we haven’t seen any wildlife except one baboon (which I missed because I was napping) on the way to Omaruru from Windhoek.

The entire trip thus far has been on one side of the street, so we now cross over to head back the way we came. We stop in at the Omaruru TakeAway shop, and buy some tasty little meat pies – curried lamb, chicken, and beef. Every Namibian will tell you that they love meat (which basically means beef; at least it never includes chicken), and there is a huge “Slagtery” butcher shop on this side of the street as well. The TakeAway is manned by a family of Afrikaaners, who clearly recognize us as new kids in town. An older Afrikaan-speaking man, clearly having had quite a few too many Windoek lagers by this time on a Saturday afternoon, actually drunkenly threatens to slit the three boys’ throats if any harm comes to us!!!

When this liquored-up threat is translated to us, Katherine and I are appalled, but the boys take it with typical teenage bravado: “Just let him try!” Luckily the man’s unsteady gait means he can’t even follow us more than a few steps down the street, and we resume our leisurely stroll towards “home” with Damion, Edison, and Efraim still carrying all our purchases. Little did we know that just a day later we would give our eye teeth for the protection of our Three Muskateers.

Even after all this meandering, we still hadn’t procured the groceries we had originally set out to buy, so we stopped at the large and largely unpopulated grocery store (especially compared to the crowds and long lines we had experienced in Windhoek) adding just a few more things to the boys’ burdens. They then showed us a short cut home to the school, crossing the river bed by foot. This is when we discovered that it is not a dry, cracked surface, but more like the just-barely-firm part of a beach, where you can sink as if in quick sand if you’re not careful where you step. On our next foray into town we actually see a small pick-up truck axle deep at the edge of the mushy river crossing, five men gathered around trying to use a jack that is also sunk about a foot deep in the slushy sand.

It has been a long walk and a long day, and my arthritic joints are protesting, but we feel as if we got the royal tour of Omaruru.

P.S. The boys appeared at our doors the next morning, went and rustled up some tools, and hung our hooks. Efraim also brought me a pencil sketch of a baby sucking his thumb. I have to get out the watercolors for this young man!