Saturday, November 23, 2013 2 comments

Animal House


The goats just had babies!
Before moving to Namibia, the words “African animals” brought to my mind the opening scene of The Lion King. In four months, I have seen only one giraffe, a handful of baboons, and the occasional roadside warthog. Despite my lack of exotic encounters, I have plenty of animal friends.

Some are more friendly than others. I am particularly close with my wall spiders Ofluffya and Owhiskas. The harmless wall spider is about the size of my palm, with a body that lies flat against the wall—a feature that makes it difficult to kill. My first night I threw a Chaco at Ofluffya. I nailed her, but she scurried away unscathed. So I gave up and adopted her instead. 

Ofluffya relaxing above my bed.
 A short time later I found her husband Owhiskas. Seeing that I can’t neuter a spider, I sternly warned them not to have babies. They promptly ignored me and now we have Osasha—whom I named after my late Siamese. While I am fond of this arachnid family, I will kill any more additions. I think Ofluffya and Owhiskas took this second warning more seriously: I haven’t seen them in a week.

The void left by Owhiskas and Ofluffya has unfortunately been filled by three roosters. My regular readers know that a few months ago I reluctantly slaughtered a hen. That ambivalence has evaporated in the African sun. I would gleefully strangle these roosters. Every night between three and five a.m. they take shifts crowing beneath my window. And every night I delude myself into thinking that if I ignore them, they will go away. They don’t. It always seems like too much work to leave my mosquito net, find my headlamp, and chase them away. But one day I will snap. Imagine me as Jack Nicholson from The Shining, ax in hand maniacally stalking the infernal fowl through a maze of huts. 

I hate this animal.
I might introduce my host family to Thanksgiving. There aren’t any turkeys, but the roosters will taste just fine.

Though I hate roosters, my affection for other farm animals has grown. Last week, my tate (pronounced “tah-tey,” means “dad”) surprised us with a calf. I initially named him Okamati, “little brother.” But in his first three nights he managed to wriggle out of two leashes and open three gates. My tate and brother found him tangled in the bush a kilometer away. I have since renamed him Okahoudini. Okahoudini loves me. Sometimes I love him too. This morning I opened my door to find him at my feet sleeping in a puddle of calf diarrhea. I did not love him then.

My host brother Absalom and Okahoudini.
Diarrhea aside, all the animals I have mentioned so far have been benign enough. But there is one foe lurking in the forest that I have fortunately not met: the black mamba. Before coming to Namibia, my knowledge of the black mamba was largely informed by Kill Bill. I was under the impression the venom could kill me instantly. However, my snake book says death can take anywhere between three and fifteen hours. Vague but oddly comforting—the nearest hospital is only thirty minutes away.

I have asked many people in the village about mambas, and there is a clear gender division. The tates (all men in Oshikwanyama are referred to as tate) boast tales of striking a mamba out of a tree 15 meters away using a single brick. The memes, on the other hand, say they have lived here their wholes lives and have never seen one. Call it gender bias or wishful thinking, but I trust the memes.

To be fair, Namibia is teeming with wildlife. I live about four hours away from Etosha National Park, where it’s common—I’ve heard—to see the Big Five African animals in a single afternoon. I hope to visit soon. Maybe I will load Ofluffya, Owhiskas, and Okahoudini into the pick-up truck and make it a family vacation. We can even bring the roosters: they’ll make excellent lion bait.
Sunday, November 3, 2013 3 comments

Oshikwan-what?




This is my desk where I spend countless hours studying Oshikwanyama.


There are many contenders for the title of most difficult language on Earth to learn. I have heard Chinese, English, even Navajo. I would like to nominate a new candidate--Oshikwanyama. This obscure African language doesn't have tones, clicks, even progressive tenses. Despite lacking the indicators of linguistics difficulty that are familiar to most Westerners, Oshikwanyama has one curveball--noun classes.

I am no linguist, but noun classes and their spawn, prefixes and concords, are the most mind boggling verbal constructions ever conceived. In English, to make a word plural, I merely add an "s" or "es" to the end. In Oshikwanyama, each noun falls into one of nine noun classes. Making the noun plural or singular depends on the noun class. For example, olukaku is shoe, but shoes is omalukaku. This is noun class two. Ear is okutwi, and ears is omakutwi. This is noun class nine. You may have noticed, as I did in my first 30 seconds of studying this language, that these words all start with O's and are around five syllables long.



This is a story from my Oshikwanyama book. It's about a cow stuck in the road.

Memorizing which class every noun belongs to is overwhelming. But Oshikwanyama is not done stomping on our minds yet. Many other parts of the language rovolve around which class the noun in question belongs to. For instance, I want to say "I saw two hyenas." "I saw" is "onda mona." "Two" is "mbali," and "hyena" is "olumbungu." But I can't say "Onda mona mbali olumbungus." No no, I must first scamper to my grammar book, look up plural prefix for noun class six (oma-). Then flip 24 pages back to find the numerical prefix for noun class six "a" to attach to my number. I can finally say "onda mona omambungu ambali." But what if I want to say "I saw two big hyenas"? Then I need to turn back to the end of my book to find the adjective prefix for noun class six (ma-) and tack it to the base word for "big," -nene. So my sentence now reads "onda mona omambungu ambali manene." I must also sprint along this scavenger hunt every time I want to use a possesive pronoun like "my" or a demonstrative pronoun like "those."

If you're exhausted, I don't blame you. I am too. So I will briefly describe the prefix's equally confusing cousin the concord. If "concord" only makes you think of supersonic jets or New Zealand, it's because English doesn't have concords. In English, to describe when an action takes place, I change the verb--I walked, I walk, I will walk, etc. To make the subject agree with the verb, I change the verb--I eat, she eats, etc. To describe the tense and to make the subject and verb agree in Oshikwanyama, I need a concord. To say "I love to eat traditional millet porridge," I say "ame (me) ondi (I in the present) hole (love) okulya (to eat) oshifima (traditional millet porridge)." In this sentence, "ondi" is the concord. This doesn't seem too confusing on the surface. But our friend the noun class also has its teeth in concords. Every noun class has six concords, one each for the past, present and future--for all active verbs--like "run" and "break." And three more concords for stative verbs, verbs like "be" or "feel." That brings us to a total of 54 possible concords all of which start with "O."


This a concord chart for noun class one. Yep, just one noun class.

Despite being daunting, I love Oshikwanyama. It occasionally surprises me with bursts of simplicity. "Now" is "paife." "Right now" is "paife paife." More than I love demanding my students study their pronouns now-now, I love the response of my neighbors and colleauges whenever I attempt to speak. Regardless of how much I butcher their lanuage, they cheer and clap like I recited the whole of Hamlet while standing on my head,

There are fewer speakers of Oshikwanyama worldwide than there are Mandarin speakers in one Chinese province. Why bother learning a language spoken by so few? Because if I can master noun classes, I can talk with my neighbors. I can ask them about their goats and how many cows they plan to slaughter their daughter's wedding. In short, I can be a real Oshikwanyaman. Provided I can evade the two big hyenas for the next two years.


My Oshikwanyama book. This is the one they give to first graders. Also still can't figure out how to rotate pictures, sorry.
Saturday, September 28, 2013 0 comments

The Bucket Bath List

I love baths. Whenever the opportunity for one arises, I pounce. Before leaving for Africa, I took a bath everyday for two months. I had a hunch this luxury wouldn't be available much longer. I was right. Now I bathe in a bucket. Today, dear reader, I will guide you through bucket bathing so that if you find yourself suddenly showerless, you won't be (too) stinky.

Step One: Select a suitable bucket. Mine is a large basin, This is good for catching and reusing water. You can splash as wrecklessly as you please and most of the water stays in the bucket. When your water tap is a couple hundred yards away, you want to keep water usage to a minimum. Some basins have pretty designs on the bottom. These are useless: the water will be opaque in one rinse.


Post bath water. Like I said, opaque.

Step Two: Heat one to two liters of water. Add cold water to taste. The exact ratio depends on the season. During the winter, hot water was the one small luxury I couldn't bear to skip.

Step Three (Optional, very optional): Shave. Fill a large cup of with water. Use this to rinse your razor. Don't use the basin, as you will needlessly mucky up the water.  When you rinse you don't want the water that was formerly on your legs to end up stuck to your shoulders. When finished shaving, dispose of the dirty water.

Step Four: Start at your head and work down. This step is crucial for women. Starting with your hair will reduce, not eliminate, the soap film that will permanently cling to your locks. Use your large cup to rinse. Don't try to dip your head into the bucket: you will get water up your nose. Do not lather and repeat--no conditioner either. You want to keep the amount of soap in the basin--and consequently, stuck to your body--to a minimum. Suds up the rest of your body ending with your feet. The heat, sand, and chacos are not kind to feet.

It's nice at this point to have clean water in another bucket to rinse with. The water in the first bucket will be extremely icky at this point. This step is also optional, however. Especially if reaching your tap involves a short hike.


View from my "shower."

Congratulations! You have just finished your first bucket bath. If your feeling fancy, spritz on your favorite perfume or bug spray. Now your ready to hit the village, paint the shebeen shanties (Namibian for bar) red, or maybe just curl up under your mosquito net and dream of hot water and claw-footed bath tubs. I think tonight I will choose the latter. 


Sideways picture of my basin and bucket. I couldn't figure out how to rotate it.
Sunday, August 25, 2013 1 comments

Like a Chicken with its Head Cut Off


Until August 10 I had never intentionally killed a vertebrate. I have remorselessly killed many insects. While I respect their ecological niches, if any chance exists they might crawl on me, I want them dead immediately. However, I feel more compassion toward vertebrates. They have highly developed nervous systems capable of experiencing intense pain, and I hesitate to cause them any.

Unfortunately, this approach has long been in conflict with my diet. I love meat. On the occasions I have opted for meatless meals, I always find myself envying my dining partner’s steak. Living in the US, it was easy to reconcile a cheeseburger with my distaste for gore. I understood mentally that meat processing involved carnage and pain. However, I didn’t understand it emotionally. When strolling along the aisles of a typical American grocery store, the meat is hardly recognizable as once belonging to an actual animal. The killing took place somewhere remote, and the result appears sterile. My attitude toward the individual animals was equally remote.

This distance ended abruptly during our Cultural Foods Day on August 10. It began with the delivery of two goats to our training center. Their lower bodies were restrained in bags, but they appeared calm. Undeterred by the prospect of eating these animals, the other trainees and I set about becoming attached to them. We petted, named, and sincerely tried to comfort them. I frantically tried to find an apple to feed them. I wanted them to enjoy a final dessert, but one of my Namibian coworkers stopped me. He said we shouldn’t feed them so soon before slaughter.

We had only two goats, and the Americans and the Namibians mutually agreed slaughtering a large animal was best left to the locals. We felt slightly more confident with chickens. I emphasize “slightly.” Someone placed a box containing several scrawny chickens in the corner of the yard and called for a few volunteers to kill them. I couldn’t bring myself to do the deed initially. I opted to hold the chicken while another trainee cut off the head with a pocketknife. The chicken was remarkably calm until its head was no longer attached, then the body convulsed wildly, and I had to muster all my self control to keep it pinned to the ground. Later, one of the other chickens freed itself post-decapitation and energetically illustrated the idiom “jumping around like a chicken with its head cut off.” They really do hop and flap. It’s simultaneously unnerving and funny.

I eventually marshaled the courage to slaughter a chicken. One of my coworkers pinned down the body and I pulled its neck taut. As I put the knife to it, I lost a bit of my nerve and closed my eyes, which—in hindsight—was a bad idea given the close proximity of my fingers. Regardless, I still felt the knife saw through feather and sinew and bone. When I did open my eyes, I was holding the chicken’s head in my left hand, and the beak was soundlessly opening and closing.

I was surprised by my reaction during the first few hours afterward. I was fascinated with everything inside the chicken. Eggs developing inside a chicken look like an alien embryo station. The shell doesn’t grow until late in the process, so dozens of exposed yolks grow in a spiral pattern along some sort of placenta-like organ.

Along with this anatomical fascination, I temporarily developed a macabre sense of humor. I would move the lifeless beaks and narrate little puppet shows for my co-trainees who, being accommodating souls, would giggle uncomfortably. I have included a picture below of me playing with a goat head as evidence of this phenomenon.

Since then multiple people have told me about faster, cleaner, and more humane ways to kill a chicken. I do not plan to implement them anytime soon. Not because I plan to maim chickens willy nilly, but because I don’t plan to kill anything in the near future. I still eat chicken. I still feel conflicted about it. Slaughtering a chicken did little to resolve my moral ambivalence toward eating one. I alternate between feeling fine about the experience and feeling disgusted. However, meat is an integral part of Namibian cuisine and is almost impossible to avoid. I may reconsider my dietary decision to eat meat when I return to the States. However, for the next two years I will continue to enjoy my KFC, because, yes, KFC is in Namibia.

Friday, July 12, 2013 0 comments

Procrastination, Preparation H, and Packing

I am a chronic procrastinator. Like all other chronic procrastinators, I swear to reform after every episode. But despite countless college essays that were written more by caffeine than by cognition, I still haven't mended my ways. Nowhere is this habit more evident than in my suitcase. It is empty and I depart in one week.

In my defense, the only thing I know about my living arrangements is that they will be within walking, biking, or hitchhiking distance of a school. Seeing that Namibia is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, second only to Mongolia, I can deduce that this school will probably be somewhere quite rural--rural and full of mosquitoes. Despite this display of detective work, I haven't been particularly proactive about my packing research, which extends to a few suggestions from current volunteers and an episode of Man vs Wild. If I follow Bear Grylls' lead, I will wash up on the Skeleton Coast (Namibia's northern coastline littered with rusting, abandoned ships) with nothing but a bowie knife, empty canteen, plastic garbage bag, and my own teeth. The last item is especially useful for decapitating poisonous snakes. While this light list appeals to my sense of adventure and would save me the hassle and expense of dragging two 50 pound suitcases through multiple airports, I am sure the Namibian customs officials would immediately dispatch me back to the U.S. in a straight jacket.

Although I haven't begun packing, I have made a list. So at the very least, I know what will be hastily stuffed into my suitcases by next Sunday. This list includes--among other items--a silk kimono, Tide pens, hemorrhoid medication, my star finder, iodine tablets, crayons, and candy--lots of American candy.

Now if only I could find space in my luggage for Bear Grylls.


 
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