the namibian children send me off with song and dance

My last days at the Bernard Noordkamp Centre, the after school program in Katutura that I've been volunteering at, has been one of the most beautiful moments during my stay in Namibia.

I arrived on one of my last days, with the intention of reading to the kids about the dangers of young people drinking (ironically, i had plans to go to the bar afterwards) when I discovered that the children had prepared a concert for volunteers like me who were leaving. They formed a choir of about fifty kids, all between grade 1 to 7 (with a few older kids helping to lead), and musical accompaniment only in the form of one girl hitting a drum.



It was absolutely adorable.

I always love listening to Namibians sing, because it seems like they all love to sing. Unlike many North Americans who needed to be pumped full of liqur and standing in front of a karaoke machine, many Namibians will sing, just because you ask them to, and they'll often break out into spontaneous harmony as well as call-and-response. I'm also impressed by their ability to dance in coordination with the music, which is something I've never really gotten the hang of myself. I just can't get enough of it. Especially with children singing. I love the sound of children's voices.



the kids sang a variety of songs in different African languages, many of them being spiritual songs, as I gathered from all the references to Jesus.



The children ended their concert with a touching song that was specially sung for us.

"good-bye our dear friends,
we shall never forget you
good-bye our dear friends
we shall never forget you
although you are very far
we shall never forget you..."

At the end of the song, they all filed off stage in a single line and gave me a hug. Every single kid in the program. All one hundred and fifty or so of them. That was a lot of hugs. Some of the kids were crying because they were upset about us leaving. I thought my heart was going to break. I may or may not have also had a tear in my eye.


the drummer


dancing


the biggest smile I've ever seen on Marybeth's face.


I decided to give back to the kids by giving my own little performance, in form of a singalong. I taught the kids a few North American classics such as "There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly", "There's a Hole in my Bucket", the theme song from the Elephant Show, and of course, "A Pizza Hut" (the consumerist junk food addict in me can't help but come out sometimes). The kids had never heard of these songs before, but they learned quickly and were singing the songs well after the concert - especially the Pizza Hut song.

My favourite moment was when, in a moment of pure selfishness, I taught them the harmony parts for my band's song "See Me". The kids loved that tune too.



The music of Scary Bear Soundtrack has never sounded so good, being sung by sixty cute Namibian schoolchildren.

It was an absolutely lovely way to send me off. Thanks for all the good times and the good music, Namibia.

my morning commute

on my last day of work, I think it is fitting to describe the morning commutes to work in Windhoek.

In Klein Windhoek, which was where the white people historically had lived and therefore is located quite close to downtown, I only have a few kilometres to go to work, so usually I walk to work. I may or may not have become notorious all over town because of this, because no white person walks to work, and generally you only see black labourers walking on the side of the road. There are no sidewalks generally, so I usually make my way down the dirt shoulders, grass as high as my thighs, past snarling dogs locked behind high gates. I pass the same black labourers every day, and by now we greet each other with a friendly smile and "Goeie môre!" as if we are old friends. I think I also pass the same cars every day, because once in while, maybe at a bar or a restaurant, I'll have the following conversation with a random stranger:

Stranger: "Every morning I pass by this Chinese girl who is walking on the side of the road."

Me: "Oh, that's me."

Stranger: "Really? I'll honk next time I pass you."

Me: "Why don't you just give me a ride??"

I've since moved out of my flat in Klein Windhoek and am now living with my friend Nenad in Khomasdal, the township where they relocated all the coloured people during the apartheid regime. Incidentally, if we were still living under South African apartheid, I think Khomasdal is probably where I, as an "Asiatic", would have been forced to live. I find this to be a very interesting thought.

Commuting to work from Khomsdal is different. The townships are very far from downtown, which was a deliberate decision by the white apartheid authorities, and is a big pain in the butt for basically every worker in the township who has to get to work in the town every morning. Windhoek doesn't have public transportation, not really. I mean, I see these big buses that go around sometimes, but nobody except some of the workers seem to figure out how they work. I suppose you might consider the fifteen or so people crammed in the back of a pickup truck to cound as public transportation, or maybe at least carpooling. But for most people, the main commute to work involves taking a shared taxi.

Taking a public taxi in Namibia is an art form that takes a lot of practice. In Canada, you would hail a cab, jump in, tell him where to take you, and watch nervously as the meter goes up and up and up.

In Namibia, you hail a cab, tell him through the window where you want to go, and then if he chooses to take you, you get in and hope nervously that he won't rob you. At the same time, you try to avoid the stray dogs on the street. On the bright side, any cab ride will only cost you one or two Canadian dollars. On the downside, you have to figure out how to tell him where to take you. Cab drivers (or Namibians in general) don't do street names, directions, or anything that North Americans are used to using to get places. Instead, you have to pick a nearby landmark, a landmark that cab drivers will recognize. I have learned that if I went to direct a cab to my work, they will not recognize "the National Library" which is next door, but they do for some reason know where Kenya House is, which is this abandoned falling apart building that nobody uses anymore which is apparently under construction and has been under construction since God knows when. I have no idea why cab drivers know this.

Also, you can't just hop in the cab and say "Good morning, sir, I'd like to go to the National Library." That's too many words and for some reason they have trouble understand North American accents. Instead, you have to drop your voice very deep, almost to a growl, and bark "Kenya House, nee?" If the cab driver grunts "Unh" he'll take you. If he says "Ah", he won't. Those two grunts sound very similar so you have to train your ear to hear for it. Otherwise you might reach for the car door to get in, only to have him drive off with half your leg in the car.

White Namibians never take shared taxis, which they refer to as "black taxis". They have their own cars. To their credit, they often offer me rides when they see me walking on the side of the road or trying to hail a "black" taxi. Or they'll just honk, because they recognize me.

On another note, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WILL. Will is the brilliant artist who draws cartoons for me, including the logo for this blog. Everyone say happy birthday to Will.

hoping my help is helpful: pondering international development work and my time in Namibia

"Not only can you make a difference, you are ethically responsible to do so." -Romeo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children

This is my last week at work here, which means that this is my last "Workday Wednesday" in Windhoek. This seems like a good time to reflect on the work I've done here.

Shortly before I left for Africa, my friend Yoni passed on a fascinating thought-provoking article that took a heavily critical view of volunteering in Africa. The article poked fun at young people in their gap year facing identity dilemmas or middle-aged folks facing an empty nest and a mid-life crisis, all deciding that teaching English or building a house in Africa is going to fill the emptiness in their lives. Helping poor people would help them feel better about themselves.

but by the time the first bombs fell
we were already bored
-The Arcade Fire "The Suburbs"

Such an altruistic conclusion is fine if you're looking for something to pass the time, but the article then questions whether you are actually helping - that is, providing meaningful and sustainable assistance that will actually implement significant long-term change in the developing country. Are you actually doing good?

Obviously there are lots of people "doing good" in these countries. But there are many examples where "help" is not all that helpful. While we were training for our program in Ottawa before we were sent overseas, we learned about foreign aid projects that simply failed. For example, the installation of a water pipe system in a village was all very nice and useful until the water pipes broke down and nobody was around to fix it or maintain it. Now the system just sits there, broken and rusty, and the people in the village still have to walk long miles to fetch water from the next well.

I was told of another story at the Katutura after school program that I volunteered at, where one well-meaning guy offered to teach a few of the kids to play the guitar. He showed up a few times, let the kids play with the guitars (and break them), and then never showed up again. Now the centre has two broken guitars.

Another difficult question that the article posed was whether your help is actually needed. Sure, you can volunteer to help build a house in Namibia during your spring break, but surely it would be better to send money to pay a Namibian construction worker to build the house? After all, he needs a job. Also, he's kind of been trained to build houses, while you have a bachelor of arts (for the record, I have a bachelor of arts). Are you actually helping, or are you putting a local person out of a job by providing mediocre quality services in something you don't specialize in?

I would argue that there are certain services that a volunteer can provide that can be useful to a country. Skills development and capacity building, for example. One of my American friends working at the local Namibian university tells me that for every foreigner they hire, they make sure they also hire a local Namibian that will be trained to replace the foreigner once he leaves. This strikes me as a responsible and sustainable arrangement.

Also, if your services are something that is genuinely in shortage and in demand in the country, your help will probably be quite useful. My friend Heather, for example, is teaching law in the Gambia, a country that opened up its first law school only a few years ago. Its legal system is still being set up and the country welcomes the legal experts of other countries to offer their advice and experience. Heather is essentially training a new generation of young lawyers. When Namibia first gained independence, we had judges and lawyers come in from many other countries to help establish a new legal system.

There is the argument that volunteering overseas provides an important learning opportunity for volunteers themselves. They get to experience new cultures and learn about hardship in the world beyond the suburban angst expressed in the new Arcade Fire album. I think this is very important, and if that is the main reason for a person to travel to Africa, then that is great. But in international development terms, there are other things to consider. The thing is, Africa is not a just playground for people from North America to come and feel better about themselves. Many developing countries can definitely use assistance, but only if the assistance is practical, meaningful, and somewhat lasting. Otherwise, it might just be better to send money. The cost of your airfare to Africa, accommodation, and meals might go a much longer way as a monetary donation than your week's worth of physical labour. Not to mention there are people in your own neighbourhood who could use help - just check out your local soup kitchen or rape shelter.

sometimes i wonder if the world's so small
can we ever get away from the sprawl
-The Arcade Fire "Sprawl II"

These thoughts have remained in the back of my mind during my entire stay in Namibia. Have I contributed something useful to the country? I would really like to think that I fall on the "useful" side of the spectrum. After all, I was recruited into this program sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency and the Canadian Bar Association for my specific skill and experience as a lawyer. My organization could not hire a Namibian lawyer to do the work that I was doing, and so by offering my services, I was able to provide something to the country that would not have otherwise been offered. I've been here for about seven months, which I hope was long enough to be able to provide meaningful significance. My particular skill is in legal research and most of the work that I did here involved conducting research, especially of the international and comparative nature, to guide the Namibian government in writing new laws.

Some of the stuff I have worked on while here have included:

• a research project on statelessness in preparation for a United Nations High Commission for Refugee regional conference. Stateless people are people who, for some reason, do not have any claim to nationality. Think, perhaps, about the situation of Tom Hanks' character in The Terminal, who is stuck because his country Krakozhia no longer exists as a state, but he has no claim to the United States, where he resides. I analysed Namibian legislation to assess whether they complied with the international standards set out in the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, and I concluded with a set of recommendations on amendments that would need to be made to better comply with Namibia's international obligations.



• The Namibian government has asked us to help draft a new Marriage Bill to address the specific issues that Namibia faces, including foreigners potentially exploiting Namibian women in a fraudulent marriage in order to gain residential status in Namibia. It's a bit of a twist on the usual sham marriages we're used to in the Western world, where mail-order brides immigrate to Canada or the United States and then face exploitation by their sponsoring partners. I helped out by doing research on what other countries have done to deal with these kinds of issues.



• I attended a meeting with representatives of United Nations agencies and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare with the aim of hammering out a draft National Plan of Action on Gender-based Violence. I assisted with finalizing the plan. It was pretty encouraging to see people in high places talk about prioritizing gender issues like domestic violence, rape, and trafficking. We'll see how the plan is implemented though.



• One of the biggest things we've been working on is completing the domestic violence study report, which evaluates the relatively new Combating of Domestic Violence Act and its ability to address the major problem of domestic violence against women in Namibia. One of the more interesting projects that I coordinated with regards this report was running a photoshoot with a visiting photographer for photos to use for publicity about the report and its issues. Ah, running photoshoots and coordinating model...the life of a lawyer is hard.
  


• In addition to the domestic violence report, my organization is in the process of publishing a report on Namibia’s child maintenance (child support) laws. Like many places around the world, Namibia is no stranger to deadbeat dads. The thing is, Namibia has a lot of single moms, so unless you want a lot of kids growing up in poverty, it's important to make sure that laws about child support payments are effective and efficient. I provided research support for the writing of this report.



• My organization has been assisting the Ministry of Health with the writing of a new Mental Health Bill. I accompanied my colleague to one of these consultation meetings in order to provide our organization’s comments on the Bill. I then provided research support for this process, comparing the draft bill with the guidelines set out by the World Health Organization and similar legislation in other countries.



• My organization has also been helping the Namibian government to re-write the Births, Marriages and Deaths Registration Act. The current one is left over from the apartheid era. Yep. Time for a new one. In order to do this, I conducted extensive research on the specific issue of how birth registration is tied to citizenship laws, and provided a comparative analysis on how countries around the world have dealt with this issue.
  


• I provided research support regarding the impact of environmental degradation on women as well as women’s access to credit and loan repayment rates, for submissions that my organisation made regarding gender issues to the National Planning Commission for Namibia’s fourth National Development Plan. The research about loans, while absolutely interesting (especially stuff about the Grameen Bank projects), made me panic a little about my own student loans.
  


• I also wrote several articles explaining the law to the public. I drafted a section of a booklet on the Ministry of Education’s new learner pregnancy policy, explaining what legal options a person has if she cannot afford to pay the school development fund contribution, according to the Education Act. I also wrote two articles for the Namibian magazine Young, Latest and Cool, put out by the youth arts group Ombetja Yehinga Organisation. One explained to young people the process under the new Child Care and Protection Act (CCPA) for removing a child from their home for child welfare and safety purposes. The other explained the difference between foster care and kinship care under the CCPA, and the procedures for both. Finally, I wrote an opinion editorial piece for the local newspaper on domestic violence.

Overall I feel pretty good about my work here in Namibia. But there is always that nagging feeling that remains. Maybe I could have been more useful if I had more experience. Maybe I should have stayed longer. And maybe the work I've done here will have no impact whatsoever because the Namibian government might not listen to our recommendations. But at this point of my stay in Namibia, I'd like to remain optimistic. I've worked hard while I was here, and hopefully it will pay off. And at the very least, I've introduced the country of Namibia to the girl-rocking musical wonders of Scary Bear Soundtrack.

"Peux ce que veux, allons-y." -Romeo Dallaire

crashing parties at Lake Oanob

Anna and Steve were going to a party in Lake Oanob, just outside of Rehoboth. I thought to myself, I like lakes, and I like parties. I decided to invite myself along.



Turns out that the party I was crashing was full of diplomatic folks from the American Embassy and the United Nations. Luckily they were all very nice and welcoming, probably because I told them I was from the embassy of China. Just kidding. I would never do that. I'd say something more believable, like, the embassy of Ukraine.

The hosts had rented out a waterfront chalet at the Lake Oanob Resort and were throwing a three-day long party. These folks knew how to party. First of all, the chalet had a magnificent view.


view from the chalet


some of the resort chalets

This was pretty awesome, even though it was the only chalet at Lake Oanob that didn't have a name from the Lion King (all the other chalets at the resort were Nala, Pumbaa, Mufasa, Rafiki, etc...).

More importantly, however, the first thing that greeted party guests when they arrived at the party was a lamb on a stick.

Note: vegetarian readers may choose to skip the next few photos and instead read this thought-provoking article about the problematic politics of PETA written by my vegan activist friend Ryan



Mary had a little lamb, and it was damn delicious

Pretty damn awesome. I actually made it far enough into the chalet to grab myself a beer, and then spent the rest of the time sitting by the lamb roast, watching art happen. There is nothing really more beautiful than the sound of liquified meat fat dripping off a bone and sizzling in the coals below.


art


what happened after the lamb was ready to be served was a different form of art. There are many ways to hack up the meat after it has been roasted. My friend Hector once had a boy's night where he built his own lamb roast contraption in his backyard, which he cooked for nine hours, even cradling an umbrella over it when it began to rain, and after it was ready, he just laid the whole meat out on the kitchen counter and the men attacked it with their knives, eating with their bare hands.

My fiance was trained at the top culinary school Cordon Bleu and cooks for a living. He's always going on and on about how a proper chef must have the best tools to cut meat. What you need is a top quality knife.

Or a band saw.


when men cook.


watching a man use a massive power tool to slice up cuts of meat was both fascinating and nerve-wracking at the same time. I had my first encounter with band saw machines in high school drafting class. The teacher had put little piece of tape to indicate the area we were supposed to keep our fingers out of, so that we didn't hack off any digits. This toolman/cook definitely had his fingers well past the line. I was afraid but I couldn't stop watching. Also, every once in a while, some hot burning fat oil would fly off the machine and hit the children watching nearby. Mmm, delicious burning pain. Afterwards, I was sorely tempted to lick the blade, which i knew would taste delicious and nothing like the sawdust usually found on bandsaws.

Dinner was delicious, the kind of delicious you can only get when you push a lamb through a power tool.

Out near the resort bar, I ran into Lize's husband, who was taking his kids out.

"What are you up to this weekend?" he asked me.

"I'm crashing a party full of Americans," I replied.

"Ah," he replied. "I was going to ask if you wanted to join us on our big boat, but that sounds like a noble cause."

I opened my mouth to answer, and then wondered for a minute which would be a better way to spend the day, powerboating or eating baby animals. You know how I eventually decided.

Besides, some of the folks were taking the kayaks out. Lake Oanob is an artificially constructed lake that lots of city folks like to visit when they want to get away from the city. It seems to be more or less the only place around Windhoek you can ride a big power boat. Personally, I wouldn't see a point in owning a speed boat in a city that is not built near any body of water in a country that is flanked by two deserts, but a lot of rich Namibian families bring their boats there and whip around the lake, motors roaring, children screaming, and giraffes wondering what the heck all the racket is.

I am Canadian, and kayaking is more my speed.





there was also the option of taking these aquacycles out, but I still have my dignity.


Kayaking was lovely. We braved the waves slapping against the side of the kayaks caused by the wake of the powerboats, and paddled our way around the lake, approaching a hillside of sheep grazing near the shore, looking peaceful and delicious.


and ducks! lekker!


Followed by swimming, with our choice of the lake or the swimming pool.







The whole party had the relaxed, chilled-out atmosphere of days I've spent at the cottage with my friends. Some summer tunes playing on someone's iPod, the cheers of men playing some game on the lawn nearby, the warm sun on your skin as you lounge on the deck, wondering if you should take a nap, go for another swim, or get a beer. Sometimes it's nice if that's the biggest choice you have to make for the day. It was a pretty sweet party.


attempts at self-portrait

the lawyer tries on an economist's hat

"Who wants to go to a meeting reviewing the national budget?" my boss asked.

"I do!" said everyone in the office. We immediately began to fistfight each other to the death.

No. Of course not. I was the only one who volunteered, because I am the only one who thinks "I have no idea what that's about. That means it'll be interesting!" Some call me a go-getter. Others call me a sucker. I myself am undecided.

I was being sent to a meeting with Members of Parliament, the business community, national media, and various civil society organisations at the Hotel Furstenhof for a briefing of the National Budget which had been tabled in Parliament last Tuesday. This was going to be interesting in its own way. I have a theory that lawyers are people that you pay to read all the stuff you find too boring to read yourself. Economists and financial analysts, however, are a different breed of the same type, and a lot of times theirs is a language I do not speak.

"Is there anything in particular I should be looking for?" I asked.

"Not sure. We haven't sent anyone to these things before," was the reply.

Like I said, I took this as a sign that it was going to be interesting.

I arrived at the conference room a half hour earlier than the scheduled start, which meant I was an hour earlier than everyone else, who was running on Namibian time. Luckily there was free coffee. I was also given a notepad from the hotel in which I discovered someone had written in the last few pages various pieces of bizarre advice on how to entertain yourself while bored ("Try not to think about polar bears." "See how long you can hold your breath." "Hurt yourself.") I also saw that a hotel buffet lunch was going to be served at the end of the meeting, which made me decide that I was not going to leave the briefing early.

Eventually the meeting started and the National Budget was analyzed by the Ministry of Finance. The theme of the this year's National Budget is “Fiscal Sustainability and Job Creation: Going More with Less”, a theme clearly written by a finance major and not marketing folks. Unfortunately, NBC's cameraman decided to stand directly in front of me, blocking my view of the speaker as well as the powerpoint slide. Some of the MPs complained. They solved this problem by handing out photocopies of the slides, but the copies ran out before they reached me. I felt like it might have just been easier to ask the cameraman to move. You are a Parliamentarian, after all.

One interesting thing I've noticed about Namibians is their love of their mobile phones. In North America, the polite thing is to turn off your phone during movies and meetings. In Namibia, the polite thing is to answer the phone during the meeting but try to whisper your phone conversation as quietly as possible. But it doesn't actually involve putting it on vibrate.

My task at this briefing was to try to understand the budget and report on the implications it would have on gender issues. The difficulty, however, was twofold. First of all, none of the figures in the budget were being presented along gender dimensions. Second of all, unlike the stereotypical image that people have of Asians, I am actually not that good with numbers, having never taken finance courses or an economics degree. Not only was I unfamiliar with acronyms like TIPEEG and MTEF, but entire paragraphs of the budget speech seemed like gibberish to me at times. Also, by the second hour in, I'd had three cups of coffee and was watching my eyeballs twitch, creating an interesting light show inside my eyelids.

In the end, instead of relying on the briefings summarizing the key points of the budget at the meeting, I ended up going home and looking at the original budget documents myself to make sense of them and to assemble the stuff I thought my organisation might be interested in. But at least I got to have a buffet lunch at the hotel.

Namibian beach dreams

easiest days of her life have been spent
wonders if she is loved, if she is missed
says a prayer as she's kissed by ocean mist
takes herself to the sand and dreams
-Red House Painters, "Summer Dress"

Every once in a while, I get this urge to escape the annoying problems and people in the city and run away to the ocean. Luckily, the coast is only a four hour drive from Windhoek so it’s entirely possible to do for the weekend, unlike Ottawa.

My pilot friend Daan couldn’t arrange flights for me this weekend, so I got to a ride to Swakopmund with Julia, who had business in Walvis Bay over the weekend. It was a gorgeous day for a road trip. Namibia’s countryside was looking green and alive, thanks to the rainy season, which was quite the change from the desert scenery that greeted me when I first arrived in the country.

On the road, I saw the most beautiful butterfly that was floating through the air. Then it ended up on our windshield.

We picked up hitch hikers just outside Okahandja, one woman traveling with two babies and one woman heading for Arandis carrying about thirty pounds of meat that she dumped in our trunk. They were quiet for the whole ride, as the ideal hitch hiker should be, and luckily didn’t seem to complain about the fact that Julia and I sang along to No Doubt’s entire Tragic Kingdom album for the whole trip.

Julia dropped me off in downtown Swakopmund. The two friends I had in town, Daan and Mark, were both still working, but I didn’t mind being left to myself. After all, I had come to the coast for one main activity: lying on the beach.

It was absolutely lovely. It seemed like everyone was out on the beach, swimming in the waves, surfing, kayaking, flying kites. Black men wore wool winter caps with their swimming trunks, a wardrobe combination I didn’t quite understand. Kids played in the sand having the time of their life. I fell asleep, soaking up the sun and feeling like nothing could ever annoy me again.



When I woke up, Daan had finished working at the airport and was grabbing a beer with two of his Namibian friends, Kali and Paulie, on the beach patio of the museum café. Daan lives on the coast and gets around on his motorscooter. He is a pilot for a tourism company. Apparently the Swakopmund airport is temporarily closed for maintenance, so he has to do his flights on a sand strip just outside the city, where you can see springbok footprints all over the landing strip. Which must be a little frightening if you’re running a plane down it. Apparently some of the animals are not afraid of the airplanes and are instead attracted to them, such as ostriches. I can only imagine how disastrous that could be, both for the ostriches and the plane.




love this cafe patio on the beach

About halfway through our beer, Mark joined us. Mark splits his time between Windhoek and Swakopmund. He’s doing a PhD on the uranium mining industry, but not on the mines themselves. He studies people. Sometimes I think I would like to make a living studying people, but then I remember that I do things like run away to the ocean just to get away from people, so maybe not.

The boys and I took a walk down the scenic boardwalk lined with palm trees that traces the coastline. It’s quite beautiful, but smells kind of funny. This is because, as Mark and Daan tell me, they water the plants along the path with reused sewage water. This strikes me as not only gross but uncredibly unhygienic. I personally would like to be able to go for my jogs without risking health problems from airborne sewage stuff. Oh well. At least it looked pretty.






I'm pretty sure I saw someone playing my guitar, the one that had been stolen from my house.





We passed the million dollar beach houses, the jetty, the aquarium, and ended up at my favourite beach bar, Tiger Reef. We had come just in time to have a drink at sundown. I also ordered a basket of fish fillet, which was fried and fresh and delicious.



million dollar beach houses


the jetty


the beach bar


the dunes






enjoying the sunset

“This is what a proper beach bar is supposed to be like,” Mark said, who is from San Francisco. “A shack that looks like it was made from random wood and stuff collected from around here. And cheap food.”






I would like to know how I could arrange my life to live on an ocean beach.

After the sun went down, it got chilly so we decided to head to another bar that was indoors and warmer. We ended up at the Swakopmund Laundry, which seems to be a bar and a Laundromat. According to Julia, who had joined us by then, it was also where the sex workers in Swakopmund hang out. Julia is in town on an interesting work assignment: to count sex workers and men who sleep with men as part of a larger public health study on HIV/AIDS in Namibia. Basically, she goes to bars at nights and counts how many sex workers and gay men are around. Sometimes I think I would like to have a job like that. I mean, the last time I was in Walvis Bay, that’s what I did, and I wasn’t event getting paid for it.



While discussing this, a woman tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said, “Two men were here asking about you, but I had told them you were gone because I thought you had left.”

My first thought was, of course, that someone was mistaking me for a sex worker once again. “Oh no, I’m not here for business…” I began.

“I think she’s talking about Paulie and Kali,” Mark pointed out.

“Oh.” They were trying to meet up with us again. Thank goodness. I didn’t want to be included in Julia’s count.

After our drinks, Mark and I left Julia and joined Paulie and Kali at the Desert Tavern, where Namibian musician Elemotho was playing a show. The bar was packed with a mixed crowd that included small children and an unusually high proportion of hippies and hipsters. I guess this is where they all hang out, on the coast. I mean, it makes sense: I was here.

Elemotho’s sound is a bit difficult to describe. You’d probably use words like “world music” which really says nothing about a sound at all while making it seem exotic. He plays a nice semi-acoustic guitar, and has an African sound fused with other genres like jazz and folk, a lot of percussion in form of rattles, and a flute player just to add that little Jethro Tull twist. It was a pretty fun show and the whole crowd was dancing. Especially when he played his reggae song “Where is the Ganja / From Okahandja” as an encore.



The next morning I woke up to the sound of gulls flying around the house, and the Russian rock that Daan was playing in the living room for some reason. I took a shower to wash the rest of the beach sand off my body, but felt my body covered in salt from the sea air immediately after stepping outside. I didn’t mind. There’s something great about smelling the sea from your front step. Daan told me every time he returns from a flight, his plane’s wings always taste like sea salt. I wanted to ask him if he really meant "taste", but then decided to let it be.

Daan lives in Tamariskia, which used to be the coloured township outside of Swakopmund. I walked back to town and stopped for breakfast at a bakery for some delicious fresh bread. As I smelled the ocean and watched people come in and out of the bakery, I reflected on how sometimes it’s easy to forget you’re in Africa and not just some beach town on the West Coast on a quiet Sunday morning. I don’t know what it is about the ocean that makes me feel so incredibly relaxed.

And then I went home in a rundown combie van packed full of Namibians like sardines in a tin can, blasting R&B the whole way home, and I remembered where I was. Another butterfly flew into the windshield and stayed pinned under the windshield wiper for the remainder of the trip. Time to go back to Windhoek.


swakopmund

The queer side of town

Despite the fact that tolerance of LGBTI rights in Namibia still has a long way to go (case in point: apparently the police dockets recording Mr. Gay Namibia’s assault have vanished), there still is a thriving LGBTI social scene in Namibia, even if it’s not quite as overt as, say, The Village in Toronto. Namibia’s first beauty pageant for gay men, one of my most fun nights in Namibia, was a great reminder of that.

I’m always surprised at how much there is going on here in Windhoek, given the generally not-so-friendly political attitudes of mainstream Namibian society towards homosexuality. Besides gay beauty pageants, there are numerous activist organizations such as LGBT Network Namibia, Out-Right Namibia, and the pro-lesbian feminist Sister Namibia. There’s even an LGBTI travel agency catering to international travelers. I’ve had the chance to meet all sorts of folks from Namibia’s LGBTI community, young, older, Afrikaner, black, coloured, foreigner, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender – it’s quite the rainbow. I’ve also had the chance to check out some of the unofficial LGBTI hang out spots.

One of these places was Sulie’s, a bar deep in the heart of the Katutura township where the black and coloured LGBTI folks like to frequent. It’s nothing like the North American or European gay clubs– no flamboyant flash, disco dazzle or even rainbows. Instead, it’s just a tin-walled place on a residential street, looking almost like any random shebeen in Katutura, with kwaito hiphop music and men sitting on wooden benches, talking to women – until you realize some of the high-heeled women in the bar are actually drag queens.


note: W, not a drag queen.

I met up with W, Micheal, and Solomon at Sulie’s. This was perhaps ironically after I'd spoken to a class of grade seven kids at an after school program about the dangers of young people drinking alcohol. Micheal was a bit nervous about taking me there. Like most places in Katutura, any white person there tended to stick out like a sore thumb, and an Asian woman even more so. There still is quite the divide between the black and white gay communities in Namibia. This was a regular hangout spot for locals (albeit LGBTI locals), not a tourist destination, so to attract too much attention to yourself always ran the risk of being robbed. Luckily, nobody paid much attention to me once we got in the bar, and we sat down on a wooden bench in the hallway with our Windhoek Lager. It was a pretty neat sight, but I felt like it would be a bad idea to take out my camera and start playing tourist.


barbed wires everywhere, as usual

Micheal introduced me to a beautiful but shy drag queen, who ran away soon after telling me her name.

W told me I had to check out the bathrooms. They were like the toilets you’d find at a lot of the bars here – no lights, no lock, no toilet paper, and definitely no desire to do anything but squat over it – but the nature of the graffiti on the bathroom walls were just a little bit different.


view from the loo

it seems like Namibia's LGBTI scene has its own peculiarities - the segregation of communities by race, for example, I guess as a leftover from the apartheid area. Although there are plenty of interracial couples and international hookups, it seems like as communities, the blacks and whites are seperate and hang out in seperate spaces. On the other hand, some things seem to be universal, such as complaints about your ex, and dramatic complications arising from one's friends all dating each other.

Another place I checked out was “Gay Night” at King’s Jazz, located closer to my end of town in Ausspannplatz. King’s is not a gay bar. It’s a sports and gambling bar, which to me strikes me as a pretty heterosexual male kind of thing. But I recently found out through the community that Wednesday nights were the new gay night.

“I’m not going to go to Gay Night,” I declared. “I’m tired and it’s Wednesday.”

“But they have five dollar shooters,” W told me.*

“Okay, fine, I’ll go.”

*Five Namibian dollars is less than one Canadian dollar.



It was an odd setting. There were a few coloured lesbians smoking near the patio, a few young gay couples dancing, and a number of regulars gambling on the slot machines and watching the rugby game on the big screen TV. You gotta love the random juxtapositions that you find in this city sometimes.


W and me, being fabulous, as a dude watches sports behind us


micheal says I'm going to pretend I'm not grossed out by Gloria invading my personal space

The music was definitely a lot more of what I’d expect from a gay club like Stonewall’s – Tina Tiner, Whitney Houston, even a sprinkling of Village People. It was mostly just us on the dance floor though. Maybe because North American flamboyancy isn’t the same as African flamboyancy. Maybe because folks still aren’t comfortable coming out in a generally straight space. Or maybe because it was a Wednesday.