The Little Things

The heat has returned, as blazing as it was when I first arrived. I did buy a fan over break, which has come in handy at night, but I am still sweating half to death anyway. The start of term has brought with it the stress of applying to high schools. Yes, in Namibia you have to apply to high school. Most of my students will be going to Otjiperongo—a junior secondary school (meaning grades 8, 9, and 10) 15km away, even more in the middle of nowhere than I am (no cell phone service and electricity only four to six hours a day). It is a notoriously bad school (so is Omatjete Primary School by the way). Terrible as it might be most have no choice but to go there. Few other schools will accept them.

The best school in the Erongo Region is called Martin Luther High School (grades 8-12 and with school fees 10 times what Omatjete’s are). It’s about an hour directly south of Omatjete and an hour west of Omaruru. I have been there twice—once with my neighbor Ms. Ikorua to take her daughter Mami back to school at the beginning of second term, the second time because the hike I took back to Omajete dropped a girl off there first.

(Mami-- Ms. Ikorua's daughter)

It’s a proper hostel school meaning that all the kids who attend live at the school. It is in a very rural area near a village called Okambahe, but is pretty much a self-sufficient community of its own. With a school truck that goes into Omaruru twice a week, a nice if minimal ‘campus,’ and students who can read and write, I have often guiltily wished that I had been placed there instead. But the time for such wishes has long passed. Now, I am just hoping to get Tjizakuje and Naftaline in. They are the only two who have the slightest chance.

Last Wednesday, Ms. Ikorua’s 25 year old son’s girlfriend gave birth to a baby boy. The baby died on Monday. I’m not sure what happened. I remember her son, also named Funa, telling me the baby was sick. I remember foolishly assuring him everything would be okay. Two days later Ms. Ikorua gave me the sad news in broken sobs through the kitchen wall of our shared house. Funa never even saw the child. His girlfriend gave birth in Omaruru and he didn’t have the money to hike out.

(Ms. Ikorua, daughter, daughter-in-law)

It is hard to know how to feel about someone who died before he was even named. Sadness for a life cut short is obvious, as is sympathy for the family. Detached as I am from the situation, the baby’s death becomes just one more example of how life here precludes almost any triviality. As if trifles are a luxury like hot showers (or running water) and enough textbooks. Every movement made seems to matter so much; always there is something real at stake. Fail your grade ten English exam and remain jobless for the rest of your life. Step on a rusty nail while playing soccer barefoot and die of tetanus. A single youthful, sexual mistake and congratulations, you now have AIDS. Even the little things are sheathed in the consequential: lose your one and only pen, and have nothing to write with for the rest of term. Forget to wear your school uniform, and get beaten with a strip of an old tire in front of your classmates.

Please don’t think that I am saying that life in America is entirely frivolous or that poverty and its terrible restraints are absent there. It’s just at home, in the life I led, I grew up above an army of second chances, never even knowing they were there until I needed one. The margin for error was so wide I could never see both ends. It’s clear to me now that my intense hope that Tjizakuje is accepted into Martin Luther High School, a scholarship in tact, is a weak attempt at giving her one of those many chances I never had to use.

While I was in college, I worked in a gum factory during the summers. At the time, what I hated most about the job (besides the boredom factor) was how pointless it was. If something went wrong, if a batch was lost or a shipment missed deadline, it made no real difference whatsoever. Not sure there’s anything in the world more trivial than gum. Now I am in a job where everything matters. Some days I’m glad of this. But some days I would give anything to be back in my hairnet, packing sticks of Doublemint and Juicy Fruit into cardboard boxes and sending them one by one down the assembly line.