One Month

It’s hard to believe that in just a few days I’ll have been in Omatjete for one month. In some ways I feel like I’ve been here for twenty-five years—in others I feel like I’ve only just blinked. The week has been a tiring one—teaching has a way of really wearing you out. Especially with the varying student levels that I have in my classes. But I am plugging along, learning from my mistakes, breathing a sigh of relief when a lesson actually goes well.

Sometimes I begin to panic when I think four weeks of term have already gone by. There is so much the students have to know in order to pass their exams, so much that I have to make them understand, and every time I think about this, the reality of my responsibility becomes frighteningly clear. Namibia works under the Cambridge system of education: three trimesters and a heavy dependence upon exams. In seventh, tenth, and twelfth grades, the government writes the exams that are taken. If you fail tenth grade, you’re out—done. No more school. Thousands of students flunk tenth grade every year. Afterwards almost all are consigned to life in “the Location.” They can’t get jobs because even high school and college graduates have an impossible time getting jobs.

The Location is an apartheid term that has yet to disappear in the years since 1990 when Namibia won its independence from South Africa. It refers to the area outside the city center where black Africans were forced to live. Of course the laws are different now, but the Location still exists. Some have more specific names like Katatura (the Location in Windhoek where I ate the goat head) which means “a place we do not want to go.”

My village is too small to have a real Location—white Africans didn’t want anything to do with Omatjete so the nicest thing they did was leave it alone. But size does not seem to provide any immunity against the gathering of poor into a confined space. I think about the men I see whenever I go to the town store. They are sitting outside of the neighboring Omatjete Restaurant, which is in fact only a restaurant if alcohol is considered food. The ages range from early twenties to late fifties. The younger ones look bored and spiteful, often leering over their 10am beverages, as if daring me to lecture them. This look evolves as the faces become more lined. The older men just seem sad and resigned. Sometimes they leer too but without any of the childish bravado. It’s more like they know something that I don’t. And I’d better wipe that pity right off of my face because they have long passed the point when mercy makes any difference.

I think about those men, and I think about my students— Daniel and Alfons and Marlon. I wonder if ten years from now, when the Namibian education system has exhausted all of its mercy, if they’ll join the leering ranks. If day after day Daniel will sit on the steps, Tafel Lager in hand, tapping his feet to an old remembered tune from sixth grade music class.

Summer is in full swing here, and the houses are like furnaces—sweating has become a constant state of being. I am off to brave the afternoon sun armed with my hat and 45 SPF sunscreen. I hope you are all well and enjoying your winters.